Running From the Devil

Come into my parlor said the spider to the fly.

Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash

The sun was just disappearing on the horizon as I drove into a small town on the Oregon coast. There was a sign announcing that this town was Oregon’s Best Kept Secret. I pulled into a gas station and went into the store to buy coffee and a pastry because I had a long drive ahead of me. I asked the woman at the counter what it’s like to live in Oregon’s best kept secret. She told me that it’s ironic, in that a secret by it’s nature is something you keep to yourself, and advertising it, the way her hometown did, could be considered a violation of our basic understanding of the nature of secrecy.

You meet interesting people driving through small towns.

That memory and this morning’s exploration of the end of the novel 1984, when Winston Smith is confronted with the knowledge that the leader of the revolution was fabricated by the power structure to help identify and root out dissidents, has led to this.

I am continually astounded by what, appears, to be mass acceptance of the idea that we have privacy or that there are places in the cyber realm where we think we are safe.

No where is safe.

This is most recently demonstrated by the mass exodus from Twitter, all the “conscious, caring” people ran to Blue Sky, only to find out that what Twitter is to the right, Blue Sky is to the “left,” a place where ideas and concepts are controlled and rules of engagement strictly enforced.

There are people, myself included, who are using Brave instead of Google, believing that it is less intrusive and it doesn’t track us.

But how do we know?

There is “ProtonMail a secure, privacy-focused email service designed to protect user communications through end-to-end encryption and zero-access encryption, ensuring that only the sender and recipient can read the messages — not even ProtonMail itself can access the content.”

But how do we know?

SIDENOTE: I was chatting with a librarian yesterday and she told me that she uses ProtonMail to create anonymous email accounts that she then uses to fool streaming services into giving her free trials over and over, a valid use of the technology.

You meet the most informed people in libraries.

The “Tor Browser works by sending a data packet through an entry node, a randomized relay node, and a randomized exit node. Each node only decrypts enough information in the data packet to know where to send it next, until the exit node finally contacts the website you want to access, completing the request without identifying the source.”

Does it keep you safe, no one knows.

There are not many people who truly understand the inner workings of the internet, and I would say fewer still who have plunged the depths of what control is possible anytime you turn your computer on.

On the conspiracy theory front, I am, mostly, convinced that there are giant monitoring stations that are tasked with making sure that all outcomes are accounted for and routing us toward information that supports our beliefs, fooling us into the false idea that we have outsmarted the system and that privacy is actually possible.

The internet, the cyber world, are just another distraction to keep us compliant and entertained while the world burns down around us.

FYI: It is possible that I will be moving to Los Angeles in the near future and that is going to take a lot of time and effort that may interrupt my posting schedule.

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