That doesn’t surprise me. I think he’s probably a socdem at best these days, specifically the kind of lib that thinks that we are in Bad Capitalism and if we just trust bust enough, we can go back to Good Capitalism, and all the smaller companies definitely won’t just devour each other and repeal regulations, putting us in this exact position or worse in another 20-30 years.

I’ve read his newsletter and that was enough.

There’s going to be a great need to properly educate the working class in the west before there’s much hope of socialism gaining any traction. They keep people just educated enough to innoculate them against critical thinking. I forget the exact statistics, but a depressing number of people have not read a single book in their entire adult lives.

They’re sovereign.

American tech companies. American national security organs cannot touch them, cannot put the hurt on them. They are independent and there is nothing Meta, Google, Oracle, etc can do to them. Look at Europe, look at the rest of the world on Facebook and Oracle products with a big gun right at their temple held in the CIA’s hand if they do something the US doesn’t like. China doesn’t have that gun at its head and because of that China can be truly sovereign from the US.

As someone who has lived in China for many years, including now, I have to say it’s really not great for accessing the World Wide Web. Within China, the accessible internet is basically a Chinese national intranet. Which is not terrible if you are a native Chinese speaker, I guess. They censor because the US sending out massive propaganda. But China’s government is producing a lot of domestic propaganda, too. Different goals - the US to destabilize and take over, China to stabilize and maintain support for the system.

As I have lived here many years, I’ve put in a great deal of effort to learn the language. Unfortunately, with limited results. Learning to read and write in Chinese requires a structured learning environment and about 10 years of focus for most people. Due to illiteracy in Chinese I can’t just switch to using the Chinese intranet. And the government keeps cracking down on VPNs. It can be very frustrating accessing the internet outside the GFW. And frankly there is a lot of useful and interesting content that exists outside the GFW.

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Yes, the best book on this is Yasha Levine - Surveillance Valley . You can find the audiobook on torrents.

The purpose the the very first DoD networks, was as an anti-communist counter-insurgency tool, mainly to aid in the collection of data and the fight against communists in SE asia, particularly Vietnam.

No, because it is not true. The Internet started as an idea for decentralized communications that the military could use in case of nuclear war. Then DARPA got the universities involved and it became a way to connect all the uni networks, which the unis used to share research when we were not being nuked.

Edit: When the internet first started to appear, there just wasn’t enough bandwidth to engage in surveillance, even after the uni’s got involved. No one anticipated it exploding into everyone’s household. Surveillance got tacked on later.

There was an old episode of TrueAnon about the links between Epstein (and the CIA) to MIT that went over some of this stuff. I’m sure there’s probably a book or article about it somewhere, but I don’t have any better citation at the moment.

There’s a tendency for “soft-leftists” to co-opt already existing terms in the Marxist canon, de-fang them of any revolutionary rhetoric, repackage them, and market it to the masses. Mark Fisher, Zizek, Naomi Klein, are the major culprits.

the problem is, before all the politicians were on the same level. hell france and the uk just passed meta’s age bill with ease. but now as trump is destroying everything, i as an american dont trust the system at all. before it was “the government doesnt care about you” now its “the government is out to destroy”