opes. I have become somewhat known for saying that slippery slopes don't exist. They are imaginary. And the reason I say that is that whenever you have a slippery slope and things are going in one direction, you always have a counterforce that pops up to respond. So if it looks like it's going to be a slippery slope forever, you're always missing the most important thing, and that is if everybody notices it's a slippery slope, somebody, and probably lots of people, will organize to create a counterforce to stop it from slipping. Let me give you some examples.

Somebody called this the privacy stack. And the idea is that for each of these social media platforms which you might be concerned about in terms of your privacy, in terms of censorship, you have an alternative. So instead of YouTube you've got BitChute. Instead of Chrome you've got the Brave browser. Instead of Google for searches you've got DuckDuckGo. Instead of Gmail you've got ProtonMail. Instead of Twitter you've got Parler. Instead of Facebook I think you have Minds. I haven't looked at Minds before, so Minds. So I don't know what the deal is there.

Now I would say that all of the competitors are just weak little slivers of the thing that they hope to compete with. And I would say at this point the likely future is that the competitors aren't going to do that much. Oh yeah, I should have mentioned Interface by OneHub, my company, as an alternative to Patreon. I don't think Patreon is social media but in this context that they've banned some people for their speech on the other platforms, so I think that's fair.

Now my point is that you see that the alternatives popped up and the alternatives will always pop up when the slippery slope gets sliding a little too far and it's a little too slippery. At this point I would say that we're in sort of an equilibrium-finding zone where we're trying to figure out if we've already gone too far. And if we have, you would expect that these alternative platforms would get a lot stronger. If we haven't gone too far and the slippery slope is just going to sort of peter out on its own, then you would expect that the alternative platforms would not thrive because they wouldn't be as necessary. You would stick with the one that gets you the most traffic.

But here's another example. There was a festival in Detroit called AfroFuture. It's some kind of futuristic group about African American culture or people or something. But the thing that got a lot of headlines is that they charged a different entry fee depending on your ethnicity. So if you were a quote person of color you paid half as much for the festival as if you were white.

Now some of you would say, well, there it is. There's the slippery slope. I told you this would happen. Sure it was good that we ended slavery. Everybody agreed with that. Yes, it was good that we fought for civil rights and did a great job there. That's all great. But what happens when things get equal? Maybe you will just keep sliding. Maybe it will slide until only Black people are in charge and Obama's your president and white people can't get jobs. That's not really likely because this very event tells you what happens.

So the AfroFuture Festival attempted to take the slippery slope a little too far and they actually charged a different price based on your color and they were going to charge white people more. The theory being that historically there were advantages to being a white person and you could go to any city, you could go to a festival, but if you were poor and you were a person of color maybe you couldn't leave your cities. So they had some excuse that nobody really bought. So what happened? The public rebelled. At least one artist pulled out. Eventbrite, they handled the online ticketing, said nope, we're not going to