Censorship on the Web. Can Substack Beat Google?

Cato the Elder 234–149 BC, better known as “Cato the Censor.” In Roman times, the job of the censor involved several tasks, including the authority to enforce public morality and maintain societal standards. Despite the censors’ efforts, though, the Roman Empire crumbled among corruption and debauchery.

One of the features of the ancient world (intended as “before 2020”) was that we were convinced that Westerners were immune from barbaric uses such as censorship. Less than one year was enough to discover that not only had censorship returned in force, but that the majority of people were happy with it, loudly asking for more. And, perhaps, censorship had never gone away, even from places where you would have expected it had no place to be. You can read this recent assessment by Cory Clark and others that show how censorship is alive and well in scientific research, and it has always been active.

Censorship also affects blogs and social media. It is especially bad on Facebook, where hordes of fact-checkers (“fat chewers?”) feel entitled to censor the best scientists and their peer-reviewed work. My “Cassandra” blog fell victim to these low-ranking minions of evil deities so much that I had to close it.

So, I moved to another blog, the “Seneca Effect”, which had some initial success, but, alas, it was also noticed by the Powers That Be. The result was that a blog that deals with collapses experienced at least three collapses during the past year. Look at these data for the past 12 months:

Before 2022, the Seneca blog on Google’s “blogger” platform normally had an average of about 2,000-3,000 connections per day. Some popular posts reached more than 10,000 views. And then, you see what happened. The collapse of July 2023 was especially impressive. It really looks like someone had turned off the tap using a monkey wrench. It fits with what readers reported: you couldn’t find the “Seneca” blog anymore on the Google search engine. It had disappeared, vanished, vanitas vanitatum.

So, after some attempts with other platforms, I found that "Substack" seemed to work reasonably well. It is where you are reading the blog now. The recovery of the views has been impressive, even though it doesn’t yet match the levels of the heydays. But the average is now close to 500 views per day, with recent posts going above one thousand views. The trend is promising.

Will the Powers that Be decide to intervene here, too? That’s perfectly possible, but Substack may be more resilient to virtual carpet bombing than Google’s Blogger. When you use a general-purpose platform, your blog is left to fight for itself in the whole World Wide Web, where the large majority of people surfing are bamboozled by the infinite stream of entertainment and soft porn that pervades everything. A blog that’s just a little difficult to find by search engines is a small dead frog in a very large pond. You could use feed readers to keep track of it, but these programs are sabotaged, too, and it is unbelievable how many people don’t even know they exist.

Instead, Substack has an inner network that connects interested people together. You may not be able to find a blog over the search engines, but if you peruse Substack, you remain connected to it. Is it the solution to maintaining a significant level of discussion on the Web? Again, it is hard to say, but we’ll see in the coming months.

But why should we consider censorship to be a bad thing? After all, you wouldn’t want people publishing things that harm others, say, “Take a cyanide pill; it is good for you!” (it was actually done by the German government during WW2). But extreme cases don’t prove anything. The problem is that the huge virtual holobiont we call the “human society” needs to have a certain variety of options if it has to survive the challenges it faces. In other words, it has to be able to change and evolve; this is the essential element of the property we call “resilience.” Censorship reduces, and sometimes eliminates, this capability by cutting out of the debate everything that does not fit the standards.

It is especially sad in science, The current wave of censorship in science can be defined as “ferocious,” with the reviewers having become an impassable barrier that filters out anything and everything that contrasts with the mainstream views. If a paper that infringes the accepted standards manages to go through, it is often censored by forced “retraction” at the whim of editors. The self-censorship by scientists makes whole fields of knowledge unable to do what science is for: that is, innovating.

So, censorship makes society and organizations rigid and ossified, unable to resist challenges anymore. The more you try to keep things together by making the system more rigid, the more likely it is that it will collapse all of a sudden. It is another way to describe the Seneca Collapse.