Is There a War on Independent Bloggers?

Far from being a situation where those who "work hard" may reasonably hope to make steady progress, those who have been "independent" bloggers for very long are likely to have experienced repeated setbacks as, due to reasons of which they have been told nothing, the traffic they laboriously built up collapsed to nearly nothing--and had to be laboriously built back up again. Thus they never get ahead, while the reason for their not getting ahead seems to them to be their being in the Kafkaesque situation of having been judged guilty of crimes they have not been told under laws of which they know nothing except that they are changing all the time, as indeed those who have so judged them insist that it is right they be told nothing. If we explained how the algorithms work, the Search Engine Overlords say, people would actually know what they would get punished for and so abide by the rules in order to avoid punishment--and we can't have that, can we? It would be totally at odds "with giving users the best possible experience!"

Going by what they actually see online it would seem to them that to the Search Engine Overlords "best possible experience" means the constant infliction on the web user of the sites of parasitical scum trying to shake them down for their money, clickbait trash, and even keyword-filled slop of exactly the kind that their highly touted algorithms are supposed to keep from offending the Internet user's sight. Indeed, those told that the search engines punish "low quality content" and self-promotion they found that there is a double-standard at work--in which the search engines are catering to the well-funded and "brand-named" as against the rest, whom the executives of the Search Engine Overlords themselves openly compare with the contents of a cesspool, with this extending to indulging the low-quality content and self-promotion of the Big Sites, not least in their outright selling visibility (advertising, after all, the revenue stream for the search engine owner). This is complimented and reinforced by the pseudo-good citizenship of the responsible executives who insist that they seek to promote "authoritative" sources and guard against the much-derided "fake news"--with, of course, "authority" equated with the well-funded and brand-named, and "fake news" equated not with the lies that a media machine effectively the propaganda arm of the powerful has spewed ceaselessly through its disgraceful history, but those outside that lie-spewing machinery, all as the standard by which they judge the "fakeness" of the news deriving from that source is not that of "realfact," but of "goodfact," as determined by masters whose brazenness in exercising their power makes a mockery of Progressive-era fantasies that "professionalism" would set everything wrong with the media aright.

Still, if it has been established over and over again for many years that the web's dynamics, and those of the media machine, have both left the independent bloggers hopelessly outmatched in the competition for eyeballs that we call the "attention economy"--and to the extent that they have managed to get noticed at all been so to the advantage of the Established (in spite of the right's complaints it is the left that suffered worst from how the web and the media work, from the Big Techs censorship-that-does-not-speak-its-name)--the fact remains that even if they have greatly favored them, those in power can never be comfortable with the fact of a mass of people presenting their opinions to the world at large without their communiques or their persons having been vetted by their Ministry of Truth because it is simply too large and unruly a thing to ever be a safely integrated, controlled and reliable part of the Media Ecosystem as they would like it to be, and so an uncertainty and an annoyance they need no longer tolerate, to go by their actions as they set about making the web approximate their ideal for that ecosystem (pretty much the online equivalent of '90s animation classic Phantom 2040's Maximum Era).

In the circumstances it does not strike me as being at all an exaggeration to speak of the mainstream media, Big Tech and that Establishment opinion which views the public's speaking up and finding any sort of audience with extreme distaste generally as waging a war against independent bloggers, and indeed having done so for many, many years now--and which should also be regarded as a war on free speech, the real war on free speech, and a war on democracy, long-escalating and increasingly making headway such that, going by what many say of recent "Helpful Content" updates, there now seem to be grounds to wonder if those fighting the war on bloggers are not now approaching their clearly yearned-for Victory-Bloggers Day.

Back when the vaporware hustlers, sci-fi power fantasy addicts and aspiring Führers of Silicon Valley were clumsily concealing their true natures behind their crudely made and ill-fitting countercultural masks, and the news and entertainment media performing their role of obediently repeating the goodfacts of the powerful to a public for whose intelligence it has never shown anything but the most acid contempt, the promise of a free and open and democratic Internet made for not just a marketing tool, but good public relations (as seen in those ridiculous commercials where Big Telecom slapped contemporary-sounding covers of '60s hits by bands like The Rascals onto "power-to-the-people"-themed commercials pushing their crappy services onto the consumer).

Nowhere near so many bought this garbage as some would have us believe, of course. Certainly any leftist worthy of the label, all too aware of the hard realities of "inequalities in resources, infrastructure, class power" between groups, was unlikely to be taken in, while even so "safe" a figure as Thomas Frank had his first popular success with a book tearing apart the stupidities of "market populism." Still, the mainstream being what it is the propaganda for those stupidities was everywhere, as the media that reached a broad audience on the whole treated them with great deference for many, many years.

All of that has since palled, and the fact that those who championed that fatuous cyber-utopianism when it was useful have long since seen it as being in their interest to turn against it in the way described here, making sure that the really effective Means of Communication are in what those in power would consider to be safe hands as the public listens and obeys rather than talks back. And so just as elites talk up democracy when convenient (as a club with which to beat regimes they disapprove for other reasons) they spend their time and energy trying to defeat democracy in actuality, as seen in how where they cannot wholly deny the public the franchise they contrive ways to nullify it, so that just as you have your vote but also find that "nothing ever changes," you will still have your little blog--but no one will ever see it, as in the process whatever measure of democracy we had online fast vanishes.