Social Paranoia

Fanning The Flames Of Social Paranoia

From a site that claims it is about living free:

We’ve gotten so used to the Gods of Tech banning, suspending, deplatforming, delisting, algorithm-screwing, and otherwise meddling in communications that don’t further the ever-shifting party line that it’s become as routine as it is alarming. But Amazon’s “disappearing” of Parler this weekend signaled a new threat level.

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You’ve heard the bitter joke: “How did you go bankrupt?” “Slowly at first, then very fast.” Friend and sometime co-blogger Silver points out that the same can be true of politically caused disasters (hyperinflation is his classic example, but the death of open communications could slam us equally fast).

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Good luck to us all. We’re gonna need it.

All this hand-wringing is because the social networking sites, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter locked Donald Trump’s accounts and Amazon blocked the alternate site, Parler. (His Twitter account has apparently been restored.) Though the site claims to be for individual liberty, this post reads like something from a statest collectivist site.

It is a very odd thing that once something exists, no matter how it came to be, people begin to take it for granted and even feel entitled to those things. Electricity, running water, telephones, medicine, and the Internet are not natural resources. They are created and produced by human minds and effort. No one has a, “right,” to any of them; they only have a, “right,” to buy those products or use those services if they can and are willing to pay for them, and those who produce them are willing to sell to them.

Internet services are especially unique. The Internet has only existed about 31 years. HTML didn’t exist until 1992. The first practical browser (Mosaic) did not exist until 1993. For most of the life of most of the people who have ever lived in this world (everyone living before 1990) there was no such thing as the Internet, and the world got along very well without it.

No one who provides a service or produces a product is obliged to sell that product or service to anyone. That is what freedom is. It is certainly not what these people are saying, however. The decision by those social media providers to lock the president’s account was a bad decision, both practically and commercially, but freedom means free to make any choices, bad ones as well as good ones. Do these freedom lovers want them to be, “forced,” to provide services to those they think ought to have them? Freedom of communication does not mean anyone else is obliged to provide the platform or means of that communication.

Since when do those who love freedom fear industry and technology and call the technologically successful, the Gods of Tech. In a post to another site I found this succinct description of some of these modern technological ogres:

How did big tech get so much power over the internet?

“Big Tech” isn’t any different from any other large accumulation of capital in American history. In general, they are companies that created a product which revolutionized the market, or created a new one, or displaced the existing market leader, etc etc. There isn’t anything special about it, for the most part:

• Google created the best search algorithm and became the most powerful corporate entity in the world. From there, they gathered the most traffic, sold the most ads, hired the best people, and created the best products to offer along with search and ads
• Facebook created the most popular social network
• Twitter came up with an idea perfectly suited for our short attention span lifestyles and text message culture
• Netflix created the first viable digital media streaming platform and disrupted the established media landscape, finally breaking the monopoly grip of the cable and satellite providers and making cord cutting viable
• Amazon defined the online retail experience and ruthlessly drove down prices while increasing customer expectations in terms of service. Then, almost by accident, they basically invented cloud computing when they realized they could sell their internal virtualization project as a service; AWS started life as an internal project to streamline their own hosting efforts and is now one of their core businesses
• Microsoft started in the seventies and eighties providing operating systems. Their big break came when they provided DOS for the IBM PC, which grew into Windows as we know it today (a very long story which I am happy to tell if anyone wants to hear it). But in the twenty first century, Microsoft has reinvented itself; long gone are the days of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer with their paranoia and FUD. Microsoft is a savvy, modern competitor, eagerly participating in the open source world, happy to distribute its development tools, and selling time on its Azure cloud services
• Apple is a cult. …

In other words, these scary Big Technology companies produced what people willingly choose to spend their money and time to purchase and use. They will continue to succeed so long as what they produce and provide is what people want, unless, of course, the government uses force to maintain them.

One may not agree with what others want. Most people do not want freedom. They do not really want to know the truth, either. But one cannot be for freedom and also want to prevent others from thinking and choosing for themselves, no matter how wrong one thinks they are.

No one is required to use any of, “big tech’s” products. As far as social media, (which this is all about), no one needs to use any of them. 3.9 billion (50.5%) of the world’s 7.8 billion people do not use any social media. If someone just cannot bear standing alone and must have the comfort of joining or belonging to something, there are endless alternatives, such as:

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Snapchat, Reddit, Flickr, Swarm by Foursquare, Kik, Periscope, Medium, SoundCloud, Tinder, WhatsApp, Slack, Yelp, TikTok, Parler, MeWe, Telegram, Viber, and Signal. If those aren’t enough, here are, “101+ Social Media Sites,“to consider.

Not A Crises

The original post by this fear monger includes a list of things one must do to be prepared for the pending disaster:

In the upcoming days:

• Make sure that key people including those outside your political networks have multiple alternative means to reach you, including non-electronic means.
• Get the same kind of information from those contacts and keep it safe, on paper, on a keychain USB stick, or both.
• Try to exchange and store the above information encrypted if you possibly can, and if not encrypted, then offline. But do the exchange however you have to.
• Keep a file—and print it out—of both the URLs and the IP addresses of websites you particularly rely on, and if those sites have email lists that aren’t complete junk, make sure you’re on those lists so the sites can notify you if they swiftly have to relocate. (For us non-techies: your computer may already be set up for the file in question.)
• Make sure the rest of your preps are as up to date as can be.

Most of the people who follow this, “freedom,” site are, “preppers,” individuals who live in perpetual fear of impending and inevitable doom and spend their time and energy preparing for every possible catastrophe they can imagine. Their biggest mistake is not realizing, an emergency is always the one thing you didn’t expect or prepare for and no one can prepare for everything.

If you are a free individual, you continually learn all you can about as many things as you can and living successfully makes you competent to deal with every possible unexpected event, which is the only rational preparation there is for an unpredictable future.

Most of the things they prepare for are the least likely of things to happen. There is no danger of all Internet communication being shut down, but, even if that happened, since 3.4 billion (43%) of the people in the world have no Internet, the other 4.4 billion could certainly manage to live without it.

As for encrypting all one’s information and communication, unless one is engaged in smuggling (a perfectly honorable profession) or dealing in finances of a million or more, it is very unlikely that the government, or anyone else, has any interest in any of your information or even knows you exist.

If one chooses to openly defy or challenge the government, an absolutely futile and useless self-destructive enterprise, all the preparation in the world is unlikely to protect one.

Nothing To Worry About

In my article, “Nothing To Worry About,” I wrote:

“This is the age of paranoia. The world is infected with a disease worse than any pandemic, a disease intentionally spread and promoted by the political-academic axis to keep the population of the entire world in perpetual fear of everything.” It is a shame that those who claim to be fighting for freedom are now complicit in keeping the world in constant terror.

Everything will change in the future, but the future is not something to fear. It is where all of our life adventure is heading. The world is not to be feared, but studied and known and embraced, because it is a, “Wonderful World,” of endless possibility for achievement, success, and happiness for those who have chosen to be free and live their lives to the fullest.

—(01/13/2021)

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—Since 2004