Technology by Ideology, Part 1
Let's review what we have so far. The 2020 election spurred the technology industry into officially taking sides with the establishment and forcing the 75 million Republican-supporting Americans into cultural exile. From here we seek technological autonomy for six major reasons I outlined last week:
1. We want to raise our children in opposition to the indoctrination found in the education system.
2. We want to preserve our ability to make decisions for ourselves.
3. We want to retain the ability to organize for 2022 without getting deplatformed, delisted, shadow banned, or demonetized.
4. We want to manage our social credit score in the new reputation-based economy the left is currently setting up.
5. We want to increase our technical literacy so we don't need to depend on technology companies that do not consider us legitimate participants in modern life.
6. We want to improve our mental health from the damage done to it by the mainstream media and their amplifiers in Big Tech.
Now that I've spilled several thousand words on context alone, this week I want to cover the types of technology available to us, how they align with our conservative values, and how they'll help us achieve our goals as outlined above.
First and foremost, we believe in liberty. It is our birthright from God as stated in the Declaration of Independence. As such the technologies we're going to favor will be free as in freedom (not necessarily free as in beer.) In technology parlance, "free software" is not necessarily free of charge. Instead it refers to software that respects users' freedom. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) identifies "four essential freedoms" that are necessary for software to be free:
0. The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
1. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
2. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others.
3. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Note that I numbered these in the same manner as the FSF, starting from 0 instead of 1.
When developers build a product, they can choose to abide by these freedoms or not. If they do, the software is considered "free." If not, it is considered "unfree" or "proprietary." Why does this matter? As the FSF notes, "With these freedoms, the users (both individually and collectively) control the program and what it does for them. When users don't control the program, we call it a "nonfree" or "proprietary" program. The nonfree program controls the users, and the developer controls the program; this makes the program an instrument of unjust power."
Does that sound familiar in this age of Big Tech manipulation and censorship?
Just a cursory glance at the freedoms above illustrates that technology and ideology are intertwined. Now that the technology industry has taken sides, we can see why. Tech moguls saw the chance to acquire power before any of us realized what they were doing, and they took it. And since they've chosen to exercise that power to silence us and promote the establishment narrative, we can stake our claim on free software and use it to advance our interests in this new dark age.
Free software supports our goals by making the applications we use more resilient. It is less likely an adversary can get a away with poisoning an application with malicious code if we can review the codebase and verify its intended functions. In addition, its less likely a left-leaning project lead can get away with cancelling an application if we can copy the code, study it, and archive it just in case. For example, should a developer discover that their app is being used by patriotic Americans, there is very little they can do to prevent our continued use of it. Signal, the private messaging app, recently had this problem. Currently, the far-left developers at Signal and elsewhere have been unable to justify their work developing encrypted apps, in part to help dissidents around the world, when they could also be helping "the wrong kind" of dissidents here at home.
Along those same lines, we will favor technologies that include permissive licensing. Licensing in this context refers to what you as the user are allowed to do with a software product once you have acquired it. Some applications are extremely permissive, going so far as to allow the modification and reselling of software you obtained from someone else. In reality, most licenses are very restrictive. Microsoft for example has an entire website devoted to what you're not allowed to do with its software. Permissive licensing will allow us to "fork," or copy an application for our own purposes should a cabal of left-wing developers decide that we're just too abhorrent to support with their continued work on a project.
To be sure, we will not be able to switch completely to free software. There simply isn't enough of it to replace everything we use now. But an awareness of it will help guide us in the right direction, and we can use its principles to find and build software to support our families, schools, and local businesses.
As conservatives and other right-leaning individuals we are strongly drawn towards self-reliance. We know that free people take on the responsibilities normally associated with governments in many other countries. God, family, and guns alone render many government services unnecessary for us, which may have been the real reason why Barack Obama slandered us in 2008 when he referred to us as "bitter clingers". Nothing upsets an intellectual more than those who don't need him.
In the name of self-reliance, there are many technological responsibilities that we can take on for ourselves. For example, many communications platforms can be what's called "self-hosted," or run on computers in our own homes. They can also be run on computers we rent from other providers. We no longer need to depend on Big Tech to communicate with our family and friends. If you use Facebook Messenger or iMessage to communicate with your family and friends, just imagine the intimate details of your lives that Facebook and Apple could glean from years of your chat transcripts. By self-hosting or self-administering a chat service, the amount of data we leak drops to zero. If you're the type of person that grows your own vegetables or fixes your own car, adding self-hosted services to your toolkit is a logical extension of that mindset.
In addition, utilizing encryption for our activities is taking a major role away from Big Tech by placing the responsibility of key management in our hands. Encrypting a message scrambles the text to make it indistinguishable from random gibberish, and it does this using what's called in cryptography a "key." In order to have an encrypted conversation with someone, these keys need to be managed and its typically the provider that does it. As a result, the vast majority of encryption provided by Big Tech is able to be unscrambled for their own use. They only provide encryption to prevent their competitors or malicious hackers from gaining access to the data you provide them.
The kind of encryption we're looking for is called, "end-to-end" encryption. When content is encrypted this way, only the sender and the recipient can see the message. Even the provider cannot see it. I suspect this is how most people think it works anyway, but it isn't. End-to-end encryption in which we the users hold the keys is the gold standard we should shoot for.
Another reason to embrace proper encryption is to maintain our privacy. Most people know we have been losing our privacy over the last three decades to the point where we barely have any left at all. This is a problem because privacy affords us the ability to communicate freely without repercussions. A world in which all speech is public is one in which only approved speech is allowed. If you've ever browsed LinkedIn and witnessed the uniformly bland posts there, you'll see how a public and reputation-based environment kills creativity and waters down ideas.
I'm old enough to remember when one of the major political parties supported free markets. That seemed to disappear after the bailouts of 2008. Nevertheless, as conservatives we support the free market because free people transact with each other in a decentralized environment regulated by prices instead of central planners. If I could summarize the left's opposition to free markets in one phrase it would be the impotent rage they feel when they watch people engage in commerce in which they the self-anointed have no role to play.
As such we will favor decentralized technologies which are resistant to censorship and resilient to failure during a disaster. Most social media platforms are centralized and therefore can be much more easily controlled and opposition shuttered. Centralized platforms serve the interests of the left because they can be used for social engineering, experimentation, and manipulation. Recently we've seen the use of centralized social media platforms as tools to spread federal government propaganda. These sites may have begun as champions of free speech but they have quickly become silencers of the powerless and amplifiers of the powerful.
Finally, we shouldn't make the mistake of simply trading one centralized platform for another. Gab and Parler are touted as right-wing alternatives to Twitter and Facebook, but they are both centralized and prone to censorship as Parler's ban by Amazon recently demonstrated. Moreover, a right-leaning service today could become a left-slouching one tomorrow. Witness the Drudge Report's ideological 180 as a recent example. True decentralized services are served from computers owned by many different users all over the world, and as a result they are more resistant to censorship and more tolerant of sudden ideological shifts.
From our values of liberty, self-reliance, free markets, and privacy come the free, self-hosted, decentralized, and encrypted technologies to which we will transition during the post-COVID dark age. We're going to find out what lies beyond the gates of the walled gardens.
Thumbnail by Jonathan Oldenbuck - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3899733
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).