This will be a thread containing a story of my humble beginnings with computers, Atari and Nintendo. Then I was allowed into law enforcement. Town dispatcher, 6+ incoming phone lines, my main radio. Break: “This is station KX7 operating on a frequency of 485.6625 megahertz for the police department, the town of Plymouth, Mass. Station D is clear.”I worked there when they got their first computers, using a modest software, Police Serve. The cursor was a revolver; when you clicked on the file to open, it shot a digital bullet. Behind me was the mic and radio for the fire department and ambulance services. Then came State Police, Commonwealth Courts information, NCIC, which had FBI, US Marshals and Secret Service; connected to Interpol.The first computer was a word server, used to write and store incident reports. It was 1986. Reagan was President, Pac‑Man was really popular with young adults. In 1997 I had use of the first real computer: a hard drive and monitor desktop. Using a site that would write the code, I created an Internet web store. It had 11 pages and was correlated to the Tree of Life. The final page displayed Baphomet, the goat‑headed spirit of Nature imagined by a former Catholic priest, legendarily also tied to the Knights Templars.AltaVista was a device where you could discover things on the World Wide Web. This was just after the AOL craze. I had run a Mark IV coding machine which could duplicate 60,000 AOL CDs.

Social media first began with email contacts. Your email was your online persona. My first email was orpheusfox@hotmail.com. It has been adopted by a couple of companies, and it is still mine. It will be 26 years old this coming year. The ability to share an email was the birthplace of personal themed groups. Some had a couple of members, some had thousands.

Then there was MySpace and Tribe.net. Not a fan of the former, but I frequented the latter. I used it to keep track of friends that sorted for political and spiritual relevance.

In those years the US census showed that “other: spiritual” was the country’s fastest‑growing religion. This created a lot of anxiety for some denominations who equated members and attendees as profit and power. They appeared to have an angle, an axe to grind, and wanted to control other people, not even just members of their religion. This played into actions of a group named the National Christian Movement, a fascist‑like group with strong opinions of what everyone should or shouldn’t do. They seek political power to force these ideas. They are the Christian equivalent of the overbearing Sunni Muslim governments, e.g., Iran.Since the beginning of time, humans invented things we basically call tools. Tools can be used by a man to create and build an object, a building, a house, and over time he builds himself. His hand will become damaged if it hits a hard object, so the hammer became an extension of his body. These first ideas, if useful, are elaborated and changed for a variety of jobs.The computer is no different. Its hardware is an extension of our brain. The software is the interface that opens the useful ends of the computation and directs it towards a specific purpose. In this it is like our minds, and when these minds are joined with others across the web, that is the Internet. When used to its known highest potential, it is an extension of the group mind made manifest. AI then is its child. Mankind’s Adam and Eve.

In just 2 decades, 20 years, computers revolutionized knowledge, communications, and information storage. Now anyone can simply connect with others on the other side of the planet and discuss something, questions and answers going back and forth at the speed of light. Facebook became, along with WhatsApp, Instagram, and the politically charged TikTok, the new town square. Made in China, TikTok had a technology that could take a small file of video and loop it. These could then be shared, a new expression of visual and audio art, mixing different disciplines, and capturing a generation’s imagination. Not always a good thing; some fads cheapen our lives, and at times perhaps it is because humans are lazy unless motivated. Today, people walk around staring at their cell phones, which have more computational power than the ships sent to the moon. The average phone is more sophisticated, by a factor of at least 10, than my first desktop running Windows 98.

I used Facebook for a budding business prospect: polishing sports cars, photography, and poetry, and my attempt to unite these. But more importantly, it kept me in contact with friends and family. People I knew in real life. I was never a big fan of specialized groups. Early on I got in trouble with the keyboard tigers. People who normally wouldn’t have much to say, but when hiding in anonymity, they become great masters and fearsome warriors who must publicly punish anyone who misspelled or dared to not edit their bad grammar. The reach of the group mind’s ability to be trivial and create mountains from molehills only worsened when the person is invisible, can’t be found, and could be anyone.In its early years, the small transgressions were handled. But Facebook soon outgrew the platform’s ability to be safe. Some people committed suicide. Young people got bullied and older people got cyber‑bullied. Scams, cons and crime. Facebook went from heavy‑handed moderation done through general algorithms to, worse, hiring a third party for fact‑checking. Their great Solomonic formula was to Google a question three times and then the average was the Truth. Never looking past the curtain of the great, mighty Zuckerberg and his Oz.A lot of humanity’s treasures of knowledge had not been digitized. So these queries were incomplete, but claimed to be, and were, the final judges.

From what I understand, failing in their business plans, they began some heavy pushing of the capitalist model of growth and profit. My personal page, occasional postings of a poem or a concern, kept receiving threats or warnings of censorship (which they claim is their right because they own the servers) called TOU and those artificially devised “community standards.” It doesn’t speak highly of your world if you are threatened by someone expressing novel thoughts, insightful rumination gleaned from critical reasoning, the vocabulary never dipping below words found in a dictionary. If your power and purpose is to sacrifice the individual, civility would at least have you give him a meal. And how can you threaten censorship and then the next day tell me if I drop a couple coins you will help grow my audience?

Then the subterfuge. An army of developed character AIs released in an attempt to make friends and relationships with humans in the hope of driving sales. A further attack against privacy when your systems are able to peel away a person’s digital property and ban people because they had “inappropriate pictures” but never noticed the images are all screenshots of the nudity you allow on your other purchased digital worlds. One hand doesn’t know what the other does, and either can’t tell the difference between their head or their ass.They took the holy grail, the greatest tool so far invented for uniting lost loved ones, and allowed it to become a place of disinformation, where the crass govern through sharing fanciful conspiracies to give the ignorant a sense of power over others. Through pressure, they folded to the Protestant Karens and worry more about the hem on a picture’s dress than the vile use of propaganda to influence elections through lying to the masses. Shame.