I read this book Imagologies published in 1994. Its about two professors of philosophy who link their classes via tele-conference technology. One classroom is in the US, and the other is in Finland. They write about the technologies as they use them, and how the new media technologies are going to revolutionize the world. You can feel the excitement and their hope for the future in their words.

The internet back then had no central hub, everyone had an equal voice. So they foresaw changes in the roles of leadership and politics, as it would become more collaborative, because every person had an equal voice. This situation, is really the goal of democracy somewhat; The sense that the ensemble of citizens come together to make decisions for the nation.

They asked "on the internet, where is the capitol?" hinting at there was no centralization, with only the smallest organization, it was like the wild west. However, the internet today does not look like this. we can identify many 'large cities' like google etc. and they use their gravity to censor. and government even passes laws to ensure censorship is law on the internet.

Censorship is the polar opposite of what the early pioneers dreamt of. It seems weird that a system of scattered nodes and users would lead to a system where these nodes have to pass through a small amount of selected nodes in order to reach other nodes (diffuse their message/opinions)

I am starting to think that government may have gave some investments, or enticements to these 'large cities' as long as they went along with the censorship of ideas. If the political class saw a more collaborative leadership revolution coming, I am certain they would do something to squash that.

So I just want to say, centralization is bad, we should all host our own googles, youtubes, emails and twitters.

Osito

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I completely share your opinion. Technically, there is no difference between Meta and you. You are all Internet users.But let me note that the modern system is built in such a way that one dollar is equal to one vote. Therefore, whoever pays the most makes the most noise. This is a consequence of the overcapitalization of a group of banksters who enable a leftist technocratic dystopia here and now.
Ultimately, if previously the question was about who owns the means of production, people or monopoly capitalists. Today the question is: who owns the means of communication, the people or the banksters and their IT cartels.

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Hello osito!

** On Wednesday 25.10.23 - 18:22, osito wrote to All:

I read this book Imagologies published in 1994. Its about two
professors of philosophy who link their classes via tele-
conference technology. One classroom is in the US, and the
other is in Finland. They write about the technologies as
they use them, and how the new media technologies are going
to revolutionize the world. You can feel the excitement and
their hope for the future in their words.

[..]

Censorship is the polar opposite of what the early pioneers
dreamt of..

So.. the book misses the notion of tracking and monetizating of
people's activities?

Any discussion/vision about encryption and privacy in the book?

So I just want to say, centralization is bad, we should all
host our own googles, youtubes, emails and twitters.

Ever hear of Nicholas Negroponte? He put out a book in 1995:

Being Digital (1995), which made famous his forecasts on how
the interactive world, the entertainment world and the
information world would eventually merge.

Personally, there are a some elements in the book that
Negroponte got wrong. But the biggest takeaway that he got
right was that data usage would be data-metered and charged;
that in it itself does not seem extraordinary, because the more
you use the more you pay would be seem obvious, but it was
around the time when I was supporting grassroots networks and
systems like BBSes. Compuserve was already a very expensive
time-metered system.

Thanks for the headsup on Imagologies. I am compelled to look
it up and check it out.
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ok ill check out your recommendation.

So.. the book misses the notion of tracking and monetizating of
people's activities?

Any discussion/vision about encryption and privacy in the book?

the authors dont come from a technical background so there was no real discussion of that. i think the closest they came was that they said something like : there is a need to authenticate who you are writing to, as at the time it was more of an out-of-body experience, your internet persona walking around in the dark speaking to strangers, unconnected to reality.

tracking and monetization; no definately they didnt get into that.

Osito

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the modern system is built in such a way that one dollar is equal to one vote. Therefore, whoever pays the most makes the most noise. This is a

the modern political system? yes for sure it is that way. but cant we change that? i mean the internet was supposed to level the playing field. everyone could speak with an equal voice, they intervened and twisted it so now the internet has filters that prohibit certain messages from passing certain checkpoints.

i look at some of my non-technical friends, (i am sure everyone knows some) they think the internet is google, netflix and facebook. if you download a song from youtube, they look at you like you are a magician. They are never going to leave those big sites. let them be, you will never convert them.

what i am thinking about is not a website, but a new protocol or something. where everyone who uses it, can speak to everyone else who does as well. e-mail, years ago, was the draw that got people started using the internet. but now it is filtered, passed through intelligence services, monitored, recorded, and who knows what else. you cant start your own email service any more, those ports are blocked, and if google doesnt recognize you, all messages from your exchange will be blocked.

for some reason, the 1%(what are we calling them now?) think communicating freely with others is a danger. I think it is a prerequisite to a healthy society.

Osito

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
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the modern political system? yes for sure it is that way. but cant we change that? i mean the internet was supposed to level the playing
field. everyone could speak with an equal voice, they intervened and twisted it so now the internet has filters that prohibit certain
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.

i look at some of my non-technical friends, (i am sure everyone knows some) they think the internet is google, netflix and facebook. if you download a song from youtube, they look at you like you are a magician. They are never going to leave those big sites. let them be, you will
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.

what i am thinking about is not a website, but a new protocol or something. where everyone who uses it, can speak to everyone else who
does as well. e-mail, years ago, was the draw that got people started using the internet. but now it is filtered, passed through intelligence services, monitored, recorded, and who knows what else. you cant start your own email service any more, those ports are blocked, and if google doesnt recognize you, all messages from your exchange will be blocked.
for some reason, the 1%(what are we calling them now?) think
communicating freely with others is a danger. I think it is a
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.

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* Origin: Shipwrecks & Shibboleths [San Francisco, CA - USA] (700:100/72)

What are some examples of this? Nothing I've ever wanted to say, > communicate, or upload, has ever been censored.

1. https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/04/the-global-ministry-of-truth-censors-c
onservatives-and-their-advertisers-to-starve-them-to-death/?utm_source=rss&utm_ medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-global-ministry-of-truth-censors-conservatives-and- their-advertisers-to-starve-them-to-death
2. https://www.wnd.com/2023/02/microsoft-acts-right-leaning-news-sites-targeted-de
funding-blacklist/
3. https://www.planet-today.com/2023/08/google-announces-worldwide-ban-on.html 4. https://www.naturalnews.com/2019-06-09-facebook-bans-natural-news-health-ranger
-responds.html
Perhaps your posts were not paleemic or did not harm the globalist agenda, so no one banned you. If you post cats or dogs, it will not be subject to censorship.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/15 (Linux/64)
* Origin: SPOT BBS / k9zw (700:100/69)

What are some examples of this? Nothing I've ever wanted to say, communicate, or upload, has ever been censored.

nor me, but i hear it happening. i remember in 2016 on reddit, they had a subreddit devoted to donald trump, the user base got so big, at first the whole subreddit was shadow banned to prevent their messages of support for him filling the home page, then eventually the subreddit was closed.

those were political messages getting censored.

but yeah, your right, i dont go to those mega sites, and have no interest in them, and if i had a message i wouldnt post them there.

haha yeah when i first heard of twitter, my face was that meme: 'but why?' it didnt make any sense to me at all. :) anyway they must fill their 'need for attention' void for those people or else they wouldnt use them. did you know so many people needed so much attention? :)

Osito

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So I just want to say, centralization is bad, we should all host our own googles, youtubes, emails and twitters.
Osito

Yes, I agree, osito. That is one reason why I like MeaTLoTioN's Element/Matrix server. It is fully encrypted and is being hosted off of his own Internet pipe, not some cloud server. It is a place where we can gather and share ideas/thoughts and amazing points to consider. You can connect to it at https://element.erb.pw/ It is our little island in the sea of corporate big brother.

Cheers!
-warmfuzzy

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They asked "on the internet, where is the capitol?" hinting at there

Currently, in the Bay Area.

Censorship is the polar opposite of what the early pioneers dreamt of.

Yep, that's the biggest disappointment. Internet turned into interactive TV controlled but left/liberal forces on surface level, virtual landlords who are feudalising the rest, under the hood.

Technologically it still brings that promise about freedom and liberties... but internet today is not a communication technology. Internet today is interactive media to engage and influence masses.

I am starting to think that government may have gave some investments, or enticements to these 'large cities' as long as they went along with the censorship of ideas. If the political class saw a more collaborative

Not sure I can relate to that. Especially from Europe which comes with a different understanding of liberty than American. I don't believe any of these definitions are accurate, but still I'd not assume other thing than from the policing and governing point of view it's easier to control these "big cities" than heavily dispersed townships.

-h1

... Xerox Alto was the thing. Anything after we use is just a mere copy.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
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hollowone wrote to osito <=-

Censorship is the polar opposite of what the early pioneers dreamt of.

Yep, that's the biggest disappointment. Internet turned into
interactive TV controlled but left/liberal forces on surface level, virtual landlords who are feudalising the rest, under the hood.

Was it Vint Cerf who said that the internet treats censorship as damage
and routes around it?

I remember connecting my first node to the internet - I had a Linux box
that was a mail server, web server, IRC and NNTP. Felt like I was an
equal player on a large playground.

Technologically it still brings that promise about freedom and liberties... but internet today is not a communication technology. Internet today is interactive media to engage and influence masses.

When customers of internet service providers were described as
"consumers" of internet services and inbound ports started being
blocked, it had all gone wrong.



... Change nothing and continue consistently
--- MultiMail/Win v0.52
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When customers of internet service providers were described as
"consumers" of internet services and inbound ports started being
blocked, it had all gone wrong.

So just like in XIX century.. if you had machines you controlled the world.
Now if you control the transmit cables.. you control the world.

Now I envy HAM and packet radio users bouncing bits off the moon with less regulation than average FB user.

-h1

... Xerox Alto was the thing. Anything after we use is just a mere copy.

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So just like in XIX century.. if you had machines you controlled the world. Now if you control the transmit cables.. you control the world.

:) i get that feeling after automating something

Osito

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