On this day back in 2001, the first iteration of Samizdata haltingly plopped onto the internet, wide eyed and not quite sure what to make of itself.
Why did Samizdata happen? Because every time a ‘news’ feature appeared about the 9/11 atrocity, I and other assorted stalwarts were done shouting at the television screen (remember them?). That was the trigger, but frankly there was much more to it than just that. It was years, decades really, of seeing the mainstream media’s disconnection from common sense and observable reality on a great many issues. We were sick of the BBC, Robert Fisk, CBS, The New York Times, ITV, Dan Rather, The Guardian, CNN, all of them.
Glenn Reynolds created Instapundit and showed the way… and we followed (Samizdata was the UK’s second political blog, the first being the long vanished ‘Airstrip One’). Many more piled into the scrum, most now long extinct. Blogspot hosted most of the new online blurting initially, they were the blogosphere’s training wheels, even if most of us eventually moved elsewhere. We held blogger bashes, networked, and people got drunk and ended up with regrettable tattoos. I met Andrew Breitbart (truly amazing guy) and Arianna Huffington (um, yeah) and they were heady days, the wild west era of the opinionated internet. We had our own platform to say what we wanted to anyone who cared to listen (which back in the ‘golden age of blogging’ circa 2002-2008 was about 30,000 people a day for Samizdata, vastly more for Instapundit or Andrew Sullivan). We were social media before anyone called it social media.
But times move on.
Gradually the internet ecosphere changed, the cacophonous mosaic of a gazillion blogs were steadily overshadowed by bigger and taller things. In their place came walled gardens that commoditised the users in return for ‘free’ access, most prominently Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. The very term ‘blog’ seems a bit archaic now, I tend to use the term ‘independent site’ these days. And independent sites like this one remain, as does Instapundit, but we are just part of a much bigger and far more managed internet, a fringe sitting on the edge of the new on-line mainstream media, which is what Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are, the new mainstream media with all that implies.
Heh, meet the new boss, same as the old boss; rolls of barbed wire are appearing atop the garden walls. With the internet rapidly becomes far more stage-managed and tightly controlled than I would have guessed possible almost twenty years ago, we are seeing a second wave of independent sites. And they are driven by the same discontent at the same MSM disconnect from reality that drove the first wave of new media post-9/11.
Excellent slick new operations like The Critic, Unherd, Spiked, Quillette and others are rising to the occasion, with sites using a more ‘trad’ blog-like format also still popping up, like Expunct, Lockdown Sceptics and others.
The weapons have changed a bit but battlefield looks pretty similar and the same war continues.
Yes – Facebook, Twitter and Youtube conned us.
They promised us free expression, sucked us in – and then the censorship and MANIPULATION started. The “Shadow Banning” when you do not even know they are hitting you – but hardly anyone sees what you have posted. And the censorship. And the leftist “Fact Checkers” who LIE constantly.
Google has turned from a Search Engine to a agitprop tool – taking us to the opinions we “should” see, and away from opinions we “should not” see. And getting even simple facts wrong – ON PURPOSE. For example the “Be Good!” doctrine that inventions must be attributed to members of certain racial groups – regardless of whether they invented them or not.
What can be done?
People who talk of special sites and the “Dark Web” and so on miss-the-point – society is not about a handful people getting the truth (because they are very clever in by passing the “Woke” Tech Giants) a society is determined by what MOST people see and hear.
And the American election is tomorrow – TIME HAS RUN OUT for “what can be done?”
If people think the censorship and other abuses are bad now (and they are) – they are tiny shadow of the tidal wave of total evil that will happen under “President Biden”.
The internet was supposed to be the alternative after the left took over television – and for a little while IT WAS, but then the Tech Giants acted, especially after the candidate they wanted (Hillary Clinton) lost in 2016.
As Google said in reaction to 2016 election – “this must never happen again”, the voters must be told what to think by the Woke Corporations.
So people look at the television stations – and mostly see leftist propaganda.
Or people turn to the internet – and mostly see leftist propaganda.
Heads they win – tails we lose.
There is hope – but it is a very grim sort of hope.
Their system will not work – not in the long run.
The “intellectual elite” of the Woke Corporations actually believe in all the most gross of economic fallacies.
They believe in the Labour Theory of Value (the World Economic Forum documents are full of this assumption) – which is complete nonsense, a totally false theory refuted by Samuel Bailey and other TWO CENTURIES AGO.
They also believe in David Ricardo’s economics of LAND – again the international conferences and documents (not just the World Economic Forum – all of them) are filled by Ricardian assumptions on LAND – which, again, are total nonsense. Refuted more than a century ago by Frank Fetter.
And all the Woke Corporations and international, national and local government bureaucracies beieve in CENTRAL PLANNING.
Ludwig Von Mises might as well never have written anything – as the Woke Corporations and the government bureaucracies have fanatical faith in “Planning” and it DOES NOT WORK.
Yes they will get their Agenda 21 – Agenda 2030 “Sustainable Development” “Stakeholder Capitalism” society – the totalitarianism they crave will be established.
And it will FAIL – it will FAIL horribly, and it will eventually COLLAPSE.
Happy B’Day Perry!
Samizdata has a pleasant air of continuity about it in this ever-changing online ecosystem. For that I am grateful. That and, of course, the wit and insight displayed here and not just by the writers but also (usually) the commentators.
Many Happy Returns!
That got the misses & I talking just now. When we moved house, we stuck our TV in a box in the basement & it’s been there ever since. To our shock, we realised that was now 7 years ago & we haven’t missed it one smidgen, watching a bit of Netflix, Amazon Prime Video & assorted stuff on Bittorrent on our PCs. Also, she’s an avid gamer & I’m starting to get the bug myself, which fills the hole that TV once would have occupied. The MSM hardly even exists for us anymore 😆
Fight on.
Wow. I came in lately, and didn’t know this. Makes me feel like I’m punching over my weight here.
As more right-leaning folk migrate away from the FB/Twit realm, are you seeing any uptick? Are we going to return to the stand-alone model?
Before the blogs there were usenet newsgroups. I remember (and participated in) the raging ‘gun control’ debates on talk.politics.guns. I remember the original Green Card Spam, and how the female half of the spammer couple whined in the New York Times about how barbaric and “wild west” and (*GASP*) unregulated by governments the newsgroups were, in response to the usenet natives rising in anger at her and her husband’s misdeeds.
There were complaints about the newsgroups having too many libertarians and conservatives, and not enough enlightened leftists. That was a big part of what drove the creation of the leftist part of the blogosphere. The ‘good’ and ‘enlightened’ wanted bubble-spaces where they could mute and exclude those nasty right-wingers. But the right could blog too, and so there we were.
bobby b,
Late… Nah… You brought a bottle and that’s what counts 🙂
Deep Lurker,
I guess there still is Stack Exchange which I frequent (not for a month or so – dunno why so long – other stuff comes up I guess) mainly on JRRT, astrophysics, maths and computer hardware.
I guess the politricks never really got me because at some level I don’t care – I’m hard science by nature and the social sciences are “like whatever”. At another level I really do care (because it directly effects me). One of the key reasons why I like Samizdata is that Samizdata seems to me to be about politics (and lots of other things) without being political (in the partisan, party-political sense) because (it seems to me*) to transcend politics as we know it – it’s almost anti-political – which is great.
I suspect our societies need that. I know for sure when I found Samizdata that I’d found a lost oasis in the desert for myself. I found a place where liberalism meant what it said on the tin and when I turned the opener I wouldn’t just find Marxism in a party frock. That is why I keep on coming back.
Well that, and over the years, I’ve just gotten used to (and indeed liked) you daft buggers 😉
*Am I getting too parenthetical?
Wow… 19 years. I now feel old. I must have been quite an early reader of samizdata – I certainly remember reading in my first year of uni (2001), coming (I think) via the NO2ID site. You lead me to Hayek, Popper, Rand and others and shaped my outlook in the years since.
Its never been more important to have independent sites on the ‘net. Even away from the political agenda the forums for my more obscure hobbies are all dead or dying and FB groups are a poor poor alternative – all too transient and filled with people who know little but post plenty.
Happy birthday, and looking forward to the 20th anniversary.
Forgive me for asking a question, the answer to which i could perhaps easily find with a bit of DuckDucking; but what is the figure today?
Pah! Infants! Now those lost days of bulletin boards over phone modems …
Happy Birthday, Perry!
I can’t remember how long I’ve been coming here, but it’s been excellent throughout!
No idea, I’d be surprised if we get a tenth of what we did at the peak ‘back in the day’, but I’m ok with that 😉
1. Get a server. I can recommend Linode wholeheartedly. $5/month for a basic always-on server. Alternatively you can use a spare old PC and some spot under a desk with a plug – you don’t even need to dedicate a monitor. Install linux.
2. Install PHP/Mysql (or MariaDB)/Apache2 – it’s all free (except the time and sanity), so don’t worry about messing anything up. If/when you mess everything up, nuke it all and start over.
3. Learn how to install simple PHP applications like Phpbb and WordPress.
4. Get a domain name from Namecheap. Go into the advanced tab and understand your domain records. Point them at the server.
Be a first class citizen of the internet, not a facebook consumer. Link to other people’s blogs. Maintain lists so everyone can find each other. (When I get a spare moment, I’m going to experiment with setting up some glorified blogroll search-engine type thing.) Let’s rebuild a peer internet.
If you’ve done all that, you might be ready for my tutorial on setting up email servers. It’s somewhat unnecessarily complicated and painful.
https://www.amssolarempire.com/Blog/?p=668
Every machine on the internet can be a server
Software is more-or-less free
And yet *this* is a medium where most people seem to feel the most helpless and dependent on world-bending monopolies. It’s very odd.
I’m trying to break into machining in my workshop – I don’t think the small manufacturer ecosystem is anywhere near as defeated as the computer software world, and the barriers to entry are far higher. (Atoms cost money, for example. Bits don’t really.)
(My previous comment may have disappeared due to a link to my blog…)
My introduction to Samizdata all those years ago was from a list of recommended links at John Brignell’s Number Watch website.
Learnt a lot from that site, and this one too. Thank you
It’s a relative thing. If I want to share my wisdom with the world, and I start a blog tomorrow, I might get my mom and a few homeless people at the public library to read it. Nothing directs people to my gems. It’s like a billboard under a rock in South Dakota.
But if I put up a cute cat video on Facebook, I get 20,000,000 hits. So, it’s not helpless so much as it is envious.
In the old days of the Internet, when it was mostly confined to Universities, they used to talk about the Eternal September. Each September as a new class of students arrived they all discovered the internet and started doing things badly taking it down because they hadn’t inculcated the culture that pervaded it at the time. Then the general public got hold of it, and we got the Eternal September.
Back in those days discussion forums were via usenet news and you read the discussions via a news reader. There were tens of thousands of newsgroups, you could subscribe to whichever you liked. Some were moderated, some where unmoderated (and consequently wild). But newsreaders had this feature called a kill file where you could automatically put in rules to delete certain users or article types that you didn’t want to see. So, really, a very honest type of free speech where everyone could way what they wanted, and you could listen to what you wanted, and you had the option of moderation if you wanted it. FWIW, although I am not a user, I hear that reddit is similar, though I have also heard that they are beginning to join the crowd of censorial overlords.
After blogs came RSS feeds, the idea being that they would aggregate blogs in much the way that a newsreader aggregated news groups. They generally didn’t have kill files like news readers, but I suppose they could have been easily added. Google used to run a feed aggregator like that, but its name escapes me for now. They shut it down. I really thought at the time that I should build a web site that basically duplicated that functionality and made it easy to migrate. It wouldn’t have been hard, and spending a bit of money to migrate users, perhaps I could have been a decent replacement, and as I say, adding kill files wouldn’t have been hard. I often wish I had done so. Perhaps I would have inspired others to follow suit.
But if we want that sense of openness that the internet originally inspired that is what we need. The elimination of central points of control. For those of you who know much about the Internet you will know that “eliminating central points of control” is in many ways the core ethos of the internet itself. In many ways RSS provides the answer (though I think it needs some enhancements.) The problem though is the Eternal September. The problem is not the technology but the people. If people don’t want freedom you can’t force it on them (which is a guess rather tautological). But I suppose the internet does facilitate small groups of people working together in their own interests, places like this, and perhaps that is something pretty great.
And for Perry In particular I think the most appropriate thing to say is: this
Happy Birthday to Samizdata – even though only a few see it.
When the men came to beat the head and face of Boethius in ritual humiliation – and finally strangle his neck with a cord till his eyes came out of his head in death, he must have felt that everything he had done had been for nothing. And that no one would see his writings, the “Consolations of Philosophy” – they would be thrown on a fire, or rot in some ditch. Whilst the blond haired tribesmen, with their blue eyes (yes a “racist stereotype” I know), picked nits off each other – and scratched themselves.
Little did he know that his short book would be one of the few that would survive the dark ages (when more than 95% of Classical Writings perished) and would inspire people for the next one and half thousand years.
May something of what now know survive the coming Dark Age.
@bobby b
OK, where’s the link? This is important!
WRT usenet: i used to follow the soc.culture.nordic newsgroup in the 1990s.
It was quite helpful in giving me an insight into Nordic cultures and their disagreements.
One thing that impressed me was American commenters telling Nordic people how to run their countries.
I do not hold it against all Americans, of course: it was just a tiny hyper-vocal minority.
But it is of interest today that one of their main complaints was the ‘liberal’ immigration policies of the Nordic countries.
I thought at the time, and still think, that their complaints were not based on rational arguments.
Nowadays i think that there are rational arguments against immigration — but all Nordic countries bar Sweden have been acting on them anyway.
Fraser Orr, was it Google Reader?
I used that a lot and it was a shame when they shut it down.
However in response some outfit created The Old Reader and I have been using that ever since.
And tomorrow is a fork in the road for the USA and the entire World. Everyone knew the name Donald Trump in 2001, who imagined that he’d be facing off to Jamala Barris in 19 years time? Whatever happens, Don’t Stop Believing. The laws of economics and physics are on our side.
My big memory of Usenet?
I was in the middle of my crim defense time. Suddenly I had eight clients – unrelated, unknown to each other – all charged with possession of thousands of pics of kiddie porn, because Usenet brought this new unregulated access to . . . whatever one sought. (Once someone hears you’ll take such cases, word spreads, and all the other crim lawyers refer the cases to you because they don’t want to touch them.)
Not exactly the noble defense of free speech one goes to law school for, but then, neither was representation of the Skokie Nazis, I guess.
(Funny story: some of the cases were federal prosecutions. The one local AUSA who handled those cases was an Anthony Comstock-type snake. I was lucky that another defense lawyer warned me about him when I got the first KP case. The way the fed statutes were written, it was a federal offense for a defense lawyer to possess those files, even if they were part of the prosecution’s case – and the prosecutor could possess them. So, we did the normal demand for all prosecution materials, and got discs containing the pics.
Then, two days later, the feds raided my office trying to catch me in possession. I had not loaded them on the office system specifically for that reason – they left frustrated with me laughing at them. Made for quite a hostile time, especially after I made a motion to the fed judge to hold the AUSA in contempt. He didn’t – it was all legal the way they did it – but he was PO’d at the AUSA for doing it, and on my side enough so that we won that case eventually.
Fun memories of Usenet. Stay out of alt.binaries . . .)
Been with you since the earlies. Carry on!
Hey, it is coming up on 20th anniversaries for guys like us, Perry.
And Blogosphere will be 20 on the coming New Year’s Day.
I have a question- is Dale Amon still alive? Haven’t seen anything from him for a while. And some of the contributors might not now be alive. Is there any way to check?
There is a transition taking place that I describe in terms of the tension between two global forces. There is the global force of centralized institutions of governance and finance and there is the global force of decentralized networks of relationships. The former has reached its apex and is in decline. Their timing was off. They should have done twenty years ago what they are attempting today. The arrival of personal digital technology is a decentralized, dispersed power of individuals talking to one another about what they see. It is ascending as this post indicates. Thank you, Perry, for writing it.
My first experience of public writing was a community column for my local paper twenty years ago. That lasted 18 months. Then four years later, the same paper hired me to write a twice-monthly business leadership column. That gig lasted four and a half years. When I started that column in mid-2004, I also began to write a blog. For the first five years, I commented on other people’s writing. Then I gradually shifted from consuming other people’s writing to creating my own. Ultimately, it led to my writing my first book, Circle of Impact: Taking Personal Initiative To Ignite Change, published in 2018.
When you publish a book, and you do book signings all over the country, people come up to you and say, “Oh, I could never write a book.” I tell them don’t write a book. Just write. Write for yourself. Write to understand what you are thinking and feeling about your life and what you see. If there is a book in you, it will show itself. You’ll be unable to not write the book.
Now, I have found myself identifying principally as a writer. When the COVID pandemic hit, my international travel schedule was curtailed. I decided that I would begin to write short books based on what I am hearing from people. They tell me stories, ask questions, and offer comments. The first five were published in August. Working now on the next five. I see myself in the older model of the pamphleteer. It is also samizdat. You can find these publications at amazon.com/author/edbrenegar.
The transition we are in is a curious one. What seems evident on the surface is often the signs of the end of an era. What is hidden is the establishment of the foundation for a new one. This is always accompanied by the free expression of the people interacting with each other. So, encourage people to write. Write every day. Preserve it. Return to it. Rewrite it. Publish it. Share it. For the era of centralized control is coming to an end because it is unsustainable. It doesn’t look like it now. But the cracks in the edifice are showing. People need tools for resistance. We have all we need right now. It is up to us to make good use of the tools for expression and communication so that we can build networks of respect, trust, and mutual accountability.
Odd, a similar question had occurred to me. I’ve occasionally wondered what he thinks about SpaceX, for example. Hopefully, it isn’t as bleak as Nicholas Gray implies, and if not, somebody as Samizdata HQ should give DA a kick up the ‘Jaxie’. It’s long past time we had a space industry related post.
Bill, you blogospherical OG rascal you! Seems a hundred years ago when you took me to that very nice steak restaurant in San Francisco!
[…] Perry De Havilland on Samizdata (one of the oldest political blogs in Europe) wrote the post below that is especially appropriate on US Election Day,. Not only have the mainstream media thrown the last bit of caution to the wind and are making even the Soviet-era Pravda look demure, but now the people who are sitting atop Big Social are making even the free flow of information impossible. Regardless of who wins the election today, it is blatantly obvious that we will need a decentralized, censorship-proof alternative to the Stasi-monitored “curated” big social media sites. And one may already be in the making. If a “doubleplusungood crimethink” message is spread among a myriad blog sites around the world, they cannot all be muzzled at the same time. […]
So apparently Bitchute was just taken down by a simultaneous service denial. Isp level banning. They tweeted about it, but those will be censored shortly. Independent channels of communication are being aggressively shut down.
Seems like they managed to bring their site back up.
If we still have a country after the election, addressing this deplatforming (especially by financial institutions and payment processors and isps, and and and) is going to be urgent. “Build your own everything” and prepare for every aspect of civilization to stab you in the back can’t continue.
“If you do not like Youtube you can go to Bitchute”.
Except that they “Woke” Corporations (including the Credit Bubble Banks – totalitarians such as “we are not an island, we are part of something so much bigger” HSBC, Saint-Simon wold be delighted) can take down non leftist Social Media as well.
Those libertarians who bleat “private companies can do whatever they like – it is not censorship when a private company takes something down, and it is not persecution when a private company dismisses you from your job for the “crime” of expressing your beliefs” are looking more and more stupid.
The Woke Corporations and the Government Bureaucracies are joined-at-the-hip – people who still do not know that by now, are BLIND.
Ed Brenegar,
This is an extremely important and insightful comment. The following sentence I’d like to suggest for Samizdata Quote of the Day
Decentralized networks of relationships is key here. Structures that ensure mutual-accountability will help these networks of relationships to grow more quickly – and thus these structures must be figured out, constructed, and used ASAP.
Urbit is an example of this:
https://urbit.org/
The new media Perry de Havilland has referred to (and he is 100% right we are indeed experiencing a second wave of these) is a symptom of the desire for networks of mutually-accountable-relationships in the area of information flow.
IMO the first wave of new, rightwing media was in response to the invention of the internet (9/11 + aftermath was just a calayst) and the current second wave of new, rightwing media is in response to the use of the internet by the Left via BIG TECH, BIG MEDIA & CENSORSHIP.
Alex Jones is right – it’s an information war.
I never did find out who Emmanuel Goldstein of Airstrip One was.