caught in the net

Dude, seriously, why in the hell would you care????? You're going to be eligible for Social Security soon, relax... It's *not* your world anymore... Let it go... Step back... Stake out a spot, keep the idiots out, and enjoy the rest of your life... Remember when you stick your toe in someone else's mud puddle, usually it's going to come out dirty...

Scott Adams blog commenter COWG

This is a good philosophy. I’ve practiced it pretty much all my life. Too bad it doesn’t work. Just because you decide that you’re going to leave them alone doesn’t mean they will leave you alone. Yeah, you can stake out a spot and try to keep the idiots out, but there’s one set of idiots, the big guys, who will insist upon knowing what you’re up to and believe they have the right to know it. They think the whole world is their mud puddle. You can keep as low a profile as you can, but unless you’re determined that you will comply with their every little whim, eventually you’re going to run afoul of their petty laws, rules, and regulations. And nowhere is this more relevant than on the internet. If you want to stay off their radar, start by staying off the net. And, to my mind, that’s not a valid way to spend the rest of my life.

It’s a difficult and far from mainstream effort to stake out your own spot, keep your head down, and keep the idiots out if you maintain a presence on the net. The only way to effectively do it is to be a part of the vast and growing alternative net undercurrent: proxies, VPNs, DarkNet, etc. And if you do, they will try to ferret you out, with whatever two-steps-behind effort. And it doesn’t matter how close to Social Security you are. They’re persecuting grandmothers now just for doing what half the population of the world is doing.

Oppression is upon us, and the elitists are not going to give up until they either get all of your money and put you in the gaol if they must or you get to them first and put an end to their domination. The only other way is to get yourself a place in wilds of Montana, stock it with everything you need, get all of whatever else your daily living requires from a local store, and—especially—stay off the goddamn net! Because, if they’re going to get you, that’s the way they’re going to do it, son.

corporate abuse

I want to belong to K-Mart’s Shop Your Way bonus club for the reward points that I can deduct from my purchases, but I don’t want to receive their promo emails; but the club policy requires that, if am a member, I must receive these emails. Therefore, even though I agree to receive them by default, I still consider them to be scum spam and I treat them accordingly by dismissing them outright and relegating them to the trash folder automatically. Maybe one day I’ll take some kind of action that more directly addresses this "disrespect” (for lack of a better word; “abuse” is probably too strong) of customers who spend money at their stores.

This issue is larger and more profound than K-Mart, though. It was not all that long ago that most customer service reps would bend over backwards to satisfy a complaining customer; but no longer. Now they tell you when you complain that they’re sorry (they’re still required to be polite) but they can do nothing for you because the issue is a matter of policy. Oh, I see. You have a policy. Well, that makes it all right then. I do admit that a certain type of customer will abuse the former bend-over-backwards policy, but then I could care less if corporations are abused—because, despite law to the contrary, they are not individual people, they are non-living  entities and thus by definition cannot be (psychologically) abused.

OTOH, corporations abuse customers all the time. In fact, the argument can be made that the very existence of corporations as individuals is a form of abuse. But, beyond that, selling by and large is no longer so much a means of providing a quality product or service as it is a means of getting as much money as possible for as little quantity and quality as possible; or IOW, maximization of profits. This is a form of customer abuse. It treats the customers as if they are idiots, which, unfortunately many of them are, which is why the corporations can get away with what they do. And the government supports the corporations because it is bought and paid for by them; and it’s probably too late to reverse this. The corruption has gone too far. No “peoples’ representative” is going to bite the hand that feeds them.

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The Oppression of the Zombie Dead

Until we understand how we are obliged to lead our lives in ways we don’t particularly enjoy (“The mass of men enter into social and productive relations independent of their will.”—Marx), until we understand more of those reasons why so many of us feel dead inside so much of the time, yes, until we recognize how much of that is not due solely to our lack of imagination or the grinding confines of a responsible life, but is also the product of vast institutional systems of greed, injustice, and manipulation that we are schooled to perceive as relatively benign manifestations, we have arrived nowhere. The only way I can tell something terrible is going on is that I feel a little duller than I ought to. Very often that’s at the end of a long chain, you might say, of social processes designed to keep us malleable, amenable, and short on such powerful emotions as outrage at injustice.

Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art

What percentage of the populace has to be anti-government before the government collapses? How many people have to be declared outlaws? How many people must routinely break laws they consider unfair? How many put into prison or saddled with an arrest record? Surely the rates to all those phenomena are rising and have been for quite some time until they now near a critical mass and the established powers are finding themselves besieged and thus fighting back as best they can, believing that to be their only defense. And they are not ineffective at it, just wrong. They are devastating in their death-throe lashings. Oppression is a natural, very human inclination of those like-minded individuals whose propensity is to form into a cohesive group to insulate themselves against any wayward type of thought process to make certain their own decided way of life predominates, and they set about to make sure their domination prevails, pushing back against all forces of change that do not benefit their cabalistic position. They may be the past, but the past hangs on for as long as it can. And meanwhile people unjustly suffer and die. I too feel a little duller. And the only way I now how to stir myself up to fight back is to write: Death to all tyrants. The only problem is, the tyrants don’t believe they are; and if you put them to death, then you become the tyrant. So we die inside instead, little by little, and the oppression continues. But there’s a light beyond the darkness:

If you don't want people to use the dark net, don't mess up the legit networks with back doors and warrantless wiretaps, 'express lanes,' censorship, using them for political pressure. … Or people will create worse versions and route around you.

The Huffington Post

They just don’t get it. Their greed and hubris blind them to reality. The truth is, if they’re going to coerce people into bending to their will, the people will find another way to do what they want to do. They’ll do an end run, they always do, and there are a whole lot more ends today than there used to be. Progress used to be slow so that the oppressors might survive a lifetime in their oppressive roles and die natural deaths. But with technology speeding up geometrically there’s no way the oppressors can maintain the oppression in postmodern society. They’re going down. Their days are numbered. They’re increasingly becoming irrelevant. They can’t keep it up. The anti-system will increasingly press in on them. Their defense of the realm will get harsher and harsher the harder it is to maintain. Increasing numbers of citizens will die as the oppressors try to keep the system together. But they’re already dead but just don’t know it yet, which is what the popularity of the zombie symbolism is all about: they’re the walking dead and we’re cutting off their heads all around the world.

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Holywood

Corporations and their agents and salesmen are predators, and you are their prey. If you believe yourself to be a customer, you are duped in exactly the way they want you to be. The concept of customer is rapidly going the way of the horse and buggy. There is no better example of this than Holywood, the fictional land that we worship because it tells us what we are supposed to think and, especially, to feel. The Holywood corporations’ customers are turning to piracy in logarithmically expanding numbers because the corporations are unwilling to give them what they want, movies that are not so exorbitantly priced (if even available in certain foreign countries) and immediate access to digital versions of released films. Theaters too, the Holywood churches distributed throughout the world, are dying, but the corporate millionaires just can’t let go of the billions that their price gouging nets them to settle for mere multi-millions in online digital sales. Instead, they choose to continue to disaffect larger and larger numbers of their current and would-be customers through arbitrary lawsuits of helpless citizens, the bribery of politicians, and the manipulation of governments around the world, increasingly alienating public opinion.

Yes, Holywood is going away, even as are (though, admittedly, far, far too slowly) the religions of the world as the intelligence of atheism spreads the truth and science dispels the myths and superstitions we have suffered with for far too long. It’s a dead-end, Sodom and Gomorrah town, but it just doesn’t know it yet. Maybe that’s why they make so many zombie movies. They’re so self-involved. Compare independent vs. Hollywood movies: art vs. lowest common denominator sensationalism; e.g., Winter’s Bone vs. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. We would all be better served if Holywood would just fade away completely, but it will continue to put up a desperate fight trying to take down as many people as it can with it. Maybe if the mindless masses of mental morons who are titillated by tits and asses and violence and gore went to better movies, they might raise their intelligence just a little bit. Any little bit will help the species. But out and out death is probably much better.


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can't steal this

Our moral dictionary says no heisting from each other. To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral. [Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book]

Time to turn to something new. (Everything old is new again.) The issue for me is not the narrow focus of the piracy itself. There are far larger legal and political issues here: The mainstream culture/system we live under is based on oppression. This is the traditional criticism of capitalism by Marxism: The proletariat is incorporated into the system as wage-slaves. But, though capitalism is dying, its death throes are devastating.

The world is about to change, threatening to enable true democracy. Free interchange of data, including (one’s own) ideas is available. The Internet has changed everything and threatens the status quo. Used to be we could loan a friend or neighbor a disk; but what if… Our best friend or next-door neighbor may be half-a-world away.

I buy a product but I do not own it, ownership is retained by the seller. The problem is with the erroneous concept of “intellectual property.” Jefferson did not believe in copyright and compromised at three years. Now, for some products, it is the lifetime of the author plus seventy.

Before 1900, music was performed; now the issue is recordings. The entire essence of music is repetitive performance. A musician creates a song every time s/he performs it. Recordings subvert this process, introducing conformity. The (recorded) musician is no longer a performance artist. S/he is now a business person, locked into a business system.

Writing is similar, the intellect creating via performance. And then the intellectual journey is over for the writer. Time for the writer then to sell his work and start again. And if others copy it, that’s just business, not writing. But artists want to live off their past performance. What if painters retained their ownership of art they sold? Oh, wait, they do, when they put it on the internet. Images, mass produced, have become intellectual property.

This all inhibits further ongoing performance. Artists should create until they die, that’s the whole point. That’s what being an artist means: doing (performing) art.

Ideas and (mental) images are free; people who buy might be stupid. If they buy as a beneficent means of supporting an artist, great. If they buy because they want a mass produced hard copy, fine. If they buy as a matter of convenience, okay; so be it. In the past, it was convenient to buy a book or a painting. Going to a library or an art gallery was less convenient. So, how is getting a book at a library different from copying it? Being in permanent possession is somehow different from a loan?

It’s not the item being owned or loaned that’s important, but content. And content resides in brains, not books or digital files. “Content” is useless unless it is interpreted by a brain. This is what net connections are all about, the connection of brains. Which is why I say that copyright is an erroneous precept. [Caveat: I live in this system, and if it insists I participate, well, then… You better not steal my ideas unless you make all ideas free. And yet…I am seriously considering the Gandhian principle: “Be the change.”]

Anti-piracy and copyright is okay only if you believe in the system. If, as a pirate, you support capitalism, then you are acting illogically. But if you see through the farce into the basic oppression beneath it… Faux-democracy capitalism must prevent piracy at all costs. That’s why it pours so much money into a dying enterprise. They could make nearly as much money by closing down the theaters. They could make nearly as much by releasing products immediately. But they’d pull down the lid of their coffin, by allowing true freedom. We can’t have any of this democracy stuff here, it’s bad for business. So the “authorities” say: Thou shalt not share files, yet they deem some entities worthy of still owning what they have sold, the fact that we have bought it being irrelevant.

a whole lot more

The effect on me of the raid and shutdown of Pirate Bay has been that I have learned a whole lot more about how to download torrents and, especially, how to find magnets without the aid of a piracy search engine; and how to do all that far more safely. The MPAA and the RIAA have done more to promote piracy than they’ve done to inhibit it. Every time they make some dramatic move, piracy increases by leaps and bounds. I seriously doubt there’s any way to stop it now short of shutting down the internet. It seem inevitable that democracy (of a libertarian sort), though it may not prevail within the system as a whole, will become the order of the day on the internet—or at the very least on the Dark Net.

systemic bigotry

I wrote, a while ago, ten or twelve years maybe—and this opinion may have been (a bit) truer back then; or else I may just have been deluded)—that systemic bigotry against minorities was slowly but significantly disappearing and all that was left was (more or less) isolated individual bigots acting outside of the official policies and procedures of the system. Whether or not that was more the case back then, it is certainly not the case now. Either I was wrong or we have backslid as a culture; or some combination of both. This is the case, at the very least, among police departments, but probably it’s true throughout the “system” that “runs” our culture; bigotry prevails as a systemic problem, and it seems to be getting worse. Bigots react against the bits of freedom and equality that minorities win for themselves via protest, persistence, and activism. The rock-headed and/or brainwashed Neanderthals and their clinging, sycophantic women can’t stand it that society is gradually turning to the left. It always does, except when the fascists rebel against it to temporarily set back the course of history and intelligence. And they are backlashing now, in the persons of police officers who stand defiantly against a culture that is intent upon changing for the better. The cops represent a large bloc of idiots who are crawling out of their holes in the earth to “support their local police.” Can you say “race war”?

thugs or idiots

♫Just like every cop is a criminal…♫

All cops are either thugs or stupid. You have to be a thug or an idiot to want to become a police officer in the first place. And, for a majority of cops, you also have to be a Neanderthal. If someone would do a long-term study, they’d discover that all of the rookies who would have graduated into good police officers quit after a few years when they find out what it’s really like to be a cop. I base this premise on the fact that those cops who would otherwise actually be good cops are in fact not, simply because, in order to be that good cop, they must choose to turn a blind eye on what’s going on among their fellow officers, which is what makes them a bad cop. You can’t be a good cop and ignore the bad ones in your ranks. Frank Serpico was an extreme rarity. As a law enforcement officer, you have a duty to weed them out. That’s why every cop is a criminal, by deed or by implication and association.

ineffectual property

The music industry, and later the movie industry, weren’t on top of the technology; they let it get way out ahead of them, probably because it would have cost too much to gear up to it. So how much is it costing them now? Hundreds, maybe thousands of times more than it would have if they hadn’t been looking to make the greatest profit possible and failing to develop long term plans. They deserve privacy. They throttled down the public’s access to their products because they couldn’t find their way to a business model that would incorporate the new technology. So consumers went ahead and developed that technology themselves, and released it onto the world for free. Then, out of their desperation, instead of taking their licks and gearing up as Johnny-Come-Latelies, the corporations went crying to the government to help them protect the “intellectual property” that “pirates” were “stealing” as a result of the industries’ own incompetence. This is a perfect case of blaming the victim for what you do to yourself.