"Once they gain as much control over us as they currently have over their employees, what then? Do we not get to financially transact unless we sign up to Google Serum and take a shot of happy juice?"
What happens when the law stops working? When the lawmakers are not only ten years behind the technological curve, but also so open to bribery that they'll happily let Amazon write the statute?
What happens when regulators don't understand the technology they're regulating?
What happens when unelected commercial giants gain more power than governments? When a country's authorities are so desperate to retain the obscenely rich Facebook as a resident that they begin defending the lawbreaker instead of the citizens they're assigned to protect?
What happens when you have to take a data protection regulator to court in order for it to do its job at all?
What happens when carrying a personal bugging device becomes not only necessary for everyday tasks, but compulsory?
What happens when cash is deprecated, and the surveillance machine has engulfed cryptocurrency, and you can no longer buy anything, from anyone, or sell anything, to anyone, without the transaction going onto a central database, gatekept by Google, Cloudflare, Facebook and Amazon, and rented out to their minion your national government?
How much control will the arbiters of this system have over your life when they arbitrate your ability to transact? Your ability, essentially, to live. You cannot vote these arbiters out.
Some of this already has happened. The rest looks increasingly likely to materialise much more quickly than even the more cynical among us could have contemplated just a few years back.
Big Tech's public-facing propaganda machine portrays government and law enforcement as the aggressor, with the tech industry as some superhero defender of public rights. But in truth the exploitative, predatory, thieving tech giants are in bed with governments, and are only lobbying to undermine government as a means to set themselves onto a higher plane of control. Big Tech's gameplan is to become a global government. Then we'll see its evil on an unprecedented scale. But in the meantime, governments around the world are doing a great job of grooving in with their ultimate masters' plan.
The plunge in privacy expectations since the covid crisis began has been so rapid that there's barely time to talk about an individual abuse before the next one rears its head. I'm not about to start spewing conspiracy theories about the coronavirus itself, but we can be in no doubt that it's been abused by authoritarian parties to further demolish the concepts of privacy and freedom, and to accelerate the grand tide of human rights violation in countries with a previously acceptable human rights stance.
The covid era has pushed societies into a horrific situation, and to say it shouldn't be managed is juvenile. However, the management of covid has already extended way beyond the necessary, drifting first into a checkpoint culture which has been exploited for digital-oil in the same way everything else is these days. Then moving on to desperate ploys to drive vaccination uptake in the face of major resistance, and now also in the face of the vaccines' failure to prevent the same sharp spikes in cases that we saw pre-vax. The spread still has to be managed with contact-reduction and/or PPE. With most of the UK population now jabbed and jabbed again, that is not a good advert for this specific vaccine.
Viruses don't care what the government or the media say. You can bullshit people. You can't bullshit a virus. And this particular virus has made that very clear.
One would think, especially considering the number of times the virus has already proved the authorities and media wrong, that all of society - especially those in authority - would take extreme care to protect individuals' rights to make their own critical health, moral and faith-based decisions.
But apparently, it's not enough that we have 24/7 propaganda for a vaccine which doesn't prevent spread, carries risk, and whose long-term effects are unknown - including direct marketing to children. According to some, we also require the shocking force of vaccine mandates.
Some sections of society have completely lost sight of what penetrating someone's body without their willing consent and inserting a substance into them by force actually means. Find a parallel bodily violation that doesn't result in a jail sentence for the perpetrator. What's the difference between an unqualified "doctor" holding you down in a rogue surgery and injecting you with a substance of his choice, and a government or employer holding you down in a financial headlock and injecting you with a substance of their choice?
Absolutely none, is the answer. It is for qualified medical personnel of the patient's choice to recommend treatment, and for the patient to seek second opinion if desired, and then consent to that treatment, or not - especially when that treatment is acknowledged to carry risk. Post-covid, a world of unqualified "doctors" has sprung up (i.e politicians, employers, the media and the public), and the unfathomable truth is that they're being allowed to influence or make medical decisions - even in violation of patient consent.
That's right, in this demented dystopia, employers (not doctors - EMPLOYERS) are making decisions on the medical treatment of their employees, and more than half of the public apparently thinks it's okay. That's where we are.
As the media revel in dividing society, as per, we look at social media and see unhinged phrases such as "jail the unvaccinated", and then we see government figures taking such demented narratives seriously. We also now have the media outlets themselves using phrases like "vaccine-dodging". This is the disgusting language of fascism and it would not have been at all out of place in a screaming Hitler monologue. Yes I'm comparing the media and members of the public to Hitler, because that's how they're behaving. Big Tech, however, has no problem whatsoever in algorithmically thrusting this fascism into the world's face, while wiping all opposition to it out of sight. And Big Tech's advocacy of this "your body our choice" policy goes beyond that, as we'll see.
The word "fascism" in relation to forced vaccination is still being dismissed by the majority, and certainly by the mainstream media. But what is criminalising or sacking people who refuse to submit to an act of state-mandated bodily assault, if not fascism?
And let's not forget that the mainstream media began this journey, at least in the UK, with a forthright chant of "You should NOT wear a face mask". They searched far and wide to find doctors who would support that narrative. It was hard for them to find such doctors, because the overwhelming evidence was that, duh, BLOCKING THE TRANSIT OF INFECTED DROPLETS PREVENTS INFECTION. DUH. How could it not?
But the government wanted to avoid a face mask availability crisis and knowingly fudged bullshit negative research about the benefits of masks until the supply dynamic changed. Then all semblance of credibility went out of the window when "You should NOT wear a face mask" suddenly became "You MUST wear a face mask" - conveniently enough, at the exact point when the PPE availability issues were resolved.
So we know that what we're being told is based on neither the truth nor our welfare. It's based on what modern propaganda is always based on. Economics and behavioural-engineering.
Before you mark me down as a lifelong, right wing, anti-vaxxer, I should stress that I strongly support mask-wearing, and have never opposed vaccination itself. I've also never sympathised with any sector of the right wing or voted for it. But at present I would even less want to be associated with sections of the left wing and their crazed advocacy of deeply violent government policies on the basis that they "want to go to parties and the unvaxxed are ruining it all" for them. Guys, if you're "immunised" and you can still get covid the problem you have is the vaccine - not the unvaxxed.
I'm not in either of the extreme camps on the covid issues. I'm not vaccinated but I wear a face mask at work and in public places. I was one of the few among a large staff wearing a face mask at work before it was re-mandated on 30th November. I believe a mask, coupled with sensible distancing, is currently much better protection than vaccination - protecting not only against coronavirus, but also other common viruses. With necessary exemptions, it's the most ethical defence currently available, and importantly, it's always instantly reversible. You can instantly take off a mask if there's a problem. In contrast, you can never unvaccinate yourself.
As to covid itself, I once again have hybrid views. I believe the virus is a real and serious danger, but I also believe governments manipulate the statistics to suit their agenda. Unlike the conspiracy theorists, I see the control grabs and privacy degradations that have emerged in the covid era as opportunism rather than the manifestation of some grand plan.
We have to remember that the covid pandemic has been unusual among humanitarian crises in that it kills rich people as well as poor. If, like most humantiarian crises, it only killed the poor, it would have been mentioned about twice in March 2020 and then promptly left for charities to deal with. When the poor are dying, it's "just one of those things and life must go on". When the rich are dying, you shut down the world and then implement fascism.
If a humanitarian crisis were to be planned for the purpose of control-grab, it would inevitably be planned in a way that preserved economic prosperity and protected the rich. No authority would subscribe to a plan that seriously damaged its own economic prosperity, let alone one that invloved giving the public free money to stay at home. If anyone did plan this, we can be 100% sure that the governments of the world did not sit round a table and nod in unison…
"Yep, that sounds like a good idea!"
But this is not to say that no agenda has arisen in the course of the pandemic. And the way the whole thing has been handled, with governments and media adjusting the "research findings" based on the behaviour they wish the public to exhibit at any given moment, has raised an insurmountable level of suspicion.
The media propaganda, twisting of evidence, and censorship is now on a par with wartime publicity. But it's global, and is both algorithmically and manually supported by Big Tech. In this climate - a climate in which the state has blatantly lied to us - I'm not having any jabs, for anything, unless I'm forced. I regard forced vaccination as violent assault and would treat such an eventuality accordingly. I regard countries forcing vaccination or mandating it at government level as fascist regimes.
I would now be defined by many as an anti-vaxxer, and yet I don't oppose vaccination as a concept or ever seek to prevent other people who wish to be vaccinated from going ahead. Before this bombardment of crazed propaganda I always had vaccinations. What I oppose is the disregard of consent. I don't just oppose that with regard to vaccinations. I oppose violation of consent as a lifewide concept. Anything else would be hypocrisy.
There are some wild anti-vax stories out there, and the morons writing them are subtracting credibility from the real human rights issues around forced vaccination. Putting far-fetched lies into the public domain gives ammunition to the human rights bulldozer which, with the support of those who control the internet, can easily exploit those lies to push its mandates and compulsions harder. For a start, the lies give tech giants an excuse to suppress opposition to forced vaccination.
We should only be dealing in facts. The facts are disturbing enough not to need embellishment.
And returning to Big Tech, we run up against a chilling truth, which steps up the threat posed by these giants to a new level.
Background: it's pretty clear to see that the tech giants want to rule the world, and in less than thirty years they've managed to get more than halfway there. They already control elected governments through convenience-whipping, bribery, threats and backdoor gang-lobbying. They're overthrowing democracy, and 99% of the public are still sleepwalking.
Foreground: it's come as no surprise that these megalomanic companies have been among the first private entities to adopt the fascist policy of forced or heavily coerced vaccination for staff members. The top end of the tech industry has taken its abuser's approach to consent re public stalking, and ported the mentality over to vaccination. Facebook, Google, Microsoft - the exact people you'd expect to completely trample human rights - have done so, true to form.
You can look at this and say:
"Yeah but it only affects the staff, and if they don't like it they should just get alternative jobs."
But these tech giants are not just take-it-or-leave-it businesses. That era passed long ago. They're now infiltrating your workplace, your bank, your government interfaces, your utilities, the health service, the offline world, and they're planning to scale all that up exponentially… Some pockets of society are already bound through the dynamics of power imbalance to possess Google or Facebook accounts. University students, many employees, etc. And as Google now desperately tries to infiltrate schools with the aid of its lobbyist puppets, the normalisation threshold is approaching. We will soon ALL be OBLIGED to submit to Google, Facebook and/or Amazon, whether we like it or not.
These giants are abusers, in the true sense of the word, and they see consent the same way a dictator sees consent. Even when we take the ultimate step of blocking their domains - the digital equivalent of a stalking injunction - they simply introduce new stalking domains on the quiet, to circumvent our blocks by basically pretending to be someone else. If they can't stalk us candidly, they stalk us in disguise. They have done that persistently, time after time. Consent, for them, is a charade at best.
If they were just companies, that kind of behaviour would be bad enough. But they no longer are just companies. They've become partners to authority bodies, and gatekeepers of access to essential human needs. We have to see the grave danger when power escalates at this level in an environment synonymous with relentless violatory behaviour.
Did you know that Google is facing an anti-trust and corruption case of such magnitude that the summary alone is 173 pages long? The majority of people don't, and that's a testament to the suppressive power of these dystopian giants.
So it won't just be Google's, Facebook's, Amazon's or Microsoft's employees whose rights are trampled by the giants' dictatorial predilection. It will be all of us. Once they gain as much control over us as they currently have over their employees, what then? Do we not get to financially transact unless we sign up to Google Serum and take a shot of happy juice? Already, we're not allowed to financially transact through online payment processors unless we own a personal bug - alias a mobile phone. By pattern, a digital dictatorship is where we're heading, and we're already well along that road.
I know Big Tech's convenience-whipping is hard to resist. That's the very reason why governments and state institutions are submitting to it as well as the public. But I can no longer reconcile my contempt for Big Tech with a long-term plan that involves using its products by choice. I've never used Facebook, I've never bought from Amazon, and I've recently escaped the claws of Microsoft with a shift to Linux. Google, for me, now remains a glaring inconsistency.
Which is why I "disconnected" my Gmail address last weekend, and moved one blog away from Blogger. I dispensed with the Google Chrome browser some weeks back, although I still use Chromium-based browsers. I've also begun scaling back my use of Google's webmaster services.
My ongoing use of Google's Blogger platform per se is something that has no hard plan at present. My resolution is to do everything I possibly can to shift away from it. I'd like to be able to say I'll never use it again, but I have a lot tied up in it, including some income, which took a vast amount of hard work to establish.
I don't know how long Blogger itself will last, and I can certainly say that my willing use of Google would not extend beyond the deprecation of Blogger. Google is also now on a mission to abolish passwords, which simply means it wants to own your means to log in and forcibly identify every one of its users. The giant is in the process of rolling out forced two-factor authentication (2FA), which could affect my ability to use Blogger in future, and almost definitely will in the longer term.
In the immediate term all I can say is that I'm making every effort to dispense with Google in a way that does not leave me worse off and still subject to its control regardless. This is now my only active blog on the platform (i.e still publicly accessible and updated within the past five months), and I'm looking at alternative venues for its continuation.
So where do I go next? Well, the first blog I've moved away from Blogger has gone to Neocities, but this is far from ideal and I won't be moving any more blogs there. The platform is prohibitively difficult to use and has no access control, which means you're trying to build a brand new site in full public view - extremely unprofessional. It also forcibly displays site views as public information (which is both a privacy abuse and a form of shaming), has a range of bugs, and is full of nags for creators to start throwing money at the platform. As Web 3.0 looms, all platforms - especially those that present themselves as ethical - need to admit that content creators are their providers, not their customers, and then stop trying to charge the providers. For their own sake as much as anyone else's.
It might seem that Patreon, Substack or Medium would be a solution, since they do at least acknowledge that creators are providers. But they're all just as obsessed with capitalism as Google, and that's reflected in their userbases. Substack's writer homepage is just a repetitive spam-hole of "This is how much money this writer makes", "This is how much money that writer makes", "Here's how to work out how much money you could make"… Wouldn't it be nice if we could, for once, take a break from appealing to the greed of capitalist drones and talk about the buzz of breaking new creative ground?
Based on past experience, I don't want to mess about with WordPress or Tumblr. And I don't want to self-host, because covering costs without going back to square one of the problem (i.e running straight back to Google for ad monetisation) would be either too much hassle or impossible given my low profile.
Currently, I'm exploring a plan to replace the idea of maintaining a personal blog with a focus on creating for established third parties. Not as a content-marketer, but in the place where I started over twenty years ago: subject-driven, magazine-style publications.
So don't be surprised to see a slowdown or halt to the updates on this blog. Whilst it seems futile to try escaping Google in a world where all indications predict there will eventually be no escape for anyone, it also seems futile to continue posting to a platform run by a corrupt-to-the-core evil whose ethos I very much oppose. And whose control-freak login goals will probably at some point prohibit me from logging in anyway.
At least a halt to posts will help resolve a tidal wave of cognitive dissonance.