For anyone who comes across this posting, if there is one video that should be watched and saved, it is this TED Talk by Carole Cadwalladr which she gave on April 8, 2025. She is the investigative reporter who broke the Facebook Cambridge Analytica data scandal. It’s less than 18 minutes of your time that is worth giving up in order to be informed.
I write “saved” because remember, YouTube is a wholly owned subsidiary of Google (holding company being Alphabet). It’s part of these global tech platforms which Cadwalladr talks about where there may eventually be a point when important information like this is simply disappeared off these platforms. This is why Amazon (Jeff Bezo being chairman, and was one of the first CEO’s to cave when it came to endorsements or editorial control with the Washington Post) and every subsidiary company was priority for me to begin boycotting (only Twitch remains but as I noted before, my time on it has decreased by 75% while my spending has gone to 0% with only what remains in my Twitch wallet as what is left to use).
Zuckerberg has ALWAYS been someone I did not like. While I was an early Facebook shareholder since its IPO, my use of the platform was mainly for informational and testing purposes (never with any personal information). The same went with every acquisition; my actual accounts have long been deactivated and I use a nicknamed one now on Instagram. The platforms (Instagram and Threads) utilizes the same aggressive algorithm that Facebook uses (it’s very obvious on Threads).
On a quick sidenote, is there a possibility that Bluesky Social is actually a honey pot ops to collect information on mainly the left leaning demographic? It’s possible but I have no evidence (yet). Bluesky’s CEO Jay Graber has an interesting background that entails a lot of cryptocurrency. In and of itself, that isn’t bad. It’s how the tech has been utilized which makes me wary of those in tech that have any form of influence to shape how it is used. I’m not sure where she stands in this tech “broligarc” hierarchy. Thus all I can say to that is be careful of what actual personal information that is used on the platform. Use a good VPN as well (this is becoming a necessity nowadays) as well as vetted browser extensions that prevent tracking and can block as many ads as possible (stop falling for the lies about advertisement revenue – that’s another industry that is a rigged game).
Backing up a bit, people often times have a difficult time understanding why I left Silicon Valley when I did (or why I chose not to ascend the corporate executive ladder). It’s partially due to everything she touched on in this talk. Making obscene amounts of money or being able to become this influential asshat was NOT a goal (that was only during my naive period before college). For one thing, I have empathy and care about people. Furthermore, huge amounts of money has this downside; it attracts a lot of bad people who are simply after a piece of it. Thanks but no thanks. Financial freedom was more than enough and I valued my privacy and personal freedom to be incognito. When your name and face is plastered in the leadership section of a corporate website, you are no longer free from the bad actors that have ulterior motives.
And I wasn’t the only one to leave that world behind. Some of my colleagues chose the same path of extricating themselves from the tech world (some early retiring in their late 30’s) to live a simple life. One more famous person was Tom Anderson of Myspace. He could’ve become the person to own the social media space. Instead, he sold it for $580 million and went galavanting around the world actually ENJOYING LIFE by partaking in photography versus trying to parlay that into billions and being part of the tech social elite circle. Sure, his now very low resolution Myspace profile image made him somewhat recognizable, but it was still nowhere as close to the known names (Anderson could still remain somewhat incognito).
This is also why I am not a fan of “AI”. All of the hype surrounding this tech are by those with ulterior motives. Wall Street pontifies about it because it is something to generate trading opportunities for while the tech industry, hypes it due to the above talk. ChatGPT (and any other front end like it) are GIGO (garbage in garbage out) that has the capability to feed large amounts of disinformation and propaganda out to people. A whole generation are being corrupted by this technology (utilizing it to generate a lot of their writing for them) which equates to the loss of critical thinking skills. Everything I write on these blogs is from my brain to my fingers (warts and all). I just do not use it period because of the amount of energy it requires for all of that model training (which these companies scrape without any permission/compensation in violation of copyright law). Yes, different set of rules apply to those in power versus the regular people (where we are made to feel guilty about copyright infringement while they go and take what they want).
The “assault” that is taking place in the U.S. now is just the tip of the iceberg. And no one else in the world is going to be exempt from what is going on should the entirety of democracy go down in flames in the U.S. (because that would represent a huge geopolitical shift/realignment). There unfortunately is this denialism that it is happening where many do not want to believe that any of this is actually happening, that the system will take care of it, that the U.S. government has not been captured by Kremlin assets. People (especially the media) are trying to normalize this like it will somehow magically disappear one day (or that the ones trying to highlight what is happening, are actually overreacting or worse, are the ones that are crazy). The one thing I refuse to do is to not say anything and to just keep my head down. That is what good German people who said nothing did which allowed Nazi Germany to flourish.
The way I look at it is like this. Everyone has a brain and the ability to think for themselves. Utilize that cognitive ability to put aside the divisive labels (like left/right, liberal/conservative, etc), and look at it from the perspective of the ultra-rich versus the working class. Look at that structure and power dynamic to see what is at play. There are more of the working class compared to the ultra-rich. They have long needed systems to control those greater number of people. Wealth inequality is part of this dynamic (with generational wealth tied to this). Privileged higher education institutions is another (you know that “Harvard or Yale educated” phrase you keep hearing is a form of propaganda right?). The list of divisive measures goes on especially in politics and the culture wars that keeps the working class population fighting amongst themselves.
I always have to mention how much I dislike politics (I’ve always felt most politicians are self-serving assholes) because it’s usually NEVER a happy/positive topic. I look back at my old blogging and I wished it was those more carefree times. I don’t really care for the recent tone of my entries BUT it’s not meant to be dwelling on the negatives. Instead, it is about knowledge = power. It’s meant to highlight what I see taking place in the informative context where it is up to each person to go out, sift through the information, to validate for themselves what is happening, to take action that matters to them, and to begin establishing connections/forming communities with likeminded people (because we are all going to need each other).
