Web and Tech

PGC – Ethiopia has announced it intends on building its  own social media platforms to prevent silicon valley from determining what is truth and what is good.   They are not the first to make this move.  China was the first, and they certainly won’t be the last.  The reason why has to do with the personal needs of the leaders of the nation-states these platforms are now controlling by controlling their public discouse.  These individuals saw the writing on the wall back in 2020.

When Facebook and Twitter moved to check the social media access of the American President of the United States, many leaders around the world, even if they might openly celebrate the move, took serious pause and asked themselves this question, “How much power do these international social media companies have to affect our national sovereignty?”

Well, that’s the dishonest question they ask themselves, the one that preserves their nobility and prevents them from seeing the self-centered motivation behind the concern.  Every leader looks into the mirror and sees Alexander the Great. It’s hard to be Alexander the Great when a power that is located in foreign lands has the ability to alter your political fortune by the particular ideology or morality it chooses to enforce upon your lands.

I predicted at the time that nations would be moving in short order to nationalize their social media platforms.  China is far ahead of the rest of the world in this regard, having rejected American Silicon Valley expansion and choosing to develop their own CCP-approved social media platforms inhouse.  Their social media platforms are already nationalized.

Outside of China,  my suspiicion was the nations that would choose such a route would be the less powerful ones, just as I thought it would be the less powerful nations willing to take more dramatic chances with cryptocurrencies (which we see in El Salvador, which has made it the legal tender of their land).  Ethiopia is just such a nation, and it has a real need to control narratives as it is in the midst of a civl war that feeds on the extreme fears and hopes of peoples who have suffered authentic injustices.

Ethiopia has been battling with Facebook over what it censors and what it does not, so now, it’s had enough.  It has decided to develop its own social media network, something well within the capacity of most nation-states, even the smaller ones.  The biggest expense in social media is in the servers and the human monitors.  If your platform is serving only one nation, your cost of operation goes down to levels that allow almost any nation-state, and many larger free associative groups (if they so chose, and they will,in time, they will) can afford to develop and support.

The leadership of Ethiopia might not be proponents of free speech themselves, but they are the first of a small few among many to follow among nation-states to take the route that they are choosing now.  The balkanization of the internet is coming, and Silicon Valley’s hubristic assumptions it could play God with morality and truth is to blame for creating the conditions that made it worth the investment of nation-stations to blunt.  Nation-states are led by individuals, individuals that look in the mirror and see Alexander the Great, a man that would never tolerate the gordian knot of distant power controlling nation-state public discourse and opinion, that’s Alexander’s job, not yours.

Alexander would march to the Silicon Valley and shell it to a fine powder.  Short of that, he would build walls to keep it out, even if it meant he had to build new digital roads within.

Ethiopia to build local rival to Facebook, other platforms

From www.reuters.com
2021-08-23 12:02:00

Excerpt:

 

ADDIS ABABA, Aug 23 (Reuters) – Ethiopia has begun developing its own social media platform to rival Facebook (FB.O), Twitter (TWTR.N) and WhatsApp, though it does not plan to block the global services, the state communications security agency said on Monday.

Ethiopia has been engulfed since last year in an armed conflict pitting the federal government against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which controls the Tigray region in the country’s north.

Supporters of both sides have waged a parallel war of words on social media.

The government wants its local platform to “replace” Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp and Zoom, the director general of the Information Network Security Agency (INSA), Shumete Gizaw,

said.

Shumete accused Facebook of deleting posts and user accounts which he said were “disseminating the true reality about Ethiopia”.

International human rights groups have criticized the Ethiopian government for unexplained shutdowns to social media services including Facebook…

 

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PGC – File this under, would you look at the proverbials on that guy, as Google decides, well, almost decided, to en an antitrust lawsuit against a plaintiff, Epic Games, by buying them  out.

Epic Games filed documents that showed Google was contemplating buying out Epic Games for fear of its potential successful efforts to get around Google’s 30 percent commission charge.  They knew if they closed the loophole, they were vulnerable to an antitrust lawsuit.

To prove that they are not a monopoly using monopolistic market advantage to coercively manipulate the market  to control competition,  Google almost decided to buy  out Epic Games, in a move to expend its monopolistic market advantage AND silence competition at the same time.

Fortunately for all  of humanity, the deal never went through.

Google considered silencing Epic’s antitrust complaints… by buying them

From www.techspot.com
2021-08-07 11:18:00

Excerpt:

 

While its ongoing feud with Apple is rather well documented, Epic Games is also in the middle of an antitrust complaint against Google over the removal of Fortnite from the Play Store. According to newly released court documents, Google at some point considered simply buying out the company in order to quash legal action.

In the documents, Epic claims that Google was afraid of Epic’s moves to dodge the 30% commission charged on payments through Google Play and offer Fortnite (and its very lucrative associated microtransactions) directly, quoting an internal document describing Epic’s plans as a “contagion” that could spread to other developers and platforms. In Epic’s own words:

Google has gone so far as to share its monopoly profits with business partners to secure their agreement to fence out competition, has developed a series of internal projects to address the “contagion” it perceived from efforts by Epic and others to offer consumers and developers competitive alternatives, and has even contemplated buying some or all of Epic to squelch this threat.

 

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PGC – “Intelligent” drones run a quick diagnostic of the state of humans at a given scene.  This data is beyond instantly filtered back and analysed by a team of deep learning ai machines, which, beyond instantly, give instructions as to mode of operation to assume next, not a complex list of commands, just an operational directive with parameters assigned.

These drone quickly identify the particular type of people the operators, owners of the drones have assigned them to identify, and for what purpose.  Drones then rush in to do what has to be done to whom, according to the parameters of the operation given to them by higher up AI who received their orders from a small council of humans who determined what kind of humans are desirable and what kind of humans are not.

This scenario is most likely already here, but if you doubt it, the Czech are publicly releasing a project alleged to have created drones with brains, drones that can identify people who might be fighting or injured or whatever, though the story doesn’t bother to explore the possible beyond the narrative given them from the Czechs themselves.

Many of the liberty-shielding standards in America simply don’t exist in Europe, so we can expect Europe to be the immediate laboratory of how to integrate police state control into current year tech opportunities.  Whatever works in Europe, narratives will begin to form in America that support the kind of stories of fear it would take to convince Americans to accept yet another invasion on their liberties.

Czech scientists develop ‘drones with brains’ to make crowd surveillance far easier : Futurology

From english.radio.cz
2021-08-05 19:10:52
/u/QuantumThinkology
Excerpt:

 

Fights and injuries occurring inside large groups of people could soon be easier to detect, thanks to a new Czech-developed crowd surveillance system that analyses drone footage via the use of neural networks.

The innovative new system was developed through a joint research programme between the Brno University of Technology and the Czech Police, who have increasingly turned to drones to monitor large crowds in recent years.

Existing drones, however, are nowhere near as efficient as they could be, according to David Bažout, a fresh graduate from the university’s Information Technology faculty.

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