I’m turning 41, but I don’t feel like celebrating.
Our generation is running out of time to save the free Internet built for us by our fathers.
What was once the promise of the free exchange of information is being turned into the ultimate tool of control.
Once-free countries are introducing dystopian measures such as digital IDs (UK), online age checks (Australia), and mass scanning of private messages (EU).
Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet. The UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets. France is criminally investigating tech leaders who defend freedom and privacy.
A dark, dystopian world is approaching fast - while we’re asleep. Our generation risks going down in history as the last one that had freedoms -and allowed them to be taken away.
We’ve been fed a lie.
We’ve been made to believe that the greatest fight of our generation is to destroy everything our forefathers left us: tradition, privacy, sovereignty, the free market, and free speech.
By betraying the legacy of our ancestors, we’ve set ourselves on a path toward self-destruction - moral, intellectual, economic, and ultimately biological.
So no, I’m not going to celebrate today. I’m running out of time. We are running out of time.
The message (which appears as a banner in the Telegram app, too) is filled with overhyped “news” and generalization regarding freedom of speech. Since him being stopped and investigated in France, he’s gone pretty unhinged on freedom of speech, disregarding the complexity of governing bodies and the real effect of information without bounds.
He makes valid points and I’m not defending anyone, but he oversimplifies and misreads some topics.
You people are cartoon characters truly. He was arrested by the whole French government because they wanted him to crack down and report users as well deleting post. It doesn’t get more direct to reality than that. It’s a quick post so it will be simplier than an essay or a speech given at a lecture.
I have the feeling you’re not really reading what I’m writing, you want to clash instead of discuss, but I’ll go on: I fully agree that taking him in custody and pressuring him to close unwanted channels is wrong and can deter startups and investments in the social network field in Europe, but Russia is a real threat and they are using all the tools possible to manipulate opinion (in Moldova for example) and create chaos. So pretty understandable that the French tried it. But he puts it like Europe and Russia are on the same level of media and chat control, and they are not. Nonetheless, there is a drift in that direction and we should uphold the free speech rights. All in all, I welcome his message!
This is what this user does, for the record. They don’t care about anything anyone else says, they must be 100% correct or they turn to insults. You may want to block them if you care about actual discussion.