Editor's note: Fair warning: This is a very thorough guide. However, we're facing an unprecedented moment in American history. Our government and multinational tech monopolies are making it clear that we, the people, are the target of the monstrous surveillance state they've constructed. The deep state is attempting to jail people who share memes, Blaze journalists, and even the leading presidential candidate. It's time we take back control over our privacy and digital communications, and this guide will provide you with the tools to do that. This is a serious guide for serious people. If you're concerned about what's coming but don't know what to do, please consider adopting some or all of these tools.
The internet was originally a peer-to-peer network where everyone ran their own servers: email, chat, and social media lived on a box in every user's living room. Being a user of this 1980s-to-early-1990s internet was hard work and required more than a little bit of technical acumen. As the internet's uses grew, it needed to become more accommodating to people without technical savvy, and so we traded personal autonomy for convenience. The technical weeds were farmed out to professional internet pioneers like America Online and Google, and slowly but surely, the peer-to-peer internet was replaced with the client-platform model that some disparage as "the Botnet." Where we once could connect as autonomous peers, we now must do so through a few massive intermediaries with their own interests.
The story of digital technology, for all the previously unimaginable wealth and convenience that it has brought, has also come with the growing issues of unwanted manipulation of our behavior, harm to our mental health, and threats to our security.
We've been sold a false narrative that privacy is over, that automation is inevitable, that the centralized vision of Big Tech is the only way to do technology, and that we just should get used to being ruled by the machine. This is false. Privacy still matters. Centralization is not inevitable. And while technology will continue to disrupt our economic and social lives, human freedom will always matter. But we need to be sure that we control technology and not have it control us and our children. The good news is that solutions are here today if you choose to accept them.
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