Over the last week there have been some interesting events taking place that are probably worth mentioning again. Firstly, the Ottawa protests in Canada showing that a few voices don't make a difference, but thousands of voices do - especially when they are voices of truckdrivers with big rigs they have chosen not to move.
But, the other thing this has highlighted and given attention to, is how useless the voices of the people are valued by governments and centralized platforms, as GoFundMe made the decision to withhold funding raised to support the truckers. Obviously, there are crypto solutions to this and one would of course be a simple decentralized fundraising platform, which sets up a new set of problems, but when forced into a corner, people will succumb or, fight back.
And this is the problem with all of the force being used, because what it is doing is highlighting how pressing the need is for alternatives to what we have been comfortable accepting earlier, because it was working for us.
For example in NSW Australia recently:
There was a privacy breach where 500K addresses that were forced to comply under the Covid check-in rules. The addresses that included defense sites and domestic violence shelters were "uploaded in error" to a government website. They said that not to worry, because only 1% of them were sensitive. That is 5000 addresses. The fallacy of numbers.
Trust us with your data. It's safe. Pomise.
I had my fingers crossed.
Despite what many seem to believe, governments are terrible with their security and quite incompetent in their ever-changing processes. The animal is just too big for there to be no errors in activity and they are often multi-tasking without the skillsets required for any. In regards to data and digital security, which is a highly skilled and lucrative subset of the IT industry, the private sector pays many times more than the public sector and offers far more interesting work - what are the chances of the government attracting the best and the brightest for a civil servant salary? Don't believe the movies.
Then there are two ongoing events that I see as related not only by topic, but ramification - the first being the attempt (and so far failure) to cancel Joe Rogan and the announcement by Novak Djokovic on his stance. I spoke about the Rogan thing a few weeks ago as well as the Novak Djokovic but it has been interesting to see what has happened since. Essentially, both have been dragged through the mud in multiple ways, having all kinds of negative "personality traits" publicized to make them look terrible.
In the case of Rogan, I think that he has managed to make himself almost uncancellable for the moment at least, as public support seems to be pushing slowly his way and Spotify has backed him, despite making some concessions. Djokovic was treated very poorly by the Australian and most of the global media and was made to look like an obsessive who only cared about being the GOAT and winning the most Tennis Grand Slams. Many newspapers took glee in saying how he is forced to be vaccinated in order to achieve his goals and many mentioned how he had backflipped on his stance a couple weeks ago.
The trouble is, they didn't ask him.
“But I’ve always supported the freedom to choose what you put in your body. For me, that is essential. It is really the principle of understanding what is right and what is wrong for you, and me as an elite professional athlete, I have always carefully reviewed, assessed everything that comes in, from supplements, food, the water that I drink, sports drinks, anything that comes into my body as fuel. Based on all the information I got, I decided not to take the vaccine as of today.”
When asked if he was prepared to give up the opportunity to be the best player to pick up a racquet?
Yes
Disagree with his decision-making process and its conclusion or not - you can't question his value system based on this. Can the same be said for most people? The media? He is not the win at all cost psychopath they have labelled him, he is someone willing to sacrifice a life-long goal for a life-long belief.
And this is why I am highlighting these four stories today, as while they are all Covid-related, they are indicative of a cultural progression, where people are starting to recognize that the power they have proxied to governments and organizations for convenience, is not returning on the promise. Instead of offering convenience, these organizations are using that proxy to extend their control.
For example, a comment made by Whoopi Goldberg concerning the Holocaust a few weeks ago was met with calls of cancel by the masses minority, but instead of what would have got her cancelled in the not so distant past, she took a suspension instead. This is a small but significant shift.
This move away from cancel culture is necessary. I don't know if anyone remembers this story from over a decade ago.
The reason no one else would do the job is that the drug cartels were murdering the police, so a criminology student at the age of 20 took the role. Two weeks later, she fled with her family and applied for asylum in the USA.
If you keep "killing" the personalities with personality, pretty soon you will end up with no one worth listening to in the middle, but a lot of extremists on both sides of the spectrum. The crazy we are seeing in the world today and the lack of open public discourse is because there is no longer nuance or room for error, there is be perfect or be killed. However, the more polarized the discussions become, the more antifragile those voices become in certain circles as people double-down on their belief systems. It is untenable for building a healthy society.
However, as we can see from all of the clicks, it is highly incentivized and the media is driven to push for that polarization, constantly playing both sides of every argument, pitching the crazy of one into the crazy of the other, like a chicken drumstick to a ravenous lion, knowing that it only increases the appetite.
While I don't want to get ahead of myself or hope too much, I do think that we have an opportunity to use the momentum of the pushback to correct course on society and start moving toward a better outcome. However, we should recognize by now that the centralization of governance is not going to cut it, nor is the centralization of economy, information, data collection and control or *public opinion.
What these four stories highlight is that there is a growing thirst for freedom of choice and ownership of responsibility, rather than reliance on an authority to say what we can listen to, how we can spend our money and what we can put into our own bodies. It doesn't mean you have to agree with the stances taken on any of this, nor me for that matter - but it is about being able to have conversations around topics without calling for cancellation or forcing people to act against their will.
There has been a heavy attack on open public discourse over the last decade and it has been driven across the platforms that at first promised to increase the level of connection and conversation in society. Ultimately though, the incentives do not push this into a position of empowerment and instead, drive for disenfranchisement from the conversation and society in general, making us voiceless prisoners with the narrative being provided by the authority which inevitably uses it to benefit itself, not us.
Things are never black and white.
But we have become colorblind as a society.
Living the spectrum, but unable to share our experiences.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]