The Mystery of the Snowden Saga - Finally Solved
Solving the Snowden mystery brings everything into focus. The Government agencies, Google and the NGOs mesh together as a team, and the entire progression of the World Wide Web makes sense.
It's reasonable to say that if you accept the offical media tale of Edward Snowden as a rogue whistleblower who stole 1.7 million top secret files, leaked the highest number of classified US intelligence documents in history, and yet is somehow still alive, free, and working as a digital marketer for US Gov-affiliated tech products, from Russia, you don't do much thinking.
This is not a wild, conspiracist assembly of far-fetched fantasies. As I've said before, if we're going to be suspicious of the official narrative, we should treat the conspiracist retort with equal scepticism.
But even without deep-dive evidence, it's fairly obvious that when someone apparently sacrifices a huge salary, destroys his life and risks death to "leak" a stash of "classified" Government files which don't tell the public anything they didn't already believe... Then hauls in prime CIA/NSA bedfellow Google to broker the story to the media, then inexplicably doxes himself... Well, let's just say that the tale stands quite significantly short of passing a reality check.
Read article →Ha, Ha, Cory Doctorow Admits Using a Slop-Machine to Produce His Drone of Propaganda
In a comment of which any prominent slop-machine-bro would be proud, Doctorow declares: you're fucked without "AI". Amid the resulting chorus of booing, he'll be wishing he could unsay it. But as he knows only too well, the Internet never forgets...
No, Doctorow. "AI" is not a good thing born out of fascism. "AI" IS FASCISM.
The mask was sure to drop off sooner or later. For over three years, Cory Doctorow has scraped through his marketing brief on a low-conversion diet. And it was fairly clear that under extreme pressure from his corporate sugardaddies, he was gonna show the "Actually, AI is really cool" card to the "AI" Resistance before long.
That moment has arrived. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, on the back of a content marketing beano for Google Premium, Doctorow has finally quit his "AI" doublespeak and chucked his cards onto the table.
Read article →Using "Google Premium" to Search a Wasteland is the Very Definition of Gullibility
If people stopped paying for smartphones, smartphones would be given away for free. It's imperative to the corporatocracy that society uses these things, and the authorities have already proved that if the user won't pay, they will. But to an extent, precedent excuses phone purchases, as phones have always carried a price tag. Search engines, conversely, are already free. To start renting access to them just as the Web empties itself of value, takes a special kind of fool.
I've said it before, but in capitalism, there is no such word as enough...
Read article →Enlazification - Enshittification's Core Propellant
If you are too lazy to think, someone is going to do your thinking for you, and it is a hundred percent certain that the ultimate beneficiary of someone else's thinking will not be you.
The progressive enlazification of society has mapped out a corporatocratic playbook in which the public are ruled not by the fist or the gun - but by their own aversion to effort...
OH JESUS...
I don't make the following statement with any kind of religious affiliation. As far as I'm concerned, the best thing a publisher could do with the New Testament is rewrite it in cod patois, paperback it, and shove it in the fiction bin at a chain of petrol stations. But I can't help thinking that if Jesus H(allucinatory?) Christ had been born in 1996, he'd now be busy telling the "enshittification" woe-sayers to grow up, stop crying, and heed the parable of the blindly selfish digital slob, who was rightfully punished for his laziness and cyberdevil-worship.
Read article →Did Surveillance Capitalism Predate the World Wide Web?
Analysing the very early Web to determine whether the purpose was a product of the mechanism, or the mechanism was a product of the purpose.
Mouse click position-tracking was conceived in the early 1990s, even before a Web browser was available for any mainstream operating system. You'd think a browser provider might finalise compatibility with Windows, Mac or DOS as a first step. But apparently, devising a pixel-accurate mouse point logger was more urgent.
In her chillingly observant book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff cited Google as the original surveillance capitalist. And that certainly looks at first glance like just another piece of on-point observation.
But if you trace back the roots of the things for which Google ultimately became infamous, you'll notice a glaring conundrum. To coin a phrase, the cart came before the horse. There's a period in the early to mid 1990s, during which the fledgling tools of surveillance capitalism are being developed, but there is no visible use for them. Historical parallels to this are exceedingly rare if existent at all. Logically, the need comes before the invention. So why does the early Web repeatedly produce the invention before the need arises?
It's assumed that capitalism is the end and surveillance is the means. But is it, and was it always, the other way around?
Read article →How to Meaningfully Oppose "AI"...
Most people realise that lobbyists operate by spinning an agenda to the government. But few realise that those self-same lobbyists also use a wall of public-facing propaganda to steer us away from doing likewise. If the public did what lobbyists do, rather than what lobbyists say, lobbying would not work.
Ah yes, the lobbyists. Always there, chipping away at your human rights. But do you know who they are? Some people imagine lobbyists as invisibles who only surface at private functions. Others, tricked by their disguise, see them as allies, and don't notice their dark agenda at all. Let's find out who the lobbyists really are, and how widespread public opposition to "AI" is being airbrushed out of the picture as an epic, multi-billion dollar propaganda and censorship machine perverts democracy...
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Robots are the tech elite's "master race". And discriminating against human experts in favour of dumb "AI" parrots is a new strain of fascism. But as this modern-day Nazi invasion plays out across global information resources, governments are not fighting. They're instead busy tacking down a red carpet.
- Backlit
WHO'S LOBBYING FOR "AI"?
For maximum effectiveness, a lobbyist needs a public face, lawyers on tap, hotlines to both press and politicians, and the ability to spin a corporate-serving agenda as a public right - to the public itself, as well as to authority. By nature of them having public faces, we know lobbyists a lot better than we imagine. Their trick is to hide in plain sight, coming in with a pretext which persuades the public that they're there for another purpose. Chances are you know the most powerful tech industry lobbyists by name. You just don't consider them to be tech industry lobbyists.
Read article →The Code Conspiracy: Why We Can't Build Software
The number of "tutorials" that give you some code, but no indication of what it means, what to do with it or where to put it, is beyond staggering.
In the 2020s, the ability to create computer programs should be as common as the ability to read and write. It's just as important, if not more so. And yet as a society, we're steadily drifting away from code literacy as the learning process becomes evermore shrouded in jargon, communicative entropy, and calculated obstruction...
Read article →The Capitalist Guide to Killing Free Webtech
The tech elite are professional vandals. If it's worth more broken than it's worth in a functional state, then inevitably, those with the power to do so will make sure it gets broken. But there's a special art to breaking the supposedly everlasting free and open source branch of webtech.
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is so often pitched as a solution to the destructive effects of capitalism in the cybertech world. Because, to quote the immortal cliche:
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"If FOSS webtech lapses into a profit-crazed nosedive, someone else can simply fork the project and drag it back onto a positive trajectory, right?"
If only it were that straightforward.
Read article →How to Block Forced Updates
Isn't a firewall meant to stop unauthorised entry?... Supposedly. So what, exactly, is it doing when your software providers gleefully shovel bucketloads of unwanted crap onto your system without asking and without challenge?
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Forced updates are not "protection against cyber attacks" - they are quite simply the cyber attack itself.
- Backlit
Let's open with the enquiry of the year:
"How can my software automatically download updates when I have a firewall?"
It's a brilliant question, because it cuts right through the core of an elite tech brainwashing regime which has tricked us into accepting firewalls that simply don't work. And that's the straightforward answer to the query:
If tech providers are able to get unauthorised downloads into your computer without your approval, your firewall doesn't work.
Read that again.
In this article I'm going to document the true facts about well-known consumer firewalls. What they're supposed to do, what they actually do, and how they've been deliberately engineered to block precisely nothing - allowing all manner of attacks, including forced updates, to persist. How they facilitate a scandalous, multi-billion-dollar malware free-for-all, helmed by the Digital Mafia itself. Take a seat. You'll need to be sitting down when you find out what they're doing, and how they've conned you into allowing it.
Read article →Weaponising the Non-Commercial Web
A carefully orchestrated non-commercial Web could cause the tech industry giants an excruciating headache. But are small web publishers ready to start a revolution that exploits Big Brother's morbid fear: immutable technology?...
We don't need to build new browsers or operating systems. Old browsers and operating systems already exist, and present little threat as instruments of subjugation or surveillance. And we know they can serve perfectly well as a means of web-access, because we literally watched them do so in the past.
In 2022 I wrote a piece about Geminispace - a web-like protocol that presented itself as a fresh take on building a dedicated, non-commercial "indieweb". I was sceptical of the idea at the time, but have since become much more firmly opposed to it, with the realisation that it's probably just another of Google's many attempts to hijack public opposition and shepherd activity into an inert backwater.
Here was a Web-like protocol put forth by an anonymous developer who mysteriously vanished off the face of the Earth. How odd. The mouthpiecing was traceable to Silicon Valley. Yawn. And most tellingly of all, this supposedly independent initiative inexplicably assuaged Google's obsessive hankering for wall-to-wall HTTPS encryption. A pointless waste of computing resources for the public content pages that Gemini(space) was designed to create. But a very pressing desire for Google, whose HTTPS Everywhere drive cut the ISPs out of the on-site data market and gave the Mountain View Monolith a lucrative monopoly. Simultaneously, Google gains other key benefits from wall to wall encryption - such as a gatekeeping mechanism, and crucially, the sweeping power to kill off old browsers and operating systems simply by changing the encryption standard.
Gemini(space)'s mandatory HTTPS only made sense from Google's angle.
Read article →Doctorow Doom: What to Say to the Public When You've Ruined the Internet
Has Cory Doctorow's tireless "enshittification" campaign been the axle of a people's fightback, or just a two-faced diversion from his own starring role in destroying the World Wide Web?...
Vilifying those who dare to assert their legal right, because you get a reward from a corporation you yourself characterise as evil, is not activism. It's the very definition of late stage capitalism. But it's all in a day's work for a Google-funded demagogue like Doctorow.
Imagine, for a moment, that you're some guy who became a successful author of fiction, and Google knocks your door one day and offers you a recurring wad of cash. It's not free money, obviously. Google resides, after all, in the extreme echelons of capitalism. So in return for a proxied salary from Google, you will use your status as an author to promote and campaign for a very specific Google agenda. The grinding down of intellectual property rights, to a point where large technology corporations are free to take any digital commodity they want and exploit it for $billions in profit.
For decades, you'll live the Life of Riley selling the concept of "Free Culture" to the public. Not that it involves much selling. You just repetitively assure the public that if they embrace the concept of corporate-theft-as-a-business-model, everything will be free forever. The public even get rewarded with little digital badges of ego massage and applause for helping said corporations to steal content. How could they resist? You have just about the easiest marketing job in history. What a hero you'll be! The guy who's making consumerism free.
Naturally, you're throwing the WWW's real workers to the lions. The people who invest their lives and their money in making all that stuff your funders are pinching - they lie discarded at the wayside. But they're only a minority, and who in your world of privilege and capitalism ever really gives a shit about minorities, eh? Best of all, because virtually no one knows that Google is lining your wallet to do its dirty work, it looks like you're writing bucketloads of content for free! Oh, this is just perfect. You're the world's first Devil-salaried saint...
...Until Google and all the other extreme capitalists whose interests you've been shilling, decide they no longer want to steal solely from the minority. They now want to steal from everyone. Which leaves you playing to a crowd who are themselves about to be thrown to the lions. And far from being the guy who made consumerism free, you're now, in fact, the guy who made consumerism more expensive. The guy whose elitist, corporate-criminal-serving campaigns killed creativity and replaced it with capitalist bot-spew. The man who, alongside a clutch of fellow propagandists, lobbyists and litigants for the tech elite, ruined the Internet.
What do you do?
Read article →Why You're Getting an "AI Chat Assistant" Whether You Like it or Not
If they're levering an "AI assistant" into their product(s), you can reliably identify them as data traders. Brave, Proton, Mozilla, Kagi, JetBrains and [insert latest bandwagon-hopper here] are simply telling on themselves. But it seems we still haven't taken the hint.
There's no point in screaming "I DO NOT WANT THIS!!!". They know you don't want it. They have decisive stats telling them, unequivocally, that people are taking proactive steps to avoid AI. Here's how JetBrains weasel-worded their way around a disclosure request for their "AI assistant" consumer objection stats...
"We can't say for sure how well these opinions represent the position of all of our customers." - JetBrains
Award-winningly slick weasel-wording, I have to admit. But that level of fact-dodging ingenuity was only necessary because they know perfectly well what the extent of the objection is. They log every last micro-shred of data they can get their grubby hands on. But they won't tell, because the volume of objection is absolutely embarrassingly bloody massive. If they disclosed the volume of objection, the world would demand to know why self-styled "ethical" brands are irrevocably deep-wiring LLM tools into their products, against a wall of protest. And that's a question the tech industry is even more reluctant to answer.
Read article →Browser Evaluation: Mullvad vs Floorp vs LibreWolf
All browser providers claim to care about privacy. Most of them are straightforwardly lying. It's easy to kid a lay crowd. But once in a while, a browser raises applause among tech knowledgeables. The threesome in this privacy evaluation have won just such an ovation. But do they live up to the hype?...
Floorp felt like Microsoft Edge or Opera out of the box, and displayed a similar attitude to privacy... I find it disillusioning that the FOSS community is really no different from the mainstream, in that it will completely disregard basic privacy and freedom in exchange for toys and pretty pictures.
BACKGROUND
It's hard for the non-technical public to assess browsers. We can blame the system for that. Here's how it works... A browser provider creates or commissions an advertorial framework - essentially a press release - for its product. Penned by marketers, this is inevitably going to be a complete fairytale.
Palms are then greased, and by hook or by crook, the advertorial ends up in the hands of a lazy, profiteering "tech blog", which is fiercely counter-motivated when it comes to critically assessing the product. The advertorial is thus presented to the public, uncritically, as "journalism", and the public accept the advertorial as fact. Commonly referenced as "paid media" or "growth hacking" among insiders, this is the de facto advertising regime for tech providers. I find reputation laundering to be a much more accurate term of reference.
Read article →Rug Pull Culture 101
If the definition of insanity is to keep repeating the same behaviour with the expectation of different outcomes, we are all insane. And our insanity is about to cost us dear. Literally...
There's a threshold in the normalisation of capitalist inhumanity beyond which public benevolence pitches into a Darwinian extinction spiral. We've reached that line.
Rug pull. The term is commonly associated with crypto hit and run schemes. But that narrow association lets other tech industry players off the hook. The rug pull has become a front-running resort for the tech elite and VC-backed startups alike. And whilst some of the methodology may be rather more elaborate than that which has defined crypto as a scammers' charter, the basic strategy behind the schemes is identical:
Bait the public into investing in something whose only value is the public investment itself, then cash out the value, run, and restart the cycle.
Read article →The Nonpartisan Guide to Conspiracy Theory
What is propaganda-hacking? Why do we support people who don't support us? And do you ever get the sense that conspiracy theorists are just capitalists dressed as activists?...
Theories that don't pass even the most basic reality check are a perfect way to attract the fools most easily parted from their money. And that is, I would suggest, the primary reason why such theories exist.
The world of conspiracy theory is a pretty toxic menagerie, filled as it is with some deeply unsavoury ideological stances, hate-group recruitment campaigns, political, religious and commercial agenda, and flat-out insanity.
Yet dismissing the notion of conspiracy outright is just as insane as believing that the Earth is an inexplicably pancake-shaped freak in a network of wall to wall globes. Authority is corrupt. We know that. History - even recent history - is absolutely littered with irrefutable and fully-acknowledged conspiracy.
And the worldviews fed to us by the official propaganda machine can be just as impossible to reconcile as those extolled by deplatformed conspiracists. On the one hand, for example, we're told we should live by "Christian" values. On the other we're told we should worship capitalists who would rather employ Hitler than Jesus...
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