WHAT TO MAKE OF BIG TECH RELIGIOUS CENSORSHIP

Tom,

I think, as usual, you missed the point . . . and then you tried to change the subject to your usual dumb blind obsessions. No thanks. Been there, done that, got the tee shirt, those roads go nowhere, not interested.

The point I was making is that you are ultimately what you consume . . . and you will ultimately be consumed by it, whether you like to pretend you know better or not. Just by being on Twitter, they own you to some extent, just as by being here you give yourself over to the worship of other gods of the media mind manipulating and data vacuuming world. Whether you trust them or not is irrelevant, even ironic in its absurdity.

You flatter yourself as being above it all. As long as you eat at this trough, you are not a wild bore – you’re just one of the other dumb media slopping pigs like the rest of us.

You seem to forget what I once did for a living too.

There is a sense and a need in about half of us that the world must have an explanation, a depth that we can actually fathom. We imagine a greater, understandable plan with a lord of light responsible for all the good and a lord of darkness responsible for all the bad things. We look for formulas and clues to tell the difference between the two. To some degree I admit that I am one of these people, but I try, not always successfully, to be cognizant of the limits of my understanding and the infinity of my ignorance about the real plan. I also know, that there is really only One Lord who is responsible for it all – that the good and the bad are all inexplicably one thing and that I am incapable of grasping even a fraction of what that all means. But our pride in such things always comes before the Fall, now doesn’t it?

I don’t think Big Tech is evil and I don’t think it is good. I don’t think that they, the masters of Big Tech, all conspire together in some amazing plan to control us. In some respects they are like the institution of black African bondage in this country, in that the economic success of that peculiar mode of white supremacy caste system came before the conspiracy to protect it. Like a Darwinian evolution, these institutions survive because of they succeed. In the cost/benefit economic ecosystem, African slavery filled and then thrived over all the other forms of human servitude because it simply, economically, worked (and it even anchored all the other forms of human labor capital exploitation). Success bred success to the point that so much of our nation’s capital was tied up on black African slavery that it dwarves in comparative percentage the money tied up in Twitter, Google, Amazon and Facebook by many times. While a conspiracy may not have originally formed to create this enslavement institution, with that much money involved, an evil conspiracy eventually congealed to protect it. The same, I think, may be true of Big Tech.

Big Tech did not create need in people to form a binary conspiracy oriented narratives of existence, but it did, I think unwittingly at first, exploit it . . . to tremendous profit. They set up an mind addiction zone for us with endorphin filled affirmation hits of “likes” and dislikes, loves and hates . . . and our inherent tribal love to hate. They collect data on that and create AI logarithms to exploit it for sale to literally everyone. That data is marketing gold because they know that, if some people like some things and search the websites for some things, those types of people like other things, groupings that can be exploited. If I am trying to sell my widget (or my thought), then knowing that I can mainline my marketing right into the spinal fluid of my specific target demographic is literally invaluable to me. Just by being here, promoting your website on a website platform that sells the data that you collect, and making yourself subject to search engines that sell that data on the users that find and read and post to you, you are helping Big Tech make money, aren’t you, Mr. “genius who used to do secret things for a living”? As the NYT article explains, even Big Brother Guvmint is buying that data.

It’s an imperfect analogy, but Big Tech, like the institution of Big Black African Enslavement before them, is seeing the evil side of what their success created blowing up in their faces. Those attractive web propagated conspiracies have a deep, dark, apocalyptic quality to them that is bound to lead certain people to a self righteous grievance based violence. They want us just happily taking the Soma and buying the stuff, not all angry and killing their golden geese If we start an apocalypse, its bad for business. So Big Tech is reacting, not so much conspiratorially as in desperation, to try to capture the rampaging, mad Frankenstein that they helped create. They are trying to shut down the violence provoking, hate filled folks at their own sources. on their own platforms. They know that, when Big Tech starts to become a national security threat (which they definitely now are), then Big Government will absolutely feel the need to regulate them. Because they are now regulating you, even you are calling for such regulation of a private industry, you rabid Socialist you.

And that’s the point, you idiot. (-;