Motus Mentis

Well, the cat’s out of the bag (to the extent that it has been in the bag at all, lately): As we learn from undercover videos of its engineers (who mostly appear, judging by appearances and accents, to be recent arrivals to these welcoming shores), Twitter is indeed using shadow-bans to mute the voices of “conservatives”, “rednecks”, and “shitty people”.

Meanwhile, James Damore has filed suit against Google for his firing on heresy charges. May God strengthen his arm.

Back in August, I commented on Mr. Damore’s firing, and Apple CEO Tim Cook’s donation of a million dollars to the execrable SPLC:

If you’re like me (of course you are!), all this makes you want to have nothing more to do with either Google or Apple. Thinking about that, though, made me realize how hard it would be for most of us to do so.

For starters: if you have a modern cell-phone, it is almost certainly an iPhone (Apple), or some sort of Android device (Google).

Maybe you use iTunes (Apple) to play music, perhaps on your Mac (Apple again). Or maybe you use the Chrome browser (Google), and maybe you use it to do Internet searches (Google again, obviously). Perhaps you watch videos on YouTube (Google), or maybe you find your way around with Google Maps, or Google Earth. If you’re a blogger, you might well be on Blogger (Google again). There’s also a good chance you have a GMail account. (I have two.)

So: you’ve begun to realize that these very powerful companies are strongly aligned against proponents of traditional Western nations and cultures. But it’s probably also the case that you are a daily, and at this point deeply dependent, user of their products. (As I’m fond of saying, invention is the mother of necessity.) Are you prepared to give all that stuff up? I doubt it. I’m certainly not inclined to; in fact I wonder how I ever lived without it.

This is something of a problem, no?

It is actually quite a horrifying problem. It’s also easy to see how it could very rapidly get much, much worse, as more and more aspects of our everyday lives are mediated by electronic networks. All of the information we consume, the money we spend, the cars we drive (or, ere long, the cars we are shuttled around in, like Spam in a can), the books we read, our communications, our appliances — everything — is connected to, or controlled by, an Earth-girdling electronic network. (Those things that aren’t already, soon will be.) Meanwhile, at every moment we are sensed, monitored, and detected: by way of the phones we carry (notice how you can’t even disable them by removing the batteries anymore), surveillance cameras, “smart” TVs, electronic toll-booths, credit-card transactions, and — the latest thing — devices like this in our homes and cars.

We have already made ourselves utterly dependent on all of this, without, as far as I can tell, any serious consideration at all, and our dependency will only deepen, very rapidly indeed, over the next few years.

To be dependent on something is a grant of power, and more importantly, a grant of trust. To grant absolute dependency as a voluntary choice, then, which is what we appear to be doing, should entail some rational grounds for absolute trust.

Right, then. How much do you trust Google? How much do you trust this man?

Do you begin to feel the horror?