AsterControl.com - (News)
Fanworks: Tron: Essays: 2024: We Have to Make Plans
We Have to Make Plans
2024/03/11
First posted here on Tumblr.
If KOSA passes
Or if any other form of censorship (there are many in the works!) ever succeeds at stepping in to impede our ability to communicate online:
We have to make plans.
Now, I dunno who'll even see this post. The few followers I have are TRON fans (who despite the fantasy we live in, tend to have realistically dismal views IRL about Disney and the various corporate uses of software).
And this fandom, on average, is pretty tech-savvy. It's where I've encountered the most people under 20 years old who actually know how to use a desktop or laptop computer.
So, if there's any hope for what I'm thinking about, this is prolly a good place to start with it.
(As with all my posts, I encourage reblogging and containment-breaching.)
(Gifs are clips from TRON 1982, mainly the "deleted love scene," from the DVD extras.)
Anyway.
Current society has moved online communication much too far onto major social media sites for my comfort. Whoever you communicate with over the internet, chances are you do it through a service owned by a big company: Tumblr, Twitter, Discord, Telegram, Facebook, whatever. Even TikTok (shudder).
These sites, despite their many flaws, can provide experiences that are valuable and hard to get otherwise. And once all your friends are on one site, you can't just leave and stay in touch with them all, not unless they all go the same place. It's easy to see why it's hard to abandon any social media platform.
But a backup plan is important. Because, as we've seen over and over, social media sites can't be relied on. They change their policies suddenly, without good reason-- and are inconsistent, even discriminatory, about enforcing those policies.
If they're funded by ads, the advertisers are their main customers, and your posts are the product. Their goal is that the posts most valuable to the advertisers get seen by people the advertisers consider desirable customers.
Helping you communicate-- making your posts get seen by the people you want to communicate with-- is optional to them.
Not to mention that the whole business model of an ad-funded website is generally unsustainable. Many of these sites are operating at a loss, relying on shareholders in a fragile bubble, doomed to fail soon just from lack of real profit.
And the more restrictions --like KOSA-- that the law puts on freedom of online speech, the likelier they are to go down or just become unusable. Every rule a site is required to follow is another strain on its resources, and most of them are already failing badly at even enforcing their own self-imposed rules.
If we want any control over our continued ability to stay in touch with our online friends-- we need to have a backup plan. Maybe it'll be simple at first, a bare-bones system we cobble together-- but it's gotta be something that will work. For a while at least.
There are lots of really good posts about ways to build your own website, using a service like Neocities. I VERY MUCH recommend learning this skill-- learning to make websites of the very simplest, most stable, glitch-resistant type, made of html pages-- which you can upload to a host while you store backups on your home computer. If you value the writing and art that you put online, this is probably the safest you can keep it.
But that's for making your own creative work public.
As for communicating with others-- for example, receiving and answering other people's comments on your work-- that gets more complex. I personally haven't found it worthwhile to troubleshoot the problems that come with having a system that allows visitors to comment publicly on my website.
But what we do still have-- and likely will for a long time-- is email.
Those of us who came of age before social media's current hold... well, we might take this for granted. Email was the first form of online contact we ever encountered... and thus it can seem to us like the most ordinary, the most boring.
But in the current world, it is a rare and precious thing to find a method of communicating that doesn't require everyone in the chat to be signed on with the same corporation.
Email is, as of now, still perfectly legal-- as much as social media companies have been trying to herd the populace away from it. I'm sure there are other ways to share thoughts online that are not bound by laws. But I am not going to go into that here.
Email service is provided by law-abiding companies, which will comply with subpoenas if law enforcement thinks you are emailing about doing illegal things. So, email is not a surefire way to be safe, if laws become dystopian enough to threaten your freedom to talk about your own life and identity.
But it's safer than posting on a public social media page.
For now.
Email is beautifully decentralized. You can get an email address many different ways-- some reliant on a company like Gmail, others hosted on your own domain. And different people, with all different types of email addresses, hosted in all different ways-- can all communicate together by the same method.
Of course any of these people, individually, can lose their email address for some reason or other, and have to get a new one. But as long as they still know the email addresses of their contacts, they can reconnect and recover from that loss. The structure of a group linked by email is reliant not on a single company-- but on the group itself, the friends you can actually count on.
This is why I am trying to promote the idea of forming email lists, as a backup plan to give people a way to stay in touch as mainstream social media sites prove to be unsustainable.
I'm envisioning a simple system of sending emails to several addresses at once, and making each reply visible to everyone in the chat by using "reply all" (or, if desired, editing the To field to reply to only some).
If enough people get used to using email in this way, it could fill most of the needs met by any other group chat or forum ...without depending on a centralized social media company that's taking dystopian measures to try and make the business profitable.
So here are some thoughts about how I personally imagine it could work.
(Feel free to comment and bring up any thoughts I haven't addressed, or suggestions to customize how specific groups could set it up. This is meant as more of a starting point for brainstorming than a catch-all solution.)
As I see it, here are the basics of what you and your friends would each need to start out:
An email address. Any kind, hosted anywhere. You should use a dedicated email account just for this group, one that you do NOT use for other communication. Being in this group will result in things you don't want happening to your main email address-- like getting a TON of email, one for every post and reply. Or someone could get your email address that you really don't want any contact with. Use a burner email account (one that you can easily replace) and change it if needed.
The knowledge of how to "REPLY ALL" in your email. This will be necessary in order to add a comment that everyone in the group can see.
The knowledge of how to EDIT THE "TO" FIELD in your email, and remove addresses from the list of all recipients. This will be necessary if you want to CHANGE WHICH PEOPLE in the group can see your comment.
The knowledge of how to FILTER WORDS in your email. This will be necessary if a topic comes up that you don't want to see any mentions of.
The knowledge of how to BLOCK PEOPLE in your email. This will be very important. If someone joins this email group who you do not want to interact with, it will be up to you to BLOCK them so that you do NOT see their messages. (If they are bad enough to evade the block with multiple burner accounts, that's what you have a burner account for. Change it, and share the new one only with those you trust not to give it to them.)
Every person in the group will be effectively a "moderator" of the group, able to remove people from it by cutting their email addresses out of the "To" field. Members will all have equal "moderator" privileges, each able to tailor the group to their own needs.
This means the group may naturally split, over time, into other groups, each one removing some people and adding others. Some will overlap, some won't. This is good! This is, in my opinion, what online interaction SHOULD be like! There should be MANY groups like this!
In this way, we can keep online discussion alive, no matter WHAT happens to any of the social media websites.
If the dystopia got bad enough to shut down email, we could even continue with postal mail and photocopies, like they did in the days of print-zine fanfiction.
If it looks like the dystopia is gonna come for postal mail too, we'll use the connection we have to preserve whatever contacts we can with people who live near us.
Not saying it's GONNA get that bad. But these steps of preparation are good no matter exactly what kind of bad stuff happens.
As long as some organized form of communication still exists, we'll have a place where it's at least a little safer to be your true self...
to plan events and meetups...
and maybe even activities a little too risque to make the final cut of a 1982 Disney movie.
They're trying to censor us. We want a Free System. So we're gonna fight back.
For the Users. Not the corporations.
Peace out, programs.
Update! ...Just wanna say THANK YOU ALL
for sharing and adding to this post and this discussion.
Which, to be clear, is NOT something we only need to face "if KOSA passes," but is a systemic issue that's been going on a long time already. KOSA might not pass at all... and if it does, it'll take some time to go into effect... and there are many different ways it could affect things if it does.
We can't be sure of every detail. But we know that many of the problems we worry about, with KOSA, are already problems on today's internet, and will need solutions no matter what. Probably solutions on the ground level, because lord knows authority figures can't be expected to fix this.
Case in point: the egregious transphobia that has blown up since I posted that (although it had been happening for a long time). When communication is dependent on a corporation, and CEOs of corporations behave... the way they do... we need other options.
I VERY much appreciate that people are sharing that post and adding their own ideas and resources, both alternatives and augmentations to my email-list suggestion. This is a problem that will need many different solutions, and I'm so happy that so many people are coming together to help each other.
I also want to add a few general ideas of my own. These are details that I've been considering specifically in regard to the email-list approach, although some of them may also be relevant to other solutions people have suggested.
Ideology in small groups
It seems like the most workable solution is for big social media platforms to be replaced by many smaller gatherings. One concern that comes to mind is, will this be a problem in terms of people getting trapped in echo chambers?
And, it's true, if we replace a huge online public square with a small group of chosen friends, we are going to end up exposed to fewer unfamiliar ideas.
There is some risk that the ideas within a group will begin to feel like unquestionable reality-- even if the group is distilling them into more extreme versions of themselves, and ostracizing anyone whose beliefs don't continue getting more extreme. This is how some of the most bigoted and dangerous schools of thought have formed online, and it's worth watching out for.
But at the same time, if you've formed this group because it's necessary for survival? Then you may end up more strongly motivated to reconsider the sort of thinking that can lead to a toxic echo chamber. When loyal friends are in short supply, and vitally necessary in an increasingly dystopian world, and going online to find new friends is no longer an easy thing... then you may start having to reconsider what disagreements are worth overlooking for the sake of shared goals.
It's still your own choice who you continue to associate with. No one else can make you agree on what type of conflict is a deal-breaker on a friendship, and what transgressions can and can't be tolerated or forgiven. But in a survival situation, your feelings on this may naturally shift. And that, too, is worth being aware of.
Cutting off contact.
So, if you have decided that your relationship with someone is irreparable and not worth keeping, then comes the question of how to cut ties.
One thing I mentioned earlier, in my description of how an email list could work, is that each individual person can cut ties with others in the list... by removing them from the "To" field of the emails, or by blocking them or filtering their messages through a function of their email client.
This would be a more personal, individual choice than many of us are used to, on big social media sites. You would have to be your own moderator. There is no moderator of the whole group. You cannot complain to some ultimate authority and expect them to cut this person off from everyone on the list.
...I mean, okay, that is possible in some types of small groups. And in some cases it's worth it. But it also has implications that are important to consider before you decide if it's the right approach for your group.
Once you have a hierarchy where a moderator makes decisions for the whole group on who to ban and who to keep... you have to contend with the fact that you're back to a version of the dependency that you had on the moderation teams of big social media sites.
And this can be much better with a small group, or sometimes much worse... all depending on the group and the moderator.
In a moderated forum, there is always the risk that the moderator will start making choices that the rest of the group can't tolerate, or that will split the group into angrily opposed factions... or that the moderator will simply give up and quit under the stress. (It can be hugely stressful, making decisions on what to allow and what to ban! Those can be hard decisions to make, and very hard to make in a way that the majority of the group considers fair and consistent.)
Being a smaller group usually makes it more manageable. But you're still depending on the whims of one person or a few people, whose choices can make or break the whole experience for you-- whether it's banning you for reasons you consider unfair, or refusing to ban someone else that you feel unsafe being around.
Moderation still can be worth it in some cases, though. A group where each member has to moderate their own experience will have its own complex challenges.
For instance, if you're on an email list where your only recourse for dealing with your worst enemies is to remove their names from the To field and/or block their email addresses... then you have to contend with questions like:
- If I stop sending my emails to them, and block them from sending emails to me... am I okay with them still seeing other people's replies with quoted text from me, on messages that I sent to the rest of the group?
- If I'm not okay with that, do I have to cut ties with everyone else who is not removing them from the To field and blocking their address?
- How will I keep track of all my messages and who I do and don't send them to, with the goal of avoiding these specific people?
- Will I have to break off into a whole separate email list with only certain people on it because I can't trust anyone else to completely cut off contact with my enemies?
- What if the enemies sneak in with a new burner account? What method will I use to prove it isn't them? How reliable is this method?
- Do I have to also cut contact with every friend who doesn't succeed in doing it? How much risk do I accept for the sake of not cutting off all my friends?
And again, I can't answer any of that for you. These are choices you have to make personally.
Higher Authorities
In either case-- self-moderation or relying on moderators of a small group-- you'll also have to contend with the fact that you may not be safe reporting anyone's behavior to any authority higher than the people in the group.
There will, technically, still be higher authorities. The email providers of members of the group; their internet service providers; their web hosts; the owners of any service they use for this online interaction. Even the police, who may be all too eager to get involved if you report that a group member has been doing something outright illegal.
But, if the group itself is of questionable legality --for instance, a group for freely discussing abortion or LGBTQ rights in a state where that's strictly regulated-- then involving law enforcement, or involving any service that is required to uphold the law, may put the entire group at risk.
You may rightly consider your enemy's behavior much more dangerous than the everyday discussions within your forum. But when you show proof of that dangerous behavior (in the form of, say, a threatening email CC'd to everybody)... the authority you report it to may decide to make no distinction, treating the entire group as lawbreakers and hunting them down by their email addresses.
You'll have to think about what, if any, circumstances would make that a worthwhile risk to take.
And what options you may have for handling the problem as a group, if you decide that it's not worth the risk to involve any higher authority.
Shifts in Thinking
The past several years on the internet have shown a lot of cognitive dissonance within many schools of thought.
This includes many people's inclination to believe that ethical rules are clear and simple... that gray areas and edge cases do not in fact exist and are just as clear as anything else to a reasonable and ethical person... that anyone who falls on the wrong side of ethics is unforgivable and should be permanently removed from all of society by any means necessary... and that there should still be absolute authorities carrying out all this enforcement with an iron fist, but just doing it more correctly.
This becomes evident every time someone advocates for a new law or a new policy, without giving any thought to questions like:
- How could this be interpreted besides how I interpret it?
- If someone was determined to retaliate against me specifically by accusing me of breaking this rule, what could they find to use as evidence for the accusation?
- Who would be enforcing the rule, and how?
- Do I trust them? Do I trust anyone else who might replace them?
- What, if anything, could stop this rule from being used in the worst imaginable way against people I would never, ever want it to be used against?
Or maybe people do give thought to these questions, but just not enough?
I'm very happy that people do seem to be applying this kind of analysis to some proposed laws-- like KOSA itself. That's very heartening.
But I still see an absence of this same critical thinking in many other circumstances... whenever anyone suggests a change that should be made to federal or state law, or even to what kind of posts should be allowed or not allowed on a social media platform.
It takes a bit of imagination to think it through: Could the proposed wording include things I don't want it to include? Exclude things I don't want it to exclude? Be taken in ways that get me and all my friends purged, deleted, arrested?
I have a lot of imagination. Sometimes too much to sleep easily at night.
And I have accepted that there is no perfect, or even really good, solution to all this.
But there are better options than what we have now. Not good, but better.
I don't know exactly what the best or most feasible of these options are. But I know that making it better on a societal scale is going to take a long time, and a lot of changes in how a lot of people think.
And it's possible that some of these changes in thinking might start to happen, out of necessity, in the course of making things better on the scale of small groups.
Anyway.Thank you all, and keep up the good fight. Tron would be proud.
...I do recommend the movie. I bought a DVD secondhand on ebay, because I'm not feeding that particular mouse, but it's a gloriously weird and delightful movie that speaks to what Disney used to be willing to take chances on, back in 1982.
Still kinda wish Lisberger had been able to produce it independently as he planned, instead of pitching it there. But realistically, with the flow of ideas controlled the way it is, I probably would never have heard of it then.
The Deleted Scene, in particular, is very dear to my heart... and not just because it's such a fantastic jumping board for the dive into erotic fanfiction.
It's fascinating especially because it's not just a love scene-- it's a scene about finding safe places to talk in private, in a world of dystopian surveillance.
And using those places for not just sex, but forbidden self-expression (in the form of fashion and decorating)... and also for PLOTTING THE REVOLUTION.
....Aaand it is especially poetic that the scene got cut.
Anyway. In the spirit of all things being in danger of cutting... I'm not gonna rely on the assumption that my Tumblr page is safe. But I'm heartened by how many people have reblogged this post, so some version of it will be around even if I disappear.
In the spirit of the whole email thing, just letting you know I can be contacted (for the moment) at astercontrol at proton dot me, and (eventually, see below) at astercontrol dot com.
And I know I've said this part before, and my resolutions are hard to stick to. But my goal at the moment is still to put a lot of my focus on the website I'm making on Neocities.
It's a huge endeavor, because I am trying to combine a lot of different topics and projects in my weird complex life.
The url will be astercontrol.com. When it is ready to be publicly viewed, that placeholder page will change to the actual entry page of the site.
When that happens, you'll be able to see pages about my writing, my art, many different things I've worked on and thought about... and of course, as many resources as I can gather to help others with that same struggle of getting free from corporate-controlled communication.
Because people being able to share their thoughts openly might be the one thing that makes the biggest difference to... ALL the other problems in the world.
Without the level of free dialogue I've seen about police brutality, trans rights, Palestine, COVID, climate change, anything... I'd know only what mainstream publications felt like telling me. I'd be in no position to even realize what help was needed, let alone help in the various small ways I've been helping.
And that's where more and more people will be, the more our communication gets crushed under increasing corporate control.
My site will probably not be complete when you first see it. There will be lots of sections that still don't have any content yet. The whole project would just take far too long, and I want to open the site soon. The way social media is going, "finding alternatives" has jumped to the front of my priorities.
Update, April 2025: Finally, at long last, the site is here. Thank you all, so very much. Check out for the beginnings of my own little email list.
AsterControl.com - (News)