Article 58 (Soviet Penal Code)

So, why be absent? Well, I haven’t gotten to the part about Article 58 yet. Recall that I don’t believe that FakeNews was an authentic narrative in November 2016. So… what was it then? Well, I don’t know. But if I had to guess, there was probably a meeting somewhere in early November of 2016, where it was decided that the United States needed a narrative to buy time for its aggrieved institutions so that the 2020 election could be ‘fixed’ to the greatest extent possible. And I believe that Fake News was likely the placeholder that had been settled upon. That would be the origin of the gradual changes in Terms of Service across Twitter, Facebook, and Google, and how the structural changes were coordinated that gradually eroded all protections for free speech across the platforms. That’s where Data and Society and its crazy ‘Guilt by association minus any methodology’ technique appeared. In essence, the four year battle plan was to figure out how to use the Fake News meme to gain greater narrative control of the news. Only there was a new problem.

We the people had become the news. We shared stories and links. And to control the news, now meant the institutions had to control us as ordinary people much more aggressively. We all opined often and often better than the professional commentariat at that. And Long-Form Podcasting, as led by the popular Joe Rogan, became seen as the great embarrassment and threat to mainstream legacy media. People dying to be treated like adults, with long attention spans, dropped NPR and the New York Times, as home to the 1619 project, which its leader openly admitted was attempting to get America to riot(?!), and flocked to podcasts hours in length to listen to Snowden or Bernie Sanders on Joe Rogan. And there was absolutely no plan to stop this that was working, when they finally realized just how powerful these podcasts are. You could hear Roger Penrose one minute and Edie Bravo the next. Everyone knew that simply calling Sam Harris “gross and racist”, Joe Rogan “alt-right”, Ben Shapiro a Nazi white supremacist, Peter Thiel “anti-gay”, Bret Weinstein “anti-black”, and Maajid Nawaz an Islamophobe, was beyond stupid. I mean, our audiences had spent hours listening to us and interacting with us at events. It wasn’t just that the mainstream media was bullshitting the American public. They were gaslighting us all around people we already knew, and failing so long as there were people willing to risk their reputations to shatter the spell.

So they figured out that we needed the platforms, in part, to reach each other and proceeded to change the platform rules over and over again to make them vague, illogical, ideological, inconsistent and actually impossible to understand. Add to that, these platforms were now patrolled by new Religious Police as if Twitter were Saudi Arabia with the The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice replaced by the Trust And Safety Committee. No one could say what the rules were. What exactly was deadnaming, for example? Is saying that Bruce Jenner won the 1976 decathlon, years before Caityln Jenner even existed, a punishable offense? Only the Trust and Safety committee could tell you.

Which brings us to Article 58 of the Soviet era Russian Penal Code which introduced the concept of “enemy of the workers” and “counter-revolutionary activities”. You see, Article 58 was a law where everyone was guilty, but not everyone was prosecuted. Thus any inconvenient person could be disappeared into the gulags or executed in show trials under Article 58. And that is where we are. Shortly before the election, a provocative mid-October New York Post article on Hunter Biden appeared that could not be shared on Twitter or Facebook. Which is, of course, insane. But also anticipated. Here’s why.

They failed to come up with a workable strategy to control us, because there is really nothing they can do short of totally draconian China-like measures, and so they will ultimately lose this battle one day. The jig has been up for years now. But the legacy and tech powers do not know how to concede. So they gaslight, harass and threaten individuals that don’t agree to silence themselves. And, sure enough, just like with Article 58 and the show trials, the tech platforms treat Trust and Safety as a Star Chamber where you can be accused without being told what you did wrong and tried in absentia. Hell, we are all guilty of violating these Terms of Service, because they aren’t real, well-defined, or even self-consistent.

- Eric Weinstein on The Portal Ep 41 in the preamble essay, "My absence, the tech platforms, the 2020 election, Jean Seberg, and Article 58"

Eric Weinstein

@ericweinstein

Every petty Stalin rediscovers the savage brilliance of Article 58 all over again.

8:12 PM · Dec 9, 2010

Eric Weinstein

@ericweinstein

There are few people who publicly criticize the @nytimes as harshly, consistently & relentlessly as I have. You can check my history if you like. Yet I strive for *specificity* in this.

But this tweet by a sitting president is an abomination. I’m with the @nytimes on this one.

4:44 PM · Feb 20, 2019

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

The New York Times reporting is false. They are a true ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!

1:49 PM · Feb 20, 2019

Eric Weinstein

@ericweinstein

A free society needs to be free of the “Article 58” monstrosity. “Enemy of the workers”, “Enemy of the people” etc... have a long authoritarian history in far Left and far Right states gone mad.

Never again fall for “Article 58” rhetoric and language:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_58

5:18 PM · Feb 20, 2019

This article is a stub. You can help us by editing this page and expanding it.

Related Pages

• Intellectual Dark Web
• Long-Form Podcasting
• How to Question the World Around You & Find Your Core Theories Part 2 (Audio Content)