💾 Archived View for republic.circumlunar.space › users › saignante › gemlog › 2020-11-02-my-threat-m… captured on 2020-11-07 at 02:36:09. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
(probably the first of many posts on this subject)
Needless to remind anyone reading this that privacy was
a short-lived myth. It became a relevant idea with the rise of personal
instantaneous global communication, and has been made basically
unatainnable to us since. Anonymity is just as difficult an ask.
You may not know who is writing these words (or you may);
any data giant could find out with ease
I was born in 1996. I never experienced the free internet.
My first memory of going online is googling "sex" at age 7.
I thrived in the hellish walled gardens of fb ig gg
and played the online distractions. At some point
I had 1700 followers somewhere, that seemed like a big deal.
Influencer culture had me in its grip.
My first web-existential crisis had me delete all the content
that those people were there for; it had become obvious to me
I was performing a false self, ever further fragmenting my soul.
And for what?
Blue backlight technicolor dopamine hits
in the form of little red hearts.
Fast forward I delete my accounts
to the degree that is possible--
gg still hosts some marketing/shopping emails.
What does it matter to me that my consumption
is somewhat tracked? I don't even know
when I last saw an advertisement online.
The http browser's ublock and noscript
make that easy enough.
After some cajoling my friends deigned to use signal--
an imperfect yet accessible tool.
All of one (1) of them has got a PGP key.
A couple have proton accounts.
Am I trying to hide anything?
It's hardly worth the effort.
A FDE-system seems silly where I live
somewhere with near-zero odds of home invasion.
Still, I've done that.
My passwords live in an offline manager.
My traffic uses a no-log DNS over https redirect.
And for what? What am I trying to hide online?
There is nothing of worth on these machines.
The only home directory with anything truly private
is my own body
I think of the public/private divide.
I assume anything I type is no longer private.
That's okay.
It saddens me that when I email my father
on the other side of the planet,
gg knows what I say. But
that doesn't make the communication any less personal.
It saddens me that words whispered to a lover
addicted to their device
may be heard by their phone nearby.
But that doesn't make the words any less true.
I sit at my shrine and I pray,
I meditate for hours,
I scry into the vastness of the ocean.
There is no way in which the machine has access to
these experiences. The only private realm
is the subjective experience of my body.
The only secrets and mysteries are
those of sensory knowledge. Therein remains the magic.