I'm a real lazy POS. I've been planning on writing a post since Christmas and look at this, it's already 9 days into the new year. LOL. Anyway I've been having a lot of vacation for a change and despite all of this grand plans I've had it's been rough trying to get anything done. I guess it's true: the less you do, the less you end up doing. Keeping that balance is rough, keeping up enough positive tension in your life so you don't end up spending all your free time doomscrolling.

Anyway looks like the US is writhing in pain again. Never did I think I'd see the day that the Capitol building gets stormed and taken over by a mob. Trump got the whole mob riled up and ready and they just stormed the place. There's been a part of me that keeps thinking "are things REALLY that bad?", probably due to my personal Overton window shifting to the right or something since I get exposed to Trumpaganda regularly at work. Well, when Congress has to go into emergency hiding and flee a mob, I think it's safe to say things are going pretty bad and something should be done.

Twitter has amazingly taken the step to outright ban Trump's @realdonaldtrump handle even before stepping down from office. I don't think only the riot pushed this decision, but also that now the Senate now has a Democratic majority. Tech companies have been trying their best not to be regulated or broken up and I can't help but see most of these moves as being motivated more out of fear of having the US government coming in than actually doing their best to calm the current political climate.

For a while now I've heard people online complain about the censorship that they encounter online and many times Americans would just say "well, Twitter is a private company, take your business elsewhere!". On Twitter I saw the tweet: "To anyone complaining about a private media company kicking Trump off their platform: Think of Twitter as a Christian bakery and Trump as a gay wedding cake.". For a long time I agreed with this sentiment. Many people might not know this but Twitter has an evil twin called Parler that is pretty much a sewer where all the people too horrible for Twitter congeal together. That place should be shown in Civics 101 classes as a class project to discuss what free speech should be. You can go to /r/ParlerWatch if you want to see how regular xenophobic and homophobic rants and straight death threats are on the platform. It really goes to show, free speech as a concept is something that is an ideal and can't just be implemented in the real world without any other considerations. The "free forum of ideas" easily becomes a screaming match if no guide rails are put up. Man, I can't believe I'm saying that. My younger self would be hanging his head in SHAME.

So for a few years Parler has been the "free speech platform" for those who have been moderated off Twitter and constituted the only real market alternative microblogging service. Now it seems that Google and Apple are stepping up and Parler is being removed from the Google Play and iTunes stores. Now even the alternatives are getting shut down. This is the outcome of having all of these monolithic corporations being left unchecked. There is a movement in the US that wants to remove as much legislation as possible and let the free market do it's thing. I can't understand the magical thinking this requires, as if the free market is some benevolent force that always comes up with good solutions. Honestly it has an almost religious vibe to it. We are now seeing this play out. We have platforms so large they can place a stranglehold on what can be expressed now. Although I agree that what Trump and his followers have expressed is horrible and should be taken off any platform it's on, I think everyone should take a moment to reflect on how much power all of these companies now have. Is this OK?

There is an anti-trust case now in the US against Facebook that followed an anti-trust case against Google, so it seems that governments are waking up to this. Yet I doubt this will lead to any meaningful change in how these massive companies are going to operate. People like large, expansive companies. Everything is integrated seamlessly, your phone can talk to all the services you are on and it's only the rare person who really cares about privacy or censorship. And although I now agree with banning Trump and his enablers from platforms, I think this is a time and place to stop and reflect on how much power these companies have and how powerless we are becoming. I mean, these are US companies here and what they decide to do shapes discourse around the world. That should really shock anyone.

There are alternatives to Twitter that I think address the core issue with microblogging services. Services like Mastadon and twtxt are decentralized and distributed, so they don't revolve around a single hub like Twitter or Facebook. The community can upkeep the system, and although this may pose a new set of problems to solve, it fundamentally brings the power of expression back to the users. You don't have to worry about moderation anymore as you are the person who moderates. To use a system like this would require users to learn tech skills and wouldn't perhaps be as easy to use right-out-of-the-box as Facebook, but that could be a good thing. Instead of mindlessly spitting out whatever you want online on a platform someone else is upkeeping and allowing you to use, you might stop and think about the effort needed to keep systems online.

I was originally going to write about an article I read in Wired recently about if the Internet is conscious. It gave some of the same arguments I've heard before and made some claims I wasn't all too sure about, like Koch's claim that the consciousness of smaller objects can be "swallowed up" when integrating into a larger consciousness entity. I might write more extensively on it later, but suffice to say it was interesting to think about. One of the big points the article makes I think circles back to what I've been writing about here. We have these massive platforms that are guiding what we view and are affecting what we think about in a major way.

The article talks about the first sign of the internet becoming a conscious entity "might feel—and I confess I find this most probable—like nothing at all. There will be no explosion, no heavenly trumpet, just that strange peace that is known to overcome tourists standing in Times Square, or walking the Las Vegas strip, a surrender to overstimulation that is not unlike the numbness that sets in after hours of scrolling and clicking." Maybe this restlessness happening regarding banning users and removing platforms can be the wake up call the world needs. Take the power back and start building and using new, decentralized platforms to wrestle our attention back from advertisers and send that attention back to what we consider important. Maybe in the process we can get a few sparks of consciousness back as well.