Hello again, braneswalkers. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?
I’m sorry to have kept you all deprived of large braned rantiness for such a long time. I know how absolutely crucial this is for your general well being.1
I promise more brany nastiness in the very near future, but this one rant will be shorter than usual. It’s only purpose is to draw attention to the fact that the branes are now accessible via good old RSS 2.0.
I only know of two things which are inherently anti-entropic: the world’s money supply, and internet social media. These also happen to share two other characteristics: they are man-made and quite dysfunctional in their current state.
In the interest of simplicity and accessibility, I’m extremely reluctant to add features to this site. Yet, I’m even more reluctant to be part of the unnatural, depressing morass of corporate-vetted groupthink that gets passed around for world and democracy enhancing2 discourse these days.
As the grip of big tech and governments alike around what we can find and express online tightens, and my usage of the common platforms decreases to a point near non-existence as a result, it becomes imperative to allow for other, more cosmologically aligned methods of information distribution.
Freedom of speech online isn’t dead yet, but if we’re not careful, it might need to be rushed to the ICU soon.3
The problem is simple: when you rent, you need to ask permission to drill holes in the walls. When you own, you don’t. This is a pretty sensible arrangement, and it’s motivations are very easily understood. Yet, what makes up most of the tubes today is neither renters nor owners, but couchsurfers. And in this condition, complaining is not just futile, it’s downright stupid. Don’t complain about not being able to hang stuff on the walls if the arrangement is that you sleep, for free, on the couch or the floor.4
There is a pill for this ailment, and it is made solely of natural ingredients. We must allow the entropy of the Internet to increase.
The real reason freedom of speech is being threatened online is the same as the reason privacy is gone: we took all our traffic, all our info, and now even close to all our lives to about two handfuls of sites or apps, which provide their services for free on the condition that we are the product. The hosts can’t have the products deciding to change their features all willy-nilly, so we must conform to the specifications provided by the host’s costumers. Specifications which will be dully enforced, even if it means “negligible” sacrifices on the part of the product.
There are many ways to stave off online censorship, but I happen to think the best ones are to decentralize and own (or at very least, rent) as much of the internet as possible. To that effect, this will be the last rant which will be tweeted (or shared by the author on any social network), and the search for a paid hosting solution which does not engage arbitrary censorship will continue.5
So what is this to you, dear reader? For now, nothing more than a friendly invitation to continue thinking for yourself, and reading and searching for the things that matter to you, hopefully a bit freer from monitoring and censorship. To that effect, consider subscribing to the RSS feed, optionally setting the auto-refresh to the vicinity of “every week” (13brane.net doesn’t spam). Oh, and log the fuck out, while you still can.
That’s it for today. We’ll keep in touch.