This has been going on for a while now.
Remember Edward Snowden? He was recently given Russian citizenship and a passport. He can no longer be extradited to the United States. Take that, Murica. Compliments of Putin. Don't we feel silly!
At the end of the day the powers that be wanted to prosecute a whistle-blower for a perfectly legal action. Snowden even agreed to come back to the USA and have a trial if it was on fair terms (with a jury and all that). I forget the exact details but that is the last thing the prosecution would want. They'd lose, and even if they didn't lose they'd be legally exposed to all the illegal surveillance that Snowden uncovered during his tenure at the NSA. Can't have that.
The moral of this story (or lack thereof) is that people are no longer allowed to have any privacy. Privacy is basically illegal, and the governments of the world act as though it's always been this way and the world would fall to pieces if people could just run around and not be tracked for every little thing that they do. Venmo and Paypal going from reporting gross sales over $20k down to $600 in a single bill: All under the guise of helping the economy get back on its feet.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6RNJavo9WwUgyo4uRuRA6S
This is the only Pomp podcast I have ever listened to. Not the biggest fan of the guy but this particular one came highly recommended by @anomadsoul so I bit the bullet and committed the 3 hours required to get through it while performing some other basic tasks simultaneously several weeks back.
Big Tech is the Backdoor around the Bill of Rights
Most recently we got a big taste of this on Twitter during covid, long before Elon Musk took over. Dissenting voices were being silenced left and right, and liberals cheered as the literal president of the United States was banned from the platform. Think about how completely batshit insane that is: to ban a president from a social media website.
The ultimate problem with this situation is that these issues of 'science' become heavily politicized on purpose so that one side will always support totalitarian overreach. Those who cheered that Trump and anti-vaxers were expelled from Twitter don't seem to realize that the cannons will be turned on them soon enough, and I suspect the right will support it and confirm the hypocrisy of the situation.
The ultimate point to be made here is that many on Twitter were comparing the situation to the book '1984' when the ban-hammers were coming down the hardest. It was seen on an infringement of 1st Amendment Rights. The left's counterpoint was that 1st Amendment Rights do not apply to something like Twitter because Twitter is not a government agency. We are living in a world where both sides are correct in their assessments.
Quite simply put, technology is progressing at such a blazingly fast exponential pace that governments and the laws they write are permanently behind the times. It certainly doesn't help that most people who ascend the ranks of politics are quite old and living in a past that doesn't exist anymore.
Thus, we now live in a world of complete paradox, where banning users from social media over political issues is a violation of the First Amendment, and it also absolutely isn't a violation.
We can see that congress didn't make a law prohibiting free speech, so it is not a First Amendment violation. We also see that government is capturing Big Tech so they don't need to make any law at all. They can just do whatever they want and enforce it without laws. This is the problem between the marriage of Big Tech and government. They can simply circumvent all the laws in play because technology provides a back door for those who have the power to walk through it. This issue will only continue to escalate over time. Technology shows no signs of slowing down. If anything it is speeding up. All the AI playgrounds people are messing around with these days only confirm the inevitable.
Mixing capitalism with 'communism'.
To be clear: China is not communist. It is a totalitarian state ruled by a single unrelenting political party. Just look at what is going on over there right now. The entire country is being turned into a prison, being sprayed with god-knows-what and drones in the street barking orders. And I thought this country was bad. Yikes.
And yet, many companies want to operate within the bounds of China, especially Big Tech. I mean, obviously right? If you get permission to operate within the borders of China you can make a boatload of money. This is especially relevant in the context of Big Tech because of the data industry. More people means more data. More data means more money.
The ultimate consequence of the "Great Chinese Wall" is that corporations have to do whatever the CCP says or they get ban-hammered from the country. Just recently we saw Apple remove the ability for Chinese citizens to talk peer to peer due to the protests that China claims isn't even happening. Many blame Apple for this, but how can we? If Apple refuses to do what the CCP says, they will quite simply be kicked out of the country and all that market share goes to another company that would be more than happy to lick the CCP's boots.
Coincidentally this is the exact same logic that makes it impossible to ban crypto. The only way to stop China from engaging in these human rights violations would be to get every corporation to agree. The only way to ban crypto is to get every country to agree. It simply can't happen. One single entity selling out and breaking out of the global agreement ruins it for everyone else trying to patch together the control grid.
The podcast talks a lot about this stuff, but even more interestingly it talks a lot about China's history with Taiwan, which I knew nothing about previously. It's a bit beyond the scope of this post but I will say that it's highly interesting and I noted here in my files that talk about China starts around the 1 hour 30 minute mark.
https://twitter.com/JoshuaPHilll/status/1587857229054705666
- JoshuaPHilll
https://twitter.com/JoshuaPHilll/status/1587857229054705666
- JoshuaPHilllCompanies must bow to shareholders and infinite growth.
And that's simply the way it is within this capitalist system. Seeking healthy balance and sustainability is simply not an option within a centralized debt-based system. This is why we are in the situation that we are in when considering pollution and green energy.
On the one hand, the left wants to push electric cars and eating less red meat and whatever else, while the right points out that green energy and the transition we are trying to accomplish is completely unsustainable. Again, both sides are right. Humanity needs to make a change, but the changes we are implementing are not real solutions in the moment. Things like solar energy and electric cars are absolutely not abundant enough to replace the current systems. In fact the political push to replace all vehicles with EV is highly suspect, as these electric vehicles are all connected into the grid and can theoretically be controlled by outside entities.
We can see that cobalt, a critical component in batteries, is centralized and bottlenecked in two different ways. Once in the Congo where it is mined, and again in China, where it is actually processed into something more useful than its raw form. Most do not think about how geo-politics enter the equation even in the case of trying to "save the world" with "sustainable practice". Politics doesn't stop because the issue is important. In fact we see the opposite is often true.
This brings us back to Taiwan and the fact that China wants to annex it back into the superpower. You might not know this (I didn't before the podcast) but Taiwan makes some of the best semiconductors out there. There is speculation that China taking Taiwan could be very bad in terms of tech monopolies. There is even further speculation that China might even allow other superpowers like USA to figure out their semiconductors situation BEFORE invading Taiwan just so the USA stays out of it, allowing for a decisive victory with little intervention. How's that for a twist?
Conclusion
Technology is pushing us further and further into Clown World. The planet no longer makes sense because technology moves too quickly while our biggest institutions are slow lumbering beasts that move at a snail's pace. Now we find ourselves in a position where these slow lumbering beasts have captured tech for themselves and use it to circumvent the very laws that were created to check the powers that be.
It should be obvious that we are heading down the path of an explosive, chaotic, and completely unpredictable outcome. That's terrifying, but also exciting. Everything seems to be getting disrupted all at the same time. Crypto may find itself at the core of this disruption. Try not to fall through the cracks.