Narrative Warfare: Del Arroz Deplatformed & OldPub Ossifies

Friend of the Retreat Jon del Arroz, the leading Hispanic voice in science fiction and independent comic book success story, got deplatformed from Storybundle today.

When popular author Jon Del Arroz opened an email regarding the recent Steampunk StoryBundle offering, he expected to find a contract, as one had been promised by its curator, the legendary Kevin J. Anderson, who accepted Del Arroz’s new release The Steam Knight into the bundle, but what he found instead was an email informing him that StoryBundle had blacklisted him from their platform.

The full press release is here.

He's spending today's Lunch Stream talking about it.

It's easy to dunk on Jon due to his habit of trolling his haters, but this just makes him serve as a lightning rod. When he gets struck, it's because he's highly visible more than it is for what he stands for; the intent is to use striking him down to intimidate the rest of us, in the same way that obvious high-profile murders of opponents by criminals is meant to intimidate others into silence and compliance.

The reality is that each deplatforming turns into an expose. Each incident reveals another node of Death Cult convergence. Each episode reinforces the reality that OldPub is nothing more than a long-decomposing zombie shambling about ever-slower as more and more of its rotting corpse finally collapses and reduces the zombie's capacity to operate at all. The Twitter thread below goes into this.

Lefty-writer Twitter this last week just confirmed what I've been saying now for years: the book industry is dead.
Just wait. In the 2020s, all B&N will look like this and cat-ladies around the world will collectively cry out.
Why? pic.twitter.com/p8GZhu0I3Z

— Clawson The Patrician (@sagaofaelorad) February 10, 2020

And OldPub is tied to Big Retail like B&N.

.@sagaofaelorad correctly identifies 3 causes of oldpub's demise:
>They're in the lumber business, not the story business.
>B&N is the last shred of their paper distribution monopoly.
>Increasing your share of a shrinking market = certain death.

— Brian Niemeier (@BrianNiemeier) February 10, 2020

I welcome the collapse, because it means the Pedo Pals that run the Hugos and their enablers will collapse with them- and they will be forced to compete with us out in the open. Flushed from their bunkers, they'll find things to be very different for them thereafter.

And nothing of value will be lost when they go out like they got hit by Getter Robo's Stoner Sunshine.

Be not afraid, friends. With every step, they cinch the rope that hangs them. Deus Vult.