"We continue to be inspired by what we're seeing in the streets, and we'll keep doing whatever we can to help you send a message." - Jun Harada, Head of Growth and Communication at Signal, on the violent Black Lives Matter riots, 8 June 2020, in a blog post.
It can be disheartening to learn that the developers of the apps you love are Marxist sympathizers or adherents of the New Faith. But even worse is a direct repudiation of your community based on false premises or mischaracterizations, like this one from Mitchell Baker, Executive Chairwoman and CEO of Mozilla, after the election fraud protests on 6 January:
"But as reprehensible as the actions of Donald Trump are, the rampant use of the internet to foment violence and hate, and reinforce white supremacy is about more than any one personality. Donald Trump is certainly not the first politician to exploit the architecture of the internet in this way, and he won't be the last. We need solutions that don't start after untold damage has been done. Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation."
This double standard has been discussed at length elsewhere, so I'll just summarize it here. Signal and Mozilla don't seem to mind their products being used to spread the retributive ideology of the neo-Marxist left. But once the "wrong people" rise up, something must be done. As James Lindsay, co-author of "Cynical Theories," notes in his discussion of Herbert Marcuse's 1965 essay "Repressive Tolerance," it boils down to "movements from the left must be extended tolerance, even when they are violent, while movements from the right must not be tolerated, including suppressing them by violence."
So why in the world would I recommend using a messenger and a web browser whose prominent creators make such gross mischaracterizations against those of us that fight to preserve America and her founding principles? Here I want to put forward an argument that, as long as a technology is free, decentralized, and private by way of proper encryption, it doesn't matter if the engineers, team leads, or even the C-suite are Marxist sympathizers or not. We should continue to use it for two main reasons.
First, the underlying technology works the same way no matter who is using it. Proper end-to-end encryption is guaranteed by the math that makes it possible, and there is no way to discern the traffic of a terrorist from that of a freedom fighter. What’s more, as the quotes above suggest, terrorism today is increasingly losing its meaning. As Americans, we were mostly united after 9/11 in combating the Islamic terrorism that was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center, but today those in power use that word much more loosely.
Decentralized technology, such as the internet, the web, the Tor network, and Bitcoin are all resistant to censorship because the forced takedown of one node does not jeopardize the entire network. When your home Wifi stops working, the entire internet doesn't go down with it. When Parler was taken down by Amazon Web Services, they found a new web hosting provider. When a Tor exit node is taken offline, others absorb the traffic. And when Gab was deplatformed by GoDaddy, their web hosting provider, it eventually found another one and came back online.
Second, as I noted in an earlier post, in January this year Signal developers faced the obvious question of "what happens when our secure messaging service starts being used by people we don't like?" Moxie Marlinspike, the CEO of Signal, attempted to answer this question by reportedly saying, "if and when people start abusing Signal or doing things that we think are terrible, we'll say something." In other words, they'll cross that bridge when they come to it.
That isn't a good answer, because Moxie knows there isn't anything he can do without fundamentally altering his product. Signal is end-to-end encrypted, meaning neither Moxie nor Signal employees can see the messages their users are sending each other. When encryption is done right, as Signal's is, all messages appear random, like an analog television tuned to a channel it doesn't receive. There is no way to work out the contents of a message based on their encrypted appearance. Additionally, Signal makes it impossible to tell who is messaging who, therefore not only is Signal unable to read their users' messages, they cannot even discern a social network of users that message each other regularly (like a BLM cell or a group of American freedom fighters). Should Signal make the necessary changes to make these insights possible, (say, by adding a master key for all messages, or somehow revealing who messages who) they would no longer have a secure messaging service, and therefore they would destroy their product. Signal would cease being used by both American freedom fighters *and* Marxist revolutionaries.
In order to explain away their concessions, they would have to rely on a technique widely used by the establishment today during the post-COVID era. They would have to change the language; in this case, by redefining the word "secure."
"Here at Signal, we can now read all messages and we report all extremism (conservative political activity) to the authorities, so our service is still secure (from the bad guys)." Or, "here at Mozilla, due to an increase in white supremacy (again, pro-America political activity), we have implemented a key escrow system which is used to scan the contents of all Firefox accounts. Users found to have bookmarked or visited a large number of sites critical of BLM, feminism, LGBT, climate change, or COVID response, will be identified and referred to the authorities for further observation. Here at Mozilla, we take your security seriously."
Incidentally, if you use Google Chrome with a logged in Google account, beware: Google already knows all this.
Some might be understandably upset by the idea of supporting neo-Marxism by using the technology products their adherents produce. However, at this time I don't believe we can afford to boycott every single service with a left-wing activist developer. There simply aren't enough openly conservative alternatives. To my knowledge, there is no web browser, messaging service, hardware manufacturer, app store, etc, that cater to us which allow us to completely abandon those who became successful by way of our capitalist system, yet actively seek to replace it. Perhaps one day I can help fill that void.
To those that argue that, once services like Signal discover that they are being used by a large number of the wrong kind of dissidents, they'll attempt to censor us, or in the extreme, shut their service down, I would respond that if the code is available, we can fork the project for our own use. However, I believe that possibility is remote. Ideological developers are heavily invested in their creations because they genuinely believe in supporting dissidents around the world. They just seem to be unable to recognize them in their own country.
In this new dark age, we need to read posts such as those outlined above in the context of the gaslighting and mass manipulation of the post-COVID era. After 2020 it would be hard to argue that the US remains the land of the free and the home of the brave. When we can be placed on house arrest at any time for any reason, when our businesses and schools can be shut down without warning, when we can be forbidden to gather with our family and friends, when we can be forced to get a vaccine we may not want, and when some of our own neighbors will unhesitatingly rat us out to the authorities because of the climate of fear created by an unaccountable media establishment, we find ourselves taking on the roles of freedom fighters and human rights activists in our own country.
When we utilize right-leaning technology, even when its developed by left-wing engineers, we become those dissidents operating in authoritarian regimes for whom that technology was developed in the first place. We become the counter-revolution that those left-wing developers don't want to think about. When we reframe our position this way, these tools become a valuable part of our fight to preserve the one place on Earth where humanity can live free.
Thumbnail by Derek Simeone - https://www.flickr.com/photos/dereksimeone/50004505417/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92664042
Don't forget to like this post, share it with your friends, and bookmark my censorship-resistant backup site in case I get deplatformed (Tor network access required).