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Surviving the techbros--learn from the past [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-24
I’ve been thinking a lot about what we can do when the techbros throttle the Internet and feed us only what they want us to read/see/hear. And I think it’s as simple to envision as it will be difficult to implement: we go back to the basics.
I’ll be 80 this November (assuming I’m not in a camp by then for opening my big mouth and telling the Trumpenfuhrer to F off), and I grew up without tech. When I was very young, we didn’t even have a telephone, and it was a long time before we got a television.
Our first phone was on a party line: you picked up the receiver and an operator said “Number, please?” You gave her—it was always a her—the number and she put the call through. If you needed to make a long-distance call, you went through the Bell Long Lines system.
When rotary phones came in, they were so revolutionary that my school actually held a class on how to use them. Area codes were still in the future, as were ZIP codes.
We wrote letters by hand.
We had few if any food safety inspectors; we used the sniff test.
OSHA didn’t exist, yet most people worked safely, even in dangerous jobs. (My grandfather was an engineer on the Pennsylvania RR, and my uncle was a fireman).
All this is to say that 40 years ago, IOW relatively recently, we weren’t plugged in 24/7/365, we didn’t track steps or take our BP on our phones. We didn’t communicate only from behind our keyboards. Our buildings weren’t hermetically sealed—we could open a window to get fresh air, a concept that seems utterly foreign today.
So . . . we do have ways around the roadblocks.
We talk to each other in person.
We make phone calls, which will probably (hopefully) not be monitored, instead of sending texts and group chats that exist forever.
We write snail mail letters instead of sending emails, which also can be recovered. Even if they privatize the Post Office, the mail will still be delivered.
Content creators and activists who are currently doing podcasts will have it the worst, but my suggestion is to build up communication trees. The creator writes the newsletter and mails it to ten people. They make ten copies and send those on, to ten more who make ten copies, and so on. Lies will spread faster than the truth as they do now, but the truth will be out there.
Like I said, it’s massive, cumbersome, and archaic—but it could work. I hope it doesn’t come to this kind of craziness, but it might. The point is we have options.
It sounds ludicrous, a French Resistance style of clandestine operations, a secret- handshakes-at-midnight in a deserted churchyard scenario. But I prefer this byzantine scheme to kissing that man’s fat ass.
And my cat Barnaby just jumped onto the desk so he approves this message. :D
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