Just read a great article by Caitlin Johnstone over at Medium where she discusses the automation of censorship tools by companies like Twitter and Google.
Putting paid Julian Assange’s warning last year on this, Ms. Johnstone details just some of the abuses that Twitter and Google engaged in to subtly and not-so-subtly shift public perception of major issues that run counter to the narrative the power structure wants us to believe.
And it is for this reason that projects like Steemit are so very important.
I talked about how important Steem is after James O’Keefe’s latest expose of Twitter (read it here). Watching people like Mrs. Johnstone wake up to the problem is great, but she also needs to take the next step.
You can’t hack something whose underlying content is stored in a distributed blockchain. Because the blockchain’s ledger is immutable, what you wrote is preserved in all of its glory (ignominious or otherwise) forever.
As she points out, type of censorship is far worse than simply throwing books into piles and burning them. With DRM and all digital assets, inconvenient truths can be memory-holed off your Kindle never to be seen again.
Abridged versions of books can be substituted for the original text and worse.
So, the blockchain as it pertains to how we communicate is a fundamental need to disrupt this communications super-state they are building.
I can’t stress enough how important this is today.
Now, more than ever, the information war is heating up. And the ability to control not just the validity of what people produce but what everyone consumes is the single most important issue of the age.
If we are to finally break the backs of the people working so hard to maintain their gravy train, we have to build systems that are beyond their control.
This is an ideological war.
One in which those that feel they have a right, nee a duty, to guide humankind to their preferred outcome for society.
On the other side is the force of the individual and chaos and the beauty of decentralization to create order versus forcing it to.
The essence of the authoritarian mindset was expressed beautifully in the much-maligned film, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.
At his lowest point a paranoid, angry and bitter Batman is trying to kill that which he can’t control, Superman. And he says with all the fury of a frustrated villain, “The world only makes sense if you force it to.”
As a long-time Batman fan I died a little inside to see him brought to that low. But it was always there. That’s the problem when you fight for something without remembering what it is you are fighting for.
It’s so easy to become that which you think you’re fighting against.
And there is a better way than using their methods, which are inherently violent. What they do is commit fraud in the name of progress. And fraud is just another form of theft.
Steem is the way to beat them at their own game, without using their methods. Simply speak the truth and record it for all time.
Moreover, it takes earning power of the idea-creator and puts it in their hands, not the hands of the distributors and the rent-seekers, like Google and Twitter.
The growth of the platform is the way to claw back the capital they have been taking for themselves because before this we were just happy to have a platform to express ourselves.
Now those platforms have become chains around our necks. Tools of censorship and oppression; spreading false narratives and suppressing the truth while making them billions.
The worst part is that we are so inculcated in this abusive system that we come to devalue our own work. That it’s not worth $2 or even $20 for us to produce something that changes the course of someone’s life.
And so people’s first reaction to Steem is that it’s a scam. It is nothing of the sort. The scam is Twitter. The scam is Facebook. Your life, ideas and work have value. But, they’ve taught you to think that it doesn’t.
That is the true power of ideas… and you know what the man said about ideas right?
Properly managed and protected, so are blockchains created to hold those ideas, preserve them in digital amber and allow us to find our own way to the truth.
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