| HN Mirror

Made an account to respond to this.

On the net a bit before you. Effectively left the net around 2003-2004 due to a dangerous rise in vigilante-ism specific to a community I was involved in. Saw the darkness coming, a prelude to the Twitterite-Trumpian shit. Net was no longer about amazing technologies connecting people. Became a power that could be used against people.

Never had any social media accounts. Surprises me people could not see where it was going. People who never touched HTML didn't see what they were giving up by raising their flag on corporate PHP. The ecosystem of private web has almost entirely disappeared. Today you're either corporate or silenced.

Don't have any permanent accounts anywhere. Imo, accounts are surveillance / advertising delivery mechanisms. The longer you ride an account, the more info "they" have on you. And one day somebody is going to want to f__k with you. And it'll all be there, on a plate.

(This is not a theory. I saw it happen, more than once. Including to myself.)

Gave up email around 2005 as the worst offender. All your account information, all your personal business, all your draft-grade ideas, all in one place, waiting for some a__h__e to hack in or get a warrant? No thanks. And nobody has any discretion in email. Nobody has figured out how to use PGP in 25 years. Hopeless.

People who use social media, imo, are like Neanderthals waiting for their extinction event. Intelligent people, engineers, and evil corporate and political people are basically cooking up crack and handing it out so they can get rich and grab power. Zuckerberg sitting beside world leaders at the G8 a decade ago kind of cemented this perception imo. And the Neanderthals keep signing up as if all of this was neutral, like clean air or fresh water.

(My favorite Neanderthals are the political activists claiming the high ground of human rights to conduct their political campaigns via Facebook without the threat of surveillance!)

And, yes, I live in a cave. I'm almost not joking.

Tried recently to get an email to register for a throwaway account somewhere. Could not figure it out via Tor. Tor services permanently or temporarily out of service. Or require non-anonymous bitcoin. No way to get emails without leaving trail. No way to be anonymous. Internet = surveillance. No more privacy. Everybody is a social media idiot. America is crumbling. Not a coincidence, imo.

When I get nostalgic for the good old days of cyber revolutionaries and tech manifestos, I think of the failure of the front page of Reddit to provide any solutions to the very serious long term problems we are facing as a species. It's all astroturfed joke gifs and one or two rage-news story of the moment. The comments have gone from bad to impenetrably terrible in the past 5 years. There's no wisdom in this crowd.

(Hackernews is an interesting exception, but the narrowness that keeps it sane is also its shortfall. Not every problem can be solved from the command prompt by start-up engineering visionaries. The principle virtue here is respect for craft, and it shows everyday in the careful comments.)

The internet has turned into something worse than television. The people are more passive as ever in their hyper-personalized info-holes, zoned into whatever gives them that dopamine hit, as you put it.

Reading used to be an alternative to television. We used to leave the boob tube and go read a newspaper, or a book. Reading was good. The internet has transformed reading into the problem. Where is the escape? The people who wrote, who called themselves intellectuals, used to occupy a social and technological space separate from television. They had their own world. Now writers, um, bloggers, newspapermen, scholars, and the rest, are all shoulder to shoulder in a disorderly cue, all mobbed together trying to get a golden ticket on the train to success. And the train station is called Facebook, or Twitter. Writers have always been poor, but never until today have they been beggars.

(My favorite omen is Twitter, where all the formerly important pillars of the political aristocracy, like Bill Kristol for example, go to flash their underwear. Trump is just the best example. Hardly the worst. Imagine Hemmingway ruined by Twitter.)

The internet destroyed the BBS scene. First came the information superhighway through that hometown feel. Then came the skyscraper social media conglomerates. Now we're getting the double tap psychological bombing campaigns that shake the ruins we are huddling in. And we are supposed to be amused.

I don't know how people manage all this disaster. Maybe like most people they buy junk cookies and pies and forget that grandma used to make this stuff at home much better, and that's why we used to love her. Life in America has become worse and worse. Emptier and emptier. More abstractly equal, more invasively political. And in the past 20 years, America has been transformed by surveillance properties of the internet.

Nobody has a handle on this. Including the great political parties, including the technologists, including the intelligence services. Great winds are sweeping through.

I think America is reaching its late Soviet period. The machine is creaking. Everybody is looking at each other wondering what part of the machine is breaking. The ship is full of leaks (and not only Wikileaks).

The plan is to rearrange the deck chairs. Just a little more Uber. A few more sprinkles of Netflix. Just one more cloud service. Fix Facebook. If we can get one more round of funding. If I can cash this pay check (with no healthcare no dental no retirement fund). One more Walmart shopping binge. One more lid of meth. One more line of code.

The internet revolution has become nothing other than the digital exploitation of the masses. Every attempt to right the ship has failed. There is no decentralized post-surveillance internet coming. Trump is the past present and future.

/rant