A free internet is still worth fighting for and is still salvageable. But it faces growing threats: from corporate media outlets eager to suffocate anything that threatens their discourse-monopoly by ginning up pressure on Silicon Valley to censor various dissidents and independent voices even more so than they are now; from political parties and politicians who wield great influence with tech giants and know they can exploit that influence to silence their critics and adversaries; and the increasing concentration of power over the internet in the hand of a few monopolies whose power and wealth makes it irresistible for power centers to try to harness to suffocate dissent.
On Monday I spoke with Snowden for a special episode of SYSTEM UPDATE, for roughly 40 minutes about the growing dangers of Silicon Valley censorship, why a tech industry that never wanted the power or responsibility to regulate discourse has had that obligation foisted upon them by politicians and journalists, the lurking dangers to press freedoms, and how a Biden/Harris administration may make all of this worse:
We developed a modelâa set of machine learning toolsâthat can identify narratives based on sets of people, places and things and their relationships.
...in a world where sprawling and incoherent conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and its successor, QAnon, have widespread followings, something must be afoot.
But what if thereâs another explanation? What if itâs the material circumstances, and not the arguments, that are making the difference for ... conspiracy pitchmen? What if the trauma of living through real conspiracies all around us â conspiracies among wealthy people, their lobbyists, and lawmakers to bury inconvenient facts and evidence of wrongdoing (these conspiracies are commonly known as âcorruptionâ) â is making people vulnerable to conspiracy theories?
If itâs trauma and not contagion â material conditions and not ideology â that is making the difference today and enabling a rise of repulsive misinformation in the face of easily observed facts, that doesnât mean our computer networks are blameless. Theyâre still doing the heavy work of locating vulnerable people and guiding them through a series of ever-more-extreme ideas and communities.
Belief in conspiracy is a raging fire that has done real damage and poses real danger to our planet and species, from epidemics kicked off by vaccine denial to genocides kicked off by racist conspiracies to planetary meltdown caused by denial-inspired climate inaction. Our world is on fire, and so we have to put the fires out â to figure out how to help people see the truth of the world through the conspiracies theyâve been confused by.
The Conspiracy Singularity Has Arrived With the pandemic and a global uprising against racial injustice to be explained away, conspiracy communities are bleeding into each other, merging into one gigantic mass of suspicion.
Well I didn't get the memo, dagnabbit. I feel left out.
Glad that you are keeping up on all of this stuff.
Too much going on to pay attention to silly shit like this.
That would make you a witting or would it be an unwitting useful idiot ?
I'm going to go with the former as you never make any mistakes.
The Conspiracy Singularity Has Arrived With the pandemic and a global uprising against racial injustice to be explained away, conspiracy communities are bleeding into each other, merging into one gigantic mass of suspicion.
it hurts actually. 
