Online Censorship’s Institutional Power

Joshua Moon

A person’s most valuable asset is their reputation, and there’s no better place to build one’s cachet than online. For this reason, there is a convergence of extreme wealth, power, and influence building up around the backbone of the Internet like a cancer. Without immediate organization and reaction from the atomized groups considering themselves “anti-censorship”, we will soon live in a less free world with a less open Internet where rich and influential people can dictate their own trustworthiness and slander their opposition with impunity.

In the 11 years I have managed my forum, the Kiwi Farms, I have seen firsthand the power in allowing people to talk about people. Anyone who is permitted to freely share what they’d like about another is enabled to punch far above their own weight. When a forum organized like the Kiwi Farms hosts stories, media, and documents that never go away, it can become a permanent blight on a diligently maintained reputation belonging to surprisingly important people. When that demerit is made on someone rich and well-connected, they may dedicate years of their life to trying to erase it.

Liz Fong-Jones is a transgender multi-millionaire, formerly employed by Google, but now involved in at least two San Francisco tech startups: Honeycomb and Tall Poppy.1 His résumé and portfolio has been leveraged to try and deplatform the Kiwi Farms since 2017. What started with a single email has expanded over seven years into a conspiracy targeting the most sensitive and important components of what makes up the Internet.

The story of Liz Fong-Jones trying to take down the Kiwi Farms is indicative of what will soon be done to all controversial web content if there is not coordinated effort made to make the Internet, and the companies which compose it, more neutral and accountable.

Liz Fong-Jones and Trans LifeLine

On August 18th, 2017, Liz Fong-Jones used his company’s <[email protected]> email address to send a complaint. The targeted provider hosted my website’s email service.2 At the time, we used Cloudflare’s security services, and a common way to bypass Cloudflare was to look at the mail server. Cloudflare does not protect email, and often the unprotected mail server for websites will be the same server or provider as the actual protected web server. Fong-Jones complained we hosted personal information, hoping that this would cause our website to go down.

The information in question was about Trans LifeLine, a hotline for transgender people in crisis staffed by transgender volunteers. At the time, Trans LifeLine was operated by Greta Gustava and Nina Chabaul. These organizers would post extravagant lifestyle photos on their public Instagrams, meanwhile the Trans LifeLine hotline service rarely had anyone online to accept emergency calls. This led Kiwi Farms users to suspect they were stealing from their charity, so we began documenting both their lifestyle and their hotline’s performance (or lack thereof).

Documents leaked to us by people who had worked with them showed that there was almost no organization, no internal support structure, and no training. Transgender people recruited by TLL to be call agents would then be put on lines to deal with immediately at-risk suicidal transgender people with scant information on how to actually help. Some callers reported being hung up on. Operators reported trauma from having to answer life-or-death phonecalls without any idea of what to do or say.

Years later, and thanks to information made available only on the Kiwi Farms, they would be ousted from the organization for fraud.3 Trans LifeLine’s operators would later file under penalty of perjury that Greta and Nina had inured hundreds of thousands of dollars.4 Liz Fong-Jones tried to cover this up while it was happening by silencing the only people who were, at this point in time, both aware of and capable of discussing transgender issues in a less-than-flattering way without being banned.

This would begin the long trend of transgender activists saying “ignore the bad things on Kiwi Farms, they’re made up” with the punchline being that we’d end up proven right over time, and with damage done that could have been mitigated if we were trusted sooner. It would take Fong-Jones 6 years to admit that Trans LifeLine was a scam at the time he was supporting them. He explains he now only donates money to causes where he can directly influence the way it operates.5 Liz Fong-Jones should be thanking us, but he still holds a vicious grudge because we reported the abuse of his Google work email.

It’s necessary to be non-anonymous to the organisations that intermediate your giving in order to get a seat at the governance table and ensure that funds are being appropriately spent. That was a very very painful lesson I learned from the fiasco that was the early days of Trans Lifeline, where the inexperienced initial board did not meaningfully keep the founders in check / insist on audits, and the major donors (including myself) didn’t think to ask for board seats to provide oversight, leading to us all getting defrauded.6

You will never hear the story of how Kiwi Farms identified fraud in a charity, because it is not written about. There is not a single article from a supposedly trustworthy media source about this scandal. No journalist in the world can catalog what the Kiwi Farms gets right, because the truth is a secondary concern to them, sitting under what is politically expedient.

Liz Fong-Jones from Google to Honeycomb

Fong-Jones would continue working at Google for another 2 years. Anonymous reports regarding internal politics within the company where Fong-Jones worked paint a picture of a continuous menace, always looking for new victims to cause problems for. Fong-Jones even finds himself named in the famous James Damore discrimination lawsuit against Google for discriminatory posts made on internal Google forums.7

He claims to have resigned in 2019, after the Google Walkout protests he helped organize. Insiders reported that Google does not give severances, unless you are asked to quit. This indicates that Fong-Jones was likely paid to leave, as opposed to his claims he resigned. Trying to fire a person in such a politically protected category, especially when they are as litigious and disruptive as Fong-Jones is, would cost more than the $90,000 he was given just to go away.

During his employment with Google, he had acquired cryptocurrency and stake in the company. It is assumed that Fong-Jones’s net worth is in the millions. Indeed, Fong-Jones has stated he has an interest in finance and wants to make wealth building a part of his career.

After leaving Google, he joined tech startup Honeycomb as Chief Field Technology Officer. Honeycomb is a business-to-business software company that sells ‘solutions’ directly to major tech companies, such as Dropbox and Slack, video game companies including CCP (EVE Online) and Behaviour (Dead by Daylight), and finance companies like Vanguard, which is one of the largest investment firms in the world.

Honeycomb is extremely progressive and has stood by Liz Fong-Jones for years, even after he inexplicably announced to the world in November 2019 that he had been credibly accused of sexual assault, which he chooses to refer to as a “Consent Accident”.8

You won’t find any information about this online, no matter which search engine you use. Instead, you will find gushing articles, portfolio websites, Wikipedia entries, and more talking about what a successful, important person Fong-Jones is. How can someone accused of rape simply walk way from this without any of the progressive organizations around them caring?

Liz Fong-Jones and Tall Poppy’s Coverup

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of Liz Fong-Jones’s other personal interests, as he enjoys a perfectly pedicured digital footprint. He is an investor and board member of Tall Poppy, a reputation management company.9 This company is also business-to-business, and advertises itself as “proactive action against online harassment and personal security threats”. The name comes from an expression in Australia and New Zealand, and means that successful people get unfairly criticized: ‘the tall poppy gets cut down’.

They have a decent list of investors and advisors,10 with two names jumping out.

Y-Combinator has invested in them. Y-Combinator is the forum which had hosted the negative post about Liz Fong-Jones quoted in this article. This post now exists with Liz Fong-Jones’s name completely redacted, a change which was documented between 23 May and 15 Sep 2023, about 4 years after it was originally created.11

Inner Loop Capital is also interesting, as Tall Poppy is outside the usual scope of their portfolio. They list on their website that they invest in “digital infrastructure”, which are generally low-level companies silently contributing to how the Internet runs. These infrastructure companies will be relevant later.

Tall Poppy boasts its customer list,12 which includes large companies like Spotify, viciously litigious associations like the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), NGOs like the Global Disinformation Index, and Amazon’s extremely influential streaming platform Twitch.

They have received glowing endorsements from Ellen Pao, former CEO of Reddit, Anita Sarkeesian of GamerGate fame, Katherine Maher, former CEO of Wikimedia, and Liz Lee, who has been involved with Twitter and Morgan Stanley (one of the most powerful wealth management organizations in the United States).

Ellen Pao was an interim CEO for Reddit in 2015. She was the head of the company when it decided to ban r/FatPeopleHate. Reddit traditionally had a policy of tolerating free speech, even when upsetting. It may be hard to believe, considering the state of Reddit today, but this was a very unpopular decision. Ellen Pao was even forced to couch these reforms in language like: “we’re banning behavior, not ideas”.

There were many changes she made, all unpopular. Her stay at Reddit was very brief. She was removed and Reddit apologized, saying they would make things right. This never happened.13 It was clear that Pao was hired to make sweeping changes, setting the stage for the new Reddit moving forward, then step aside during the outrage so that she would take the fall. Not a single policy Ellen Pao implemented was ever reversed by Reddit’s corporate, and they have since been compounded and expanded upon.

Ellen Pao married an openly gay man, but has been going through a divorce since 2019. Details on this divorce are hard to come by online. It raises questions as to what exactly Ellen Pao has been paying for.

Katherine Maher is a former Wikimedia CEO and current CEO of NPR.14 She is an avid ideologue whose reputation is so incredibly poisonous that her position on the Signal Foundation has raised serious concerns if the beloved privacy app Signal is fundamentally compromised.15

This direct connection helps explain how Liz Fong-Jones is able to generate significant positive press for himself, and is permitted to craft narratives on Wikipedia articles he is directly affected by and has incredible conflicts of interests with, including for his company Honeycomb and for the Kiwi Farms. His contributions are made by suggestion only (via the “Talk Pages”),16 but since he is direct friends with Wikipedia admins who manage these pages, they are always included in as favorable a light to him as possible.

Wikipedia is supposed to be a “free and open” platform for cataloguing the knowledge of mankind. Katherine states here that this is no longer useful, and that “free and open” perpetuates a “White, male, Westernized construct” and is exclusionary to communities “without written tradition”. “These ideas of radical openness … did not live up to the intention”.

Wikipedia is by no measure a free and open platform. You are only permitted to edit Wikipedia using specific IP addresses, meaning anyone concerned about their privacy may not edit Wikipedia. Since Wikipedia admins and Wikimedia C-Level executives may be friends with people trying to ruin your life, this necessitates de-anonymizing yourself to hostile actors to even create an account.

Then, you will discover that almost every important Wikipedia page is under special protections, especially controversial pages like the Kiwi Farms, living people such as Liz Fong-Jones, and his companies like Honeycomb. You will need a certain level of reputation within the Wikipedia community to even attempt editing these pages. Protected and high-risk pages like the Kiwi Farms’s are watched for changes by hundreds of bureaucrats continuously. Your edits will be critically scrutinized, whereas the edits of Liz Fong-Jones and his personal Wikipedia admin friends will pass with rubber stamps.

One major reason your edits may be reverted is for “original research”. Original research is anything extrapolated from a primary resource. This includes government websites and the Kiwi Farms itself, if you’re writing about the Kiwi Farms.

What Wikipedia likes is secondary resources from trusted publications. Trusted publications are explicitly whitelisted news media websites.17 Kiwi Farms users in 2022 asked Wikipedia to start being impartial on the subject and stop trusting biased news articles. This prompted 10-year Wikipedia veteran editor Bilorv to state, “If Wikipedia had existed when expert consensus was that the Earth is flat then we would have asserted that position as fact”.18 The men who burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for discrediting geocentrism now write for Wikipedia. At least Bruno’s executioners got paid; Bilorv’s 38,828 edits were made to Wikipedia for free purely for the self-satisfaction and ego.

So, in practice, Maher’s revolutionary “not free, and not open” Wikipedia means that any wealthy technocrat may buy fluff pieces from legacy news websites, and can request these articles be added to Wikipedia articles by their admin friends, specifically to accomplish political goals.

Incidentally, the Wikipedia article for the Kiwi Farms is nothing but sloppy accusations citing articles which contain no evidence themselves. Whatever the news writes becomes the truth, and the news writes what Liz Fong-Jones tells them to write. He is often directly contributing to the news articles, or is the subject of favorable interviews with these publications, which he then personally passes through to Wikipedia admins to complement and grow articles in the direction he pleases.

Wikipedia’s true power comes in its presence on search engines. It is almost always the first result of any search, its contents are fed into the infobox summaries found on search results, and its data is accepted uncritically by AI chatbots. If I ask Google Gemini to describe the Kiwi Farms in a sentence, it tells me “a controversial web forum known for its users’ online harassment and stalking campaigns against various individuals and communities”, despite the Kiwi Farms having explicit and enforced rules against contacting people off-site (i.e. harassment). To the average person, Wikipedia is the truth, and whatever is written on Wikipedia is what will be believed.

Liz Fong-Jones’s reputation management looks like this:

1. Crafts a media narrative with contacts in the press.
2. Cements this narrative as publicly held truth using his Wikipedia contacts.
3. Sends links to these articles directly to ISPs himself as proof of abuse.
4. Remove from search results, or the Internet completely, any upsetting pages.

In this way, he can “prove” criminal behavior through a line of “reputable sources”, despite no actual evidence for criminal behavior, because no criminal behavior exists.

This works both to harm websites like mine, and to his benefit in crafting his and his company’s reputation to his liking. It works especially well because he’s very low-profile and not known outside of his fields, where there is no political crossfire to hold Wikipedia accountable. Instead, the only voice identifying this behavior is the Kiwi Farms, which has already been thoroughly maligned.

This email from Blake Willis of Zayo Paris exemplifies the trust in Wikipedia and the power of Liz Fong-Jones’s connections within the industry. I must stress that the decision to terminate Internet service at the level suggested in this email exchange is unheard of. This is the equivalent of the power company cutting off an abortion clinic or coal mine because they are too controversial. A mere ten years ago, a decision like this would have been completely unthinkable.

#DropKiwiFarms: The Censors are Taking Notes

There is a sentiment I want to overcome: that the Kiwi Farms—as only a moderate sized, niche community that is often times mean-spirited—does not effectively act as a canary in the coal mine for the broader Internet. I will demonstrate that the lessons being learned from this meddling are testing a broader strategy applicable to all.

In 2022, after disgraced fraudster Clara “Keffals” Sorrenti would falsely claim the Kiwi Farms had orchestrated a swatting of his domicile in Canada, Liz Fong-Jones would lend his talents to try and finally destroy the Kiwi Farms. This included Liz Fong-Jones appearing in person at Syndey to protest Cloudflare, which provided security services to us.19 The idea was that by getting our security service to abandon us, we would be opened up to illegal cybersecurity attacks that would bring us down. It worked, and very powerful people took notice.20

Liz Fong-Jones hoped to achieve total censorship of a community made of tens of thousands of users. His efforts, and his achievements, are now being used as a proof-of-concept for academic research. If Liz Fong-Jones succeeds, the model he is constructing will be applied to easier targets than the Kiwi Farms. I also stress that the Kiwi Farms has been unusually flexible and able to resist deplatforming, in no small part because I as an individual am very unusual. Most people would have the good sense to quit and abandon their projects well before it gets to the point it has with the Kiwi Farms. This is doubly true for websites which must operate cash positive as a successful business, whereas the Kiwi Farms lives off cryptocurrency donations, a privilege unique to dedicated communities with very tech-savvy users.

Liz Fong-Jones personally gave a presentation at Cambridge, concisely detailing his own efforts to deplatform the Kiwi Farms at every conceivable technical level.21 Shockingly, the most effective targets were the most important to the broader Internet, such as T1 Internet backbone company Cogent, based out of D.C., who to this day will block any of their own customers who allow the Kiwi Farms to use them.

I think even Liz Fong-Jones was surprised at how quickly the Internet backbones began censoring at his request, because it took months for him to even try. Once he realized they would do what he asked, it became his go-to strategy. Why bother with the small, conscientious companies at the bottom when you can threaten to kneecap their entire business out the gate with top-down censorship?

The following Cambridge academic paper was released, which directly follows the deplatforming efforts made against the Kiwi Farms. Interestingly, it also follows the impact on user numbers and post participation in the community using publicly available data. It accurately details how post rates slowed due to low availability. For instance, while we almost always were available on Tor, many users chose not to download special browsers to continue accessing the forum. Cambridge sees that as a win.22

This figure is extrapolated over a very nice timeline figure that outlines precisely the long-lasting, enduring attacks made at every level of infrastructure, including illegal attacks aimed at putting the site offline by directly compromising our software.

The Kiwi Farms is so central to these researchers and their work, they have appeared on a cybercrime podcast Hackting Out to discuss the Kiwi Farms (albeit indirectly). 23

They have also delivered this report to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) just this year.24

The IEEE is an incredibly important organization whose members decide international standards for technological development. It works together with, and has significant membership crossover with, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). These groups publish RFCs proposing changes to how the Internet works.

Liz Fong-Jones and his friends in academia would hope to persuade the IEEE and IETF make the entire world smaller, more centrally organized, more brittle, and easier to break apart. These changes could be implemented at a technical level so innate to how the Internet works, that it would be almost impossible to explain to a layman what has even happened.

The Cambridge study is oriented to persuade important engineers that they must break the Internet so that mean websites can effectively be removed everywhere, and these studies are being made off where Liz Fong-Jones is currently failing to bring down the Kiwi Farms. Their political pressures conflict with the First Amendment, as we do nothing illegal. Now, they apply pressure inside academics, corporations, and trade organizations to instead circumvent our rights.

Liz Fong-Jones and Litigiousness

Liz Fong-Jones sued Vincent Zhen, the owner of Flow Chemical Pty Ltd, in Australia for AU$400,000 for defamation.25 To demonstrate how insane this is, I will chart the distance between Vincent and the posts which Liz Fong-Jones alleges defame him.

1. Vincent, an Australian, owns Flow Chemical, an Australian company.
2. Flow Chemical has IP addresses through APNIC, an Australian non-profit.
3. Flow Chemical leases some IP addresses to 1776 Solutions, LLC in Wyoming.
4. I, a Floridian, own 1776 Solutions, LLC.
5. 1776 Solutions, LLC has provided service to my other company, Lolcow LLC.
6. Lolcow LLC (West Virginia) owns the Kiwi Farms’s assets and licenses for posts.
7. Users of the Kiwi Farms, who are mostly American, made posts about LFJ.
8. LFJ alleges these posts are both untrue and defamatory.

Therefore, the courts believe Vincent personally owes half a million dollars.

I know Vinny and speak to him maybe four times a year on average. We live on different continents in completely different timezones and it is hard to maintain a friendship over that sort of distance. As a result, Vincent knows almost nothing about the Kiwi Farms or what I do, and has no say in how I use the IP addresses I pay for.

In affidavits supplied to Australian court, Liz Fong-Jones has promised under penalty of perjury that these IP addresses are critical to the Kiwi Farms’s operations, uptime, and (most importantly) ability to deliver mean posts about him to the world-wide Internet.

We have not used these IP addresses in a year, and only used them publicly for less than a year. How critical these IP addresses are can be easily determined by the fact that the Kiwi Farms remains available to the world-wide Internet, and that we do not use any Flow Chemical IP addresses in doing so. It would be accurate to say that we enjoy more uptime without using Vinny’s IP addresses, due to very technical reasons that Liz Fong-Jones has learned to exploit — broadly, how to complain to ISPs and get entire networks removed from the Internet.

Vinny is very stubborn. He trusted the Government to recognize the flagrantly spurious and fallacious nature of these accusations and dismiss them on its own, sua sponte. He also is a busy person who has better things to do with his time and money than be sued by a lunatic. I continually advised him against inaction, perhaps once a month every month, until he was guilty by default.

He is working on the slow and expensive process of overturning the default.

The real victory of this judgment is that Liz Fong-Jones can now pretend it says the Kiwi Farms is illegal and/or creates civil liability for its hosts. Indeed, it has appeared in numerous articles published by the usual suspects who tend to polish Liz Fong-Jones, and these articles have somehow found their way to the Kiwi Farms’s Wikipedia page, despite zero direct involvement between Kiwi Farms and Flow Chemical or Vincent.

Liz Fong-Jones is nothing if not incredibly spiteful. The money and resources he has acquired are merely tokens for him to purchase human misery.

The Anti-Censors are Falling Flat

Last month, Sony released a video game called Stellar Blade to the PS5, which had featured a protagonist in very revealing clothing, which the developers had promised would not be modified when released to the West. Sony did end up tailoring her outfits to be less revealing, and this decision prompted outrage. A petition to undo this cosmetic defect accrued 84,000 signatures in two weeks.26

Stellar Blade’s petition is the largest outcry against censorship in recent memory, and it has so far failed to get Sony’s decision reversed. This failure highlights to me what I believe should be obvious: public outcry and petitions do not get things done. Money does. Whatever monied power convinced Sony to make these changes outweighs the perceived economic threat of gamers promising not to buy their game.

The anti-censors rallied around this cause en masse, no doubt thanks to how easy it is to complain on social media and sign a petition. Meanwhile, there is a vine of thorns wrapping around the esophagus of the Internet. Our ability to even communicate is at risk of being destroyed, and the people who intend to destroy them have networked an obscene amount of wealth and power without being noticed. Indeed, the monied powers actively working to destroy the Internet find themselves intertwined with supposedly anti-censorship entities without trouble.

For instance, the closest thing to institutional power online for anti-censorship is Rumble, which has recently started a cloud service that consists of a single datacenter, a single ISP (Cogent), and a single security service (Path).

Rumble highlights, in particular, the anti-censor’s total and complete inability to learn lessons from other anti-censors. I have personally attempted to communicate to Rumble by email, to CEO Chris Pavlovski, and to Head of Product Rick Racela the imminent and urgent danger that relying solely on Cogent and Path presents to their companies, and all of their customers.

Cogent has taken unprecedented, deranged steps to stop the Kiwi Farms from being able to operate, including threatening to disconnect entire datacenters in Poland for allowing us to continue to host there. The decisions to prohibit the Kiwi Farms and my company 1776 Solutions from operating on Cogent networks come from the very top. Two separate sales representatives from Cogent have confirmed to me that a C-level decision was made to stop me from acquiring a hookup with them. I have attempted to call in on Cogent investor meetings during public Q&A and was screened out of the caller pool.

I stress that, even a few years ago, a T1 ISP making waves to try and censor online content would have been international news, a terrible blow to their reputation within the industry, and no company would possibly trust them with supplying transit.

Path’s CTO is Corey Barnhill (now August Heart), a pedophile. Corey is on record admitting to watching a 9-year-old girl be sodomized.27 His company, Path, has attempted to illegally seize my hard drives by sending fake Canadian court orders to my datacenters. Path proudly advertises they were the first ISP to disconnect the Kiwi Farms at an ISP level, and boasted about this directly to Liz Fong-Jones.

Despite this, Rumble still uses them. What’s worse, Rumble’s video site apparently uses Path for application level mitigation as well, which means Path (a mismanaged, near-bankrupt “security” company currently being evicted from datacenters for missing months of payments28) is probably the SSL endpoint for Rumble. If true, it means Path & Corey Barnhill can intercept and read all communications to Rumble’s website. I have warned them about this for months!29

At a very basic and fundamental level, the key players in anti-censorship are fractured and isolated from one another. They do not have cohesive goals and frequently allow irrelevant personal issues divide them. At best, their efforts are split and duplicated, and at worst, they are openly hostile to one another.

No such issues exist in the pro-censorship crowd. Drowned in capital from megacorporations, which they share between friends like bottles of wine, they plot a web of academic journals, media publications, and presentations at important international organizations to achieve their goals. They live in penthouse suites outside of San Francisco callously deciding which small, atomized, defenseless component of anti-censorship they will tie up in litigation and defame next.

There is no equivalent for anti-censorship. No one stands at the IEEE or IETF and discusses how the Internet is about to collapse into dystopia. The few who do merely cheer it on. Anti-censorship does not network and ignores the lessons already learned. They are too afraid of what will said about them in the media, when the media is already a demonstrably poisoned network of people who can’t wait to strangle the life out of them.

The most important anti-censorship organization was the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The one time the EFF tried to write in defense of the Kiwi Farms, they had to anonymize their authors because the two women who wrote it were threatened by a transgender mob.30 To this day, the EFF will take the side of the mob who threatens them and hates them, over any organization in genuine need of defense which may lack a favorable Wikipedia article.

At the time the Kiwi Farms deplatforming was starting to show cracks in the Internet backbones, the EFF even launched a petititon website called “Protect the Stack”, dedicated to trying to preserve the neutrality of the Internet.31 They have never contacted the Kiwi Farms directly to learn about where the stack is in danger, and as a result they have accomplished nothing! Despite the size, prestige, and financial support of the EFF, Protect the Stack has accomplished nothing!

It is no wonder, when they are staffed with the likes of Cooper Quinton, a senior security researcher with the EFF32 whose hobbies include wishing death on users of a website who have openly supported the EFF for years.33 Quinton is proof-of-concept that anti-censorship wastes its breath trying to involve itself with the existing, rotting structures of the past’s anti-censorship. Those organizations are subverted and only new ones with renewed purpose can work.

In Conclusion

I would like to end this article with a call to action. “Here is the problem, here is the solution.” While I would generally encourage intelligent cooperation between Anti-Censorship movements, I have no hope for that. Anti-censorship is inherently individualistic, as those types benefit from freedom the most.

Some cohesion is necessary. The anti-censorship crowd is mostly preoccupied with lining their own pockets. Every anti-censorship startup seems hellbent on being the first person to “solve” the censorship issue, without any cooperation from others, so that they may take in all the “glory”. There is no conservative think-tank doing what the pro-censorship camps do every day: combining intelligence, power, and money. Instead, we each run our own race, and make less progress overall, falling further behind in our endeavors every day, winning only superficial victories with video games and in local jurisdictions, while pro-censorship wins on the big stage and behind the curtains of the international organizations who actually make decisions.

There will be no participation trophies at the gallows.

For those with resources, I emphasize that confederation is required to survive the next decade. There are companies making up the Internet which are toxic and needing to be scraped out, and companies which are principled and needing to be built up. The good is out there, and good people are trying, but they don’t get the attention they need. A serious person with serious aspirations could start a pro-free speech trade organization or coalition, but it needs to be done in earnest and with resources out the gate, and it cannot exclude members and what they would bring to the table simply by the negativity of their Wikipedia article.

For the average person, instead of asking you to do a specific thing, I ask you to consider something: Every day, Liz Fong-Jones wakes up and dedicates the whole of his existence to making the world a worse place. He decides how he is going to enrich himself, who he is going to exploit, where he’s going to invest his wealth and grow his personal power, and how he’s going to expand his network of nepotistic friends.

What are you doing? Are you spending your days productively? Are you putting effort into growing your own wealth and improving your own standing? Are you waking up each day to a personal situation that is better than yesterday’s?

Anti-censorship, in general, appears most sensitive to pop culture changes, like media localization, video game outfits, and movie race swaps. I fear this may be because anti-censorship has become complacent and defeatist. It appears to many that perhaps the only achievable victories are keeping a movie remake’s character White. I think many are spending their time absorbed in media because our real situation seems so dire. The plane is crashing and everyone just wants a nice in-flight movie.

I ask that everyone makes their every day more productive than Liz Fong-Jones and his friends have made theirs.