LOG26042019: XIII century Blade Runner


Congratulations to fellow sundog kvothe for leaving Facebook [1].
That "service" is a plague upon humanity and one for which we all,
users and non-users alike, will pay a heavy price long after its
eventual demise, if we're lucky to see its demise.
Some things are beyond reform and rehabilitation. The entire
architecture of social media, and Facebook in particular lies on a
foundation of abuse. Its business model relies on systematically
violating your privacy, and selling it.

There is no plan B, or C. Facebook is a monumental lie.
They're not the only culprits for this demented panopticon we live
in though. Google in particular became a full surveillance platform
rivalling Facebook and surpassing it perhaps.
The worst part is perhaps the abuse by the political system of such
platforms. They now have plausible deniability when accused of
censoring information.
They can actually say they value freedom of speech and do so with a
straight face, since state control over private businesses is
anathema and such ventures have their own code of conduct.
Lobbying and cosy relationships will take care of the rest.
        
After posting my somewhat radical solution of reshaping vast segments
of the internet into a formless void [2], this inevitably lead to
questions of convenience in modern life.
So, how can one live without such conveniences one might ask?
Well, the truth is that we lived without such conveniences to begin
with.

If you're willing to be generous with your time, let me recount to
you a couple of experiences that took place in China.
Whenever there is some political event in China, the local government
blocks VPNs in order to avoid any potentially embarrassing or
undesirable information leaking outside. Perhaps to save face, or in
order to avoid unrest. And let's not be naive. If it's not widely
acknowledged, then it should be, the fact that foreign governments
interfere and constantly try to interfere in the internal matters of
other nations.
One needs to look no further than Venezuela to see what it's front of
our eyes, regardless of one's preference for team A or team B or C.
So yes, in many ways it's a dystopic society, but it happens also as
part of a siege mentality. The causes of which are many and complex,
but this didn't happen in a void.

Needless to say that ChinaNet is a hard place for a foreigner.
Without a VPN, you're left with pretty much a heavily censored
version of the internet, or just black holes everywhere.
And ChinaNet.
Without knowing the local language you'll be in pain.
After some of these political events, what can you do? Well, if you
don't have internet, then you have the outernet of course.

Reading a book, learning something new, going out for a walk,
drawing, building something, anything.
One starts wondering about the destructive influence of the internet.

A constant excess of information at our disposal is a burden.
Trying to allocate cognitive resources efficiently to everything
eventually causes our attention to diminish, thinly spread over
countless threads. What's going to be the long term effect of this?
There was no internet when many of us were growing up, or if there
was, it was in its early pioneering days. And yet we had access to
culture, sources of information, knowledge.
It's much easier nowadays, but at what cost?

Being cut out from the internet by force for weeks makes one realize
the extent to which we are dependent on this technology to the point
where we refuse to work in any other way. We can work in any other
way, but we don't want to.
It's just too easy to have it this way, and being abused. Privacy is
something that we publicly advertise as a cause of concern, but when
the time comes, we sacrifice it for the convenience.
In some cases you truly have no alternative though, but this vast
construct was one of convenience to begin with and not all of it is
indispensable.

Long ago I saw  this centuries old ruined monastery in a valley in
the Carpathians. There was a fresh water stream nearby and you were
surrounded by wilderness. Immediately the mind went at work imagining
the possibilities for that monastery. Its cold stone walls covered
with wooden roof, your library inside.
Your food being grown nearby in the fertile soil.
A fireplace providing warmth and a orange scintillating glow to your
chair, with countless lives surrounding you in the form of thousands
of books. Pages yellowed by time, showing darkened edges and greased
corners, no longer retaining the smell of the ink.

At the risk of blatantly ripping off Blade Runner and wrecking this
monastic image, a (real) owl.
Something for the hermit in all of us, the idea of a refuge,
solitude, and companionship at the same time.

We gave away everything for convenience.
With the STASI everyone could be an informer. Now everyone is an
informer.
You are an informer, and this might be unbeknownst even to you.


26/04/2019


Post Scriptum:

Several fellow sundogs mentioned "digital minimalism" [3] in their
writings, leaving me intrigued as to what exactly "digital
minimalism" was. Hopefully it should arrive in the next few days,
leaving me with enough time to finish Gerald Posner's "God's Bankers"
[4]. I extend gratitude to them.


[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/1/%7ekvothe/phlog/2019-04-20-bye-facebook/
[2] gopher://circumlunar.space/1/~sol_solaris/software/overclocktheinternet
[3] http://www.calnewport.com/books/digital-minimalism/
[4] http://www.posner.com/gods-bankers