Category: InternetCategory: Internet

According to Ken Klippenstein, “the government is building a sociological profile of political discontent.”

Homeland security field agents are scouring the social media site Reddit, monitoring the communications of law-abiding Americans critical of the agency.

And if they’re scouring sites like Reddit, you know damn well they’re scouring Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and everywhere else.

Raziq Rauf from Running Sucks wrote about how some running clubs are choosing to not post about their events on social media because they don’t want to tip off ICE.

“I learned about all these run clubs from Instagram, but we’re doing a new thing where if you wanna get with South Central Run Club, you have to be in our Signal chat. South Central deals with hyper-policing. Most of our runners are Black and brown and you never know when ICE is gonna pull up. Instead of broadcasting our runs and making us vulnerable to surveillance, we stopped putting it on Instagram to make people feel safer to come and hang out.“

Exercising our legal right to free speech and protest (or just run with our friends) is hard without some of these digital tools, especially when those tools are owned by the very forces we oppose, but as Priya Parker says, “connection is the antidote to fascism.”

I love the internet. I love Zoom calls, message boards, and checking my bank accounts without visiting a branch.

I read blogs, news sites, keep up with sports, and music, and current events with intention, rather than sitting back and letting these things be curated for me by computers that are programmed to increase shareholder value and help pay for executive yachts.

Social media is a walled garden, similar to AOL back in the early 2000s. The platforms do everything they can to keep you on their service. Not on-line, but on-their-service.

“You’ll see what we show you,” they say.

Posts with outbound links don’t get seen, and sometimes links aren’t allowed at all (like Instagram).

Fresh new content is wired to your eyeballs with every swipe and scroll and refresh, giving you very little time to even click off and actually do anything “online.”

From the ‘Butch Is Not A Dirty Word’ Kickstarter:

“Our entire library lives scattered across platforms we don’t control — where every algorithm tweak and policy shift edges us closer to erasure.

If our Instagram disappeared tomorrow, ten years of work and community memory would vanish with it.”

We can’t trust the tech-bro platforms. This is why we must build our own websites and platforms that we control, outside of the greedy claws (and watchful eyes) of the Unholy Trinity.

“We’re divesting from Big Tech and building our own independent digital archive — a permanent home for a decade of history, built by us and belonging to us.”

Social media can act as an outpost, a billboard, but don’t let it become your home. I like to say that we meet our fellow freaks and weirdos at the food court at the mall, but then we grab dinner and head back to our bedrooms and back porches, to our own spaces free of corporate influence and control.

Maybe centralized kingdoms of power are a bad thing, via the ACLU:

“Recently, Apple pulled an app called ICEBlock from the AppStore, making it unavailable in one fell swoop. This app was designed to let people anonymously report public sightings of ICE agents. In the United States people absolutely have a First Amendment right to inform others about what they have seen government officials doing and where — very much including immigration agents whose tactics have been controversial and violent.”

AI slop, censorship, never ending streams of videos – this is what we get from handing over so much of our lives to the unholy trinity.

Did a surprise Substack Live today on a whim. Just me, a webcam, and my cat (Blue) losing his mind in the background. OBS melted down half the time (I have no idea what I’m doing), but here’s some threads worth pulling out:

Serving the people who already showed up

I keep saying this because it never stops being true: Notes is just social media. Chasing the feed means a few winners and everyone else shouting into the void. The only sane move is making your best work for the folks who already subscribed, not every stranger on the internet.

Why I nuked every platform except substack

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn — all deleted. The only “social” thing I use now is Substack Notes, and even then it’s more of an on-ramp to my newsletter.

(more…)