Subj : Re: Book: iMaGoLoGieS To : osito From : Fissile Syntax Date : Fri Oct 27 2023 06:13:21 os> the modern political system? yes for sure it is that way. but cant we os> change that? i mean the internet was supposed to level the playing os> field. everyone could speak with an equal voice, they intervened and os> twisted it so now the internet has filters that prohibit certain os> messages from passing certain checkpoints. What are some examples of this? Nothing I've ever wanted to say, communicate, or upload, has ever been censored. I get that some of these platforms do censor one thing or another, but I just don't use them. Had you pitched to me the idea of Twitter in, say, 1987, and described its userbase and what it was, I would have said that, like Compuserve and similar services, profits were going to be the driving factor of what was permissible and what wasn't -- nothing like we /<-r4d BBS users are used to. I'm not interested, personally, in the idea that these megaplatforms may censor one idea or another. It doesn't concern me. I'm against the idea of thinking of the Internet as a series of megaplatforms, and that is user psychology. We're all here on Spooknet right now, which is a truly obscure corner of the Internet, and it's just one example of an alternative to megaplatforms. What I think has to happen is people who are annoyed by these megaplatforms need to make a firm break with them. The average Internet user never will, but he was never going to, anyway. What this means, though, is an understanding that, in using these many alternatives, there will never be potential audiences of millions of people, which I'm fine with. os> i look at some of my non-technical friends, (i am sure everyone knows os> some) they think the internet is google, netflix and facebook. if you os> download a song from youtube, they look at you like you are a magician. os> They are never going to leave those big sites. let them be, you will os> never convert them. Exactly. But there is no alternative timeline I can think of where things would have gone differently. Network enthusiasts were always going to be the irritable edge cases. There are all of these subreddits full of people posting really annoying TikTok videos showing the sheer vapidity of the mainstream Internet. I watch them to gawk at them; it's a vice. But the Internet didn't make people vacant; the vacant crowded on to these platforms to be their tedious old...influencer...selves. os> what i am thinking about is not a website, but a new protocol or os> something. where everyone who uses it, can speak to everyone else who os> does as well. e-mail, years ago, was the draw that got people started os> using the internet. but now it is filtered, passed through intelligence os> services, monitored, recorded, and who knows what else. you cant start os> your own email service any more, those ports are blocked, and if google os> doesnt recognize you, all messages from your exchange will be blocked. os> for some reason, the 1%(what are we calling them now?) think os> communicating freely with others is a danger. I think it is a os> prerequisite to a healthy society. PGP still works on any open platform that can accept text or binary data. There are no known exploits against PGP. From there we have the problem of metadata (unencrypted From: and To: issues for e-mail routing). Some time ago I wondered if alt.test on Usenet or web-based pastebins could be used as a message drop. You could post ciphertext there and have the recipient scan for it and slurp it in. In this case, presuming you use tor to drop it onto Usenet, that should be fairly secure since you are not directly routing anything to the recipient; it is being copied to Usenet, widely. One thing that should be understood, is that states do not have unlimited resources. Anything I've ever wanted to discuss -- radical politics, technological exploits, and so on, pale in importance compared to the rampant drug dealing, child pornography, and advocacy of political extremism or terrorism online. While it is possible a State could slurp up your information in Utah because you're a critic of the government, critics of the State are a dime-a-dozen now. There's nothing radical about being radical. I have a difficult time believing being angry at the US government is in and of itself enough to devote resources to, with true threats to the State (being a "free thinker" isn't one) being the priority. One thing which a lot of critics of the State seem to think (right and left) is that they're in some kind of minority or rare caste -- they aren't. They're everywhere. In any case, the technology currently exists to build such a service as you mention on tor. The question is, if you build it, will they come? Here's the last thing, and why I asked for examples at the beginning: my own personal ethics rarely stray so far from mainstream sensibilities that anyone would ever be concerned about silencing me. When I was in college, I used to use a term: "getting around to it." It was used to describe a phenomenon in which any discussion I was truly interested in (not small talk) would eventually wind around to a discussion of how, and under what circumstances would it be permissible, to topple the state by revolution. Libertarian friends would eventually drift off in this direction. Leftie friends would, too. The only conservatives I knew were National Review types who weren't about toppling anything. As for the far right I've never had much personal contact with them, but I expect it's the same over there with the neoreactionaries and accelerationists. College students were disproportionately interested in the ol' smashy-smash. I sometimes went to these parties with student radicals and the higher everyone got as the night went on, the closer people would get to the edge. At times, someone (usually a Marxist of some sort) would start ranting in classic pinko argot (factories, countrysides, "the people," etc.) I used to find this highly entertaining; on one hand, I grew up in a family which despised communism, and I knew people on the right who feared communism, but the closer I got to actual communists, the less scary and funnier they became. Like I couldn't imagine these guys being able to run a bake sale, much less a revolution -- a position which hasn't changed, by the way. This, I expect, has played out for decades and decades now, and it has become, I suspect, a kind of undifferentiated white noise to the intelligence establishment. "Oh, another Internet user who hates the government." They probably have filters which skip these. But for example, what are some examples of subreddits you'd like to create, that you think would be banned or censored, if you were -- just for the sake of argument -- predisposed to creating them there? I use reddit as an example of a megaplatform which is chock full of absolute and total filth. --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64) * Origin: Shipwrecks & Shibboleths [San Francisco, CA - USA] (700:100/72) .