#consorship

If your backup is in the cloud, MAKE ANOTHER BACKUP. A PHYSICAL ONE. Get an SD card, a flash drive, an external hard drive, a CD, a floppy... Hell, print it out and stick it in a binder under your bed, but BACK IT UP SOMEWHERE THAT CORPORATIONS WON'T BE ABLE TO GET IT. If you worked really hard on something, the last thing you'd want is for some company or government to suddenly delete or block you from accessing your content because of what they have magically decided is morally right or wrong.

The GOP no longer argues that free markets, rather than government, should choose “winners and losers.”

In today’s Republican Party, the primary economic role of the state is not to get out of the way. It is, instead, to reward friends and crush political enemies.

Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham expressed the new ethos in a recent monologue threatening companies that advocated for LGBTQ rights, ballot access, racial justice and sundry other political stances that are anathema in today’s GOP.

“When Republicans, they get back into power, Apple and Disney need to understand one thing: Everything will be on the table,” Ingraham warned. “Your copyright, trademark protection. Your special status within certain states. And even your corporate structure itself. The antitrust division at Justice needs to begin the process of considering which American companies need to be broken up once and for all for competition’s sake, and ultimately for the good of the consumers who pay the bills.” [...] In other states, such as Georgia, GOP politicians have punished private companies for taking supposedly “woke” stands on issues such as gun violence. Republicans in Congress have likewise tried to use antitrust enforcement and other government levers to punish companies whose public stances on voting rights or internal policies on content moderation they dislike.

This approach to governance was expertly modeled by Donald Trump, who as president frequently used the power of the state to reward friends and punish perceived political enemies. [,,,] Cancel culture, however ill-defined, generally refers to the use of voluntary social pressure to punish those whose views are deemed somehow unacceptable — through public rebukes, boycotts, shunnings, firings or other refusals to engage with some persona non grata in the public square. Republicans (like Democrats) have of course engaged in all these behaviors and worse: Trump himself frequently called for boycotts and firings, including over the peaceful expression of political speech.

But now his party is attempting codify these responses into law, using the power and weapons of the state against those who disagree with them.

Or when Livejournal used to be the place to be but then they started censoring people and deleting accounts so we all left and went to tumblr?