Hysteria

I am not on social media except for this site and one or two others. I don't really engage in internet meme culture. I don't really pay much attention to mainstream news. Most of the time, I can go blissfully unaware of all of these various problems. Life is fine.

On the other hand, I still do read summaries of the news on Fridays from multiple sources. In many cases, care is warranted. Long before people starting caring about privacy and tech monopolies, I degoogled. This happened when Google changed the terms of service of Blogger.com in 2006. At that time, I started using metcrawler and other search engines, got off gmail, and not too long after that deleted my Facebook account. What became apparent to me was that I was merely the product of the companies and not a customer.

Like everyone else, I was lead to a world of renting things. I rented media through subscription services, and I owned very little. No books, because I can get them electronically from Amazon. No music, because I can use Pandora, Apple Music, Spotify. No movies, because I use Netflix, HBO Now, and whatever else. This is stupid. I am not constantly listening to new music, or watching new movies. I could easily simply buy an album or two, or a movie or two each month for a lower price than I am paying each month to gain access to them. This is a harder habit to break. If the "wrong" sort got into governmnet, it would be trivial to order this handful of companies to erase any media that paints them in a bad light. It would be trivial to change the history of our world.

The monopolies don't just turn you into a product. They make you incapable of leaving them by changing the world around you. It is now expected that you be reachable via email, slack, mattermost, zoom, teams, or whatever at all times by your employer. It is expected that your electronic leash be nice and tight around your mental neck. Meanwhile, whichever monopolist silo your in will gather all of your data and make it available to anyone for the right price. It would be absolutely trivial for a government to simply take all of that data... oh wait, the NSA already does that. It would be trivial for a government to weaponize all of that data against its population.

41 years ago this wasn't the case. A phone was a phone (though possibly monitored by a government). Music was a tape or a record. A movie was a tape. TV was a few channels. News was a paper. Now it's all just ephemera.