..to an alarming number of users. I’ll never forget a visit home on leave to PA back in the late 80s. Went to the CO (Bell Telephone Central Office switching station) on a side trip with Dad to buy some tires for ‘ol Betsy. I recognized the washing-machine-sized disk units similar to the ones we had at Buckley and asked what was up. Staring intently at a small CRT monitor, Dad replied “No clue. Somehow the connections get from here to there, but there’s no wires I can see. Must be magic. We’re having a training class on it next week.”
Information floating around “the Net” is no less magic to a majority of consumers, than those phone calls stuck in an early generation disk drive were to my father. The question on everybody’s mind consciously or not, is what to do with all the magic stuff the Internet constantly bombards us with?
It’s a simple trust issue that’s been around since the first smoke signals wafted across Africa in the birth of telecommunications. The correct answer is NOTHING – until either the information becomes a verifiable known quantity or the risk of not acting on it becomes too great. Knowledge owners make the true stuff a scarce commodity for good reason. The root of all power comes from knowledge, and what’s good for the goose is not always good for the gander.
I found the news story about Canadian Qanons harassing people over the queen of the great white north unusually disturbing. Reality is, the FAANGs are making alot of money with Internet-borne digital apparitions of all kinds. The politicians are generating alot of power with widespread digital disinformation – backed up in analog on Fox! Bad actors have unfiltered access into the minds of a populace through the unregulated magic medium called an Internet connection contained on any cellphone.
Free speech? You get what you pay for. Dumb people rant about magic. Others wonder WTF.
