Could an Internet Blackout Be Imminent?

I’ve been pondering the myriad ways that the Internet and social media sites hijack people’s brains for the dopamine hits of likes, loves, retweets, hugs, comments, traffick, and money. If I were to set up a structure to first monitor a population and then to steer things in the desired direction I can think of no better way.

I was around in the relatively early days of the web in the 1990s. There were chatrooms back then which were free for alls. There were no pictures and certainly no videos of the participants, so it was common to have introductory threads for name, age, gender and location. These wild west days for me often turned into psychological forums. People began sharing their most intimate personal struggles of their health, their family, their sexual lives, their money struggles, fights with others and the like. I think the powers that be did not like this TMI stage as eventually it might allow people to compare notes with each other. Perhaps in doing so they would have discovered that most of modern medicine is snake oil and that what we’ve been told about the way the world works is often a carefully constructed narrative.

Enter social media as computing speeds accelerated. Now photos and later videos could be shared. Hot or not Facebook almost certainly was steered in the direction of positive reinforcement of the beautiful and the rich. It was the quick dopamine hit, the instant gratification which was reinforced in creators that began fueling the instahoes. Deeply creative works which took hours, days or weeks to do received a small fraction of the likes that could be had from a snapchat enabled selfie. Long form writing and deep personal struggles were never liked. They were not, after all, very monetizeable. Advertisers leapt in with all of the newly mined data. Fortunes were made.

So where are now? I think many of us have realized that a lot of this is fake.

I get some thread updates from Quora on my email, mostly from my interest in a guy who runs a page called “Hacking the Afterlife.” This morning I saw one email which I excitedly clicked on. It was entitled “Did you get the Covid vaccine and do you have any regrets?”

I wondered how people were feeling about these things in 2024. The first several responses were depressing including the most upvoted response which was a long convuluted thing about the person’s mother having had polio and being in an iron lung and how if only a vaccine had helped her then! I started clicking on date estimates which indicted that the first two well written adamantly pro vaccine responses had emerged around four years ago. This would have been in March of 2020, before Covid vaccines were even a thing. They had been pre written. There’s a lot of that stuff going on and more people waking up by the day to it.

Could the powers that be then shut down the Internet in response? And how would they go about doing that? Somewhat obviously they’d have to shut down the nodes.

Kyle Young had this interesting post in the Secular Heretic regarding his struggles with substack:

the transhumanist agenda is underway

In it he writes:

“First an update on a problem I mentioned a few weeks ago - being blocked from signing into Substack. When I first contacted Substack about this I explained that the issue was associated with the Captcha app we all have to use to sign in. When trying to use Captcha I would get a notice saying “something went wrong”. I sent a screenshot of that to Substack with my first email to them. No word back for days. Meanwhile I discovered a work-around that would allow me to get in. I was able to make another post and reply to a few comments.

I finally heard from Substack that the problem was being worked on by their engineers.

Some days later I got an email form Substack saying the problem had been fixed. I tried to sign in and got nowhere… not even the previous “something went wrong” notice came up. I tried the work-around and that also failed to work. Instead of being fixed, the problem was worse than before. I was completely blocked from signing into my own site. According to Substack, all writers own their content. In other words, I was being blocked from gaining access to information that I legally own.

With this new twist it became even more obvious that the problem was with Captcha, so I did a little research. Turns out Luis von Ahn, who invented Capthca, sold it to Google in 2009. Learning that was an aha moment.

Sometime during 2020 (maybe earlier), Google developed an algorithm that allowed them to find words like plandemic, scamdemic, vaxx, toxic jabs, ivermectin and many other words that indicated someone may not be fully on board with the covidcon agenda. This ‘stack has been rife with words like that since I began writing here in November of 2020. I was also commenting on many sites using words like that. But the trap was likely sprung in my gmail (Google) account where I was using those words frequently during 2020. I first discovered I was being censored in early 2021 when I found my comments on YouTube (owned by Google) were being removed. Soon, I wasn’t even allowed to comment. I wrote about this censorship in a post around then.

Shortly after learning about this I dropped gmail like a hot potato.

Fast forward to my aha moment a week ago when I learned that Captcha is owned by Google. I sent an email to Substack reminding them that according to their own agreement, writers own their content.

I asked Substack why they were allowing Google to serve as gatekeeper for writers like myself.

Why does Substack have an outside corporation serving as a gate keeper to determine who can and cannot get into Substack?  That should be the responsibility of Substack, not google.  According to your policy, this is my Substack.  I own the information it contains.  Why are you allowing google to block me from gaining access to my own material?  There are some legal issues being breached here.

The next day (this past Wednesday) the issue was resolved. A problem that had existed since the 18th of February was resolved less than 24 hours after sending them the above notice.

To date, Substack has said nothing about why it allows Google to control writers access to material they own.

‘Nuff said about that.”

Now his problem was fixed for now but I have been having weird and seemingly unrelated problems on substack and elsewhere. This is what I messaged to BlueSphynx yesterday regarding this:

So far I have been able to sign into substack with no problem on my laptop. I tried to access the site this morning on my husband's phone, however (which I was previously signed into/app downloaded before I left Thailand in December) and could not get to the website. This continues on from issues on other platforms: Gab is completely blocked from here without a VPN (though Andrew Torba's pay to post rule might have torpedoed the site anyways), twitter will no longer let me like or share other people's posts (it says this action is forbidden and to refresh). With twitter/X I noticed this problem about two weeks ago when I was still in Las Vegas and it is ongoing in Thailand so it has nothing to do with crossing countries. I keep a facebook account for messenger and have heard about multiple blackouts. When they can no longer control the flow of information blacking out the internet becomes more likely.

Regarding substack I also noticed a weird downgrade in likes on recent posts which also started about two weeks ago when I was in America. I had two meme stacks in a row where when I clicked over from gmail to the likes section it claimed that I had over 100 likes. When I went directly to substack and opened the same post there were less than 50. The second time this happened I tried to click onto who specifically had hearted my post and memorize a few names. You and Toby Rogers were two names that had hearted a post where on substack it was no longer visible to me that you had. Since I have been in Thailand my posts have not had as high of like counts, perhaps because I am back to posting more often, but also perhaps because they have figured out a way to suppress hearts before I even see them. This type of suppression is not new to me and is a nefarious way to control the information flow of creators. By suppressing some posts and perhaps boosting others the feedback loop gets altered of what I should be writing about. It's gotten to the point that I am best just writing what I am thinking about and to Hell with what my metrics say. I can't trust them.”

I have been noticing multiple issues that began around March 1. Perhaps the Ides of March is going to strike again, though I see it as unlikely that they’ll take out the Internet wholesale. The disruption such an event would cause might not be easy for them to steer. A return of the real world and interacting in this dimension would likely serve us all well. What do you all think?

Are you having any problems with sites you use? Including, for example, substack?

I’m going to write what God tells me to write…

Buy me a ko-fi