Början på ett mediakrig om mångkulturen?

The real pressure, it seems, comes from the payment providers – Visa, Discover, PayPal, especially Mastercard – which have taken to using financial blacklisting as a way of enforcing progressive ideology.

There isn’t space here to discuss why they are doing it. It is simply an observable fact that, as Breitbart writer Allum Bokhari puts it, ‘it has become increasingly difficult for individuals engaged in controversial yet lawful speech to fund their activities online.’ Even liberals are starting to worry. Banks and credit card companies, says the left-leaning Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), have become ‘de facto internet censors.’

No one is safe from this growing censorship, not even, potentially, the biggest internet star of them all PewDiePie – a Swedish comedian with 77 million subscribers on YouTube and nearly 20 billion total views: three views for every human on the planet.

Yet still, for all his massive popularity, and despite the ostensibly apolitical nature of his japesome content, PewDiePie is threatened by the New Puritanism. Sure an attempt by the left wing website Vox to smear him as a ‘Nazi sympathizer’ failed (not least, due to lack of evidence). But it won’t be the last for, as Allen Farrington puts it in a recent Quillette profile, PewDiePie regularly commits the crime of being funny. ‘And the online corporate giants have no idea what to do with humor’ – especially when, as PewDiePie does, it’s used to critique their opaque monetization, copyright and content restrictions, and slyly to mock their leftist sacred cows.

So the battle lines for free speech in 2019 have been drawn: on the one side Silicon Valley and its authoritarian ‘progressive’ sympathizers everywhere from academe to the card payment processing industry; on the other, all those people who’d prefer the internet to be a place where they are free to make whatever jokes they like, express whatever viewpoint they like and fund whichever creatives they like, uncensored by the tech and finance worlds’ self-appointed Witchfinders General.

This reflects what seems at first glance like an odd dynamic, in which predominantly progressive people combine with large corporations to pressure their partners into restricting speech and behavior. In this sense, Patreon’s case strikes me as emblematic of a broader development in the technology industry, where idealistic founders and early adopters wanting to liberate people from restrictive structures have found themselves pressured to enforce restrictions of their own.

But how do we explain this strange alliance between progressives—including progressive activists and organizations—and corporations? These two groups seem naturally opposed, but that isn’t nearly as much the case as it used to be. The reason, I would argue, is that there has been a realignment among both groups that makes their interests far more aligned than they used to be.

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So, it would be wrong to say that this emerging safety culture has replaced progressivism. Rather, it seems to have reframed it. If we define progressivism roughly as a movement focussed on the desire to minimize domination, then this aspect has clearly been preserved. What does seem different relative to traditional versions of progressivism, though, is that it’s less prone to describing domination as oppressive and restrictive, and more prone to describing it as harmful and violent. Consequently, it tends to frame its goals in terms of safety and harm-prevention, rather than in terms of freedom.

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This follows in the wake of a decision by Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority to enforce a new code from June 2019 so that: “British companies will no longer be able to create promotions that depict men and women engaged in gender-stereotypical activities, amid fears that such depictions are contributing to pay inequality and causing psychological harm.” Also, “adverts that suggest that transforming your body will make you romantically successful,” will be banned. It also clarified “rules on the sexualisation of young women.”

It’s obvious from the use of terminology that these changes have been heavily influenced by the kind of safety culture Haidt and Lukianoff refer to, although it’s not something that’s easily attributed to overprotective parenting. A better explanation here seems to be the influence of feminist ideas and discourse in relation to beauty and fitness norms, gender stereotypes, and sexuality.

More broadly, though, it’s not unreasonable to think that the influence of feminist ideas has helped cause the reframing of progressivism from an emphasis on freedom towards an emphasis on safety and harm-prevention, and that this isn’t just limited to the specific issues mentioned above, but represents a general shift in attitude that includes less tolerance of offensive speech, for example.

And there does seem to be a gender-component to this. An ongoing survey of the political orientation of incoming American university students dating back several decades shows an eye-opening trend. During the early 1970s, men were more likely to be on the political left than women. That gradually reversed during the late 1970s and 1980s, and the gap has been growing. Today, women are substantially more likely than men to be on the political left among incoming university students.

Women are traditionally are more conservative than men, but modern progressivism seems to have gradually developed into a movement that is extremely appealing to women, especially younger, more secular women. And part of the reason for this, perhaps, is that it has shifted away from the freedom-oriented attitude of the 1970s and towards safety and rigid norms. It has essentially adopted values traditionally associated with conservatism, thus making it something of a hybrid. (This refers to mainstream progressivism, not the radical fringe.)

But this seems to have produced a counter-reaction of predominantly young men who find themselves unable to identify with this version of progressivism. So, almost by default they find themselves on the political right, aligned with conservatives with whom they have almost nothing in common.

What’s interesting about this new version of progressivism is that it’s much more palatable to corporations. While there’s a common belief that corporations are focussed on “making a profit,” this is an oversimplification. What corporations are most concerned with is growth; especially stable and predictable growth. For example, Apple, the world’s most valuable company just three months ago, has lost almost 40 percent of its market capitalization since then. This wasn’t due to a massive drop in profitability, but rather because of uncertainty related to its future revenue potential, especially in China, as well as because of general economic uncertainty. When corporations downgrade their revenue forecasts even slightly, they’re usually punished by investors.

So, corporations are interested in fostering a stable environment that minimizes risk and which provides a platform for predictable long-term growth. And in this regard, progressives that want to restrict offensive speech and regulate behavior to ensure safety and minimize the risk of harm can actually be quite beneficial. Certainly, they pose less of a problem than more disruptive old-fashioned progressives.

And this is especially true when taking into account a second shift in progressivism over the past few decades: a de-emphasis of class- and labor issues in favor of an emphasis on other forms of identity, especially race, gender, and sexuality. Not only does this reduce the pressure progressives have traditionally placed on corporations, but it also supports the increased emphasis most corporations place on growth and talent-acquisition.

If one were to design the perfect employee for these corporations, it would be hard to do better than one that was cosmopolitan and desexualized, while also being exquisitely sensitive to offense and harm.

And, of course, there has also been a shift in the corporate world which makes this even more relevant. Industrial companies have become less and less important, and technology companies more and more important. Of the world’s six most valuable companies, five are technology companies: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), and Facebook. All of these companies operate in sensitive international environments and recruit from all around the world.

Now, it would be an exaggeration to say that contemporary mainstream progressives never are at odds with corporations, clearly they sometimes are. But their interests are far more aligned than they were in the past, and even when in conflict, they’re easier to placate. Witness the many social justice projects that corporations undertake in cooperation with progressive organizations. While they aren’t free, they’re more manageable than facing serious disruption, and they create co-operation and goodwill.

The point is that one shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that companies like Patreon face surprisingly similar pressures from both progressives and corporations—their concerns are in many respects more similar than they might initially seem.