Most people on this side of the great divide have concluded that the time for fixing what is broken in America has passed. The historical processes that have been unleashed by past error will just have to run their course. What comes after will be whatever the winners of the great struggle create. What if that is not true and there is a window to stop this process? What things could we do to break this cycle of madness that seems to have gripped the American empire?
One thing that should be done right away for no other reason than to slow things down is shutting off the mobile phone system. Humans evolved to interact with one another in person, not through the virtual reality of the mobile device. Everywhere you go you see people walking around like zombies, glued to their phone. It is like the drug soma from the novel Brave New World. The difference is this drug puts people into a trance in which their senses are bombarded with data that irritate them.
One reason we have become an outrage culture is outrage is the only way to get attention from others. In a world where people are linked to a constant stream of images and bursts of text, getting noticed means being outlandish of outrageous within those data streams. On the other hand, being glued to the data stream leaves little room for real human interaction and even less room for real emotion. Large swaths of the population only feel human when they are outraged by the stream.
This would not be as difficult to do as you might think. The rulers could impose a dollar per minute tax on the service. Sure, the wireless firms would fight it, but the government has tanks and men with guns. Shoot enough wireless executives and the rest either run away or fall in line. The firm slap of authority is best conveyed against the wall of the prison, after a quick trial. It was not that long ago when mobile charges were prohibitive and very few people could afford a mobile phone.
Similarly, the big social media platforms have become a problem. They are nothing more than cauldrons of human misery now. Again, it was not so long ago when these platforms did not exist. If we got rid of Facebook and Twitter, the world does not change in any important ways. People would simply migrate back to small private groups on-line or go outside again. Turning off the big social platforms would have an immediate positive impact on the psyche of the public.
Shutting these down would be easier than limiting the mobile device. Enforcement of Section 230 along with new privacy laws that prohibit them from harvesting your activity on-line would shut them down in weeks. Once they are subject to the same laws as everyone else and they cannot steal from their users, their business model would collapse in a hurry. Small platforms would still exist, but as labors of love or as small businesses run by one or two people with a narrow interest.
Another rollback would have to be the cameras. If you are out in public and have a heart attack or you are attacked by a criminal, people pull out their phones and begin taking pics of your suffering. They rather hope you die so they can get a video that will go viral. Combined with the cameras put up by the government and business, all of us now live in a synopticon. This is a world where all of us are individually monitored by all of us, a mass of camera wielding ghouls.
The solution here is your image is yours and you own it. Anyone possessing your image or distributing your image without your express permission is no different than someone trafficking in stolen goods. If someone wants to post your bad day on-line, they need your permission. The platform hosting it needs your permission. Otherwise, they are liable for possessing your property without your permission. This would also apply to security cameras. They can be used only in a courtroom.
This is not a novel concept. Many states still have laws on the books, for example, against filming a public road. Movie companies used to need permission to use video of people walking down a street. Your image used to be your property. A big part of what ails us is we have allowed the ownership of your information to fall into the public domain. Everywhere you go someone is taking pictures of you and you have no control over what they do with those images.
What is being proposed here, in effect, is rolling back the last 25 years of technological and economic change that no one contemplated, debated, or voted on. This all just evolved quickly before anyone could contemplate the impact. A generation long real-world experiment has proven it was a bad idea. We have created a world of outraged shut-ins and snitches. The only thing everyone agrees upon is that everyone hates the world they experience, either in reality or through their device.
Would people riot in the streets if their phones suddenly became useful only in emergencies as a way to call for help? Would there be protest marches over the loss of Facebook and YouTube? Would Zoomers begin forming militias when they can no longer video every moment of their life with their phone? Obviously not, as these things did not happen over Covid. In fact, people would adapt and maybe regrow the backbone and spirit needed to protest such things.
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This sounds like a lovely boomer version of John Lennon’s imagine.
The unfortunate truth is that this would never happen because the security apparatus loves the idea of a surveillance apparatus that is more carrot than stick. Even if the public had the will, things tend not to happen when the people with real power are in control.
What it sounds like is Richard Fernandez’s idea that you own your own data. Make that clear and a lot of the changes will fall into place. It’s one of those proposals that are simple, but not easy. In a time of crisis though, it might be possible to do.
Good suggestions for the most part but these never will happen as long as the Left continues to control all aspects of life. As we have see from the dragnet for Capitol trespassers, technology really is the key to police state oppression.
The exception I take is with cell phones, which I actually hate. These may be very useful tools for us as things get worse. That’s why there is a sudden push to hack texts and shut down podcasts.
I don’t know if government will give up the surveillance powers they gain by having the population glued to their phones.
I also think our representatives are bought and paid for by by big tech and they will stay bought and paid for.
It’s probably not as simple as you think. The people who have the most data to analyze tend to be pretty boring. Does the government really benefit from knowing that a random Karen binge-watched Friends last weekend and is looking for a new bed for her kitten, or that Joe down the street wants a new truck? Most data is pretty banal and predictable, just like most people. The people the government wants to surveil most are generally good at avoiding surveillance. The dumb criminal crowd is easily surveiled…but never arrested. It’s pretty obvious that the Epiphany insurrection happened because a lot of people were able to coordinate online, so giving up cell phones would probably be a net positive to the government, all things considered.
Ted Kaczyinski said it wasn’t possible to ban bad technology without getting rid of all technology, but Z’s proposal is worth a try.
Try, how? He is right and if put to a vote I would vote yes, run it up a flag pole and I will salute it. Just a philosophical exercise that we can for now plant in the minds of the like minded.
I am having a zoom meeting tomorrow with Zuckerberg, Fauci, Dorsey, and Kamala. I will run this by them.
If you gave an average Joe the Unibomber Manifesto to read without him knowing the context, chances are he would agree with 80+ percent of it.
For polite company, Bill Joy’s classic from 2000 is a good pre-Kaczynski appetizer. https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/
This is a nice fantasy, but it’s not going to happen until a die-out event-collapse or a brutal military dictatorship forces it. Both of them are very unlikely.
Hell’s bells, Z. I am a Boomer and if you took my phone, I’d spit on my hands, hoist the black flag and slit YOUR throat!
I am not addicted to my phone. I don’t twit or Bookface, I hardly ever talk on it or text. But I love the tools, the camera, the apps. I even have my bible on it. You are doing what the gun grabbers do. You blame the tools for the actions of their users.
The other day on Blab I saw a good one. Some old biddy was on her knees out in the street, planting flowers beside a tree on a public sidewalk. Along comes a vibrant jogger, who sees the woman crouched with her back to him… and he kicks her hard in the head as he passes for gits and shiggles. You won’t see that on mass media. You won’t see the footage of the Covington high school kid being trolled by a shitty old red nogger, you wouldn’t see the cops lawfully trying to cope with violent joggers where the media only shows them getting beaten into submission.
Ours are people problems. Steel and blood are the only things that can fix many of us now. I hate to say it, but that’s the way of it. Any delays now will only increase the final body counts.
Yes!
Why not get rid of TV while you’re at it ? Or, hell, radio too maybe.
No it’s the internet, the social media, that has allowed a dissident movement to grow at all.
This is the main benefit. Race realism is becoming absolutely necessary thanks to low IQ joggers incriminating themselves on camera while committing acts of violence. Combine that with surveillance cameras of their heinous behavior and easy access to crime statistics by race, and i believe the next generation will be much more race aware.
Oh come on. Yes, they would riot in the streets.
People who cut off social media rarely seem to regret it.
“I actually like that. You get to spend more time doing other things and more important things than burying my face in my phone,” Larson told reporters.
I deleted all the games off my phone about five years ago, after a very young niece repeatedly asked me if she could play a game on my phone at a family gathering. It clicked for me what a time waster it had become.
https://www.outkick.com/after-being-canceled-kyle-larson-learning-he-doesnt-miss-social-media/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1612982219
I never answer my mobile phone. I have no apps on it other than what came with it and Outlook. I use it for emergency calls and reading e-mail when I’m away from the office.
To be fair, you do vent often on Gab. The release is needed it seems.
I can tell Gab’s getting far more popular as he’s been pretty effective in kicking a hornet’s nest of conservative normies with some of his posts.
I treat Gab like the local pub. You can go there and blow off a little steam. The thing with gab is it is /ourguys/ and civic nationalists. No lefties. If it was flooded with lefties, then I’d kill my account. I have no interest in interacting with those people.
My relationship to my phone is much like yours, Z, but we’re around the same age and we grew through childhood, adolescence, and became adults without mobile phones or smart phones. Both my kids are around thirty, and though I never gave them a mobile device during their childhood, they don’t know a world before the internet and mobile comms. Neither of them are sunk into the craziness of the worse aspects of social media, but “going back” is not an option for them because it’s not “going back” – they were never there!
An interesting development is Facebook banning all political content. They want to go back to moms posting what they made for dinner and other, more innocent things. It will be a good test to see if the genie can be put back in the bottle.
Of course, they will bend the rules as to what’s political, but given the flagrant bias before, this will at least even things out a little in theory.
Yeah, now that they’ve won, let’s stop talking politics – especially about how we won…
This suggestion will literally never happen. The corporate powers and governmental spy agencies love what they have wrought. It’s only going to get worse as sensors and various gizmos are inserted into you so that you mesh perfectly with the Internet of Things and don’t need to carry a device around.
We have lost. Whatever comes next will be a civilization created by people other than us and hostile to us.
The ridiculousness of your proposals only further prove how the whole thing isn’t fixable.
Also, the fatal problems precede the invention of the smart phone. I don’t know what you hope to accomplish by banning them.
Well, I just read that on my phone. A more appropriate analogy if it’s like the one ring to rule them all.
We can’t take her eyes off of it, it infects us with its malignancy, we search for it desperately If lost, and when you use it, you disappear from the real world and enter the ethereal realm of the wraiths, where the Eye of Sauron can directly see you with the greatest ease.
You know what would precipitate the removal of mobile phones, a total technological collapse. And coincidentally that would also get rid of birth control with take care of a lot of problems. After the Bronze Age collapse it was 400 years before the first cities formed again. That’s 20 Generations. I think about that a lot
I have a 1 and half year old who loves to play smart phones, tablets, and laptops. She picked up the mechanics of it so fast! I have to pay attention to how much “screen” time she’s getting and do my best to get to read and play with her toys. It is my responsibility to teach my child the importance of socializing in real life instead of social media.
While it would amazing to go backwards, I think the cat is out of the bag and its unlikely. There is too much money, power, and control in this technology and the ruling class would never give up any of that. I think a better use of our time and resources is to focus on paying attention to those people in our lives who you may have some influence with. Spend quality time with those people! Or if you need to do more, look to running for a local government position where you might impact your local community. Many of the same issues we face on a macro level, we also face on the micro level.
I’ve been advocating for killing social media since I heard about the illegal facebook experiments trying to manipulate people moods (they could).
I can do without the phone camera (generally shitty pictures), though it does come in handy sometimes for work, but I could plan ahead.
20 something years ago I went into a favorite dive bar of mine and someone was shooting an indie movie. I had to sign a waiver to go into the back room to shoot pool and ended up being background in an extended scene. I knowingly entered an agreement with another private entity to be filmed. That’s how it should work.
Music is another thing that needs changing, or going back to the early to mid 90s. Rock was still dominant in the culture and on radio, and it actually still sort of reflected genuine culture at the city level (even if you don’t like the stuff that came out of Seattle, it grew organically out of that time and place). Only a very small portion of people like the gruntings of the subnormal, promethazine-drinking black underclass. But it’s blasted everywhere now and it’s a soul-killing, soul-draining, dignity-robbing affront. I always remember what my friend told me about the night the DJ at a boxing match rebelled and played nothing but Sinatra for the whole night. No one complained, and this was a majority black and brown crowd.
Music is another way in which we’re atomized and isolated. Globohomo doesn’t want music that comes from somewhere. You mentioned the Seattle scene of the 90s, with Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, etc. A bit before that in the 80s, there was a scene in Minneapolis with the Replacements, Husker Du, the Suburbs, and Soul Asylum and others. At the same time, the Southeast was nurturing REM, the B52’s, the Db’s and more. And before that New York City had a scene that Talking Heads, the Ramones, Blondie, etc. came from. I don’t know enough about popular music today to know exactly how it’s determined what gets produced and what gets promoted, but it’s obviously not a result of bands slugging it out through hard work, endless gigs, developing a devoted following, etc. It seems more a result of top down boardroom decisions, that they think will appeal globally. As one example, look at the Super Bowl halftime show this year and the last few years. As America becomes just a place for the world, so does the music and entertainment.
I think a better analogy is smartphones are like the one ring to rule them all. We can’t take our eyes off of it, it infects us with its malignancy, we search for it desperately If lost and when we use it we disappear from the real world and enter the ethereal realm of the wraiths, where the Eye of Sauron can directly see us with the greatest ease.
Nice thought experiment, today, Z – what’s up for tomorrow; revoking women’s suffrage or repatriating Blacks to the Dark Continent? 😉
I am totally with you on the photo thing. I think it should be illegal to post or publish a photo or video anywhere without the subject’s permission. Of course, that will also never happen either; makes it harder for the snitchers.
The mobile phones will go away eventually but not by legislation, the technology – and the rest of modern civilization – will collapse after the death of The Last White Man. Then again, the East Aisers can probably keep it going…
I have noticed myself getting on Twitter and Facebook less and less just like I notice myself watching sports ball less often.
The half time show in the Super Bowl is an example, it was so repulsive that I just walked away and came back in the third quarter.
I don’t think it’s possible to go as far as the Z wants without something major happening in our ruling structure but I do think many normal people will be so repulsed by where social media and media in general is going that we will self regulate ourselves to some degree away from modern media.
Great article, Mr. Z.
I agree with Mr. Glenfilthie: it is a people problem.
This is not an excuse, but for us corporate drones, my super phone is the way I access the internet during the day. This very blog is blocked on my work computer as hate speech (liberal blogs are OK).
Liability for recording or disseminating a person’s image without their consent is already “the law” (your ticket stub at a sportsball event includes a waiver of that right). But along with all of the rights enshrined in the constitutions of the old Soviet Democratic People’s Republic and the US founding agreement, we live by the rule of men, not laws.
Burma just banned social media. It can be done. They also have the best cheroots. Thinking of moving there.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/6/22269831/myanmar-orders-block-twitter-facebook-instagram-military-coup
Good luck with that…
Another thing we can do is organize localized push-backs against the petty progressive tyranny of our neighbors by using the power of county authorities, principally the sheriff’s department and county commissioners. If these authorities don’t want to enforce the WuFlu mandates or gun restrictions, even in Blue states, the results can be very inspiring. See this article…
https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/horowitz-constitutional-sanctuary-movement-begins-to-grow
Once Pandora’s Box is opened it’s impossible to return it’s contents. Prohibition. Nukes. Darwin. Anti-social behavior, crime, loneliness, isolation, suicide, drug & alcohol abuse all aggravated by this lock down and the spread of totalitarianism. Most people would prefer to put down their phones and go bowling, play softball, take a date to the movies, Boy Scouts, YMCA, Loyal Order of the Raccoons, take in a baseball game, if they were allowed to.
“Most people would prefer to put down their phones and go bowling, play softball, take a date to the movies, Boy Scouts, YMCA, Loyal Order of the Raccoons, take in a baseball game, if they were allowed to.”
No, they wouldn’t. That’s projection.
The panopticon state will create all sorts of consequences. On a convo with one of my directs last week she mentioned her BIL who just put in his 20 year papers with the NYPD. Loved his job, would have worked for 30, but after this summer and the realization that you are only one optically bad and highly edited encounter away from being fired and left pensionless decided it was not worth it. Got a new job in a small city dept in another state in a snap–as those department love to get guys with “big city” training and experience Most of his colleagues are of the same mindset to the point that the department is “throttling” retirements. Floyd is a good example—we saw 8 minutes, not the whole body cam array showing the real story—or the autopsy. This will accelerate the chaos in the blue cities–can’t replace that experience with probies hired under the now very relaxed standards.
Step #5 The Road Back
The road back will be a slog, not a sprint. And it will be a journey of persistence and endurance for which few, if any, of the first wave will likely live to see the fruits of their labor. This mindset is crucial to success. We have become a damaged and dysfunctional species that lives in the moment and demands instant gratification. And there is no magic bullet with which to beat a cancerous tyranny ruling over a whiny and parasitic people. The first step back is to restore the robustness that our ancestors bestowed upon us. And that takes time and relentless determination.