You're honing in on a specific definition of violence, ignoring its historic colloquial usages.

People make their own choices about who to do business with and how to go about their business

More attempts to pin the narrative as a business transaction while ignoring the larger implications of phenomena such as deplatformization in public forums operated by unscrupulous corporations who control access to their audiences of millions.

The lesson to take away here isn’t that YouTube should be regulated like some kind of utility and to take away their ability to terminate relations with producers, but that you shouldn’t be so thoroughly dependent on one supplier for your business that it is financially ruinous to lose their services.

Try applying that same logic to someone who is stuck in an abusive relationship, deprived of the resources needed to secure their financial and emotional independence. We shouldn't regulate domestic abuse, because people should not be so thoroughly dependent on one person for their welfare. It's their choice.

Information is the currency of modern society. In a two-decade span we've allowed extreme centralization and gatekeeping of digital information, placing control of its flow into the hands of a dozen or two corporations.

Twenty years ago, decentralization was alive and well and if a community of 50-100 people had a hardass for an admin, that was fine, because there were often plenty of other communities of similar caliber elsewhere for popular topics.

Now we have things like reddit. "Decentralized", but communities are constantly plagued by misguided, ill-informed decisions handed down from the guy upstairs. Entire communities of thousands of people are destroyed overnight. But where else will they go? No one registers for forums anymore, reddit is in the top 20 most popular websites in the world with 300 million users. That's an entire country.

YouTube shares a similar tale. Whether you would like to admit it or not, what these large companies in positions of power are doing today is the equivalent of mass censorship, restriction of speech, and ideological persecution. And these platforms often support user-created censorship as well.

I’m sorry you had that experience on Facebook. I wish I could tell you that kind of thing is surprising or unexpected, but unfortunately it isn’t either of those things these days. I hope you’re doing alright and that you’re able to put it behind you.

As for violence, I standby what is the more useful and regular definition. There may be useful non-physical extensions in colloquial usage, but the word itself has connotations of a physical forcefulness that nothing else really has.

* More attempts to pin the narrative as a business transaction while ignoring the larger implications of phenomena such as deplatformization in public forums operated by unscrupulous corporations who control access to their audiences of millions.*

I don’t have to pin the narrative as such, that is exactly what this is: a transactional relationship between unscrupulous corporations and small businesses. Both have equal right to make decisions as to who they do business with.

* Information is the currency of modern society. In a two-decade span we've allowed extreme centralization and gatekeeping of digital information, placing control of its flow into the hands of a dozen or two corporations.*

Information has always been an asset in any society. What’s changed is that we can aggregate it at a larger scale than ever before, extract more value than ever before and have many more applications for it than ever before. Let’s say there are a dozen or two companies that have largely centralized it. That in itself is a bit of an oxymoron if there’s as many as a dozen, or two dozen participating in the trade. However, there are far far more companies trading in the information market than that!

To bring this back to social media: no one has yet to make a compelling case to me that this market is in fact centralized. You may be able to make this case in a country by country basis. You may be able to make the case that of the various subtypes of social media companies, there’s maybe one that matters in each category. Social media as a global market has never been centralized, and is decreasingly so every passing year. Facebook having a few billion users hardly matters when many of them are also active users of Reddit, Twitter, WeChat, LINE, Slack, LinkedIn, and so on and so forth. You can setup a community today and host it yourself using basic web tools or something like Mastodon.

Is deplatforming a form of mass censorship? Absolutely it is! Can you make a moral case against it? Absolutely! Can you also make a moral case for it? Again, absolutely! Does it hurt the people it targets socially and/or economically? In many cases, yes.

It’s not the government making those decisions though, which is an important distinction to make. Government censorship comes with the long arm of the law attached, which ends with the guy in the navy blue uniform with the gun. Corporate censorship is inconvenient, but it’s not prison.

I think social media is going to continue to exist, continue to have a business case, and continue to increase the total number of communities. In a couple decades, choosing a platform might be like choosing a pub: you evaluate who the maintainer is, what the community is oriented around and what are their values. Can you post pictures? What kind? Can you also post little clips timed to music? Will the messages expire?

We already see this to some degree today with group chats on different platforms. The platforms have their own rules as to what can be posted, as well as their own technical limitations, but they’re a semi-private space to cordon off a subset of the larger platform and give the members a place to exchange messages and data.

>As for violence, I standby what is the more useful and regular definition.

Often, certain commonplace words become terms of art within the disciplines which study them[1][2]. For example, "kind" or "type" or "resistance" take on special meanings within mathematics and computer science. While these terms are clearly derived from their commonplace definitions, they either work alongside the original meaning (such as in "resistance") or they replace it ("kind").

Scholarship dating to about 1980 describes two forms of violence, objective and subjective. Subjective violence is very easy to spot, it involves physical contact. Objective violence, also related to systemic violence, is not: it's the backdrop against which we measure subjective violence[0]. This is not restricted to the description of society as violent. Go onto Google Scholar and search "systemic violence" - the term is used to describe security searches of children at schools, abusive familial relationships, drug markets, and a plethora of other things.

[0] "As Žižek would argue, we consistently overlook the objective or "symbolic" violenc eembodied in language and its forms, i.e. democratic state's monopoly on legitimate violence. He asserts that "subjective and objective violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint: subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of the non-violent zero-level, asa perturbation of the “normal” peaceful state of things; however, objective violence is precisely theviolence sustaining this “normal” state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains thevery zero-level standard against which we perceive something as [visible] violence – in order to perceive it, one has to perform a kind of parallax shift"."

[1] "One of the great controversies in defining violence pertains to its scope. Vorobej opts from the outset for a wider concept of violence and not for restricting it to cases of direct physical harm. With these cases and the more commonsensical notion of interpersonal violence the analysis begins. The first definition is borrowed from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), to which he adds apparently more sophisticated variations, for example from James Childress, Robert Holmes, or the WHO, before finally returning to the OED as the most useful paradigmatic definition for this type of approach to violence: "Violence is the exercise of physical force as to inflict injury on or damage to persons or properties" (6). After having worked through a series of ambiguities of the definition and questions that arise from it, Vorobej finally rightly problematizes this approach for its one-sidedness. Interpersonal violence "emphasizes what individuals do to others, at the cost of ignoring what happens to people" (52)."

[2] https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/violence/v-1

I’ll bite and acknowledge there might be a dimension to violence that I am overlooking, however, every example of objective violence you gave except “drug markets” appears to align perfectly at face value with the definition of violence I gave earlier: a forceful violation of one’s person or property. Probably “drug markets” would too, I’m just not altogether sure what element of a drug market you mean since there wasn’t a verb attached.

I’ll look for the full paper from your link, it looks interesting, but that will have to wait until the morning. Same with your Google Scholar search, you’ve hooked me.

In the mean time, let me ask you if the difference between subjective and objective violence looks like this: Subjective violence would be the act of a pimp slapping a prostitute within his service, and objective violence would be the entire social apparatus around pimping which enables him to find women who are willing (in this example I’m assuming willing to prevent this from branching into a discussion on slavery and the various gradations of prostitution) to work under him as prostitutes in what is I assume would be considered ultimately a form of violence that works against them and women in general?

Or alternatively, a prison might be a violent place to be in, and thus is subjectively violent, but the existence and operation of the prison is objectively violent?

> It is the forceful physical violation of one’s person or property.

But not all property is physical. And increasingly, our property is just data located in somebody's servers: your Dropbox contents, your Steam games, the money in your online bank account.

I would argue it is physical insofar as it has to exist on something tangible, whether that’s an aggregated bank ledger or a server somewhere or as backups on disks that you own, but your point is taken so I’ll address the concerns you raised.

Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your perspective, but unfortunately from my perspective, in the case of Steam games and software, that is largely covered: you paid for licenses to play games rather than licenses, but some of it is DRM-free so you can take backups.

That money in the bank account is yours, unless seized through a legal process, which can happen and you can challenge it if it does.

Everything else, Dropbox, Google Photos, iCloud, emails, whatever, you should have your own backups. You should have them not just for legal reasons or because your service providers might terminate their services to you, but because they might actually lose your data.

You have some rights to that data, but none of the businesses involved in hosting it are compelled to do business with you specifically, and aren’t required to keep it anymore than the law compels them to.

> That money in the bank account is yours, unless seized through a legal process.

And this is because through the centuries we have enacted enough laws to deter private banking companies from messing with our money. If left to their own devices, we would have DRM-ed money, random service terminations, unexplained money loses, etc. We just need to extend these rights and safeties to other spheres of our digital property through the use of law and its enforcement.

Yes, but a bank can still terminate its business with you. It just has to return your money to you.

Now if you’re suggesting we have a law that companies which hold our data have to return our data when they terminate their business relationship with us, I wouldn’t necessarily disagree.

The legal obligations of a bank towards its clients generally extend way beyond your example, depending on the country, but yes, returning the client belongings upon termination of the relationship should be a basic right mandated by law. I think it is profoundly absurd that we are renouncing hard-fought consumer rights just because business is now being conducted electronically. If the letter of the law no longer matches the spirit, we should update the letter, not lose the spirit.

I think we agree more than we disagree. Thank you for your time.

Most of these things aren't really property. And even for banks, you partially forfeit your property rights when deciding to keep your money there...

Say there are sanctions imposed on a country by the U.S. that make it near impossible to import the necessary mediacations for cancer patients, as a result of which, some of them die.

I'd say calling that 'economic violence' is pretty accurate.

A trade sanction is intended as a form of physical violence backed up by physical force. You could call it economic violence, I would just call it violence.

I see this as analogous to saying

> Numbers are inherently binary. You could call 93 "a decimal number", but I would just call it "a number". There's no point in having the term "decimal" since the tech stack is all just "(binary) numbers" beneath layers of indirection.

Surely you see the usefulness in assigning each layer of indirection a unique qualifier?

Am glad to hear that, I'd actually agree with you, but many wouldn't because of that thin layer of 'we didn't technically use the military to accomplish this', but rather the global financial system, even if the outcome is basically the same

They might not, but for a sanction to be applied properly, you need to apply violence somewhere within the enforcement process.

Take the sanctions against Iran for example. Huawei violated these sanctions and this directly led to Meng Wanzhou’s arrest in Canada and her bring charged in the United States. It would appear the extradition hearings are still going on with the trial set to start this month and it might go as long as October.