A Lazy Coward`s Guide to Fighting Fascism

There are a lot of useless comments on Internet support communities. They have been around since Usenet first allowed semi-anonymous threads to ooze over audio couplers at 300 bits per second. I’m sure you know some of the hall-of-fame bangers.
“RTFM”
“You’re using it wrong.”
“Why would you want to do that?”

Apart from being cursed with the inability to see anything from any angle but their own, the Useless Commentor™is also, generally speaking, extremely volatile toward any reasoning that challenges their monolithic view of any topic. While it is genderless, classless, and raceless - able to survive in any habitat - our dear UC does trend toward the white, the male, and the conservative. As is, likely as anything, a shock to no one.

Lying in wait, ready to pounce upon anyone trying to learn or, worse still, trying to get help with a legitimate problem, the UC will attempt a dominance display at the first opportunity. Usually arriving shortly after the ‘First!’ers, perhaps the only group of posters who can lay even less claim to enriching discourse. They are a generally harmless species, mind. Just pissing on every tree stump they can like a dog with a tiny body and a titanic ego. They are all bark, and the bark itself is just a nuisance more than it is a confrontation. The UC, as is often the case with the second carrion scavenger at the carcass, is bigger and uglier.

Rushing in to dismiss another person’s experience is a passtime for a certain personality type. On the extreme end, you have the people making policies strictly to bolster their narrow views, with harm as an intended side effect. An extra kick in the ribs as the people they’ve ‘othered’ fall in the mud. Adding insult to injury is not a bug. It’s a feature. The UC gets a similar hit of neurotransmitters when griefing prey. Make no mistake, that’s what it is. These mallets lie in wait, jumping on new posts like Richard Branson jumps on any woman younger than 27. Awkwardly, uncomfortably, and ‘only as a joke’ if called out.

The UC delights in scuttling the ship of curiosity in novice hobbyists. Kicking the chair out from under already frustrated people hoping to find an answer to a blocking problem. Setting fire to the joy of anyone who, in an age of access to information so unfathomably vast compared to only 45 years ago one from that age would think you an utter lunatic in its description, simply wants an answer to a simple problem and hopefully throws their bottled message into an unforgiving sea.

Of all their hunting methods, none of which provides any hint of usefulness to discourse, the one I despise the most is ‘It works for me.’

‘It works for me’ is infuriating on a level that exceeds the other sufferings put forth by UCs simply by the wastefulness of it. Reading the fucking manual, apart from not being immediately helpful, is - at some level anyway - advice. Alternate use cases are often the workaround a person was looking for, but presented as a rotten herring drawn across the face as an insult. The lack of empathy required to blind oneself to other possibilities is somewhat tragic; not deserving of pity, but also the kind of self-immolation of respect that anyone with a modicum of introspection immediately clocks as a personal lacking in someone crowing on about it.

No, ‘it works for me’ is a special brand of disrespect and smugness that the UC wears proudly. Like TapOut! graphic tees or Berkleys on the back of the head. It’s a dogwhistle to their ilk and is often met with similar howls in response from other UCs who share in missing whatever key piece of nurturing keeps a person from turning into an asshole whenever the moon is the moon.

‘It works for me’ serves no purpose other than to tell an uncaring universe that you are alive and you are better than some random person on the internet. It is, at best, a brag and at worst a shut down. It adds literally nothing to discourse, acting only to hinder or derail it. It’s the call of the incompetent developer. The cry of someone with no idea of how to help, but with an ego that refuses to not be seen. It’s an attempt to be part of a conversation from across a crowded room that bulldozes the entire buffet table.

Sure, the phrase itself can be uttered and followed by suggestions or help, but at that point it becomes useful and stops being the thing it was. When uttered in isolation it’s nothing more than a prayer to an indifferent cosmos - a 5 year old throwing a toy at someone because they aren’t paying them the attention they think they deserve - and a pheromone trail for other emotional leeches to follow.

In fairness, it’s not always about individual superiority. It’s often used as an aegis to a brand identity grown as a replacement for a personality the UC never cared to cultivate. Xbox can do no wrong. Apple is infallible. Anyone having a problem is obviously a shill or a troll or a naysayer out to do harm to an omnipotent, yet unimaginably fragile god. Any question is an attack. Any problem is an affront. Because if the things they buy and watch and believe in aren’t perfect, what does that say about them?

That’s when the tribalism kicks in. The pack mentality of the kind of person who brands themselves a ‘lone wolf’ is shockingly cohesive. Point out that the reply helps nothing and prepare to be stoned at the city gates. The gnashing of teeth and ripping of flesh will continue until obedience is restored. Threads will get locked and answers will go on being ‘un’d and nobody is the better for any of it. The people who could help will never see the post because it was shut down before it could get their attention. The other people who might have a legitimate answer will be unable to respond or the person who originally asked will never return to see the words that could have helped them get out of their pickle. For no other reason than a small person in a vast eternity had nothing more to offer than, ‘well, it works for me.’

One of the broadly-accepted privacy stalwarts has just turned rat.

https://tech.yahoo.c … -aids-160711711.html

There’s a lot to say about this news. The fact that the service sells privacy as the product even more than the service itself, to the fact that free accounts are inherently more secure than paid accounts owing to this utterly unforgivable loophole in their protections for customers. The fact that aiding an active regime of war criminals is being brushed off as ‘following orders.’ The fact that they are using the buffer stage of rolling over for their own government as the excuse from ridicule. The fact that you are constantly bombarded with upgrade/upsell ads when using the service which all - again - focus on buying privacy and security. The fact that they have a glib, canned response and astroturf trolls on social media trying to steer the conversation into personal accountability. All of it is obscene.

Proton has taken an immediate, reactionary, hostile approach to this being leaked to the news. They call it click bait (it’s not). They call it misrepresentation (it’s not). They have their brand-identifying user base marching for them in social media comments, decrying the person for not obfuscating their own payment methods rather than blaming the person who lied to their user base (they did). They call it anything but a problem for them to solve, violently hand waving to the point of slap fighting.

And as problems go, Proton, despite being A problem, is not THE problem on display here. They suck. Do not think I’m in any way asking for absolution for their utter shittery. Rather, there is an inherent problem with any service you do not personally host. When faced with compromising their advertised ideals, they are only as strong as their board members will allow them to be. Promises are free. Actions are not. Until an event occurs which burns away the facade they’ve built in times of easy sailing, there is never a guarantee that any entity you don’t control won’t immediately cave to any outside pressure deemed too difficult or expensive to challenge. In this case, rather than even test the laws of their home country, the company scuttled the ship at the first sign of a boarding party. Being a Not For Profit just means the decision was made by people who didn’t want to deal with the hassle of defending their product’s core feature, rather than being a fully financial decision in the endless pursuit of more profit. Same outcome.

There’s no solution for this, from the standpoint of the average consumer. Hosting your own e-mail service is no longer tenable for nearly anyone and doing it in an anonymous way is basically impossible. Constantly using throw away accounts means not having a permanent address and basically makes e-mail about as useless as a rain-soaked ValPak stuck to the top of the communal dumpster lid.

There are a few mitigations, but no matter what you do, ultimately anything hosted outside of your control is outside of your control. VPNs? Doesn’t matter what the law is where you end up. With enough pressure, it can all be linked back to you if any piece of identifiable information is involved. Your payment method? Easy. Your originating IP? A little harder, but not by much. Even if you hop and hop and hop, the trail exists. Your only true option for anonymity is burner hardware that you dispose of after use. And that’s economically and ecologically a horrible option. All you can do is make the trail back to you as hard as possible to follow. I know it sounds as if I’m echoing the people who blame the victim for not obscuring payment info, but their action - in this case - is correct. The blame still lives with the company that lied, but in praxis, that’s little consolation. It is, however, a good way to find people to block on social media.

There are a few things you can do to make the pursuit of your information a high enough cost of entry to prevent a free bingo square for the pigs and pigeons who might want to find you. First and foremost, don’t believe a goddamned thing any company says about privacy in regards to selling it to you.

Second, don’t pay for any service you want to be anonymized through an account linked easily back to you. Prepaid cards are an option (bought with cash, preferably). Crypto is about as anonymous as a Zorro mask worn while showing off a chest tattoo of your driver’s license and the world built around it is very similar to these privacy-first services. They do not actually protect you from anything. The manifests for transactions can, with a bit of forensics, bet rebuilt pointing right back to you unless you did the initial buy in a completely anonymous way. If you’ve already got your foot in that quicksand, do what you will. But for people who don’t want to touch it, stick with converting cash to anonymous payment methods in the real world.

Third, use free accounts with false information to run any protest organizations. Don’t use subscription based services that force you to keep a payment record on file. Freedom of speech, and in fact, the entirety of the Bill of Rights has been shown time and time again to not be anything but a promise to gullible customers. Especially when critiquing capitalist dogma or elite class supremacy. You can go online and talk a child into killing themselves or walk into another state and open fire on brown people all you want and it’ll be considered your undeniable right. But say that you think rage-fucking the entire planet into apocalyptic extinction is maybe not so good and your information will be handed over without a second thought. The Mrs. Kravitses of the world are overwhelmingly fascist-leaning and will drop more dimes than a busking hedgehog running into a spike trap.

There are options like co-op service subscriptions where ownership is decentralized among a few people who trust each other or running through the absolute dredges of humanity along side illegal pornographers, human traffickers, and raw milk peddlers. There’s a high bar to entry in understanding things like the Onion network and an even higher bar of technicality in implementing those understandings. You’re still stuck with the first-payment problem, in most cases. Getting comfortable with using cash is still the key element to protecting yourself from payment provider abuse. Laundering your completely legal activity should not be something we are required to do and my hope is that a lawsuit arises from this that costs Proton much more than they would have spent defending the principals they sold. The world does not deal in fairness, though, and the business self-preservation instinct is myopic, amnesic, and very, very stupid, so lessons will likely be ignored even if that does happen. All we can do now is tell people who blame victims to shut their fucking mouths but take their methods and internalize them.