Are Authorities Using the Internet to Sap Our Instinct for Freedom?

I spent months thinking about this. It troubled me from the beginning of the Twitter Files story. Now, I believe Americans are not just being censored. I believe there s an equivalent effort on the front end of Internet culture to rob people of their will to be free. I believe this is is the hardest part of the Internet censorship story to understand, but also the most crucial and most dangerous.

Here I would like everyone to pause for a moment and indulge a corny exercise. If you could, please close their eyes. Imagine that instead of Google, we invent in the near future an internalized search engine, one in which our thoughts can move a cursor. A thought occurs to you: what was the name of that road-trip movie you watched ages ago with Dom Deluise, Burt Reynolds, and Farrah Fawcett?

You ask yourself the question, and mixed in with your own organic memories come machine-aided search results. In a second as it would with Alexa at home, the answer flashes behind your eyes: it was Cannonball Run! Right up there with Citizen Kane.

You can open your eyes now.

Now imagine that instead of trying to remember a silly movie, it s something more serious. You re walking down the streets of Washington and you visibly encounter a demonstration in front of the White House.

It s a gang of Boogaloo Bois, or maybe people from the Green Party, or campaigners for someone like RFK, Jr. It could be anyone. Instead of flashing labels for harm or age inappropriate content, this new app tinges certain images it finds dangerous with the same warning colors animals use in nature to warn others to stay away, like yellow or red. These protesters therefore look a bit like poisonous insects to you, bathed ever so slightly in visual menace.

Then, when you try mentally to remember what you know about the group you re looking at, you again get the search engine, which calls up a string of condemnatory headlines and words like fascist or extremist or antivax, which are just the verbal equivalents of black and yellow stripes, transparent code for threat.

With this app you ll also have internalized access to communications services like texting, Zoom, Signal etc. Do you silently capture an image and forward it on social media to tell people what you ve seen? Likely as not, you won t, unless it s to attach a negative comment, which you may do instinctively, in search of the dopamine hit of return affirmation the Internet has already proven so effective at delivering.

via www.racket.news

Matt Tiabbi. Probably true.