05 October 2022
Most of you (who comment) don't argue too much with the idea that centralization is inherently evil. At the same time, most of you seem to have no idea how centralization works.
In recent years, a couple of professors published a study on how bureaucracy compartmentalizes people. They looked at the history of how and when it was introduced into the US federal government, and then went on to explain how bureaucrats are two different people in the same body. The herd mentality in a bureaucracy is so potent that people will simply assume a totally different identity at work versus who they are outside of work. And it seems all perfectly normal to them. Yet, once in the bureaucratic herd mode, they have no moral foundation at all. They'll go along with bureaucratic plans to torture or slaughter mass numbers of people and never give it a thought.
It's been said that bureaucracy is like cancer, in that it's not exactly a living thing by itself, but it does metastasize on a country or nation like diseased tissue that went haywire. It seeks to grow in power and to reduce inconvenience to itself. What is convenience for a bureaucrat? It's mostly about reducing variations in whatever it is they confront. They seek to reduce human variation so that they don't have to actually think. They protect the herd from anything that makes them wake up and become morally conscious.
This is the instinct behind centralization. It's one thing to know that we can blame Jewish leadership, neocons, globalists, etc. It's another thing to have a clear understanding of their methods and tactics. You need to understand what evil is so that you can ask the Lord how to resist it for His glory.
Scott, in a guest post on Jack's blog, talks about the Duluth Model for dealing with domestic violence. In brief, the model is simply wokie nonsense that men are inherently evil as men, and that the only way to fix this problem is to build treatment programs based on these assumptions. This crap has been injected into the bureaucratic system of many states so that any psychologists contracted with the state loses their independent choices, and are obliged to use the Duluth Model regardless. As Scott notes, scholarly critique means nothing to the bureaucracy. Once it's institutionalized, it's locked in and the bureaucrats never look back.
That's how some things are centralized.
How will the Internet be centralized? In similar fashion, the bureaucracy reduces the number of options it has to deal with. Slowly but surely, the independence of Internet participants is being restricted. Back in the old days of telephone bulletin board systems, all you needed was a decent modem and cheap little MS-DOS machine that could run the bulletin board software. Censorship was virtually impossible.
Then came a faster protocol over phone lines (DSL), and then cable, and then fiber, and over a very short time, the Internet became something for which anyone could rent a connection. And better servers were offered with improved capacity; hardware prices began to plunge and the Open Source movement wrote increasingly better software. At one point, anyone could lease a connection through an ISP and run a server on it.
The first round of restrictions mostly had to do with providers making more money and reducing the hassles of independent idiots who refused to abide by common rules. And for a long time, only technology people understood much of it, and they could easily lie to governments. Until recently, bureaucrats could not even understand how it worked, much less how to add controls.
But they understand it now. They came to understand all the various levels and protocols, and developed a comprehensive vision of how to bring it all under their control. It's incremental, of course. Their excuse is typically the complaints of lobbyists that their advertising isn't working as well as it should, so the bureaucrats should make snooping and tracking legal, even mandatory. Of course, the bureaucrats love snooping and tracking for their own use.
And the bureaucrats also love when some outfit gets big enough to buy up all the little guys. It reduces the variation bureaucrats have to handle. Advertising is like that, with one company controlling almost all advertising on the Internet. And that same company controls the single most popular browser, and has gotten other large companies to use their browser engine, which of course includes all the various changes they make to force people to endure snooping and tracking, while at the same time disabling techniques that might reduce advertising exposure. Oh, and they are also coding whole operating systems that run on roughly half the smartphones and tablets, with a related OS on the vast majority of cheap laptops.
Yeah, I'm talking about Google. You know, that company that started as a decent search engine written by two guys who took CIA money to fund their early work. Yeah, the bureaucrats love Google. Today, the distinction between Google as a private corporation and the government bureaucracy is insignificant. Google is just another branch of the federal government, only pretending to be a private company. It "competes" against just a handful of other huge Internet empires, each gobbling up little companies and snuggling up closer to government bureaucrats.
This blog runs on a server in a massive server center (somewhere in Florida, last time I checked). It is not owned, but leased, by some guy I know who has several other customers, and their websites, and his own three of four sites. How long before the bureaucratic controls mixed with buyouts force him to shut it all down? How long before we are all forced to seek permission from a tiny few oligarchs or a monopolist just to send a private message, never mind publish something that others can find on the Net?
Unless there are some major surprises, I'm guessing the current trends mean this blog will disappear from the Net in a couple of years, at the latest. And the entire federal bureaucracy will force every state program to embrace the Duluth Model for dealing with every whiny feminist complaint. And every other element of our daily lives will come under one centralized bureaucracy or another, and probably several at once.
Now, for sure this will all break down and grind to a halt on its own. But until it does, things will get more painful. If we don't bend the knee, they will want us dead.
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