The Dying Light of Surveillance Capital Dependencies
Social media and the elective problems they present to the public as a voluntary-compulsory social market could find their end.
I am back to my writing and producing duties this week. As I rested up, I made a rather complete effort of clearing my senses of any kind of false attachments and guilt over the atmosphere of online interactions. The bombastic chorus of advocates and writers bellowing of horrors, of diverse boundary invasions, demanding answers for bad behavior continues uninterrupted at social media.
I also think burnout actually has a sound. I believe it sounds like tinnitus or ringing in the ears. It could also be the sound of consecutive alarmism in a very real war of ideas, speech convictions and earned space. Same sound sensation, by the way.
As we go online, the people we want to trust have a rival side to their presence online. The can be perfect online stage actors. Then behind the scenes be very hostile, unfriendly and competitive about the wrong things. You can link an intractable, corrupt, petty and vindictive group of people who pest in packs to an ideology but oftentimes not to one single person or identity. Many similar complaints about identity online are two decades old at this point. They are maturing into second, even third generation cloud surveillance performance issues and artificial intelligence generative language models online.
The worst of this is that we play right into the hands of our captors, compulsively with a fallacy, “If you are not online, you don’t exist.” Well, that works great for the solipsists who manufacture online platforms. They tend to power trip on your given interactions from time to time. To manufacture a dependency on people who insist that you don’t exist without them experiencing you, personally, is a recipe for self-injury.
…WELL, WE’RE GOING TO NEED TO SEE SOME I.D.
The premise has been for the better part of a decade, “Online verification of identity schemes can root out ‘bad actors’.”
This statement, over the years, has become a loaded accusation, a misnomer. In a normal scheme, where social presumptions are that criminals are bad, porn is not for underage people and predators get a hasty criminal referral from tech platforms, you could assume who the bad actors are. What you live with is an inversion of meaning. You, and most people online, remain wary under the speculative eye of monetized moral relativism. If you have followed the #TwitterFiles and the Weaponization committee hearings in Congress, it sounds just like this.
“Today is Tuesday. The cash flow says… anti-vaxxers are bad people. Government enterprise greylisted these keyword terms for suppression. BOLO going out to AI Trust & Safety hounds now. Catered lunch on Pfizer guys, woot!” *This is merely a simulation.
Everything and anything you may say or do can be instantly transformed into some kind of fault, silently, without any kind of court or communication with the Author. They feel zero duty to maintain a dialogue about the security of their technology. This includes the whereabouts or domain of your identity. That is a non-disclosure matter, especially to you, apparently.
On the horizon is the eruption of a “reputation economy”. The true manifests of that are unknown. Who controls the aspects of your reputation? How did what you do online somehow skip over any kind of consent management to an online behavioral worth credit rating?
Well, in the great and concurrent haul of mass surveillance monetization thrown over the fence to APAC, your answer lies in a digital economic ‘coupling’, for financial reasons with China. China does not care about your personal liberty, your private property or your private information, but they still have your profile. You get a free social credit score whether you want one or not.
We have truly walked into a one-sided crab trap if multiplicities of online profiles, generating surveillance data, becomes the definition of who were are in society. No one portrays themselves truthfully online, either. After being lured in, we are told by the combo of MarxistBots/AnarchoBots, aka people the same as the AI, and National Security helicopter AI what bad people we are for expressing personal thoughts.
Despite the battering, we are invited and expected to produce our ‘free thoughts’ and ‘to speak freely’ as INDIVIDUALS on social media and online forums where commentary is actively and concurrently solicited. [See picture at the header] The idea of ‘hyper-individualism’ is still a turned down idea concurrently treated as a ‘bad virtue’. That is the distinct stink of CCP business cultural tampering alongside mercurial Trust and Safety censorship as the hidden coalition of online nannies who treat known legal adults online exactly the same as children. ‘Well we can’t be expected to make a decision about these things without verification.’
That would be a fair assertion if they were transparent about their rules for online etiquette, web speech and when those rules change, like diapers or the weather. For now, platforms are becoming a place where there is zero accountability to Users for what is done with both their personal information and the content they generate on their platforms. It’s legally and morally unfair.
The interpretation of a Terms of Service or EULA violation is usually dictated by the online company. There is EU and US corroboration with the PRC on the brokerage of *your* personal information. The contract requirement to fly to San Jose, CA to challenge their rules to their manipulative shell game over: the availability of your content, the filching of your IP or private information to appease BRICS partners are unfair. The terms of risk are all assumed BY YOU.
The deep problem of corruption of US Congressional officials by an unaccountable international technocratic class has no real advocate in the Casey Newtons of the world. They really just want more ‘rules for the Internet’ with zero reachable mutual public accountability on companies and more freeway for the PRC. They want continuity of criminal sameness, where they can enslave otherwise free people, steal their IP and make them work for free. How is that human progress?
That will never be okay. No matter how much they yell and scream at pictures of Trump on the screen or deflect to US slavery practices of the 1800’s, it is incomparable to the human rights violations they’re in the middle of right now.
It’s not okay, kids. The UN cannot just wash away four concurrent genocides in progress, forced labor practices and diverse active forms of PRC aggression on the US by pointing to “global climate change” where the rules are unenforceable in Asia and crushing here in the West. Platforms also cannot escape near consequences for rights violations of law in the West.
Nor can we endure the gaslighting of “tech libertarians”, just like Peter Thiel, who use the identical global financial and information slavery architecture of American’s personal information. While they are speaking out of their neck about “free enterprise” they are bent over the barrel for the US national security state, to get their investment cash and selling their fellow man into Chinese identity servitude. They are very busy undermining the interests of freedom. They are people who wear a Liberty policy hat two times a year, while creating an enterprise grade autocratic tyranny the entire time.
Their actions put personal liberty past tense. Don’t be intentionally dumb or willfully blind because “platform”.
THE SELECT POWERS TO WALK AWAY
US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said ‘we won’t decouple from China,’ when the PLA are launching APT attacks on US email servers as soon as last week. There’s a hidden message in there for individual business owners.
The US government doesn’t have to martial an official policy of decoupling, because risk averse business interests are dropping PRC factories and moving foreign manufacturing elsewhere, like Bangladesh, Seoul, and diverse locations in Vietnam and Thailand. More opportunities for closer foreign investment are in Latin America. They don’t come with Chinese mass surveillance and a condition of forced intellectual property transfer. Brick and mortar small business may get the comeback they need. Especially if factory business creeps back onto US property.
That would make US dependence on the online spectrum less necessary. You can go to someone you know, apply in person and leave the online mandate for existence behind.
So this last gasp, this requiem for interpersonal mandate that you “go online” for all you need in this Earth, might just dry up alongside the Chinese economy. They are in real trouble now as Western capital partners are just - leaving. So all that tyranny that you have endured: the public calls for censorship, personal surveillance misbilled as “being social” or “gaining influence” will not be a well fed dog.
So go ahead. Deplatform me. I can make it without social media. They cannot make it long without user trust and engagement. That’s gone.
So it’s just a waiting game for this lawless era of surveillance capitalism, compelled by ODNI subsidies to scab away.
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