Everyone Condemns Big Tech—Who Is Fighting It? DOJ/Google, Crowder/Shapiro, Brazil, & More | SYSTEM UPDATE #28

Many people in politics and journalism love to tell how angry they are at Big Tech, how much contempt they harbor for it, and how devoted they are to subverting, weakening, and undermining it. And while some of them do mean that, many of them do not. When everyone is watching and the cameras are rolling, they strut around posturing as threatening and menacing enemies of Big Tech but when the cameras are off and nobody is looking, many of them suddenly lose interest in what they are claiming is such a passionate cause for them, while others do something much more cynical, and more destructive: they work to fortify and benefit from the very system of Big Tech they claim to despise.

This is a topic that can lend itself to moral posturing, sanctimony, and hectoring but I think it’s both too nuanced and too important to lose time with any of that. We’re going to try and do our best to examine what is actually a challenging and an interesting question: faced with a very small group of corporate giants who have used anti-competitive practices to make themselves virtually unchallengeable and inescapable, how can one shrewdly subvert their power without sacrificing one’s integrity, or, worse, cynically exploiting the sincere anger of the public toward Big Tech for one’s own personal aggrandizement?

We’ll use several recent stories in the news – including the ugly and vitriolic dispute between YouTuber Steven Crowder and Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, The filing of a new lawsuit yesterday by the Biden DOJ against Google, Rumble’s various battles against Big Tech censorship, and the growing censorship crisis in Brazil – to understand who those are who are attempting to foster free speech on the Internet and who is fraudulently pretending to do so.

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