TOTW: How do you use your cyberspace?

It's no surprise that anarchists would reject the internet entirely as being used for liberatory purposes. After all, it started out as ARPANET by the military, with the obvious intent of further dominating their territory as well as U.S. controlled locations abroad abroad. This ended up working perfectly as a business model as well in late capitalism, with the internet becoming a giant data collection scheme.

However, many caught on to how easily they could subvert these purposes for distributing free entertainment, encrypt their communications, and find even crazier outlets for counter-cultural activities. Part of the reason I use the internet is that it allows me to avoid cable television, with the constant flux of ads and ridiculous propaganda. This is not to say that it hasn't caused problems for me. To me, the internet has largely been an experiment with how I would like to better interact with it.

How has the internet aided your desire to be free of authority? Has it aided you in this purpose? How have you changed your internet habits to suite this purpose?

[Thanks to anonymous for this guest TOTW received via email]

There are 60 Comments

i've learned of the world (including anarchy) mainly from the internet. i have no life. without internet, would my life be richer? i'd probably know less things, including the things that i like the most, and have had many less interesting conversations.

in the past the youth were given the choice between love, and the garbage disposal unit. everywhere they chose the garbage disposal unit. but that was then, now...

I AM BECOME GARBAGE DISPOSAL UNIT, SHIT-POSTER OF WORDS

For me, the online space is about encountering ideas as they battle each other, usually not in a dignified way. More of a cringey slap fight between two old drunks who can barely stand.

Watching people throw strawman arguments past each other is perfect for if you need help taking off your rose coloured glasses!

I still get a thrill every time I hit the send button. I have 4 screens in my room (TV, laptop, tablet, phone) I like to get them all going at the same time. I feel like a mad scientist with my whirlygigs and whizbangs. It is a self imposed exile if you retire from the world and if you try to go back you take Cyberia with you.

I intuited that somehow you were not an outdoorsie nature type who enjoyed fresh air and manly outdoor activities.

you'd be surprised. i intuit that they skate and know a couple of neat tricks on the skateboard.

skate and ride a bike but now I carry a phone so I still have an uplink. I would say I'm about fully recovered from internet addiction because I got over Linux once handheld devices became popular. There were a few years where all I wanted to do was sit in front of my PC but thankfully I had a moment of clarity and hit the street.

i do ... hope that comment was completely sarcastic.

"...I carry a phone so I still have an uplink. I would say I'm about fully recovered from internet addiction..."

is like food addiction you don't have to give it up completely to recover from it. You just have to work a program and live a balanced life because too much of anything can be deleterious.

how can i make a topic of the week? just for the sake of knowing, not that i have any particular idea at the moment

email: thecollective [at] anarchistnews [dot] org

thanks

It's a constant tension and apprehension that's for sure.

It may be useful to initially split the internet up into
>Internet the infrastructure - where it becomes a broader topic of technology
And
>Content - this is what I'm referring to below

A large plus for me is the easy access to a large body of theoretical work.

I have yet to have had a meaningful conversation, at least beyond email.

Social media is poison in the sense of opioids, and after experiments with it I've abandoned it completely.

I was, and many with me I think, quite optimistic about the internet early on. but there was a shift during the 00's. Now I harbor no illusions.

Im painfully aware and paranoid about the surveillance capitalism-aspect of internet. I also lack the energy to give a shift.

I love TOTW.
The internet is liking being on Pleasure Island in the Pinocchio movie. It is seemingly limitless in terms of interactions (both open and hostile), knowledge ,and plunder. But in the background I know the corporates and the state track your every move. Google has websites that maps where your posts and searches are coming from.
The internet reinforces anarchy by allowing axis to anarchist news, texts, podcast, chats , etc. All the authorities need are a few incidents to limit its use

" avoid cable television, with the constant flux of ads and ridiculous propaganda"

if the second part of that sentence does not correctly describe the internet just as much as cable television (which i have not seen for at least a couple decades), i'd love to know what internet you are using.

as someone old enough to remember dialing up to bulletin boards on a 300 baud modem (as an adult), i can remember the pre-internet days all the way through these days that are completely dominated by the internet.

there is no doubt that disseminating information across a much broader audience is much easier now with the internet. and so finding information is also much easier (with a huge asterisk referring to the quality - and validity - of that info). i have come to the conclusion that the one real benefit i can see is this:

the internet provides a really good window into the absolute best and the absolute worst of human intelligence, creativity and activity. the ability to coerce has become almost universal, and i doubt even george orwell could have come up with a better tool for it.

all that makes it absolutely clear to me that any benefits are far outweighed by the drawbacks. i use the internet, as i use the state: as tools when i need them, and as enemies to be avoided when i don't.

I wanted to respond since this is my TOTW. Yeah, the internet is a huge propaganda machine. The difference between internet and TV is the huge amount of relative control. I even installed ad blocker and no script to black all the stupid pop ups and ads. YouTube still hasn't figured out a way to get me to give a shit about their ads so I'm good on that.

I dialed up a BBS was on an IBM XT 4.77 Mhz Intel 8088. In some ways it was better because you could still read email, forums and chat and play games without all the commercial hoopla but it still wasn't free you needed a phone line.

It seems to me, the internet has accelerated abstraction and subjectivity toward an objective endgame-of-sorts.

Without the internet I'd probably not have acknowledged anarchy or being anarchist by this point. I suspect I'd probably have continued being an impulsively criminal weebly who simply hated bullies in frustratingly nuanced ways while acquiescing to a socialist mode of government.

Urgh!

Who knows, the prevailing narrative could have had me comfortable with its systemic rot and protective of its antagonism.

Uuuurgh!

WTF?

Funny how I should dislike it so much now.

Whatever...

The plastic-anarchists of North America would doubtlessly call it Activism in a most disdainful manner, but the internet is for ATTACK. As our good friend Jeremy Hammond showed us solidly in his numerous attacks on police stations and corporate spooks that anyone can do it have they the Will too.

All them not saying thay use internet porn like thay not bad
Sex not bad but killing is bad how cum peepill say porn bad but war killing ok
Grown up sex ok grown up killing bad trump wall bad wars bad

But me good, because it's me and me not u. Duh!

member wen b4
internet bored n alone
u had 2 bare it?

here in Cyberia where we can meet up anytime. Only thing is I gave up some social life in the real world when I started staying home but oh well everything has consequences.

I run a political blog and participate in disucussions on Reddit, typically. I used to have Facebook accounts and to recycle/discard them regularly, but when FB started to crack down on privacy/anonymity, I left that place.

Yeah I quote Facebook a long time ago because I ended up getting into arguments with ppl, when I recently tried to join they shut down my profile because I had a bear picture instead of my face, fuck them

again, alright. I've been losing them 2o or 3o @ a time, FB must be deleting fake accounts, mostly hookers. People who show their butts on their profile photos are pretty easy to get along with. Now I have over 1ooo Twitter followers, must've broke into a new network. Nobody likes me much, maybe when they get to know me. Could be bots or just haterz. They write in funny letters, maybe Arabic ¿

U baad GO3 u no like hookers
Thay make sex good u hate sex then ub baad

Wow you must be cracking mirror/ screen ugly huh?
I know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder,
But......

My mama doesn't even want to see me. Correction - Beauty is in the eye of the BEER holder. Some of the ugliest people breed. I have colorful accessories, I can dance.

You're a beautiful person inside
* quotes from -- The Ten Best Pick Up Phrases in the Known Universe--*

I never understand why anarchists use that great information transmission belt to the cops commonly known as Facebook for anything more than propaganda purposes to the general public. Mind you when Wikileaks exposed the sheer level of internet surveillance I learned how to use PGP within 24 hours with the common sense assumption we would all be encrypted in days. Now judging by the minimal number of cryptoparties internationally roughly 15 years later most still seem not to be encrypted and Wikileaks is a far greater folk devil than the bastards we sent to Iraq and a dozen other states to indiscriminately butcher women and kids who were just trying their best to get through the day.

RIPA type legislation will become international soon, and penalties accordingly based on assumed crime. Argument being transparency is good faith, non-transparency traitorous or anti-community.
The term Freedom of Speech has been dissected down to raw intent.

And which legislation? International as in "platenary-wide", or just NATO-wide?

petulant? ha! you can’t insult me with words i don’t know!

not even close to hipster.

shit is something my body makes, it’s good manure

http://blog.ninapaley.com/2019/02/04/why-i-dont-use-preferred-pronouns/

Why I Don’t Use “Preferred Pronouns”
The short answer is I use SEX pronouns, not GENDER pronouns.

What activists call mis-gendering is in fact correct-sexing. What “preferred pronouns” demand is mis-sexing, which requires a lot of mental bandwidth.

Like most mammals, I can’t help but identify someone’s sex with +99% accuracy. (A tiny minority of humans intentionally “pass” as the opposite sex, and others are ambiguous. I know a few women who refuse to perform gender entirely, and that confuses some men. Women, I think, are better at identifying sex than men, either due to instinct or conditioning for survival, since males pose threats to us [physical overpowering, rape, impregnation] they don’t pose to other men.)

Pronoun activists are conditioning everyone around them for authoritarianism. That is, they are training everyone to override their own perceptions, and replace them with what they’re told. In order to signal loyalty, friends are required to publicly lie.

That is bad for individual mental health, and the health of the community.

It is crucial to have conscious awareness of our own perceptions. All of the great social catastrophes we are taught about – Naziism, Fascism, the Slave Trade – make us ask, “how could people DO that??” The answer is, BY DENYING THEIR OWN PERCEPTIONS. We lose our ability to resist or think when we deny the reality in front of our very eyes. No matter how well-intentioned, “preferred pronouns” condition exactly that.

Manage your own perceptions; you don’t get to control mine.

P.S. I don’t “correct” anyone for mis-sexing. If a man perceives himself a woman (or animal, or helicopter) I don’t deny him his own perception. If his friends call him “she” I don’t interfere. His friends, however, often aggressively police others, demanding they change their own perceptions. Everyone is free to identify however they wish, but they don’t get to control how others identify them.

I first heard about Nina as someone who hates copyright law as culture should be free to all as it flows though us.

She is the type of gal I like to have around, who calls a spade a spade.,.

no sarcasm intended. I think re-appropriating perception as being YOUR OWN rather than it being some currency passed between THE OTHERS is what anarchism should be all about, as well as having fun. I'm glad I never got caught up in the left-idpol counter culture. The "oppressed" identity garbage has clearly made its way into mainstream media though, so I can't really say its a counter-culture anymore.

If there was a Comment of the Week, 09:57 would be the winner. It is a raw and sexy plea for all of us to be honest and bona fide individuals in autonomous relationships.

addicted

*whispers* Mommy dearest, can I have your opioid suppositories, I have many non-aggressive perceptions to engage with?

Personal background
Slackware Linux
Athlon XP 2000
Shuttle AK32A Spacewalker
512mb PC2100 DDR-RAM
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I think it's neat.
SETI@home member since 30 Dec 2002
SETI@home classic workunits 1,093
SETI@home classic CPU time 9,625 hours
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers.

Is there an actual moron in here who still follows SETI, with all the UFOs going around in hidden plain view?

many caught on to how easily they could subvert these purposes for distributing free entertainment, encrypt their communications, and find even crazier outlets for counter-cultural activities.

Nothing is free and encryption is only a false sense of security. Ask yourself why would Russia test disconnecting itself from the internet and what does that mean if they succeed? Who really produces and controls the infrastructure that you believe gives you this cyberspace fun and freedom?

Part of the reason I use the internet is that it allows me to avoid cable television, with the constant flux of ads and ridiculous propaganda.

You can always put up an antenna for TV or is that not "free" enough for you? This site is primarily ads and ridiculous propaganda of the anarchist kind!

Who could have figured out that @news is run by a hub of the deep state! We are all hubs for THEM, to spread statecraft and coercion! ABANDON TECHNOLOGY AND CUT ALL THEIR CABLES!

@news is run by a hub of the deep state

No, only that they are using a network that is built and monitored by the state. It doesn't matter if you rent a building with some hardware in it that you purchased off Newegg to run your little site. The network infrastructure is monitored. The hardware you buy can have numerous back doors along with the software being used (including the OS). All data can be captured off the network then stored and decrypted as needed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

on*

How has the internet aided your desire to be free of authority?

It hasn't.

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