There are about six companies that control most of the internet and social media, and they are all infested with Social Justice Warriors and are converged with the narrative.
- Apple
- Sony Entertainment
- Time Warner
- Disney
- Amazon
There are also, in the open source world, projects that now openly censor their user base and groups. Some examples are:
- Debian: “Linus, why are you a bastard?”
- Mint. Does not want any Israelis to use. Virtue seeking troll.
- Canonical: Ubuntu is broken. Sort of. And signals virtue.
- Mozilla. Virtue signalling is more important than keeping good people
There are other issues with some of the open source git hubs and repos where there are terms of service. The best thing, however, is to keep away from the big companies and work with the small ones, using open source.
Here I’m pragmatic. I use ubuntu on the Pine because it is the most stable and developed, and Antergos on the laptops (mainly because when crunchbang died I did not go for bunsenlabs linux) I don’t need, now the extra handholding that OpenSuse or Ubuntu give. And I like minimalistic distros.
When it comes to search engines, use Duck Duck Go. One of the reasons to switch to qupzilla (which has a armh version that is stable on the Pine 64 and a version for the laptops which is blazingly fast) is that it assumes you will use Duck Duck and integrates adblock.
And avoid the Apple.
A theme that Vox Day has been hammering lately as Apple plays stupid games with accepting an iOS Gab app, as Wikipedia, publishing, the SF world, and so forth becomes progressively more converged, is that of helping out.
Every little bit helps. Even if you cannot provide assistance to a good project, you can help suffocate the beast by starving it of oxygen and resources.
If all you can do is to minimize your facebook usage, do so.
If you can start using Gab at gab.ai instead of Twitter, in whole or in part – do so.
Cite Infogalactic at infogalactic.com instead of Wikipedia.
If you have to post a reference to a mainstream media article at Salon, the Huffington Post, the NYT, the WashPo, and so forth, archive it first, and link to the archive. This not only starves them of ad revenue, it also minimizes the chances that they silently “correct” the article later.
If you can tell friends, family, and others about them, do so.
If you can contribute time to edit at infogalactic, do so.
If you can contribute to gab, the infogalactic “burn unit”, or something similar, do so. They’d rather have steady, small contributions than big, showy ones.
If you have a choice between a book at a big 5 publishing outfit, and something less mainstream like Baen, Castalia House, or a number of excellent independent authors – consider the alternate sources first. Castalia alone is taxing my ability to keep up with the reading, even without considering Nick Cole, Brian Neimeier, B V Larson, and others.
Every little bit helps.
Do what you can, when you can.
The net will change when we vote with our keyboards.
And if all else fails, install pihole.