Building Alternatives is the Best Protest

From the privacy point of view the establishment is building a big digital prison. Don’t complain about being kicked off social media. Be glad it happened.

The whole point of leaving bondage is not to wander in the desert but to enter into a promsed land. There’s got to be more to life than providing grist for the giant machine learning mill — and there is.

To make the point unmistakably clear dissidents should build, subscribe or invest in new networks that protect privacy and data ownership. The only way to convincingly demonstrate the benefits of freedom is by competitive contrast.

Tech startups have been creating onion networks, vpns, encryption and blockchain search engines for some years as an alternative to systems everyone knows are deeply flawed. Today’s big silicon may be tomorrow’s legacy old country from whom many will be glad to be free.

The natural allies of rebels are innovators not ideologues. No rebellion is sustainable unless you can make a buck at the same time.

But it won’t happen without hard work.

The genuine new world is not just a negation of the existing one but a competitive improvement on it. It is achieved less by destruction than by construction and by learning what others are forbidden to discover.

Your Report Card

Has China’s social rating system come to America? Once something is potential it very often becomes actual. Like the big red button marked ‘do not push’, some curious fellow always does.

Those with lower scores find daily life harder. They aren’t allowed to buy high speed train tickets or take flights. Doors close to certain restaurants. Their children may not be allowed to go to college.

Such report card systems are bound to hunt down the outliers. Unfortunately that is often where the solution to the challenge problem lies. The knowledge potential of a society is highly correlated with its ability to rigorously describe what it doesn’t know. If you considered things you didn’t know as blank volumes with only titles, how would you file them in the Dewey Decimal System?

Strategies in Dealing With Complexity

The establishment’s approach to complexity is to control it with one global long term plan. The alternative is to foster lots of small, relatively short term efforts to adapt, ameliorate or harness unexpected developments.

Establishment efforts will always be Too Big To Fail. By contrast the problem solving approach uses failure to learn and make changes.

Perhaps most importantly the diversified approach is inherently competitive whereas establishment efforts are only cosmetically different but they are operationally monolithic.

Detaching oneself from the hive is possible. There’s a lot you can take with you offline. Public domain Gutenberg alone is nearly a terabyte.

Part of freedom is the right to be alone with the problem under consideration, to seek a haven from committee meetings and groupthink. Perhaps the worst thing social media did was define every POV in opposition to another.

Less Spying

One of the advantages of using the standard Internet protocol site (like this) is that you don’t have to give up your information to access the site. Many social media sites are Walled Gardens that leach out your personal details.

Coming here is cheaper, in lost information, than going there. Nobody takes your info at the door.

Speaking for myself it’s a relief to be rid of character limits, little text boxes and overlapping windows.

Many partings

The social media purge means that conflicting sides can no longer abide in the same virtual room. This does not mean a breakdown in communication, just a breakup of the network into components.

Rather than being one loud space the universe will construct rooms. One of advantages of componentization is that POVs need not be one size fits all. It can more easily cross the boundary into concrete action for instance.