It seemed to happen so fast. With barely 24 hours of warning, the Alt-Tech platform Parler was simultaneously kicked of Google Apps, the Apple Store, and their server Amazon Web Services. In an obvious coordinated effort by Big Tech moguls, Parler – a long with its millions of subscribers and users – disappeared from the internet in a flash.
The elimination of Parler (where we had over 60K subscribers!), was but the apex of what’s being called The Purge where, beginning with President Trump’s Twitter account, tens of thousands of accounts were deleted and de-platformed in a deliberate effort by Big Tech oligarchs to silence dissent.
The extremity and extent of the silencing was emphatically denounced by lawmakers and leaders from around the world. The Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron were two of the more vocal critics of the draconian censorship, and legislators from India to Poland were proposing legislation that will severely fine and punish Big Tech for such egregious behavior in the future.
In the process, Twitter has lost billions in stock prices, and millions of users are voluntarily closing their accounts and moving to Alt-Tech.
But something even deeper is going on here; there’s another backfire against Big Tech that goes way beyond simply a mass exodus of users, or the calls for prosecution. A technology is quickly developing that would actually have the effect of rendering these Big Tech monopolies totally and completely irrelevant! And that is a technology known as blockchain technology!
Life After Google
According to the recent book by economist and entrepreneur George Gilder, Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy, all of these attempts by Big Tech globalist corporations to silence nationalist, populist, and traditionalist voices will soon become irrelevant, and that is because we are entering into what he calls a post-Google age, an internet age where tech giants will simply no longer be able to control and manipulate information.
If you’re not familiar with him, George Gilder is an extraordinarily prolific scholar and author who is both an economist and analyst of future trends. He is acclaimed to be the most oft cited economist by President Ronald Reagan. In fact, in the early 80s, Gilder predicted the economic boom that would eventually occur through Regan’s tax cuts and de-regulation of the economy, and he also predicted that the big clunky computers that sat on tables at the time would one day be small enough to be strapped around our wrists!
The basic thesis of his book Life After Google is that Google’s business model is fundamentally flawed and will simply not be able to compete with the rise of what’s called a blockchain economy. The business model he refers to here is what’s called the ‘aggregate and advertise’ model. The reason why Google gives everything away for free — its email, internet searches, YouTube entertainment, calendars – is twofold. First, so that Google databases can amass a significant portion of the world’s population as its users, but then, secondly, so that it can take the information that it has on these users (in terms of tracking how they use the internet, their demographic information, etc.) and sell that information to advertisers.
And what this means is that you and I, as users of Google services, are not Google’s customers; instead, we are its products! We are the ones who are for sale, our data profiles that is, and this is how all the Big Tech corporations operate, Facebook and Twitter alike! This is why they can de-platform their users anytime they want; it’s because their users are their product, not their customers. No single Big Tech company has any customer loyalty or service to their users whatsoever, precisely because their users are not customers, they’re products!
A Massive Information Revolution
Gilder argues that while the Big Tech companies have committed themselves to aggregate and advertise, there is brewing under the surface a massive information revolution that promises to change the entire architecture of the internet. And that revolution is one where the information that’s currently controlled only by a centralized corporatist elite, like the Google corporation, is in effect being dispersed and now shared among the billions and billions of internet users. Information is moving from vertical control where it is amassed, stored, and indeed controlled by a small group of people to being unleashed and dispersed among virtually all internet users. That’s the key revolution that’s going on as we speak.
And this revolution is taking place primarily through the rise of what’s called a cryptocosm which operates by cryptography and through the use of blockchain technology. Now, if you’re not familiar with what’s called blockchain technology, it’s rather complicated; but when all is said and done, blockchain technology promises to provide an alternative trust and verification system to that currently provided by institutions and corporations. We’re already seeing the rise of things like cryptocurrencies made famous by Bitcoin. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are probably the most popular forms of blockchain technology that we know of today.
Gilder gets into the weeds of how it works if you’re interested. But for our purposes here, he argues that innovators are already exploring how Bitcoin technology can be used for quite literally anything, including social media! In fact, social media platforms are probably the first industry that will be majorly affected by the rise of a blockchain economy!
A Censorship-Free Internet
The prediction is that social media platforms will eventually be decentralized from any one particular company such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and that’s because what a blockchain economy effectively does is it transfers ownership of all of your social media data from the Big Tech companies to the user, that’s the key difference. YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter will no longer be able to control or own your personal data, your friends, your subscribers, your followers. You now own all of that. If you want to leave a social media platform, you get to take all of your network connections with you; you just reestablish the networks on a new blockchain.
If President Trump was on a blockchain network, he could take all his 80+ million followers with him. Twitter would no longer control them. That’s the magic of the blockchain. It removes any and all data associated with a person from centralized control to personal control; you now own all of your own data and no one else can intervene. And of course, with blockchain technology, users of social networks will have the option of choosing the platforms on which to establish a network. In short, blockchain allows you to establish your own interconnected network on your own terms with no centralized authority threatening to ban you ever again!
Now of course it all remains a bit abstract at this point since we simply don’t yet see this kind of internet architecture in widespread use, but what Gilder argues is that it is indeed coming. And the Big Tech companies know it! They know that their days of controlling data are coming to an end, and according to Gilder, they don’t quite know what to do about it. Blockchain technology is going to completely change their business model and as a result, completely overturn their monopoly over information technology.
I hope this has provided you a tremendous boost of hope in the midst of all of this internet censorship, knowing that the days of Big Tech’s monopoly over information technologies is indeed coming to an end!
