Y2K reprise?

Do you remember the fear about 2000? Computers all over the world were allegedly going to treat Jan. 1, 2000 as Jan. 1, 1900, with dire consequences. Power grids and banks would fail. Civilization would come to a halt. The responsible thing to do — according to the fear mongers, including, I was sad to see, Ligonier Ministries — was to move to the country, buy lots of guns and supplies, and be ready for a complete meltdown.

I was on a camping trip with some friends in the fall of 1999. Some of them were unsure what to do. All of us knew someone who had made drastic changes to prepare for The End. They were called Preppers.

My friend Marty ridiculed the idea. “So when your neighbors come begging for food, you’re going to shoot them?”

My attitude was that too much money was at stake, and people would find a way, somehow, to make sure the world didn’t come to an end. My only preparation was to buy an extra 6-pack of beer, and I only did that as a joke. I’m a homebrewer, so there’s rarely a shortage of beer in my house.

I’ve heard rumblings recently that seem similar. Gun sales are through the roof, and people are wondering how to prepare for civil unrest, or … whatever.

It’s a good idea to have enough food and water on hand to survive for a few days, or even a week or two. It doesn’t take civil unrest to kill the power and such. A hurricane, or a really bad snow storm, can keep you cooped in your house for a while. We were without power for five days after some weird weather event about a decade ago.

But what, exactly, are you supposed to plan for?

Am I supposed to buy guns? Seeds? A water purification system? A power generator?

Honestly, if it gets to that, I would probably have to pack as much as I can in the car and go visit some friends in Wyoming.

It’s time for government control of the so-called platforms

The First Amendment prohibits the government from interfering with free speech. Nothing stops the tech oligarchs because they are private companies.

This is wrong and must change.

As a rule, I am against giving the government more power, but in this case it is necessary (and overdue). In the modern age, allowing the tech companies to regulate speech on their so-called platforms is as absurd as allowing AT&T to regulate what you say on the phone, or the post office to regulate what you can say in a letter. The difference is a regulatory fiction that has to be eliminated.

A standard pro-market response would be to say that if one company does something people don’t like, they can take their business elsewhere. That kind of simplistic answer is entirely insufficient for this situation. We wouldn’t accept that logic with the phone carriers. We take it as given that the phone companies can’t regulate what you say. We need to have the same attitude towards online methods of communication.

The tech companies need to be regulated immediately.

Today will be a rare day in two ways. First, I am calling for more government regulation, and second, I find myself in agreement with the World Leaders [who] Denounce Big Tech Censorship of President Donald Trump.

We cannot leave it to American Big Tech to decide how we can or cannot discuss online. Today’s mechanisms destroy the compromise searching and consensus-building that are crucial in free and democratic societies. We need a stricter regulatory approach.

The hypocrisy of the tech oligarchs is astonishing, but they get away with it all the time.

In Russia, the opposition leader, Alexey Navalny, who is an outspoken anti-corruption campaigner, said he believed the ban was an unacceptable form of censorship and was based not on a genuine need but rather Twitter’s political preferences.

In a thread posted on the platform on Jan. 10, Navalny said: “Don’t tell me he was banned for violating Twitter rules. I get death threats here every day for many years, and Twitter doesn’t ban anyone.”

As private citizens, the tech oligarchs are free to contradict themselves and have absurd and inconsistent standards however they like, but the management of companies of the size and reach we’re discussing can’t be left to private whims. Otherwise, why have laws against monopolies?

And that brings us to the real bottom line here. We oppose monopolies because they exercise too much economic power. They can charge absurd rates for service and keep others out of the market, and we rightly object to that.

Here’s the gut check. Do we value economic power more than we value free speech? To say that Twitter, as a private company, can ban speech, so long as they don’t have monopoly power in the market, is to say that money is more important than ideas. I reject that. I don’t want companies to have too much power in the market, but I am far more concerned with companies having too much power in the marketplace of ideas.