C.R.E.A.M. by the Wu-Tang Clan says “Cash Rules Everything Around Me.” No, my fellas. It is Chaos that reigns supreme. I do think you understand that – it does get mentioned in your song, by synonyms. Anyway, I’m feeling it tonight, feeling my religion, as I ponder the problems of our time and come back knowing less than before I started pondering.
The biggest problems that face humanity may be insoluble. No resolution but the bitter end – which I don’t expect for some time to come, will not likely live to witness myself, so don’t get too bent. But it’s a possibility – over a long enough arc an inevitability – so whoever is there to bear witness, I hope they can care for each other with a dignity that has eluded the masses of people for a long time. Learn the lessons of Hellstar Remina.
But smaller problems than the apocalypse are giving me a case of the ass right now. Take any one issue, think of a solution, and you can think of a thousand ways it can fail. The nature of life is that everything angles for every advantage it can achieve until it undermines itself or is outmaneuvered by another angling life form or circumstance that throws the chess pieces on the floor. Start over, if you can. The same principle seems to apply to civilization.
One of the big problems that philosophy applied itself to, going back to the ancient world, was to decide what is the best society, and how it can be best achieved. By the nineteenth century and early Modernism, this took the shape of various theories about the natural progression of history, of which Marxism was the most enduring. I remember hearing a Rage Against the Machine song where lil’ Zacky said, “It’s the end of history,” and the commie rocka was not talking doomerism, more the idea that capitalism was entering the stage where it is inevitably defeated. Lovely vision.
I’m pretty sure one or more of those old Modernist theories included the notion that this progression of history is cyclical – that societies come and go in a predictable way. To that I say, maybe not all that predictable, but yes, invariably societies fall. Political ideas and orders fall. The idea that America was ever about freedom, that is rocketing into graveyard of history. It’s sickening to see all of Orwell’s observations about totalitarianism coming to pass here – especially the inverted language. Yell freedom while demanding servitude and conformity. Seriously, fuck the USA so fucking much on that one. Y’all fascists make me wanna puke. Utterly beneath contempt.
Not what I was thinking about when I started this post. Here it is: when the fascist screws tighten on the internet, how will we communicate with each other? When the police state algorithmically suppresses all leftist / lgbt+ / non-christian thought online, how do we stay in touch? Social media is a panopticon. Right now, the means to communicate “off the grid” are too elaborate for the average person use, in practice. VPNs are controlled by businesses, which are all focal points of attack for fascists – systems that can fail. Being based in Uzbekistan doesn’t make your VPN much safer; it just means the efforts to compromise it will be covert and illegal. The dark web is grimy pedo murder city, no place to be, and involves some kinda weird technical knowledge just to get through the door, right? Ya probably don’t want to answer that question if you know, heh.
Chain e-mails? I’m told e-mail has terrible security. Encrypted e-mails? How does that shit work? Could we get everybody on the same page in time to dodge the hammer coming down? Will we be passing around secret media, thumb drives in brown envelopes? What will we want to tell each other about, and how can we do so, in a way that minimizes exposure to a state run by murderous thugs?
Everything I can think of has failing after failing, exploit after exploit, and can’t hope to rival the reach of even the worst social media sites. I’m not looking forward to this becoming a more significant problem than it already is.
One sliver of hope in that: When corporations are the only law, competition between those corporations gives windows for some small amount of liberty. For example, let’s say the fuckos who run bluesky decide they want to keep snatching all the business from non-creeps, and successfully resists buy-outs and government pressure. Eventually they will become corrupted or fail, but in the meantime, it’s somewhere to be that isn’t run by the state’s biggest corporate allies. The hand of the market giving us a favor, for a minute. Maybe this keeps happening – we all just keep wandering from place to place, until our years in the desert are at their end.
It’s chaos. The corporations would like to monopolize everything, fight to become Big Brother, but they’re still ruled by entropy, at the end of the day. They eat each other, teeter, and fail from their own internal corruption. We’re just fleas on the dog.
Anyway, for the time when Matt Mullenweg’s meltdown consumes wordpress and thereby Freethought Blogs, I hope you’ll all subscribe to my xerox’d zine, coming soon to the haunted and burned-out remains of a university near you.
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Depends on exactly what your threat model is…
If we’re talking about suppression on the big platforms (which is already happening), then there’s still the open internet. Lots of people are doing lots of good stuff on self-hosted blogging, federated social media, all that stuff. If you need help to feel better on that score, you could do a lot worse that read or watch Fighting for our web from the wonderful Molly White. Hell, even without the particular issues you’re talking about here, the big platforms are shit, and getting worse, so we need to build something else anyway.
If, on the other hand, you’re worried about suppression or surveillance at the network level, then that’s a different matter, and much more difficult. There’s the option of end-to-end encrypted comms such as Signal or Telegram, which have been used to good effect in many places, but how effective they are against a really determined and capable state-level adversary is debatable – the servers could be blocked, the apps themselves could be pulled, and you’ve always got to worry about the human element (infiltration) once you get that paranoid.
But there are still other, older tools available: phone trees, photocopiers, mimeograph machines, typewriters… Maybe worth learning about the history of samizdat under the Soviets? People find ways.
it all involves a lot of work doesn’t it? social media got us used to easy things. time to get hard.
Keep in mind that modern digital printers, and that will likely include modern photocopiers, have state surveillance crap built in (not least, the “yellow dot code”).
Either find a working analog-ish black-and-white one from the 1980s or thereabouts, if they still exist and it’s still possible to keep one working, or use a print-stuff kiosk at a Kinko’s or similar, paying in cash and wearing a covid mask and a ball cap with the bill tipped down to be unlikely to be identifiable from any store surveillance camera footage, bringing either no gadgets that can network (just the thumbdrive with the documents to print) or a burner phone purchased with cash and loaded with minutes under similar circumstances.
Another option if you have a printer that doesn’t have ink cartridge DRM or for which a DRM hack is available: empty the yellow ink cartridge/tank, and if it refuses to print anything (even in B&W) if one of the colors is empty, refill the yellow with water (and use the DRM bypass if needed to get it to accept the refilled yellow). Presto: no yellow dot code. I wouldn’t trust a network printer though, unless you have it and the PC on an airgapped LAN — no internet whatsoever only local networking, like at a DooM party in 1994. Better yet use a USB or parallel port printer on an airgapped PC.
sounds like some samizdat literally involved transcribing shit longhand. an easier way would be record yourself reading it with a disguised voice, or having a robot read it, and distributing sheisty podcasts lo-tek style.