Written by an anonymous friend who also senses the arrival of the long night of networked tyranny:
"Today is the final day of 2018. As years go, it was adequate to its purpose, which was delivering us in one complete orbit about the Sun. Enough with retrospectives: let us understand what is coming in 2019.
Yesterday, on the 19th of December at 9 PM GMT, a drone overflight shut down Gatwick airport, the UK's second busiest, stranding tens of thousands of holiday travellers.
Over the last several weeks we've seen a rapid diminishment in the fictive kinship that unites us as Americans. In fact, many of us don't just disagree with other Americans. We see them as existential threats.
Here's a good example of global guerrilla tinkering and decentralized defense.
Fire Kites
Palestinian guerrillas in the Gaza strip have developed a simple and effective weapon for disrupting Israel. It's a fire kite. Here are the details (reuters video report):
Here's a question you should be asking yourself:
What does 21st Century authoritarianism look like?
Given what we've seen so far, it isn't likely that we're going to see a return to the 20th Century model, with its absolute dictators, industrial scale bureaucracies, paramilitaries, ideologies, ubiquitous/vicious secret police, relentless propaganda, etc...
That model died when globalization and the Internet hollowed out the nation-state.
Here are some notes tracking the arrival of what I’m calling the Long Night -- a world run by oppressive social networks that ruthlessly narrow public speech and behavior.
Covered topics: Twitter's bubble maximizer. Enforcing limits to free speech in NYC. Doxing protesters in Russia.
I did a long interview with Jack Murphy and Ian Scotto for SOFRep Radio earlier this week (the first 45 m or so prominently features my staccato/machine/Boydian gun style of thinking/speaking).
Here's an interesting though experiment.
The EU's new data privacy law is just about to come into effect (May 25th).
That law makes it very hard for Facebook and other services to collect data on individuals because it has a very high privacy standard.
That's a problem for Facebook and many other Internet companies.
Facebook, and other tech companies, set up a fake International Head Quarters in Ireland to avoid paying US taxes.
How does the open source moral network -- the combo of the #resistance, #metoo and #neveragain -- turn lists of violators into something people can easily digest and act upon?
An online system that can work at scale?
I just saw something published on Twitter that moves this closer to reality.
Last month's Global Guerrillas report used a combination of:
to figure out how we can adapt to the challenges we face without the radical simplification of societal collapse.