patrick.net

In 1998, the payments app was created to empower individuals. Today, it’s a cornerstone of our emerging social-credit system.

By Rupa Subramanya

Tuesday, Dec 13, 2022

One by one, they go to start their business day only to find a baffling message from their payments app informing them: “You can no longer do business with PayPal.”

There is little or no explanation. They have somehow offended the sensibilities of someone somewhere deep inside the bureaucracy.

They are simply told via an email from PayPal’s Risk and Compliance Department that, after an internal review, “we decided to permanently limit your account as there was a change in your business model or your business model was considered risky.”

In case there is any doubt, the email adds: “You’ll not be able to conduct any further business using PayPal.” ...

If you’re one of the lucky ones and your account has just been suspended, you can go to customer service, explain your situation and hope that someone gets back to you. If you’ve been banned, you’ll need an attorney to file a subpoena for the internal PayPal documents—simply to learn why you’ve been banned. (Good luck getting unbanned.) ...

The people who founded PayPal—the so-called PayPal Mafia—include Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks and Max Levchin. All are champions of free speech. All have expressed shock and dismay at what is happening to the company they created. Several founders agreed to talk with The Free Press for this article.

“If the online forms of your money are frozen, that’s like destroying people economically, limiting their ability to exercise their political voice,” Thiel told me. “There’s something about destroying people economically that seems like a far more totalitarian thing.” ...

Since those early heady days, PayPal has amassed 429 million active accounts. Fifty-eight percent of Americans use PayPal, and in 2021, there were 19.3 billion PayPal transactions. It now has a market valuation of $84 billion.

But the company that was meant to liberate countless individuals is becoming something else.

Increasingly, it is becoming a police officer. It is deciding what is right and wrong, who gets to be heard, who is silenced. It is locking out of the financial system those people or brands that have slipped outside the parameters of acceptable discourse, those who threaten the consensus of the gatekeepers. The consensus is hard to articulate; it is an ideology lacking clearly defined ideological contours. But the tenets of that consensus are unmistakable: the new progressive politics around race and gender are a force for good, the Covid lockdown was just, the war in Ukraine is noble, and an unfettered exchange of ideas and opinions is an unacceptable threat to all of the above. ...

The first inflection point, the old guard agreed, was September 11, 2001 and the federal government’s response to the terrorist attacks—including adoption of the Patriot Act.

Among other things, the Patriot Act imposed tight controls on money flowing in and out of the United States. “It would obviously make sense to ensure that Osama bin Laden shouldn't be allowed to open a PayPal account,” Jackson said.

Then came Ebay’s acquisition of PayPal, in 2002, for $1.5 billion.

On the day of the acquisition, July 8, PayPal announced it would stop processing payments for sports-betting sites. The company also chose not to retain any of the founders. ...

The next flashpoint came in December 2010: WikiLeaks.

After being pressured by U.S. officials, PayPal suspended the account of the activist group that released millions of classified documents—with information about, among other things, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, CIA surveillance, and the Democratic National Committee. Thom Bradford, a former engineer at PayPal’s Berlin office, said: “I was naive enough when I worked there to believe that the Wikileaks thing was just a bizarre, isolated incident that they did because they were being pressured by the government, and they didn't want to be subjected to heavy-handed regulation. But now it seems as though they take pleasure in it.”

But it wasn’t until the summer of 2020—the summer of Covid lockdowns, Black Lives Matter demonstrations, the burning cities, the presidential election—that the contours of the new controlling authority came into focus.

It was not a conspiracy. Democratic officials were not colluding with the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and owners of legacy newspapers and cable networks and studio chiefs and university presidents. It’s that, in a matter of a few months, maybe a year, they had all embraced the same leftwing identitarianism, the same slogans, the same hashtags and pronouns, the same statistics, the same talking points, and they reinforced each other, and they made it exceedingly difficult for anyone to challenge the new orthodoxy. ...

Referring to the Chinese Communist Party, Kara Frederick, who previously led Facebook’s Global Counterterrorism Analysis Program, said: “I started noticing discomfiting similarities in what the consolidated centralized power of the CCP was visiting on its internal population, and what this combination and symbiosis of corporate power in the form of big tech and the federal government is, frankly, seeking to turn on specific American citizens.”

Frederick recalled, for example, Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, Jr., applauding the new PayPal-ADL partnership. Or Jen Psaki, President Joe Biden’s then-press secretary, announcing, on July 15, 2021, that the White House had identified “problematic” Facebook posts that spread “misinformation” and that it expected the social-media site to take down.

If you protested the status quo—if you were a trucker in Ottawa in early 2022 angry about the country’s vaccine mandates, if you were against defunding the police, if you were against critical race theory seeping into your six-year-old’s classroom, if you questioned the wisdom of exposing children to drag shows, if you believed in everyone’s right to argue openly about all of the above—you were, oddly enough, in a suspect class. You were, increasingly, at risk of being deplatformed, debanked. ...

The revolt against the machine has started, but it’s mostly a bottom-up, grass-roots affair.

After he was shut down, Toby Young, in London, called PayPal’s Customer Support to appeal his suspension. When his appeal was denied, he wrote a letter to British officials calling on them to adopt legislation preventing banks and payment platforms from discriminating against users with opinions they disapprove of. The letter attracted the support of 42 members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

“Why is it that these large corporations based overseas think they can effectively intervene in public debates in the United Kingdom?” Young said.

Shortly after the letter was released, all three of Young’s PayPal accounts were restored.

But the real revolt, if there is to be one, is likelier to come from within the technocracy—the people with the money and power to force a major overhaul of a system that seems designed to keep the great undulating mass of users distracted and divided.