In the CPUSA, back when I was still active, we were told (and others said) that there was a time when members went into the woodlands or certain national parks or on certain hiking trips just to have a conversation or conference. This apparently ended around 2014 or maybe 2015.

This was to avoid government surveillance entirely.

However, there is a huge problem now (a problem even back then as well, but especially now): “everything” is on the Internet.

We don’t know what is beyond our GPS system now, in a way.

All that matters is the GPS system.

And all that matters is what’s on your screen in front of you.

In Attack of the Clones, one of the most annoying and dumbest scenes to most audiences at the time was Obi-Wan Kenobi straight-up thinking that “everything” was supposed to be recorded on the Jedi Archives.

Until it turns out that there was an army being built in secret in another planet entirely without that planet appearing on such an extensive database.

Why this scene?

Well, in the 2000s, people indeed had reservations with “everything” being on such a database like the Internet.

Because the world wide web is the repository of “all data,” you do not think outside of what you see on the screen. “Everything” is now on your screen. Why look anywhere else? Why go off that GPS system?

Marx said that when you habituate your mind (in, for example, a factory) to using a machine, your very “soul” becomes enmeshed with that machine and affected by that machine and you start thinking in metaphors congruent with that machine and that tool or machine dominates your life, as tools have always done throughout history. On that very same book regarding analog technology that I read about two years ago, Nietzche’s writings and perhaps cognitive processes became more acute and easier to record when he started using a typewriter that could let him continue writing despite the issues with his vision (whereas before, he would have to furiously scribble things down on paper, maybe in shorthand, just to eventually have it in font type in a word press later).

In this case, we do not think outside our screen; our screen rules are heads. Why do you think people have literal “screen fatigue” where there really wasn’t before?

But, of course, with that selfsame screen fatigue and putting “everything” on your tablet or laptop or phone, we can’t leave it behind, we literally need it to function.

And because of that, the class that builds that machinery have us in the palm of their hands.

And our cognition is thus shaped by that screen that “everything” is on.

If the Internet was shut down or destroyed today or tomorrow, there might literally be more protests, uprisings, occupations, and straight-up firefighting in the streets

(But of course, that would only go so far because a lot of people are not used to coordinating in tandem with others beyond the very same infrastructure and hardware that makes it possible to use the Internet, meaning that eventually those millions of uprisings or worker occupations would be snuffed out one by one given time while the state apparatus would have the advantage of complete coordination and logistics).

Because we are so used to the technology in front of us, we do not go outside to march in solidarity or occupy a police precinct or blockade arms shipments, we are in front of our screen all day (well, not all of us, but you get the point; it seriously does dampen organizing in general)

That technology not only distracts us and over-stimulates our very nervous system in the meantime.

It is also our main means of communication in most cases.

What happens when the bourgeois class has almost absolute control over those communication devices and forums?

Then they can change the conversation almost instantly.

Not for nothing do most countries on the globe put a clamp on their own media and speech apparatuses.

It is not about “controlling the message” per se or “keeping people in the dark” (though that may be a factor for certain countries).

It is about the fact that the United States controls and is leaps ahead of every other country when it comes to:

a) the communication infrastructure, networks, and wi-fi signals and the capabilities of beaming them out

b) the propaganda methods wrapped in all of that

c) the penetration into every other country, including Vietnam and China, when it comes to their own news services and social media platforms (less so with the social media in China’s case)

d) the acute level of “soft power” that has been present in a lot of the countries in the Global South (since arguably the 19th century, in my honest opinion, though many might disagree with that framing there, I think)

Frankly, a company like Ciena is more powerful than Tesla or X will ever be.

Deng Xiaoping was certainly right about this, whether you agree with him or not: communication technology, especially the Internet, is tightly bound up with the means of production and means of bourgeois rule.

As long as Ciena, Tesla, BlackRock, etc. have the power to bake water reservoirs dry with their data centers, send out radio signals from Christian evangelical churches into Africa to further proselytize American Christianity, flood YouTube and TikTok with troll farms from various places to propagate Zionism, even influence the very mosques themselves with Wahhabi literature (never mind the Wahhabi websites that Muslims in the West turn to) through Saudi Arabia, etc. then they may be the strongest advantage the capitalist class the world over has over the proletariat and oppressed masses.

Which is why I feel that many MLs or Marxist-Lenininsts in general need to take up “freedom of speech” issues again that they once championed during the 50s and 60s again, to give an example.

Because the Internet and especially social media is the enemy’s domain

You do not fight your enemy on their turf, not often anyway.

But because we are essentially caroled or guided into social media and Internet clouds, etc., we are essentially fighting an uphill battle against megacorporations, hoping that some FOSS app or some open-source social media platform will come along the way later and make sure that the NSA will not be able to snoop on us and our coordinated actions.

Not only that: because communication is more valuable today than it may have ever been in the past, we are further hampered by laws and bylaws and pretexts used by legislators and unelected officials to arrest and defang many leftist organizations.

We say everything we want to say on their platform and they, being the ones that made it, are able to delete entire YouTube channels and ecosystems overnight, ban statesmen from other countries on their own platforms (that many have to use in order to get their message across or at least stay relevant with others), “flood the zone” with their own content to drown out whatever we have to say, and then, if that isn’t enough, have us arrested for “inciting” actions that have been made either illegal or deepened in the severity of their respective sentences, whether that casus belli be terrorism, cyber-crime, violent rhetoric, etc.

Let me reiterate that Marxist-Leninists have every right to be against “free speech absolutism”

But when you are a) forced to use the very hardware and software 24/7 used to maintain a job, life, family, etc. while also using it as your main means of self-expression / coordination / communication with others in the world, and b) forced to self-censor or censor others or get censored yourself lest you and your loved ones find yourselves interrogated by federal agents or jackbooted cop thugs due to the legality of what you are able to say always being tenuous, then that leaves you stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Those two things are bound with each other, in my point of view, and actively reinforce each other.

If even our main means of communication can either be taken from us

or land us in jail

distract us

then, to me, I don’t see how they are not related.

If you control where and how people say things and what they are allowed to say, then you are stuck a truly draconian maze of a surveillance system.

That is why I want to see if we can somehow circumvent this entirely (even if, occasionally, we are forced to use certain FOSS or open-source media options on the side).

Honestly? I think the ruling-class is trying to block us before we can have any success making that move with the influx of frock cameras.

People want out. They want out of the technology they are forced to attend to every day. They don’t want to be socailly pressured into being behind a screen all day, especially now.

I think the ruling class sees the writing on the wall and is taking precautions to make sure that the proletariat is not able to make any progress in doing any of that and linking up unharassed, particularly in countries such as France, Germany, the UK, Canada, and the United States, where there is a lot of anger and rage, but no real outlet to utilize such a force.

Eh, I don’t think you will understand what I’m getting at even with what I’m saying here, it’s been on my mind for some time now, but frankly, I don’t care.

Anyway, I shall resume reading what you wrote.

Chao

now that i think of it, doesn’t the EFF sort of do this? they are activists doing all sorts of stuff related to technology, ai, privacy and such. they imply a leftist lean and afaik aren’t really anti-imperialists, they are also much smaller than WAICO in scope. could be someone else to learn a couple of tricks from though.

we desperately need to bring these conversations to not-computer-nerd leftists, and not just AI. technology sadly contains the new public squares, and we are still trying to play the oligarch’s game individually and atomized on their platforms. we could “easily” be a much more integrated worldwide coordinated effort just like theirs, and i hate wasting this potential.

i’m not very savvy on the details of founding such an org at all, but i like everything that goes in that direction.