Big Tech At War: Act 1, Scene 1.

This years started with a bang, and so much for all the hopes about 2021 as a better year than 2020.

You already know all about the riots in Washington DC; I bet that most of you are following the political downfall and the legal actions against the perpetrators. It looks like we have the start of the first war campaign made by the big tech companies, using Parler as the intended target.

Now, this is interesting for many different issues. This post of mine is intended to set some points together; I already know that there will be more to come. For a summary of all the related facts, I suggest reading this article (LINK). It’s from CNN, so you can drop all the bias against right-wing sources.

The first thing to be considered is the role of the app stores. Whatever your business is, you have to go through Google Play or Apple Store. The whole concept of gatekeepers was already discussed many times in the last ten years, so I will pass. Bear in mind that any app, no matter how successful, could be dropped (or suspended) from these stores any day.

BRITISH AIRSHIP PILOTS IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR (Q 67698) A British airman dropping a bomb. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205314988

The reaction of the Parler users has been defiant. You block the app? No problem, I will go thru a browser. Several tech-savvy posts about how to keep on your phone the Parler app are available, so a simple search will show you what to do. A word of warning, I haven’t tried any of such solutions (I’m not a Parler user), so be considered.

The second act of this little dirty war came later, with the decision from Amazon to zone out the Parler site from their AWS hosting service. For those who still don’t know, Amazon controls a huge share of the hosting market. They give a week’s notice, just the time needed for the news to circulate worldwide. So we have Google, Apple, and Amazon on the same side. Wow, it looks like overkill to me.

If you put yourself on the Parler side, business speaking, this is huge. The big players in the market just kick you out of the field, with many the media scene doing a standing ovation. I’ve lost count of the related posts on social media, not to mention hashtags and such. The message is quite clear: step out of the lines, you will be burned to the ground.

Now, I cannot predict the future. I know for sure many people will move to Parler and leave Twitter and Facebook for good. I also know a bigger number of good guys and gals who are ready to call for judiciary actions against Parler because it is “on the wrong side.” What I see here is another kind of polarization, with more fuel pumped on a fire that shows no signs of calming down.

Finally, we get another landmark. January 2021 will be marked as the start of internet-related corporate wars. Sorry, I’m not happy about that.

The Power Of The Social Media – Truth or Myth?

The ongoing investigation against the Cambridge Analytica company is a good starting point for a question: how much political influence, if any, could be created in the social media? I’m more than a bit skeptic about it, but such a question cannot be ignored.

We already know that every social media user is somewhat profiled by the big players and it’s a safe bet to say that such data are evaluated (almost in real time)and used for a number of commercial reasons, from advertising to research.

We also know that advertising adapts itself according to the changes we made in our daily use of the social media platforms. The mechanism set up by the big players is quite efficient and the constant push to buy or to acquire services is self-evident for everybody with half a brain.

Ghost in the Shell, the return of cyberpunk

Back in the ’90s, the Cyberpunk genre was the place to be for sci-fi lovers like me. Every fan got his/her own favorites and there was a lot of debate about the works of writers like Bruce Gibson and Pat Cadigan (not to mention a thousand others!). Dystopia was the name of the game and some sort of post-apocalyptic world was accepted as the most likely perspective of our near future.

The truth as we like it

Please consider for a moment this infographic. As you may see, that comes from a news network, in order to show us how the Palestinian territories has been shrinked thru the decades. The message delivered is quite clear, isn’t it? It’s easy to see how the Arab population of that area has been overcomed by the Israelis in a matter of a century. What do I ask you today is: is this the truth?

Because I have another map to show you. Same area, almost the same date. It’s a representation of the Middle East in 1922, when all this area was under European control after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in WWI. Ready?