THE economic situation of the year 2020 is awkward. Almost all attention was paid to COVID-19, more so than the US election, rising national debt (public liabilities), austerity measures, and the surging power/wealth of Western oligarchs. "Looters" is a label used to describe the beggars, not the people who rendered them beggars (and then pretend to be "job creators" who save the world). We're supposed to blame everything on a virus; to suggest otherwise is "crazy", so it's safer to ignore that many of the bailouts (or "stimulus") ended up in offshore (tax avoidance) bank accounts of very rich people, some of whom are vaccine profiteers with a grip on the media.
"In the West, the total wealth amassed by just thousands of individuals almost exceeds the total national debt, so one might joke that all that money collectively indebted... is 'loans' from grifting oligarchs, who not only took that money but want more of it back with interest."Astoundingly enough, media in the hands of Western oligarchs refuses to call those Western oligarchs what they truly are (the term "Russian oligarchs" is more popular, albeit it describes more or less the same characteristics which we find in the West). There are protests in Russia right now, but COVID-19 is used as a pretext to arrest those who participate (the general over public there knows it's being looted by the regime and the regime arrests those who present evidence). In the West, the total wealth amassed by just thousands of individuals almost exceeds the total national debt, so one might joke that all that money collectively indebted... is 'loans' from grifting oligarchs, who not only took that money but want more of it back with interest.
What does any of this have to do with tech and with rights? We'll get to it in a moment.
As is widely known, technology companies (telecom, social control media, OS vendors) work towards oppressing the population on behalf of abusive regimes. Those regimes might change their faces every now and then, but the same oligarchs remain in charge 'from the shadows'...
Want a progressive person, who fights for the common man and woman?
You can't have that. All you can have is empty "MAGA" rhetoric of fascism, led and funded (literally sponsored) by oligarchs. We know their names. Some sites have the "receipts"...
They want us to think that the reason they do all this is "social responsibility", guarding us from misinformation and dangerous lunatics such as "QAnon". But those are straw man arguments that suit their agenda.
Microsoft, Bill Gates, and Jeff Epstein aren't enemies of one another. In fact, conveniently enough the whole Epstein episode helped remove Richard Stallman (RMS of GNU fame) from power, at least temporarily. Gates and Epstein come from the same system, they were groomed by the same system, and they see eye to eye (class identity).
When one finds oneself in positions of great power, facilitated by growing wealth (partly provided by one's government in the form of military contracts among other "lucrative" contracts), one loses track of what's right and what's wrong. Power begets more power and the population is bound to lose any sense of involvement in the political process.
Russia is protesting. Russia is tired of the lie that the masses should just "eat snow" and be eternally poor (the country itself -- as a whole -- isn't poor or doesn't need to be poor).
And back we come to tech and to rights. The right to express oneself is going away, but many aren't aware of it. The right to communicate with other people is also going away, and it's easier to attain that when people are home-bound and policies are passed to restrict online speech (which nowadays is almost all speech, for anything else would be "unsafe" and "irresponsible").
Techrights intends to embark on a long fight for free speech and sharing online, seeing that under all sorts of bogus pretexts (like sedition/insurrection spun as merely a "riot" to pass new laws against protests) we have speech and pen pals equated with swords.
While it's true that sometimes speech can be weaponised to incite violence, we ought not allow straw man arguments to dominate the debate/discourse. While conspiracy theories (basically nonsense) do exist, we ought not let dissatisfaction over the passage of wealth (and asymmetric power structures that imperil true democracy) be spun as "conspiracy theory" or a "call for violence".
The solutions to the existing problems would likely not be policy-based. And why? Because policy is written by (and for) the oligarchs, by proxy. They've got the system "by the balls" (or the wallets). So we must adopt technical means to bypass the abuses and weaken oligarchy. We need to bypass censorship, centralisation, surveillance and so on. Those are technical challenges. Policies won't be on our side. ⬆