Spy in your pocket

Nobody expected the Shining City upon the Hill to cave in to corporate fascism as easy as it did.

Fascism is, in the words of Mussolini himself, corporativism — the merger of the state with big business.

With state power and corporate power merged, the little guy and gal will lose. Common people have no real representation in the corporativist state, except as subjects and consumers.

Now that it has happened, and the Corporate States of America is upon us, what can we do?

One thing you, as an individual can do, is to deprive the corporate state of what they need to control and manipulate you.

They need your personal information: where you are, what you’re doing, who you’re with, what interests you, who you know.

Unfortunately, we’ve been gifting the corporations this information for almost two decades.

You have a spy in your pocket, running software controlled by two of the corporations: Google and Apple. One of those two will know almost everything about you.

You might have apps from Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Spotify on your phone, and those apps require all the permissions to soak up everything about you and what you do.

They can literally listen to everything you’re saying within the walls of your home.

If you don’t want to play along with the corporativist takeover, you will need to eliminate that spy.

If they know everything you do, you can do nothing against them.

On a practical level, some of the steps are these:

• get a phone that’s not an iPhone or Google Android. The easiest is to get a phone with a de-googled Android system. There are several on the market, such as FairPhone and Murena.
• remove all the apps from the large corporations from your phone. This means Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Amazon, Spotify, Twitter, the list is long. If you can’t replace some of them, use the website in a browser, not the app.
• switch to a privacy respecting, fully encrypted messenger system, such as Signal. There are several which are safe enough. WhatsApp is encrypted, but it will still leak who you’re communicating with.
• get a privacy-focused browser, such as DuckDuckGo. Again, there are many. Some can also block trackers in other apps, so they can’t track your activities any more.
• if possible, run some Linux variant on your laptop or home computer. Windows is as much an advertising and surveillance platform as an operating system. Unless you have really specialised needs, there’s probably sufficiently good software on Linux for what you want to do.
• don’t log in on corporate website to read news, especially not using logins through Google or Facebook. Those login systems only exist to track you. There are intermediate websites where the articles can be read anonymously, such as archive.today or archive.org.
• the only non-corporate social media is the Fediverse, that is, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Bookwyrm and the others. While they too have their issues, at least they’re not spying on you. Have a look at the permissions required to run the Facebook app, and compare with the default Mastodon app. The former asks for all possible and impossible permissions, the latter for nothing.

Modern fascism controls the means of communication to control you.

Modern anti-fascism starts in your pocket.

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