This Post.
This post is a personal post, I will do a few of these from time to time. Not really about anything technical but more about personal thoughts about whatever the topic is. This time it is about my feelings about being in privacy centric circles and obverving the descent of many of them into QAnon, and other conspiracy theories (While I don’t know if I fully dig Miller’s work, I do agree that conspiracy theory is generally a term to end a conversation and not always fair to use. But it is the only word that fits here.)
The Transition.
I have been on a journey towards deleting all non-secure communication channels for awhile now, in my quest for complete privacy against governments, companies and nosey people. I am unsure precisely when this began, I like to personally think it all began when I first started listening to Immortal Technique in school, which also occurred around the time of an ethics class where we discussed some very heady topics, one of which being is it ethical for a company, or really anyone to know more about you than you do? Myself going through a bit of a libertarian phase, after a bit of a tanky phase was of the mind that they had better so they can sell to you better, and if you can’t keep your personal information secure then it is on you not the company! Now however, it seems more grey. I am undecided if it is good, bad (currently I would say I am probably in a post-modernist phase), or unimportant if a company tracks every little detail about you. While I may be undecided about the wider implications of this, I do know one thing, I don’t like it! I am perfectly fine remaining mostly anonymous in the wider world (the irony of writing that in a blog post is not lost on me), and as such prefer to move to more secure lines of communication. Which leads to a problem, unless a critical mass of people in my immediate circle decide they don’t like this either I am stuck with a very secure series of communication channels with the one sound coming to me being cricket chirps. This requires stepping out of secure channels and making most of the efforts to secure my communications fairly pointless.
What Now?
I haven’t figured this bit out if I am being completely honest, if you go to the about page you’ll see I have a fair number of channels available for communication however I have currently exactly 1 person on these. This is mainly due to one issue, how to bring up transitioning to a communication platform so you can’t be tracked. I understand the feeling people who think the Illuminati is an ever present threat or that there are Draconid aliens impersonating humans in order to control the New World Order behind the scenes must feel wanting to bring this up. A somewhat more radical thing, which requires a complete transition in the way you interact with someone. Especially when it is simply one person, are you going to get an encrypted email, download a non-FaceBook owned E2EE chat application, and then on your desktop switch from Discord or Skype, to something like getting Matrix Configured or Wickr? Probably not, it is a big ask just to be able to speak to one person. And I wonder if this is what leads to the descent I see in other similarly privacy/security centric people.
Descent? What Descent?
This requires some background, and also the revealing of a terrible fear of mine. That fear is, am I as susceptible as the countless people before of dropping into borderline madness from the starting point of distrusting the government and companies, and is it an inevitability instead of just a risk? Now that is obviously a bit heavy so some context. I am on several very privacy minded chat channels, think stuff like 4chan, but, not what like 4chan and a little more focused on tech, hacking, and security. This doesn’t mean that everyone in these chats are perfectly stoic and logical. There are a lot of channels on these platforms that are at least QAnon adjacent and at most purely focused on QAnon topics. Take the one channel I look into occasionally to see what is new with QAnon and practice my QAnon, the all Spanish speaking QAnon channel. I wonder internally at times while chit chatting with some fellows in the other channels about, topics like encryption, secure communications, and other privacy related topics what differentiates us from those talking about secret military attacks in China to overthrow the CCP and reinstill Trump as president of the USA? This site is definitely a bit much but the amount of links I see from this site is surprising. There seems to be some weird divide in these channels I find people of a like mind on many topics of. One slice discusses EFF articles which one would be hard pressed to label as crazy and deluded and whom I find a good connection with. While another is discussing what are at least things that are a stretch, and at the worst are events that don’t appear to be from the same reality as the rest of us.
Should I Fear The Descent?
There is a part of me that is concerned about this, I mean who wouldn’t be if one of their natural peer groups is a stones throw away from a belief system completely detached from reality. But I would be exaggerating to say that I am under a constant and ever present fear of waking up one day believing things that currently seem absolutely insane. I get that 99% of all this tracking is really just so that a banner ad on some random webpage can persuade me to go with product x over product y when I inevitably need one of those products. Nonetheless I do feel for the more pessimistic amongst us who start to understand technology. If they don’t already have strong interpersonal connections and everyone around them is fine with a lot of things they don’t like they might find themself accidentally self selecting into groups who, say externally we are pro-privacy, pro-security, blah blah blah, but underneath are a lot of malicious and frankly whack beliefs that feed on the uninitiated’s sense of caution towards the government and corporations. With any luck in the communities I move around in newcomers will find themselves drawn more towards these cautious and privacy centric conversations that stay within reality and don’t get sucked into the other more insidious channels. Because while it is pretty funny to read some of the threads, it is always a little saddening realizing these are someones beliefs and that their reality is full of so much fearful negative things, and they are constantly being teased with hope just around the corner, that everyone from the outside knows will never come.
–Roger