Since I first went online in 2005, I have watched the rapid decline of free expression, not so much through censorship but something much more insidious along the lines of mob psychology and emotional entrapment. While assuming a nick offers some degree of anonymity it also easily becomes a subterfuge of consensus manipulation through multiple identities. Given this, social networks readily degenerated into popularity contests, where anyone who didn't sycophant the consensus views of the wannabe gurus, soon found themselves either shunned or bullied in the most insidious ways. Nonetheless, the terror tactics are always the same. One sock puppet or minion tries to win your trust as an ally, while another tries to work you down psychologically with their disguised attacks. Never directly, so they can easily deny it all as some figment of your paranoid imagination. The only problem with that argument is their persistent urge to keep getting in your face, like the bully that blocks the door or the dog that pisses on your leg when you're trying to focus on more important things. There is no limit to the means of sabotage and public humiliation when it comes down to that....and all the while you're bleeding your heart out to that alleged ally, they're already setting you up for the next drop kick. Being quite fearlessly independent-minded, I've always been a target of such ploys, which I was more apt to see as an opportunity to develop my own counter-strategies. It was amazing how readily these blighters fell for their own fail traps, thinking they had me sold on their paltry. Still, for all their vain-glory, they could never accept they had been outwitted by something so far removed from that self-defeating paradox.
I've also had a great deal of professional experience with all levels of society in real life. Quite frankly, I find very little difference between the power struggles there and what you find in cyberspace, no matter how trivial or unreal the objectives. The bottom line is that humans are no less opportunistic than their simian cousins, when it comes to sexual displays, harem building and other territorialisms. So-called civilization has really only beguiled us into more elaborate charades, ever more inconsequent to the dangers of self-deception. Indeed it's wonderful to have the whole information highway at your finger tips, but without any real-life experience, how will you tell truth from lie? How many have been taken in by the cleverly worded congenialities of sexual predators? How many have been misled by the promises of an ideal world as if it were really that simple? Think again.
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