What is Wrong With The Internet ?

Yes, I know we could write a book, but essentially what is wrong with the Internet is the way we use it.

The public changed has the way it uses the Internet to the benefit of a few monopoly tech companies and those that want to spread disinformation because laziness has caused them to succumb to the cult of convenience.

We will skip the very early days before the World Wide Web and corporations being allowed on to the Internet and jump to the Internet/Web being broadly adopted by the public and accessed via computers.

In those days websites operated by organizations, institutions, media, businesses and even individuals were how we accessed the web. Phone apps did not exist.

We used search engines (Alta Vista was my preference) to find websites that we trusted to proved us with information. And we judged that information by how much we trusted the sources, seeking medical information from places like Health Canada or the Mayo Clinic and our news from reputable news media that we trusted offline.

We also used the World Wide Web for creating communities via online forums for specific subject interests like photography or mountain biking. All without being beholden to one predatory corporation for everything we did online.

We did not simply type a question into Google and believe the first response it provided without even paying attention to the source as many do today, and was the start of the decline of the reliability of the Internet (due to our choices). And this was before Google started selling search rankings and site operators started using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to artificially raise their rankings.

Perhaps the biggest thing wrong with the Internet is users not paying attention to the actual source of the information they find there.

The next thing that went wrong was users abandoning the Open Internet for the convenience of one proprietary source designed to sell advertising and drive traffic to that advertising. That, of course, was/is Facebook and it only became worse when it became a phone app and now a huge percentage of users never use the Open Internet at all and just use Facebook because it is so easy and all that they need and it is so easy and they do not care about all the well documented problems with and evils of Facebook because it is so easy. The cult of convenience trumps everything. And of course people believe Facebook is free.

This is not to say there are not a lot of good things like community resources and voluntary organizations available through Facebook. The thing is before Facebook all these resources were available on the Open Web. Unfortunately those of us who will not engage with the evil that is Facebook no longer have access to many of these resources that are now only available on Facebook because so many have decided that Facebook is absolutely necessary and irreplaceable. For many Facebook and other related phone “apps” have replaced the Open Internet.

I was going to link to articles on the evils of Facebook and how it is not free but that information is readily available and being added to regularly so we will let people use the Open Internet to do their own research, preferably not via Google. We suggest DuckDuckGo.

If only Facebook was the greatest evil online.

I once had the naive view that the Internet would be an effective tool against the promotion of hate and bigotry. In the “old days” the racists and bigots used to recruit directly from disaffected groups, youths with no hope for the future, recently laid off workers, etc., by befriending them and providing them a community where they would teach them their hate and bigotry. These were closed communities that sheltered members from other points of view.

When recruiting moved online I thought that the easy access to the truth would be an effective counterbalance.

Unfortunately they have created their own closed communities online in dark places like Eight Chan and Q’Anon fuelled by disinformation sites like InfoWars and Rebel News and now BrandX, formerly Twitter, along with certain places on YouTube.

Their followers shy away from the mainstream media, they shy away from science, they shy away from any authoritative information sources. These are people who believe stories like PizzaGate.

I just wrote “perhaps the biggest thing wrong with the Internet is users not paying attention to the actual source of the information they find there”. But that may not be true. Perhaps the biggest thing wrong with the Internet is users limiting their use of the Internet, with its broad access to knowledge, to just sources that reflect back to them their own world view, a world view often based on wilful ignorance and disinformation and actual real fake news.

I have not yet touched on what the cult of convenience has done to online shopping. My first experience with online shopping was using the Internet to check product features and specifications on manufacturer’s websites while purchasing locally. I moved on to the convenience of purchasing online with free shipping, but for the most part sticking to stores with local retail outlets.

However, for many, the inconvenience of shopping around has become too much work and they have decided buying everything from one predatory monopolistic outlet is best for them. The cult of convenience wins again.

However I find Amazon’s business model to be as abhorrent as Facebook’s and I will never buy anything from them unless I absolutely need it and I absolutely cannot get it anyplace else.

There are wonderful information sources on the Open Internet and every day I learn of something new that I don’t always have enough time to check out. It is sad so many people want to hide away in dark places avoiding the light the Internet can bring to them.

Much Ado About Truckers and Building a Canadian White Supremacist Fascist Movement

So what is going on with the truckers. They are calling it a protest. But it is not like any protest I have ever been involved in.

Protests are designed to attempt to make change. While they may be aimed at getting governments to change their policies, gaining public support to pressure government is always an aim of legitimate protests. To get the public’s attention of course you need to get he media’s attention and that usually is done by means of a large protest or some form of disruption.

The truckers are in an excellent position to do that. Large transport trucks take up a lot of space, one truck can taker the space of 100 marching protesters, so they can easily make a protest appear to be larger than it actually is. And trucks can be disruptive. You want attention, block the streets and clog traffic. So do that for a day or weekend and you have the media’s attention and you can get your point across.

Of course the truckers argument against the government protecting the health of it’s citizens is a hard sell to the general public.

So while you might need some disruption to get peoples attention you do not want to alienate the public whose support you are trying to gain.

So blasting neighbourhoods with noise, shitting on peoples lawns, attacking them as they go about their daily business and otherwise harassing and terrorizing them is not what a protest is about. Neither is openly displaying signs and symbols of hate a tactic used to gain the general public’s support. That is aimed at a much smaller target audience.

So what is going on. This is clearly not aimed at gaining public support. Nobody thinks they are that stupid. Something else is going on here.

We have bullies using tactics that appeal to other bullies. I believe it is clear that this is a recruiting move aimed at the worst elements of our society, bringing them together to form some sort of comradeship and solidarity. And one cannot discount the usefulness of this as a dry run for something even more nefarious than terrorizing citizens, but a rehearsal for actual insurrection.

Any actual truckers involved are just being duped and used as pawns in something very dangerous. What we are seeing is just one component of the building of a white supremacist fascist movement in Canada aimed at destroying the very fabric of our society.