It seems that WordPress has taken down Chateau Heartiste.

I don’t know what part of the Terms of Service Heartiste supposedly violated. It seems as though the pretense of objectivity is slipping more and more each day. They just remove people, without explanation beyond a vague allusion to ToS without specifying which — if any — particular term was violated. Interestingly, “hate” and “hatred” do not appear in WordPress’ current ToS.

I find this particularly sad because Heartiste was, in many ways, the best science on gender psychology around. The rewards and punishments of being wrong about what works and what doesn’t are pretty clear in the dating world, relative to the academy, and as a result, Heartiste would regularly hit on some conclusion which was subsequently (and always unenthusiastically) validated by some study a year or two later.

The solution to all of this, I think, is difficult but simple: don’t feed the monsters.

These controlling, digital mega-companies survive and thrive on attention and use. Fighting against the censorship and black-listing is perhaps better than doing nothing, but not by very much. When people fight them, they are usually fighting to retain their right to use these platforms. This is an inherently inferior position, and gives power to the platform, even while ostensibly opposing it, by treating them like necessities.

The reality is, they aren’t.

I’ve been living without Facebook for probably around 8 months now; without Twitter for about 3. My life is markedly better without those distractions… because — after all — attention given to them is attention lost on other, more important things. There are only so many hours in a day.