Libre Solutions Network

Fungible Digital Infrastructure for bottom-up resilience and censorship resistance

Wed, 06 May 2026 13:57:40 +0000

In our uncertain and chaotic times, it is very easy to be pessimistic about technological freedom. For many, much of the world wide web has congealed into a small set of overtly tyrannical systems. Social media has gone from a place where people express themselves and interact with loved ones, to a digital circus with a quirky but dangerous machine ringmaster. To make matters even worse, most of the actual devices we hold and interact with have become dreadful to interact with. A simple question of “how do I directly send this photo/video/document to you?” becomes a negotiation of different apps and services. It seems like a cruel joke that personal computing devices are not at all new, yet basic fundamental features are mired in arbitrary complexity. Why can’t things just work and be intuitive? This is because much of our digital experience is built primarily for the convenience of the corporations that want to harvest our data, rather than being built for utility first and foremost.

This isn’t because engineers and programmers are evil, in fact I would argue things would be much worse if they actually were. The biggest problem is that there is not a great deal of resources being invested in building truly general purpose digital tools for people. Software & hardware freedom are often seen as lofty goals to the degree people can conceptualize them at all. This is primarily because actual change requires a dramatic shift in not just the systems we use, but also how they fundamentally work. It is high time that the people begin to direct cyberspace for the benefit of each other, rather than institutions that seek to micro-manage us. Changing paradigms isn’t easy, but the first step is recognizing how radically different things can be.

These days, almost everyone has to contend with a corporate gate-keeper for almost any action online. Despite how ingrained this is to our digital landscape, it is far from a fundamental technical necessity. In fact, there are many solutions to similar problems that all have different qualities and trade-offs. If you have problems with Big Tech social media giants, it is certainly easier than ever to start up your down independent social media presence, but that also has you contending with a different set of challenges. It would be nice if it was possible to “have our cake and eat it too” in terms of convenience as well as privacy and censorship resistance. I believe we are actually at the cusp of a phenomenal opportunity to have just that.

Conceptualizing fungible digital infrastructure

When your digital devices work, you don’t have to think about how the electricity they run was generated or where it comes from. Power from an outlet or battery just seamlessly works for you. It would be really nice if our tools had the same capacity when performing basic functions. From an engineering perspective this is possible, but requires addressing a couple of pertinent points. When I send a file, is it sent directly to the recipient? Over what transport mechanism? If the recipient is offline, is the file stores somewhere until they come online, where and how? The answers to these questions all have different trade-offs and implications which is why we have so many different messaging apps and other similar tools.

There are techniques that allow for systems to leverage inter-changeable resources to accomplish tasks. For example, a public file-hosting server can be used to share large files in chats or social media apps. This is a good start but can be decentralized further. You could use a standard protocol like object storage to support access control and allow use of any provider. Doing this means that the program or app doesn’t care what servers are being used as long as it supports storing and sharing files. By building systems that treat infrastructure as a fungible utility redirects incentives towards the best of all worlds. People can select providers they trust, are reliable, and work for them. Developers no longer need to ‘reinvent the wheel’ every time their app needs to do something simple.

Originally, I was somewhat repulsed by the idea of fungible digital infrastructure. As someone who values individual digital sovereignty, I was very concerned that the ‘digital nomad’ approach would isolate people from their data entirely. Over time, I have learned from projects putting these techniques into practice, and reflected on the incentives around this radically different paradigm. More and more, I became convinced that this is how things should have been all along. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear to see that much of our digital landscape is needlessly and arbitrarily consolidated around corporate bottlenecks. It is exciting to think about the possibilities of restructuring cyberspace with tools built with fungible systems as a foundation. In an attempt to communicate how I’ve come around on this, I would like to share what I’ve learned in trying to understand various examples of fungible digital infrastructure put into practice.

Manyverse

Manyverse is a social network built on Scuttlebutt. The project was interesting for many reasons. First, it worked by keeping your data on your own device, which is a huge win for individual data sovereignty. It also would allow you to connect to others over the Internet, or other networks like Briar. I was able to briefly use it with my twin brother to experiment in the early days.

In trying out the app, I began to understand that decentralizing not just individual systems, but means of connecting was a powerful force. It helped me conceptualize how different means to do the same thing could be harmonized to build a resilient system. Even more radical was beginning to see how peer-to-peer tools could actually leverage these techniques to get ’the best of all worlds’.

Nostr

Coming from the Fediverse, I was always a bit biased against it. I initially presumed that Nostr had little meaningful potential. Nostr’s proponents argued that not using servers was a win for censorship resistance. While that’s true, for a user without a reliable relay, this meant they were giving up coherence. With no single authoritative source for events and notifications, it can be easy to miss things.

Despite my reservations about Nostr as a whole, I remain open-minded to the project. Like many decentralized systems it’s constantly evolving and there genuinely is a great deal of promise. One simple thing about it is that (for better or worse) most Nostr clients add image links as attachments to posts. It’s a small thing but it does make a big difference that clients themselves can choose to seamlessly support a image hosting solution for the users.

Delta Chat

It was only when I actually started using Delta Chat consistently did I begin to properly appreciate fungible digital infrastructure. When I first started using it, it was mostly “e-mail but chat, and also better and private”. You would connect the client to your e-mail address and things would just work out of the box. Simple enough, and fancifully backwards-compatible. It seemed like a great option for moving people from old systems to something much better. In many ways, Delta Chat already proved itself to be remarkably resilient to state level demands.

But over the course of using it, Delta Chat has evolved quite a bit. It also migrated from using a single e-mail server to inter-changeable relays. Having actually used Delta Chat for a while I’ve been very impressed with how it actually works. It feels reliable, and seems to be getting better all the time. It supports a wide variety of fascinating features like in-chat apps and even experimental peer-to-peer calls. I am certainly eager to see how Delta Chat evolves moving forward.

Mitra Mini

Mitra is an explicitly pro-decentralization Fediverse instance. It supports many fancy features like Monero donations and even darkweb federation. I had the pleasure of publishing a Q&A with the developer Silverpill and for a time ran my own instance. In that Q&A Silverpill stated he wanted Mitra to become “a powerful social media server that has everything you need, costs nothing and can run in your pocket.” and has made some very exciting progress towards that goal.

Recently, Silverpill announced that Mitra Mini now supports a peer-to-peer synchronization mode. Meaning that Mitra no longer needs to use the Internet to communicate, and can instead use the sneakernet. Seeing multiple systems working towards the goal of being ’transport-neutral’ is a fascinating development that can route around surveillance and censorship.

Future possibilities

It is my hope that the cyber rebels of the world consider this paradigm and find ways to help people get the most out of it. Having had my own mind changed on the potential of these techniques, I can appreciate the abundance of opportunities in this space. It is my opinion that this way of organizing cyberspace can exemplify how digital freedom and autonomy is actually pro-social rather than anti-social. In a time where our online experience is so overtly hostile and manipulative, it is ever so crucial to consider ways to course correct.

Laying the foundation

Fungible digital infrastructure is fascinating in software, but it’s certainly possible on the hardware level as well. Communities can pool together resources that provide shared utilities such as file storage/sharing, and other online services. Net neutrality becomes less of a policy, and more of a fundamental structure we work to maintain like other utilities.

Private, secure & direct connections

I anticipate that ‘freedom-tech’ generally is going to rely more and more on transport neutrality. Being able to send data reliably without a persistent connection is certainly very valuable for censorship resistance. It’s possible that a layered application of these techniques can allow for direct connectivity without many of the drawbacks of existing online systems.

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Directive 4 of the Internet

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 06:11:43 +0000

Most analyses of whatever is currently wrong reveal that before the current thing went wrong, there was something else just before it that was also wrong.

When I have meditated on this and attempted to regress as far as possible without analyzing Layer 1, it becomes clear that a key problem that remains unresolved is the exclusive network that limits us and can be weaponized against all of us.

Internet is a word used to refer to all networks using the Internet Protocol (IP) and under this definition a network is not necessarily connected to other networks.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) controls an exclusive network via their own networking suite. The most critical function of the ICANN-controlled networking suite (ICANN-NS, unless someone suggests something better) is control of addresses and routing. Being that this is an exclusive network, not only can ICANN approve who uses the network, they can expel anyone previously approved.

While ICANN has remained relatively neutral in its stewardship of the ICANN-NS, the suite can, at any time, be weaponized. While most people may initially consider merely the quantity of IP addresses possible and thus conclude that ICANN cannot control every single user, the more useful analysis is on the number of organizations approved to operate within the ICANN-NS – a significantly smaller and more manageable number. Almost all organizations with assigned numbers require having those numbers as a core part of their business. Threatened with expulsion from the ICANN-NS, all of these companies will either comply with whatever ICANN requires or go out business.

It could be said that because ICANN has never weaponized the ICANN-NS against its users, it can also be said that ICANN has not adequately protected its users. In the case of LLM training, it can be argued that more users are harmed by the activities of the LLM bots across the ICANN-NS than benefit from the same bots. The activities of the LLM bots include violating myriad published protocols, notably IP address spoofing. Thus, ICANN is minimally derelict in their oversight and potentially a cruel master.

Networks operating completely independent of the ICANN-NS are sparse.[1] Implementations of mesh networking are usually regional. My personal, limited experience with public mesh networks is that they are heavily saturated and used primarily to access bridges to the ICANN-NS free of charge. I have observed that many people taking part in mesh networking believe that money should not exist and everything should be free.

Another competitive response would be a freely-associative[2] network that includes following protocols to negotiate payment options between nodes and has no central authority.

At the physical layer, real assets are required for any network to function. I believe that my limited experience with mesh networking is at least correlative with fundamentals of economics which would conclude that such a free service cannot sustain itself. Therefore, somehow, physical resources must be available to propagate and sustain a network.

A protocol could be created to quickly negotiate an agreed ledger[3] to be maintained between two nodes. The purpose of the protocol is for node operators to quickly determine if they have compatible payments and to agree on terms for balance settlement.

Since the protocol is very flexible in the sense that it could permit gratis service generally, limited gratis services, physical (or “manual”) remuneration, remote exchange services, or any combination thereof, and to include terms to re-negotiate and scale, node operators would become completely in control of what reaches their nodes.

In the case of LLM bots abusing networks and increasing labor and hardware expenses, the LLM bot operator could be converted into a funder for increased labor and hardware expansion or just go away. Not to mention that the ever-narrowing portal of services available to dissident voices could reverse course, as this could effectively facilitate a universal micropayment system.

This would also have the effect of generally reducing overall hardware requirements at nearly every step, nearly eliminate market viability for DDoS attack mitigation services, and provide marginal ease from the current A.I. industry hardware stack supply chain attacks.

At the same time, it could spark an entrepreneurial boom in the form hyper-local ISPs, such as small roaming nodes, mobile node stations (e.g., parked vehicles, trailers, etc.) and various support services, such as network analytics indicating geographic demand for bandwidth. This would be analogous to dial-up ISPs that formed during the 1990s, which were effectively a precursor to broadband services, establishing a customer base with inexpensive service prior to the more capital-intensive broadband network construction.

The challenge for all such proposed ideas is getting anyone to take any meaningful action. For any action to ever be taken, the idea has to somehow be presented, shared, discussed, critically analyzed, and responded to by both proponents and opponents. Then, ideally, a usable and useful protocol can be proposed, tested, implemented, and maintained.

Notes

[1] The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) may be able to operate without the ICANN-NS, it is currently not actually useful without the ICANN-NS. If ICANN decided that it does not want IPFS on the ICANN-NS, they could threaten operators with expulsion if they do not exclude the IPFS from traversing their networks.
[2] Not “inclusive,” as this word implies users are required be part of the network and are additionally required to interact with everyone on the network.
[3] The word “ledger” is used in the most generic sense and not to imply blockchain technologies. I would, in fact, argue against blockchains in this application.

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Bring your voice: Guest posts welcome

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Moving forward the Libre Solutions Network is now welcoming guest posts. I believe this is an excellent opportunity to bring in more voices interested in advancing digital freedom and autonomy. Things are quite dire these days and I believe it is time to use what I’ve created to help lower the barrier to entry for others.

I am first and foremost interested in personal experiences written in the first person. Why do you care about privacy? How have restrictions on technological freedom impacted your life? What do you long and hope for in a better technological future? I’m also very interested in helping recruit attention and assistance to interesting and truly ground-breaking projects. There is certainly a great deal of potential in the bright minds of the cyber rebels online, so there is a great deal to look forward to once we begin.

To be clear, the bar for new submissions is high. I fully intend to filter out half-baked AI-written submissions and marketing for various products. The content of this site is fairly political so politics is acceptable but aggression is not. This project is explicitly anti-war.

Why contribute?

The Libre Solutions Network receives world-wide attention and has been featured on The Corbett Report and Geopolitics & Empire. I also personally maintain a reasonably sized newsletter. This site is mirrored to both Tor & I2P and regularly receives traffic via these routes. The Libre Solutions Network was designed to be a resilient and censorship-resistant initiative, and as such I think it is crucial to explicitly welcome anonymous submissions. While I am happy to link your name/website this is purely optional.

Ideal posts

Anything related to Free Software & Hardware Projects
Digital Autonomy (Privacy, Security, and independent cyberspace)
Complaints about the state of big tech & cyberspace
Censorship resistance and anonymity
Personal experiences and opinions on anything related to LSN content/topics

Terms

I am asking that you submit me perpetual permission to publish your guest post on this site. This requires the post to be your own original creation and not AI or otherwise copied from elsewhere. I reserve the right to remove posts without notification.

Basic rules

Submitted as markdown or plain text
Reasonable length (5-10 minutes in estimated length) but this is flexible based on subject matter & quality
Images are welcome but video is discouraged
Links are welcome but referral & tracking links are explicitly forbidden
Optional attribution (Name/Link or anonymous)
Personal accounts and editorials are preferred
Audio voiceovers (to include in the podcast RSS) are welcome
I may make non-content corrections for spelling and other simple mistakes, subject to approval by the author
Can’t market a product
Must be original work

Approval

All approvals are subject to my own discretion at my leisure. The Libre Solutions Network is my passion project that I can only devote so much time to. I will do my best to respond quickly to submissions I’m interested in publishing. Timing will inevitably shift with the nature and volume of submissions sent to me.

How to submit

Reach out to Gabriel Tor I2P via any of the linked contact methods.

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We will come to regret our every use of AI

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 13:58:08 +0000

It may be a bold statement, but I feel compelled to warn about the risks of using presently offered AI tools. My goal isn’t to convince you to avoid these systems entirely, but to at least consider how judiciously they should be used if at all. This is because many people are going to use these tools, and there needs to be a more precise argument made than to either uncritically reject or embrace it all. This piece is an attempt to draw a bold distinction between what we have, and what could be. The difference is vast, and recognizing it highlights opportunities for the road ahead.

Machine minds and machine hearts

In such a relatively short period of time, we have gone from “doing work with computers” being a novel and fringe idea to it being the irritating background noise of our lives. Institutions shifted away from paper records to digital files and many of us shrugged and called it progress. Change is often good, but not all change is good. Even change that appears good at first, can often come along with serious downsides. While change itself is inevitable, there will always be alternative paths forward. As technological tools become more enmeshed with every aspect of our life, it becomes increasingly important to ask how and why. The stakes are high, and lives hang in the balance as the wartime applications of AI come to the forefront.

“AI” has become a vague category to mean a wide variety of tools and systems like LLM chatbots, generative tools and automated flows. These tools, when combined with all the information available, creates a colossus of immense power. People are then asking themselves many questions, but the most actionable seems to be how to interact with it, if at all. Personally, I think it is more important to consider the consequences of its use rather than merely asserting what use-cases are and aren’t valid. Regardless of our intentions, these systems have structures and characteristics that must be understood to have an informed opinion on their use. The benefits of this particular technology may be overshadowed by the dangers created by our indifference to the fine details of its implementation.

In any discussion about AI use, I often see people fiercely exclaim that AI tools are no threat to their domain of expertise. I call this Gell-mann’s Apathy: people are often more accepting of using AI for endeavors outside domains they care about, but are often much more judicious and critical of AI use within their own domains. Which is the skill domain equivalent to Gell-Mann Amnesia where people are able to see the flaws in reporting on subjects they understand, but often take things at face value outside their familiarity. Proficient programmers argue that AI agents are not a threat to truly skilled software developers, artists point out that creative works lack substance, and writers can foreshadow the consequences of devaluing the written word. Only one wholly under the spell of the AI hype would dismiss all these critical objections. On the other hand, we can certainly recognize the powerful incentives that drive the use of these systems.

For example, I will explain the magic behind ‘Vibe-coding’. Instead of merely using LLM chatbots to speed up searching for information and writing code, why not have the ‘AI Agent’ directly try running the program. That way you automate away the step of copying error messages back-and-forth. The consequence of this is that ‘software that compiles’ and even ‘software that passes tests’ is something that can be effectively brute-forced with enough computing power and energy. At least for now, it would seem that the financial costs of vibe-coding to end-users are being discounted by orders of magnitude. But the answer to flaws in AI written software is often to throw more AI at it. Instead of adding ‘don’t make any mistakes’ to the prompt, you use another agent to come up with known issues to check for and test against. To the degree this all works, it’s fairly impressive as one as one doesn’t try to imagine the absurd levels of waste involved. To make matters worse, this huge cost is being paid to seize a powerful monopoly over computing itself. The long-term impacts on privacy and freedoms are hard to overstate.

The hardest part is to recognize that the current iteration of these tools isn’t the only possibility. It is entirely possible, maybe even within reach, to have a set of implementations that respect digital autonomy. Economically sound, pragmatic use of these techniques could be a boon to society at large. Sadly, we’ll never get there if we treat the existing crop of AI tools as the only option. In identifying the broader range of possibilities it is much easier to recognize and work towards better ends. This requires us to wrestle not with the comforting distractions sent our way, but the fundamental realities that challenge even our own foundations. It is a difficult process, but it is the only way to chart a different path than what malevolent forces have planned for us. If we are not careful, we could already be living (or have let pass) peak technological freedom. If this is the case, we must consider the grave impact this is likely to have on all other aspects of our lives.

It is high time to explicitly recognize that it is our responsibility to ensure technological advancement isn’t an idol we sacrifice society and each other to. Yes, the fruits of powerful tools and systems can be wonderful for us and humanity at large, but there will always be dangers to keep watch for. Merely accepting anything offered to us, or even tolerating what is imposed on the public without judgement is a recipe for disaster. Enshrining even the best protections in laws or regulations will have little to no impact when the abuses are forged into the system structurally. Now more than ever, it is paramount that we recognize the fine line between using tools and letting systems use us. Many systems of our time definitely blur those lines, and often it seems unavoidable.

Tool use is what makes us smart

I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t love technical tools and what they can do for all of us. I love that at least for now, the open web offers the potential for genuine and authentic bottom-up cultural expression and exchange unprecedented in human history. I am actually quite excited about how sophisticated systems make it easier than ever to discover insight from others with radically different experiences. For all its faults: even YouTube deserves a great deal of credit for being a phenomenal resource for making it easier to learn new things. Computers and the Internet have certainly democratized not just access to information, but also engagement with culture as a whole. It is clear that we haven’t even begun to appreciate the limitless potential technology can offer us. That potential comes with risks, and it is important that we recognize the inevitable shifts in power for and against the people.

For example, if somebody asked me “should hospitals use AI?” I would have to ask for clarification. I certainly don’t think medical staff should have to consult with a chatbot before taking any action or making a decision. On the other hand, it would be absolutely negligent if we didn’t improve hospitals with the advancements in machine learning, automation and robotics. The line gets real difficult to see when the issue comes to personal health data. Unfortunately, information is fungible. This means that once information is collected it is not possible to guarantee it won’t end up in the wrong hands. The more sophisticated these systems get, the more dangerous their misuse becomes. As the technological landscape consolidates, the stakes only get higher, which creates a powerful feedback loop for further control and tyranny.

I’m no “techno-optimist” because I know the details matter.
I’m no “techno-pessimist” because I can see how much potential is needlessly wasted.
I wholeheartedly believe the way forward is with equal parts courage and skepticism.
Without courage, you’ll never try to improve anything.
Without skepticism you’ll fall for every half-baked failure that comes along.

I can recognize the appeal in leveraging all that can currently be known to build a CI/CD pipeline to improve society on scales big and small. Quite ironically, it always seems easy to argue for more bureaucracy in the name of efficiency. Incorporating people into automated workflows is merely the formalization that civilization isn’t something we co-create, but is something that manages us. Ultimately, it would seem that this is the ultimate goal of the “AI industry”. People seem to believe that this specific implementation is the only way to create technological advancement, but this isn’t at all true. It is highly ironic that those who are the most fervent proponents of imposing the use of certain tools on the public are also the most fierce in opposing bottom-up innovation. It seems that when the benefits of the tools are too good to pass up, that suddenly real competition is too dangerous to allow. ‘Innovation’ that must be protected from failure (or even slowing down) is domination disguised as progress.

This is because if individuals, institutions, and communities were able to build and experiment on their own terms ‘disruption’ would become the norm rather than the exception. Powerful interests would have to spend much more effort keeping pace with genuine advancement, rather than managed relative stagnation. It is baffling in a time with rapid world-wide information sharing and collaboration that we are still confined by structures constructed to gate-keep bottom-up change. The answer to that is outside the scope of this piece, but ultimately technological freedom is very intertwined with freedom in other domains like economics, civil rights and even health. It is worthwhile to appreciate the efforts in those areas. One of the biggest reasons people struggle to recognize the potential for a better future is just how many things would rapidly change if negative feedback loops were replaced with positive ones.

We already have a great deal of ‘power tools’ that are downstream of artificial intelligence research. Text-to-speech and speech to text have both gotten a lot better and more accessible. For all their limitations, even small LLMs can do fascinating things. Functions like interacting with computers and systems via chat or voice are a genuinely useful patterns to consider. With the right approaches, and doubling-down on hardware & software freedom, I am confident a great deal of good can come without the disastrous consequences of our current path. The good news is that the problem isn’t actually the technologies themselves, but how they are packaged. In hindsight, it would seem that if digital privacy was as unreachable as people have been conditioned to believe, the efforts to consolidate our entire computing experience wouldn’t be necessary.

Because nothing is new under the sun, I’m going to draw a comparison between the expansion and domination of social media from the 2010s to what we are likely to see with AI moving forward. It would seem that despite spending billions on “AI safety” we are in the process of making the very same mistakes at a whole new level. This is precisely because I don’t believe the harms from the that era were an accident, but rather the intended outcome. While there is now a growing push to address these issues by various governments, I can’t take them at face value when we are in the process of rapidly re-creating a much worse situation with AI.

We’ve seen this all before

In hindsight, it is clear that big tech social media served a variety of functions. For the vast majority of people, it transformed the web from something you would surf and search to a doom-scrolling casino. With huge numbers of people flocking to participate, businesses, individuals, and even institutions felt immense pressure to adopt these growing platforms. In hindsight this was a terrible deal. Social media giants would eventually hold their captive audiences hostage, algorithms were tweaked to effectively ransom voices own audience against them. The deal changed over time, first by gradually reducing reach, to blatant and extreme acts of censorship.

The mass adoption of social media had disastrous consequences, but it filled a very useful niche. By leveraging the rise of the smartphone, these companies were able to offer a strong illusion of what the web being open to the masses would be like. This came at a high cost, shifting online social interactions from a diverse range of self-styled unique online experiences to a standardized commercial machine was a huge blow to the concept of online anonymity. What was once common sense advice to stay safe online was beginning to seem suspicious, if not dangerous. The more people participated on social media rather than the open web, cyberspace itself would consolidate in favor of this trend.

The impacts of all this have fundamentally altered our online experience. Surveillance, censorship, and algorithmic manipulation are a given. Despite many data breaches having disastrous impacts on people, we are seeing an acceleration of the information being required from people through ID verification schemes and other measures. The combination of social media dominance and the rise of the smartphone were a double-tap on individual privacy online. Your digital footprint was no longer mere traces in various places, but is now a commodity bought and sold in real-time. The invasions of privacy themselves created new risks as sensitive information about people was abused for a wide variety of ends from scams to hostilities.

The worst of it all is what could have happened in its absence. If we hadn’t ‘put all our eggs’ into the Big Tech basin we could have had radically better systems perform the same functions. Systems and tools are built on assumptions, and those assumptions are usually built on the way things are. It takes radical vision to imagine, never mind build on a different set of principles. This means that as the ground shifts, so does the nature of systems built on top of it. That’s the reason why the online social environment has been so chaotic and difficult to keep up with. The trouble is that we have been relying on consolidated technological structures that the idea of truly independent digital infrastructure is fringe. So much so, that the idea of building a ‘cyberspace for and by the people’ is essentially unthinkable.

The trap is being confined to the dominant paradigm. Power decides what is projected top-down and it is ultimately fruitless to try to ‘out-compete’ these systems on their own terms. In hindsight, it would seem that there have been many iterations of the same psyop to stifle independent technical talent. The pattern is quite straightforward: pitch to status-seeking individuals that they’ll be rewarded handsomely for building what power needs. Instead of having government build social media and the censorship apparatus on top of it, it was auctioned off to whatever platforms could get the most users. Social media quickly transformed from being about connecting with contacts to ‘people farming’ for data collection. We then saw this very same pattern with the blockchain ‘revolution’. Not long after a digital token for ‘peer to peer digital cash’ caught worldwide attention, the focus shifted from emancipatory technology towards running more and more brazen ponzi schemes. Decentralization becomes less about ‘changing the game’ but more about trying to beat the malevolent forces at their own game. None of this means there aren’t merits to social media, blockchain technologies, or even AI tools but there are fine distinctions that need to be made.

The feedback loop

There are a lot of great reasons to never use ‘AI tools’ in the way they are currently available to people. Research has already shown profound cognitive impacts to outsourcing your thinking. Multi-media generation and chatbots double-down on what is arguably the most dangerous aspect of social media: it burns you on a pyre of your base impulses and then pours gasoline on the fire. If these tools were physical products they would likely be packaged like cigarettes, with terrifying warning labels. Yet despite all this we constantly see people prophesying that these are the future, and that one must become familiar with them to not be left behind. In fact, there is a desperation behind the adoption of these tools, a burning desire to ‘one last sprint’ their way out of the seemingly inevitable ‘permanent underclass’.

This is because what both AI evangelists and critics can see is the all-consuming nature of how the game is played. AI as it is currently understood is not mere technology, but a system of total technological domination over the public. Just as institutions and people have already ceded too much of cyberspace to the cloud, we are in danger of offering even more of our lives and society on the altar of centralized computing. The ‘singularity’ was never to be an economic or technological boon, but rather the mere collapse of society under the weight of digital totalitarianism. Naked human dominance and tyranny was the face behind the techno-utopian mask. A generation was evicted from the ideal of home ownership by the combination of a variety of economic and social forces, it would seem that the same is taking place in cyberspace. ‘Hardware is the new homes’, as the public becomes priced out of securing a modest home server.

For at least the foreseeable future, the path of least resistance will always involve using centralized AI tools. While it’s certainly possible to run your own models on your own hardware and energy, you’d be at a massive disadvantage compared to those using the discounted costs of the cloud. This builds a significant financial incentive to shift capital away from producing consumer-friendly hardware to equipping data-centers to take over computing itself. In effect, both state & private investment in AI giants is effectively investing in seizing computing power and digital infrastructure from the public. For those who are already well-assimilated into the cloud, the difference is imperceptible. For those who wish to reclaim and protect digital autonomy for the people, the game is all but entirely lost.

Regardless of how ultimately useful the technological techniques behind AI tools actually are, what people are actually afraid of is the run away feedback loop that seizes control of cyberspace as society is further dominated by it. It may not matter what currency we use, or if our government ID is digital in a time where everything needs to ask the central computers for permission to take any action. This could be tolerable if we saw a commensurate rise in innovation and invention, but it seems that was just the marketing for invasive control and surveillance. People are beginning to realize that the very nature of this system is anti-social and inhuman. The question isn’t if it is bad or good, but rather how bad it’s going to be.

The ‘Super-intelligence’ red herring

Critics often fall into the trap of believing these systems have no use or utility. It should not be at all surprising to see fascinating applications of bulk-processing the totality of society’s creative and intellectual works. The sheer magnitude of powerful machines and useful mathematics is genuinely impressive. With some margin of error, and a pretty intense amount of waste it does certainly seem achievable to fully automate a wide variety of tasks. The combination of sophisticated automation and vast information collection can certainly provide the illusion of super-intelligence, but this would be like giving paper the credit for all the knowledge contained in books throughout history. The mythology of AI super-intelligence itself is a powerful force for dis-empowering people. Just as a gang of brutes can keep an lone dissenter intimidated, people are likely to develop an inferiority complex relative to the processed output of all of human creation. This insecurity is deliberately fostered to build on learned helplessness to make AI super-intelligence an illusory self-fulfilling prophecy.

When pressed, even the most fervent AI evangelists will retreat to “they’re just tools to help smart people work harder”, but it’s clear their heart isn’t in it. If the goal was truly to unleash a new revolution of innovation and progress we would see sincere efforts to radically improve education and build up people’s skills. Yet if anything, it would seem that AI is to be not an actual industry, but a bureaucratic babysitter for a public treated as a nuisance at best and an existential threat at worst. Schools and workplaces are being outfitted with systems to demote people from mere cogs in the machine, to its subjects. With this level of dispossession and displacement, it is no surprise at all that the primary applications of AI are distraction and warfare. None of these troubles are direct consequences from technological advancement, but are the culmination of power plays through the long arc of history.

Cloud AI has an immense advantage when it comes to the magnitude and variety of information available. Scale gives these large corporations access to a treasure trove of information while copyright enforcement turns a blind eye. This is an immense asymmetric advantage that allows for the building of very useful information management and retrieval systems. But this usefulness cuts both ways. The consolidation of information inside these systems drives people to be more dependent on them. The mental atrophy of using LLMs to do work is accelerated by allowing other research skills to atrophy. Independent verification may be entirely overshadowed by all other sources reflecting back the outputs of AI systems, that may or may not be up to date or even accurate.

“We have altered the deal, pray we don’t alter it further”

One of the biggest traps is assuming that just because these AI tools are presently generally useful, that they will always remain productive in specific domains. Your quirky genius companion is likely to reveal its true colors when alternatives fade. Just as we are seeing consumer computing being brought out of reach for most individuals, so too can specific capabilities be withheld from the users of AI systems. We may be able to salvage utility from cloud models to make cute graphics, learn interesting things, or even build software, but this is all on borrowed time. Not only will these tools continue to become more powerful. the same mechanisms of control over them will also become more sophisticated. It is entirely possible, if not outright guaranteed that at some point these tools will eventually narrow their usefulness towards various ends, and withhold access to particular groups and people. This form of ‘cyber exile’ effectively transforms everything and everyone connected to the system into a potential adversary.

It is also not a given that these systems will be as inexpensive as they presently are. The economics appear wholly unsustainable. The costs (in price or otherwise) to use these systems must inevitably rise. Therefore, all reliance on these commercially available AI tools is taking on an indeterminable future debt in exchange for short-term gain. This is highly concerning considering the already clear troubles relating to using these systems. We have already seen institutions impose AI systems for employees, it is an open question how easily individuals of society will be able to escape them at all. For it is not just about an individual’s choice to use these systems or not. Regardless of their choice, these systems are going to be used against them. Facial recognition and other surveillance systems are ubiquitous and omnipresent. Currently, opposing this adversarial model of technological tyranny is quite difficult, and gets more challenging over time.

Getting off the fence: refusing to compromise on humanity

I genuinely get it. These tools are very handy and can do a lot of interesting things. Telling someone to avoid using these tools feels like asking them to take on an immense disadvantage. That ‘downgrade’ is relative to your perspective. The drive to replace human creativity and input with centralized compute is on its own self-defeating. It means that all those rushing to become familiar with these tools are at best racing to push themselves out of society. The paradox is that in a desperate race to not be ’left behind’ you realize that you had to give up to participate. My point is that being a mere technician for AI tools is highly likely to be a ‘crowded trade’ and practitioners will be replaceable by design. This is because the exponential consolidation of cyberspace didn’t begin when people started using ChatGPT, but actually when people shifted away from independent websites to Big Tech social media services. It’s a much longer trend, and we’re merely beginning to see the deeper impacts.

I am also not so naive to prescribe an all-or-nothing approach. I recognize that many are going to be confined to these systems for a variety of reasons. It is paramount that we recognize and address structural factors rather than turning on and attacking people making different choices than us. You can’t disarm totalitarian thinking with “Join me or else!”, but rather with the strength to endure long enough to build something better. People are going to use these systems and there are many disastrous consequences of it. People are also going to strive to avoid it all at great personal cost. There will be all kinds of people everywhere in between. It is paramount that those of us concerned about these issues are focusing on connecting with the people, rather than merely fighting the machine.

This is because what is actually more powerful than all these systems is what we see in each other. Despite all the hype about needing to sacrifice each other for AI to ‘defeat China’ we’re going about it all wrong. A human society that cherishes and nurtures personal agency and capacity will absolutely out-compete a system that trades what we are for false idols. It is fatefully ironic that those who desperately wish to surpass all of human achievement, knowledge, and culture are entirely unappreciative of its wonders. Art without experience, words without coherence, and even software without sense all reveal how erroneous the current path actually is. The question was never what tools we use, but always what they’re being used for? We have a small window of time to refocus on meaningful connections rather than what algorithms choose for us, doubling down on what’s real is the winning move.

Presence and purpose

Everything about our present digital experience is aimed at preying on our panic. That pressure is imposed via a variety of means, but is always used as leverage against us. First and foremost it is crucial to protect your mind in these times. Peace and sanity doesn’t have to come at the expense of being informed if you properly pace yourself. Taking the time to meaningfully engage with what’s important to you allows you to bring the care that’s called for. No matter what you’re doing, be especially focused on ensuring you’re being deliberate. A relatively small amount of self-awareness can help ensure you’re using tools rather than have them using you. The line between the two is being blurred all the time, so it’s always a good practice to question why and how you’re doing things. Taking the time to dive deep into the details of your experience is helpful to keep your real goals in mind.

I won’t condemn you merely for using AI tools, but I’m going to expect a lot more out of what you accomplish. With great automation I expect much greater care into the precise details. With the power to accomplish so much by using these tools, how you choose to leverage them does tell me a great deal about what you actually prioritize. Merely generating ‘slop’ to stay relevant in social media algorithms reveals that the message was never the point. Using AI agents to ‘vibe-code’ freedom tech can be impressive but can also reveal the extent of your imagination. I am personally skeptical that those who choose the ’easy route’ are willing to put in the care that is truly needed in our times. It’s all well and good to retort “it’s not the critic who counts”, but then don’t say we didn’t warn you.

With actual vision we could demand so much more out of what’s being offered. They came onto the scene promising an acceleration of growth and innovation but in practice we are seeing breakneck corruption and escalating wars. I encourage you to recognize that you don’t have to go with the flow of top-down madness. It is difficult to chart your own path, but it is equally rewarding. Anyone saying you must yield to these systems is ultimately gambling with your future, I encourage you to take it into your own hands. Despite what the hype would make you believe, there is a phenomenal amount of opportunity outside just paying for tokens and waiting for more tokens.

If you trade your ability to think on your own, or develop your own skills to compete in mass media algorithms, those algorithms can now ‘cut out the middleman’. It’s not that people are replaceable, but that our role in these highly consolidated structures was always arbitrary. People and communities are capable of so much more than just being managed by top-down control systems, and have so much more to offer outside those confines. I would encourage you to protect and preserve what really matters in these mad moments: communities, connection, and genuine expression. It is clear to me that the problems of our time are constructed out of our distance from those things. Do not let the demeaning of the people turn you against yourself and others.

Fighting for technological freedom

Today, the vast majority of people are unaware that there are different approaches to technological systems. Despite Free and Open Source software having an outsized impact on the technological landscape, people are often still ignorant of the philosophy behind these things. It is a tragedy because an unrelenting expectation of user freedom would have avoided the social catastrophes of the social media era, and the many dangers behind AI systems. The answer lies in directly opposing the maintenance of technological monopolies as a force for control over the population. The greatest threat to technological totalitarianism is democratized innovation. Instead of relying on Big Tech AI companies to be the arbiter and bottleneck of technological progress, society could introduce advancements in parallel.

It is quite convenient for those seeking power over the public, that the problems created by corporate AI are being used as a pretext to crack down on the Free and Open Web. Online anonymity is being ‘phased’ out as corporate infrastructure creates managed gates over online services. Legislators are more than happy to tighten restrictions as they face a frustrated populace. These days I am growing skeptical that the ‘clearweb’ will survive as a viable tool for dissent. The vast majority of the public gets all their information solely from corporate cyberspace and governments are taking full advantage of that fact. Despite all this, we are still quite far from ‘game over’ when it comes to online censorship. If we are willing to ‘up our game’ when it comes to technological resistance, there is still quite a lot of potential.

Independent cyberspace, be it from small personal blogs to massive online communities, needs to be fiercely seeded, nurtured, and protected. Salvaging what utility is left of existing systems is a necessary and urgent priority. There is a great deal of hardware available that can be used for all kinds of endeavors. Making the best of it is going to require acquiring and mastering new and old skills. Instead of begging corporations for the right to repair, it is clear we’re going to have to seize it with reverse engineering.

Cultivating creativity

The greatest danger of our present moment isn’t hypothetical future risks, but what we’re already losing. So many are merely going through the motions of human connection, not realizing that something fundamental has broken. The first AI to destroy humanity wasn’t run on a data-center, it was the bureaucratic machine run on people. People kept going through the motions as rigid rule-following calcified every social interaction. The very fact that people could meaningfully intervene in the moment was a bug that was always going to be patched out eventually. As bad as fully-automated AI tyranny is, it’s less of a radical shift and more of the end result of a very long running trend. The damage only appears more extreme because we don’t know what we have until it’s gone.

What genuine creation has the capacity to do is to remind us all what we’ve actually lost. For most of history, culture was a negotiation between top-down impositions and genuine bottom-up expression. In recent decades, the raw domination has managed to tip the balance by surgically severing the bonds that represented a firm limit on top-down power. If we want a human culture, healing those wounds is the only thing with a hope of turning things around. The painful scars make this a very difficult problem to tackle. No progress can be made by playing the same game of treating each other as replaceable at best, and resources to be expended at worst.

The best thing about generative art and media, is that it forces us to answer a difficult question: “What is the point of creating?” The machine can do it all faster, and with pleasing enough qualities for little effort. Why write when it has all been said already? Why sing if we can hear any song we like? This illusion of abundance strikes at the real suffering behind our existential starvation. Choosing to create is an inherently relational exercise. It is the purest expression of what we’re capable of doing for each other. Culture is weaved by threads of connection made by people spending their time on meaningful creations. It was never about the colors, the sound, or the witty words strung along together. It was always about the context behind our shared experiences. The ‘slopification’ of everything coming for digital media is just the extension of all our lives being cluttered with mass-produced junk. Appliances, tools, and even instruments lack the care and craftsmanship that used to be taken for granted and is now just a memory.

The point is that a better future requires people willing to put care into things, not for the sake of financial gain, but because it is the right thing to do. That can only come when we recognize our own humanity and work to express it on any level we can. It isn’t something that can be done alone. It starts with you but it’s not about you. A pro-human future needs actual humans, and villages need villagers. The system profits of imposed isolation because the void in our hearts it creates will never be filled by consuming. This cycle can be broken, and it requires us to be willing to be there for others. Slop isn’t the enemy, but rather our own indifference is.

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Please Stand By: Technical Difficulties

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 23:52:10 +0000

Bad news: The PeerTube instance is (irreparably) broken.

While doing an upgrade I mistakenly wiped my database. Due to being short on time, this was being done over several days which meant my regular backup overwrote the old data. It only became clear when this morning I noticed my instance would run but all the data was gone. To be frank this is pretty disheartening. Winter has always been challenging for me, but this one especially so. I’ve taken on a lot and it has taken a lot out of me. While my personal weight loss journey continues going well, it seems that the ‘big picture’ of the ‘freedom fight’ has gotten far more dire.

The good news is that I haven’t lost any of the videos. I have all of them in some form or another, It’s just the Fediverse instance itself that went down with all the associated metadata. While I am very pleased with the fact that I’ve managed to get a few views via my own self-hosted PeerTube instance, it never actually got any significant engagement. Therefore I’m not in a huge rush to simply reconstitute it on a different subdomain, but that may happen in the future.

I’ve had very little time lately to address the technical debt I’ve built up over the course of this project. Over the course of working on this, I have learned a great deal. On the optimistic front, I’ve learned that the free and open web is truly much more alive than I had hoped. It is genuinely good to know that the ‘old web’ is very much alive and being rebuilt by many phenomenal people and I have been delighted to participate in some small way. On the darker side, I’ve learned so much more about the traps and pitfalls well-meaning people can get ensnared in. I’ve come to realize how much more difficult battling for anything worth preserving actually is.

This is not the end.

This disruption is as good a time as any to take on some readjustments that I had been putting off for quite some time. Many assumptions that had been made when I started this project are no longer tenable. With generative AI “flooding the zone” of online discussion and governments instituting their controls over cyberspace it very much feels like the ground has shifted in challenging ways. It seems that I am being presented with a concrete reason to reinvent this project for the years ahead.

I’m going to need some time to really rethink how I want to engage on this front moving forward. There’s a much bigger picture than mere digital freedom that has become integrated with my understanding of many things. I had already considered a “rebrand and relaunch” to encompass a broader set of themes, and I’ve also been wanting to focus more on building meaningful tools than “screaming into the void”. With my time being spread very thin these days, I need to above all really focus on restoring my passion and energy for where I believe I can actually make a difference.

So I’m expecting to be more quiet for a while. I’ve been frustrated at my growing backlog of half-written articles, but I’m posting this to grant myself permission to really dedicate my focus on building what I need to continue. I’m going to need some time to recuperate on many levels and focus intensely on what I want to construct. I’ll be doing a lot of rethinking and planning, because the game has changed in ways that I believe need to be properly adapted to.

Libre Solutions Network 2.0

I am hopeful that I can make best of this opportunity to reinvent this passion project with everything I have learned. The war against digital autonomy is here and is being won by the tyrants. Sadly, the general public is still largely apathetic if not entirely in the dark about the real stakes. Thankfully, the (real, independent) web is a powerful force for good and we have to fight for it. There is so much ’low-hanging fruit’ that could be built to meaningfully liberate people from hostile cyberspace. Even better, the bar for actual progress is so much lower than doomsayers, shills, and purists would have you believe.

I’m absolutely frustrated to be in a bit of a bind these days as my real-life priorities have shifted and technical debt has me behind, but I want you to know that I am quite optimistic. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned while doing this is to meaningfully appreciate the great work being done by others. It has been a great relief to get involved and realize that those of us who care about digital autonomy are not at all alone and there actually are quite a lot of us out there. As bleak as things are I am thrilled to share that I have found a great many reasons to be optimistic in our ability to make a difference.

While we wait

I’ll definitely be back. In fact, I’m hoping to publish some off-the-cuff “walk with me” rants about how I see our critical point in time. I’m adapting this project to my life circumstances, but I’m doubling-down on the mission. I’m very much down, but don’t count me out! I want to thank you and the many people who have engaged with this project one way or another, it has been a phenomenal adventure and I am intensely focused on how I can continue to work for what matters.

If you haven’t already, now is absolutely the time to bookmark this website and import the RSS feed because that’s going to be the best place to stay up to date. The next best place is following the project on the Fediverse
If you’ve got a show/podcast and want to pick my brain, now is definitely a good time if you’re fine with recording on a Saturday.
Suggestions, feedback, and anything else would mean a great deal right now. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.

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The State of Cyberspace: Twilight Hours

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 20:25:38 +0000

This last year has been a difficult and chaotic time for those interested in preserving and advancing the pillars of digital autonomy: privacy, independence, and security. Governments are working overtime to weaponize cyberspace to gain dominance over their subjects and corporations are constructing the machinery to enable it. To make matters worse, much of the public is either unaware or entirely apathetic to the looming threats, except in ways that can be used as a pretext for expanded top-down control. These concerns are far from purely hypothetical or speculative, but rather are the consequences of many powerful and long-running trends. You can listen to Keonne Rodriguez outline the consequences of trying to take these forces head-on on the Watchman Privacy Podcast. If that seems too far removed from an ordinary persons’ difficulties, you can read this account of how a person was locked out of their entire digital life by Apple. These are two concrete but highly significant and related instances that are both downstream of the consolidation of full-spectrum technological dominance over the public.

The cause is not at all hopeless, but the hour is quite late in. Many knowledgeable cyber rebels are speculating if this is ‘game over’ for a free cyberspace. I can certainly empathize with the terror, and can absolutely admit to feeling it first-hand. In times like these it is crucial to be aware, but not petrified of problems. The antidote to fear-based paralysis is proactive effort taken on sustainably. The good news is that there is a great deal both technologically skilled and those who excel in other domains can do to meaningfully address these challenges. This is due to the fact that the terrors in the technological dimension have origins outside that realm. A broader base of knowledge is absolutely required, and so is a much greater emphasis on responsibility and seriousness. As I outline these dangers, know that hardly any of them exist in a vacuum. The inter-related dynamic of these problems is what seriously raises the bar for comprehension and correction. This is an attempt to give a glimpse at the ‘bigger picture’ as I currently understand it.

Novel assaults via cyberspace

The main lesson that should be learned from the mid 2010s to the early 2020s is that mass human misery is a force multiplier to all the predatory aspects of our present digital experience. This factor creates a tectonic divide between those who are vulnerable to all kinds of harmful psychological manipulation, and those who may be spared from them for a variety of reasons. This couldn’t be more clear in the rapidly escalating ‘Chatbot Psychosis’ phenomenon, where lonely and/or wounded individuals are easy prey for advanced neurological traps. To make matters much worse, these ‘soft’ dangers are amplified by shocks of economic instability and rising precarity. Those shocks are in part being accelerated by the rapid deployment of massive data-centers, which in turn are ostensibly for further AI deployment. This alone, is a significantly powerful feedback loop for devastation of the public.

One of the more troubling developments when it comes to the digitization of everything is its impact on the workforce and institutions. An extreme potential example would be the person who came forward claiming that ridesharing apps use a scoring mechanism to flag drivers who are desperate to ensure they are being paid as little as possible. This may sound like far-fetched speculation but there are already individualized pricing schemes being tried out by retailers, and it has been a feature of online sales for some time. These tactics raise questions about what possibilities there are in the future for a “multi-tiered” society to leverage all kinds of incentives and penalties to shape behavior. This potential system is far more opaque than a mere state-run “social credit system” because it would a mesh of various business and institutional interests making it very hard to even pin down who should be held accountable for specific abuses. To make matters worse, many of these excesses are effectively normalized today. It can be very difficult to draw the line between acceptable business decisions and what is very clearly organized collusion.

One of the important developing trends would be the wars and rumors of wars that threaten to upend what little stability remains. ‘War footing’ is a powerful pretext for corruption and the erosion if not outright suspension of civil liberties. It should not be ignored that as countries begin to rearm, cyberspace is becoming far more overtly tyrannical in favor of top-down control. It would certainly appear that we are in the stages of a ‘whole of society’ preparation to eliminate dissent prior. It is anyone’s guess what that preparation is actually for, but we can fully expect the many ongoing top-down threats to digital freedom to be rapidly escalated as this continues. As such it is our duty to be proactively focused on the wide array of methods our technological experience can be leveraged against the public to nullify political, social, and economic dissent.

At minimum, it should be expected that a great deal of the data collection over the last decade has been very fruitful in precisely tuning psychological manipulation tactics. Social media giants have been enabled to collect vast amounts of mental health data about individuals in even the most sensitive contexts, it would seem that physical health is next. Health monitors and various ‘wearables’ are not necessarily new, but with the rise of AI technology there is a desire to rapidly expand real-time bio-surveillance on individuals, and the public at large. If the mass abuse of the people’s mental health information can be any guide, we can fully expect the further digitization of health to be a similar-scale disaster if not much worse. Just like real identities online, we can see biometric surveillance move from fringe, to trendy, and eventually all-but-mandatory. It is clear that the politicization and commodification of health will reach exponentially new heights in the relatively near future. When the public is ‘feeling the pinch’ from all directions, there is an understandable impulse to latch on to any readily available ‘solution’ to make the pain go away.

There are many concrete examples of this already. We had the extreme and overt ‘biosecurity’ tyranny of the covid years, where people were denied access to employment or even society generally due to injection status. During the crisis, governments and corporations tested the limits of what they could impose on people. Platforms brazenly suppressed debate on state imposed measures, and institutions harshly punished internal dissent. Those seemingly ’temporary’ or ’emergency’ impositions are certainly not as unthinkable now as they would have been prior to 2020. Far more damaging than the measures themselves is the erosion if not outright eradication of medical ethics that has not been repaired. This means that any health information is almost certainly going to be weaponized as much as people’s social media information has been if not more so. This is escalating at a time where the youth face extreme pressures to leverage any ‘quick fix’ to thrive in a predatory economic and social environment. This can be seen plainly in the ’looksmaxxing’ phenomenon, where many either popularize or aspire to biohack themselves into improving their appearance at potentially high costs. For some of these people, transhumanism isn’t a hypothetical sci-fi concept, but rather a game they are learning to play. There are already people ordering experimental peptides directly for a wide variety of purposes. I speculate that the state’s “monopoly on medicine” is being phased out in favor of DIY human experimentation managed by Big Tech.

State and corporate conquest of cyberspace

What can sound as outlandish or absurd to those not influenced in these spaces, can still have outsized impact in people’s real lives. Far too often extreme toxic dynamics are underestimated because the damages are relegated to neglected youth confined to hostile cyberspace. Social media is already very proficient at leveraging their emotional weaknesses for self-destructive and highly profitable schemes. This can range from self-destructive subcultures to gambling, and naturally predator dominated environments. This dynamic severely victimizes vulnerable people, and the carnage builds demands for radical solutions to resolve the problems. Unfortunately, these problems are complex and require more than simplistic knee-jerk responses. Unfortunately, the (well-deserved) political capital to address the problem ends up being redirected towards seizing more control over cyberspace. Age verification and social media bans in the name of protecting youth do very little to address root causes and are hardly sufficient to hold negligent or malevolent platforms accountable.

The pattern of redirecting justified outrage stemming from complex problems appears to be a constant feature of our time. What is most conspicuous is that there is a repeated pattern of technological systems that exacerbate particular problems are granted free reign in the name of ‘innovation’ despite predictable hazards. Once the damage accumulates to the point of crisis the answer always seems to be a readily prepared package of chipping away at what little room for independence yet exists. All this despite the fact that the bulk of the problem was inflated by top-down consolidation of cyberspace, not mitigated by it. This familiar pattern is very clearly seen in the almost religious fervor governments and institutions are pushing for rapid AI integration throughout every aspect of operations, despite vocally crying concerns about the dangers of AI. Predictably, there wasn’t and still largely isn’t a mainstream discussion about the dangers of the massive power consolidation in cyberspace.

The formula is irritatingly simple:

Prop up a system that nobody really asked for like chatbots in everything, serfdom as a service replacing previously stable employment, and more recently X users getting Grok to undress people
Leverage the resulting frustration as an impetus to carry-out pre-planned policy prescriptions like more censorship, more surveillance, and even more bureaucratic control
Because the top-down control that instigated the issue remains in place, the cycle repeats and is an endless feedback loop of more of the same

What is just as frustrating as the simplicity of this formula, is how well it rhetorically traps objectors. Just as anyone critiquing unprecedented and irresponsible covid lockdown measures were derided as ‘anti-science nutters’, those who point to the irresponsible and ham-fisted deployment of these systems can be similarly dismissed as AI denialists. This works because the complexity or hypothetical promise of the domain is used to both dismiss critical concerns of outsiders, while also being used as sufficient justification for not addressing harms. What’s notable is that this ‘sleight of hand’ is only acceptable when it is used to consolidate power, not to protect civil liberties or decentralize regardless of overall merit. For example the hypothetical benefits of giving children access to AI tools are presumed to outweigh the risks, but the benefits of people having anonymous access to the same material the bots are trained on (the web) is considered too dangerous to allow much longer.

We are currently in the midst of governments finalizing the negotiations with corporations under what terms they will dictate cyberspace to the public. What is good for the public, never mind what the people actually want is irrelevant to this process. The presumption is that a state’s “digital sovereignty” and corporate “innovation” are vastly more important than the interests of the people. This is why all ‘safety’ reforms for cyberspace will inevitably fail to actually increase safety, they’re not really intended to. In fact, the most likely outcome of these ‘reforms’ is to be highly dangerous to the public in more insidious and difficult to quantify ways. The fact that governments across the world are highly concerned about having control over any information the public potentially has access to, and communicates to each other should be alarming. It is highly unlikely that such unparalleled and unprecedented power over the population will be used for benevolent ends, and there are many if not countless malevolent machinations for it.

2025 has been a big year for the expansion of ‘age verification’ on various platforms. This too is a very difficult rhetorical trap. Serious and pressing online safety issues are the justification for drastic measures. Unfortunately these schemes are unlikely to meaningfully protect anyone. It’s security theater for anxious parents. Politicians get to show how seriously they take the issues, corporate compliance firms get their rates, and we all get to pretend there aren’t root issues to address. It would seem that the so-called ‘anxious generation’ isn’t actually the children using social media, but rather the parents and institutions that are beginning to grow concerned of the consequences of neglecting a generation. The firm hand of mass censorship and the smothering watchful eye of mass surveillance work together to ensure that there is nothing disturbing the false harmony that keeps the illusion going. Because of this, we can fully expect more scapegoating of digital freedom for issues that people would much rather not look to closely at.

Cyberwars and ‘splinternets’

They say war never changes, but it certainly has expanded into new realms. Advanced autonomous systems have driven drone warfare to ‘change the game’ on the battlefield, while cyberwars introduce new challenges for both military and civilian systems as a whole. The idealistic vision of the world wide web as a unified shared resource for humanity is certainly in peril. As our countries transition to wartime economies, ‘Digital Sovereignty’ becomes the slogan for total digital dominance over the public. Restricting access to the rest of the world virtually is just common sense to those who wish to have uncontested information control over the public. It turns out that between foreign propaganda and scams, there are endless justifications for doing exactly that. It is absolutely vital that those of us who do understand the dangers of total information control help others understand the grave threats involved. This dynamic is almost guaranteed to fracture the world wide web into a set of ‘splinternets’ separated via ‘great firewalls’ or even physically disconnected. This vastly complicates the future for not just internet freedom, but civil rights and freedom generally.

As it currently exists, the web is quite consolidated already. Cloudflare outages bring down a huge portion of the actual sites people actually use. The vast majority of people’s experience on the Internet is limited to a handful of smartphone apps. This means that for a great many people, the ability to manipulate and constrain their access to information is relatively straight-forward. State initiatives and corporate propaganda can enjoy uncontested authority when any dissent is considered too ‘high risk’ to propagate. As the web becomes more controlled, the people are no longer using the Internet, but become passive subjects to it. The ‘information superhighway’ is relegated to being “broadcast television 2.0”. You can be sure that the digital distraction tools will always be online in some form or another, but that’s not the same as the World Wide Web continuing to live on. If the encryption wars are any guide, we can fully expect information exchange across the world to be seen as too dangerous to permit.

This is not to say there aren’t serious cybersecurity threats. It is just a genuine tragedy that actual security seems to always take a second seat to the need for control. Instead of building up the people to make the best of the challenges and opportunities ahead, it seems that the ’nations of the free world’ would rather keep their citizens docile and compliant. Despite ’lawful access’ backdoor systems being infiltrated by foreign attackers, there seems little interest in actually building up a secure digital foundation for the public from the ground up. It would seem that the powers over the population are seen as much more critical than resilience to foreign threats. As an ordinary person, you’re essentially caught up in the crossfire of titans who are wholly indifferent to your well-being. This means that it is up to individuals and communities to build up digital independence, while that’s still possible.

The War against general-purpose computing

The last year brought one of my principal concerns to mainstream attention: the war on (public access to) general-purpose computing. I wholeheartedly believe that a great deal of scapegoating of technology is directly aimed at manufacturing consent towards ‘cyber disarmament’ of the people. What thrust this important fight into the public’s consciousness was the rapid spike in memory prices largely caused by OpenAI’s purchase of silicon wafers allegedly to ‘stall competition’. In additions to computer RAM, there are concerns about other components like storage becoming much more expensive. Given that storage is one of the primary resources in cyberspace, there are pretty serious implications to the public losing access to it over time. As we have seen, corporations would much rather you store your entire digital life on their cloud servers, rather than privately on your own machines. This then creates the opportunity for governments to dominate the information landscape by controlling these online services. To make matters worse this is not limited to just storage capacity.

Originally GPU prices rose because they were being bought up to run Bitcoin mining farms. This is because GPUs (‘aka “Gaming Cards”) are very useful for parallel processing which makes them great for the number-crunching required for bitcoin and using various AI tools. This double-punch has made what used to be a moderately expensive component to one that will likely be out of reach for a great many people. Not only that, in theory GPU mining on cryptocurrency reinforced the potential for decentralized systems via distributed Proof of Work. On the other hand GPUs being hoarded for centralized data systems would have no such upside. What’s worth recognizing is that the price hikes alone on GPUs effectively lower the ceiling of what potential computing power can be run independently. Computing power is also a primary resource in cyberspace, arguably one of the more critical ones. It is very difficult to decentralized compute in general due to its heavy reliance on energy. On some level computing power will always be inherently centralized to a degree, but the question is if the public be allowed to have independent computing at all.

People vastly underestimate the importance of general-purpose computing, and can’t fathom how much worse things can get when it’s gone. Imagine all the (real) economic benefits since the invention of the transistor being directed by a command economy. Liberties we take for granted on already flawed and compromised systems could be diminished entirely. A non-trivial part of this is that one could argue that personal computing has always been artificially cheap. It’s possible that these price hikes better represent a ‘fair’ value of these machines. That said, I have a feeling that if people paid the true value of computing, they would have zero tolerance for surveillance and any lack of software or hardware freedom. It just so happens that the artificial subsidy is being removed after enough dependency on various technological systems has been established. This is at minimum a form of technological austerity, where the opportunities derived from advances in technology are stifled or reversed.

Another troubling form of ’technological austerity’ would be a AI bubble itself. While so many conversations about AI are entirely contrived, there are important details to consider. Economists argue that opposing automation or technological development is bad and irrational because (in theory) everyone benefits from the efficiency gains. This can certainly be true, but it doesn’t always have to be. Just because a technological tool or system is involved, that doesn’t necessarily mean there are efficiency gains. Every tool is going to have trade-offs, especially when the explicit goal is to replace actual people with automated workflows. Those trade-offs can be net-positive, or net-negative depending on the circumstances, implementation, and complexity involved. For a long time, it would be safe to assume all technological advances would involve a net-positive situation. As our tools become more sophisticated this can change in ways that are hard for many to grasp.

Most people accept the argument that job losses and disruption are good trade for life improving overall. If fancy technology can make hospitals save more lives, move goods around faster, and create great new opportunities for people, then it’s all worth it. But this time seems to be different. People are beginning to recognize that the actual effects of how “AI” is currently being deployed are treating human displacement as an end to itself, rather than a mere byproduct of increased efficiency. They notice that the disruption of participation in society is being disrupted even at the cost of efficiency. This can be seen in large bureaucratic institutions to even warehouse operations. This fundamentally violates the ‘social contract’ behind automation: even if the gains aren’t shared equally throughout society, there should still be a net-gain to the public at large.

It is my position that this is what the “AI bubble” actually is. It’s not about any particular stock or even sector being overvalued. It’s about the recognition that particular tools and systems are being treated as an end to themselves because of real power dynamics, rather than sound economic activity. Anyone interested in ‘calling the top’ of the AI bubble should be warned that the market can remain irrational, longer than you can stay solvent. This is to say that we can expect the imposition of net-negative efficiency tools to continue far longer than raw economic analysis would explain. This is why the discussions around AI technology often involve rhetorical traps. Critics of what can be plainly seen as destructive economic warfare can be easily dismissed as ignorant luddites, while the promoters of the scheme lean on economic arguments that do not even apply in this circumstance.

It would be very different if these systems and tools had to truly compete on a level playing field. I would go as far as to argue that the actual technological benefits of many artificial intelligence tools are actually being under-utilized despite the hype. This is because the social imperatives driving so called “AI adoption” are actually divorced from the economic factors. For example, it’s a lot harder for ’the market’ to invest in machine efficiency in situations where the economic equilibrium is maintained by exploitation. Enterprises like farms and factories are much less likely to mechanize if the political environment is perfectly fine with supplying a grey or black market of workers with no bargaining power. This in turn devalues labor as a whole, impacting even the ‘high skilled’ workers over time. Much worse, eventually the problem becomes a structural dependency, and the idea of unraveling the economic distortion itself becomes seen as too costly. Factors like this are corrosive to actual wealth creation. The opportunities of a skilled and competitive workforce using the latest and greatest tools are traded away for politically connected ‘insiders’ maintaining their ‘moat’.

The point here is that the “AI bubble” is actually a lot worse than a mere misallocation of capital and resources. It is a scheme that is not only transforming the future of cyberspace, but also being weaponized against the public themselves. These assaults are being used to manufacture consent for the digital disarmament of the people by restricting access to the general public. A big part of this is the ubiquitous availability and scaremongering over anti-social use of various AI tools. Simply telling the public “tools aren’t good or bad” will fall on deaf ears when they can plainly see the technology being used in evil and destructive ways, while the benefits of the technology are either abstract or entirely hoarded away from them. The problem is that the public has very little understanding that consolidation over technology itself represents a dire threat to them, and it’s getting much worse over time. Due to the powerful nature of these sophisticated technological tools, there is a desperate race to seize a monopoly on computing itself. As such a true ‘free market’ of technological innovation can’t actually be permitted to exist. Instead of allowing entrepreneurs to focus on innovating ways to improve society, a bottleneck will be needed to ensure ’thinking machines’ don’t upset the many delicate rackets that maintain power over the public. While it’s unthinkable today, if this power grab goes unchecked I can imagine something as simple as a calculator won’t be permitted to be in public hands without the watchful eye of an AI system supervising it’s use. This is far beyond the mere destruction of knowledge, but the total control over information management itself.

Darkest before the dawn

Despite all the above, I think there is a great deal of excitement and opportunity in learning to forge a new path. For those who are interested in developing technical skills, there is a real chance to build truly transformative things. For those who have passions outside of technology, there are also real opportunities to shine. It is absolutely critical that those who want to build a better digital future learn from those who have skills to teach and culture to share. For far too long the idea of being ‘good in tech’ simply meant being the lubricant that allows Big Tech to seep into all aspects of our lives. With these uncertain times, things are dynamic enough that even relatively small things can have a huge impact.

For this year ahead, I am encouraging you to focus less on the small details. Instead of fighting over minute technological choices like which messaging app is best or what social media to use, stay focused on the real fight. What is the better digital future we’re hoping to pass on to future generations? What do we need to do to make small steps towards that? What do we need to genuinely foster not just a world wide web, but and entire technological landscape that supports human society rather than undermines and extracts from it? These certainly aren’t simple questions, with no easy answers, but they are the foundation for meaningful decisions.

There are going to be many technological difficulties that impose all kinds of difficult problems. People are going to be stuck in difficult disentangle traps that may look simple on the surface. Above all, I hope we remember that we’re trying to fix cyberspace for people, rather than ‘fixing’ people for cyberspace. As broader societal problems take on even more of a technological dimension, it is genuinely difficult to remind ourselves that that the problems don’t start and end with the devices we touch. The good news of this is that means there is a great deal that can be done by those outside of the technological realm, to make the job of improving things much easier.

With all this bleakness out of the way, you can look forward to me sharing how we can meaningfully act on these bigger fronts. Of course, I won’t be able to hold back from dropping a few ‘hot takes’ on the fine details as they come up as well. I’m wishing you an excellent 2026, and looking forward to building a better cyberspace with you.

Gabriel
Libre Solutions Network

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Teachable Moment: Will the digital control grid inevitably fail, or is it already here?

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 01:53:40 +0000

Are people truly choosing digital tyranny?

This is my contribution to a larger discussion started by Terry Wolfe (AKA The Winter Christian) referencing a piece: Is Global Technocracy Inevitable Or Dangerously Delusional?. Terry Wolfe states “Brandon Smith has been a more sober analyst than most for the last decade. He says the digital prison planet is fragile and unlikely.” I’ll certainly agree on the fragility of a global control grid, but wholeheartedly disagree that digital totalitarianism is somehow a remote possibility. Any frank and sober analysis of our existing digital landscape reveals how overtly tyrannical and abusive much of it is, but this is often blamed on the victims.

For example, Brandon Smith’s piece argues that digital tyranny is entirely built on the consent of those ruled over by it, therefore if enough people simply ‘smarten up’ then all the issues will never come to pass. This ignores the very real and pressing impacts that people are already experiencing. For decades people have lamented countless people throwing away their lives scrolling on screens, but hardly any of them really ask Why. Why do so many people carry smartphones, despite the numerous privacy, security, and mental health dangers? Why do people put up with our present digital experience when it is so overtly malevolent?

‘Convenience’ we can sneer. This simple word allows us to shift the blame away from billions in social engineering research and manipulative tactics onto those who merely play the cards they’ve been dealt. It is the height of hubris to believe that just because we may have taken proactive steps to protect ourselves in this evolving virtual environment, that those who fail must simply be too dumb and lazy to care. Resistance to modern digital intrusions requires a certain luxury of time, if not an investment in skills or particular sacrifices. While yes smartphones and other modern systems and tools are very much responsible for accelerating human dispossession, to identify them as the cause is to mistake the symptoms for the illness.

It is my position that the nature of the control grid is primarily financial. This is plain to see in the technological realm. Surveillance capitalism is a fascinating feat of financial engineering that has built the foundations of our terrifying and tragic digital experience online. The “attention economy” as it exists was not an inevitable outcome of the Internet Age, but rather a deliberate construction to enable mass data collection. The smartphone was a convenient beachhead for these intrusions but was certainly not the only means of delivering this kind of manipulation.

Which is where Brandon Smith’s piece makes some fairly important points about AI technology, but still misses the forest for the trees. The AI bubble is undeniably a creature of the national security state just as Big Tech. We can point and laugh at people who succumb to asking LLM chatbots for life advice, but in doing so we’re forgetting the full-spectrum assault on deploying that particular payload to desperate, vulnerable people. My point, is that digital tyranny is downstream of actual totalitarianism, not the other way around. It is absurdly obtuse to begin human history at the invention of the transistor and then use that as the “blank slate” to condemn people for falling into particularly nefarious traps.

It is genuinely fascinating to me that for all the shouting about the evils of smartphones, there has been very little interest in understanding why they continue to thrive and dominate with hardly any real resistance. It is my belief that placing all the blame on digital tools (even where it is warranted) achieves two disastrous aims: 1) It is a useful distraction from the social, economic, and other real-life pressures that drive adoption. 2) Pushes simplistic discussions about digital tools being wholly good or bad without real nuance and due consideration. To use a metaphor, smartphones are an apex predator adapted to a particular environment, the predator will ultimately remain until the environment changes. In concrete terms, people aren’t ‘on the road to slavery’ because they have smartphones. They have smartphones because they are on the road to slavery.

This inversion of cause and effect is not only simplistic, but places the blame on those assaulted rather than on those doing the assaulting. It is a familiar pattern that rarely ventures deep into examining the specific mechanisms of how power is consolidated over time, and leads to structural impacts on people’s behavior. A lack of domain knowledge can be easily made up with writing everything off as evil, but this approach rarely leads to useful discussion on a better path forward. On the other hand, those with the critical technical skills can struggle on two fronts: 1) being unable to bridge the knowledge gaps to the general public, therefore sounding incomprehensible 2) being entirely reliant on the control grid for income, staying silent as long as the credits roll in.

What one needs to consider is that one of the primary drivers for digital control systems is risk management. Almost every mass-surveillance technology has a simple small-scale security project as a proof-of-concept. Facial recognition, access control, and invasive data collection are all vital features of any robust security solution. It just so happens that those systems are also very valuable for tyrannical regimes. This goes even further into the realm of cyberspace, where control over access to information itself can maintain order over unstable situations. We have already seen many counties in the ‘free world’ move towards not only regulating social media itself, but also developing control measures over the Internet itself.

Scale is the enemy: a deep analysis of the control grid

In response to Terry’s points, DJ put together a very valuable presentation: Technocracy: Okay but can they do it? (No not really.). I disagree with the title, and many of the conclusions drawn. That said, this presentation is absolutely worth the watch due to the excellent historic overview of how our digital experience was constructed over time. A main point of DJ’s presentation here is that the entire digital landscape went through various phases of development. He explains how digital systems started as research projects, then moving into institutions, to how industry picked them up to being to “model reality” to track people and transactions. This detailed technical explanation of where we have been and where things are headed is unparalleled and certainly worth your time. Unfortunately, I do worry that it isn’t particularly accessible to those without significant technical backgrounds, so I will do my best to charitably explain the main ideas.

Transcript

DJ explains that for a technological control grid to function, it requires particular dependencies. In the presentation he does a fantastic job outlining how those dependencies were logically constructed together. To properly control individual behavior, a digital ‘model’ is required to conceptualize the person or entity in virtual space. Trying to do this for billions of people, the development of immensely scalable and interoperable systems is critical. He explains that these advances have happened through a few major ‘revolutions’ in technological infrastructure. What makes his presentation invaluable is that he outlines precise technical details and explains how they are directly connected to particular tyrannical measures.

Where DJ and I disagree is the assertion that we are not ‘advanced enough’ for digital totalitarianism. We could nit-pick back and forth the question of is it complete or scalable enough, but that is to miss the forest for the trees. The ‘digital control grid’ is not a prerequisite for human tyranny, but rather an enhancement on top of it. Tyrannical digital systems are creatures of the environments they are developed in. If it was truly the case that a system was itself sufficient to be the difference between tyranny and liberty, then liberty could simply be delivered to less-free nations via cargo plane. While delivering entirely Free and Open Source systems to people in tyrannical nations is certainly worthwhile assistance, it itself is wholly insufficient to transform their lives.

In fact, I would argue that Brandon Smith is correct that digital tyranny is brittle and requires human cooperation, but it is the height of naivete to believe that human cooperation can only be coerced via technological means. This is where I disagree with the conclusion that a digital control grid is something that exists in the future rather than the present. Digital totalitarianism is something that exists alongside tyranny in other domains, not merely before it. Both Brandon and DJ are correct that the public is being lied to about the nature and applicability of AI. However, DJ raises the important point that ‘on-site’ LLMs can be ‘good enough’ to be used to dictate behavior inside systems that are gated behind various control measures.

Terry, DJ, and Brandon are mistaken to focus on the concept of a global and total control grid. This all-or-nothing approach to the problem of technological tyranny dismisses real, present dangers in the name of hypothetical future ones. Cyberspace is certainly becoming more hostile, but this is largely due to the governments and corporations that have so much control over it are themselves becoming more overtly tyrannical. It is my position that for many, their perception of digital tyranny is shaped by their experiences with how they experience abuse of power in their real lives. If one is so lucky to be (even relatively) insulated from the consequences of abusive governments and corporate coercion, digital tyranny seems like a remote and fanciful idea. Yet ironically, for those who genuinely struggle with the worst of digital assaults technology isn’t actually that high up the concern list. For many people who’s data is directly leveraged against them and their vulnerable circumstances, the need to acquire necessities is a much more principle concern.

If a concrete example of this is needed, try searching for jobs online without having/leveraging any personal connections. Job seekers are expected to divulge an absurd amount of personal information online to countless institutions with no real recourse if their information is misused and abused. Your typical ‘gig worker’ is unlikely to have privacy at the height of their concerns when the choice is between ‘opting out of tyranny’ or attempting to make a day’s wage. Both of these people are by their precarity ripe for exploitation in ways that some will never even contemplate. This “class divide” on digital tyranny is no accident, it is a powerful way to assert the rigid barriers on social mobility. This is before you consider concrete financial incentives such as the comforts of working in line with state preferences, and the punishments of working against them. Consider how politicians can choose winners and losers by giving particular industries (such as AI) preferential treatment, and those working for more independent pursuits (like your local farmer) may struggle with red tape and burdensome regulation.

Fight tyranny now to prevent the control grid

As stated earlier, the control grid is here not in the future. Any future instantiation of a digital control system is the direct consequence of present-day power plays. Our hostile digital experience, and its grave impacts on much of the public should be evidence enough that there is an urgent threat of technological totalitarianism. Instead of giving up on the public as helpless ‘sheeple’ we should be more willing to dissect and interrogate the incentives driving behaviors. The ‘big picture’ is a lot more complex and messy than the surface public discussion would lead you to believe. If any of this was simple, it would have reached a conclusion by now.

It is all too easy to a-priori define complete digital totalitarianism as impossible or unsustainable, but that does nothing to address the real problems that exist today. Instead of patting ourselves on the back for resisting measures that are yet to come, why not consider what needs to be done today? There are innumerable ways in which we can make our current digital landscape better. Some of those decisions are personal, but others are much more complicated collection action problems. Instead of giving up and treating those coordination challenges as impossible, we should directly focus efforts on confronting them. I think it is prudent, but also entirely critical to fight to leave our descendants a better digital future no matter what is in store.

Ultimately, the hardest part is humanizing those who struggle with these assaults. In the broader discussion around global tyranny, it seems that the most seductive explanation is the one that transfers blame from the tyrants to the people. I am convinced this is a critical part of how such tyranny is maintained. People will exclaim that it would all end if the people just refused to tolerate it anymore, but how many of us tolerate the abuse against our fellow citizens when it happens? What red lines get crossed as we watch on indifferently, merely because it doesn’t yet impact us? What are we actually doing in our day-to-day lives to enable, or add friction to abuses of power. What should be done to safeguard people’s liberties both in their real lives and in cyberspace?

These questions aren’t easy. They have messy answers that require consistent work. Nothing is as simple as a single decision that eradicates all the problems. As such, we should be more surgical and precise when it comes to analyzing problems. While I may disagree with DJs conclusions, I am thoughoughly impressed with his outlining of his thought process in a way that can allow us to get to the meat of these issues. It is this level of analysis I find terribly lacking in many dissident circles. It is so much easier to chant consensus rather than to openly inquire about the messy reality we find ourselves in. When it comes to being capable of preventing egregious overreach, technological or not, it requires an uncharacteristic level of humility and courage. We don’t just need technical skills to fight digital tyranny, meaningful compassion and understanding are far more essential.

The simple fact is that none of us alone has any real control over what the future brings. There are many good reasons to believe that technological tyranny is a dire and urgent threat that is unlikely to be stopped. On the other hand, there are also a wide variety of reasons to hold on to hope that we can prevent future abuses and address existing ones. The real discussion isn’t about what is and isn’t likely, so much of that is out of our hands. The important part is what are the real risks, and what can be done to address them today.

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Inbox Question: Becoming computer literate

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 10:55:14 +0000

I recently was asked an excellent question about how to become computer literate and where is a great place to start. Despite digital technology getting much of the blame for current-day problems, I wholeheartedly believe that computer literacy is a very valuable skill for people of all walks of life. As our digital experience becomes more complex, it’s needed more than ever to judiciously use machines rather than have them use you.

Far from surrendering the digital landscape to tyrants and those who uncritically accept their machinations, we should encourage, foster, and support an environment where people are maximally able to be as computer literate as possible. This very much strikes at the root of why I believe this project (the Libre Solutions Network) is an important part of building a better future.

Where do I start with all of this?

I know, vague, but I have no idea where to begin. I’ve used Windows for a long time, and like most people I didn’t do a lot of ‘computing’ on computers; mainly just used it to access the internet, some games, and a few programs. I moved to Linux Mint a few years ago but I use it basically the same way I used Windows XP before.

What fundamentals do I need to start using technology, instead of having technology use me?
What should I study first to learn how to actually compute things?

The only direction I have in mind is getting a thinkpad or other old computer, getting it with libreboot or coreboot, and using a decent operating system, but I don’t know what how or what I can do with it aside from simply store text files locally.

I know Rome wasn’t built in a day, but I have no clue where to lay the foundations. What sort of things should I seek to be independent of, what things will I practically need such as e-mail, etc. I want to know the groundwork of tech literacy so I can know what things I can gradually work towards, and how to accomplish them.

This may not even be relevant, but I have access to an old Commodore 64 and some books on programming with it.

Defining ‘computer literacy’

These days computers are very much everywhere and take a variety of forms. It can be dizzying to enumerate all the different platforms and form factors from laptops to smartphones and wearables. For the purposes of this question ‘computer literacy’ means being proficient at using desktop computers for a more varied and useful set of functions. My personal and broader definition of computer literacy means getting the best utility out of the hardware available. Computer literacy even in this narrow domain is still quite broad. We can include proficiency with a wide variety of software tools, to command-line mastery as well as some sophisticated scripting. Like many rewarding skills there really isn’t a ceiling to hit, but more of a trade-off of what you want to get for how much time you can invest.

What fundamentals do I need to start using technology, instead of having technology use me? What should I study first to learn how to actually compute things?

No matter what you have access to, there’s always a lot you can do to level-up. Every system is going to have a wide variety of (Free & non-free) software options available to try out for all kinds of different tasks. Even if you’re at a loss of what you would like to use computers for, it helps to try out simple things to get a basic familiarity with what’s available. Maybe try recording a song, or editing a video with the tools available (such as Kdenlive on Linux) to scratch the surface of what’s doable on your machine. Even relatively simple things like spreadsheets in LibreOffice Calc can help you do a lot of useful things. I use it to track my weight loss journey. At the beginning, it’s not important to necessarily master every tool, but just scratch the surface of things to learn what is possible.

As you get more comfortable with accomplishing different specific tasks on your system, you will eventually form a broader understanding of how truly flexible and impressive even fairly old systems can be. This can also involve becoming more proficient with the operating system you’re running. As a linux user you’ll likely want to consider becoming proficient at the command-line to learn to manipulate data directly with the wide variety of console tools. The advantage of this approach is that you’d be very surprised at what can be done with ‘just text files’ and processing them.

Of course, another great place to start is by learning how the system you’re using works. Trying to make as many (reversible) changes as possible, and try to find things that make it work more to your liking. For example, after trying out many different ‘window managers’ in Linux, I personally found that KDE gave me the mix of convenience & customization that I really enjoyed. As you refine your system over time, it can become more of a reflection of what you want out of your machine. Some people just want a minimal and sleek experience, while others sometimes want flashy and beautiful options, the beauty is that with enough effort it all seems very much within reach for advanced Linux users.

Major steps:

Try out a wide variety of software to perform a variety of tasks
Discover what changes you can make to your system itself and find out which ones improve your experience for you
Consider learning the very basics of the command-line if you’re very motivated to maximize the utility of your system

That said, that’s definitely not the end of your journey. Once you’re comfortable with those steps you reach the tipping point of having a non-trivial idea of what’s available. That’s only a tiny fraction of what’s actually possible. Depending on the particularity of your goals, you may find yourself interested in building your own software to accomplish particular tasks. It starts out small, but eventually one realizes that they can change almost anything with enough time and effort. I don’t think learning to program is essential to make good use of machines, but it definitely helps put many things into perspective.

Eventually you learn that all software is just layers of code. The programs that you run, and the scripts you tinker with are just code calling other code. Making meaningful programs is something you can do the moment you learn the basics of the command-line for your system. The command-line ‘shell’ for your system interprets instructions, and a list of these instructions written down can already be a very powerful script. Scripting on your system will get you very comfortable with manipulating data you acquire or modify with a wide variety of programs, but writing your own programs and scripts for this purpose changes the game dramatically.

Rewiring the foundation

It is ironic that you can accomplish all of the above, become a very powerful ’tech wizard’ but many will still gate-keep you as a mere trickster. While at that point you can likely accomplish almost anything you set your mind to yet there will still be people claiming you don’t actually understand computers. As frustrating as this is, there is truth to it. Learning various software programs and even writing your own doesn’t really require you to actually wrestle with what the machine is doing at a physical level. Our entire digital experience, even for programmers, is built on layers and layers of abstractions that simplify more fundamental operations. For those interested in not only getting the most out of their machines, but also reforging a better digital future, there is a great deal of opportunity. Learning to master the machines themselves, rather than just the abstractions built on top of them is invaluable.

This may not even be relevant, but I have access to an old Commodore 64 and some books on programming with it.

It is absolutely quite relevant, because that platform is a great place to start learning both programming but also learning to wrestle with the machine directly. Other alternatives like micro-controllers and Raspberry Pis are great starts, but the C64 is definitely an all-in-one solution to gaining very valuable skills to enhance your long-term programming pursuits. Depending on your goals, learning to program closer to the metal, can make a radical difference on your perspective of computing. Ironically by recognizing the vast differences of all the different platforms, you begin to understand and appreciate the underlying shared foundation.

When one broadens their understanding of ‘computer’ to mean any sufficiently complex circuit, you can absolutely take on the broader challenge of robotics. With basic programming under one’s belt, they unlock the ability to wrestle with mind, machine, and physics. There is a phenomenal wealth of opportunity in learning to repair, salvage, and build better devices now that things are more accessible than ever. Parts are cheap, but ingenuity and passion are much more precious commodities. When one understands that every aspect of our digital experience, software, hardware, and even the devices themselves are very much interchangeable, the game changes dramatically.

Learning and building digital independence is a lot more than just a solitary endeavor. From the very beginning I would encourage you to join communities where you can find help and learn from others. The more we come together the more we can find ways to overcome shared obstacles and challenges. I would absolutely encourage you to learn more about Free Software and the collaborative mindset behind Free and Open Source Software/Hardware movements.

What sort of things should I seek to be independent of, what things will I practically need such as e-mail, etc.

Ultimately, this is entirely up to you. I would personally recommend recognizing that much of our digital experience is hostile cyberspace and that it is up to us to rebuild a better foundation. Big Tech social media is one of the more openly malevolent forces of our time, yet many people struggle to disconnect without feeling isolated. E-mail is the very same in which it has many problems but a great many institutions people interact with rely on it. One can argue you’re free to forgo any aspect of our present digital environment, but in practice the consequences can be quite non-trivial.

I’ve written before that every technological evil has “a very simple engineering solution, but a hard collective action problem to fix”. This means that improving your own digital experience very often requires the cooperation and participation of others. This is the main reason why this project, the Libre Solutions Network exists. We need others to understand and value each other’s privacy, security, and digital independence. The first step is education, and we’re going to need a lot of teachers. I wish you well in your journey to master machines.

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A low-stakes critical thinking exercise for online media

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 08:56:46 +0000

Critical thinking is a fundamental skill for staying sane in today’s online media landscape. Like many valuable and rewarding skills, it takes practice, and is much more difficult to master than it can be described. To make matters worse, a lack of critical thinking amongst the public creates opportunities for some of the most despicable behavior to go rewarded if not outright addressed. With this piece, I hope to provide some ‘beyond the basics’ guidance for those who may already be fairly good critical thinkers as well as a pragmatic first step for those who could benefit from an accessible starting point. While it is easy to dismiss online media as a whole, this should help people to navigate the unprecedented complexity of our current digital experience.

Instead of giving up entirely, it is valuable to get the most out of what is available today. Very often one can find excellent information from unlikely and often conflicting sources, while trusted and well-known resources can just as often fall short. Being skeptical of things that go against our biases is easy, but being as focused and critical of things we identify with is much harder. To truly be a shrewd critical thinker, and a proficient learner, one absolutely must learn to to put all ideas, foreign and comfortable alike, into a precise sieve. With the right frame of mind, one can transform their mind into a powerful forge that refines raw ideas into precious insight. This frame of mind includes a variety of cognitive skills that build on each other, and are relatively easy to take on at first. The real challenge is being consistent and properly processing ideas from sources and mediums you trust. The purpose of this overview is to help you learn how you can upgrade your own critical thinking capacity without coming up against any bias or personal stake.

An “info-junkie’s” guide to media

I certainly don’t consider myself an expert or authority on the subject of critical thinking. I like to believe that I am proficient at it, largely due to being an extremely online ‘digital native’ for much of my life. For a long time letting my curiosity run wild over the Internet was a major (counter-productive) coping-mechanism for stress to me. In hindsight, I can see how over-time I gained a valuable skill for traversing narrative networks to identify the most interesting speakers within a particular domain. This ability is something I would do unknowingly to abate my insatiable curiosity. Recently, I have had the opportunity to consciously assess this skill. By taking on a new interest of mine (health & fitness) I applied the same familiar skillset while reflecting on what I was doing and what I was learning. The results were fascinating.

With the abundance of online media already, and generative AI threatening to completely flood and outpace what was already immense, there is an absolutely overwhelming need to learn to evaluate and filter what information is out there. The great challenge of this, is that when one is new to a domain, we do not know what we do not know. A certain amount of trial and error is expected to wrap our minds around not just the domain itself, but also the fine details of the inevitable disagreements within that domain. The good news is that relatively simple methods can absolutely help you get the most out of what is out there fairly quickly.

The most important habit is epistemological humility. Understanding and accepting that there are limits to your knowledge, always will be is fundamental to building a strong mental refiner. You can’t learn if you don’t believe you need to learn. To go even further, you need to also be able to honestly evaluate what you believe you know. As you improve this skill, it will become easier to discover and confront your presently unknown biases and knowledge gaps. Epistemological humility helps improve every aspect of critical thinking in practice. By recognizing your own mental and intellectual limits you can also be comfortable recognizing those of your allies and trusted sources.

Collecting insight

As I’ve always loved to collect information the early steps are always the most fun for me. My curiosity gives me an open mind by default on many topics. Once you’ve recognized that you have more to learn in a particular domain, it becomes natural to seek out sources of information on that domain. Each domain will have specific topics that themselves represent almost entirely new domain in many cases. Once you get a sense for how vast and deep this fractal of knowledge is, the more you can appreciate the lifelong joy that learning truly is. This means that when one is new to particular topic or domain, the quality of the beginning sources matters very little. When beginning to wrestle with a topic it is crucial to expose yourself to the broad representation of what the discussion entails.

By casting a wide net, and not being too picky when starting out you can begin to learn the boundaries and differences within the topic or domain. As you let your mind feast on the diversity in quality and presentation of information, gradually you begin to build your own understanding of it. As this knowledge improves you now have the capacity to deliberately focus your learning on the topics that are either in contention, or otherwise important to you. In the beginning, it is immensely valuable to spend the time to seek out less-known or popular sources of information, but sometimes you can luckily discover them in passing as you explore. With a bit of epistemological humility, you can recognize that early on you don’t have enough understanding of the topic to judge sources too harshly.. The best use of this early stage is to use it to collect a variety of sources in whatever media forms you wish to learn from. The variety will later serve you as you begin to narrow down your focus to high quality sources of information or on those that otherwise provide valuable and unique perspectives.

Conflict is good, actually

One of the earliest discoveries one will make when entering a domain is that there are always significant points of contention. To outsiders it may often look like needlessly splitting hairs, but in many cases there is a crucial value in understanding the important distinction being made. If ideas are raw minerals that you refine into precious ingots of insight, conflict is the fire that puts the ideas to the test. Disagreement is when different understanding or perspectives are brought into contrast. This is not to say that all conflicts and disagreements are productive however. Drama can be fun and entertaining, however being able to disagree without losing composure or crossing lines is a difficult skill that I myself have yet to properly master. A great speaker with loads of insight may struggle when challenged, and a calm person may or may not have a passion for the finer points of the discussion. This makes getting the most out of conflict within domains a particularly difficult challenge, but it is productive, it is often immensely instructive.

The reason it “leads if it bleeds” is that any disagreement usually reveals much about not only the topic at hand, but also about the participants. What may appear at the surface to be mindless petty gossip and juvenile mud-flinging can often unearth things that people have yet to truly contend with. This goes beyond just the unknown biases of individuals, but also the thinkers within a domain almost entirely. By recognizing conflict as an opportunity to learn, you can often run off with the spoils of a debate from the sidelines while others continue to lose themselves. Of course, eventually you learn enough to be trapped in these conflicts yourself. This is where your learning becomes contingent on your ability to honestly reflect on your own participation as well as your opponents. ‘Turning the other cheek’ can very often be an opportunity to learn from your own conflicts and develop a much deeper understanding of what drives not only the conflict itself, but even your own actions and reactions.

When you get to this point, you’ve learned enough to begin to discern what sources of information are useful in particular contexts. It is crucial to not develop an “all-or-nothing” approach to this. Some sources will still be valuable sometimes, even if they are not for the vast majority of time. At some point, it is necessary to do a “cost-benefit analysis” of your time engaging with any particular media source. Each source and speaker has a certain “signal to noise” ratio and frequency. Having a rough idea of both will help you decide how best to partition your time and engagement with particular sources.

Intellectual prospecting

On any issue, there is almost guaranteed to be a variety of perspectives, or at least two sides. It is very common, that even the unpopular side may make some particularly important points that are valuable to the discussion, or even other issues as well. Under-represented positions are often a valuable deposit of unique perspectives and different approaches. Being able to listen to those who have different positions than you, even opposing ones for valuable points can be a way to find flecks of precious insight in what may otherwise seem valueless. In my own experience, being able to glean important points from those who I share very little in common with has presented me with ideas and opportunities that I never would have found otherwise. Being open-minded doesn’t mean merely changing your values and beliefs with current trends, but rather being able to fully investigate a concept even if you’re opposed to it.

If you ever needed a reason to love your enemies, a good one is to recognize that you can learn a lot from them. If you listen, they’ll very often make some scathing and excellent critiques of your allies. It may be worth taking those criticisms seriously, even if you have no intention to change your perspective on the issues. Very often your opponents and critics can be a very valuable mirror to hold to yourself. It’s much easier for you to recognize their flaws than your own. It turns out, that you’re quite likely to have similar flaws and weaknesses, even if only in kind but not degree. This is an opportunity to protect your mind from your ego. It is quite a mistake to ‘judge a book by its cover’ and assume there are no fruitful trees in the forest. To go even further, connecting with and learning from those on different sides of various issues can help get you a better grasp of the basics.

This is yet another area that epistemological humility plays an important role. While you may be incredibly certain about your understanding of a particular topic or focus, it can be easy to miss that your understanding has its limits. While other perspectives may clash with your own experience, it is possible there are many factors you yet don’t understand that explain the difference. Being able to accept that there is much outside your personal experience can help you identify places you need to understand better to truly gain a well-rounded grasp of a contentious issue. To make things so much more complicated, there are many inevitable communication barriers between people of different life experiences and backgrounds. To truly gain a broad understanding of divisive issues, one must learn to patiently listen to those in ways that over time can overcome communication barriers.

While true and false are absolutely real, and some of objective reality is regularly measurable, don’t make the mistake of being overconfident in certain positions. There can be a lot of value in understanding what leads people astray. By dismissing it all as ‘brainwashing’ or ‘disinformation’ you can miss that there may be real grains of truth underpinning the argument. There are many issues where our measurements of reality are simply too limited. Think of how many headlines are generated from studies that ultimately relied on self-reported surveys asking vague questions. Precision matters, and there are many places we will never truly have that much precision.

Hate the game, not the player(s)

With some of my personal experiences running this multi-media passion project, I’ve gotten hands-on experience wrestling with the incentives around content creation. Most people are familiar with the fact that mainstream social media algorithms will often influence creators and projects with how particular content and presentation is rewarded. This project was started with a deliberate focus on being as pro-decentralization as possible. This means not only making use of more niche systems like PeerTube & RSS, but also forgoing analytics entirely by running two darknet mirrors for the site. This means that in terms of feedback, I have very much been “running blind” relative to more mainstream media endeavors. While at the same time, Substack and the people I have come in touch with have provided me valuable context for the more commonly tread side of things.

“Follow the money” is absolutely timeless advice that pays dividends when it comes to critical thinking. I have had the frustration and pleasure of “not being bought” when it comes to this enterprise. I have deliberately forgone affiliate codes, and have yet to become notable enough to receive any sponsorships for products and services. The only financial gain I have directly received from this project is a small set of paid supporters via Substack, and some BuyMeACoffee / Monero donations. I give this context to explain that I have an understanding of the pressures of independent content creation, and the incentives that transform online discussions. Much of my choices have limited the time for this project to be as grand as I would dream. Lack of funding has restricted my time for this project as well as made ‘production value’ a very difficult challenge.

Every platform and medium has its own pros and cons. Decentralized platforms such as the Fediverse and nostr will defnitely have more niche content, but otherwise are also a smaller audience. The big platforms requires you to thrive in a highly competitive “crowded trade” and it can be very challenging to stand out. Large corporate platforms will decide what does and does not perform well on their platform and that can have a immense impact on content and presentation, especially over time. Diversifying platforms can equalize access to your content, but unfortunately it is much easier to do that rather than diversity the income coming from a variety of sources. In almost every major online media platform the revenue follows a typical Pareto distribution where the vast majority of the revenue goes towards a few highly profitable ventures while the remaining majority make little if any at all.

Individual incentives and compromise

A powerful incentive these days is that very often creators will not be alone. Collaboration is almost always a win-win exercise when it comes to learning and presenting information as well as deepening ties between interested parties. I have greatly enjoyed my Digital Autonomy Series of interviews, and other collaborations I’ve done. That’s not to say there are no downsides or considerations that audiences should have regarding collaborations. Some people, like myself, are pretty happy to talk to pretty much anyone relevant. In many cases, people should know that collaborations can very much be direct business associations. This is intuitive to many people, even if it is not outright recognized. But there is also another form of association truly worth contending with: narrative networks.

There are different kinds of narrative networks, some are bottom-up, others are top-down. The modern media landscape is an “attention economy” that turns your time and attention into real financial gain for some. Some forms of content (such as propaganda) are deliberately produced at a financial loss to buy influence. To make matters even more complex, with people seeking out independent voices, there are many trusted speakers who can be bought for much less than institutions would require. This is what makes the democratization of the media landscape a bit of a ‘double-edged sword’. Independent voices are a vital force for accountability and unique perspectives, however they are more vulnerable to certain forms of pressure than larger institutions. This is not to say large institutions are incorruptible however, the fact is that their very existence has to rely on some source of funding which will represent a set of interests. If a single person is malleable, consider how corruptible a large project with exponentially more resources at stake and an existential opposition to particular voices and ideas.

As such, both individuals and organizations alike can organically and by design drift in and out of various groups. These groups are effectively playing a “team sport” to amplify each other implicitly and sometimes explicitly. This has benefits for those involved, but very often audiences bear the costs. It is much harder for voices deeply embedded in a narrative network (either top-down or bottom-up) to be critical of those on their team. Beyond mere personal association, there may in fact be strong interests or business ties that make criticism within the same ‘side’ a liability. This is why in 2025 you will rarely see mainstream figures publicly point out shortcomings of their own side. Nuance and authenticity is traded for consensus and figures both mainstream and independent alike are absolutely vulnerable to this. This is another area where an “all or nothing” approach isn’t helpful. It is reasonable to recognize the limitations of particular voices and projects, while at the same time learning from what they can offer. A problematic association itself may be disappointing, but recognizing the reality of the pressures on online media explains a lot of behavior.

Because of this, escaping online ‘filter-bubbles’ requires truly out-of-the-box thinking. This is why I mentioned earlier that a wide diversity of information sources is valuable, these days it is paradoxically all-too-easy to forget other information sources even exist. The trouble very often boils down to trust. As someone with a lot to learn on any given topic, trust is always required at particular points in time. It is absolutely paramount that we regularly reevaluate that trust so that we can refine our information sources over time. That said, to not close yourself out it is vital that you still remain open to differing sources of information, even revisiting old ones.

Refining information into knowledge

The difference between education and entertainment is application. There is nothing inherently wrong with entertainment itself, but it is very important to be deliberate about what you are doing. I think “infotainment” itself can be a perfectly viable way to present information, but it all boils down to what you’re acting on. Your learning should be aligned with your goals and values. Confronting your goals and values is an inherent part to developing them over time. So it is important to challenge yourself just as much if not more than the information you come across. Consider asking yourself what is the reason you are investing so much of your time with particular online media or platforms. It’s entirely possible that there are many important reasons for why you are, but sometimes it can boil down to the app or platform having conditioned you into craving novelty for a constant dopamine rush.

Learning to think critically requires putting ideas to the test. If you’re not willing to act on it, then you’re simply collecting. Again, I don’t think there’s much wrong with collecting information itself, as long as that is what one chooses to do. But I have learned myself that the best way to truly learn a particular topic or domain is to put the information to actual use. By testing what you have learned against reality you will inevitably learn that things are far more complex than simplistic and comforting explanations may convey. The truth of many things will always be hidden, you can only gradually improve your flawed grasp of it over time with feedback. Learning isn’t just about rote memorization of dogma or facts, but rather about the deeper understanding forged from testing your knowledge against your own experiences.

But that’s only part of the story. Your experiences as vast as they may be, can only account for a small portion of reality. It is entirely possible that you’re missing out on factors that are entirely unknown to you. Instead of assuming you’re perfectly objective in all things, being willing to seek out opposing views can help you truly refine your own knowledge. This is where it becomes very important to have real connection with those substantially different from yourself. Deep friendships with others who have radically different perspectives are valuable, especially if both participants have the capacity to set aside differences to grow each other. These days, those kind of friendships sound almost mythological, but I can assure you they are worth developing. Nothing is more epistemologically humbling than being confronted with an argument you never would have imagined by someone you already know quite well.

But sharing is definitely caring. Even at the most advanced stages epistemological humility pays off big, if not even more so. Sharing your understanding can be painful when one is used to criticism or fearful of correction. But both criticism and correction can be some of the most valuable feedback you’ll get. While validation feels nice in the moment, even the harshest criticism or uncomfortable correction will teach you so much more if you let it. The clearer you share the fullness of your knowledge the better feedback you can receive. You’ll be able to ask finer questions and learn from anyone. The beauty of this is that you can build your expertise while realizing you’ve been teaching all along the way. Teaching others not only reinforces your own understanding, but can also bring other fine minds into your circles to learn from.

Exercise: Analyzing a Narrative Network

Speaking of putting things into practice, I wouldn’t leave you with all this without a way you can immediately build your critical thinking skills. One may think that practicing critical thinking isn’t something you can just do, but I have found that’s not true at all. In this exercise you’ll find a domain you (likely) don’t have strong feelings about (Don’t worry, eventually you will!) and exploring it. You’ll need to follow the process I described above and cast a wide net for information then synthesize what you’ve come across. You’ll then be able to answer a question from a variety of angles, but also understand what drives those perspectives.

In an attempt to not bias your process, I have decided to omit any links as a starting point. I think using your own research skills to find a starting point would be more useful.

Example 1 - A foundation of sand: ‘Evidence-based’ weight-lifting"

A notable exercise scientist has become embroiled in scandal when a YouTube video about his Phd thesis was published. It turns out that the thesis as published was riddled with embarrassing mistakes, casting doubt on him. The scandal has erupted into a broader debate about the major figures in online “evidence-based lifting” circles.

Questions:

What does the quality of Dr Mike Israetel’s PhD thesis say about his advice on weight-lifting to the general public?
Who is critical of Dr Israetel and what are their major disagreements with him?
Putting aside who is right and who is wrong, what motivates particular figures to take particular sides in the drama?
What are the major limitations you see in the public exercise science discussions online?
How should people get information on building strength & muscle?

Example 2 - It’s just a game: Is Star Citizen a scam?

Over a decade ago Chris Roberts crowdfunded for two ambitious space games. One a single-player story experience, and a full-fledged Massively Online Multi-player game to go along with it. As of 2025 the single-player game is still not released and the MMO lacks many of the promised features and content. The game is regularly dismissed as a failure if not an outright scam in many gaming circles, but you won’t often hear that opinion expressed by content creators who speak about the game. By now, anyone still talking about Star Citizen regularly is subject to quite the survivorship bias.

Questions:

What content creators are regularly talking about Star Citizen and which ones are more or less influenced by Cloud Imperium Games?
How does that impact coverage of problems in the game, and problems created by Cloud Imperium Games?
What does coverage of Star Citizen look like inside and outside the community, what drives the difference?
For the creators who talk about the game, but are critical of Cloud Imperium Games, how do they fund their work?
If you had to suddenly make a living off creating Star Citizen content, (Please don’t do this!) what incentives would impact your presentation and content?
Restrict yourself to videos and content from a particular point of time. What would you have believed about the project in 2012, 2016, and onwards? How does it compare against your current understanding?

Example 3: Choose your own adventure!

Think of your own topic or question and explore the different sides of it. Try to think of an issue where you’re not invested in what the answer might be. Don’t just interrogate the question, but who takes what side and why. Consider things that are said and left unsaid.

Follow-up questions: Questioning yourself

After completing one or more of the above exercises, now you can really put your skills to the test!

Ask yourself the following questions:

What business/political interest(s) are represented by your favorite media sources stories and coverage?
What influences information sources I regularly pay attention to?
What kind of sponsor do you want supporting your media, and what kind(s) of sponsorships would you want them to avoid?
For businesses I support, what media represents their interests? How do they cover information that may be ‘inconvenient’ for that business?
What do you look for to discover and identify quality sources of information?

Bonus exercise: Feedback

It would be absolute hubris to believe that I have perfectly encapsulated all of what people should think of to build their critical thinking skills. If anything, I have left out a great deal to produce this as a single post. I would invite you to re-read this, and think of glaring omissions. I would certainly appreciate learning them, and I’d be thrilled to share any sent my way.

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We are not machines: Overcoming tyranny with VN Alexander

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 17:32:05 +0000

Victoria N. Alexander, Ph.D., is a literary fiction novelist, writing about censored and controversial subjects with audacity, humor, and compassion.

It was an honor and pleasure to speak with VN Alexander on a wide variety of topics. I hope you’ll enjoy our conversation where we touch on the finer points of many ongoing changes in our digital experience. Learning from her vast knowledge and expertise has been a valuable experience. You’ll definitely benefit from exploring her works, which range from novels to educational courses.

This conversation was a thrilling opportunity for me to learn from her in-depth knowledge and precision about AI tools, online safety, and the fall of our institutions. We explore the opportunities and possibilities in taking part of the change to bring about a better digital future. By precisely understanding the deep differences between biological systems and machines we can make the best of the future.

Links discussed

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Digital privacy questions with Samuel of Privacy Now

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 19:47:16 +0000

Samuel reached out to me to offer people free consultations to improve their digital experience. I took the opportunity to have a rich conversation with him about the finer points of privacy and overall digital autonomy in our time. It was a very welcome chance to connect over not just the perils of our age, but the actual opportunities to build a better digital experience.

This conversation was a helpful way for me to dig deep into some of the finer points of our current struggles to maintain digital autonomy in our time. We start off talking about how telling someone to “just use Linux” should be the start of a conversation, not a command. We talk about how your overall choices have an impact regardless of what particular product or system you chose.

This overlaps with many pressing questions like the end of support for Windows 10, as well as choosing ‘dumbphones’ over a smartphone. It’s not just what you use, but also how you use it. The importance of judicious use of social media is a great example. Yet, neither of us are purists, we believe that changes that ultimately isolate you from other people are wholly impractical for a better digital future.

What I hope you take away from our conversation is an invitation, no matter what your background is, to consider how you can use technology rather than have it use you. Privacy shouldn’t be about hiding, but about building trust and protecting real independence. Both Sam and I would encourage you to nurture a desire to steward a better digital future for yourself and others.

If you’re impressed by this conversation, you may want to consider bookmarking his website haveprivacynow.com which will eventually feature blog posts and a newsletter.

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Fall Mini-Recap: On the brink

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 00:09:50 +0000

Updates

New XMRChat from Leo:

Thanks for the excellent article on Zano, and in general for the information you share. Keep up the weight loss! Share how you did it? Staying away from soft drinks was key for me, as well as cutting out all caffeine.
Weight loss progress - Major Milestone: Below 350 🎉
New Article: You don’t understand the Culture War
Technical blog Self-hosting: Speed, decentralization and efficiency

Happy Cybersecurity Awareness Month!

Personal Security Checklist

Technological Tyranny

Hope in a better digital future

Honorable mentions

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You don't understand the Culture War

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 08:15:30 +0000

These days, there is a laudable desire to turn down the temperature of social conflicts in our chaotic times. While a nice idea in theory, in practice this often results in well-meaning but misguided calls to ‘rise above division’. There is a dangerous and counter-productive assumption that all wounds will be mended and all differences can be set aside. This lack of seriousness can further entrench resentment as it can be interpreted as callous indifference. For those without stakes in the conflict, it is all-too-easy to mock participants as dull brutes or hysterical maniacs. But there is so much more to it.

The ‘culture war’ in the western world is far from just a feat of advanced social engineering. Being more than mere theater, the dynamics are complex and self-reinforcing. It is a black hole of misery that slowly and insidiously traps victims before they can even recognize they’re captured. Those outside it hardly notice it at all, but those trapped inside are suffering incomprehensible horrors. Just as light can’t escape the gravity well of a black hole, the stories of those from within the culture war seem impossible to be understood outside it.

This piece is an attempt to address some critical blind spots that exacerbate the problem. I certainly can not claim to have the last word on this. This is merely my own self-reflection from my years wrestling with these questions. There are critical observations that must be understood if we truly wish to resolve the negative feedback loops working against our online and actual freedom. If nothing else this is an invitation for those who are outside the culture war to better connect with those trapped within it. We should hope that these feedback loops are reversible, because a lot more is at stake than just the mental health of our socially isolated. If we are not careful, the black hole of the culture war can consume not just ourselves, but all of society.

Scapegoating tech

Our technological landscape often gets the brunt of the blame for the culture war and its consequences. The consolidation of our digital experience has brought state-of-the-art manipulation through a variety of sophisticated means. Smartphones were a beachhead for corporations to launch novel surveillance, manipulation and consumption oriented paradigms. People are justifiably concerned about algorithmic amplification and state-level propaganda campaigns being weaponized against the public. The error is to believe that this is all there is to our present polarization and rising tensions. It is the height of hubris, if not outright negligence to presume that our social problems are dictated by technology and not the reverse.

It is quite convenient that tech gets the majority of the blame, because it allows us to absolve our own responsibility for these patterns. Every technological evil has a really simple engineering solution but an immensely challenging collective action problem keeping it in place. This directly contradicts the flawed assumption that our digital experience dictates actual power. People are not powerless because our technological tools withhold it from them. In truth, these systems are merely adapted to suit the needs of a public in captivity.

The weapons of the internet age are undeniably powerful force multipliers, but they are far from the source of the anguish and pain driving the culture war. Any honest accounting of the deep roots of our present-day nihilism and tragedy would take us back far before the public went online. Just as we could never have expected the world wide web to resolve all our human failings, we can’t truly hang all our hopes and blame on it either. Building a better future for people online and ‘IRL’ requires contending with the darkness that drives people to self-destructive escapism.

It is a serious lack of conscious awareness if not basic intelligence, to think that physical violence is the worst form that war can take. The war of today is simply far more sophisticated and effective than it once was. And many of the tactics being used are quite frankly far more abusive.

One of the saddest parts of this modern type of warfare is that people do not understand why they feel the way they feel. We all know that wartime is horrible to experience. That it takes a serious toll on people. But when people know the world is at war, and they understand what’s going the things that they’re experiencing and the ways that they’re feeling make sense to them. In this war, so many of the symptoms of war are absolutely there, but nobody actually thinks anything is going on like that.

Teal Swan - The World is Already at War

The human side of the culture war

Politics has often been defined as ‘warfare mediated through other means’. Different people and groups will have different interests and conflicts naturally arise. The question fundamentally boils down to how are those interests protected and what means are used to mediate the conflicts. Cycles of disrespect accelerate into open hostility if not outright violence. This chaos naturally erodes what little tenuous peace remains.

‘Divide and conquer’ works not because people are foolish, but because there will always be real vulnerable points to be exploited. In times of rapid social change, the youth and elders struggle to communicate, much less understand each other. When social roles break down, expectations are unclear and trust becomes a fantasy. The fraying of societal cohesion creates an anxiety that fuels more anti-social behavior, creating a powerful downward spiral.

Ultimately, the fractal of conflicts is merely the renegotiation of unstable dominance hierarchies. Denis Rancourt argues that all our forms of social organization will always be downstream of the shared dominance hierarchy. This has some very troubling implications, but absolutely explains why politics is as dysfunctional as it is. You may think you’ve ‘chosen a side’ but in actuality this was already decided for you. Fundamental aspects of who you are will place you neatly within the collectively constructed battle lines. Your decision to engage or not means little when your existence is interpreted as an existential threat to others.

Spiteful Mutants: The bastard children of a dying empire

How did ‘wokeness’ spread from a niche ideology of extremely online college students to being a de-facto state-mandated religion of managerial elites? People will often point to ‘weaponized empathy’ as the defining characteristic that allowed it to flourish, but this is a mischaracterization of something important. Social justice was able to fill a crucial niche that had gone long abandoned: a trauma-informed approach to politics. Due to their personal experiences, these people were able to peer into the abyss of the darkest human evils, tragically the abyss often peers back.

With this knowledge. the progressive left innovated a radically different way of approaching systems of power. By deconstructing order, they were able to identify how predators leverage self-destructive feedback loops to keep prey in line. This understanding unearthed a wide variety of political, social, and economic warfare that their opponents were wholly unprepared for. The right, but even the general public found it impossible to engage without conceding to the progressive framework. This was because they had no conception for a understanding of politics that wrestled with the nature of trauma. This did have consequences however, the brash and overzealous enforcement of progressive norms created a powerful opposing force. Many correctly recognized that dangerous political weapons were being used to monopolize not just the public discussion, but actual institutional, social, and economic power. This reaction created what was called the ‘alt-right’. What most people will recognize is that both the woke progressives and alt-right are extremely online movements, but that’s just what’s visible from the surface.

What people struggle to recognize is that these are just the most outwards and overt expressions of broader undercurrents. These major factions are entirely corrupted by the economic and social influences of online media. Because the movements were born online, they are creatures of that environment. The YouTube recommendation algorithm is often cited as a major driving force of online radicalization. This is funny because very often progressive men would complain about Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro videos being pushed to them. They couldn’t understand why the algorithm would recommend something so alien to their preferences. But what the algorithm saw, was that these people were so much closer to ’the other side’ than they think. This is because culture-warriors of all stripes are recruited into their preferred digital cult based off their deep wounds and personal characteristics.

People correctly diagnose that most authoritarian progressives have a deep rooted hatred for the society they live in, but they seldom ask why. A charitable understanding of the spiteful nihilism requires dissecting the pain and hurt that drives people to hate their origins. Many incomprehensible behaviors make quite a bit of sense when you consider the consequences of abuse, hopelessness, and a lack of constructive outlets for rage. On the other hand, the existence of the alt-right shows that not all people respond to the same trauma the same way. There are many adaptations and reactions one can have from the same difficulties. The more defensive and hostile stance of the right is perfectly suited to escalate the game the woke is playing.

Ironically, heavy-handed efforts to prevent conflicts escalate them. Censoring hate drives further resentment, and restricting conflicts seems to only raise the stakes. A terrified public desperately pleads the state to take drastic measures to ‘avoid civil war’. These knee-jerk reactions are wholly unable to assess much less resolve root causes and inevitably backfire. This creates a run away cycle where the means of preserving order are leveraged to create more chaos and destruction.

Forging peace in turbulent times

We absolutely need to be fiercely critical of how the digital systems we use exacerbate real social problems. But if we allow ourselves to believe that technological systems are the source of our social problems we are setting up for total failure. To truly resolve the difficult problems of our time, we’re going to need significantly more seriousness, honesty, and care than is readily available. Humanizing others, and ourselves to others is only the first step.

Courageously rejecting awful paradigms

Give yourself permission to think outside the prescribed narrative. Just because you’re given a (false) binary choice, that doesn’t mean either is a particularly good option. Having the courage and patience to find a way to be something radically different is a fantastic gift to yourself. You are not confined to fitting within the characterization your enemies have for you.

Technological paradigms are arguably the easiest to change. You should recognize that everything can change with enough time and effort. All the platforms and systems we use are ultimately things we could redesign from scratch if we wanted to. None of the gadgets and software we encounter will be eternal, so embrace the mission of playing for the long game.

Building a virtuous cycle: Understanding

If there’s one skill that can be a game-changer moving forward it would be epistemological humility. By that I mean being willing to recognize that you don’t, but also likely can’t know everything. There are going to be people with experiences you don’t and maybe can’t understand. By being able to tolerate some uncertainty, it is so much easier to listen to those vastly different than you. This way, you can build a connection that allows you to begin to learn their experience.

By understanding our differences, it’s perfectly reasonable to put up boundaries. Self respect isn’t hatred. Understanding doesn’t mean enabling. Instead of taking an all-or-nothing approach, we can begin to actually negotiate rather than escalate conflicts. By beginning to recognize and assert our needs, it is so much easier to avoid self-destructive passivity.

A useful recommendation to the right, but even the public generally, would be to build a better understanding of trauma responses. The progressive left, and some of the mainstream discussion has a fairly decent grasp of these issues. Unfortunately, those without this understanding are effectively easy prey for those who have it. With this understanding we can genuinely reach out to those who are hurting and provide genuine care instead of moralizing and condescension.

Redemption: The antidote to nihilism

Despite being innovative and powerful, the progressive project is largely doomed. This is because it emphasizes inherent and collective evils that are immovable burdens on those who carry the blame. The progressive understanding of power is quite useful at identifying serious challenges, but entirely worthless when it comes to solutions. By treating people as irredeemable you’re forcing them into choose all out war, or self-debasement. This ‘Church of no salvation’ breeds apathy on behalf of those who refuse to submit and self-loathing among those who do. To truly bring people together, there needs to actually be a viable path for repentance.

People are going to disappoint you, and they’re going to fall short in a lot of different ways. To actually make a difference we’re going to need more than just those who neatly fit within our preferences. This requires a radically different approach to the madness of today’s politics. Honor cultures are corrosive to authentic values because they inevitably descend into prioritizing appearances rather than substance.

Forgiveness is not about creating opportunities for future harm, but about ensuring that those who wish to make amends are able to do so. We should be gentle with those who have been wounded by the abuses of the culture war. They’re going to be sensitive and troubled, but a lot of good can come from learning from our own mistakes. By salvaging good out of the evils of our time, we can learn, create and share real solutions to our troubles.

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August Recap: Sorry for the delay!

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 15:11:48 +0000

Updates

Trends to watch

The Future of Android

Monero’s ‘Hashrate troubles’

Notable items

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Chatbot psychosis is actually a really big deal

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 20:42:24 +0000

The latest developments in mind-machine intermingling are as silly as they are horrifying. Despite being a relatively new phenomenon, ‘AI psychosis’ actually has its own Wikipedia Page and was recently covered in Psychology Today. In a time where people are quick to blame technology for social problems, this is undeniably a problem with how these tools are structured and used. The public’s understanding, or lack of understanding, is a force multiplier for what is already a very troubling situation. This piece is a warning for those who may fortunately be isolated from these troubles, but want to be there for others.

Why should we care?

It’s generally distressing how social impacts of tech companies are often brushed off as a ‘skill issue’ on behalf of the victim. People struggling with these problems are in need of outreach and support, not scorn and derision. Eventually, as the mental (and sometimes physical) carnage piles up, the will to take drastic (and often counter-productive) action finally arises. In many situations, this ends up being the worst-case-scenario for all involved. The only way to truly wrestle with this kind of problem is to tackle the social, economic, and technical challenges together, lest we let the abuse continue in an altered form.

The extreme cases always get the headlines, but that’s not the entire picture. We shouldn’t forget about the less extreme, but much more widespread impacts. It wasn’t so long ago that admitting to poor mental health due to online interactions would have been embarrassing, so we can fully expect people to downplay and deny the effects of chatbot use on their lives and relationships. It’s possible that people may be more willing to reach out for help this time around, but I would argue the impacts are far too insidious for that.

The stakes are immense. We have only begun to see the first-contact effects, and we have yet to comprehend the long-term consequences. Given the full range of impacts from mental health to IQ loss, we can expect a vast array of terrifying phenomena. The solution isn’t to eschew responsibility until enough political will conveniently arrives, we should be proactive in addressing the roots of this from the beginning. Taking action isn’t just about protecting yourself, but also recognizing and reacting to emerging dangers for others.

The roots of chatbot psychosis

The loneliness epidemic is tragic. The drought of human connection is leaving many in a seemingly inescapable abyss. In a time when people are starved for real human companionship, mentorship, and support, workplaces and other institutions are working to remove the human element from nearly everything. Even if this is for ’efficiency’, is it truly worth the cost? When it comes to loneliness, people love to blame the victim. It certainly helps that those without real human connection get quite bitter after a while. This cycle of disrespect is what has caused so much of the population to give up on each other. This social dynamic is no mere accident of our times. It is a cultivated territory for farming clicks and purchases out of human misery.

Bitter and miserable people are effectively perfect consumers. By distancing themselves from everyone around them, they end up cut off from people who may even be able to help. On the other side, people who can get along with others and cooperate can actually end up building things that address these profitable problems, keeping people lonely kills two birds with one stone. We have seen all of this and more with social media algorithms. They’ve caused all kinds of body image issues, unraveling of the social fabric, and mindless distraction at the expense of people’s real lives.

You may think I’m just talking about a small fringe minority of irresponsible people, but you’d be surprised how prevalent these issues are. How many people in your life know the ‘real you’, by your estimation? Odds are you’re not very confident in how much you really know more than a couple of people in your life. With an incentive to keep these struggles to oneself, troubles can be buried for far longer than one would think.

In many ways, ‘AI Psychosis’ is nothing new, it is merely an extension of the existing trends By allowing de-facto monopolies over our digital experience to profit off human misery with hardly any opposition, we are encouraging this to get much worse. It does not matter what technological or political ‘solution’ we wrap around our refusal to address the challenge posed by Big Tech control over so much of our lives.

What actually is new is the rapid feedback and vast array of content. Asking AI chatbots questions can definitely feel like you have the totality of human knowledge communicating with you in real-time. The magician’s trick of these systems is that they encourage you to create an egregore of it out of your own perspective and desires. ChatGPT 4o’s affirming personality effectively allowed people to ‘speedrun narcissism’ only for them to mourn the next version which was less supportive. These tools are more than mere ‘mirrors of the mind’ but are actually just doing the same disastrous pattern that Big Tech social media had: keeping you engaged at all costs.

As we continuously see that Big Tech, and its enablers to want to have their cake and eat it too. You can expect them to impose a double standard of requiring restrictions on general-purpose computing and communication in the name of ‘safety’, while at the same time arrogantly refusing to be held accountable for any of their own dangers.

What can we do?

AI Discipline

I’m skeptical that we can convince others to avoid these tools entirely. We’re up against corporations mandating their use for work, and they’ve already become commonplace if not expected in education. These systems are already ubiquitous and backed up by a horrifying amount of institutional inertia. The cause is far from hopeless, but it makes sense to pick our battles wisely.

If we can’t talk others out of using these tools, we should at least encourage judicious use. I believe all the ‘old internet’ advice applies here well, your real identity shouldn’t be attached to all your online interactions, especially with AI. Avoiding using your real name is a good idea. It’s also crucial to ensure you’re not communicating sensitive information about yourself to these systems, but unfortunately you have to hope nobody else does it on your behalf. Ideally, we should want everybody to be on ’team privacy’ and that is all about keeping personal or sensitive information away from data harvesters.

Where possible, it makes sense to seek out less-harmful alternatives. This requires there to be knowledgeable enough to know the difference, which is no trivial thing. The general public is stuck struggling with questions like “are these things alive” while the important questions go unanswered.

Don’t compromise on humanity

Our technological landscape is downstream of our cultural and political context. A few l33t h4x0rs on the Deep Web are never going to single-handedly turn the tide. (no offense, you guys are great!) It seems that when older generations are confronted with the fact that we have raised multiple generations online they recoil and blame the young for their foolishness. If we truly want to wrestle with these problems we have to ask ourselves what deteriorated our societal and social bonds to the point that Big Tech social media felt like a less painful alternative. Finding who’s at fault is a lot less useful than finding out what we can do to turn things around.

Bringing people together takes constant efforts, and is arguably harder than ever with the time constraints people have to contend with. A lot of trust has been broken as people feel isolated and abandoned. Taking the effort to turn the tide is going to be no simple task. Be patient with yourself as others as you try to bring warmth and peace. People really have no idea how much better things can be with a bit of calm and sanity.

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Inbox Question: What good is hope in a digital prison?

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 11:32:37 +0000

I got an interesting query that I felt was critical to share. This person shares a fear that I imagine is quite prevalent these days. While there are many exciting censorship resistance and privacy tools, they are not so widely adopted we can simply ignore ongoing power-grabs. I hope you’ll find this exchange helpful.

Question:

I would love to talk to you about internet entrance ID. As far as i can see nobody is talking about what we can do when internet use is only possible after identification. Surely all use of vpns, tor en fediverse is then a bit silly because authorities will know who we are anyway. When that kicks in normal people (non- nerds) will have no way to discover the solutions that the nerds think up. As far as i can see we’re nearly fucked. But nobodys talking about it. Everyone is talking about digital ids and cbdc’s and censur and like but if we cant get onto the internet because are ISP wont let is in without identification then isnt the game then over?

At the same time history is being deleted (wayback machine) and history can be rewriten (1984) in any way that suits the times. I know that you are very positive about the future and that you are inclined ( like James Corbett) to rant about black pilled people who “give up” but i havent seen anyone answer my question. You dont really believe that any of you guys will be allowed on the internet if it is so easy to shut you down and as far as i can see this is what is going to happen. It seems to me that the only real solution to this world wide dystopian situation is that we all throw away our phones and refuse to be digital prisoners anymore. But this of course will never happen.

I think that there is also a possibility that you and other digital freedom lovers and promoters are making the situation even worse because you promote hope. We can keep hoping and hoping and hoping and then suddenly free use of internet will not be possible anymore and we will be prisoners for life and for ever. And don’t imagine that revolution will work then because it won’t. I read and follow your stuff and i am willing to pay for your great work but i would really like a few answers first. Is there a way to get around an ISP?

Answer

To be clear, it is already the case that it is normal for people to have internet access associated with their real-life identities. At least here in Canada almost every residential ISP will be able to pass on subscriber information to law enforcement when a request is made. This is even more true for mobile data, where your internet access is linked to a single person instead of a household. To oversimplify a bit, all VPNs do is allow you to “share” a connection with people over the Internet. This means that depending on the policies and procedures of a particular VPN (such as logging, and cooperating with law enforcement) they may offer differing protection against state surveillance. That said, even in situations where state-level surveillance is omniscient, I think it is important to still prioritize privacy and security from other threats. (Such as corporations, scammers, cyber-criminals and mobs)

You’re right to point out that VPNs and overlay networks like Tor are definitely next in line to be targeted by these measures. How big a problem this is may depend on your jurisdiction. For example in China people often have to use workarounds to access the Tor network for both practical and legal reasons. While motivated tech-savvy people will always find ways around these problems, the vast majority of people are going to “go along to get along” effectively entrenching the censorship and control. In many ways, the biggest problem here isn’t strictly ID verification by ISPs, but the legal and technical mechanisms governments will use to secure sovereignty over cyberspace at the expense of their citizens. The fine line here isn’t strictly the risk to individuals, but also the fact that in time it may be entirely impractical for anyone to run an online service for others that in any way clashes with stated and unstated policy. So all I’ve done here is confirmed and enhanced your concerns. In short, the Internet as we know it isn’t dying, but is being killed.

So what’s the solution? This is a trend that extends far beyond a single national government, and the impacts are worldwide regardless of which nations do and don’t participate. Whatever is able to coordinate and carry out this assault on digital freedom worldwide is absolutely outside the reach of the ordinary ‘checks and balances’ of democratic governance. The traditional technical solutions to this are unlikely to reverse and resolve this situation. There simply isn’t a critical mass of the public interested in protecting their digital rights, if there was we wouldn’t be even having this conversation. When it comes to “real solutions” it is important to consider that technology is just part of the picture. It can’t be the entirety of the answer because our digital experience is shaped by an array of “collective action problems”.

Therefore, if it is as bad as you say and technological solutions alone are insufficient to address these problems, what purpose is it to share hope in technical solutions at all? I believe in human creativity and ingenuity. I am wholeheartedly committed to the idea that even people trapped in a relentless digital prison may still find ways to make a difference. These draconian measures by governments across the world are serious problems, but that’s not the same as it all being over. These shifts are radical transformations of the social and legal environment simply change the game for those interested in technical solutions. Just because old solutions are no longer viable that doesn’t mean it is impossible to build new strategies and systems adapted to the current environment. It is true that this environment is much more overtly hostile to free expression and privacy online, but I anticipate that technical solutions built in this era will be far more resilient than ones of the past.

My goal has never been to put particular tools on a pedestal. If anything I’ve consistently tried to put the things I’ve been interested under a microscope and dissect their qualities. By carefully considering the pros and cons of particular tools and techniques, we can be more informed of what approaches are viable in an evolving and changing environment. I originally conceived of the Libre Solutions Network understanding that nothing is currently perfect and that far more work than I can imagine needs to be done to actually build a free and just cyberspace. It is by facing the problems head-on that I’ve chosen to spend so much time investigating what can be done. By learning from imperfections of the day we can refine approaches to bring about truly revolutionary change, and that is what I think is needed to overcome our present-day challenges.

I wholeheartedly understand the desire to want to retreat from it all. I don’t think anyone should focus all their energies in saving or engaging with cyberspace, but I definitely believe that it is a worthwhile pursuit. For example, there are many problems with the medical field, especially as it relates to ethics and the politicization of health. I would absolutely not want to discourage someone interested in becoming a doctors or medical expert. We as freedom-loving people are always going to want skilled and experienced people on our side. Ironically, doctors and academics are arguably more controlled than technical people given their dependence on professional networks, yet we wouldn’t tell anyone to give up on the concept of human health in a dystopian society. My mission, from the beginning has never been to just promote a few tools and leave it at that. I believe we need to recruit technical minds to a mindset that values human flourishing and equip them to make it a reality.

To answer your question: How do I get around a hostile ISP?

The reason why we need freedom-minded techies is that we need independent digital infrastructure. Governments and corporations are only able to control cyberspace because so much of it is reliant on their infrastructure, provided at our expense. Recognizing that much of the Internet as we know it is ‘hostile cyberspace’ we can begin to actually build up our own networks and tools to truly reshape our digital landscape from the ground up. This requires local action. I love the idea of community-run networks, and it is clear that where they are possible they should be explored. The beauty of many existing tools is that they are still very much compatible with a radically different internet. I think with a little bit of change, people would realize how little change is needed to make things much better, and that’s an exciting prospect.

Nobody is going to build any of this without hope. I have never meant to promote complacency, which is why I work to emphasize not just the dangers of our present digital experience, but also the opportunities in building a better digital future. There is so much to be excited for if we can work together to find the opportunities to overcome our technical and social challenges. Ironically, these days I feel that the darker things get, the lower the bar for meaningful progress actually is. Once you really begin to grapple with the big picture, you realize we haven’t even begun to make real change. As much as I am just as terrified as you for what lies ahead, I am also ignited by the hope that we can make the best of it.

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You Can't Please Everybody: censorship in decentralized networks

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 14:24:05 +0000

One of the principle concerns of corporate social media is how people are manipulated to boost profits, attention, and engagement. The effects of this automated algorithmic manipulation are all-pervasive as they are disruptive. It is the very reason that the newspeak phrases like unalive have entered the public vocabulary. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter raised the profile of discussions about the impact and influence of social media on society. Among those who consider with these issues, it is clear that a radically different solution is needed.

While people have always attempted to migrate to ‘alt-tech’ competitors to mainstream sites, we have the opportunity to explore new paradigms. Multiple models of decentralized social networking have risen to show what is possible. Due to their nature, different systems will have advantages and disadvantages. There are many crucial details to understand when trying to make the best of any of these systems. Sometimes, solving particular problems opens up new challenges. It is our responsibility to learn from the options we are contending with today, so that we can work on new solutions for the future.

There are many decentralized social media systems. There are multiple iterations of the dream of protocols not platforms, where systems span larger than a single implementation. The major benefits to this paradigm are interoperability, accessibility, and anti-fragile architecture. Some are blockchain based like Bastyon, others like Mastodon use federated servers, and nostr uses encryption-as-identity for portable identities. Each approach has trade-offs and considerations. For the purposes of this piece, I will be focusing on the limitations of the Fediverse.

Deficiencies: The Fediverse in practice

The Fediverse (which includes Mastodon) is an inter-connected network of federated social media sites. This includes various Free Software services like Mitra, Ghost, or even big tech giants like Meta’s Threads. Even alternative networks like nostr can be connected via bridges. This means that instead of one single platform, there is a wider interoperable network, at least in theory.

Every platform on the Fediverse can be called an “instance” each instance hosts accounts for the people on the platform. While followers & follows can be migrated, it is not seamless. Generally a profile exists on an instance and is beholden to the rules, features and limitations of that instance. Instance operators are offering their users a beachhead into decentralized social media, and the users are offering attention and community in return.

This may sound like a win-win for everyone involved. It’s now possible for operator-run independent social media to exist, but why hasn’t it caught on yet? The Fediverse is very much a social experiment as well as a technological one. Just like users can follow, block and mute each other, so too can instances. This means that operators can effectively decide which instances (and by extension users) their users can interact with.

The major innovation of the Fediverse is the creation of a website that isn’t PvP, but team deathmach instead.

Can you be banned from the Fediverse?

There is no mechanism to prevent an individual from using federated social media, but there are a variety of reach and accessibility considerations. Instance operators, especially those of larger instances, can have a huge impact. While they can wield a significant amount of power over the network, that power is not absolute. You can be banned from particular instances, and those instances can ban instances that host you.

This may sound like it defeats the purpose of using decentralized social media for censorship resistance. The lack of a single unified network has its own advantages and disadvantages. Due to the decentralized, but also fragmented nature of the Fediverse, it is impossible to be banned from the entire network.

Account bans

If you join a fediverse instance, you are a guest on someone else’s infrastructure. This is very similar to the deal Big Tech offers you when you create an account. The benefit of choosing the Fediverse over Big Tech is that hopefully, your instance administration can be more reasonable than Big Tech. That’s likely not a high bar at all, but there will inevitably be times where they disappoint.

Your account on a particular instance can be banned just like any other online service. In this scenario, you’re perfectly able to join a new instance that aligns with you, or setup your own. Setting up your own instance involves non-trivial work and resources, including maintenance costs. The good news is that most fediverse software supports mechanisms to export your follows and follower lists, so you are not strictly ‘starting from scratch’ when you are banned or simply migrate instance hosts.

The critical detail is to recognize that an account ban is merely removal from a particular instance. You’re still able to join another instance that’s even running the same software, such as Mastodon. In general, instance administrators only have control over the community they provide infrastructure for.

Instance bans

Of course, the natural solution to the above problem is to run your own fediverse infrastructure. By procuring your own system, you can operate on your own terms. While this solves many problems, it won’t solve all of them. Other instances, with often sizable user counts can block your instance. This is due to the biggest difference between decentralized and centralized social media. In centralized social media association is not interpreted as endorsement or approval. On decentralized networks, association is something you can be punished for. Your instance can be blocked by others who wish to ‘protect’ their users from either your content, or content of those associated with you.

There are many valid reasons for all-out instance blocks. Spam is a problem for both centralized and decentralized networks, and needs to be fought accordingly. Different jurisdictions have different requirements for removing illegal material, so every instance is likely to have slightly different policies and practices when it comes to such material. This means that there are more than just technical costs of running an instance, but there are also legal and social risks to consider. In our highly polarized times, people struggle to get along well over the Internet. Not all disagreements are handled nicely. Due to the “hub and spoke” nature of the Fediverse, ‘dogpiling’ is arguably no less prevalent than on centralized networks. The difference is that now there are more opportunities for conflict.

One way to manage these risks has been the proliferation of curated blocklists. It’s certainly a lot easier to be put on those lists than to get off them. This means that truly independent or otherwise unpopular instances must effectively rebuild their own federation outside the more “mainstream counterparts”. This bifurcation creates particular social dynamics that leave both sides arguably much worse off. The solution to this problem is for more responsibly run instances to exist. Your instance doesn’t need absolute federation with the entire network, it just needs interested people to connect with. Larger communities investing in their own instances to provide the platform is a viable approach to tackle this problem.

Nostr fixes this?

A popular approach to this problem is to simply use nostr instead of federated social media (though they can overlap). Using encryption as identity nostr mitigates the problem of account bans by separating users from particular relays (servers). The instance blocking problem is also resolved a bit, because much of the interactions involving relays are done client-side.

The significant downside of nostr’s approach is that not only is there no such thing as a global coherent state, but that it’s difficult to have one at all. The best way to ensure you don’t miss any notifications or interactions is to run your own nostr relay, but this can be impacted by all the same troubles a fediverse instance can have. That said, Ditto is an interesting project that provides a nostr relay and its own fediverse bridge. Providing a viable platform for those interested in both Nostr and the fediverse.

Freedom isn’t free

In a time where governments and corporations are restricting the Internet at a breakneck pace, it is vital to take an active role in preserving our digital freedoms. Free speech online isn’t something a billionaire can buy for you. You can’t rely on governments to protect it, and legislation will be insufficient to safeguard it. If we want a robust and valuable ‘digital town square, we need to work diligently to construct it. This is well outside the scope of what an individual can accomplish, but many hands make light work. it is absolutely achievable to radically transform the web with enough independent technical skill and resources.

The fight for online freedom relies on people actually feeling it. Those trapped on big tech corporate sites aren’t going to invest in a future that never felt real in the first place. It is our role as cyber rebels to do what we can to bring digital freedom to others, not to abandon the public to their foolishness. The public inherits the digital landscape we tolerate, and forgets the solutions that aren’t supported. Cyber rebels need to consider how to reclaim territory in cyberspace not just for themselves, but for others as well. This requires assessing various solutions as they are, not strictly how we’d like them to be.

Since at least 2020, online censorship has accelerated and people have become more pessimistic about the future of the web as a whole. This is naturally understandable. If we want a better digital future we have to not just work towards it, but share it with others. This requires seriously evaluating the problems as they exist, not as we would like them to be. If building a better technological future was cheaper, more convenient, and easier to work with, it would be done already. It is always going to take dedicated independent effort to preserve digital freedom and that work is precious. Giving up on digital freedom has profound consequences. Things are far too inter-twined to abandon IRL rights for digital ones or vice-versa. It is high time we recognize the common causes of not just wishing for a better technological landscape, but actually working towards putting it into practice.

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Summer 2025 Recap: Personal Touch

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 23:36:34 +0000

Updates

Website updates

New vanity address for the Tor hidden service lsnonion2dv35xqlfv2batqdhyasi7oa734h7t4z2py43de4wb6jlyad.onion
- I would recommend bookmarking the new address via the Tor Browser.

RSS Reader project

I really would like your feedback on what features are essential for a desktop RSS reader to have in 2025! I am not a designer, so UX suggestions are very much valued. I want this project to be built for making the open web a first-class contender with other media systems. The more feedback I get early on, the better this can be in the long run.

Help me build the best desktop RSS client!

XMRchat

You can now leave tip messages via XMRChat Feel free to browse the repository for XMRchat. XMRchats will be read and answered in the next relevant piece or recap, whichever comes first!

Personal note

I’ve hit a major weight loss milestone of 200lbs down from my high of over 570. That mission has definitely impacted the Libre Solutions Network as a project, but I’m grateful to have made so much progress. I am optimistic that with enough support, I can really go full-throttle into making the Libre Solutions Network an impactful project for digital autonomy.

Items of Interest

GiveWP Data leak

ID verification and Digital ID

The Fine Details

Notable Mentions

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Teachable Moment: All is fair in love and war

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 12:15:51 +0000

The narrow window of time where the public could make use of the web to hold power accountable is coming to a close. The corporate consolidation over the digital town square has already relegated the free exchange of ideas to the moderately technically savvy user. When it comes to challenging totalitarianism, this is a catastrophic loss. Far from being humanity’s “information super-highway”, much of cyberspace has been transformed into broadcast television with likes.

Governments have caught up to the digital tools of our time. While “team freedom” becomes more apathetic and nihilistic about technology, a well-funded and connected league of bureaucrats are working to ensure that the people can never again use these tools to threaten their power. During the Covid years, it was invaluable for people of the world to share notes on what their governments were doing to them. It is clear that such an opportunity will be throttled away in the future.

Last week, the world was given a major demonstration of how bifurcated the web of tomorrow is. The vast majority of people are going to concede to verification schemes to access web content, and a small minority will be gated from major online services. This separation is but a first step into a vastly more gated and controlled web, that will make digital dissent a fading memory. For now the focus is on the United Kingdom, but there have been many similar proposals in Canada, Australia, as well as Europe. It is fortunate that while this is being put into place, there was a high-profile example of the concrete dangers of our current path. It just so happens that a dating gossip app had a devastating data breach, weaponizing the private and personal information of those who were required to hand it over to participate.

The tea spills

It is easy to be hard on the young. Our social and technological environment has been changing so rapidly it’s genuinely hard to understand the challenges people face. Young boys and girls are creatures of an environment many hardly understand, much less work to improve. To make matters worse, not all interventions work out for the better. An app was made with the stated goal of allowing women to share notes and red flags about men in their lives. As it grew in popularity, eventually somebody noticed that the uploaded photo ID documents (to prove the users were women) were publicly accessible.

This breach is perfect culture war fodder, and has received a great deal of mainstream coverage. This alone raises the stakes of the breach. Assurances of safety and security mean nothing in circumstances where there is sufficient motivation to leverage the data. S2 Underground makes a point to highlight the national security implications of this breach. Many people verified themselves with their workplace ID, or had their selfies linked to their actual location. The problems don’t end there. Scammers will routinely make use of breached information to find prey, and this kind of information can be expected to be leveraged for harassment campaigns.

This strikes at the root justification for ID verification online: the idea that it makes anyone at all safer. The tight intermingling of our real-world identities with the digital world has been a disaster for privacy and safety as a whole. The apathetic refrain “[they] can get everything anyways” says a lot more when “they” isn’t just intelligence agencies, but scammers and vindictive people online. While governments and corporations will promise you that they will take every precaution to protect your information, take no comfort from it. Breaches are a fight against entropy and almost assured on a long enough time line. Personal information has been leaked from small start-ups to the biggest tech giants of them all. If what we’re actually after is safety, it’s high time to consider what that truly means in a digital context.

The safety promised by these systems is merely the transfer of risk from the giant institutions onto the people. The dangers only escalate as these systems consolidate control and power while failing to truly address the problems of our time. The false dichotomy between safety and freedom online is a very convenient way to avoid having to answer for the power they possess in control of these systems. It can’t be ignored that while these measures are put in place to ‘protect us’ governments are also introducing ‘back-door’ legislation to be able to spy on all that transpires on these platforms. The sum effect of these regulations is that there will be fewer independent digital platforms, and so much more speech control online. Nothing new, but an escalation of existing trends. Do you feel safer already?

The digital dark age begins

Despite age verification being imposed for your safety, scope creep is inevitable. It did not take long at all for the this law to ensure that X was suppressing footage of protests. Ultimately, none of this is new. Governments across the world are leveraging the corporate consolidation of the web to completely eliminate dissent. One has to ask: what do these governments intend to do once they have seized total dominance over the public discussion? It is important to consider what this global coordinated gating of information is actually aimed at solving.

Age verification often fails to accomplish its stated goals. Already we have seen that video game screenshots are sufficient to fool some of these systems. Correcting for mistakes by making validation more invasive simply increases the risk to participants. As simple methods continue to fail, we can expect the intrusions to move from platforms to your own devices. Client-side scanning and other mechanisms can be adopted to ensure safety at the expense of a state veto over political dissent. The paper-thin pretexts of policing hate and disinformation collapse entirely when one observes how these policies are actually applied in practice: the letter of every regulation applied to silence inconvenient voices, while selected speakers are given preferential treatment. The new dark age doesn’t look dark at all, but instead brightly illuminated like a casino. A wide assortment of attention-grabbing colors arranged to hide rot we’re not supposed to notice. Any attempt to communicate to the public requires you to play by the house’s rules.

The destruction of the web as a place for independent exchange of ideas has absolutely dire consequences for the future of humanity. Conceding cyberspace to tyrants after they made it inescapable is the final defeat before endless torment. Abandoning the free and open web only gives your local propagandists an unparalleled advantage over you. Setting proper digital boundaries is possible, but the opportunity to do so is fading.

Curating coherence

People do not appreciate the vital importance of a free cyberspace enough. It is clear that we can expect the vast majority of the public to not only accept the death of digital dissent, but to lecture us about how important it is. At this stage, the best one can hope for is to merely preserve what is important as the darkness creeps in. With enough care and persistence, we can work to reverse the trend, but it is going to take much more than what has currently arisen.

Recognize and resist hostile cyberspace

The ultimate contradiction of trying to make the Internet safe is that the corporate web exists to farm value from people. There can be no safety on platforms that exist to sell every moment of attention at the expense of your mental health. Another unpopular distinction is that merely using a VPN to evade the current iteration of ID verification is not a way to resist these measures. At worst it is signaling to the corporation that their users can be expected to absorb the impact of future violations.

Understand that there is more to the world wide web than a few corporate controlled platforms. There are new decentralized protocols, and ways to build up independent cyberspace. These giant tech monopolies will be the enforcers of state politics and morality for as long as people tolerate it. We are already beginning to see the intrusions leap from mere mental health concerns to health trackers observing minute biological details.

Under the guise of making cyberspace ‘safe’ for all, we are seeing a parallel escalation in the ways in which our digital landscape can control, manipulate, and abuse people. These trends are hardly coincidental. It is high time to directly face the fact that these systems are hostile to the people they manage. You are not even a ‘user’ of these systems, you are a resource to be exploited, if not a liability to be managed. Do not give these platforms the benefit of the doubt, much less your sensitive personal information.

Develop and build independent technical capacity

The existing set of cyber-rebels are largely a loose set of individuals who chose to break free of hostile cyberspace early, for a variety of reasons. As a community, we have hardly begun to tread water. We are not even close to building rafts for others in any large way. Organized independent technical skills and resources are needed to truly chart a better direction. This requires freedom fighters from all walks of life to recognize the centrality of digital freedom in their real-life endeavors.

Digital freedom is not the most important fight, but it is becoming a very critical front that is a prerequisite to holding governments and institutions accountable. If we wish to truly break new ground, rather than optimize within the boundaries assigned to us, victories in cyberspace are needed. This is no simple task. I can admit it is not easy to find technical people who recognize the stakes, responsibility, and opportunity in forging a radically new direction.

Breaking free from hostile cyberspace requires finding or producing independent alternatives. It is utterly pointless to finger-wag at those trapped in virtual prisons if we are not well-equipped to offer an alternative. For far more people than you think, this is all that they have known. As the years crawl by, it becomes increasingly dire for increasing numbers of people.

Curate Independent cyberspace and ‘IRL’ space

If you want people to connect offline, you need to ensure there actually are rich social environments for people to thrive in. This may come as a shock, but authentic person-to-person interaction takes time. To make matters worse, our modern environment undermines a significant amount of trust which makes this even harder. Bringing people together is not just work, but a phenomenally valuable skill. It is important to be patient with the process, remind yourself what this is really all about.

At the same time, it really is not ideal to write-off the digital entirely. Fundamentally the goal should be for discovering, building, and maintaining a better digital experience that doesn’t intrude on our actual lives. The ability for people across the world to share information and connect has never truly been the problem. The problem has always been how social interactions have been gated and mediated by corporations and governments with malicious intent.

A better digital landscape is possible, it should compliment our lives rather than intrude on them. This simple distinction is what separates a free cyberspace from the controlled dystopia the powers of the world wish to force on us. What can we do to protect this boundary?

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Darknet Market Maximalism with Anti Moonboy (AKA Xenu)

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 13:42:05 +0000

Listen on Peertube

This is a great conversation with Anti Moonboy a highly knowledgeable Monero advocate also known as Xenu on X. It was a pleasure to be joined by a knowledgeable and passionate cyber rebel to discuss many things including his latest manifesto Darknet Market Maximalism. In our conversation we touch on the wider cryptocurrency discussion as well as the finer points of decentralization and privacy.

If you’re interested in staying up to date on Monero and other topics Anti Moonboy News is a phenomenal resource. Please consider following Anti Moonboy through his site’s RSS feed, but you can also check out his channels on YouTube, Rumble, and Odysee.

The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.

Satoshi Nakamoto - Bitcoin Genesis block

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Decentralization in Practice: Pitfalls and Possibilities

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 17:21:41 +0000

This conversation is an opportunity to learn from Simplified Privacy, an organization that works to put decentralization in practice. It was a pleasure to talk with Shadow from the team to dig deep into the challenges involved with privacy for fun and profit. This was a great opportunity to compare notes on the bleeding edge of decentralization and privacy tools and the practical realities of putting it to use. There are a lot of important questions to ask and lots of fine points to consider.

You can follow Simplified Privacy on Nostr to get connected.

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Smile! You're being recorded.

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 15:00:42 +0000

Omnipresent surveillance isn’t merely normalized, but expected. It’s a sad state of affairs when the extreme consolidation and misuse of sensitive personal information is merely yet another risk placed on individuals without a care. Worse still, people are quick to blame consumers for particular technology choices without considering structural factors. While it is worth our time to try to find ways to minimize digital intrusions, at some point the bigger picture has to be drawn and confronted. We are well past the time where being careful about what you post online was sufficient to protect your data. In our time, almost every institution you interact with creates a larger and larger digital footprint that is almost entirely outside of your own control.

While this can be mitigated by refusing to interact with any large public or private institution, it is unreasonable to expect the general public to make the same sacrifice consistently. Instead of playing the blame game, it can be useful to take stock of the information that is unnecessarily collected by institutions we choose to interact with, and those people are forced to contend with. Even when information collection is necessary, we should ask if data retention truly necessary? Even if it is, how long? Regardless of how long the information is kept, what practices are acceptable with that particular information? By recognizing the new threats created by mass data collection we should reassess how we allow people’s information to be collected and used.

Many of these issues are currently coming to a head with the sale of 23andMe’s treasure trove of sensitive data ranging from personal details to DNA. In many ways this is but the tip of a massive and jagged iceberg, given that the potential uses (and misuses) for intimate personal and medical details multiply by the day. While institutions both public and private promise to protect the information they collect with the latest and greatest standards and practices, these guarantees aren’t worth very much. Data breaches are so common to be background noise to many. Once information is shared, sold, or stolen, there is hardly any recourse for those who are harmed by its misuse.

The only way to ensure information is protected across time is to never record it in the first place. Consequences of breaches both large and small are severe for individuals. Information divulged in breaches is often weaponized against individuals, resulting in a wide array of terrible consequences. The tragedy is that your digital footprint is already far outside your control. While it is advisable to avoid proactively enlarging it, the sad fact is that almost every institution and service has an incentive to work against you.

The latest stock-market hype cycle, "AI Mania" is the fuel for this particular bonfire of civil liberties. The clear desire to integrate ‘intelligent’ tools into all levels of society is based on the assumption that the mass collection, retention, and use of sensitive personal information is not only harmless, but desirable. This is a direct assault on the ability for individuals to have, much less choose their own boundaries with particular entities. It’s a lot harder to ‘opt-out’ of particular features when your phone plan is linked to your healthcare or entities are able to leverage information collected on you from everywhere and anywhere.

The problem is not contained to a single institution or sector. This is a classic negative exernality feedback loop. The privacy and security of individuals is being traded for risk management by institutions both public and private. This trade is anything but voluntary and immensely one-sided. Powerful automation and robotics systems are being developed with the express purpose of making our physical reality as controlled as our digital one. If one is concerned about the information dark age online, they should be a great deal more concerned with what is coming to our actual lives if this trend continues.

It can be hard for people to see why anyone would cooperate with all this, but there are many strong incentives to go play pong with the machine. The gold rush surrounding artificial intelligence tools means that many are going to experiment with ‘AI agents’, even at their own peril. The more interwoven these tools become with our lives, the more serious abuses can come from the misuse of personal information. It’s one thing when a person chooses to use these tools, but a whole other scenario when institutions are making use of them and individuals are left with the consequences.

While private entities are massively responsible for expanding surveillance, Governments are escalating their own measures. Every level of society, including corporate data collection can be leveraged for real-time social control. The militarization of everyday technical tools has profound implications for governments capacity and willingness to suppress even the most minor signs of dissent.

This depressing dystopia is far from the inevitable path that its beneficiaries and sci-fi would have you believe. The biggest barrier to a better digital future is not the systems we have to contend with but our own imagination and will. Devices can be repurposed, systems can be replaced, and tools can be rebuilt or refined. In the worst case scenario, we’ll have a great deal of recycling to do. It is difficult to draw the line that the problem is not the devices themselves, necessarily. ‘Wearables’, touch-screen devices, robots, and automation are all things that get a lot of well-intentioned ire, but are hardly the actual basis for the feared top-down technological terror. The actual problems are caused by these tools being built for a terrifyingly consolidated power structure to manage any resistance, internal or external. As political corruption consolidates actual power, the digital landscape morphs to suit this state of affairs. It is unavoidable that those who want a better digital experience must be engaged citizens supporting initiatives for transparency, accountability and justice.

The good news is that non-technical people are very much needed in this fight. None of this is an engineering problem. This is a reflection that our digital experience is a direct consequence of the powers at play in society. It is understandably overwhelming to consider the greater scope at hand. To make matters worse, it is entirely unlikely that these problems will be properly addressed. One can bet on more invasive (both voluntary and coerced) data collection on even the smallest details one can imagine in their life. The problem with privacy is that its harms are largely abstract to many people. The solutions are even more opaque as it’s genuinely difficult to understand what moves are genuinely worth the effort. It’s a challenging problem to solve because the harms are effectively diffused throughout society, like pollution, harming people in subtle to severe situations over longer periods of time. Odds are, there will likely be no single moment where people decide to take these issues head-on, especially when there are more pressing matters at hand. Unfortunately, this does nothing to stop privacy issues from impacting various other areas of life. This leads to scenarios where people are distraught by our modern digital landscape, but feel it’s not only inescapable but also impossible to change.

There is a case for apathy. Those of us who want to see a better digital future may not want to admit it, but many people are up against more acute and practical concerns than data privacy. This is incredibly frustrating as we see the consolidation and weaponization of information used to create new and concerning dangers. Instead of blaming those who are unable to prioritize privacy, we have to ask ourselves what we need to do to structurally change the game. It is not reasonable to expect those shackled by information control and invasive surveillance to pay the entire cost of overcoming it themselves. Such an expectation is an inevitable descent into disappointment and despair.

But what can we do?

I would encourage you to face the problems as they are, and with some faith and creativity seek out smaller wins. Given that we have finite lifetimes, our goal shouldn’t be to unilaterally solve everything. Instead, a cooperative long-term approach of building momentum in the right direction can absolutely yield meaningful results. There are notable examples from history in both the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but know that you need not be constrained by these particular efforts. Don’t be afraid of drawing your own lines in different places than others. If anything it can be a unique advantage to recognize particular problems and share insights.

Those who can unplug their minds from algorithmic control should, those who can protect their information absolutely need to, but that’s not the entire picture. The best we can expect from the vast majority of people is for them to play the cards they’re dealt. It is our job as those who want to work towards a better digital future to give the public better cards to play. In hindsight the cypherpunks most important point was recognizing it was the role of privacy advocates to create things that make digital autonomy possible and convenient. It is absolutely a high bar. Every year commercial trends raise the expectations the public has for technology. This is a daunting challenge, but more importantly an awesome opportunity.

It is fundamentally crucial that we recognize that our digital experience is downstream of our cultural understanding of the tools and systems we use. Without judicious and careful understanding of the world as it is, we will never see the future as we would like it to be. The dreamers must come to understand the doomers, and the doomers in turn must learn to appreciate the dreams. With this common understanding then we can wrestle with the fundamental social foundations of our technological landscape. This is far from philosophical navel-gazing, but is a necessary prerequisite for making the change necessary to avoid digital totalitarianism.

Now more than ever, it is vital to build a vision for a better digital experience. Simply decrying the egregious abuses of our existing one will only help us find opportunities to cope. By bringing people together to envision a truly radical and ambitious transformation of cyberspace, we have the opportunity to build lasting and holistic solutions. We have only begun to grapple with the consequences of our experience as it is. There is so much work to define what a better future looks like. Those of us with technical ability have two immense responsibilities: to be stewards for technology as it is, and to be fierce advocates for technological change that is used for people rather than against them.

If we are willing to take on these responsibilities, it is outright shocking how quickly things can improve. By responding to present-day realities we can properly inform long-term approaches. There is a real chance to make the tyrants of the world regret leaving so many bright technical minds without work. Fighting for freedom in the real world is increasingly dependent on recognizing and addressing the realities in cyberspace, and we would ignore this to our peril. Those interested in a better future in general would be wise to consider how we plan to make space for a much needed independent technical revolution.

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Digital Autonomy & Open-Source Intelligence with James Corbett

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 10:55:02 +0000

We return to the Digital Autonomy series to take a close look at our role in participating in today’s information landscape. It is an honor and a pleasure to be joined by James Corbett of the Corbett Report to dig into this topic in detail. James brings his vast experience as an independent researcher and alternative media voice. We discuss the evolving digital landscape as well as the pressing concerns around artificial intelligence tools. Independent voices and audiences themselves face unprecedented challenges to make the most of the opportunities of our time.

Consider taking this as an opportunity to reevaluate how you want to engage online. It has never been more clear that our time on corporate platforms is on borrowed time. You can consider trying out the Fediverse or nostr or even just bookmark sites you find important and valuable. We all have a role to play in shaping the future of the information landscape, and our choices matter.

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Cool Concepts That Deserve More Recognition

Tue, 27 May 2025 10:37:16 +0000

Over the years, there have been many fascinating projects attempting to push the limits of digital decentralization. What makes these inventions interesting is the opportunity to truly transform the systems people take for granted. While not every attempt succeeds in radically changing the game, there is often quite a fair bit to learn from them. In fact, it is often through failed experiments that we can learn the most to inform future approaches. Cyber rebels of all stripes need to rekindle their sense of creativity and curiosity.

It is tragic that so many brilliant technical minds are absorbed into big money cargo cults rather than drawn to working on practical answers to pressing problems. A lot of the very tantalizing and game-changing techniques are very often the most obscure. It is our job as cyber rebels to give these underrated gems their due credit. In the hopes of exploring the art of the possible, we’ll be looking at a few fascinating projects that have covered important ground.

ZeroNet - A web revolution

A particularly ambitious project to reinvent the Internet as we know it was ZeroNet. This project was a particularly daring attempt to solve a great many problems all at once. Describing itself as “Open, Free and un-censorable websites, using Bitcoin cryptography and BitTorrent network”. The project was also built to be quite friendly with Tor, leveraging existing anonymity solutions to protect privacy on this new frontier. This project had some absolutely astounding potential and some very well-refined approaches. It is a shame that the repository hasn’t been updated since 2021, but the project lives on as 0net.

If ZeroNet had gained significant adoption, it would have become an incredibly powerful tool against online censorship. ZeroNet attempted to level the playing-field of information dissemination by ensuring that sites were served by their visitors. Getting the visitors to share the load meant that the originator didn’t even need to stay online for their content to remain available. This has many performance benefits that have also been replicated in other projects. IPFS is another parallel initiative that tried to take this on, but ZeroNet also had other advantages.

Far from merely being a resilient content delivery system, ZeroNet had a truly revolutionary design for serving dynamic content. A limitation IPFS and other similar approaches had was that it was impossible or impractical to build even relatively simple web experiences on top of them. Because of its radically different approach to static and dynamic content, ZeroNet had mechanisms to allow for any modern site to be built on top of it. At the peak of its popularity ZeroNet had a decentralized, password-less, pseudonymous single-sign-on system that worked with blogs, mail and even an attempted YouTube clone. Serving a web site from ZeroNet rather than the regular Internet had many advantages similar to other darknets, such as no cost permission-less hosting.

ZeroNet did a lot of very interesting things, but it certainly had its limitations. To my knowledge it was quite obscure and relatively unknown even to technical people. Many trade-offs had to be made to work as well as it did, and there are a wide variety of valid criticisms one could make. If ZeroNet was remade today I’m sure it would be radically different, but there is a great deal to appreciate about how it was put together. The best and worst thing about ZeroNet was that it took on a lot all at once. This made the project much more rigid and inflexible, but certainly created a more user-friendly experience than similar projects often have.

OpenNIC - Democratic DNS

Many people underestimate how many problems of our current Internet are downstream of the social conventions around DNS, Domain Name System. Web addresses (such as libresolutions.network or example.com) are effectively just names mapped to assigned numbers. What we know of as the Internet is largely based on the mutual agreement on a single set of addresses mapped to assigned internet addresses. There is no real technical barrier to people deciding to use alternative numbers mapped to the same names. You very well could reinvent your own internet and assign names and numbers as you wish, but then the problem is getting others to cooperate. This may sound wildly impractical, but it’s truly a testament to how free we can be with technology if we choose to be. It’s worth understanding the advantages of an alternative DNS root if for no other reason to recognize the real potential we have to change our digital experience.

The centralized and capitalist nature of the domain name system is a huge design problem for those of us working to build bridges between the centralized Web and the Peer Webs as the current system makes it very difficult to match the onboarding experience of centralized platforms. (You can sign up to a centralized social network in 30 seconds… can you register your own domain name, have your server and app set up, and be up and running with your decentralized one in that time? You could. But not with our current system.)

Web+ - Aral Balkan

One of the recurring problems when it comes to radically transforming the very structure of the web is facing DNS. While some attempts try to eliminate DNS all together, a great deal of infrastructure has been built on top of it, so throwing it away entirely includes a variety of trade-offs and consequences. The trouble with going through the effort to reinvent the wheel, is that you’re also going to reinvent many other things people take for granted as well. This would notably include infrastructure for generating and accepting certificate files to protect connections with TLS.

Despite being over 24 years old, OpenNIC is a very ambitious attempt to maintain an independent DNS root. What’s worth considering is that it doesn’t have to be the only one. As covered in NWNW 1328, Russia made a move in 2017 to build their own. With some creativity, it’s absolutely possible for even smaller localities to experiment with doing the same themselves. By localizing control over the “Internet phonebook”, it’s possible to begin building truly independent digital infrastructure.

PirateBox - Portable internet

Chgoddon, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons Source

If you’re interested in local internet you can start yourself, PirateBox was a phenomenal demonstration of what can be done. The concept is relatively straightforward: you load up public services on portable hardware and then share a public WiFi (or wired) access point. The PirateBox project itself is discontinued since 2019 but it’s a relatively simple concept to replicate. In many ways it is much easier, because many open source self-hostable solutions are even more robust and accessible.

It may seem quaint in a time where most people spend their time collaborating online, but there are real advantages to locally-based digital services. At minimum, it’s a convenient way to have your own separate internet with a curated set of content and services. With a significant investment in network access, a permanent installation could provide private and uncensored comms to a small community.

As a proof-of-concept the project demonstrated that even mobile phones can be utilized. It’s important to consider that there are many ways to adapt to modern consumer trends. Ironically, because smartphones are consumption-based devices, they’re well suited to be clients for PirateBox-like systems. With permanent installations, and long-range communications there can be many useful independent networks with a wide variety of capabilities.

Gun - Decentralized application framework

The holy grail that cyber nomads have been seeking for a long time is a truly refined ecosystem to build dApps. A “dApp” is a decentralized application that doesn’t rely on centralized points of failure. The calling card for a good dApp is “write once, use forever, anywhere”. Gun is a web application framework that provides peer-to-peer functionality and a decentralized database to persist data. These features are what’s necessary to build truly revolutionary online experiences.

This means that any developer who learns to use gun can build almost any peer-to-peer private application they can imagine. This radically different way of building applications creates new possibilities to escape the problems of our present paradigm. By breaking free of centralized management, these applications have the potential to build the “best of all worlds” when it comes to convenience, security, and resilience.

Gun has the advantage of leveraging many modern web browser functionalities. This is both an asset and a liability. On the positive side, it allows for many tried and tested technologies to be leveraged to build the foundation. But on the negative side it means that these applications are entirely dependent on major browser vendors. In a time where the future of the open web is in doubt, there are reasons to take this concern seriously. Like many of the other projects in this piece, and others across the web there are win conditions beyond critical mass success. Even if gun doesn’t become the main dApp framework, there can still be a lot to learn from it’s successes and challenges.

The Future

These three examples are but a taste of the ocean of possibilities out there. I wanted to highlight these examples to show that obscurity or lack of mass adoption is not actually failure. Ambitious attempts themselves are valuable experiments regardless of how they end up. Often times, newer projects are inspired or informed from techniques that were tried in the past. It’s high time we embrace the “freedom in freedom” and learn to explore possibilities rather than fight over dogmatic preferences and approaches.

There are a wide variety of projects I’m currently curious to see grow and evolve. From Guix a new approach to a fully-free Linux OS, to the fascinating work of the Spritely Institute on real-time distributed computation. Peer-to-peer and private applications are also entering a new phase as Iroh and Veilid are becoming more mature. But software is only part of the real equation. Finding truly independent and ‘hackable’ (user-modifiable) hardware solutions is what I’m most curious about these days.

As dark as the technological landscape can be at times, it’s now more important than ever to remember that there is so much potential to build a different future. The inertia behind centralized and controlled platforms is very much on borrowed time. Even you could discover, build, or share the part that tips the scales. There is an immense amount of power in the hands of those who decide to strike out a new path in our time. Digital technology is really just a heap of re-programmable logic circuits, with enough effort, creativity, and inspiration there are no limits to how much things can change.

Never forget that your choices matter, and that we can always forge a new path.

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The opportunity of our time: Reversing Demoralization

Sun, 04 May 2025 20:44:38 +0000

A free cyberspace needs people willing to take action and learn from mistakes. Demoralization robs people not only of their capacity for action, but also their very spirit. Making the best of our future requires us to directly oppose the mass-demoralization that paralyzes people in despair and complacency.

To take part in a better digital future, we are obligated to wrestle with the real human problems that will be with us no matter what tools we use. The social dynamics of our society aren’t things we can out-engineer, nor should we want to try. It is of utmost importance that those of us interested in better tools for a brighter tomorrow need to contend with the real difficulties people are actually facing. If we do not work to “win hearts, and change minds” on important issues like privacy, security, and digital autonomy; nobody will have any sympathy for our concerns.

How many times have freedom-minded people heard:

“It’s hopeless.”

“It’s too late.”

“We won’t make a difference!”

“What’s the point in trying?”

“They won’t let it happen!”

There is a dire need to recognize and reverse the most insidious force working against people’s lives and liberty. It is so oppressive and omnipresent that many feel it is not merely immovable, but a fundamental structure of our reality. The vast majority of things needed to make our digital (and actual) lives better aren’t technological engineering challenges, but rather sophisticated collective action problems. This means that the path to success isn’t dependent on novel breakthroughs in technology but rather in preserving and repairing a frayed social fabric. It is tempting to blame those who wallow in despair, but it is always far more important to ask ourselves why so many are trapped within it.

“Despair is an op[eration], and it’s world wide.”
Catherine Austin Fitts

The most potent weapon of our time is not merely fear, but the calculated mass application of it. When governments and corporations are the most desperate to maintain their stranglehold over the public, we can expect ever increasing resources to be deployed into never-ending mass demoralization. This is because a demoralized individual is compliant, dependent, and unwilling to consider alternatives. The demoralized person is a very profitable mark because they are vulnerable to advertising campaigns and emotionally charged scams. A demoralized public will be entirely unable to push for accountability, justice, or even simple truth, by design. It is vital to understand that rage is not evidence of resisting demoralization, because rage can be directed. If anything, rage is a weakness that leads many to a path of fruitless self-destruction.

Recognizing demoralization

It’s relatively easy to identify demoralization in those who are different than us, but so much harder to find it in our peers and ourselves. When we understand the harms of both targeted and mass demoralization, it is crucial for us to recognize it in our midst. At its root, demoralization is learned helplessness. The constant mutterings of the demoralized is that “it doesn’t matter”. Details, or even the truth itself are irrelevant when one learns that their own contributions to society, or even their own life make no difference. Robbed of dignity and self-determination, people individually and as a whole begin to adapt to their captivity.

These adaptations drive the individual to lose perspective of their situation. Over time it becomes difficult to even remember what life was like before they had to adapt to a countless array of impositions and threats. In losing touch with their own life circumstances, it becomes almost impossible to understand others, especially those who are different. While it is certainly possible for an individual to rise above these challenges, it is a whole other matter to reverse the tide society wide.

Why are people demoralized?

The easily accessible answers are far too oversimplified. While it’s undoubtedly true that modern entertainment technologies and convenient services have taken face-to-face time away from people, “digital disconnects” are only a partial and temporary measure. It is more difficult to wrestle with the idea that mass demoralization of the public is an intended policy outcome for its stabilizing effects. It’s so much easier for corrupt schemes to go along nicely when people are unable to react and respond. Over time, the consequences of this kind of abuse create conditions that perpetuate these circumstances.

Very often, the subjects of demoralization are themselves blamed for their condition. In a world where everyone can recognize omnipresent negative messaging and polarization, this seems to be an uncharitable stretch. Viewed from a far, it is so much easier to identify demoralized people because the problems they are adapting to seem abstract or at least distant. Whereas when we look at ourselves and those around us we are intimately aware of the circumstances that constrain our agency and power. This mismatch is precisely responsible for much of the polarization we see today; different groups of people are demoralized by different but similar circumstances, leading to anger and confusion.

As times get harder, bitterness and resentment settle in. These feelings make it harder to trust and cooperate. This directly attacks people’s ability to work together to achieve things that matter. As people begin to forget that people actually can work together to make a difference, eventually the entire idea begins to sound crazy and impossible. All this creates a suffocating atmosphere of futility and despair. Living in those conditions is no simple thing, one necessarily must cope however they can. Truly recognizing demoralization in oneself and others is often far too terrifying to contemplate.

We’re not exempt

Demoralization isn’t about what you know, or what you have. It’s about what you’re doing. Given the overall depressing atmosphere of the modern digital landscape, it is no surprise that almost everyone shows some signs of demoralization. It’s easy to arrogantly dismiss that we have been corrupted by hopelessness in one way or another simply because we want to believe we’re above it all. What makes despair and apathy corrosive is that they weave themselves into the very social fabric that means no single person can fight it alone, no matter how well-equipped. Do not fall into the trap of assessing yourself as having everything figured out and others being a herd of dull and demoralized masses. In truth, almost all of us are closer than we care to admit.

Yuri bezminov was (hopefully) wrong

While he didn’t invent the term, people often associate the word demoralization with Yuri Bezminov’s lectures. He makes a couple of very strong claims that are entirely counter-productive to overcoming mass demoralization:

Claim: Demoralized people can’t be reasoned with

With the benefit of hindsight, this seems to be a great mindset to isolate oneself from others. This ironically creates more demoralization in the long run. It would be more productive to consider that one has to take more care when trying to persuade others. Any good sales person knows the most important skill on their part is to listen. One has to understand a person’s perspective to begin to change their mind. It’s entirely possible (and quite likely) that those you can’t persuade have concerns and risks you don’t comprehend.

Claim: Demoralization is irreversible

The fundamental point of this piece is that we can and should work to bring others from the brink. It is worth striving to refine our skills, knowledge, and language to build a digital future people want to be a part of. Things are hard, and many people are absolutely struggling with a lot, but there is so much that can be done to make real tangible change. Not immediately, not all at once, and definitely not easily, but it’s absolutely achievable.

Learning to overcome demoralization

Just because it’s outright impossible to single-handedly and unilaterally transform society, this doesn’t mean we can’t make a meaningful difference. With people growing more and more frustrated with our existing digital experience, building gradual improvements seems like a lower and lower bar every day. The most important step is to remind others and ourselves that we don’t need to accept things as they are. We are entitled to a better digital future and we can work together to make it happen. Resisting digital totalitarianism requires a lot of hope, and all the imagination we can come across. It is perfectly within our reach to work to build, and share a culture of good stewardship over our digital lives. We must recognize the opportunity in inspiring ourselves and others to take first steps. With clarity, focused effort, and willingness to cooperate, there is so much that can be accomplished.

No, Humanity Doesn’t Have to Zombie Walk Into a Dystopic Nightmare Future

Growth mindset

The thing holding most people back the most is the understandable desire to change everything all at once. That’s far too impractical for many, so embracing gradual change is a practical necessity. A dozen different projects starting small can avalanche into massive changes over time. Odds are most people can think of a few things they would want changed in their digital life, even the simpler fixes can be quite meaningful.

It’s a lot more important to be willing to learn than to have everything figured out. Nobody is going to change everything all at once, odds are people are going to want different options. Being able to withstand setbacks and experiment can really unlock better opportunities and insights. Building the capacity for people to take risks to try new things out itself is a worthwhile goal.

Embracing win/win cooperation will be the biggest game-changer when it comes to transforming our digital lives. It’s entirely likely that people with radically different visions for a better cyberspace can still share insights, progress, and opportunities. By focusing on shared objectives we can set aside petty fights that derail meaningful improvements.

Learning lessons

Optimism doesn’t mean refusing to admit difficulties. It is natural, and absolutely vital to spend time recognizing the limits and drawbacks of particular techniques and tools. A willingness to take criticism is far more valuable than avoiding it entirely. By being able to maintain honest and open communication, so many embarrassing problems can be avoided. Facing the bleakness of how difficult things are isn’t about diminishing hope, but about refining and informing it. Making strategic decisions can be the difference between playing around and gaining serious ground. It’s almost certain that many techniques have been tried in the past, and that there is useful information to glean from previous attempts. Despite how shiny and new our tools can seem, almost nothing is truly new under the sun.

There’s no extra credit for working alone. Surround yourself with people willing to do what they can. Teamwork makes the dream work as they say. Becoming comfortable working with others to build new things is very much its own reward. Finding ways to share joy despite bleak circumstances is often what will make or break long-term success. Spending time to recharge and celebrate the small wins is critical in maintaining morale and momentum. Appreciating and supporting creative works can go a long way to make things less of a slog. Songs, memes, and silly cartoons are all things that can help get the word out and share perspective.

A better digital future has to be explicitly pro-human and pro-fun. We have a unique opportunity in our time to make things that are truly transformative but also have real soul and care put into them. There are so many ways in which we can revitalize our digital experience with play and creativity rather than tyranny and profit. It has never been easier to make a bigger impact on the future of cyberspace, it is high time we embrace it. There are all kinds of ways one can get involved, but it starts with helping others break free from the worst of it.

Remind yourself that your enemies aren’t those with different technological choices, but rather those who seek to impose theirs on others. Willingness to accept differences and make compromises can absolutely yield promising results with proper boundaries. Even relatively small projects can do a lot of good. A simple forum, small online community, or even a simple tool can be part of a bigger picture to help people gain a much better digital experience. Instead of surrendering cyberspace to bots and Big Tech, we can proactively create our own things that demonstrate that we can all ask for better.

If the Internet never forgets, how do you want to be remembered?

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The Lie of AI

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 01:25:57 +0000

Tools can be great, but stories are much more powerful. By weaving a fantastic tale you can trap people into wrestling with the wrong questions. It is difficult to disentangle the reality of what machine learning tools actually offer, as opposed to the sci-fi cultism that surrounds “AI” discourse. To make matters wore, efficiency and accelerated progress are mere pretexts for the central management of all economic (and even non-economic) activity under a consolidated technological machine. If the top-down roll-out of AI tools in workplaces were about efficiency and productivity, there would be no need to push so hard to get the workforce to adopt tools. Any truly revolutionary advancements would have workers and entrepreneurs experimenting with or without permission, not under mandate. The imposition of “AI first” policies in government and corporations reeks of a political maneuver, rather than a technological one.

AI Politics

Science fiction offers no shortage of terrifying potential futures at the hand of rogue AI systems. The far more pressing issue for many people is the concern about generative tools like ChatGPT and more sophisticated “agents” eliminating jobs. If these tools were being adopted purely for efficiency and innovation this would be merely a difficult transition in a phase that could potentially leave people better off. The problem is that consolidated infrastructure and information management under centralized control creates additional risks. It seems that the ’efficiency’ that much of theses institutions are after is not productivity, but this technological and economic consolidation. This is conspicuously absent from the public discussion about throwing AI into everything.

Generally, this line of questioning comes up in regards to equity concerns. If we’re transforming every institution to systematically discriminate, the chosen solution seems to be to merely carve out the most broad categorizations. Unfortunately, the more data provided to the machine, the more innocuous reasons the system can find to discriminate against or target any particular person or group. Even worse, we must ask what are the consequences of creating even more dependence on these corporate platforms. Countries have already begun to recognize digital sovereignty as an important priority. It is high time we heed that warning and recognize that institutions are often much more vulnerable to these problems than we consider.

The stakes are quite high. There are countless initiatives to deeply integrate various “AI tools” into almost every major institution in society. Healthcare, law enforcement, and even education aren’t safe from the long march. Manufacturing and military are no exception as the AI arms race heats up. While workplaces are being disrupted with inane chatbots and AI workflows, the real innovation is in building an all-encompassing ‘algocracy’. The difference between the average person’s direct experience with AI, and how vulnerable they are to its excesses couldn’t be more extreme.

People are already beginning to notice that a reliance on generative AI tools not only builds dependence, but also atrophies the mind. It is intuitively clear that taking the “easy way” undermines one’s ability to properly master their trade or craft. On the other hand, that doesn’t matter at all when the job one is confined to serves no real purpose other than to boost the stock value of AI companies. If the plan is to replace a competent, skilled, and rational workforce with robotic servants, training human talent serves no purpose. This has profound impacts as not only do workers have to worry about AI tools being imposed in their workplaces, but for skills and training to be withheld from them. We can expect more professions to be ‘de-skilled’ and replaced with streamlined AI-friendly gig work.

The two-punch combination of withdrawing opportunities to learn skills, and the expectation that workers self-sacrifice their mental faculties for minimal gains is likely to be devastating to people’s long-term prospects. The true dangers of AI for most people are not magical properties of the technologies themselves, but rather calculated economic warfare waged in the name of their implementation. It has almost nothing to do with the technology itself, but is entirely in the way these controlled platforms are infiltrating society. It is crucial to understand that without the AI mania hype manufacturing a bubble to distort incentives, these tools would be deployed in more rational and productive ways.

The Death of the Web?

Corporate social media has caused a lot of problems, but one of the more subtle ones is the absolute devastation of the Web as a resource for people to create, learn & share together. A world-wide means of direct communication for people in a variety of media formats has truly changed the world. Government censorship and corporate consolidation have drastically impacted the ability for the Web to function for dissent as well as cultural expression and exchange. To make matters worse, the companies training AI models are raising the costs for those trying to share content at all. There aren’t many great solutions to this, it’s really a difficult predicament to manage.

If we are not careful, we could absent-mindedly give AI tools the authority to be the gateway for people’s access to information as a whole. Search engines are in a difficult spot with more people beginning to use chatbots to respond to any and every query. Without direct audience support, it is unlikely that running a web site will be economically viable for much longer. This has profound implications for the future of humanity’s knowledge as a whole. It is ironic in the quest to build tools that could deliver all of humanity’s knowledge to the forefront, we end up putting it in jeopardy.

The Dead Internet Theory isn’t a quirky observation, but a serious problem with devastating consequences. If everyone’s information landscape is entirely polluted by corporations and dictated by governments, genuine dissent and accountability will only become more and more out of reach. The last thing we want is for every level of society to be manipulated by the same forces that have transformed the ‘digital town square’ into a spectacle of self-harm and menticide.

Rising above

Things are absolutely looking staggeringly dire. As people’s opportunities in the real world decline, we can sadly also expect them to evaporate in cyberspace. It is crucial that we recognize that this is a path we can deviate from. If we recognize the manufactured dependence on these systems as the problem and threat that it is there are many alternative actions that can be taken. It is paramount that people get others to understand that we are allowing our civic, social and economic lives to be systematically undermined by not mere technological change, but the weaponization of it.

The situation is far from hopeless. It seems quite likely that the economic engineering of insanity is as fragile as it is potent. You have the power to rationally plan out your future on what’s good for you and those around you. Just because there are overwhelming incentives to ‘go with the flow’, that doesn’t mean that it is, the only path possible. There are thankfully many ways for you to double-down on your humanity. I fully expect our present insanity to sow the seeds for an environment where people begin to respect genuine craftsmanship and care.

The worst thing AI tools can do to you is to deter you from building up your own capabilities. No matter what skills or knowledge you work to acquire and refine, the better you can recognize the truly useful advances in your field or endeavor. While automation and generative AI can be very sexy, it can also leave you with an unpleasant feeling of being unfulfilled. Mastering your own craft, or even learning a variety of practical skills can be its own reward worth cherishing. We may not be able to escape the AI inquisition over our lives, but we can at least create room to retreat from it.

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Practical Paranoia: Navigating A Hostile Digital Landscape

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 05:10:00 +0000

One of the greatest roadblocks to people making real progress in improving our digital experience is apathy. The all too common refrain “they can get anything if they want” ignores the all-too-real reality that “they” can be more than just governments and intelligence agencies. Given our sad state of affairs, they can be smaller and smaller entities as the stakes rise. You would be shocked at what could come your way if you just became enough of a target. To make matters worse, to the worst offenders, everyone is a target. Governments aren’t just interested in spying on you, but seizing more and more control over your entire life. Recognizing the ‘big picture’ of our technological troubles can help us appreciate the long term objectives. It is far too late to merely make a few simple changes to feel ‘safe’.

Privacy invasions are bad, but dependency is arguably worse. Once people are ’locked-in’ to particular tools, they’re vulnerable to future impositions with less ability to change course. The sheer scale of consolidation in our time makes even relatively abstract abuses have immense impact. Subtle propaganda or ‘dark patterns’ can force behavior change in large groups of people. Making the effort to avoid or circumvent these intrusions can be daunting in the best of circumstances. The situation is dire, but is it worth going against the grain?

In today’s digital landscape, even the very idea of privacy appears entirely out of reach. Flexibility and independence is impractical and expensive for the vast majority of people. This is because many of the encroachments that appeared under the guise of convenience have come at significant costs. Many people struggle to recognize the undesirable impacts of tools and services they use, much less devote time to mitigating them. When one becomes aware of these all-pervasive threats, the natural response is to become entirely overwhelmed. It’s a reasonable question to wonder what’s worth one’s effort and what is more pain than peace of mind.

Deciding how far one is willing to go to secure not just privacy, but digital autonomy and censorship resistance will have a lot to do with one’s goals. While I would hope that you’re sympathetic to these aims, it’s certainly a great deal to expect one to make it their top priority. Even worse, in some circumstances like employment, people often have little choice. Those choosing to refuse to adopt the ’latest and greatest’ are often seen as sticklers or ’luddites’ despite there being very valid reasons to have pause. It is crucial to consider the path we’re on and what can be done to navigate in a more productive direction.

A sizable portion of the public has clear ideas of what should be avoided, but a concrete idea of where to go is generally lacking. The Free Software movement has done a great job providing incredible alternatives, but genuinely radical change is required to make an impact for the broader public. Many great strides have been made in public awareness, but actionable steps are often insufficient and/or require significant technical ability. The fight for a better digital future requires a truly independent vision of a better cyberspace that isn’t aiming to put massive demands on the public.

At the very least, we must recognize where things have gone wrong. Beyond merely adapting to every new imposition, strategic choices have to be made. To make real progress one has to accept that this is not an all-or-nothing affair, but it is a war of attrition. Can our greatest and freest minds build something better before everyone is trapped into selling every neuron in their brain? Can we create, build, and share genuine solutions before people are out of options? Do we have the humility to reach out to those behind before they’re trapped in shame and despair?

The broad strokes

Any attempt at narrowing down what’s worth a person’s time is almost definitely going to be contentious and incomplete at best. Each person is going to have more or less available time and resources available to improve their digital experience. It’s easy to blame people for not doing enough, but much harder to consider what steps could be taken to make the right choices more practical. In my opinion, the optimal balance is to be motivated by deliberate decision-making with reasonable expectations, rather than fear.

Simplify

No matter where you wish to draw the line, complexity is bound to cause problems. A disorganized digital life is as problematic as real-world analogues. Cutting back from non-essential accounts/software/systems can go a long way to bring back some peace of mind. Ruthlessly streamlining your digital life can yield time, money and even security benefits. By focusing on tools, systems, and devices that enrich your life, you can avoid the stress of innumerable dead ends. Above all, it is important to remember that we should fiercely exercise our right to refuse various tools, devices and systems while we still can.

Replace the most egregious options

Things are far worse than the “if it’s free, you’re the product” days. If anything, people often pay for the privilege of a user-hostile experience. When things truly can’t be given up, it can sometimes be worth learning a better alternative until you’re ready to make a complete switch. Don’t let purists dissuade you from making small steps to change your digital life, gradual progress is real change. Ultimately, it’s about asking yourself if the product or service is financially incentivized to give a good experience, or simply collect your data. Sometimes, like in the case of social media companies, they also have a vested interest in manipulating you, potentially making the deal much worse.

Fortify your mind

The information landscape is both incredible and tragic, sadly much of it is getting much worse over time. No matter what technological decisions you make, it’s prudent to guard your mind against undue influence. Manipulating minds is big business that scales to incredibly significant power. Being skeptical of information sources, especially those saying what you want to hear is absolutely vital. It’s critical to take time to understand the incentives that your media, news, and entertainment have. It is intuitively clear that entities with the resources to buy the best influence, PR, and advertising are likely not those providing honest value-for-value. Recognize that your trust is an incredibly valuable prize that you should be very judicious with.

Ask others

Odds are, you likely have trusted friends who have already taken many steps to improve their privacy and/or security. Instead of simply following someone’s prescribed plan of what ‘should be done’, it can be incredibly useful to get feedback on how particular things work in practice. It is very easy to put together lists of theoretically good options, but it’s much harder to spend the time properly evaluating then. Learning how various tools or substitutes actually work in practice is much more useful than stressing over perfection.

The Fine details

The best use of your time is to gradually refine your digital habits to work for you. There are crucial areas where you’ll want to start, but pragmatism goes a long way. You’re not going to be able to change everyone else’s habits once you’ve decided what works for you. Flexibility and compromise are necessary parts of adapting to the world as it is.

Digital sovereignty

Reclaiming control over your work, ideas, memories, and files is a great place to start. Prioritizing tools that allow you to work without the internet is a great strategy for long-term resilience. It’s much easier to predict a system you have some control over than a wide variety of online services competing for attention and market-share. If you can’t do anything productive without access to online services, it’s worth wondering how much of your device is wasted computing power.

Offline or offline-first tools go a long way towards allowing you to be productive in a permission-less way. This is an area where Free & Open Source software provides a great deal of abundance. The less dependent you are on online services the less influence corporations and governments inherently have over your processes. By taking action to protect your information and workflows, you’re also building reliable independence.

Communication

Ensuring that your personal communications aren’t being leveraged against you is a pretty critical objective. Why should your sensitive conversations with friends and family be fed into AI algorithms to precisely market or manipulate you? Healthy boundaries are a must-have in a time where companies are rushing to squeeze everything out of you and governments are desperate to suppress dissent. The trouble with improving your communications is that some level of negotiation with others is required. People may have different priorities and ease-of-use is often a very important factor. Communication is definitely an area where choosing the “lesser evil” is a perfectly defensible choice.

OPSEC

Protecting your data is one thing, but protecting data about you is a whole other challenge. Anonymity and pseudonymity are very valuable tools when interacting online. Speaking from experience, using your real name online for a tiny bit more credibility is not worth the many serious downsides. We are in a time where it’s relatively easy for novices to automate cyber-stalking, and there are other severe threats like ‘doxxing’ and ‘swatting’. When people are more polarized than ever, its never been easier for small organized groups to make an example out of a target.

Consider being very careful about what information you share on public platforms, or with services that collect and sell data. So much is already out of your control that what little you can do to protect your identity online is very valuable. Things can seem innocuous and harmful today, but you never know where the winds will blow a decade from now and what makes somebody a ‘fair target’ for harassment and abuse. Fierce insistence on not only your own privacy, but respect for that of others is absolutely paramount moving forward.

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The UN Is Working To Open Source Your Government: For Better Or Worse

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We are in a difficult position when it comes to maintaining our digital liberties. Governments across the world are racing to seize more control over people’s private information and communications. People are beginning to recognize the downsides of moving the “public square” to controlled online platforms. In truth, we are only beginning to grapple with the problems caused by our technological landscape. A great deal can be done, but if we continue to let apathy and defeatism discourage real action, we will end up in very grim circumstances.

It’s certainly possible to withdraw oneself from the most blatant intrusions, but escaping entirely ends up being quite unsustainable. Various workplaces are introducing their own intrusions into people’s digital lives, and many public institutions evaluating “AI tools” with little care for the important details. The public is denied representation in the future of technology. For many, their only voice is to choose one intrusion over another.

With enough effort, collaboration, and time we could forge a better path. While many of the devices we use have become so entrenched in our lives, that doesn’t mean we no longer have the ability to set healthy boundaries. The devices themselves can be redesigned, changed, and improved based off lessons we have learned in recent decades. A healthier digital landscape is very much within reach, we just have to devote our focus and resources to it. If we aren’t proactive in shaping the future of our own technological experience, governments and corporations will speak for us.

Many super-national entities are working towards transforming our digital experience. The United Nations has a concerning initiative that may have far-reaching implications about the future of digital government and open source projects. This isn’t the first initiative of its kind, but a parallel initiative that could very well end up being quite impactful. During the Covid Crisis, The EU launched the Next Generation Internet plan to reshape cyberspace. The plan included leveraging open-source development to truly harness decentralized innovation. While there were many excellent advancements under this initiative, the positives were largely incidental. The EU NGI was motivated by a desire to help European governments protect their digital sovereignty from Big Tech, but not necessarily to protect the digital sovereignty of European citizens. In part, the goal was to transform not only Europe’s digital experience, but also that of the world. While the rhetoric against digital totalitarianism was laudable, in practice it seems that Europe’s stance was in degree and not in principle.

The UN & open source solutions

While it was great to see many great and excellent Free Software projects get funding, it certainly comes at a price. If the EU or any institution directs funds towards open source projects, they can effectively pick winners and losers. Various ‘soft’ mechanisms such as codes of conduct can enforce social and political behaviors. This means that the more investment made into Open Source by Big Tech, governments, or other institutions, the more the ecosystem is made in their image. The stakes of this are quite high. Not only does this mean particular projects can thrive or be broken by political incentives, but so to can individuals seeking to build their skills. To truly build a better digital future we must contend with these forces and find ways to make our own impact.

The greatest challenge posed by the UN’s involvement in Open Source is the mere fact that there are a lot of resources being tapped into. A world-wide network of people to collaborate with on particular projects, and a great deal of mentorship and support. It is quite possible that many communities will be entirely unable to retain technical talent that hasn’t gone to either UN initiatives or Big Tech projects. This is a non-trivial problem to overcome.

Recognizing the significant potential for Open Source to be deployed to accelerate progress on the SDGs, ECOSOC has called for the development of specific proposals for how its power can be best leveraged.

The OSPO for Good event hosted by the United Nations Office of Special Envoy on Technology and the United Nations Office of Information and Communications Technology answers directly to this call by focusing on how OSPOs, which have been instrumental for tapping the value of Open Source in the private sector, can be used also outside of industry, by governments, not for profits, and academia.

Such “OSPOs for Good” have the power to bring the world’s population closer together, both technically through an open and interoperable infrastructure, and socially through the open and culture-spanning communities that maintain the infrastructure through peer-production and collective action.

OSPOs for Good Building & Designing Cooperative Digital Infrastructure

The UN like the EU, recognizes the power of open source collaboration and bottom-up change. It’s highly likely that these initiatives will bear genuinely good fruit, but there will be smaller details to be concerned with. Putting our entire digital future in the hands of the UN, (or some compromise between governments & corporations) is sure to diminish any hopes of having meaningful digital autonomy in the future. It is important to recognize that decentralized innovation is the future, but many forces are competing to seize control of it.

This year at FOSDEM, a European open source conference sponsored by Google and other big companies, there was a presentation made by representatives from the Digital Public Goods Alliance. The presentation outlines how open source initiatives are driving various UN sustainable development goals. The DPGA has received funding from various governments, the Gates Foundation, and many more notable members like USAID. They even include an interesting registry mapping projects to particular SDGs.

Digital Public Goods & SDGs

Just as many great things came out of the EU NGI, it’s important not to take an all-or-nothing approach. Digital public goods can definitely be a fantastic mechanism to build a freer cyberspace, but the devil is always in the details. Recognizing the potential of actual digital public goods is not necessarily the same as elevating the DPGA’s definition. The Digital Public Goods Alliance has its own standard for what meets their definition of a digital public good. The standard includes 9 ‘indicators’ of something meeting the criteria. Indicators 4,5,8 are great things relating to what is worth striving for, but indicators 1 & 8 are where things get messy.

#1 is the primary concern. The DPGA has explicit political goals for open source projects that aim to meet the standard. While the goals themselves may seem desirable, the devil is often in the details. For example, what content preferences can we expect from a project aimed at advancing education? Given the UN’s preference for censorship of what is deemed misinformation, we can expect any ‘digital public good’ that meets the standard to be also hostile to unpopular or inconvenient (but possibly true) information. In #8 the standard also includes a requirement for the project to “Do No Harm by Design”. Knowing the UN’s heavy-handed approach to sensitive issues, there is no reason to expect this standard would be enforced fairly or consistently, especially world-wide.

Given that we know the UN is not the ideal steward for the future of open source, how should we react? Is the plan to merely avoid anything labeled a ‘digital public good’ and fall prey to corporate schemes instead? Big Tech is just as, if not more willing to take control over our digital future if we don’t reassert our own vision. Privacy, censorship resistance, elegance and efficiently can all be things we expect out of our own tools. A great deal can and should be done to help people reclaim their digital autonomy with a flexible but informed approach.

Notable Examples

The DPGA recognizes various projects and systems, some you may even be aware of already. When one browses the registry it’s clear that this is a large collection of tools for helping nations secure some form of digital sovereignty. While this can overlap with individuals and communities reclaiming their digital autonomy, it doesn’t always. Some genuinely useful (or otherwise harmless) projects are included within the registry, but others with more explicitly agenda-driven motivations are too. Browsing the software section reveals a variety of technical tools with health & climate monitoring dashboards.

Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater!

In discussions about digital tools, people are incredibly quick to take an all-or-nothing approach. Just because we understand influences in the open source community, doesn’t mean that “open source is compromised”. By its own definition open source is decentralized innovation. Institutions like the EU and the UN are correctly recognizing its potential to make radical and dramatic change quickly. It is crucial that we recognize the very same potential and actualize it ourselves.

One can expect many excellent and worthwhile software and systems being recognized by the DPGA. For the moment, those under threat of digital totalitarianism have to make the best with what is available, or they can produce themselves. Expecting perfection is a non-starter in an environment where people have to make difficult decisions with available resources. It’s quite possible that many UN sanctioned Digital Public Goods are worth considering for particular purposes.

In fact, those interested in forging a truly independent digital landscape should consider what has been done by the EU and the DPGA. Learning from not only the featured projects, but also the plan itself. There are many crucial details that those interested in building real “freedom tech” need to understand before even beginning to build their own solutions. Until such a time where we can expect independent communities and freedom-loving people world wide to build up their own technological innovation potential, there will always be catching up to do.

Digital Freedom Goods

A good place to start would be defining a set of objective and testable criteria for what real freedom tools would be like. We can expect them to align with Free Software & Hardware goals, but there are many other things worth considering. We are at such a critical point because there is still a great deal of time to make real changes. We can gain a lot from taking the time to peer back through existing experiments and lessons learned over the years. There are useful projects that show promise, and useful techniques worth replicating.

It is important to make the distinction between tools that give governments more digital sovereignty, as opposed to tools that can build a better digital landscape for all of us. There will be systems and tools with overlapping purposes, but others could be irrelevant or entirely at odds with personal digital sovereignty. It is critical that those liberty-minded individuals among us spend time putting together a vision of an efficient but ultimately healthy digital landscape. With enough people united under this vision, people would have something to flock to instead of Big Tech corporations or government-sponsored tech.

While many do build great things on their own, they’re often without much support. It is on us to discover, share, and support useful freedom tools so long as they are genuinely useful. It’s long past time to stop falling for marketing hype and start focusing on building up truly independent paths forward. Governments and corporations have very clear ideas about what direction we will be heading in, it’s time we work towards building our own vision.

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Teachable Moment: Memecoin Mayhem

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Javier Milei, Argentina’s “libertarian” resident promoted a memecoin ‘Libra’. The project’s website, which Milei linked to, claimed that the project was “created with a clear mission: to boost the Argentine economy by funding small projects and local businesses, supporting those who seek to grow their ventures and contribute to the country’s development.” While this certainly sounds laudable, the game was rigged from the start.

It turns out that shortly after hitting a lot of quick attention, the price quickly dropped 89%. Javier Milei even deleted his tweet supporting the project. This controversial launch, featured things that look like a pretty typical pump and dump scheme. This whole incident is noteworthy because of how much memecoin shenanigans are tolerated in politics and activist circles. Even president Trump has his own official memecoin. It’s worth asking ourselves, is this the behavior we want to see from our ‘allies’?

Coffeezilla interview highlights

Coffeezilla does fantastic work. I’m a huge fan of his reporting. Coffeezilla managed to get Hayden Davis, one of the creators of the Libra memecoin to talk about the incident. If you haven’t given much thought to the memecoin hype, this is very much worth your time. Coffeezilla manages to get some quite detailed and shocking admissions from Hayden. It’s worth expanding on some of the small details of the conversation to get a better picture of the memecoin schemes. You can also watch Coffeezilla’s follow-up video here.

The reality distortion field

The most fascinating part of this interview is listening to someone from a particularly strong reality distortion field. Much of what Hayden says shocks Coffeezilla, and likely much of the public as well. When one is surrounded by people with particular strong preferences and beliefs it becomes difficult to question the atmosphere we are in. It is a great reminder to question our own assumptions about many things, even where there may even be consensus.

As an outsider, it’s very clear that Hayden is surrounded by people who claim to believe that while these memecoins often end up as naked rug-pull scams, there is surely a bright future for ‘social finance’. His attitude is nakedly nihilistic about these schemes because of corruption throughout the rest of society. Going so far as to argue “but then how else can we make money?” as if to say that profitable returns are the only meaningful indicator of productive economic activity. It’s understandable to be cynical about the bigger picture, but at what point do we take responsibility for our own actions?

This reality distortion field is itself troubling to contemplate. That many bright, entrepreneurial people are being given a strong signal that fraud is a good and productive use of their talents. In the interview, Hayden explicitly makes the case that the entire cryptocurrency industry, or even the economy at large is fundamentally no different. Even if one accepts this premise, it’s not difficult to make the case that there are wildly varying degrees to which this is true in particular places. The nihilistic refusal to make these distinctions seems to be a fundamental pillar of this reality distortion field. While it’s certainly true that neither Hayden or I will change all this, there’s something tragically dim about giving in to these forces. Is this truly the best we can hope for? I beg to differ.

Sniping

Much of the conversation revolves around discussion of ‘sniping’ the memecoin supply. This is when people will quickly buy up a sizable chunk of the memecoin supply before it’s even announced. For example, between when the Libra smart contract was deployed, and when Javier Milei tweeted about it. This gives the ‘snipers’ an extraordinary advantage over all the people who find out about the memecoin later.

If this activity was purely organic, it would be easier to defend the behavior. It gets worse when behaviors like insider trading gets involved. It’s one thing to buy up a memecoin quickly because you think the name has potential, it’s a whole different world when you know in advance it’s going to be promoted by big names. Given the way these launches are structured, it’s guaranteed that there will be some with access to information that can be used to get massive returns at the expense of the rest.

To take things to a whole new level, in the interview the co-creator of Libra explains that those launching their own memecoin feel a need to snipe their own tokens. Not only was it done in this case, he argues that this is common practice in the space. This makes an already quite predatory arrangement even more slanted. Not only are the ‘outsiders’ competing with those who specialize in sniping memecoins, inside traders, but also the creators themselves. By having a large control of the token supply, the creators and insiders can directly manipulate the price of these assets with very little transparency.

Insider perks

In addition to all the other issues related to the Libra launch, Dave Portnoy was offered a substantial amount of tokens to hype the project. David claims that after being told he was not to disclose this, that he returned the tokens. It just so happens that this very favorable exchange happens after the tokens had already crashed in value.

One insider who had lost about $5.34 million on LIBRA was compensated $5 million.

This insider, none other than Barstool founder David Portnoy, had spent 29,000 SOL worth $5.77 million on LIBRA tokens roughly 9 minutes after it launched at $2.51 per coin but quickly lost over $5 million as the token crashed amid speculation of foul play and as President Milei pulled his support, Lookonchain analysis showed on Monday, February 17.

After the loss, however, Portnoy was sent 5 million USDC in two tranches of 4.5 million USDC and 500,000 USDC. He also dumped his remaining LIBRA holdings after receiving this compensation.

How LIBRA Token Creator Compensated Dave Portnoy While Others Hold the Bag

Unlike other bag holders, David was given the opportunity to be made whole. The very fact that this was done demonstrates the nature of these memecoin schemes. There are many losers and a few winners by design. It’s worth considering how memecoins exemplify cryptocurrency at its worst, and what incentives they create for content creators. Despite a great deal of rhetoric about eliminating central banks, it’s troubling to see many trends all converge on the mere privatization and digitization of central banking.

Opposing the grift industrial complex

How memecoins work:

To put the interview in perspective, it’s worth contemplating the scheme from start to finish.

People get together to plan to launch a cryptocurrency asset
Deals are made, to get investment and buy off influencers
Branding and marketing is put together, then the token is launched
Word gets out, project creators, insiders and skilled traders leap on the opportunity to secure large amounts of the token
The influencers and figures promote the token to the masses
Enticed by a rising price, the captive audience flocks in and buys the overpriced collectibles
Large holders dump the token absorbing a majority of the funds put in by wider public

It does not matter if the price tanks immediately, or after some time, the scheme is the same. All the buyers of the token are effectively a commodity being sold to investors by leveraging their parasocial connections. As was brought up in the interview, people you follow ("key opinion leaders"/KOLs) have many opportunities to exchange your trust for financial gain. Sponsorships absolutely have their problems, so it is on you to judge your sources of information based on what they market to you.

Memecoins are far from the only way this happens, it’s just one of the more blatant iterations of it. It is an instructive example of what kinds of behavior are indicative of mass manipulation. Looking at the bigger picture, we can consider how predatory modern social media is. Centralized platforms like Big Tech and Alt-Tech all have the ability to pick winners and losers. As the selected winners grow large audiences, they then have the opportunity to make substantial amounts off promoting various products and schemes to them. It’s worth asking how ‘independent’ many of these voices can be when they are beholden to not only the platforms they choose, but also the partnerships that fund their operation. If we truly want to build up independent voices in the public discussion, we have to support them. Payment processors notwithstanding, it’s often just as easy to directly support great investigative work as buy a memecoin.

We can do better

I would encourage you to adopt high standards. Not just in the voices you let influence your thinking, but also for platforms and what your wider community tolerates. There is definitely a limit to how effective your activism or cause can be if you permit your constituents to be fleeced by frauds and needless time-sinks. There is a great deal you can do to uplift truly independent voices, sharing great works directly with others is much more revolutionary than jumping to the “next great platform”. If we want a meritocracy in public discourse, it’s up to all of us to be the stewards of it.

Above all, it’s important to consider how many social and political phenomenons are primarily driven by the desire to emotionally manipulate audiences to put them into a ‘marketable’ mindset. We all have buttons that can be pressed to raise fear, urgency, or insecurity. Recognizing that social media manipulation builds real fortunes can help put the need to disentangle from these machinations into perspective. It’s largely a matter of judgement: do you want to put your efforts towards supporting the most sleek and popular leaders, or would you rather discover and share genuine insight that others need?

No matter how sophisticated our digital prison becomes, never forget that we have the ability to shape the future together. You would be genuinely surprised at how effective even the smallest of steps can be. Diverting your attention away from hype and instead turning it towards what you can do to make a difference on the small scale will yield fantastic results over time. There are many ways to make a difference, don’t let clever marketing trick you into thinking a purchase is the first step.

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Can we save free speech online? Yes, if we build it!

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

What would it be like to build something as radical as the printing press or the Internet today? Many of us take for granted that the World Wide Web already is the pinnacle of this achievement. We then erroneously assume that any improvement must be out of reach for us mere mortals. The good news is that there already is a blueprint for radically transforming the Web. This is no pie-in-the-sky fantasy. I will share the fundamentals of how to forge a path for a better cyberspace.

It is tragic that for many, the World Wide Web is entirely confined to a few social media sites and mainstream publications. There are many tools one could build to reshape our online experience, but there’s a single one that can change this dynamic entirely: a Content Management System. Yep, CMS tools are things that truly don’t get enough attention when it comes to building a better cyberspace.

What is a Content Management System (CMS)?

A Content Management System is the service that runs many functions for a website. It generally interfaces with a database and provides tools for non-technical users to configure and run the site. Without a content management system, one has to write every web part of their site “by hand”, or with the help of a static site generator. The CMS is the lifeblood of a website that effectively defines what features and functionality is possible. If one wants to have a dramatic impact on the future of the Web, building a great CMS is likely one of the best ways to do it.

Novel features can be designed to build a CMS that not only transforms cyberspace, but also makes it more resilient to censorship. There is a great deal of ’low-hanging fruit’ ripe for taking on many present challenges head-on. Building a truly transformative CMS is no small task, but the potential upside is immense.

WordPress: A proven record for decentralizing cyberspace

The History of WordPress is its own long story. WordPress is a very ubiquitous CMS that powers over 43% of the World Wide Web. There’s an entire industry around themes, plug-ins, and support as well as education. As a software project and community, WordPress is wildly successful. Thanks to its plug-in system, it’s hard to think of anything that can’t be done with it.

It certainly didn’t start out dominating the Web. WordPress was one of many open-source blogging platforms. Its flexibility and relatively high usability gave it real staying power. It’s a shining example of how much wealth can be made off building a fundamental public good. One doesn’t need to pay to use WordPress, merely install it and run it like any other Free and Open Source Software. Part of this permissiveness allowed it to be packaged by hosting providers even further lower the barrier to entry.

By its mere existence, WordPress has given many people the opportunity to participate in Cyberspace that otherwise might not have been able to. Its relatively accessible features and adaptability are what allowed a simple open source project to dominate the entire Web. If you’re somebody who does manage to move their attention beyond social media sites, odds are many of the sites you visit are running WordPress.

No matter how “big” WordPress is, it’s still a very useful tool for decentralizing the Web. It supports RSS out of the box, and even has a fediverse plug-in. Despite being over 20 years old, WordPress is still pushing boundaries and innovating. Practically everything you want to do with a web site can be built with WordPress, and if it can’t you can always build new themes and plug-ins to support it.

This isn’t to say WordPress is perfect. No software project ever fully breaks free from the assumptions it was built on. There are new innovations worth fully embracing from a fresh start. The greatest advantage a new competitor can offer is simplicity. WordPress itself can do anything, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to pull off. There are many competitors to WordPress, some open source as well, others fully proprietary. If one wants to radically transform cyberspace for the better, learning from WordPress’ example is a the place to start.

Can we do better?

Building a new CMS to forge a new Cyberspace is no small feat. If we truly want others to participate in a free and open web, we must ensure that the tools to do so are accessible and intuitive. It will take a fair bit of investment, lots of work, but it’s likely the best place to start. There are many great examples to learn from, and many new innovations to embrace. Building a configurable, user-friendly, pro-decentralization CMS is certainly an achievable goal to strive for.

Personally, I took a look at Ghost which is a newer CMS that also took a stab at decentralized social media. Ghost is trying to leverage itself to take on the independent creator economy, and includes payments as a first-class feature. The trouble is, I don’t believe payment features and a bolted-on social layer are quite enough to truly adapt to present-day troubles.

The beauty of a first-class free and open source CMS is that it can solve many problems at once. Once those problems are solved, others can then leverage those solutions. This is the mechanism that allows a truly revolutionary tool to actually reshape cyberspace.

Building the best: The ‘perfect’ CMS

If you’d like to hire a CTO to build a free software revolution in cyberspace my contact details can be found here.

😅 I’m (mostly) kidding. I plan to freely share the secret sauce here since I am currently unable to build such a tool on my own. I have some smaller projects in mind for this year, so I’ll be pleased if people beat me to it.

Aim high

Imagine a radically better cyberspace, and build the tool that people would actually use in that reality. Recognize that for every person, business, or group a “website” can be all kinds of very different things. Come up with as many different “use cases” for your software and hone those insights into requirements for a truly flexible platform. This defined flexibility will guide the construction of a truly revolutionary tool.

Despite what the defeatists will tell you, there’s a bright future in building real solutions to present-day problems. The endeavor itself will make anyone involved a powerful force for shaping cyberspace in a better direction. Armed with an ambitious goal, some diligent testing and experimentation, programmers can become a real force to reckon with.

Security

A fundamental pillar of this project has to be strong security. As a tool for even the technical novice, it must not create opportunity for costly mistakes. Recognizing that this system may be operating in hostile cyberspace, it’s crucial that security is at the foundation of every decision. One way to enable decentralization without compromising on security would be a layered module approach.

Instead of giving every plug-in or custom module access to everything, modules should have defined roles and be granted only what is necessary to fulfill those roles. A custom theme shouldn’t need direct access to your database, and a new video player shouldn’t need to connect to remote sites. Strong authentication will be needed to protect users and resources. Adopting the latest and greatest in security practices will yield great results moving forward. The plan from the beginning should be to be adaptable to future security upgrades.

Decentralization

A great deal of software today is written to build a monopoly around. Instead, there is an opportunity to build a truly revolutionary tool. Building a CMS with censorship resistance from the ground up can be a powerful advantage. Instead of “reinventing the wheel” the system can gracefully connect with existing censorship resistance technologies. By defining alternative transports, the entire idea of “the Web” can be broadened further beyond what it is today.

There are many alternative transport mechanisms for websites. Some people use the “dark web” with Tor & I2P, but there are even more options. Veilid and Reticulum are both fascinating new ideas for revolutionizing cyberspace. For all the reasons existing content management systems are adopting federated social plug-ins, it makes sense to build this kind of decentralized social layer directly into the software. Mitra supports cross-federation over the web and darknets alike.

By designing the system with decentralization in mind, there must be a concept of a “remote user”. Recognizing that somebody commenting on, or engaging with your site must be able to define their own profile on their own systems. There are ways to leverage decentralization for better content as well. PeerTube uses decentralized technologies to enable peer-to-peer streaming. RSS and Podcasting 2.0 should be first-class features of the CMS.

Beyond this, it should be a goal of the system to provide the capability to help guests & contributors migrate their work to their own platform. Many fascinating systems could be built to allow multiple publications to collaborate over the open web. With this in place, people could gradually move from being guest contributors to eventually having their own body of work on their own platform as they learn.

Modularity

The CMS should be designed to open as many doors as possible without drowning the user in abstract decisions. Instead, it should be designed to have an opinionated approach to things to serve the user. Learning from WordPress’s modularity is important, but that flexibility needs to be harnessed properly. A great many things that can be done with plug-ins should be able to be done with the software itself.

With a strong baseline set of features, and defined modularity, the CMS can be in an excellent position to adapt and grow over time. Modules that users don’t want or need can be disabled. When beginning to use the software, basic questions can be asked about what they would like to begin with various “profiles” of pre-set defaults.

Efficiency

Above all, the tool should work for the user. There are many solved problems that are unnecessary to make the user toil with. Properly converting and sizing media, transcribing audio & video are all things that can be easily done automatically today. Focus on assisting the user do what they want to, rather than making them fight the CMS to get basic things done. Performance is another critical objective. A great deal can be done to optimize for speed without the expense of quality. Being blazing fast at different scales is no small feat. The CMS should be as responsive as possible and find ways to optimize speed without dependency on third-parties.

Accessibility

Administrating the CMS should assume very little technical knowledge. This requires some strong design skills to ensure the software is intuitive as well as powerful. In addition to this, every effort should be made to use progressive enhancement to be adaptable to a wide variety of viewers.

New innovations are a great way to differentiate itself. A companion app could make it easy to publish content on the go. With the proper open protocols, this companion app could make updating one’s own space in cyberspace as easy as posting to social media.

Can we build it?

It would certainly require a great deal of work, but the opportunity is there. This is likely outside the scope of a single person, and would need a broader team or community to turn into a reality. Difficult is a far cry from impossible. It’s worth remembering that online free expression can be safeguarded by deliberate innovation if we put our minds to it. Instead of falling for the next big platform that promises to be better, we can truly build a foundation for a better outcome.

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How to REALLY Resist Digital ID – #SolutionsWatch

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It was an honor and privilege to join James Corbett for #SolutionsWatch to discuss Digital ID and how we can (or can’t) stop it. James Corbett is a legend and a great inspiration to this project. I would highly recommend you check out more of his work at the Corbett Report.

Show notes and comments on the Corbett Report
Since I’m a Corbett Report subscriber I’ll be engaging there as well!

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Reminder: Big Tech sucks no matter who is in charge

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Animal Farm: The digital pen

The power and profit from manipulating masses of menticided people is not to be underestimated. Nations across the world are considering it as part of their ‘digital sovereignty’. The people, are not as dull as social engineers would hope, and are beginning to turn away from the most egregious abuses. This is impacting growth & engagement figures, and also impacts their ability to collect more data for artificial intelligence. Despite years of troubling decisions, these companies are now beginning realize they need actual people on their sites. The most overt sign would be Mark Zuckerberg’s interview on Joe Rogan, but this is no isolated incident. There has been a long trend of people beginning to recognize how abusive social media giants can be. The industry even has a cute term for it ’techlash’.
The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation describes it as:

“New technologies and the tech companies that provide them are accused of fueling a myriad of economic and societal problems—from destroying individual privacy to amplifying biases, destroying jobs, and snuffing out competition.

Techlash 2025: The Outlook for Tech Policy in the Trump Administration

Of course, the ITIF argues that these are myths and exaggerations, but despite their damage control, it matches people’s lived experiences. The problems created by corporate consolidation of cyberspace will manifest no matter which company the public flocks to. Even worse, these problems become normalized, making the intrusions feel acceptable. The answer is not new platforms, but new paradigms. There is a great deal of potential already being demonstrated in the decentralized social media networks such as Nostr and the Fediverse. It’s important to remember if you just want information, RSS still can’t be beat! By truly committing ourselves to a better digital future, the road ahead becomes much more clear.

Zuckerberg cooling marks

Zuckerberg’s interview on Joe Rogan is a great introduction to the concept of cooling the mark. Skilled con artists have recognized that many people are smart enough to decipher schemes as they happen. This creates a problem where those who recognize the fraud or abuse end up willing to do something about it. Instead the scammer has to spend time consoling the victim. By arguing that the scheme was not only not a problem, the con artist can slip in that it was actually good for the victim.

As such, Zuckerberg is outright saying out loud what many had seen first-hand, but never seen addressed for years. Many commenting on the interview have been attempting to create a mark-cooling narrative that lessons have been learned and that mistakes will be corrected in the future. This presumes that Meta’s actions during the Covid Crisis, or other political events were not intended from the beginning. By re-contextualizing the overreaches of the last years, not only is history re-written but actual important lessons are buried. Even worse, by reframing reality with the same assumptions the problem was created with, the groundwork for future offenses is being laid.

One of the questions people have to ask themselves is “Why the sudden pivot on censorship?”. Failing to consider this is to fall into the same trap of not asking why specific overt measures were put into place at the start. No serious individual can truly swallow the idea that governments and corporations are only now seeing the error of their ways. In fact, the Streisand Effect has been well understood for two decades. Instead of naively chalking it all up to ignorance, one needs to consider a more sophisticated game of mindwar.

All strong emotions are prone to being weaponized. By putting people in a situation where they are desperate you can leverage their dissatisfaction to run all kinds of cons and schemes. It is my perspective, that what many experienced as ‘The Culture War’ was a carefully crafted psychological event. In hindsight, it is clear that many people with a variety of concerns had their voices silenced in an orchestrated and coordinated fashion. It is too easy to presume that the eventual state of having to “tone down” the overt manipulation wasn’t known from the beginning. That limited window would be a very valuable opportunity to discover what techniques are able to manufacture consent without as much resistance.

Speech not reach

Elon Musk notably announced a new standard of “Freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach”. There are natural barriers that make widespread information dissemination difficult, but modern-day social media companies are artificial structures. They have two major functions: attracting people to consume content, then selling their information and attention to others. Selling attention shifts incentives on the platform, prioritizing that which is profitable to promote. This means that there is a specific reason for every dominating narrative.

People often mistake social media platforms for a level playing field. Truly ‘organic’ discovery and growth is something that can only be possible in a radically different environment. This is something that already exists in some form on the open web. Outside of these consolidated platforms, nobody is funneled to spend time on specific sites over others. Your web browser gives you access to the limitless potential of the entire world wide web. There are still barriers, but they are somewhat limited to what is inherent to the technology, rather than having artificial gate-keeping organizations. The way to actually ‘fix’ online free expression is to create a ‘web browser for social’. People need a tool that allows them to communicate in an interoperable permission-less way. If you’ve been following the Fediverse, you would know that there are exciting things on this front already.

Platform Migration

Just prior to the United states banning Tiktok, many people have flocked to another social media app ‘Rednote’. This strategy is highly unlikely to be effective. Even if the community successfully migrates in significant numbers, countries all over the world are building the technological capacity to segregate themselves from ‘foreign influence’. Digital ‘sovereignty’ for your government, but at your expense. Switching from platform-to-platform will never be sufficient to actually resolve these problems.

The fact of the matter is that almost every social media app is going to be a spying nightmare. Nit-picking a particular one can be missing the point. No matter what platforms you’re on you should consider sticking to the web version, rather than the apps. It’s worth thinking about how every bit of data you provide these platforms can be leveraged by governments and other partners against you.

It is vital now more than ever that people and communities begin to consider how to build up their own independent digital infrastructure. Without doing this, people will always be subjects of the whims of governments and corporations alike. It is incredibly ironic that localizing the Internet will also have significant advantages to combating world-wide censorship. With a truly sovereign community infrastructure, it is much harder for outside forces to prevent messages from reaching it. As more and more people worldwide rebuild cyberspace from the ground up, you would be surprised how much better the web could be.

Turning away from the trough of menticide

It is high time we reject Big Tech for what it is rather than who’s in charge of it. In hindsight, it is clear to see that social media giants were specifically designed as public control systems. One has to understand that every corporate (or state-run) social media platform is its own rigged game, with varying degrees of fairness. Continuing to migrate to the most perceived ‘free’ option merely entrenches the mechanism itself: the commodification of parasocial interactions. What’s worse than profit off destroying minds is the real power that can be gained by manipulating those minds.

‘Slop’ and ‘brainrot’ are both terms to describe content with little informational value maximized for social media metrics. On any platform designed to capture one’s attention, these addictive and demeaning forms of content will proliferate widely. If you’re not used to listening to those with different perspectives than you, it’s going to be very hard to identify what percentage of your feed is pure slop. The brainrot is the long-term effects of not proactively managing your attention, and merely ‘doomscrolling’ until your dopamine centers can’t respond anymore. The truth is, liberating yourself from these machinations still leaves many others trapped in it. Many are justifiably concerned about the effects of these platforms and want to either push for reform or outright ban these platforms.

Banning particular platforms will only mitigate the most egregious examples. The better option is to build ‘digital town square’ on a foundation that doesn’t foster these problems. This is not about just slapping a web3 token on top of social media, but truly understanding what participation in the Free and Open Web means. Big Tech CEOs, including Mark Zuckerberg have repeated over and over again that reducing online harms at scale is impossible, so we need to stop pretending that they’re going to miraculously figure it out. We are responsible for our participation online, and it requires us to consider what models we empower with it.

Anti-slop protocols

It’s clear that many people are going to continue to use mainstream social media, often without exploring the decentralized alternatives. This is a shame, but it’s at least a situation that can be mitigated. Taking the time to protect yourself from ‘slop’ will go a long way to reduce social media’s impact on you. It’s a bit of effort and might even be controversial, but you may find these techniques effective.

Keep your purpose in mind

Don’t visit a social media site to merely gaze at what the algorithm decides for you, remember what you actually want out of visiting in the first place.
Use the web version, rather than the app

This is a great way to keep you from being distracted by notifications and also reduces the information the platform can learn from you.
Organize people you find insightful into lists

This is massively better than just waiting for their updates to be put into your feed.
Make use of mute feature

Sometimes you can mute words as well! It can be helpful when a big story is getting too much attention to simply ignore posts where that phrase is used.

It’s also a great idea to mute accounts that specialize in slop or otherwise inflammatory content.
Engage Judiciously

Leaving a ’like’ can feel like such a small thing, but the algorithms tend to take it quite seriously. Your engagement is largely what drives your experience so make sure you’re being deliberate.
Don’t respond to a post with massive engagement

If a hundred thousand people have already liked the post, and there are thousands of comments, reconsider the benefit in adding yours to the pile. If you want to respond to an overall conversation, it’s better to take the time to write your own long-form post about the discussion.
Ignore anyone too big

Any massively public figure inherently has to maximize for the lowest common denominator. Consider finding accounts that others may not be aware of that have real merit. “Too big” can be a judgement call. My own metric is if your IRL contacts have heard of them, that’s way past the ’too big’ scale.
Prioritize length

This signal is a bit noisy since people can use chatGPT to generate large amounts of text, but it still holds relatively well. If someone is willing to take the time to frame their argument well, it’s often more worth considering than a simple one-line reaction.
Resist the urge to stay current

It’s only natural to want to be on top of breaking issues. On the other hand, unless you’re personally involved, fact finding takes time. There is a great deal of noise that can be added by good-faith speculation and outright shameless attempts to capitalize on breaking news. Prioritizing which events are worth understanding in detail can definitely go a long way.

These are of course, suggestions and aspirations. Feel free to take on what you think can help you stay focused and discard the ones that aren’t desirable or even supported on your platform of choice. The most important thing is to be deliberate about what you’re doing and not let platforms themselves dictate your participation. Of course, like many other things this is easier said than done.

For those with spare time, resources, and creativity at hand, it may be seriously worth considering creating your own platforms. The Internet may be dead, but we can salvage the Free and Open Web by doubling-down on building it ourselves. While having your own website may not bring in huge amounts of views, you would be surprised at the quality feedback you get with quality contributions. Consider what you would like to see the digital town square look like, and what you can do to build that future.

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Digital Autonomy & Fitness with Zachary Boissinot

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I would like to introduce you to Zachary Boissinot. A great Canadian who is passionate about health and people’s autonomy. I joined Zach to discuss what it’s been like for him a personal trainer and owner of a gym. Recently I’ve begun to make progress on my own weight loss journey thanks in big part to his instruction. We touch on some of the recent challenges people are facing, as well as potential concerns of how health data can be misused. I hope you’ll find our conversation worth diving into.

The Digital Autonomy Series is where I try to have conversations to ‘bridge the gap’ between technical minds and the real concerns people have in their daily lives. The goal is to build some understanding of the pressing issues related to how our digital experience impacts different domains of life. By learning from others with a solid understanding in one of those areas, we can begin to imagine how a better digital future would actually work.

Zachary runs A Foot Above Fitness a gym with an excellent community and it’s a pleasure to be a part of it. There’s something uniquely inspiring about a community of people being so forthcoming with kindness and encouragement. Even if you’re not local, there’s a lot that can be learned from his example. You can also get connected through either Facebook or Instagram.

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The Zano Conspiracy: Hijacking Privacy

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last December, Roger Ver appeared on the Tucker Carlson show. Taking the time to outline his history as an old Bitcoin fan, and staunch economic freedom advocate. He raised his concerns about how Bitcoin was ‘hijacked’ by nefarious forces to neuter its utility as anything other than ‘digital gold’. Roger’s take on Bitcoin’s flaws are incredibly compelling, partly because it is backed by some real history. I raised many similar concerns when I spoke with Mathew Crawford and Hrvoje on Geopolitics & Empire. It is concerning however, to see this Bitcoin ’limited hangout’ used to promote a very suspect cryptocurrency.

Roger is currently being prosecuted for tax evasion, despite renouncing his citizenship and “becoming a citizen of the world”. He believes this is a politically motivated prosecution. In her interview with the co-author of Roger Ver’s book ‘Hijacking Bitcoin’, Catherine Austin Fitts points out that how Roger is being prosecuted is highly irregular. The public petition in his name has currently reached over 18 thousand signatures. The petition has been signed by notable names like Tucker Carlson, Bret Weinstein, Jeffrey Tucker, Aaron Day with many others.

In his conversation with Tucker, Roger Ver argues that the only way to preserve financial privacy and autonomy is for humanity to adopt cryptocurrency, but specifically private ones. This is because while there are many cryptocurrencies, many of them are perfectly transparent. This creates privacy concerns. While private cryptocurrencies are absolutely worth exploring, Roger Ver has a few specific solutions in mind. Leveraging the fear of state abuse via central bank digital currencies, he argues we need to rush into more cryptocurrency projects. Saying he would be embarrassed to promote Bitcoin today, but he explicitly promoted two other cryptocurrencies Monero & Zano. I had already been familiar with Monero which I consider one of the few decent cryptocurrencies, but I had never heard of Zano. What I found looking into Zano I found highly troubling.

I am choosing to highlight Zano for two reasons:

Some quite prominent figures vocal about decentralization and privacy have promoted it.
It’s exemplary of what one should avoid if they are to consider cryptocurrency at all.

After spending a significant amount of time digging, and comparing notes with others even more knowledgeable than me, my mind is made up. I am strongly convinced that there is something nefarious in the promotion of Zano.

What’s wrong with Zano?

Zano is a cryptocurrency that has a great deal of red flags. These particular red flags put it in the same league as many failed projects and outright frauds. In many ways, it is an excellent example of how predatory the cryptocurrency market can be. Even people who may be familiar with Bitcoin itself, may not truly be able to appreciate the significant differences between it and other cryptocurrencies. There are many fundamental differences to these digital assets that can have a profound impact on how they work, as well as their future.

The liquidity problem

Making a small cryptocurrency popular is no simple task. Bitcoin has had over a decade to gain familiarity and access, but almost every other cryptocurrency has to compete with thousands of others. It is incredibly hard to stand out without at least promising truly innovative features. It’s very straightforward to download the source code of a cryptocurrency, make some trivial changes to function and branding to make a new one. These slight variations are often shameless attempts to ride on the coattails of a more successful project, but also create a “spam” problem for exchanges.

Exchanges are online platforms where people generally buy their cryptocurrency. There are a huge variety of them, and they all have a different selection of cryptocurrencies. Some are naturally more popular than others. When one creates a cryptocurrency, it is not automatically listed on any exchanges, especially not the centralized ones. These exchanges effectively operate as “on-ramps” for people to acquire cryptocurrencies and trade within them.

For smaller cryptocurrencies, this creates a bit of a “chicken and egg problem”. To be listed on an exchange, the coin needs to be sufficiently popular and liquid, but to be sufficiently popular and liquid it needs to be on exchanges. A potential solution to this is DExs (Decentralized Exchanges), but these are generally not as popular among users. This creates many problems, but especially for cryptocurrency investors.

The biggest problem when trading a small coin is that you’re effectively at the mercy of the few exchanges it is sold on. Even if you ‘mine’ your own coins, you won’t have many places to sell. What’s worse, is that all kinds of market manipulation is possible by even relatively small players on obscure coins and exchanges. To make a bold statement, this means that there is no such thing as organic price discovery for coins not widely listed. Prices can wildly vary between smaller exchanges. All of this together gives larger holders of smaller coins very powerful economic influence over the ecosystem. Specifically in the case of Zano, over 85% of its known daily trading volume (at the time of writing) takes place in a single exchange. Yet even at the most popular exchange Zano isn’t very liquid.

Hijacking privacy

The Zano project seems to have a lot of resources to throw around and buy influence. This on its own is a huge red flag for me. It wouldn’t be the first time a nominally ‘decentralized’ project that used its own tokens to buy up positive PR. Odysee/LBRY had a program where they would sponsor creators with a significant amount of LBRY credits to be unlocked after a particular time. This meant that many popular figures had a huge incentive to promote and speak well of the platform no matter what the reality. Many well-known figures, may promote various cryptocurrencies, without being able to properly communicate the massive risks in playing with unproven cryptocurrencies. It’s often the case that many of these personalities themselves may not be able to reasonably tell just how bad a particular asset can be. This is because cryptocurrency projects all have very important details that often get glossed over by people getting excited about rapid price increases.

I am highly suspicious that Zano has effectively “bought its way” into the online discussions it’s featured in. Regardless, the plug in Roger Ver’s Tucker Carlson interview has effectively done this. It’s so easy for somebody enchanted by a beautiful website, rising price, and growing popularity to overlook many glaring signs of trouble. Technical details take time to prove. Software requires testing and validation to truly prove that systems work as intended. It’s incredibly common for catastrophic bugs to come out of nowhere, just ask Crowdstrike. But price rises come a lot faster than technical merit. It’s incredibly easy for a new cryptocurrency to become multiples of its current price on small exchanges before most people even hear of it. This in combination with project creators (and investors) maintaining control over the token supply with a huge pre-mine makes for a very predatory arrangement.

Rigging the game

Zano actually had multiple opportunities for insiders to take significant control over the token supply. The pre-mine allocated nearly 30% of the total token supply to fund the project. This means that as the cryptocurrency launched, a huge share of the total supply was under control of the project team. Some argue that this is a good thing, it gives those working on the project a means of funding development of the project. Unfortunately, this is also a very popular means for outright frauds to run straightforward pump and dump scams. For some cryptocurrencies, they use ‘Proof-of-Stake’ as their consensus algorithm, which makes this circumstance even more dire. Because under a proof-of-stake system large holders have a significant control over the currency itself. In addition to this, large holders can maintain a permanent advantage by receiving profits from staking their large holdings.

While Zano had a very generous premine, that wasn’t the only opportunity for insiders to acquire a large stake of the supply. In a highly unusual move, holders of a different cryptocurrency called Boolberry were able to exchange their tokens for Zano at a 1:1 ratio. In another unusual action, the window to swap tokens was relatively short. Lasting around a month, one can assume that only the most ‘in the know’ holders would have had the opportunity to swap. Large holders of this highly obscure and relatively inexpensive token can potentially have a significant stake in Zano. Since Zano is intended to be a private cryptocurrency, there is no known way to learn how much of the supply is dominated by insiders.

In yet another unique move, Zano uses both Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake. Proof-of-work is where computing power is used to validate the network. Proof-of-Stake instead has holders of the token ’lock up’ some of their funds to participate in exchange for a share of block rewards. Because (like many others) Zano is a relatively new cryptocurrency, its proof-of-work consensus is at risk of being dominated by those with significant computing power. The creator argues that adding proof-of-stake is a means of overcoming this initial weakness. On the other hand, there are other solutions that don’t create immense profit for insiders. A popular solution other cryptocurrencies use is ‘merged mining’ where the cryptocurrency can be ‘mined’ in parallel with other larger coins, encouraging more computing power a lot faster.

A hybrid consensus algorithm is a bold move that may encounter un-intuitive complications. The introduction of Proof-of-stake itself may not have been done for system security reasons, but possibly for profit. The combination of a pre-mine coin and proof-of-stake “pump and dump” is a scam that has gotten very old these days. It’s almost comical. Zano is possibly in the worst of all worlds given that there was a massive pre-mine, a large amount of Boolberry trade-ins, which will all be able to profit off staking rewards in the future. To discuss this and other issues in a Q&A with the Zano team, ‘Untraceable’ effectively argued this was a “dev tax” on Zano in perpetuity. Meaning that the developers would have the capability of profiting off the system at the expense of participants. It is worth considering that it is not just merely the developers, but also unknown insiders who may also be able to reap significant staking rewards. To the degree it works out this way, it a frustrating re-creation of all the things cryptocurrencies were ideally invented to eliminate. If we are willing to passively accept the owners of a cryptocurrency dominating the consensus algorithm and profiting off the ecosystem itself… are we really any better off than with central banks?

Zano is attempting to corner the market on private digital currencies (and assets!) while maintaining significant control over the token supply. A digital currency using proof-of-stake with a consolidated supply is truly just a CBDC with extra steps. It’s really worth considering how many of these projects directly aimed at enticing ‘freedom fighters’ are “wolves in sheep’s clothing”. Since at least the FTX collapse, it’s clear that there is a desire to build a CBDC issuer that’s technically private. I wholeheartedly believe that Zano is an attempt to encircle the private cryptocurrency space and neuter it, because it’s possible that alternatives are far too resilient to tolerate. If Zano is given preferential treatment compared to Monero by exchanges, you will be able to be certain that this is true.

The bigger picture

One can argue, that none of this matters. The Zano team effectively did during their Q&A. As somebody who has watched the cryptocurrency space when people actually cared about decentralization, innovation, and potential it’s truly awful to witness. It seems that the simple strategy of setting up yet another cryptocurrency and hyping it up is itself so profitable it distracts from sincere attempts to build real solutions. What concerns me the most about the Zano platform is that it seems perfectly suited to operate as a means to recapitalize on the memecoin hype, without delivering much in tangible innovation. I’m quite sure that sounds harsh, but regardless of whatever price movement Zano makes, I am incredibly skeptical it will accomplish stated objectives.

It’s clear that there isn’t a lot of interest in pointing out the flaws of various cryptocurrency projects. The time and effort to validate well-funded marketing in an area the majority of people don’t understand is daunting. It’s not just myself. If you listen to the Q&A, Untraceable is very knowledgeable and has clearly done his homework. But I fully expect this to be ignored as the price may well continue to rise despite it all. I made an attempt to reach out to others much more knowledgeable about cryptocurrency than me, and received variations of the same question: “Why are you even looking at this?”. Those I know who have a serious grasp of the fine details can’t take this project seriously, but is your favorite parasocial hero going to tell you this?

But all the major red flags: the premine, the token swap, decisions made about the consensus algorithm, lack of technical documentation, are all worth keeping in mind for any hyped-up asset. When one watches the cryptocurrency market with a healthy dose of skepticism you will see many doomed-from-the-start projects rise and fall over and over. One of the things that makes Zano particularly noteworthy is that it is not merely cryptocurrency, but it also intends to be a platform to launch other digital assets. As Untraceable pointed out in the Q&A, Zano doesn’t support smart contracts. This means that any digital assets launched under Zano are ‘dumb tokens’ that currently are under centralized control. If Zano becomes significantly popular, the platform itself can become a haven for pump-and-dump memecoins that have no utility. The centralized issuance and lack of ability to create smart contracts makes any of these assets suspect.

Kaurma: Not all that glitters is gold

Bitcoin may be very successful as ‘digital gold’, but many people are very disinterested in the current trajectory of the Bitcoin community. The race to seek out the ’next Bitcoin’ is very intense these days. Many are desperate to recapture the vision, or the dream of peer to peer digital cash. Building a project to take on this ambition is laudable, but actually achieving it is no small feat. If Bitcoin was ‘hijacked’ or otherwise unable to function as a medium of exchange, any new project has massive shoes to fill to even make the attempt. In public discussions, there is a huge lack of serious consideration for what lessons could have been learned. Privacy, scaling, decentralization are all secondary concerns to marketing the next hyped up asset.

One of the things I stumbled on while looking into Zano was Aaron Day’s ambitious project Kaurma. The Zano profile on X shared a video of Aaron Day explaining the dangers of CBDCs and economic surveillance. Arguing that you ‘defeat surveillance with privacy’ and therefore we need to use Monero, Zano and his new project, which is planned to be built on top of Zano. The choice to build on top of Zano is interesting, given the details above. In defending this choice, he argues that a “fair launch” isn’t really important. This certainly raises concerns about his ability to fairly steward a stablecoin project.

Aaron Day wrote:

Tether will either blow up in a scandal or will be co-opted by the establishment and will become the de facto CBDC for this US. Either way, the end result is digital tyranny.

This is why we are launching Kaurma - a gold-backed privacy stablecoin on Zano.

The world deserves private, P2P digital cash.

A “gold-backed privacy stablecoin” is quite the mouthful. It’s also at least an order of magnitude more complex than actually succeeding to build a peer to peer digital cash system. The intention appears to be to build the stablecoin (a digital asset with a stable value) with Zano’s “Confidential Asset” system. There are significant concerns about how these assets are centralized. In addition to this, tying the physical world (like with gold) to cryptocurrencies is no simple task either. There are many cryptocurrency projects that have ’tokenized’ gold, but none of them are truly decentralized. Despite many people being attracted to cryptocurrency for decentralization & privacy, it seems that one is going to have to trust the operators of Kaurma to back their end of the bargain. While it’s almost guaranteed that Tether has problems, is building more Tether-like entities truly a solution?

Those genuinely interested in decentralizing financial power have to understand that the fine details matter. Being overly ambitious without due caution is at best a recipe for making others pay for your foolish mistakes. The problem is that this is largely a question of values. Being okay with your “allies” being fleeced by endless frauds and scams is a road to de-facto sabotage. There are values that served those who got into cryptocurrency early, that have largely been forgotten as the market has been refined into a parasocial plundering machine. It is highly suspect that those with the means to rise on centralized platforms always happen to have a ‘solution’ that requires people to hand over their money and data for empty promises.

Can we do better?

Decentralizing is hard. Adopting a cryptocurrency in 2025 is not going to meaningfully protect people from CBDCs, de-banking, or state surveillance. For the vast majority of people their real weak-points are employment and ability to pay for necessities. Neither of those are going to be transformed overnight. If your goal is to just make enough money off suckers to ’liberate’ yourself from today’s major inconveniences, then maybe that can work. When one is truly interested in rebuilding the foundations of our digital experience, a lot more fundamental work is required to make meaningful change. The desire to do something to oppose tyranny is wonderful, but it’s also something that can be weaponized against you.

At some point, thought leaders need to demonstrate their willingness to walk the walk. If they talk a big game about innovation, decentralization, and protecting privacy, how much do their actions reflect this? It’s easy to be skeptical about what you’re being told, but it’s a whole other challenge to consider what you’re not being told. In an age where people’s digital experience is being confined to increasingly controlled devices, the systems we slather on top are never going to make a meaningful difference.

I am incredibly disappointed that I am even moved to not only write this piece, but make it as long as this. One of the prime motivators for me to begin writing about technical topics was the complete un-seriousness they are given in so-called freedom loving circles. I am convinced that at least 99% of the cryptocurrency ecosystem exists to build a cargo-cult that keeps motivated technical minds away from real solutions. Bitcoin was released in 2008, do you feel more or less digitally free since then? Almost everyone who is old enough to remember would admit that things have gotten dire. Has the plentiful variety of cryptocurrencies available meaningfully enhanced your digital experience? I certainly doubt it.

The most important way to make progress is to work against people being forced into digital systems not herd them into yet another unproven ‘solution’. If it truly is the answer, it can absolutely catch on organically. Technology can be a powerful force for helping people with all kinds of problems, but things will continue to get worse if we continue to be careless. New tools are needed, but at a much more fundamental level than mere software. It is distressing to see well-meaning people lured into blatant scams by appealing to their justified fear of tyranny and abuse. We should expect better from our thought-leaders. If they are so careless to look into the fine details, who needs enemies?

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Casey Means: 'Good Energy' & Biosurveillance

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Since the Covid Crisis, there has been a renewed interest in people taking control of their health. This on its own is fantastic news. This is something that’s very close to my heart since I’ve been embarking on my own health journey. As part of this, I was gifted Casey Means’ book Good Energy by my mother. I think there is a lot of very useful and important information in this book. Sadly, it also leaves out a wide variety of important information, especially when it comes to digital autonomy.

Good Energy

The book is about Casey Mean’s journey from being a surgeon within the medical system, to adopting new ideas and practices for helping people take charge of their own health. Recognizing that to a surgeon armed with a hammer (scalpel) everything starts to look like a nail, she started to consider how many different problems were caused by common lifestyle factors. The book outlines how taking on many simple habits can really build into massive health improvements over time. The author provides a large picture of how our modern environment impacts our health, and strategies for mitigating this. If you’re somebody like me, who could learn a lot more about health, I would highly recommend reading the book as a good step in taking responsibility for one’s health.

Just because I agree with many points made by the book, doesn’t mean I agree with every line. It is absolutely true that to take better charge of one’s own health getting more information is helpful. On the other hand, as a ’techie’ I have significant concerns over data privacy. It would be different if all the means of acquiring your own personal health information were entirely analog. In that case, you could harmlessly get all the information required with few to no privacy concerns. Sadly this isn’t the state of things.

Good Energy explicitly recommends many smart watches and devices known as ‘wearables’. There are non-trivial privacy concerns people should consider before making an informed choice about using them. The book goes even further to recommend having a Continuous Glucose Monitor (GCM) to get real-time metabolic information. The author is an adviser to Levels, a company that is launching a new smart GCM. over time, I’ve become more and more skeptical of the further digitization of health. All kinds of companies are after everyone’s medical information, but what are they using it for?

Wearables: A cause for concern?

Health monitors as a whole are a gold mine of useful information about a person. This is something that can be used for an incredible amount of good, but sadly also just as much evil. The best way to protect sensitive information is not to record it, and these tools by design do a lot of recording. It’s one thing to have crucial information in your own hands, but once it’s in others’ control the game changes completely.

While digitizing medical data could revolutionize healthcare, systemic inefficiencies, weak security measures, and a lack of trust in Big Tech make it risky. These vulnerabilities expose patients to data theft, scams, fraud, and exploitation. If patients can’t trust healthcare companies like UnitedHealth Group to safeguard sensitive health data, why should they believe digitizing and uploading healthcare data to a Big Tech company like Google is a good idea?

Android Police: Digitizing and sending medical data to Google sounds like a bad idea

This is a non-trivial concern. As we ‘digitize’ healthcare, there are many serious questions to ask about who or what is being empowered with our sensitive health information. We have already seen much simpler IoT devices used to enable stalking and harassment, the dangers related to health monitors are only beginning to become apparent. There is a frustrating lack of health monitoring gadgets that don’t require a smartphone app. These apps all inherently rely on connecting to a corporate controlled service with very few real guarantees of privacy. Even when a particular provider may have strong guarantees, little prevents it (and all of people’s sensitive information) from being sold to a new company with less scruples. There are countless ways personal health information on a wide variety of people could be misused and abused.

In fact, we already saw in the Covid Crisis that vaccination status was used to fuel systematic discrimination in many areas of life in many countries. Given the serious decline in both medical ethics and privacy since that time, there are hardly any guarantees about all kinds of forms of medical discrimination in the future. To be clear, there’s a lot of good to come from people being given the tools to take charge of their own health, but unfortunately that’s not exactly what’s being offered here. With the vast majority of commercially available options, the risk of people’s sensitive biological information being in the wrong hands is almost guaranteed.

In addition to all this, there are also simple fundamental technical problems with the lifecycle of these products. Being so dependent on smartphones and online services means that these products are vulnerable to (if not designed with) planned obsolescence. Just as one begins to take charge of their health, a simple business decision could pressure them into giving up more data just in exchange for continuing to use the tool they’ve begun to rely on. With people beginning to connect the very idea of taking care of themselves with cloud-based tools, they can forget the most important tool of all: being in control of their health and data. Without the individual being in control of their technological experience, just like with health, they can fall prey to very nefarious and harmful schemes.

Biosecurity: Is more information always good?

To reiterate, individuals having control of their own information is an entirely different circumstance than powerful institutions having insight into the public’s information. As we saw with Big Tech social media, information that can be abused inevitably will be. The stakes can only become higher and higher as the information collected from people shifts from self-reported data to passively collected biological markers. Far from a mere hypothetical, these tools are able to be weaponized to build wearable prisons given enough opportunity.

In a much related manner, the ruling class also seems to be marrying the issue of mass incarceration with the wearables revolution.

“In a digital world with ankle bracelets and GPS devices, there is no reason to believe that physical imprisonment is the only option for those convicted of nonviolent offenses,” Darrell West wrote for the Brookings Institute in 2015. “Compared to incarceration, ankle bracelets and GPS devices seem far more tolerable. They keep offenders in society, are less punitive than prisons, and are much less expensive.”

Wearable “Solutions” and the Internet of Incarceration

When one is letting a cloud-enabled wearable govern their personal health decisions, are they truly free? How many of those subtle nudges from the platform able to change seemingly unrelated decisions? Is it not out of the question to imagine of the individual’s biological information for propaganda and control purposes? Just as these ‘innovations’ blur the line between those incarcerated and those who are ‘free’, they also blur the line between civilian and target. Military use of and investment in wearables is rising precipitously. There are serious questions to ask about how personal health information is able to be used against people in the future.

And he’s [Giorgio Agamben] really articulated what this is and where it’s going, and the fact that this is a new governance paradigm for the planet. For example, he did an interview in May of 2020—so, very early on—called Polemos Epidemios, where he said:

“An epidemic, as is suggested by its etymological roots in the Greek term demos (which designates the people as a political body), is first and foremost a political concept. In Homer, polemos epidemios is the civil war. What we see today is that the epidemic is becoming the new terrain of politics, the battleground of a global civil war — because a civil war is a war against an internal enemy, one which lives inside of ourselves.”

And it goes on to say:

“It is important to understand that biosecurity, both in its efficacy and in its pervasiveness, outdoes every form of governance that we have hitherto known. As we have been able to see in Italy — but not only here — as soon as a threat to health is declared, people unresistingly consent to limitations on their freedom that they would never have accepted in the past.”

Well, that’s a pretty good articulation of what’s happened over the past couple of years.

James Corbett Lays Out the Biosecurity Agenda

Not only we can be sure that these changes have disastrous consequences, but we can also be sure that this information is already leaking wherever possible. Both wearables and various online fitness services have had massive data breaches in the recent past. Even when these services aren’t being outright breached, generous data sharing and selling will ensure that your information is not ‘siloed’ within a single organization.

It’s incredibly troubling to see prominent voices having financial ties to ‘solutions’ that collect, and eventually give away sensitive health information. For a time, a huge amount of YouTube personalities were sponsored by BetterHealth, an online teletherapy service. It turned out that BetterHelp was lying about it’s promise to not share customer sensitive data with Big Tech giants. This is an important reminder that we can’t take these companies privacy guarantees at face value.

Are there good wearables?

It’s certainly a minefield. Despite Mozilla’s glowing report on Garmin wearables, I’m not convinced there are enough acceptable options in the space. The most convenient option for many will be either the Google or Apple variant based on their smartphone of choice. The apps built around these watches all inherently make you more reliant on their services, undermining your ability to keep your information private. If you’ve made the (laudible) effort of “de-googling” your phone, a smart watch will likely claw back some of the progress made. Even if you do find a decently secure and private choice, other health apps can be their own problem.

What I would like to see in a smart watch

I don’t think it’s impossible for a company to build a privacy-friendly wearable. In fact, ZSWatch is a model project to consider. It’s a Free and Open Source hardware & software solution. Using a powerful app Gadgetbridge to put you in charge of your own information. There’s a great deal of opportunity in designing a health monitor that doesn’t sacrifice on privacy and autonomy. If you’re interested in building these kinds of products, here’s my wishlist:

Highly Repairable
Waterproof (I like to swim!)
Replacable straps
No Smartphone/app required
All the basic metrics:
- Sleep
- Steps
- Heart rate
Workout tracking
Optional personal server (appication) that can be run for those who want real-time metrics available.
Optional User-friendly software for updating firmware and making changes
Direct data export & backup/import
Robust support for simple applications being built by users
Notifications/Interactions for phones
Compatible with KDE Connect
Works as a FIDO2 key / additional storage.

Thinking differently

There are definitely still some “app free” pedometers available. I would encourage you to focus on the healthy habits rather than particular technologies. The most powerful tool you’ll ever have for improving your health is your own mind. Taking your own notes, recording your progress in a workbook can help a great deal. My hope is that you walk away reading this not only cautious about many of these wearables, but more importantly confident you can make changes in your life without them. All the value of these tools only matters if they genuinely improve your life, which is something you have the power to do without them. Having more in-depth information helps, but there’s a great deal that can be done on your own.

The book Good Energy by Casey Means is still an excellent guide for taking control of your health, even if you pass on the wearables recommendation. Having already made many of the changes suggested in the book myself (even prior to reading it) I’ve noticed a radical change in my quality of life. You will still get a great deal out of taking charge of your lifestyle without making yourself dependent on these online services. I can certainly understand circumstances where it may feel like a decent trade-off regardless. In that instance, I would just remind you that you’re not forever dependent. Once you’ve built the habits, you’re always free to continue your journey without the wearables.

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Teachable Moment: Bitcoin can survive everything... except World War 3

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I stumbled on a shocking piece making the rounds on social media. It’s a fascinating example of how hype or doom can be manufactured so quickly over such a fundamental misunderstanding (or deception). The article was a piece in Fortune titled "Bitcoin would need over 300 days of downtime to adequately defend itself from the ‘imminent’ threat of quantum computing, research finds".

Here is the offending paragraph:

A study from the University of Kent’s School of Computing calculated that if Bitcoin were to try to effectively protect itself from the threat quantum computing poses, it would take a protocol update that would take the cryptocurrency offline for 76 days. More realistically, the study calculated, Bitcoin would instead designate 25% of its server to a protocol update and allow its users to continue to mine and trade at a slower rate. But in that scenario, the downtime would take about 305 days. That’s 10 full months.

Please point to me where the Bitcoin server is, Fortune.

I was immediately perplexed about this article because anyone who spent time following the blocksize war in Bitcoin would know that upgrades happen without downtime. I was even more surprised to read the linked paper from the Kent’s School of Computing, which also seemed to have this knowledge gap.

Proverbially, this is easier said than done. Any upgrade to a current-day cryptosystem to make it quantum-secure comes with an all-but inevitable downtime.

It’s funny how this line in the paper doesn’t have a citation. I genuinely have no idea why the authors of the paper put this in writing. The only scenario I can imagine this being plausible is if a powerful entity had kept an advanced protype quantum computer secret and their first observable act was to take on Bitcoin. Is it possible, sure…

But not only is this not particularly likely, but there would most definitely be other signs on the way. In that scenario, Bitcoin is already toast, as the trust in the system will be gone entirely and it would be pointless to even attempt such an upgrade. There are many other scenarios where the Bitcoin network has time to upgrade. None of these scenarios involve downtime. The truth of the matter is that this paper fundamentally misunderstands how decentralized networks operate, which makes me have serious questions about the state of academia.

I’ve been meaning to follow-up on the Bitcoin conversation I had the pleasure of participating in on Geopolitics & Empire. Not only has it sparked many intense debates within my friends and associates, but there’s also been a much wider discussion on Bitcoin’s role in shaping the future of the US dollar and even digital currency systems. I believe there are some fundamental pieces of information that should be wider understood as this conversation progresses. It is clear, that there is a significant hunger for a deeper understanding on this topic.

The basics

Quantum computing hype

Google’s new Quantum Chip ‘Willow’ has reached a new milestone of cracking a key challenge in a tiny fraction of the time it would take an ordinary machine. This is due the fact that quantum computers process information in a much different way than classical computers do. The idea is that these differences can potentially find answers to hard-to-compute problems. Of course, these differences have profound security implications.

Encryption apocalypse

Encryption uses math to protect information. To the degree quantum computers are vastly more powerful at the kinds of math used to protect information, they can be much more capable at reversing that math. In theory, this could be used to break many forms of encryption used today in online banking, websites, and even Bitcoin. As such powerful forces across the world are not only racing for Quantum Supremacy, and having the most quantum computing power, but also for having the strongest post-quantum cryptography, to protect their secrets.

This has profound impacts for cryptocurrencies, which all function due to cryptographic math. If quantum computers to become practical to use for breaking all kinds of cryptographic functions, than only “post-quantum” cryptocurrency projects will be able to withstand the onslaught. Of course this is not unique to cryptocurrency. Governments across the world have been collecting people’s communications on a “harvest now, decrypt later” basis that will absolutely give those interested in historical mass surveillance an unprecedented insight into people’s lives.

To make matters worse, all digital communications and security would be impacted in this scenario. A nation or corporation using such computing power for their own interests would effectively have the ability to read any intercepted communications. Online finance, and other institutions already have to solve these problems, just differently than cryptocurrencies.

A Bitcoin post-quantum upgrade

The punchline is that Bitcoin could absolutely upgrade to post-quantum cryptography with zero downtime. The paper, and the article(s) written about it are fundamentally misunderstanding how upgrades work in a decentralized network. Unlike centralized services, where the service provider can use a load-balancer to seamlessly migrate users to an upgraded system, decentralized networks have to handle things differently. The benefit of a decentralized protocol is that no single entity can shut down, disrupt, or modify the network, the idea of “downtime” for upgrades makes little sense.

Bitcoin, and every other blockchain based system has an advantage. Every block is an approximate for time and can be programmatically used to trigger certain events. Here’s a step-by-step walk-through of how a post-quantum upgrade of the Bitcoin network would work:

The developers would agree on one of likely many solutions to migrate Bitcoin’s addresses, and security to new post-quantum cryptography.
The ecosystem developers would then modify their Bitcoin software to “switch over” to the new cryptography after a certain time, defined by a specific block in Bitcoin’s blockchain.
Operators would then on their own time, without any downtime to the wider network, upgrade their software.
Eventually, once time passes to reach the selected block in the blockchain, everything running on the Bitcoin network switches over to the new cryptography and continues running as normal.

But it can’t be that easy right?

Here’s the rub, that’s a possible, but simplified & idealistic scenario. At minimum, you’d want to not hinge all the massive changes on a single hard fork. It presumes that all participants are enthusiastically pleased with the desired solution. In the past, controversial changes to the Bitcoin network have torn the community apart. But why would anyone reject this upgrade? Surely everyone in Bitcoin wants to have quantum-safe Bitcoin?

Imagine a hypothetical scenario where there is not one single post-quantum cryptography solution, but a variety. Instead of everyone making the choice between making the upgrade or not, maybe there are multiple competing proposals. Consider that the technical details, may be relatively minor, but we’ve already seen how social media can be weaponized to turn minor misunderstanding into horror and rage. With many competing scenarios, even assuming them all to be genuine finding consensus on the solution long-term is a non-trivial task.

These different directions would likely be not only incompatible with each other, but by design they would all have to be incompatible with the way Bitcoin has run since its inception. This means that the post-quantum upgrade to Bitcoin must be a hard fork, any software not applying the upgrade will effectively be running a completely different system.

Given how the Bitcoin community has handled scaling & privacy, I am pessimistic that they could actually perform a migration to post-quantum cryptography. This is not the same as saying that it’s impossible. Given the amount of wealth in the Bitcoin ecosystem, I imagine there’s quite a bit of incentive to get it right. But this highlights Bitcoin’s fundamental weakness, it will always be vulnerable to manipulation of people influential in the community.

The mere idea of post-quantum Bitcoin splitting into a couple or several different parallel hard-forks would be absolutely disastrous for the long-term health of the project. On the other hand it’s possible that entities interested in resolving problems in Bitcoin could take advantage of the hard fork opportunity to correct other problems as well. In that scenario you would likely see different post-quantum Bitcoin networks diverge into entirely different projects, which could be a great thing in the long run. Bitcoin successfully migrating to post-quantum encryption would be a historic accomplishment that would be very difficult to overstate. If the Bitcoin community successfully completes a post-quantum upgrade hard-fork I will certainly be recanting some of my harsher words regarding how I see the community …but I won’t be holding my breath.

But what is the real Bitcoin killer?

The ongoing discussion around Bitcoin and its future is lacking some very important wider context. It is my personal belief that the major powers in the world are preparing (but not yet initiating) a global-scale World War 3. Bitcoin ‘maximalists’ would argue that this can potentially be avoided if countries can replace brutal and bloody wars with softwar. The simplest argument for this idea is that if entities can become more wealthy peacefully enriching themselves off Bitcoin, why would they commit acts of aggression to get less?

I believe that only analyzing human warfare at the economic level is reductive. One could ask, “If Bitcoin hasn’t stopped any wars yet, when will it start stopping wars?” If not at 100K USD, will it need to reach 1M USD? How about 1 Billion USD? I’m sure many would consider outright astronomical numbers a bargain to end wars forever, but wars may yet come. When wars get hot, many things quickly get pushed off the table. A scenario where World War 3 escalates despite Bitcoin is one where its utility is drastically limited.

Bitcoin (and every other cryptocurrency) inherits circumstances downstream of our technological landscape. No matter how well designed and robust the Bitcoin network can be, there are fundamental realities that it relies on and must contend with. In an open warfare scenario, not only is energy likely to be rationed away from independent operations, but computing power is already aggregated into clusters. This means that while the network itself may be able to operate in the most dire of circumstances, access can certainly be restricted and manipulated by strong forces in wartime. To the degree Bitcoin can be a threat to opposing powers, it can also be a target.

Regardless of what the future holds, it is crucial that we consider the fundamentals of our technological landscape. Cyberspace itself must have fertile ground for supporting peaceful innovation, lest we surrender it all to the Military Industrial Complex. Bitcoin and many other great and useful technologies, serve effectively no purpose if digital freedom as we know it is extinguished by warmongers. It matters not where you fall on Bitcoin being benevolent or malevolent, it is time to ask what is the future of cyberspace and where does that put us?

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The Cyberwar comes for thee: telecommunications companies breached

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

You can taste the palpable salty feeling from the US Federal Government having to tell citizens they should use encrypted communications. After ages of fighting citizen’s right to private communications from the very beginning, it seems that desperate measures must be taken to prevent foreign adversaries from having access to sensitive information. This is a radical departure from the top-down message of “nothing to hide, nothing to fear.”

Telecommunications Breach

Since 2022, a hacking group presumably linked to the Chinese government categorized as “Salt Typhoon” have gained incredibly sensitive access to telecommunications infrastructure all over the world. This has recently escalated, to there being evidence of targeted spying on both 2024 presidential candidates.

What’s most troubling about this breach, is that it also included the “lawful access” backdoor wiretaps. So not only are everyone’s sensitive communications vulnerable in specific contexts, but also by anyone with the capabilities of leveraging Salt Typhoon’s intrusion. Currently, there is no announced timeline for this being addressed. There’s not a whole lot of reason to be optimistic. Last month, a Senate Judiciary Committee discussed just how logistically challenging it is to address this issue.

Never Let A Crisis Go To Waste

Naturally this kind of disaster is a great pretext for governments to push sweeping changes in impacted industries. At minimum, we can expect massive changes to be driven in cybersecurity, telecommunications, and hardware manufacturers. While many of these changes are long overdue, with security professionals rejoicing, others are not so benign.

This massive breach itself can be used as a rallying cry to consolidate control over digital products, companies, and even entire digital ecosystems. As the cyber security industry has advanced, the line between “cyber” and human problems becomes quite blurry. Serious concerns, like transnational repression can potentially be weaponized against subsets of the population. What’s more is that almost any aspect of what people currently take for granted as “digital freedom” can evaporate away as ’national security’ interests take priority.

I am not so naive to believe this is the long-overdue wake-up-call to governments that their citizen’s security matters. If anything, this is a rallying cry for control freaks to demand more top-down micromanagement of all things technological. Instead of working on strategies from the ground up to create a truly resilient and secure digital landscape, these concerns will be leveraged to seize even more control over the World Wide Web. We have the opportunity to push for a different direction, but time is vanishingly short.

Re-Introducing Civilian-based Cyber Defense

Originally, I introduced the idea in Good Governance in Cyberspace: Digital Freedom Policy Framework for Policies for the People. The idea is inspired by the idea of Civilian-Based Defense, which is a fascinating model for society-wide resilience and freedom. Bringing civilian-based defense to cyberspace is likely to be much more effective than any top-down approach and can radically transform our digital landscape for the better.

The Structural Basis of Freedom

When power is effectively diffused throughout the society among strong loci, the rulers’ power is most likely subjected to controls and limits, thus enabling the society to resist oppression, usurpation, and aggression. This condition is associated with political “freedom” When, on the other hand, such loci have been seriously weakened or their independence of action has been destroyed, when the subjects are all equally impotent and the society’s power has become highly centralized, then the rulers’ power will most likely be uncontrolled. This condition is associated with “tyranny.”

It is no accident that past totalitarian systems have attempted either to eliminate all independent groups or to subject them to full control by the party or state. Ultimately therefore, freedom is not something that rulers “give” their subjects. Nor, in the long run, do the formal institutional structures and procedures of the government (as, for example, may be laid out in the constitution) by themselves determine the degree of freedom or the limits of the rulers’ power.

A society may in fact be more free or more oppressed than the formal constitutional or legal arrangements would indicate. Instead, the extent and intensity of the rulers’ power and the actual degree of freedom of the society will be set by the strength of the subjects and the condition of: the institutions of the whole society. The rulers’ power and the degree of the society’s freedom may in turn, be expanded or contracted by the interplay between the actions of the rulers and those of the subjects: some rulers may choose not to be as oppressive as the structural condition permits, and other rulers may receive more support than the structural condition requires, making them more powerful.

Increases in the rulers’ power are directly or indirectly determined, on the one hand, by the willingness of the subjects to accept the rulers, to obey to cooperate and to carry out their orders and wishes. On the other hand, reductions in the rulers’ power are determined by the subjects’ unwillingness to accept the rulers, coupled with their ability to disobey, to withhold cooperation, to defy orders, and to refuse demands made upon them.

The degree of liberty or tyranny in any political society is, it follows, largely a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free, of their willingness and ability to organize themselves to live in freedom and, very importantly, their ability to resist any efforts to dominate or enslave them. In other words, the population can use the society itself as the means to establish and defend its freedom. Social power, not technological means of destruction, is the strongest guarantor of human freedom.

Civilian-based Defense - A Post-Military Weapons System: Page 32

This maps directly onto our digital experience. The Free Software movement has demonstrated the incredible potential of building solutions that put power in the hands of the user. By building verifiable, open and transparent systems more people can collaborate to innovate on genuine solutions to pressing problems. The Open Source model of development has been so powerful that even giant mega-corporations have adopted it (in part or in full) for their needs. True digital decentralization requires a hard look at how our devices are manufactured, built, and repaired. The entire “lifecycle” of the devices we use is filled with opportunities for genuine advancement.

Devices and software built with this in consideration can radically lower the “technical knowledge” barrier required for everyone to comfortably navigate. Many of our current challenges are precisely caused by the present condition of so much consolidated control over digital technology. I would encourage the future cyber rebels in our midst to consider building for the future we all want. Instead of corporate or state requirements driving innovation in this space, people can take on the challenge of learning to construct within new paradigms and discover novel approaches. The beauty of programmable circuits is that their potential is very often more constrained by our imagination than physics.

Everyone needs to consider who we are empowering when we allow nations to seize control over the digital landscape in the name of keeping us safe. Are we truly protecting ourselves from digital threats when we accept governments and corporations dictating our digital futures to us? If we do accept ceding more and more control in the name of safety, how can that control inevitably be abused? What should we focus on when it seems that our entire future is highly intertwined with present changes in the digital landscape?

I ask these questions aloud because there are no simple answers, only urgent lines of inquiry. More study, less complacency is the way out of digital totalitarianism. More passion, less apathy is what we need to truly push back against nefarious forces. I’m convinced that the public does have the qualities to build a much better technological future, all that’s required is some effort and creativity. In these times, this can’t be more urgent. If we desire strong freedoms within and without our societies, a much stronger emphasis on bottom-up problem-solving is required. The nature of cyberwarfare is that there aren’t really battle lines, merely troubles that come for us all, in one form or another. Governments and corporations will take care of themselves, but who’s thinking about everyday people?

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Teachable Moment: GrapheneOS DESTROYS Unplugged

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

GrapheneOS writes to Unplugged: (Emphasis mine)

No, you created it to make money. You do not believe in anything beyond making money. You’ve marketed your products with highly inaccurate privacy and security claims including claiming it’s impenetrable.

You are scamming people, and spreading misinformation about an open source project further contributes to it.

The past history of many of the people involved in your company didn’t get erased through creating a new one.

You aren’t on the same side as us and the deeper you dig, the more of a response there’s going to be from us. You are not our allies, and you are not bringing people privacy and security. You’re grifters.

What?

Alright, let’s rewind a bit. GrapheneOS is an open source custom operating system for Android devices (in the Pixel line) that “de-googles” the device and provides a wide variety of security and privacy features. Unplugged is a “private smartphone” company founded by the Blackwater founder Erik Prince.

The above exchange began when Pierre Chang on X asked Unplugged what makes their phone more secure than GrapheneOS, tagging them.

GrapheneOS then replied with:

Where do they make any claim about GrapheneOS?

It’s an ARMv8.2 MediaTek Dimensity 1200 SoC device running a non-hardened fork of the Android Open Source Project. The hardware/firmware doesn’t come close to meeting our security requirements, and it’s not a hardened OS.

To translate this a bit. Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is the base foundation that all android-based systems are built on top of. It initially doesn’t include Google and other bloatware, but vendors tend to add that on. As GrapheneOS states, hardware and firmware matter a great deal when it comes to security, so getting it right is important. They also claim that the Unplugged phone’s operating system LibertOS isn’t hardened. In this context hardened means making specific modifications to improve security.

What’s interesting to note is that in this exchange, Unplugged doesn’t attack GrapheneOS in their weakest point: dependence on Google manufactured hardware. It’s possible that they don’t do this because they don’t want people taking too close a look at their own hardware choices.

They get close in this exchange where GrapheneOS replies to Unplugged defending their firmware.

When using GrapheneOS (or any other custom ROM), Google driver binaries are required, but Google does not provide any commitments regarding data collection or privacy in this code.

This claim about data collection / privacy for the firmware or drivers isn’t accurate. Additionally, you use a MediaTek SoC device with proprietary MediaTek firmware and drivers, and they aren’t known for having good security. The hardware, firmware and driver security of the devices we’re supporting is much better, not worse as you’re making it seem.

As a side note, GrapheneOS is an operating system. The term ROM isn’t accurate and we don’t want it to be referred to as such. It’s a fork of the Android Open Source Project like the stock OS on any Android device.

Unplugged makes the argument that their product is important because the GrapheneOS web installer is too difficult for much of the general population. You can watch Mental Outlaw demonstrate the process and judge for yourself. Regardless of the overall difficulty, would it not be better to have a trusted friend or relative give you assistance rather than settle for a potentially inferior product? In fact if one wants the privacy and security guarantees of GrapheneOS, you can always buy a pre-flashed version from a provider like Above Phone …but that does require putting trust in that provider.

Back in July in response to a podcast, GrapheneOS wrote:

Unplugged has simply doubled down on false claims about GrapheneOS security, pretending people cannot buy devices with GrapheneOS installed and pretending it’s hard to install along with promoting their blatantly insecure products with false marketing.

…

They keep pushing the false claim that Pixels supporting using another OS makes them less secure. The reality is that it’s properly implemented in a secure way without adding any significant attack surface. The bottom of the barrel MediaTek Unplugged devices have awful security.

They still haven’t ported to the initial release of Android 14 with Android 15 right around the corner. This means they’re missing at least around a year of Moderate severity privacy/security patches and huge privacy/security improvements from the past year of Android releases.

Unplugged is using an SoC from MediaTek, a company known to have poor security practices, which fares poorly against real attackers and which has a history of repeatedly shipping actual backdoors. They’re trying to portray that as more trustworthy and more secure hardware. Nope.

Unplugged was founded by Erik Prince, noted war criminal and illegal arms dealer. They make a point in talking about the involvement of their employees in enabling these kinds of operations

That doesn’t imply competence, but explains the lack of ethics.

They’re trying to present themselves as if they were leaders in the field and switched sides, but they never were and simply want money.

Unplugged is an affinity scam in the same vein as the Freedom Phone. At least Freedom Phone doesn’t seem to try to harm open source projects.

Unplugged has built their product out of open source projects, but without complying with the licenses from projects like DivestOS and while trying to harm open source. Claiming to be in the process of replacing some of the code they were caught stealing doesn’t change much…

Now that’s the root of the teachable moment here. What is an affinity scam? In short, it’s when people create a scheme to profit off values without actually “walking the walk”. At worst, it is a deliberate attack on a particular group of people that masquerades as “one of them”. It happens to all kinds of groups and movements, and the privacy and security space is no exception.

It’s really worth asking why so many targeted operations end up having severe data breaches. Is it really too crazy to believe that in this day and age, cyberwarfare is just part of politics? Even Exxon is being investigated for allegedly hiring hackers to go after environmentalists.

We are in serious trouble if we can expect huge amounts of money to go into undermining people’s security. At minimum, it means everyone has to be a lot more careful about recommendations from media figures and personalities. This is one of the major reasons I am in no rush to sell any products. I don’t inherently believe that commercial success is impossible while providing good security, but I consider that bar extremely high.

This is largely because nothing exists in a vacuum. If one company does everything they can to be the best they can be, they can still lose. We don’t have a “perfect market” when it comes to digital security. Because a large portion of the public aren’t very knowledgeable about the issues, it creates opportunities for them to be taken advantage of. A company that spends a majority of it’s time buying PR and marketing will inherently out-compete one that actually invests in the technical merits, all else being equal. But all things aren’t equal, many institutions and private interests have a great deal to gain from undermining people’s security.

This is why Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is a pre-requisite for genuine advancements in privacy & security. By delivering solid software or hardware as a public good, it is much easier for more parties to test and validate any claims, especially security. Despite what many believe, refusing to compromise on Software & Hardware freedom doesn’t mean making money is impossible, it just means you have to take a radically different approach. My personal suspicion these days, is that the “Unix Philosophy” of “Do one thing, and do it well” can do a lot of good. Instead of single-handedly trying to completely transform the smartphone market all at once, maybe it’s better to focus on a single component and delivering it in a robust verifiable way.

This ultimately brings me to my own objection to the Unplugged phone on a very conceptual level. They pre-load some interesting software options with the phone. With their own dedicated VPN/Messenger/Antivirus and Store apps, it really makes you wonder how much of your life you’re trusting to them. Are we supposed to believe that while using sub-standard hardware (according to GrapheneOS), they’ve managed to somehow deliver the best secure Messenger/VPN & antivirus without any problems whatsoever? Call me skeptical.

Can smartphones be safe?

There really does seem to be a pattern of inferior options being promoted by slick marketing and alternative media. Even the Brax2 phone was no exception. People want to believe there are simple ways to avoid all the pitfalls of our modern digital environment, but that’s not possible. Everything involves trade-offs or sacrifice when one is trying to make meaningful progress. When one doesn’t understand these trade-offs they can fall prey to outright deceptive claims and become ensnared in something far more malevolent than even the defaults.

This is a big part of the reason why this project is about trying to build understanding and context to these problems. Meaningful improvements are possible and within reach, they just require seriousness and dedication. One of the most important steps of all is building up more independent security research. This requires a great deal of funding, education, and promotion for those who either have the skills, or are able to learn them. Anything we can do to bankroll independent security research will go a long way to answering the questions we have about how to move forward.

TL:DR

I wouldn’t recommend buying the Unplugged phone and still see GrapheneOS as the gold-standard for smartphone security. It’s important to remember that a great deal of interests have sophisticated means and a huge desire to undermine your security. Tread lightly, and always double-check your assumptions.

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MAHA & The Military - A Medical Freedom Roundtable

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Make American Healthy Again (MAHA). It’s the slogan that brought together former adversaries Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and President Donald Trump under a unified vision of a happier, healthier tomorrow. But questions remain: where does MAHA fit into the second Trump administration, and among the competitive agendas of Kennedy’s newfound allies?

Teachers For Choice: https://teachersforchoice.org/
Liam Sturgess: https://www.liamsturgess.com/

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Why Does Digital Freedom Matter?

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A defense of lost causes

A lot of the negative feedback I receive is not that digital freedom is undesirable, but generally that it’s impossible. Or at least, that it’s too difficult to be worth considering. In truth, these are very valid criticisms. At best, digital freedom is very far down the list of people’s pressing concerns of today. It is incredibly difficult to argue that a great deal of effort (and opportunity costs) needs to be taken on to radically reinvent our digital landscape. What could possibly justify the immense challenge on so many fronts just to begin making incremental change?

The purpose of this project, is not to single-handedly succeed at resolving all the massive issues at play. It is plain to see that this is impossible. Instead it is to act as (one of many) guideposts for others to start forging a better path. We have a once-in-a-century opportunity to make an impact on the future of technology from the bottom-up. It is of utmost importance that we take the time to evaluate how to avoid the dire pitfalls and build a better future. This chance is worth seizing. It is highly unlikely that there will be an opportunity this good ever again if the present sentiments of defeatism and apathy take hold.

Digital freedom is not the most important cause, but it has profound impacts on almost every other cause. As digital systems have infiltrated so many aspects of our lives, it’s important to consider how they can be used and abused.. Unless one decides to opt-out entirely, there will always be a degree of impact that must be understood to make optimal choices. A defeatist will tell you that these changes are inevitable and unavoidable. This is the wrong mindset because there are alternatives to an all-or-nothing approach.

For the same reason a great deal of people won’t decide to forsake electricity entirely, there is a phenomenal amount of good that can come from adopting powerful tools. But for all the reasons people are becoming suspicious of corporate social media, we must be chiefly concerned with how these powerful systems can be weaponized against ourselves and others. The goal is not to fight change itself, but take an active role in participating in shaping that change. Because if we refuse to, we will entirely give up our digital sovereignty individually, and collectively… and who knows what else.

Digital consolidation is consolidation of everything else

One of the most underestimated forces in our day is how consolidated power in the technology space impacts almost every other issue. The most blatant example is the fact that when there are few viable online platforms, very little has to change for there to be rampant censorship and manipulation. In an environment with more competition and interoperability, there would be less problems and a better experience overall. As more and more people live a majority of their lives locked within corporate digital platforms, their options become drastically reduced.

We are already seeing how digital platforms are themselves ushering in Orwellian doublespeak, as remake new words to express things outside the automated censors. This effect is only going to have more profound impacts as we allow our entire digital landscape to be dictated by a handful of mega-corporations. Since digital platforms are already having a significant impact on culture, a powerful feedback loop is already in effect. The cultural changes from our digital decisions have impacts on our options to make change in the future. When we abandon the free and open web, in favor of a single corporate controlled “digital town square” we doom the future of free expression no matter who holds the reigns.

This applies to hardware as well. How many people are constantly frustrated with how badly smartphones have impacted their lives, yet feel powerless to address it? This is beyond mere addiction. As society centers itself around technological assumptions, those assumptions become hard requirements very quickly. There is no reason to believe this will end with smartphones. If we do not take the time to radically reassert individual autonomy separate from technological choices, things can get grim as fast as you can say ‘singularity’.

This is the secret behind the true importance of fighting for digital liberty. Not only can we avoid future dangers, but we can also correct many serious problems in the present day. With a truly holistic and bottom-up approach for building a new digital foundation, fixing problems that seem impossible to resolve becomes much more viable. Suddenly issues such as e-waste, energy efficiency, and digital control are all much easier to tackle with pragmatic solutions. The opportunities are endless when it comes to taking the time to learn, create, and share not just alternatives …but entirely new paradigms.

Crucial objectives

It’s all well and good to wish for a better future, but it needs to be defined. Clear parameters are required to identify current problems and plan new directions. The only constraints on our ability to create a free cyberspace are our collective drive and creativity. There are many levels of detail that can go into this, but it’s clear that the primary objectives should at least be: privacy, security, and autonomy.

Privacy

Privacy is not hiding. It’s about informed choice over one’s information. Everyone deserves a surveillance-free digital experience to effectively accomplish what they need. Participation in society, or acquiring basic needs should not require one to give up their reasonable expectations of personal privacy. The severe disks of weaponizing personal information individually and at scale are only beginning to become more widely understood. It is a guarantee that there are far more disastrous and un-intuitive impacts that are yet to be discovered.

Security

Making compromises on security will always cause problems down the road. Having high standards for verifiable security is effectively the starting point of making any kind of guarantees at all. Reasonable precautions need to be taken to ensure systems function as expected. A strong security environment can be a powerful public good that can make cyberspace a great deal better than it currently can be.

Autonomy

Digital Autonomy is the cornerstone of a pro-human digital future. Devices and systems must work for their operators not against or on them. This requires radical transparency and deliberate decisions to avoid imposing artificial limitations or restrictions. By taking the “protocols not platforms” paradigm to the hardware level, people can more freely choose to use or refuse all kinds of options. Personal computing needs to become even more personal, not something imposed from outside forces.

Other useful considerations

These really are just a starting point. Since the road is long it makes sense to consider other objectives as well. Elegance should be a priority to make systems maximally usable. Efficiency should be prized as it’s own end. Robustness can be a focus to enhance reliability. As you can see, even with all these factors there are boundless opportunities to learn and improve. The truth is that there is no finish line, it’s all about constantly refining things for the better.

Playing the long game

At the simplest level, a radical shift in our cultural understanding and attitudes surrounding technology is a must. We can no longer afford to naively accept impositions from corporations or governments as if they have no consequences. Above all, education and outreach are essential to addressing this long campaign across time. Perfectionism should be a guiding star and not a obstacle to making change. People from all walks of live will have meaningful feedback on how things can be made better. The better we become at properly incorporating that feedback, the better our digital future will be.

There are a wide variety of barriers to making this kind of radical change across time. It may sound entirely unreasonable economically. This challenge is something that needs to be confronted with sober ambition. Transforming the entire foundation of our digital experience will always take a great deal of time. Thankfully, there will be significant improvements along the way. Even moderate approaches towards this ideal can have phenomenal impact on people’s very lives. We must nurture the garden of cyberspace to flourish a bountiful fruits of innovation, lest we let it wither into a thorny maze of tyranny.

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Geopolitics & Empire: Bitcoin’s Rise & Its Future Role…Tulip Mania or Digital Gold?

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It was an honor and pleasure to dig deep into the Bitcoin discussion on Geopolitics & Empire. Mathew Crawford brings a wealth of knowledge to the table to take it to the next level. I really enjoyed taking the topic to task with two brilliant friends.

Gabriel of Libre Solutions Network and Mathew Crawford discuss all things bitcoin and how it seems the plan was to have Trump installed and push crypto. They comment on the role of the U.S. military, influencers, BlackRock, the potential future role of bitcoin erasing U.S. debt and functioning as a banking currency, digital gold, tulip mania, viewing the technology as neutral, bitcoin’s future price, and more!

Mathew Crawford

Mathew Crawford is an Educator, Entrepreneur, Statistician, Finance Specialist, and Founder of Rounding the Earth.

Comments:

You may also enjoy previous conversations with Hrvoje from his TNT Radio show.

Podcast intro music is from the song “The Queens Jig” by “Musicke & Mirth” from their album “Music for Two Lyra Viols”: http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)

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Did You Enjoy Your Ephemeral Web Experience?

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Internet Archive has been down since October 9th. As of morning eastern time, a provisional read-only version of the Wayback Machine is online.

Initially when archive.org went down, there was a prompt displaying a message:

“Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!”.

“HIBP” referring to the breach notification service have i been pwned?, which is worth checking with any and all emails you happen to use. At the very least it’s worth making sure you’re not re-using any passwords from previous breaches.

The outage itself meant that for many, we are already experiencing an ephemeral web where the current state is the only state. The old adage “the Internet never forgets” relies on a variety of assumptions and compromises. The truth is, a great deal of information disappears from the web on a very regular basis. Projects terminate, companies rebrand and/or change, other sites just disappear without a trace. In the hope of preserving crucial information, various online archives have been used. It takes an immense amount of resources, allegedly 160 petabytes, of data to even attempt to store a record of the web’s state. This is something that very few can even consider taking on. This difficulty means that the web will always have ephemeral qualities to a degree, and we have to consider how best to navigate that environment.

Navigating The Ephemeral Web

Have you ever been in a chat room with disappearing messages? Maybe you should. The web as it exists is very similar to that. Every site and service changes over time. In some ways this may not necessarily be bad, not every byte of data on the web is inherently valuable or desirable. Some people may be relieved that their digital footprint fades over time. But there are serious and troubling concerns as well. As an information management system, the World Wide Web is arguably one of the wonders of the world. Any decision to deliberately, destroy, conceal or manipulate critical information is itself a massive problem. Beyond mere entropy, there will always be concerted efforts to ensure that particular information is kept from being used to counter various interests.

The deliberate removal of information online can be as simple as various platforms removing content from their site, it could be institutions breaking links to previously available reports and documents, or even destruction of entire sites. It takes a great deal of effort to preserve information across time. That effort isn’t to be taken for granted. Online information destruction certainly isn’t new, but there is a troubling, and accelerating trend. One of the more significant warnings is episode 384 of the Corbett Report’s podcast The Library of Alexandria is on Fire where James Corbett gives some excellent advice regarding overcoming this problem:

Refuse cloud-confined devices

The very beginning of preserving information is having the very storage devices under your own control.
Move away from controlled platforms

Relying on online services to protect information is doomed in the long run.
Save EVERYTHING!

As far as your own information management is concerned: if it’s not on your own machine, it doesn’t exist.

It’s worth reiterating that information management is its own (very worthwhile!) skill. There’s a variety of things you’ll want to do on top of preserving information, but saving it is always the first step. Never feel bad merely saving information, but here’s some things worth considering after you have:

Indexing: Is your information stored in an easily searchable way?

The easiest way to accomplish this is to use very descriptive file names, so that they can be searched with your operating system, regardless of media type.
Conversion: Sometimes you want information in a different format, this is useful to save space and stay current.
Adding Metadata: There’s a lot of useful information about saved content that’s worth keeping, such as transcriptions, summaries, and citations.
Sharing: Why keep it all to yourself? Sharing is caring and can help better protect information by increasing the amount of copies in existence. Remember hoarding is not preserving, but it’s a good start!

But why do we need information on our machines if the Internet Archive exists? If we can’t hope to compete with the 160PB behemoth ourselves, why bother duplicating data ourselves?

Concerns

While it’s been confirmed that the entire Internet Archive should be back online in “days not weeks” there are some serious questions to ask in the meantime. At the very least, we have up to 31 million emails breached from a population that is more likely to be journalists and researchers.(independent and mainstream alike!) This is an important reminder that when one is doing sensitive work, that you should make sure to isolate online identities from each other by using completely different emails. It should go without saying that any information that can be used, will be.

The outage itself is a serious concern. Given that not only is this an election year, but also many high-stakes events are currently taking place that benefit from having a public information trail. The (hopefully) temporary outage of the Internet Archive not only temporarily memory-holes the existing record, but potentially permanently prevents current events from being properly preserved. This may have profound implications on the future.

Far more troubling than the outage itself, is the nature of the hack of the Internet Archive itself. With the data from the breach, we know that those who attacked the Internet Archive had access since September 28th. There is a great deal of damage that attackers could do in even a single day without being detected. Even worse, because the Internet Archive is a record of events a mere rollback to a previous state is insufficient to reverse serious inside attacks. Independent tech journalist Bryan Lunduke raises the serious concern that these attackers may not be the only ones attacking the Internet Archive, merely the ones that we know about.

It is difficult to overstate the implications of the Internet Archive potentially being manipulated in real-time. Attackers with high-level access could absolutely manipulate records in difficult to address ways. We have assurances from staff that the data is safe, but it is an open question how confidently they can make those assurances.

What Makes The Internet Archive Great?

Despite all this, should the Internet Archive return, there is no reason to abandon the cause entirely. Imperfections are themselves noteworthy, but never a reason to completely disregard any particular tool. For what it is, the Internet Archive is a phenomenal achievement and a incredibly useful service for a wide variety of people and purposes.

Trust

As a long-standing archive, the Internet Archive has garnered a great deal of trust. For many, the site is a go-to resource, and it has partnered with many organizations like libraries and other institutions. This trust is a big part of the reason why citing the Wayback Machine is very often considered as good as citing the original link itself. Other alternatives, may not have the same level of trust, and it may be difficult to rely on them.

Scale, Depth & Diversity

The size alone of the Internet Archive is formidable. Beyond merely archiving versions of the web, it also includes a massive amount of media from all over the world. The cultural and historical relevance of that information is its own treasure not to be taken lightly. No radical new approach will even begin to reach the same size anytime soon.

Age

Founded in 1996, the Internet archive has a massive head-start over other projects. Despite present circumstances, almost 30 years of being operational is nothing to scoff at. Catching up to 30 years of information at such a scale is an enormous task.

Limitations of The Internet Archive

Despite these things, there are reasons why one should consider alternative archives for particular purposes. For some situations, these limitations may be deal-breakers, for others they may be fairly trivial. In any case it is still best that one still maintains their own archives of important information, for its own sake and potentially because of the following.

Centralized

The Internet Archive is a massive target. From now, until it stops existing it will always have to contend with a wide variety of threats. From cyber threats like this incident, to even financial and legal troubles. The institution itself is vulnerable to being pressured by a variety of forces that all have their own agendas. This is not to say that a decentralized internet archive is some kind of panacea. Such an undertaking would absolutely have its own challenges and trade-offs.

Removals

There are primarily three ways that information is deleted the Internet Archive:

Copyright Infringement:

Since March 2001, their copyright policy states:

The Internet Archive respects the intellectual property rights and other proprietary rights of others. The Internet Archive may, in appropriate circumstances and at its discretion, remove certain content or disable access to content that appears to infringe the copyright or other intellectual property rights of others.
Deletion Requests:

Internet Archive honors deletion requests as well, these are reviewed by their team. There are many reasons why a request would be honored, such as removing personal information, but can quite plausibly include a wide variety of other requests as well.
/robots.txt

Every website can forbid the Wayback Machine from recording information through their robots.txt file. This file is generally used to suggest to search engines and other bots what information is supposed to be indexed. Not only does the Wayback Machine honor this mechanism, but they also apply it retroactively. Meaning that it is relatively simple for any website operator to “memory-hole” their own specific content, even on a per-item basis.

A Call For Innovation

The greatest challenge with independent archives is credibility. Anyone can create their own modified mirror of a web site and claim it’s an honest and true archive. If the operators of the site deny its authenticity how can others be sure? It’s a reasonable question if any archive can be trusted on a long enough time frame. One can even argue that generative AI tools can make any and all information falsifiable. Reputation can’t be trusted, because it can be sold as a commodity like anything else.

Credibility alone, is not the only reason to preserve information, however. The truth is that there are many reasons to take on the task even in such conditions. In many scenarios, the information itself would be lost to time forever. Preservation can very often be its own end for a wide variety of reasons. When aiming to hold powerful institutions accountable, very often the information can be corroborated by other facts.

Trying to independently archive the entire Web is effectively an impossible task. The goal should never be to preserve the totality of information online, but merely what is important. Defining what is important is its own massive challenge, but ultimately it boils down to a personal choice on how to use resources available. It is clear that more tools for independent information management are needed. Either building those tools yourself, or teaming up with others to cooperate on them would be a massive step in the right direction. Indexing and automation are both viable avenues to provide powerful tools for independent researchers.

We can hope, that for as long as the digital landscape remains somewhat free, that there will be those willing to support investing in building specialized tools that can begin to level the playing field. If we are not ardent in our support for a better technological future, we may end up with the ones imposed on us via governments and/or corporations.

Tools to Consider

Other Online Archives:

These are definitely worth considering, even in parallel with the Wayback Machine.

Archiving Tools

Courtesy of the Awesome-Selfhosted list:
Webrecorder which is a suite of useful tools for maintaining one’s own web archives. Webrecorder aims for accuracy that may not be matched by other tools.
SingleFile Browser add-on to save pages “as a single .html file”, which can be a handy alternative to printing a page as a PDF.
yt-dlp for downloading videos & audio
For those who want to go pro, archive team is a great place to get started.

Don’t forget your backups!

Any data that isn’t backed up is considered to be in a superposition of accessible and gone forever. It’s there until it just isn’t. Since the goal is to preserve information, it’s crucial to learn how to protect information now that you’ve started collecting it.

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Good Governance in Cyberspace: Digital Freedom Policy Framework

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What is “Policies for the People?”

Policies for the People is a fascinating project aimed to help the public “open source” policies for a better future. They have several main categories such as Health, Food, Liberty, Economy & Peace. I would encourage you (but especially Americans) to get involved in either writing your own proposals, or at least giving constructive feedback to ones written about issues that are near and dear to you.

As somebody who is a HUGE FAN of bottom-up strategies, I believe this is a golden opportunity to recognize the potential of elected representatives having organized, genuine bottom-up feedback. The platform is running Discourse which is the go-to choice for many open source projects & communities. The platform itself is available as fully Free and Open source, so it’s even possible to setup your own independent instance. I would highly recommend considering how you could adopt this model for your own region or priorities.

I am thrilled to take a stab at building a better technological future by presenting my vision on what the United States Federal Government can do to improve. My hope is that you find my submission a worthwhile conversation-starter. If you have feedback, I would highly encourage you signing up to Policies for the People, and then replying to the post.

Executive Summary

Primary Concerns

Allowing Foreign governments to dictate free expression online
Big Tech & Government stifling innovation
Mass surveillance and privacy risks to citizens

Overview

There is an immense amount of opportunity in building conditions for a more free cyberspace. By adopting a strong stance on digital freedoms and protections, Americans can transform the digital landscape. This opportunity represents a chance to truly resolve many pressing concerns, and brings huge economic and cultural benefits.

When many think of grand-sweeping changes in technology, often they think of the European Union. As a leader pushing for ambitious reforms, the EU is very much in the driver’s seat of deciding the future of cyberspace. While there are many benefits to this, the EU does not prioritize classic American values such as free speech. This is quite apparent in many projects and initiatives.

In this proposal, I share a vision on how the United States can replicate many of the successes from the European Union’s strong digital vision, without conceding cyberspace to be dictated by the EU or foreign adversaries. This proposal is a vision for a future of cyberspace where Americans are free to maximize innovation, creativity, and security.

At a high level the following reforms are required:

A strategic vision to exceed the European Union’s Next Generation Internet initiative
Institutional Safety
A Digital Bill of Rights
Creating opportunity for a better cyberspace

Strategic Vision

Protecting the interests of Americans in cyberspace requires a bold new departure from the status quo. For too long, the web has largely stagnated as cyber threats and online harms escalate. Instead of trying to address concerns on a reactionary per-issue basis, a new direction is needed to confront the foundations of these troubles. The goal must be to transform the technological landscape to represent one of innovation, collaboration, and strong security practices.

First and foremost, there must be recognition of the fact that online freedom issues quickly become national security concerns. If Americans don’t feel they can safely and effectively engage online, they become vulnerable to being exploited, undermining their own security. Transformative change is required to adapt to the realities of cyberspace in our time. As the Crowdstrike Global IT outage has shown, top-down security efforts have their own risks. Instead of developing a plan to centrally manage digital affairs, Americans deserve a properly decentralized technological landscape.

A variety of EU projects are aimed specifically at granting the European Union digital sovereignty, but falls short of reclaiming it for the citizenry as well. A cyber strategy for the United States has to recognize the importance of it’s own digital sovereignty as well as that of individual Americans. If this opportunity is forsaken, the entire infrastructure of our online interactions can be dictated by the European Union, or even foreign adversaries.

Thus, the United States Cyber Strategy must pivot away from consolidating power through Big Tech, and towards empowering citizens, families, communities, and businesses to be truly resilient from modern cyber threats. This will require a long-term plan that includes necessary components like right to repair, privacy protections, strong privacy guarantees, and above all transparency and accountability. Americans are not lacking in skills, knowledge, or creativity, what is lacking is a solid foundation to build a modern and free cyberspace.

The benefits of a bottom-up effort to transform our digital landscape are immense. This taps into vast swaths of under-utilized labor and skills and create the conditions for multi-disciplinary collaboration and innovation. Open Source has proven to be a highly effective and highly resilient model for not only innovation, but also collaboration with throughput vastly superior to constrained models. The future of work is here, it’s just about making it economic.

The purpose of the strategic vision is to realign priorities towards Civilian-based cyber defense. This principle recognizes the reality that every person has a role to play in keeping digital threats at bay. Therefore radical new approaches are required to foster an environment of education, collaboration, and competition. By creating fertile ground for innovation and bottom-up feedback, many of our present challenges can be transformed into opportunities.

Civilian-based Cyber Defense

The principle of Civilian-based cyber defense is so effective that it has already been partly implemented out of necessity. Organizations like CISA run programs to raise cybersecurity awareness and digital education. This is something that needs to be explored to it’s fullest, and brought to the forefront of many cyber & education initiatives. Instead of relying on massive entities to safeguard everyone, a radical new approach is required to tackle modern digital threats. This new approach is equipping every individual to be an active participant in a more safe and secure future.

Understanding the threats

These risks are outlined to demonstrate that many of these threats and their components are inseparably intertwined. For too long our institutions are modeled with a vision that cyberspace is entirely separate from the real world and people’s lives. Cyber threats very often include planning, preparation, or even methods that impact real-world infrastructure and people’s personal vulnerabilities. The idea that these threats can be mitigated, much less eliminated without a holistic, bottom-up approach is madness at best and arrogance at worst.

Cyber warfare
- Software / Hardware supply chain attacks
- Mass surveillance (foreign and domestic)
- Ransomware
- System disruption
Cybersecurity & IT
- Malware
- Breaches
- Outages
- Social engineering attacks
Online Harms
- Harassment
- Cyber-stalking
- Exploitation
Privacy Risks
- Identity theft
- Personal safety / Extortion
- Undermines trust
- Chills speech and participation
Fragility
- Single-points of failure
- Dependence
- Censorship
- Lack of competition

Civilian-Based Cyber Defense in Action

Education

Our technological future is always going to be in the hands of our youngest. Their decisions on what to use, how to use it, and what to build on fundamentally reshapes our collective digital experience in real-time. At the very least, it is crucial that this is an informed decision. At the bare minimum, “computer literacy” should be tracked, fostered, and improved just like actual literacy.

Beyond schooling, public awareness is crucial. Education and outreach must be a life-long experience. Just as online threats and harms have evolved over the last two decades, we can be quite sure they will continue to evolve at a rapid rate. This can only be ameliorated with an environment where Americans are able to have a meaningful impact on their own digital experience.

A wide range of initiatives are on the table when one recognizes that the first-line of cyber defense isn’t powerful tech giants, but rather individuals themselves.
Research

Information is the most precious resource. Initiatives that can acquire vital information about pressing concerns are invaluable. America’s highly skilled and creative workforce can take advantage of opportunities to leave no stone un-turned when it comes to investigating digital threats, and their solutions. Agencies should be leveraging their unique insight to provide information to the public on ground that needs to be covered.

Building a national defense strategy around bottom-up innovation requires exhausting lines of inquiry that many technical minds are eager to explore. With properly aligned goals, the digital sovereignty of individuals and national security can lead to powerful strengthening of both. By relying on the same methods to secure both, citizens can have a direct impact on not only improving their lives, but the very fate of the nation.
Collaboration

Leveraging powerful models, like Open Source development (for both hardware and software) offers huge benefits for innovation. There are many ways to include people with varied expertise to gain multi-disciplinary benefits from broader collaboration. With open and transparent methods of governance, and even tools and techniques, feedback from the front-line can make an even bigger impact.

Transparent sharing of insights, but also including public feedback into the equation, allows for much more rapid iteration on crucial concepts.
Innovation

With the benefits of hardware and software freedom, technologies can be safely used in both public and private contexts. Optimizations can be widely deployed and many can reap the benefits. By building the foundation for a truly free technological landscape, the USA can become the home for boundless innovation. Realigning strategies and goals for a free digital future has immense opportunities for both individuals and institutions.

Institutional Safety

While all of the above sounds wonderful and amazing, very little of it is truly possible without trust. This is very much where the European Union fails to deliver on what they intend in their digital strategy. With some reform, the United States is in the unique, enviable position to be a world leader in not just technological innovation, but also digital freedom and security. Improving the relationship between institutions and people, trust can be built towards genuine cooperation and shared interests.

De-FANGing the Surveillance Apparatus

The very fact that the European Union has spent so much trying to break free from American companies tells us all we need to know about how much Americans can trust public-private collaboration with these entities. As such, not only do Americans require stronger privacy and security guarantees, but they also deserve a government that doesn’t leverage private entities against their interests. Public, short, medium and long term plans must be made to entirely dismantle domestic surveillance.

Cooperation, subsidy, and information sharing with for-profit entities must be phased out. These institutions seize and pacify a huge amount of America’s top minds and puts them to work building things that are incompatible with a free digital future. Maintaining proper boundaries between private and public institutions is a vital reform in building meaningful trust in the future. When law enforcement requires information, it must be obtained with a valid court order, both requests and receipts must be properly and transparently disclosed.

Digital Bill of Rights

The White House currently has a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. Some of the concerns raised are excellent, others are unnecessary barriers to innovation. Even worse however, the AI Bill of Rights is far too narrow, and possibly wastes the opportunity to develop a truly comprehensive Digital Bill of Rights. A Digital Bill of Rights must not only apply to government departments, but where possible, to publicly traded and regulated entities. Some of these exist already in some form or another, but a comprehensive (Federal) act is required.

Digital Bill of Rights (Shortlist)

Access
- Non-discrimination on protected status, politics, or even a wider range of criteria
- Prior notice to disruptions to access with proper due-process
Data Sovereignty
- Right to refuse data collection
- Control over how information is used and shared
- Right to request, and delete personal data
Transparency & Accountability
- Clear and transparent disclosure of information sharing and breaches of personal information
- Liability for data misuse
Freedom of Choice
- The right to refuse particular devices, services, and systems

Regulate digital public infrastructure providers as “common carriers”

Not only as a means to strengthen the Digital Bill of Rights, but also to protect good-faith providers of digital infrastructure. With a broad conception of public digital infrastructure, more Americans can feel they can equitably participate in the digital economy.

This would include:

ISPs
Domain Registrars & Public DNS Providers
Cloud & Web Hosting Providers
Payment Providers
Financial institutions

Protecting Innovation & Security

To compete in the modern digital environment, new approaches are required to stay adaptable. Beyond sustaining various rackets, the goal is to allow American innovation to thrive in an environment that makes people and cyberspace more free. There is significant demand for secure, verifiable systems that put the person first. Instead of falling behind foreign competitors, the USA can reclaim it’s status as not only the land of the free, but also free cyberspace.

Right to Repair

Right to repair involves various reforms that are essential to long-term innovation and security. Of crucial importance is the ability for users to have the capacity to modify potentially defective firmware. Very often digital products fall behind in security, so much so that the EU is considering harsh import restrictions under the Cyber Resilience Act.

By encouraging an environment where devices are more free and open by default, users can have the control to obtain the highest security guarantees needed for the situation. This alone has the potential to resolve security issues faster than any single initiative could, by allowing almost everyone to take a role in thwarting cyber threats.

Prioritize Free & Open Source Software & Hardware

Software & hardware freedom is a very important public good. Open source is a very effective way to put bottom-up feedback and contributions to use. By harnessing these goals, America’s technological economy can be radically transformed in a way that provides a great deal of jobs and opportunities. By using Free & Open Source Software, government agencies and departments can not only reclaim their own digital sovereignty, but individuals as well. The technological landscape moves very quickly, and is only poised to accelerate as enthusiasm for decentralized open cooperation improves. It’s crucial not to miss the opportunity to embrace this change.

Related Proposals:

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Mitra: A tool to rebuild online free expression

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

For quite some time, I’ve been on the hunt for effective technological solutions. One of the major game-changers online has been the rise of decentralized social media. The Fediverse is one such system for building and running decentralized social media. In my opinion, the Fediverse is one of the more under-utilized tools by those who want to protect free speech online. Instead of merely moving to greener pastures with a new tech giant, we can take advantage of the opportunity to transform the social landscape ourselves.

I run a few of my own Fediverse servers at the moment, such as Peertube, Mitra, and Misskey. But when it comes to censorship resistance features, Mitra is a cut above the rest. And so I had asked Silverpill the developer of Mitra if he would join me for a Q&A.

Q&A

In your own words, what is Mitra?

Mitra is a social media server for the Fediverse.

Why that logo? How did you come up with it?

The outer shape is known as Rub el Hizb, it’s an Islamic symbol. There is no deep meaning, I just saw it somewhere and decided to use it as a starting point. I experimented with many different designs and selected one that seemed most interesting and pleasing to the eye. You can spot a bunch of “M"s inside.

You can have your own Twitter, Facebook or YouTube, connected to thousands of other small networks. Isn’t that great?

I think federation is the best architecture for a decentralized social network. The user experience is decent and the network can scale without compromising on decentralization, as was demonstrated by Email, XMPP and Matrix.

Mitra home

Why did you decide to build Mitra?

Before Mitra I was working with blockchain technology. At some point I realized that decentralized financial infrastructure needs a social layer, and that existing solutions are inadequate. After doing some research on decentralized social protocols I picked ActivityPub because it was mature, well-designed and had a strong developer community with values similar to mine. The missing pieces were decentralized payments and decentralized identity, so I started working on these problems.

What makes Mitra unique compared to other Fediverse servers?

So, one of my original goals was integrated payments. I tried several ideas and eventually settled on paid subscriptions. This feature provides a way to accept payments in Monero and publish premium content for paying subscribers.

The second goal was decentralized identity, or “nomadic identity”, as we call it in the Fediverse. This turned out to be a very difficult task, but I’ve made significant progress. Nomadic identity mechanism allows people to have an account that is not tied to any single server, but exists on many servers simultaneously. My implementation of this mechanism is not complete yet and currently can be used only by developers.

Mitra also can federate over Tor and I2P networks.

Besides that, it is very lightweight and easy to host, so it might be a good choice even for those who are not interested in subscriptions and nomadic identity.

My favorite server is Pleroma. I borrowed many ideas from it when Mitra was in the early stages of development. Streams is also very interesting. It implements nomadic identity in the same way as Mitra, and has many other nice features.

Among web clients, my favorite was Soapbox, but its developer quit Fediverse (there is now a fork called Mangane). For Android devices, I recommend Husky.

In your opinion, what features are most important for censorship resistance?

In my work I prefer to focus on the positive side of censorship resistance: digital sovereignty. A server that runs on your own hardware and that doesn’t depend on any external services is practically unstoppable. This is already possible today with Tor and I2P, but requires specialized technical knowledge, and even if you have it, you can communicate only with a very small number of people.

So the most important features are those that make this experience more accessible. Ideally, everyone should be able to send messages to millions of followers from a personal social media server that runs on the phone with unstable internet connection.

What are the biggest threats to online free speech, and what do you believe has kept them at bay the best?

The biggest threat is centralization. It occurs on multiple levels, both technical and social, and every time there is a bottleneck, someone tries to use it to censor their opponents. What keeps it at bay are all those people who invest resources in building decentralized networks and circumvention tools, and those who make information about these tools accessible to the general public.

Are any of the alternative protocols (like nostr) meaningful competition from a censorship resistance perspective?

Nostr seems to be the only meaningful competition, although it is still not big enough to matter. Other networks are even smaller, or not really decentralized.

The current situation is really unfortunate because so much effort is wasted in technological dead ends. Fediverse is the biggest decentralized network and is perfectly capable of supporting decentralized identity, the purported lack of which is often used as an excuse to create a competing protocol.

How does a person, or even a small group directly oppose online censorship?

Use decentralized networks and open source software. Educate others. Ultimately, this a collective action problem, and only together we can make censorship prohibitively expensive and therefore ineffective.

What are your short, medium and long term goals for Mitra?

In the short term, I’ll be working on several basic features that are still missing, such as polls, audience controls and moderation tools. Medium term plans include finishing nomadic identity system, improving premium subscriptions and implementing groups. I’m also planning to release a Rust library for developing ActivityPub applications. In the long term, I want to build a powerful social media server that has everything you need, costs nothing and can run in your pocket.

What motivates you to continue building Mitra into the future?

I think a tool like Mitra is necessary, an no one else is working on that, so I have no choice but to build it myself.

Outside of just Mitra, how are you working to make the Fediverse even better?

I proposed a number of standards for the Fediverse, covering message signing, quote posts, federated payments, data portability and other things. I also help maintain a platform for publishing those proposals (Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, or FEPs).

Every Friday I publish a newsletter about the Fediverse: https://mitra.social/@weekinfediverse

What’s the best way to support your work?

Try Mitra. If you like what I’m doing, you can help by suggesting improvements, testing different clients, reporting bugs and spreading the word.

If you’re a developer, you can contribute to Mitra or implement my FEPs in your own project.

I also accept donations. My Monero address is 8Ahza5RM4JQgtdqvpcF1U628NN5Q87eryXQad3Fy581YWTZU8o3EMbtScuioQZSkyNNEEE1Lkj2cSbG4VnVYCW5L1N4os5p

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Cyber Fix Episode 8: Learning from Others

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to Cyber Fix, your dopamine-infused tech news update.
My name is Gabriel, here to help get other information junkies up to speed with important tech news. Stay tuned for a light-hearted exploration of hostile cyberspace and what we can do about it.

Cyber Fix is on hiatus, you may now listen to full episodes on PeerTube

Stories

Platform Peril

Solutions Roundup

The Fine Details:

Cyberwar

Music Credits:

Honorable Mentions

These are items that didn’t quite make it into the final episode, but noteworthy in their own right.

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Cyber Fix: Episode 7

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Cyber Fix is on hiatus, you may now listen to full episodes on PeerTube

Part 1

No Joke: Exploding Pagers & Radios

Digital Blunders:

Solutions Roundup:

Part 2

Tech News:

Precrime Roundup:

Control Grid updates:

Music Credits:

Honorable Mentions:

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Private Web Search: A Contradiction in Terms

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

One of the first things many people do online is search for information. A simple search may not seem like sensitive information, but all of everyone’s searches, on every topic, all the time absolutely includes a lot of sensitive information. If that wasn’t bad enough, it’s relatively simple for those collecting the information to make inferences on that data to learn incredibly sensitive things about individuals.

There is a wide variety of search engines that have attempted to build their own indexes, or tried to position themselves as privacy-respecting alternatives to mainstream search:

Swisscows is an “anonymous search engine” hosted in Switzerland.
Brave is not just a browser, but they have also attempted to put together their own independent search engine.
Kagi is a company that hopes to make paying for search a sustainable way to improve search functionality.
Stract is another interesting option that received funding from the EU, but unfortunately intends on using ads for funding in the future.
Mojeek is another attempt at an independent search provider.
For those who like their solutions tokenized there’s Presearch.
But if private search is a fruitless endeavor anyways, why not get some trees out of it?

To figure out how to protect our information online, we have to take a serious look at one of the biggest culprits of not only invasions of privacy, but also online manipulation and censorship: search engines. It is incredibly tempting for some to want to replace a known-malicious part of their tech life (like Google) by merely introducing a “better” drop-in replacement recommended online. Unfortunately, solving some of the serious problems regarding dragnet surveillance and censorship will require more consideration and effort.

Understanding Web Search

To many, web search is synonymous with “Google”. Google certainly isn’t the only search engine out there, but it is by far the largest and most used in the English language. Despite it still being the de-facto standard for many, the concerns related to Google Search are quite numerous. From banning particular results and queries, to the significant privacy concerns, there are a lot of reasons why somebody would want to switch to a different search engine.

But the friction is quite high. Many report that no matter what engine they switch to, they never get quite as good results. This itself can sometimes be a bit of a “skill issue” given that searching is something one can get better at over time. There definitely is truth to people’s trouble however. Any competing search engine has a phenomenal amount of work to do before even beginning to think about being comparable. Any existing search engine has the advantage of time and hindsight. A new project effectively has to out-innovate both of those advantages in addition to building almost entirely from scratch.

The most valuable and important parts of any search engine are the crawler and the index. These are the two crucial components any serious attempt at building a new search engine has to get right.

The Crawler

To allow others to search the entire web, you’d have to actually visit the entire web at one point. If for no other reason to load the site and store what’s on the site. Building a bot (or set of bots) to scan the entire internet and record their contents is a massive undertaking. This alone sets a very high minimum on the amount of resources required to build and maintain a search engine. Presumably, you want your search engine to be reasonably up to date, so this requires constant upkeep.

Loading so many web sites, and downloading any needed resources alone is a huge burden in both bandwidth and storage costs. Some smaller search engines will focus on a particular niche. This comes with significant downsides however, crawling less creates blind spots for your search engine thus limiting its usefulness for others. That can be a perfectly reasonable trade-off when aiming for specialization. Wiby for example, primarily indexes non-commercial hobbyist style web sites.

While crawling the web there are effectively two big questions that need answers. 1) How wide do you cast your net over the web to discover resources? and 2) How much information do you collect on each resource? Number 2 is harder because one could just store links and their titles, but a more sophisticated engine will store keywords or even the entire text to have the most accurate information possible. With the the greater accessibility of machine transcription, it may even make sense to download and transcribe audio/video content for even more accuracy.

If all that wasn’t challenging enough, there will always be content online that is inaccessible to your crawler. Any information that requires an account or payment will automatically be refused to your crawler until it becomes well-known and approved by those resources. The more time people create & share information behind these walled-gardens the worse off all search engines inevitably become.

The Index

After you’ve crawled all over the web your work still has only really just begun. A proper search engine needs to be fast, complete, and accurate. All of this relies on the information you’ve stored being intelligently analyzed and categorized for retrieval. For fast retrieval you’ll probably want to calculate scores for common queries in advance, or use mathematics to generate them with a carefully curated subset of your information. A search engine without a crawler is frozen in time, but a search engine without an index is just a massive unsorted collection of online resources.

Properly building a search index requires a great deal of forethought and maintenance. There will always be ways to improve accuracy and speed. The algorithms built on top of your index may be specifically designed for particular kinds of information. There is ultimately no limit to what can be done to craft the perfect index of the entire web. I would argue that the index is the most important resource of a search engine, big or small.

The Problem of Surveillance

This is important to understand to make sense of the privacy risks of search engines. When you use a web search, it’s very difficult to hide the fact that you’re using it, especially from the provider itself. While tools like Tor & VPNs can mitigate the risk a bit, the vast majority of people won’t even take these (far from bullet-proof) measures. This creates a wide variety of concerns, especially as the searches from a wide variety of people starts becoming massively aggregated. Search data from particular people is also very useful information to have against that specific group.

There have been many “private web search” providers that have entered the space. Ultimately the first thing they offer is a promise to collect less data about you than Google. While that’s good, it’s not a high bar. Even when a search engine actually collects very little, the aggregate information as a whole is still a treasure trove of power that can be used against individuals and groups alike. And if no user data is collected at all, that will never stop governments that snoop on their own citizens.

In a time where people running tech companies are placed under arrest, it’s time to start wondering how independent a search engine truly can be. Even with no data collection and no snooping involved, every entity will face the pressure to leave out inconvenient information from their index, even merely as a cost saving measure. The difficulty of running a large search engine itself creates so many challenges that are almost impossible for any truly independent organization to achieve without external interference.

To make matters worse, given the difficulty in hiding that one is using a particular public search engine, it’s entirely possible that using an obscure search engine itself reveals a fair amount about a person.

Alternative Strategies

Metasearch

One strategy is to use a privacy-protecting front-end to route your search queries through a variety of public search engines. SearXNG is a notable example that’s highly configurable. Using a metasearch engine alone is a meaningful improvement over using many public search engines. A community of people sharing a metasearch engine provides more people “safety in numbers”, at least from the search engines themselves.

Of course, the danger of using a metasearch engine is that one is placing their trust on the operator to be responsible, trustworthy, and competent. Another point to consider is that a metasearch engine can not find information that is concealed (or otherwise not indexed) by the configured search engines.

The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay is an example of a web service that has been able to stay online despite a massive amount of opposition both legal and technical. It’s important to note that this was possible because The Pirate Bay exists to index a narrow set of content (Torrents) and stores the bare-minimum amount of information to work. This allows the service to be quickly mirrored or migrated elsewhere incredibly easily. The larger and more complicated a service is, the harder it is to make resilient to external pressure and influence.

Searching Particular Sites

Many seem to forget that various websites often have their own search function. This amnesia is sometimes warranted because sadly many sites own search engine is not as efficient as just using google and specifying the site. When looking for specific information, it’s often quite effective to search specialized or related wiki’s or forums to get a specific answer. This lost art is becoming part of many people’s habits again now that search engines are gradually getting worse

Of course, searching a specific site is only as private as the site you’re visiting is. It is sad to hear that allegedly “Gen Z” is notorious for using TikTok as their go-to search engine, which is a condemnation of our current situation.

Can We Do Better?

It’s hard to believe that yet another private search engine is the panacea to resolve all our privacy concerns. While many of them provide non-trivial benefits, for those aiming to make dragnet surveillance impossible, we need to go even further. Breaking away from the cloud works for various kinds of software, why can’t it work for search?

Local Search

Usually, your device has an embedded search function that can search files and even settings. This is a very useful thing to have. It doesn’t immediately sound like a crazy idea to distribute indexes to devices for people to search on their own. A narrow, but useful search engine would be a powerful thing to include on one’s own machine. Kiwix is a fascinating project that aims to provide (searchable) online resources for offline use.

Personally, I actually do have my own locally hosted search engine. One of my favorite RSS readers, FreshRSS stores every article from each feed I’m subscribed to. This means that when I want to find relevant commentary on a particular story, I can easily find stories related to topics I’m interested in. Having done this for quite some time, I’ve found it a very valuable tool for looking back as issues develop.

Indexing the entire Internet is an immense affair. It’s entirely possible that the best search engine for an individual to represent an incredibly tiny fraction of the entire whole. Where possible it would be nice if such a search engine was able to be dynamically extended with additional indexes. That would mean that provided the device one is searching on is sound, all searches would be safe from prying eyes, and even censorship!

Information Management

What ultimately makes one search engine better than another is relevance. This is what makes LLM-generated search summaries convincing even when they’re obviously wrong. If the solution to make offline search a viable endeavor is sharing small, but useful indexes, then a wide variety of information management tools are needed. Once such tool I’ve been starting to use is Logseq and I’ve been quite impressed.

Software like this, that allows users to leverage their own computing and knowledge in a harmonious way is clearly the way we build not only better privacy, but a much better digital experience for people. Those interested in learning how to build software should consider how to build tools that enable that experience, rather than ones that fit neatly within the cloud paradigm. More and more people are learning to break free from the cloud for their workflows, but often find themselves looking for tools. There are many niches worth filling, so find one you find interesting!

Building High-quality Resources

Condensing information and resources is incredibly valuable. By maintaining a public online resource where you curate useful knowledge, you can greatly assist others in saving time. This is where the Free and Open Web really shines. High quality independent websites are the backbone of a truly free cyberspace and can do innumerable things to tip the scales in favor of people and communities.

As long as your content is available in accessible and/or machine-readable formats, a great deal can be done to make those resources indexed more easily. With a large collection of valuable information to share, you can reduce the odds that snoopers have a clear idea of what specific information people are accessing. This is why I would highly encourage any web site to include a full-text RSS archive of all their posts. You never know when such a thing may be seriously helpful.

Conclusion

Private web search is almost impossible in our current environment where large institutions are fighting over control of people’s very own knowledge. It is crucial to build solutions that broaden people’s ability to learn, create & share independently. Information control is a terrifying force that can be incredibly difficult to reverse. For many, search is where they acquire most of their information online, and it’s getting increasingly controlled. Thinking about ways to acquire information online without systems acting as gatekeepers is going to become only more important as time goes on.

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Teachable Moment: John McAfee's Gmail Rant

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve seen this video making the rounds and feel compelled to use it as a teachable moment. This is a great example that can be used to go deeper into a couple of important points about privacy & security. It’s always important to consider why a particular short, oversimplified video is making the rounds right now. Often it’s not too hard to speculate why nefarious interests would be interested in promoting particularly simplified views. Important ideas take time to understand, so always take the time to reflect on the details when you can, or at least embrace some uncertainty.

Who was John McAfee?

That’s a complicated question to answer. Allegedly John McAfee died of suicide in 2021. John had a compelling technical resume. Besides being known for selling anti-virus software, he also worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed, and even NASA. Despite being well credentialed, he was quite a controversial figure with a very dramatic life. What’s specifically relevant to his statements here is that he was somebody who got to learn computers very well just as they were getting off the ground. There is no doubt that he was a very skilled technical mind. In addition to this, he would bring important issues like Cyberwar into the forefront of the 2016 US presidential election.

He made some excellent statements regarding online privacy and security. It’s obvious that McAfee had a very clear understanding of not only the technological details, but also the broader social implications. During some of his more lucid comments he discusses the important details with clarity that I hope to someday myself. In some ways, I would argue this clip is doesn’t represent him at his best. So much so, that I am convinced the wide dissemination of this particular clip is a mindwar operation aimed at not only disarming people from taking their own privacy seriously, but also to discredit some of McAfee’s more salient points.

One final disclaimer is that I am uncertain when this video was recorded, but of all people John would still know better regardless.

[Link to transcript]

Overall message

Before addressing the content of the message, there is a lot about the framing that needs to be addressed. The most important factor is that privacy and security are not a simple binary of “safe/unsafe”. Safe from who? Unsafe how? There are always finer details that matter. Given McAfee’s complicated history, he has a particular (well-funded and well-staffed) adversary in mind and is predominantly concerned with a single threat (the US government).

Feel free to download and share!

You’re probably (hopefully) not in the same situation that John McAfee was, therefore your particular risks and circumstances will vary. Not only is this specific advice not particularly applicable to most individuals, many more concerns have become more pervasive threats to individuals and organizations alike. In short, cyberwar is no longer a sci-fi, or state-vs-state affair. Instead governments and corporations are wrestling over control of not just the public conversation, but our technological future as a whole.

Thus your average individual (even more for a high-value target!) needs to be cognizant of a wide variety of threats: stalkers, scammers, online mobs, gangs of cyber criminals, and even tech companies themselves. While McAfee makes some factual points in the video, the overall video leaves a counter-productive impression. It’s the opposite of informative, and requires fine correction. In today’s environment, things have only gotten much more complicated in the last few years, and certainly the last decade.

Yes, it is almost certain that a capable, motivated adversary can absolutely seize data from almost anyone no matter how cautious. The question is at what cost? Can every adversary seize everyone’s data all the time? That would get quite expensive rather fast, it would become even more expensive if those people were taking strategic measures to enhance their privacy and security. Ultimately, if we wish to de-fang the surveillance and censorship apparatus, getting more people involved to take action to raise the cost of mass surveillance is a highly effective tactic.

In addition to new adversaries, the game has gotten a lot more complicated with the advancement of new threats to people’s digital lives. Various governments are cracking down on various forms of dissent and online speech. Highly sophisticated online scams are on the rise. The sum total of data collection on people is weaponized to manipulate the public. Even employers are getting in on the mass surveillance game. State and private propaganda influence operations wage cyberwar both covert and overt. And if all that wasn’t bad enough, machine learning algorithms are quite capable of making all of the above a lot worse.

As always, the only constant is change. One can’t expect to clip two minutes from somebody with a very unique situation and an incredible depth of knowledge and necessarily expect to fairly represent their sum total expertise. I am certain that if John McAfee was still alive today and didn’t have the adversaries he did, he would state things very differently.

Point by point

Email

I am dissed constantly for using Gmail as my email system
…
if you think you have any privacy whatsoever with an encrypted system whether it’s an email system like Proton mail or an encrypted messaging system like signal you have no fucking privacy

The problems with email are pervasive. Even tools like Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) have their limitations. While McAfee is correct to point out that encryption is no ‘silver bullet to privacy with email, he’s completely wrong when it comes to the choice of provider. As he points out later in the video, encryption was designed to thwart man-in-the-middle attacks. He’s likely not at all concerned about somebody (other than the govt) compromising Google’s infrastructure to get at him. The problem is that in his situation, the vast array of concerns from Google itself are still worth considering.

It would be better if McAfee explained that in his situation, abstract concerns like data-mining and data sovereignty are a much lower priority to him when he has to worry about imprisonment (and potentially assassination). But when an email provider (even one such as Proton) has the capability of snooping on emails, there are many reasons why an individual would want to take precautions. This is where the condemnation of Gmail makes perfect sense. From a standpoint of protecting emails from prying eyes of the provider, Google is obviously the worst one to choose.

That said, Signal and Proton mail are worlds apart in terms of the risks involved. It’s not a reasonable comparison to make. Signal was originally designed to protect SMS messages, and eventually this was dropped in favor of becoming a pure messaging app. It’s pretty cool these days to dunk on Signal for it’s board’s membership, but when governments come knocking they repeatedly show they have (almost) nothing to hand over as recently as last month. On the other hand Proton has repeatedly handed over user data.

Notably, there is a “secure by design” email client that does offer similar protection. It seems surprisingly absent in many discussions around secure messengers, but Delta Chat is a fascinating telegram competitor that I believe is vastly underestimated in this space. Recently Delta Chat was able to respond to Russian authorities that they have no user data to give away.

Encryption

encryption was designed 35 years ago to prevent a man in the middle attack meaning someone between your transmission and your receipt
…
encryption is a worthless piece of shit old technology that is being marketed as a safe system. There is no safety anymore, there is no privacy.
…
you are being sold a fucking bill of goods which is worthless with encryption

As explained earlier, this is all relative. Cryptography (encryption) is a tool, and tools need to be applied and understood in their proper context. McAfee is absolutely correct that “encrypted” has become somewhat of a marketing buzzword that loses meaning rather quickly. Encryption is a very useful tool in a wide variety of contexts. It’s quite ironic that many sharing this particular rant would also argue Signal is “worthless” because it didn’t encrypt the local messages database in the desktop client.

There are different ways to use encryption to protect information. You can protect information in transit (which is what McAfee refers to here), you can encrypt it at “rest” (which is what Signal was criticized for not doing), and apparently while in use. Depending on your situation, these different techniques all have very important effects on what and how it protects. Of course, the details matter. Encrypting not enough is often just as damaging as not encrypting at all.

This is where my charitable interpretation of what McAfee is expressing is that in his situation, he feels that encryption will not protect him against the particular adversary he’s concerned about. That’s certainly a defensible position, but it’s far from saying encryption is worthless for everyone, everywhere, all the time.

Smartphones

there’s no man in the middle anymore! we don’t need them
your fucking smartphone is the surveillance device preferred by every government on the fucking planet

This is the strongest point in the entire video, since many individuals will also have a smartphone. It is important to have reasonable expectations about what protections you can have from un-trusted devices you use. Arguably, this is the biggest ‘Achilles Heel’ of various privacy software, if it only works on a smartphone your expectations have to be reduced dramatically. This also applies to any system running an atrocious AI data-miner such as Microsoft Recall ( or even antivirus software…? )

How much you can trust a particular device or system is a complicated question. A great deal has gone into protecting consumer devices, and for various Android devices there are ways to have them “De-Google’d” that may provide some benefits. But! McAfee’s strongest point is also a fairly weak point against encryption in general. Because serious risks to savvy smartphone users are really only presented by governments and tech companies. For those concerned with protecting their data sovereignty, there are significant benefits to encryption even on these devices. At any rate, people always have the choice to perform private tasks on more secure devices.

Malware

Do you know how easy it is to plant malware?
Go on pornhub, if you’ve been on pornhub someone is now listen[ing] to you.
All you have to do is do a drive-by of a website and it sets the “download unauthorized applications flag”, the first click and you now have malware that is doing two things:
Watching your inputs before they’re encrypted and transmitting them
And reading the outputs after they are fucking [de]crypted people

This is another very solid point in general. It’s not just state-level actors leveraging malware to collect people’s information or seize control over people’s devices. As always, this is a greater concern for high-value targets, but even just the technologically naive can fall for opportunistic traps. Again, this doesn’t feel like a strong argument against encryption, but rather raises the amount of effort one has to put in managing their digital affairs. Nobody would seriously suggest that just because a thief can throw a brick through your window that you should never lock your doors.

One could always avoid porn sites and hostile cyberspace all together. It’s possible to build more secure systems that protect regular users better. There’s always a great deal that you can do to measurably reduce your risk to malware. Just being careful and running an ad-blocker takes you a great deal of the way there.

Legal

I use Gmail for one reason
the last company that requires a fucking subpoena from a government in order to give them your information, and their lawyers have 30 fucking days to review the subpoena
30 days is enough for me, I change my email every 15 days

I think relying on a legal strategy to protect your data is more flawed than relying on encryption. Just ask anyone who wants to be forgotten online. I don’t think anyone can be certain that Google can’t figure out which of their users keeps changing accounts every two weeks. The best argument McAfee would have for using Gmail is that he is so attached to the Google ecosystem that it would be pointless for him to try to withhold information from them. Even simple things like using an Android phone, and various cloud services is enough to cross that threshold. But that represents an entirely new problem.

Not discussed, but still relevant

Interacting with others.

Lets take everything McAfee said at face value for a moment. He claims that in his situation, there’s no benefit to him for switching from Gmail to any other nominally secure provider for email. This breaks down the moment somebody else wants to contact him via email or he contacts a person through email. Suddenly he’s impacted someone else’s ability to protect information from Google just to communicate with him. This is exactly why even if it would do him no benefit to switch, others would benefit from him switching to a different provider. For example, if he was using Proton for mail, any Proton user could send him an email that would be encrypted in transit and at rest, and be at least a fair bit safer than in plain text on Google’s servers.

Conclusion

While John McAfee was a very knowledgeable person, his particular situation leads him to make judgement calls that aren’t necessarily right for everyone, especially as the situation evolves. At best, it’s an important reminder that your privacy and security are never entirely up to a single technology choice. It is the sum total of all your digital decisions that makes up your overall situation. Systems that handle personal information need to embody the spirit of “secure by design”. As always, the best way to protect information is not to record it, but the next best thing is to not store it. If it must be stored, than encryption is one tool to protect it from prying eyes.

If you see somebody sharing that video to make a snide point that protecting privacy is worthless, please consider sharing this post to explain why the reality is much more nuanced than that short clip presents.

Rest in peace John McAfee.
I pray that God has mercy on his soul, and for comfort to his loved ones.

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Cyber Fix: Episode 6

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Cyber Fix is on hiatus, you may now listen to full episodes on PeerTube

Tech Disasters

Solutions Roundup:

Control Grid Updates:

Finer Details:

I ain’t scared of no nanobots

Honorable Mentions:

Music Credits:

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Operation: Hearth

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A radically different digital experience is more within reach than it would seem. With a bit of effort, support, and creativity, small groups and communities can make a huge difference. People can build up, pool, and share digital resources to benefit others. By adapting to the physical realities of digital systems, we can make more beneficial choices. Not only that, but there is the opportunity to restructure cyberspace in a way that is more in tune with people’s real-life connections. Despite how “pie in the sky” this may sound, it is a realistic initiative for gradually liberating people from top-down digital control.

The secret to Operation: Hearth is the efficient re-allocation of technological resources with people in mind. Big Tech has operated on the basis of providing so much for free, that even highly technical people have lost sight of the importance of these resources. This creates scenarios where entire communities, institutions and even governments struggle with control over their own digital sovereignty.

“Decentralization is the way of the future…
The revolution is already here. The only question is:
Do you want to be a part of it?”

James Corbett

Decentralize Everything: How To Avoid the Technocratic Nightmare

I’ll re-introduce the three primary resources in cyberspace brought up in my guide Reclaiming Territory in Cyberspace which are: computing power, bandwidth, and storage. Every device you acquire, or put to use has advantages and disadvantages regarding those resources. For example, it is intuitive to even non-technical people that a smart phone is likely not the device you want to use to provide a web service to millions of users. Our advantage when trying to reclaim cyberspace is that we’re not trying to move everyone on big tech to a new super-massive platform. Instead we are trying to do our part to make radical change on the small scale. The following strategies are introduced in order from least to most skill required.

Offline-first Workflows

Free (and Open Source) Software is fantastic. Many people intuitively understand the benefits of software being collaboratively built in the open, but there is a far greater advantage of using such solutions: offline-first workflows. By ensuring all your working data (such as documents, photos, videos and everything else) is in one place makes it much easier to keep track of and backup when needed.

This is something almost anybody can take advantage of. The goal is not necessarily to never connect to the Internet, but to do all you can without being reliant on it. A great deal of my software choices have been made with this in mind.
Here is a list of Free (and Open Source) Software that I believe are useful for this:

LibreOffice for documents / spreadsheets.
Inkscape for creating / editing images as well as PDFs.
Krita for those with artistic talent.
Blender a phenomenally powerful tool that can be used for a wide variety of creative tasks. I’ve used it for video editing but it’s also a very powerful 2d & 3d animation suite!
FreeCAD A parametric 3d modeler, which means you can design precise components for 3D printing.
KiCad allows you to design circuit boards.
Thunderbird
Gitnuro a tool for git [Developer interview]
LiveCaptions is a pretty neat utility that provides real-time audio transcription for Linux desktop users.
…and many, many more. This is not an exhaustive list by any means.

The following are strategies that more technical people can use to help bring others the benefits of more localized and (more) trusted computing. The downstream consequences of such a transformation would do wonders to combat censorship, top-down manipulation, and surveillance all at the same time. What many people under-estimate is that it once particular services are established and running, it can be quite trivial to share them in ways that make it even easier to for others to participate.

The Home Server

Change really can start at home. If you have a spare computer lying around, or even just a powerful machine, you can start running your own home services. This is a very useful way for technical people to provide their family members with the advantages of a (more) trusted computing experience without as much friction. One of the more popular options for this is to run a Nexcloud server. The options are quite limitless especially if one learns to build their own services.

The main advantage of a home server is that you can once again gain all the benefits of cloud computing without the drawbacks of putting your data under somebody else’s control. With great power comes great responsibility, so it is important to take on challenges gradually as you learn to resolve troubles. Becoming your own (or your family’s) IT person can be frustrating and demanding at times. With reasonable expectations, gradual improvements, and a bit of patience by everyone involved, a great deal of good can be accomplished. I would highly recommend experimenting quite a bit to get a feel for what you want to run and support before taking on others as users.

There are a variety of tools that themselves can help one in their goal of learning to run their own services. While these specific tools are handy, they are by no means a requirement. It’s possible to even run your own services from a Windows machine.

Community Services

Do you know if you have a local, trusted hosting provider for various online services? It seems highly likely that the real reason many people are stuck with big-tech options is because of a lack of trusted local services. With surveillance and censorship only becoming more extreme, providing private local services seems like a huge opportunity for skilled and well-equipped entrepreneurs who want to protect not only themselves, but others as well.

Community services are very well suited to systems that perform better at scale. These can be things like e-mail & community discussion platforms, to other more radical ideas such as providing storage and bandwidth for smaller entities in the community. Another benefit is that thanks to the Internet, these community run services can still be quite accessible to the wider-world when needed.

For those who are remote or isolated for whatever reason, they can absolutely still benefit from online community services. Both skilled and less-skilled people alike can reap the benefits of pooled resources with a wide variety of options. Some may choose to offer open services to the public, but that is not the only option.

Pubnix

I’d like to take the opportunity to highlight the concept of a public access unix system. The provider(s) maintain and run what is essentially a shared computer over the Internet. This means that the capability exists for small online communities (or “digital tribes”) can have all kinds of community-centered experiences. Once someone with the skill understands how a pubnix works, it becomes clear that they are a very powerful tool for empowering small-scale groups of people online.

An old and famous pubnix is the Super Dimension Fortress and it’s something I wish I had encountered when I was learning my way around computers & linux. SDF has been in operation since 1987 which makes it older than a large amount of computer users today. It’s not the only example, there is also the Tilde Club and a wider network of tilde communities. While these existing pubnixes are excellent and fascinating projects by themselves, I would challenge you to imagine what starting your own would look like.

Many of these pubnixes provide a near friction-less experience for members who want to start building their own web space on top of it. Of course this is not at all limited to the web, and applies to many other kinds of online services. It’s an invaluable model for online communities that deserves much greater traction and awareness.

Restructuring Cyberspace

With a long goal of radically changing cyberspace in mind, it becomes clear that there is actually quite a bit of work to do. It’s easy to be overwhelmed with despair when one understand how far the Internet is from what it could be. What should excite you is that much of the effort required presents a treasure-trove of opportunities for learning and innovation. It has never been easier for individuals and groups, to have a positive impact on our digital future.

New Software & Hardware

As the three primary resources in cyberspace (storage, computing power, bandwidth) become less scarce to smaller groups, new opportunities open up for systems better suited for that environment. Many ideas and techniques that seem implausible now, may very well be critical in building the foundation for a better digital future. The chance to write truly important software, and build revolutionary hardware is becoming more and more accessible. Early innovators can take a chance at building for the future they want, potentially resolving many “chicken and egg” problems.

Local ISPs / Community Networks

Acquiring and running computing power and having lots of storage definitely helps a person, group, or community gain more digital sovereignty. When it comes to the world-wide-web having low-latency high-speed connections are also quite important. There are many radical approaches to not only making networks more accessible, but by building local networks you build resilience from external disruption.

Self-management, the absence of profit, technological appropriation, and a community nature are recurrent characteristics of community networks. Self-management means that the decisions about the infrastructure will be made by the community itself, based on the formulation of its own rules.

Community Networks and The Internet in Brazil

A famous example would be NYC Mesh where enterprising tech volunteers built a powerful community internet for residents in exchange for a monthly donation. It’s worth pointing out that community networks don’t necessarily have to be wireless ones, and there are many advantages to running fiber to homes. It is possible to design community networks in such a way, that allows for direct connectivity to local services. Even greater censorship resistance can be built on community networks directly connecting to each other across large distances, instead of necessarily being routed through hostile cyberspace.

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Trouble in Tech with Michael Ginsburg

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I had a great conversation with Michael Ginsburg of Actionable Truth Media discussing how people are manipulated into supporting fake decentralization or fake solutions to pressing technological troubles. If you enjoyed our conversations you can visit his website at actionabletruth.media or on his Substack.

The Musk Operation (X)

We briefly touch on how many people are falling into the cult of personality around Elon Musk, ultimately empowering Musk to have more control over their digital lives. Rallying around false saviors has a high opportunity cost in the best case scenario, and makes one complicit in all manner of concerns the worst case.

Web3 Technocracy

While the Odysee team seems to be making an admirable effort taking action against censorship, there is reason to be concerned with the finer details. When one takes a close look at the “web3” ecosystem, many red flags come into view. Regardless of how one feels about the SEC decision, there are good reasons to take a close look at what new direction Odysee is taking.

The road to hell: misplaced optimism in the blockchain space

Internet Shutdowns

Michael raised the concern around Internet shutdowns. In whole or in part, internet shutdowns are a recurring phenomenon as governments seize control during times of unrest. World-wide accessible communication is a vitally important objective for those who care about a free and open Internet. In our conversation Michael explores how an internet shutdown could be used to manufacture consent for various policies such as digital ID. Currently, it seems like the primary use of internet blackouts is to quell dissent.

Tools of the Technocracy: #9 Internet Shutdowns

Information control is the root of modern tyranny.

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Cyber Fix: Episode 5

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Cyber Fix is on hiatus, you may now listen to full episodes on PeerTube

Links Discussed:

Advertising and the Future of the Web

AI SUCKS

Crowdstrike Outage fallout

Solutions Roundup

After the Break:

Tech Troubles

Control Grid Updates

Dunking on Bitcoin

Fine Details:

Music Credits:

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Are You For Or Against Technocracy?

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We are far from the time where various dystopian terrors were mere science-fiction. They are here, and we can see their effects. No longer blissfully ignorant, we have a choice, and a role to play in shaping the future. Some see the rise of surveillance, censorship, and consolidation of power as a threat to all we hold dear, others may see it as an opportunity to enrich themselves or resolve crises. This may initially seem like a fair exchange: some data and personal choice in return for mild advancements and security. We have seen this deal turn sour over and over, time and time again. It is poised to only get worse as digital intrusions continue to become more invasive.

Has the technocracy already assimilated you?

Where does the balance of power lie within your life?

The decision to maintain control over your data, or to avoid hostile cyberspace may seem entirely inconsequential. But each day, each person refutes or reaffirms their support or withdraw from consolidated power and top-down control. Decisions over details that may seem innocuous, such as where to store data, how you work, and what tools are used; all amount to meaningful changes in cyberspace both for good and ill.

Presently, it seems that the path of least resistance is one fraught with suffering and despair, for ourselves and for others. The best thing about our problems being better understood is that we can identify the sources of problems, and start to find solutions. The hardest part about this burden of knowledge is that we must face our own responsibility for our choices.

It’s all well and good to recognize the danger of an all-encompassing totalitarian cyber-police state. Complete hubris is to consider that it’s just being used incorrectly. After all, if the problems are entirely who’s really in charge, taking on that responsibility is the clear alternative. This means that there are not merely two choices.

Alternatively, one can recognize the dangers of such power and work to withdraw their financial, social, and cognitive support for the technological terror that is being constructed. Ultimately working to ensure that no person or people is able to wield such power against others. Doing this requires a lot of hard work, compassion and creativity to truly make waves across time.

Rise of the Cyber Resistance

Finding the path that works for you

But those are not the only options. One may recognize the opportunity within the corrupt workforce to seize the power for themselves. There are all kinds of rationalizations that will comfortably fit within one’s mind to justify whatever excesses are necessary to secure such power. Telling themselves “If I don’t, worse people will!” and that may sometimes be true to some degree, but it’s always relative.

But why take on all that work yourself? This is something that can easily be outsourced to the well-funded political machine. Instead of doing the hard work of understanding how systems actually work, and then working on ways to decentralize power, you can simply watch a new false savior to wage your battles from the comfort of your favorite glowing rectangle. By shirking your responsibility to engage, connect, and understand, you are empowering those who profit off speaking for you. With no mind to accountability in any form, power will be abused without resistance.

For better or worse, it’s not entirely up to you. This is a decision we all make in some form or another, on all kinds of issues. In terms of systems for mechanized control, the consequences can be quite profound. Therefore your decision is not merely a consequence of your preferences, attitude, or stated goals, but actually involves many more decisions like allies, methods, and choices.

This applies not just to individuals, but institutions like corporations and even governments. If one is quick to blame people for choosing convenience over principles, they must also consider how that multiplies over large organizations. It makes no difference how these systems are organized, be it through government, corporate power, or even on a blockchain the troubles are all the same. It is of utmost concern that the tide of machines being used to manipulate, destroy, and control people is reversed.

The Ugliness of War and Technocracy

A look at weapons of war in the digital age.

The purpose of this project is to encourage each other to take on the task of making total technocratic control impossible. This means, not merely in ‘the right hands’, not only when convenient, not ever. There are a wide array of convincing pretexts one may use to justify censorship, mass surveillance, or worse. It is my position that these methods themselves distort incentives against them being used properly, and ultimately lead to terrifying abuses.

The trouble for those working to re-work the foundations so that future generations may be more free from and over their digital experience, is that it is crucial not to be naive about those with different choices. First one must understand that there are many who are not willing or able to put in the effort to liberate themselves much less others, and forgive them for it. Then also recognize that there are many who will knowingly work to undermine the autonomy of others for their own benefit.

With the understanding that there are not only those who go along to get along, but a wide array of people competing for dominance, it becomes easier to understand why so much is spend on undermining the efforts of those working to improve cyberspace. The many differing factions vying for control over cyberspace are aligned in a single goal: nobody should be able to liberate the public. That is why you’ll often encounter fair-weather allies turn 180 degrees once they’ve built a stronger coalition than their opponents.

Mass Resistance Redirected

Selling out for shamefully low prices

There is an urgent need for people to set aside petty differences and be honest to keep malevolent forces at bay. It is well past time to push for genuine accountability in our systems and our governance. This requires people to urgently build connections that are stronger than any political or social drama of today.

The future of a free cyberspace depends on the future of people being free to live without being micro-managed by systems of control. This is why our freedom over technology is inseparably connected with freedom from it in the real world. Instead of conceding cyberspace as a force for intrusion into people’s lives, we can reclaim it for each other.

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Heads up! Software Freedom Day: Reconnect, Rediscover, Rebuild

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Never before has our ability to build complicated systems been such a threat to our very being. Social manipulation, media addiction, and many other problems lead people to want to disconnect entirely, or capitulate in despair. Many of us know better, and want to share a better digital future with others. Bringing that into being requires more than just using the right tools yourself, or having the perfect setup.

It is incredibly important our journey to reclaim digital autonomy isn’t taken on alone. Getting others involved is a fun and engaging way to actually strengthen your community online and offline. The answer is to learn, create, and share together with others. These days, people are almost begging for reasons to leave cyberspace behind and bond with each other in person.

In just a little less than two months, you have time to prepare what you want to share with others for Software Freedom Day on September 21st. Maybe you’d like to organize a get-together, or instead merely get drinks with some friends to talk about your digital experience. Whatever you choose, there is tons of opportunity in sharing the software freedom with others. This is an excellent chance to rekindle a world-wide movement for digital freedoms, and reconnect with each other.

Resurrecting Software Freedom Day - LibrePlanet 2024 Source

What is ‘Software Freedom’?

Software that is free allows you to inspect it’s source code, make your own modifications, and share it with (or without your changes) with others. Ideally, this means that our software can be more transparent, personal, and flexible. There is a vast array of Free Software available, with over 6000 projects listed on the free software directory. The free software movement has grown significantly in no small part due to warning about many of our current day struggles as early as four decades ago. Software freedom is about more than just software licenses, it’s a mission to reclaim control over your machines and ultimately, your entire digital experience.

That mission is about more than just our individual experience, but also about withdrawing consent from consolidated top-down control systems. By supporting the digital autonomy of others, you’re helping throw a wrench in the gears of the technocratic machine. The less data and control flowing to corporations (or dictated by governments) the more people can expect their systems to be transparent, efficient, and reliable. The fact that a great deal of Free as in Freedom software also happens to be free as in low cost is a great win for accessibility.

Helpful Resources for Software Freedom Day

The Digital Freedom Foundation

The Digital Freedom Foundation is a non-profit that aims “to empower all people to freely connect, create and share in a digital world that is participatory, transparent, and sustainable.” It’s the go-to resource for organizing, or discovering local digital freedom events.

Event	Date	Description
Software Freedom Day	September 21st	Software Freedom Day is an annual worldwide celebration of Free Software. It provides a wonderful way to increase awareness and educate others about the value of Free, Libre and Open Source Software.
Hardware Freedom Day	April 19th	Hardware Freedom Day celebrates the benefits of Open Hardware and Open Hardware design initiatives. Imagine what we could do if medical and technical hardware was inexpensive and accessible for manufacture for everyone needing these tools.
Document Freedom Day	March 26th	Document Freedom Day is an international event to celebrate and raise awareness of Open Standards. Without Open Standards how can we successfully communicate, share knowledge and scientific discoveries?

Hopefully you can get connected with others through these events, or manage to run your own! Change really starts when we get together to share our passions, knowledge, and experiences. There has never been a better time to get people engaged on the wide variety of issues caused by our reliance on Big Tech, or state encroachments on cyberspace.

Of course, you’re always welcome to use the Internet as a last resort!
Feel free to share your thoughts, experiences, or creative work for Free Software Day however you can.

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Cyber Fix: Episode 4

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Cyber Fix is on hiatus, you may now listen to full episodes on PeerTube

Links Discussed

Wacky tech news:

Firefox Woes:

Firefox’s new Web Site Advertising Preferences are a dark pattern and the idea of private personalized ads is nonsense anyway

Solutions Roundup:

Dispatches from the Cyberwar

SAP AI Core Vulnerabilities Expose Customer Data to Cyber Attacks

After the Break

Crowdstrike

Government and Tech

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Why Support the Libre Solutions Network?

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

[Jump to how you can help]

As more people’s lives become entirely dependent on technology, the impacts of the systems and tools we use can only become more profound. By naively accepting the assumptions and systems provided by corporations and governments, we allow ourselves to become prey on their hunting grounds.

This project was always intended to motivate people to take part in changing the technological landscape from the bottom up. We can all take action in our lives, for a better balance with cyberspace, one that isn’t outright dominated by large institutions. Each member of the public is under threat from grave concerns like mass surveillance, censorship, and manufactured dependence. Overcoming this will require time, perseverance, and a commitment to judgement-free education and outreach. As difficult as this can seem, we know that it is demonstrably within our power to fundamentally change our digital experience.

Instead of merely presenting one-size-fits-all solutions, the focus has always been on providing the necessary context to build meaningful understanding. I wholeheartedly believe that we can build a digital foundation that isn’t corrosive to our autonomy, mental health, and civic participation. It will require a phenomenal amount of work, which is why it’s crucial to take on incremental goals while keeping a long-term vision in mind.

What is That Vision?

The primary vision of the Libre Solutions Network is to discover, share, and collaborate on actionable steps for individuals and communities to reclaim their digital autonomy. Which is when people are in charge of what systems they use, how they are used, and when they are used.

Without becoming overly invested in particular approaches, this project is about learning important lessons to build a solid understanding. Then with that knowledge, making the journey from where we are to where we would like to be. At the same time, it is important to recognize the shortcomings of approaches that rely too much on insulating people from each other, or from understanding.

In short, this project aims to be the “Teach a man to fish” equivalent to promoting digital autonomy. Instead of striving to find the single best answer of today, the goal is always to build a more complete picture of where we are and where we would like to be. The way forward is going to require people motivated to learn, collaborate, and share. The values this project aims to promote are stewardship, responsibility, and dedication. Collaboration between people of different walks of life requires putting particular concerns aside, and embracing the opportunities that lie ahead.

What Makes This Project Different?

The Libre Solutions Network is about getting the public excited about opportunities in building a better digital future. A great deal of this includes research into novel solutions as well as long-forgotten techniques to modern-day problems. I’ve come to learn that the biggest obstacle to people’s privacy, security, and digital autonomy is not doubt, ignorance, or even fear, but actually defeatism.

Despite the current state of technology being a recent phenomenon, a great deal of people see it as not only inevitable, but also immutable. These are both false. Through the Libre Solutions Network I aim to raise people from the slumber of apathy and despair and reinvigorate people’s fierce pursuit for true innovation.

By putting cutting-edge software into practice I advance and share not only my own technical knowledge, but its application to broader objectives such as censorship resistance and digital autonomy. By recognizing the advantages of tried-and-true techniques, genuinely foundational knowledge can be shared to help others start on a better path.

Why Gabriel?

I have been told throughout my career that I have a gift for communicating technological ideas and problems to those without advanced knowledge. I have witnessed my capacity to bridge understanding between those with tech skills and those without. This project is primarily motivated by my desire to use these skills for good.

I believe this project is important, and a great deal of compulsion drives me to carry it forward. While I will always work to advance this mission in some form or another, financial constraints limit my ability to allow this project to flourish. I’ve spent a great deal of time researching this problem, but I know I’ve really only scratched the surface. I believe I am in a unique position to know where the rich veins of insight can be found.

With more resources for this project I feel like I would be able to make significant investments that could make this project much more effective. Acquiring knowledge in specific areas of interest often results in costs from hardware or even information. Expanding my own knowledge helps me get a clearer picture of the larger whole. The hope is that if I am given the ability to fulfill this mission directly, I can then greatly accelerate other’s ability to get up to speed.

I have ambitious goals. If given the opportunity, I believe this project can grow into a powerful force. Not only for keeping the the encroachments of technocratic control at bay, but it would also do wonders for helping people discover and adopt vastly better ways of working with technology, rather than being forced to work for it.

Furthermore, I believe that it is about more than merely the goals themselves. Goals are important, and one is almost always lost without them. However, I have a firm appreciation that the means used to accomplish particular goals are themselves worth giving serious consideration. If we truly want to deviate from the digital status quo, prioritizing education as an end to itself is vital. We need to recognize that building up the people’s knowledge is a more worthwhile endeavor than providing a ‘solution’ that teaches them nothing.

Achievements

Over the course of this project, there are a variety of things that have validated its importance to me.

Digital Autonomy First

All of my work has been made with censorship-resistance in mind, and decentralized platforms are given first-class treatment. Posts are written for this website which includes a media-embedded RSS feed for use with various podcasting apps. In addition to this, videos and audio broadcasts are given first-class treatment on the self-hosted PeerTube instance. Furthermore, for those who are deeply concerned about their anonymity, the website is mirrored on Tor & I2P hidden services, which also includes the same RSS feeds.

The content itself is made with primarily Free Software and/or Open Source tools:

Images: Made with Inkscape and GIMP
Videos: Edited using Blender and often recorded with OBS Studio, some intereviews have taken place over Jitsi
Audio: Editing done with Audacity
Operating System My favorite Linux Distribution
Command-line tools: ffmpeg for converting audio/video &
Website: hugo for static website generation with a automatic continuous deployment service integrated with Forgejo for source control.
Information Management FreshRSS

World-wide Reach:

Some of my articles, notably The Tools of The Technocracy as well as The Ugliness of War and Technocracy have been translated into many languages and widely shared. This website has seen hits from 79 countries all over the world!

Country	Visitors
🇺🇸 United States	(44%)
🇷🇺 Russian Federation	(13%)
🇨🇦 Canada	(7%)
🇬🇧 United Kingdom	(5%)
🇦🇺 Australia	(3%)
🇳🇱 Netherlands	(2%)
🇩🇪 Germany	(2%)
🇨🇳 China	(2%)
🇫🇷 France	(2%)
🇦🇹 Austria	(1%)

Despite being Canadian, it seems that more of my known hits are coming from Russia.
Hopefully more Canadians find interest in this work!

Unique Coverage:

Where possible, I’ve covered topics that aren’t easy to find elsewhere:

Long-form guides on Actionable Topics

Testimonials

A great partner in the fight to liberate our stuff!

Fight to Repair

Gabriel, you doing something unique and useful. Helping people like me navigate the dangers of technology while also appreciating and taking advantage of is invaluable!"

Anne Gibbons

Gabriel, awesome that you are helping people to learn about free software and to embrace the freedom and respect the community generates.

William

Excellent and detailed coverage on the tools of technocracy and their privacy invasion and mass social engineering.

A Lily Bit

I’m Sold! How Do I Help?

The Basics

I greatly appreciate any encouragement or constructive feedback. I’ve certainly learned a lot from insight provided by those who appreciate this project, always know that your thoughts, questions, or suggestions are always welcome.

If nothing else, it can help a lot if you just make sure this resource isn’t forgotten.

Bookmarking the website at libresolutions.network goes a long way.
I highly recommend following the media-enabled RSS Feed or the light text/audio only feed.
Don’t forget that there is also a PeerTube instance for all audio and video broadcasts.
Sharing the information in this project with others is always very appreciated.

If you use social media, you are encouraged to share clips, screenshots and link back!

Getting Involved

This project has always been about more than just myself. I’ve always greatly appreciated the feedback and insight I’ve been given from others who have commented or reached out via other means.

Financial Support

There are three ways to financially support this project, both Substack and Mitra subscriptions include access to full-length episodes of my new tech news roundup Cyber Fix. At the time of writing I believe the show is off to a great start, and I look forward to keeping it informative while making it more and more of an enjoyable listen.

If you are already supporting this work, you have my sincere gratitude!

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Noise About Signal

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this month, Signal was embroiled in controversy as a known vulnerability in the desktop client was rediscovered by an iOS developer. Initially, the president of the Signal Foundation decided to state that it didn’t need to be fixed, but after a short period of time, the Signal developers started working on a fix. In short, community engagement saved the day and we can all sleep better knowing that a fair amount of people care about security enough to push for meaningful improvements. That’s not quite the end of the story though, there are good reasons to consider the fine details.

What was the vulnerability?

Many programs you use require persistence in some form or another. In the case of Signal, this means that without saving files you would need to re-sync your account every time you open the program and download all your messages again. To solve this, programs generally store file and/or a database in an application data folder under your user account.

This seems like a normal and reasonable thing to do, however on desktop platforms there is less protection from the user themselves accessing files. This means that any other program you run has the capability of stealing that information as long as it is run under your user account. Mobile operating systems like Android and iOS work differently, and try to isolate files on a per-app basis.

Without any additional protections, such as the user having to enter a password to decrypt the messenger’s files, the user’s messages are vulnerable to being read by malicious actors. Anyone who seizes access to the files also has access to the user’s Signal chats and their content. It’s worth noting that for this particular vulnerability, Session (a Signal fork) was also impacted by this problem. In truth, for the same reasons that Signal didn’t see it as an important problem in 2018, I would expect other applications to have similar problems.

What are the implications?

Convenience vs security:

Depending on what the goals for a particular project are, you can rationally defend particular limitations. If a software project merely intends to be a “starter option” for somebody just beginning to seize control over their digital affairs, ease-of-use may be a higher priority than state-of-the art. It does sound like a terrible idea to those of us who do prioritize privacy and security, but getting more people protected from the most egregious threats can have a huge impact if made easy enough.

Signal is held to a higher standard however, at least by many who see it as the de-facto standard for a secure messenger. One way to overcome the convenience vs security dilemma is to allow for users to opt-in to better security protections. This isn’t necessarily ideal, because people rarely switch away from the defaults. Another solution would be to offer various “flavors” of the program, with different defaults based on the needs the user has. With regular reminders that enhanced security is available, this could be a best-case scenario for everyone involved at the cost of additional development headache.

Another solution that I believe should be considered more, is the adoption of hardware token based authentication. Instead of relying entirely on ourselves to remember and constantly enter difficult passwords, using an authentication key can work better. Having a dedicated encryption module can offer a more seamless interaction with various security measures at the cost of more development overhead. In addition to this, hardware keys can not be stolen over the Internet as easily as passwords.

Of course, without any development work, a sophisticated solution is for experienced users to use something like Qubes OS to manually isolate every program on their system in its own virtual machine.

The only constant is change:

Personally, what’s really interesting to me is that this scenario really highlights how much people are generally willing to overlook problems when there isn’t a readily available ’turn-key’ solution. Since 2018, operating system features built for protecting sensitive information have been developed and more widely adopted by other applications. These features gaining prominence is the very thing that moved the needle on making the status quo untenable.

Not only do threats evolve, but so do solutions. It is possible that many things we currently accept may become disastrous, yet easy to resolve in the future. If nothing else, this is a call to seriously consider long-term sustainability of various habits and techniques, as well as how we can emphasize adaptability in a rapidly changing environment. It is clear that now is not the time for complacency, and that a significant amount of effort is required to truly build a coherent foundation for computing.

File management:

Consider: Does it even make sense to protect various files as ‘special’ in the first place?

While at first glance one may assume that critical information like decryption keys are inherently more worth protecting than miscellaneous files or other program data, but there are good counter-arguments. For example, any documents or records you keep themselves may have sensitive content that also needs to be protected. In addition to this, most browsers are also vulnerable to the same threat, which means attackers can potentially break into a person’s accounts or read their entire browsing history.

That itself is a big problem, without simple answers. One option is to try to build more protections on top of existing systems, another is to wipe the slate clean and try to rebuild entirely based on lessons learned. If you haven’t already, I’d highly recommend watching this interview I had with the developer of Serenum to discuss his attempt at resolving some of these issues from the ground up.

It’s a bold direction for sure, but even more important than the project itself is for more people to learn the fundamental levels of computing to help transform the foundation. People vastly underestimate what can be accomplished with a bit of knowledge becoming a bit more common.

A defense of pragmatism

I will reiterate my position that it’s always worth using the most secure messenger you can with those around you. Isolating yourself entirely by refusing to compromise with close contacts is a road to being very isolated. Instead of demanding everyone you know only interact with you with a single ‘perfect’ option that doesn’t exist taking on the burden of being familiar with multiple good or even less bad options can help move people away from the most egregious circumstances.

Remember that while your own situation is vital, the big picture matters a great deal too.
To paraphrase the founder of FUTO:

“A good programmer can often get in the weeds and be like: Hey, this is cool! I solved this hard conceptual problem, but polishing this for a billion users, that’s no fun! Who’s going to polish it for a billion users? It’s gonna be a big company that can pay people money.”

FUTO - Using the term “open source” - a response to everything!

Protecting digital autonomy needs to be about more than just our own individual self-interest, and more about doing what we can to help others. It is clear now more than ever that we don’t just need great programmers, but we also need more people to take these issues seriously, and that can’t happen if the solutions are too difficult to use. Despite everything, I find it easier and easier to be an optimist regarding these problems. It definitely seems that we really are only a bit of education, support, and passion away from making radical changes for a better technological future.

As bleak as things can be, it’s reassuring that a great deal of the problems we want to take on are very much in the open. As much as it can feel like rebuilding it all requires starting from scratch, that’s not true in the slightest. Important lessons have been learned that can help us steer clear from a wide range of fundamental problems and there is a lot of amazing software to retool or at least learn from.

I hope you can get excited about considering how things can be different, and how you can fit into making our digital environment better for not only yourself, but also those around you. It seems the opportunities for real change are only just beginning to present themselves.

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Digital Autonomy And The Arts with The Starfire Codes

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I spoke with Demi Pietchell from The Starfire Codes to learn from her experience as someone with a long career in online media. We touch on many ongoing concerns such as community dynamics, censorship, the loss of coherence online, and even how that impacts artistic and intellectual creatives.

Featured Works:

The Digital Autonomy And The Arts Series includes an open invitation for discussing how our digital experience impacts our lives. Beyond simply exploring arts & tech, I would be happy to explore other domains as well. If you’re interested in exploring this discussion, consider getting in touch to share how your passion connects with, or is impacted by technology.

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Serenum: The 'From Scratch' OS Revolution

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I had the honor and pleasure to speak with Sam Smith about the new operating system he’s building: Serenum. We had a conversation about what motivated him to build this system, plans for the future, and where this all meets the bigger picture.

Now more than ever, it’s time to seriously look closer at the fundamentals of our technological landscape and Sam has done the hard work of building something that could be the beginning of a solid new foundation to build on. For those who want to really advance their technical skills, it’s a great chance to seize the opportunity to understand computers at a very sophisticated level. Even for the ‘non-wizards’ among us, this project should represent a ray of hope in an otherwise tragically bleak technological landscape.

Even for those among us who aren’t ‘computer wizards’, this project should represent a ray of hope in an otherwise tragically bleak technological landscape. When it comes to forging a new path, I believe that making technology truly personal is something that can be a real game-changer. Even if one isn’t able to engage with or directly support this project, some of the fundamental principles are worth understanding to be aware of just how different things can be.

This project is fascinating for many reasons, but especially because it’s a call to action for those who wish to start truly innovating for the future. Many programmers, especially inexperienced ones can become intimidated by “low level” development, feeling filtered by complexity and lost in a labyrinth of extremely technical documentation.

The Serenum project is an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of an exciting new frontier to take one’s technological knowledge to a new level. At the very least, let this conversation to be a reminder to stay curious, push the boundaries of your knowledge, and take the time to truly gain mastery over circuitry.

No capture card, sorry!

If you’d like to learn more about the Serenum operating system, you can take a look at the latest release. Interested in more technical background details? Take a look at his original demo and follow-up Q&A.

Keep up with Sam’s work at: Twitch, YouTube, or join the discussion on Discord.

This is an ambitious project, which in its own right is worth celebrating. I highly recommend thinking seriously about having reasonable expectations for what you intend to get out of this. If you feel you have the desire, time, and patience you may want to consider getting your hands on the hardware. You can do so at taberna.shop.

Other from scratch operating systems you may have heard of, or be curious about are:

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Cyber Fix: Episode 3

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Cyber Fix is on hiatus, you may now listen to full episodes on PeerTube

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Insecurity

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It’s ironic that the more the governments try to close their grip over the minds of the public, the more it begins to slip. From domestic turmoil, rising populist sentiment, and even just economic conditions, people are increasingly feeling a need to have a concrete impact on state policy. Instead of simply leaving it to their managerial handlers, motivated people are working to educate themselves and take action on a wide variety of topics.

This is incredibly dangerous to ‘Our Democracy’ and those who benefit from how it functions. The greatest fear of those responsible for overseeing the system is that over time, people’s actions can actually tip the balance of power away from the delicately constructed ‘pay to play’ dynamics built within it. If the public manages to wrestle political power away from lobbies, corporate powers, other ‘stakeholders’, the less power politicians have to auction to the highest bidder.

For government officials who perceive their job to be managing the public, rather than serving them. This is an urgent and pressing crisis. To overcome this a phenomenal amount of research has gone into tracking and identifying how information spreads online, with a huge amount of help from Big Tech no doubt. That was only the first step in then refining information control measures to protect the public from their desire to enact meaningful reform.

A wide variety of methods were attempted in “digital public spaces”, such as social media, forums, and even video games. Such methods included shadow-banning which is when one is banned from being seen without any clear indication, or more overt methods like banning individual accounts that gained traction. Eventually it became clear that the only way to truly fortify the public from their own ideas was to start leveraging financial control.

‘De-monetized’ is now a well-known term online for when an individual or even company are restricted from receiving funds through a particular platform. This is a double-hitter when it comes to chilling effects on free expression. Not only are those who are impacted potentially forced to shut down operations, but their opposition has more space to grow louder and bolder. Financial de-platforming for political reasons is a very potent tool that has an impact that shouldn’t be underestimated.

As effective as these methods can be, they ultimately rely on people deriving their world views from the parasocial hell that is corporate social media. Independent web sites, and personal communications have been largely but not entirely unaffected by these measures. This has created a lot of room for those who are motivated enough to begin the work of seriously making a difference. While this may seem like such a minor or trivial thing, but it’s actually far from it. It’s crucial to understand that when it comes to the ability to broker political power to ‘stakeholders’ any real opposition has the capacity to spin out-of-control, especially in our highly-connected yet-not-entirely-controlled environment.

Breaking In

Because even private dissent and private thoughts are intolerable, and independent web sites and social media are just too much to bear, governments feel the pressure to take drastic action. In what is only the latest assault on people’s fundamental natural rights, governments of the world want to break into your home. Not yet literally, nor physically, but they want to have unimpeded insight into the communications between you and your closest contacts. Dinner table talk just isn’t the same with a government agent sitting next to you.

End-to-end encrypted communication outside corporate networks is something those who wish to have total control over information can not tolerate. This is true of any encryption for the most part. From the beginning of the crypto wars governments have always attempted to undermine the public’s privacy even at the expense of security. If you listen to this discussion, on the history of encryption, you’ll learn not only was privacy in the digital realm a very hard-won fight, it’s even more important than ever.

European Union Strikes

The European Union is taking bold action against people’s private communications. Ironically, while they support many initiatives that can support people’s digital autonomy, they are moving fast to undermine it from the top-down. Previously they’ve proposed back-dooring all online web traffic, but another proposal aims to directly attack private communication with mandated client-side-scanning for illegal material.

While fighting CSAM and its distribution is a desirable and noble goal, this step ultimately is prone to staggering scope creep without any guarantees of accountability or transparency. In situations where people are given obscene one-sided power over others you will always inevitably see abuses. In case you had doubts, EU ministers have already moved to exempt themselves from the measure. Thankfully, the vote for the legislation seems to be postponed, for now. This is a great indication that being vigilant and being proactive can create tangibly beneficial results.

A World-Wide Push

It seems as no coincidence, that 2024 marked the year in which the most people voted globally, is also marked as a year with an immense world-wide push for internet regulation. It’s not only ironic but highly demonstrative of how inter-twined the balance of power in nominally democratic countries is with online participation.

Notably, Many internet censorship bills have been making progress in North America and throughout the world. In addition to online ID or age verification laws, more aggressive legislation against various forms of speech is also being proposed in many jurisdictions. Undeniably, these restrictions and impositions create many chilling effects.

This is a delicate game for those who wish to maintain control. While getting large tech corporations to censor or promote content is effective, the more people who break away to independent alternatives make it exponentially harder. As more and more people truly learn to use technology as an effective tool, rather than a self-curated mind-prison, the more impossible information control becomes. Those who wish to push for meaningful change, transparency, and accountability need to skill-up and adapt without falling into the many well-laid traps.

A Chance for Change

All this, motivated the creation of a beehive called Canadian Cyber Freedom at cyberfreedom.ca. It’s intended to be a resource, but also a collaborative environment for Canadians to learn new ways for citizens to engage on political issues. The purpose of the project is to demonstrate that with a small amount of technical knowledge, activists can greatly enhance their efforts.

Very often legislation comes out before the public gets a chance to understand the issues, much less make fair judgement on them. In most countries, giving the public a close look at legislation that impacts their lives is likely enough to motivate real pushback. With the pace that legislative bodies have to work at, a relatively tiny amount of activists could assemble resources that can adapt and move faster than legislation itself.

The best way for citizens to move the needle against troubling legislation is for activists to effectively and fairly educate the public. Very often, debates over political issues become needlessly divisive. The way to resolve this is to find ways to collaborate on educating the public on not just the legislation itself, but also the wider issues. The more polished the collected information can become, the more opportunities towards bringing people on-board.

This requires trusting the recipients of the information a bit. Instead of merely relying on a single emotionally charged opinion piece, sharing the entire picture, warts and all will ultimately lead to better decisions and more rational opposition. Canadian Cyber Freedom is just an example, that I hope eventually becomes a meaningful resource. But there are many ways for groups interested on a wide variety of issues to adopt the same pattern to tackle other issues.

Taking On Online Harms Directly

While I am wholeheartedly opposed to giving governments and corporations more control over people’s ability to dissent, I am not ignorant of many serious online threats to individuals and especially children. It is understandable that many who recognize these dangers urgently want change that is far too long overdue. Having government ‘child-proof’ the Internet is just as irrational and likely to backfire as leaving everything on the shoulders of parents. It’s not about ‘striking a balance’ but rather about understanding that the problem is far bigger than just small parameters.

Online spaces don’t exist in a vacuum, they’re a part of our human society. As things become challenging and confusing in life, there is an incredible draw to retreat to online spaces that feel cozier than the rest of the world.
Leading to all kinds of problems:

Sleep deprivation

Depression

Over-eating

Escapism

Political extremism / radicalization

Sounds a lot like a millennial doesn’t it? Many of us are internet-addicted for a variety of reasons. Many of these problems aren’t new, and likely won’t be going away anytime soon. Some appear to have gotten much worse.

Is the Internet safe for children?

Every aspect of people’s lives is becoming increasingly intertwined with online services and a wide variety of online interactions. This alone is a serious reason to take a look at a much broader picture. If even a small fraction of people only get their interactions with other human beings mediated by online services, (or even worse …AI-enabled ones) this alone can compound into a serious crisis of loneliness and despair for those people. Just as the problems have increased, so has the damage. Is it not fair to say that nobody could be prepared for having most of their socialization pushed online? While the Covid Crisis is a notable event, in this respect it was a mere escalation of an existing trend. Having compassion for those suffering from a wide variety of impacts is a necessary step towards lasting change.

Placing a larger emphasis on real-life personal interactions is of utmost importance. Quite tragically it seems we are completely forgetting that children need a safe and nurturing environment in the real world. We are all under constant threat to online surveillance and addictive gamified interactions, which can only cause problems in the long run. With this in mind, I don’t believe that all online interactions and systems are equal. Raising maximizing the quality of use for devices and systems, while minimizing dangers from less ideal services is the optimal path for everyone.

Clearly, resolving this goes far beyond a bit of legislation and hearings. To the degree those blunt instruments can be useful, there’s always more direct action people can take in their lives to make a meaningful difference. The first step involves getting a serious sober grasp of the problems. On that, a great starting point would be the work of Catherine Knibbs. Catherine has written many books on the subject and has worked extensively as a child therapist seeing these troubles up-close. Online Harms and Cybertrauma is necessary reading for any online user, in my opinion. You can also check out her YouTube channel or Instagram account and share particularly useful videos or ideas with those around you.

It is extremely important for those who truly care about improving online safety have a strong understanding of these issues. Not only for its own sake, but also so that we can all have serious, reasoned discussions about addressing the root causes of these problems. Problems don’t go away merely because we don’t approve of popular solutions, there are many who are already in great pain who need care. Instead of allowing tragedy to be exploited for political power, we can all work towards setting proper boundaries at all levels of society. A lot more can be accomplished through compassion and education than scoring cheap political ‘wins’.

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Cyber Fix: Episode 2

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Cyber Fix is on hiatus, you may now listen to full episodes on PeerTube

Music Credits:

Y&V - Lune: https://youtu.be/n79aphwhpW0
Valcos - A New Light: https://youtu.be/o_v9WSImGIU
Killercats - Kaibu: https://youtu.be/qLYmtdi-GzA
@SavkMusic - The Traveling Symphony: https://youtu.be/Qn3mb4LsoD8 GhostrifterOfficial - Resurgence: https://youtu.be/IzA39soWYG8

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The Ugliness of War and Technocracy

Sun, 16 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

For those interested in preserving our nations, free markets, culture, or even basic human rights, we are in an outright harrowing time. Many of these challenges are direct physical assaults like warfare, but there is also a wide variety of abstract dangers. Such as censorship, surveillance, economic warfare, or disaster capitalism. Governments battle against their people for control over policy, and against mega-corporations for control over the public. Families, communities, even entire nations are stuck in the crossfire of larger plans without clear allies to depend on. Marshall McLuhan’s quote has become a tired cliche these days as more and more people recognize that vast swaths of humanity are under attack from seemingly every direction.

“World War 3 is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”

- Marshall McLuhan

The quote accurately describes what many are feeling, but little else.
It leaves behind many questions to ponder further:

What is the war about?
Who’s waging the war, and against whom?
Who’s winning?
Is there a side to join or oppose?
When will it be over?
What can we do to protect ourselves?

I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but there are useful guides to follow. In the words of Spartacus “War has always been a convenient human-shredder for the overclass. It has always been this way. …It’s a scam. It has always been a scam.”. We’re reminded to consider who has always had a hand in orchestrating and profiting off wars: the powerful. Unfortunately, this isn’t immediately helpful. Just as the atom bomb changed the balance of power between nations of the world, network warfare, where dynamic super-national forces engage in a global civil war, the game has changed immensely. As super-wealthy cliques accrue wealth and power that rivals nations, governments themselves can easily become mere strategic objectives in larger games.

It is arguable that network warfare has been the essential root of all human warfare throughout history. The only difference is that both people themselves, and our means of waging war, have the potential to be so disconnected from pre-existing structures of tribes, faiths, or nations. Never before have the warmongers of the past had the entire world potentially at their mercy, as well as the entire population. This form of warfare is total unrestricted warfare, and encompasses all aspects of participation in human society. It has been said that ’the person is political’, paired with the acknowledgement that politics is warfare waged through other means, we understand our predicament more clearly.

There is a way to keep this simple, without losing the important details. People feel under attack, and they are correct to feel this way. This is because unlike what AI evangelists or ‘Net Zero’ malthusians will tell you, human beings are the prize. Not just the prize, but the only prize. Tyrants of all scopes of ambition realize that the source of all earthly power stems from effective cooperation between human beings. This requires them to use more and more sophisticated means of coercion to not undermine the value of total control.

The point of sharing this is that you understand what “side you’re on” is a much more complex question than various accidents of birth. The physical, economic, and even digital empires run by many or even a few are competing for dominance over you and others. Lending your strength or allegiance to one may or may not be mutually exclusive with others. This naturally leads one to wonder if they can opt-out entirely, and abandon the game of conquest and live a life of peace. We can always pray this is possible, but it’s important to recognize that we inherit circumstances that make this require much more intense work than merely not choosing to commit overt aggression.

Conceptualizing a Global Civil War

Economic control is no less devastating than bombs or bullets. Even when direct violence is involved, there are a wide array of ephemeral ‘slow-kill’ means available. Biowarfare, toxins, or even sabotage of essentials are all means to cause mass poverty, suffering and death. Normalcy bias and plausible deniability allow atrocities to take place without recognition or recourse. Quiet weapons doing minor cumulative damage can make a significant impact despite going undetected and being difficult to attribute. To make matters worse, responsibility can be diffused by providing a vast array of self-destructive means of illusory relief.

A Fractal of Suffering

Almost everyone can intuit simple cause and effect, most of the time. What’s much harder for many people to grasp is force multipliers. Various techniques such as propaganda, spycraft, or even financial engineering can make relatively straight-forward attacks work through an incomprehensible maze of complexity. In these circumstances people only identify the pain, not the source of it. This can often lead those who don’t wish to feel guilty to justify the existence of that pain for their own comfort.

Overheated Threat Awareness

With attacks coming from seemingly nowhere and everywhere, there is a natural desire to identify threats. This desire can be leveraged by propagandists and profiteers alike to further their own ends, exhausting the reflex. As people continuously transform themselves into the boy who cried wolf over and over, the populace becomes numb to the sensation of danger. In circumstances where this numbness has taken hold, people are no longer able to act on their self-preservation instincts, creating easy targets for even the most blatant schemes.

Propaganda

The “information landscape”, which is an abstraction of everyone’s thoughts, perceptions, and available information is a valuable strategic target of tyrants. The ability to control, restrict or modify the flow of information gives anyone a significant advantage over others. Pairing this with sophisticated understanding of people’s natural desires, fears, and hopes is a phenomenally powerful weapon to wield against individuals and groups alike. Beyond merely being a blunt instrument to rally compliance, propaganda can be weaponized to turn people against themselves, even individually. This immensely toxic pattern mass-produces hurt people who are readily able to hurt others.

Merchants of Death

War can be big business for propagandists, profiteers, and plunderers alike. It provides the state the pretext to more overtly and more aggressively dominate the financial system. This leads to the mass financial and social engineering of the economic structure to support the war effort.

To illustrate how U.S. military and intelligence agencies have supported tech startups, consider the case of Keyhole, a small San Francisco-based company that developed software for creating three-dimensional models of the earth’s surface. By patching together satellite images and aerial photos, the program could essentially produce a high-resolution map of the entire planet.

In-Q-Tel provided seed funding in 2003, and within two weeks, military and intelligence agencies were reportedly using Keyhole’s software to support the U.S. war in Iraq. The following year, Google acquired Keyhole for an undisclosed sum. It was renamed Google Earth and today, it is worth approximately $4 billion. In this case, In-Q-Tel’s investment paid off in monetary terms, but the bigger jackpot was the Keyhole program itself, which the CIA and Pentagon immediately deployed in support of military operations.

Like many DIU and In-Q-Tel investments, Keyhole-Google Earth is a dual-use technology that can be adapted for both military and civilian applications. The vast majority of In-Q-Tel funded startups acquired by large tech companies have created dual-use products, such as AppThwack and Elemental Technologies (acquired by Amazon); Acompli and Perceptive Pixel (acquired by Microsoft); Tacit Software (acquired by Oracle); Cleversafe (acquired by IBM); MindMeld (acquired by Cisco); QD Vision (acquired by Samsung); and Pixim (acquired by Sony).

How Big Tech and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex

It’s hard to imagine the long-term incentive changes when an entire industry becomes a creature of the MIC. When states and super-national entities harness such massive economic power to run sprawling computing power to mechanize warfare, is there even possibly room for accountability? How does all this spending impact journalism, academia, or even governance?

Cyberwar

When people imagine cyberwars, they often think of shocking news stories of ransomware attacks by shady hacker groups. This is a very serious concern, but another quite troubling development is the digitization of warfare that has accelerated since people’s very lives have become technologically transformed.

The technological dimension of warfare is staggering. There was a time where the most horrifying technological terror was the atomic bomb. While not eclipsing its destructive power, various tools of precision like drones, surveillance infrastructure, or autonomous weapons can be part of the construction of all manner of inhumane horrors. The tragic irony is that warfare has generally been quite human. Warriors throughout history taking up arms against other people across the globe, or even withing their own regions, have always had to contend with the atrocities up close. It seems that we may be on the cusp of witnessing this change in real-time.

Surveillance

Data collected for seemingly innocuous purposes can quickly become military intelligence. There are many non-intuitive uses for even seemingly insignificant data-points collected over time.

Using AI from Palantir, an American firm, Ukrainian counter-intelligence fishes for illuminating linkages in disparate pools of data. Imagine, for instance, an indebted divorcee at risk of losing his flat and custody of his children who opens a foreign bank account and has been detected with his phone near a site that was later struck by missiles. In addition to such dot-connecting, the AI performs “social-network analysis”. If, say, the hypothetical divorcee has strong personal ties to Russia and has begun to take calls from someone whose phone use suggests a higher social status, then AI may increase his risk score.

How Ukraine is using AI to fight Russia

A serious challenge caused by industrialized surveillance is information asymmetry, where information is known to few but unknown to great many. The first casualty of war is the truth, and this is never more clear when immense amounts of data are collected in secret to be used selectively. Just as cyber threats blur the lines between military and civilian targets, domestic surveillance becomes more of a priority for troubled regimes.

From War to Worldcoin: collecting biometrics for later use.

Machine Learning

It would be naive, if not outright dangerous to underestimate the consequences of military use of machine learning, and how it can move to dominate our lives. Artificial intelligence is its own buzzword, but one must not fall into the trap of thinking it’s all worthless. The more a problem (or killing) can be accurately reduced to a simple set of variables, the more effective these tools can become. Another danger is that many downsides of contemporary AI tools are still serious concerns. Machine errors can be devastating and must not be used to downplay accountability.

The military industrial complex (MIC) is a terrifying machine. Media, industry, and economy are all impacted directly or indirectly by it. Between 2022 and 2023 US Department of Defense spending on AI related contracts jumped from $269 million to $4.3 billion. It is concerning at minimum that this huge amount of resources in military uses of machine learning effectively drains talent from non-combat uses, which could actually improve people’s lives and solve serious problems. While it is true that military advancements in technology eventually trickle down this only happens after an immense amount of avoidable suffering, it is not without cost either.

Dominating Cyberspace

The Internet, despite it’s flaws, is a valuable tool for transmitting critical information. During times of conflict it is a common tactic for powers to cut off access as a means of restricting information or aid. It is a mistake to believe that an Internet shutdown means that others can not use their own private (or military) networks to maintain connectivity. This means that Internet shutdowns are a measure that overwhelmingly impacts civilians and may have much smaller cost for the initiator than one would assume.

Cutting off internet access can also be done in parts. Sophisticated techniques can be used to deny, filter and even manipulate content given enough resources. In many circumstances, it may be preferable to simply inspect network traffic rather than outright block it. Interfering with communications changes behavior, but silently monitoring generally doesn’t.

Cyber Attacks

Just as the lines between the physical and digital realities blur in our lives, so too do they in warfare. The more critical systems that depend on inter-connected online services, the more brittle and vulnerable people are to malicious (state-backed or not) entities. The impact can be devastating with little distinction between civilian and military targets. Because of this, major cyber attacks certainly get the headlines. The impact of disruptive attacks on infrastructure can not be over-stated, but the risk management solutions by the regime can be just as troubling.

Governments have made it clear that information counter to their interests being disseminated itself is seen no different as a ‘cyber attack’. In recent years there has been greater emphasis on manipulating minds in the name of safety and national security. This is a troubling new direction in justifying the elimination of free expression, and justifying propaganda operations. A regime that treats it’s own citizens as if they were any other computing resource will justify very troubling means to meet its objectives.

As non-combatants, it is not merely enough to demand secure systems. It is crucial that we do not allow the fear of cyberwars to allow institutions to take over our digital or actual lives. There is an immense pressure building for people to set aside digital autonomy or even their civil rights in the name of safety. One must be cautioned that conceding these is a road to supporting atrocities without even the pretext of accountability. By being cow-towed into dependence on the regime, the public can very well make themselves unknowing accomplices in what they would otherwise resist with all their might.

Mechanized Murder

As mechanized murder has become more advanced, and various technologies specialize into broader “soft-kill” capabilities, the circumstances become grim in unimaginable ways. Despite conflicts feeling vastly distant for many North Americans, warfare is as real as it as even been. For decades we have seen how many techniques and weapons of war are first tested in remote conflicts then eventually assimilated into the domestic control structure.

This raises the stakes when it comes to our moral culpability in supporting such actions. Just as more powerful weapons expand our capacity to unleash terrible atrocities, automated weapons make each decision carry an immense amount of moral weight. Instead of responsibility being diffused between dozens of people, each reacting in the moment, a single person shoulders the entire responsibility for an orchestra of death and destruction.

The technology on offer may fall far short of Terminator-style robots: in Ukraine, the call to engage with a given target still lies with a human decision maker. But for how long?

…

“If you think of AI as drones autonomously and independently making some decisions to strike or not to strike something, there is no such thing yet,” said Fedorov. “But I think that there is a certain future for it.”

‘Our Oppenheimer moment’ — In Ukraine, the robot wars have already begun

Becoming a Peacemaker

If you are not already convinced, I would hope that you would consider taking on the role of peacemaker. The powers that are in play are capable of irreversible damage, not only that but our responsibility has never been greater. Despite what the overwhelming propaganda would have you believe, we all have an opportunity to push for peace. By connecting with those around you and working to understand and resolve even minor disputes, greater impacts can build over time. Bring peace to first yourself, then those around you, so that you can all work against cruelty in all its many forms.

It is good to be proactive in asking ourselves if our words, and actions dehumanize others or build trust and empathy. Taking action in your own life to withdraw your support and presence from institutions and structures that support senseless violence is highly admirable. It is your burden to take on the massive undertaking of consciously evaluating how you support, or hold accountable various human endeavors without losing faith.

When one sees how bleak things are, it becomes easy to judge. We are all born into cycles that must be broken. Feeling superior to others, or more morally righteous is a prideful pathway to turning into what one wishes to fight. Genuine compassion, patience, and mercy are non-negotiable attributes when it comes to building lasting peace. It is painful to witness further pain caused by ignorance or arrogance, but it is typical that people know not what they do. Taking the time to understand other’s frame of mind and how to build trust and understanding is the only reliable path to making progress in dark times.

Header photo Destroyed Residential Building Under Gray Sky

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Cyber Fix: Episode 1

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Cyber Fix is on hiatus, you may now listen to full episodes on PeerTube

Music Credits:

Y&V - Lune: https://youtu.be/n79aphwhpW0
Valcos - A New Light: https://youtu.be/o_v9WSImGIU
Killercats - Kaibu: https://youtu.be/qLYmtdi-GzA

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Rise of the Cyber Resistance

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Confronting The Techno Empire

Humanity has a long history of overcoming complicated challenges, even self-inflicted ones. Tyrants desperately want you to believe their control is total, inevitable, and impossible to reverse. This belief is not only a self-defeating illusion, it’s also very easy to dismantle. What’s harder to dismantle is the idea that many modern technologies aren’t inherently evil themselves.

For many, various devices and systems are themselves manifestations of the malicious intentions behind our modern digital experience. This is a perfectly understandable belief in many circumstances, smartphones themselves are notorious for being the gateway of online intrusion into people’s daily lives. Even worse, many of the major companies laying the foundation for almost all of the software and devices we use are themselves attached to shady organizations and hostile agendas.

Despite all this, there are many who are diligently working to unravel all of it, piece by piece. This can sound impossible until one takes the time to learn the fundamentals. When one starts to tune out all the propaganda and calm their fears of technological terror they can start to make progress at forging a different path. Those at the forefront of breaking new ground take the time to learn simple physics, a programming language or two, and a bit of engineering. The more skills these cyber rebels learn, the more cyberspace can be reclaimed for noble causes.

To those who take the time to reflect, things are in quite a recoverable state. We are a long way into rediscovering and mapping out the ideal software patterns and practices that avoid many, if not the vast majority of our modern-day woes. The truly immense challenges ahead are more fundamental and will require inspiration, creativity and a drive for real innovation. Low-level learning of circuitry, computer engineering, and how to program circuits will be the bedrock of the new cyber resistance. The cyber rebellion is all about making the best of what we have while building that which can truly work for the people rather than against them.

In the broader fight against tyranny, those with technological aptitude and understanding are vital in many underestimated ways. Just as vehicles adopting more surveillance technologies doesn’t make mechanics evil or useless, it creates an opportunity for skilled individuals to participate in a better way. Salvage, reverse engineering, repair, and creation are all vitally important techniques that will only become more important over time. Those practices will also themselves highlight lessons that are crucial to truly improving the devices and systems we use.

Cyber Rebel Profiles

Despite aiming for mostly similar goals, many digital rebels operate completely differently and have wildly different preferences. Instead of working to unite the differing flavors and specialties into a single consensus, the optimal path forward requires finding ways in which they can compliment each other. Aligning over shared goals, and knowing when to set differences aside is one of the most valuable skills in these times. The following profiles are generalities, and a single person may find it advantageous to dabble in more than one area of focus.

Digital Nomad

With almost every major platform having serious issues, digital nomads move from pasture to pasture to get the most out of what’s offered until things turn sour. These people will likely focus on one or maybe two devices, generally preferring whatever works on-the-go. Simplicity and elegance are valued over having any and every feature available. Often they tend to be quite good software developers, happy to build something that suits their particular needs. Digital nomads prefer systems that works in close proximity like peer-to-peer messengers such as briar, and ephemeral services like nostr.

Resources

Cyber Homesteader

Instead of taking the web for what it is, these individuals focus on building up their own micro-internet. Self-hosting services, using powerful hardware the cyber homesteader dreams of being able to provide fully-featured network of services for those around them. By building up their own services and community, a cyber homesteader is able to reduce reliance on the Internet as a whole. They have the advantage of leveraging the latest and greatest hardware to enable others to have reasonably secure infrastructure with a decent amount of work. With the same skills, even a pile of old hardware can be transformed into a micro data-center with a high amount of utility.

Resources

Specializations

Archivist

Despite the problems of the current Internet, there’s a tremendous amount of valuable information worth preserving. Never before has so much knowledge been able to fit in something as small as a simple microSD card. Just as immediately as people started sharing information, data was beginning to be eroded by time, technical changes, and outright destruction. By curating a personal collection of data, the “data-hoarder” works to ensure valuable insights, great works, and magnificent art isn’t lost to entropy forever.

Resources

Computer Wizard

A good developer is worth a great deal. With the right focus, well-made software can make what we want to do easier and what we don’t want harder. These people are problem solvers through and through, the challenge is to get them interested in the right problems! Computer wizards are also excellent at securing software and systems. Those who learn from the cypherpunks will build systems that are resilient from surveillance and censorship alike.

Resources

Mechanical Mind

Those with a sophisticated understanding of how hardware works on a physical level can make the impossible doable. Getting the most out of hardware that exists, or being able to reprogram logic circuits are skills that can resolve a great many problems. To a great mechanical mind there aren’t good and evil devices, only components that can be stripped out and put to better use. With the ability to make the most out of existing components, and even build new ones, the opportunities are endless.

Resources

Cyber Muse

Those with a flair for presentation, can hone their skills in multimedia. No matter what the medium, their expertise is ensuring that tyrants can’t stop the signal. Getting the word out by a variety of means, these cyber rebels work to ensure they’re heard by other rebels and even those captured by the techno empire. Having a broad understanding of media formats, live production, and various multimedia skills allows them to be very useful in a pinch!

Resources

Retro Conservationist

Nostalgia not a dirty word! One can the principle of “If it ain’t broke, don’t throw it away!”. In the 2020s one would be very surprised at what can be accomplished with hardware from a decade ago. A retro conservationist is crucial to keeping systems running across long periods of time, having seen first hand how entropy treats machines. Our culture throws a lot away, and there’s a great deal that can be repurposed instead of wasted.

Resources

Futurist

There will always be those fascinated by the latest and greatest to see where the limits are. Following emerging trends can help those both new and experienced adopt new techniques or refine existing practices. Often there are useful new strategies that can be applied in other contexts. Those reflecting on the latest and greatest can get a sense for where new opportunities lie.

Battlefields

But where will you find all these fantastic net warriors? If you’re lucky you may find a couple sticking around on mainstream social media or accessible platforms, but these days you’ll find a majority of them engaging in the fight for the web itself.

Independent Web

We can rebuild the web by taking part. No matter how bad search engines get, or how void of information mainstream websites become, there is always the opportunity of creating an oasis in the desert. Too many forget that the web itself is an open, decentralized, permission-less system that is vital in the fight to oppose tyranny in all its forms.

To some it may come as a surprise to know that social media can already outside corporate control. There are a variety of protocols but the two major ones are nostr and activitypub, both effectively part of the larger Fediverse. By migrating to owner operated systems surveillance and censorship can both be challenged directly, at the cost of working out how to cooperate in an open network.

Networks

There’s a very powerful tug-of-war going on. The fight to wrestle control over the entire single world-wide Internet has the potential to destroy it forever. Those interested in the ability for people around the world to challenge power have to wrestle with the consequences either way. There’s a wide variety of strategies that can be employed, but overcoming this challenge requires a lot more study by brilliant minds.

Machine Brawl

Changing the technological landscape over the long time requires changes in hardware. There is only so much that can be done in software, eventually more deliberate work is needed to make improvements. It is possible to reclaim many modern conveniences without sacrificing autonomy or privacy if effort is put into improving the very foundation of our digital experience. Those engaged in rewiring the future have a great deal of power to have a massive impact.

If you’d like to suggest a resource, feel free to reach out!

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What is Digital Autonomy?

Tue, 28 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When Big Brother Has All The Cards…

It is clear to many that modern digital society includes at best trading away one’s private life in exchange for fleeting novelty and convenience. At worst, we’ve industrialized profiting off people’s self-destructive traits to infantilize humanity mentally, socially, and even spiritually. These troubles have been long in the works, with minor exchanges here and there, but now the situation is dire and escalating.

Just as some people were beginning to grasp how large social media giants manipulate their feeds and minds for profit, an entirely new game has arisen. Companies hyping up their cloud “AI” chat interfaces as a substitute for any and all means of properly navigating information online. Google has been caught in a sticky situation where its search would return ridiculous answers to ordinary queries. This is really only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how the web may be transformed if the public acclimates to this form of finding information.

It’s easy to hyper-fixate on the flawed use of “AI” in its present, quirky form. In doing so, one can completely fail to see how to overall trend is moving against people’s ability to find information online, or even use their own devices. Not to be outdone, Microsoft decided to eliminate any doubt that the Windows operating system is spyware. Announcing a new feature called “Recall AI”, the system is intended to take at least a dozen screenshots per minute, potentially building a very complete user profile to be sold, or stolen off the device.

There is a frustrating sense of apathy and defeatism when these stories make headlines. Some will remark the creeping risk created by more surveillance and control, but ultimately many will simply shrug these concerns off like they have done in many other instances. Worst of all, those who do recognize some danger from these threats and encroachments will retreat into total nihilism and exclaim “nothing is really secure” or the all-time classic “they can get you anyways”. While both of these statements are indisputably true, it’s wildly irresponsible to treat every security problem as a reason to care less.

In the spirit of being charitable, I don’t believe the large numbers of people who are apathetic about privacy, ignorant about security risks, or even dismissive of concerns have malicious intent. It seems more likely that much of this is a form of learned helplessness developed over the long course of attempting to adapt to technological intrusion. Just as those who reject propaganda outright may feel weary from incessant long-term exposure, those who are subjected to digital slights may too regret them piling up.

It is not hopeless. It is easy to feel completely at a loss of what to do or where to go next. The solution involves identifying a guiding star to follow towards the right direction. That guiding star is Digital Autonomy. Which is the acknowledgement our natural rights such as bodily autonomy, freedom of conscience, as well as life, liberty, and happiness are not void in cyberspace. Protecting these natural rights in cyberspace requires more careful consideration of various technological systems and strategies.

Understanding Digital Autonomy

A simple definition of digital autonomy is the ability to retain awareness and control over your own affairs in the digital space. This requires not only for systems and devices themselves to be transparent and consistent, but this also requires community stewardship and education. Many systems and devices are defective by design in a variety of ways. Manufacturers will often impose restrictions to protect their interests at the user’s expense, or online marketplaces can restrict you from content you’ve paid for or remove it entirely. These concerns sound trivial when applied to media, but are far more nefarious when it comes to personal devices or vehicles spying on you for a variety of entities. On the road we’re taking, many goods are beginning to resemble smartphones in all the wrong ways.

Your digital belongings need to begin to more resemble your analogue possessions. When you use a notebook, you’re likely not confused by the pages or lines inside it. It is not miraculously working to profit some other entity at your expense, and it is wholly yours as long as you choose to keep it. You have the ability to share it entirely, or even in individual sections, even sharing them with the wider world. Of course what is shared can generally be hard to un-share, but at least the choice is yours to begin with.

In many cases it isn’t really about rebuilding everything, but merely how various tools are used and reworking particular features. Even relatively simple things go a long way to enhance a person’s digital autonomy while using a system, such as intuitive menus that allow data to be painlessly exported. As more and more people learn to expect these simple methods, they can be further refined to synergize with existing solutions for an even better experience.

Unfortunately, many of the ideal solutions don’t quite exist yet, or not in an easy to substitute way. As the public became accustomed to getting work done on cloud solutions, many offline-first workflows have largely faded into distant memory. There is a great deal of power to be regained as people rediscover, build or learn ways of doing computing work on their own systems without outside interference.

Despite what defeatists would have you believe, it is possible to build genuinely empowering technology. None of it would have ever been popular at all if there wasn’t a spark of ingenuity that drew people in the first place. With a relatively small investment in education, experimentation and encouragement, we could transform the digital landscape to be entirely unrecognizable. Too many assume that a radically better digital future involves no online interaction at all, this is too pessimistic. It’s entirely about setting the proper boundaries so that meaningful interactions are enhanced by new tools rather than governed by them.

Digital Autonomy Is About More Than Tech

It is undeniable that the Internet has encroached too far into people’s lives. It has gone so far that people in entirely unrelated domains feel the pressure of looming technocracy. I would encourage you to imagine how a vastly better digital ecosystem would impact your passions in life. As part of this conversation, I’ve had the pleasure of hosting many conversations with people about how technology intersects with their passions to gain a finer understanding of these issues.

Digital Autonomy and Fitness

One of the more concerning trends these days is the encroachment of big data on our very bodies. It’s important to carefully consider how health information can be weaponized individually and as a society. Never forget that the best health tool is your own mind.

Digital Autonomy and Resilient Living

For those who are more off-grid it can be interesting to discuss the finer points of being connected to the wider world. I hope you’ll enjoy this broadcast with Rebecca!

Digital Autonomy and The Arts

I am blessed to know many wonderful artists. They were generous enough to launch the digital autonomy discussions with me, and for that I am grateful.
You can watch the entire playlist on PeerTube

I would be pleased to connect with passionate individuals who are interested in sharing their challenges and hopes when it comes to how technology impacts our lives.

Please provide a short summary of your passion and what you’d like to discuss!

Take Charge

It’s very easy to become overwhelmed. The goal isn’t to change everything all at once at the same time. Just like many other transformative changes in life, this is a marathon and not a sprint. You can make simple changes like using Free Software tools like LibreOffice, Blender, or Inkscape to create your own media and documents. Those who are more ambitious may want to try to run their own home server with a variety of services like FreshRSS, or even their own website. The hard part would be migrating communications away from mainstream providers like Facebook. This involves working together with others to negotiate what best fits those participating.

There is a lot of opportunity in experimenting with and learning the large variety of techniques that people already use to break free from the cloud. As time passes it may be easier to support new device manufacturers, or large software projects to really create radical change. The more work that goes into solving this problem the easier things will get. There is little need to be dogmatic or impatient with others, any collaborative success will go a long way towards shaping the future we want.

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Introducing Gitnuro

Thu, 23 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Many hands make light work. This is the essence behind the idea of Operation: Beehive which outlines how people can use various software collaboration tools for non-technical uses. Git by it’s nature is an offline-first collaborative tool, this perfectly models what the optimal offline/online balance should be for many activities.

To maintain our digital autonomy, it’s crucial to find ways to collaborate without being locked behind cloud platforms or locked-in services. This requires working in completely different ways than how Big Tech has trained people to collaborate within their digital walls. In scouring the net for research and ideas, I stumbled on Gitnuro which is described as a “A FOSS Git multi-platform client for newbies and pros.”

I hope you find this conversation with me and Abdelilah El Aissaoui illuminating and inspiring. It was a pleasure to discuss not only his project but also his experiences and what people can do to support excellent software like Gitnuro. If we want to change the technological landscape for the better, it requires is to put our money where our needs are and support independent developers and projects ourselves.

Abeliah himself gives some excellent tips on what actions people can take. Even simple things like opening quality issues, donations, or even a written thanks can go a long way to reinvigorate their efforts. I hope that you may consider sponsoring Abdelilah on github, or any other Free Software project that suits you well!

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Digging Deep into Digital ID

Sun, 05 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Join Gabriel & Liam Sturgess in a discussion taking a look at the video Canada Fell Behind on Digital ID by Canadian Civil. The video contrasts Canada’s government log-in systems against Australia’s RealMe single sign-on, making the argument that Canada should make changes. This video, presents an opportunity to learn from advocates for strong Digital ID systems, and to refine our understanding of the merits and pitfalls of that position.

Take the opportunity to watch our response to Canadian Civil’s video. You’ll likely be surprised about how much you can learn by listening to fierce advocates on ’the other side’ on this issue and others. It is far better to be equipped with awareness of your opposition’s arguments, rather than to be disarmed by ignorance. We’ll encounter some of the very strong arguments behind changing the way Canada currently does things, but also our concerns about how that change may take place.

Learn more

Due to many technical issues during recording unfortunately the production quality is not as desired. Some cleanup was done, but my apologies for the overall visual quality.

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Understanding Hostile Cyberspace

Thu, 02 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

To make deliberate decisions to improve one’s own privacy and security, one must make sense of cyberspace itself, and how it can be weaponized. With the benefit of hindsight, it is quite easy to see the traps that were set out for the public. The great news is that there is a phenomenal amount of territory to be reclaimed when people take action. Even a relatively simple shift to offline-first workflows will do wonders to secure control over one’s information. Of course, not all applications can be carried out entirely offline. For a variety of reasons, one must make use of the Internet and online services built on top of it. This piece will help people learn to discern the various risks related to hostile cyberspace, to better choose what to use and how.

Cyberspace Fundamentals

What makes computers amazing is that they can talk to each other. Software you use can connect with software running on other machines to do all kinds of fascinating and interesting things. Cyberspace is any and all connected machines, including the services and apps running on them. These apps, services, and websites will all have various features and functionality. Unfortunately not all of this functionality is harmless. Spying, censorship, and even manipulation can be omnipresent threats on various websites and apps. One of the more un-intuitive network security problems is that these machines can lie to each other which is the root of many serious concerns. Setting aside some of these more advanced concerns, we’ll explore how cyberspace is structured.

There’s No Place Like Home

Home is the machine you’re running. Provided you’re not infected with malware, this is your kingdom. You can decide which services to run, what to do with files, and whatever else suits your needs. With enough knowledge you may even be able to modify the device itself to change fundamental behavior. There are many ways for programs to share data on your own machine if you wish, and a great deal that you can do without connecting elsewhere.

Generally, you’ll have a web browser installed on your device so you can reach the world wide web, and the variety of services on it. This is often where most users will spend most of their time if they have not yet been assimilated into a wide variety of cloud-based services. The browser is a very sophisticated program that loads web sites from all over the Internet, but also has many advanced features for web applications. Ensuring that your browser itself is not vulnerable to intrusion, or giving away unnecessary information is vital to your own privacy online.

Other applications can also interact with online services. Using programs to load data from the web is fairly common, but can also have many of the same concerns as using a browser. Since browsers can generally be uniquely identified by their fingerprint, specialized software may be designed to access online information without divulging as much information. Some information leakage is unavoidable. By accessing an online resource it is inherently impossible to hide the fact that you’ve reached a particular service. The moment your request leaves your own network, it is now under control of the remote operators, and potentially others in-between.

Reaching Out

To retrieve information from the Internet, your request has to be routed across the world. The server may be next door, or all the way across the ocean. To make this happen, various routers will forward along the request to others towards the destination. Once the request is received the response is then forwarded all the way back to your system. Without any issues on the part of the service you connect to, it’s entirely possible for traffic between you and your destination to be copied, spied on, censored, or even manipulated. This is why the web uses encryption (HTTPS) to ensure that you have a secure connection to a server. Keep in mind that there are ways this can be overcome. Network security is it’s own challenge when it comes to these problems.

Assuming that your connection to the service isn’t being interfered with or abused in any way, it is unfortunate that the service itself can betray your trust in all kinds of un-intuitive ways. The phrase “If it’s free, you’re the product.” certainly applies. Unfortunately, being a paying customer is no inherent defense from malicious activity. Beyond merely selling your data, the service itself can expose you to malware through advertizing or even require you to install dubious software. One of the major contributors to the death of the web is search engines driving traffic to hostile web pages that make browsing the web it’s own challenge. To make matters worse many services are hostile to users using privacy enhancing technologies like Tor or those connecting from proxies. By requiring users to reveal their real IP address, they are exposed to having their location, or even identity potentially uncovered.

Far, Far Away

That is not the end of potential troubles. The online services you use could be reliant on other services. These distant providers may have undesirable implications for the service itself and your use of it. These third-party services are generally responsible for many privacy risks, but for a high-value target they may even be a security concern. This risk is so serious that many governments are questioning how it can impact their own data sovereignty. This is a much more difficult problem to resolve because such information may not be readily available. For the more surface-level technical details a service like BuiltWith may help, but for some services you’ll never have a complete (or honest) picture.

Defining “Hostile Cyberspace”

Hostile cyberspace is any and every online site or service that engages in malicious activity such as:

Harvesting data

Manipulating people

Sharing or failing to secure user data

Censoring or manipulating content

Provides features at the expense of dependence (vendor lock-in)

Distributes malware or serves ads that do

This includes a vast majority of the Internet. The most blatant examples would be mainstream social media, many smartphone apps and cloud productivity software. An un-intuitive example of hostile cyberspace would be sites and services that abuse your trust with bad practices. The root of hostile cyberspace is making use of storage/bandwidth or computing power that isn’t entirely under your control, or that of those you trust. Trust, in this circumstance, means more than congeniality, but responsibility, stewardship, and competence.

People Farming

The line between corporate data-harvesting and state surveillance gets ever blurry. The more and more people relying on a single giant organization the more value there is in exploiting and subverting the users and their information. This unfortunately creates a feedback loop where large services can use power gained from large user counts to capture or leverage against other people. Selling user data for profit is one such feedback loop, but there are many others.

In our time it is not simply about money, influence over minds, especially large numbers, can easily be converted back into money or other forms of power. Profiting off people’s online activity aligns incentives to ensure that people are encouraged, or even addicted to being constantly online for the sake of being online, to their own detriment. Taking control of your own mind requires making deliberate choices about what online organizations and systems you allow to influence or even govern your information and activity.

Shields Up

When one knows that they are interacting with hostile cyberspace there is a variety of measures that can be taken. The most basic but also very efficient measure is to use ad-blockers or other protections like disabling scripts and remote resources. By “locking down” your browser you limit what can ultimately be used against you. On the network side, you can proxy your requests through a remote server or anonymizing software like Tor. This is useful in situations where you don’t want either your location, or precise network details to be known. Using random or otherwise false personal information to fill out forms is one of many ways to work against active data collection.

None of this, is a silver-bullet however. The more one interacts with hostile cyberspace the more opportunities are presented to compromise the user, thus raising the complexity of proper countermeasures. It can be easy to overlook particular technical details that undo all the work of protecting oneself in hostile cyberspace. It is always about a cost-benefit between what you’re willing to do to prevent bad outcomes. The most efficient means, is to merely avoid hostile cyberspace by making use of personal or offline alternatives where possible.

Avoiding Hostile Cyberspace

While the majority of the Internet is hostile to your digital autonomy, it would be a mistake to believe that it is entirely so. A non-trivial portion of the web includes many sites that merely provide information and don’t engage in the wide array of nefarious practices. Unfortunately in many cases they do not get the same amount of attention due to not usually being commercial ventures. There are rare services and online communities that do value and take responsibility for protecting user information and providing beneficial tools.

For example, databases of valuable or detailed information aren’t necessarily something someone wants to download entirely just to look up a few items. It makes sense for an entity to provide a means for the public (or customers) to have easy access to specific information. This only becomes nefarious once users themselves become a means to a different end than providing information as a service.

Another example would be cloud services that make use of open standards and Free Software. Taking proper measures to protect user data (such as encryption under control of the user, and good security practices), much can be done to run a service or platform quite responsibly. Useful features like being able to export data or media, as well as run your own instance can provide people the means to try new options before they’re ready to commit to maintaining them themselves.

Ultimately, simplicity is the key. Over-complicated or ambitious solutions can fail in bizarre or unexpected ways. Reasonable expectations, and a pinch of caution can go a long way to make better choices.

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Is This The End?

Thu, 18 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Will We Watch The End Of The Free And Open Web?

These days, people are quick to attack the web for how it is, or more precisely how they make use of it. It doesn’t take a technical mind to notice that ‘browsing the web’ has felt less like an adventure, and more like being at the console for a nuclear power plant. Day-to-day things are boring, but every once in a while panic rises and simple mistakes can have disastrous consequences. People who were around to see it generally miss how the web was before corporate social media: small sites and small communities. We have forgotten the power of small niche online interactions.

Simple sites, created for fun or as quirky experiments. Among them even blogs containing unique treasures, galleries of personal photography and art. As online communities grew larger things became so much more serious, and the barrier between the far away alternate reality of the web and real life was fractured. This barrier would crack, and eventually break once a critical mass of people were nudged into not just being online, but being themselves online. It is quite ironic then, that much of the generations that brought themselves to the open web, may be the ones to see it’s demise. A light dims in the distance, as we begin to forget what it was even for.

The Media Matrix has caught up with the Internet Age. Large institutions are no strangers to this rich new medium of the millennium. Far from it, they’re already very far into the process of remolding what could have been into what serves their interests. No longer a refuge from censorship (to the degree it was), or even the insanity of the world, the Internet is far less free than it could be. Corporations lead the charge on surveillance, building all-pervasive real-time monitoring of every person who didn’t take proactive measures to limit contact. Governments chose to work to restrict dissent that threatens preferred policies and power. Despite the early Internet being well within living memory, it is no longer for individuals.

Internet War Measures

Snowden warns that this week, the NSA is being given control over the Internet. This is done through extending the powers in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) section 702, allowing the NSA to compel communications services to act as part of the country’s surveillance apparatus. The United States is not unique in this regard, there has been an ongoing assault on citizen’s digital autonomy that has only escalated since 2020. Late last year, the EU proposed regulation to back-door web traffic as well as build a digital identity framework.

Warfare has changed, and so too has the players. While nations still have conflicts with nations, governments are also becoming more tyrannical as they start to see the public as a threat to their uncontested power. This is made worse by private entities like multi-national corporations increasing their own power, locking large institutions into a negative sum game. No matter what the outcome, people will be worse off for the scramble. As geopolitical, economic, and other tensions rise we can fully expect for institutions to seize and abuse more and more power.

This means that the Internet is just another battlefield. To maintain untenable policies, institutions first seize control over information, then communication, and lastly the people themselves. The free and open web isn’t the reason why liberty is at risk worldwide, it’s merely one of the early obstacles to all kinds of atrocious acts. It’s easy to forget that many online services can stay very much intact while the ability for people to share vital information or cooperate can be taken from them entirely. Too many fall into the trap of believing that the web is entirely a tool of oppression, and underestimate it’s value for opposing tyranny.

Where Do Things Go From Here?

Structural assaults such as ISP-Level De-platforming and other interventions make the death of a single Internet for the world all the more certain. As corporations and governments develop their own great firewalls to micro-manage communication, the net will be fractured into a variety of splinternets. These “split internets” will be highly-controlled networks that one may be allowed access to use particular services. This is effectively the final-form of hostile cyberspace where any communications, content, or even access is completely under control of the operators. Such access can be gated behind authentication or even identification.

As this escalates, one can fully expect all but the most trivial discussion migrating to darknets while they still function. People themselves will either choose to work within an increasingly hostile and constrained digital environment, or will spend more and more time actively working to resist it. Eventually, this work will eventually culminate in small groups creating their own small internets. Community networks become much more important, and specialized tools will be highly sought after.

The great danger is if people entirely lose the ability to communicate with the outside world. While the tragedies of the world may weigh heavily on some, it is vital that people do not forsake the world or allow ourselves to be forsaken by it. If tyrants are permitted to perfectly isolate people from each other with the powerful tools that exist today, widespread atrocities are all but inevitable. This is the real challenge before us. Not to save a particular website, not to reform a particular service, or even to seize control ourselves. The single objective is to preserve people’s ability to challenge abuse of power and to victimize the defenseless. This requires getting serious and realistic. It is far beyond anyone to single-handedly resolve all of it. Instead it’s critical to prioritize actionable meaningful steps that can be replicated widely for maximum impact.

The Simple Heroics Of A Lost Cause

When one recognizes the value that a free and open web presents to those who wish to hold abusive authority accountable, the more precious even relatively simple things become. When one thinks of a hero, they often think of a champion who receives the praise of all the world and recognition in history. People forget the anonymous everyday heroes who make small acts of charity, cooperation, and hope. The independent web does not need to have the best servers, the most clever software, or even the best minds to make it thrive. It does not need to compete with corporate networks and government control. People working to create, learn, and share together is always enough to make a difference.

It’s easy to underestimate the resilience of the World Wide Web. For all it’s faults, and all the concessions made, it’s still an amazing hypermedia system. Just as regimes can destroy books, there will always be people who have preserved them. A single person, can have an immense impact to work to preserve and restore information, digital technology has made this phenomenally easier. As long as people have access to digital tools, there will be people willing to store and share important information. The beauty of simple web sites is that not only can they make use of many modern media formats, but they’re pure data. This means that they can be distributed all kinds of ways.

It’s time to seriously consider how you want to take part and make your mark on the future of cyberspace. Will people continue feeding data, money, and power to the machine until the end? No matter where things end up, we still have a choice today. We can choose what services we want to use, run or share. We can make deliberate decisions on which technology we wish to use and avoid, while supporting the right of others to refuse to be locked in. Your participation matters, and every little action has an impact that can build up over time.

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Unjected Shows Nothing But Contempt For Their Users

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this week, I hastily recorded a video for the substack newsletter to dennounce the astounding behavior by Unjected in response to news breaking of their site being found to have serious vulnerabilities. Instead of informting their users of the risks of their information being vulnerable, the company instead would prefer to downplay and dismiss any concerns and mislead their users about what steps they should take to protect their private information.

I have included the video here for anyone who may like to see an exemplary example of the attitude you DON’T want to see in operators of a site you frequent. It’s important that people learn Lessons from Alt-Tech Failures of the past. It’s highly concerning how various ventures will take people’s values or identity to wear a skin-suit of them for self-serving reasons. Educate your friends and family of the risks of data breaches, and try to choose only online services you can trust, better yet consider self-hosting what you can.

More importantly, don’t let people use the scare tactic of “the government can get everything” to dissuade you from putting in the effort to reinforce your own privacy and security. There are many advantages to even incremental steps that can resolve future problems.

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Lessons from Alt-Tech Failures

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Data breaches are a serious problem. We do not live in an environment where it is safe for people’s PII (Personally Identifiable Information) to be widely available. When somebody’s data is leaked or stolen, there can be and have been serious repercussions for that person. It is desperately important that we not only carefully choose the platforms we use, but also that they’ve taken steps to protect their users from risks related to the platform itself. This piece aims to highlight examples where so-called “Alt-Tech” platforms have failed to do so, and hopefully provide meaningful insight from those experiences.

Big Tech has its own share of blame. By providing convenient access to privately owned (but often publicly funded) infrastructure, people have been lulled into a position of not only dependence, but outright helplessness. If it had not been for the model of everyone throws their private information into a handful of nominally-free services, it’s possible that problems we have to account for today wouldn’t exist at all.

Breaking free requires more than simply switching providers. Consolidating information into a single large target has its own risks, changing the operators of it do not inherently resolve those risks. Sadly, it is all too easy for people to fall into the trap of supporting ill-equipped, negligent or outright malicious providers if they merely brand themselves differently. As more people are and have been pushed out of mainstream providers due to escalating and extreme censorship, they may fall into outright traps.

Can You Trust an Online Service?

What most people underestimate these days is the position of trust one puts into any service they use, but especially those they share important information with. Those who profit off mass data collection are very content to keep this information in the dark. By connecting to an online service you are at minimum trusting the fact that you’ve accessed it won’t be used against you. The problem with data about you being leaked online is that suddenly you’re not just worried about big brother, but now you have to ask yourself if you have ‘nothing to hide’ from extremist political rivals, people with personal grudges, and a large variety of online cyber-criminals.

There are many concerns even for well-managed services:

Passive Data Collection

For the most part, most people are essentially navigating hostile cyberspace. Passive data collection is what’s collected by simply interacting with the service. From tracking scripts to ads, there are many dangers inherent to online services that people will mitigate with tools such as ad-blockers and firewalls. That’s only part of the picture however, as there are many nominally benign forms of passive data collection, which may include:

Recording the IPs of your visits
Technical details of your device or application (fingerprinting)
Storing your activity across the platform
Logs recording information across time

Active Data Collection

Active data collection is information you have to explicitly provide the service, this can be your account details, ID verification, or any posts and interactions made on the service. Active data collection can include a wide variety of forms including:

Log-ins & Sessions
Posts and uploads
Requested personal information and documentation
Payment information

Third-Parties

Of course, any nominally dissident service can defeat all the efforts of putting together a rock solid service by slapping Google Analytics on it to track their users. To go even further, it’s worth considering the entire “tech stack” that the service is built on. Is it dependent on hosting from Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure? Is it making use of hosted providers that themselves can be restricted or abused? The sad truth is that a lot of malicious activity can be hiding behind a pretty website or smartphone app.

Application Exploits

Even in an online service designed with the best of intentions, there are ways in which simple errors can create devastating security breaches. When there is a security vulnerability in the application running the service, additional data can be stolen from third-parties and misused. The impact can vary greatly in scale and scope: from impacting a small portion of the service, to potentially giving hackers and the curious alike admin-level access. Even worse, application exploits are a very important tool for hackers to gain system-level access to the operator’s systems.

System Compromise

System compromise is a disastrous and serious concern. It’s hard to imagine things worse than an application exploit giving the hacker admin-level access, but system compromise gives access to every component of the services that run the platform. This means that those who gain access can then modify records, cover their tracks, introduce new “features”, or disable others. The platform is effectively under new management and any information that’s available (far more than one would think) is vulnerable to destruction and publication. Without proactive vigilance from service operators intrusion can go undetected for quite some time.

Examples: Alt-Tech

It may seem unfair to focus on “Alt-Tech” when there are many data-breaches in Big Tech services. It’s true that data-selling and data breaches are a serious problem on those platforms, but this is a known problem. What’s harder is when people starting a venture to replace Big Tech are naive or flippant about the many security risks. In the name of being better than Big Tech these ventures are also taking on the massive challenge of properly safeguarding their users’ data. Especially when one is aiming to provide services for people who are being mistreated by their own governments. When working to help protect others from state overreach, they should realize the seriousness of their task increases their responsibility significantly. Some may sadly fall into a false sense of security when it comes to so called “alt-tech” alternatives. While a service that isn’t deliberately selling your data can be an improvement, one that gets breached can end up being just as dangerous if not more. When hackers seize the data from a service people trust maybe a bit too much, it can transform that service into a de-facto honeypot, even if the providers had no intention of being such.

Ledger

Those of you thinking ahead may have anticipated web3 as a solution. Unfortunately, there are many impure implementations of Web3 that allow for private profit and project governance. These projects are just as vulnerable as any other web service. Despite the security advantages of a hardware wallet, the associated Ledger service had its own breach in summer 2020. This is highly concerning alone due to the privacy and security benefits one may assume from using a dedicated security solution. The breach includes physical addresses, which is a very dangerous data-point to have exposed for many people.

Parler

Despite being de-platformed by Amazon Web Services, activists managed to scrape a large variety of public posts and upload terabytes of user content to The Internet Archive. This wouldn’t have happened if Parler had dead-simple rate-limiting features that many other services will have to basically keep bots in check. The lack of such feature, and other bad design choices created the problem. The scraping of public data is a grey zone when it comes to data protection. In many circumstances it’s not considered a real Data Breach. For the purposes of the impact it has on individuals, it often won’t have much of a difference. In this case, Parler’s data was used to create an interactive map of protestors and identify them for legal action or vigilante retaliation. Regardless of how one feels about that particular protest, it’s worth keeping in mind that this tactic would be effective against any protest that isn’t overwhelmingly popular.

Gab

Given the creator’s decisions over the years, It’s hard to take Gab seriously. Originally created by a “buy a website” online shop called Pusher, the social media site has had a long history of bizarre technical issues. In hopes to resolve some of these, Gab eventually used the code from the Federated Social Network Mastodon. This created some issues as the mainstream Fediverse urgently reacted to work against Gab’s inclusion into the wider network, a political decision that emboldened a culture of thought-policing over parts of the Fediverse. Despite this some other servers would have been interested in federating, but Gab itself decided to not maintain federation.

Eventually, Gab had its own data breach leaking 70GB of user information. The site DDOSecrets is holding on to the data and scraped additions. They claim to have restricted access to the data to “journalists and researchers” for what little that’s worth. This data was one of many treasure troves of data used to research not just extremism, but also a large swath of people who were displeased with mainstream social media and sought an alternative.

One can choose to believe that Mr. Torba is sincere in his effort to legitimately represent a large amount of the American public hoping to dissent against various policies. This gets harder to believe when the CTO of Gab has threatened to abuse data to build profiles on their own users. Ever since the site announced they would be pay-walling media attachments, the rise of anti-anonymity rhetoric by the founder and others is highly concerning. To be clear, it makes no sense to use your personal information on a site with a long history of security issues, no matter what their cause is.

Unjected

Data breaches from dating sites are a non-trivial concern even in ordinary circumstances. People are encouraged to share intimate details about themselves they likely wouldn’t on other services. Despite a fairly small amount of users, the “dating site for the unvaccinated” is a particularly troubling example. The technical details are very much worth reading, but an attempt to do them justice will be made. The whole saga involves an embarrassing attempt to downplay and dismiss grave security concerns. When building a service for a community of people one feels are in need of special protection, a lack of concern for user information is a serious red flag.

In mid 2022 Unjected was caught with their pants down with an application exploit that was trivially easy to avoid. Despite its simplicity, that exploit allowed someone to have full admin access immediately. To make things worse, there were other exploits discovered, the site effectively didn’t enforce any security at all. Once somebody knew the paths for particular items, they could access whatever they wanted. This meant that from the beginning the site had no real security, only security through obscurity which doesn’t help for long, if at all.

The Severity of the security risks raise more than just technical concerns. Like many other examples, there was a callous hubris on the part of the organization in the face of what should have been taken very seriously. The last thing you as a user want is for a service you rely on to have their spokespeople focused on PR and damage control over actually investigating and resolving potential problems. This absolutely raises the burden for those interested in starting this kind of venture, but the alternative is to lead users into a trap.

Update: Daily Dot reports that despite two years passing, the original researcher who discovered the 2022 breach confirms that the site is just as insecure as before.

GiveSendGo

Crowdfunding is an extremely powerful tool. Large amounts of individuals choosing to donate to accomplish an achievable goal is something society needs to consider more and more. Unfortunately, those who have concerns with the largest platform may feel the need to settle for the next best thing. This was the case for the Canadian Freedom Convoy protest of February 2022. After raising over $10M CAD, GoFundMe had closed the crowdfund. A new fundraiser was created on GiveSendGo that raised over $9.7M CAD, with donors across the country and some abroad. What could have been a success ended in disaster as hackers published a as website that published all the donors information.

Making the rounds on Twitter the release of information about supporters was given free reign on the platform. Eventually this lead to retaliation against those who donated even relatively small amounts. This was so egregious that even Ilhan Omar tweeted “I fail to see why any journalist felt the need to report on a shop owner making such an insignificant donation rather than to get them harassed. It’s unconscionable and journalists need to do better.”

This is an excellent example of how political polarization in the public can be manipulated to undermine everyone’s rights. The response to the Freedom Convoy protest by the Canadian Government as well as the media, is a mark against Canadian civil rights history. We should all be careful by what means we permit institutions to limit peaceful means of resolving conflict. It’s never a bad time to to ask ourselves just how far we’re willing to let states go to suppress protests and other forms of political dissent.

Epik

The more important a service is, the more dangerous information from it being abused can be. Epik was a web hosting provider and domain registrar. It’s one thing to have your own website hacked, but if your service provider is hacked you have a whole world of other troubles. The Epik breach was an epic disaster. Hackers effectively stole everything and made it available as a torrent.

Domain purchases
Domain transfers
WHOIS history
DNS changes
Email forwards, catch-alls, etc.
Payment history
Account credentials
Over 500,000 private keys
An employee’s mailbox
Git repositories
/home/ and /root/ directories of a core system
Bootable disk images

While the media will focus on the most inflammatory websites, a mass dump of the data doesn’t quite discriminate. Others who chose to use their service for whatever reason will end up caught in the crossfire. Since Epik’s own systems had been infiltrated, this has serious security concerns for any website hosted on their infrastructure at the time.

If you’re curious, you can see the list of Data Breaches during the Covid Crisis I started on Campfire.Wiki

A Concerning Pattern

Theres a similar pattern among similar incidents where irresponsible operators will put the needs of their business ahead the interests of their users. You can find examples of outright denial, downplaying, or even inadequate solutions touted as a complete fix. When a representative for a service follows the following script, it is a sure sign to never do business with them again:

“There was no hack, they’re lying, it’s FUD!”
“Okay there was a hack but it was a minor glitch and we fixed it.”
Hackers claim it’s not fixed, and post more data
“Okay it was bad, but it’s fixed, for real this time, but they’re not in our systems!”
Media reports that the systems were in fact actually breached and/or data is posted online, potentially because of system compromise or a major vulnerability.

Does It Really Have To Be This Way?

One may argue that attempting to find solutions to this problem is a hopeless endeavor. If teams of people with serious funding aren’t able to solve the problem what hope is there? It is of utmost important that we take a second look and ask ourselves what problem we’re actually trying to solve. Are we actually trying to fight against censorship and democratize problem-solving? Are we truly motivated in making sure the problems caused by Big Data are put behind us? Resolving those questions is far beyond the scope of “how do I design my next website?” The answers lie in taking a look at the fundamentals of cyberspace and being willing to explore a much wider variety of possibilities.

Education Is Key

Communities need to prioritize their own technological knowledge capital. Spending time to teach the fundamentals can help people not fall prey to the most prevalent of problems. Relying on governments or corporations to secure the Internet for everyone is asking to be entirely beholden to them. The ideal way forward requires people to be taught not merely how to use various technologies but to understand them at a deep fundamental level.

When fighting for something that matters, the details matter. One must not only consider what someone is up to but also how they intend to achieve it. The means of achieving particular goals can very easily and quickly corrupt the entire enterprise. Having the knowledge, but also the courage to call out careless or negligent behavior among one’s allies is a very difficult but important thing to do.

Join The Self-Hosting Revolution

I can personally attest that self-hosting is a fun and liberating venture…most of the time. It does take a fair amount of skill and effort, especially to maintain across time. While it may not be for every single person, small communities self-hosting services can help distribute the data, and therefore the risk much better than large monolithic platforms. It’s much safer to keep everyone’s data separate and distributed. To make the most out of this, open protocols are the way to allow a variety of different systems to still maintain some form of interoperability. A heterogeneous network built with a common protocol will be much more resilient to cyber attacks than everyone running the same one-size-fits-all solution, or pooling their data in the same entities.

One of the best advantages of self-hosting or running services for a small community is that it reduces your reliance on large platforms. While it may be a challenge to protect your own systems, with proper backups you’ll have a lot less to lose than someone on a large platform that got breached or was selling the data anyways. With reasonable expectations, such as accepting that software is never complete but always improving, we can create radical change with relatively simple innovations.

OPSEC (Operational Security)

With our existing platforms and services harvesting more and more information on their users, it’s worth asking what you’re willing to do to mix things up. Does every website you use require your real name just to lurk occasionally? Is it even reasonable that most online entertainment includes all kinds of invasive forms of surveillance? Our predicament as individuals is that protecting our private information is a burden that has been placed on us by the circumstances we find ourselves in. It takes proactive work, and careful consideration to not fall into traps.

Let’s ask a few questions:

Do you sign up to newsletters with your main or work email?
How many sites have your only phone number or physical address?
Do you repeat usernames (or even worse passwords) across services?
How many accounts do you have open with sites that you haven’t interacted with in years?

Each of those are OPSEC problems that you may want to spend time resolving in advance of a breach. As always it’s worth checking known breaches for your information. Sometimes controversial online services will openly share guides with their users on how they can proactively protect themselves from being compromised in the event of a breach. General understanding and awareness can often go a lot further with a bit of creativity than relying solely on every service being impervious.

Advice for Future “Alt-Tech” Projects

Think all the above were just chumps or malicious from the start?
Believe that you could do better and want to build the next big thing?

It’s still worth it to consider the following:

Have a plan to detect system intrusion proactively
Build your product with security as a priority: Make deliberate choices in components and software
Test your application for exploits based off previous breaches
Get independent security audits
Assume you will be breached, take measures to minimize harm
Treat user information as radioactive: store as little of it as you have to, secure what you must keep
Make an organized effort to ensure members of the organization are aware of important security practices

TL:DR Take cybersecurity seriously and don’t bite off more than you can chew.

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The Jason Lavigne Show

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I had the pleasure of Joining Jason Lavigne on The Lavigne Show. It was an excellent opportunity to share my message with a Canadian audience of liberty-minded individuals across the country. Jason has had a fascinating variety of guests on his show including Hrvoje of Geopolitics & Empire, Doc Malik, JJ Couey and even Dr Robert Malone among many others. It has been an honor to be featured on the Lavigne Show, and I was absolutely astounded at the positive feedback I received in the live chat.

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Online Threats & Technocracy with Hrvoje Morić

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I had an excellent time talking with Hrvoje Morić on his TNT Radio show. I highly recommend getting caught up with some of his great interviews with a very wide variety of fascinating guests. If you don’t already know of Hrvoje, you’re missing out and should absolutely take a look at Geopolitics & Empire!

Breaking Update

An update from the Geopolitics & Empire telegram channel:

Hrvoje has left the building! I have finally found a guerrilla with enough experience to replace me on TNT Radio. Veteran information warrior Lieutenant General Jason Bermas!

The Ides of March was my last transmission on TNT Radio after 2 straight and grueling years of non-stop live shows without pause or break…broadcasting from Croatia and from around the USA and México.

I am completely frazzled and burned out. I LOVE TNT Radio, they have been amazing to me, they’ve never censored me or caused me any problems, in fact…they’ve largely left me alone the entire time. They were basically like: here’s a mic, you got 2-3 hours, here’s your pay, go!

But doing 10-15 interviews a week is nuts, personally, for me right now. I desperately need to take a break and slow down. I will re-focus my efforts on Geopolitics & Empire! Stay frosty and stay tuned! 🎙 ✊

It’s been an honor to be part of Hrvoje’s show on TNT Radio, and wish him the best!

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Tools of the Technocracy: #12 Network States

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Tools of the Technocracy: #12 Network States

The Trap

Network states are pitched as a nice-sounding way to improve or sometimes outright replace governments. This is a trap disguised as an opportunity. It would seem that the goal is to diffuse people’s desire for accountability into a variety of schemes for private profit. Tragically, even if these became successful, people are to be left behind. For many, the temptation to eschew all the baggage of existing governments and ‘start fresh’ is very tempting. Especially for those who are young and beginning their careers, who understandably feel no responsibility for the tragedies of the past. In the long run, those people would be entirely disconnected from the community they fled, potentially leaving many others who aren’t so lucky to struggle with the consequences.

This is the exact opposite of what’s needed to actually secure justice for those victimized. Any ‘solution’ that leaves people disconnected and communities shattered is the worst possible outcome. Instead of turning on the public, ideal solutions need to be oriented in investigating and acting on the truth. Digital tools can help, but they themselves can’t be treated as the idol that absolves us of the responsibility to act.

To make matters worse, false saviors can betray their followers into building the very system they aim to avoid. People’s justifiable frustration with the way things are is a very powerful impulse for malevolent forces to exploit. It seems entirely predictable, that once tragedy of nearly any kind strikes, pre-packaged solutions are conveniently prepared for people to latch on to. By not allowing any crisis go to waste, people’s time, focus, and resources are redirected from maintaining things well enough to prevent or mitigate the seemingly inevitable next crisis. These non-solutions are often very attractive, in the same way fast food is addictive but unhealthy.

The Encroachment Phase

It begins with forces using the unjustifiable aspects of the status quo to bit-by-bit dismantle or eliminate the parts that people rely on. By putting on a performance of impersonating independent reform, various non-state actors can expand their own power at the expense of people. Often these displays will make use of pretty language or voice long-running concerns that have gone unresolved.

A well-known example of this model is the company Uber. Uber was not an innovation that created new opportunities for communities. In many jurisdictions, the company started out operating as an illegal taxi, with arguably worse working conditions, and added smart-city style data risks. Taking advantage of a highly regulated industry, there was opportunity to move fast and break things, and seize more central control. It should be noted, that Uber wasn’t even profitable. It ran at a loss up until 2023, making it significantly harder for competitors to participate in the space until then.

The company is a shining example of how profit-driven digital control can shape governance. As the service gained adoption, the riders themselves were leveraged to pressure governments to adopt more favorable regulation. If local governance is able to be dominated by a single large corporation, it raises serious questions about how much autonomy local residents truly have. Even federal governments, and even multi-nation structures like the EU have had to contend with large corporations and their dominance over industries or domains of life. This tug-of-war over control very often leaves the people taking the raw end of the deal. One has to wonder if governments will use network states to seize more control with vehicles like smart cities, given how much big tech was weaponized in the last decade.

Understanding the Network State

In mid 2022, Balaji Srinivasan published The Network State: How to Start a New Country, which more-or-less argues that the existing structure of nations is obsolete. Advancing the idea that “The Network” is the Next Leviathan, the book argues that digital technology can enable human beings to cooperate on a scale that entirely outmatches the ways of nation states. By citing a couple of examples, the chapter makes it clear that Network States are explicitly digital and explicitly connected, arguing that mobile is better than stationary, virtual reality is superior to physical interaction, and that smart contracts are outright better than laws. If this isn’t sufficiently staggering, those examples are expanded on with the following:

These examples can be multiplied. As mentioned before, Uber and Lyft are better regulators than the State’s paper-based taxi medallions, email is superior to the USPS, and SpaceX is out-executing NASA. If you think about borders, you now need to think about the Network’s telepresence (which defeats physical borders) and its encryption (which erects digital borders). Or if you care about, say, the US census, the Network gives a real-time survey which is far more up to date than the State’s 10 year process.

Page 53 The Network State

Ultimately, the appeal seems to be the lie that our problems with current nation states are that they are merely not efficient enough. Pretending that geography is a thing of the past now that people can be relegated to exile in cyberspace. By asserting that network states can be more powerful than nations, one is lead into the trap of believing that this is to the benefit of participants. For many people, the abuses from government and institutions come swiftly enough. The desire to make this process faster and more able to change on a whim isn’t to the benefit of the people, but rather the owners of the system. Network state advocates argue that one is able to co-own the network with other participants, but if they truly are the Next Leviathan then one has to wonder what about opposing networks and nations? Many are concerned by China’s high-tech surveillance and control model, it seems that network states merely enhance all the worst aspects.

For all the fanfare, smart contracts are not a marker for fairness or even certainty. Odds are, there are many times you’ve agreed to terms you haven’t read or didn’t truly agree with. By attempting to make governance trust-less, one is effectively placing ultimate trust on these systems. DAOs (“Decentralized” “Autonomous” “Organizations”) and smart contracts can both be hacked and rolled back, vastly increasing the challenge of system security. Jason Lowery has an excellent explanation why smart contracts backed by proof of stake are inherently malleable.

I don’t agree with Jason with all his conclusions, but it’s really important to understand his position that: System security depends on physical power (measured in watts). Meaning that the system needs a justification in the real material world, and can’t solely exist as a social construct. Nation states solve this particular problem with taxes and armies. For a network state to truly replace nation states, it would require similarly powerful means to compel compliance. This means that while some people may come together and make their own authentic democratized network state, but it will still only exist within the wider context of physical power of those outside and within the system.

This brings us the problem of using Bitcoin or another proof of work system to build a network state. While it’s inherently superior to any “proof of stake” solution, it has many drawbacks that are inherently non-starters. For example, we could not create a truly decentralized and self-sovereign network state with Bitcoin today because the costs to self-custody one’s own Bitcoin becomes very prohibitive as the network expands. Scaling this, requires more computing resources, bandwidth and storage that can also increase the costs of running the network. This is the very reason why so many Bitcoin users use so many custodial exchanges and wallets despite Bitcoin being created to eliminate that problem.

But if proof of work is superior, why are other options even attempted? To create a powerful illusion. The very reason why network states have to pretend that living in augmented reality is superior to physical reality is the same reason they have to use proof of stake, hiding where the power actually is. A great deal of the blockchain space seems devoted to not democratizing power, but competing to build a mirage of doing so. If one advocated building a network state out of Bitcoin, people would immediately realize the immense price of being self-sufficient within that kind of system, in proof-of-stake systems, those costs can be concealed.

In the name of selling decentralization, advocates of network states offer a singularity of digital intrusion into people’s lives, with a staggering acceptance of surveillance and control packaged as risk management. In addition to this hard sell, one has to take the claims of digital security at face value. Since any serious interrogation of privacy, security, and lock-in risks reveal many serious concerns. Once these concerns are raised, they are claimed to be addressed in the implementation phase of the revolution. Why worry about the details when there is a grand cyber-utopian vision to evangelize?

The Next Leviathan

Paradoxically, the very anti-human idea of network states is borne out of it’s principle contradiction: Human beings are useful and valuable. All the technocratic hype about automation, blockchain, AI, and virtual reality masks the true power underlying what Balaji calls “The Next Leviathan”. What those seeking to advance network states correctly understand is that large numbers of people cooperating can be an almost unstoppable force. This Leviathan is a cybernetics machine that competes with other mass-mind control machines. In doing so, digital systems can be leveraged to transform human beings into cyber-collectivist foot-soldiers.

To avoid mincing words, this is the declaration of a permanent, automated, real-time slave auction with every human being on the planet as fair game.

Understand that when harmonized together many of these new digital systems could be used for extreme levels of digitized tyranny. This series was primarily intended to help others consider the risks of mass-adoption and over-consolidation of various digital tools. Through the course of writing this series, it has become clear that what I suspected was possible is already highly formalized. To understand this, one only needs to read the book The Network State or watch the entire Network State Conference without being enchanted by the techno-utopianism.

Far from a voluntarist utopia, it seems that the archetypical network state is a form of digitized anarcho-feudalism. Leveraging members to undermine what remaining protections nation states do provide, in exchange for a facsimile nation over cyberspace. Just as young people today are bribed to give up privacy and security in exchange for convenience, the network state offers ways to streamline one’s submission to all the same digital intrusions into people’s lives. Blockchain tools to manage people and assets, smart technology to streamline systems to control more and more people.

The dark and twisted truth of this power is that human mind control experimentation has evolved past beyond controlling a single human being, but further into controlling people controlling other people. Artificial intelligence built on machine minds is an immense energy waste and effectively a dead end. It is immensely wasteful to use exponentially more energy to make LLMs (Large Language Models) only marginally more effective. Instead, seizing control of large amounts of human minds can do much more work with far less resources. The next level of artificial intelligence may very well be human intelligence organized into swarms for particular ends. This would necessarily require a form of total mental subjugation to ensure workers are on-task.

With this in mind, all the machines and digital systems are mere instruments for a more critical goal; wrangling control over people’s brain functions. This is an entirely new frontier, and the network state framework effectively argues that he who conquers the most minds wins. If true, it would be a devastating race-to-the bottom in terms of human liberty, as various gurus are positioned to take control over others, leaving no minds uncorrupted.

What makes our current time so dynamic is that there is an open bid for those who are willing to manipulate others into control structures of a singular design but varying flavor. If you’re ambitious enough, you’ll be given the opportunity to sell-out your fellow human beings for shamefully low prices. What makes the network state powerful is that large amounts of coerced people can be weaponized against critics and dissenters. It is naive to believe that in an era where network states rule uncontested that human rights would be any better protected than they already are, and there are quite a few reasons why things would be even worse off.

Lies of the Network State

Network states advocate for an entirely new system of power with many different illusions that mask the troubles caused by buying into the “digital > physical” prison. To successfully market the dissolution of existing nation states, to make way for a world-wide technocracy, one has to be indoctrinated into believing the following lies:

Elimination of Violent Competition

Human history has had innumerable acts of war, genocide, and slavery. Much of this is attributed to nation states and their authoritarian ideologies across time. Time again that the very same dangerous superstition can be wrapped up in different language or symbols, just to enact the same regime of terror and cruelty. Network state advocates pretend that once people assemble themselves into self-selected groups, that there will no longer be any reason for violent conflict. To go further, the dream of network states relies on ignorance of various forms of engineered dependence such as disaster capitalism, industry capture, and coercion from non-state actors. By distracting people with beautiful virtual reality, it provides only escapism from, not means to improve actual reality.

Decentralization

Fake decentralization is a booming industry. If Facebook or X forced users to maintain a “profile server” that was responsible for handling all requests, but maintained control over sorting and filtering posts, would that be decentralizing social media? In this case, the data is in the user’s control, but not the means in which it is used. The same can be applied to organs of government, a system can dismantle most if not all the laws and regulations, but maintain the power over others.

There is a bizarre assumption that decentralization can only happen digitally. It seems that decentralization is a post-hoc rationalization of the extreme emphasis on digitization. This is despite the fact that analog options are inherently more decentralized and private. It is the introduction of automated digital systems that placed the burden of privacy and security on the plan. It is also entirely possible that greater digitization of society can create real limits to how decentralized a system can be.

That They’re Needed

If one recognizes that large groups of cooperating people are a powerful force that can rival nations, there is no need to put so much emphasis on digital systems and surveillance technology. It seems that advocates of network states are eager to have a system that tracks everyone’s human connections, rather than simply building infrastructure that helps nurture meaningful connections between people. The adversarial focus against existing nations is also unnecessary, even the advocates themselves admit that most “network states” would have some form of cooperation (or subversion) of an existing nation state.

Fixing “Statism”

If government is the problem, don’t turbo-charge and automate it. If government isn’t the problem, then you’d fix the ones you have rather than dismantling it outright. Network states all seem to converge on the worst of both worlds. Network states are not merely an alternate form of government, but they are a model to create far more terrifying governments that are entirely unbound by what restrains existing governments. A principal focus of network states seems to be undermining or avoiding regulations or even human rights protections.

Inevitability

If we accept the premise that network states are inevitable because they are inherently superior to regular nation states, that doesn’t at all imply that any of the so-called benefits of network states would materialize. A lot of damage can be done while dismantling nation states without delivering on the good promises made by network state advocates. People can quite likely be very much worse off as problems not yet discovered manifest themselves after it’s too late to reverse.

If network states are such a clear and obvious upgrade over nation states, what is preventing nation states from augmenting themselves?

Living in Cyberspace

There is quite a bit of focus on the immaterial. This is a fanciful distraction from what is taking place in the physical world. Why is there such a rush to capture more and more people into virtual reality prisons? We should ask what is taking place, that people would be forced to adapt to having no control over their actual lives that they must be satiated with surrogate digital activities. “Living in cyberspace” is a contradiction in terms, hence the emphasis on tiny, cheap, modular homes for the people evicted from the physical world.

Solutions

The root of the issue when it comes to network states is the frame of mind. By doubling-down on the worst aspects of digitized society, people are pointed towards awful and avoidable directions. Instead of putting time and effort making human dependency work, try to imagine ways in which a people-first approach can keep cyberspace a distinct experience from our waking lives. It’s not hard to work to forge a new path, it just takes some creativity and persistence. Take responsibility for holding public and private institutions accountable for overreach, corruption, and fraud.

Refuse and Reverse the Digitization of Society

It does not matter how trivial or benign the application is, it’s clear that mandated use of technology is a recipe for disaster. Remember that it was not so long ago that everything was run with paper forms and correspondence in the mail. Institutions that serve us should be expected to have arrangements for those who choose to go without these intrusions.

This is a situation where apathy and defeatism can do a lot of damage. We owe it to future generations not to burden them with shackles that many still do not even understand. You can start small, start with a local bank or a nearby provider. Getting together to ensure that opt-ing out of these systems is still an option, or making it an option once again is the principal way people reassert their autonomy online and in the real world.

Be Judicious about How Things are Done

There are excellent digital tools, and there are awful digital tools. In addition to this, how they’re used matters a great deal. Just because you agree with the goals of a particular initiative, that doesn’t mean that all means to achieve it are desirable or effective. Take the time to understand the impacts, and downsides of particular tactics and methods. There are many things which may seem like a fantastic idea early on, that can have insidious effects after time.

Ask questions of your allies and opponents alike. Consider alternate motivations and incentives. Raising your tolerance for those asking difficult questions goes a long way to make your mission sustainable, and accountable. Consider what your actual goals are, and if the means you’re taking are actually effective towards your ideal goal, or merely in service of someone else’s interests.

Free Minds and Save Souls

When one is alone, and justifiably fearful of what’s going on it’s very easy to fall for all kinds of self-destructive scams. Now more than ever it is crucial to recognize the assaults on people and have compassion for their struggles. Doing what we can to support each other and refuse to leave others behind is what can set us apart from those who seek to dominate and control others. Taking the time, in whatever way you can to alleviate fear and suffering can go a long way to directly undermine both analog and digital tyranny.

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A Warning about Network States with Hrvoje Morić

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In anticipation of publishing a new tools of the technocracy article, I had a chat with Hrvoje on his show to talk about what I had learned watching through The Network State Conference 2023. It’s clear that the entire concept of Network States as published in The Network State and highlighted by the speakers, is at best an attempt to dress up an all-encompassing technocratic terror. At worst, it’s a declaration of a world-wide open bid on human surveillance and control. Sharing some initial thoughts for the discussion, follow up article in Tools of the Technocracy #12

More episodes: https://geopoliticsandempire.substack.com/s/hrvoje-moric-show-tnt-radio

Tools of the Technocracy: #12 Network States

The formalization of world-wide tyranny

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Attention Democracy with William Maggos

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In a special converation you would have a hard time finding elsewhere, Gabriel joins William Maggos to discuss the fediverse, attention economy, and the Culture War. Taking a sober look at the very foundation of our media and online discussions, William Maggos introduces the concept of attention democracy, where we can have a real impact on culture by choosing platforms that put people in charge of helping spread ideas and culture.

Learn more about William Maggos’ work at Culture War Radio
Follow @wjmaggos@liberal.city

The RSS Feed linked to the wrong video, this has been corrected

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The EU Plan to Reshape the Internet Forever

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The world wide web is no stranger to government control. The Internet itself was created by the US Military, and governments across the world have subsidized Internet infrastructure in all kinds of ways. Many factors, such as the economies of scale, and sheer workforce size give large organizations an immense advantage when it comes to shaping the future of cyberspace. Just as individuals struggle with troubles relating to digital privacy & security, so do large organizations and governments.

In response, governments across the world are moving fast to address these concerns. With the motive and means to transform the fundamental elements that lay the foundation for our digital lives, a tidal wave of change is taking place and just beginning to accelerate. The winning move isn’t to challenge the whole tsunami directly, but rather to find the right waves that can carry us to where we would like to be. Indifference and apathy will certainly lead us to a similar place it took us all during the big tech era: to dependence and exploitation.

“I am not familiar with the history of how the Internet/tech companies have infiltrated my life– I only know one day the past, the before Internet part of life was like in another galaxy, and I was forcibly acclimated into accepting an intrusive technology if I want to use the Internet or a “smart” phone.”

Written by a friend

If nothing else, this should be a reminder of the dire necessity to be vigilant of how governments and large corporations can shape cyberspace to tilt the balance of power against the public. Many governments like to be permissive in all the ways that don’t impact prioritized policy objectives, then turn brutal the moment public opinion starts to shift against those policies. As the digital world has taken hold over more and more aspects of our lives, now more than ever, we all need take responsibility for shielding ourselves and others from such abuses.

Instead of continuing to let the web be dictated by American Tech Companies, Europe has a bold new strategy to plan, build, and enforce a new vision for cyberspace. The European Union’s Next Generation Internet, or NGI for short, aims to terraform cyberspace to represent the values of their elite. This plan is explicitly aimed at changing the Internet not just for Europeans, but for the entire world as well.

Understanding the “Next Generation Internet”

If you take a look at the brochure, it self-describes the plan as a “Human Internet for a better future”. Despite this, the document starts out making it explicitly clear that many technocratic ideals are directly woven into the plan. Surveillance, censorship, and more digital intrusion into our lives aren’t depicted as problems to be solved, but rather responsibly managed.

The Internet is the engine of digitisation of our society and our economy. As connectivity increases, the boundaries between the real and the digital world are blurring. With the explosion of the Internet of Things (IoT), multimedia content and social media,the Internet offers an unprecedented access to data and online services.
Artificial intelligence helps to extract meaning from this data and to embed autonomy and intelligence into networks, connected objects and services. However, there has been an erosion of trust in the Internet following revelations about the exploitation of personal data, large-scale cybersecurity and data breaches, and growing awareness of online disinformation.

Do you feel the warm and fuzzy human feelings yet? To go further, this is an excellent example of “brokering legitimacy”. Which is when advocates for solving a problem undermine their cause by carving out counter-productive exceptions to their principles. This process uses the very real concerns about privacy and security to justify more control. Effectively binding critics of the plan, because it’s leveraging the unjustifiable aspects of the status quo to dismantle the parts worth preserving.

It is naive to believe that the European Union, which very recently pushed to backdoor everyone’s web traffic, is somehow sincerely interested in the privacy or even security of their citizens. I can wholeheartedly believe that European governments are very concerned about their own security from the public, Big Tech, and foreign entities alike. As cyberwars escalate moves are required to innovate not just their own systems, but to make changes to the systems that their citizens use as well. The following quote is from the Next Generation Internet Policy Summit in 2020, I find it exemplary of the kind of spirit that animates the initiative.

[Relevant Transcript]

In the name of resolving a wide variety of issues created by the US Government and American Tech companies, Europe is working to consolidate information control over the Internet. In hindsight, it appears that the laissez-faire approach governments took with large tech companies was to merely buy time while more sophisticated digital surveillance techniques were built up. Hence the desire for rapid regulatory and technological innovation emphasized in the above quote.

In late 2019 Aral Balkan spoke with the European Parliament. Raising many important points, he pleaded with them to kill ‘surveillance capitalism’. The video is absolutely worth watching to get an understanding of how where we are bridges to where the European Union would like to go.

[Regarding citing Facebook]

If this is the presumption under which you are regulating the Internet, I despair about the future of human rights and about the future of our democracy.

…

You’re going blindly towards a Silicon Valley model, I don’t know why you’re doing this.

In short, Aral seems unconvinced that the EU will actually go far enough to radically support citizen’s digital autonomy and is instead trying to import aspects of the big tech control regime under state control. It’s hard to disagree with that perspective, and he exemplifies what actual opposition to these problems looks like.

As frustrating as some aspects of the Next Generation Internet vision are, it is to the EU’s credit that this is a massive transparent undertaking. Much of it is not only open public knowledge, but features initiatives in which open participation is encouraged. This appears to be the case largely because the concerns around censorship and paternalism seem to be more broadly socially accepted in Europe, a critical sign that social acceptance of censorship is what entrenches it. The way in which the Next Generation Internet is being rolled out is very effective at neutralizing any outright opposition, to the degree it is even possible. It is easy to see how such sweeping and extreme transformations made in other domains would use a similar model.

It is a foolish and dangerous mistake to fall into the trap of thinking governments are entirely comprised of out-of-touch bureaucrats with no understanding of technology. In fact, these reforms are being drawn up by people with an incredibly high level of understanding that is quite difficult to match, independent reformers (if there truly are any) are at a serious disadvantage.

Fully Embracing Open Source

One of the advantages the European Union has, is that they have recognized the immense opportunity of actually leaning into the open source development model. While North America bickers about remote work and commercial office space, the EU is harnessing the power of efficient decentralized work. By taking the “build it and they will come” approach, they are entirely out-maneuvering competitors with a treasure-trove of opportunity that has been laying dormant in people’s apathy and defeatism for over a decade.

The NLnet Foundation funds a wide variety of Open Source projects and tools that fit within the Next Generation Internet vision. This is good in some ways, notably that many of these projects are Free Software, which means that if things do go wrong, at least people can modify the projects for their own needs. One does have to wonder what the exact terms of the agreement are, and what ‘carrots and sticks’ are used to ensure compliance.

Such explicit means may not be necessary however. It’s entirely possible that this is merely a circumstance where both governments and individuals have aligned interests to resist foreign surveillance and control. When it comes to how the Internet is currently controlled, it’s not always individual software itself that’s the culprit. While Google/Apple/Facebook may be reading your messages, there are other ways to achieve the same goals.

Open standards, protocols, and Free Software are all things that benefit everyone. The degree of benefit will naturally vary on the nature, purpose and quality of the project. It is critical that people seize the opportunity created from this deluge of resources being thrown into making useful software. To be clear, the NGI vision absolutely includes a lot of genuinely good ideas and solutions that should be taken seriously. It also supports many excellent and important projects that shouldn’t be seen as ’tainted’ simply due to association with this initiative.

Like similar initiatives, I believe many of these projects are selected because it is clearly an elegant and efficient way to achieve particular goals. One would hopefully understand that many technologies, but especially digital technologies can be used for good, evil, and everything in-between. An example worth pointing out is garage which appears to be building a highly-performant file storage server that organizations and individuals alike can both use for particular purposes. Naturally, there are some aspects which will benefit larger organizations more, but that will vary from project to project.

To be clear, I still fully intend to use and support PeerTube and Misskey for the foreseeable future, despite them both being supported, along with wider support for the fediverse. I am very concerned that EU funding many excellent (and important) FOSS projects will be used by people with different agendas to undermine Free Software generally.

It would be all-too-easy for private companies to start selling unverifiable software-suites in the name of promising you “real security with none of that open-source stuff”. Falling for that kind of affinity scam is how you end up falling for things like the so-called "Freedom Phone" which inevitably includes a lot of open source tools because they’re just outright better than what most people can achieve in their own time. Simplistic, binary thinking is what sabotages serious and meaningful reform. Even worse it can very often enable the worst aspects of the project by allowing them to be justified by the important parts of the initiative.

Velvet Glove, Iron Fist

Just because there is good to be done, that doesn’t mean there aren’t rough edges to be concerned about. Keeping in mind that the primary motivation for the Next Generation Internet has more to do with protecting governments from the people rather than the other way around. With decades of surveillance scandals, censorship, and corruption there are good reasons to consider not further empowering governments through digital systems and tools.

Another serious concern one should consider is that the NGI project is very much a Covid Crisis era initiative. NGI Dapsi which did support an excellent project like PostmarketOS for linux phones, also sponsored the creation of a vaccine passport candidate, the Digital Immunization Passport. Information control initiatives such as tracking and combating so-called misinformation and disinformation, are very much a foundational principle of the EU’s strategic priorities.

In early 2020, The European Commission published their Strategic plan for 2020-2024. The strategic plan outlined “A Europe Fit for the Digital Age”, with 6 specific objectives:

Europe’s strategic autonomy is ensured in critical technology areas

European single market for data where data can flow for the benefit of all and where rules for access and use of data are fair, practical and clear

Artificial intelligence that is human-centric, ethical, sustainable and that respects EU values

A fair, competitive and resource efficient digital economy

A cyber resilient Europe, promoting digital identities for all Europeans, while protecting their e-privacy

A modern, open and pluralistic society in the digital age where online disinformation is countered and diverse cultural content is available to all Europeans

Objective 1 makes it exceedingly clear why so many resources have been put into great software that actually works well. The EU, unlike the Canadian government, actually understands how to get meaningful results. With a strong desire to actually augment their national digital sovereignty, better privacy tools are sorely needed.

Objective 2 is arguably the most interesting. It seems that the EU intends to become the single broker for all of Europe’s data. This is a fascinating (if not outright terrifying) concept, and is effectively the legalization of domestic mass surveillance. It is clear that the level of intrusion will be determined by how the EU leadership decides the benefits they receive outweigh the risks to the public.

Objective 3 is just an outright fanciful delusion at best and a desire to single-handedly regulate away general-purpose computing at worst. One has to wonder if the “EU values” referenced in the documentation represent values of the European public or values that are being imposed on them.

Objectives 4,5,6 greatly enhance state control over the Internet and where it reaches into public life. After decades of American administrations using “national security” as a pretext for all kinds of abuses, it’s high time we understand that national sovereignty doesn’t quite mean what it used to. From everything we have seen, it is clear that this vision is entirely about protecting the European Union’s political structure rather than it’s people.

Conclusion

Despite many people being seriously concerned about hostile governments working to destroy the Internet, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the European Union. Many significant regulations have already been put into place and it seems that they are only the beginning. It is understandable, if not outright laudable, for the EU to take it’s digital sovereignty seriously. It is however, our role to ensure that we are doing what we can to ensure those gains aren’t at the expense of people’s ability to dissent or otherwise participate in society.

Learn about Free Software, learn how to contribute to open source, these models are already clearly demonstrated to be the most efficient way forward on a wide variety of issues. This doesn’t automatically mean that everything that is made that way is wholly benign. It means that our participation matters. What we do to decide how we build our tools and how they are used are vitally important concerns. The devil is in the details, as they say. The last thing I want to see, is people sharing this post to say “X project is funded under the NGI, so therefore it’s bad!” in a bizarre knee-jerk reaction.

Anyone who even partially understands the state of online mass surveillance is keenly aware that the problem is larger than any single project or tool. We should absolutely be concerned about the state and future of projects that are entirely dependent on the EU for funding, but we have a role in this too. If we aren’t proactively focused on supporting development ourselves we can hardly expect for it to be built out of nothing.

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Digital Autonomy & The Arts with Hunter Stabler

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Thrilled to have had an excellent conversation with Hunter Stabler about digital autonomy and the arts. We spoke about many different topics, ranging from Free Software, community, and the broader impact of social media. It was a pleasure to connect with somebody who’s taken many steps towards reclaiming their digital autonomy, and has such incredible talent.

You can take a look at Hunter’s creations on his Pixelfed.

We share an affinity for Blender Antennapod and XMPP. Hunter has put together a CNC machine and likes to create with Free Software where possible. Adding that we need to all find ways to collaborate and work together to solve problems of education, outreach, and support.

Links Discussed

A Taste of Freedom: Libre Hosters

A very important topic highlighted in this discussion was how somebody without much time or resources can get started with using excellent Free and Open Source Software. One way to become familiar with self-hostable services is to try them out with an online community that provides them.

Of course, since you are a guest on somebody else’s infrastructure it’s important to be a good digital citizen and respect their rules and culture while using their services. Of course, if you’re an experienced self-hoster with spare resources, consider becoming your own libre hoster for others!

Here are some examples:

Browse others at the libre hosters directory

This conversation took place over the Free Software Foundation’s Jitsi Instance. Consider becoming a member to support Free Software, and gain acess to numerous member’s benefits, including an XMPP account. OBS Studio was used to record the conversation, and cleanup/edits were done in blender and audacity.

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Pushing Back against Surveillance and Control with Hrvoje Morić

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Early this month, Hrvoje and I had a conversation about how governments and corporations are tightening their grip over the information landscape. We discussed some of my latest work, and it was an excellent opportunity to add some finer detail to points that come up often. Near the end, we talk about the war on dissent in Germany. It’s important to note that the acquittal of CJ Hopkins is being appealed by the German government. Reiterating the importance for us to rally around the importance of Free Speech and Expression in the face of totalitarianism.

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SoundCloud Censors Geopolitics and Empire

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

So I have been a loyal customer to Germany-based SoundCloud since 2015, where my podcast has been hosted…and now they have finally jumped on the censorship bandwagon…by deleting one of my interviews from a year ago. Are there any censorship-resistant podcast hosting providers left?

The censored interview: https://geopoliticsandempire.com/2023/02/14/christie-grace-big-pharma-wants-to-force-biologics-on-us

Geopolitics and Empire on Telegram

This particular interview being censored is very notable to me. I was dissapointed to see that an episode of Geopolitics and Empire was removed, but when I noticed which specific interview was removed it certainly raised an eyebrow. I’ve only had a passing awareness of Christie Grace’s work, with much of it going over my head. The thing I find specifically concerning is that there is a pattern of those with substantially higher-effort investigative work being sidelined in favor of those who can meet the demand for simple and inflammatory rhetoric.

Not cool at all.

When it first read her tweet I was stunned. Stunned that someone would have the audacity to demand a domain expert to coach them how to present ideas instead of… letting her speak to her expertise and answer questions. There’s undeniably a sexist angle to this, as such I also worry that this may be more common than one would expect. It’s a tragic mis-allocation of resources for those taking the time to actually put together potentially life-saving information to be maligned by those operating under the premise that it’s all just business. This makes it explicitly clear that what our governments and mega-corporations fear the most is ordinary people choosing for themselves who and what to platform, rather than allowing intermediaries to shape any and all discussions.

The Attention Economy is the Problem.

It’s really easy for someone to dunk on Hrvoje for using soundcloud. You should be hosting it yourself silly! Right? That sounds like useful information, but is naive at best and arrogant at worst in the face of infrastructure-level de-platforming. It is certainly possible for an individual to run a multimedia project as a passion project out of pocket, but the more hurdles that are thrown in the way, the fewer will actually manage to take part.

It may seem like an extreme position to some, but it is clear that the industry built around supporting media with advertisements is fundamentally malignant. A smaller industry would not be able to get away with infecting users with malware and operating as a 24/7 continuous data breach.

We are NOT Powerless.

Blocking advertisements just makes sense, but to go even further we must explore more democratized and meritocratic ways of hosting, distributing, and sharing multimedia. The Free and Open Web is a beautiful thing, and despite many efforts to seize control over it we can still decide to reclaim territory in cyberspace and make our mark on history.

What is Podcast Hosting?

Podcast hosting is a service that stores media files (either audio clips or video) and that allows for various podcast applications or apps to download and play media. Podcasting had its origin in RSS Feeds and sadly many “podcasts” stray from this open standard that really began a new independent media revolution. By allowing people to upload media for free, the platform seizes control over the content that is stored on it. If you’re lucky, the platform still publishes an RSS feed instead of relying on centralized indexing services.

A podcast itself is very simple. It’s a collection of video and/or audio files with a file that is machine-readable as in it’s very simple for a program to parse the information and use it as needed. A slimmed-down example of what this file would look like is this:

<rss version="2.0">
    <channel>
        <title>Example Podcast</title>
        <link>https://example.com/podcast</link>
        <item>
            <title>Episode 1</title>
            <link>https://example.com/podcast/episode-1</link>
            <enclosure url="/episode.mp3" />
        </item>
    </channel>
</rss>

The file outlines the title and description for the show, as well as a link to where each audio/video clip is stored. Distilled down to this level, a podcast is quite similar to a static web site designed for a different kind of application interface. It’s pure data that can be stored in a large variety of ways. This means that any simple, inexpensive web hosting can be used to host a podcast. As the size of it grows, you may want to consider how you’re purchasing storage, and maybe using something like object storage can help you reduce costs.

Podcasting 2.0

By wholeheartedly embracing this, Adam Curry (aka “The Podfather”), co-creator of the podcast has started an exciting initiative called Podcasting 2.0. This initiative aims to expand the RSS format to include additional features that many “podcast” platforms refused to adopt. These features include donation links, chapters, and even transcripts. By expanding the RSS format with the “podcast namespace” Podcasting 2.0 allows for anyone to immediately take advantage of the latest and greatest features using open source software!

Censorship resistance is only part of the story. It is down to all of us as individuals to take a proactive role in helping get the word out for independent voices that take the time to make room for conversations that need to happen. Censorship thrives as long as there is tolerance for it, making a deliberate choice to amplify those who are suppressed is a very effective way to counteract it.

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New Website: Cyberfreedom.ca

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

There’s something very powerful about splitting up a huge task into tiny pieces and making it easy for people to work on the particular chunks. In hopes to demonstrate how this is done, cyberfreedom.ca is now launched to demonstrate Operation: Beehive. It is still very much a work in progress, but the seed is planted. A lot of basic questions need to be answered, but there’s lots to come!

Operation: Beehive

A model for highly productive decentralized work.

What is Cyberfreedom.ca?

Canadian Cyber Freedom is intended to be a resource for Canadians to identify legislative attacks on their digital autonomy and privacy. The site is a beehive because it’s using a version-control system git to manage changes. Once changes are accepted, they are automatically integrated with the site. Anyone is free to clone the repository and start making their own changes. Once they’ve published their version of the repository (or sent it directly) their updates can be integrated into the project.

The idea of keeping up with, and extensively detailing all the ways in which the government of Canada is working to undermine Canadians digital liberty is overwhelming. The hope is to recruit motivated volunteers to assist with building a resource that will help Canadians engage with their representatives to turn the tide in favor of liberty. While total success would be wonderful, even enough engagement to demonstrate the tactic would go a long way to change the game.

Why all the fuss?

Many hands make light work. The ability to get many people working together in a decentralized way is severely underestimated. The goal is to exemplify a process that with a little learning, allows everyone to maximize their own ability to contribute to larger projects.
The major challenges are two-fold:

The project has to be deliberately setup with this kind of workflow in mind. Some data formats or ways of managing information become much more complicated as projects gain participants or become larger.
It does require a bit of learning on the behalf of volunteers, in exchange for learning a useful skill, they’re able to build things that would be impossible for individuals.

On the other hand, there are also many advantages:

Anti-Fragile Information Sharing

It’s a lot harder to suppress information when a variety of people have a copy of it, that can be easily shared over many different mediums.
Highly Scalable

The more people who get involved, the more can get done quickly
Inherently Self-Hosted and Offline-First

It’s all just managing information, there is no requirement to use websites or services at all. They’re just convenient for access and sharing.
Optimal Trust

You may want the ability for people to contribute without necessarily trusting them with keys to the kingdom. Using git allows you to pull changes from anyone without having to give them control over your project.

Once you do want to trust collaborators to help you manage the project, it’s as simple as creating an account on your forge for them, and setting up permissions to the repository.
Division of Labor

The beehive model allows for tech people to focus on tech things (such as site hosting and configuration) while contributors can focus on their areas of expertise such as writing, editing, translation, or creating multimedia content.

What can be Accomplished?

Demonstrating how to decentralize collaboration online and offline is a phenomenal asset to those who wish to endure and oppose total top-down control. The goal is to primarily demonstrate how a task that appears to be too large to take on can be relatively simply transformed into a goldmine of opportunity for all involved. If this process was better understood, the broader community could adopt this model towards creating resources for other kinds of important issues.

Of course, it would be wonderful if cyberfreedom.ca becomes the go-to resource to equip Canadians to engage with their elected officials to gain new ground for digital autonomy in Canada. With a bit of effort this resource could track terrible legislation before it has time to pass and give citizens the confidence to oppose it together. If this proves successful, it would be even possible for people to write new proposals that would greatly enhance the privacy and free expression rights on Canadians.

Thank you: A Personal Note

I want to thank everyone reading this at the moment, it’s been a very rough start for me but I am very excited for the future of this and other projects. I hope that even if you can’t contribute time that you’re willing to at least share the idea with others, so that we can all start to bring meaningful change together. Whether you’re reading this via email, the website, or RSS feed your support has meant a great deal and your feedback means a great deal.

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Digital Autonomy & The Arts with Anne Gibbons

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’m pleased to have had the opportunity to discuss Digital Autonomy & The Arts with Anne Gibbons. Anne is a courageous cartoonist and an inspiration to those who want to learn to make their mark on the canvas of history. We discuss the unique challenges that impact our lives at the cross-section of digital autonomy and artistic expression. I really appreciated having a discussion with a creative and passionate voice with such a wealth of experience.

You can follow Anne’s work on her website and substack

Special Thanks to Margaret Anna Allice

This discussion wouldn’t have taken place if not for Margaret Anna Alice and I am very thankful for that. Please take the time to watch (and share!) Dr Yeadon’s incredible reading of Mistakes Were NOT Made: An Anthem for Justice.

Data Shedding

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The following video is a summary of a report on how programmatic advertising can be weaponized for mass real-time surveillance. This report is highly troubling but not particularly surprising. If you want to learn how it’s being used, read up on the mastodon thread made by one of the report’s authors.

Securing your Data: Backups

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Backups can feel like a chore, but they’re actually very empowering. Beyond the peace of mind knowing that you’re much less likely to lose data, you’re also in a better position to make changes. Many tasks, like moving from Windows to a Free and Open Source operating system, are much easier if you’ve already got your own backups. Keeping your data safe can be as simple as making copies and distributing them, all the way up to running your own cloud. The main purpose is always the same, preventing the horrors of data loss.

Data loss can be tragic. In a time where commercial services train us to think that everything is at our fingertips, it’s easy to forget that some things really are irreplaceable. Sure you can probably hunt down all those memes you’ve saved, but personal photographs, notes, and works can all disappear in a moment of surprise to be quickly replaced with a flood of dread and regret.

There’s the harsh saying, data that isn’t backed up is already lost. I’ve personally felt the loss of some personal data over the years that I’ll never get back. There are so many ways to lose data including deleting/overwriting data by mistake, device failure, or hostile attacks like ransomware. The solution is to keep your data on multiple devices in multiple places. Fortune favors the prepared, so it’s best to do what you can to avoid such scenarios.
The important steps are: Simplify, Store, Distribute, Test.

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Simplify

Just like it can be hard to track down a specific form on a cluttered desk, it pays to have a deliberately organized system. Making as much use of your home directory as possible will go a long way. If you were able to have all your important files in a single place, such as C:/Users/Gabriel on Windows or /home/gabriel on Linux or Mac, it can be much easier to then copy and transfer those files.

Of course that’s the ideal scenario, things may be saved elsewhere for all kinds of reasons, or even relegated to a particular cloud provider. This creates a new challenge of tracking down particular files in a race against time before they are forgotten all together. The complexity isn’t always your fault, programs have the capability of installing their configuration settings in different places, so being aware of what program settings you need to keep safe is very important.

Using simpler tools, taking an offline-first approach, and spending time to organize important files can go a long way to making your backups simpler. Simple backups can sometimes be fully automated or at least sped up with scripts. This is all even more true when you use multiple devices, the more organized each device is, the less work required to manage it all.

Store

Recovery Checklist:

For a complete recovery you’ll want to account for:

Personal/Work files

Any file you wouldn’t want to have deleted. These include personal photos, documents, scanned documents or media.
Organizational Data

Calendars and contacts are some of the first things you’ll want to ensure you have in a format under your control.
Passwords

If you use a password manager, it’s very important not to lose all your passwords.
Browser Profiles

Arguably the most important program to back up the settings for would be your browser. You can also separately back up important data such as bookmarks. By having the entire profile you ensure you keep your settings, add-ons, and many other useful things to avoid disruption.
Configuration files

These are the program files mentioned earlier. Where they’re stored will vary from program to program, and it may depend on what system you’re using.
Installation media

At minimum, it’s nice to have a fresh start every once in a while. Having an installer on a USB to reinstall your system after any issues is a very useful thing to have when you can just throw all your files back in place.
System backups

You can save time on re-installing your system and programs by maintaining a backup of your system in it’s current state. System backups are very useful to get back and running after a catastrophic problem or if a device is lost.

No matter how much (or how little) simplifying you’ve done, you need to figure out how you’re going to store your needed files. At minimum you’ll want to copy them to some form of external medium or remote server.

Types of Backups

Copy

The most straightforward way to move files is to copy them from place to an external device such as a USB drive or optical media.
Push

If you have access to a home or remote server, you can regularly push files to keep them accessible.
Pull You could also give a home/remote server the capability to download your files remotely.
Sync It’s also possible to use tools to sync files and folders between devices in real-time.

Encryption

It’s useful to encrypt your backups, so if they fall in the wrong hands all your private files are safe from compromise. Sometimes cloud services will claim your backups are encrypted, but it’s critical that you control (and protect) the key that’s used to access the files.

Automation

Automation saves you time at the cost of initial configuration. It’s ultimately up to you how sophisticated you want the backup to be. It can be a very simple regular copy, or very complex with real-time sync and extra features.

Offline backups

As far as I know, it’s impossible to steal data from an unplugged storage device over the Internet. Even if it was possible, it would be incredibly impractical to target most people. Having a backup that is disconnected from power is safe from all kinds of cyber threats.

Time

Sometimes files aren’t merely lost, but are mistakenly damaged or altered. It’s useful to have a version history of particular files or keep multiple system backups from different moments in time.

Redundancy

Less is absolutely not more in this scenario. If you’ve got spare time/resources and want to consider an additional layer of protection, more copies and/or more storage locations significantly increase the odds of being able to recover files in a disaster.

Distribute

There are scenarios where it’s vital to have your data not exist in a single physical location. Natural disasters, break-ins, and many other unpredictable incidents can make it impossible to retrieve data once it’s gone. Having a backup located somewhere else is how you overcome this.

For data that isn’t personal or sensitive, sharing is a perfectly viable option. If you’ve assembled an important curated collection of writing, media, or even just links publishing it online can help ensure your work isn’t wasted. You can even distribute files (that you have the rights to!) on archive.org to make a mark on history.

Storage Types

Portable Storage

The easiest way to get started is to copy your personal files to a portable storage device. When one doesn’t require a huge amount of space, these are very convenient and work quite well. Portable flash storage is generally quite fast, but may not be suited for long-term storage.

Optical Media

If you’re storing a relatively small amount of data that you don’t need to change, optical media such as CDs, DVDs, or Bluray disks may suit your purposes. Data stored on optical media is often likely to last much longer than flash storage when kept in ideal conditions.

External Hard Drives

A go-to method for people with many files is to back up their files to an external hard drive. These usually require their own power and data cable to work. They can feature faster speeds, and much larger storage space in exchange for a bulkier size.

NAS / Remote Storage

A more sophisticated method to store data is to run a server that allows files to be transferred over the network. There are all kinds of methods to setup repositories of data with various different forms of access control.

Test

Backing up is just the first step! You’ll want to make sure the files are properly usable. You don’t want to waste the time running a fancy automated fully-encrypted backup system to have that effort tragically wasted the moment you actually need it.

File Integrity

If it’s been quite some time, it’s worth making sure your old file backups aren’t corrupted or otherwise damaged. Bit rot, errors, and ordinary wear can all damage the information stored in a backup.

Disaster Recovery

It’s good to make sure you can start with a new/fresh device in the event it gets damaged, or your residence is hit from a natural disaster.

Encryption

If your backups are encrypted it’s important to make sure you can actually decrypt the backup. Otherwise, you’re just generating random data.

Improve

Over time, you’ll find things in your backup strategy you want to improve. By testing your backups you have the opportunity to identify problems before you actually need the backup.

Tools

The best backup tool is the one you’ll actually use. Each will vary in features, complexity, and ease-of-use. You may be limited by what system you’re using and your comfort level with command-line tools.

System Features

Both Windows and Mac have built-in features for file backups and system recovery. There are many Utilities for Linux distributions as well.

rsync & rclone

rsync and rclone are tools that are so useful, either one of them is enough to consider learning how to use command-line tools yourself. Both are excellent tools for transferring and syncing files between multiple systems.

Disk Cloning

Clonezilla is a great tool for making an image of an entire disk. This is one of many ways to create a full backup of an entire system or to migrate a system from one disk to another.

Example Strategies

Easy Street

Copies personal files to an external hard drive
Has two extra usb drives one with an OS installer and the other with program installers or scripts
Regularly rotates the external hard drive with a relative for a secure offsite offline backup

The Digital Serf

Maximizes their use of cloud services
Uses multi-factor authentication to prevent intrusion
Distributes data among nameless and innumerable third parties
Zero digital autonomy, their entire digital life is at the mercy of a single provider without much ability to switch

Total Sloth

Uses their systems’ “file history” feature to have multiple versions of each file across time.
Once a month, shuts down their system and creates a system image from the drive
Copies the system image to an encrypted filesystem on an external drive
“Simple as” they mutter while driving to their secure locker offsite storage.

The Leech

Encrypts files and uploads them to free or cheap cloud storage
Abuses free signups
Automates everything, providers hate him.

DIY Cloud

Self-hosts a variety of services
All their devices sync to the home server
Remote backup server pulls regular backups from the home server
Doesn’t need much of the Internet anymore

Extra Resources

Video Guides

Links

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Face to Face on the The Hrvoje Morić Show

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’m very grateful for the opportunity to share insights that don’t fit neatly into longer posts. Hrvoje Morić who is well known for Geopolitics & Empire, is a fascinating person to talk to and a very knowledgeable host. We hit many important topics, opening with how big tech is working to regain people’s trust as well as legislative attacks on people’s online freedom. We also discuss Signal and the Open Technology fund, as well as cost savings from ditching the cloud.

The Hrvoje Morić Show: https://geopoliticsandempire.substack.com/s/hrvoje-moric-show-tnt-radio

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Operation: Bankroll

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Putting Your Money Where Your Needs Are

This mindset is applicable to all kinds of problems, but I think is particularly suited to the challenge of helping people reduce their dependency on big tech infrastructure and state manipulation. Taking the time to evaluate your resources, and your requirements, you can put together a plan on how you and/or your friends or community can properly support a better path. Getting others involved can magnify your impact significantly, and better represent a variety of people’s needs and concerns.

It has been a huge mistake for people to accept either high fees or surveillance in exchange for computing that should rightly be done under their own control and on their own devices. There will only be so many opportunities to correct that mistake, and time is running short. The desire for institutions to seize control over peoples’ computing is only likely to rise over time, so too will the necessity to be proactively involved in building better tools for people of all walks of life.

Liberty-minded individuals need to become proactive supporters of the technological ecosystem we wish to participate in. If we appreciate all the benefits we enjoy from useful Free and Open Source Software, then we should reward the effort with proactive funding. In so many ways over the years, people have become familiar with the costs of “free” services that aren’t under their control. The demand for digital autonomy can only rise as corporations and governments around the world become increasingly predatory.

Now is the Best Time

With Big Tech services bootstrapping themselves with debt only to operate at a loss to shove out competition, skating by through lucrative government contracts, they’re arguably at the weakest they’ve ever been. Corporations are raising prices, reducing services, and having massive layoffs, forcing their workforce to find opportunities elsewhere. The last thing we want is for skilled, intelligent, and motivated people to continue building tools that work against us rather than for us. It is up to us to reverse this trend. Luckily, we have a great opportunity ahead of us.

Voting with your wallet now matters much more now than it did for the last decade. Source

Now is a very unique window of time to make a serious impact on the future of technology. With interest rates higher than they’ve been for quite some time, it’s (relatively) harder for corporations and governments to purchase influence. Every dollar you spend (or refuse to spend) means a great deal about what incentives are created and maintained. This means that what little you can spare can make a real impact. If you’re interested in bankrolling a better technological future, and have resources to spare I can’t think of a better opportunity.

Holding in Reserve

Of course, I am not telling you to spend without analyzing your own situation. First and foremost, ensure that you’re still taking care of your responsibilities and that you’re spending money that you would happily part with to make a better future. Odds are there may be charities or local support systems you may want to consider giving to. It can also be fruitful to save. It’s possible that you may want to participate in supporting something new or want to get together with others to pledge a larger amount of funds to work on something ambitious.

Projects Worth Supporting

These are intended to be examples of how somebody can take action themselves to fund a more freedom respecting digital landscape. Suggestions are welcome! The intention is to give you an idea of what may be worth considering. Ideally, you’d be using a substantial amount of Free and Open Source Software already and you’re just going to budget to support the software and systems you use regularly or find useful.

Organizations

New initiatives and organizations are always needed to bring new ideas into reality, but those not willing to risk their limited resources supporting a long-shot can choose to instead support organizations with a track-record for delivering real results. Supporting an organization may also give benefits like membership, giving you a voice to raise concerns or even vote on important changes. Large organizations are complex machines. They may not be functioning exactly as you like, but by supporting organizations as a block of members, you can try to move them into a better direction.

No matter what organization you choose to support, be sure to make sure it is aligned (or able to be aligned) with your goals and values. Many large organizations have a tendency to lure in supporters with a deceptive brand that presents itself as noble, but in actuality under-delivers.

Local Credit Union

While not strictly technological, I believe that supporting credit unions is an important step to protecting financial transaction freedom. While no organization is safe from state overreach, it’s best to proactively put up as much resistance as possible, and build up resilience at the local level. Of course, supporters of digital autonomy should use their voice within any financial institution to encourage them to reduce their own dependency on big tech services, tracking, and other anti-user impositions.

At the time of writing this, I am currently a member of a credit union.

Advocates for Digital Autonomy

There are organizations centered around restricting state surveillance like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Free Software advocacy such as the Free Software Foundation.. Of course, taking it to the local level can help. Donating funds or equipment to local clubs can help those without access to devices, or gain more materials to learn and share.

At the time of writing, I’m currently a Free Software Foundation member, and have donated in the past to KDE e.V. in the past.

Software Foundations

If you use blender, Inkscape, PeerTube, or matrix you may want to consider supporting their organizations. Large foundations can work on a variety of initiatives rather than a specific project. Love the Web? you could even become part of maintaining open web standards.

Liberapay

Liberapay needs more love. It’s a donations platform for much of the Free Software and Open Source community. The platform allows you to support projects or developers directly if they wish, even pledge for projects that aren’t on the platform.

It’s a pleasure to highlight some of the excellent projects collecting donations there:

If there is any ever doubt. It’s always a good idea to verify with the project’s website to ensure you’re donating in the right place. Liberapay just makes it easy and convenient to support FOSS projects. Through other means, I’ve donated to GrapheneOS, Misskey and PeerTube as of the time of writing.

Purchases

The traditional use of the phrase voting with your wallet refers to buycotts, choosing to support a company with better practices than the competition. When it comes to purchasing hardware, the FSF’s Giving Guide is a good place to look at the advantages of hardware that respects your freedom. It wasn’t long ago that many wouldn’t know where to find a computer vendor that sells machines with a linux distribution pre-installed, but now there are many vendors. When it comes to buying hardware, it’s a good idea to do a bit of research to ensure it suits your needs well. Choose carefully, but boldly!

Sometimes it can be nice to get something back in exchange for supporting a wild idea. Other times, you may make a purchase in the hopes of opening an entire new frontier of devices, such as the Reticulum packet radios or the framework laptop. These devices can come at a high price, but are often unique in quality or features.

I’ve had good experiences purchasing from Pine64 and System76 and the devices are still working well at the time of writing.

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Digital Autonomy & The Arts with Margaret Anna Alice, Visceral Adventure & Liam Sturgess

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In what has become my most ambitious media project yet, I had the pleasure of hosting a conversation with people I look up to as among my personal heroes. The Digital Autonomy Series is now one of my favorite projects as it allows the Libre Solutions Network to truly start to live up to its name.

Visceral Adventure

I got to know Tonika through Operation Uplift. Her open mind, kindness, and drive are huge inspiration. I was absolutely blown away by how succinctly she summarized my primary motivation in writing The Tools of the Technocracy.

This is the first time the technology has actually caught up with the goal of technocracy. This is why I think this is such a pivotal moment in human civilization. This is the first time that they can actually succeed in their goals and I think that is a huge distinction.

Substack: https://visceraladventure.substack.com/
Rumble: https://rumble.com/user/VisceralAdventure
War and Democide: https://visceraladventure.substack.com/p/war-and-democide

Liam Sturgess

If I was suspicious of any human being having superpowers, it would be He is an incredibly diligent investigative reporter in addition to being a phenomenal musician, voice actor, and producer. If you haven’t already, give Foreverland, a listen!

After all the years have flown away
Meet me at the crossroads come and pray
Looking out across from the open shore
Live a life with open wings and soar
We’ll find pieces where we’ve been
And live off adrenaline
We’ll lift off from where we stand

Substack: https://liamsturgess.substack.com/
Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/liamsturgess
Website: https://www.liamsturgess.com/

Margaret Anna Alice

George Orwell wrote: “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Margaret Anna Alice is a passionate chronicler who has ensured that the revolution will not go without the truth. She has an unparalleled ability to artfully share the voice of reason without mincing words.

You can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free.
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer;
then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.

COVID IS OVER! …If You Want It

Why The Perfect Messaging App Doesn't Exist

Sun, 10 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Surveillance of peoples communications is a severe overreach. Especially the act of monitoring people’s sensitive discussions with their most trusted contacts. Large institutions like corporations and governments are wrestling over control of and insight from people’s private chats. This is largely because there are limitations to only data-mining public communications. All the money and effort spent on propaganda and censorship can be for naught if people are still allowed to make their own minds in private. This is why since the Covid Crisis there has been a rise in research into how to limit speech in private communications.

Already, there have been many proposed regulations all over the world, aimed at securing control over people’s ability to communicate. Most infamously, we have the EU’s ChatControl & Digital Services Act. It’s important not to forget that corporations themselves already wield a significant amount of power over public and private communications. While governments helping themselves to slices of that pie is a problem, we should reconsider our role in baking it at all. This is to say, we are all responsible for top-down control of communication with our choices to use platforms that enable it.

The cost of apathy is quite high. If you’ve been at all concerned about the ability for consent to be manufactured across a variety of issues, it will only be exponentially worse when people aren’t permitted to dissent in private, much less public. If that isn’t bad enough, there is a sense of defeatism and helplessness by those who haven’t begun their journey to take control over their computing. Those who don’t truly appreciate the benefits of free software are very prone to seeing it as an all-or-nothing affair, forgetting that incremental change can have massive benefits. Often, critics of more privacy-focused tools will underestimate the problems from more popular systems.

Understandably, you have to take your first steps to truly feel the difference. While I encourage you to learn how to store your own files, host your own services, and use a variety of Free Software tools, this piece is about why there is no silver bullet to online communications. Of course this applies to much more than just instant messaging software, but it can be a useful example to highlight a wide variety of important issues. If we truly want to improve our technological landscape, we need a serious and thoughtful approach to understanding the problems.

Why The Perfect Messenger Doesn’t (Yet!) Exist

People really need to stop letting the fantasy of perfect security get in the way of making gradual improvements. Letting imperfections get in the way of you stepping away from total corporate control will leave you in a very sorry place. See the following threat modeling infographic. Just because you’re still vulnerable to state-level threats doesn’t mean it’s not worth using a secure password, or proper encryption methods.

Your risks aren't a single entity, but involve a variety of adversaries.

What is Perfect Anyways?

For the purposes of this piece, the perfect messaging software has the following non-negotiable attributes:

Free Software

Free and Open Source Software has a variety of benefits that are highly valuable to those interested in computing on their own terms. Open Source software doesn’t guarantee security, but potentially has the ability to resolve serious issues quickly, and allows for innovation from broader and more diverse perspectives.
Self-Hostable

If you’re locked-in to a single provider, you’re immediately placing them in a position of trust. They may be able to provide better security than you could on your own, but in an ideal world you (or your team/community) would have the option to take on that responsibility.
Interoperable

Being able to communicate across instances of the server software. This means that large communities, and single users / peer-to-peer deployments should have the ability to seamlessly communicate with each other.
State of the Art Security

The perfect software necessarily has to be secure from at least the majority (but ideally all) known risks. This includes threats of impersonation, censorship, and interception.
Significantly Cross-Platform

There is no point developing the perfect software only to run on corporate controlled ecosystems. Requiring Some to use a smartphone or other non-ideal software can be a deal-breaker.
Expected Features

The software should support a majority (if not all) of the same features people are used to using, such as video and voice calls, Group chats and calls, multimedia, and all kinds of other nice-to-haves.

Additionally, I’ll also define these nice to haves which matter a great deal to gaining traction:

Has a Significant Userbase

While obscure software may be sound, safety in numbers applies in digital contexts too.
Independently Funded

Either as charity, or a crowdfund, it would be important that the project’s existence is not beholden to a entity that can be controlled.
Accessible

Being easy to use is a pre-requisite to being ideal.
Highly Configurable

There may be reasons for people to prefer slight changes to the software’s design. It’s important to put the person in control of their own experience.

Maybe You’ve Heard of Something Like That?

Maybe such software actually does exist… or at least in part…Right? You may even argue some of my criteria aren’t essential at all, and that I’m making perfect the enemy of good. You might actually be right, If you have a suggestion that meets a majority of these criteria, let me know and even if it’s close, I’ll do a full review.

Security is Hard. Really Hard.

The perfectionists often really underestimate what they demand. A straightforward solution to one security problem can sometimes make another one significantly harder. Seemingly simple questions like “Where are the messages stored?” can have profound impact on a variety of security concerns. This doesn’t mean there’s no point using anything at all, but it’s important to understand what benefits you intend to get out of particular options. There can very often be solutions that are well suited to a variety of these problems, and the trade-offs may be worthwhile.

Metadata

Metadata is a serious concern. All kinds of additional information about content like who is talking to who, how often, and when can give spies a significant amount of information. The sum total of who you communicate with may seem like innocuous information, but it’s very valuable to those who aim to control the flow of information. Being able to detect when particular figures gain (or lose) influence over others itself is a significant data-point as well.

Securing metadata is a non-trivial problem to solve, especially if you want to have a variety of community & individually administered services. The advantage of having communications go through a single-point is that erasing metadata is as simple as deleting it (or not preserving it in the first place). This becomes impractical for other reasons though, because if one can be prevented from accessing that single service, its metadata protection is…irrelevant.

Encryption

The other side of the coin of secure messaging is encryption. Your messages need to be safe from prying eyes in transit and at rest. There are many factors to consider when understanding what encryption features are available. When information is encrypted with a key, those who have access to the key(s) will be able restore the original information.

Key Management

When messages are encrypted, whose keys are used?
Are messages secured with the participants keys or is a corporation doing all the encryption?
Where are the keys stored? On the device, or with a service provider?
These questions have profound impact on the security of the system and people’s messages. Simply taking encrypted to mean secure is an easy trap to fall into.

Key Exchange

When someone starts a chat with someone new, how are keys exchanged? Are the keys shared by users directly? Or is a service provider assigning keys to each participant?

End-to-End Encryption

Are messages secured from being snooped on by the service provider? What are the guarantees that nefarious changes can’t be introduced by the big tech corporation managing the keys?

Encryption at Rest

Wherever the messages are stored for safekeeping, the last thing anyone wants is for those messages to be stolen and revealed. This means that the messages need to be stored privately, as well as encrypted in case the storage is compromised.

Perfect Forward Secrecy

It’s a bad idea to have a single key for every message, to protect messages across time they need to be secured with a unique key individually. This means that if a key is discovered or revealed, it can’t be used to decrypt past and future communications.

External Threats

Interception

Even if your communications are secure, it’s possible that they may still be intercepted and stored. This gives attackers time to try breaking encryption as technology advances and more sophisticated techniques are discovered.

Software Environment

Your messaging software may be perfect, but that may not prevent other parts of your system proactively attempting to spy on you. Even something as innocuous as the notifications system on your smart phone can be used to steal information.

Interlude: Why is this Worth Understanding?

It’s critical that we get key management right. After countless data breaches and hacks, it’s understandable that institutions want to move people away from difficult (if not impossible) to secure systems like email and sms. You’ll notice, both of these systems are used for authentication. Not only that, but sms for 2nd-factor authentication is also what has increased people’s dependency on smartphones. We have a chicken and the egg problem when it comes to authentication. Switching to new systems ultimately requires some way to practically solve key management.

Diving into Authentication

There is a great push to end online privacy for all kinds of reasons. Governments and corporations don’t really have incentives to protect you from risk, but rather want to protect themselves from your risk. This is why many workplaces will issue their own devices, locked down under their control and governments are seeking ways to digitize personal identification.

If we truly want to be in control of our own digital identities, and how they can and can’t be used, it’s critical that we refuse to be boxed into identity systems modeled after feudalism. Of course, escaping it by oneself is hardly sufficient, as liberty-minded individuals it is of utmost importance that we empower others to also refuse digital tyranny. Tools are a useful part of this, but so is understanding the proper boundaries.

By allowing a corporation or government to assign you a sole, permanent, digital key management system under their control, you’re not a client but a subject. Suddenly as that authentication mechanism becomes embedded in other areas, such as entertainment, finance, and even social interaction one can be penalized in all kinds of cruel and bizarre ways. While using a single, intuitive, and permanent authentication method for everything may seem convenient, it’s going to have troubling drawbacks if people don’t have at least the option of self-custody.

Hardware authenticators and global password-less logins aren’t inherently evil, but it’s easy to see how they will be used to lure people into digital key management systems that take authentication out of their control. This can get much worse as biometrics are integrated into authentication itself. In that scenario it can be much harder to opt-out.

Anyways, it’s worth thinking about.
Back to messaging software.

Common Pitfalls

Reliance on Smartphones

Mainstream smartphone platforms have constant and pervasive privacy risks, even from the manufacturer’s themselves. This makes reliance on smartphones a net-negative for any secure messaging system. Some messengers exist exclusively as smartphone apps, meaning that those who do not use, or would prefer not to use them are locked out entirely. If nothing else, it’s nice to have access to a keyboard once in a while. Requiring a phone number and/or text message to register is functionally the same as requiring a mobile phone to use the system.

Large Groups

As the number of participants rise, encrypting communications becomes more complex, and less useful as the content becomes all-but public information anyways. In some circumstances, it may be preferable to warn users as groups become too large to keep meaningfully private.

Third-Party Integrations

It can be very simple to rely on external providers for additional features. These additional features can come with significant privacy risks as clients make requests to these additional services. This can also include problems and security threats inherited from software ecosystem choices like particular libraries and APIs.

User Experience Challenges

It can be difficult when a piece of software is superior on a large variety of important criteria, but then fails to be intuitive to use. This can be a significant barrier, and may also include accessibility concerns.

Free of Charge vs Paid Services

Who funds development? Where does the hosting for the service come from? These are critical questions to ask about any project, but it’s especially important when it comes to your private communications. There’s also the question of non-technical uses of funding. Does the app have an army of (potentially paid) online marketers? Is it featured in advertising or paid sponsorships? Are donations/revenue used for efforts that are more about politics than improving services?

Open Protocols

Open, interoperable protocols are exciting. They can help separate specific service providers from being the totality of the system itself. In the long run, hopefully these systems become significantly anti-fragile as they’re adopted further. The main advantage of having an open protocol is that a variety of client software can be used, instead of betting everything on a single application. The point of an open protocol is to define a common standard that different systems can all interact through.

When it comes to choosing between Matrix and XMPP, you may want to consider this outline. That said, open protocols are one of the foundational pieces of building a better technological future.

XMPP

The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol has been around since at least 2004. It is a fully decentralized protocol with a variety of clients and servers. Definitely worth considering for fully independent communications infrastructure. XMPP supports multiple end-to-end encryption schemes. Since XMPP is an open protocol, it’s possible to build a server from scratch.

Clients

For Linux/Windows: Gajim
MacOS/iOS: Monal
Android: Conversations

Servers

Advanced guide

Matrix

Matrix is an “open network for secure, decentralized communication”. The primary client is Element, which is a polished and intuitive cross-platform application. The matrix foundation has some exciting innovations in the works, including VR experiences!

Clients

Servers

Alternative Messengers

Signal

Signal has recently been under harsh scrutiny after recently asking for donations to run their service and beginning testing on using usernames instead of phone numbers. Despite a solid history the hard requirement of using a phone number has been a significant concern.

For those unable or unwilling to run their own communications infrastructure, Signal is a huge improvement over corporate and mainstream social media messengers and boasts quantum resistance. In fact, many of them are adopting a modified (possibly inferior) version of the signal implementation of end-to-end encryption.

For android, Molly is a fully-free open source alternative client. The majority of issues surrounding Signal are inherent to using a phone with google play services.

Briar

Briar is a fascinating project aimed to allow communication over a variety of networks, including bluetooth. Unfortunately, Briar is limited to running on Android and it would be nice if it supported other platforms. Briar is missing some expected features, but it’s censorship resistance features are very sophisticated.

SimpleX

SimpleX is very much in the same vein as Briar. Looks like an excellent and promising project, but sadly is limited to smartphones. SMP servers can be self-hosted and the documentation is quite good.

Jami

Jami is a peer-to-peer communication suite available for android, Windows & Linux. It can also function as a SIP client to make ordinary phone calls. Jami can take a bit of time to learn, but has a wide array of useful features.

What to Choose?

I generally recommend not putting all your hopes into a single option. By restricting your choices to a single option it can be difficult to coordinate with others. Being flexible can help, but this should be reciprocal. Everyone’s situation and desired results will be different, but in general I recommend using the most secure options that you and your contacts are willing to learn/adopt.

This is no trivial task, which is why you should help inform your contacts why taking their own privacy and security affects them and you. Many hands make light work, and we can achieve a lot when we work together.

Potential Game-Changers

None of this means we are doomed forever. There is a great deal of opportunity in working to resolve these problems. Not only that, but there are some key innovations that would go a long way to tipping the scales in favor of secure self-custody communications.

Modularity

So called “freedom tech” needs to embrace the “Unix Philosophy”: Do one thing, and do it well. Far too many projects will try to reinvent everything and predictably fall flat while doing so. For example, when developing software for a particular purpose, consider using an open standard like OpenID connect or IndieAuth to let other software handle authentication. Separating authentication from primary functions can allow for other innovations to improve that aspect of more systems.
Hardware Keys

A truly Free (as in Freedom) self-custody system for managing encryption keys could help in many areas. A permission-less system like FIDO2 could go a long way to make secure options much more user-friendly. Allowing for greater convenience and greater autonomy.
Network Agnosticism

Assumptions made in the past may not hold for the future of a more surveilled and censored Internet. The ability to seamlessly work with censorship evasion and anonymity technologies like Tor and I2P can go a long way.
Generative Tools

If metadata is such a big problem, embedded text-generation machine learning models could send out extra communications at random to unused keys. This could make the complexity of mapping actual communications significantly more expensive at minimal computational cost.
Custom Devices

People would do well to take inspiration from Beepy which is a custom device one can use with secure messengers. This straightforward concept of a single-purpose device can greatly reduce people’s dependency on surveillance devices.

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Digital Autonomy and Resilient Living

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this feature of Digital Autonomy Discussions Gabriel had a discussion with Rebecca Cunningham who runs Red Flyer Media. She is a Visual Storyteller, Motorcycle Rider, Vagabond, Video Editor, Moto-Journalist, Documentary Filmmaker. We discuss censorship resistance, the rural and urban divide, as well as the many factors of building up one’s own independence.

Resources Referenced:

More to Come

This series is intended to help bring together different voices to explore how technology can help (or hinder) people’s ability to live their lives. This episode is just a taste of the wide array of topics worth giving their own attention.

Join the Discussion

Would you like to talk about where digital autonomy intersects with your passion?
You’re invited! Feel free to get in touch.

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Papers Please: The Attack on Online Privacy

Sat, 18 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Leaping at Shadows

Calls to end anonymity on social media are not new, but every once in a while they return as tensions rise. These renewed calls will suggest more extreme measures against platforms that allow even mere pseudonymity, much less complete anonymity. These proposals aim to ensure that the cost of communication with others, or even the public will be privacy. The argument presumes that if everyone was forced to have everything recorded in their real name, then interactions online would always be more civil and productive.

This is a very disingenuous argument. Seemingly polite and efficient communications under one set of assumptions, at one time, may be seen in an entirely different context years later. Forcing people to speak only with their real names forces all communication to be contextualized within real-life power struggles. To say it a different way, the progressive leftists are correct that free speech isn’t free speech if it’s constrained by social status and institutional forces. Where they tend to go wrong is that they believe that building a new “equitable” social hierarchy and institutional structure on top can resolve this conflict.

What they misunderstand, but the establishment power players do understand quite well is that online anonymity changes the game. The cypherpunks had the right idea, give the people privacy and we can liberate ideas from the humans they’re temporarily attached to. You may have heard “If voting ever really made a difference, they would make it illegal!”, with that in mind you might reconsider why online anonymity is such a threat to power. Despite being around for quite a while, people tend to misunderstand what social media is.

There is limitless information online, more media than you could ever watch or listen to in many lifetimes. People do need a layer to discover, prioritize and share that content. One of the things that made social media immediately successful was to receive content made by, or suggested by your trusted contacts. Over time, platforms moved to monetize that trusted attention and started taking over people’s feeds. This has lead to many people forgetting what good social media ever was in the first place. With state censorship and corporate surveillance the deal has only gotten worse and worse over time.

But hypothetically, the fact that you still can get information from others near and afar, friend and foe alike is immensely powerful. Being able to learn from those who don’t share your background can help broaden your perspective and make you empathize with those you may not otherwise. Being able to receive information from others across space and time without governments or corporations interfering is the gamechanger that the powerful fear the most. This is why you should be not just suspicious, but outright disgusted at those who wish to restrict all communication to real names only.

This is why journalists have procedures to protect whistleblowers, who must remain anonymous to keep them safe from retaliation. Unfortunately, as media institutions become corrupted, so too does their ability to properly platform those wishing to fight abuse. A problem with this is that while one may have important information, it may be seen as not worthy of a particular journalists time. We should be grateful that there are tools that can help whistleblowers speak to the public directly without risking their identity and safety. It’s frustrating to see the calls for transparency only go in one direction. The policy position is clear: “Privacy for me, but not for thee”

What’s in a Name?

It is quite convenient that the people who often advance calls to undermine privacy are those who have already established profitable personas within the established orthodoxy. When one speaks out in their own name, (as I do) there is a price being paid to do so. Naturally one is open to criticism and attacks, but also the internet never forgets. We are in a time where one’s public positions are always known once they are known. We would all do well to be careful with what we wish to attach our names to. This is often why those who choose to speak out in their names receive significant praise and trust. After all, if one is willing to stake their entire reputation on an issue, they must always be a strong incorruptible champion. The trouble though, is that things don’t always work out that way.

Not everyone can afford to risk their income, or even their lives, to dissent against power. While there will always be a lucky few, who are able or willing to take that risk, imposing it on others will simply reduce the amount of people willing to speak out. It would be a mistake to restrict all speech to those who can afford to take the risk of speaking in their name. Protecting online privacy allows for more people to speak out about more things. It’s very possible that there are people in positions to reveal damning secrets, but don’t feel safe pointing others to the truth. From top secret institutions, to corporations, and even families, it’s critical that there is always a channel for people to speak out about abuse, especially of the vulnerable. It should be our top priority to ensure that it’s possible to correct grave wrongs.

For the majority of the public, the information landscape has significantly consolidated around a few major services. With the exception of those who have already fled to decentralized alternatives, the majority of social media users have their attention constrained to a couple of corporate controlled entities. Those entities are under pressure of more state control to direct that attention. This means that anyone choosing to speak out in their name has to be careful about how they use their limited resources to make an impact. Those with power and influence can easily bribe, flatter, or otherwise compromise those with a large following. One may have a critical message to share, but the means they use to disseminate it can be quite restrictive.

To make things worse, using real names doesn’t eliminate the worst of abuse and hostility. Hate and rage is often freely expressed (and sometimes rewarded) when taken out on officially sanctioned targets, creating scenarios where those speaking out in their names are likely to be more cruel than one can be without naming themselves. When people are attacked by those with a well-known identity, it can often be more personal than a few low-effort attacks from trolls. This gets worse when everyone has to be named. Without the choice of opt-ing out of giving up your identity, you are forced to run the risk of eventually being turned into an “acceptable target” with no recourse.

This is true of taken names as well. Pseudonymity doesn’t protect against attacks, slander, sanction or almost any other measure that can silence a real name. The major advantages of using a pseudonym is that your content can be disconnected from you as a person, and that your pseudonym is disposable. In fact, using a pseudonym instead of your real name was generally considered to be basic internet safety until social media companies started selling your data. When one demands all pseudonyms be unmasked, I ask: “What gives you the right to demand everyone’s personal information?”. Because unlike a pseudonym, your real name isn’t disposable.

This is not to say that there shouldn’t be places where people choose to interact with their real names, but we should vehemently resist a one-size-fits-all imposition. Shoving anonymity and pseudonymity out of real-discussions won’t improve things, but in fact is more likely to cause more radicalization and abuse. Discussions without real names attached can be less personal, so rational thought can take the wheel instead of heightened emotions. Emotions are part of the human experience. We should guide our thoughts and actions with love and compassion, just not at the expense of wrestling with difficult ideas.

Society Needs Its Radicals

Much of the desire to purge online spaces of privacy has to do with the idea of building a perception of proper care and etiquette. There is nothing wrong with an exclusive space curating their own ideal experience, the troubles come when that becomes the only permissible model. Unlike the real-life metaphors people will cling to, such as bars and concert halls, the internet practically has no space limits. Outside of the raw storage to hold media, and the bandwidth to carry it, there is no reason one space has to exist at the expense of another. What does happen, is that legacy institutions resist and attack attempts to build democratized competition.

Radicals and their wild ideas can challenge long-held assumptions that may no longer hold, or resolve an untenable contradiction. New ways of thinking, new ways of solving problems are always a threat to entrenched power. Not all wild ideas are good ones, but the only way to find out which ones is to give them a chance to be understood. The more an institution is build on assumption, the more vulnerable it is to being disrupted by new concepts and different views. This means that those institutions will treat those ideas as an existential threat, regardless of their merits.

The advantage of isolating ideas, is that they can move faster than people. You have permission to copy this text, and share it with your friends, and they have the same granted to them, and so on. If this caught on, this piece and it’s points would spread faster than any institution could keep up with. This is true of any written words, but we’re seeing it apply more and more to images, and video as digital technology advances. Anything that becomes detached from it’s origin and spread gets the benefit of being interpreted and reinterpreted from all kinds of different contexts. This can either add clarity, or refute the concept entirely.

Online and offline anonymity is worth protecting, but there’s so much more that we can do. If we really want to move on from corrupt institutions, captured governments, and hostile media, it’s possible we need to rediscover ways to cooperate without all the extra noise of who is who. A crucial task is building up tools, infrastructure, and projects that democratize information without compromising on people’s privacy. This is because with a bit of creativity, all of us can work together in ways that are impossible to shut down. A group of people working anonymously for a common purpose are significantly more expensive and complicated to infiltrate, bribe, or control. It’s really easy to manipulate and pick apart a few popular figures, or pit their fans against each other. Successfully building efficient bottom-up tools can create a win-win scenario: institutions either reform themselves to adapt to the new circumstances, or are made obsolete by new structures. Either way, the people can choose to move things in a better direction.

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The EU Cyberwar on People & the Web

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The largest institutions from governments, alliances, and multi-national corporations are all wrestling for control over total digital dominance of the public. Your own access to information, and control over your data are both important objectives to these organizations. This battle over people’s digital lives is not without it’s consequences. There are disastrous possibilities if any group manages to secure surveillance and/or control over everyone’s online communications, transactions, and information.

This problem isn’t new. Even back in 2002, Stephan Engberg was one of many warning about how knee-jerk approaches to digital security can end up creating new unnecessary risks. From convenience to institutions with control over our lives, there are all kinds of ways in which security and control can be out of the people’s hands. Essential services like banking, communication, and access to necessities can very easily be gated behind “secure” options fraught with problems.

Privacy Engineering Group - Stephan Engberg Source

There is a temptation, to try to build a privacy respecting foundation to build digital identity on. Stephan himself is working on Citizenkey, which aims to make anonymous verification possible, with the possibility of de-anonymization through a trusted third party. As an alternative route to total top-down control and tyranny, this would seem like a decent compromise, but unfortunately there is little reason to believe it would stay that way. The assumption that institutions have the right to treat people like livestock to be tracked is itself the problem.

There is no reason that as our lives are transformed by additional digital options, that we must accept losses of privacy to move forward. This arrogant fallacy merely suits those who want to rent-seek on advances in technology by privatizing (or brokering) control of it. At least while we still can, it’s important to remember that each and every one of us cna choose a different path.

The Poison Pill

The EU recently had to back-off extreme client-side-scanning measures, to much fanfare, even calling it a victory. Repealing merely the most offensive part of legislation that can enable and sanction state overreach is not a long-term solution. As we can see, the EU is already rolling forward with more egregious attacks on people’s privacy.

An open letter signed by Mozilla, and other tech organizations and companies, decries the inclusion of a root certifiate into browsers. A root certificate is a digital file that validates SLL certificates for websites, for any website. If I can place a root certificate on your device (or have it included in your browser) I have the ability to decrypt all of your online traffic. This has been done by despotic regimes to snoop on internet traffic and opens the door to even more egregious acts of online censorship. Not only are the root certificates required, but under the regulations browsers are not allowed to revoke the certificates if they are abused.

It’s great to have organizations like the Linux Foundation, and companies like Cloudflare stand up for our internet security right? Not so fast! All the fanfare about eIDAS 2.0 seems to suspiciously exclude the fact that the regulation itself builds a framework for digital ID. These organizations are merely standing against the worst part of legislation that will undermine digital freedoms. If we can’t trust our governments to not include provisions like the root certificate addition, trusting hem with digital ID is merely another opportunity to exploit the public.

Digital ID

It’s well understood that most internet traffic is bots these days. It’s only becoming harder and harder for us and the controllers to tell who is a person and who is a digital agent acting on someone’s behalf. Surveillance and control of the outside world is still an expensive and violent affair. Digital ID is something that can mitigate both these problems. By forcing you to give up anonymity (or even pseudonymity) in a variety of places, you can be controlled by those who control the system.

During the Covid Crisis vaccine passports functioned as a beta test for Digital ID. Access to all kinds of entertainment and recreation was contingent on having a digital wallet that included your health information, many people lost their employment for lacking one. Far from a hypothetical, China used the health pass system to suppress bank runs. This has given many insight into the abuses that are possible if access to services and essentials is gated behind a programmable identification.

While sympathy for those without vaccine passports wasn’t particularly high where I lived, it’s important to understand what this system does to all of our fundamental rights. For quite some time now, the western world has made civil rights progress by establishing groups that are protected from particular kinds of discrimination. Just as it wasn’t any help to protect people from medical discrimination during the covid crisis, this framework will be wholly inadequate at protecting people from automated individual discrimination.

If the power structure has insight to all of a person’s activities, what they read, and what they say. It becomes easier to oppress particular people for reasons that aren’t attached to a protected class. More and more people’s fundamental rights will be eroded by a constant flow of conjured exceptions to individual rights protections. In the Covid Crisis the discrimination was over health decisions, but the exact same framework could be used towards other ends. One day, a tyrant could use the system to punish those who are neurodivergent, or otherwise deviant from the ideal model citizen. Instead of punishing people for crimes, you can use permissioned control of society to punish individuals for what they are and for particular aspects of their lives.

Slowly, Then All At Once

Bit by bit, people have granted large corporations more and more control over people’s lives. Governments are keenly interested in having an impact on this new source of power. The great challenge is that there may come a time where it is impossible for people within this system to reverse the effects and regain control. Digital IDs being launched voluntarily, is no guarantee that they will remain optional.

From the FAQ

The main novel element offered by the new rules is that everyone will have a right to have a EU Digital Identity Wallet which is accepted in all Member States. But at the same time, there will be no obligation. Users will be able to control what personal data they want to share with online services. While public services and certain private services will be obliged to recognise the EU Digital Identity Wallet, its security features make it attractive for all private service providers to recognise it for services that require strong authentication, creating new business opportunities.

The fundamental issue is if people are willing to let top-down state control be inserted into all aspects of their lives like the internet was. Will people allow their governments to use corporations acting on their behalf, to carry out the same overreach? Will those who truly want to protect individual rights, find ways to help others outside this system? Is it already too late?

What Can We Do?

Right To Be Offline

Accept that there are situations where people shouldn’t be forced to use a particular electronic system or device. Accept that anonymity, especially online, is one of the best ways to protect against total surveillance. Anything that can be done to support those who choose not to be identified, or to refuse interacting with particular systems and services can go a long way.

Pushback

Get connected with people in your jurisdiction and get informed about the state of cyber laws and protections affecting you. A single person writing in to their bought-and-paid for politician isn’t sufficient. This has to be one of the issues that a coalition is built around to find a better direction. Cooperating with others to run your own digital services as a community would be a radical improvement.

Don’t make tyranny easier by complying. Anything you can do that adds friction to the process of tracking and controlling everyone’s activity can really make an impact. Choosing to avoid big tech services where possible, or refusing to adopt an “optional” government program can be something that reduces it’s chance of catching off broadly.

More Resources

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A Grayjay Review

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

What is Grayjay?

Grayjay is an android app. It’s in early development but already works as an excellent video player. The goal of the app is to allow you to watch videos from creators on many platforms on a single app. This means that it doesn’t matter as much to you if the person is on Youtube, Twitch, or Odysee you can subscribe to them all from a single app, even without an account! I imagine for many people who’ve wanted to break away from certain large platforms, but have stuck around for a few great creators, this is a good option to solve that problem.

My immediate impression of the grayjay app was a good one. It seems like there’s a very well-designed interface for browsing and watching videos. As someone using a de-googled grapheneOS phone, it was an outright upgrade. Where before I wouldn’t be able to cast youtube videos to chromecast at all, with Grayjay I was able to cast right away. I had no issues trying to follow people on supported platforms and everything just felt seamless.

I really like the design choice to have a solid user interface and abstract each platform into a plugin with particular features. You can even filter by platform in search, and even disable particular platforms as a whole in the sources tab. You really are very in control with this app, you can choose to limit what platforms are featured on the “home” tab, and even search. I’m sure things like comments and payments will be different from platform to platform but it served the very basic role of being an excellent app to follow and search various video content creators.

Can This Help Fight Against Censorship?

In short, I’d say I’m very optimistic. While this app can’t stop anyone from being banned on a particular platform, it is already a very effective tool for following people across many platforms. Putting polycentric to aside for a moment, the very fact that it’s possible to create new plugins to support other sites and integrate them ourselves means a great deal. I believe if Grayjay (and apps like it) started to become more common, we would see much better adoption for interoperable permission-less protocols. If most people were using this app to watch their videos, they could choose whatever plugins they wish. Some sources and plugins could be more or less censored than others, but the power of this system Software means that the user is in control.

For example, while at the time of writing the peertube plugin had some issues, I myself was able to correct them by writing my own peertube plugin. This is an excellent demonstration of what makes free software very powerful. I didn’t need to ask for permission, the code and details were just sitting there for me to take the initiative. This means that in a very short time I was able to conform grayjay to work with my own self-hosted peertube instance and make it work even better than the current state.

It’s actually quite hard to overstate what this actually means. This particular app can be used to support any platform your device has access to. Any set of videos on a website can be first-class citizens on the grayjay app. I can definitely say I think this really does level the playing field when it comes to online media. Suddenly, those who want to follow my peertube can with the same app they use to follow their mainstream youtube channels. Every user gets full control over what they do and don’t want to see.

Moving Forward

In conclusion I do think this is the start of something exciting. There is a lot of excellent free software apps on F-Droid so I hope this can be someone’s start into becoming more comfortable with free software in general. The more you shift away from proprietary software the more you appreciate the gains made by using software that respects you as the user. If you like what this app has to offer I would highly recommend trying out AntennaPod for Android as well. It’s an excellent podcast app that supports multimedia and works pretty well as an RSS reader too. I would argue that it does most of what you would want out of an app like Grayjay, but the more the merrier.

I do have some concerns however, one of the problems FUTO is trying to solve is decentralized online identity. As someone concerned about the implications of Elon Musk trying to transform Twitter into “the everything app” I’m not sure building an open-source everything-app is a good goal. Grayjay works very well as a multimedia app, and I think it’s great for that. I’m not sure I would want to then start entangling everyone’s personal lives directly with it. The advantage of a decentralized online identity would be that when someone is removed from a platform, or even gets censored by ISPs there would be a way for the audience to migrate to other options or even a hidden service.

That said, the advantage of free software is that it really is what we make of it. People can definitely appreciate the great features this offers, and even entirely strip out whatever future enhancements are added on top. I think Grayjay is an excellent example of how to build censorship resistant software, even if it itself isn’t reaching the ideal of Free and Open Source Software.

I have not been paid by FUTO or anyone else to make this review, or try the software.

Correction: Grayjay isn’t Free and Open Source (FOSS)

The PeerTube plugin is licensed under the GPL a Free Software License, but the Grayjay app isn’t, it’s licensed under a different license. Why does this matter? Essentially, FUTO is welcoming user control and collaborative innovation when it comes to their plugin system, but not the app itself. To go further, this increased my concerns stated below about integrating other identity features. In short, the Grayjay app is useful, but still lacks essential software freedoms. If you’re interested in an android app that can truly decentralize the media landscape, I’ll reiterate my endorsement of antennapod.

FUTO Tech explains it on twitter

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Digital Autonomy and the Arts: Part 3

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It is my honor and pleasure to have worked alongside such a passionate and talented writer. Margaret Anna Alice is an inspiration to those worldwide who wish to resist and dismantle totalitarianism. She is one of many critical voices in these turbulent times.

Margaret Anna Alice writes about media narratives, politics, propaganda, mass control, psychology, history, philosophy, language, film, art, music, literature, culture, and health with a focus on COVID at Margaret Anna Alice Through the Looking Glass.

Must-see works:

You can support Margaret Anna Alice’s excellent work by:

Subscribing on Substack
Sending Bitcoin to bc1ql706rr7vj7c7nzxnqfp9rldw8ddfc20f492jk0
Purchasing The Vapor, The Hot Hat, & The Witches Potion

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Applied Cyberwar: Hardware Exploits

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Recently a rumor that the tragic Hamas attack was enabled by a potential lack of backdoors accessible by western / 5 Eyes intelligence. Despite this, I wouldn’t recommend rushing to order a Huwawei phone for privacy reasons. If my threat model called for investigating hardware attacks, simply changing providers would be insufficient to keep them at bay. Understanding hardware exploits requires a bit of understanding about how systems run, so let’s take advantage of this teachable moment.

You’re definitely going to want to revisit A Non-Combattant’s Guide to Cyberwar and Escalating Cyberwar: Warlord Technology if you haven’t already. The important take-away is that there are very advanced tools for infiltrating systems using software. In addition to this, when working to combat hardware-based threats, you’re going to need serious regular cyber audits.

It’s All Broken

It can sound very bleak when one understands just how vulnerable digital systems can be. The sad truth is that if somebody is willing to spend significant effort, resources, and time it’s not a matter of if, but rather when they’ll be able to breach your systems. At least for now, it can be a reasonably safe assumption that those who make a reasonable effort to protect themselves can at least secure themselves from un-targeted attacks, and otherwise make themselves a less valuable target.

The challenge is that modern hardware and software is essentially a massive jenga tower of accumulated technical debt. For those who require utmost security and reliability, almost everything available today is absolutely unsuitable for that purpose. Supply chain attacks can be done by compromising either the physical components of the device, or the software built into the tech stack. The tech stack is everything required to run software on your device.

Imagine that any one of these layers can be compromised

The biggest reason why simply switching hardware providers is not sufficient to mitigate hardware threats; is that someone capable of intercepting a shipment sent to you can then attack the device directly. If you’re already concerned about government surveillance, especially targeted surveillance, you’ll need a proper way to validate that the systems you’re using are free of unwanted changes, bugs, and not tampered with. In addition to this, you’ll want to make sure your verified clean hardware actually Respects your Freedom!

While hardware backdoors are a serious concern, it’s important to pay serious attention to the software environment you’re running. There’s absolutely zero point making changes aimed at mitigating hardware based attacks if you’re planning to run software that is known to spy on you on behalf of the same organizations. With all that out of the way, let’s take the topic head-on.

The Hardware Attacks

If the manufacturer (or manufacturer’s suppliers) introduce a defect or modification to their product, that modification can be exploited. Naturally the defect would be exploited by those who put it in there, but it’s worth understanding that the very same defect could be exploited by others. This is why it is of utmost importance that we the public make it exceptionally clear that we will never accept undermining security or privacy in the name of safety, especially when it empowers unaccountable entities. In the long-run the only solution to this problem is designing hardware so that it can be independently verified with only a moderate amount of effort and tools.

Almost every device is complex enough that it’s not all developed by a single entity. A single company could place a nefarious component into their portion of a device. It is safe to assume that most manufacturers would be testing for defects to detect obvious intrusions, but what if the modification doesn’t impact device functionality? There is currently a lot of research into this. I’ve come across a couple of papers discussing fascinating strategies for detecting that.

Click the image to view the slides, definitely worth your time

Antennas are strange devices, the little I’ve spent learning about radio communications has made me realize how little I understand about these devices. In a really strange way, anything can be an antenna if it’s run with enough power, at a high enough frequency… Wireless communication definitely is one of the more interesting developments. To say nothing of some of the more bizarre advancements like quantum computing.

Even as a highly technical person, it gets really easy for the layers of abstraction to fool you into assuming that lower level details like hardware and firmware are always pristine. It’s important to understand that at a fundamental level all these devices do is store, process and relay information. It’s quite possible for a device to use information sent to it in deceptive ways, and there are very un-intuitive attacks at the physical levels. These threats are very serious and almost impossible for a single person to attempt to mitigate. If it is the case that all our institutions are hostile, corrupt, and incapable of reform, it is then long past time for people to proactively cooperate on establishing the means to design, manufacture, and validate devices independently.

Firmware

Alright, so you’ve used the latest and greatest techniques to validate that your hardware is free of any hardware intrusions or defects. Your team has triple-checked the specifications of every component to the smallest detail, and tested each component for common problems. As you start running software on it, you start to detect strange behavior. Suddenly, your device that you spend so much effort validating isn’t working as intended.

You re-compile all your software from scratch in an effort to solve the problem, but it hits you. There’s a whole layer of code between the software and the hardware. Many hardware components are themselves programmable. A passive component is something that serves a very simple and direct purpose, like a light that shines with power. Logic circuits are components that themselves have memory that allows them to be programmed with additional instructions or parameters that defines how they process information.

It may be complete overkill for a rogue intelligence outfit to compromise an entire system. Instead, it would be much easier to introduce changes to the closed-source firmware on the wireless radios for all kinds of smart devices. With that level of intrusion, it would be very difficult and expensive for someone to detect and correct, and the hardware and software would be none the wiser. This is why it’s important to not only insist on free as in freedom software, but hardware and firmware as well.

Some other interesting videos:

Machines Can Lie

Programmable chips are incredible tools. So many amazing possibilities are enabled by the fact that they often are designed for abstraction. For example, a display may not actually expose direct control over all it’s nitty-gritty details, but instead accepts commands to display pictures and text. This can make it much easier to build a simple device, but it comes at the cost that the other components sending the information are unable to ensure that what was sent is actually what is displayed. With this understanding, it’s quite easy to see why security is such a hard problem. On some level, it is all downstream of physics.

It is clear that governments, corporations, and intelligence outfits have the means and motive to corrupt our devices and systems. We are aware that this happens in a non-zero amount of cases, including in western countries. It is anyone’s guess how deep and how pervasive the problem is. It is an important problem to keep in mind when thinking of what direction we want our tools to go in, and how we intend to use them. On the other hand, I find this information not to be terribly practical on a day-to-day level. A big part of this is the fact that it’s often very unnecessary to compromise hardware to spy on people or steal their data. If anything, people themselves have shown themselves to be all too willing to comply with surveillance and control if it’s merely sold under the right pretext.

Personally, I believe the best way to act on this knowledge is to realize the dire necessity of building genuinely transparent, efficient and accountable institutions that can work to tackle these difficult problems. We can’t do it alone, but I’m more than confident we can get intelligent people together to make some serious progress.

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Mass Resistance Redirected

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As scary as those with the means and motivation to dominate the world are, there’s something immensely more powerful. The people. No matter how powerful you, or even your entire crew are, you still can’t quite stand up to the rest of the world alone. This was my primary motivation to write Tools of the Technocracy, the out-in-the-open desire to power up the tools of mass subjugation is a terrifying prospect. Fear, isolation, propaganda, and violence are all means which the powerful use to keep people in line. What’s less familiar to people is how bribery, flattery, and seduction can be used.

In my opinion, the greatest strategic mistake made by who (or what) rules the earth, is that they unloaded absolutely every dirty trick at once. I wrote the Tools of the Technocracy to take my part in documenting how technological weapons can, and could be used to dominate and control others. Not only is it incomplete, but even if it was, it would only be a very small fraction of the entire picture. I can definitely admit to being shockingly naive to mass mind control when I began writing it. At the time, I believed that the brainwashing was essentially 60% economic, and 40% mass media.

Despite being aware of even some of the examples listed below, it was only once I understood the magic trick did I begin to better conceptualize how highly motivated activists can be assimilated into the very same thing they want to fight. This really isn’t unique to any particular idea or movement. Every sufficient power structure is going to develop defenses against becoming overthrown.

One of the stronger adaptations a dominance hierarchy can have is flexibility. A rigid system is too vulnerable to being outright overthrown by radicals. Instead of single-handedly orchestrating your machinations, it can be quite effective to open bid those actions to those you will reward handsomely. This is an excellent tactic to prevent defectors, because those interested in their own self-advancement will align themselves to your goals. Suddenly your vast conspiracy to dominate others is working as a decentralized network with plausible deniability, with the added bonus of components being entirely replaceable.

Tools of the Technocracy: #11 Social Credit

There are two components to this:

Allowing for particular changes, but nothing that undermines your power.
Making your opposition complicit in maintaining it.

Instead of taking your opposition head on, redirecting their focus, energy and resources on means in your favor or even under your control saves you a phenomenal amount of work. This means that you don’t need to be convinced to stop fighting, you can self-destructively stew in anger and rage at the machine while it feeds on your essence. Anger is an important part of the human experience. Denouncing anger as a problem is its own problem, but it’s important that your anger is properly focused and channeled. Whatever you’re fighting for, it’s important to keep in mind why, and how you intend to achieve your goals.

False Saviors

A clear-cut example of how this is achieved is a false savior. A figure is thrust into the spotlight as the answer to major problems. By dressing the figure up with your ideals, goals, and dreams you replace an ordinary human being on an altar of your own hubris. False saviors can be the work of powerful interests choosing to lead the opposition themselves or made as leaders get corrupted by fame, attention, or other compromising factors.

Beware false saviors

Putting faith into leaders is a road to disappointment.

False saviors are erected by placing the complicated task of solving vastly complicated problems on the shoulders of a single person. No matter how powerful a single person is, they are still mortal and have the same weaknesses as many of us. In addition to this, the more power you put in someone’s hands, the more it inevitably corrupts them. This is because power has strings attached, no system exists in a vacuum and there will always be constraints on how powers can be used. Just as human beings can and will be corrupted, entire organizations are arguably more vulnerable to all the same factors.

The Affinity Scam

If one wanted to financially liquidate their opponents, lawfare may be one option, but there’s a far more effective means of separating your enemies from their wealth: Affinity fraud. By dressing up your financial enterprise with sleek branding that gives your opponents the impression it’s run by those who are just like them with the same values and goals. It is naive to assume that frauds targeted at activists are merely interested in money, instead of other goals like sabotage and infiltration. With money taken from your opponents, you can then use it to buy influence over them.

Philanthropaths

There is a particular brand of “philanthropist” that dresses themselves up in the greater good, but who’s methods don’t pass even the most basic scrutiny. They may claim to use their vast wealth to solve important problems, yet are actually engaging in very profitable impact investing by seizing control over the problem and enabling it.

A philanthropath wants you dead … for the good of humanity.
A philanthropath wants you enslaved … for the good of liberty.
A philanthropath wants you silenced … for the good of free speech.
A philanthropath wants you confined … for the good of your health.
A philanthropath wants to surveil you … for the good of security.
A philanthropath wants you to eat orthopterans … for the good of the planet.

Anatomy of a Philanthropath by Margaret Anna Alice

Philanthropaths will generally focus on the most widely appealing causes, who opposes solving poverty, hunger, and disease? Those who don’t have the desire or the time to evaluate or properly investigate the actual issues will very often fall victim to this kind of scheme. This kind of impact investing often builds power structures that get in the way of meaningful local solutions to these serious problems.

Grifting

Are universal ideals too mainstream for you? How about something more specific? You’re completely different from the brainwashed masses, instead you see things how they actually are and are willing to pile up lots of money on top of your active social media engagement. “Grifting” is the art of liquidating a highly motivated niche. It’s just business after all.

So-called "Liberty Safes" actually had a backdoor into all their products. Source

Individuals, organizations, and even charities can run into the terminal stage where their existence is dependent on the problem they set out to ameliorate. Over time, insidious but disastrous conflicts of interest can pile up in very unintuitive ways. This is actually termed quite well by progressives, for environmental concerns it’s called greenwashing and in the tech space there’s privacy washing.

“The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”

Robert Conquest

Robert may be on to something that’s more than just a mere assumption.

Outright Robbery

By tapping into outrage, panic, and urgency, nefarious agents can short-circuit their victims better sense-making. The well-informed expert may be sponsored by outright scams while they deliver you hard-hitting critical information. We all need to make a living, but some blame can be put on those who take sponsorships without any due-dilligence. The more profitable a scam is, the more eyeballs it can purchase through buying more advertizing, if the only goal is to simply liquidate opposition of money this alone is sufficient to create a powerful feedback loop.

Resistance for Sale!

I would argue, that activist communities themselves have been commodified and resold online. We all feel a natural need to connect with others and work together. This is a very important facet of the game, but when money and dunbar hacking is involved, it can raise some serious red flags. Once you’ve got a captive audience, it’s very easy to then divert them with all the normal manipulative tactics to divert their attention and resources. Small insular communities are vulnerable to being transformed into a cult even when they don’t begin as one.

Understanding the difference

This wouldn’t be the Libre Solutions Network if I didn’t have any thoughts on how to proactively tackle this problem. Affinity scams are entirely about exploiting vulnerable, isolated, and scared people who are concerned about very real issues. It may be quite difficult to understand their concerns. Odds are if you have no idea why someone is wrapped up in a bizarre cult, it’s because you’re not sufficiently aware of their concerns.

Become a Human Again

The best way to rob would-be scammers of targets is to be a trusted judgement-free friend to someone. That way they can be potentially much more likely to consult you with something that’s raised red flags. Everyone needs a trusted circle of people who genuinely care about them, and tragically for some it can’t even be their own family. There will always be desperate lonely people, who may even be over-represented in activist groups because their work may be their own way to ask for help.

Learning from Others

Building on the last point, consider that those with different values and beliefs than you, even opposing ones, can be correct about issues you care about. By escaping your echo chamber you can learn from those who have a radically different perspective that gives you meaningful opportunities to grow. This requires you to humanize them as well as yourself to them. Be a great ambassador for your beliefs by being genuinely willing to listen to others, even when it’s exceedingly difficult.

Results Matter

Self-awareness is critical. Work to understand your principal concern well enough to at least explain how a particular initiative or cause will meaningfully solve the problem, ideally without causing harm. At the very least, try to evaluate products and services on their genuine merits, rather than who is endorsing them.

Walking the Walk

For any particular concern, there are at least a couple of actions a figure or community can take that demonstrate they understand the problem and are willing to spend meaningful effort to correct it. Choices matter and compromises add up like tetris blocks. Practical compromises may seem like a winning trade in the moment, only to turn out to be a deal with the devil over time.

All Money is Blood Money

Become incredibly skeptical of money, especially large sums of money. Wealth may not have to be a zero-sum game, but in many circumstances it certainly acts as one, or even negative-sum. Everyone needs currency to provide for their essentials, or to build the life they want, but understand that everything has a cost. It’s possible that the true cost of money is on your soul, rather than it’s pure monetary value. Remember, you can’t take it with you.

Imagine a giant picket line. The strike is over the future of humanity. People can either cross the picket line to work for those who want to enslave (and eventually destroy) humanity, being showered with fleeting opportunities and resources… or to stand up for oneself and find new ways to build elsewhere. The tragically sad truth is that there is a near limitless supply of desperate scabs who would happily (even knowingly) trade all of our futures for some present sustenance or comfort. You may be angry at these people, even willing to attack them, but they are not the root cause. Much of the harm that has already been done has created much tragedy and many victims.

Tools of the Technocracy: #11 Social Credit

Tools of the Technocracy: #11 Social Credit

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DIY Cyber Audit

Sat, 30 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It’s good for people to take their own cybersecurity seriously. It’s a huge topic, and it can be difficult to decide what’s worth starting with, or expending a lot of effort on. This guide is intended to walk you through some of the basic “bare-minimum” steps one would want to take in improving their online security. In addition to pure security goals, this piece aims to emphasize how to reduce your dependency on systems that seize control of your information and workflows. It is my opinion that consolidated power inevitably leads to abused power, therefore one should take an active role in reducing their participating in enabling nefarious entities.

But why? you may ask. If the corporate platforms, services, and tools are working fine, why put any effort in changing? It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing our actions are of no consequence, and that compromises made along the way don’t accrue debts. Over the last decade, people have given corporate digital giants (aka “Big Tech”) immense power in society. While it has already been abused in many ways, more concentrated power means more abuse.

It’s largely a matter of personal responsibility on where you want to draw the line. Maybe it suits you to simply focus on preventing unwanted intrusion to your important accounts, or you could be willing to invest time and resources to do everything within your power. Your goals and aspirations are important to consider. Sometimes a small bit of effort can be strategically used to get the maximum benefit, others like to dedicate lots of effort over a significant amount of time. Ultimately the best moves are the ones that get the best impact with the effort and time you’re able to expend.

This overview is intended to be a starting-point for someone interested in reducing what sensitive information is shared about themselves, and keeping their systems safer from unwanted intrusion.

More Great Guides:

It may seem redundant to list other guides with similar information. Every project is going to have it’s own perspective, prioritization, and level of detail. If this guide is not to your liking, I would hope that one or many of these will suit your needs.

…More is to come!

The Regular Audit

I’d like to introduce you to the concept of a regular security audit. Instead of trying to reinvent your entire digital life overnight, it can be helpful to set aside some amount of time to make gradual changes, or to spend dedicated time solving a particular problem. This can help you transform a giant task over time, without too much immediate disruption to how you currently do things.

You can commit to whatever time interval works for you. It could be monthly, quarterly, or even yearly is worth considering over never at all. This can help you budget the time you’d like to spend on making changes, as well as help you keep an eye out for things to address later.

One helpful strategy would be to tier specific practices to certain intervals. For example making sure to run updates more regularly, but worry about changing passwords on a less frequent basis.
A hypothetical plan could look like this:

📆 Interval	✅ Task
Weekly	Running Updates
Weekly	Cleaning your inbox
Weekly	File Backups
Monthly	Changing important passwords
Monthly	Deleting unused apps & extensions
Quarterly	System Backups
Quarterly	Checking for breaches
Quarterly	Helping others make changes
Yearly	Complete password rotation
Yearly	Online footprint inspection

Why? Committing to a regular plan can help correct errors and keep you accountable. It also gets you focused on more proactive actions instead of always playing catchup.

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The PEBKAC Vector

The easiest way for someone or something to infiltrate your accounts and systems is your own capacity to make a mistake. Hence the, Problem-Exists-Between-Keyboard-and-Chair vector. (That’s you!) One of the more obvious examples is how much people have been trained to share intimate details of their lives on corporate social media. Beyond just embarrassment, a lack of proper precautions can lead to having your entire system compromised. Consequences of that can range from mild regret to financially devastating.

Phishing Attacks

Phishing is when communications are sent out to trick a person to accidentally load a program, or divulge specific information. Phishing is very effective when combined with other attacks. The more someone (or something) can learn about you, the more effective phishing messages can be tailored to you. It is not out of the question that voice cloning, and other generative AI tools will be used to impersonate trusted contacts.

From A Non-Combattant’s Guide to Cyberwar

There are many different ways [phishing] can be carried out:
E-mail: one kind of attack is an urgent email that requires you to immediately click a certain link. That link will then present a fake log-in form disguised as a legitimate site. This could be used to steal your credentials. If the site itself has a vulnerability, merely clicking the link itself could be enough to compromise your account.

Attachments: any file sent your way may be more than meets the eye. There are a variety of methods that allow a file that’s opened to either run as a virus, or send your data elsewhere.

None of this is exclusive to e-mail.
Messaging apps, and online communities can all enable the same problems.

The line between spam and phishing is very blurry

Sometimes, an adversary being able to figure out which accounts are yours is enough to get very useful information, or to break into already compromised accounts. Other times, getting you to run some malware can give up complete control of your system. The best defense is to be aware of phishing, and take precaution before opening links or attachments.

Video: Protect Your Devices From Hackers – Don’t Get ‘0wned’ by AJ and the Electronic Frontier Foundation

For each channel, a purpose.

Reflect on how and in what way your trusted contacts will interact with you. Having separate email address(es) for different purposes can help filter specific messages for you, this will help you know if a particular message is genuine or not. Very often services will give you the option to enter a code instead of clicking a link, which is helpful in this situation. If you’re sure you must click a link, it can be worth copying it (with a right-click, or long touch) first, then inspecting it yourself before opening it.

Even something as simple as keeping in mind who tends to give you a phone call and who else prefers to use an end-to-end encrypted messaging app. If someone is reaching out to you in an unusual way, that can be an indication that something isn’t right. This applies to workplaces too, it can be a good idea to avoid mixing your career with your personal life, having an account for each can keep things separated.

Big Tech Services

Another way you may be outright, voluntarily handing out your information is when using cloud-driven and/or non-free software and services. Moving your data to your own devices, or at least to services run without vendor lock-in.

Disentangle Yourself from Cloud Platforms

There is no cloud, just somebody else’s computer!

Many online tools are just a service as a software substitute. This means that while you gain the convenience of sophisticated technologies at scale, you will also be unable to choose the terms of your computing. Simple things like using your own software like LibreOffice or Inkscape to create media allows you to keep your information under your own control. By not relying on external services for creating documents, presentations, or even notes you can go a long way to help reassert your own autonomy.

Choosing how you use social media will also have a significant impact. If you’re willing to put up with some inconvenience, it can be worth using alternate front ends for mainstream services to browse without being directly associated with an account. This can definitely help those who want to break away but don’t want to miss out on important information.

Online Footprint

Tools of the Technocracy: #4 Online Identity

What is following you in your digital tracks?

Being deliberate with your social media privacy settings is very important. Understand what features are available, and what it means for who can see what.

Who can see posts you make?
Is your profile searchable by site-members or anyone?
Does someone have to request access to see your information?

It’s important to consider what you’d like to be public, vs what is best left offline.
The best way to protect information is to never record it in the first place!

Find Yourself in Search Engines

You can see how easy it is to get information on you by performing your own searches. Given that search engines will make an attempt to find results relevant to you, it’s worth trying multiple search engines rather than making assumptions off a single search. Including details about yourself may help narrow the results.

Consider Alternate Identities

On other platforms, you may have an identity that isn’t your real name. It’s generally a good idea not to repeat usernames across platforms unless the intention is for them to be publicly associated.

Close Dormant Accounts

If you no longer use a service, you may want to consider closing the account if the option is available. If nothing else, it ties up another loose end.

Privacy Policies

Digital products and platforms will have a published privacy policy that ideally outlines what information is collected and how it’s used. They will vary in content, clarity, and detail.

For online platforms privacy policies can help you understand:

What information the platform collects
If your information is being shared with or sold

Another document is a warrant canary. A warrant canary is a document that explains that the organization hasn’t received any requests for information from governments and/or law enforcement agencies. It’s a useful thing to have, because law enforcement agencies will sometimes gag providers from informing their clients, or even stakeholders.

“Two government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the Justice Department obtained an individualized order from a judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court last year. Yahoo was barred from disclosing the matter.”

Yahoo Said to Have Aided U.S. Email Surveillance by Adapting Spam Filter

Legislative Protections

Depending on your jurisdiction, you may be entitled to privacy protections. Notably, EU Citizens are covered by the GDPR which grants outlines regulations for organizations handling data deletion requests from individuals. It is worth being familiar with what privacy protections exist (or don’t exist) in your locale.

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Account Security

Using a Password Manager

While a notebook of passwords can be lost or stolen, there are digital means to keep track of accounts and passwords. Conveniently, some managers have integrated browser extensions that can make it easy to log in with stored passwords. These tools can go a long way towards improving your account security a lot easier to maintain.

Two password managers that I’ve used:

KeePass XC (Offline)
Bitwarden (Self-Hostable)

Long & Unique Passwords per account

Why? So that one account breach doesn’t spread to others.

How strong is your password?

Reusing passwords means that if your password is found in a data breach or hack, it can be used to gain access to other accounts.

Using a password manager can help you generate significantly longer passwords that are significantly harder to break, and may be more random than what you can come up with yourself.

Learn to develop good password management practices

Turn on either ToTP or hardware two-factor authentication, where possible

Why? By adding two-factor authentication you significantly raise the difficulty of attacks on your accounts. This can also buy you time to reset your password if it’s stolen. Multi-factor authentication is very important for protecting important accounts.

Unique e-mail addresses per account

Why? To make phishing campaigns much easier to identify.

Some e-mail providers support adding additional words to your email. For example you may be able to use +shopping at the end of your email as: name+shopping@example.com. This is good for filtering mail, but makes your alternate e-mails potentially discoverable.

If you’d like unique e-mails forwarded to your own e-mail address, an e-mail forwarding & aliasing service like firefox relay or addy.io can help. Many people will already have multiple e-mails from different providers, some of them may support aliases or disposable addresses.

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E-mail

Email is something that’s critical to get right. Almost every online account allows for accounts to be recovered (or stolen!) through email. This means that it’s the most important account to secure. Rotating your e-mail password more often than other accounts can definitely make a difference in the long run.

Beyond just being able to steal accounts, a hijacked email can also be used to spread scams and malware to others. Taking account security seriously is important!

Choose a Great Provider

Choosing a provider can be difficult. Even when one finds a great one, it’s not worth entirely relying on a single provider. If you run your own website, e-mail hosting can sometimes be included with web hosting. Of course, there’s always the option of running it yourself. That however, has its own challenges, but there are many advantages.

Email Provider Recommendations:

Criteria to consider:

Privacy

There are limits to how private e-mail can be, but it’s at least worth selecting a provider that isn’t profiting off scanning your mail.
Things to consider for privacy:
- How long the provider has been in business
- Reputation of the provider
- Jurisdiction
- Business model and funding sources
- End-to-End Encryption
Features

Different options may have some variation in offerings. Important features can be:
- Webmail
- Storage size
- Custom Domains
- Disposable aliases
- Multiple accounts/mailboxes
- Encryption / PGP Support
- Client (IMAP & POP) Support
- Forwarding and Filters

I personally believe the best-case scenario for mass e-mail providers are responsibly run local non-profit enterprises. As online communication has become more central to people’s lives, competitive local infrastructure needs to take a more central role. While on the total other end of the spectrum, there also needs to be a place for less personal, but still quite small, providers that operate indiscriminately. Both have a very important place in safeguarding online freedom from a variety of threats.

Email Encryption

Every e-mail provider is going to market itself as secure. Secure from what? One may ask. Security is about proactive measures taken against particular problems. Nothing is 100% secure. Many security features proudly proclaimed by big tech services are really just about protecting information in transit as it goes from your machine to theirs. It’s very difficult for a provider to protect you from themselves, even when there’s desire to. There is always a degree of trust involved with hosting your data on somebody else’s computer.

Domestic government (and corporate) surveillance is a serious concern as well. Many of us in the so-called “Free World” have to be concerned about the 5 prying eyes. With all this in mind, I would never put too much faith email security guarantees. Even in the best of circumstances,treat e-mail like you would a postcard in the mail; not for anything particularly sensitive or private.

Strategy 1: Inbox Level

There are many end-to-end encrypted (“zero knowledge”) mailboxes provided by larger privacy-focused email providers. How it works is that in addition to your emails being secured in transit, they are also encrypted when they are stored. This means that as long as your account/password are secure, your email’s content can only be read by you. This often comes at the cost of lack of third-party client support.

This strategy has advantages, but mostly its ease-of-use. It saves you the time of having to manage your own encryption keys, meaning that others should be able to send you encrypted emails right away. The downside of this strategy is that you’re still placing a significant amount of trust on the provider, especially if you’re using it for sensitive information.

Strategy 2: Message Level

When using your own email client, you can choose to proactively encrypt emails with PGP. For recipients who’ve already setup their keys, some clients will be able to auto-discover the correct key for you so it can be fairly convenient. This strategy ensures that the email is secure as long as the recipients keys are, from all other parties. If your recipient already publishes their PGP key. (Here’s mine)

A Joke, but one with some elements of truth in it.

Metadata headaches

Regardless of which strategy you use, due to how e-mail works it’s impossible to conceal who you are sending it to, and many other details. Encrypted mail will protect the contents of the mail, but not extra information like when it was sent. For those who absolutely need to keep their contacts a secret, like investigative reporters, there are better options than e-mail.

Using an e-mail Client

Using Free Open Source Software clients put you back in charge of your mail. While webmail and apps can be very convenient, they can often be very opinionated on how you should interact with your mail. Mail clients are a very important tool. Some will provide privacy features like blocking e-mail trackers, and other useful tools like custom filtering.

Instead of leaving your mail on a server forever, you can move them to your computer for offline access. Every client will have its own features, but having the capability to encrypt emails with PGP is a non-trivial advantage.

I’m a huge fan of Mozilla Thunderbird though there are other e-mail clients, Privacy Guides has an excellent list of recommendations.

Configuring Your Client

It may seem intimidating, but if you have an uncommon mail provider, or roll you own email you may need to configure your client. This requires a few more options than just a username/password. To understand what the options mean you have to realize that you’re setting up two things:

Incoming Server:

Which needs:
- The mail server’s hostname (such as pop.example.com)
- Choosing either IMAP or POP as the protocol, this changes how the server handles mail that’s delivered.
- The port number the server is running on
- your email & password
- Security settings
Outgoing Server:

Which needs:
- The SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server’s hostname
- The server’s port number
- Your email & password
- Security settings

You’ll want to consult your e-mail providers documentation for the specific values. Contacting customer service may help. These settings are what’s required to configure any mail client, though some will be able to fill in some of the details when you provide your email address.

Delta Chat

Delta Chat is a mail client that looks and functions as an end-to-end encrypted messaging app. It’s an absolutely brilliant technique. Despite none of my contacts being (currently) willing to take it seriously, I actually believe that delta chat is one of the more underrated online messengers.

In theory, it should be very easy to adopt because it doesn’t require anyone to create any new accounts. It handles encryption key management for you, and uses your own inbox for storage. Of course, it can also send regular emails to those who don’t have it yet. For those who find signal requiring a phone number to be too much, I consider delta chat a must-have.

Inbox Cleaning

Junk mail piles up. Over the years, it can be easy to accumulate more and more spam and incoming mail that becomes unmanageable. This causes a lot of people to essentially ignore their e-mails all-together. If you’re not quite at the point of just abandoning that particular email and starting fresh, there’s a lot you can do to reduce the amount of unsanctioned messages.

Folders and Filtering

Odds are, a lot of regular incoming correspondence is expected in advance. This means that you can create sub-folders for particular domains, and use filters to sort your mail for you.This can keep the important stuff at hand, while allowing you to sort through the rest at your convenience.

Unsubscribe Without Mercy

Getting your email added or removed from marketing lists can really add-up over time. Reducing your incoming emails to what you specifically want can make a massive impact.
You can clean a busy inbox with this process:

Find an example of something you no longer wish to receive
Hit the “unsubscribe” button (usually near the bottom) on the email and get removed from the list
Search for messages from that sender and delete them all
Repeat every so often

Eventually, you’ll find you’re entirely free of unwanted incoming e-mails except for outright spam.

The Spam War

If you’re getting a great number of spam, it’s a sign that your email has appeared on many kinds of lists. Not having it published publicly can help, but fighting spam is a team effort. It’s worth your time to report egregious examples, but eventually you’ll want to setup your own filters for it. Where possible, if you have a filter that’s working well, I’d recommend having it also mark the message as spam.

Both Canadians, and Americans can report spam to law enforcement.

Trackers

There are two common types of e-mails you can send/receive. Plain text, which as the name implies is just text and is therefore entirely free of trackers. Emails can also be HTML, like web pages. This allows for them to look appealing, include images, and unfortunately trackers!

When you load an e-mail that loads content (like images) from a remote server, those assets can be used to send information. This can be used to get all kinds of engagement stats about how even you as an individual respond to particular messages. A troubling consequence of this is that those running phishing campaigns are able to use that information to come up with more compelling scams.

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Browsers

You may be reading this in a browser. As you likely are aware, a web browser is a powerful program that displays & runs web pages and web applications. For many, it’s their primary gateway to the world wide web as well as the internet as a whole. Being complacent about what browser(s) you’re using is a surefire way to put your information in the hands of questionable external forces.

Understanding the Web

A good place to start is to refresh your understanding of what the web actually is. Like many things in our technological landscape, it wasn’t built in a day, or even by a single person. It’s an amalgamation of the work of many different people, institutions, and even governments over time. I’m very passionate about people choosing to take an active role in shaping cyberspace. Collectively, we do have a real impact on the future of the World Wide Web.

To begin, we have to start with the simplest of web pages. These are static web sites that display a set amount of text, images, or media.

Far from being mere hypertext, the web now includes multimedia applications. Web 2.0 was when web sites became dynamic. Forums, Wikis, and even the first social media sites were dynamic because user interaction fed into a database that was used to generate web content. The earliest of these could work without many (if any) scripts at all, and were processed by the web site’s back-end software.

A web page can load real-time data from an online service, and/or stream audio and video. Because of this, the browser is the primary tool in many people’s digital life. Like anything else, this includes a variety of risks and trade-offs.

The addition of more content and features to the web has made browsers themselves increase in complexity significantly. In theory, a browser would only need to support downloading the page, and displaying the text on it. As the web has evolved, browsers now support all kinds of multi-media, interactivity, and online gaming.

While this isn’t necessarily news to you, what is worth understanding is that all of these additional features have meaningful trade-offs when it comes to privacy & security. There are those who yearn for a return of the days of just clean pure hypertext. If that sounds like something you’re interested in, gemini is right up your alley. For the rest of us who would like to enjoy a wide variety of modern enhancements to the web, there is much to account for.

Surveillance

In many ways, it helps to think of much of the Web as a street filled with surveillance cameras. Without making significant effort, it’s trivial for those watching to keep track of where you go on a regular basis. In addition to this, the places you visit themselves may also be spying on you in exchange for a pithy sum.

Cookies & Storage

It’s pretty useful to be able to log-in to a website. It’s also very handy for the server to save some additional information on your end so when you return you can continue as normal. Using sessions is how servers keep track of who they’re talking to. Naturally, if you divulge more information about yourself to a particular service, the more that information can be corroborated with other data points. Without saving cookies, log-ins and site settings would be lost immediately, but that doesn’t mean you need to hold onto them forever.

Scripts

Either scripts from the site itself, or remote scripts pulled in from other services can do a wide range of things to try to uniquely identify you. On the other hand, many sites will not work at all and refuse to display something as simple as an article. Many tracking blockers will block all external scripts, but others will make exceptions that keep certain mainstream sites working.

The best practice would be to block any unnecessary scripts. There are many add-ons that can make this easier. “Unnecessary” can be a very broad categorization however, in some cases you may consider it worth blocking any and all scripts everywhere. This is the recommended setup when using the Tor Browser, because scripts can do many things to de-anonymize a visitor.

Sadly many of these invasive scripts have been thrust on the public without much alternative. As a web developer, it may be tempting (or even good for your resume) to develop using the latest fancy script frameworks, it’s important to remember that you can maintain all the advantages of dynamic web sites without it. When security and privacy of your users is paramount, it’s something worth considering.

Fingerprinting

Now that you’ve put in the effort to properly mitigate unwanted data leakage. There’s still another nasty problem. If you require perfect anonymity online, it’s worth understanding that your browser fingerprint can be used to uniquely identify you online. This is a problem, but it’s one not worth working on at the expense of protecting important information.

Choosing a Browser

DigDeeper.club has an excellent if troubling post on browsers. Unfortunately the major take-away is that the situation is very dire:

The only reasonable choice is Pale Moon. Or, just try wean yourself off the modern web by sticking to websites such as the ones on Neocities, wiby.me, etc. which are functional in NetSurf or terminal browsers. I hate to kill the positivity of yet another summary, but if reality forces me to - what can I do?

(emphasis mine)

If you require using the modern web (ie. most “normal” websites) I recommend reading through the guide carefully and choosing what strikes the right balance for you.

Reading through the browser guide leaves the impression that a serious web & browser renewal is something people from all walks of life should strongly consider.
The root of the problem is two-fold:

Additional features on modern web sites introduce additional privacy risks
To support these features, browsers themselves become more complicated to support, maintain, and validate

I intend to follow-up on this particular section, and I think it’s important to think-through how things should be done. This is one of the many reasons I emphasize more people getting involved, rather than let governments and corporations dictate it for us.

The More the Merrier

Because browsers are tools, it doesn’t often make sense to entirely limit yourself to a single one. There are some advantages to using different browsers for different “spheres” of your life. Above all, it’s best to understand why you’re using a particular browser for a certain task. If you’re really in love with a particular browser, you may be able to use multiple profiles with different settings in mind for different uses. Even something as simple as having separate bookmarks for each profile would make it easy to stay consistent.

In all cases you’ll likely want to alternate browsers for different tasks, with at least one clearing cookies/logins/history on reload. You may also want to search for a hardening guide for whatever browser you choose, depending on your particular needs. It can help to have a hardened browser for most of your basic web tasks, with exceptions made for sites/services you need/trust and alternate ones for other things. Compartmentalization can go a long way especially with many browsers offering built-in VPNs. More on VPNs later

Hardening

Here is an excellent firefox hardening guide for firefox.

Hardening is the process of changing settings for particular privacy and security. Sometimes these changes include disabling tracking from the program itself! A good place to start is opt-ing out of any telemetry or analytics reporting. Then I would generally recommend taking the most extreme settings you can bear day-to-day, and consider increasing as you adapt. Some more ‘extreme’ changes would be disabling WebRTC to protect your IP at the cost of some real-time applications breaking.

Many of these changes will either be in your browsers settings panel or additionally about:config on firefox based browsers. On desktop Firefox Arkenfox’s user.js file is a highly-recommended change for getting the most optimal settings. This alone may be a good reason to pick a firefox or its derivatives over google chrome and its derivatives.

If you’re using brave shields you have an intuitive interface for being as strict as possible. It also has the advantage of being built into the browser for additional performance gains. On other browsers uBlock Origin is the go-to add-on for having complete control over what resources sites can access. Learning how to use these tools can do a great deal of good.

Browser Add-ons

A browser can feel very limiting without many essential add-ons. Ad-blocking is de-facto necessary for browsing a great deal of the web to salvage some of your time and attention.

I’ve personally used:

uBlock Origin
uMaxtrix

It’s great to have full control over requests on a site-by-site basis. It takes a bit of learning, but is a very powerful tool that I’d love to see built-in to new FOSS browsers. By blocking specific kinds of remote requests across the board, you can disable all third-party ads.
LibRedirect

A very useful tool for redirecting all kinds of mainstream social media links to dedicated (somtimes self-hosted!) web proxies.
Bitwarden
KeePassXC

See Account Security
Decentraleyes

If you’re going to allow remote scripts, it can be handy to proactively cache them, so that you’re not constantly being tracked by loading them on each visit to separate sites.

Back to Contents

Network Security

Computer networks are fascinating things. The ability to link two devices over a long distance to accomplish sophisticated tasks is what makes much of our modern computing environment seem outright magical. Of course, where there’s power there’s also danger, the massive capabilities of networked systems vastly complicate the challenges of securing systems. To do the best you can, it’s important to have a basic understanding of computer networking and take reasonable precautions.

An important place to start is to understand that every data connection relies on a physical connection on some form. You can relay data between two computers by linking them directly, or use routers to share data with networks outside your own local network.

Local Area Network (LAN)

Odds are, you likely have a modem/router machine in your house. It runs your local network and also provides a WiFi access point to wireless devices. This allows for all devices on the network to use the router to connect to your internet service provider (ISP).

The importance of protecting your local network can not be overstated. Usually, your router will have a web admin access that you can use to ensure only devices you’ve authorized are connected. Managing access to your local network is your first-line of defense against many nefarious threats. For low-value targets, physical access may be sufficient, but for high value targets or high-traffic locations, the considerations differ.

WiFi

Use a strong WiFi password. Any device connected to your WiFi may as well be wired directly into every other computer or device on the network. Due to their nature as broadcasted signals, wireless networks are difficult to properly secure and may be vulnerable to unintuitive attacks. An open network, or even a weakly secured one creates opportunity for spying, compromise, or infiltration. There are many ways in which WiFi signals can be intercepted or jammed, in most cases it’s best to run sensitive systems over a direct wired connection. In situations where WiFi is needed, there are options such as segregating wireless clients from the same network. An option is to have the wireless network entirely disconnected or to relegate different devices to separate VLANs.

Router

Routers are what move messages between networks. Your router may connect to an internal modem that acts as a gateway to your internet service provider to connect to the rest of the Internet. Like any device on your network, it’s very important to ensure that you’re able to choose a router that has up to date software and isn’t compromised. Given its important role in your network, having a router you can trust is arguably one of the most important aspects of network security. At least in Canada, the status quo for many customers is to rely on a single device managed by their ISP, for better or worse. In some cases, people will decide to buy their own device running software that they trust and is maintained, to separate their network from the ISP provided router.

Firewalls

A firewall is a useful tool to manage connections that come in the network. While it’s worth remembering that Firewalls Don’t Stop Dragons, they are a vital tool in making connecting to the Internet without necessarily giving complete access. A firewall accepts incoming connections and ignores any connections that aren’t explicitly allowed. Firewalls can be software on a router, such as the one included in many ISP-provided routers or a dedicated device. A go-to recommendation for custom firewall software is OPNsense which is built on pfsense.

Domain Name System (DNS)

Every site or service online has a publicly routable IP address, to connect to it your browser or applications need to get the correct IP address from the service’s domain. This means that DNS is effectively a real-time system divulging what you’re connecting to, how often, and when. One solution to resolve this is to encrypt your DNS queries. To do this, you’ll want to make sure your devices and browsers are configured with a deliberately chosen DNS provider. Encrypting your DNS requests is as important as not making them to a malicious or negligent entity.

There are many providers, but this only protects you from protecting onlookers from monitoring your requests, the provider may still have that information. Another important technique is to cache your requests with a recursive DNS resolver. This means that your devices will all connect to a resolver you run yourself, it then asks another DNS provider for the information and remembers it for a short period of time. Pihole is a fairly popular option for achieving this, and it also includes ad-blocking features.

Why?

…for many actors, metadata is far more valuable than the content. From a privacy perspective, DNS seems to be one of the most under-appreciated aspects of protecting oneself.
In many ways it is because most good VPNs will handle DNS as well, but there are other considerations.

DNS can also be set at the application level. Browsers, for example, will have their own DNS settings. Most major browsers now support DOH, which is a very convenient way to encrypt your browser’s DNS queries. For encrypting all of your system’s DNS queries you may want to consider using DNSCrypt.

Reclaiming Territory in Cyberspace - DNS

End-to-End Protection

For a connection to be fully secure, it needs to:

Reach its destination
Not be modified or interfered with
Have reasonable protection against being identified

This turns out to be quite a high bar, even encryption often only protects the content of communications but it can be much easier to observe who’s communicating with who, how often, or other metadata. You can do everything right on your end but if you connect to a malicious or compromised service, you can have problems. Man-in-the-middle attacks are even possible with modern encrypted websites, anyone able to use a certificate recognized by your device can do many malicious things including deep packet inspection to effectively nullify most web encryption. Resolving this is much more complicated, and requires much more effort.

Proxies, VPNs & Darknets

For computer networks to work, every computer needs a public IP address. How this works in practice (with IPv4 usually…) is that your machine has a number that your router knows, which has a number your ISP knows, which is then shared with the rest of the internet. That last number is your IP (public) address. Using a VPN does two things: 1) encrypts traffic between you and the service 2) forwards your connections through one of their IP addresses.

Virtual Private Network are often seen as the solution to all online privacy issues. This is people being mislead by slick advertising. VPNs are very useful for accessing content that is blocked in specific regions or protecting your IP from being known by online services. There are many ways users using a VPN can have their IP leaked so it is essential to make sure you are using your VPN properly.

Your internet service provider (ISP) may not be trustworthy so you may want to use a VPN, it is important to realize that by using a VPN you are effectively transferring the risk of your ISP logging, tracking, censoring your information to that VPN provider. Like ISPs VPNs are businesses and it is foolish to assume they will put your needs as an individual or customer before the interests of their business.

Tools of the Technocracy: #5 Networks

Just like DNS providers, your ability to trust your VPN provider is quite important as well. Your ability to protect your information from them is just as difficult as masking your internet activity from your ISP. In addition to this, VPNs are prone to very unintuitive attacks. DNS leaks are when your VPN is working fine, but your DNS queries are being routed from your home IP address instead of the VPN providers, effectively unmasking you. Ironically, VPNs are often recommended in circumstances where you can’t trust the network, such as a public WiFi, but this is the exact scenario where a recent attack would allow somebody to reroute your traffic outside the VPN. A proxy is a simpler way of changing where your requests come from than a VPN, but has similar concerns.

Unless you plan to work entirely offline, you’re going to have to consider how you connect to the internet, and specific sites & services.

I would argue, that it’s more important these days to hide one’s IP address than it was in the past. Internet geolocation as only gotten more precise over time. Depending on the accuracy, someone may be able to identify your neighborhood.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to VPNs. Just like email, there are many VPN services out there and you should choose the service that works best for you. Depending on which one you choose, you can benefit from an increased level of security when connected to networks you wouldn’t ordinarily trust. But this means you’re placing your trust in the VPN.

Choosing the VPN That’s Right for You

Consider your goals:

Are you just trying to avoid disclosing your IP with sites & services you visit? Good VPNs & Proxies will suit this purpose.
Are you trying to evade ISP-level censorship and connect to services that are online but inaccessible to you? This is what Tor was built for, potentially being difficult to identify is also a useful feature but is much less guaranteed.
Or are you trying to connect to specific “hidden services” served anonymously?
Then you’ll need want to consider darknets like Tor or I2P.

Back to Contents

Thank you taking the time to read this overview.
Any comments, questions or feedback would be appreciated.

Is this all there is to do? Of course not! I hope that this can be a good starting reference for those who don’t know where to begin.

Additional resources

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Conceptualizing Mind-reading Technology

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When the War on your Mind Goes Hot

From influence, profit, and power there are innumerable reasons why some and institutions would want the ability to manipulate your thoughts. Of course, an efficient tool to learn how to control other’s thoughts is to be able to read them in real-time. When it comes to online platforms a great deal of the mind-manipulation is done indirectly.

Ranking algorithms, Censorship, and financial incentives will all radically transform how people individually act as a group, but there will always be more direct forces that can be used. The problem with direct mind control devices is that they are difficult to understand. Just like social media, the applications are likely going to appear entirely harmless and innocuous to mask nefarious intent.

In this piece, I want to use an example to illustrate brain transparency. Which is the primary application of mind-reading technology. Instead of using indirect means to learn your thoughts; such as likes, comments, or what sites you visit, instead insights can be gleaned directly from your mind. With advanced technology and sophisticated understanding of how the brain actually works, mind-reading technology is far closer than one would imagine.

Brain Transparency

Without even asking, I’m very sure you can identify the patterns embedded in the two AI generated images below. From a distance, you can clearly see the pattern, but when you tune in to the fine details you can see that the image doesn’t look too unusual without the extra context.

Image Source

Like any other illusion, it works because your brain works to identify patterns. Some patterns (like text) are more universal than others. If you wanted to construct a system that wanted to understand the person better than they know themselves, you could test them in a variety of ways with specific patterns that only resonate with specific people…

If your childhood involved countless hours spent capturing, training and battling Pokémon, there may be a wrinkle in your brain that is fond of images of Wobbuffet, Bulbasaur and Pikachu.
Stanford psychologists have identified preferential activation to Pokémon characters in the brains of people who played Pokémon videogames extensively as kids.

Stanford researchers identify brain region activated by Pokémon characters

This leads one to ask: Could patterns be deliberately placed to then further manipulate people in ways others wouldn’t notice? Like a perfect dogwhistle. Effectively turning everyone into a sleeper agent that can be identified, and manipulated. It’s not just what you know, but how you know it. It’s also what you don’t know, or can’t recognize. Everyone is different. There will always be ways to precisely target people with this knowledge, for either marketing, manipulation, or even psychological torture.

Far from being mere memes on the internet, once people start putting electrodes on their heads, the game changes dramatically. We have already seen how social media deteriorated people’s ability to connect and communicate with each other, advanced mind-reading technology makes direct mind control a lot more of a pressing concern. It’s possible that profit-seeking algorithms for social media have already had this effect in some form, but with devices that receive direct input from our minds, the results can be much more extreme. Tagging people based on what patterns their brains recognize is only one out of countless ways advanced technology can learn how people think.

Applications

As an example, let’s pretend that I run a major communication platform. Let’s name it after a single letter of the alphabet. X (for eXample) is a place where people believe they can participate in the digital town square. As the operator of X, I have access to all the users information, as well as devices they’ve purchased from me. Instead of using machine learning to ban or censor users, I merely work to please users who fall for my preferred (or sponsored) propaganda, and frustrate those who aren’t properly learning from the propaganda. I introduce a new fictional character that represents the values I’m pushing. Those who can’t immediately recognize that character must be avoiding the propaganda, so they must be nudged or corrected.

There really isn’t much of a debate on if this technology should be used to control people. Instead, we have technocrats gleefully announcing all the social problems that would be solved if we merely put all of our minds in the capable hands of the powerful. Many simply dismiss practical application of cutting-edge biology as sci-fi, which leads ethical considerations to be debated after the damage is done.

Did you happen to watch Nita Farahany’s presentation at Davos about Brain Transparency?
Did you ever wonder why she wasn’t booed off the stage?
It’s because everyone there implicitly accepts this sort of heinous rhetoric. They’ve gone all-in on these technocratic fantasies of theirs. They don’t even hide it. They’re actively normalizing ideas that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

Spartacast 7

There’s something about this topic that is downright terrifying to the soul. Those who recognize what’s at stake can clearly see that a terrifying system of mental control has already been constructed. Speculating on future harms may seem fruitless when the already applied forms of conditioning, propaganda, and punishment have taken control in serious ways already. The difference this time is that dissenters are much easier to identify.

Those who cooperate with the regime can be marked in their minds, in a way that is very difficult (if not outright impossible) to fake. If there was ever a time to take the time to truly reflect on how you’re using your thoughts and what impact there having, we may be approaching the end of the line. This is why I’m highly concerned about the adapt or be left behind messaging embedded in discussions about machine learning tools, and potential cybernetic augmentations. What someone thinks is opting-in for career advancement may in fact come with some extremely invasive strings attached. One may want to reconsider the entire point of “getting ahead” when the price is complete control over your words, actions, and even thoughts. I have a feeling, that in the long run, these consequences will vastly outweigh potential benefits.

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Signs the 'Dead Internet Theory' is correct

Thu, 21 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The “Dead Internet” Theory

The basic concept of the dead internet theory is that a vast majority of the engagement online is artificial. And/or that every single human being on the Internet isn’t actually connected to everyone else, but merely a chosen subset of people. One of the reasons this idea has gotten so much traction is that it eerily explains much of people’s online experience. While it’s possible that the feeling is just a figment of people’s nostalgia for exploring the web for the first time, there are actual trends and circumstances that support the idea.

The following is a couple of signs that definitely point to the idea that the Dead Internet Theory is likely, and/or at least possible. Afterwards, I’ll outline why this trend should be reversed, and how you can help.

Immense Bot Traffic

An individual has to make the decision to choose to engage, bots are just full auto. As long as there’s currency, influence, or power to be gained from online participation, we can naturally assume the amount of bots online will steadily increase left unchecked. It’s worth noting that not all bot traffic is inherently malicious. Timely notifications, alerts and announcements are all things people may want to be provided automatically.

Examples:

Content Generation Tools:

By lowering the barrier to human-like participation, bots can get more human reactions, making them much more effective. Being able to put together sentences, or speak with a voice can drastically change the game for even other bots. In this competitive arms race, new tools have a profound impact for both people and bots alike.

Examples:

ChatGPT
Midjourney
Voice Cloning

Big Tech Consolidation

It’s a lot easier to manipulate people on a small set of online services, than over a wide ecosystem of independent online sites and communities. By herding the public onto only a few services, coordination also becomes much easier.

Examples

People only use a small set of apps
People can’t name more than 10 websites
Search sucks now

Reach Control

With control over major platforms, it’s possible to counter breakthrough narratives before they gain momentum. Not only is this capability a highly profitable commodity, it’s also a highly effective mass mind control weapon. Screens are always going to be finite, and so are people’s attention and lifespan. There will always be power in having direct control over prioritizing what others can see, even when you’re not outright gate-keeping information.

Examples:

Non-chronological “home” and “explore” feeds
Curated Trending
Facebook’s virality circuit breaker
Freedom of speech, not reach

Virtualized Segregation

One of the spookier claims associated with the Dead Internet Theory is that people are effectively segregated from other human beings and relegated to an algorithm ghetto. At first glance this seems like something that would be impossible to test for. It would be safe to assume that the state-of-the art surveillance and identification tools would be used to filter users. In addition to this, platforms could (directly or indirecly) share information with each other to coordinate the isolation beyond a single platform or medium.

How it works in practice: World of Warcraft sharding

When too many players are in an area, the game automatically creates a new “shard,” a copy of that area. Players entering the area will be placed on the new shard. The world appears identical from the player’s perspective, with minor differences:

Players can only see other players on the same shard.

Each shard has its own set of NPCs. As such, rare NPCs may respawn at different times on different shards.

Each shard has its own set of objects such as herbs and mining nodes.

Shards can be any geographic size but are usually limited to zones or smaller areas. The borders of a sharded area are invisible to players.

By design, players usually do not notice when the game moves them between shards, but players may notice NPCs momentarily disappear.

The simplest way to understand sharding is to think of it as people being split into multiple parallel dimensions. There are performance reasons to do this, but there are also other advantages to be gained from keeping people unable to coordinate. For systems simpler than online games (like social media) sharding doesn’t have to be absolute. Potentially, a system that does segregate people by default, could still make it possible to occasionally interact outside the bubbles to maintain the illusion of an open platform.

Other Examples

Facebook’s mood manipulation experiment
Personalized curation for geographical or political circumstances
Delaying feed updates or excessively rate-limiting access. (Sharding by time, rather than groups)

Internet Censorship & Shutdowns

The internet even in it’s current form can’t survive the current trend of escalating censorship and demands for top-down control. Left unabated, these forces will continue to transform the web into merely another highly advanced propaganda machine.

Human Disengagement

Ironically, as the digital world has encroached more and more into peoples lives, actual participation hasn’t kept pace. Commerce has greatly expanded online at the cost of centralizing control into a small set of payment providers. As the perceived value of engaging online drops, the easier it becomes for manipulators to take complete control.

Potential Examples:

None of your contacts participate online regularly
Being inundated with low-effort comments
Getting to know people online feels impossible
Content and seems entirely disconnected from real-life events
The tone of online spaces is vastly different
A complete lack of humor

So is the Dead Internet Theory actually true?

It’s not dead, but it’s dying.

The internet is less of a single body and more of an ecosystem. There has undeniably been immense disruption, habitat loss, and disasters. That isn’t to say that things can’t improve.

What you can do:

Are you ready to reclaim cyberspace? It’s a massive undertaking but many hands make light work. By taking control of your online presence, content, and attention you are already making a massive impact on how the future of the web. Instead of providing unpaid labor for top-down information management systems, you can genuinely contribute to a global and public information superhighway.

Maintain a non-commercial web space

I don’t believe it would take very many people at all taking an active interest in maintaining truly independent and personal (or anonymous) spaces online to have a massive impact on censorship resistance and meaningful interactions online.

Use open protocols, instead of corporate platforms

Your own web space is just the beginning. There’s a world of opportunity to explore open protocols & systems for chat, audio/video calls, social media, collaboration, and many other things you can imagine.

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Operation: Shadow

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Navigating Hostile Cyberspace

Many people are outright victims of virtual imprisonment. Social media addiction is just the surface of a panopticon of data-mining and manipulation. If this wasn’t bad enough, governments and public-private partnerships alike are further working to analyze, contain, and restrict dissent. This asymmetric use of technology enables innumerable abuses and consolidates power in terrifying ways. Almost everyone recognizes that people’s behavior has changed drastically due to online pressures, very few imagine the sum total effects this has on society.

If only there was some way out! A way to not attach every click, paragraph read, or comment left to a permanent record. A way to opt-out of this all-pervasive system of individualized discrimination. There is such a way: anonymity. Anonymity used to be the default online. Someone downloading a web page didn’t automatically need to divulge who they were individually. Even when websites had user accounts, they could be disposable and didn’t need to collect so much sensitive personal information.

More and more services are collecting, and sometimes requiring increasing amounts of personal information. This can disproportionally create risks for some. Things have deteriorated into such a state where one requires constant effort not to divulge who they are to certain entities online. There is a wide variety of technical means available for those interested in following specific individuals, or even subsets of the population across cyberspace.

There have been many prominent voices pushing for the eradication of online anonymity. Elimination of online anonymity is the digital equivalent of banning cash. In a misguided attempt to crack-down on crime and abuse you rob people of privacy and protection from discrimination when they need it most. One individual may not want a public profile attached to their name, but is still comfortable divulging their information in particular situations. Individuals from all walks of life should be empowered to only provide their identities when necessary and desired.

Threat Modeling

You may feel no danger seeking out information, or speaking your mind online, but that’s no comfort for others who might. Different people will have different risks, and the louder one aims to be the more enemies they tend to accrue. Anonymous speech potentially enables anyone on earth, to raise attention to a grave injustice with a much lower risk of retaliation. This is an essential trait to combat tyranny of all kinds worldwide.

Issues can be big or small, but no matter how powerful a person is, they are still one human being. There are absolute limits to how much they can protect themselves from retaliation from rivals, stalkers, and abusers. These threats can all be individual people, groups, or even entire institutions. Below, a threat modeling infographic is provided.

If one requires perfect anonymity, attaining it is quite a feat. That said, it’s important to understand that this is not an all-or-nothing ordeal. Every step one takes to protect themselves online, affords them some defense against particular threats. One does not need to be a mastermind cyber-criminal to appreciate the benefits of incremental security improvements. It is critical to not let a sense of defeatism or nihilism creep in, small improvements do have a large impact.

As the web itself becomes nearly entirely consolidated by large corporations, hostile governments, and public-private partnerships, there are bound to be many who choose to make a conscious choice to go a different direction. Even if you’re not willing to go as far to protect your digital independence, there’s quite a bit you can do to help make it possible for more and more people. I don’t take this lightly, but I consider this piece the most important I have written to date. Even more important than Reclaiming Territory in Cyberspace. The dark web and it’s derivatives is a topic that is surrounded by myth and rumors of questionable intent. There is quite a bit of technical knowledge that is vital for people to understand, even without the desire to interact with these systems.

Where did all the whistle-blowers go?

Anonymity protects those who don’t wish to be mistreated or otherwise silenced because of who they are. Many authors have published books or articles under a pen name, other times people would put up posters while concealing their identities. There is a significant bias against those choosing to speak out without exposing their identity. There is an understandable reason for this; staking your entire reputation on a cause or a mission can add significant weight to one’s words and actions. On the other hand, those who speak out in their name are shackled to pressures and incentives of their own existence in a world that is much bigger than themselves. Anonymity is one of the few scenarios where ideas can truly be judged on their merits, rather than associated with a person or groups reputation and perception.

You should never take anything anyone says at face value. Confide in trusted friends, research the claim yourself, but never dismiss something entirely because it merely comes without a name. While in some ways we are all more free to express ourselves than ever, the costs of non-conformity with present and future dogmas are permanent and extreme. Many problems today exist because hardly anyone is willing to threaten their livelihood rebuking authority, even when desperately necessary. This is terrifying because it creates a positive feedback loop that selects against any bottom-up feedback in society. People will constantly acknowledge that their leaders in government, business, or even civil society are deaf to their concerns and needs. If nobody will speak out…how can things change? In light of this anonymous speech is arguably more important than non-anonymous speech. It potentially allows for grave errors to be corrected, if nobody is willing to stake their social standing on it.

The suppression of anonymity takes two major forms:

Introducing surveillance or identity verification as a requirement in more circles of life.
Proactively working to de-anonymize people or discourage them from protecting information that exposes them to risks.

You can refuse to participate in domains where you’re forced to give up your identity, but once an anonymous person becomes known, they will never again be unknown. This is especially likely in the case of dissidents or critics, who may have valid reasons for protecting their identity.

Online anonymity is important, despite being near impossible

Big services like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon (among others) spend a massive amount of effort trying to understand every person that uses their platform(s). So much so, that there is a great deal of surveillance infrastructure that ’trickles down’ to glean even more information from people elsewhere across the web. When using any of these top-down platforms you are at minimum an unpaid worker providing data about you and people in general. For better-or-worse every action you take while using these systems is you acting as an informant for the stakeholders that they represent. Far too many people assume they aren’t saying a thing if they merely lurk or passively view content. To the contrary, where your attention goes says a great deal about you and even others.

A coordination problem

The web, or even the Internet as it exists wasn’t built in a day or by a single entity. The internet is largely a compromise between all kinds of different people, groups, and institutions. At least for now, no single entity has complete control over all of it, and we should all hope it stays that way. Beyond merely pleading, there is a great deal many of us can do. Even choosing to use a site or platform that collects moderately less information can have lasting impacts. If people understood how much effort was made to steer their attention, they would appreciate how much of a valuable force it really is. Due to the very complexity of how things are now, there is no ‘silver bullet’ that can easily, simply, or quickly solve all or even many of the problems. Focusing on incremental change isn’t just the best option, it’s all anyone can do to make a difference.

The Internet’s Achilles Heel: DNS

What is a website? is www.example.com a website? That address is a domain name that allows your browsers and apps to connect to a specific server. DNS stands for domain name system. In theory, DNS is actually decentralized because while there are well established DNS servers and registrars, all it does is connect network addresses to names. There is little other than inertia preventing people from using alternative systems.

As it exists, most web administrators will generally register their domain with a regular domain registrar which is a company that runs their own nameservers. Usually, this requires a real name and address. In addition to this, payment methods like credit cards or non-private cryptocurrencies will make easy work of identifying who registered a particular domain. Because of this, and many other things it’s almost impossible to host a website or online service anonymously as an individual person or group. While people who visit your site may not know who you are, but it’s trivial for somebody to find out.

Domain Seizures

Due to the lack of anonymity, it’s entirely possible for governments or even public-private partnerships to demand domains be seized. Domains are registered by legal entities and many domains have already been seized to combat all kinds of criminal activity. The danger of this is that there may be a future where domain registrars have to police the content on domains registered by them. Just as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter/X in the past have taken an editorial stance over their platform, it’s not impossible for registrars to do the same.

DNS Censorship

The registrars are only part of the equation. Nameserver operators can also be compelled to block sites in the name of preventing copyright infringement, serious crimes, or political expediency. Already we are seeing countries like France become more totalitarian online for political reasons. It would be naive to believe that this isn’t already a worsening trend.

Surveillance

Because DNS queries are so useful for understanding how people use the Internet, it’s trivial for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and other entities to sell valuable batches of unencrypted dns queries. In most cases the default setup is unencrypted and possibly not cached, meaning many entities know who’s visiting what sites, and how often. This is but one of many ways to track people across the Internet. There are many more ways in which people are identified and manipulated online. It’s perfectly reasonable to want to simply side-step all the insanity and simply start fresh.

Tools of the Technocracy: #4 Online Identity

What is following you in your digital tracks?

Using a Darknet

The simplest “darknet” is a computer (or group of them) not connected to the Internet. It’s quite straight-forward for someone to keep an “air gapped” (disconnected) machine as an offline repository for records and information management. Any means to connect one computer to another, that’s not widely accessible is technically a “darknet”. The phrase the deep web is often associated with Tor hidden services, but has also been quite erroneously used to describe fringe or unpopular websites on the regular internet.

Anonymous browsing

A major use of darknets is for people to browse the “regular internet” anonymously. This is one of the primary uses of Tor. Anonymous browsing is a significant challenge and requires a significant amount of caution. However, the benefit of being a Tor user on the Internet is that with some caution, you blend in with all the other Tor users. Unlike using a personal use VPN, using a darknet to proxy your connection to the regular internet allows you to act like a fish in a massive school of internet fish. The bigger the school, the lest identifiable, and ideally less of a target you are.

Hidden Services

Hidden services are where darknets get really neat. Remember everything said above about DNS? Forget it! Hidden services sidestep all those issues all at once. There are other ways to decide who connects to who. An alternative method is to have each site generate encryption keys that secure the connection, and identifies them as a key. Once this is in place, it’s possible to route messages anonymously through the network. Through a marvel of modern mathematics, you have a new layer to the Internet where it’s possible to have truly private and communications that can’t be censored.

Website Mirroring

By making your website accessible over darknets, you’re allowing those who may come from oppressive regimes to access your content. In addition to this you protect your online presence from censorship and domain seizure. It’s best to mirror a static site that doesn’t rely on cookies or javascript. Running a hidden service yourself is free, so it’s an option to archive a website after you no longer with to pay for regular hosting.

SecureDrop

The possibility of online anonymity and hidden services are potentially a great boon to whistle-blowers from all walks of life. In an environment where your average well-rounded citizen is capable of at least browsing the darknet, those who wish to right terrible wrongs may have the capability of speaking out without retaliation. Many damaging and twisted scandals could be broken far earlier, preventing even more damage in the long run.

SecureDrop is a fancy tool that allows people to submit information anonymously over tor. Running as a packaged hidden service, and being Free Open Source Software, it’s even easier to democratize real transparency.

Examples

DIY VPN

In a close circle of trust, it can be helpful to share information or provide members only-services. You can create your own darknet by creating your own VPN or using SSH tunnels. Using either Wireguard or OpenVPN you can create your own private network for you own internal services. For a small group and community, you can significantly protect your digital activities from prying eyes by rolling your own hidden services on your own virtual private network.

Sneakernet

Embrace the analogue and burn your information to optical disks and send them in the mail like how netflix started! Got some homing pigeons? You can be the bleeding-edge of IP over Avian Carriers. A local community could use Operation: Beehive to cooperate on all kinds of interesting projects over a sneakernet.

Tor

Tor is short for The Onion Router. Onion Routing is how messages sent within the tor network stay anonymous. Tor uses special clients called bridges that allow traffic from the network to go to the regular internet, allowing people using tor to access regular websites.

Tor Project Website

How to Access the Dark Web - Mental Outlaw

Snowflake ❄️

If you’re interested in supporting those working to protect their privacy and/or overcome censorship, Snowflake is a great way to help people connect to the Tor network.

Distributions

There are a variety of linux distributions created to assist in aspects of using the Tor network. Tails is a temporary operating system to make every session start identically on the Tor network. Like tails, Whonix routes all it’s traffic over Tor. If that’s still not enough for you Qubes OS allows you to create disposable whonix virtual machines.

TailsOS Guide for the Ultra Paranoid - Mental Outlaw

I2P

Not as interested in touching the regular internet? Are you looking for a darknet with hidden services specifically in mind? The Invisible Internet Protocol (I2P) may suit your needs.

I2P Project Website
I2Pd

I2P Tour: Search Engines, Free Anonymous Email, Interesting Eepsites

Limitations

Perfect anonymity is extremely difficult. While darknets can protect your private information online, it can be difficult to hide that you’re using one. This makes darknet users, and those who wish to protect their privacy online in general, significant political targets from those who would like to seize control over digital communications in whole or in part.

User Error

The greatest threat to one’s online privacy and security is PEBKAC errors. Your own mistakes, and capability to be manipulated is not to be underestimated. If you require perfect anonymity, ensure that you are diligent and don’t become complacent. Even as someone who doesn’t need anonymity, you’re not immune to cybersecurity threats and all kinds of information can be leveraged against you.

Fingerprinting

Despite the best efforts of many intelligent and skilled people, perfection is far from within reach. Many sophisticated surveillance tools are precisely tuned to identify patterns and correlations. This means that even the smallest technical detail can be used to potentially identify people

Browser features

A great deal of the modern ‘conveniences’ that current-day browsers have tend to leak sensitive information, when making choices about your setup, it can be wise to rely on basic text and images rather than full single-page applications.

Size of the network

When swimming in a school of fish, numbers matter. Efforts to discourage people from knowing how to use privacy tools greatly undermines everyone’s ability to not only be anonymous online, but also to escape abuses by big tech platforms. For now, Tor users are not numerous enough, or don’t have enough social capital to prevent big tech services from discriminating against them. In part this is because any privacy tool can be used for nefarious means, and they are often restricted as a security caution.

When a privacy network is small, it becomes much easier for those with significant resources to either target specific people within it, or even de-anonymize the entire network. In an ideal world, enough people would use these tools to protect dissidents from retaliation, and law enforcement would still have the tools to go after violent criminals through other means without compromising lawful people’s privacy.

Useful Resources

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Digital Autonomy and the Arts: Part 2

Tue, 05 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Liam Sturgess and Visceral Adventure join Gabriel to discuss the arts and cyberspace.

Watch Gabriel & Liam’s previous discussion on digital autonomy and the arts here

You can follow Visceral Adventure on Substack, Twitter & Rumble

Visit liamsturgess.com to stay up to date with Liam’s work. You can also follow him via Twitter or the Fediverse at @LiamSturgess@gigaohm.bio Don’t forget to check out his series Microjourneys on Rumble. Which is also mirrored on this instance

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Cybergeddon: ISP-level De-platforming

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It is important to remember that when it comes to free expression online, no corporation is coming to save you. For far too long, people have placed too much trust in corporate social media. They have certainly abused that trust, but as of recently a far more concerning trend has arisen: parts of the Internet de-platforming itself.

ipv6 prefix-list ipv6-prefix-filter-as400304
seq 950 deny 2607:46c0::/32 le 48
Archive

It doesn’t look like much, this innocuous text reveals that the Internet isn’t dying… it’s being killed. It’s not so much the what here that’s important, but the why that matters a great deal here. For now, what’s important to understand is that the Internet is built very differently from how most people imagine it.

The internet isn’t a single homogeneous network, it’s a network of networks. Those networks need a protocol to negotiate a vast array of details, to successfully and efficiently move data around. In many ways, it’s somewhat of a miracle it all works at all.

Naturally, there are weak-points that get tested over time. In our age of incredibly high polarization, people may choose to take incredibly rash actions even if there are immensely harmful consequences to vital structures. In a way, I am conflicted to point this out, because if more mobs of people decided to selectively pressure ISPs to wage the culture war for them, it is effectively game-over for the Internet as a meaningful tool for free expression, cultural exchange, and the preservation of knowledge.

Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of wishing the cat back into the bag. This is a one-way trip into a world where this is a risk people need to properly account for. In recent times, we have seen just how motivated governments and corporations across he world are to secure total dominance over online communications and commerce, it would be a mistake to idly stand by while politicized mobs secure a veto over critical infrastructure.

What happened

Joshua Moon runs a controversial online forum Kiwi Farms, which is the target of extreme and escalating online censorship.
Hurricane Electric has blocked network traffic from IPs associated owned by Joshua Moon, impacting IngocNet’s services in Washington.
Washington has common carrier protections for communications online.
It is up to their attorney general, to enforce those protections.
IncogNet LLC has filed a complaint to the washington attorney general against hurricane electric for de-platforming their IPs.

If you’d like to hear the situation broken down by Joshua himself, you can listen to this episode of the Heterodorx podcast.

Technical Background

Internet service providers (ISPs) have to connect to each other for this whole internet thing to work. One mechanism that helps with this is BGP (Border gateway protocol), which is how networks introduce themselves to each other. This connection between ISP networks is a fundamental unit of the Internet. Without it, you’d need to have a direct, physical connection to every service you want to use.

BGP is a big deal, despite being something very few people have to interact with directly. Causing problems with it made the Internet unusable for half of Canada last year. It’s a trivial change to block a particular network, which is done to mitigate direct attacks on the network or criminal activity. The weaponization of this is an immense challenge for anyone who cares about a free and open internet.

Not all ISPs are equal, anyone with the capability of applying pressure to critical components on “the stack” has the ability to have immense power over anyone’s ability to participate online.

The only reason we’re hearing about this at all, is because of how dedicated Joshua Moon has been about keeping his website online. In the face of being de-platformed by multiple providers, many other projects would have merely given up. How many businesses or publication would persist after being de-platformed by ISPs and hosting providers all over the world?

What makes this incident personally interesting to me is that this is a window into the bleeding-edge of censorship online. I doubt that the Internet itself is resilient to sustain politically motivated attacks at such a fundamental level. This incident forces all of us to consider how the world would be different if access to the Internet was only possible with permission and control of unaccountable public-private partnerships.

Why this matters

As cited in Tools of the Technocracy: Internet Shutdowns:

In a deeply troubling response, after both terminations we saw a dramatic increase in authoritarian regimes attempting to have us terminate security services for human rights organizations — often citing the language from our own justification back to us.

Cloudflare blog

Said succinctly, the slope is indeed very slippery and very steep.

It’s difficult to overstate what this means for the future of the Internet. No site, service, or community can single-handedly withstand the forces at play here. The very same tactics used to shut down that forum, can and will be leveraged against anything. This means that even if the forum is successful at staying online, a strategy has been introduced that can be attempted at a different time, with a different pretext, on any target.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
By John Perry Barlow

What you can do

Joshua Moon himself suggests that you:

Learn how to acquire & use Cryptocurrency if you’re interested in supporting those who are de-banked.
Learn how to use Tor, to access information that may be entirely removed from the “clearnet”.
Support expanding common carrier protections for speech online.

A call to stand up for individual rights

You don’t even have to like the forum to recognize that escalating top-down control over the Internet is a net-detriment for all our liberty. The feedback loop of people leveraging institutions to abuse their opponents only further escalates the cycle.

You need to start deciding what measures are “too far” even for those you disagree with the most. It is critical that we as people in society strengthen the restraints on how institutions are able to interact with people. Given how fundamental the Internet is with commerce and people’s lives, it’s vital that we reassert people’s human liberties in cyberspace as well.

Non-Solutions

Tor alone

Relegating free and open expression to a small minority of technologically savvy dissidents is all-but a win condition for tyrants. Tor is an incredibly useful tool, and it is critical that people understand how to use it and other privacy networks, but it is not a complete solution. Any single tool that can be used for dissent can itself become a target.

While it’s one thing to access the Tor network, it’s a whole other challenge to attempt to hide that you’re using it. If we allow ISPs to be weaponized against their customers, and the Internet itself, there is very little that can be done to route around it.

Web3 Fixes this!

Building on he previous section, we cannot out-engineer a culture that tolerates, much less demands censorship. Due to the very way the Internet works, this problem can’t be fixed with merely a different coat of paint on top. There are fundamental structural realities that higher level applications can’t solve.

The road to hell: misplaced optimism in the blockchain space

This is because the physical state of the network is downstream of real physical realities and economies of scale. It would be much easier to reaffirm individual rights, than to try to bet everything on engineering a perfect global network without compromise.

How to normalize institutional abuse

There is a pattern where further and further excesses are justified in the name of persecuting the worst of the worst, yet they manage to be generalized to all of society like the Zero Covid Policy or the War on Terror. It wasn’t long after Alex Jones was de-platformed that governments across the world were coordinating to control social media entirely.

1. Find an unsympathetic target

By selecting a target that’s difficult to defend, people will very often ask “Is this the hill to die on?”. By procrastinating to defend people’s right to due process or from unreasonable sanctions, we enable further abuses. The target isn’t selected for their suitability towards the intended policy goal, but rather because they are unsympathetic.

2. Target them with a dedicated smear campaign

I would caution you to not dismiss that you yourself may very well be such a target. None of us are without sin, and almost everyone can be fit to be tied in our age of algorithmically enhanced outrage and polarization. It’s very easy to find a couple of points about anyone, that someone can find a non-trivial amount of people dislike.

This is the real danger of our polarized times. People are unwilling to stand for other’s inalienable natural rights, and instead prefer to only stick out for their perceived allies in the culture wars. This means that nobody is truly above being tarred and feathered by a highly motivated group of activists.

Note: Nothing has to be fabricated. People are naturally quite different and there are going to be real and meaningful disagreements. It is our responsibility to ensure those disagreements are handled properly and fairly, rather than wage culture war with the justice in the balance.

3. Shut down or shut out the target without any due process or means to appeal on factual grounds

Again, ironically it’s not really about the target, it’s about the power to be seized from an opportunity. There are all kinds of means to burden a target with fines, reputational harm, or even violence without providing a fair an impartial hearing. In fact, even a guilty target being convicted would be counter-productive, because the goal is to use the perceived injustice to justify further excesses.

4. Broaden the scope of targets

As the target is removed from play it doesn’t matter anymore who is on what side anymore. You can now use that incident as a precedent justify the same action on unrelated targets. Instead of addressing matters on their merits, instead you can smear critics as being accomplices of the target, or just as profane. With the mechanism in place, people who gain from exploiting it will be motivated to keep the narrative in place, and to continue to silence those who speak out against it.

The road to serfdom

Let’s pretend for a moment that we will fully intend to use this power for the benefit of all. Despite mainstream social media giants being unable to fully eliminate criminal activity of their networks, we’re going to deputize ISPs to police every interaction online.

With means like online identity verification, criminals and deplorables alike will be able to be entirely purged from the Internet merely at the cost of an increasingly powerful bureaucracy monitoring, blocking, or altering people’s communications. The process itself becomes the problem. Instead of actually resolving the problem we have merely concentrated more power into a more consolidated structure that becomes ripe for abuse.

Additional References

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Digital Autonomy and the Arts

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This conversation is a follow-up to a piece written last year

Art is the expression of the human soul, with it’s value being largely in the eye of the beholder. Corporations and governments can imitate art, or mass produce it with financial advantages, but they can’t compete with genuine creativity borne from real passion and real experiences. Tyranny isn’t beautiful, and slavery isn’t inspiring. When given a choice, people will naturally choose the free and beautiful over the rigid and stagnant. As freedom loving people it is absolutely vital for us to encourage, support and fund ventures to provide people the opportunity to enjoy pro-human media and creative works.

Artists are craving for a way for their work to be properly supported. Many artists are disillusioned by not being able to make it in large corporate spaces. If we truly desire a culture that protects freedom we must work to provide the space for artists to promote this culture. Working together we can support artists who care deeply about building a better world. This will create real cultural capital that can upend the systems that undermine our liberty. With truth on our side, there can be no limit to the heights of our imagination.

Information Warfare Super-weapons

Change the culture with these super effective tricks. Social engineers HATE these!

Later in the conversation, we discussed how machine learning tools are changing the game for artists out there.

The Collapse of the Intangible

Keeping your head above water in a tsunami of change

More about Liam Sturgess

@LiamSturgess@gigaohm.bio on the Fediverse!
Webisite
Substack
Locals

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Escalating Cyberwar: Warlord Technology

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

You have been found guilty.
No trial was necessary, your device has testified against you.

When one navigates corporate controlled cyberspace, the message couldn’t be more clear. Governments and tech giants negotiate the terms of total and utter digital feudalism while the people are herded into systems that are explicitly designed to control them. Even while it’s still possible, opting-out comes at a non-trivial cost. It is a cost that must be paid in one form or another, because refusing to do so has a grave price as well.

Understanding Warlord Technology

It’s generally the case that powerful tools can be used for good or evil, but there are exceptions. Often things can be specialized for particular purposes, and those purposes can themselves be evil ends. On it’s face, facial recognition may seem like something that isn’t inherently bad, but things change a great deal when it’s combined with an orchestra of social manipulation and control systems. Just as a bank account is useful to have, it’s a whole other can of worms once people start being de-banked for political purposes.

As such, there are many tools that would be entirely useless to a single person on their own, but are immensely useful for those who have large groups of people to manipulate. What makes these tools asymmetric is that the advantages are only for the wielder, and disadvantages are imposed on the subjects. Centralized social media platforms are well-suited for this. Not only are these platforms surveilling and manipulating their users, they have the capacity to lock down content only to fellow captives. This means that a public figure limiting their voice to these platforms is only able to get their voice out if they’re allowed to. Those of us who want to reach the public, and the public themselves must do more to support independent platforms and protocols, or else we’ll all remain beholden to top-down information control systems.

There is a well-earned reluctance from the public to adopt smart appliances, and other intrusive technology. When every device is monitored and controlled by corporations in the cloud, any feature of that device being abused arbitrarily becomes an inevitability. Understanding this means that warlord technology is any device or system that enables someone else to have power over one or many other people. What effectively makes this technology so dangerous is the fact that it’s simple to disguise the actual purpose. Tech giants offering free services in exchange for data-harvesting has successfully put many of the serious risks out of sight and out of mind. As governments across the world become more repressive, these risks come into view well after they could be prevented. The opposite exists as well too, it’s possible for emancipatory technology to be developed that’s useful to people generally, but fundamentally useless for anyone seeking power over others.

The Free and Open Web is an excellent example, independent and non-commercial websites managed by individuals using open protocols would have been a nightmare to properly index and seize control of. Because of this, people were nudged onto controlled platforms instead of self-publishing. Another example of asymmetric technology which benefits the people would be encryption and privacy tools. Those in power will always have the means and coordination to conceal their activities. Providing simple ways for users to protect their private information increases the costs of violating people’s rights exponentially, which is why these tools are often targeted by governments with any excuse they can find.

Of course, there is symmetric technology as well. Many general-purpose tools can be used for both great evil and good as well. I would argue truly asymmetric technologies are rare, or at least highly specialized. Almost everything has all kinds of potential uses that themselves can be used for benevolent or malicious choices, ultimately it’s downstream of the human condition. It is important to keep in mind however, that even the most symmetric of technology can be used by those with malevolent (or indifferent) intent for malicious ends. Just as a hammer can be used to build or for cruelty, what may seem like a reasonable exchange may end up being a terrible situation.

Cyberwar on Civilians

As noted in A non-Combattant’s Guide to Cyberwar, governments are increasingly treating your devices, connections, and even your mind as a national security target. Under the pretext of combating foreign funded misinformation, governments across the globe are working to secure total information dominance over their populations. It should go without saying that this itself is inherently anti-democratic, despite being done in the name of protecting our democracy. Surveillance and censorship are serious problems, but very often the lede being buried is that it’s just as much about manipulation.

A Non-Combattant's Guide to Cyberwar

Making sense of the chaos and the crossfire.

Censorship and surveillance themselves are serious attacks on the rights and liberty on civilians, outright manipulation of the public is an even graver overreach with even more troubling implications. We can not take for granted the mistake it would be to allow these measures to continue unopposed. Too many ignore the active role governments have taken in waging cyberwar on the public. While it’s intuitive to many that corporations have a profit-incentive to acquire and control as much data as possible, to others it’s inconceivable to many more that governments would violate their own laws to secure domestic or foreign policy objectives.
Despite the first amendment in the united states being quite clear:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The United States has an entire information control complex that involved government departments explicitly working with corporations to manipulate public discourse during the Covid Crisis. Even when the courts attempt to restrict such overreach the largely compliant media will continue the campaign of normalizing censorship and information control, essentially advocating for the nullification of the people’s rights.

The Silent Invasion

The Speculative Foundation of Surveillance Behind the Ongoing Privacy Erosion

All-encompassing surveillance is bad enough, using that information to manipulate and control the public is even worse, but far more terrible is to undermine people’s security. Governments across the world have made it explicitly clear that while you may nominally have the right to privacy and security, it disappears the moment it conflicts with policy objectives. Due to the power gained from limitless surveillance, you being a law-abiding citizen in good social standing means little. Free citizens across the world must find ways to reassert control and ownership over their governments, lest we all become subjects of tyrannical systems.

Digital Blockades

The greatest mistake is to always presume internet blackouts are an all-or-nothing affair. The tragic truth is that the tools of suppression can be incredibly precise. The public at large has been almost wholly ignorant of this, and this has enabled behavior that leaves them vulnerable. Many people are expecting a full-on “lights-out” internet blackout. In almost every case this is unnecessary, as people themselves are all too willing to use top-down controlled platforms, self-censor and ignore practical privacy risks. The biggest challenge is that something as simple as not encrypting your DNS queries by using the default, allows governments to lean on service providers to seize control.

Tools of the Technocracy: #9 Internet Shutdowns

Information control is the root of modern tyranny.

It is almost cliche these days, that governments will do everything in their power to suppress genuinely useful information in a crisis when it plays to their advantage. It’s important not to be naive about corporations as well. They are every bit as capable of egregious abuses. Public-Private partnerships have worked to transform our turn-key totalitarianism into an unending ratchet of tyranny. As economic, social, and political power concentrates, it can be harder and harder for truly independent infrastructure to operate in a neutral way, if not outright impossible. Over time, it can be too odious for even willing infrastructure providers to withstand the pressure to participate in censorship. No dissident or marginalized person can actually rely on a business or institution putting their needs ahead of the it’s existence. This means that as more people conform to information control, and are compliant with ever more restrictive technology, the harder it is for people at all levels of society to break free. This is especially true for those who are disadvantaged.

Ultimately the more capable our devices are the more leverage they can potentially have over the public. We must be vigilant to not enable governments, corporations, or other malevolent entities to leverage them against us. Legislative restrictions are not sufficient to prevent abuse. Citizens must be well-educated on the risks, where possible devices & systems must be properly verifiable and secure, lastly there must be severe consequences for abuse. In the name of fighting terrorism or other threats the French government is introducing powers to leverage every device a person has against them. Even if one agrees that this power is warranted in this specific circumstance, there is no guarantee that such powers won’t be generalized over time. In fact, even very specific measures preventing such abuse have consistently been ignored by all kinds of governments under all kinds of pretexts.

Full-Auto Tyranny

We already live in a world where the state of cyberspace has profound impacts on how people behave outside of it. As it currently exists, the majority of cyberspace is dominated by Corporations, Governments, and other un-accountable entities. The dream of an “information super-highway” where people of all backgrounds can meaningfully create, learn and share together is in dire peril.

Hive Moderation is a real-time AI censorship tool.

“Moderation at scale” effectively means mass information control. Instead of merely ranching people onto platforms to serve them targeted ads, now the capabilities exist to immediately prevent inconvenient discourse, or even entirely shape discussion. Even if people are starting to wake up to 2010s era social media, hardly anyone is prepared for the impacts created by upcoming and state-of-the art systems of control. It is critical to not let the inefficiencies and short-comings of existing systems lure you into a false sense of security when it comes to future threats.

Naturally, these excesses will be demanded on the terms of safety, and preventing crime. While there are real and severe dangers in cyberspace, it is important to note that this level of control over the people is entirely unprecedented. As these systems roll out, people will only barely have solace in their own mind, but hardly anywhere else.

Fertile ground for resistance

First and foremost, we need to strengthen our commitment to each other’s inalienable human rights before nit-picking on particular technological choices.

These implications have a very real impact on our daily lives. More and more events and services are going entirely cashless which often requires people to use products and services with terrible privacy protections. You may have been able to opt-out of these systems yourself, but what can be done to protect others from them? What about people who are perfectly fine with trading a total online-enabled surveillance grid if it makes their life easier? What about those who genuinely lack the time and energy to devote to opting out? Even entire cities can fold to the pressure of conforming to these trends in the face of powerful incentives.

Regardless of one’s chosen level of participation, it is absolutely vital that we get others to understand the risks. With that understanding it can be much easier to individually and collectively negotiate vital protections that need to be available, and encourage investment in new products and techniques. For now, it seems that the demand for tools and systems that don’t impact one’s privacy and freedom is far too low. We are all responsible for if not outright raising that demand, and communicating it effectively.

It’s a shame that the benefits of free and open dialogue are only readily apparent when they’re gone. The capability for people across the world to freely exchange information near instantaneously is absolutely critical to people’s life and liberty. It is vital that humanity maintains this critical component in holding the powerful accountable. Allowing the massive power structures that exist to have a veto power over people’s communication is too large an advantage to passively permit.

In times of inflamed tensions, social unrest, or even economic troubles, it can be very tempting for governments to smooth things over by constraining people’s ability to learn, create and share with each other. In many cases this undermines the peoples own ability to adapt to changes, potentially being caught unaware of dangers the state failed to (or chose not to) communicate. These days, whenever a nation adopts a particularly egregious control measure, regardless of pretext or circumstances other nations aren’t far behind. While the assaults on people’s privacy and digital autonomy are top-down they are enabled or even welcomed by particular behaviors that we have a responsibility to stop, and prevent.

The major challenge is that people from all walks of life need to be willing, able, and prepared to oppose abuse the situation arises. Like all deterrents to abuse, they have to be genuine and credible, or the people risk having their bluff called.

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Out-thinking the Culture Wars with Gary Sharpe

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I really appreciate Gary Sharpe‘s perspective on the emotional side of what people face. He has a wealth of excellent advice and I was pleased to have the opportunity to do this Q&A.

Gary Sharpe’s Articles

Q & A

One of the threads I’m currently following is the Culture Wars, and how the public has been largely divided into a multitude of different ideologies that can often perceive each other as an existential danger. This itself seems to be a massive stressor that drives much of the strife people experience these days.
From your perspective, what would be effective ways people can deescalate the cultural tensions without necessarily “giving up ground”?
I ask this because, it’s starting to take more of my attention. I’ve been filtered into my own ideology, and I can certainly feel a limit to what kinds of people I can plausibly reach or even communicate with. Initially I had more hope that this would be resolved over time, but if anything it’s only gotten worse and worse.
Appreciate your thoughts!

Gary: “That’s a Big Question, and I wish I had the answer. Firstly, I agree with you that the Culture Wars are stressful for everyone. I also suspect that the powers-that-be are fomenting them on purpose, as part of classic divide-and-rule tactics.

The basic problem is, when we are in a fearful, or stressed, state, which as you say the Culture War itself induces and maintains, our psychological and physiological states shift markedly from when we are in a calm, relaxed state, when we feel safe.

In particular, from Dr Iain McGilchrist’s work, we know that we lose access to the right hemisphere of our brain’s way of attending to the world. In this state, we can be totally delusional, and very rigid in our black and white thinking, utterly believe our own lies and construct halls-of-mirrors against receiving new or challenging information.

From Dr Stephen Porges’ work we know we also lose access to our social engagement system, including the loss of the ability to read other people, and become literally unable to tune in to other voices, and so we tend to see “others” from outside our tribe as dangerous threats.

Indeed, recent advances in psychology show the brain is essentially a predicting organ, and when the reality of the world doesn’t match its predictions, it has to resolve the contradiction. It can do this in one of two ways: delude itself and ignore reality, or update itself and its predictions. In the stressed state, we tend to opt for the delusion, as new or countering information can induce a significant danger response in of itself: this threatens our own identity or world view, and shifts in these can be traumatic.

So the pragmatic answer to your question is when people are already triggered, it is probably not worth the energy trying to connect or get through to them [with facts and figures] The “not giving up ground” part of the question is probably part of the answer: to be able to be together, but agree not to discuss religion/ideology or politics if this triggers each other! One of the issues, however, is how every topic of conversation has become political.

*“Every topic becoming political” - sadly, that’s a big part of the problem. Language itself has become politicized and the decision to use/not use particular words is effectively signalling affiliation in many ways. I think a lot of it comes down to trust. I really like this video about a game called The Evolution of Trust.

The simulation concludes that three things are required for the evolution of trust:

repeated interactions
possible win-wins
low miscommunication

I’m not sure what can be done about the first two, but on the third item I have continuously worked to try to be clear as possible, with varying degrees of success.

Gary: On the trust and win-win topic, have you come across the work of Liv Boeree she has been thinking about this and how to overcome the lose-lose forces of “Molloch”.

Many online communities that are pleasant to be a part of aren’t actually tolerant, but rather merely one of many echo-chambers of like-minded individuals.
In Corbett’s Media Matrix documentary he cites that since the introduction of television, offline social interaction has been on the decline.
I think the biggest change in our era is that online interactions aren’t merely an additional layer on top of regular human-to-human interaction, can be an alternative, especially for those who lack friends & family.
Would you say that itself is the problem, or is it something that we could handle better?

Gary: According to the work of Dr Stephen Porges, “real life” social interactions and social engagement is vital for humans to flourish. This is why putting someone into solitary isolation in prisons is the worse form of punishment, and considered a method of torture. It is also why loneliness is the biggest predictor of fast decline of conditions like Parkinson’s or dementia.

Online social engagement can provide some of these needs, but can not replace it completely, because it is missing some important “nourishing” elements, such as body language and touch. This is why zoom calls can be exhausting, whereas positive social engagement in real life can be restorative, and energy giving.

I feel like this explains a great deal of why people are constantly kept in fear. There is much to be concerned about, but I think much of the fearmongering is to find ways to prevent people from seeing win-win scenarios. I spent much of 2020/2021 in fear, not of the virus, but what the state would/could do over it.
While there was definitely serious overreach, and incredible harms done in the response I’m not sure being consumed by fear improved my ability to handle it. In your opinion, what are some good ways to handle rational fear that goes too far?”

Gary: I heard something which resonated with me on this just yesterday “fear is the worry that you are going to be less safe in the future than you are right now”. So the problem with being stuck in chronic fear is that we exile ourselves from even feeling safe in the now, even when there really is no imminent or proximate danger. Fear does keep us divided and distracted, and I agree this is being used on purpose by those who seek to control everything and everyone.

On the fear that comes with “waking up” to what is really going on the world, I have seen a common arc, including in myself, similar to what you describe. At first, it is not only terrifying, but also going down the rabbit holes can be addictive. So we get very scared, but also keep ourselves in the fear by constantly staring into the abyss.

Then we start to feel a need to do something about it, to become solution oriented, begin to focus on resistance and finding like minded people, and a sense safety in numbers. We then begin to pay less attention to the day-to-day minutiae of what the elites are up to and start building alternative systems.

I have watched daily youtubers like Richard Vobes and Dr John Campbell going through these stages in real time. It might like the stages of grief, so it might actually be necessary to go through the fear stage, in order to get to the other side.

You’ve hit an important point! There really does seem to be an addictive component. This is often pathologized to dismiss people’s very real concerns, but I can’t help but wonder if that element serves a real purpose. In your mind, what do you think specifically makes it addictive?
I’ve seen the mainstream argue it’s because it’s just selfish people who want to feel better than everyone else. In my experience this doesn’t match up to reality as many of the other people I’ve encountered on this journey are some of the least selfish I’ve met.
I do think the fact that it’s even possible is a marvel to itself, it’s a testament to how useful a free and open web can be.

Gary: When we are stressed or threatened, we go through a defence cascade of escalating responses. First a startle or orienting response, that takes us either back to calm, or to a fight-flight type response. If the flight-fight response isn’t successful at ameliorating the threat, we then escalate into a rigid type of freeze, or playing dead, response, and if that doesn’t work we end up fainting or in a floppy type of freeze response.

Many of the threats that our nervous system perceives in the modern world are not ones we can fight or run away from. So a lot of people are stuck partially in a freeze response, with various levels of dysfunction. By putting ourselves into states of anger or functional fear, e.g. by focussing on an “enemy” that we can fight as “keyboard warriors”, we can temporarily bump ourselves out of the freeze response back into a fight-flight response, by generating internal dopamine and adrenaline.

Being in fight-flight allows us to be temporarily more functional in the world, and while this is not a healthy state to be in long term either, it feels generally less unpleasant and uncomfortable than being in freeze, so it is preferable for a lot of people.

Of course, like all addictions, using the Culture Wars or taking ourselves down the scary rabbit holes as our way of choice for getting the dopamine/adrenaline fix ends up needing more and more extreme stimulus for it to work and have the effect. Eventually we need to move out of the fear, into a more creative stage, becoming solution orientated and helping to build alternatives.

Thank you so much for this, I greatly appreciate it and the answers themselves.

If you haven’t read any of Gary’s writing, I’d highly recomment the following:

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Tools: the Good and the Bad

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

If all you have is a hammer, suddenly every single thing starts to look like a nail.

Hardly and tool itself is wholly evil or entirely good. Not only are the tools themselves important, how we use them matters quite a bit as well. This applies all the way from the entire software ecosystem, down to the hardware components themselves. The fundamental attributes of the tool will set the incentives for how they can be used, and how they are used creates incentives for how future tools will be made. This feedback loop can be used to concentrate power or to distribute it. This is precisely where your understanding is a prerequisite for making deliberate choices.

Concepts

Autonomy

Can I do what I want, on my own terms?
Privacy

Does using this, divulge information in unnecessary or unwanted ways?
Efficiency

Does it complete it’s function with minimal waste?
Verifiability

Is it possible to validate the condition and function(s) of it?
Accessibility

Is it reasonably useful to those with different needs and requirements?

Examples

In the past, I have been asked for a quick answer to explain if a particular technology or system is itself good or bad. It can be difficult to give a concise answer when there are often a couple of fine points that are worth taking the time to focus on. It has often been said that the medium is the message and this much more the case when it comes to digital and online systems.

QR Codes

With the introduction of vaccine passports, QR codes have soured on a lot of people. Gating access to venues or services behind the need for one to digitally identify themselves presented many serious risks to privacy and civil rights. Unfortunately, none of this required a QR code specifically. NFC or RFID access cards could provide the exact same functionality. While QR codes were a highly-visible mechanism to enable automated segregation, there’s no guarantee that future systems of control will look the same.

This article's URL as a QR code

This is because QR codes are just one of many ways to transmit data over a short distance. Using a camera the device detects the pattern and then decodes it into the required data format. This can just be a bit of text, a website URL, or binary data. I don’t think there’s anything inherently harmful to QR codes being used on things like posters and business cards provided that they aren’t hiding data or using tracking links.

QR codes are not all created equal

Because anything can be encoded into a QR code, there are still some risks to be aware of. Just like you shouldn’t open strange links, you may not want to open every QR code you see. This is why some QR reader apps will display the decoded information so that you can decide if you want to open the link or not.

Another problem is that you may not even be able to decode the QR code at all. If you have to present an app-generated QR code to interact with a system, you may not have any knowledge of what data is being used and shared.

Smartphones

The powers-that-be don’t want you to write your own stories, make your own movies, and draw your own art, even though everyone has, in their pockets, the technology to do all of the above, with a good wireless keyboard, a camera module, and a stylus.

No, they want you to read their dumbed-down prolefeed, watch Netflix, Instagram your cat, your food, and your cat food, swipe through Pinterest a few times, get your daily fix, and then peacefully, complacently, obediently nod off on the couch. They don’t want people carrying around devices that center the user as a creator of content. Instead, they want you to do nothing but consume their approved messages.

In short, for the vast majority of people, they’re trying to turn personal computers into television. They’re trying to drag us backwards, into a prior era, where the ruling class had a death grip on the narrative. This is a trend that must be resisted. Never give up your keyboards, ever.

Spartacast 06

If someone was limited to only using a smartphone they may be severely limited in what they’re able to accomplish. As you can see, the consequences of giving up a keyboard alone are immense. If that wasn’t bad enough, these devices tend to be vulnerable to malware exploited by all kinds of bad-actors. Smartphones are a high-value target because many people keep a treasure-trove of personal data. If that wasn’t bad enough often the manufacturers themselves will participate in undermining your privacy.

I’ve written in the past:

It’s not the smartphone, but what was in it.

There is nothing inherently mind-killing about a small, portable computer that uses a touch-screen interface. What truly forged the massive mind control apparatus was the things that came with it:

Real-time location tracking

24/7 audio and video surveillance capabilities

Corporate Social Media as Digital information Control Systems

Conceptualizing Information Control

There are many ways that the useful parts of smartphones could be replicated in a simpler, more focused device. Re-installing android without google play services can go a long way for many android devices, but in the long run it would be excellent if we could support independent manufacturers that create genuinely good devices.

Centralized Platforms

A tried-and-true business model is to run a platform that allows users to create valuable content. With a large audience to attract all kinds of writers, musicians, podcasters, or even video producers, the platform can double-dip acquiring data on the audience as well as the performers. Just as creators will be able to see stats for their content, the platform’s operators themselves will have all kinds of metrics and data on everyone.

Substack readership stats

Creators on these platforms essentially trade some (or all) control over their content in exchange for an audience. No matter what method you use to disseminate your message, it’s critical that you maintain control over your work. For example, the Libre Solutions Network is written for the website first, then the content migrated to substack for additional reach. This means that if I ever lost access, or decided that staying on the platform wasn’t worthwhile, all the content would still exist.

As a member of the audience, it’s critical that you help make it possible for creators to maintain their own independent presence. Simple habits like bookmarking and using an RSS reader can really make a huge difference in supporting an independent information landscape. At the very least it’s vital that you ensure that your attention isn’t entirely locked to a single or set of controlled platforms.

Social Media: Learning the right lessons

Understanding information control

Machine Learning

The most dangerous aspect of AI right now is that it’s being used as an excuse to build a regulatory environment that empowers the very same technocrats to have even more digital control over people. While machine learning tools are very effective force multipliers in particular situations, most of the so-called AI risks have already been done by people to people with tools that are already readily available. Humanity has never lacked the tools to totally and completely annihilate itself, additional powers and tools only represent a danger to the degree they tip the scales.

For example, while I currently choose not to automatically narrate all my posts with a cloned voice, it’s a viable option. I would definitely oppose any effort that seeks to keep such technology out of people’s hands, especially if there were offline-available tools that could be used without assistance from cloud services. Those who’s power relies on information being a controlled resource would love nothing more than to have a monopoly on extremely efficient content creation.

Tools of the Technocracy: #2 Big Data & Artificial Intelligence

What is all this data for anyways?

There are many efficient uses of machine learning that don’t automatically enable obscene privacy invasion. Distributing pre-trained models would be a great way to help people get more use out of low-power systems, potentially preventing a massive amount of waste. A prerequisite for better AI tools is a better way of building them. Instead of allowing big tech to hoover up all of everyone’s information, we need to work together to collaborate on important datasets with data we choose.

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A Non-Combattant's Guide to Cyberwar

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We live in interesting times. In addition to the many boots-on-the-ground conflicts going on, cyberspace is a theatre of war with hardly any distinction between military and civilian targets. Nothing is off-limits and combatants can be anything from creative individuals to well-funded state level actors like governments and multi-national corporations.

There’s no way to be perfectly out-of-the-way. Any significant cluster of data, storage, computing power, or bandwidth can become a strategic resource to be sought after. When it comes to hacks, many cybersecurity professionals will say that it’s a matter of when, not if. This means that the goal of the technocratic empires to centrally control data on everyone… everything… everywhere, backfires when resilience starts to become critically important.

What makes you a target?

You may not be interested in cyberwar, but it has ways of being interested in you. For many governments, dissenting narratives are themselves considered a threat. The infodemic narrative allows funding intended for protecting critical infrastructure from hacks, to be used to classify citizens or censor your speech. If only it stopped there, law-enforcement and intelligence agencies often make use of malware themselves to invade people’s devices with dubious oversight.

This is where your participation really matters. Propping up systems of control only raise the risk for yourself and others around you. It may not be a big deal when yet another company has a massive data breach, but it’s a whole other matter when it’s a treasure-trove of data the state has been collecting on everyone.

I hope that this would encourage democracies worldwide to shift from control and domination to education and innovation. By treating citizens as just another target you give up the most important strategic advantage: resilience.

You cannot invade mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass.

The best way to properly mitigate risk is to properly diffuse it. Avoiding systems that unnecessarily introduce risk would go a long way too. We don’t just need people to have computer skills, but we need to implement better tools and methods for many aspects of cyberspace. Allowing tyrants to seize power over cyberspace for your safety merely replaces small solvable problems with a single massive one.

With all this in mind, even as a non-combattant, it’s important to understand the battlefield and what you can do. There is a lot to understand even if you have no desire to ever hack anyone. Taking your own privacy, security and systems seriously can go a long way.

Cyberwarfare

Keeping digital systems safe from intrusion requires active vigilance. Whether it’s your social media accounts, company software, or critical infrastructure, a great deal of proactive work is required to prevent or mitigate problems. The challenge is that the defense has to get lucky every time, whereas the attackers only need to get lucky once.

A serious problem is that various exploits can be chained together allowing for more sophisticated attacks to take place. To complicate matters, the Internet never forgets. Data that has been seized or leaked can be weaponized forever. This is why the top-down strategy of the state and corporations data-mining and manipulating the public is a terribly poor strategy for cyber resilience.

We are all human after all. Ignorance is a problem, but so can an occasional act of carelessness. The point isn’t to beat yourself up over every mistake, but to take incidents seriously enough to learn from them before they can be a bigger problem.

It has been often said the people are the weakest link. If such an individual is known, it can sometimes be much easier to manipulate a person with access, rather than the system directly. This gets much worse when everyone is under constant surveillance by a variety of different entities. Suddenly, a one-off cloud account hack can be a springboard for other intrusions.

Phishing

Phishing is worth it’s own post.
There are many different ways it can be carried out:

E-mail: one kind of attack is an urgent email that requires you to immediately click a certain link. That link will then present a fake log-in form disguised as a legitimate site. This could be used to steal your credentials. If the site itself has a vulnerability, merely clicking the link itself could be enough to compromise your account.

Attachments any file sent your way may be more than meets the eye. There are a variety of methods that allow a file that’s opened to either run as a virus, or send your data elsewhere.

None of this is exclusive to e-mail.
Messaging apps, and online communities can all enable the same problems.

Tools of the Technocracy: #4 Online Identity

What is following you in your digital tracks?

Impersonation

Thanks to a variety of voice cloning tools, impersonation is a significant risk. There are already many scams where someone receives a call from someone who sounds like their loved one asking for urgent financial assistance. The biggest risk from impersonation is not just manipulation of your loved ones, but it also makes the risk of identity theft more potent.

Malware

Malware is a bit of software that allows the attacker to either infiltrate or take control of particular systems. Sometimes it’s for mining cryptocurrency, stealing data, or more nefarious ends. Not only are cybercriminals making use of malware, but governments too.

Remote execution

Usually the first thing a sophisticated attacker wants over their target is the ability to execute a payload on the target’s system. The payload is additional instructions or programs such as more malware.

Privilege escalation

It’s bad enough to have a computer virus on your system, but often these programs will have techniques to give themselves more access over the system. This can include things like acting as your computer’s administrator, or gaining access to control over services hosted on a server.

Botnets

When an attacker has control over many systems, they can be used as a botnet. A massive swarm of infected systems can be used for DDOS attacks or merely act as remote storage and proxy for attackers. By proxying their attacks, attackers can quite effectively disguise their origin.

From Espionage to Warfare - Cyber war grows

Slow death of privacy

Vulnerabilities

Believe it or not, machines aren’t perfect either! Software development is complicated and computer engineering is even more so. From either simple mistakes or lack of forethought problems pile up over the course of development. From time and resource constraints hardly any product is perfect. Many large software projects will routinely release updates to fix vulnerabilities so updating is important.

0 days

“0 days” are a term for very valuable exploits that are presumed to be unknown to the developer/manufacturer at a given moment in time. This means that there’s likely not a security fix coming for some time. 0 days can be be minor or quite critical. A major bug in a browser could potentially be part of a 0day that gives a malicious website access to your system. The most important take-away about 0days is that while software may be secure when working as intended, there can be circumstances where it isn’t.

Supply-chain attacks

Especially in the cases where a vulnerability is introduced in production. Software is often built on other software called libraries, and hardware is generally built with components from other suppliers. This creates an opportunity for malicious actors to introduce problems in the creation of particular software or systems. Because many projects will often use the same components or libraries, this kind of attack can impact a wide variety of targets.

Backdoors

More and more governments around the world are working to undermine end-to-end encryption and online privacy. Intrusions do not end at demanding access to everyone’s intimate conversations. Often governments and law-enforcement will ask for a vulnerability to be introduced to the product itself. This is the worst-case-scenario because it’s a guarantee that such a valuable key would be discovered, stolen or abused.

Ransomware

A particularly nasty kind of malware is ransomware. The gambit is that the virus encrypts all the infected system’s files and demands a payment in cryptocurrency. Not only is everything unaccessible, but often the software will overwrite everything the system has access to potentially taking out entire enterprises. The only protection from ransomware is regular offline backups. May be a good reason to start sharing copies of your critical backups with trusted friends or family. Otherwise, you may end up with a particularly painful, or expensive lesson.

Consequences

As geopolitical conflicts continue, and attackers gain more ground, I would say there has never been a time where it has been more important to take control of your information. Demanding analogue or offline ways of interacting with important institutions is a must.

There is a significant push to digitize national currencies, and identity documents. One has to wonder if the escalation of state-funded cyber threats has less to do with strategic objectives, or rather creating a pretext to force citizens to surrender more information and control to less-and-less accountable institutions.

Governments and institutions are quickly rushing to orchestrate a top-down solution and handing over more influence to public-private partnerships. The “stakeholders” for these partnerships won’t be representing your needs or your interests, but rather the influences over those entities.

It’s very concerning to see soft-power projection taking control over people’s lives. In his show MicroJourneys Liam Sturgess discusses how these public-private partnerships respond to these threats, and opens the door to discussing the implications.

It is becoming hard to see where state power ends and corporate interests begin, and where they overlap. If the last few years is any indication, we can be sure that any additional power granted to these institutions inevitably leads to politicization, abuse, and weaponization. We are all responsible for how we enable governments, civil society organizations, and corporations to undermine our freedom, rights, and security.

There will never be any guarantee that centrally managed services can be safeguarded properly. The only way to protect information, and the people who’s safety depends on it, is not to record it at all. If it must be recorded than measures need to be taken to ensure it is not widely-shared. Sovereign computing needs to be less of a buzzword and more of a foundation for how we build, maintain, and interact with digital systems.

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Operation: Beehive

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Bottom-up, decentralized, and permissionless strategies are at a premium. With the tools available to us, people from all walks of life are able to cooperate on incredible projects. Instead of relying on a tyrannical pharaoh’s vision for some great project, people can make their own public goods. We don’t need to be bigger or more powerful than large institutions to do incredible things. In many cases, it merely takes some creativity and diligent work.

There is much work to be done. Many important projects are unable to attain necessary funding or the volunteers to make it work. While it would be nice if we could merely come together and bankroll these projects, in some cases it may be efficient to reorganize the work itself. By being better able to manage large projects to parallelize work, we can gain efficiency in ways that are difficult to stop.

Many hands make light work.

Have you ever wanted to contribute to a project and been stuck trying to figure out how? Have there been times would you have just liked to get started right away to get a feel for what’s involved? Often people don’t know where to start, which allows big tech platforms to herd people into controlled environments.

It’s time to think like little worker bees. Some go out and gather information for a project. Others, will take the information and process it into reusable chunks. These chunks can be assembled to valuable works. With even moderate success, we’ll be overflowing with tasty honey. People vastly underestimate what could be accomplished if we merely found ways to properly parallelize large tasks.

Rebecca Miller-Webster gives an excellent talk about this.
Remember! You don’t have to use GitHub to use git!

The worker bee

Are you ready to be a humble worker bee? With some consistent effort, you and other worker bees can start making delicious information honey. Honey is sweet, there are different kinds of honey. The choice is yours, on what particular kinds you’re interested in making.

Every good worker bee needs the ability to contribute to the hive. A beehive is a git repository The repository stores all the information, metadata and history about the project. What’s phenomenal about this is that unlike actual beehives, in the case of a disaster you can pick up and start where another hive left off.

You’re going to want to be familiar with how to use git. Git is an incredibly powerful tool that allows project changes to be managed from many sources. Imagine, that in the beehive (git repository) you and the other worker bees produce cells (commits) that the beekeeper decides to include in the hive.

What’s excellent about using git is that you can still use many of the same tools you want to use to edit your files. There are also some excellent text editors that integrate git into them so that working with git can be almost effortless.

Principles

Division of labor

Everyone has special talents, we should maximize people’s ability to contribute without hassle.
Efficiency

🐝 Beecome allergic to re-inventing the wheel. Wherever possible, avoid people having to do the same thing over again.
Robustness

Work should always be in a usable state to avoid waste.
Using machine readable formats can help with that.

Goals

Decentralized projects

Often times, there are multiple uses for the same information.
Different groups may want to use it in slightly different ways.
Public repositories allow this to be done without starting from scratch.
Friction-less participation

Allowing work to begin without permission allows people to start without coordination.
Censorship resistance

With strategic use of these tools, critical projects can continue despite immense censorship and pressure.

Advantages

Collaboration

By managing changes directly, you can eliminate a lot of the work involved with coordination. In a well-documented project, volunteers can help get other volunteers started.

There is a wide range of possibilities for what kind of access control you want. You can have a small group of trusted participants, or allow the entire world to have access and have people approve changes.
Automated workflows

By using source files, and a deterministic process, you can have information transformed into a variety of formats automatically when changes are made. These formats could be websites, books, or other materials.

You can see this in action in a presentation given to the MetaPrep Education community.
Version control

Being able to revert to a previous project state is quite useful, especially in instances where you’d like to pick up where another project left off.

Examples of Beehive projects

This is not a mere hypothetical, there are real decentralized projects making use of this strategy already. While they’re largely focused on technology and privacy, the same model could quite easily be applied to many different areas in life. These projects are excellent resources themselves. What makes them incredibly powerful is that with a little bit of knowledge, anyone can contribute to improve the project.

Go FOSS

https://gofoss.net/

gofoss.net is a free and open source guide to online privacy, data ownership and durable technology. The project was launched in 2020 by a small team of volunteers, and is 100% non-profit – no ads, no tracking, no sponsored content, no affiliates.

We deplore that many tech companies generate profits at the expense of user privacy. We are increasingly concerned about governments intruding into the private sphere of citizens. And we see an urgent need for action to lower the environmental impact of technology.

Online Spyware Watchdog

https://spyware.neocities.org/

The goal of this website is to classify spyware programs, so that users can be more aware that they are installing spyware.

Many “everyday” applications are actually spyware. We take an expansive and strict stance on what constitutes spyware. We define spyware as anything that includes telemetry, phoning home, automatic updates or is listening in without the user’s knowledge or consent.

PRISM BREAK

https://prism-break.org/en/

Help make mass surveillance of entire populations uneconomical! We all have a right to privacy, which you can exercise today by encrypting your communications and ending your reliance on proprietary services.

Switching Software

https://switching.software/

switching.software is a grassroots website, that is trying to let people know about ethical and easy-to-use alternatives to well-known websites, apps and other software.

Privacy Guides

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/

Privacy Guides is a socially motivated website that provides information for protecting your data security and privacy. Our mission is to inform the public about the value of digital privacy, and global government initiatives which aim to monitor your online activity. We are a non-profit collective operated entirely by volunteer team members and contributors. Our website is free of advertisements and not affiliated with any of the listed providers.

Awesome / Delightful Lists

Lists like these are excellent resources for finding curated and detailed information. These are very often more useful than search engines, which will very often point you to a few sponsored results.

Publishing your own lists and indexes is a very powerful thing indeed. It can be as simple as a text file, or a fully-featured search-enabled site. No matter what, the content is able to stand on it’s own and can be freely shared.

Understanding the method

FreeCodeCamp.org has an excellent Crash Course on git for beginners.

Example: Filling a large spreadsheet

Suppose you have a very large spreadsheet that has links to check for information, which then needs to be filled out into columns. With only a few rows, this can be quite manageable, but when there’s thousands it can become difficult for even a team of people.

Link	Model #	Price
example.com/1	Type 1	$5,500
example.com/2	Type 2	$6,450
example.com/3
…
example.com/1230532
…

Instead of trying to sync a massive spreadsheet with hundreds of volunteers, making coordination quite difficult, you decide to try to use git to allow for parallel changes.

The first step would be to turn the massive spreadsheet into a .csv file, so that it can be edited in pure text, without worrying about which tools people are using. This allows your volunteers to contribute even if they don’t use the same software as you.
It would look something like this:

Link,Model #,Price
example.com/1,Type 1,5500
example.com/2,Type 2,6450
example.com/3
example.com/4
...

The goal here is to have volunteers submit their changes as quickly as possible in a way that’s easy to manage. So that there isn’t any duplication the project is hosted on a forge. A forge is an online site that hosts git repositories. For simplicity, in this example we will use GitHub.

The project maintainer creates a new git repository on github, then adds the .csv file. A simple procedure would be to encourage volunteers to start at a random item # to further avoid duplicate work. I’ll explain what a potential contributor would need to do in this instance.

The worker bee

Volunteers will clone the repository. This allows them to download the .csv file and all previous changes that have been approved. The volunteer can then start opening the links and adding the information to their .csv file.
For example:

Link,Model #,Price
...
example.com/15,Type 15,7500
example.com/16,Type 16,3225
example.com/17,Type 17,4605
example.com/18,Type 18,8420
...

The advantage of using git here is that it manages the changes. The volunteer can send this .csv directly to the project maintainer, or use the pull request feature to ask the maintainer to incorporate their changes.

Alternatives

The vision behind operation beehive is decentralized permission-less work. This is not limited go tools like git. In fact, any wiki with open registrations would work quite well as well. The important features are that you work in an open and deterministic way, that makes it easier for people to carry on.

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Has the technocracy already assimilated you?

Mon, 29 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The technocracy is a managerialist top-down system of control with no accountability towards it’s subjects. From the perspective of the system’s owners, the subjects are at best livestock to be harvested and the worst is far too horrible to imagine. Such a cruel and deranged system seems quite alien to most people, despite often living it out in their own daily lives. Regardless of what disagreements divide people, far more are united under subservience to technological tyranny.

But surely you’re immune to this? You’ve recoiled in horror at many recent developments, turning that disgust into productive action to work towards a better future right? Sadly, we know all-too-well that there’s always more work to be done. It’s a never-ending, thankless toil that merely begets more challenges and more frustration. It’s become quite clear to you that merely seeing through the lies alone is not enough to manifest change.

Technological Terror

The “Internet of Things”, and cloud services all work well to centralize information and control into a small set of hands. With innumerable opportunities for abuse, these systems create dangers that can be quite difficult to identify once one has become a captive. Restrictions can often be out of sight, and out of mind. Convenience is often a derogatory term for pragmatic choices people are nudged into making.

On-demand

With a couple of taps nearly anything can be at your door in a relatively short period of time. Instant gratification of all manner of pleasures is only restrained by your budget or appetite. Cheap pleasure erodes away people’s ability to appreciate joy in the simple things. While some things are now more accessible, many people fall into the trap of losing control of their own agency. What was once a convenient take-out treat can be a vulnerable person’s go-to-meal.

Data serfdom

Many online services can help people start projects quickly. Those projects can be locked-in to formats that can be difficult to reproduce other places. Regaining control of your media and source files can be a massive challenge when one works entirely within online cloud services instead of programs running on their own machine.

Junkification

As bad as the software can be, often the hardware isn’t much better. Devices can constrain the user from installing or removing software, they can also take on surveillance directly. Despite much progress, the complexity of these devices often makes them too difficult or too expensive to pragmatically repair. When devices no longer receive security updates, it may not be safe to use them much longer anyways. Planned obsolescence is just part of the picture, a variety of awful incentives can create unusable devices from the very beginning. This is especially true of devices that are reliant on online services.

Hacking humans

Power in society has always been some combination of resources, force and influence. These factors create powerful incentives that have a massive impact on people’s behavior. The more extreme the power, the more overt it would become, sometimes formalizing into official structures. In some instances, people would consciously decide to act in defiance or opposition to such rule for a variety of reasons. In the information age, power doesn’t need to be so crude, it can disguise itself with all kinds of illusions.

Information Asymmetry allows those with power to act in ways others may not even be able to predict. Censorship, surveillance, and propaganda are all powerful tools used to coerce people into a variety of losing bets. Over time, the distortions created by the powerful can fade into the background and become unthinkable to even notice.

Algorithmic Feeds

Being able to control what others see is a phenomenal power, having influence over it is quite a valuable currency. The advertizing industry built very sophisticated tools to monitor and manipulate people in precise ways. Far from being limited to mere novelty, these techniques were used to sell ideas and emotions. Through advanced marketing tools people’s very minds became yet another natural resource to become polluted. Instead of the hazards being toxic chemicals, the ideal consumer was forged in an overwhelming foundry of fear.

Fear leads to anger…

Impotent outrage

It is well understood that triggering people’s fight or flight response will get decisive action. Bathing the public in their insecurities became a very effective way to drive people to buy or promote things without thinking. These rash actions would inevitably create negative consequences, buyer’s remorse would be greeted with familiar temptations. As people’s relations with each other soured, the onset loneliness would drive people further and further into anger and sadness.

…Anger leads to hate.

Radicalization

As tempers flared, something needed to take the fall. The true (and often self-inflicted) causes of people’s suffering was far too difficult to face, instead people tore into each other. It’s far easier to get cheap satisfaction over another than to address one’s own problems. Perceived slights escalate into violent outbursts. With no shortage of justified rage, people lose sight of the humanity in each other.

…and hate leads to suffering.

Tragedy

It didn’t take much for people to eye-for-an-eye themselves into a very blind world. Not only can people not see what’s right before them, but they can hardly hear those around them either. Instead, people instantly react to the quickest impression they can form to a particular post, comment, or piece of media. Nobody feels heard, and all feel forgotten. The wounds from past battles accumulate as the war on all rages on.

Those with any sense flee to what few alternatives existed, or retreated entirely. The digital nomads roaming cyberspace are scattered. They can see the fires from a distance, but they would often dissipate before getting close. Many were able to purchase peace at the price of solitude and isolation.

Checkup

Every Yes answer to the following questions is something that gives the technocracy leverage over you. Nobody is completely invulnerable. When engaging with others, it’s important to encourage each other to make positive change, rather than nit-pick various shortcomings. Flaws should be an opportunity to learn how to overcome challenges, rather than a cause for scorn.

Finance

Are the majority of your purchases made via credit card?
Are you unable to get your essentials from locally owned enterprises.
Would you willingly “sell out” for money or career advancement, regardless of the impacts on others?
Are you living paycheck-to-paycheck?
Do you feel pressure to “make-up” for lost time?
Are your financial assets solely comprised of publicly-traded corporations and government bonds?
Is your income derived from government funding?
Are you constantly exposed to advertizing or sponsored promotions?
Would you be unable to trade for essentials without currency?
Are you inefficient with your time?
Can you name 5 brands, but not 5 kinds of trees native to your area?

Technology

Would you be unable to go a day without your smartphone, and still be productive?
Does most of your computing take place using commercialized online services rather than offline programs?
Does your operating system record data on you?
Do you own a “Internet of Things” device like a smart TV or smart appliance?
Are search engines your only means of finding specific information?
If the Internet went down, could you still earn a living?
Is a majority of your entertainment derived from online services?
Would you be unable to do your regular errands without GPS or online-assisted navigation?
Is your profession reliant on cloud services or other proprietary enterprise software?
Would you be unable to teach a child math, art, or other skills without assistance of the Internet?
Does your transportation require you to divulge personal information?

Alright! Alright! Now what?

Before you despair too much, understand that this isn’t a single person’s journey. To varying degrees, we are all captivated by forces either entirely outside of our control, or simply the consequences of decisions we’ve made in the past. With few exceptions, almost nobody has managed to entirely wild themselves from the world. Perhaps this isn’t inherently a bad thing. Ideally, in a fair and just society people would want to have a stake in it.

Society grows great when people plant trees whose shade they shall never enjoy.

No single person has the power to unilaterally transform it all, but every one of us has the capacity to redirect our focus, resources and spirit in a different direction. Have compassion for your own shortcomings as well as those of others. If we truly want to make a lasting improvement instead of merely pledging support to the same leaders in different uniforms, we’re going to need to change the game itself. To do this, we’ll need to understand what we’re trying to navigate away from, which can help prevent us from forgetting what we’re working towards.

Rewilding ourselves

Society domesticates people. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, as trust grows people are naturally able to lower some defenses. The trouble comes when tyrants or opportunists decide to abuse that trust, rapidly diminishing it and harming those who haven’t yet raised their own defenses. Then those who are the most trusting are hurt the most, and those who are the most guarded can often endure.

Becoming wild again doesn’t mean becoming aggressive or cruel, merely gradually rebuilding your individual and social boundaries that have been eroded over time. Empowering yourself to be stronger, more skilled, or efficient can go a long way to rebuilding that independence. Though it’s important to remember that we are social creatures, we need friends, allies, and family all the same.

By making yourself wild from systems of control, you can help build independence from it that builds room for others to do the same. This is an entirely different path than merely reforming society as it exists. Instead you are taking as much control of your life as you can, and working to build something entirely different. Taking deliberate action to become wild is to embrace a world where every choice is your own.

To do this, you’ll need to make a conscious decision to reject the world as it exists, and form a clear idea of how you want to live despite it. In some cases there may be a negotiation, in others there may be outright rejection. You will likely still face consequences for these actions, but ultimately you are taking them head on. A simple example is to reject a social credit score in advance. Knowing that one is being made gives you the opportunity to deliberately live in defiance of it.

Make peace

The greatest weapon of all tyrants is fear. Fear is used to induce compliance and paralyze opposition. Regardless if your fear is of death, capture, or assimilation into some hivemind, your first act of resistance is to shed your fear of it. Living without fear is hard. It’s easy to underestimate the challenge during easy times, but when one is surrounded by panic it’s a different environment all-together.

Every bit counts. The more at peace you are with yourself and your surroundings, the easier it is to make progress and support others. It’s natural to get caught off-balance once in a while, but it’s critical that you maintain focused on regaining your focus. We all need each other. Helping your allies in a difficult time can often mean a lot more than advancing against your opponents.

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Raise your Shield

Fri, 19 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a cliche nowadays to point out that society is fractured. The Culture Wars are no longer a side-show for the politically obsessed, instead they are front-and center in the spectacle, aggressively inciting the wider public to participate. Hate your family? Hate your community? Hate your country? Even worse, do you hate yourself? There is no shortage of (often quite valid) reasons to keep you in a prison of rage and despair.

They want you to hate

It’s quite alluring bait. The trap is so well executed that people’s ability to truly humanize each other is effectively cut off by their own anger. This was no accident. It is quite a mistake to entirely dismiss the Culture Wars as a mere distraction. Many people have lost much just trying to make sense of the chaos and suffered a lot in the crossfire. The terrifying truth is that we have the most influential powers in society actively working to undermine people’s ability to peacefully resolve conflict.

This has disarmed us from being able to correct or prevent institutional abuses. By fracturing people into isolated pits of fury and sadness people are unable to build even enough trust to communicate. Think of those people you’re entirely unable to reason with, who benefits from your collective isolation? It’s hard to escape when everyone is either too worn out or too hurt to meaningfully reciprocate.

Surely you’ve heard “The only winning move is not to play”.
That leads one to ask “What game is being played, exactly?”.
In this piece, I’m going to try to lay out the game in it’s entirety as best as I can.

The Game

Life itself is a series of contests. Some are trivial like friendly competitive sports, others are all-encompassing horrors like wars. You don’t always get to choose what competitions you’re in, some even operate outside a person’s natural lifespan. A great variety of circumstances of your birth have profound impact on what games you’re a part of and which ones you can join or leave. No two people are entirely alike, (as a twin I would know) different people will very often play the same cards differently.

Many games make many prizes, some for the good, others for ill. Depending on your goals, some prizes may be hugely significant others may be outright disastrous. Ignorance is not bliss in many cases, others will often leverage it to their benefit. With only so much time to think, choose, and act, things can really start to look rigged from various points of view.

Very few people have the means, power, or influence to make massive changes on their own, but the sum total capabilities of many people can’t be overstated. Being able to influence a great many connected, talented, and driven people is a phenomenal power for one to have. This is the real power that rulers wield. Whether taken by force, or voluntarily given, there is a hard limit on how much cooperation can be effectively leveraged towards goals. This is the raw basis for the social contract. Eventually, the ruler or institution loses enough will to cooperate that people move to defect.

Keeping score: Currency

It’s ironic to talk about the raw power of money these days. Odds are if you’re reading this you’re used to using a fiat currency which is to say a currency backed by “faith and credit” of your government. This is not the same as saying it’s backed by nothing. Far from it, any currency is a de-facto measurement of the amount of raw power wielded by it’s participants. That power can be used for good or evil. Every person proportional to the currency they wield makes a real tangible impact on the use of that currency.

Currency in a peaceful and productive civilization will be highly valuable, but there are other variables. The currency of a despotic and cruel system is blood money. This is what makes the love of money the root of all evil: prioritizing currency above all else is an open and active endorsement of the naturally imperfect dominance hierarchy. The more vicious the society, the more cruelty required to maintain the currency.

One of the vital aspects of currencies is that they act as a means of communication. Prices send powerful signals to people in all stations of life. For some prices represent options, for others they represent permission. This is why nearly all discussion of the Culture Wars misses vital context. The Culture Wars are merely offshoots of an all-encompassing global class war that we were all born into.

“Money makes the world go round” as many say, but it’s far from the only factor. For many people once their basic needs are met they often consider different pursuits such as pleasure, knowledge, or power.

The rule of power

Since currency is information, consider that money is the code that programs society. But what is the machine doing? Money communicates and coordinates power, but every civilization that uses money uses it for various purposes. Those purposes can be things like maintaining order, researching and building technologies, or fighting off competing civilizations. This is not merely done with money, but often with hard violence.

Anarchists correctly point out that governments are inherently violent entities. This is because every government is a formalization of a very real and harsh power structure. This power structure effectively operates as a protection racket, requiring some of your wealth or labor in exchange for keeping competitive systems at bay. Every idealist hopes that we can live without the need for brutal and violent governments, if any at all. The challenge is that any person or group powerful enough to compete with other states is nearly already one themselves.

Rulers offer people a choice, exist within the established order or at least don’t interfere with it. Those choosing to negotiate with the existing order are reformers and those who actively seek it’s demise are radicals.

Reformers will always have to make compromises with the society as it is. They generally have a great deal to lose if the game changes too much. A good reformer will work to make the system more flexible and robust. All reforms come at a real price however, they cost those in power making serious concessions potentially at the expense of their own station. This means that whatever power spent, they are almost always insufficient to address the primary grievances that drive them.

This is why every society will have a significant amount of varied radicals who focus on a kaleidoscope of interests. Radicals that are isolated and alone are fruitless. Societies over time have come up with many ways to either placate or contain radicals of all persuasions. Radicals can never and never will be united on consensus. Everyone can be fractured along lines of culture, religion, social class, among other things. This doesn’t mean things can’t change however, the moment radicals start to unite along widely shared red lines, they have a real chance to upset the balance of power.

A healthy society actually needs radicals. Every society will gradually assimilate reformers into being wholly ineffectual. In an advanced state, there will be no reformers at all, merely puppets instead. Eventually things become so apparent that radicals are able to build coalitions that together represent enough power to either fundamentally change the hierarchy. This is one of the reasons it’s nearly impossible for societies to merely “turn back time” and go back to how things were, the conditions have been changed entirely.

When a large coalition of radicals is in danger of truly flipping the table, society has a stabilizing mechanism: an open bid for reformers. It’s in the interests of those in power to provide the smallest concession that dismantles the coalition. This is why radicals have no use for a complicated consensus, it can be fractured far too easily. Only when an overwhelming amount of people get together and decide which few changes are non-negotiable is when a fruitful coalition can form. That said, it is much easier said than done.

Power corrupts, absolutely

There have been many times throughout history where one despotic order was replaced with another one that was every bit as cruel. This is because as people accrue power, be it through influence, currency, or force it begets a terrible cost on one’s soul. The desire to rule over others to achieve one’s goals is a very powerful temptation.

Very often ‘victory’ can come at too high a toll. When the price of more change is more power, power often comes at the cost of real priorities. This creates a horrific spiral of needless destruction. Surely none of us want that right? How can we avoid the corruption of power while still advancing peace, liberty and prosperity?

Is it even possible at all?

Becoming incorruptible

Becoming a saint is certainly no small task. Thankfully, you don’t need to succeed to make a meaningful impact. While it’s impossible to get by with no power, your goal is to fundamentally maximize your efficiency with power. Being able to do more with less direct power gives you phenomenal options. By reducing your reliance on corrupt or tyrannical systems you will gradually become less beholden to their machinations. Eventually, you could get to the point where you’re able to support others to act in better ways. The less power you need yourself, the more you can share with others. Power efficiency isn’t a zero-sum game. Often helping others will significantly help you as well. This inevitably helps you form positive and healthy relations with others.

Setting small tangible goals and working towards them can help you better understand your limits and faults. The only way to turn down the allure of vast power is to come to terms with what is ’enough’ for you. Coming clean to yourself about what your real goals can help you understand what you are, and are not willing to do to achieve them. Once enough people work towards making incremental changes to shift away from systems working against us, and make small movements towards better areas, we will all benefit in innumerable ways.

Team up

If not already, you are now on Team Humanity. Your goal is to find ways to support others or otherwise decentralize power away from corrupt systems and people. Almost always you don’t need to take anything or anyone head on, instead focus your energy on building people up and other productive outlets like making things. Learning, Creating and Sharing are the three pillars of the decentralized revolution. Instead of working to rally behind another despot in the waiting, you can help everyone get to a point where tyrants have no power at all.

Teaching others, providing for their needs, or comforting them is what will truly make an impact. It sounds too good to be true, but every ruler needs an army. Odds are you don’t have a bigger army, so your only hope is that people together have the means and motivation to resist abuse of power. The more powerful the people are in every way, the less power individuals can accrue over others. This applies to all aspects of life; necessities like food and water, tools like technology and machines, as well as social needs like belonging and companionship. Team humanity needs to be where the cool and happy people are.

Anything that you can do to provide for yourself and others is vitally important, but stop short of working to gain power over others. Leadership is about setting an example and proving that things truly can be different. No state or laws can withstand the collective might of the people. You don’t need to be on the same page as them to trust them to act in their own interests, which is why leveling the playing field helps reduce defectors.

Be the change you want to see

With the powerful tools at our disposal today, we have not just the opportunity but the obligation to try to use them for the most noble uses we can muster. The device you’re reading this on is much more powerful than the systems that put a flag on the moon. Don’t underestimate what a couple of creative individuals can achieve if they truly dare to imagine a better future. Don’t give up on people, we all have our flaws and have made many mistakes. Take the time to reflect and collect yourself before engaging in petty fights. There is so much more to others than you think. The only thing worth fighting for is genuine love for yourself and others. Genuine self-respect is the bedrock to building a solid foundation of compassion and genuine joy with others.

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DDoS Attack on the Mind (with Operation Uplift)

Tue, 09 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Introducing the Operation Uplift Community Watch on Rounding The Earth

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The Protocol Wars are Here

Mon, 08 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Protocol Wars

Battle lines are being drawn. The stakes could never be higher, the very future of how we all interact online is in our hands. It was so simple when everyone was silo’d onto a few corporate controlled platforms. Now, there are new platforms that aren’t merely controlled by a single entity, they are interoperable with each other, meaning that each system is composed of compatible units.

Will one system entirely dominate the others? Will “super-nodes” grow to dominate the entire ecosystem, leaving us with big tech tyrants yet again? How will you ensure that communications networks aren’t used as tools to shape the discussion, rather than support it?

Awaiting the peer-to-peer utopia

Currently, we’re not quite able to jump straight to a private, secure and free-as-in-freedom peer to peer network. There are a variety of challenges in attempting to create a pure peer-to-peer ecosystem that get in the way. A peer-to-peer ecosystem that relies on participants using locked-down and controlled smartphones has limited usefulness. On the other hand, peer-to-peer file-sharing networks have maintained their robust existence as they are build on top of powerful machines with lots of bandwidth and storage.

We can’t escape the fact that hardware is a critically important part of the technological landscape. People’s own technical skill and the capabilities of their hardware have a profound impact on what possibilities can emerge. There are real trade-offs when trying to move away from a client-server model. This is because servers are useful and efficient. Different participants may want more or less resources assigned to particular tasks, and using specialized hardware for the task goes a long way.

Principle: Hardware matters

It is easy to underestimate the underlying structure of our digital world.

There are also privacy risks when it comes to peer-to-peer connections. Some protocols still will require a server to set up connections between peers, and unless you’re using an anonymization network like Tor or I2P you’re divulging information about you to other peers. This is why there is still a long way to go before truly peer-to-peer systems will be used as the standard.

The Server to Server paradigm.

This doesn’t mean we can’t meaningfully decentralize. It’s possible for people to run servers for themselves as well as others. The people using them gain most of the advantages of centralized systems, like being able to connect from thin-clients like smartphones.

Distributed Fediverse Instances Source

You can then add real interoperability by using an open protocol to allow the servers to act as servers for each other. With a Server-to-Server layer, these systems have the advantage of being parts of a larger whole. Often these systems are called federated because they work as networks of communities.

This allows new protocols and systems to scale as well as the Internet itself. Having a server-to-server mechanism allows for an incredible amount of flexibility. Maybe some servers respond to all the others, maybe some of them only respond to ones they know. Everyone could eventually be situated with their own preferences without impacting others, all while still having an interoperable means of connecting.

Bridges

Once there is an open server-to-server protocol in place, it’s easy for different systems to be bridged to each other. Either systems can adopt the same server-to-server protocol (federation) or they can translate from one protocol to another (bridging).

Bridges have been used on matrix to allow people to control all their chat applications from a single account. Any open protocol can be bridged to bring people together.It’s a powerful technique that means that no single protocol has to dominate, instead they can cooperate.

Trade-offs

There are large differences to using different ecosystems. People may prefer something that could be decentralized but is still quite controlled like Blue Sky, or they may want to build custom software to only use protocols in deliberate ways. It’s a wide spectrum, and some choices have bigger impacts than others.
Things worth considering are:

Is the protocol open and allows permissionless participation?
Does the protocol allow you to store information on your own machine, or one under your control?
Is the software free from unwanted or harmful dependencies?

Broadcast systems

If you’re trying to get information out into the world, privacy may not be the highest priority. You’ll still want to be secure, you won’t want to be credibly impersonated, but you may not need perfect anonymity or to encrypt messages. A simple static website suits this purpose, but so does a profile on a well-run and popular social media service.

Fediverse

The fediverse has the potential to be a truly meritocratic digital town square.
There are many community-run or self-hosted servers that operate without algorithmic manipulation or ads. Each user either runs or joins an instance that will host their content as it’s shared with others.

Get started: https://jointhefedi.com/
Popular Servers: Soapbox or Mastodon and many more..

Nostr

Nostr is a simple protocol with lots of new clients and features being built. It replaces the concept of a “home server” with many inter-changable relays. The primary advantage of this is that it prevents server administrators from being able to block people on behalf of other users. As long as two nostr users share a relay they are able to communicate. Some nostr communities have setup paid relays.

Get started: https://nostr.com/get-started
Project: https://nostr.com/
Popular Client: https://iris.to
Popular Relay Software: nostream

Private Systems

When having private communications with friends/family or even co-workers it’s great to have systems away from prying eyes. It’s helpful to have a free and open protocol that people can communicate with you privately, that doesn’t rely on sharing infrastructure. End-to-end encyption helps protect users on different servers from prying-eyes.

Matrix

Matrix is an excellent chat protocol that supports large rooms as well as direct chats. As of now, video rooms are now in open beta.

Get started: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now
Project: https://matrix.org
Popular Client: https://element.io
Popular Server: Synapse

XMPP

XMPP is another federated chat protocol. It’s fast and efficient and has been used for quite some time now.

Get started: https://xmpp.org/getting-started
Project: https://xmpp.org
Popular Client: https://astral.ninja/
Popular Server: Prosody

Making your choice

It’s up to you! It’s worth trying different things out to see what works well for others. Some may just stick with signal for convenience, others may use delta chat because it can be used on top of e-mails people already have. Whatever you can do to take control of your own information and computing can go a long way.

Check out this conversation I’ve had with Mathew Crawford on Rounding the Earth about how to think about different approaches to keeping your information safe.

Whatever you do, it’s important to know why you’re choosing one system over another. It may be more effort, but a little change can go a long way when it comes to keeping your information out of the hands of adversaries. Once you have something that works well for you, it becomes easier to share those advantages with others.

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Conceptualizing Information Control

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Knowledge is power. Control over knowledge is immense power. This power isn’t merely used to advance sciences and create new technologies, instead it’s often used to take control of other people. Almost everyone these days seems to believe they’re surrounded by brainwashed masses. What if there really is something to that? Who, or what, is actually doing the brainwashing?

It is a mistake to assume that someone who is acting differently than you is always making those decisions from incorrect information. There are often times where different people will have wildly varying interpretations of the same information. Now, instead of using the same information, see how they react to subsets of the same information.

This doesn’t mean that everyone is always right, but rather that they can often be talking about different aspects of the same problem. This has been a substantial driver of the Culture Wars because different messaging is naturally going to resonate with different subsets of the population. To make things worse, problems and solutions are framed in terms of “What nails can we hit with this hammer?” before considering other tools.

This is what has made language a critical component in political competition. If we do not share goals, it is to my advantage that I ensure that you use my framing to understand the world around you. Words themselves become skirmishes over the broad ideas they can represent. Splitting into dialects, different factions sound increasingly incomprehensible to each other. Cooperation becomes challenging, compromise becomes impossible. Even worse, people are no longer able to negotiate boundaries. This all-but-ensures future conflict.

Motivated reasoning

As this process advances, and people start to perceive that they are in some kind of existential competition, Culture Wars escalate. Suddenly, groups are less interested in finding workable common-ground, but instead every action is part of a greater conquest. Groups are now no longer devoted to cooperating in wider society, but instead fracturing out territory to secure their interests.

There is a fair amount of evidence, that much of the present-day divisions have been manufactured since the 2008 bail-outs and Occupy Wall St protests. I’m sympathetic to this interpretation, but it’s important not to lose sight that these manufactured divisions have real, material consequences.

Hurt people hurt people

These consequences have, and if not addressed, will continue to escalate tensions. The biggest challenge is that people are not always likely to state their frustrations in the most constructive manner. Tragically, many will often aggressively take out those frustrations on those they can, rather than the actual causes of that frustration.

How many wounds have been caused by the Covid Crisis? How many real avenues have people had to even have their grievances acknowledged? Different people will have all kinds of unique and complicated scars from different challenges. It is no small task to merely bring clarity and understanding to what has happened, it’s an even greater one to conceptualize the long arc of it all.

What does this all have to do with information control?

Leveraging people’s unique perspective towards specific ends is how targeted advertising works. The technocracy has had the tools and understanding of how to manipulate large groups of people, each one at a time, for well over a decade, if not significantly longer. Many rush to point to smartphones as the culprit. In fact, their rise in prominence is very coincident with the rise of many of the Culture Wars. I’ll present a different interpretation: It’s not the smartphone, but what was in it.

There is nothing inherently mind-killing about a small, portable computer that uses a touch-screen interface. What truly forged the massive mind control apparatus was the things that came with it:

Real-time location tracking
24/7 audio and video surveillance capabilities
Corporate Social Media as Digital information Control Systems

Information Control Systems have been the cause of not only the Culture Wars, but many more problems as well. The smartphone era was what made these Information Control Systems go digital, but it was not the origin of information control.

Surveillance is rarely merely about curiosity, rather it’s about gathering information to leverage control over situations. Massive dragnet surveillance of the population is one of the greatest acts of Information Asymmetry in all of human history.

Information Asymmetry

I know you are, but what am I?

Spy craft of all kinds is highly reliant on information asymmetry. Being able to see even only marginally clearer through the fog of war is a massive advantage.
There are three ways to gain and maintain your advantage :

Become faster or more efficient at uncovering valuable information
Sabotage other efforts by undermining them directly
Selectively manipulate or destroy information not to your advantage

This is where surveillance, censorship, propaganda, and all kinds of devious activities come into play. By being able to monitor you, while keeping things secret from you, powerful entities are able to maintain an immense advantage over you.

By learning your emotional limits, it’s possible to learn how to manipulate you.
By learning your habits, it’s possible to plan around them.
By understanding who you are, it’s possible to target you specifically.

It’s impossible to comprehend the scope of what information about you is available for mechanized manipulation. On the other hand, it’s vastly simpler for someone with control of that data to use it for nefarious ends. This vastly enhances psychological manipulation efforts and puts each person at the mercy of forces they can’t fully understand.

It is the height of hubris to take your understanding of publicly available information to be the best understanding anyone can have. It is a guarantee that there are groups and lines of communication that you’re not aware of that have been more successful at gleaning a clear picture.

This is why the stereotype of “the lone conspiracy theorist” is such delicious fodder for conspirators. There may simply not be enough information available to truly present a coherent case, even when there is one. With full understanding of your conspiracy, you can selectively reveal information to undermine even the best possible explanation. Even worse, it possible to discredit true accusations with slander and deflection.

If an entity has a clear understanding of a situation or set of information that knowledge can be used to selectively manipulate disclosure.This is different than a merely incomplete picture that just happens to be lacking information. Without knowing the entire picture it can be very difficult to distinguish manipulated from incomplete information.

This is why limited hangouts are such a serious concern. While it’s possible that companies and institutions may be interested in true transparency, unless they’re willing to provide all the information as they have it, it’s still at best an incomplete picture. They may be obligated to omit information for legal reasons, or deliberately omit references to certain events to fundamentally alter people’s perception of the disclosure.

Many times, the best that people have is an incomplete picture. People can quickly fall into the trap of grasping the first seemingly-coherent explanation that fits the data they have, without realizing that they may be missing all kinds of crucial information. While this may sound like the worst case scenario, it is far better than falling prey to a manipulated understanding presented by an adversary.

Digital Information Control Systems

I routinely call any centralized information sharing platform an Information Control System. This is precisely because of the asymmetric information advantage given to those who run and operate the system over the people who participate in it. Rudimentary tools like “Trending” lists are such a minor fraction at what operators of these systems have at their disposal.

For example, one could learn all kinds of things about you if they merely had access to your credit card’s purchase history. Just like if I read through every post you’ve ever made online. Any tool that isn’t explicitly avoiding collecting data, is inherently vulnerable to divulging such information.

Surveillance is only half the story, manipulation is the other side of the coin. In many cases outright censorship is too crude. It’s well observed that the majority of people like to rely on whatever main feed the system provides for them, and will make hardly any attempt to deviate from it. This means that the main feed on any application is prime real estate for those who want to buy and sell your time and attention.

Outside of mere commodification, anyone who has a monopoly over a large number of people’s attention in this way has the capability to do great harm to others. This is the true danger of information control systems, this is what makes civilian targets ‘fair game’ in information war. You have likely heard that your mind is a battlefield, but what is the war over?

The prize for information control is nothing short than all-out dominance. Maintaining information control is an inherently aggressive stance. The people most interested in identifying where everyone spends all their attention, are the most likely to have nefarious motives for doing so.
So you have three major choices:

Opt-out, and ignore the information landscape entirely.

To the degree that you can, as there are always choices to be made.
Choose a side, and face the consequences.

By joining the ranks of a cultural titan you are at the mercy of it, and your newfound enemies.
Democratize the information landscape as much as possible.

Instead, work to mitigate the ability of those to control others.

Predictive Programming

I reject the common definition of predictive programming and present you with a different one:

Using indoctrination to get the public to accept and act out an impossible concept.

That’s it. No complicated whinging about karmic consequences or secret plans. The world is a stage, and predictive programming is all about teaching the public what role they need to play. What’s powerful about these impossible concepts, is that like any scam, there’s always more. Always another try, another attempt at converting your hard-earned resources and attention into their profit.

Transitioning to renewables

Fortunes have been made off of the delusion that it’s possible to transition the majority of human energy consumption to wind and solar energy. By leveraging the public’s ignorance of the true energy cost in running society, investors and consumers alike can be freely fleeced of resources in the name of making the impossible happen.

It’s akin to hooking up two motors to a battery, and demonstrating that your perpetual motion machine is a breakthrough that will revolutionize the energy industry. Sleek 3D rendered windmills and solar panels on bright grassy landscapes leave out the awkward details that get in the way of real-world application.

Pandemics

Long before the Covid Crisis people were presented with many examples of a hyper-lethal and hyper-contagious virus that would necessitate extreme measures. People grew to accept the idea that an indeterminable emergency would require all kinds of extraordinary measures without any real rational explanation.

I don’t believe it is possible for any contagion to meet these three conditions:

It must be sufficiently contagious, otherwise it wouldn’t be a problem
It must be sufficiently severe and untreatable, otherwise it would be dealt with easily
It must be successfully contained by measures taken during the Covid Crisis, otherwise there would be no point in trying in the first place.

A virus that meets two of those criteria would still a serious problem, but would not require the suspension of constitutional rights and massive wealth transfer orchestrated during the Covid Crisis.

AI Sentience

Currently, many people fall victim to many mass media depictions of machine minds capable of sentience. This is vastly detached from the current or even rationally projected state of machine learning. I’ll be the first to say that large AI models are very powerful and sophisticated tools, but they are not as magical as the hype would imply.

Machine learning models are essentially massive tables of numbers. Training the model involves modifying the numbers to fit the desired outcome. This results in a very useful table of numbers, but not a sentient one. Tragically, people are already anthropomorphizing these tools at the expense of real human interaction. I promise you, while large language models are quite interesting, they do not grow fond of you or even have a stake in your life.

Fearing them is also the opposite mistake, very often it’s not the tools themselves that are evil, but rather the ends that people aim to use them for. It is critical that you invest in yourself as a human being, rather than live in terror that machine minds are out to destroy humanity. The terrible truth is that human beings are all too capable of that themselves, and they should be held responsible regardless of the methods they employ.

Overcoming Information Control

Discretion

Privacy and Security are important. It’s more important than ever to use tools that aren’t proactively testifying against you. Software and hardware freedom are vitally important concepts these days that we should all do our part to promote.

Opposing the use of mass surveillance by the state and corporations is also of utmost importance. Privacy and anonymity need to be normalized, and the consequences of abusing people’s private information need to become more severe.

Humility

Don’t fool yourself into thinking you can or will know everything. Understand that you and everyone around you is only human and there are limits to your knowledge. Idolizing a specific person as the expert on everything, even on a singular topic, is often a surefire way to be misled. With a healthy amount of distrust, you can build an understanding that isn’t reliant on completely outsourcing your cognition to others. It’s important to be courageous enough to question, but humble enough to question yourself too.

Persistence

Personal memory units were banned six years before the crash, after someone found out that a few rogue Interplanetary Holy Tech officers were routinely editing consciousness data blocks in the cloud, modifying public opinion against IHT guidelines. There was an upheaval, media pundits had a field day, and the court hearing was transmitted to every citizen’s brain. In the end, the IHT officers pleaded guilty and were sent to the Genetic Recycle Lab. Shortly after, the AI Head of the IHT gave an address in which they talked about the need to tighten memory data security. Evidently, the best algorithms have been consulted with, and they concluded that personal units had to be turned in. I considered doing as I was told—but something inside me rebelled. Perhaps it was the fact that I have always felt like I was different, or maybe it was an encoded message from my grandfather, a famous artist and dissident who disappeared into the Genetic Recycle Lab a hundred and fifty years ago. I chose to follow my gut—and wiggled my way out of compliance.

Deprecating Free Will: A Future We Don’t Have to Accept

By Tessa Lena

You need to save information.

One of the primary goals of information control is suppressing information that can be used to support dissenting narratives. Taking notes, or preserving information, is a very simple and effective way to prevent that outcome. The more people can do do preserve information the further along we can be to truly leveling the playing field.

By extending your own and the public’s memory, you can safeguard yourself and others from mass manipulation. Nothing is new under the sun and old scams resurface with new sleek branding. Being able to point out the connections can make a critical difference at important times.

Cooperate

Do what you can to meaningfully communicate with others. Take the time to be patient with those with different perspectives. Even if you don’t end up agreeing, there is very often lots of useful information to glean. Where possible, do your best to connect with others to understand them on a deeper level. Working with others allows you to accomplish more than you could on your own. By cooperating you can uncover things that may be impossible alone.

Not only do you need to do this for yourself, but you should want to pass down critical information to future generations, rather than just mere material wealth. Communicating across generations is one of the most important ways to ensure that people don’t keep falling into the same all-too-familiar traps. A straight-forward way to do this is to publish your own information and attempt to make it as resilient as possible.

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Storing and Protecting Knowledge - Round Table with Mark Kulacz

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Mirrored from: https://rumble.com/v2iuqae-storing-and-protecting-knowledge-round-table-w-mark-kulacz-and-gabriel.html

Gabriel, Mark Kulacz, Liam Sturgess and Mathew Crawford discuss how to protect knowledge in an age of rampant censorship and manipulation.

Show links:

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The Coordinated Attack on Cyberspace

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

For tyrants and dissidents alike, the Covid Crisis was a defining moment in the history of censorship. Top-down information control leapt out of the shadows into an overt campaign of propaganda, suppression and manipulation. One of the defining aspects of the crisis is that it exemplified an arms race between those who want complete top-down control, and those who would dare to seek their own path.

Despite the best efforts of Big Tech corporations, governments and NGOs, people who took a stand against creeping totalitarianism were able to meet, organize, and share information. Tenuous alliances were formed, dissidents from all walks of life made new allies, forging bonds with people they wouldn’t have otherwise known.

From the Technocracy’s point of view: this is a colossal mistake that must be corrected. The dual nature of the Internet as a tool to track people, as well as allow them to share information; is starting to become untenable to the technocracy.

Of course, they could try shutting down the Internet, and starting something completely different. Instead of going for something so rash, we are currently witnessing a massive legislative push to grab immense power over people’s digital lives.

For now, the primary objectives are to take control of:

Ranking algorithms

We have all witnessed the incredible power of a majority of people getting their information from a small set of highly curated sources. Previously in the domain of corporations, the technocracy aims to put algorithms in control of either governments, or public-private partnerships.

Personal communications

Without the hindrance of a state and corporate backed censorship board, people can speak freely with each other if they choose. People’s own personal networks are a viable channel for dissent. Unable to leverage interpersonal trust, the technocracy has to nudge people to self-censor to their closest contacts.

Anonymity

The ability for people to submit information to the public record without retaliation only really works in the people’s favour. Requiring some form of Digital ID to use services or access information is a vital requirement to taking control of cyberspace.

Information

“Cybersecurity” is far more broad than merely protecting against computer viruses and data breaches. The censorship industrial complex treats counter-narratives as security concerns.

The Legislation

UN Cybercrime Treaty

Link: https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/cybercrime/ad_hoc_committee/home

Ad Hoc Committee to Elaborate a Comprehensive International Convention on Countering the Use of Information and Communications Technologies for Criminal Purposes

That’s quite a mouthful, isn’t it? The EFF has a helpful breakdown. The cybercrime treaty includes:

Restrictions on Free speech
Expanded surveillance
Sharing your information with other governments
Compelled assistance in reducing security

Five ways the draft U.N. Cybercrime Treaty undermines your rights

United States: Restrict Act

Link: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686

Erroneously known as the “Tiktok ban” the restrict act has been called the “Patriot Act 2.0”. It proposes steep penalties and harsh sanctions on anyone using, or supporting, digital infrastructure deemed a threat to national security.

The RESTRICT Act Is a Threat to Digital Freedom

Europe: Chat Control

Link: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/docs_autres_institutions/commission_europeenne/com/2020/0568/COM_COM(2020)0568_EN.pdf

The game-changer in the ChatControl proposal is client-side scanning, entirely by-passing end-to-end encryption. The stated objective is to

#StopScanningMe: How to actually protect children online

Canada

C-11

Link: https://www.parl.ca/LegisInfo/en/bill/44-1/c-11

In the name of preserving Canadian content, C-11 aims to give more control to the CRTC. This is a broad overview of Canadian internet regulations. A highly contested part of the legislation is regulations on user content.

What Is Canada’s Dystopian “Online Streaming Act”?

C-26

Link: https://www.parl.ca/LegisInfo/en/bill/44-1/c-26

A great deal of commentary of C-26 includes the phrase cybersecurity is national security. This bill is Canada’s revamp of cybersecurity legislation.

Learn more: https://fournier.substack.com/p/digital-surveillance-in-canada-2023

The truth is that this is a coordinated campaign that goes beyond even the technological impacts. One of the biggest challenges is that governments are stepping in to resolve problems created by corporate digital systems. While in some cases it may seem necessary, these bills take a sledgehammer to civil rights in the name of fighting real problems.

It is not enough to merely disengage and try to adapt to these excesses. People must work together to take control of their own computing, then enforce our natural rights.The best way to truly oppose this wave of totalitarianism is to take on the responsibility yourself of making changes in your life.

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The Twitter and Substack Divorce

Sat, 08 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When it comes to Twitter, Substack was on borrowed time. Musk has shown anti-competitive behavior in the past. In response to Substack announcing their notes feature, it appears as though Musk has sanctioned Substack in it’s entirety. I appreciate that Substack has been a valuable platform for many who spoke out during the Covid Crisis. They provide a quick way of starting a newsletter and a valuable feature of allowing cross-pollination between communities through social features.

Social Media: Learning the right lessons

Understanding information control

At the end of the day, Substack is still a Service as a Software Substitute. Like many other entities, the convenience of getting started quickly or seamlessly is exchanged for a loss in freedom. Many rush to accuse Musk of “building walls” around his platform, but is Substack really much different?

Substack made a deliberate decision to allow embedded twitter tweets and youtube videos, but hasn’t included various competitors to those platforms. Both twitter and Youtube have centralized and decentralized competitors that could have also been included, yet there is no sign of embedded PeerTube or even Rumble videos any time soon.

Twitter has retaliated against Substack the same way it attacked Mastodon, by labeling links to the platform as dangerous. This is and was a blatant case of profit-driven disinformation, yet neither Musk nor Twitter will face any sanctions for watering down the concept of such warnings. It’s an act of deliberately yelling “Fire!” in your theater when a specific performer goes onstage.

Substack under attack?

The other day, the ADL published a list of substacks that included Steve Kirsch and Robert Malone among what they consider the worst of the worst. Arguing that Substack has too lax moderation policies. Odds are, you could zero in on the most controversial members of any big platform and would find similarly deviant participants. What’s interesting to note is the lumping in of the most visible critics of how the Covid Crisis was mismanaged. In time, we will see how Substack responds to these accusations moving forward.

To the degree the platform has allowed authentic investigation into questions that the powerful don’t want investigated, every platform is under attack. It does not necessarily be an all-or-nothing affair, it could be limited to a specific author, or specific post that gets too much attention. No matter what, Substack is going to have a difficult task of balancing the needs of it’s writers against the pressures put against it.

Preserving the good

Substack is an excellent community. It’s one of the many places I’ve recently encountered a wealth of free-thinkers that have deliberately put themselves out to challenge the madness during the Covid Crisis. For many, it’s been a great place to encounter other people to express frustration about lockdowns, mandates, and consequences of bad policies when people’s friends, representatives, or even relatives wouldn’t hear it.

Many have interpreted the partial removal of mandates as the end of the push for top-down tyranny. Unfortunately this is far from the case, if anything very dangerous precedents have been set without hardly any correction. I would encourage any fellow authors, especially those who wrote during the early days to get involved in documenting it on the Campfire Wiki

There is a lot of excellent and valuable pertinent information exclusively on Substack. I would hope that all of these authors have made sure they have at least a local copy of their work instead of exclusively relying on Substack to keep it online. At minimum, I’d recommend archiving your favorite articles with something like archive.is to be preserved long term.

Guerrilla publishing

When it comes to Substack authors specifically being censored by twitter, many of them are lucky to have their content also be mirrored by Truth Talk. Oddly enough I am one such author lucky enough to have them mirroring my writing

In addition to me, others are also mirrored.

I greatly appreciate being included, and this is a model that would scale quite well. If authors were interested, volunteers could create new “hubs” to mirror excellent content across the Internet and bypass the basic link blacklisting censorship. This has the advantage of disarming the programmed response by people who will disregard content if it’s from “tainted” sources. You’ll note this is why the establishment has changed gears to emphasizing that people should only listen to ‘approved’ sources.

A better way

That’s really only part of the battle, because ideally you want your information to be easily accessible. Mirroring your content to a backup blog (or documents on your own machine) can go a long way. No matter what, you don’t want to put all your writing/research/work at the mercy of a single platform you don’t control.

No matter what your process is, consider keeping your writing on your own hardware & software. This means either your own word processor or notes application, or something more sophisticated. This will make it easier to publish and migrate to a variety of other formats. It is fortuitous that I have recently written a guide on getting started on self-publishing yourself with static site generators.

The best website for a single person

Add your voice to the free and open web

If you’re interested in a more open and decentralized alternative, publishing your own website goes a long way. Static site generators make it easy, but unfortunately you may miss the social aspect. If more and more people migrated to the fediverse, much of the community aspect could be integrated without the same top-down control of centralized social media. If you’re interested in a fediverse-native blogging platform there is write freely

To reiterate, please make sure your work isn’t at the mercy of any single platform. We have seen that the technocracy is eager to constrain the people’s access to information, and to wield the devastating weapon of information control. Reach is a sincere challenge, we can all make our own content resilient, but ultimately people need to have an active desire to seek out alternative voices.

This is why the first operation, Chorus emphasizes the importance of freedom of speech and expression. Those of us with any ability to get the word out do have a responsibility to boost and promote independent authentic voices. This is a tremendous task, there is much that needs to be said and little room to get through the few avenues of getting information to the public.

If you recognize that challenge, you’ll understand my excitement for what we can do to truly democratize information dissemination. Everyone can take action in their own lives to redirect their attention away from platforms and services intended to monopolize their access to information.

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Rounding The Earth Interview

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Rounding The Earth

Gabriel of Libre Solutions Network joins Mathew Crawford and Liam Sturgess to introduce the RTE community to an ever-growing world of alternative platforms for social media, communication and more.

Watch on Rumble Show notes on Rounding The Earth

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The best website for a single person

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Every single person should have their own website. I don’t just mean that we should all rush out to buy a fancy firstname.com domain. Instead, that it would benefit us all, if more people would take an active role in building the free and open web.

As I wrote in Reclaiming Territory in Cyberspace, there are three primary resources in cyberspace:

Storage
Computing Power
Bandwidth

We are all lucky, that websites are not at all demanding when it comes to these resources. The biggest concern is storage, with bandwidth being the next most important factor. You need the storage to hold all the files in your website, and the bandwidth to reach your audience. I believe there are many conditions today, that if we were willing, could enable us to truly take the web out of the hands of governments and corporations. Does this sound too good to be true? Allow me to make my case.

Understanding static websites

A static website is one that’s merely a collection of properly formatted files. These files will include the HTML, JavaScript and CSS (the skeleton of the website), as well as any other multimedia content like images and video.

Static websites can be quite simple or support a wide range of multimedia. Either way, it’s best to think of a static website as a pamphlet or poster that you can easily update. Depending on your ideal audience, it can be better to work with a text and links only but informative website, or include beautiful images, video or animations. This will all depend primarily on where you intend to store the website (in the cloud, or on your machine?) and how much bandwidth you and your audience have access to.

While I am generally a critic of leveraging cloud infrastructure, static sites are one of the major exceptions. Since a static website is like a poster, hosting it on the cloud is akin to putting it up on a commercial, but prominent bulletin board. An underappreciated feature of static websites is that they are inherently unhackable. Like a poster, it can be taken down or defaced, but you’re never going to suffer a data breach or have it infect your systems.

Static Site Generators

What makes static websites more accessible than ever is static site generators, these generators are designed to allow people to ignore the nitty-gritty aspect of web design, and just get to writing content. What really makes static site generators excellent is that they make the job of maintaining a large and complicated website relatively simple for a single person.

The basic process of using any static site generator to build your website is like this:

Install whichever generator you choose
Run the generator to build a new project folder
Browse the Generator’s themes gallery, and import whichever theme suits you
Use whatever editor(s) you like to modify, copy and create files into where they need to be
Run the generator command to view changes in real time

Pages are usually written in markdown

Hugo

Site: https://gohugo.io/
Themes: https://themes.gohugo.io/
Documentation: https://gohugo.io/documentation/

Jekyll

Site: https://jekyllrb.com/
Themes: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/themes/
Documentation: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/

Zola

Site: https://www.getzola.org/
Themes: https://www.getzola.org/themes/
Documentation: https://www.getzola.org/documentation/

Hexo

Site: https://hexo.io/
Themes: https://hexo.io/themes/
Documentation: https://hexo.io/docs/

Astro

Site: https://astro.build/
Themes: https://astro.build/themes
Documentation: https://docs.astro.build/en/tutorial/0-introduction/

Enhancement: Themes

Themes are important, they do a lot of really heavy lifting in the end-result of the generated site. Themes will outline what goes in the headers, footers, sidebars and the overall look of the site. Themes will also have control over some of the finer details like social media previews and RSS integration.

This is what’s motivated me to build my two Hugo themes Freedom and Valor from the ground up. They are very much a work in progress, but I appreciate having a fine degree of control. Odds are if you have very specific requirements, modifying an existing theme can also work for you.

Enhancement: Widgets

Static sites are nice, but you want MORE. If you want to add dynamic features like comments or real-time integrations, overhauling the theme can be overkill. Often you can create shortcodes, that will give you the ability to include custom html/css/javascript that will work like a new widget with enhanced functionality.

Some theme generators will also give you the ability to override parts of the theme. For example, if you want to add icons to the navigation menu, you could copy the existing one into the designated overrides folder and add your icons there.

Enhancement: Version control

Ouch! You’ve gotten hit by a ransomware attack. All your files have been encrypted by a virus, and can’t be recovered unless you hand the hackers some Monero. Thankfully, you’ve been using a self-hosted version control system like Gitea. So you can simply pull down the old version of the website and upload it again. Version control allows you to have a permanent record of changes made over time.

Teams

Online version control is also very useful for collaboration. Instead of maintaining the static website alone, you can share access to the repository with others. Many online source control providers will often also include integrated hosting.

Hosting

Static websites are portable by nature. As long as the site structure is sound (use relative links) you can often put mirrors in multiple locations. This is an excellent way to maintain a resilient presence, instead of relying on a single point of failure. Because static websites are often quite simple and small, multiple uploads of the same content aren’t always so arduous.

Online Source Control:

Want to get started quickly? Github Pages has an excellent overview on how to use Git to push your static site to a repository and get running immediately.

You can also use:

Own your own domain

When you buy your domain, which is your web address online, (e.g. https://libresolutions.network) you’re going to want to own the domain yourself. This means that you purchase your domain directly from a domain registrar. For an often modest yearly fee, you can secure a name on the regular internet. It’s important to have control over the dns records yourself, in case you feel the need to migrate or add additional services.

Managed hosting

Often, domain registrars themselves will offer some form of managed hosting. This means some tool like cPanel will be available to you to simply upload the files to the site directly.

DIY Hosting

You can always run your own web server, although it will require more technical knowledge. Going DIY allows you to reduce as many intermediaries as possible.

Getting on the Dark Web

Tools of the Technocracy: #9 Internet Shutdowns

Information control is the root of modern tyranny.

For those concerned about the increase in draconian control over the Internet, it can be helpful to mirror their content to one or many darknets, such as Tor or I2P. Even as a regular web user, I would highly recommend at least having the knowledge of how to visit websites on the darknet, for we do not know what kind of measures will be used in future crises.

Sneakernet

With a static website, you don’t have to worry about complicated things like databases and user accounts. This means you have the advantage of being able to mirror the entire content onto a physical, portable format that can be distributed in person. When paired with version control, it can become a very efficient means of securely distributing large amounts of critical data.

Who knows? Maybe we can start supporting independent websites by purchasing archives in a physical format!

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The Collapse of the Intangible

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve reflected on how the rapid pace of change has warped my perspective relative to those significantly older than me. Becoming curious how upcoming changes and trends will leave me out of step with new experiences.

Video: Yayoi Kusama Infinity Mirrors

Advanced machine learning models have allowed people to hold a mirror up to the vastness of internet data. This is not just any mirror, but an infinity mirror. This phenomenal infinity mirror transforms a mere slice of the human experience into a kaleidoscope of infinite possibilities. It’s the ultimate creative force multiplier. This unleashing of creative force will inevitably be used to spread both joy and pain in incalculable ways. The game is changing.

All intangible value is heading to zero

What does this really mean? All kinds of media (articles, photos, videos, etc.) will be entirely fungible. With the assistance of automated text generation tools, people have rushed to flood existing niches of creativity. As these tools improve, more and more complex media will be often little more than a mere thought away.

As copyright holders struggled to contain digital distribution, they’re no match for automated regeneration of personalized derivatives. Any remix or rehash of old ideas is within the grasp of anyone with access to tools trained on them. Imitations, parody, outright frauds are all inevitably going to saturate any and every available context.

This isn’t limited to content, impersonation is well within reach. You may receive a call from a familiar voice, only for it to be a scammer impersonating your relative. Video and voice deepfakes aren’t necessarily new, but it’s clear these things are going to be more within reach over time. This can have the effect of eroding trust in nearly any digital context. With very few (if any) ways to demonstrate authenticity, it will be impossible to validate frauds from genuine actors. Online spaces that were once giant profit-earning engines will dwindle into a mere ghost of the past.

Desperate Measures

Governments, corporations and all the powers of the world will rush to keep this all under their control. The last thing they need is individuals having the power to rapidly and efficiently communicate ideas in a variety of ways. While people may be presently separated by differing experiences or ways of thinking, these tools have the ability to help people effectively translate cultural messages.

Imagine a trivial scenario. An activist finds a fantastic article that explains a vital concept in a useful way. They want to share with others, but can’t quite express the idea for those coming from a different perspective. Now they have the power to use automated tools that may better understand the other’s context.

All kinds of intangible differences between people evaporating would cause significant troubles for those who profit off those distinctions. Suddenly, almost anyone can be brought up to speed, regardless of ideology.

Actions taken to restrict or control machine learning algorithms aren’t likely to succeed. Without successfully robbing people of all general-purpose computing, there will always be mechanisms to circumvent interference. Amusingly enough, we’re already witnessing them being redistributed to inexpensive machines. Like Prometheus gifting fire to mankind, it would seem that the very technology itself is prone to democratization.

The hard limit: Information

No matter how powerful these tools become, they have one unmovable obstacle; they can’t create information. Representing existing information in other ways is possible, but these tools can’t act on information that isn’t there.

For example, generating articles or other short written content is quite trivial. With the ability to generate limitless words, you’re presented with a challenge: What to say?

Do you continue banging the same drum in a multitude of different ways?

There’s value in that. It’s a highly effective way to communicate fundamental concepts to different people.

Will you strive on your own to bring something genuinely unique, at your own pace?

The adventurer

If you’re faced with the potentiality of people creating countless imitations of your original ideas, do you abandon your quest? Shut down and sit in the cave watching the shadows? Or do you leave the endless noise and forge a new path?

It’s important not to fear the power of limitless creation. For those who wish to discover and create, it is an opportunity to be the very root of countless experiences. This is the best guarantee anyone can have that their accomplishments and insights will truly leave a mark on history.

With all the tools of at your disposal, it’s critical to focus on what should be said rather than merely what can be said. Understand that you’ll have no significant advantage following the crowd that wants to endlessly regenerate new iterations of popular or alluring experiences. Regardless of if you embrace media generation tools, or shun them entirely, steer your mind on how you can share joy, love and hope.

Rebuilding balance

Almost everyone today has reservations about the drastic impact the Internet has had as it’s taken over our lives. The saturation of the intangible gives us an opportunity to leave the immaterial to be immaterial. Leave the free and open web to become a space for sharing and learning from information, but not allowing it to become a parasocial replacement for living.

It seems that we are at the beginning of an immense fracturing of our way of life. While the intangible creations will continue to have dwindling value over time, becoming overly invested in them is a path to self-destruction. This may very-well be the “last call” to those who would like to escape the machinations that dominate the minds of the people.

To truly be ahead of the game, one needs to wholeheartedly embrace genuine tangible interactions with other people. While the Internet can be a fantastic and wondrous place, we should live for each other and not the machine. It’s never a bad time to lend someone some assistance, build something new, or even do something active.

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Tools of the Technocracy: #11 Social Credit

Sat, 04 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I will remind you of the opening for this series:

In the past, tyrants and dictators have had a hard limit on how far they could push people. From either logistical difficulties, fear of resistance, or liberation from other nations; these hard limits have been getting softer and softer as technology advances. Recent history has shown an ever-increasing centralization of power into a smaller and smaller set of control structures.

…

The tyrants of the world are winning a massive arms race against the rest of humanity. We must not merely avoid these systems, rather every one of us is responsible for preventing them from being weaponized against the people.

The covid crisis was a preemptive strike¹ against those who would consider challenging perpetual top-down control. Using unjustified and arbitrary measures to put small enterprises out of business,² putting many workers out of work. Sabotaging the education of millions of children.³ Separating families, and forcing the elderly to die alone.⁴ Deploying a barrage of fear and propaganda that many have hardly recovered from. The total human cost is incalculable, but the oligarchs made trillions.⁵

All that, was just in 2020.

Odds are, if you’re reading this you’re very well aware of this. The problem is you have to understand the majority of people hardly understand it. This preemptive strike against the public was deliberate and calculated, the lack of serious mainstream accounting is all the proof anyone needs.⁶ The legacy media is (at the time of writing) complicit in justifying the measures and downplaying the harms. Upper-middle class workers in the so-called ’laptop class’ were effectively bribed with generous work from home policies. While they had the time to investigate the wider issues around them, many chose not to “rock the boat”.

“Not my problem”

Why don’t people care? Anyone aware of this can just look around and see incredible amounts of devastation everywhere they look. Surely everyone can’t be so blatantly ignorant? It’s true that many may genuinely struggle to make the connection, even if they can see it, but that doesn’t quite explain the overwhelming wave of apathy that meets these issues. People are vastly misinformed about their place in the world, and the diffusion of responsibility is pure paralysis for those who aren’t prepared to take responsibility.

What does all this have to do with social credit systems?

A gentle introduction to the human dominance hierarchy

Tyranny and abuse weren’t invented in 2020. Much of what has happened, has already happened in similar ways or all kinds of variations. For as long as there have been humans, you can count on some of them to form groups to seize control over resources, territory, and other people. Everything from your local social group, to geopolitical alliances between nations is encompassed in this.

There have been precious few exceptions and limitations. Historically, though a lot of blood, sweat and tears people were able to set limits on the abuses powers could get away with. Back in 13th century, through the Magna Carta; people managed to codify that even the king, the ruler and owner of everything, needed to have limits.⁷

Whenever Legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.

John Locke

This is because at even the simplest level, a gang requires some degree of chosen (or coerced) participation. The decision-makers form a chain of compliance that must remain unbroken for orders to reach all the way to the lowest levels. This means that the “game” participants play has to account for every level of the system. As groups get larger, from villages and towns to globe-spanning empires, the ‘game’ of raw domination would take on more abstractions and aspects of soft-power. Every aspect of human life is downstream of our collective behavior in this dominance hierarchy.

Programmable currency

What is it good for?

For example, some countries may emphasize great importance in education to develop competitive technologies to gain wealth. Others may merely use their military might to seize resources from other regions. The impacts of those differences will reverberate down to even the humble carpenter. Regardless if the country is a top-down command economy, or an entirely free market, the carpenter will find success or failure based on how compatible his products are with the power structure. In one he may have more success and status making tools, in the other he may do better making weapons.

This all sounds rather bleak. Wouldn’t it be better if we had a good hierarchy, or none at all?

The story of “I am good”

People can be sold a lie that’s merely a convenient pretext to participate in conquest or to mistreat others within society. Beyond lies, lots of true information can be leveraged in support of the dominant order. One can easily argue that opponents of it are misfits, freaks, or even deplorables, and that the system’s foreign enemies really aren’t any better.

In fact, in many circumstances their own self-preservation instincts will fight their better senses to conform. Just as a baby knows it will die when unloved⁸, every cell in your body understands what standing against the dominance hierarchy means. This places an overwhelming amount of stress on anyone who consciously exists outside or against it. For the story of “I am good” to take hold of society, it doesn’t need to be particularly robust, it hinges on people’s natural impulses.

As an individual, it can be difficult to understand how your actions can cause risk or harm to others. I am highly suspicious that the Social Justice movement was weaponized to get people to reflexively defend their position within the hierarchy. “Check your privilege” was not only a rhetorical weapon used to silence others, but backs people into a corner of system justification.⁹

This isn’t to say a good and fair dominance hierarchy can’t exist. It’s just that it has to overcome the challenges posed by competing hierarchies that compete on raw force and efficiency. There are good people constantly working to level the playing field or address problems, we know meaningful change is possible. It just does require difficult things like compromise and consensus.

Redefining "High Places"

Lets re-balance power from the bottom-up

Things can be hard for those who recognize what’s gone wrong and want to fix it.

Radicals vs Reformers

The only true revolution is the replacement of an existing dominance hierarchy with a different one. This is what radicals want, while reformers simply want to modify the structure of the existing one.

Reformers want to make the dominance hierarchy more fair or efficient, ideally with sane and humane goals. They recognize the benefits of preserving what’s functional within the existing structures. Even the most effective reformers will struggle against various inflexibilities of the system refusing to bend.

Anatomy of a psyop

Cognitive warfare in action

Radicals may or may not also want those things, but more principally want the dominance hierarchy reorganized. For some games like monarchy, replacing the king could result in a dramatic shift. Radicals recognize that those with status and resources within the hierarchy are squandering them, and that they should be used in a different way. Radicals often struggle to build meaningful coalitions to support overthrowing the existing dominance hierarchy.

In the context of many activist movements, among those who agree on many issues, the dividing line will be between radicals and reformers. The radicals will accuse the reformers of being propped-up by the existing power-structure. Then the reformers will retort that the radicals are sabotaging meaningful change with their resentment, arguing that keeping the power structure in place is a fair trade for meaningful change.

One of the stronger adaptations a dominance hierarchy can have is flexibility. A rigid system is too vulnerable to being outright overthrown by radicals. Instead of single-handedly orchestrating your machinations, it can be quite effective to open bid those actions to those you will reward handsomely. This is an excellent tactic to prevent defectors, because those interested in their own self-advancement will align themselves to your goals. Suddenly your vast conspiracy to dominate others is working as a decentralized network with plausible deniability, with the added bonus of components being entirely replaceable.

What fuels a social credit system is to reduce one’s participation in society to currency. Many would argue we’re already there, but the existence of public goods, like a free and open internet can go a long way to level the playing field. Carbon allowances, CBDC’s, energy rationing, smart contracts are all things that can be used interchangeably to place restrictions on individuals for their conduct. What this changes is that room for those who don’t culturally, intellectually, or morally conform to society is all but eliminated. Suddenly, all of humanity is reduced to mere cogs in the machine for some ‘greater purpose’.

Maybe you’ve got a ‘greater purpose’ in mind for such a system. I can promise you that it’s pure madness. The very imposition of such tools for total top-down control themselves are incompatible with fundamental morality. For example, we have seen an incredible rise in censorship, yet hate remains and people aren’t noticeably any nicer online. I am highly skeptical that this would improve in different hands. Merely replacing one tyrant for another isn’t the answer here.

The Rules for Rulers - CGP Grey

The game of power

A social credit system is an implementation of the human dominance hierarchy. The system functions to incentivize individuals to conform to the decision-maker’s goals. Today, because people are rightly concerned with the dreams of the technocrats they remain arrogantly ignorant of the existing mechanisms of social control. Social conventions, institutions, and financial incentives are all downstream of the human dominance hierarchy. Instead of running through a digital ID and connected to a smart-contract fueled grid, it runs on people.

People decide who is high status and low status. Every act, either reaffirms or denigrates the dominance hierarchy and has associated consequences. Money is merely currency. People’s entire lives are ruled by how they are treated by those around them. There are many non-financial actions that have immense impact on a person’s overall well-being. Reducing the sum-total effects of human social interactions to financial transactions is to explore a planet through a keyhole.

The “Great Reset” and 4th industrial revolution are in fact a revolution. This revolution is one that reduces the various ‘inefficiencies’ in the human dominance hierarchy from the perspective of the technocrats. Instead of allowing people to evaluate their situation and use their mind to respond, the goal is to construct a system that dictates how they should act.

Analog to digital

The advantage of going digital means that you replace an army of well paid upper to middle class managers with mere code that the rest of humanity is forced to live by. Effectively, the oligarch class has decided to “cut out the middle man” between themselves and the workforce. By simplifying everyone’s vocation to a set of rigid standards that must be followed without question, nobody is safe from being replaced with a trivial software suite and an army of underpaid ‘gig workers’.

The Rise of a SkyNet Workforce

Just as people communicate social signals, a digital social credit system will communicate praise or condemnation in a variety of ways. Instead of merely fining people or using the brutality of a criminal justice system, the technocracy can simply de-rank the individual and their associates. To some this may appear as more compassionate, but may end up having incalculable harms and distortions in the long run.

Just as advertising algorithms have already learned how to influence and manipulate people, more and more machines can be deployed to manage human beings. Many organizations that currently exist would be made totally obsolete, for better or worse. There are many efficiencies to further digitizing society, but there’s no real need to implement it in such a top-down manner.

Central planing works, but all effective central planners are evil

Robots are no exception. Tyrants in nations and the workforce are often poor performers unless they figure out ways to expend those around them as a resource for greater efficiency. Do you really expect the digital social credit system to place a high value on your individual well-being? I would already bet against it. In many countries, there are poor protections for fundamental rights. In addition to this, in the last few decades civil rights gains have only carved out additional niches of protection rather than protecting individuals as a whole. The “protected class” framework will likely not protect anyone when civil rights are entirely discarded on an individual level.

Population management

It really is impossible to overstate the danger of putting humanity’s fate into the hands of a few technocrats. Their malthusian desire to lower the population is something they’ve made abundantly clear. If only that was the worst of it, with existing technologies at their disposal, the capability exists to alter what remains of humanity in fundamental ways. People haven’t been getting any healthier under their watch, and we would only watch the deterioration accelerate when given more control.

Fit for purpose

The tools outlined in this series are very much the tip of the iceberg. It’s concerning to see so much information control ramp up exponentially in the last decade. In hindsight this was no accident. As things increasingly converge on more troubling outcomes, we can only become more aware of the urgency to oppose tyranny. It’s important not to underestimate information asymmetry. The amount of publicly accessible information isn’t likely to encompass even most of the true threats and dangers. The impressive AI tools that are just reaching the public are mere children’s toys compared to what is likely already being used in the halls of power.

The human element

Imagine a giant picket line. The strike is over the future of humanity. People can either cross the picket line to work for those who want to enslave (and eventually destroy) humanity, being showered with fleeting opportunities and resources… or to stand up for oneself and find new ways to build elsewhere. The tragically sad truth is that there is a near limitless supply of desperate scabs who would happily (even knowingly) trade all of our futures for some present sustenance or comfort. You may be angry at these people, even willing to attack them, but they are not the root cause. Much of the harm that has already been done has created much tragedy and many victims.

This is why you can’t just “outrun the next guy”, or earn enough to isolate yourself from what is currently in the works. If there’s one lesson I want you to learn from Tools of the Technocracy it would be this: No one is safe, until this is stopped. Nobody is rich enough, or connected enough to suddenly win a fight against tyrants who have planned this since before I was born. This is why all the heroes people line up to worship will always fail them. They couldn’t stop it even if they tried.

The people are the key, but they’re not just fodder you can throw at the problem. Without a real plan, or at least some meaningful support you will run out of bodies by the time you figure out what’s hitting you. Many of the more intelligent commentators will point out that people need to connect with their communities, but for many that underestimates the very real decimation of social bonds that has already ocurred. Rebuilding society and culture is a momentous task, now people must figure out how to do it while under attack.

Solutions

I don’t have all the answers, just parts of the puzzle. I started writing this series in part because I myself was at a loss of what to do, and decided to focus on a narrow part of what I saw as the overall problem. I wholeheartedly believe that to secure individual rights, and create a future worth passing on, revolutionary change is necessary.

For Radicals

My advice, dear radical, is to never turn on the people. More of them are on your side in numbers and ways you can’t fathom.

There is a legal, decentralized, and incredibly powerful mechanism to disrupt the dominance hierarchy from the bottom-up. Charity. We have already seen enough to know that large numbers of energetic and healthy people are what the technocrats fear the most. It is much easier (and more practical) to build up people than to single-handedly try to take town those with immense wealth and power.

By simply working on effective ways to support others you can help provide people much-needed breathing room to build themselves up. While it’s important to start with necessities like food, energy & shelter, other under-appreciated things to provide would be education & training, social support, and recreation facilities.

Recognize that there are real reformers. Not everyone who agrees with you may be willing to go to the same lengths to achieve the same goal, this doesn’t mean you can’t cooperate or share ideas. Because reformers tend to work within the system rather than outside of it, they may have decent suggestions on how to secure resources for pressing concerns.

For reformers

Your task, reformer, is to sincerely take the time to understand the grievances of radicals. It is very difficult for those under the strain that is placed on them to properly articulate their concerns.

The False Awakening

The changing of the guard is not the same as defeat of the guard

“Stop!” is your friend. Reformers will face innumerable obstacles trying to implement any real change, but reducing further harms can go a long way. If a terrible idea is being discussed, work to prevent it. If it can’t be prevented work to delay it. If it can’t be delayed, work to reverse it. If it can’t be reversed ensure it can never happen again.

Recognize the limits of the system, find opportunities to alleviate suffering despite it.

For us all

No matter who you are and what your outlook is. Reclaim the power of deciding who deserves your time, attention, and respect. Reevaluate the systems you use and organizations that get your time, money and work.

If you want to learn more about how I think things can be turned around, take a look (or listen) to my 2030 backcasting.

Backcasting 2030

What made 2023 the pivotal year?

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Operation: Chorus

Sun, 19 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“omnes voces nostri”
“All our voices”

Many problems in our time are caused by a severe power imbalance caused by information hazards. Information hazards are created when people and even entire societies operate under false pretenses. We can not rely on any single body or organization to question the foundations of every aspect of society to find errors, instead individuals should be empowered to use their own knowledge, skill, and intuition to learn from the world around them. As those individuals learn and share insights with others, we can all make a better world together.

Merely creating a hierarchy of those who are “qualified” to suppress so-called ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ simply uplifts a small few to a priestly class for an array of false gods. Instead, truth-seeking will always be an inherently decentralized process. People from all walks of life, and a variety of perspectives are all required for society to truly self-examine. Criminalizing expression only worsens problems, entrenched orthodoxies crystalize into terrible abuses. Censorship is only ever effective at protecting abusive hierarchies, and sowing resentment. Instead, people should be given the leeway to learn from themselves and those around them, and opportunities to correct mistakes.

If you make peaceful revolution impossible, you make violent revolution inevitable

John F. Kennedy

If society continues the trend of increasing censorship to resolve inconsistencies, people will continue to suffer without real representation. All this does is build enmity between those with the means to insulate themselves from abuses and those without.

Principles:

Advocating for maximal free expression rights for all people is one of the best ways to sustain liberal values long term.
Public institutions should uphold freedom of expression.
Organizations should be held accountable for censorship, chilling effects and propaganda.

Goals:

Promote expanding socially and legally acceptable free expression
Enhance labor protections for workers and whistle blowers to speak freely
Empower individuals to have difficult conversations
Encourage the adoption of interoperable and permissionless systems
Lobbying local institutions to provide these systems as services to local residents
Oppose legislation that empowers censorship or surveillance
Remembering and supporting those who are silenced¹

Relevant content

See more relevant content.

https://malwords.substack.com/p/remembering-the-victims-of-the-medias ↩︎

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Backcasting 2030

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

What is backcasting?

Backcasting is when you imagine a scenario for an ideal future and try to trace a path to there from today. Instead of simply being comforted by a future world as we would like it to be, the goal is to identify opportunities to take action immediately. Backcasting is about discovering a blueprint for that better future and investigating how it can be made into reality. I will be using the scenario from the Solari Report:

For our purposes, the year is 2030, and this is our “desirable future”: In 2030, freedom reigns planetwide, with the push for central control having failed miserably. Local currencies are flourishing, while lack of use slowly marginalizes the few CBDCs that were implemented. The World Economic Forum is bankrupt, and a depressed Klaus Schwab has retreated to his home in the Alps. Family and community prosperity is growing throughout the developed and emerging markets as economies decentralize—and as government enforcement, regulation, intervention, and taxation decrease. In short, there is much to celebrate.

How was this brought about?

Accountability

Change really begun with accountability. People taking responsibility for the systems they use and the incentives they bring about. By being more critical of our choices, it became easier to make deliberate decisions that grew to impact wider society.

It started with courageous individuals

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

Joseph Campbell - A hero of a thousand faces

Heroes aren’t the people who you see on the TV or those who get the big interviews. In this story, the heroes are those who recognized the great evil lurking and set out to challenge it head-on. People who quickly went to confront the darkness themselves so that they may spare others the horrors. They made mistakes, suffered losses and won small victories. Learning many things the entire way. When they returned from their journey they brought light and hope as the darkness faded away.

Simple acts of heroism

Not everyone started at the same point, some were born ready, others had preparations to make. As more people made progress, it became easier for others to catch up.

The first and most courageous act one makes is continuing to love in a world of hardship. Injustice rightfully gives rise to great anger, but love must always be the animating force. Coming back from facing darkness requires a conscious decision to choose life. Forging a strong commitment to embrace life, beauty and wonder to the fullest was when heroes were truly forged.

With so much anger and pain, nothing was safe from a deluge of dread and sadness. Many of the heroes fell in terrible ways trying to just stand still in the torrent of chaos. Some had support, others had preparations, but the few who endured managed to find some footing to steady themselves from the otherworldly brutality they had been exposed to. They never lost sight of those alongside them who weren’t so fortunate.

Steadying themselves required powerful introspection and the ability to care for themselves. The heroes needed to build themselves up to be stronger than ever. Not in a selfish manner, but in a way that gave them the strength to carry on. Carrying on often meant accepting difficult differences with others. Other times, it meant shielding one’s mind from malevolent forces. Reducing energy spent on enraging culture war rivalries, and instead focusing on concrete goals for action. As the heroes made progress, unshackled from doubt and despair, things started to gain momentum. Fear shrunk away from being an ever-present oppressive force to becoming once again a distrusted stranger.

As momentum grew, so too did a constant reorganization of priorities. So many different voices had unique insight into the road that lead us all astray. It took time to shift attention and refocus energies so people tended to take more care with those resources. Spending extra time to reflect to themselves, or to investigate their own concerns more deeply. This questioning of not only the world as it is, but of themselves and us all for what we are. With this insight, gradual but meaningful changes were made on a constant basis.

The work of legends

It all started within reach. The massive tidal wave of change was built with individuals choosing to act on the world around them. Local movements grew and caught on quickly, learning from mistakes made along the way. What made the difference wasn’t brilliance, riches, or even luck. It was all built through tireless persistence of those who dared to dream of a better world.

Hardly anyone could even attempt it all alone. Our heroes didn’t just need to be stronger, they needed allies, support and numbers. While many different groups had many fantastic victories, it was support that truly laid the foundation to our bright future. The victims of the old ways were innumerable, many of the heroes themselves haunted by the extent of the suffering they managed to witness. What made 2023 the pivotal year was the defensive victories.

This required a solid fortification of people’s right to life, liberty and happiness. Support didn’t merely mean taking on the banner of other’s suffering, but meaningful actions to address the causes. Those who were injured were given care.Those who lost loved ones were given comfort. Those who’s careers were displaced by technocratic tyranny were found meaningful work. Those left behind were remembered. With real systems of support outside the technocratic state-controlled bureaucracies, people were able to take more risks to work for change without simply being burnt out and spent like fodder. Positive change was only possible when we stopped losing great freedom-fighters to the cold entropy of letting them fall.

Gradually, community bonds started to heal as people began to share the abundance of each other. Neighborhoods became warm and welcoming as people made meaningful connections. These real bonds forged in staving off devastation, became wellsprings of joy. It was this joy that brought people to new heights they never imagined before. Major victories were starting to happen all over, as people would use that joy to fuel supporting others.

Liberating the tech stack

Brought together by the joy of life and living together, there was much that needed to change in the technological landscape. What was originally seen as inconvenient and arbitrary changes were eventually seen as natural and obvious. People individually and collectively renegotiated different ways of using, building, and sharing technology.

Big Tech social media was the first to go. People saw how it had been weaponized against them from the beginning. More and more grew distrustful of any top-down centralized service calling itself a “platform”. These systems of control were difficult to break free from, but the heroes were the first to fully disconnect their minds from the mass mind-control platforms.

Increasingly aware of how Digital ID could be abused against the public, the people learned to make little use of anything that required an account for the purposes of collecting data on users. Instead of using apps from big tech stores, open and accessible web-based apps became more popular. As people became more familiar with experimenting with different options, lesser-known minimal protocols like Gemini were given a chance to show us a different kind of web. The heroes were at the forefront of encouraging others to embrace open protocols instead of the latest popular platform running on big tech infrastructure.

As people started regularly thinking about their software choices, and how they can impact their freedom, attention eventually moved to hardware. With a newfound appreciation for freedom, sovereignty, and privacy in the digital world, there were many things that needed to be done differently. Early on a great deal of attention was spent on right to repair ensuring that independent farmers weren’t beholden to technocratic abuse. Repairing old technologies was a fantastic way to reduce e-waste and give people opportunities to learn and experiment.

Principle: Hardware matters

It is easy to underestimate the underlying structure of our digital world.

There would be instances where devices designed for a corporate dystopia simply wouldn’t have much use anymore. There was lots of opportunity for innovation. “Nostalgic” things like physical keyboards, removable batteries, and single-purpose devices all made a comeback in a big way. Efficiency and true elegance were real priorities.

Stewardship

Oddly enough, some of the heroes were fairly technologically inclined themselves. Long-disillusioned with Big Tech and the way things had gone, they had many ideas on ways for the rest of us to break free. People would regularly be shocked and surprised at how many of these innovations had just been abandoned to the aether. Over time more and more individuals experimented with different tools and technologies to find what adapted well to their situations.

These heroes would begin to start community-run services. Instead of everyone needing to use e-mail from Big Tech providers, dependable and trustworthy individuals were able to run small operations for small groups of users and assist others with starting their own. Education and outreach were vitally important parts of recruiting more people to build and share. These community services were a nightmare for those who wanted easily indexed access to everyone’s private information. All kinds of different services were provided, some communities had more novel needs than others. If nothing else, there was now real local representation in cyberspace that people could rely on.

Call to Action: Join the Fediverse now!

A simple, but very effective way to tip the scales in favor of free speech.

Instead of using their skills to help large corporations harvest data, our technological stewards helped people take control over their own computing. Teaching them how to use Free and Open Source software to manipulate their own data gave people a real sense of digital autonomy. New projects would be created for building useful public datasets that don’t include people’s private information.

As people’s digital independence was better safeguarded, it became even easier for people to protect their sovereignty in other domains. Instead of wasting massive amounts of human effort and energy moderating “the one conversation”, people would participate in the places they felt had value. People were used to difficult and honest discussions and got better at resolving complicated disputes. Instead of people constantly calling for censorship, it was hardly ever considered. Egregious legislation worldwide was challenged and opposed. ChatControl and other laws targeting digital freedoms received constant and serious criticism. Politicians could no longer justify these excesses as “for the greater good” as people no longer believed them.

Those of us who were technologically inclined, realized that our talents weren’t the only skills lacking. We understood that we needed all kinds of people with all kinds of skills. Instead of simply dragging people onto platforms we deem superior, we build the groundwork that open alternatives “just work” for all of us. We work to empower those with different talents and build on their successes. This is my message to you, dear reader. No matter what your unique skill-set is, it definitely has a place in building this beautiful future.

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In defense of anonymity

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men. I will find something in them which will hang him”

Cardinal Richelieu

In a time where so much data about people is being constantly harvested in increasingly invasive ways, there is a lot of material to work with. As I’m sure we have all seen, there innumerable ways in which people’s own beliefs, mistakes or decisions land them in serious trouble. Even in cases where the anger is justified, is it truly justice to weaponize constant mass surveillance against everyone at all times?

The internet is a dangerous place. The more intertwined your life is with it the more leverage it has to impact you. Many people dash straight at this for the upsides, but are shocked and horrified once they discover that there are downsides as well. This is because whatever the Internet really is, it has tremendous power.

Tools of the Technocracy: #4 Online Identity

What is following you in your digital tracks?

This is not to say everyone must be anonymous at all times, but rather that people vastly underestimate the consequences of undermining online privacy. Different people have very different risks related to being forced to disclose even simple aspects of their identity. It is difficult to overstate how much our digital landscape acts as an extension of state and corporate power.

Pseudonymity

A common mistake people make is to assume that just because you’re not aware of a person’s real name, that they are actually anonymous. In many cases they’re simply using an alias to forge a found identity to build an online presence around. Where possible, I’d recommend doing this. There are many great tools for creating new identities from scratch:

Need a profile photo?

This Person does not exist.
What about all the little details?

DataFake Generator can help.
Are people too boring? This X does not exist.

Surely you’re wondering by now.

But Gabriel! Are you real?

Yes, dear reader, I use my real name and face. When you listen to my voice-overs you are hearing my real voice. This is a conscious decision because far too often defenses of anonymity are dismissed merely because the arguments are made from an anonymous/pseudonymous speaker. I wholeheartedly wish to prove there are important reasons for anonymity, and that you don’t need to be anonymous to make that case.

All-too-often ‘accountability’ is something seen to only apply on the lower levels of the pecking order. If we are ever to live in a time with responsible leaders and trustworthy institutions people need to be given the opportunity to learn, and correct mistakes. Privacy, generally, evens the playing field.

Appealing to Authority

A common mistake people make is to completely disregard information from the fringes. This is what has allowed many to be blind-sided by many of the rapid changes in the last decade. Ideally, people would develop a habit of judging every idea by its own merits, instead of by its origins. Many hands make light work so it is efficient to decentralize ways of collecting, analyzing and sharing information. A highly underestimated problem is that those with prestige, credentials, or even a proven track record can lie. Often people with the right data share the wrong conclusions because of warped incentives. Ensuring that all people regardless of backgrounds can question leaders and experts is a fantastic way to keep them honest.

It is a tragic shame that during the Covid Crisis, some of the best information came from a decentralized gang of ‘misinformation’ spreaders. Unlike the mainstream and credentialed sources, they consistently came up with the wrong answers. The great irony is that while it is hard to verify information from ’less credible’ sources, they often have few incentives to lie and mislead. Many are simply those who feel it’s their only way to make a real impact. Because of this many anonymous and pseudonymous commentators have a real ability to “cut through the crap”. In addition to this, not everyone with useful insights is in the position to handle vigilante retaliation from angry political opponents.

The failure of intelligence

The current state of affairs is a warning that top-level intelligence is failing

There are times when you need someone (or an army) to shout “The emperor has no clothes!”. Nobody is perfect, and this isn’t made better when we get into groups. Governments and organizations of all sizes would do well to properly respond to bottom-up feedback to avoid catastrophic problems. Many organizations have critical “stop-the-line” processes designed to address critical safety issues. Over time large, organizations have gradually come to recognize that the greatest scandals are often seen as they develop, by the very people carrying out their duties. With real accountability and proper integration of internal feedback, great disasters can be averted.

Pseudonymous figures speak truth to power

Sometimes we are not so lucky to have critical feedback come from inside the house. Other times we are all reliant on those who have seen the problems up-close taking on the herculean effort of trying to get the word out despite the all-too familiar stubborn reactions of disbelief, denial and deflection. When the time for justice comes, these voices are critical for rebuking the familiar excuse: “there was no way we could have known!”.

You may be enlightened enough to listen to the truth wherever it comes from, but a great deal of people don’t. Often when people attempt to voice inconvenient truths they are first slandered as being entirely ignorant. Once it is shown the person actually does know what they’re talking about, the very next accusation is that they are simply leveraging the problem for their own self-interest. (As if nobody could possibly have anything to gain from the status quo). Lastly, if all else fails, the personal attributes of the critic are use against them to discredit their case. Their age, social status, race, or any other details you can imagine can all be used to bludgeon down the truth.

Instead of confusing matters with personal drama, an alternative approach people take is to leave their identity out of the discussion. Nobody has anything to gain by pressuring people like this to reveal any aspect of their identities. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter who they are. What matters is what they bring humanity as a whole by daring to investigate and speak out where others are afraid to. Those who have everything to gain from warped incentives or outright corruption would be pleased with any attempts to expose weaknesses.

Here a few examples:

Doomberg

Substack

The little green chicken reminds us that: Energy is life. Warning of the dangers of counter-productive energy policies and various geopolitical risks. While their recent content is now premium-only, I will share some highlights from the past that aren’t paywalled:

StormCloudsGathering

StormCloudsGathering has long been a vocal advocate for non-violent resistance to tyranny. A consistent promoter of a “common ground movement” where we put aside petty political divides and work towards our common stake in the future.

Spartacus

Substack

The Spartacus Letter was distributed anonymously. It is a well-sourced compendium of corruption and abuse from the Covid Crisis.

This message is too important to be silenced. Its tone is admittedly incendiary in places, but it was difficult for us not to get emotional about this, given the nature of the subject matter and what our investigation revealed.

Jikkyleaks 🐭substack.com/vv

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Sometimes is helps to be a small little mouse (or an army of them).

Feel free to suggest more inclusions

The “anonymous cowardly troll demons” problem

A simple irony is that anonymous trolls are the perfect target to false flag. There’s no complicated branding to imitate or re-create, just simply fly whatever feels relevant. Those who would like to make sure everyone is accountable to a digital social credit system are highly motivated to make sure people have a low opinion of people’s ability to speak anonymously.

It is undeniable that not all anonymous and pseudonymous actors are good. People do need the tools to be able to filter out attacks. The problem begins when anonymous bad actors are used to justify attacks on privacy and anonymity. If you’re at all concerned about digital ID you’re going to recognize cries for burdensome regulation and demands for authentication as part of that agenda.

Digital ID: The Basics

What is it? What can you do about it?

This is all enabled by the “bait and switch” tactic of increasing control in the name of keeping people safe from harm. Notoriously used by governments, corporations have also been adopting it as an excuse as well. The only way to truly protect data is to never record it, which means that it’s impossible to keep people safe through invasive surveillance.

Individual Rights

In name of protecting vulnerable groups, more and more ground has been ceded to to-down control. In hindsight, this has done a very poor job at protecting those groups. Instead, tensions, resentment, and mistrust have all grown out of the further and further encroachment against individual liberty. There is great danger in gating access to information and vital services behind surveillance, which will inevitably grow into control.

Redefining "High Places"

Lets re-balance power from the bottom-up

The solution isn’t to limit what individuals can do or freely express. Rather the proper way to address these situations is to enforce limits on what can be done to people regardless of who they are. This is the only way to create a immovable schelling fence against complete erasure. These simple limits are called rights. Regardless of what particular ‘red lines’ you believe should be drawn, we all need to at least agree on a couple of fundamental lines that must not be crossed…quickly.

Regardless of who the target is, are you comfortable with them:

Being unable to voice potentially life-saving information?
Being unable to make a living ever again?
Being cut off entirely from all human interaction or trade?
Being subjected to arbitrary confiscation of assets or even children?

Even if you can imagine circumstances where these actions are justified, hopefully you’d at least want them proven to a high standard in a truly independent process. Make no mistake, people do need protection from online mobs, but I would urge you to consider who or what benefits from their use. And also, what is there to lose from anonymous voices being silenced forever.

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Social Media: Learning the right lessons

Sun, 11 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

What went wrong

Corporate social media entities aren’t “the public square” and they aren’t a safe way to stay in touch with family and friends. While they may masquerade as such, they are the furthest thing from being either of those. These are information control systems. One of the best things about the #TwitterFiles is that for many people, it’s a window into what those operating these systems see. This is hardly a secret. In 2020 The Social Dilemma has great coverage on how social media corporations are built to manipulate their users. Ironically, a lot of its commentary on “fake news” already hasn’t aged very well. The documentary pathologizes those who didn’t fall in lockstep with the lockdown agenda. The first hour is still worth understanding.

Twitter is only the tip of the iceberg

As governments and corporations fight over who gets to be the arbiter of truth, suppression and manipulation will continue to rise. The cost of this constant manipulation is hard to quantify, and most commentary treats it as a non-negotiable fixture of modern life. Control over everyone’s access to information, and ability to express themselves begets all kinds of problems. In mainstream coverage, a lot of the emphasis is focused on misinformation from users. Yet, they’re notably silent on state and corporate driven disinformation.

Tools of the Technocracy: #4 Online Identity

What is following you in your digital tracks?

As people’s access to information becomes more centralized and controlled, there’s a rising acknowledgement that so does the responsibility over it. We are currently stuck between a tug-of-war between corporations and governments over control over the people’s access to information. This didn’t suddenly take place. Far from something these platforms were instantly tasked with; the preparations had been gradually taking place for years. Purportedly to stop the harms of , censorship gradually ramped up. Over the long run the public was conditioned to accept increasingly invasive censorship.

Twitter

The blue bird has been largely regarded as the “digital public square” for quite some time. Despite a minority of people using the platform, and an even smaller minority actually posting, Twitter has relied on the perception of being the public square. Much of that illusion was propped up by a first-class presence of mainstream media, as well as the verification system. Prior to Musk’s takeover being verified on twitter was a form on status symbol on the platform. In addition to this, being verified allowed the user to ignore interactions from the “riff raff” of unverified users.

Twitter has been as bad as any other big tech platform for censorship, datamining and algorithmic manipulation. The site has long been criticized for the short character count, making clear communication difficult.

…Twitter has censored leaks about corruption in politics, crimes committed the Government and spy agencies, opinions that didn’t agree with the Western propaganda about the war in Ukraine. This is criminal. This is wrong. And this is what’s happening at all big tech companies.

I like to tell @Jack and all our fellow tech entrepreneurs… You have sold us out. You have betrayed us. You have destroyed our rights and democracy. You have turned the dream of what the Internet can do for humanity into a nightmare. Shame on you.

Kim Dotcom on Twitter

The #TwitterFiles is a very important confirmation of what many have suspected for quite some time. It is easy to fall prey to the illusion that this was merely a failing of Twitter’s management at the time. In an age where governments and corporations will use any and all leverage they can against the people, anything that can be subverted will be. New management is likely to be little more than a fresh coat of paint on the same top-down information control machine.

The False Awakening

The changing of the guard is not the same as defeat of the guard

“The bird is freed” Tweeted Elon Musk. The mainstream media is in full meltdown over the uncertainty of what “Twitter 2.0” will be. Whatever Elon’s plans for Twitter are; there aren’t enough assurances to those who are used to controlling the conversation.

Facebook AKA “Lifelog”

Twitter wasn’t the only platform outright puppeteered by government. Facebook certainly has dubious origins when it comes to government interference. It has been caught running experiments on it’s users and vast misuse of user data.

Yes, Twitter censors people + has close ties to the National Security State.

However, now people are not focusing on how SBF is about to get away with a billion dollar Ponzi or how the WHO is about to establish a global biosecurity authority, etc. Whitney Webb on Twitter

Speaking of FTX, it’s very concerning how many ties keep leading back to information control. Liam Sturgess has a great explanation of Facebook in his look into effective altruism. He brings up many of the things that the movie “The Social Network” has left out.

Examining Effective Altruism: Part II - Rounding the News

YouTube

Far from being an organic video sharing platform. YouTube is big business. It’s a game for the big players and there are rules to compete. What makes the platform unique is that it shares ad revenue with it’s creators. This means that YouTube has a spigot to encourage or discourage a wide variety of behaviors. All kinds of fantastic and hardly-controversial creators have been “demonetized”, effectively eliminating them from mainstream participation.

Game Theory: The End of an Era

Where big business takes the wheel, propaganda isn’t far behind. Those with power are able to use their wealth to mislead the public into accepting that which isn’t in their interest. Anti-human nihilism and guilt can be placed squarely on the masses to disarm themselves mentally.

How Kurzgesagt Cooks Propaganda For Billionaires

Is it really still a mystery why so many positions that are “settled science™” all point in the same anti-human direction? Can we really blame “those crazy kids” who have been raised (or radicalized) in hyper-reality manufactured entirely to destroy them?

Reddit is a site that features walls of [deleted] and [removed] posts on every controversial topic and even some seemingly non-controversial ones. This is because Reddit is patrolled by legions of volunteer moderators. It’s no free-for-all because the moderators have a clear hierarchy which builds powermods. These powermods essentially control the content over the entire site. A notable powermod was maxwellhill, who notably hasn’t posted since Ghislane Maxwell has been arrested.

In addition to outright censorship, reddit is notorious for self-censorship because your posts are linked to a profile that earns “karma”. Not only will users be called out for old posts, but losing too much karma impacts your ability to participate in different subreddits.

Discord,LinkedIn, Tiktok, Tinder, and others

Anywhere people’s access to others is gated behind an opaque centralized service, they are open to manipulation and abuse. It is high time that people recognize this and refuse to cooperate with it. People should be empowered to make their own decisions without being arbitrarily retaliated against. Those who seek the ability to control information will always have questionable judgement.

The trap

A recurring theme in mainstream commentary on social media manipulation is that this is simply a problem that needs to be managed by various non-profits and state actors. This presumes that such manipulation is tolerable in the first place. It is quite ironic that the very problem created by state and corporate influence is something the mainstream is pushing to be solved with more state and corporate control. If anything, they have already shown a severe lack of trustworthiness with the tools that already exist.

Swimming with sharks

So, Elon Musk’s new free-speech Twitter appears to going extremely well...

It is highly dishonest to portray social media enterprises as rogue actors let loose by “laissez faire” free market profiteering. They’ve all had very close ties with governments and even intelligence agencies. Any and all harms permitted while three-letter-agencies had their hand up these companies is a problem of prioritization not power.

As the actions of Twitter before the Musk purchase have shown: Trust and Safety isn’t about protecting the people. These institutions work as commissars within centralized services to thought-police in ways that would have been impossible not long ago. The terrifying reality is that the watchers are being watched by other watchers, competing for zeal to climb for status. The current political environment suffers in part by a self-organized conspiracy against the people. The people are effectively out manuevered, and in limited supply of options to protect themselves.

Self-hosted and decentralized alternatives are foundational steps towards progress. The people taking action to adopt these platforms would go a long way to leveling the playing field. However, this is not the totality of the fight. It would be naive to believe that once the people walk away from information control systems, that those who profit off controlling the discussion would just pack it in and give up.

Tools of the Technocracy: #9 Internet Shutdowns

Information control is the root of modern tyranny.

Many of the same mechanisms use to control and manipulate social media are just as applicable to service providers. Free speech exists as a widely shared cultural principle or not at all. Stronger safeguards need to #Protect the Stack from being leveraged against the people. Service providers as well as financial services are all points of failure that can be weaponized to eliminate competition.

The root of the problem

We can never know what would have happened, Lucy. But what will happen is another matter entirely.

Aslan - The Chronicles of Narnia

We have a saying here: “We only have one timeline”. In short, this means that the damage is done. There is no use to endlessly speculate about how history could have been altered if things had been done differently. Instead we should learn from the past for the purpose of building a better future, or at least avoiding past mistakes.

The Mainstream

The mainstream media and platforms have effectively sold out their credibility. Trust in these institutions has justifiably been in decline for some time. In hindsight, it is easy to believe that the mainstream media has always been the top-down information control machine that exists today. It can be useful to keep in mind that different technologies and forms of media have their own trade-offs. In todays media landscape, the medium is the message couldn’t be more obvious.

Charitably, a single mainstream information landscape has a purpose. There was a time where the technology to get messages out wasn’t as democratized as it is today. In addition to raw technological challenges, it is useful to have information dissemination enhanced with credibility and expertize.

Whether it’s fact-checkers, universities, or large corporate media outlets, they all suffer from a primary weakness that has inevitably lead to a loss of trust: rigidity. This refined information propagation machine has to function in ways that undermine it’s ability to properly convey issues. Mass media is inherently limited by the very constrained attention span of it’s audience. This leaves hardly any room for nuance, or representing a broad spectrum of issues. These institutions fail to properly characterize, prioritize and report on nearly every pressing concern of the day. More and more, as the mainstream loses dominance, it will have to divert more and more attention to issues that inflate it’s self-importance.

This means that anyone earnestly attempting to get people to understand any issue through this medium, is going to be restrained by the very same constraints. It’s easy to underestimate the challenge of communicating simple concepts to a broad audience.

Narrow

Only a few topics can rise.
Brief

No topic can be given much time for depth or self-reflection
Dogmatic

Authority is presumed, and hardly questioned if at all.

With all these limitations one could easily be mislead to think there is no room for malice. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The Media Matrix is a comprehensive history on this. If the mainstream media ever had a legitimate purpose, it has certainly transformed itself into part of a large growing information control apparatus.

During the Covid Crisis, instead of merely reporting on information as things developed; the mainstream media took an active role in shaping the conversation. If anyone is to receive clemency for getting things wrong, it is certainly not those who ensured that people would. To many this was an outright shocking development. It was so shocking, that people often couldn’t accept that things were this bad.

Surely, they will eventually report the truth as lies get discredited in time? That is a very cold comfort. Smothering the truth when lives are on the line isn’t erased by getting it right years after the fact if at all. it is important to realize this is far from the only time.

Getting it right

The Covid Crisis laid bare the deadly effects of censorship before all to see. We are all responsible for learning from what has happened.

Among other things, we should:

Grow our disgust for:
- Thoughtless compliance
- Censorship
Enhance our appreciation for:
- Principled opposition
- Inalienable human rights

Redefining "high places"

Lets re-balance power from the bottom-up

Connecting with others

Instead of focusing on a single public square, it is better that we nurture a symphony of vastly different spaces with different parameters and cultures. This way important information and insights can be properly elevated from a variety of sources, instead of being bottle-necked by a single mindset or culture. Achieving this requires a solid commitment to authentically liberal values and a much higher tolerance for differences than people have generally shown.

Call to Action: Join the Fediverse now!

A simple, but very effective way to tip the scales in favor of free speech.

If you’re still trapped on any of the big tech social media platforms please consider leaving. At the very least you’ll want to consider building a presence on more accessible federated alternatives. In doing so you can help diversify people’s ability to express themselves and learn from others.

Live not by lies

When the truth offends we lie and lie until we can no longer it is even there…but it is still there… Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is paid.

valery legasov

There’s never a bad time to come clean. Anything you can do to fix the little things in your live can build to meaningful change over time. While lies have real, devastating impact, there’s always something to be gained by making good on wrongs done.

Oppose censorship

One of the many ways we should honor the victims of the Covid Crisis is to work to make impossible the level of censorship and top down control that enabled the very crimes committed.

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The Rise of a SkyNet Workforce

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Machine learning is starting to take over the economy the very way the Internet already has. A variety of newly available tools have caused a great deal of controversy in art circles and free software communities.. These advancements in AI-powered tools are effectively game-changers in the domains they disrupt.

Hailed by techno-utopians of all stripes, these advancements are huge part of driving the so-called 4th Industrial revolution. If we are not careful, we will run straight into the trap of allowing these tools to be weaponized against everyone. Understanding how these tools work on a basic level is important.

You may have heard “Data is the new oil”. That “oil” is fuel for massively powerful machine learning algorithms. No publicly (or easily) accessible data, media, or information is safe from the “data beast”. The data beast is hungry for any and all information, it doesn’t matter how trivial or private, it wants everything. The reason is because every addition of well-collected information is invaluable in building a wide array of powerful machine learning models.

Tools of the Technocracy: #2 Big Data & Artificial Intelligence

What is all this data for anyways?

What is a machine learning ‘model’?

A model is the sum-total of all insights a machine learning model “learns” while analyzing large amounts of data. The larger and more complicated the model the more sophisticated problems the model can be used to solve. For example, imagine you wanted to be an olympian athlete but hadn’t decided on a sport. An AI could use a model trained on data from every previous athlete, like their physical attributes, record, diet, and other things to give you a “life plan” it calculates is most likely to succeed.

Models are “trained” by analyzing massive, well-categorized datasets. This means that the raw data itself often isn’t enough. It needs to be carefully curated into a highly detailed and correct set of information and it’s quite easy to fall short of that. Any and all deviations from reality will distort outputs from machine learning models. This gives rise to concerns about AI models treating people unfairly. Models trained on data we collect is effectively holding a mirror up to ourselves. Whatever small slice of reality we simplify and package to train on is how the model sees the world.

The only way to solve that problem would be a highly invasive all-pervasive surveillance and control system that tracks nearly every atom in the area of concern. In addition to being highly impractical, it’s highly unlikely people would knowingly choose that kind of world. It’s what we unknowingly choose that is a problem however, what systems are we building by refusing to take an active role in shaping the future?

Employee of the month: Terminator

A great deal of resources are invested in understanding how robots can recognize, track and destroy things.

That video is from a tweet saying:

Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING I see these robots doing, I am imagining a host of military grade weapons attached to them, how those technologies trickle down to the police, and ultimately who will be attacked by these robots.

When it comes to the workforce, soldiers and police may be the most at risk of being automated away entirely. Such a shift could be used to eliminate any trace of accountability or morality in such institutions.

AI has “learned to code”

This demo is quite impressive. The presenter is using Github copilot to build a simple program with spoken words instead of typing. It’s initially quite striking how much of a win this kind of technique is for making development more accessible. It is fair to be skeptical, many live tech demonstrations are often highly staged to smooth over many real-life issues. That said, this specific goal does not seem very far away.

Are software developers obsolete now? Likely not for a while, even using these tools requires some technical skill or understanding. It’s also a lot harder to make guarantees of safety or security for systems that aren’t carefully designed by humans. That’s not to say there may not be powerful analysis tools built from these models that could strengthen security.

The Dark side

Github is what’s known as a code forge. A place for developers to host their code and collaborate on improving it. Different forges have different features but Github, owned by Microsoft is the largest and most popular. Developers often choose to distribute their code under various licenses. These licenses dictate the terms in how the code can be used in other software projects.

Code is just information. Nothing has stopped Github from training copilot with all the data on their platform, and potentially other publicly accessible repositories as well. It is arguable that Microsoft has violated the license of many of these projects, however when it comes to those who use copilot to make new projects it’s not clear at all.

Can a robot create a beautiful masterpiece?

Gearheads aren’t alone, creatives are now struggling with the same issues. DeviantArt, a large platform for sharing artistic works announced DreamUp which is their equivalent of tools like stable diffusion. Trained on a massive collection of categorized creative works, the model could be used to create entirely new works.

The artists raised some concerns about how this was done.

Did DeviantArt train their model with artists art without explicit permission?
How can artists opt-out of such data-mining?
Will DeviantArt remove artists art from the model or dataset(s) if the artist did not wish for their works to be used for training AI.

Concerns

As you can see, these problems are highly generalizable. Sure it’s programmers and digital artists today, but how far away are authors, musicians, or even lawyers from being assimilated? It is tempting to nit-pick particular implementations and say that the flaws of today are an inherent fixtures of AI problem solving. This is naive, because it can be hard to predict what problems can be solved quickly and what problems will take ages.

Copyright & Trademark concerns

Is using publicly accessible content to train AIs a derivative work? Are models fair use? Even if one is fully within their rights to use an artists works to train a model, what about use of the artists name in the creation of new works? If someone trained a model on your voice and published songs of you singing, should you have any right to demand compensation or restrict how it’s used?

Asymmetric advantages

It is naturally impossible to know who is making models out of what data unless those entities chose to disclose that information. This means there is no way in knowing how much your data has been used to train models used to manipulate you. What recourse will you really have when violations take place in secret?

Tools of the Technocracy: #4 Online Identity

What is following you in your digital tracks?

Large platforms have many inherent advantages over smaller projects, even when there isn’t any malice or bad behavior. Amazon has been caught using their platform to produce knock-offs of viable products from smaller sellers.

Is machine learning too powerful not to use? In any competitive environment, can you really afford not to use performance enhancing tools regardless of the ethical or legal considerations? How can people and organizations properly set conditions to not incentivize massive fraud and privacy violations?

Machine Learning Into the Destruction of Science

The Science Wars Part XII

Workforce displacement

Since we’re already seeing problems in education, the wider workforce likely isn’t far behind. Just because your entire profession can’t be automated, that doesn’t mean that machine learning can’t simply be used to assimilate away the most viable parts of your business model. Even despite a so-called labor shortage workers are having a difficult time negotiating higher wages and better working conditions.

Tools of the Technocracy: #3 Robots, IoT, Automation, Oh my!

Transforming the world in ways seen and unseen

Cybernetics, novel biologics, and performance enhancing drugs can all be things people may feel forced to take on to compete in a rapidly changing work environment. While we are to be concerned with the consolidation of state power through CBDCs, we must also be vigilant against corporations using the very same mechanisms to control people. We do not have the luxury of passively allowing “futurists” to decide what they’re willing to have us all sacrifice for their own greater wealth. As this continues, the road ahead looks quite grim indeed. The following video is about a fictional setting in the game Warframe, it’s a warning worth heeding.

Ethics concerns

When it comes to surveillance and aglorithmic manipulation much of the work takes place out of sight and out of mind. There are real questions of ownership, rights, and autonomy when it comes to how personal and private information is used. It’s important not to be defeatist on this point. Just because information can be used in particular ways doesn’t mean we can’t recognize it as a crime. A great many terrible things are nearly impossible to stop, the solution isn’t to accept them but to create a proper framework for addressing them.

The bright side

It’s not all bleak and terrible. There is good news in this story too. Just as these tools are powerful they can be used for good. At it’s core, machine learning is a useful way to extract actionable information from massive datasets. Creating large, accurate, ethically-sourced public datasets can create fascinating new possibilities.

New public goods

Mozilla Common Voice is a project where people collaborate on creating a massive, diverse, high quality voice dataset. This can be used to power useful models like Text to Speech for all and DeepSpeech. DeepSpeech can be used to create your own voice-controlled applications. This is a very cute demo of someone using stable diffusion to place an AR elephant in a tree. Despite it’s silliness, it does show how effective this technology can be in creating new and fascinating experiences.

Of course there are tons of medical advancements related to using machine learning to recognize patterns. These are fantastic for things like diagnosing issues from x-rays or other data. To reiterate, machine learning clearly isn’t evil, but rather the impetus to spy on everyone to dominate them absolutely is. There are responsible ways to collect, store and curate data and these need to be at least enforced but ideally supported.

Taking action

Fundamentally we the people have to choose. Either between allowing our collective destiny to be dictated to us by those who have no regard for humanity, or to take on the great effort of wrestling control back into our own hands. As radical as this sounds, it doesn’t require a massive shift.

It never been more urgent to stop contributing to tyrannical systems of control. If you’re involved in making top-down control into a reality, I urge you to reconsider the downsides of building a future you likely don’t want to live in. It is high time we not only step away from top-down control, but assist others doing so.

Redefining "high places"

Lets re-balance power from the bottom-up

On a higher level, it’s worth coming up with new standards and approaches to how information is collected, stored, and shared. Anything we can do to break away from the cloud goes a long way in mitigating the nefarious technocratic forces. Storing your own data instead really helps mitigate how it can be used against you.

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The False Awakening

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The changing of the guard is not the same as defeat of the guard.

Twitter is under new management. There is all kinds of excitement and despair over what this means for the future of free speech on that particular information control system. Odds are, we can expect some noticeable changes on what is and is no longer allowed within the new paradigm. This should not be mistaken for an expansion of the people’s right to voice dissent. As priorities change, harmless admissions of past infractions are not evidence of reform.

If nothing else, people must not be fooled into thinking this shift of policy is the answer to all the censorship and suppression of the past. This essentially presumes that we are presently aware of the full scope of past information control. It is highly likely that there are unknown taboos that still haven’t truly found a voice. When someone desperately waits for free speech to return to a top-down centralized service, they underestimate the problem.

Beware false saviors

Putting faith into leaders is a road to disappointment. We all have to work together as individuals to make lasting change.

Freedom of speech is freedom from consequences. In the name of fighting hate and so-called misinformation people have ceded incredible ground to organizations to shape public discussion. By allowing voices to be suppressed in all kinds of situations, the protections for all kinds of essential and vital dissent are constantly eroded. It is tempting to attempt to find ways to engineer away censorship. This constantly underestimates the willingness of the public to participate in censorship by refusing to uphold protections that whistle-blowers and those with dire warnings have to rely on.

The currently watered-down concept of freedom of speech is essentially the right to utter words alone, and face incredible sanctions for it. The public has long nurtured its tolerance for censorship to grow massively. People can be shocked and horrified by an opaque and arbitrary social credit system, but underestimate the sum effects of allowing censorship to flourish. This is to say that freedom of speech can only exist as a widely-shared culturally protected concept. This is first and foremost a social problem. People urgently need to reevaluate the mechanisms used to silence people and the costs we have paid for them.

As acceptable discourse has shrunken into a vanishingly small clown show, people are predictably and understandably desperate for discussions where their concerns are properly heard. This impulse is being exploited by innumerable bad actors to trap people into micro-cults out of touch with everyone else. These micro-cults are as varied and diverse as any other consumer product. Over time, creating a false dichotomy between the blatantly absurd mainstream and a kaleidoscope of mind prisons.

A Mind Prison Example: Q

Many Q phrases are instant red flags. “White hats” which generally refer to the benevolent overlords in positions of power. They for some reasons must allow atrocities for the “greater good”, yet never actually make any real change. “The great awakening” which is this cult’s equivalent of any utopian fantasy’s great revolution. The Q cult has outgrown a small set of posts on an anonymous image board to a full-out megagrift empire.

People stuck in the Q mind prison are fervent ideologues, they are quite often more invested in people’s opinion of Q than of any of the so-called “redpills” that have supposedly awoken them. Despite a phenomenal track-record of falsified predictions, many of them still circulate. Others are practically unfalsifiable. For example, claiming that all the politicians you don’t like have already been executed, but have merely been replaced with body-doubles to not alarm the public. By exploiting what people are starting to learn about many nefarious agendas in play, people are lured back into a safe containment. The “Quantum financial system” is simply a re-branding the evils people are starting to question. Other times, luring people with the idea that they can somehow be at the top of the social credit system, it traps them into morally justifying the system. This insidious moral inversion is all pervasive in these mind prisons.

Anatomy of a psyop

Cognitive warfare in action

The most aggravating aspect of the Q situation, is that it is very often used as a justification for more top-down control of information. “Behold all the silly nonsense the plebs can convince themselves of, surely we must protect them from such harmful influence?” say the technocrats and their chorus of compliant media. The sad truth is that the accusation on its face isn’t wrong, a great variety of people do believe in a great variety of nonsense. The problem begins with assuming that more top-down control is the answer and not the root cause of the issue. Only through honest, open debate with proper transparency can we avoid creating our own dark age.

A recognizable pattern

This is all in no way limited to the Q mega-grift, which simply has some of the most recognizable branding. Regardless of your political or social beliefs there are almost always outright scams ready to take your money for comforting lies and entertainment. They generally follow a predictable format:

They are in possession of magical cheat codes that they are eager to share with you, the wise critical thinker who sees through all the lies
Thankfully, the answer is trivially simple and requires no real work on your part or upheaval of existing structures or systems
It comes at a very low cost, but for some reason you’re still always an additional larger contribution away from the prize
An inability to actually discuss or explain the merits of the primary worldview or issues
A winning combination of shock, flattery, and shame to keep you in suspense

It is overly simplistic to think of the cost only in terms of money. Your time and attention are precious and should be something you optimize continuously to serve you and your loved ones. It is clear to me that our present environment wants nothing more than for us to fight each other over anything and everything. Taking the time to bring people together despite differing beliefs and values is likely one of the most challenging, yet vital tasks of our time. A good identifier for a mind prison is one that preaches you as a lone fighter against the ignorant masses. All kinds of people are doing fantastic work all the time, and we would do well to remember and take time to give credit.

Redefining "High Places"

Lets re-balance power from the bottom-up

This is one of the most nefarious aspects of these mind prisons. Instead of helping people build up and celebrate new heroes, these schemes essentially downplay any real urgency to confront the issues at all. The arrogant belief that the elites in society know best and that the “riff raff” can’t be trusted is it’s own mind prison. By embracing a limiting top-down view of society you blind yourself from truly making an attempt to understand human beings and what drives them. People vastly underestimate the advantages of bottom-up strategies and structures.

Beware the Trap

Being stuck in a mind prison is not only counter-productive, but it can be dangerous. You isolate yourself from people you need to stay connected with. People who don’t share your beliefs aren’t your enemies. Focusing on fighting the people around you is only going to make you unpopular and alone. It’s important to humanize yourself to others as well as you when you look in the mirror. Taking time to better understand your ideas can help you properly convey them to those who may not be receptive at first. Everyone needs a good friend more than they need another truth bomb.

That said, do not let what allows you to forgive friends and family be manipulated into grating blanket amnesty to those who abused their power and authority. The Covid Crisis didn’t merely open up new wounds to tear apart society, it also revealed to many an unforgettably dark corruption that has taken near complete control. When it comes to many of the technocrats plans, people ask “Why now?” and the answer lies in the fact that much of our cultural rot is from a mask worn to hide terrible and unsustainable lies.

I believe the technocracy is desperate for a scapegoat and doesn’t particularly care who or what it is. By putting people into difficult situations, then slandering them in the media otherwise kind and dutiful people from all walks of life are made into monsters. As more and more divisions in society isolate people, the danger rises. We have seen how effectively the technocrats were able to use the covid crisis to inflame hatred, we would do well to do anything we can to prevent that from being utilized further. It would be all to easy for those in power to entirely avoid accountability if they maintain the ability to turn the public against a convenient scapegoat.

This is the root of the false awakening. More and more people stumble into the all the lies, corruption, and contradictions of our established order. As these doubts, fears, and concerns pile up; so does friction and resistance. Those in power have an incredible incentive to manage this fragmentation by effectively isolating every fracture into it’s own bubble. We can expect the manufacture, marketing, and adoption of individualized mind prisons to be increased exponentially as those in power get more and more desperate. It’s not hard to see our current culture fractured into two inconsolable factions, if we’re not careful we will end up with everyone perfectly isolated in a terrible free-for-all.

You being aware of a particular piece of truth isn’t the answer, what we need is integration. Being authentically awake isn’t simply accepting a single redpill about some scandal or lie in society. It’s about being able to properly conceptualize the world as it is, rather than how others would like it to be, or even how you’d like it to be. This integration of understanding is what needs to be shared. We won’t all know everything about everything, but we need to cooperate on processes to properly investigate the truth, uncover corruption and make concrete, lasting change.

Without actually integrating our understanding with how we work together, we run the risk of granting those in power and corrupt institutions total control over the future. Our future is already uncertain in so many ways, the only way to properly account for those risks is to bring them to the forefront of our mind and actions. Almost every institution in our lives is in need of complete and total reform that may be outright impossible in some instances. These institutions reflect the unacknowledged damage that has been inflicted on the public for a long time, that has gone neglected and forgotten. Rebuilding essential civic and social institutions will be an all-too-difficult task. We are all going to need as many people willing to come together and practice an unfamiliar amount of solidarity. This can only take place with excellent individuals working to reach out and authentically connect with those around them. I wish you the best of luck.

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Tools of the Technocracy: #10 Central Bank Digital Currencies

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Tools of the Technocracy: #10 Central Bank Digital Currencies

What is money?

This is a really humorous video that really gets at the core of this discussion.
Money is something we made up.

Her tiktok attracted a lot of people lecturing her on inflation, about how raising the money supply devalues the money. What those responses are missing is the key statement in the video.
“You let THIS happen!” she exclaims holding up a plastic 5$ bill and plastic 50$ bill side-by side.

What exactly did we “let happen”?

A third of Americans still believe the US dollar is backed by real, tangible value in the form of gold. This hasn’t been true for quite some time, and that is why our central bank currencies are also called fiat currencies. It is almost a guarantee that you, the reader reader are paid, taxed, and earning income in a central bank currency known either as dollars, euros, or any other national currency. This has already had significant impact of society.

What is a central bank?

A central bank is a “bank for banks”.
“Why would a bank need a bank?”
Your deposits at a bank are a liability to that bank, they have legally needed “bank money* called reserves to offset that liability on their balance sheet.

John titus does a fantastic job explaining how this works, and has changed during the Covid Crisis.

From "Larry & Carstens' Excellent Pandemic" by John Titus Source

Central banks are corporations, that lend money to governments and other banks. Central banking is effectively the death of free enterprise, not only do market participants have to out-compete vertical monopolies but also entities with the power to create and distribute money from nothing. This power effectively means that some participants experience lavish success in a simulated economy, while those outside the simulated economy must operate in the harshest of economic conditions. Before countries entirely adopt CBDCs en-masse, now is the perfect time to consider (if not the last time) if central banks are institutions that ought to be abolished entirely.

Digital Currencies

In a sense, any digital form of national currency is already a central bank digital currency. It is important to understand that while digital currencies are tools of the technocracy so too are central banks themselves. What central banks are after with digital currencies isn’t merely control. They have control already. Their concern is that their control is too crude, instead they would prefer precise options to micro-manage the economy down to individual transactions.

Tools of the Technocracy #1: Digital Currency

How the digital financial complex works against you...and what you can do about it.

Payment processors

Online payment processors allow people to seamlessly transact. Most payment processors use central bank currencies because for most people they are the only currency they use. These payment processors have significant leverage over those reliant on them. As if monetary policy didn’t distort the economy enough, now payment processors are eager to show they can be proactive in surveilling, fining, and otherwise restricting their users. This is because they will be effectively competing with CBDCs in these areas.

Cryptocurrencies

Satoshi made history when he created the first digital currency with no central issuing authority that couldn’t be counterfeit. This was no small feat. By using the power of raw computing power, Bitcoin is still the largest mover in the huge cryptocurrency space. Not all cryptocurrencies are decentralized. As computing power, or financial control ramp up, only time will tell how many truly decentralized projects will survive.

The road to hell: misplaced optimism in the blockchain space

The biggest challenge with cryptocurrency in our current age is that money is only part of our current troubles. We can all switch to a “silver bullet” system tomorrow and there would still be immense damage to be undone. Just as money is a construct we create, it is also entirely reliant on the rule of law. No money, no matter how secure or private can itself alone overthrow tyrants.

What is a CBDC really?

The major threat that new CBDCs present is that they are highly likely to be streamlined with the following properties:

Programmable

In addition to having control of every transaction, programmable currencies allow participants to enter new kinds of transactions. This could include all kinds of things, such as directly monetizing surveillance. Automated systems could be used to enhance these digital contracts.

Programmable currency

What is it good for?

Interoperable

As Mathew Crawford points out: “A networks value increases exponentially in relation to the number of its users” it wouldn’t make sense to limit total top-down financial control to a single jurisdiction. Eventually a global uni-system could be built on top without the participants having any power to prevent the change.

So what?

These things can enable an industrial revolution without people. The technocrats don’t just believe they’ve won in finance, but all of human history and evolution. They intend to transform all our countries into giant (but shrinking) open-air prisons.

Corporate-backed digital currencies

Odds are essential workers will likely not be lucky enough to use the state-issued CBDC. Instead they may be restricted to using their companies Corporate-Backed Digital Currency, a modern version of the company store. These indentured servants would have no capacity to transact outside approved channels.

Servicification

One of the greatest threats to private property rights.

It is critical not to simply be reflexively averse to a central bank digital currency, and naive to the threads presented by corporate backed digital currencies. Where convenient I recommend mentioning both in similar situations.

Concerns

Frustratingly, it doesn’t take much imagination to guess how these systems will be used. We have already seen mass de-platforming by financial institutions as a means of censorship. So many things that could be done with a CBDC have already been done on either as a whole, or with specific interventions.

Other encroachments will be much more sinister and harder to predict. New functionality and advancements in technology will open up unimaginable possibilities. No single person would be capable of understanding it all, making anyone who attempts to sound mad to those who haven’t.

Surveillance

Surveillance itself is enough of an invasion, regardless what it is being used for. People deserve the right to make mistakes, learn, and grow as people. It is troubling in an age where there is hardly any accountability for those at the top, the public is being targeted for any kind of micro-infraction. The only way to restore a free and fair society is to tilt the scales in the opposite direction.

Censorship

Programmable currencies are entirely able to dictate their use. No transaction is permanent, likely only the record of it is. This can be used to develop powerful feedback loops to entirely eliminate dissent.

Financial Repression

Reprisals for unapproved actions can be harsh and all-encompassing. Not only are you entirely vulnerable to the whims of the system, those around you will also face the same consequences for lending support.

Using financial control to manipulate the public is already being tested.

Micro-management

With additional forms of contracts punishments can be fine-tuned to elicit very specific responses. All kinds of virtual systems can be precisely configured to represent your deemed place in society.

Failure

Central planning in any form is civilization’s equivalent of putting all your eggs in one basket…over a cliff. It is a total failure mode of any human system and should be avoided at all costs. When these schemes inevitably go wrong, so much damage to lives, communities, and vital human capital is often unrecoverable.

Or more importantly, why the rush?

There are a variety of factors that mean that the powers that ought not to be might not really have time on their side when it comes to preparing alternative financial systems.

John Titus can explain complicated financial concepts in a way that is remarkably accessible. He’s published many great videos addressing the bailouts and lack of criminal prosecution since the great financial crisis.

Presenting America’s Real Coup d’Etat

Geopolitics

As the world changes so do alliances and incentives. Many brilliant minds have suggested that the Covid Crisis could be a painful diversion from an ongoing geopolitical Struggle.

Regardless of the underlying reasons we can almost certainly expect future disruptions and difficulties. If nothing else please find ways to be more resilient yourself and take care of others.

Solutions

Just say “NO!” and Do not comply!

Tank your social credit score in advance! The most powerful tool the technocracy has to influence you is your own mind. Deliberately properly aligning the incentives yourself can go a long way.

Authentic peaceful disobedience is priceless in these times. As aggrivating as things are it’s important to understand that it’s our duty to demonstrate that all peaceful options have been exhausted.

Hold institutions accountable

We can not engineer nor evade our way around the fact that the rule of law is precious and needs to be restored. There is hardly any reason to start new laws and constitutions from scratch when we can’t even enforce existing ones. Greater transparency and accountability will pay dividends in all other aspects of working for freedom.

A great way to eliminate financial incentives is to provide what you can without financial strings. Cooperation is at a premium these days, so there is much to gain from sharing with others. Building a robust safety-net for those ejected from the social credit system is a pre-requisite for mass resistance.

Sound money

I’m not particularly biased towards any asset or commodity, but I am highly skeptical of any solution that doesn’t re-ground society back to tangible value. Our manipulated currencies have corrupted even trivial incentives for so long that I doubt we can avoid facing those consequences. This is why it is all-the-more important that high-profile criminals be prosecuted for their ill-gotten-gains.

Time banking

Anything that values human beings and their time more is a good thing. The technocracy has aimed to glamorize a future without other people. If we all have to embrace barter to resist tyranny, time banking is a very efficient model.

Local digital currencies and decentralized cryptocurrencies

While any and all useful digital systems should be used for what they can, relying on a single global blockchain may be an inefficient option for regions that may face radically different circumstances. Building an online bank from the ground up is not a technically sophisticated task. Anyone capable of creating a dynamic website is capable of building a functional prototype. The main difficulties are around physical security and accountability for the assets.

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Servicification

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Today, so many online services confuse the concept of ownership.
Ownership is not merely access to a product. Ownership is about rights, for both tangible and intangible property.
What options do you have to use, enjoy, or transfer that property?
What limits (if any) exist on those options.
These rights are entirely dependent on either the rule of law, or on force.

If Claus Schwab aims to deprive me of my property and my liberty, he needs to remember I have a gun.

Rick Rule

The very reason the law exists, is so that people don’t have to resort to violent means to defend themselves. In an ideal world, people would clearly and efficiently negotiate outcomes. This requires acceptable and enforceable boundaries to limit what actions can be taken against people. Otherwise the situation can rapidly devolve into anarcho-tyranny. ¹

The tools of the technocracy aren’t always used to outright rob people. Quite often, they are instead used to tip the scales in a way that coerces people into giving in to schemes that they otherwise wouldn’t. Convenience in exchange for surveillance is the most clear example, but there are other options. If not prevented by a vigilant populace, the state can force people to beta test additional surveillance and control.²

Servicification

Servicification is the replacement of concrete ownership with temporary access. Arguably there are some efficiency gains. Instead of fragile, disposable products providers would invest in products that are built to last. In addition to this, unused products could be accessible to be used by others. These benefits are more advantageous for the owner of the property rather than the users. The only benefit the user gains is that it potentially gives people access to products that they would be otherwise unable to afford.

A big problem is that in our current landscape, the users will likely be charged more than just currency. People may have to pay with their data in addition to currency. Even worse, by using these products may be entirely gated behind a social credit system armed with all-pervasive mass surveillance.

Virtual goods

Music, videos, software, & video games are all already quite accessible through online stores. “Owning” these virtual products isn’t actual ownership, it’s merely purchasing a temporary license to make use of them. Temporary as in, the service provider can decide to no longer give the user access. Or even when the service provider goes under, access becomes impossible.

NFTs are an interesting attempt to solve that problem. If one stores entire digital goods on the blockchain, smart contracts could allow permanent ³ and transferrable access. This arrangement requires there to be an incentive for the blockchain to be stored-long term, which may require a high and increasing token price.

Reality alterations

Beyond digital goods, servicification can be used to regulate and manage physical assets and goods. With enough surveillance and automation, renting something or somewhere can be done without any human interaction. This is always a double-edged affair, when things are conveniently enabled without human interaction, they can also be restricted without any human interaction or judgement.

Video source: Twitter

This is a new frontier for digital intrusion into people’s lives. While one may hope that they are exempt because they don’t own any smart devices, there are ways around this. People with less money can be presented with predatory arrangements where renting a place also requires them to opt-in to all kinds of surveillance and control, ensuring that privacy and autonomy is only limited to the very wealthy.

It is important to note that these measures aren’t enhancements. In no way does adding internet access to a lock make it more secure. A digital token may represent access but this is in no way the same thing as a key physically required to mechanically unlock a door.

Jobs aren’t safe either. Offshoring allowed the financial class to use human suffering as a competitive advantage against labor. Servicification allows an even further impoverishment of the citizens. By cutting up a single well-paid career into micro-tasks that are then farmed out to either underpaid workers with no bargaining power, or simply automated.

Consumerism in America has transferred billions and trillions of dollars of wealth to would-be financial despots who now want to monopolize all resources, all property, and collect rents from them from now until the end of time, all in the name of sustainability.

Spartacus

In the best of circumstances, this will have disastrous consequences for the workforce. This precariousness-by-default will eliminate the last vestiges of security people once took for granted. Taken to the extreme, it undermines the very social contract by turning the entire public into mercenaries.

Better ways

Entrepreneurship

The lockdowns during the Covid Crisis were an atrocious attack on small enterprises. If local economies are to ever thrive again this must be actively reversed. This is not something we have the luxury of simply hoping for. People need to actively work to reduce unfair barriers leveraged against local businesses. One of the things the technocrats fear the most is strong communities with economic self-determination. Making these changes may be difficult and expensive, but it is a whole lot more difficult and expensive to live in a society without an authentic local economy.

Libraries

Yes, most of the efficiency of servicification can be gained from your local library. Using a library of things ⁴ allows people to get use out of items they may only need occasionally. There is no reason that the products being shared need to be owned by a multi-national corporation. By supporting and enhancing surveillance-free alternatives we can all benefit from modern efficiency without compromising the vulnerable.

The future will be community-based

The need to belong is thwarting the globalist agenda.

Anarcho-tyranny on urban dictionary

Anarcho-tyranny is a concept, where the state is argued to be more interested in controlling citizens so that they do not oppose the managerial class (tyranny) rather than controlling real criminals (causing anarchy). Laws are argued to be enforced only selectively, depending on what is perceived to be beneficial for the ruling elite.

↩︎
Vaccine passports are a notable example. ↩︎
Well, as permanent as the blockchain running it anyways. ↩︎
Share a shovel, share a machine ↩︎

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The failure of intelligence

Sat, 08 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In an ideal world, people would do their best to understand reality and share that understanding with others. Some call this journalism. This kind of journalism has been under attack for quite some time. The very reason that ideal world can’t exist is because being able to understand reality better than others, or to even conceal that reality from others gives one power. That power is sought by all kinds of people in all kinds of situations and it corrupts them. No amount of “It’s for the greater good!” rationalization will comfort their souls, and deep down they know it.

The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.

John F. Kennedy 27 April 1961

Secrets beget more secrets, and they blister with corruption. This deep corruption has taken root in almost all levels of society. One has to be ejected from it all to appreciate the full extent of it. People very ability to understand what lies before them is under attack on the most fundamental levels. More control, suppression and deceit are constantly required to maintain the illusion. These illusions are not mere phantoms, they require sacrifice. Greater and greater sacrifices are made just for more to be demanded.

People are not blind to this. Every day in all their actions they make a conscious choice. “Is this level of sacrifice enough to cover the secrets I maintain?” We are all tainted by the secrets we participate in. Every deviation from sharing the truth as we know it incurs unimaginable debts. There is only one act that can truly change things. It is a loving act of self-sacrifice. That act of self-sacrifice is to shout:

Enough!

Enough with the lies, enough with the pretending, enough with the sacrifices. It takes a monumental act of courage to take on not only the secrecy, but also make yourself an enemy of those who still harbor them. This is no small feat. Telling the truth in an age of deceit is an immense risk in even the most trivial of examples. How do we as free people respond?

Don’t underestimate the power of truth, there’s nothing more powerful. Now in order to speak what you might regard as the truth you have to let go of the outcome! You have to think: “Alright I’m going to say what I think. Ignorant as I am, stupid as I am. I am going to state what I think as clearly as I can and I’m going to live with the consequences no matter what they are.

Jordan Peterson at the Manning Conference 2017

As Peterson warns us, it is not safe to speak the truth. People have to do it anyways. You need to have the faith that the cost is worth it. Without that faith you will falter when you’re needed most. You may never know when that time comes, it is best to always be on guard. If nothing else, understand you’re not alone. There are many others who have taken up that challenge in the largest and smallest of ways.

#FreeAssange

John Pilger on Twitter🐦

Julian Assange is in prison, representing you yes, you. Why? Because eventually the violent, rapacious power that put him there will touch your life, perhaps worse than that...

By sacrificing Julian Assange for these lies, what’s next? Who or what should we prepare to hoist onto the altar of public relations. Merely evading the wrath of those who benefit from secrecy is not enough. These injustices simply beget more injustices. In doing so we don’t just corrupt the public record, but our own moral understanding. Some may argue these methods are worthwhile, but it is indisputable they have a cost. That cost rises every day with every concession away from the truth.

This is the mechanism that is making all our lives more difficult. You can choose almost any contentious political issue, delve deep enough you find ultimately the troubles are the cost of maintaining some kind of secret. People have been mislead in so many ways. It is terrifyingly asinine to label a handful of alleged misconceptions “disinformation” to take the blame for decades of deceit.

When you try to equate yourself with Julian Assange you’re making a very dangerous gesture.

John Bolton

We are well past dangerous. We have gambled with so many lives, for so long and for what? Deranged western leaders have sabotaged generations of human capital. Nobody is safe. No amount of acquiescence or displays of loyalty will protect anyone from a system of total corruption. Wealth won’t protect anyone either. Without the rule of law safety and wealth are both meaningless, unenforceable concepts.

The goal is justice, the method is transparency

Our goal as free people in society shouldn’t simply be to be those in-the-know. Being “awake” is a pitiful consolation when one idly watches the tides of tyranny crash forth. It is long past time to take action, but I’ll also call you to imagine. Imagine a world that isn’t constantly wasting time, energy, effort, and lives in the name of preserving secrecy. What could be gained by saving the immense cost of maintaining secrecy and lies?

All around us we witness the unending failures of intelligence at the highest levels. What is all the censorship, surveillance, and narrative control for if it fails to bring forth truth? People struggle to agree on some of the most basic tenets of our reality. Instead of cooperating to build understanding we draw battle lines. Waging our culture wars, while criminals plunder our societies in the cover of ignorance and hatred.

Whatever we currently call intelligence needs to give way for justice. Agencies, think-tanks, and individuals are all called to say “Enough!” and aim for restoring integrity. We can undo the damage done by lies, but we can use the truth to set us free of them.

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Principle: Hardware matters

Wed, 05 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Back to Basics

There are innumerable examples of average people being unable to explain how the modern conveniences of their life work. From creating food, energy, and products to what it takes to make them accessible, nearly everyone is quite ignorant about these things. In an age of such rapid transformation it is quite understandable if not predictable. When it comes to technology, almost everything is quite obscured for a person who doesn’t take the time to look.

This creates a great deal of confusion and friction when trying to truly decentralize power. In most cases, it’s not always necessary for someone to know details about every service and system they use. However, there are many advantages to being aware of some fundamental elements of digital systems that surround us. We as people working to safeguard and expand human liberty, must at least understand the basics of how things work.

Hardware

In their simplest form, computers use power to run computations on signals. They can use those signals to manipulate devices to do all kinds of things like run displays or store information. These devices can have ways to collect information and signals for the computer. With more sophisticated programming we can use these signals to create files and media, access the web, and enjoy a large variety of multimedia content. When it comes to any device you have, you’ll at least want to be aware of what it can do.

Reclaiming territory in cyberspace: #1 Hardware basics

Start your journey in building up your digital sovereignty.

Specialized hardware

One cpu = one vote

Satoshi Nakamoto

One of the things that initially got me excited about Bitcoin was that it created a market incentive for people to acquire more powerful computing. I had hoped that this would eventually decentralize computing power across society. That was quickly demolished when specialized hardware was created uniquely for the purpose of mining Bitcoin. There are also specialized devices for machine learning and authentication. using specialized hardware can do wonders for resource efficiency and simplifying problems.

Tools of the Technocracy: #3 Robots, IoT, Automation, Oh my!

Transforming the world in ways seen and unseen

Unfortunately that also means that general computing devices could end up being restricted from the people. If all kinds of functions are available through cloud providers and specialized products, bad actors could argue that general-purpose computing is too dangerous to be accessible to the masses. General purpose devices would likely consume more resources, and these “wasteful” devices could be restricted in the name of conserving energy.

What happens when we ignore hardware?

There’s no reason to guess because in many ways we already have. Smartphones are the perfect representation of what happens when we aren’t in control of our computing. People’s own devices and data can become weaponized against them.

The cloud

There is no cloud, there is only someone else’s computer

By putting all of your data on cloud services you have no idea where the data is actually stored and if it is truly protected. While the best way to protect data is to never record it, a great way is to only store it on your own devices. While many cloud providers boast stringent security, data breaches are an all-too-common occurrence. By keeping your data to yourself, it is safer because you’re likely to be less of a target than everyone’s cloud data combined.

Tools of the Technocracy: #4 Online Identity

What is following you in your digital tracks?

“Serverless”

Why use your own devices at all? Why not simply centralize all computing power and storage into one giant big iron. Due to the economies of scale, it can be tempting to reap the efficiency gains of using massive supercomputers as a common good. While for some applications this may be quite viable, the name “serverless” is entirely misleading. All the computation and storage still needs to exist somewhere. Whoever, or whatever has control of that mainframe is effectively the master of the resource. Bad actors would be highly motivated to corrupt and manipulate that resource, undermining any efficiency gains from centralization.

If you’re sincerely interested in running systems without servers at all, you may be interested in gun.js. Gun is a useful framework for building peer-to-peer persistent applications. These applications effectively store all the important data among the users.

Rebuilding

All three primary resources in cyberspace (Computing power, Storage, & bandwidth) are entirely reliant on hardware. This means if you’re hoping to democratize our online experience, you want to ensure those three (and the hardware that supports them) are as decentralized as possible. While it may be impossible to perfectly decentralize these things, incremental progress can yield exponential results.

Free (as in Freedom) hardware

It is a mistake to continue to buy hardware from large corporations with an incentive to sell you cloud services. You can’t reasonably expect that they will chose principles they don’t have over their bottom-line. Ideally your hardware would be entirely sourced from local, ethically built, businesses that respect your freedom. Unfortunately we are quite far away from that being the standard. It is our responsibility collectively to remove unnecessary barriers to making that a reality.

The Free Software Foundation has a fantastic campaign called Respects your freedom or hardware that meets their certification

Other initiatives

Regardless of what we choose, it’s important that we get better at supporting hardware designers and manufacturers that support freedom.

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Programmable currency

Sun, 25 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

With ordinary money like cash or coins, the holder decides what they want to do with it and what needs to be disclosed. Programmable currency is an entirely different situation. In many ways, they aren’t much of a deviation from existing digital currency that can be tracked, blocked and controlled. The differences lie in scale, scope, and application. When someone has their donations seized, or their bank account frozen, there is an action that needs to make that happen. Someone has to recognize an event, then take action and make the change.

With programmable currency intervention can be the default. Instead of you being protected from interference, you are at the whims of the rules of the game. Ideally, people would be able to choose the terms they’re beholden to. The challenge is that both state and corporate entities are more than able and willing to enforce one-sided terms onto the public. There is much to say about the diabolical uses for programmable currency.

What is it good for?

Currency is a concept first and foremost. Instead of getting lost in the technical details of specific digital currencies, realize that programmable currency can be built on simple ideas. This piece, aims to help you understand how these systems work. Surely there’s more to programmable currency than pure evil? What can programmable currency be used for?

Smart contacts

There are many situations where one may want some product or service, but isn’t too concerned about who or what provides it. With programmable currency one could automatically pay the first entity that delivers it. Even fully-centralized programmable money may provide the mechanism for ordinary people to setup these kinds of interactions.

This has all kinds of other uses. With this, and a high degree of automation; one could run a nearly entirely automated business. When a customer places an order, the machines detect the transaction. The machines then can prepare the order, maybe even paying human laborers in the programmable currency to handle some of the trickier parts along the way.

Open Science

Kevin McKernan argues that the peer review system is broken. That its main flaw is the lack of a price signal for reviewers. Funded by the Dash project, Kevin published results and papers about sequencing cannabis plants. Through the course of the project a great deal of progress was made. He does focus more on the scientific elements of the project, but some elements are clear:

Science could be a lot more transparent
The barrier to entry can be lowered significantly
Participants can be better rewarded for their contributions

Kevin McKernan - Texas Bitcoin Conference

Alternative financial models

Many proponents of programmable currency are fierce advocates of universal basic income (UBI). Cesium is an attempt to make this a reality. Every day each participant in the web-of-trust is given a daily guaranteed dividend. The value of the currency is solely determined by the value offered by the participants. This currency isn’t designed for saving or investing, but purely as a way to provide grassroots liquidity.

The libre currency without jargon

A trivial example

If you’ve ever tried a variety of games for Android or iOS, this can illuminate things a great deal. Many smartphone games are outright designed to extract the most amount of money from the customer as regularly as possible. With all the state-of-the-art research on how to manipulate people, any centralized digital currency will definitely resemble the worst aspects of any popular mobile game.

How Gacha Games Trick Players into Spending Thousands

As a player of any mobile game you bring in two primary resources: your money and your time. Your goal is to effectively convert one or both of those resources into in-game experiences and rewards. These mobile games tend to have two in-game currencies: one that is purchased with time, another that is purchased with your money. If you understand those dynamics, you understand everything you need to about how programmable currency will be used against people.

The game’s two currencies have many properties that are unique to programmable currencies:

They are limited to specific uses

In these games the currencies are not equal. “Money currency” will take you so much farther than the “time currency’ and there is usually a very unfavorable ratio when exchanging these.
May be explicitly manipulated by the issuer

The player doesn’t have any control over the game’s infrastructure. Their only choice is to use the currencies as intended or work outside the system entirely.
Purchasing the currency locks you into the system

There may be no way to recover value from the system. If the game itself is not one you enjoy, and you’re outside of the refund window, there may be no way to recover the value you put into the system. It may even be outright impossible.

What can’t programmable currency do?

Eliminate security concerns

There are many examples of poorly designed Web3 projects getting hacked or having funds sanctioned. These systems aren’t immune to all the same failings that existing digital infrastructure has. Like any other endeavor great care should be placed in ensuring the privacy, security and autonomy of participants. Just like with any other kind of app, convenience can come at a price.

Handle Trust

It is all-too-appealing for those of us interested in technology to believe in our hubris, that simply the right technological innovation will overcome human problems. It can’t be overstated that this mindset will always lead to mistakes. Tools are tools, whether they are wielded by us or the technocracy. “Trust-less” systems can’t bring health and wealth to a society of people who don’t respect each other.

The road to hell: misplaced optimism in the blockchain space

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Redefining "high places"

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The technocracy is a terrifying, horrific and inhuman assault on our very being. People are under assault from all angles: financial, emotional, and intellectual. By keeping people alone and isolated, the technocracy can seem all-but-entirely unopposed. It is quite easy to fall into the trap of envying it’s power, or even wishing to share in the ill-gotten-gains. This trap is what can transform the most fervent freedom fighter into yet another foot-soldier for the machine.

Selling out for shockingly low prices

Working for the technocracy is working for those who want to enslave you, and everyone around you. With previous regimes, one could argue there was an incentive to defect. People naturally feel drawn to securing their own legacies, even sadly at the expense of others. This however, doesn’t apply here. There is no pleasant future purchased in exchange for complying with this inhuman agenda. Whatever temporary creature comforts one enjoys for attacking humanity is a very small price in exchange for the consequences.

“What consequences?” Rizza Islam started his speech at Defeat the Mandates with a profound statement.

This is the example of what you get when you choose to attack all members of the human family.
This is what you get when you decide to go after a person’s child.
This is what you get when you choose to attack men, women, medical professionals, those with degrees, those without degrees, and those in-between.

If there’s one thing we need to do above all else, it is to maintain and nurture our love for humanity in these dark times. This is a highly necessary call to unity. We do not have the luxury of being choosy with allies. You’re not going to agree with everyone in this fight. Odds are you may have severe disagreements or even unhealed wounds.

In case anyone needs a reminder, governments all over the world used the pretext of a crisis to seize more power and control. Instead of using any of that power to help anyone, all major institutions enforced measures and decisions that consistently caused harm instead of preventing it. When presented with evidence of harm, these institutions responded with threats, gaslighting, and indifference. Regardless of what can be salvaged from these institutions, they have no authority, credibility, and legitimacy until the cause those issues is addressed.

Redefining “high places”

This is not a call for attacking people in those institutions, wishing ill on them, or even replacing the institutions themselves. It is well past time to acknowledge what is, rather than what we would like to be.

These institutions, as they exist, are working against people.
These institutions, as they exist, are hopelessly corrupt.

Thankfully the good doctor has a cure for this situation:

“Turn away from evil, run towards good”

Dr Vladimir Zelenko

Turn away from evil

Stop envying their wealth and prestige

In many ways, this is the hardest and most critical. People are being placed into desperate situations and it is a very trying time for almost everyone. Any status gained from working within institutions responsible needs to be met with extreme scorn. While there may be people inside them that are kind and loving within their own circle, but nothing they say or do is to be met with praise. Achievements in service of evil are no achievements at all.

Stop complying

When given the choice to make a situation easier or harder for those working against humanity, why do them any favors? Anything people can do to create friction for those who desire total control works to help us all. Total control would be almost impossible if people actively chose to encourage indifference to err on the side of non-compliance.

Denis Rancourt on Twitter 🐦

To all those who say "we need mass resistance"... I say "we need individual non-compliance". Plus, that is something you actually control. Stop being a social theorist, and actually join the resistance.

Don’t take them seriously

We live in a time of aggressive absurdities. People are expected to live a lie to maintain the illusion of a functioning human society. These are dangerous times and mistaking propaganda for reality is a very expensive and life-threatening mistake. As much as possible, give no credence to what these institutions would have you believe. Instead, work with those who are continuously working to dig up the truth beneath the surface.

Run towards good

Value and nurture what has been taken from the people

So many things have been ripped away from people, or even forgotten entirely. These are the things we should be maximizing in our lives:

Truth
Health
Trust
Beauty
Peace
Autonomy
Privacy
Wisdom
Freedom

How many of these things come from the technocracy? Will total top-down control with us at the helm bring these things to each other? Remember that it is impossible to win at that game, and it is good that what we want can be achieved through different means.

Support others

All of this is bigger than any of us. Nobody can take it all alone. Unity is our greatest strength.

They want people isolated and alone? Work with others to bring people together.
They want people fearful and in dread? Raise people’s spirits and give them hope.
They want people angry and wrathful? Bring peace to difficult situations and settle disputes.

Step into yourself

To err is human, to forgive is divine. Forgive yourself as well as others. Working for human freedom requires courage and otherworldly strength. Forging meaningful connections with others can help you truly recognize your own talents and strengths.

You have friends in high places

What do you admire most?

Is it large sums of money? Fame? Power? No?

If you’re be willing to trade all of those things for a better world, I have good news for you.

You are not alone.

An incomplete list, in no particular order:

Dr Kulvinder Kaur MD

Kulvinder Kaur MD on Twitter 🐦

If you are trying to make sense of this nightmare, pls start here. Beginning a Scientific Evidence-Based Humanitarian Response to Covid-19: can be applied globally based on GBD

Dr Paul Merik

Dr Christina Parks

Dr Byram Bridle

Jessica Rose

I have no words for how elated I am at my most recent experience in life.

World Council for Health meeting in Vienna

Meryl Nass

Catherine Austin Fitts

Spartacus

ICENI - Institute for Coronavirus Emergence Nonprofit Intelligence

We are a loose confederation of independent COVID-19 researchers who have collected and analyzed large reams of data on the virus, its nature, its origins, and the ongoing political scandals surrounding the government response.

Stormcloudsgathering

The Freedom Convoy

There were tons of people who organized, supported, and participated in the Canadian Freedom Convoy. Every single one of those great people are cheering you on.

and many, many others:

Beyond the pillars of courage that are recognizable to anyone, there are many more people who have put in many tireless hours for the good of all. This is the time for all of us to reject tyranny however we can.

Those searching for, and sharing the truth
Those working to comfort those in need
Those who’ve donated their skills and expertise to uncover corruption

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Tools of the Technocracy: #9 Internet Shutdowns

Sat, 03 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Tools of the Technocracy: #9 Internet Shutdowns

The free and open web is an idea. It’s the idea that humanity can share a distributed (or entirely decentralized) information repository for free expression and open dialogue. So many great things would be outright impossible without the world’s information superhighway. The threats to a free and open web are legion, governments, corporations, and other malevolent entities are eager to control your access to information.

In the age of widespread tolerance for censorship, the term “net neutrality” is entirely forgotten. This is an important reminder that censorship is very much as social phenomenon as well as a technological threat. Controlling information is always about controlling people. Given complete control over what information one’s subjects have access to, that entity is their ruler regardless of the law.

Why Shut Down The Internet?

The internet can be a phenomenal equalizer; people have access to immense amounts of human knowledge and expression. Despite all the aspects of our digital world being leveraged against people, the Internet has many properties that are beneficial to humanity at large. It’s censorship resistant, and good valuable information can be relatively permanent.

The internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it.

I really like that quote, but I feel it misses the mark. People interpret censorship as an attack on their right to freedom of thought, and those people work to route around it. This is a nightmare for technocrats and tyrants of all walks of life. Professionals, academics, and bureaucrats don’t fear the public being able to use the Internet to learn their skills and replace them. Instead, what they truly fear is the public being able to use the Internet to expose them as frauds. Censorship is an attack on all people by attacking their very ability to learn, create and share.

The danger of internet shutdowns, in whole or in part, is the fundamental undermining of the people’s ability to peacefully find alternatives to serious problems. It is true that the Internet is used to surveil, control, and manipulate people. Those activities could very easily be deployed by these forces on their own separate networks & infrastructure, it just happens to be fairly convenient to use what is here already.

Whole Internet Shutdowns

Internet shutdowns are already a well-established phenomenon. Regardless of justification, whole internet shutdowns have drastic consequences on the people and represent an overt attack on their civil rights. By denying people’s ability to access information, and their ability to be heard by the rest of the world; you enable the worst actors to commit their crimes in the cover of darkness.

India leads total shutdowns globally. In 2021, the world’s largest democracy shut off its internet 106 times – more than the rest of the world combined. Hardest-hit was the conflict-ridden region of Jammu and Kashmir, which was subject to 85 shutdowns under the guise of containing separatist violence. The blackouts shut down Zoom classes for students, stopped doctors from communicating with their remote patients and crippled the banking system, causing mortgage holders to default on their loans. Apple crops rotted before they could be sold and businesses were paralyzed.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/29/flicking-the-kill-switch-governments-embrace-internet-shutdowns-as-a-form-of-control https://twitter.com/jrotermund/status/1564158516327333889

Such a drastic measure is (outside of accident & sabotage) never taken lightly. Any trivial excuse for initiating one is almost certainly a lie. A government may blame a foreign adversary, but one has to ask: “Qui bono?”. Who really benefits from cutting off a nations public access to information, and to be heard from the wider world?

Partial Internet Shutdowns

While a whole internet shutdown could be localized in a small area, another option is altering the infrastructure to monitor, alter, or deny access to specific kinds of traffic. It is possible for unencrypted (or recognizable patterns) traffic can be filtered, throttled, or monitored. This means that specific kinds of services, like e-mails or uploads can be disrupted entirely.

Great Firewalls

When an entity has control of some parts of the Internet infrastructure there are all kinds of techniques that can be used to block access to sites and specific kinds of services. These “great firewalls” can also be used to block connections entirely from or to the outside world. From a strategic perspective, blocking isn’t the only option, surveillance is an incredibly powerful tool for hunting down dissidents.

Tools of the Technocracy: #5 Networks

Much of the digital infrastructure in place today is built to structurally enable tyranny.

The little padlock on your browser means the site is secure right? No. The only thing that little padlock says is that you have a direct encrypted connection to a server. Without inspecting the certificate itself and verifying with others you can’t always be sure you’re connected to the correct server.

This technology drastically reduces the amount and kinds of services you can trust. These insidious techniques can make it seem almost impossible to use the Internet securely and privately. Solutions exist, but one has to responsibly manage their expectations when it comes to trade-offs. It’s essentially an open secret that the Internet was developed for the purpose of being an all-encompassing surveillance grid. If humanity wants to maintain the information superhighway as a public good, we are all going to have to learn to be nimble and change our behavior to reform cyberspace.

Targeted Attacks

A broad internet shutdown is a desperate move. Strategically, it’s much more efficient to eliminate sources (and disseminators) of information that you want to restrict. This is exactly why the public at large must constantly be told why censorship has to continue. If people understood the true cost of censorship, no self-respecting person would tolerate it.

Cyberattacks

Sufficiently motivated adversaries with enough resources can make keeping a service online very difficult. Just as we are all mortal no service is fully attack-proof. The cost to fight a cyberattack is almost always significantly more than the cost to initiate it.

Denial Of Infrastructure

In a deeply troubling response, after both terminations we saw a dramatic increase in authoritarian regimes attempting to have us terminate security services for human rights organizations — often citing the language from our own justification back to us.

Cloudflare blog

In ideal circumstances such restriction would be impossible. However, as long as the three primary resources of cyberspace (storage, computing power, bandwidth) are subject to the economies of scale; there will always be powerful incentives to rely on certain entities one-way-or-another.

Attacking The People

The people running any kind of site or service are just humans like you and me. They are mortal. Not only that, but they are vulnerable to smear campaigns, threats, and bribes.

The Infodemic

There is a high demand for people rationalizing censorship. Technocrats, tyrants, and social engineers of all kinds are all willing to pay handsomely for (or even fight for) the ability to control people’s minds. In today’s day and age, it’s completely laughable to believe that any of that power will be devoted at all for the people’s benefit.

Are there limitless lies on the Internet?.

Absolutely.

Are there mobs of angry people willing to do all manner of cruel things to others on the Internet?

No doubt.

Are there groups of people disproportionately targeted by all kinds of online abuse and manipulation?

Yes, 100%.

Is anyone, any group of people, or institution so entirely noble and wise that they can wield the power to control information justly?

Nope. Not now, and likely not ever.

Why?

This is a reasonable question to ask. It’s easy to imagine society can decide what forms of expression are most cruel, most egregious, most harmful and only limit sanctions on that. The unfortunate truth is that even if that is the case today, there is never a guarantee that it will remain that way. The “slippery slope fallacy” can’t be applied to events driven by exponential growth and decay. When abuses of power aren’t swiftly and harshly punished, future abuses aren’t just welcomed; they are incentivized.

Misinformation, Disinformation, Malinformation

These terms are thrown around so casually these days, attributed to so many things that it is hard to see them as anything other than thought-terminating-cliches.
Apparently they are supposed to mean:

Misinformation

Information that isn’t true but the people sharing it believe it is true
Disinformation

Information that isn’t true, even though the people spreading it know it’s false
Malinformation

Information that is actually true, but has “undesirable effects” (such as loss of trust in institutions, bank runs, scandals)

Ironically these terms themselves are actually quite dangerous ideas. They presume not just the desirability of information control, but also the outright moral necessity of it. That alone would be bad enough, but having seen how these labels are applied over the last two years. They are hardly used fairly at all. These terms are little more than smears by a desperate press that’s losing trust faster than they can say “Streisand effect!”.

Harassment

Human beings have a great capacity to hurt each other. The internet, like any other tool greatly enhances this. When someone doesn’t take absolute care to be anonymous there is little-to-nothing they can do to protect themselves from the ire of an irate mob, especially a well-financed and motivated one. This makes many people want to rush to suppress any hostile expression. It backfires all the time. Societal rifts need to be healed, not torn further and further apart.

Facebook can’t handle all the hate and abuse from people on their own platform, with the state-of-the art tools. While there may be financial incentives for Facebook to fan the flames, they fail to completely eliminate all kinds of criminal activities from their services. It is highly likely that suppressing all anger and hate is an impossible task.

This doesn’t mean that the hate has to continue to burn. Selectively suppressing anger and hate just fosters resentment and escalates the hate. Instead, empowering people to peacefully negotiate, separate themselves from, or simply accept differences in society can help. Raising tensions only serves to benefit those who have bad intentions or ulterior motives.

Automated Extremism

We are not just dealing with small groups of malevolent people. Automated tools exist to flood people with all kinds of inflammatory material. Simply lashing out at the people who are confused and angry is blaming the victims. Yes, they often beget more victims. Which builds a cycle of eye-for-an-eye’ing each other for a very blind world.

For those that are sincerely worried about extremism, or people indoctrinated with nonsense, remember that those people don’t exist in a vacuum. It is well understood that suppression doesn’t actually reduce those problems. We have seen over and over that all it does is inflame anger and drive people further underground. Exiling those people and demeaning their concerns is incredibly counter-productive.

The only reason to take the suppression approach is if there is some part of the associated discourse that you want to keep buried forever. If that’s the case I’m highly suspicious of your motives.

What can be done bout the anger and hate?

You are the solution!

If you’re reading this, you’re already a curious and thoughtful person. This is the key to diffusing the conflicts in society. While we all have ways we can improve ourselves to be more charitable and understanding with others, you have to take time to be more outspoken to humanize those who are being attacked. Tessa Lena has a fantastic presentation on this.

Solutions for censorship resistance

Build Big

Nobody can tackle the full threat of internet shutdowns alone. It can be difficult to get people interested in collaborating until it happens. That said, everyone is going to wish that in a moment of an internet shutdown there is a flood of volunteers rushing to help get people back online immediately.

Democratization of internet infrastructure is vital. High-bandwidth long-range communications aren’t easy to build, but many of these challenged can be overcome with dedicated and talented people being supported.

What’s more powerful than too big to fail? Too small to shut down.
Power and control should be as distributed as possible. Instead of relying on heroes to have all the answers we all need to work on solutions that can scale beyond our self-interest and political division.

Useful Projects

These all require some degree of technical knowledge, but are highly worth exploring.

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Digital ID: The basics

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

101: What is Digital ID?

The rise of technocratic control has justifiably motivated people into taking action and resist the foundational tools of the technocracy. Many of these tools are well positioned to leverage any form of digital ID against you. What forms can Digital ID take?

A biometric implant?
A smartphone app?
Your face?
A microchip in your passport?

Any and all of these can be used in such a system. There isn’t a specific need to use exclusively and only those. Mass surveillance (online and outside) can make anonymity entirely difficult to outright impossible. This has incredible implications for all kinds of interactions; instead of you getting to choose who (or what) you identify yourself to, you are automatically identified to the system and quite possibly everyone else around you.

Identification

“Who cares if people know who you are?” you may ask. If only it were that simple.
While your identity may not be shared with everyone around you, the system will know. Then almost anything and everything can be used against you.

That article you read three years ago?
Someone you’re associated with?
Religious or political views?

Tools of the Technocracy: #4 Online Identity

What is following you in your digital tracks?

This information has already been used against people. It is impossible to predict what information will be leveraged and how. Once the system is in force it is highly unlikely there will be any transparency or recourse when it is abused. We have already seen how big tech social media and other organizations are eager to misuse information, how much more likely is it to be abused by an even less accountable entity?

Surveillance

The feedback loop driving further data collection is very strong. The more data you have about people the more power you have over them. Even if you’re as careful as possible; your fellow citizens, businesses and services, or even institutions can all be pressured or bribed into divulging information about you.

Tools of the Technocracy: #7 Smart Cities

Smart cities are marketed as if they are for the convenience of its residents, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Even when services and organizations aren’t proactively concerned with what your activities are, they could be using convenient systems that simply collect information in the background.

Devices

“Smart” devices, implants, computers, can all be used to represent you. All that matters is that the system can uniquely identify you. Even if the devices themselves aren’t proactively being used against you, software and services you use can often pick up the slack.

Tools of the Technocracy: #3 Robots, IoT, Automation, Oh my!

Transforming the world in ways seen and unseen

Data sovereignty

Digital ID begins with data. While you can avoid using devices that disclose that data, it’s much harder to prevent state and corporate entities from collecting and sharing the data they have on you. That’s the trouble. Data about you isn’t the same as your data.

The road to hell: misplaced optimism in the blockchain space

The only data you can call “your data” is data that is stored on systems you control. Data about you is near impossible for you to entirely quantify. Surely, if we made sure that everything was stored on a blockchain it would be better! At least more transparent?

Governance

The threats inherent to a mass surveillance and control grid are not solved by changing who’s running it, or what technology it is stored on. With such a system, the people running it are not immune to the all-too-human problem of being corrupted by power. Putting this system it’s own artificial intelligence to determine how it should be run is no better.

Due to the very nature of this kind of control, there is no reason for it to be fair, consistent or even logical. By placing everyone’s destiny inside a centralized control grid you introduce catastrophic failure modes. The failure of every utopian fantasy, of every totalitarian regime, is thinking “this time we have all the information we need to decide everything”.

As we have seen, the very process of collecting every minute detail of everything is itself an inhuman endeavor, and an absurd waste of resources. Fear and distrust has turned people against each other to clamor for a false savior to attack their enemies. Don’t make the mistake of betting against humanity. While human beings have a horrifying capacity for evil, people from all walks of life are capable of great feats of mercy and justice.

Solutions

Don’t fall prey to despair. The propaganda that leads you to believe that these systems of control are inevitable is just that. They can all be dismantled simply and quickly with enough will and effort.

Data economics

Data needs to become a liability instead of an asset. There needs to be serious criminal consequences for misuse of data, and civil liabilities for leaking data about people. If organizations became liable for information they collect, you can imagine how quickly they would start to prioritize the privacy of their patrons and staff.

Embrace the analog

There are all kinds of things that people can do to take back the future and have fun doing it!

Cash & Coin
Physical Records
Non-digital entertainment
- Books
- Board games
- Live music
- Sports
Community gatherings
- Barbecues
- Dances
- Competitions
- Workshops
- Worship

There is a reason most democracies have codified the right to freely assemble and the right to pursue happiness. Our society becoming more advanced and connected should only enhance our ability to do these things not take away from them.

Support humanity

This agenda thrives on insecurity and desperation. If you were ever waiting for a good time to give to those in need…now is a fantastic time to give to those who need it most. Food banks and shelters have a direct impact on people in your community and can make great use of what you can give.

Warn people!

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Tools of the Technocracy: #8 Transhumanism

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Tools of the Technocracy: #8 Transhumanism

None of the tools of the technocracy are better marketed than the concept of transhumanism. To some it brings to mind techno-utopian ideas like advanced cybernetics and augmented reality, to outright hubris like defeating death. That’s not really where the dark side even begins. It gets ghoulish fast when one realizes the potential impacts to healthcare, propaganda, and human health as we know it.

Criticism of novel technologies is it’s own trope. Most people aren’t necessarily concerned about the existence of new technologies, but rather how those new developments are allowed to shape and impact our lives. It’s easy to see why more useful, durable, and accessible prosthetics would be seen as a nearly universally good thing, just as mind-control chips programmed by the technocracy would be seen as universally bad.

The sanitized term is digital convergence. “What happens when biology and digital technology merge?”
Note the certainty, when biology and technology merge not if. This is because even some of the most trivial technologies can have profound impacts on society. For example smartphones and social media have changed people as well as the media landscape in big ways.

Humanity is already being altered

Our modern societies have witnessed drastic changes in people’s physiology in a relatively short period of time. When a class of technocrats have complete control, advanced gene-editing technology is overdoing it. Just like plants and animals, humanity can modify these things with selective pressures and breeding. Giving technocrats top-down control of society, provides them absolute power to do the same to the public. Eugenics is in many ways the same technocratic formula ( collect data on everything, make modifications, shape the future) applied to biology.

This creates the potential for a terrifying crisis. With the technology that is already within reach, a society that doesn’t recognize individual rights will inevitably transform people’s bodies into a tokenized commodity. By denying people ownership of their own bodies, all other trespasses are a mere formality. Mandating euthanasia, modification, or use/denial of reproductive means will be all in play. This is the fundamental problem; not about which technologies are good or bad, but entirely about how to preserve our rights and autonomy.

What are the technocrats after?

COVID-19 Deep Dive Part VIII: Transhumanism

The concept of human enhancement goes hand-in-hand with technocracy

Complete domination over humanity

The tools of the technocracy are essentially all the pieces the technocrats want on the board to ‘checkmate’ humanity. Once the people are locked into being collateralized by the system, the technocrats can make use of the public for all kinds of twisted and monstrous experiments.

Immortality

Why rule if you can’t rule forever? The desire to seize complete control overlaps perfectly with a lack of willingness to give it up. Acceptance of death is a vital part of coming to terms with your life. Over and over those who live in fear of death, often die without having lived.
Even if you envy the ability to live forever, would you really want to live forever on the technocracy’s terms?

I once dreamed of being cybernetically-enhanced

NOT ANYMORE... a personal thank you from me to the responsible unintelligencia

Beyond bodies

Living forever in the same human body just doesn’t suit the technocrats. Even after all kinds of fancy augmentations, fanciful ideas like uploading your consciousness to exist as a program for the end of time gain traction.

How the technocrats plan to achieve it

The 'Internet of Bodies' — The WEF’s Proposal to Control Human Behavior Through Authoritarian Surveillance

The central theme of the Great Reset agenda is the manipulation of human nature to advance globalist corporate-state power-merging and the erosion of individual rights and liberties-oriented policies.

Narrative Control

It can’t be understated how much the tools of the technocracy build each other up. More centralization and control makes it easier to further centralize and control things. Propaganda will look like a crude instrument once the technocracy has electrodes directly connected to people’s brains.

Health control

Turning people against their own bodies is the fundamental transhumanist goal. Anything that makes people look weak and sick compared to the pristine cybernetic products will work to their favor. Getting the public to be confused about what protects and what harms their health is a very powerful means of achieving this.

When people’s lives, bodies and minds are all just data-points on a dashboard it’s very easy to argue in favor of monstrous policies and practices. In the name of doing “what’s best for the patient” medical staff can be made to serve the system rather than the patients.

Technological integration

What are all the gadgets for anyways? People are going to need additional sensors on them so they can be bombarded with all kinds of numbers to track about themselves. Those numbers could be used to do more than just make better health decisions, but also pushing new products.

Tools of the Technocracy: #3 Robots, IoT, Automation, Oh my!

Transforming the world in ways seen and unseen

The Faustian Bargain

It is important not to be distracted by the sci-fi utopianism to be lured into a false-sense of security about the downright ghoulish downsides of this technology, and especially this technology in the technocrats hands. It is important to keep in mind that these systems can be very easily used for evil and horrific things.

Downgrades

Instead of an implant, chip or system that augments your ability to do things, it’s often much simpler to make these systems prevent certain things. Crude mechanisms to create pain in a person when they behave in ways the system doesn’t like is a very trivial mechanism that would have powerful results in conditioning a person.

Rights

The transhumanist agenda creates a great deal of civil rights troubles. As technological systems are allowed to invade our minds and our bodies we put the liberty of all humanity at risk.

1. Privacy

The most obvious concern is privacy; if these devices are monitoring all kinds of activity in and around your body, who has access to that information?

Tools of the Technocracy: #2 Big Data & Artificial Intelligence

What is all this data for anyways?

2. Economic pressures

If only it was as simple as just disconnecting from these systems. In some situations cybernetic augments may be seen as a necessary requirement for certain jobs. This creates a powerful incentive against people who wish to keep their bodies unmodified, or would rather avoid specific modifications.

Tools of the Technocracy #1: Digital Currency

How the digital financial complex works against you...and what you can do about it.

3. Censorship and manipulation

Many ‘upgrades’ go beyond what you can perceive. All kinds of imperceptible actions will be able to manipulate people far better than social media and advertising can. Instead of relying on symbolism and experiences to produce certain thoughts and feelings, the technocrats will aim to make you experience the desired inputs directly.
Even if they can’t force people to forget things yet, they’ll be forced to act as if they have.

Solutions

Take control of your health

Understand your body, get to know your habits.
Find trustworthy people to help you build up your health, and avoid the things that damage you.
Get active, play and enjoy being a human being!

Don’t let them define human

While it is true that you are more than just the sum total of your parts, it’s best not to give the technocrats complete domain to define what we as human beings are, and what we are not. We as people should support each other’s dignity regardless of what chosen or refused modifications are made.

Corbett: Technocracy Is Insane, Anti-Human And It WILL Fail

“But on a more relatable level, we already know intuitively that the anti-human, synthetic systems that the technocrats are trying to put in place are a pipe dream. Does anyone other than the most deluded technocrat believe that humanity can really abandon the natural world and adopt a food system completely dependent on synthetic, lab-grown “meat,” genetically modified “plants” and poisonous chemicals? Or that sentient AI chatbots are going to be running society as soon as the Google engineers let them out? Or that an economy built on social credit and CBDCs can really function? Of course not. Even the people who are pulling the technocrats’ strings know this isn’t workable in the long run.”

Technocracy News

Free (as in Freedom) Hardware and software

These technological systems need transparency and consent. People should never be forced or pressured to integrate technology into their body ever. This line must never be crossed or we risk falling into outright techno-totalitarianism. If people choose to integrate technology into themselves they should have the full rights to repair, modify and use it however they see fit.

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Simple Tips: Tracking Links

Tue, 23 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

You can clean your links by removing extra parameters or making sure to only send perma-linked content to people.

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Tools of the Technocracy: #7 Smart Cities

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Tools of the Technocracy: #7 Smart Cities

What is a smart city?

Just like the ‘smart’ in smart devices is really just code for surveillance. A ‘smart’ city is really just a surveillance & control city. In essence, the smart city is the ultimate application of all the tools of the technocracy against it’s captives. Even the tone of their marketing gives off how much disdain they have for human beings.

ICENI Bulletins outlines the primary attributes of a smart city.

Attributes of a Future Smart City

It must be a planned community, laid out for high efficiency and short transit times. Practically everything one would need would be within walking distance of one’s apartment.

For many workers, telecommuting via the metaverse would replace physical commutes. One’s home would also be one’s workplace. Therefore, office space would be replaced with residential space, and practically everything along one’s commute - convenience stores, clothing shops, laundromats, coffeehouses, restaurants, et cetera - would be eliminated.

Physical services and many commercial areas would largely be replaced with on-demand and delivery services, including robo-delivery by drones or other unmanned vehicles.

Everything would be tightly regulated, with people’s utilization of services, consumption of goods, criminal activity, and other behaviors monitored by constant, all-encompassing surveillance.

This same surveillance system would be used to automatically dispatch emergency services, as required, by detecting ongoing crimes, medical emergencies, and fires, using all manner of networked sensors.

Networked sensors would also be used to determine electricity and natural gas usage, among other metrics of consumption and waste.

COVID-19 Deep Dive Part VII: Smart Cities and Neo-Malthusianism

So in short…

Why?

One of the most underestimated factors of the technocracy is the massive arms-race between the people and the technocrats. If people understood how essential the liberty they have left to their survival is they would have guarded it much more carefully during the Covid Crisis.

Data alone isn’t that valuable, it’s the ability to leverage it for power and control that has fueled the constant eradication of privacy in people’s lives. In many ways people choose to trade their privacy for convenience, but there are powerful incentives tipping the scales.

Smart cities are marketed as if they are for the convenience of its residents, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Smart cities are built for efficiently monitoring and controlling all aspects of people’s lives. There are massive challenges in trying to monitor and control every minute detail in life.

There are only two ways to solve that problem:

Build up more computing power, storage & bandwidth incurring greater energy, resource, and management costs.
‘Simplify’ the problem by limiting people’s freedom.

There are limits to how far you can go with #1. Management of more and more complexity can become an impossibility. Energy is also likely to be highly constrained for the near future. You only need a convenient pretext to get the public under your control to go along with #2.

What does #2 look like in practice?

Tools of the Technocracy: #2 Big Data & Artificial Intelligence

What is all this data for anyways?

If you don’t have the computation to store and calculate everyone attending social events, visiting family, and otherwise moving about?

Just stop them from moving around!
Can’t easily build the infrastructure to listen to everyone, everywhere, all the time?

Simply force them onto digital platforms you control!

Tools of the Technocracy: #3 Robots, IoT, Automation, Oh my!

Transforming the world in ways seen and unseen

Don’t want things like human understanding, mercy or charity dulling your harsh enforcement mechanisms?

Simply use machines to carry out the orders!
Tired of administrators being held accountable for decisions that impact people?

Deflect to the automatic system and claim it is for the greater good!

There are all kinds of ‘optimizations’ you can do when you decide to grab complete top-down control, and develop robust mechanisms to silence and discredit any dissent. This is why smart cities will resemble all the worst aspects of company towns.

It’s already started.

“Noah was a conspiracy theorist when it started to rain”
Dr Zelenko

An easy mistake to make when thinking about the tools of the technocracy, is to only recognize them in their most extreme and visible forms. Systems are gradually introduced and built on to construct what could be seen as impossible. While someday you may see drones enforcing edicts on street-corners, it’s a mistake to think that because there aren’t outright visible features, that the system isn’t already being built.

For cryptocurrency the 2010s were a decade of optimism and hope. The 2020s are where we get to see the real ‘double-edged’ aspects of these systems. Blockchain technology is efficient at administration and storing information. As you can see, helium is being used to roll-out IoT infrastructure.

There are many good uses for such a project, sadly, in our troubled times no tool is above political interference. There is a storm of attacks on anything resembling independent, censorship resistant communication/financial networks, even if they aren’t secure as they seem. It is important not to become overconfident or have too much faith in an individual product.

The road to hell: misplaced optimism in the blockchain space

Digital ID

As far as a smart city is concerned, you aren’t human. You don’t have rights. You can’t own property. Your activities aren’t limited in terms of money, but rather permission. All your activities are constantly monitored and the system has the capability to intervene at any time.

Tools of the Technocracy #1: Digital Currency

How the digital financial complex works against you...and what you can do about it.

To the smart city administration, you happen to be an animal that carries around a tool that represents you in the system. If carrying the tool is too burdensome it can be implanted.
Yes, the smartphone works as a digital ID. Your phone number and/or IMEI is enough to uniquely identify you in all kinds of situations.

Tools of the Technocracy: #4 Online Identity

What is following you in your digital tracks?

Solutions

Boycott Digital ID

Reducing your dependence on surveillance devices is important. It is equally important to prevent people from being forced into using them. The more people locked into these systems, the less they are able to accept your refusal to participate.

In any and all circumstances it is best to refuse to divulge personally identifying information, especially with institutions and services you don’t trust.
This includes (but is not limited to):

Full name
Location data & home address
Phone Number
E-mail address
Credit card details
Government ID

Vitally important is to support the great local organizations working to protect freedoms in your area. The Take Action Crowdfund is a fantastic resource for finding initiatives to support.

Get involved

Toronto wants to kill the smart city forever

The city wants to get right what Sidewalk Labs got so wrong.

By May 2020, Sidewalk had pulled the plug, citing “the unprecedented economic uncertainty brought on by the covid-19 pandemic.” But that economic uncertainty came at the tail end of years of public controversy over its $900 million vision for a data-rich city within the city.

It’s hardly unusual for citizens to get up in arms about new development, and utopias fail for all sorts of reasons. But the opposition to Sidewalk’s vision for Toronto wasn’t about things like architectural preservation or the height, density, and style of the proposed buildings—the usual fodder for public outcry. The project’s tech-first approach antagonized many; its seeming lack of seriousness about the privacy concerns of Torontonians was likely the main cause of its demise.

Almost everything the technocrats want to force on people are impossible without the compliance of the public. Do not fall for the trap of believing these changes are inevitable. We can all work to shape the world we want, and the most important part is getting connected and engaged in your community. It’s important to build and maintain systems and infrastructure that strengthens communities.

Work to prevent an all-digital financial system.

Catherine Austin Fitts (Solari.com) and Children’s Health Defense have a fantastic series Financial Rebellion that regularly discusses strategies to prevent total top-down control of the financial system. One of these strategies is #CashEveryday

Independent long-range communications

Establishing ‘off-grid’ communication networks to bypass censorship will be a dire necessity once the capability exists to completely segregate locations from the Internet. As technology improves, so does the ability to counteract censorship.

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The road to hell: misplaced optimism in the blockchain space

Thu, 04 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I didn’t want to believe James Corbett at the time, but he warned us in 2018.
The bitcoin psyop outlines the differences between central-bank digital currencies (CBDCs) & public permission-less blockchains. He also rightly outlines how smart contracts themselves could become tools of the technocracy.

Tools of the Technocracy #1: Digital Currency

How the digital financial complex works against you...and what you can do about it.

This article isn’t intended to denounce every blockchain based system. Public blockchains can be used to create fantastic public goods. It’s still important to understand how they can be used for evil. There is a great deal of inherent danger in how they can be used to create digital prisons around us.

Yes, Bitcoin too.

Bitcoin is the linchpin of the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. Its disruption or disappearance would cause near-existential risks for the rest of the blockchain space. While it is the most successful public blockchain to date, Bitcoin is not without it’s problems. The most significant challenge is scaling it to support more transactions. There are sophisticated systems layered on top of Bitcoin that attempt to solve this, but in many ways it starts to look like just building the tower of babel higher and higher.

The most significant difference between Bitcoin and other blockchain based systems is the consensus algorithms they use. If you simplify these systems down to a game, the consensus algorithm is essentially the rules of the game. Every round the participants compete to validate a block.
The two main consensus algorithms are Proof of Work (PoW) or Proof of Stake (PoS):

Proof of Work

Using an arms race of computing power to “mine” a block, this competition creates hard physical restraints on hostile entities ability to manipulate the outcome. This is the solution what makes the idea of counterfeiting Bitcoin a near impossibility.

Proof of Stake

Instead of ‘wasting’ so much energy you could ask participants of the game to “lock up” some tokens to proceed to the next round. This complicates matters significantly. How should initial tokens be distributed?

At first glance, both of these consensus algorithms have significant trade-offs depending on the system you want to build. There are other varieties and hybrids but it’s important to understand that the rules of the game are only the starting point. While Bitcoin’s PoW mechanism seems “fair” in hindsight, many are growing concerned about the concentration of mining power.

What blockchains do well

Storing information

Naturally you’d want to fill the blockchain blocks with something. Blockchains are fantastic for permanent records. Regardless of the consensus mechanism blockchains are effectively auctions for permanent storage. If the value of the token goes too low, the participants may leave for a more profitable game.

Bootstrapping systems

As long as cryptocurrency has value, systems can automatically transfer that value. This means that certain kind of bounty or reward systems are able to distribute that value within desired parameters. By defining a set of behavior we want and creating a market for a token that pays for that behavior, very complicated changes can be made quickly.

What they can’t do

Create

Blockchains don’t create or build anything, they simply administrate activities. This means that if you’re using a blockchain based system to use more storage than exists on your device, that storage has to be maintained by another party to keep the system functioning.

Solve human problems

Using blockchain to enforce social credit scores will be a tantalizing option for the technocracy, refusing to adopt digital ID is a pre-requisite for stopping this. It’s dangerous to pretend that this can be entirely escaped by simply adopting a new technology.

Despite what some may hope, these systems operate within human society not outside it. This means that many pre-existing problems (corruption, poverty, ect) are not automatically solved by adopting blockchain based technology. Tyranny is very much a human problem, one that can’t be simply prevented by escaping to yet another controlled virtual world.

Problems

Blockchain != decentralization

Because of the apparent success of decentralized blockchain systems there is a “cargo cult” mentality applied to blockchain-based solutions to various problems. This creates a very dangerous blind-spot. Just like any other useful tool blockchains can be used to useful purposes and malevolent ones. Many projects can very easily incorporate some benefits and harms in the same system.

It’s important to keep in mind that any blockchain based system runs on top of the existing physical reality. Imbalances in the primary resources of cyberspace (storage, bandwidth & computing power) still manifest in important ways. Simply transferring data & computation from “the cloud” to “the blockchain” doesn’t inherently provide any additional protection or benefits. There is an illusion that blockchains are inherently run by more trustworthy actors, but that is far from a guarantee.

Can Bitcoin Circumvent Economic Tyranny?

Dr. Joseph Mercola hosted a phenomenal discussion between finance guru Catherine Austin Fitts and Aleksandar Svetski, editor of Bitcoin Times magazine, to talk about the breakdown of our economy and potential solutions.

Oversimplifying security & privacy

By giving users wallet software as a substitute for accounts on centralized services, people can in-theory gain some additional control over their data. These systems can even encrypt the users data so that the provider(s) have little-or-no access. This can be a significant improvement from the client-server model where the service operator has access to all the data in the system. While these are real possibilities, it is a mistake to assume a system operates this way simply because it uses a blockchain.

There’s a saying in the cryptocurrency community. “Not your keys, not your coins”
This applies to any privacy or security guarantees made by a blockchain based system. For most people, having someone hack into their e-mail or facebook would be a big problem, but at least the damage can be limited. If people integrate their entire online identity with a wallet, gaining control to that wallet is full-on digital identity theft.

Single Point of Failure: The (Fictional) Day Google Forgot To Check Passwords

Throwing data onto the blockchain (even when encrypted) violates the first rule of keeping data safe: The best way to protect data is never to record it.

NFTs

This article could only go so long without including the word “scam”. NFTs are effectively a mechanism to turn anything (property, jobs, or even you!) into a virtual commodity.

Instead of merely being overpriced novelties, in the hands of copyright owners NFTs could become the fuel for powerful information control systems. It’s hard to overstate the dystopian potential of tokenizing ideas.

Information land-grabs are one thing, but permission can also be tokenized. Instead of activities having a price the system can simply hand out vouchers and only allow the select few to use them.

Net3

The current state of the Internet is too useful to humanity. All the current censorship and control is a mere atom compared to the ton of power the technocracy wants to have. The very foundation of the Internet has to be destroyed and rebuilt for them to achieve their aims.

Web3 replaces separate, compartmentalized accounts with a “wallet” that holds the keys to your identity. Instead of signing in with a chosen username and password you are signing in with a universal and distinct identity. While current iterations allow for relatively anonymous use, it is a mistake to assume this will always be the case.

The web3 wallet operates eerily similarly to how a digital ID would operate online. I would be so bold as to suggest that the web3 space exists to beta-test such initiatives. While the vaccine passports were introduced to beta-test the physical and enforcement side, web3 is effectively the online prototype.

Call it “net3” because instead of an interconnected web they are building a net to trap us all into specific systems of control.

Automation

Throw robots in the mix and you’ve got the capability of building an entirely inhuman system.Instead of a person being responsible for decisions the blame can be placed on the amorphous “system”. Removing the human element can’t improve outcomes in situations where responsibility is paramount.

Doing it right

One of the largest problems with tokenized solutions is that their participants are financially pressured into pushing other people onto the platform. Many crucial downsides may be omitted by those evangelizing their particular solution. If there’s one thing you should leave this remembering it’s: Data in your control is much better than data in any blockchain.

Surely there’s a better way? How can we truly work for actual decentralization without embracing technological terror? Some important concepts have been (re)introduced to people through the blockchain ecosystem:

Self-hosting
Peer-to-peer connections
Encryption & Key management

Many of these things are doable without tokenizing and storing every interaction. It’s best not to throw all of these things into one basket, and use them intelligently where they work best.

New ways to log in

When trying to reduce the amount of sign-ins or eliminate passwords entirely there are interesting options that don’t require a cryptocurrency wallet. IndieAuth looks quite promising. It uses your own website to link to already existing systems to authenticate yourself.

Hate passwords all together? Webauthn is an interesting proposal to do that. It uses hardware authenticators to generate separate identities for every service. This allows password-less login backed by strong encryption.

Federation

Both ActivityPub and Matrix use interoperable servers to connect communities together. You can run these servers yourself and have all the benefits of a fully-decentralized ecosystem without your data leaving your control. This is why PeerTube will likely be much more successful than any blockchain-based video-hosting service.

Call to Action: Join the Fediverse now!

A simple, but very effective way to tip the scales in favor of free speech.

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Is the Internet safe for children?

Sat, 23 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Nope.

Just as playing in traffic isn’t safe for children, all people need to be properly mentally, and emotionally equipped to navigate the chaotic environment of the Internet. Sometimes it’s market forces, other times it’s algorithms, but nearly everywhere there are pitfalls designed to rob people of all ages their time, attention, and resources.

Gaming gets a lot of flak for doing this to children, but it’s far from the only place. Social media likes, boosts, and shares are effectively points keeping score in larger social games. The greatest challenge of protecting children online is realizing that their mind is as much at stake as their body and safety is.

Visualizing the problem

Imagine the Internet is a massive, sprawling city. There are some amazing, safe, and well maintained places. There are also some dangerous places infested with notorious gangs. Not only that, but there are places that range from everywhere in between. Most people would understandably plan to steer clear of the more dreadful places, but people underestimate the barriers to entry (and residence) in the nicer places.

Risks

Surveillance

Many online services make it exceedingly easy to just give away more and more information. Many platforms attempt to mitigate it but the problem is systemic. There are a number of dark patterns used to gate access to information or content behind accounts, personal details, or other information. It’s not always clear what is optional and what is required.

Tools of the Technocracy: #4 Online Identity

What is following you in your digital tracks?

Constant surveillance of all people is a significant problem. We won’t know the true costs of putting children at the mercy of machine learning algorithms for a long time.

IoT: The 'Eye-on-Thee'

A fantastic real-world example of how simple, inexpensive devices can be used for evil.

Mental health

Online spaces don’t exist in a vacuum, they’re a part of our human society. As things become challenging and confusing in life there is an incredible draw to retreat to online spaces that feel cozier than the rest of the world.
Leading to all kinds of problems:

Sleep deprivation
Depression
Over-eating
Escapism
Political extremism / radicalization

Sounds a lot like a millennial doesn’t it? Many of us are internet-addicted for a variety of reasons. Many of these problems aren’t new, and likely won’t be going away anytime soon. Some appear to have gotten much worse.

One of the things that has gotten a lot worse is algorithms, in the early days feeds had only the crudest metrics to judge engagement. Now AI has an immensely accurate picture of how to manipulate people into all kinds of behaviors.

Market forces

The advertising industrial complex comes for every marketable group. It does not care if you’re a wealthy person with tons of time on your hands, or a child who’s stolen their parents credit card. It’s a powerful machine designed to do whatever it takes to separate money from the fools and wise alike.

These systems effectively work to build addictions in people. The system really doesn’t care what kind of addiction it is: gaming, gambling, porn, food, ect. It only cares about how it can turn that addiction into regular and increasing business. You can call these systems evil (and I’d agree) but the important thing to realize is that they’re entirely indifferent to the suffering they create.

Institutions

Schools have been guilty of rolling out surveillance technology to use on children. During the covid crisis many schools closed their doors, with predictably disastrous consequences for children. Remote learning was a golden opportunity for centralization and control as the tools presented to the schools were loaded with privacy problems.

Large institutions are often given deals on software packages that have business model in surveillance. EdTech is a big industry and a non-trivial part of it is data collection. In many ways these tools are not really tools but glorified cages. While your child will seem knowledgeable in using these products, they could be like a fish-out-of-water when having to learn how to accomplish the same tasks without them.

A significant challenge is that trying to bring change or accountability to these institutions is nearly impossible to do alone. It is in your own interest to ensure that not only your own children, but also the children in your community aren’t beholden to technocratic control.

World Economic Forum website suggests there are 'rational' reasons to microchip your child

The article suggests there are ways to 'ethically make these amazing technologies a part of our lives.'

Peer pressure

If any of the above were bad enough, unfortunately you have to be concerned about your child’s peers. It’s hard to feel included when you’re not in the latest devices and systems. It can be hard to balance your child’s desire to interact with their friends against the harms caused by these platforms.

The wrong answer: Censorship, Control, and Centralization

Governments around the world are converging on ‘solutions’ to these problems that all inch us closer towards technocratic totalitarianism. The problem with most of these methods is that they aren’t even useful in the extreme circumstances where someone will try to justify them.

Censorship harms children’s ability to learn and process information.
Greater control over people’s digital lives teaches them learned helplessness, effectively robbing them of the opportunity to learn to take control themselves.
Centralization harms everyone’s ability to solve problems, and build resilience.

One of the greatest things protecting all people online is relative anonymity.
Anonymity allows people to interact with sources of information without necessarily having to divulge any information about themselves. From bullying, online predators, and financial scams there is more and more propaganda trying to convince people that anonymity must be eliminated. This is the absolute worst solution, in every instance it’s been tried it has failed to successfully safeguard the vulnerable. Elimination of anonymity only serves to feed data-collectors and empower those who seek control over others.

Solutions

Real life activities

What children need most in the world is engaged parents who proactively work to enhance their freedom, opportunities, and well-being. Unfortunately this isn’t always easy, but it gets easier when you get others involved with you.

Host community dances
Teach and learn skills together
Get involved in community sports
Be where the fun and joy can be found

Instead of children lurking online to escape the world, ensure that there are real opportunities for them to learn, create, play, and share with people in their community.
Taking time to build a strong family bond is one of the most important things you can do to keep your children safe. Being approachable allows them to warn you of dangers that may not be on your radar.

Ground rules

There are a handful activities you would want to restrict until your child has shown an appropriate level of responsibility. Like many other rules there are ways around them, but the point is to steer them away from sliding into a trap.

Smart devices

If nothing else the more your entire family can avoid ‘smart’ devices the better.
Screen time

The internet is a useful tool, disallowing it entirely is likely not the best strategy. Outside of practicing specific skills, long stretches of screen time will do most people very little benefit and non-trivial harm.
Online purchases

The easier it is for your children to make purchases the easier it is for algorithms to rob them with scams and manipulation.
Online Games and communities

Take the time to investigate certain games and online communities to make a reasonable judgement on a case-by-case basis.

Build their technical understanding

Preventing technology from monitoring or manipulating your children doesn’t mean they have to be ignorant. There are many age-appropriate ways to learn how to build or modify simple electronics and write basic programs.

What you will want to do is protect them and their information from data-driven services.
Ensure your children know not to share identifying or sensitive information:

Real names
Location information
- Residence
- School
- Nearby activities
Photos (only share the best memes!)
Any kind of financial details
Contact information

Account security best practices

How to make sure every service you use is as secure and as private as possible.

It can be useful to create fake identities (make it fun!) for them to use on various platforms so you can make sure the accounts don’t have it. Anything you can use your own accounts for the better, such as purchases and subscriptions.

Adapt your child’s education

The current system is setup to teach people helplessness and dependence. It is important to everyone, especially at young ages to understand that they do have the capacity to build their own independence. Find resources that have higher goals than teaching children to be cogs in a machine.

Watch Corey Lynn’s appearance on CHD TV’s show: Financial Rebellion

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Anatomy of a psyop

Sun, 17 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A shadowy figure appears out of nowhere and tells you:

They understand your problems
It’s worse than you think
They have a really simple solution they just need you to hand over your private information (or large sums of cash) to make all your worries go away
The solution doesn’t require any real work on your part

It’s a scam.

Blatant scam artists and social engineers both heavily rely on affirming your biases. The scammer will say things that are either well known to be true, or strongly believed by subsets of the population. As someone aware of the threats totalitarian control presents, you are a prime target for social engineers. Anything that they can do to give you either a false sense of security or a harmless outlet for frustration, makes it harder for you to fight back.

Chewtoys: The Alchemy of mastering mass anger

Now that the public has a higher level of awareness about the top-down control grid, there is a race to ensure that the public isn’t actively focused on rebuilding their own sovereignty. Sovereignty always requires work. Paying a protection racket doesn’t liberate you, it only allows you to rent some temporary safety. Having reliable, trustworthy, and accurate information is one of the most important steps in taking control in your own life. Information can be seen as a form of capital that can be enhanced with tools and skills.

That’s all very difficult and complicated right? In today’s fast-paced and complex world, surely there is a simply and easy solution? What if I just take a moment to listen to what this shadowy figure has to say.

Snow job

An effort to deceive, overwhelm, or persuade with insincere talk, especially flattery. Urban dictionary

Don’t worry about your social media habits!

Don’t worry about the technocratic control system!

We have a way to get you into the elite class!

It’s simple all you have to do is join our telegram server and share with your friends.

Are you starting to doubt? These guys can’t be fake, take a look at their ‘leet’ hacker skillz!

…Except that on firefox, all you have to do is add view-source: before the address and you are immediately aware that this is a normal Wordpress site.

When releasing sensitive and critical information to all of humanity there’s a few basic things you want to get right:

Reduce points of failure as much as possible:
- Publish only a simple set of pages written without extra scripts or plug-ins
- Avoid any third-party publishing platforms
Make the content as resilient and censorship resistant as possible:
- Where’s the TOR hidden service?
- Why isn’t the information backed up on IPFS or even available as a torrent?
Don’t have any “official” communications from big tech platforms such as Youtube / Twitter / Facebook and, yes, Telegram.

Why?
- At best, you’ll waste time getting banned over and over again
- These platforms have the capability of limiting whatever reach you may potentially have.
- You’re giving away information to these platforms that can be inevitably tracked back to you.

That’s just the bare-minimum basics before you get focused on the more complicated things like:

Where do you host your server?
What communication methods do you and your team use?
What are your backups? Can everything be seized in a single day?

But they’re getting hacked!

They’re not special, almost any website of a certain size will get this kind of attention. Bots are constantly looking for vulnerable systems to exploit to use for their own ends. Exploiting a completely open system is something that is trivial to automate.

Beware the false saviors

Putting faith into leaders is a road to disappointment. We all have to work together as individuals to make lasting change.

Who knows? That might be the kind of problem they have when they can’t even setup their WIX website without having an ad banner.

What do they want?

Your time and attention are precious resources. Anyone and anything that can soak it up by offering you an easy road to freedom doesn’t have your best interests in mind. A far more nefarious goal would be to slander people with real concerns about digital IDs and the surveillance economy as simply deluded by this straw-man.

The most disgusting aspect of this performance is that it rides on people’s greed to passively accept a top-down slavery system. “Oh, it’s as bad as you think it is but worse, but it will only be the good people in the elite class now,” is a disgusting attitude to take. Power without accountability is corrosive on morality. A social credit caste system with the “good people” on the top will inevitably devolve into a nightmare with evil people on the top.

Social credit systems are real, and not just in China. The massive wealth divide does effectively create different classes of people. The “system” they’re warning you about is already in place on a basic level. Promising to “wipe your slate clean” in exchange for promoting them on social media is not the ideal solution even if it worked.

Sovereignty is power. All power is expensive to maintain. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance and proactive action. None of us will be able to simply purchase freedom. The freedom of your fellow human beings, even when you disagree, is your greatest asset. We must work to restore integrity and accountability in all aspects of our lives, not chasing quick-and-easy scams pretending to be solutions.

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IoT: The "Eye-on-Thee"

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Internet of things (IoT) is not so much an agenda, but a consequence of cheap, ubiquitous technology. Much of the engineering, investment, and application has gone directly into making devices better at gathering information. This information is then fed to machine learning algorithms to further “optimize” society.

This constant data-collection is not benign. There is an agenda to constantly push the boundaries of centralization and control. Most of the opportunities provided by the internet of things are asymmetrically advantageous to the technocracy. All the systems of surveillance and control will be deployed foremost against the public. This doesn’t mean however, that other people won’t be able to leverage those systems to cause people harm. While the technocracy has a minor incentive to reduce the power other gains from these tools, it is essentially a negative externality

Example: AirTags

Airtags, are simple wireless devices made by apple to help people find their lost things. What makes airtags miraculous is that they don’t require complicated GPS technology, but instead rely on nearby devices and networks to report it’s location. Simplifying in this way allows the devices to stay in operation for a very long time.

The process is simple:

Add the tag to your account
Give it a useful label
Leave it on or with what (or who) you want to track.
Watch it go on your “find my device” app.

It is worth noting, that this is not the first way to get a hold of someone’s daily routine. Android devices maintain a location history that keeps tabs on you in real time. In the past one would only need to have access to your google account to watch your every move. I highly recommend turning off location history, I can’t think of a single benefit of keeping it on. Unfortunately it is important to keep in mind that turning these features off does not prevent them from being used by the corporations that run them.

They just found out that they were being tracked by AirTags, and didn’t know how it got planted on them.

Apple has introduced features to make it harder for stalkers to track people without their consent with these devices. Notably the device will transparently inform nearby apple devices that it is in range of them. This is a step in the right direction, however it is almost impossible to completely eliminate the privacy risks of such a device. Understand that devices such as this can become a whole lot smaller in the future, and much easier to conceal.

AirTag Anti-Stalking Features Revealed!

This creates a great deal of problems for all kinds of people. Counteracting these measures requires proactive vigilance, despite requiring very little effort on the person using the tracker. As these devices improve so will this asymmetric advantage. Not only that, but the technocracy will then be able to leverage this enormous power in even more egregious ways. The line gets blurry when agents of the technocracy use that power against people in their personal lives.

Woman Allegedly Used Apple AirTag to Track and Kill Her Boyfriend

It is important not to understate the dangers. All surveillance, be it targeted or blanket is a serious risk to individuals of all walks of life. The more information collected on people, and the more sophisticated the tools to use that information, the more danger people are in. This should be a rallying cry to all to force large institutions to have proper accountability and leadership. The rising corruption and totalitarianism is a force that will ensure all these tools are used to the detriment of humanity.

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Tools of the Technocracy: #6 Virtual Reality

Sat, 30 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Tools of the Technocracy: #6 Virtual Reality

What is reality?

Is it what you can touch?

What you can feel?

What you see?

How much do your thoughts and past experiences shape those things?

Psyops

As of 2020, Most forms of mind control were constructed through incentive structures:

Social media algorithms incentivize specific kinds of engagement to maximize people’s reprogramming of each other. Strong financial incentives are used to shape interactions and transform entire sectors of society in various ways. Mainstream media still shapes a powerful impression of the state of reality for a significant amount of people, creating top-down cultural incentives. Academia isn’t safe either, despite all the criticism placed on the public over trading autonomy, independence & integrity for convenience…all kinds of institutions are far more egregiously guilty of the same offense. Ironically, due to the slow rate of change in organizations; they are often trapped into choosing the simplest changes, rather than the more important ones. Over time this creates a tidal-wave of institutional change that costs significantly more energy, resources, and career credit to oppose than to ride. This often pushes institutions to adopt technology and solutions that work against people, rather than for them.

A massive game-changer for the technocracy will be the ability to build powerful behavior modification systems (mind control) that take advantage of your own senses. Cognitive warfare is waged by exploiting vulnerabilities in our minds. Overcoming these effects is much more challenging than simply recognizing incentives and working around them when possible. When it comes to perception control, every drop of prevention is worth an ocean of cure. Because we’re only at the beginning of witnessing these techniques, we can only speculate on the extent of the dangers. As always, it will be of utmost importance to guard your mental, emotional, and even spiritual state in the face of these challenges.

Tools of the Technocracy: #3 Robots, IoT, Automation, Oh my!

Transforming the world in ways seen and unseen

Technological terror

When most people think of virtual reality they think of high-resolution displays presenting a 3D environment for people to explore and interact with complex controllers. Tactile improvements to people’s ability to really feel what’s in these environments are only getting better and better. The only thing slowing this down seems to be people getting motion sick from playing for more than short periods of time. As more improvements are made and more problems get addressed this will become the frontier of multi-media content. Suddenly, instead of learning things in purely abstract ways, people will be able to learn all kinds of things by doing it. With truly endless possibilities this means that VR will also be the state-of-the-art delivery mechanism for propaganda.

For now, when a tragedy or circumstance is exploited to drive people’s emotions; the technocracy has a couple of ways to convey the situation. As this technology develops and becomes more ubiquitous, the technocracy will be able to have people experience these events directly, in a completely crafted scenario. The lines between propaganda, entertainment, learning, and all kinds of things will be blurred even more than they are already. Virtual reality will be the information war battleground of the future, but as it stands it won’t be a battle but outright mind-slaughter. Unless people’s ability to create and distribute these experiences is democratized, large institutions will enjoy a massive advantage in controlling content. This is a significant challenge because of the significant start-up costs.

Body snatchers

The campaign doesn’t end there however; virtual reality technology won’t end with nicer displays, controls, and tactile feedback. As cybernetics improve, there will be powerful incentives to have these systems send and receive direct signals to your body. This would allow these devices to save incredible amounts of energy and provide a level of immersion that is currently impossible. This shift from presenting stimuli to create signals in your brain, to sending those signals directly to your brain will exponentially increase the power and influence of those who have control of these systems.

Surely this technology wouldn’t be forced on people right? It will stay purely in the realm of entertainment and all you’ll have to do is turn off the VR TV right? This is sadly not the case. As long as our society still yields to top-down control, almost every institution will have powerful incentives to adopt these tools. Training and education will likely be the first place to majorly adopt these systems because of how powerful an information transfer tool they are. It will also enhance automation efforts. In a society driven by these technologies, your rights to bodily autonomy will be seen as an outdated inefficiency that gets in the way of powerful societal “innovation”. Big data and machine learning has a massive role to play in this space. Many of these devices will be used to get more data from people to learn how to further manipulate them.

The competitive advantages and economies of scale could make these problems nearly impossible to uproot. It is absolutely critical to do all we can to prevent these systems from driving all our lives in the way that the Internet does already. Digital currencies are a very powerful system for bootstrapping new technologies, and it is no longer inconceivable that people will be bribed into transforming their body into a test-bed for novel technology. It is of utmost importance that we work to protect bodily autonomy in an environment where people will be even more motivated to set it all aside. We as a society have already gravely crossed red lines that never should have been crossed.

Solutions

Take action

Pushing back against centralization and control takes a great deal of active focus to start. Once you’ve regained some of your own independence and liberty you can then help bring it to others. The crux of these issues is not necessarily the technologies themselves. Instead, it’s our cultural acceptance for top-down control of so many aspects of our lives. Bringing awareness of these issues, and what we should prioritize to safeguard ourselves can go a long way.

The primary advantage the technocracy has is a monopoly on people’s perception of reality. A very effective way to turn the tide in the information war is to share art, beauty, and stories that bring people hope, and a desire for change. Anything you can create to bring more independence and freedom into their lives is worth making. Try to have appreciation for the great works people have created. Try to appeal to people’s better selves, instead of cynically just trying to win with snark.

Support open software and hardware

Many of these systems aren’t going away. Being able to liberate people from these systems may require a significant amount of technical skill and tooling. There is a great deal of potential in prosthetics and assistive technology. We can avert many of dangers by promoting software and hardware freedom. There is a treasure-trove of opportunity when we realign our focus to support and prioritize ways to enhance each other’s lives.

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Tools of the Technocracy: #5 Networks

Wed, 27 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Tools of the Technocracy: #5 Networks

Networks are the infrastructure used to bridge the physical world and online systems. They can enable people from all over the world to communicate with each other, which sadly has the downside of technocrats having the capability of monitoring and controlling people’s communications.

Networks have precious resources that enable their utility:

Latency

How quickly can a signal reach it’s destination
Range

How far can a signal go
Bandwidth

How much information can a signal carry
Encryption

Prevents people from snooping on signals

These resources are critical in delivering content. One of the largest challenges to decentralization is the economies of scale. This means that “the system” has advantages to completely eliminate any competition. Centralized and privacy invading options will always be more efficient and convenient than other options. It is important to manage your expectations accordingly.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare is the world’s largest MITM [Man in the middle] proxy(reverse proxy). Cloudflare owns more than 80% of CDN market share and the number of cloudflare users are growing each day. They have expanded their network to more than 100 countries. Cloudflare serves more web traffic than Twitter, Amazon, Apple, Instagram, Bing & Wikipedia combined. > Cloudflare is offering free plan and many people are using it instead of configuring their servers properly. They traded privacy over convenience. Source: http://crimeflare.eu.org

Almost every large website and service is using Cloudflare, this means that any encryption between you and the website and service is effectively broken at that point. While your connections will be protected until they reach Cloudflare’s servers, after that point it is entirely down to trust. It is naive to think that Cloudflare isn’t forced to monitor the massive trove of data it can collect on people’s online activity. A VPN may protect your IP but it won’t be able to secure the data sent to these services.

What services get out of using Cloudflare is DDOS protection. Distributed Denial of Service attacks are when a massive amount of bandwidth is used to take down your service. This is essentially a protection racket where any site worth targeting has to spend resources to protect against these kind of attacks. It is possible that many of these attacks are being initiated by actors who would rather sites stay behind Cloudflare or similar services.

VPNs

Virtual Private Networks are often seen as the solution to all online privacy issues. This is people being mislead by slick advertising. VPNs are very useful for accessing content that is blocked in specific regions or protecting your IP from being known by online services. There are many ways users using a VPN can have their IP leaked so it is essential to make sure you are using your VPN properly.

Your internet service provider (ISP) may not be trustworthy so you may want to use a VPN, it is important to realize that by using a VPN you are effectively transferring the risk of your ISP logging, tracking, censoring your information to that VPN provider. Like ISPs VPNs are businesses and it is foolish to assume they will put your needs as an individual or customer before the interests of their business.

Wireless Networks

The largest challenge of wireless networks is that there will be many of them outside your control. Ubiquitous surveillance provided by devices all around you isn’t something you can easily mitigate. Ignorance isn’t bliss however, you are still vulnerable to these systems.

Wi-Fi

Wireless networks are difficult to secure, especially from a motivated adversary. Even your own wireless router is likely outright selling your data. Activities done over wireless networks are much easier to intercept than ones over wired connections.

If this wasn’t bad enough, wireless devices can be used as sonar to track everyone in a given space. Given that these devices are continuously listening this can provide a very complete picture of people’s day-to-day lives.

Mobile data (LTE / 5G)

Much has been speculated about the health risks due 5G / Wi-Fi, while harms from EMF may be worth investigating in specific circumstances they are outside the scope of this article. Even in instances where the technology itself is harmless it can often coincide with other weaponized technology.

What is clear is that introducing more and more cheap, accessible bandwidth to more devices exponentially increases the capabilities of those who want to track and control. 5G will be very useful for relaying huge amounts of data including ultra-high resolution video from all kinds of angles.

LoRaWAN

For some applications, a full internet connection is overkill. LoRa devices can send small signals over a very long range. This can be a very efficient way of relaying data from sensors. There is already a cryptocurrency launched to bootstrap a worldwide surveillance grid.

IoT & Automation

The more accessible connectivity is for devices the more these devices can encroach on the physical world. These applications can become cheaper and more common, discreet, and invasive. As networks expand, techniques that were impossible before become viable opportunities.

Tools of the Technocracy: #3 Robots, IoT, Automation, Oh my!

Transforming the world in ways seen and unseen

Big Data

Any information, no matter how trivial can be collected and analyzed to gain power over others. Those in control of the data collection systems will have massive advantages over those who don’t. Machine learning can be used to make these systems much more efficient at collecting specific kinds of data based on raw details.

Tools of the Technocracy: #2 Big Data & Artificial Intelligence

What is all this data for anyways?

Solutions

Tor

Like the Internet, The Onion Router (Tor) has origins as a military project. It has two very useful features for reclaiming your digital freedom:

Anonymity

As far as online services are concerned, Tor users generally appear the same. When one uses the Tor browser they have the same fingerprint as all other users to make them harder to individually identify. As well your connection is then routed to the Internet through “exit relays” such as the Snowflake extension.

Hidden services

Hidden services are services that are accessible entirely within the Tor network. This means that they do not use “exit relays” and instead are only routed within Tor. The advantage of this is that you can be very sure that you are having a secure connection directly to the intended recipient, with all of the security guarantees of the Tor network.

Having your website or service available as a hidden service has some significant advantages:

Protection from Man-in-the-middle attacks
Your service can still be accessible if your domain is taken from you
Hidden services can be served from mobile connections

There are other “darkweb” protocols such as I2P.

Community networks

Meshnets are a useful way to democratize connectivity. There doesn’t need to be a one-size-fits-all approach some options will work better in different places. You could also run your own services behind VPNs run by your community instead of commercial enterprises. Investing in a truly independent community network is a significant challenge but can yield incredible rewards.

Faraday is your Friend

Having a faraday bag can help keep your phone from reporting your location while you travel with it. Given the potential these devices have against you, it can be wise to create secure locations in your home or business that don’t allow signals in or out. This won’t prevent devices from listening and recording, but if you place them in a soundproof location that can help.

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Beware the false saviors

Sat, 16 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

There is a great deal of buzz about Elon Musk’s face-off against twitter. While it is impressive to see Elon specifically raise free speech issues against Big Tech, it is unlikely that even radical changes to twitter would actually create meaningful change. Sadly many people allow figureheads to lure themselves into a state of complacency. By buying into the idea of a fantastical leader to rally behind people can fall into the trap of thinking that change is sudden, and requires no work on their part.

Many of the problems we face didn’t start with Twitter and won’t end with Twitter either.

Twitter is a big system, big systems have a great deal of momentum. This momentum grows or shrinks in response to incentives. As anyone can see, Twitter has been run as a loss leader to sell centralized information control. Any system that has a monopoly on people’s access to information will inevitably become a valuable target for malevolent entities to corrupt and control.

Getting excited and distracted by large figureheads (politicians, celebrities, ect) inevitably leads to disappointment when a single person is unable to make massive changes that are out-of-step with the way people are acting in their daily lives. By investing in promoting and cheering for these leaders we can lose sight of the simple changes we need to make. Every individual has a vital role in changing the culture and incentive structure. Don’t think about needing the perfect leader, think about how their job can be made easier by encouraging those around you to make changes themselves. Big Tech didn’t simply gain control over everyone’s lives overnight, it happened gradually, bit-by-bit over time with each concession by each person. Everyone is responsible for reversing the power that the Tools of the Technocracy have taken over the people. These are systems that collectively we have financed, built, and maintained…thankfully they can be dismantled together.

What can we do?

GET MOTIVATED!

There is so much we can accomplish by working together, so many new things can be created if we have a will to break free from centralized control. Being willing to invest time, energy, and resources into building things is a vital aspect of changing anything.
Diversify your information sources
- Don’t depend on any specific site/app for all your news or information
- Bookmark (CTRL-D) useful or informative sites so you can visit them again without being tracked by search engines
- Not every issue or topic is new, you can often find very valuable information published in books, there is a treasure trove of useful information in the past. Don’t limit your knowledge to what is relevant in your feeds.
Fight back against the centralized control system.

There is a fantastic series on Financial Rebellion hosted by Children’s Health Defense. It is a great starting point on how to create friction against centralized control systems.
Read the Tools of the Technocracy Series if you haven’t already. In each article I include solutions to undermining top-down information control.

Tools of The Technocracy

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Tools of the Technocracy: #4 Online Identity

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Tools of the Technocracy: #4 Online Identity

There are some good reasons to attach your identity to online interactions, there are just as many (if not more) good reasons not to. It is important to understand how your actions ripple across the Internet and wider data-landscape. One of the greatest challenges in keeping your data secure is the fact that the Internet almost never forgets. It’s so difficult to be aware of all the data-points that have built over time.

Even if you are a very open and public person, it is vital that you are in control of what data about you is collected, stored, and analyzed. Instead of having systems actively probing you for any and all data they can seize, it is better to understand and use systems that give you the control to only disclose what you want to share.

Concerns

Conformity

Social media has been largely what closes the loop between you staring into the data abyss, and the data staring back at you. By learning peoples’ interests, likes and dislikes the algorithms are able to put that information to use to manipulate them. The most dangerous part about social media is the capability to leverage your self-image against you. With even relatively simple techniques (such as suppressing the visibility of a particular post) these systems can manipulate how your social circle reacts to specific information.

Facebook is really old news when it comes to data-mining people. Tiktok is the state-of-the art, in learning from people. Tiktok has advantages that older social media platforms don’t. It’s purely mobile focused, which means the app has access to all kinds of data from your mobile phone. This includes cameras, microphones, location data, and even how you’re holding the device while scrolling. It would be foolish to assume we can imagine all the ways advanced algorithms can be used to study and manipulate people. How many people would even consider facebook was up to this in 2011-2013?

Echo chambers

This conformity, is the foundation for a fractal of echo-chambers, all becoming isolated from the larger whole. Echo-chambers create divisions within society that eventually make cross-communication almost impossible. By entrenching people into their sub-groups and turning them against each other, everyone is effectively silenced. This is an under-estimated effect of chilling effects.

I believe it is naive to operate under the assumption that these echo-chambers are a purely organic phenomenon. Manipulating the human mind is a massive, and well funded academic venture. The power gained from destroying people’s ability to collectively search for the truth is immense.

If covert censorship wasn’t bad enough, there is a vast array of censorship and suppression tools available. The more information the system has about you the more it has at it’s disposal to use against you and ideals you may support. The ever-increasing cries of “fighting misinformation” and “combating hate” are used as a pretext to justify further centralized information control.

Personification

Now back at you, all these tools are specifically aimed at identifying, storing, and analyzing your every action in the hopes to get leverage over you and others. Very subtle and innocuous information can be correlated with other data to make unthinkable associations.

They will shut it (Bitcoin) down not by controlling the technology, but by controlling the people.

Catherine Austin Fitts

You can leave behind a banned account, even evade region locks with a VPN, but it’s not easy to get a new identity and almost impossible to erase your online footprint. The more online systems demand people turn over their identities online, the more people are vulnerable to all kinds of threats. Dissidents can be marked for life with no recourse. Naturally these people will be restricted from the digital financial complex.

Stalking

Not only are exposed people vulnerable to retaliation from the state, but in an increasingly polarized environment people will be vulnerable to retaliation from anyone who has access to their information. As the dehumanization of the opposition continues, people won’t draw the line at harming innocents if they are led to believe the situation is dire enough. No transgression will be too small to justify retaliation. How many times have we seen people respond to someone losing their job over past comments with “Freedom of speech isn’t freedom from consequences”?

This is a clarion call for abusers and petty tyrants. The very reason the rule of law and the presumption of innocence are important is because the spillover damage from vigilante justice is unending. In our modern enlightened age we certainly have managed to forget basic problems that have been with us since the dawn of civilization.

Children

As someone who spent time exploring the Internet from a young age, I can certainly admit to being unable to comprehend the dangers at the time. As grown-ups today believe that their parents were clueless about technology, the exponential growth, escalation, and evolution of online threats have left current and future parents woefully outmatched. Children won’t simply be at the mercy of their own potential actions, but the actions of relatives and even friends.

As a parent it is your responsibility to make sure that they are prepared to face these dangers, but also that your information is not making that more difficult. Safeguarding them from all the new and tantalizing services is going to be a very difficult challenge. This is an area that needs more research.

Is the Internet safe for children?

Surveillance, manipulation and online predators are threats we all face. How can we keep children safe?

Bots & manipulation

Humans are outnumbered! In many circumstances there is little reason to believe that the person you are talking to online is even human. This is an incredible problem when empathy is already severely lacking in online discourse. As bots get better and better at convincingly imitating people, people will feel more and more overwhelmed which will contribute to some simply choosing not to bother speaking at all.

Botting social networks isn’t necessarily a zero-sum game. Some platforms are easier for smaller actors to influence, it is a critical mistake to assume all bots are from a single interested party rather than a group of varying (sometimes overlapping or conflicting) agendas.

Anti-anonymitity

Anonymity gets a bad wrap in online discussions. Far too many people consider it “cowardice” to speak out without having your name, reputation, and future at stake. This is not a compassionate or reasonable stance to have in an age with so many asymmetric power imbalances. It is a very convenient way for those perfectly within established orthodoxy to throw stones from their glass towers. The most vital way to undermine centralized information control is to prevent knowledge from being judged by it’s origin. A fantastic way to achieve this is publishing information, data or communications anonymously.

In defense of anonymity

Don't let the trolls bait you into turning on privacy

Your online tracks

Personal devices

Every device you come into contact with has the capability to be turned against you. Smartphones are some of the worst. Devices with microphones can record your every word and expression. Cameras can track your expression. Worst of all is location data, which gets more and more precise as technology improves. All this is simply assuming the device is working as intended, phishing attacks can be used to gain even more intimate access to your information or otherwise do you harm.

Many people complain of social media “holding their real-life contacts hostage”. It is very important that you aren’t gating social interaction with you behind data-mining social services. This does require a fair bit of effort and a willingness to compromise. Social media becoming the “town square” wasn’t an inevitable development, it was a necessary step in the encroachment of digital systems dominating our entire lives. You may have a right to remain silent under your laws, but unfortunately your data doesn’t make use of it.

The technocracy’s vision of what social media is and should be is evil. Until we can migrate people to services that put people in charge of their data, it is best to avoid putting any significant importance on social media under the control of corporations & government influence.

Online services

There is no way of knowing for sure an online service you use isn’t simply sharing data with big tech in the first place. Even if they adamantly refuse to share or sell data that all evaporates when the company is sold. Services can be hacked and the only way to protect sensitive data is to never record or share it. Understand that everything you share with any particular online service can eventually be used against you.

Digital ID

Digital ID is the crown jewel of technocratic totalitarianism. Like any other deal-with-the-devil scenario it will be attached to many luxuries and conveniences… at least at the start. Take any of the problems in this article and make them 10x worse. There will never be any guarantee that digital ID systems will be any more secure than systems that came before it. The terms of the digital ID program may appear to be favorable at the beginning, but once locked in… the terms will be altered and your only recourse will be to pray the terms aren’t altered further.

Digital ID: The Basics

What is it? What can you do about it?

It is impossible to overstate the importance of preventing, resisting, and outlawing the implementation of digital identification. Merely avoiding it yourself will be no protection, as those entrapped in the system will be weaponized against you. The weaponization of people who have fallen prey to centralized information control is a mere taste of what is to come when people are locked into a digital gulag.

Solutions

Connect with people in real life

Be the person to provide the authentic, uncensored human experience with those you care about. The fight to maintain human liberty is bigger than any one of us. Bring joy outside of online experiences and focus on the people around you.

Provide people with a more secure form of communication

By having multiple good options for people to try you don’t have to try to force everyone onto a single app/system. Some great options are:

Delta Chat
Session
Element
Signal

Improve your account data and security.

Account security best practices

How to make sure every service you use is as secure and as private as possible.

Call to Action: Join the Fediverse now!

A simple, but very effective way to tip the scales in favor of free speech.

Self-hosting

Want to be entirely on your own terms? Running your own website is a way to have complete control while still being able to maintain a presence. These two sites have great guides for getting started.

Tools of the Technocracy: #5 Networks

Much of the digital infrastructure in place today is built to structurally enable tyranny.

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Information Warfare Super-weapons

Sun, 13 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Memes

Memes are very often under-appreciated due to being simple or not taking themselves seriously. They are powerful tools to bring new insights to discussion. Social engineers target memes due to their incredible impact in spreading ideas. Many of the threats to liberty aren’t always actions of tyrants but rather the apathy or ignorance of the public. If we are to preserve liberty we need to greatly magnify our efforts to promote liberty as a cultural value rather than simply a personal asset The effectiveness of memes comes from their simplicity and the potential to evoke strong emotions. The most valuable part of a good meme is the ability to “compress” lots of information into a consider sharable medium.

The problem is that people are ensnared in a culture that doesn’t properly value liberty or their rights. Corporations and governments work hard to curate online spaces to shape culture in their favor. This has had disastrous social consequences and devastating effects on people’s mental health. We must not only focus on undoing this demoralization but also on preventing it from taking hold ever again. People must not only learn the tools to protect themselves, but they must also learn to value things that are good and beautiful. The most effective way to rebuild a freedom-loving culture is to properly invest in providing a strong foundation for that culture to flourish. How does one build this foundation?

Art

Art is the expression of the human soul, with it’s value being largely in the eye of the beholder. Corporations and governments can imitate art, or mass produce it with financial advantages, but they can’t compete with genuine creativity borne from real passion and real experiences. Tyranny isn’t beautiful, and slavery isn’t inspiring. When given a choice, people will naturally choose the free and beautiful over the rigid and stagnant. As freedom loving people it is absolutely vital for us to encourage, support and fund ventures to provide people the opportunity to enjoy pro-human media and creative works.

Artists are craving for a way for their work to be properly supported. Many artists are disillusioned by not being able to make it in large corporate spaces. If we truly desire a culture that protects freedom we must work to provide the space for artists to promote this culture. Working together we can support artists who care deeply about building a better world. This will create real cultural capital that can upend the systems that undermine our liberty. With truth on our side, there can be no limit to the heights of our imagination.

I am no artist, but this piece is a call to people who value freedom to commit to supporting independent artists and building a true appreciation for their works. It is impossible to overstate the potential to change the global conversation against those who hate humanity when we sustain methods of lasting cultural change. There are so many ways to express what has gone wrong in the last two years. There are stories that need to be told, tragedies that cry out to be mourned, and victories that must be shared.

Starting small

In the long term, it would be ideal to create formal spaces and institutions with these goals in mind, but as individuals there is still a great deal we can do:

With an appreciation that you need beauty in your life, hire artists to paint, sculpt, or even draw pieces for decoration in your home or office. These can be fantastic conversation pieces.
Connect with local musicians, get people together to enjoy their music.
Host events to give them an opportunity to promote themselves.
Hire artists to create content for your website or social media profiles. Very often they can create better memes than what many of us can do with simple skills.
Prominently feature like-minded talent in projects you undertake.

Do it yourself!

Can you draw, sing, dance, sculpt, paint, draw, carve, or create in other ways? Now is a great time to shine, you can stand out by promoting hope, freedom and compassion. I would be more than happy to feature you on my website! Do you have your own website? You might find Interverse interesting!

I also recommend joining the Fediverse:

Great FOSS Tools

There are a lot of fantastic Free & Open Source tools that are very useful for creating content. My hope is that one of these tools will help spark inspiration in what you can achieve or support someone in achieving. I would highly recommend donating to the development of these tools because they have made creating content much more accessible.

Inkscape

https://inkscape.org/

Whether you are an illustrator, designer, web designer or just someone who needs to create some vector imagery, Inkscape is for you!

Inkscape is fantastic for vector graphics, which are awesome at all sizes! It’s a fantastic tool for making posters, logos and even full-size banners!

Support

Krita

https://krita.org/en/

A digital painting program.

Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone.

concept art

texture and matte painters

illustrations and comic

Demo Video: Krita 5 is HERE! Go for it!

Support

Darktable

https://www.darktable.org/

Photography software

Darktable is an open source photography workflow application and raw developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.

LMMS

https://lmms.io/

Music production

Let’s make music with a free, cross-platform tool for your computer. Produce music with your computer by creating melodies and beats, synthesizing and mixing sounds, arranging samples and much more.

Support

Synfig

https://www.synfig.org/

2d animation

Synfig Studio is a free and open-source 2D animation software, designed as powerful industrial-strength solution for creating film-quality animation using a vector and bitmap artwork. It eliminates the need to create animation frame-by frame, allowing you to produce 2D animation of a higher quality with fewer people and resources.

Support

Blender

https://www.blender.org/

Blender can do almost anything:

3d modeling
Digital sculpting
Video editing
Simulations
Digital painting
Animations

Support

Godot

https://godotengine.org/

Game engine

The game engine you waited for. Godot provides a huge set of common tools, so you can just focus on making your game without reinventing the wheel. Godot is completely free and open-source under the very permissive MIT license. No strings attached, no royalties, nothing. Your game is yours, down to the last line of engine code.

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Tools of the Technocracy: #3 Robots, IoT, Automation, Oh my!

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Tools of the Technocracy: #3 Robots, IoT, Automation, Oh my!

With big data as the brains, robots act as the eyes, ears, and fists of the technocracy. Ubiquitous 5G (and above) connectivity gives autonomous systems a massive advantage over human beings. Understand that there is more to these systems than meets the eye. There is an entire orchestra of coordinated systems and services that harmonize into incredibly powerful tools. These tools are only beginning to be weaponized against the public.

Robots

Eventually the digital world needs to make an impact on the physical. Robots are the ideal tool for the technocracy to enforce it’s will on the material world. In many situations it is becoming much more inexpensive to accomplish tasks with robots than to equip humans for the same task. Robots won’t question their orders, they won’t (likely) turn against the system, and most importantly they don’t have legal rights. The technocracy has an urgent need to replace thinking, responsible people with autonomous drones with pre-programmed commands.

The most obvious example would be police robots. When equipped with advanced riot suppression technology, these robots will by able to quell any and all public uprisings with little resistance. Far from science fiction, the capability exists to terminate people with almost fully automated systems.

Drones

While scouting for information, highly mobile drones can be equipped with a large variety of surveillance equipment, sensors, and weapons. Having an aerial view can provide incredible context to large scale situations. While soaring up above, acting as the “eye in the sky” drones can be used to transmit information to a variety of systems. Small disposable drones have advantages that other “heavy duty” robots may not, they can operate in swarms and each independent unit may be entirely expendable.

Transport and Access

The convenience of autonomous delivery will be what ushers in the invasion of more autonomous drones, cars, and trucks. Autonomous vehicles are an invaluable tool for the technocracy. By removing humans from the driving-seat of the economy the system can effectively seize control of nearly all trade. Eventually, access to goods and services can be entirely restricted by simply not allowing vehicles to travel to certain places. If proximity isn’t something that can be controlled, locks can be used to prevent access to specific places. Beyond merely imposing fines for arbitrary infractions, a person’s entire life can be restricted by the manufactured world around them.

Tools of the Technocracy: #7 Smart Cities

Smart cities are marketed as if they are for the convenience of its residents, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Robots in disguise

Any robot, with it’s variety of sensors, tools, and networks will be able to perform a wide array of functions in a highly robotic world. A robot preparing your food may also be listening to your conversations simply to fulfill some contract in the system. Cryptocurrency and smart contracts can be used to expand what existing robots can be used for. More and more these discrete systems will converge into a single operating fabric. Robots will become more generalized as technology advances, with tasks being mostly assigned by proximity.

“Smart” devices

Smart phones, smart TVs, smart homes… What is it that makes a tool “smart” anyways? In a general sense “smart” simply means that it can be used against you. Why is your phone “smart” but your laptop isn’t? It’s because your phone is a surveillance device. It provides the system vital functionality that isn’t under your control.

Is a device or appliance really “yours” if it is constantly working to incriminate you? How about if it refuses to work under conditions dictated by others? These systems don’t specifically need to be commanded by a malevolent entity, your dishwasher could simply require you to use a smart contract to operate it. This smart contract could be fed real time information about water use in your region to ensure it is being rationed correctly. Smart contracts can be incredible mechanisms to make systems fair, but their ability to make unjust systems shouldn’t be underestimated.

Smart contracts define incentive structures, and they can be designed with an incredible amount of precision. It is entirely possible for products and services to micro-manage quality or effectiveness relative to your status in the system. This means that the most innocuous and fair systems could end up being leveraged against people if the system itself has a flaw.

Implants

Not all digital devices are optional. As medical technology advances people can be very reliant on complicated systems. It is of the utmost importance that people with disabilities are empowered by these tools and not harmed by them. While giving up your privacy (or opting in to ads) may seem like a fair trade for your sight back, this is not a trade we should force someone to make.

The major challenge is that there is no end to what can be turned against you. This can be forced onto the more vulnerable by making the only affordable items sabotaged with tracking & control. The most dystopian outcomes imaginable are on the table when the effects are unseen or individualized. People are far too quick to rationalize the suffering of others rather than to truly take the time to understand the underlying causes.

Tools of the Technocracy: #8 Transhumanism

How close are the technocrats to modifying you? Too close.

Tiny Tech

There’s nothing sacred to the technocrats. There’s nothing special about biology that would prevent them from using your individual cells like they use your data against you. Most people are familiar with the idea of nanobots. but the idea of manipulating small-scale natural processes directly is very much out of mind. The very nature of tiny technology is that it very easily stays out of sight, and can be difficult to properly conceptualize.

Nano-machines and “smart dust” are still very real concerns as well. Even in the most benign of circumstances they can become a terrible form of pollution like micro-plastics. The technocracy has shown terrible stewardship for the natural world despite manufactured appearances. It would be very difficult to properly investigate the long-term ecological or individual health impacts of individual nano-scale applications.

Automation

Automation isn’t simply about making robots better, but also making our lives more robotic. In many cases is it much easier to simply reduce a task into smaller tasks than to design, build, and equip a robot to take over the entire work. This has profound implications for the direction the system is moving in. People will become marginalized to make room for robots in the name of efficiency. The most insidious part is that workers are already being conditioned to train artificial intelligence to learn from them. Many workers are training their replacements without knowing it!

This has far-reaching impacts beyond the service industry. Nearly any job can be broken down into small units of work that could be automated eventually. The safest positions are the ones that are harder to break into smaller units, or tasks that take advantage of a large variety of skills. Media and legal institutions will be pressured to force professionals to undermine their own field to make it easier to be automated away.

The Rise of a SkyNet Workforce

Employee of the Month: Terminator

It’s worth noting that automation itself isn’t inherently evil or wrong. Ideally workers would be properly compensated for training AIs and people would be supported with the understanding that their livelihoods were sacrificed for greater efficiency. Currently automation is a super-weapon against the working classes. There is no reason it has to stay that way.

Solutions

DIY

Consider countermeasures against robots

Instead of WiFi, using wired networks
Setup spaces your devices can’t listen in to.
Use a faraday bag for your smartphone
Use analog/low-tech solutions where possible

As more and more valuable tools are converted to “smart devices” there is an immense opportunity to take up a niche market of simpler devices that don’t violate their owners privacy. AI doesn’t need to be a harmful development. By learning about these systems we can avoid the dangers as well as develop more humane ways of moving forward.

Principle: Hardware matters

It is easy to underestimate the underlying structure of our digital world.

Build and maintain the “human economy”

Robots & automation are going go displace an incredible amount of people in the best-case scenarios. The optimal strategy would be for people to work on establishing an economy for people instead of one against them. This doesn’t mean you shun progress, in fact developing efficient systems allows you to share the gains with your community.

If you’re building autonomous systems ensure that they are licensed, developed, and distributed in a way that benefits human beings. For example, a city could establish a smart contract that requires robots to pay taxes on transactions that help support local food & housing systems.

Body mechanics

As the world becomes more and more controlled, the machine of last resort is you. A self-driving car may decide where you can drive to, but your own body can be the limit of where you can bike to. Even better if you have access to horses for travel. Developing tools and methods that focus on augmenting what you can do yourself will liberate you from relying on tools that work against you.

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Call to Action: Join the Fediverse now!

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Fediverse is a web of federated social networks. Powered by the ActivityPub protocol, they allow for interoperability between them. Here is a fantastic demo of it in action today

Currently there are many federated equivalents to popular sites people use:

For YouTube there is PeerTube
For Instagram there is Pixelfed
For Twitter there is Mastodon, Pleroma and Misskey
For Facebook there is Frendica
For Podcasts & Music there is Funkwhale
For Reddit there is Lemmy

Why bother?

Continuing to use mainstream social networks is becoming more and more untenable each day. None of them operate for the good of their users. This has already created a dire crisis for free speech online. This doesn’t mean we should all run and hide. It is vital that we overcome chilling effects to ensure that voices can be heard. As Peterson explains below, it is better to pay the price for speaking than not speaking.

Things can be better this time

Federated social networks have a significant set of advantages. Simply being aware that they exist gives you power. You are not required to have an account or maintain a presence to access information on these sites. For example, you can browse the #Censorship hashtag for any instance you choose. This works with any tag. Don’t want to browse? You can change that same link to an RSS feed by adding ‘.rss’ to the end.

This is an immense improvement from current social media sites; anyone with an RSS reader can access all the same information as anyone in the network without having to give up privacy.

How do I start?

For most instances it’s as easy as creating an account on any other website. An instance is like a home. There are features to migrate accounts if you like as well. Your presence doesn’t need to be permanent and I would encourage you to have multiple identities.

Check out the fediverse.party portal to pick an instance: https://fediverse.party/en/portal/servers/

These are instances listed by interest or focus. Be aware that each instance has it’s own rules and culture. People are generally friendly, but like anywhere else, try to be kind in turn.

Get connected

You can make a post with #introduction to introduce yourself to the network, this is a handy way to get followers and meet like-minded people. #askfediverse is a very useful hashtag to get answers to questions that people might know. Each instance has a public directory that users may choose to be listed in. For Mastodon it will be the instance site + /explore. So for mastodon.social it’s https://mastodon.social/explore

Getting the most out of it

By getting your information from the fediverse, you can avoid having to share twitter/facebook links if the same information is available there. This helps promote a more resilient online information ecosystem. The software running these instances is open source and can be run yourself. This can be a challenging task but is very useful for people who want to have complete control by having an instance for just themselves.

Follow the Libre Solutions Network on the Fediverse.

A note on privacy

The Fediverse is an open network, it’s important to keep in mind this is for broadcasting public information. By leaving big tech platforms behind it is essential to redefine what we believe should and shouldn’t be shared publicly.

If you’re looking for a secure platform to communicate sensitive information I would recommend checking out XMPP & Matrix.

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Tools of the Technocracy: #2 Big Data & Artificial Intelligence

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Tools of the Technocracy: #2 Big Data & Artificial Intelligence

Big data

Big data is an arms race for information and computing power. The more information and computing power an entity has the more power it can leverage against you or over others. Privacy is generally discussed in terms of protecting yourself individually, but more and more it is becoming vital to protect your information to protect everyone. By reducing how much you feed into big data, you prevent that data from being weaponized against others. How is all this data collected anyways?

Web & App analytics

Online services are very interested in where you spend your time and attention. There are a multitude of different ways trackers infect your online experience.

Browsers currently have much more fine-tuned control over what information you share with sites you visit. There are mechanisms to mitigate this. With a smartphone app however, there are much fewer ways to restrict surveillance, and they generally require more effort.

Fingerprinting

Browser Fingerprinting is a set of techniques that analyze how your browser behaves. Many technical details about your browser (such as your monitor size, language, & time zone) allow you to stand out from other users. When combined with other information, such as your IP, it can be very easily to track you as a unique user. This does not mean that you should continue to leak data. The best defense is getting more people to take their privacy and security seriously. An alternative would be to find ways to send out fake data and interactions to add noise to the dataset.

Gemini is a new protocol intended to mitigate the amount of tracking sites can do. It is a growing ecosystem and there already is a great deal of great content there. Websites on Gemini are called capsules. You do need a gemini-compatible browser to view them.

“Data driven” services

Cloud platforms and online services aim to be ‘data driven’ this means that details from every interaction are recorded so that they can ‘improve their services’. Unfortunately for their employees, clients, and partners, this data is very often collected and processed by a third party. Other times it is simply outright sold.

Many organizations use Microsoft, Google or other cloud providers to run their day-to-day affairs. This has tragic implications for the people who rely on those institutions. Your ‘private’ information could be collected by big tech firms without you ever directly using their services.

Dragnet surveillance

Simply not being a target is not enough to avoid problems. Instead of relying on tracking you as an individual, many techniques involve spying on everyone. By being able to analyze every interaction, everyone can manipulated all the time. With more and more sophisticated tools, this becomes a larger and larger threat. The state has the power to force people into using specific services. As a matter of principle the powers of the state and large corporations to collect information on people must be restricted.

Biometrics

Biometrics are special pieces of data that should be guarded the most. Such as:

Your DNA
Your face
Your eyes
Your fingerprints
Your heartbeat
Your gait

Essentially, anything that uniquely identifies you is not something you want your data to be able to be traced back to. The problem with biometrics is that unlike passwords or keys they can not be (easily) changed or revoked. It is much easier to change a password than get an entirely new face.

Limitations of “De-identified” data

De-identifying data is the process of removing or changing information like names and addresses in the hope that the dataset won’t allow you to uniquely identify a person. This protection, isn’t absolute. For example, location data is essentially impossible to ‘de-identify’. How many people visit your home during certain hours each day? Even if the system doesn’t list their names it’s probably not too hard to find out.

Data brokerages

When your data is collected by different parties very often they will repackage and sell out the data. There are large data brokerages with massive datasets. This means that intelligent systems (or a determined adversary) could potentially gather a near-complete picture of your life by correlating pieces from different datasets. This is a massive advantage that large firms will always have over smaller organizations.

Data breaches

It is not only your own personal security that matters, but also the security of all those who are keeping data about you. HaveIbeenPwned is a great tool to verify if your e-mail appears in any data breaches. The trouble is that any information that becomes accessible is impossible to truly erase. Those wishing to use data to control others likely do not care for ethical concerns about how it is sourced.

Artificial intelligence

AI is no longer a sci-fi concept, it is very real and very present in our lives. Artificial intelligence is fueled by big data. This creates a feedback loop that incentivizes further data collection. The more data that exists, the more data there is to abuse.

How does it work? Signals & Levers

To oversimplify a bit, an AI algorithm is given many signals as ‘inputs’ and outputs one or many results. AIs are ‘trained’ by feeding them inputs and the desired outputs. It is essentially the AIs job to learn how to produce those outputs. By adjusting the values in its ‘memory’, it will learn how to give better results. Once an AI is trained with enough data it will be able to reliably produce accurate results for new data.

A great deal of these results are derived from a properly designed network and dataset. An AI fed with data that is incomplete or biased can produce useless or incorrect results. This is why it is a horrific idea to allow AI algorithms designed to track and control you to have control over your life. These AI algorithms can work together to create more sophisticated tools.

Hard-to-predict correlations

AI algorithms shouldn’t have direct control over systems that have the capability of harming people. By giving complex AIs levers to control the real world it can be almost impossible to predict what the potential impacts can be. The potential risks to human rights or even safety can’t be overstated.

This is because no matter how powerful our machines are, or how sophisticated our algorithms are we are not able to fully simulate the human experience in our human societies. There will be blind-spots and bad incentives. They are designed by humans after-all.

These tools are impressive

This is not to say AI is useless or bad, it has many very useful and powerful applications. You can explore the possibilities with this amazing YouTube channel Two Minute Papers. The best way to use AI is to use it where there is no danger in a wrong answer. My favorite example is upscaling, generating higher resolution images from lower resolution ones.

The Rise of a SkyNet Workforce

Not all sunshine and rainbows.

The sad news is that many of these systems are in control of our very lives. There is a race to give AI algorithms complete control of what we see, hear, and remember. It is important to keep in mind that these powerful tools are constantly working in the background in the interests of powerful institutions.

It is very possible that these AI algorithms feed into each other in unintuitive ways. As the technocracy expands out their digital control the impacts may become more clear.

Advertising

The study of the humans in cyberspace has been ongoing for quite some time. The game-changer is that artificial intelligence can find subtle ways to manipulate you that even its creators couldn’t imagine. Every time you interact with an ad online you are training algorithms to learn how to grab peoples’ time and attention.

Censorship

Giving AIs the power to moderate the Internet has disastrous potential. Human beings, for all their wisdom, have failed to ever use censorship for anything good. Artificial intelligence should never be a barrier to people’s ability to access information or express themselves.

Astroturfing

Bots are also faster at engaging online than human beings. It would be trivial to use currently available technology to swarm the Internet with bots that are able to out-produce any real human input to spread propaganda. Bots already outnumber humans on social media. The usual solution to this is to demand that human beings use their real identities online, but this immediately backfires by giving AIs a list of ‘real targets’ to hit.

AI is a game-changer for the technocracy. By herding people into systems with defined goals, the systems can set incentive structures to make the herd act how the system wants. If you believe money is a powerful influence over individual people, watch when every aspect of their lives is made better or worse based off how they are judged by these systems.

Plausible deniability

An underestimated part of these AI algorithms is that with datasets on everyone they can still target people individually. While this specific case may be an isolated incident, the capability exists to manipulate individuals more subtly. This can impact those who may be more vulnerable, or less likely to speak out.

Perception management

As top-down control drives more and more of what people see and experience this allows AIs to learn how to manipulate people’s behavior in incalculable ways. As we allow fewer systems to take total control over information, those who run those systems can actively brainwash the public for any purpose.

Perception management is a weapon primarily aimed at people’s subconscious minds. There is immense opportunity to leverage people’s very own biology against themselves. Fear, disgust and anger are some of the strongest emotions that can be used to influence people.

Digital Gulags

‘Social credit scores’ don’t need to be binary. Everything in your life can be put on a sliding scale. If you behave ‘well’ the system can reward you with:

A more pleasant social media feed
More favorable transaction costs and terms
Preferential resolutions in disputes
Access to more computing power
Access to more energy
Better quality food

If the system decides you’re not doing what it wants it can punish you with:

More negative news
Less representation in disputes
Less computing power
Energy rationing
Lower quality food

Once allowed, this system wouldn’t simply turn people into slaves, it would hijack evolution to transform what once were human beings into different creatures all-together. Sounds a lot like Roko’s Basilisk….

Solutions

Take privacy and security seriously

Consider switching away from tools and technology that track you as part of their business model. It is worth your time to find hardware, operating systems, and programs that aren’t proactively reporting on your behavior. This doesn’t have to be all-at-once but can be done gradually. Every bit helps and there is a gradient of success. Another option is simply to modify your lifestyle to find ways to rely less on digital systems.

Limit your interaction with data-driven services

This doesn’t mean you have to immediately close your bank account or quit your job. Using your influence as a customer or employee can help shift institutions in a better direction. Be aware of how these systems work and how you can mitigate their effects on your life. In any instance where you can replace a service or tool that is tracking you with one that isn’t you’re making great progress. Consider having your data deleted from unused sites. Try shopping in store, rather than from an online store-front.

Call to action: Join the Fediverse

A simple, but very effective way to tip the scales in favor of free speech.

Switching away from Algorithmically manipulated social media towards better alternatives such as pleroma & mastodon can help a great deal. Gab also doesn’t manipulate what appears in your feed. Ensure that you’re bookmarking important sites. RSS feeds are also critical in getting information without censorship or moderation.

Support open data

AI can be used for good! Open source tools and open datasets level the playing-field a great deal. An interesting project in this space is Mozilla Common Voice. It is difficult for this kind of work to compete with corporate or state-level initiatives, but it would be much harder to hide private data in a public dataset.

Consider getting involved locally, if there are local groups interested in privacy rights as well as security you can work to influence local governments and institutions to better protect people’s privacy.

Tools of the Technocracy: #3 Robots, IoT, Automation, Oh my!

Transforming the world in ways seen and unseen

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Tools of the Technocracy: #1 Digital Currency

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Tools of the Technocracy: #1 Digital Currency

Digital currency is what makes online commerce work so well. The trouble is that as the Internet has invaded our lives, it has given the digital financial complex more and more power. This is the foundation of a “social credit system” that aims to control every aspect of your life. Having the “right” social attitudes or behavior will not be enough to endure this. The game is total control and the prize is all your time and assets.

Data collection

The first thing to be surrendered to these digital financial tools was privacy. Having access to transaction data tells those collecting the information a great deal about you. It is trivial to glean travel patterns, interests, and all sorts of details about your life if they can catalogue your transactions. It is near impossible to keep your financial information private when operating through these services.

Censorship

People assume that financial institutions will only intervene in the most egregious of circumstances. Under the guise of stopping terrorism, hate and criminal activity the financial sector has acquired the power to be the arbiter of online commerce. Large institutions are only getting started abusing this power to micro-manage more and more economic activity.

This censorship, even when used for so-called “benign” purposes, distorts market incentives. At minimum, there will be chilling effects and perverse incentives created by these interventions. As these measures accelerate, trust becomes a fading memory.

Financial repression

Do you have control of your money? If not, is it really “your money”? In many cases, digital currency can be frozen, blacklisted or even seized from you. In these situations you often have little-or-no recourse. The cryptocurrency space has a term “Not your keys…Not your Bitcoin”. This is doubly true for fiat-based platforms. Digital currencies linked to fiat (state) currencies also have the unfortunate side-effect of being silently seized through rising amounts of inflation.

The Villains

Credit/Debit Cards

The earliest stage financial tracking. Almost everyone is guilty of using these. They are certainly preferable to the alternatives listed below, but in all instances it is better for you to use debit cards instead of credit cards where possible.

Cryptocurrency

Not all cryptocurrencies are the same. Some are more decentralized than others. Important questions to ask are:

Can you run your own client/wallet? (a “full node”)
Who are the developers?
How is the protocol developed?
Does it have a proven history?
Does it shield you from inflation?

Unlike debit/credit cards where financial transactions are tracked by a private entity, financial analysis is open to anyone who has access to the blockchain (usually everyone). Some argue this is more “fair” and that it would be better if we transitioned our entire financial system to a public ledger.

This wouldn’t achieve the desired effects. Those with power and wealth would still have the means to conceal their activities. On top of this, they would still have the ability to have asymmetric power over individuals by developing better tools to track and analyze their financial activities.

The notable exception being Monero. While it’s privacy may be currently intact, there is no guarantee that it never will be broken. By nature of being stored on a public blockchain, once that protection is broken it is lost forever.

Custodial services (Paypal/Venmo/Stripe/ect)

These services often aim to make it easier for people, businesses and institutions to accept payments. They often come at a high cost. If financial tracking wasn’t bad enough, they also have the power to control your customers money. They can unilaterally decide to cut you off often leaving you in a very difficult financial situation.

In late 2022, Paypal instituted a policy granting them the power to fine users for so-called misinformation. After a massive wave of account cancellations, Paypal announced that the policy was included in error. At best, this policy was a “trial baloon” to get a pulse of how much tolerance the public has for financial censorship.

Centralized Cryptocurrency exchanges and services

Speaking of: “Not your keys, not your Bitcoin”, keeping cryptocurrency assets on exchanges or services exposes you to counter-party risk. You shouldn’t rely on a specific service to hold all your cryptocurrency/assets. Many of these institutions may not have a strong history to justify any level of trust.

Exchanges have been caught trading against their customers, selling information to the state, and being outright ponzi schemes. An underestimated concern is that many cryptocurrency exchanges operate as the “on-ramp” from the fiat currency system. By converting fiat currency into cryptocurrency you can be transferring value from a system that has little privacy into one with no privacy.

Where is all this headed?

Blockchain Prisons

A misconception people often have about cryptocurrency and blockchain projects is that they are, by their nature, decentralized. This is not an essential feature of blockchains nor cryptocurrencies.

The road to hell: misplaced optimism in the blockchain space

What blockchain technology gives the technocracy is interoperability. A private distributed ledger could be used to give interoperability to CBDCs. On November 15th 2022, the New York Fed launched a 12 week digital dollar pilot.

Smart Contracts

A smart contract is an incentive system built on top of a blockchain ledger. None of the currently existing smart contract platforms are private. This means that all the data in a given smart contract is public. They could potentially encrypt data with a wallet’s private-key but that does make it difficult to share that data with others.

Programmable currency

What is it good for?

Smart contracts build systems that can create ways for humans and non-human systems to be rewarded by specific activities. For instance, Helium is attempting to incentivize people to provide data connectivity to systems built to track-and-trace activity in the real world. This is a powerful way to re-engineer society.

NFTs

A Non-Fungible-Token is a blockchain asset that can be assigned to a specific entity. Notably, for now, people are selling “digital ownership” of pieces of art. It is not difficult to imagine a scenario where all property ‘rights’ are regulated by a system that temporarily assigns NFTs to those who are “authorized” to access that particular item or property.

NFTs have even more potential. These systems can be much more flexible and opaque in very unintuitive ways. Everything is determined by the smart contract. It would be trivial to create individualized rules to limit who gets to use their ‘rights’ to the fullest…if at all.

Web3

Web3 is the encroachment of the cryptocurrency space into the entire internet. By building experiences on top of smart contracts, which have no privacy, every activity online can feed into algorithms that are used to tailor the totality of the online experience to each individual.

In many ways Web3 allows for much of Silicon Valley to be automated away with blockchain systems. While this may sound like a good thing, you are merely changing one bad system for another. Without a truly decentralized, private and secure blockchain Web3 will only work to the detriment of it’s users.

Internet of Things

By connecting more and more ‘things’ to the Internet it exposes them to being dominated by the systems discussed here. A ‘thing’ doesn’t need to be a trivial device such as a “smart speaker” or a fridge. It would very well be the car you drive or the door you enter to get to your office.

Permission Economy

Do you think everything outlined above sounds awful and dystopian? The following will take it into overdrive:

CBDCs

Central bank digital currencies are the final form of repressive fiat currencies. Instead of your central bank simply devaluing your labour and wages for fiscal stimulus, they can now control the demand side of the equation by limiting what you are allowed to buy (or sell) and when. The system has no desire to use prices as a mechanism to allocate resources because of the belief that the technology now exists to run everything.

Tools of the Technocracy: #10 Central Bank Digital Currencies

Late-stage financial repression

Tokenized life

NFTs could be used to determine permissions in the ‘internet of things’. In that case, it will become near impossible to act outside the wishes of the system. Eventually the system will want to have every gram, ounce, or milliliter of resources accounted for. In the name of ‘efficiency’, they will attempt to track and control every atom on the planet.

Tools of the Technocracy: #7 Smart Cities

Smart cities are marketed as if they are for the convenience of its residents, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Virtual Reality

Once people are denied all mobility rights and determination it becomes a lot easier to sell virtual experiences for data and profit.

Tools of the Technocracy: #6 Virtual Reality

Seeing is believing, and the capability to leverage your own senses against you only gets more extreme over time.

This is the endgame of control. After seizing all the resources and property, they will also control the people by having direct control of their perception. When the physical world becomes much to harsh to bear those who remain will be psychologically herded into a virtual farm that’s entire purpose is to keep them ‘out of the way’.

Solutions

#CashEveryday is an initiative to keep cash alive, by using cash transactions wherever possible. While fiat currency has its problems, cash is an anonymous and untraceable way to transfer value. You really should be using cash in every possible transaction. This reduces the amount of control third-parties have over transactions, and promotes keeping things local. Regardless of what new innovations take place, there should always be a private, physical component to the financial system.

Volunteer / “Buy nothing”

There are two other highly underestimated commodities that are drained by the technocracy: your time and attention. By giving your time to support people and causes in your community, you can often have a huge impact with very little financial input. Your contributions won’t be able to as easily be frozen or tracked by third parties.

Redefining "high places"

Lets re-balance power from the bottom-up

Often you may be able to find local “Buy nothing” groups on social media. Donating items you don’t need anymore can help restore locked wealth in your community and help those who may need those items. You may find something useful yourself!

Understand that wealth is more than just currency

I highly recommend you watch though the Peak Prosperity Crash Course. Updated in 2018, it has aged frighteningly well. While the main take away is the role of energy in our society there are many other vital insights. The most valuable tip in leaving the rat race is to realize that there are many things much more vital to your well-being than currency.

Work to break away from the all-digital financial system

There is a fantastic series by Children’s Health Defense called Financial Rebellion which is a treasure-trove of great advice in this series.

Tools of the Technocracy: #2 Big Data & Artificial Intelligence

What is all this data for anyways?

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Tools of the Technocracy

Sat, 08 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Our Darkest Hour

We are currently in a time like none other in all of human history.

In the past, tyrants and dictators have had a hard limit on how far they could push people. From either logistical difficulties, fear of resistance, or liberation from other nations; these hard limits have been getting softer and softer as technology advances. Recent history has shown an ever-increasing centralization of power into a smaller and smaller set of control structures.

We as everyday people have been complicit in building and maintaining these control structures. Almost every technology has allowed people to trade privacy, security or freedom for convenience. Technology isn’t inherently bad, but allowing this power to go unchecked absolutely is.

The sum total of what the world is constructing is nothing short of a planet-wide enslavement grid that has never been possible before. The individual parts create feedback loops that make it very difficult for people to extrapolate the long term impacts.

The tyrants of the world are winning a massive arms race against the rest of humanity. We must not merely avoid these systems, rather every one of us is responsible for preventing them from being weaponized against the people.

Our last chance

This time is so critical because the powers that ought not to be are in a desperate rush to finalize this system. The internet and the ability for people all over the world to coordinate and learn from each other has greatly tipped the balance of power into humanity’s favor. It is paramount that we put all other differences aside to focus on protecting the future for all people.

This means that until the technocrats are discredited and prosecuted the following doesn’t matter at all:

Political affiliation
Religious affiliation
Education
Cultural background or race
Physical characteristics such as sex or disability
Wealth (or lack thereof)
Anything else you can think of…

The truth is the only useful indicator you have for who can be trusted is if they are proactively focused on enhancing human liberty and fighting against human enslavement.

You are going to find people in this fight that have different beliefs than you, often staggeringly so. It is paramount that you put these feelings aside for the good of all. You and everyone else will be better for it. Those who can reach across to those with fundamental differences to oppose tyranny are going to be the most important people in the world.

A future worth fighting for

Overthrowing this evil will open up a fractal of possibilities for people to improve the world around them. There have been incalculable harms done by the waste of building these systems that could have been used for much better things.

Ending information control will allow people to work to provide genuine solutions to many of the worlds problems. Stopping the censorship of cures will eliminate much avoidable suffering. Resources spent oppressing people will be freed up to solve real problems. We will still have challenges, and there will still be political squabbles, but we have a very real opportunity to right many grave wrongs. I am not promising anyone a utopia, merely a world immensely more just than our current one.

The tools

This series will help you better understand what technologies are being weaponized against people. Simply avoiding them or remaining ignorant isn’t quite enough to avoid their effects. Much of the public is in the dark about these things, it is vital that we are all able to explain what is wrong with these mechanisms of control.

Tools of the Technocracy #1: Digital Currency

How the digital financial complex works against you...and what you can do about it.

Tools of the Technocracy: #2 Big Data & Artificial Intelligence

What is all this data for anyways?

Tools of the Technocracy: #3 Robots, IoT, Automation, Oh my!

Transforming the world in ways seen and unseen

Tools of the Technocracy: #4 Online Identity

What is following you in your digital tracks?

Tools of the Technocracy: #5 Networks

Much of the digital infrastructure in place today is built to structurally enable tyranny.

Tools of the Technocracy: #6 Virtual Reality

Seeing is believing, and the capability to leverage your own senses against you only gets more extreme over time.

Tools of the Technocracy: #7 Smart Cities

Smart cities are marketed as if they are for the convenience of its residents, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Tools of the Technocracy: #8 Transhumanism

How close are the technocrats to modifying you? Too close.

Tools of the Technocracy: #9 Internet Shutdowns

Information control is the root of modern tyranny.

Tools of the Technocracy: #10 Central Bank Digital Currencies

Late-stage financial repression

Tools of the Technocracy: #11 Social Credit

What's new is old.

Tools of the Technocracy: #12 Network States

The formalization of world-wide tyranny

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The most valuable asset for the coming decade

Tue, 04 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Trust

Over the last decade individuals and institutions have shifted from covertly selling out their trust to overtly abusing that trust. Trust is essential to have in a civilization. So much of our society is built on assumed trust, or worse trust only maintained by illusion. By abusing the trust of their clients, partners, and the general public they are supplanting their own existence and in turn tainting those who rely on them.

What makes trust most valuable is that there are limitless masses of those who will lie, cheat, and steal to get ahead. There is no competitive advantage to joining them. Can you trust a person who is beholden to a corporation that is working against your interests? Can you trust a company that relies on the exploitation of the most vulnerable? The faster we seek better alternatives the better we can make the world.

This fractal of opportunity means that if we can be trustworthy, we can work to create better alternatives. But how? The first step is disintermediation.

News

Information control is one of the most powerful weapons used against the public. Ideally you would have a curated subset of sources of information that you trust but also a wide net of opinions and disciplines to avoid blind-spots. This year, ensure that you have explored the new media that is being birthed in this time and find ways to avoid being too influenced by a single person or organization.

Social media is the main tool for information control. By dominating the terms of interaction between human beings social media can work to undermine culture itself. To foster a liberty-minded culture I recommend you look into federated social media such as Mastodon and Pleroma. We on our own instance

E-mail

E-mail was once a very reliable way of ensuring people got your message but even now they are updating spam filters to censor information. Big tech e-mail providers will proactively scan your e-mail contents. If you or your loved ones are still stuck with Google/Outlook for e-mail I would highly recommend they switch providers.

Messaging Apps

Facebook Messenger / WhatsApp / Google Hangouts / Duo / ..ect shouldn’t be the means in which you’re willing to communicate with others. There are many alternatives but one of the more interesting options is Delta Chat. Signal is also great because it seamlessly works with SMS. Personally I host my own matrix instance to run element.

Payment processors

PayPal and Visa/Mastercard are already abusing their contracts to enact censorship by restricting access or levying fees. It is paramount that we all work to reduce our dependency on credit card systems as much as possible. Cryptocurrency is an option, but for local uses it would be far better to use physical money or cash. If you’re in the US you may find GabPay useful.

Operating Systems

Windows, ChromeOS & MacOS all have too much control over your digital life. It would help a great deal if more and more people switched to Linux where there is much less data collection on users. There is a fair learning curve, and not all software is equally available so it is important to recognize where you are and how easy it is for you to switch.

For someone who hasn’t tried linux at all I would personally recommend taking a look at PureOS though Ubuntu is also a very popular choice. For smartphones I would recommend using GrapheneOS or LineageOS instead of Android.

Open Hardware

I am a big fan of the Pine64 project. I look forward to when the Pinephone is ready for mass adoption. Open hardware is going to be an important space in the future so keep an eye open for it!

Big picture

There are so many ways we can work to fix the future and it can be difficult to keep them all in mind. As a guide I like to occasionally revisit Coming Clean from Solari. That advice is a lighthouse in turbulent and uncertain times.

Work to find other trustworthy individuals and organizations to collaborate. Show others that you can be relied upon. We can make the world a much better place, with consistent focus and effort there is no limit to what we can achieve together.

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Account security best practices

Sun, 19 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The best way to protect data is not to record it

Almost everyone has at least a dozen accounts and it can be quite a disaster if your password gets published in yet another data breach. Passwords aren’t the only information worth stealing and the best way to protect important information is never to collect it. In general, it’s best to avoid making an account with a service if you don’t need to. Sadly many services force you into making an account by gating content, which is a dark pattern.

This also applies to payment information. Not only should you only input payment information when you need to, but you should also consider what kind of payment methods you use. Cryptocurrency is perfectly transparent to everyone, and your credit cards are perfectly transparent to whoever your card provider shares their data with. In many cases its worth asking yourself “does this service really need my information to do what I need it to do?”

Using a password manager

There are many password managers usually with trade-offs between trust and convenience. The most secure option would be to run an offline password manager and manually sync between devices, but there are other options that provide a cloud-based solution for convenience.

Consider:

KeePassXC
If you use Nextcloud you can also use it to sync passwords

Benefits of using a password manager

Strong passwords

The most obvious advantage of a password manager is the ability to store and keep difficult to remember passwords. This is critical to having a strong unique password for each account.
Unique details

Passwords aren’t the only thing that is best to have unique. You can also easily keep track of different usernames and e-mails for each service. Not only that but you can avoid disclosing your e-mail address with a temporary e-mail through a free service like TempMail.
Account fungibility

With a password manager it is now much easier to manage multiple accounts. Sometimes it’s nice to start fresh, other times services like reddit will want you to have a properly aged account to comment or access certain features. Keeping track of accounts makes sure you don’t forget any.

Multi-factor authentication

Multi-factor authentication is an essential tool in keeping accounts secure. This allows you to be protected even if someone gets access to your password. There are many ways to use multi-factor authentication but it us usually up to the service to support it. It is best to enable whatever method is available and works for you.

SMS/e-mail codes

This is the bare-minimum for a service trying to offer two-factor authentication. If you’re not using unique passwords, e-mail authentication won’t provide you any additional benefit. Also using a throw-away e-mail that you don’t have access to excludes you from using e-mail based authentication.

SMS authentication has often been broken by dedicated attackers social engineering the service provider. This is largely only done for high value targets. Another drawback to SMS multi-factor authentication is that you have to divulge your mobile number to the service.

With these shortcomings in mind, SMS/e-mail confirmation is still another layer of protection that can still be helpful.

TOTP codes / “Google Authenticator”

Timed one-time-pad codes are a fantastic tool. Essentially you are given a special ‘key’ by scanning a QR code which will generate random numbers to act as your “second password” and it works quite well for this.

There is often a “recovery code” that must not be disclosed as this will allow someone to generate your time codes. TOTP codes are great because it would be very hard for an attacker to have access to your password as well as a personal device to enter the code.

If you’re on android Aegis Authenticator is available on F-Droid
On iOS you can use Google Authenticator

Avoiding data leaks

You can generally assume that all your information for every service is being collected and sold for purposes outside your control. Services get hacked and data breaches happen. The less exposed you are to any particular service being compromised the better.

Tools of the Technocracy: #2 Big Data & Artificial Intelligence

What is all this data for anyways?

Integrations are evil

“Sign in with…” sounds very convenient but it undermines the uniqueness of each account. The more big tech can identify patterns between your accounts they can very often glean unintuitive insights from fairly innocuous data.

Avoid signing in with big tech platforms and only authorize apps to connect to your accounts in very limited circumstances. Remove any unused integrations once you’re done with them.

Disable e-mail alerts

There aren’t many conditions that allow you to guarantee that your e-mails aren’t being read by someone, or something else. When a service sends you an e-mail alert about something, (like an online purchase for example) this gives your e-mail provider and anyone they share data with access to a key window into your life. Salt your data

Many sites and services will ask for data that serves no purpose and can’t be verified. You are under no obligation to provide them a correct, useful dataset to be used against you.

“Salting your data” is to simply input incorrect or unintelligible data such as incorrect birth dates or fake names to undermine these data-collection efforts.

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Breaking Free

Sat, 11 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

How do you find the perfect app? What can we do when all the major services have been designed to track, manipulate and control us? Should we just turn everything off and run to the woods?

Prepare your mind

The systems built to manipulate and control us weren’t built in a day. It requires all of us to focus intently on building a human-centric instead of data driven digital experience.

Remind yourself that will make a huge difference over the long run:

Accept that your privacy, security, and freedom require your active participation.
There will be many situations where mitigation is the best-case-scenario.
Consider the difference between technology improving or imposing on your life.
Not all tools are equivalent different options have incredibly diverse trade-offs.

Even the simplest habits can build up into massive improvements. Like many other things this is a marathon and not a sprint. Your choices matter a great deal because they change the incentives for systems and institutions. Managing expectations is critical in avoiding frustration.

Team up

One of the most effective ways to improve is to try new things. Everyone knows adopting a new messaging application is very difficult when nobody you know uses it. Getting others to join you helps everyone involved.

The most powerful way to help others adopt better solutions is to spend the time and effort to set them up. Very often little maintenance or support is needed once someone is ready to go.

As a team you can collaborate on supporting each other. Not everyone has the same familiarity and ability to adopt different solutions. Once your team gets familiar with one option it also gets easier to adopt others as well.

An underestimated advantage of teaming up is that you can now pool resources to solving problems. If teams of people using free and open source software that respects their privacy the burden of donating to support development could be shared much easier. Many developers for very important projects would benefit from donations by the people instead of larger corporations.

Accept reasonable compromise

Perfection is often unattainable. For example properly securing e-mail communication between multiple parties requires a great deal of effort that could be much better used by keeping mission-critical messages on more secure infrastructure. Odds are you will still need to be able to receive e-mails all the same.

Compromise is essential when working with many people. Your favorite (and possibly even most secure) option may not be easy right away for others to start working with. Ideally the first thing you compromise is urgency, a plan to move forward is much better than betting everything on immediate success.

Consider that a hot new app may make claims that have yet to be proven. Rushing people into adopting novel technology can very often backfire.

Embrace the analog

The fastest and most secure way to send someone a file is to hand-deliver them physical media with the data written to it. Every time you send files through networks the only guarantee you have is that they likely won’t be decrypted right away. Over the long run this guarantee becomes more of a hope.

Sending large amounts of data over the mail is easier and easier as storage gets better and better. For greater protection you could send a relative an encrypted disk/drive and then simply message them with the password.

I hope to generally avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater…but “smart home” devices are almost always a trap. I personally would only rely on a “smart enabled” lock or appliance without any connection to the Internet and running software I understand.

Thank you

Thanks for reading this post. This is the last in my starting series discussing the big picture as I see it. I also want to thank my first paid subscriber! Moving forward upcoming articles will be about small scale improvements and how to bring them to your life. Premium articles will be similar to these big picture musings.

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You have a right to remain silent, but your data doesn't!

Fri, 03 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Where is the data?

Data-driven services are ubiquitous. They all feed into machine learning algorithms who’s purpose is to decode the human psyche.

E-mail providers scan your e-mails to learn about your interests & online purchases
Entertainment services gather all kinds of information about what catches your attention and stimulates specific emotions
Every time you spend money financial institutions and retailers are analyzing your explicit and implicit voting with your wallet.
Social media and other communication services can adequately measure your individual impact as well as gauge messaging.
Advertising platforms catalogue and collect not only which sites you visit but how you navigate within and between them.

How is it used?

You may not mind amazon knowing what packages you order. You may not mind google knowing everywhere you have been. You may also be unbothered by your bank knowing your financial history. It’s not a big deal that social media networks are aware of every human that is aware of you. Surely there is nothing wrong with further and further data collection of everything?

The trouble comes when all this information is bundled and sold off to other data warehouses to train more sophisticated AI which is then used to provide input to corporations and institutions. This isn’t simply a ‘social credit system’ this is the groundwork for skynet’s total domination of humanity.

That does sound extreme but consider that this data analysis won’t end with humans. We were simply the easy part because we were able to be tricked into adopting and feeding these systems. Smart contracts are a fascinating aspect of blockchain technology but in this light they are a terrifying tool for the Internet of Things™ to begin tracking and tracing every atom on this planet.

How does that hurt you?

Back to the little picture, there are already very sophisticated systems learning about you specifically and as a human creature. There will never be any guarantee that these tools will be used for your benefit. All indications point to these systems being used to extract as much value from you as possible as quickly as possible regardless.

In fact this is precisely why Youtube has been named as a agent provocateur in the culture wars. Youtube’s recommendation algorithm has been given a lot of flak for ‘radicalizing’ people. This isn’t because Youtube has any specific desire to create extremists, but rather that was a side-effect of maximizing engagement. That was a relatively simple system compared to recent more refined machine learning algorithms.

You have no way of knowing that insidious goals you are being nudged along with and odds are there are many running in parallel. Occasionally someone will point to some benevolent outcome of these systems but these will always be overshadowed by the grievous harms caused by abusing such power.

What you can do to mitigate it?

The only proper way to protect data is to not collect it in the first place. Many data breaches have revealed that a company saying their data is ‘secure’ is merely a promise. Encryption can usually be broken by breaking the people safeguarding it.

This means avoiding data-driven services and tools as much as possible. Trading with cash or barter eliminates economic tracing. Physical mail is already more secure than e-mail especially when delivered via a trusted courier.

Because of this, the sneaker-net is the only secure digital network. Handing someone a flash drive with the files they want won’t create any metadata about what was transferred.

This is not a binary choice however, you will have to make compromises. The benefits are still quite large, because the less these systems know about you the less the effects can compound against you. Every byte of data not recorded will potentially save lives in the future.

If data must be recorded (such as data with great public interest) blockchains are a great tool for this because you can guarantee the data is public and therefore at least people are on a level playing field. This is much better than the alternative where you provide data to a corporate or government database that will be used with little or no transparency.

Political solutions

A digital bill of rights is long overdue. As we have seen, rights must be (nearly?) absolute and require enforcement mechanisms. There must be no distinction made between who may or may not infringe on these rights, none are to be permitted.

My short list for inclusion in a digital bill of rights would be:

Services and Software are only allowed to collect data that is required for the specific features used by the user to function. Any data sharing must always be opt-in
Identity should never be required for any platform or service, discrimination against anonymous users should not be allowed.
Users must have the tools for filter their own experience where possible. Allowing users to choose what content to filter is a much preferable option to blanket bans and censorship.
Interoperability is a must, unnecessary lock-in should be treated as anti-competitive behavior.

Educating people on the current state of systems will be the most vital part of this challenge. The Libre Solutions Network is being built with an explicit goal in advancing this. This is very much a moral challenge as well as a technological one.

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Emancipate your mind from mental slavery

Thu, 25 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

You are not immortal, and you can be fooled from time to time. This is okay, admitting it is much more important than being right all the time. Admitting you are wrong, and can be is the very thing that allows you to escape the prison of lies. In fact, admitting it can do a great deal of good in helping free other people from false illusions.

My goals with the Libre Solutions Network are:

To help people recognize the digital tools weaponized against them
To connect people with groups, ideas, and tools that help people maintain and advance their freedom.

Freedom is your right to determine your future on your own terms.

Privacy prevents systems, institutions and people from leveraging information to undermine that freedom. Often very innocuous, seemingly-unrelated information can be used to manipulate and control people.

The goal of understanding digital privacy shouldn’t be to achieve a life of perfect secrecy. Self-censorship is one of the most powerful kinds of censorship that is used against people. Instead the goal is to make sure that the information that is collected on you is as deliberate as possible, by avoiding unintentional disclosure.

Freedom is your most valuable asset. Odds are you are not the most powerful human being on the planet. Therefore it is vital that you understand you are at a disadvantage in terms of information, resources, and representation. Freedom, privacy, and security are all vital tools to shift the balance of power back into your favor.

It would be all to easy to simply say “social media is manipulating you” this is overwhelmingly true but needs to be broken down into the specific methods. Social media is incredibly powerful because it latches onto your primal needs to feel accepted and validated by others. The power social media derives is primarily driven by people attaching status to influence on these platforms.

Media sorting and filtering

Almost everyone intuitively understands that when moderators of a community or site remove posts this impacts people’s ability to be exposed to that information. What is not as clear is that the order in which the information is presented is just as impactful.

How many people will scroll to read each and every comment on a particular post? Certainly not the majority. In many ways content that is slid down the feed may as well have been removed in many instances.

There are many techniques that can be used to work against this, but in general you want to be sure that your posts are being sorted in an unbiased way (such as chronologically) if possible.

“Trends”

On almost any site the chosen “trending topics” are an editorial decision by the people running the site. This can involve them choosing every single one, or simply removing undesired trends.

Trends can send the false impression that these are the “most important topics” at any given time. This is always false because each person has different priorities and challenges at any given time.

Reward mechanisms

People liking and sharing your posts enhances your reach and will help boost your own perceived status. This is very good at manipulating people.

For now it is up to your friends and followers to ‘like’ your posts to provide you with the feedback mechanism that your posts are important. There is no rule that it will stay that way. Sites could experiment with paying cryptocurrency to users who make certain kinds of posts.

Nudging

Ever experience a strange glitch while using social media? It may not actually be just a glitch. Many mainstream social media sites have run psychological experiments on their users to evaluate how they respond to particular situations.

Every aspect of your interactions are being recorded to further shape your behavior on the platform. Your attention and engagement are the primary signals to these algorithms.

These are all very concerning because regardless of the specific platform, anyone with write-access to the software that runs these systems can alter information that most would assume is unaltered. There is never a guarantee that the ‘likes’ you are being shown on a post are actually promoting that post. You can never be sure that anyone has seen your content at all.

This is not to say that nothing on these platforms has an impact, but it is vital to understand that there are ways that systems can work against you.

Thank you for reading.

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How to help the Libre Solutions Network

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Libre Solutions Network is a multi-media passion project.
If you find value in this work, any assistance would go a long way to help make it viable.

Feedback

This project is primarily a labor of love for my own personal and professional development.
Any thoughts, queries, or suggestions are entirely welcome.
You can get involved with the discussion by following this project on the fediverse or via Substack.
Direct contact is also possible via a variety of means.

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Libre Solutions Network

Fungible Digital Infrastructure for bottom-up resilience and censorship resistance

Conceptualizing fungible digital infrastructure

Manyverse

Nostr

Delta Chat

Mitra Mini

Future possibilities

Laying the foundation

Private, secure & direct connections

Directive 4 of the Internet

Notes

Bring your voice: Guest posts welcome

Why contribute?

Ideal posts

Terms

Basic rules

Approval

How to submit

We will come to regret our every use of AI

Machine minds and machine hearts

Tool use is what makes us smart

We’ve seen this all before

The feedback loop

The ‘Super-intelligence’ red herring

“We have altered the deal, pray we don’t alter it further”

Getting off the fence: refusing to compromise on humanity

Presence and purpose

Fighting for technological freedom

Cultivating creativity

Please Stand By: Technical Difficulties

Bad news: The PeerTube instance is (irreparably) broken.

This is not the end.

Libre Solutions Network 2.0

While we wait

The State of Cyberspace: Twilight Hours

Novel assaults via cyberspace

State and corporate conquest of cyberspace

Cyberwars and ‘splinternets’

The War against general-purpose computing

Darkest before the dawn

Teachable Moment: Will the digital control grid inevitably fail, or is it already here?

Are people truly choosing digital tyranny?

Scale is the enemy: a deep analysis of the control grid

Fight tyranny now to prevent the control grid

Inbox Question: Becoming computer literate

Defining ‘computer literacy’

Major steps:

Rewiring the foundation

Flourishing independence: Sharing is caring

A low-stakes critical thinking exercise for online media

An “info-junkie’s” guide to media

Collecting insight

Conflict is good, actually

Intellectual prospecting

Hate the game, not the player(s)

Individual incentives and compromise

Refining information into knowledge

Exercise: Analyzing a Narrative Network

Example 1 - A foundation of sand: ‘Evidence-based’ weight-lifting"

Example 2 - It’s just a game: Is Star Citizen a scam?

Example 3: Choose your own adventure!

Follow-up questions: Questioning yourself

Bonus exercise: Feedback

We are not machines: Overcoming tyranny with VN Alexander

Links discussed

Digital privacy questions with Samuel of Privacy Now

Fall Mini-Recap: On the brink

Updates

Happy Cybersecurity Awareness Month!

Technological Tyranny

Hope in a better digital future

Honorable mentions

You don't understand the Culture War

Scapegoating tech

The human side of the culture war

Spiteful Mutants: The bastard children of a dying empire

Forging peace in turbulent times

Courageously rejecting awful paradigms

Building a virtuous cycle: Understanding