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Oct. 28, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

23:18

THE TRUTH ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANIES

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	Hey everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine.
	Hope you're doing well. So this is where I started, in my very first full-time professional gig.
	After high school, I was in the woods in northern Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, doing claim staking as a prospector, a gold prospector.
	And it has, many years later...
	It has supplied me, gosh, 35 years later, it has supplied me with a perfect analogy, I believe, for what's going on with social media companies.
	And if you want to understand the censorship and put the libertarian private company's argument in perspective, this is the way to do it.
	Of course, I've come out here to record talking about the woods in the woods, and the woods have decided to start raining on me.
	But that's all right. We could be hardy in these troubled times.
	So... What I did, and this has recently changed to an online system, but what I did back in the day was I would go out with another guy.
	We'd be flown out to the middle of nowhere.
	We'd set up camp, and we would tie rope 100 meters in length to each other.
	And I was the point guy, so I would go ahead with the compass in a straight line through the woods.
	No matter what you're facing, you kind of got to go in a straight line, and you would hammer in Metal plates into trees in about a one kilometer square radius and from that you would get the mineral rights for a certain amount of time.
	If you didn't use those mineral rights within a certain amount of time then they would revert back to unowned and nobody of course would bother building a mine unless they had certainty about the property rights or the mineral rights really of The land.
	In Canada, mineral rights, like 90% of the land is owned by the government anyway.
	We're just crowded onto a few kilometers north of the 48th.
	But in America, I think you get mineral rights with the land rights, but not in Canada.
	So, it's funny too, it just struck me that nobody would build a mine.
	Mine, of course, being a word with more than one meaning.
	Mine being what you dig into the ground to excavate valuables from.
	And also mine, as in the seagulls from Finding Nemo.
	Mine? Mine? Mine?
	Mine? You rats with wings!
	So mine being ownership, right?
	So you would go and hammer these squares in, and it was pretty brutal and rough work from time to time.
	And it was a fine job for a young man.
	It gave me money to go to university with.
	I did it for about a year and a half, all told.
	And it was, you know, it sort of...
	Led me to this kind of conclusion that I have as a basic rule of life now, which is I don't trust the philosophy of anyone who hasn't done hard manual labor at some point in their life.
	Like, I just don't trust their philosophy.
	It's so easy to get... Wound up in airy-fairy platonic bullcrap if you've never actually had to deal with the elements on a muscle-to-mass ratio, right?
	You've never had to deal with brute nature, which you can't talk in and out of people.
	If you spent your whole life convincing people, then it seems to me much more likely you'd end up in this kind of airy-fairy universe Where reality is subjective and whims and relativism and blah blah blah.
	There's no relativism in the woods.
	You get lost, you spend the night in the woods.
	You don't prepare, you get frostbite.
	You get the drilling wrong, you lose a finger, a hand, an arm, and you are probably two days travel from any kind of hospital, so you just bleed out there in the snow.
	So, there's no bullshite in base muscular reality, and I don't mean to sound like a class guy, but growing up very poor, working hard, menial jobs, and so on, it gives you a respect for base empirical reality that you just can't get for books.
	So, why am I talking about this?
	Well, I want you to think of something with regards to the social media companies.
	Really important. Really important.
	Now, You stake a claim to a website address, right?
	You get registered and that is true whether you are registering your own domain directly or whether you are going to youtube.com forward slash free domain radio or twitter.com forward slash Stefan Molyneux.
	You are staking a claim.
	And the social media companies, my understanding of it back in the day, was, hey, if you don't break the law, if you don't promote illegal actions or perform illegal speech, not this made-up thing called hate speech, which is just, you know, speech you hate is not hate speech.
	It's the basic reality that the left doesn't really seem to grasp, or maybe they do.
	It doesn't really matter. They act as if they don't.
	So you're staking a claim, in the same way that when I went out in the woods...
	And I muscled my way through swamps and leeches and bushes and with snowshoes in the winter and hiking boots in the summer.
	Hey, let's look overhead, see if we can see the birds.
	No. So, you stake a claim.
	Now, without staking that claim, no mining would ever be possible.
	Without having a claim to land, no housing would ever be built.
	And so, I want you to think of social media companies, and I think it's valid, as like the Land Registry Office.
	Now, the Land Registry Office is simply supposed to ask, have you fulfilled the rights of ownership?
	Yes. In the past it was hammering in these metal plates in a square kilometer at a time and now it's some online garbage that obviously disfavors the rich as usual.
	But you could go be a claim staker and you could go and stake your claim and then if valuable minerals were found or there was reason to believe that they could be found then you would sell your claim and To a larger, usually a mining company that would then pursue it to try and make money.
	So, the Land Registry Office.
	Now, I want you to imagine this scenario.
	That you have staked a claim and you have built a mine.
	And again, remember, the only reason you built that mine, invested in building that mine, was because you had the right of ownership on that piece of land.
	Now, then what happens is, you work that, and we work the black seam together, you work that mine for 13 years.
	You throw everything you have into that mine, you mortgage your house, and you work that mine, and it's doing okay.
	It's doing okay. And you have obeyed the law, you've paid your taxes, you have not done anything environmentally destructive or against the law, you've paid your workers, and you're in full compliance with the law.
	And then what happens is, The Land Registry Organization, the Land Registry, I guess in Canada, most places, it's a government agency, but the Land Registry says, you know what, we don't like your mind.
	We don't like your mine. We think that you should pay your workers more.
	We think that you should maybe do more environmental management.
	We don't like some of the people who are buying the minerals you produce.
	We just don't like your mine. And what they do is you show up to work one day with no warning.
	They have hired a bunch of security guards and they have Take in your mind.
	And not only have they taken your mind, but you can't even get in to get your money, your savings, your documents, your whatever, right?
	You're not even allowed in.
	You can't, like it's locked.
	You just show up for work one day and your mind is gone.
	Did you break the law? No.
	Were they fine with your mind for 13 years?
	Sure. Did they give you any warning?
	Nope. Your mind is gone, baby.
	Gone. Now, as it turns out, funny story.
	It turns out that some of your competitors who couldn't compete with you very well had actually made up stuff or taken things out of context to make it seem like you were a bad guy.
	And they are the ones who had been complaining to the Land Registry Office that you shouldn't have your mind anymore.
	Well, this is for successful online personalities, talking heads, whatever you want to call us.
	Well, we were doing pretty well in the glorious heyday from The ten years, right?
	Everybody says, oh, the people should have a voice.
	Well, finally the people had a voice.
	Turns out, funny story, they don't want the people to have a voice, the powers that be.
	They don't want that at all. So ten years, from 2006 to 2016, you had ten years where you actually had a voice.
	And in terms of truly having a voice, it was probably less than half of that, because starting off in 2006 was a tiny audience, and it took quite a while to grow it, right?
	So, the land registry takes your mine, which only exists because the land registry was never supposed to take your mine unless you broke the law.
	The land registry takes your mine and you can't get back into it.
	What do you think of that situation?
	What do you think would happen to mining, to investment, If 13 years of labor could be snatched from you without warning, without process, with no recourse, really, if it could just be taken from you like that.
	Well, it's pretty brutal, right?
	As you can understand.
	The mine exists because security of ownership was guaranteed...
	It was guaranteed. Now, what if the regulations change, but then they go back ten years and find something that you did that was against the new regulations, though perfectly fine at the time, and that's why you lose your mind.
	Because you did not comply with regulations that did not exist when you built your mind.
	Well, in a just standard of law, that's called getting grandfathered in.
	And it's fairly common, right?
	You can't have retroactive law in any just legal environment, right?
	Now, for those of you who watched my documentary last year, which certainly I would imagine contributed to my banishing from the public square, I talked about how when the communists get into power, what they do is they take your land.
	They call it land reform, right?
	It's not really land reform.
	They just take the land for the most productive and then they redistribute it to the less productive, to their political cronies, to their friends, to their family, to whoever, right?
	They buy the allegiance of the less confident by dividing the spoils of the more confident.
	And this, of course, is what I believe the hard leftists in the social media companies are doing, is just as they will take your land when communism comes along, and they'll take your home, and they'll take your business.
	They are taking people's virtual businesses, And redistributing it.
	Now, of course, they're not redistributing the actual URLs, but what they are doing, in effect, is redistributing the audience, right?
	So the people who used to listen to me are now going elsewhere.
	And that redistribution is a hallmark of a leftist takeover.
	And it's, of course, not going to stop with Virtual businesses, it's going to continue and it's going to end up encapsulating and absorbing Borg-like actual brick-and-mortar businesses and so on.
	So that's kind of an important thing to understand.
	Now a couple of objections that are worth mentioning in this analogy.
	So when you register with the land office, they don't have costs really.
	I mean a little bit here and there, a little bit of Storage space, you know, some small slice of salary and real estate and so on to store your files or whatever, or some servers now that it's gone electronic, but they don't have significant costs in hosting you, whereas of course if you have an online media channel there are costs associated and bandwidth associated and so on.
	Well first of all the bandwidth It's significantly subsidized by the government for big companies.
	And the government, of course, played a role through the taxpayer, forced taxpayer funding in developing some of this technology in the first place.
	So it's not exactly like, you know, that old Barack Obama thing, you didn't build that?
	Well, to a large degree, for the social media companies, they are feasting off Taxpayer resources in the development of the internet and they're feasting off taxpayer subsidies in the bandwidth that they consume.
	Which, of course, makes them much closer to a public utility than a private corporation, in my particular view.
	But if you have a channel, it's a little bit different, of course, because it costs money for the company to maintain that channel.
	It's a difference of degree, not of kind, because, again, it also costs money for the government to maintain your ownership of land, your mineral rights or whatever.
	So it's a difference of degree, not of kind.
	But the difference is, of course, that you don't...
	Generate income for the land registry.
	I mean you kind of do as a taxpayer and so on but not quite in the same way as social media companies.
	So generally the way it works of course is that you bring traffic to the site and the social media company sells either ads or a subscription service like a monthly subscription service and that's how they fund what it is that they're doing.
	And so There's a slight difference in situation.
	Again, it's a difference of degree, not of kind.
	But that's an objection that could come up.
	Now, of course, if the social media company chooses to demonetize you, then they're choosing to enter into a relationship wherein you're going to be making precious little money for them.
	I mean, you'll make money indirectly because you'll bring people to the site.
	The people will watch your videos or listen to your podcast, and then they'll go and consume other media, other shows, which will have ads.
	And, of course, it could also be that...
	People buy, even if you're not monetized, they will buy a subscription for a service just based upon supporting what it is that you do.
	So it's not quite as clear, but there is that aspect that is a little bit different.
	But again, can you get grandfathering in?
	When I first started on a lot of social media companies, there weren't any ads at all.
	Not a one. So can you get grandfathered in?
	Well, that of course should be the ideal.
	So I think it's really, really important to think about this as an analogy.
	So when we look at these companies, we are looking at companies that promise to a large degree That they are neutral, like the land office.
	The land office shouldn't care whether you're on the left, whether you're on the right, whether you're a socialist or a libertarian or a communist or whatever.
	They shouldn't care because your ownership is not dependent upon your political arguments.
	So, if we understand how to look at these companies...
	It's a little bit different from something like a public utility like a phone company or a hydro company or whatever it is because people don't directly make their living and invest Many, many years of their life, tens of thousands of hours, to build up an income and an audience directly on the hydro company.
	Like, they'll use the hydro company, but they don't use the computers, the servers or anything of the hydro company or whatever.
	They'll use the cell phone or the landline, but they don't necessarily use that as their entire business.
	So, if you think of these companies...
	Not as, you know, publishers versus platforms.
	I think the way that you want to look at them is as property registry companies.
	As property registry companies.
	Now, the foundation of the modern world is property rights.
	And property rights have had precious little play throughout most of human history.
	Finally, in the 18th century, In agriculture, in the 19th century in capital, and in the 20th century in intellectual property.
	There have been some advances, and the modern world is entirely founded upon these advances.
	If you look at the ancient world, in many places, like 80-90% of the population were slaves, and slaves, of course, is a violation of property rights, the violation of the universality of owning yourself and owning the effects of your actions.
	So, property rights have been extended and expanded, and the only reason we have cool stuff, the only reason that there's this phone, the only reason that there's this microphone, this hat, Is because there are some guarantees of future property rights.
	Property rights, of course, being the lawful exclusive use of a resource.
	And if you don't have property rights, nothing gets made.
	Like a farmer will grow excess crops only if that farmer has some guarantee of owning the excess crops and having a market to sell them in.
	The only reason there are cities is because farmers have property rights in the market.
	Otherwise, farmers simply grow subsistence to keep their family alive, and they don't bother building anything more.
	Why would they? Why would they?
	Simply to have it stolen.
	In fact, if you have excess in a lawless society, you are in graver danger than if you had just enough to survive on.
	Because by having an excess, you become a target.
	For the brigands, the warlords, the thieves, the parasites, the bureaucrats, or whoever.
	So not only is excess not encouraged in an anti-property rights environment, but excess is actively sought out and punished.
	We only have the modern world.
	We only have... We only have any kind of above subsistence resources because of property rights.
	And social media companies, in my view, act as a registrar of ownership.
	Say, ah yes, well they own the servers and they own it.
	Yes, I understand all of that.
	I understand all of that.
	And the government owns the land registry office, but that still doesn't mean that the government can morally engage in politicking and punishment of wrongthink by denying people's well-established property claims.
	Because the property is not just the servers.
	It's the URL. To a mild degree, it's the audience.
	And channels.
	Particularly channels which challenge existing thinking, which is, of course, the only way that society advances.
	I mean, they call themselves progressives, some of the hard leftists, they call themselves progressives, which is extraordinarily ironic when you think about it, of course, because they hate new arguments, they hate new ideas, they hate things that go against what they want.
	And so it's actually very regressive, right?
	Primitive societies are...
	Really defined by punishment of those who question, of those who think for themselves, and of course, as a result of that, a lack of property rights.
	So the modern world only exists because we've had property rights for about two centuries or so, maybe two and a half for land.
	That's the only reason we have the modern world.
	The intellectual flowering of the new enlightenment, which is being strangled in the crib as we speak, as you listen.
	The possibility of a quantum leap forward in human consciousness based upon the challenging of existing falsehoods.
	Intellectual freedom, freedom of speech, property rights is the only reason we have anything above bare subsistence, hope it doesn't rain, destroy the crops so we all end up starving and eating the cats.
	The only reason we have all of that is because of property rights and free speech.

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