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!smokesignal{"m":["Why Support SmokeSignal?","","A tool like SmokeSignal unapologetically provides the space for everyone to speak. Yes, even nazis - and they won’t be the worst of it.\n\nSo, why? What reason could we have for building a platform that nazis and other undesirables could use to broadcast hate?\n\nTo put an end to Cancel Culture.\n\n### Cancel Culture\n\nCancel Culture is a virulent meme, descending from political correctness and interwoven with Wokeness. Let’s summarize the ideology and resultant policy.\n\nThe ideological claim: some kinds of content, which might be labelled hateful, hurtful, or politically incorrect, should not be allowed in public discourse. Anyone responsible for this \"offensive\" content should be excommunicated and/or punished, to promote “safe spaces” where people are protected from being offended or emotionally damaged.\n\nThe policy naturally follows: we must _cancel_ the offensive content creator. The creator and their content are permanently silenced and excluded from the public conversation. To be cancelled, in short, is to be ostracised permanently from public discourse.\n\n*Cancel Culture* supports this strategy as a legitimate and sustainable response to unwanted ideas. According to Cancel Culture, the primary solution to nazism, racism, sexism, and many other problems, is to silence and/or punish offensive speakers and erase their content from public view.\n\nThis strategy is dangerous, stupid, and historically naive.\n\n### The Ever-Present Fringe\n\nAnyone who’s dealt with personal demons knows that when we ignore things we don’t like, they have a way of growing larger and more menacing. Alternatively, facing the ugliness in or around us gives us a chance to transform it into something good, true, or beautiful.\n\nThe same can be said about large groups and societies. Censorship - the societal equivalent to psychological repression, the “Don’t think about that!” - doesn’t actually defeat ideas, good or bad. It just pushes them to the Fringe. And the Fringe will always exist to receive them. There the ideas will fester and grow (mingling with other “problematic” ideas, no less), bound to eventually re-enter the public scene, modified just enough to bypass or dismantle filters that pushed them out last time.\n\nSmokeSignal and this very post could be seen as an iteration in this process.\n\nThis is a direct implication of basic memetics. Ideas evolve to survive - the truth is a secondary concern in this Darwinian struggle. To cancel nazism so hard that it goes away is as ludicrous a proposition as eliminating all species of mosquitoes in the world. We are not that mighty. If we try, new forms will emerge *specifically designed by evolution* to resist such eradication attempts. Mosquitoes that hibernate for years, say - or the 88 nazi dog whistle. Like it or not, that’s reality: memes evolve, and repression as a response is both ineffective and immature. We can agree on that while agreeing that both nazis and mosquitoes should be smacked.\n\nThe Fringe is a memetic space that cannot be eliminated. Repressed ideas will always find a home there, then mutate and evolve until one lucky little variant finds its way onto a Tweet.\n\nAnd it’s important to note that culture relies on the Fringe for growth. The Fringe is where new ideas form, and sometimes these new ideas are crucial to our survival. Sometimes they must exist in the Fringe for decades, evolving bit by bit, until society accepts them, as was the case with the Copernican revolution.\n\nClimate change awareness came from the Fringe. Women’s suffrage, racial equality, and democracy itself were all radical ideas that could only be borne in the Fringe. Gandhi, Darwin, and Copernicus all relied on the Fringe to promote their revolutionary ideas, which only became mainstream in retrospect.\n\n### Cancel Culture vs The Fringe\n\nAny given ideology or culture has its own particular Fringe.\n\nCancel Culture, like all totalitarian ideologies, sees its Fringe as the enemy. It prescribes certain conceptions of history and justice as sacred, and treats any disagreement as some kind of evil to be eliminated.\n\nCancel Culture is also becoming increasingly blind to its Fringe - another hallmark of totalitarianism. SJWs consider it Mission Accomplished when someone is apparently cancelled, but both the meme and the human it rode in on are still out in the world, still cross-pollinating and communicating.\n\nSolzhenitsyn, the writer of _The Gulag Archipelago_, tells us that totalitarianism always fails. Its Fringe can’t really be killed, and grows stronger as Cancel Culture pushes more people and ideas out (out to the Fringe). Thus the fight seems fixed: Cancel Culture is doomed to crumble and collapse.\n\nBut that leaves the timeframe open, and the longer we must wait for it to fall, the more fallout we’ll have. For example, how many children will undergo operations that remove their reproductive abilities, and how much of this will be due more to social pressure than well-considered reason? Cancel Culture would forbid us from even asking this reasonable and urgent question.\n\n### Cancelling Cancel Culture\n\nSolzhenitsyn’s _The Gulag Archipelago_ is widely recognized as a (perhaps _the_) crippling blow to the Soviet state. We aspire to take our own swing at the creeping totalitarianism of our time. We make this attempt by developing, releasing, promoting and improving SmokeSignal - and note with pleasure that such a tool would have been incredibly beneficial to Solzhenitsyn in his own time.\n\nSmokeSignal posts are immortalized on the blockchain and thus uncensorable. This interface will live on forever on IPFS and ENS at smokesignal.eth. Content creators can’t be deplatformed - not even by us, not even by nations - and their identities are protected behind pseudonymous Ethereum addresses. The whole system is not owned by us or any other legal entity, and thus can’t be legally attacked or pressured.\n\nSmokeSignal is public discourse, immune not just to Cancel Culture, but any future censorious ideologies. It is an indestructible platform for ideas on the Fringe."],"v":3,"c":{"topic":"smokesignal"}}