Shock and Awe⁠↗

While many politicians earnestly believed their Covid policies necessary and good, it is impossible not to notice these policies also afforded our political leaders sweeping new power over the lives of ostensibly free people. Beyond the world of elected power, on questions related to the nature of the pandemic from which these new political powers draw legitimacy, media companies policed our information landscape for dissent, and social media companies erased that dissent from the internet. All of this was managed unofficially in tandem, and with ruthless efficiency. Tensions flared. Flaring tensions were further repressed. Backlash was inevitable, and in Ontario that backlash manifested on the road.

The relationship between the press, big tech, and the government is complex, and tenuous, and for the most part unspoken. This all makes it difficult to address. But when it comes to the great ideological battles we wage online my sense is the conflict between this alliance and the rest of us is almost all we’re ever really talking about. On one side there is the Authority, more greatly empowered by the week, and on the other there is everyone else, a motley crew of crypto-libertarians and soccer moms and actual, frothing-at-the-mouth crazy people who refuse to submit.

Over the years, freedom-oriented technologists have responded to encroaching authoritarianism by building ever greater tools to evade it, from encrypted, vanishing chats to digital assets that can’t (easily) be seized by the government. Anti-authoritarians have also embraced cultural technologies like anonymity and pseudonymity online. This has cartoonishly shaped our information landscape into an ideological battlezone where Real People — neck beards, substitute teacher hair, bright blue checks beside their name — go to war with communist anime fairies and based Greek statues, themselves at war with each other. Here, we grapple daily with such important questions as whether or not a series of very expensive cartoon apes is possibly an existential threat to the country.

As the media is generally populated by nihilist English majors who hate their rich dads and struggling 35-year-olds who made a few wrong turns and never looked back, wealth is generally, for them, a good enough reason to destroy someone.