My pet ducks have an Instagram. Leading up to the election, I made campaign signs for them as a joke. Honestly, I would have been happy if Catarina and Chaos Duck went to the White House. They ran a good campaign. (Worms for all! Fish at bedtime! Everyone gets their own cage!)
Instead, Donald Trump was elected President.
Maybe the new privacy policies would have happened either way. I can’t say. What I do know is that my Facebook accounts were flagged as “having the potential to reach a lot of people,” and I was told that I needed to turn on “advanced protection” features in order to keep them.
I clicked the link to read what “advanced protection” meant. It meant two things:
1. I would have to agree to the new “advanced protection privacy policy” that would force me to let Facebook to hot mic my phone, track my location, and monitor all my internet usage on every website and app.
2. I would have have to prove my identity, and then use a 2-factor authentication service like Google Authenticator each time I logged in to Facebook.
That’s scary, but it’s not surprising.
Way back during my first year in South Korea (ah -my younger days) I used to hang out at the Military Intelligence bar in Anjeong-ri outside of Camp Humphreys. I remember folks telling me that someday they would track everything you said or wrote, and artificial intelligence (AI) would screen for key words the government didn’t want you saying. If you said or wrote any of those key words, a human would review your content and then the FBI or some other serious men in suits would visit you.
I guess we are now through the looking glass and into the part of the story where things get surreal. Although now, it looks like it’ll be drones instead of the FBI, and more “Jennifer Government” by Max Barry than “1984” by George Orwell.
Keep in mind, I don’t talk about anything illegal or do anything illegal. I’m a home owner who spends most of my time maintaining my house. I have pet ducks who are semi-famous on Instagram. I work for the government. So does my husband. We vote. We pay taxes. We should be considered “model citizens.”
Of course, I haven’t been a saint.
When it came out that the National Security Agency (NSA) was recording all the phone calls that Americans make and flagging them for key words like “bomb,” I would joke about it on phone calls sometimes for fun. Small acts of rebellion, you know? I would say that I’d never bomb anything, and that I didn’t think people should assume that everyone of Middle Eastern descent was a terrorist. You see, I wouldn’t say anything bad, but the key words were there. Some poor schmuck at the NSA would have to listen to my boring phone call to make sure I wasn’t planning anything nefarious.
I just wanted to use my freedom of speech to waste the time of the people assigned to spy on us. (The Whitest Kids You Know did this, too.)
However, this new censorship -in the form of “enhanced privacy” policies- isn’t being done by the government. It’s being done by corporations.
Maybe the corporations and the government are coordinating. Maybe their interests simply align because campaign contributions are all politicians care about and money is speech now. I don’t know. But, I know I won’t consent to a government or a corporation accessing my location, everything I say, and everything I do on my phone.
I have no doubt they are doing these things, but let them do it illegally if they insist on doing it. They won’t get my consent.
I know most of you already have bugs in your homes. Smart TVs, Alexa Devices, Roombas, and all manner of technology with user agreements that include lines like: “You consent to the corporation using your speech to train word recognition software in order to enhance the user experience.” (Which means: To listen to everything you say.) I just feel more comfortable without all that stuff in my house.
Side Note: I like when people first visit my home and try to figure out where the TV is. Surprise! There isn’t one.
If you think not having a TV is bad, wait until you hear about how I like to go to the beach and leave my phone at home. I go to the beach to swim. Leaving my phone in the car would only invite people to break in. Leaving it the hot sand seems like a bad call, too. So, I leave it at home. All by itself. I also leave it in the house when I am gardening so it doesn’t get muddy, run to the store without it, and spend entire days not checking it. If you’ve known me a long time, you’ll know that I:
• Resisted getting a cell phone for years after they were widely available.
• Resisted getting a Smart Phone until my elementary school students bullied me into it in 2012.
• Have never used Uber or any similar service. Guam was too rural for such things, and so is my home in the mountains in Hawaii.
• I’m not a Luddite. I had a BBS back in 1995 when it was cool. I learned to program in HTML and CSS as soon as the internet became a thing. I love my laptop and my phone. I’m just cautious of technology and how it is used by people, governments, and corporations.
I mean, aren’t you afraid of how they transitioned search engines from an algorithm that indexed information available on websites into an AI-driven bit of programming that can return you the results that corporations want you to have?
The internet has become extremely censored, and it happened overnight. I feel like almost no one noticed.
Anyway, my social media accounts were all flagged as problematic because I complained about corporations not paying taxes, about how they were artificially inflating prices, and how they were buying up all the single-family homes to prevent US Citizens from becoming home owners. Basically, I was complaining about corporations doing the things that they are actually doing. Since they don’t want you to think about those things, they flagged my accounts. Just like that, I was banned from social media (though hilariously, the ducks were not).
I sort of expected this to happen a little at a time. I wasn’t prepared for the entire country to just become censored within the span of a few months. Also, I thought it would be the government censoring things, not corporations. I admit that I was wrong about who and how. I just wish I was wrong about it happening at all.
Maybe I’ll start blogging more. Maybe I’ll hole up and write a few more novels. I don’t know. All I know for sure is that I won’t be on Facebook or other social media because saying things about how corporations are squeezing the working class and manipulating the government will get you banned.
http://www.instagram.com/catatinaandchaos
Look me up on Instagram, because ducks never complained about the profits-over-people attitude of US corporations, so they still have an account. WordPress may also censor me for this, but here is a graphic of the things I said on Facebook that got me flagged as a radical.
My long-time friends might have no problem seeing me as a dissident. After all, I used to be a journalist. But, I guess we all assumed I’d be a government dissident, not a government employee being branded as a dissident by corporations. Max Barry once signed my copy of Jennifer Government at a book store in Phoenix, and I hope someone tells him that he was right all along about the US. You hear me Max? You were right.
JD's Blog 