“A cliche is haunting America — the cliche of a second civil war,” writes Jesse Walker in the Los Angeles Times. Pundits left and right wax ominous over the prospect of a permanent break in American society along partisan Republican/Democratic lines, citing outbreaks of street fighting a la Berkeley and Charlottesville.

But, as Walker points out, “[i]f you flip quickly between small violent clashes and big political disagreements, those big disagreements will look bloodier.  But that’s an optical illusion.” The fighting at the extremes, and between wings of the mainstream political class, doesn’t reflect the gooey, ever-shifting political center where most Americans live.

Elections are centrifuges which temporarily spin that center out into two halves (with a small remainder of third party voters), after which the people involved go back to living with each other in relative peace. Which is why, as Walker writes, “a near-future war with two clear sides and Gettysburg-sized casualty counts is about as likely as a war with the moon.”

Another reason to doubt predictions of such clear-cut conflict is geography.

Even in America’s last Civil War, the lines of demarcation weren’t quite so clear as we like to see them in retrospect. The status of Missouri, Kentucky, eastern Tennessee and western Virginia vis a vis Union and Confederacy were very much up in the air through much of the war.

Today, the lines are even more blurry. “Red” states abut “blue” states and “purple” is a thing too.  Purple Colorado is surrounded by a sea of red. The reliably Democratic west coast states are across the country from most of their partisan sister polities. “Live free or die” New Hampshire borders the effectively euro-socialist enclave of “Taxachusetts.” We’re too mixed up to break up.

So, if we can’t get along and we can’t separate, why not just abandon the notion of geographic state monopolies and let people choose the kinds of governance they want in situ at a more granular level?

It’s called panarchy,  defined by John Zube as “[t]he realization of as many different, autonomous and voluntary communities as are wanted by members for themselves, all coexisting non-territorially, side by side and intermingled …”

Sound complicated? It really isn’t. All any of us owes his neighbor is justice. Outside that general principle, there’s no particular reason that you, me and the person across the street all need answer to the same rulers or get our “public” services from the same providers.

Would an interlocking framework of autonomous, voluntary, non-territorial communities give rise to novel difficulties? Sure. But there’s no reason to believe those difficulties would be any worse than those we face now in our one-size-fits-all political system. And we’d be freer to find solutions.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Breaking up is Hard to do. Or is it?,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 08/23/17
• “Breaking up is Hard to do. Or is it?” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 08/24/17
• “Breaking up is Hard to do. Or is it?” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 08/25/17
• “Breaking up is Hard to do. Or is it?” by Thomas L. Knapp, Pahrump Valley, Nevada Times, 09/20/17

On July 12, a number of prominent companies joined in the “Internet-wide Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality.” Among them were GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google, and CloudFlare. All four companies issued pious statements about the dangerous possibility of Internet Service Providers cutting off access to perfectly legal content.

A little more than a month later, all four companies (and others) are themselves doing exactly what they warned us ISPs might do unless a “Net Neutrality” law forbade it: They’re cutting off access to perfectly legal content (yes,  neo-Nazi speech is legal in America).

Specifically, GoDaddy, Namecheap and Google have canceled (and in Google’s case, stolen) legitimately purchased domain names for, and Cloudflare has cut off DNS forwarding and DDOS protection services for, The Daily Stormer, a site connected with the “alt-right” and “white nationalist” groups of Charlottesville infamy.

This sudden turn of tech sector players  has a Nazi analog, too: The Night of the Long Knives, a three-day purge in 1934, intended to eliminate threats to Hitler’s power from within his own party. The victims here are the companies’ customers.

What gives, guys? A month ago, you were promoting the message that stuff like this would  end the “free and open Internet.” Why is Net Neutrality sauce good for the geese (ISPs), but not for you ganders (other providers of Internet services)?

I personally oppose Net Neutrality laws because I prefer to let the market handle things and expect other service providers to fulfill the market demand these companies are refusing services to. I likewise support the companies’ right to decide with whom they will or will not do business, although in my opinion Google went a bridge too far by actually stealing a customer’s domain name.

But wow, the hypocrisy. “Net Neutrality for thee, but not for me.”

And where does this stuff stop? Rumor has it that Cloudflare has now cut off another customer, Ghostrunner.net. That site is a seller of perfectly legal gun parts and machine tools. I’ve been unable to confirm that it’s an ideological ban rather than, say a billing matter. But if it’s the former, then Cloudflare’s war on a “free and open Internet” is already escalating.

First they came for The Daily Stormer. Is it possible that by 2020 the Internet will routinely “protect” us from “fake news” and only show us industry-approved “mainstream” political candidates?

As they like to say in the news biz, developing …

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Net of the Long Knives? Neutrality Advocates Put it in Reverse,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 08/22/17
• “Net of the Long Knives? Neutrality Advocates Put it in Reverse,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 08/22/17
• “Net of the long knives? Neutrality advocates put it in reverse,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Fredericksburg, Virginia Free Lance-Star, 09/02/17

In a recent column, I celebrated the phenomenon of “Social Preferencing” and the boost Charlottesville gave to an online, crowdsourced, social media version of it, “@YesYoureRacist,” which makes it easy for everyone to “ostracize a Nazi.”

That column received quite a bit of pushback from readers with a darker view of the situation, pointing to the likelihood of shattered innocent lives (due to mistaken identity or intentional fraud) and predicting an era in which unpopular views are suppressed by the digital equivalent of lynch mobs.

Those readers are right: Both scenarios are indeed playing out even as I write this.

University of Arkansas professor Kyle Quinn received death threats and demands that he be fired after he was mistakenly identified as one of the “white nationalist” marchers in Charlottesville. He’s still dealing with the fallout. Presumably others are in the same boat. But mistaken identities and false accusations are not unique to social media. They’re just magnified by it. And the tools which create that magnification can also be used to correct the errors and falsehoods. This is just a matter of scale, not a new or insoluble problem.

On the other hand “guilty” individuals like Christopher Cantwell and organizations like the Daily Stormer web site are losing access to their soapboxes (and their livelihoods) as they’re dropped by web hosts (GoDaddy), payment processors (PayPal), social media outlets (Facebook and Twitter), intermediary utilities (Cloudflare) and even, in Cantwell’s case, dating sites (OKCupid).

As vociferously as I disagree with people like Cantwell and organizations like the Daily Stormer, I agree that this is a problem.

It’s not a problem with the Wakfer model of Social Preferencing, which explicitly calls for “accessible personal disclosure” of the kind being prevented by these exclusions from, effectively, the public square. But it’s a problem nonetheless.

While the actions of these large firms are not, strictly speaking, censorship (the parties involved are not owed platforms by any particular providers and are free to seek the services they need elsewhere), it’s a simple fact that they hold market positions which can at least temporarily create the same effect. They are using those positions to create that effect.

John Gilmore famously noted that “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” Libertarians like me view the market in much the same way. This situation is a practical, nuts and bolts test of those views. There’s a great deal riding on the outcome.

If GoDaddy, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal et al. are in effect creating damage to the public square — and I say they are — can the Net and the market effectively route around that damage?

Usable publishing platforms (Diaspora, Steemit, Minds.com, Gab.ai, and so on) and processors (Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies) are already in place and there’s nothing to stop others from launching.

Will the big players pay a preferencing price (to the benefit of those other platforms) for their attempts to decide for us  what and whom we may view and hear? Here’s hoping they do.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Charlottesville haters: Test case for the Internet as public square,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Fon du Lac, Wisconsin Reporter, 08/18/17
• “Charlottesville haters: Test case for the Internet as public square,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Arizona Republic, 08/18/17
• “Charlottesville haters: Test case for the Internet as public square,” by Thomas L. Knapp, USA Today, 08/18/17
• “Charlottesville haters: Test case for the Internet as public square,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Detroit, Michigan Free Press, 08/18/17
• “Charlottesville haters: Test case for the Internet as public square,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Rochester, New York Democrat & Chronicle, 08/18/17
• “Charlottesville haters: Test case for the Internet as public square,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Nashville, Tennesse Tennessean, 08/18/17
• “Charlottesville haters: Test case for the Internet as public square,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Des Moines, Iowa Register, 08/18/17
• “Charlottesville haters: Test case for the Internet as public square,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Indianapolis, Indiana Star, 08/18/17
• “Charlottesville haters: Test case for the Internet as public square,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Cincinnati, Ohio Enquirer, 08/18/17
• “Charlottesville haters: Test case for the Internet as public square,” by Thomas L. Knapp, El Paso, Texas Times, 08/18/17
• “Charlottesville haters: Test case for the Internet as public square,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Milwaukee, Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, 08/18/17
• “Charlottesville Haters: Test Case for the Internet as Public Square,” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 08/18/17
• “Charlottesville Haters: Test Case for the Internet as Public Square,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 08/18/17
• “Charlottesville: Test case for the Internet as public square,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Pawtucket, Rhode Island Times [web and print editions], 08/19/17
• “Charlottesville: Test case for the Internet as public square,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Woonsocket, Rhode Island Call [web and print editions], 08/19/17
• “Charlottesville Haters: Test Case for the Internet as Public Square,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 08/19/17
• Charlottesville Haters: Test Case for the Internet as Public Square,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Uinta County, Wyoming Herald [print edition], 08/22/17
• “Charlottesville haters: Test case for the Internet as public square,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Newberry, South Carolina Observer, 08/22/17
• “Charlottesville Haters: Test Case for the Internet as Public Square,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Key West: The Newspaper [Florida], 08/25/17
• “Internet as public square tested,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Pasco/Pinellas, Florida Suncoast News, 08/28/17