The shooting at the YouTube offices in San Bruno, California may not be in the headlines for long, as the story is so off-beat compared to other recent events that it doesn’t easily fit the model the media prefers for reporting gun crime (or high tech stories). Mark Steyn calls it the “grand convergence”:
The San Bruno attack also underlines a point I’ve been making for over a decade, ever since my troubles with Canada’s “human rights” commissions: “Hate speech” doesn’t lead to violence so much as restraints on so-called “hate speech” do – because, when you tell someone you can’t say that, there’s nothing left for him to do but open fire or plant his bomb. Restricting speech – or even being perceived to be restricting speech – incentivizes violence as the only alternative. As you’ll notice in YouTube comments, I’m often derided as a pansy fag loser by the likes of ShitlordWarrior473 for sitting around talking about immigration policy as opposed to getting out in the street and taking direct action. In a culture ever more inimical to freedom of expression, there’ll be more of that: The less you’re permitted to say, the more violence there will be.
Google/YouTube and Facebook do not, of course, make laws, but their algorithms have more real-world impact than most legislation – and, having started out as more or less even-handed free-for-alls, they somehow thought it was a great idea to give the impression that they’re increasingly happy to assist the likes of Angela Merkel and Theresa May as arbiters of approved public discourse. Facebook, for example, recently adjusted its algorithm, and by that mere tweak deprived Breitbart of 90 per cent of its ad revenue. That’s their right, but it may not have been a prudent idea to reveal how easily they can do that to you.
What happened yesterday is a remarkable convergence of the spirits of the age: mass shootings, immigration, the Big Tech thought-police, the long reach of the Iranian Revolution, animal rights, vegan music videos… But in a more basic sense the horror in San Bruno was a sudden meeting of two worlds hitherto assumed to be hermetically sealed from each other: the cool, dispassionate, dehumanized, algorithmic hum of High Tech – and the raw, primal, murderous rage breaking through from those on the receiving end.
