The internet has become a tool for government oppression
And not just a tool for government oppression – a remarkably comprehensive and efficient tool. Companies such as Spotify and Twitter and GoFundMe and so many others have helped to centralize communication in the public square, which is increasingly the internet, and they increasingly do the leftist governments’ bidding.
In its early days, the internet was supposed to facilitate free expression of ideas around the world. Great! Fab! But over time it has featured platforms that have centralized that information and grown to huge size, allowing their private owners to have tremendous power to censor and to affect politics around the world as they see fit.
We certainly saw that during the Trump years. The process is now close to Orwellian in scope even though it’s not usually the government doing it directly. And as a telescreen-equivalent, the internet isn’t forced on people but is instead involuntary. We have forged our own chains – or at least, we’ve put them around ourselves.
At the moment, alternatives to big companies with leftist-based censoring such as Twitter or GoFundMe are allowed to exist online (although remember how Gab was closed down for a while?). How long will these alternatives be allowed? Even when they exist, however, they are smaller and weaker than their well-established and more powerful rivals who have already been building their user bases for many years while holding themselves out as welcoming nearly all and then later coming down hard on the right.
The internet has also greatly facilitated the ability to spy on people – in other words, to collect vast storehouses of information on them and to search it for whatever the government or the company is seeking. For example, GoFundMe has the personal information of everyone who donated to the truckers convoy; do you think they would protect that infomation if the government wanted it? I sure don’t. In fact, it’s likely that the government already has access to it. And such goings-on also discourage people from contributing to conservative causes in the first place, because they fear the government will retaliate. That’s one of the goals of this entire process, too – to induce fear and avoidance behavior.
Enormous amounts of information are on computers, far more than paper and pen could afford in the olden days, unless a person was a diarist suffering from OCD. Computers track what people read, buy and sell, wonder about, watch for entertainment, write, and financially transact. It all can be stored easily (none of the pneumatic tubes and paper archives of Orwell) and – perhaps most important of all – it can be accessed easily. A search for a certain word in all of someone’s correspondence – that would take years with paper – now takes seconds and can be expanded without much trouble at all to encompass many millions of people.
The internet is potentially (and perhaps already actually) the greatest totalitarian tool ever invented.
[NOTE: At the moment, the EARN IT bill has been introduced in the Senate by Blumenthal and Graham. It is supposedly meant to give the government the tools to investigate online-mediated child abuse, and if you read the material at that link, nothing about it sounds bad. But – although I’m not going to write a post about this right now – I’ve seen assertions online that it will give the government the power to scan all of our online communications. I have to say I’ve suspected it was already doing that.]
We’ve gone a long way downhill from the Homebrew Computer Club’s original ethos.
Will the Internet or at least the point where it became widely used be one of those inflection points where things progressively get worse from that point forward?
I would say that has been true so far.
A generation ago, you looked at publications like Wired and the tech world seemed to have a libertarian ethos to the extent they had a social or political stance at all. The IT techs I knew personally had that vibe as well. I’ve been stunned the last seven years or so as it seemed the whole bloody enterprise was taken over by sectaries. I’m not understanding the trajectory of the young or the trajectory of people employed in tech.
I’ve also found it’s useless to have conversations with street-level Democrats about anything.
https://tinyurl.com/34fe3x4t
That’s a link to “It’s Back: Senators Want EARN IT Bill to Scan All Online Messages,” published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I have to admit that the crushing growth of our totalitarian surveillance state has become more than a little depressing.
Most of what I do — e.g. install VPNs — simply minimizes the routine surveillance executed by the big IT companies and our government, but I have to believe that there are business opportunities available for companies that want to build hardware, software, and services that provide privacy. For example, Pinephone is a smartphone that uses Linux and other open-source code. It’s been in development for a long time, but I think that a public version is supposed to be available soon. If it works, maybe a big-pockets company will provide expansion capital, or buy it outright. Still, for the time being, I use an old flip-phone.
I’ve received feedback from astute lawyers who note that public accommodation businesses in California, where Airbnb is based, are subject to the Unruh Civil Rights Act — which forbids the very kind of anti-free-speech, anti-free-association and anti-equal housing discrimination Airbnb has visited upon me and my family. Much more is at stake, of course, and there are other sound legal grounds for seeking relief.
IOW, they’re a California company blatantly violating California law. Liberal outfits engage in this sort of try-every-door behavior routinely and they usually get away with it.
Typo: In paragraph 3, for “involuntary” read “voluntary”.
On first reading, the EARN IT Act removes big tech immunity from liability for child pornography on its sites. Properly designed, this might be a good thing, if they removed it upon discovery or complaint. I suppose the worry is about some requirement for them to aggressively scan for it, rather than just removing it when found. That kind of scan could indeed be misused.
Canada is pushing its own version of the EARN IT bill… no doubt other nations will follow.
@Cornflour:
I’ve bought as a matter of supporting those guys principle the PineBook Pro and the first general release of the PinePhone around the time that component shortages in began in 2020 and slowed them down.
Ironic, really, that freedom from Big Tech lives and dies by what goes on in Shenzhen.
I think the PineBook pro has more value merely by being a computer with no Intel Management Engine lurking in the undergrowth. Linux Phones and encrypted chat have some obvious benefits, but possession of one (easily detected by networks) could much more obviously red flag you than possession of a networked ARM PC.
Anyway… Having gotten most of the populace to voluntarily carry around smartphones which surveil them and everyone they meet (remember the Deep State can Aggregate), the next step is to *mandate* that the holdouts do so. Won’t need to be vaccine passports. Can be your D/L, VA card, plus of course making it harder to make purchases or pay bills without a phone. So maybe you can have your Linux Phone… but it’s not going (to be permitted) to run the other Android or iOS apps you need to navigate daily life.
Almost every company is run by Leftists or afraid of Leftists, it takes very little of arm twisting, if not self arm twisting to do what the administration and hive mind of Leftists want which is shut down opposition.
As Instapundit says, “The old, decentralized blogosphere had the advantage that it had no single points of failure and was virtually impossible to censor. A cynic might suggest that that’s why the powers that be rolled out social media to displace it. But the real problem of the Establishment Media, as with the rest of the Establishment, is that people don’t trust them because they’re not just liars, they’re bad liars, and they’re not just bad liars but people who can’t help — in fact who glory in — displaying contempt for their audiences.”
Can Tim Berners-Lee succeed in redesigning the web and interrupting the ‘silos’ of information that Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. have become? I hope so. He’s doing God’s
work.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/world-wide-web-tim-berners-lee-internet-remake/
No one is required to use the ‘walled gardens’ (complete with serpent) of social media; there are millions of independent websites and at least thousands of worthwhile ones. But a lot of people seem to prefer one or two platforms. I”ve made several attempts to ‘convert’ certain people I know on FB to get involved in the blog world…people who are independent-minded, very offended by censorship, and in some cases quite technically competent…but very limited success so far.
Re: Electronic Frontier Foundation
EFF came largely out of the countercutlural communities of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth, hackers and the Grateful Dead, which all had a libertarian, don’t-trust-the-government ethic. EFF has remained true, though I’m not sure how thrivingly so.
Yes, I’m disappointed that the internet has become a tool of government oppression. And farther back, the counterculture likewise, e.g. Neil Young, Joni Mitchell etc.
The message I heard was “Freedom.” The message others heard seems to have been, “Wait until we are in charge.”
@ J J > from your link:
“Building on ideas developed by an open-source software project called Solid, Inrupt promises a web where people can use a single sign-on for any service and personal data is stored in “pods,” or personal online data stores, controlled by the user.
“People are fed up with the lack of controls, the silos,” said Berners-Lee, co-founder and chief technology officer of Inrupt, in an interview at the Reuters Next conference. This new, updated web, Berners-Lee said, will enable the kind of person-to-person sharing and collaboration that has helped make the big social media services so successful while leaving the user in control.”
Color me skeptical, but what will prevent the governments from accessing those “pods” anyway? A single sign-on would totally destroy any anonymity on different platforms.
Change my mind.
“The internet has become a tool for government oppression”
Actually, EVERYTHING POSSIBLE is being used by “Biden” as “a tool for government oppression”…
(It’s simply what “Biden” does…since after Russiagate and after the grand heist of November 2020, EVERYTHING GOES…)
“The January 6 Committee of Attainder”—
https://www.nysun.com/editorials/the-january-6-committee-of-attainder/92033/
(i.e., what “Biden” does; and what “Biden” HAS TO DO to stay in power…)
And now….Spotify appears to have folded, majorly:
Spotify Just Memory-Holed More Than 100 Episodes Of Joe Rogan’s Podcast—
https://notthebee.com/article/spotify-just-yanked-over-70-episodes-of-joe-rogans-podcast
Key graf:
“…NOT GOOD…”
– – – – – – –
Speaking of “memory-holed”…(heh):
“Ex-Clerk For Biden SCOTUS Hopeful Edited Wikipedia Pages To Make Her Look Better, Rivals Worse”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/ex-clerk-biden-scotus-hopeful-edited-wikipedia-pages-make-her-look-better-rivals-worse
…which is precisely what anyone should expect from someone supported by “Biden”….
I saw this with FLat Earth Theory, and you were incidentally part of the problem, Neo.
Where would we be without the Bee?
https://youtu.be/Cg1ISl2u5Lg?t=206
Hard to imagine.
in the spirit of lighting a candle instead of cursing the darkness here are some conservative friendly alternatives.
feel free to add your own.
Gofundme – givesendgo
Youtube – rumble
Facebook – mewe
twitter-gab, parler
Drudge-Bongino Report
other even handed internet environments
locals
substack
Imagine where we’d be without the Bee.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHx4MYzlpY8
in the spirit of lighting a candle instead of cursing the darkness here are some conservative friendly alternatives.
–Bob Wilson
Yes and the wave of creative, independent thought on blogs is still a force for liberation. They’re not putting all the toothpaste back into the tube just yet.
}}} I have to say I’ve suspected it was already doing that.]
There is little doubt that the NSA has been doing that all along, as their capabilities developed. Certainly they were doing it for international communications, as Project Echelon, initiated under Clinton, demonstrated.
But this would allow them to be blatantly open about doing it, while purportedly “protecting the children”.
Funny how a woman’s “Right to privacy” is all-important when it comes to abortion, but no one has any “right to privacy” in their communications.
Aesopfan: “Color me skeptical, but what will prevent the governments from accessing those “pods” anyway? A single sign-on would totally destroy any anonymity on different platforms.
Change my mind.”
Way beyond my pay grade. We can only hope that Sir Tim has the knowhow to make it work. Legislation would probably be required because the Feds are now ignoring the Fourth Amendment. That cookie jar is so attractive because there haven’t been any penalties for such behavior. Provide penalties for such unreasonable searches and seizures. Ten years and a $100,000 fine might be a start.
Praying for Sir Tim and all who work with him. That’s what I can contribute at this point. . 🙂
My technophobe relatives use Facebook for baby pics and things like that. No chance of turning them to MeWe but they are at infinitesimal risk. Most of my internet use is blogs but the surveillance is universal.
The no-holds barred fight to debar Joe Rogan (continued):
“The Revolution has come for Joe Rogan.
“There is no forgiveness because they seek destruction, not restoration.”—
https://technofog.substack.com/p/the-revolution-has-come-for-joe-rogan
Parlors deplatforming after Jan 6 by Amazon web services and apple and Google for their app stores was huge.
Lots of tech company deplatforming going on.
Shopify, largest e-commerce store provider stopped hosting Trumps campaign store.
Twitter and Facebook censorship of Trump is huge.
Lots of ‘email providers doing the same.
Gateway pundit reported T-Mobile I think it was, censoring texts with their url,
Google playing games with search results to censor.
Facebook censorship of groups and people for wrong think.
And a site Neo writes for has had a lot of headaches finding a new provider. I had an interesting chat at their San Diego event.
The lunatic is on the grass
Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs
Got to keep the loonies on the path
The lunatics are in my hall
The paper holds their folded faces to the floor
And every day the paper boy brings more
And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
And if there is no room upon the hill
And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon
You raise the blade, you make the change
You re-arrange me ’til I’m sane
You lock the door
And throw away the key
There’s someone in my head but it’s not me
And if the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear
You shout and no one seems to hear
And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes
I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon
Artfldgr:
A link for anyone unfamiliar with the source.
david foster,
Several years ago I had a business idea related to your comment at 10:55pm, yesterday. I just looked at chicagoboyz and I don’t see an email for you there. Perhaps you, like me, are using a nome de guerre, an “infinite jest,” so to speak?
Is there a way I could reach you to discuss this?
Cornflour:
Saw this linked at Ace about the Pine Phone.
https://liliputing.com/2022/01/test-15-different-pinephone-operating-systems-with-megis-latest-multi-distro-demo-image.html
Also, I use my old Nokia-brick since my flip-phone died when I left it in my pants when they went in the wash.
“I’ve seen assertions online that it will give the government the power to scan all of our online communications. I have to say I’ve suspected it was already doing that.”
NSA does but that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms. What this bill does is make “de facto” into “de jure.”
One reason the “alternative platforms” are small and scattered (and ignored by most people) is that they’re
1) fighting among themselves rather than cooperating
2) often riddled with the worst scum of the earth who see their “total free speech” approach as an excuse for the most vile and horrible of content (gab e.g. is so riddled with anti-semites and other very vocal racists who’ll invade every thread there and pepper it with calls for violence, with the total approval of the owners of the site).
3) have no budget, no way to make money. They’re shunned by banks and payment providers so they can’t take donations, or sell advertising for example.
4) admitting to most anyone that you have an account there leads to ostracisation and probable loss of your job, in no small part because of 2) leading many people to believe that’s all those sites are used for.
Well, “Biden”‘s been lying about everything else, so why not job reports?
“…You Just Saw History Being Made”
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/rabobank-you-just-saw-history-being-made
– – – – – –
Related: Let them eat…grass.
“Tyson Foods Soars To Record After Hiking Beef, Chicken And Pork Prices By Double Digits”
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/tyson-foods-soars-record-after-hiking-beef-chicken-and-pork-prices-double-digits
File under: Anything Kim c’n do I c’n do better.
– – – – – –
Meanwhile, in the Ukraine “theatre”, we’re already in Act II of the force, which opens rather explosively as follows:
“Damn it Vlad, will you freakin’ invade already! You’re making us all look like f*$#% idiots!!”
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russia-might-invade-ukraine-soon-tomorrow-white-house
Oops: “force” should be “farce”.
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