Reflections On What It Means To Be Retreating More Into Virtual Existence In Fear Of A Virus

This is not intended to provide any sort of conclusion as to where to draw the line about appropriate cautions to take as we make our individual and collective decisions about dealing with Covid-19.  Still, I feel it’s essential to reflect on certain things as we adopt unfamiliar, new and unnatural ways of living and societally interacting.

As we are increasingly prompted to convert all our social and interpersonal dealings into a virtual, through-the-internet verisimilitude replication of the lives that we used to lead, some kind of existence that is ethereally Matrix-like, it is important to remember how the internet was built for data-scraping and surveillance.  Amazon, with its strange history and ties to the U.S. Military and intelligence communities, already knows far too much about everyone already, and our encouraged wholesale retreat into manifesting our interactions in exclusively digitally ways will only be making the big internet monopolies more formidably ginormous and powerful.  A lot of us now find ourselves on Zoom conferencing discovering its merits as one of the prime candidates for virtual meeting options– Zoom sends your data to Facebook even if you don't have a Facebook account–  And Facebook has a record of coordinating, Big Brother style, with groups like the Atlantic Council and Cambridge Analytica that affected the 2016 election.  Let’s also remember that internet technology, knowing what it knows about us as it collects information about us for that purpose, can manipulate us as well.  It is routinely hired out to do so.

Heretofore, some of the antidote for the control of control and ubiquity of the internet was to take a break and go where the internet’s reach and influence might peter out: Have face-to-face, peer-to-peer personal interactions, read physical vs. digital books, assemble together in real meetings, assemblies and forums, listen to and support the kind of live radio that the internet cannot squelch, censor or take away.  It is part of the reason that I, as a co-founder of Citizens Defending Libraries have been fighting for the continuation of traditional libraries with physical books and trained human being librarians. . .  It is part of the reason I support WBAI radio, 99.5 FM, the Pacifica station in New York that is New York City's only truly listener supported public radio station.

. . . You may have noticed that a spin-off of the coronaviris effects has been the closure of most libraries.  We would hope that this is not subsequently cited as additional evidence that this public commons is a public asset society can now dispense with.  Meanwhile, the public’s habits of hanging out in the shallower digital internet world will, perforce, be reinforced as we live protecting ourselves from the virus.

. . . With the emphasis on digital substitution you may not have noticed that lock downs and new rules against groups of more than a certain number of people gathering, for instance restricting groups to no more than ten, leaves by the wayside the First Amendment right of assembly guaranteed by the Constitution.  Why was the right of public assembly one of the first enumerated rights?  Seasoned activists are well acquainted with the fact that when opposing war, or agitating for rights including, for instance, healthcare, the clicking of Facebook posts to like them or even generating acerbically astute and insightful Tweets, just doesn’t cut it and hardly equals the impact of crowds getting out into the streets.

We are also in the middle of a national election.  I recently joked (before some of the new really strict new controls) that those in power were coming up with a prohibition on future Bernie Sanders’s rallies, but that they weren’t bothering with an equivalent rule for Joe Biden rallies because Biden doesn’t draw any crowds.  Is there a virtual substitute for the formidably energetic Bernie troops knocking on doors; something they will not now be able to do?  Telephone calls are not the same as face-to-face knocking on doors.

Nothing is the same as face-to-face and knocking on doors because human beings were not built for virtual existences.  We are social animals designed for the social bonds that come from real interactions.  When we are infants, the mother holding the child generates the hormone oxytocin, which promotes the bond between the mother and child.  Same thing when a father holds the baby.  It is a physical thing.  The same hormones are generated when owners pet their pets, in both the pet owner and the pet.

Oxytocin from human closeness not only generates, builds and strengthens the bonds between human beings, it actually confers benefits like building up the immune system, calming us, and making us more capable.  It is ironic that, as we go into isolation to avoid getting sick with the coronavirus, we may actually, through our isolation and physical separation, be weakening our immune system’s ability to respond to and for us to survive the virus if we get infected. . .  Thinking about how important human physical touch is, holding a hand, giving and receiving a hug, I feel, in depth and achingly for the afflicted patients who must recover separated and physically apart from their loved ones.

When email took over as the new default method of communication, the phenomenon of “flaming” was widely recognized as an unfortunate byproduct. Email communications, and some internet communications can be launched instantaneously with the press of a button.  It’s not like a letter that sits around to be mailed the next day when more sober instincts might prevail.  With the disinhibition of not dealing with another person face to face, communications can be extra harsh, especially if exchanges back and forth escalate into a “flame war.”  Even face-to-face communication can be hard; you have to realize and know what you want to say; you have to say what you actually mean; other people have to hear what you actually say and they have to understand, without misinterpretation or incorrect filled-in suppositions, what you actually mean.  All of these things are harder over the internet without all the moment-to-moment micro-adjustments you can make speaking to somebody face to face as you intuitively sense from another’s physical body in the room responding, the ongoing success as opposed to misdirection of your communication.

Added to this is the way that our ongoing fear-based enforced physical separation from others can enhance our suspicions of others.  We walk through the streets now socially distancing each other and maintaining six-feet gaps like wary gunslingers in a Hollywood western.  Fear turns on our lizard brains, and these distances can enhance the instincts toward unhealthy “othering.” This comes just at a time when the obvious solution to get through our current crisis is more community cross-support for resilience.  Covid-19 could not be a more perfect and obvious “my health is your health/your health is my health” argument for Medicare for all.  With massive, nationwide layoffs because of the Covid-19 health crisis, millions of Americans are now losing their “if you like your private employer health plan, you can keep it,” health insurance right at the time when they need it most.  This is notwithstanding Joe Biden’s very recent statement that if the Democrats pass Medicare for all he will veto it if he is elected president. . .

In many ways, Americans are now in a particularly vulnerable time if anyone wants to deploy the typical kind of divide and conquer tactics that neutralize the public’s ability to organize for common goals and make our democracy work.  One of the most valuable big picture overviews available right now about the way things stand is Naomi Klein's Intercept video about the fork in the road decisions ahead of us as we face the Coronavirus crisis (Coronavirus Capitalism — and How to Beat It): Either we could go the route of improving and making our society more resilient the way FDR did in dealing with the Depression of the 1930s, or, instead, another round of disaster capitalism maneuvers could be effected.  We know that the 2008 financial crisis was mishandled by pumping money into wealthy investment funds, banks, and corporations at exactly the time that asset prices were low and temporarily suppressed, prices for things like the homes of people in the Main Street economy, and those assets and homes were then bought up by those hedge funds, banks and corporations. . .  It was one of the greatest wealth transfers ever, increasing wealth inequality in America.  Plus it was paid for with taxpayer money.  The people who lost their homes paid the taxes that financed those tilted economy buy ups that deprived them of ownership.

It's exceedingly hard to maintain a big picture consciousness when news about the virus is frenetically reported with rotating reports of the very latest statistics in different countries, different cities, different regions of different countries, the world, and then starting over again at the beginning for updates because by the time the end of the list is reached, the numbers have already up-ticked.  Alternatively, a fairly good big picture overview doesn't require drowning in the latest moment to moment statistical data: our health care system is at the point of being overwhelmed, the United States is in many ways inexcusably ill prepared for such a pandemic; and, additionally, we are not doing many of the sensible things we could be doing, and yes. . .  people should be cautious  One day, a time may come when we look back at 2020 and say, "that was a very peculiar election–how do that ever happen?"; and if, as we might  hope, the virus finally exits center stage and exact memories of it recede just the way we now have to work to remind ourselves of the 1918 flu (which occurred during the Midterm elections of President Woodrow Wilson's wartime presidential tenure), we may answer: "Oh, that's right, that was during the coronavirus crisis when we were so all distracted and worried about other things."

The coronavirus crisis feels a lot like the 2008 financial crisis and 9/11 wrapped up into one.  It is worth remembering how with the distractions of 9/11 (and the tag-team Anthrax attacks that closely followed), we, as a nation, just as with the 2008 financial crisis, also made a series of really bad decisions as we were distracted from big picture truths.

There are silver linings to our new world.  Families where parents are now working at home are spending more time together, building stronger bonds.  They are experiencing the opposite effect of the separation and isolation that is making our larger world feel so relentlessly dystopian these days.  Some may even experience the new quieting down as meditative, and it may feel as if there is also some shift away from things materialistic.  We may feel closer to some essential truths about what is truly valuable.  That is not to say that all family groups have equal tools to deal with what could feel like a pressure cooker of forced togetherness.

Not everybody has a family that they live with, and that can be unfortunate.  For many their sense ongoing family and human togetherness was achieved by getting out in the world and physically spending time communing with other people.  The virtual is an inferior substitute: Before the virus ever arrived, it has been noted how often people who spend a great deal of their time on platforms like Facebook for their companionship and for their “friends” can wind up depressed.

One last good thing to note is that it does seem that we are, for the most part, presently being good to each other despite the human separations being forced on us and the digital substitutions being offered for our existence.  Hopefully, still being good to each other, we will all be communally together again, in a real physical sense, soon.

Feeling Constrained By Your Digital `Liberation’? Speaking Personally, I Am

Here is a personal dispatch from New York City– Weren’t computers and all the delights of digital supposed to liberate and set us free?  I know that was once propounded as the concept, but computers are great. . .  Until they are not.               

Not very long ago I had yet more conversations with Verizon about our Verizon land line, which has been out of service since mid-May.  Verizon gave us a revised estimated restoration of service date extending another six weeks into the future.  That makes it more than an entire half year now in all, with us having to suspect that, as before, the date could be pushed back even further before everything concludes.

Verizon offered to give us a device that would use a cellular signal to supply service to the line.  In that case, they would start charging us again for the full price of a land line, notwithstanding the lower voice quality we would get, and that, on our own, we could install the equivalent connection via cell signal for a fraction of that price. We declined Verizon’s seemingly kind offer.

It is almost as if Verizon is trying to convince us that we don’t want to have a land line. . For one thing land lines are now so much more expensive than digital signal options.

Once upon a time, (and it was up until very recently) it was the land lines that never went out, that worked faithfully and dependably when electricity went out, whenever cell phones didn't, when there were internet or cable outages.  Land line problems, which pretty much never occurred, were always resolved within mere hours if they did occur, as if people's lives depended on it, as they often did. . . Now, it’s as if Verizon wants to convince us that land lines are the least dependable and desirable options.

I don’t know if you have noticed, but if you want to call Verizon about repairing your land line its very hard to find the number to do so: It’s like they hide the number. We also now get a separate bill for the land line from your cell phone.  If you call the easy-to-find number to call about cell phones, they will tell you have the wrong number to call about land lines.  However, on the other hand, if you call about your land line on the correct number using your cell phone (it’s about the only way to call if your land line isn’t working), a robot will ask if you are calling about fixing the cell number you are calling from.

About the only way it doesn’t feel that the phone company is pushing cell phones over land lines is that they haven’t devoted the resources– band-width etc.–  or used the technology (and it is available) to make the voice quality better.  Guess they just don’t want to give up that little bit of profit.

Just the other day, I was reading about good old-fashioned land lines in Tim Shorrock’s book “Spies for Hire,” so I was remembering that at page 199 Mr. Shorrock was saying that in the 1990's the NSA’s historical dominance in surveillance technology was beginning to fade and that it was having difficulty keeping up “with the millions of calls it was monitoring every day.”

He wrote:

And in the course of a few years, the world switched from using telephone lines and calls beamed by radar to using fiber-optic lines, cell phones, and wireless technology. The NSA's eavesdropping skills, in contrast, were in the old telephony infrastructure and electronic signals; the fiber-optic lines increasingly used around the world were almost impossible to monitor from above the ground.

"Wiretapping was physically relatively easy" prior to the 1990s, says Peter Swire, the Ohio State law professor. “If I touch my copper wires to your copper wire, I can listen in. That's the old-fashioned wire-tap.”  But that doesn't work with fiber optics. “If I touch my glass to your piece of glass, it doesn't do anything to conduct.” As fiber optics increasingly became the system of choice for communications, intelligence analysts began to say the NSA was “going deaf.” 

But as we all know now from the Snowden revelations, things pretty much flipped around after that: The NSA got the technology it needs to collect vast quantities of information and data electronically transmitted over the newer infrastructure and have that automatically transcribed, indexed and searchable.  They can even unleash artificial intelligence on it.  “Total Information Awareness,” it’s an intelligence agency catchphrase, it’s the name of a program and it’s even an acronym: “TIA.”  So these days it’s really become the reverse, the NSA, must by contrast to those nostalgic old days, feel relatively deaf with the old copper wire technologies.

When our Verizon land line went out, our intercom for people coming into the building to visit our apartment went out as well.  In all likelihood, that’s because our intercom used the phone line to for us to hear people at our front door and operate the front door lock to let them in.  That’s the way it's been for a number of years, since we went with a new state-of-the-art system in 1996.  When we moved into our building before that, there was a system with push button squawk boxes that had its own designated speaker lines and power source.  We also discovered during a renovation of our 1883 building, once the tallest in Brooklyn, that once upon a time they did it the real old-fashioned way: The walls were filled with courses of hollow tin tubes, one for each apartment in the building, that went all the way up to the top floors.

Our 1996 system was always supposed to work with or without a telephone company involved, but because the technology is now different (and Verizon is reportedly difficult and obstructionist, if not an outright saboteur) we are going to have to get a new system for the building.  The new systems these days all work through our cell phones.  Whoever comes to your front door to visit winds up, by pressing the front door bell, calling you through your cell phone.  Interesting.

Another way I am feeling constrained by technology right now is that I am having problems with Apple.  Yes, I guess that means what I am telling you is that I am having trouble with my cell phone too.  Actually, what I am having problems with is losing my “memos,” the notes, I store on my phone for information and reference. . . .

. . . To be fair, the problem also involves AOL.  (BTW: Let’s mention, for those of you who don’t know, the AOL email service recently merged with the Yahoo email service, so AOL and Yahoo are no longer competitors or alternatives to each other; they are just two different faces for identically operating services– When AOL changed its terms of service recently, Yahoo made exactly the same changes at exactly the same time, with exactly the same message to users asking us if we `consented’ to their new terms.)

What happened with my Apple cell phone is that an update for the operating system came through.  After my phone loaded it, my AOL email no longer worked properly; I was receiving emails, but I could not any longer send emails from AOL, my main email account.  When I tried I got a message about not being ablet to find the server.  (I know other AOL subscribers, so I know I was not the only one who this happened to.)  I intuited that the solution was to simply delete my AOL account from my phone and reinstall it.  (In fact that is what Apple Support told other users to do as well.)  I even did some preliminary research just to reconfirm that, as should have been the case, I would not lose anything this way: Advisory sites told me I wouldn’t lose anything because the information was all securely on a server that would put it right back on my phone.

I deleted and reinstalled my AOL account on my phone.  My AOL email worked perfectly; I received emails and I could send them again.  Then a few days later, I noted that all my memos were gone from my phone.  Why?: Because my memos were stored as AOL memos and my phone was apparently now pointing to a different server for memos than it had before.

What were these “memos” of mine that were missing?  Oh, just a few things I’d been collecting over the decades: Family anecdotes and reminiscences involving ancestors or histories that had been emailed to me; a list of about a hundred classic films I had compiled by genre for my daughters as suggested viewing as they grew up; things to remember like my eye glass prescription or for filling out medical forms, how many micrograms I am (or my mother is) taking for certain prescriptions; a list of all the mayors of NYC, and another of the president’s of the United States; the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States, Bill of Rights and other amendments; key facts about global warming/climate change I’d collected over time; a time line I’d put together with major events in the formation and geo-history of the earth and the evolution of different species, including mankind on earth; what everyone in my family wants if I am picking up dinner at Chipolte .  . . .  I could go on, but you get the idea: a collection of the things you want to collect and have on hand for easy reference.

In the very distant past, I would have kept a lot of these things in my pocket in a small notebook, perhaps a few inserted pages therein, or in my pocket calendars.  Remember pocket calendars?; Remember when everybody had one? . .

. . . At a later time, I was carrying these notes in my Palm Pilot, the last one of these I owned being a Palm V.  That’s what replaced my calendar too.  The Palm was nice because it not only kept all these notes available to me in my pocket, it also “synced” to make them available on my computers and, vice versa, moved what I wanted from my computer to put in my pocket in the Palm.  My computers were safely under my control.

There were nice things about those days: My Palm also played music and when I wanted it to be able to hold more information or music I could insert tiny memory cards that could be upgraded and were always getting cheaper, going from inexpensive to costing still less, at the same time they were becoming exponentially more capacious.  My iPhone now has tons of memory, but only because I was careful to pay extra for a lot of it upfront: I can now never upgrade.

When I started carrying a phone with me (and the Palm Pilots came in phone versions too in the fashion of what everyone was referring to back then as “convergence”), I never ran out of battery, because I carried two extra batteries in my pocket (they were cheap and small) to swap out whenever needed.  You can’t do that with an iPhone.

When I gave up my Palm Pilot to start using an iPhone as my new phone (and for my calendar and address book), I would have lost my collection of memos, except that, obviously, I was not the only one who didn’t want to lose data like that: There was an iPhone app that would efficiently transfer the notes with all these things I wanted to remember, and it would keep them where I could open and, by hitting the app’s little button, I could search through them.  It was a fine solution for a while. . .

There came a day when my iPhone 4s operating system needed to be `upgraded.’   I didn’t want to upgrade: I had been holding back from doing so and skipped quite a few iterations of 'upgrade'.  But Twitter and some other things on my iPhone that had been working fine, suddenly weren’t working any longer.  At the Apple Genius desk they told me I had to upgrade the operating system to make Twitter work again.  I ‘upgraded’ and doing so caused my handy memo app to stop working.  That’s when I “moved” my memos, this time to the iPhone `notes’ app (in the AOL category) by laboriously copying them there.  To do so, I had to restore my 4s iPhone to its previous state to temporarily get back the previously handy app that wouldn’t work with the upgrade.

In the end, upgrading my 4s iPhone to the new operating system (IOS) to use Twitter was not such a good idea in certain other ways.  It turns out that the new IOS had a buggy relationship with 4s iPhones.  It caused the phone to think the internal antenna was overheating and shut it down, thus turning off the phone’s wifi access to the internet, while it also wrecked the phone’s battery life.  (The same thing had happened to my wife's phone when upgraded.)  On the internet (particularly YouTube videos) I found lots of advice and videos telling me that there was strange fix to the problem: Heating the phone up to a high heat with a hair dryer and then freezing it to reset its calibrations.  At the Apple Genius Bar they told me this was very ill-advised; that it would break the phone and that I needed to buy a new one, advice to which I succumbed.  Nevertheless, trying the hair dryer fix on the device that was then no longer my phone, it did indeed, absolutely fix it (and it has stayed fixed), so the device is now a very nice music player.

Was Apple just trying to sell me, like other 4s owners, a new phone?
 
Apple Support hasn’t been able to fix my most recent lost memo problem yet.  They tell me they are still trying.  Let me explain that I haven’t exactly lost my memos completely.  My memos are still on my iPad, and because I did not upgrade my iPad to the new operating system like I did my phone they are not lost to me there.  But I can’t upgrade my iPad to the new operating system although my iPad persists in electronic notifications telling me that I should want to.  Apple Support tells me if I upgrade I will lose my memos from that device too.

There is a workaround: I could “move” all the memos still on my iPad from the AOL category (thus the AOL server) to the iCloud memo category (which get saved by Apple on the iCloud server).  Do you remember when Apple was working to convince you to store all your music on their iCloud server?  This is sort of the same thing, except that it means that Apple gets all your memos as well any of your music that you might have entrusted to their cloud.  It wasn’t exactly consoling to learn that, as I was considering this, the iCloud server went down for a while.  People I knew couldn't use their iCloud accounts to send emails. It’s interesting to speculate whether the system was overtaxed with people moving data onto their cloud for the same reason that I was considering doing so just at that moment.

I could also go to look at some of my older notes and memos in the desktop program that went with my old Palm that operates on my faithful old and steady XP operating system computer.  I could do that, but Microsoft has abandoned support for the XP operating system and doesn't want me using it any longer.   Browsers are not working well with it anymore.   The abandonment was a major reason I had to buy and migrate to a new computer.

I must confess that, while it was working on my phone, it was nice to have my memos and notes about things “in the cloud,” since I could make a note or put in an update on my iPad and it would show up on my iPhone or vice versa.  Maybe it’s less private, but having things in the cloud can feel reassuring and easy— until those things disappear.

It has been suggested that the ability to stream all sorts of excellent films from the cloud makes it seem “less important to purchase and own pricey Criterion Blu-rays or to leave the house to see a digital restoration at the American Cinematheque,” when you can conveniently rely on the cloud, but now some cinephiles are declaring that they will “clutch” their “Blu-Rays and DVDs tighter” since Filmstruck, the classic film streaming service from Criterion and Turner Classic movies, announced that it is shutting down after just two years of operation.  It was just announced this October, but the “lights go out” at the company on November 29th.

That shutdown may very well be attributable to the different decisions and views about profit engendered by AT&T’s monopolistic takeover of Time Warner.  There are fewer and fewer companies owning things and delivering such things as news and content. This shifts the thinking of those decision makers about what we may be delivered as consumers as that number dwindles steadily downward.

Would it be better and more secure to buy your streaming rights from Amazon, and if you buy a film from Amazon, do you really own it forever?  Might you then find yourself rooting for Amazon’s continued existence?

I know that I am complaining about some of the technology that we have, but sometimes it amazes me, and I complain about the technology that we don’t get—  Once upon a time, not that long ago it seems, I carried a small pocket radio with me at all times.  It’s the way I quickly knew that radio stations were down on 9/11, because I tuned in for news on it that morning as I was arriving at work.  Since that time, radio technology has been improved.  Something called HD radio, or “High Definition” radio has been invented and deployed.  It’s radio that provides an ultra-clear listening experience, without the static.  It even allows extra stations and programming to be broadcast with extra spectrum needing to be assigned to it.  You could be listening to it now and you could easily be carrying a tiny inexpensive HD radio in you pocket.  In fact, taking up no space, they can be built into MP3 music players.  That’s what Microsoft did in 2009 when it designed its new Zune music player. 

Palm Pilots and Microsoft's Internet capable 2009 HD radio and MP3 Music player, mysteriously withdrawn from the market- Try finding pocket HD radios now: It's hard!

Then Microsoft mysteriously withdrew its Zune players from the market, abandoning everything to Apple.  Mini-portable pocket HD radios have been designed and built since, proving that they need cost virtually nothing, but try finding one: They are inexplicably almost totally absent from the marketplace now.

I remember periodically going in and asking the salesmen at J&R (remember the J&R, the now vanished cornucopia electronics store?) why they didn’t have other combination music players/HD radios.  I remember the shrug of the salesmen as they responded that people were supposed to be listening to their music and radio stations over the internet now.  But sometimes you are not close to the internet or a cell phone signal that could connect you.  And there is a difference: When you listen to terrestrial broadcast radio no one can monitor you and collect your data.

Is it just that almost everyone automatically carries a phone now so they don’t think about what else could be available?  It would be a cinch for our slim little phones with built in cell antenna and built in wifi antennae to also have HD radio capacity that way the 2009 Zunes (which also accessed the internet) did.  It would be a cinch also for them to load apps that would (like Tivos or DVRs for radio) and record programs time shifting them for later listening.  Maybe that’s solving a problem that podcasting also readily solves, but it would give the user more control and there might not be the same kind of monitoring and data collection.

Getting back to my disappearing memos— People warn that what is in the digital realm can’t be expected to be forgotten, that your college antics in Facebook posts could follow you around for life.  All right, fair enough, but the potential evanescence of the digital can also be frightening.  HBO recently aired a new film version of “Fahrenheit 451,” Ray Bradbury’s very famous novel about a future where the government has banned books and burns them.  I found the remake quite inferior to François Truffaut’s 1966 poetic film with its brooding Bernard Herrmann score.  Nevertheless the film briefly introduced a brilliant notion that it hardly explained and didn’t elaborate upon at all: That the book-loving enemies of the government were subject to being punished by having their identities digitally `erased.’

That seems potentially terrifying.  And maybe it was more and more terrifying because the film didn't make clear what was being erased.  As more and more of our identities and the record of who we are is entrusted to a few big companies that may or may not keep what we give them, it seems there is a huge proportion of who we are documented to be and how we might remember about our selves, friends and families, that might disappear when those companies vanish or if we fail to migrate to their next idea for the digital playgrounds they want us to be playing in.

I am convinced that many families have stopped keeping scrap books, expecting Facebook and/or other web and social media platforms to make it all available for them in perpetuity.  Want an example of the way things can disappear?: An entire major social media connection service set up by Google to compete with Facebook, Google’s Google+, is going to be shut down.  (I don't whether that means that all my Google+ posts will vanish.  Yoko Ono's?)  Fairly widely used, Google+ is pretty closely modeled on Facebook; it's more or less the same thing.  It presently hasn’t gotten to nearly the same scale as Facebook, which is probably why the shutting down of such a similar site doesn’t cause us to image that Facebook, which didn’t exist in 2003, might one day not exist again.
    
The timing of the shutting down of Google+ as well as the reasons given for it are suspicious, something I’ll have to get into in a later article.  Facebook isn’t down, but just recently in a huge censorship binge (right in time for the midterm elections) Facebook expanding upon previous censorship endeavors is taking down hundreds of pages (apparently coordinating its censorship with Twitter in doing so).  Many trying to do good work (although it may have been considered dangerous or irksome to government officials or the corptocracy) have lost year's worth of work they expected to keep along with connections to online communities they had been building, all of which will have to be subject another later National Notice article.

Mainly, I just wanted to ask in this article: Are you feeling constrained by your digital “liberation”?  Because I am.