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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