Para-State

Discussion

Arcotherium:

“Tech companies had, and used, the power to close the Internet, but they could not and would not have done it alone. The 20th century totalitarian party-states, like Nazi Germany, the USSR, or the PRC, with their tendencies to formalize and unify authority, had official government censorship departments with lists of ideas and topics that could not be mentioned, and a party line on what narratives are publicly acceptable. Western states today, and especially the US, do not. Instead, these functions are outsourced to an opaque web of nominally-private NGOs, media organizations, and academics. Jacob Siegel, pointing to the close links between these organizations, tech companies, and US intelligence, calls this network The Information State, and I prefer the term “para-state” for those organizations that are neither for-profit tech platforms nor officially part of the government.

This type of arrangement, with organizations separate from, but reliant on and often deputized by, the state determining publicly-permissible thought is common in Western history. For much of its existence the Catholic Church played a similar role. Today, the most institutionally similar regime outside the West is the Islamic Republic of Iran, with a clerical body that is not part of the formal state, the Supreme Council of Cyberspace, determining what is to be censored.

Why is it appropriate to call these organizations para-statal rather than private? First, because they are often public trusts, given tax privileges35 in exchange for operating in the public interest as determined by the state. Second, they were and are usually funded by governments— especially the EU, Germany, Britain, and the US—or by other tax-privileged public trusts. Third, they exercise power, such as blacklisting and censorship, usually exercised by states36. Fourth, they are often directly privileged and empowered by governments; for example, under the EU’s Digital Services Act, tech platforms must defer to registered “trusted flaggers.” These institutions are not part of the formal state, but they are part of the ruling regime.

In the US, the para-state is much more dangerous than the formal state when it comes to censorship. The formal state in the US is extremely fragmented and polarized, which means there are always power centers within the formal government to oppose the censors. Perhaps even more importantly, the US has strong memetic antibodies against formal state restrictions on speech, which makes it very easy to point at and mobilize opposition against. The para-state, on the other hand, is homogeneously leftist (aside from a handful of explicitly conservative organizations, as per Conquest’s Second Law) and unbound by Constitutional and many legal restrictions. The formal state also typically coordinates through public and explicit law or regulation rather than vague, opaque, and ever-shifting “codes of conduct” and “content policies,” which are much harder to oppose. This is less true in the rest of the world, where explicit state controls on speech are common. There, such organizations are often backed up by very heavy-handed state power.”

…

* Journalists

Before the Internet, the social role of the media was to uncover and disseminate information about the world. The Internet rendered this largely obsolete, as it allowed for much easier dissemination of information, which put traditional media in steep decline. The closure of the Internet gave the media a new lease on life as an integral component of the emerging censorship para-state. Rather than finding information, media outlets became sources of official truth to be cited by fact-checking organizations to be used by tech companies to provide lists of ideas, groups, and individuals to suppress, and to coordinate censorship campaigns with threat of bad press. To facilitate this, Meta and especially Google began replacing lost ad dollars with their own grant programs for recognized news organizations.

In some jurisdictions, this para-state relationship is even formalized, with the governments of Canada, Australia, the Nordics, the United Kingdom, France, California, New York, and Illinois giving officially-recognized journalists direct subsidies or tax exemptions, and the European Union and the United Kingdom exempting them from some online speech restrictions. This is in addition to publicly-funded broadcasters in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, the Nordics, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which enthusiastically participated in the closure of the Internet.

* NGO Enforcers

The last leg of the para-state involved in the closure of the Internet was the army of enforcers that was responsible for making sure dozens or hundreds of the different private organizations involved got with the program of mass censorship. NGOs can’t throw people in prison, so they operated through pressure campaigns, both in public in concert with media organizations, and behind the scenes, against private companies. These organizations used mafia tactics: censor the people and ideas we want you to censor, bringing people aligned with us into your organization and decision-making structure to do so in the process, or we’ll launch a PR campaign smearing you, with the threat of aligned governments and already-captured private institutions destroying your business to back said PR campaign up. Like the fact-checkers and disinformation experts, these enforcer organizations were and still are overwhelmingly tax-privileged nonprofit public trusts.

It is difficult to tell from the outside, but the most important of these organizations is probably the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The best account here is Patrick McKenzie’s “Notes on a non-profit indicted for bank fraud,” which can be summarized as follows (though I would recommend reading the entire thing): The SPLC ran a coordinated pressure campaign, starting in 2017 and escalating in 2020 and 2021, going after “Internet companies” which included not only tech companies like Facebook and Twitter, but also “banks, credit card processors, and any other financial infrastructure their enemies could touch” to remove “extremists” from the Internet and from financial infrastructure. The SPLC maintains a blacklist, the SPLC Extremist Files, to be used in financial infrastructure and elsewhere, one with quasi-official status used across many major companies and platforms, alongside the US Treasury Department’s OFAC. It’s worth pondering the word “extremist” for a moment. Even taken entirely literally—and the SPLC, of course, is not a neutral organization whatsoever—all it means is extreme relative to the mainstream/orthodox view. The SPLC thus does its best to purge any sufficiently radical social critique from both financial infrastructure and the Internet.

The SPLC campaign had two parts, a public pressure campaign in the media, and a much more consequential series of private, behind-the-scenes, meetings with industry.”

(https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-closure-of-the-internet)