Technology by Ideology, Part 4
Deep within the rough of pervasive surveillance and politically-motivated censorship found in today's technology landscape, there are some forward-looking diamonds that I want to share with you this week. For many of these we're going to reach back in time and rediscover some popular technologies of the past whose time came and went because they handled user data in such a way that make it inconvenient or impossible for Big Tech to convert them into data-extorting monstrosities. Others are at the tip of the innovation spear created in response to the abuses of our privacy and autonomy that we see today.
To recap, here are the elements of right-leaning technology:
Free as in freedom
Decentralized
Private by being self-hosted or properly encrypted
These are ideals which we won’t always be able to meet completely, but they provide a framework which we can use when deciding which tech to keep and which to discard.
Now that the dust has settled on the contentious 2020 election and the ruling elite has returned to power, we're gathering our wounded and guarding ourselves against roving bands of leftist marauders driving around the battlefield shooting survivors. And the first place we're going to wrap our concertina wire is around our homes. We're going to reembrace the home network.
Our wifi networks form the foundation of establishing an American monastery in our homes. Although most people today simply see their internet router as a necessary annoyance which needs to be unplugged and plugged back in periodically, routers serve a far more important function. They are the doormen in front of the Copacabana. They determine who is allowed in and they keep everyone else waiting in a perpetual line behind the velvet ropes outside. In other words, they act as a firewall which prevents unwanted internet traffic from entering our homes.
Once inside, a robust network can offer many services that are typically outsourced to Big Tech. Messaging, photos, music, movies and TV shows, podcasts, file sync, home automation, and more can be safely and reliably provided by a computer in your home without the need to trust a hostile technology company with your data. In addition, we can acquire audiobooks, music, movies, shows, and podcasts and store them at home for later use. As the left continues to cancel our history and culture, having liberated digital copies of our favorite works is more important than ever. I'll get into what a "liberated" copy of something is later. Lastly, we can add internet filtering to our networks in the same manner as businesses and educational institutions. Not only can we keep unwanted material out but we can keep devices like smart TVs and refrigerators from accessing the internet if we don't want them to.
A fortified home network is a good foundation for technological autonomy, but the devices inside our networks should also promote freedom, decentralization, and privacy. Mobile devices are unprivate by design, so we're going to reembrace the desktop computer. If you're rolling your eyes at the possibility of reintroducing one of those large virus-laden black boxes with the big screen into your homes, hear me out. They're a lot better now and combined with right-leaning software they are a gold mine of content creation and content acquisition. Desktop computers have shrunk in size substantially since the last time you may have had one. Intel makes a line of personal computers called NUCs which are small enough to hide almost anywhere and have a wide variety of uses. Other companies such as Acer and HP make similar-sized models. There are even artisan-style desktops made by companies like System76 which feature open hardware and real wood inlays. A great choice for kids just getting started with computers is the Raspberry Pi, a credit card-sized computer that punches far above its weight at only $35 for the bare board or about $130 for the kit. And of course there are still those black towers made by Dell, HP, Acer, and similar companies.
If you're one of those people that tossed her last computer into a pile behind Goodwill and never replaced it, get ready to replace it. There should be at least one computing device in your home that operates on your terms, that serves you the user, and over which you have complete control. A desktop computer running Linux should be that device. A intermediate step would be a Windows 10 or a Mac without an associated cloud account. We'll get into that more later, too.
Once on a trusted computer, our choices of applications are crucial to maintaining control of our data. Since a major portion of computer use involves surfing the web, the web browsers we use make a substantial difference in the amount of privacy and autonomy we retain as users. On a scale of 1-10 with 1 being the most invasive to 10 being the most private, Google's Chrome browser with a logged in Google account is a 0 and Firefox with a logged in Firefox account is about an 8. These numbers are subjective and there are other browsers out there besides Chrome and Firefox. But the importance of a private and secure web browser cannot be overstated. In the web development industry, the browser is referred to as the "user agent." In other words, the browser is supposed to act on behalf of the user, rendering the code supplied by the web server and nothing more. Google Chrome transformed this relationship by conscripting the browser to act instead as an agent of Google and its advertising partners. Browsers like Firefox and Brave remain closer to the original intention of web browsers as agents acting on behalf of the user.
Now we need to communicate with each other. After last week's newsletter you may be wondering which messaging platforms are left after I finished criticizing iMessage, Facetime, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and others. Two options come immediately to mind. Email and Jabber.
Email, at the foundational level, is open. Email is inexpensive. It is decentralized and hard to suppress. It is resilient to censorship because a mechanism for doing so was never written into the original specification for it. It comes with a wide variety of tools to manage the flow of messages into your inbox which most people have never used but are right there for the taking. Advanced users of email can use their own "domain" (the part after the @ sign, like "yourlastname.com") to enable a host of new capabilities usually reserved for email providers themselves. Email provides a mechanism to send private messages that cannot be read by anyone except the sender and the recipient (although in its default configuration, email has the privacy level of a standard postcard). Your email inbox provides a time capsule of your memories and business transactions and can be instantly searched. An email you received in 1994 could, if you managed to keep it that long, be available in your mailbox today as if nothing had ever changed. If you look at your inbox and shudder at the metric ton of useless garbage you see in there, you can start over. Our email is one of the few messaging platforms that can we can truly "own," or at least as close to "ownership" one can get in the messaging space. An email service outside of Big Tech with a custom domain forms the foundation of technological autonomy. It's a major change from the passive and spam-laden role email has played in the past. Although its not the most private means of communication available, we should strive to embrace email as a powerful messaging tool for the new counterculture.
Jabber (or "XMPP") is an instant messaging protocol similar to the old AOL Instant Messenger or MSN Messenger. It offers many of the same benefits as email with the added bonus of real time communication with better privacy that works great on smart phones. Whatsmore, Jabber provides an entire messaging infrastructure that can be run from top to bottom on cheap, low-powered hardware in your own home. Your family's intimate communications could be completely liberated from modern surveillance platforms and placed into a safe environment that is completely private and under your control. Exactly the way many people thought it was when suddenly on their iPhones, many of their text messages started turning blue.
For those looking to transition their messaging from Big Tech to another centralized service, Signal does a lot of things right. The service is end-to-end encrypted because of the "signal protocol," a framework for keeping the content of a message and much of its metadata a secret. Signal is engineered in such a way that not even the company can read the messages of its users, a fact which was further confirmed back in January when some Signal developers raised concerns that their app might be used by freedom fighters inside the US. I'll get into why that doesn't matter in a later newsletter. I know I just argued that centralized services are inherently left-leaning, but if a company engineers its service in such a way as to make it impossible for it to see or access user data, that tech becomes a viable option for us. Firefox accounts are another example of a centralized service done right.
So is there any entertainment in my hypothetical monastery? Absolutely. Podcasts might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of right-leaning technology. From a user's perspective they appear to be centralized and monitored which is exactly the opposite of what we want. But to understand podcasts in their most pure form, we need to separate them from the podcast apps and aggregators that place a left wing facade in front of a right wing cathedral. Podcasts are no more than audio or video files recorded by creators that you download to your device and consume. That's it. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Play Music all play the role of gatekeepers that can censor and delist dissenting voices in exchange for discoverability. But ultimately podcasts do not depend on any one service or app to function, and we can learn to avoid left wing gatekeepers and discover great podcasts independently. On Android, I prefer AntennaPod.
As I mentioned earlier, audiobooks, music, movies, TV shows, and other media can be a part of our home environment once we cut the digital leash that tethers them to their provider. In later issues we'll explore the various ways we can purchase content and liberate it from its digital shackles. I want to be clear that this is not the same thing as pirating bootleg content like Napster or Limewire from days past. We're going to cover the process of backing up content we purchased for our own home use. Why bother doing this? As time goes by and the left's standards continue to shift with the wind, we will never know which work of art they will censor next or for what reason. What they thought was perfectly fine yesterday could be on their moral chopping block tomorrow. If we want to preserve our favorite content for our children and grandchildren, we need to own it and physically possess it instead of relying on a streaming service for it.
Finally, I want to touch on some new and promising technologies that have caught my attention and which I look forward to writing about more as they develop.
IPFS - The "Inter-Planetary File System" promises to be a distributed and decentralized alternative to the web. Content similar to websites is spread out among many different computers which makes it censorship-resistant. Since leaving your computer on all the time running an IPFS node (like a website) can be cumbersome and expensive, users are incentivized to do so by receiving a form of cryptocurrency called Filecoin. The web browser Brave now supports IPFS natively.
Encyclosphere - Larry Sanger, the co-creator of Wikipedia who has recently become disillusioned with his centralized and ever more left-leaning creation, imagines a "ownerless, leaderless, centerless knowledge commons." In other words, he seeks to create a decentralized version of Wikipedia which would be resistant to the forces that caused it to decline in quality and objectivity. Incidentally, Dr. Sanger is a great follow on Twitter.
Solid - It would be hard to argue that the web hasn't strayed far from its founder's original vision. That's why Tim Burners Lee created Solid, another decentralized alternative to the web which provides "true data ownership." Users create "pods" which hold their data, and these pods can link to other pods or provide access to applications in such a way as to allow the user to retain ownership of his data.
LBRY - A new protocol that specifies a decentralized content hosting platform which couples payment with access. Like IPFS, content is spread out among many different users and governed by a distributed database called a "blockchain." Possibly the most well-known implementation of LBRY is Odysee, a decentralized alternative to YouTube which is mature enough to be well worth your time exploring right now.
Briar - Possibly the most private and secure messaging app available today. Briar requires no central server as messages are synchronized directly with each user's device over the internet. Even when the internet is unavailable, Briar can still communicate over Wifi or Bluetooth, increasing the chance that a message will still arrive at its destination. In contrast, if Apple is forced to shut off iMessage, that's it. No more iMessage.
Tor - "The Onion Router" is a private network which routes internet traffic in such a way that identifying the origin and the destination of the traffic is nearly impossible. My backup site (linked below) is just a standard website located inside this network. Due to the way Tor is architected, the more of us that participate in the network, the more secure it becomes.
Bittorrent - Bittorrent has acquired a worse reputation that it deserves. Simply put, bittorrent is a file transfer protocol which, instead of sending a file directly from one person to another, splits a file into many pieces and reassembles those pieces when a user requests it. Should a dissenter wish to offer a book or a video to his fans, he could do so using bittorrent and the left would be hard pressed to censor him (like they censored Ryan Anderson's "When Harry Became Sally").
Bitcoin - Money without government. Leaving aside the wild speculation and resulting price fluctuations that have characterized the world's first and most famous cryptocurrency, bitcoin is way to transfer value from one person to another without relying on a bank or a government. Maybe it isn't possible to have a first world economy on bitcoin alone, but if you need to transact with someone and you've been deplatformed by the banks under pressure from the left, bitcoin is there for you.
See the pattern? Decentralized, private, ownership of your data, open and available code. This is the future. Whether any of it will become commercially successful remains to be seen. But as conservatives and other right-leaning individuals we recognize that the free market will respond to the needs of consumers by offering entrepreneurs a market for those needs. Gab and Parler are a start, but if this was 1776 they are more akin to alternative monarchies than the republican form of government that was ultimately borne out of the American Revolution. We have the tools today to walk away from the algorithmically amplified toxicity of Big Tech.
Ultimately, maybe the best way to keep toxic content out of our homes and away from our families is to not allow it into our minds in the first place. Perhaps it's the partisan news channel running 24/7, or the constant flow of notifications from social media apps, or the dopamine hit that comes from winning a boss fight in a video game. In this newsletter I covered in broad strokes the technology that gives us more autonomy over our lives by helping us establish an outpost of freedom and tradition in a hostile political environment. But no technology no matter how right-leaning can replace our inherent ability to walk away from those things in our lives that make us worse people. Maybe the best use of cancel culture is to apply it to our vices, and if I can be permitted to invent a new term, maybe the best use of creation culture is to replace what makes us worse with what makes us better.
Thumbnail by Staff Sergeant Nicholas Phelps - US Air Force Public Affairs [1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7196591
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