I’m not one who’s prone to thinking that things ever really get much worse very quickly. I tend to be skeptical when people say that we’ve turned a corner.
But in the recent past, we’ve had the TikTok ban (clearly became an urgent issue after it became a major vehicle for challenging media narrative about Israel among young people), Twitter and Facebook clearly taking orders from the US government and banning accounts for supporting Palestine, the arrests of the Sarah Wilkinson, the Telegram guy, and the other OSINT guy arrested at Heathrow (can’t remember his name).
But for me, it’s events just in the last week that have really caught my notice. The Electronic Intidada - relatively small but awesome website and channel on YouTube - got hit with a weeklong ban for reasons unknown. The Red Stream - a small website and Telegram channel - got called out by Lucifer himself (Antony Blinken) and they got bumped from YouTube. And just the other day, Light Herself was talking about how we should arrest and charge people when they spread “Russian disinformation” (you just know libs want to arrest people for saying inflation is too high as being “Russian disinformation”).
I don’t, it feels like things have rapidly accelerated just in the last couple months. Anyone else feeling this? Or do we still have a long way to go here before we can say things have actually gotten “bad”?
A new stage where it's just getting more obviously hypocritical - Russiagate set the stage for the Chinese software panic that's really highlighting it. Before it was just the CIA ruining someone's life or killing them for investigating elite crimes or resisting, and having backdoors for the data collection in telecom/big tech.
I've always figured Telegram was some weird NATO thing, so I figured that arrest isn't really that special. It was either knowingly or unwittingly a honeypot for a decade, by not really protecting anything while operating with relative impunity from places like Dubai, the Caribbean, and France....
In theory it's "resistable" if a lot of people were ready to replace their technology platforms with decentralized ones, with webs of trust for identity (cryptography nerd in me has to mention that we can make digital signatures today which do not necessarily authenticate a statement is from a specific person, but it's at least been made by someone that we all know, however we know each other, and federate from there if needed). Would be nice if this and other things turned into a systemic change because yeah even the meshnets and shit are still censorsable, if there's not enough resistance.