CATALLAXY FILES, THE AUSTRALIAN right-wing blog that was central to the local mid-2000s early-2010s blogging culture, and Larvatus Prodeo’s counterpart across ideology, has closed. Its domain points to its own archive held by the Commonwealth.

At its best, as I wrote of LP when it closed in 2012, it was one of the few places where Left and Right still spoke. More often it was home to the kind of marginal ideas (and behaviour) that the ‘blogosphere’, for good reason, encouraged—Austrian economics, free-speech absolutism, and so on. In the era where everyone with a twitter account is her or his own megaphone, and where nobody can pretend Internet Speech doesn’t have the potential to end in real violence, with real mobs with real fists, we forget how constrained the world of political ideas was in the 2000s. It’s hard to believe it really could be refreshing, rather than harmful to one’s own mental health, to go online and read other people’s firm views. It was the only place on the internet—indeed, in the world—where someone like Graeme Bird could be tolerated to take on all comers in a >10,000 comment argument about the fractional reserve in banking, about growth, profit and the State, and the nature of money, never anybody quite sure how much was playful and how much was deadly serious.

At its worst, and there is no kind way to say this, it was a hatefully racist and sectarian sewer, and was a predecessor of the kind of filth-as-speech that is now the worst, and most dangerous, of social media. It would be kind, but unfair, to remember only its good moments, without the horrible.

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