One thing I found interesting about living in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism was just how easily people can flip-flop between ideologies, but still retain the same personality. The ideology is just the veneer - a thin coating for many people. Their deeper philosophy that allows this is need to force compliance in others. In my mind the Trump supporter and the militant feminist share this these deeper traits, and I noticed this trait in former communists in the late 1990’s. They believe there is one right way, but have difficulty explaining it or discussing it. They often express anger when you try to break down exactly what their point of view is.
Honestly facebook has always been nefarious. Just look at how it was developed. I was an early adopter of google in 1998 and was amazed at what I found back then. Nothing like today. The change came when Google changed it’s ownership and business model in 2004 and became a public company. It’s around that time they started to have aspirations of global domination under the guise of making things more convenient.
For the crackdown on tracking, we have to go to an interesting place - the busting up of the Dark Web silk road in 2014 (though of course they were using tracking technology before then). Under the auspices of law enforcement protecting the common good, they developed techniques to track people suspected of criminal activity. Yes - the silk road was a freaking horrific space so I’m not saying it shouldn’t have been closed. But the techniques used to bring it down were then turned on the next target - bootleg Hollywood movies distributed through torrents. The Pirate Bay and other torrent aggregators went down in 2014 and now there is a strong case to be made that the current Pirate Bay is a sting operation. Facebook’s tracking algorithm became blatantly obvious t me around this time when I got an ad in my facebook feed for LDS derivatives for research purposes based on a site I had browsed on another computer. I like to keep my work and personal life 100% separate, and I kept getting friend suggestions from my work environment. I figured out this was based on my personal email and phone number being in at least one other person’s address book (like my boss), and then his email being in hundreds of people’s address book.
What I am disappointed in is when people get on the bandwagon only when their chosen side wants to win an election, then suddenly never talks about the subject when their chosen side is in office.
Vigilante groups such as Anonymous, Oathkeepers, preppers, and so on are an example of this. All through the Obama years there was an amazing amount of anti-tyranny social media content across all platforms. It was a full court press for 8 years to get that “guy” out of office and keep Hillary out of office. Then in November 2016 the silence across all these channels was deafening.
What I see as the similarity between the rise of totalitarianism today and 100 years ago is the lack of any actual consistent ideology except being “against the elite”. Communism came into power because the proletariat was against the bourgeoise, and they didn’t think beyond the idea of taking their neighbor’s property. Today we have the populist movement growing against the “elite liberals” but there isn’t any kind of consistent philosophy or policy beyond being against something. The most obvious of these is Trump being all in on vaccines and being proud that he was the one in office to push their development - but at the same time his refusal to advocate using those same exact vaccines because he lost. I could go on and on about policy flip-flops and 180 turns that happened in 2016 and 2020. Fiscal responsibility is another conservative policy that has gone completely out the window because it’s unpopular with the new proletariat.
Oh yes - the first real nail in the coffin was the Patriot Act 20 years ago. That’s how deep we are into this.
