Musings

I was twelve years old when 9/11 happened. After the first tower was hit, the teachers turned on the televisions and we all watched. We saw the second tower get hit and the both of them fall.

I watched 3,000 people die live on television. We all did.

I'd never been called or even knew what a faggot was until after this event. Kids got meaner, angrier. I wasn't super popular in middle school, so it was easier to just avoid the Brown kids, even though my best friend in fifth grade was Indian.

What I didn't know then was that people like Jerry Falwell were instilling hate and fear into the population, and this was affecting the other children from their parent's beliefs:

The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularise America, I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'
– Jerry Falwell on 9/11

Whatever was going on, all the adults were terrified and that Halloween all our candy had to be screened for anthrax because our neighbors could be terrorists, the same way they could have been communists or witches in years past. These days, we call the the state approved enemies Anti-Fascists or Antifa for short.

Popular Culture

The television series “24” started airing that November and Jack Bauer was my idol. I didn't start watching it until I got the DVDs in the mail from Netflix in 2005 or so though. He worked for the Counter-Terrorist Unit and though his methods were unconventional, no one can dispute his results.

Much of my adolescent life I was afraid of a terrorist threat with neurotoxins. I imagine this was similar to the way people lived through the Cold-War knowing a nuke could rob them of their life at any moment, similar to how the US bombed the civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki back in WWII.

Between 129,000 and 226,000 people died in those attacks, we'll never really know because the method is indiscriminate and thus, unconventional. You can't dispute the results though, right?

As I got older and began questioning our shady past, it's hard to miss how a lot of American History is pretty messed up. Growing up alongside the World Wide Web, I was wide eyed and optimistic that we were approaching a harmonious future. The entire world connected and you can speak directly to anyone, anywhere, instantaneously.

I knew the threat to our nation wasn't the Brown people driving taxis and running convenience stores, despite the rise in hate crimes and murders of them after 9/11. Quite a few of the assailants were never found.

Even still, there was a real threat out there, laying in wait and plotting against America. In my Communications 101 class in college, I gave an informative speech about more humane forms of torture, such as waterboarding. The things Jack did at times to stop the terrorists were barbaric, so we needed to draw the line somewhere, but we still need answers, right?

A Call to Arms

As calls to join the military were increased and more boys became men ready to serve, fight, and die for their country, I was not among them. As someone that resembles a faggot and made to know that many times growing up, I wasn't cut for that cloth.

But still I love my country and was willing to fight for it. Just kinda on my own terms. I saw how the people in 24 that were really good with computers were able to help Jack without getting into the mix on the front lines.

I decided to join the CIA, but needed to actually figure out how the world worked first, since what I saw on television didn't really match the world I was learning about on the web. So I dove deeper into the web and eventually ended up at Liberty University.

While there, I learned about a pretty convenient pipeline to graduate and end up in DC working for an alphabet organization. It was actually pretty similar to what happened in the television series “Chuck” at Stanford.

It took about six months for the preliminary background check, but then I was ready for an interview. Sadly, from when I first applied, Aaron Swartz was demonized by the FBI and committed suicide as a result; I imagine he imagined he'd face a similar fate that Julian Assange is facing, at the time of this writing. Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA and Big Tech partnership in the form of PRISM.

That's where I drew the line and bowed out from the God and Country aspirations I had and turned down that CIA interview.

Say What Now?

Those 3,000 deaths on 9/11 were used to justify and pass the PATRIOT Act. In turn, this allowed for PRISM, with the NSA partnering with tech companies to build a massive surveillance dragnet. Anything anyone in the world has shared online has been indexed and is searchable, very similar to how Google operates.

You can imagine PRISM is just Google with all the information that legally can't be searchable on Google for clear privacy violations.

Meanwhile, the tech companies are using the same information to build comprehensive profiles to sell to advertisers. The most notable public incident here would be the Cambridge Analytica election engineering from 2016.

Want to target voters in swing states that lean towards your opponent and are also into skateboarding and secretly musicals? Just a click and a check away.

The algorithms the companies use are completely unbiased. Well, they get tweaked a bit to optimize for revenue, but that's all. It turns out the longer you can keep eyes on your platform, the more ads you can sell.

This also means that hate gets amplified a bit as a side-effect, but it's not really a big deal. Outrage keeps people engaged longer and longer consuming more and more of their mental capacity.

By the end of the day, they're exhausted and they buy the thing they've been seeing all day just to feel better. It'll be here in two days from Amazon and they go to sleep dreaming of a better tomorrow when their new bandage comes. It's satisfying until someone else ends up being wrong on the internet... again.

These methods are indiscriminate and unconventional, but effective. After all, money is peace and peace is money. Eyes are dollars and it's possible to straight up print money if you build digital mechanisms to exploit the humans properly.

Big Facts

Every day we're presented with the opportunity to live our lives in freedom or in fear. Armed with facts, we can collectively achieve truth through discussion and deliberation. Alternatively, we can believe from the outset that we know truth and make it our mission to convince the world of our truth or fight to eliminate them and their falsehoods.

The big fact is that 3,000 deaths fed our surveillance state enough to utterly rock the world almost 20 years later. Instead of protecting us from the terrorists, they've effectively fed us to them. The systems that have been built have enabled vocal individuals to make a buck and shape perceived reality in their favor at the same time.

In doing so, many are missing the biggest threat we've faced as a planet in the history of our species. Since my November 2nd essay, we've added an additional 12.42 million coronavirus cases and 134,000 deaths in the US alone.

For anyone keeping score at home, that's more than the low estimate of casualties from the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings. In American terms, that's 433 9/11s that have occurred in the past two months on US soil.

The data we have now shows this disproportionately affects minorities, but why? For starters, they're more likely to live in multi-generational homes, work essential jobs that provide enough hours to pay the bills, but not to have access to healthcare.

Consequences

Meanwhile, many are going about their daily lives, still seeing friends and family with confirmed cases in their circles or going to bowling tournaments because they don't have a fever. They don't really see how this is ravaging the underbelly of America, because they either don't want to or the algorithms that power the economy shield them from it.

And even if they did know, this would only be affecting the terrorists that caused 9/11, the rapists jumping the fence from south of the border, the orientals that totally got us into this mess in the first place, the rioters that are burning America's cities, and the immoral faggots that are aborting and molesting our children with the lizard people while eating pizza in Washington DC at this very moment celebrating Biden's victory.

With an election so close, it's really a shame we couldn't have spread the virus faster. It would have been an indiscriminate and unconventional, but effective way to win the election that was stolen from us all.