It's so destructive to basic human rights and dignity, so shocking in its possible uses by the surveillance state, I can't understand why it's even possible.
What if we just exclude such abuse to approved white people?
If everyone were like me, millions would be over at the capital building with pitchforks and torches.
Chinese-made Polynesian Tiki torches?
My husband is from Lebanon, and he tells me that Americans tried to get the Lebanese to accept surveillance in Beirut streets. Not anything as sophisticated as 5G - just cameras. There was no possible way. And no surveillance at the airports, either. You can't abuse the Lebanese this way. They will kill you. And more importantly, they are willing to die in order to stop you.
Where is our dignity? Why are we so cowed? Do we wanna live forever?
So ... what you're saying is that if your husband was still living in Lebanon, he would be bombing 5G cell towers and such, but he hasn't done so here .... yet?
Such as 5G will help facilitate the automation of repetitive and boring work, like lawyers, store clerks at 99 Cent stores and such. As President Yang has pointed out, such automation got your almost hero (and his Slavic illegal immigrant, whore wife) into the White House.
But as my recently posted video on
The War on Sensemaking suggested about looking for a positive Synthesis from the traditional dialectic poles, President Yang provides just such. That you should not be a Luddite and instead revel in the profits of such as Bezos and Zuckerberg, so that we can give every American $1,000 a month to spend in such as 99 Cent stores. It would be a terrible world for you 'Christians' if small business owners had a lot more money to look after, and business owners small and large didn't have to take care of their employees' health insurance costs and issues.
Of course, if all Americans had proper access to health care, and not bad access to disease treatment, the medical industry and its investors would lose out on trillions of dead presidents each year.
This is all so ironic hearing these particular complaints about 5G, from someone who was whining about her lost profits in Bitcoin:
...
Powerful people have always imposed their ideas of money onto others to reinforce their wealth and dominance.
Maurer notes that the emergence of gold and silver as dominant currencies in the ancient world stemmed because of the fact that wealthy elites had previously acquired status objects composed of precious metals. As they consolidated their power over government and laws, they made those metals currency standards.
Bitcoin has its equivalents of those ancient elites. Big mining firms, early adopters/investors, and core developers all have an oversized interest in promoting it. The same goes for the “whales” of Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, ether and other cryptocurrencies.
This isn’t to say the crypto elites don’t deserve rewards for being early to the game or for helping to develop and secure an ingenious new form of money. Nor can one equate the power they wield – all within a system that doesn’t actively prohibit anyone from mining, owning or contributing code to bitcoin – with that of governments that use military might and judicial threats to control access to their money.
I raise it simply to point out that these influential players are both incentivized and financially enabled to aggressively push and promote their positions.
Believers gonna believe
These competing, financially enabled voices are battling for the minds of users, which means they’re appealing to people’s passions and emotions.
It’s unavoidable. You can be as nerdy and detached as the most cerebral cryptographer, but if you want your favored currency to grow to the point that it becomes money, you must engage in cultural production. You want a shared story of belonging to develop around it, one that’s widely accepted enough that your currency is widely held and used.
Of course, you also need your currency to have intrinsic qualities – those of scarcity, fungibility, transportability, durability and divisibility are common to both gold and bitcoin, for example. But in and of themselves, they aren’t sufficient. For something to become money, it needs belief.
Here we enter into the realm of myths and storytelling, the foundations upon which the most powerful systems of human organization are built – nations, religions, brands and, most of all, money.
Think of the importance attached to the unknown identity of bitcoin’s founder. It not only denied critics a target to accuse of running a get-rich-quick scheme; it gave the bitcoin community its genesis myth. That, in turn, has fed the posturing over Bitcoin Cash and Wright’s Bitcoin SV, the latter’s name alluding unabashedly to the prophet-like notion of “Satoshi’s Vision.”
But here’s the thing: “believers” are vulnerable to manipulation. (Just look at how the powerful have gotten religious communities to do their dirty work through the ages, from priests and mullahs stirring up “ethnic cleansings” to America’s televangelists fleecing their congregations.) Sadly, the increasingly wide communities interested in cryptocurrencies are similarly vulnerable – the thousands hoodwinked into BitConnect, for example.
And in a situation where specialized knowledge about the complex workings of cryptocurrency is limited, those vulnerabilities are heightened for the many who don’t fully grasp the tech.
“Because it’s supposed to be about the code and the mathematics, and not everyone understands the code and the mathematics, people take advantage of that to try to sell you whatever they want to sell,” says Maurer. “People are desperate to have a firmer foundation for their beliefs. So, it’s easier to fall for someone that offers that to them.”
I’m not saying the “trust in code” mantra isn’t useful when applied to the decentralized management of a cryptocurrency’s monetary policy or payments system. But it’s naïve to believe the human networks gathered around this technology are somehow immune to the failings of humanity itself. Worse, that belief enables the scammers.
So, if we want to rid ourselves of the Faketoshis, snake oil salesmen, and general cultural chaos of crypto, it’s up to we humans, not the code or the coders per se, to come up with ways to mitigate those failings. Human governance matters. ...
Faketoshis? Ask that marketing mate from Phoenicia about why his kind helped give us those neighbors of yours, his Semitic cousins.
