Funny you made a thread for this, because I was going to make a topic about this as well. Although you did make another thread that was more on topic with your comic, so I never commented on that since I felt I would be off topic.
First, I have a lot of thoughts about this. I don't know if I'm going to be able to cover all of my thoughts and brain cells in this one reply, but I'm gonna try.
Anyway, this isn't the beginning, but for context on what I want to say, back in the YouTube's adpocolypse era YouTubers were told to stop cursing or stop saying/doing certain things in videos if they wanted ads. Fast forward to after Bytedance bought Musically and rebranded it to TIkTok, normal people then were told they couldn't say certain words that invoke self-harm or whatnot. There's no doubt that it had brought some good things into online communities, obviously. However, this wasn't actually a good thing, it's disguised as a good thing so users would comply with changes because corporate terms of services are still relatively new, beforehand a lot of issues that arises were just enforced by the community on each site, people weren't really able to truly know the implication of corporate terms. During the 2010s, the phrase that people used to throw around a lot was "the customer don't always know what they want." That phase sounded right at the time, but it was never true. And truthfully, for over decades things were shoved down people's throats in "cheap" or "free" dosage to keep people from rising against governments. The people who pay for this are exploited labors from other countries that now in the 21st century can't be fully exploited thanks to people coming together to make change, only through human trafficking people are able to be exploited completely.
In mid 20th century the rest of the world was watching the US and wanted to know how they could build a democracy of their own. This caused countries to create bills but to also abide by "international" laws, particularly through treaties. At the same time, the stock market entered the market as an alternative for gold, because there's no more newly discovered gold mines and land of oils, artificial bubbles were created. The people who benefit from these treaties was not from the west, and it certainly isn't the poor, immigrants or the middle class.
During the introduction to speculative market to certain inner social groups, credit cards were introduced in the US, and people loved it because it was convenient, safe and it "helps" small businesses deal with fraudulent checks or whatever reasons to make physical things less valuable. With all of this start the transfer of wealth, power and the freedom of speech.
Now, credit card companies are silencing people through artificial places after moving us here and making small problems into big ones, so we'd comply with people from a country that has nothing to do with democracy.
The end.
That's my thoughts for now. I tried to make it as short as possible. I tend to ramble on, so I might've missed some details.
