The Future

 

The surest evidence that an election was stolen is if, immediately after the election, it is forbidden to suggest that the election was stolen.

I had thought that the tech execs were only interested in making money, and that their censorship was a temporary bug, forced on them by advertisers and users. I was misled by economic theory. I should have been thinking psychology.

Now it occurs to me that if you are the type of restless spirit that sets about acquiring vast wealth, and you succeed, and a few billion more or less no longer seems to matter, and you inevitably find you are still not satisfied, you are naturally going to turn to other possible sources of satisfaction. Why not, say, try for power, if the opportunity is there? 

The internet looked at first like something that would decentralize power, as the invention of printing did. That seemed inherent in its architecture. Now everyone would have a printing press and a video camera. I overlooked the fact that those more open channels for communication went both ways: also allowing increased surveillance of everyone.

At this moment, I am almost prepared to indulge that luxury of the old, despair over the future. I think we have lost both democracy and free speech. That means the only way to resist oppression is with violence, and violence is both appalling in itself and leads to purely random results.