Drum lives in Irvine. He's not a Bay Area mega-NIMBY. I think it's true Ds went after tech differently. But so did Rs. Under Trump is where tech antitrust began. Trump disliked crypto his first term. 1/

Previously, both parties were friendly to Big Tech, and since Clinton, to money generally. Under Biden Ds began gently reverting towards a more egalitarian, New Deal liberalism, Republicans stayed "pro business", Trump sold tech his support, and that was enough for the industry to go Nazi. 2/

Gates is and always has been an IP maximalist, a position as conservative as they come. It's that Democrats at the time weren't challenging material conservatism, only social conservatism, that let Gates remain a Democratic and lets you describe him as liberal. 3/

Tech was willing to be liberal when liberalism was about sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. As soon as liberalism began to demand competitive industry structures and revisit material obligations towards anything like a just and cohesive society, it went Nazi. /fin

giving people what they want isn’t democracy working. democracy working means aggregating everybody’s interests and values from everybody in a way that results in high quality decisions that deliver well to some “fair” balance if those interests and values. 1/

so if more personalist regimes can’t be held accountable in a way that’s meaningfully better than more institutionalist predecessors (or otherwise deliver superior outcomes), i wouldn’t describe it as democracy working, however popular the strongman might be. /fin

traditionally we regulated free speech by eschewing prior restraint but using torts and the judicial system to impose some accountability ex post. it was a good balance! lawsuits are risky and costly so you could speak pretty freely, but outrageous threat and defamation were deterred. 1/

but we now have a class for whom lawsuits are not risky and costly, for whom the expense — even if they lose and some anti-SLAPP law hits them — is negligible. and these people are difficult to sue, since a lawsuit can become an all-pay auction in legal expenses, and plutocrats can outbid. 2/

to some degree it was always thus — corporations have long had deep pockets. but the emergence of ideological, aggrieved billionaires who can speak without accountability but punish others for speech they dislike strikes me in practice as a sea change. 3/

i find when i write in places like this i worry much more about Elon Musk than i ever did about Goldman Sachs. (i said a lot of mean stuff about Goldman Sachs!) 4/

plutocrats championing the traditional free speech regime are championing a regime where no meaningful accountability binds them, but they can hold others painfully to account at will or on a whim. 5/

i dislike some of the censorious tendencies of the last decade, even the ones those very billionaires complain about. but “free speech unless you piss off a billionaire” strikes me as imposing a far worse chill than any excesses of wokeness or public health overcaution. /fin

I think you'll find that what you see on network or cable news or NPR was often a scandal du jour a day or two before on Twitter. On cable news, they literally put up someone's tweets with some frequency. The only alt-site that ever happens with is Truth Social, and only for Donald Trump there. 1/

This dynamic is a bit diminished from what it used to be, but not so much. British politics has been completely overthrown, for example, in the last few weeks, by Musk's resurrection of the Rotherham scandal. Musk is a special case, you might argue, but a prodigious and destructive case. /fin

I’d have to think about the last point, but you’ll find political insiders, prestige academics, think tank types, and mainstream journalists still writing their threads and having their arguments on X. 1/

Some (who aren’t on the right) dislike that they are there, most don’t take tech ethics seriously and let their annoyance at the sanctimony of people (like me!) who tell them they are doing something wrong psychologically justify digging in. 2/

Which you want to do anyway if you are interested in prestige or career visibility, because X remains where the relevant conversations are. BlueSky has critical mass enough for “engagement”, but outside its smallish user base it remains, for now, a backwater. /fin