I’m a long-time believer in the Drudge Report. Drudge is an aggregator of news stories. He lists many mainstream news outlets, a lot of crap sites too, but the movers and shaker people inside the Washington DC beltway go to his site religiously to find out what’s really going on in the news cycle. He’s also someone they love to hate. Part of his genius is not just that he finds the best representation of the news cycle, but he curates and display it in such a way that it’s greater than the sum of its parts. Such is the case with technology news.
Recently, Drudge has started a trend of grouping what I’d call ‘big brother’ articles. Here is a sample from this morning, 4/11/19:
‘Russia moves to expand state control of internet…’
‘FACEBOOOK users sent to ‘concentration camps’ by Chinese cops…’
‘Social rating system for behavior…’
‘APPLE Censors Tiananmen Square Songs for Govt…’
‘Beijing building surveillance state through Latin America…’
‘Your car is watching you: Who owns the data?’
I didn’t read all of these articles, in part, because I’ve read so many with a similar message. This group of articles focuses mostly on China and Russia but don’t think this does not apply to you. Note the deep involvement of Apple and Facebook. If you happen to follow the news feed over the next days and weeks, you’ll find equally alarming news about American Internet-based liberties.
The drift of the article set is about the rapid, even overnight clamp-down of the Internet. This mirrors similar and only slightly less draconian efforts in most Western European countries. So far, the US has avoided only the most open trampling of Internet based freedoms, but there is a reason why Apple and Facebook are piloting worse constrictions elsewhere…first. In 10 years, the Internet as we know it will be gone. That went fast, didn’t it?! Defining any unpopular or conservative thought as ‘fake news’ or ‘hate’, unrestrained and ubiquitous gathering and sale of your personal data, rewarding and punishing ideological positions, absolute systemic domination by only bought and paid for entities; all of these things are a reality now. The Internet that you knew is already gone. You are being tracked today and by the aforementioned mechanisms, you will soon be controlled. We have 10 years or less to effect a paradigm change.