The Internet Accessibility Wars Are Just Beginning
They Can Already Control Your Device Remotely. What Happens When AI Takes the Wheel?
For the last several days I have been having a problems with Microsoft Word. I wrote all of my books using their Office Suite and do all of my editing for FactSet on it too, as everything must be turned in in doc format. I use Excel here and there too and OfficeSuite has been a must have for my laptop for a few decades.
Sure, Microsoft does have One and “free” online programs. These are less than useless to me. Because I sometimes don’t have Internet I must have a word processor that works offline. Even more damaging was that some changes weren’t tracked/synced because my satellite Internet connection went out for a little time. So I turned in a few documents which I had worked hours on, thinking they looked right as rain on my end, only to discover that whole sections I had edited weren’t actually edited. This wasn’t going to work for me.
I consider it fundamental that whatever words you are typing on a keyboard have the ability to be saved and stored for later even if you are NOT connected to the Internet. Maybe you’re typing terrible, dangerous words, or you are not sure that you want to share them with the world at the time. Maybe you’re travelling or your Internet is spotty for other reasons like having no electricity. I try to save things to flash drives and back up systems through email copies and cloud storage. I still lose things sometimes because I don’t remember where I had them.
So Word has apparently blocked me from doing anything with any of my documents. No selections are open to me, including changes on the properties menu and every selection on the taskbar is blocked. Any attempt to type, edit, copy and paste, or anything else says “this selection is blocked.”
I spent a while with a Microsoft help desk person yesterday. The person asked for permission to control my computer remotely. Okay. It’s scary that they can even do that, and if this guy can do that by at least asking permission, what can governments and nefarious actors do without asking permission? In theory this guy could have opened any tabs I had open, read any content I had open (it was just one of my book excerpts! Ha. If the person read it they’ll be the first one to do so, according to Amazon anyways). Perhaps if I’d had a bank tab open they could have done something with the screenshot. There’s no money in there, but I think you get my point.
The Microsoft help person was not able to help me. I bought this computer second hand just two months ago from a computer shop. Apparently the copy of Office is password protected or for institutional users or something. I obviously have no idea what the password is. My concern is with having a word processing system which obviously A: Works, as in I can edit, format, and do whatever I see fit with my documents including OFFLINE and B: Being able to share them, if I so choose to, on the wider Internet, whether it be substack or whomever, without interference or formatting errors.
In the end this person was not able to fix the problem. Whether they still have techincal access to my computer remotely is unknown to me, though I’d assume that this low paid worker probably isn’t supposed to. But the crux of the Internet problem is this: where there is no trust, there can be no access.
Since the hordes of tech corporations have sold off access to the metaphorical Visgoths, i.e. corporate contractors, how long do they really have on extend and pretend until Rome gets sacked for all of their promised land? It’s a real question. I haven’t even started on the power of AI to literally break the code. Not only are CBDCs a bad idea because of the whole centralized control, they’re an equally bad idea for all of the promises of theft. But since money itself is a fungible token, what can they really do? They’ve got to keep whipping the slaves at the front. More tokens! More likes! More dopamine hits! Your Patriotic Duty is to go Shopping! That’ll show those Muslims!
How long can this really last? There’s clear signs to me that it won’t last much longer. I see everywhere an information overload, which has been accelerated greatly by ChatGPT and the like. Now you can make a book in hours, and there’s even instructional videos regarding how to do so. Supposedly ChatGPT outperforms 99% of conventional creative types.
As Matthew Aldred writes:
“The decentralized collective intelligence is rejecting the false dichotomy of “Left” and “Right” politics; in fact, it is realizing that we have been previously trained or programmed with aesthetics and semantics that keep us from seeing the underlying reality of our situation. Now we see it: We are being parasitized by a rapidly increasing and powerful group of Elite$.
There are fundamentally two types of Elite$: the psychopathic Elite$ and the non-psychopathic Elite$. I don’t have to explain the psychopaths. However, the non-psychopaths are delusional and just as dangerous, maybe worse. The delusional Elite$ tell themselves the story that they love the peasants and know what is best for them. They are convinced that they know how to radically change all our social, economic, cultural, ecological, agricultural, nutritional, financial, and biological systems etc. to create a world that is a “safe space” for all (with a really nice space for themselves, as a reward). This now accelerated “great opportunity” push towards Utopia—their Great Reset, their Rules Based New World Order, their Great Narrative—will not build anything back “better”, it will destroy us.”
I doubt that AI can achieve any significant level of human like consciousness, although I think the greatest hope for the technology lies in finding ancient wisdom, holistic healing and hidden patterns henceforth not understood. I also think you have to catch a wave before it breaks, to use some surfer lingo. Finding the wave to catch is an art of its own. And regarding ChatGPT, why don’t we just use it to make money in the Internet casino known as the stock market? I’m thinking of compiling a trading strategy using the third harmonic.
I like this lady. She clues you in to the grift without saying so directly, by mentioning the profit loss after commissions and the like. Indeed all of the “Make a bunch of money using language learning models” tutorials I’ve seen, whether they’re about writing a book in ChatGPT in a few hours or whatever, are all pushing some app, some investment, some mainstream tech service that they need your money for. That is precisely why YouTube puts them at the top of the algorithym, beyond the fact that they are piled on with ads.
Of course if AI was going to be useful for something for the common plebs, it should obviously be making money on the casino known as the stock market! Actually in broader terms I think Forex is much better, but my point remains: If they can just make money at will, and the information race says that their competitive advantage in making these tokens is lower right now, why not try out these AI trading strategies? Why can’t everybody be a billionaire, besides the hyperinflation aspect of it? How many cars or yachts or houses or private jets does the billionaire need? Mark Zuckerberg has spent $43 million on security details in the last 3 years alone, apparently while donating $3 million to defund the police. Apparently his life matters to him. Why can’t we all just get along?
As James Corbett writes:
“Anyone who has been paying attention to the rise of the censorship-industrial complex over the past decade, anyone who has seen country after country after country after country after country implementing internet shutdowns and great firewalls and internet kill switches to keep their tax cattle from accessing online information detrimental to the powers-that-shouldn't-be, anyone who has seen the push for age verification and digital identification and "driver's licenses" for the internet knows the truth by now: to whatever extent the "Internet" of yore ever existed, it is now well and truly gone.
Heck, I just spent ten minutes searching various search engines with multiple queries to find an article whose exact headline I already knew. (And, irony of ironies, that article is about Canada's new online censorship bill).
My friends, it is now beyond doubt that we are no longer living in the utopian era of the Information Superhighway but in the dystopian nightmare of the digital gulag.
The Internet is dead.
But what does it mean that the free and open Internet is dead? After all, the ARPANET was designed to be able to survive and to continue functioning even in the wake of nuclear Armageddon, wasn't it? So how can some meddling governments take the whole thing down?
The most obvious answer is that the clueless masses who began logging on to the internet over the past two decades had no clue about the benefits of decentralization and merely gravitated to the most convenient and popular online spaces. By eschewing the labour of creating their own websites (or even designing their own geocities blog or Myspace page), by forsaking the quest to find new, unexplored corners of the net, they unwittingly recreated the dinosaur media paradigm in the new digital domain.
The parallels are striking: just as there were a handful of TV networks and newspapers and media companies that were able to dictate what almost everyone saw, heard, talked about and thought about on a daily basis in the old dinosaur media paradigm, there are now a handful of social media platforms where people are allowed to create a standardized, cookie-cutter profile and talk about the (fact-checker approved) news of the day.
And, just like that, the wacky, weird, intensely personal web of blogs and fora and message boards became the handful of standardized, soulless, corporate social media sites that dominate the web today.
There's even more to the story, though. The truth is that the Internet of yesteryear became the internet of today through a series of actions designed to make a decentralized, distributed network of information exchange into a centralized network of information control.
In fact, from its earliest beginnings, the ARPANET relied on a single "HOSTS.TXT" file maintained by the Stanford Research Institute to map hostnames to IP addresses. That system eventually developed into the Domain Name System that exists today, turning the inscrutable 77.235.50.111 IP address into the human-readable corbettreport.com.
Of course, most people don't give a moment's thought to the domain name system—how it is managed, who controls it, or why such a centralized directory is needed at all to run a supposedly decentralized network—until their domain is seized by the feds, that is.
Nor do they consider the dangers of relying on one of the few big-name web hosts or content delivery networks to host their web site . . . until their hosting is pulled and no one can access their site anymore.
Nor do they ponder the implications for the free, open, decentralized web if everyone relies on a handful of social media platforms run by a handful of Big Tech companies to provide access to their online "friends" . . . until their profile is suspended or their account removed for wrongthink.
Of course, as viewers of #SolutionsWatch know, the concept of truly decentralized communication is still alive and well. From Bastyon to Qortal to nostr to Blockchain DNS and many other projects besides, there is no shortage of developers who are working on ways for people to use the internet as it was intended: as a decentralized, distributed network with no middleman capable of stepping into your peer-to-peer information exchange.
Of course, the majority of people don't care about decentralized communication. They're happy to watch videos on YouTube and to share news on Twitter and to post vacation photos to Instagram and to pretend to be Facebook friends with people they haven't seen since grade school and to call all of this "the internet." They don't care about censorship or government surveillance. After all, if something is banned from this or that social media platform, then it's probably Thoughtcrime and deserves to be censored anyway, right?
Do I think that there will be continued demand for REAL information regarding the world around us? Indeed I do. With the political discourse running off the rails in every sense of the word and the sort of extend and pretend fake fairytale of look at my new car gaining less and less tokens, real life is going to come to have greater meaning. Talk to your family, talk about God or what you think happens in the afterlife or what you believe the meaning of life is. Why are you here and what is your purpose in this dimension? What can you take with you, if anything? Was it all just a dream, or a process of evolution?
Think about the things that matter. I suspect a very bumpy ride.
Teledoc to be staffed by chat GPT?
One thing that is kind of encouraging is that just as the Delivery apps would send you to the wrong address or tell you to turn down the wrong way on a one way street or the self driving cars would mow down the lady on the bike...the Robots are going to botch shit.
Great post!