So, I just got off the phone with a PayPal representative. A lovely lady. But a frustrating experience, all things considered.
I admittedly feel like a special agent with 4 Paypal accounts, connected to 4 email addresses, connected to many different phone numbers. I’m a digital nomad with multiple different crypto accounts, myriad international phone numbers, numerous multicurrency bank accounts, and lots of online personas. But it’s Two Factor Authentication (2FA) that is crushing me.
Specifically, it’s mobile 2FA. The Deep State is busy typing to get all of us to use devices, which not only make us stupid as a species, but make us stupid, trackable, and pliable to mobile propaganda and commercial advertising. Pay-As-You-Go stupidity. And it’s impossible to operate in society without a device.
Why The Devices?
Every new application, especially banking applications, requires phone verification to get started. There was a time when giving out your phone number was quite a delicate process. Now you need one for everything, including some crypto platforms. And there is no real reason why this is not allowable with email 2FA. Why is everything tied to a phone?
The answer is because the Deep State needs you tied to a physical address, which is tied to a mortgage and further enslavement mechanisms. If you want to knuckle right down to it, they need a way to send you threatening messages in case you don’t send them money for their wars and experiments. You need to be reachable for this to happen. They don’t like people who are not traceable, which they say is for “security purposes” (i.e. they feel secure when they control/track you).
I’ve been fighting the good fight as a crypto warrior for many years, but the parasitical necessity to own a phone is weighing on me. The best I can do is cut it all down to a minimal number of accounts. But I needed my (recently canceled) Google Fi number as it works internationally. Now I need a number per location. I travel a lot as a global citizen not tied to some Orwellian nation-state that wants to command my financial, medical, and political affairs.
Global citizens need to have a constitutional right to travel and interact anonymously if they so choose. This can be enacted via blockchain given the clear document privacy infringements based on mandatory identity theft. Tracking should remain a post-crime activity.
The Digital Spring Clean & The Technological Swamp
The PayPal call is the result of a digital spring clean I am doing. You know, when you clean out your garage after 10 years? I’m doing that in a digital sense. So many accounts, tied to email addresses and phone numbers and debit cards have since been etherealized. But the cleaning needs to be done. Meaning I need to call representatives and get the accounts closed, for once and forever.
Every one of us is in the same boat. Do you have any idea how many accounts you have accumulated over time? Social media accounts, photo editing software, email addresses, government accounts, university accounts, software applications, downloaded applications, payment processors, etc? Getting onboard with Web3 and cryptocurrency are noble ideals, though they add to the total number of accounts you need to maintain.
Next, of course, is password management. All these accounts need all these passwords. All these passwords need to be between 8 - 20 characters long with one upper case, no sequential numbers, and two special characters. Oh, and they need to be changed periodically. And they can’t be the same as the last one.
Swamped with applications, devices, passwords, debit cards, crypto wallets, and Metaverse “assets”, modern citizens are going to struggle. And this is the pre-Metaverse era; the situation will get worse.
Mass Technology Dysfunction
The fact is that we’re in the midst of an existential crisis centering around technology. I’m struggling with it, and I’m considered “good” at technology by my friends, having a masters, investing in crypto in 2013, and being an early adopter of new technology trends. Ultimately, however, I don’t have a handle on it. The best I can do is reduce as much as possible over the coming weeks and limit my time spent using devices.
Technology has been weaponized against us. A few years ago this would have been considered conspiratorial but it's just a run-of-the-mill accepted fact at this stage. The court cases and document leakages are there. It’s legal for your phone to listen to you, 24/7. And nothing has changed at all despite the ongoing technological attacks and privacy invasions.
Web3 and distributed ledgers do offer a silver lining, but the transition is going to be choppy at best. We will pull ourselves from the quagmire of technology, but it’s not going to be an easy or clear procedure. The situation gets worse as most people do not know how heavily entrenched technology has become in their lives. So they don’t take the necessary and boring steps of cleaning up their digital environment, which is more important than you might think.
How clean is your digital environment? if you have not cleaned it up, then it is dirty. Looking the other way does not mean it’s clean.
Dominate Your Technology
As a blockchain and Web3 advocate, I can strongly proclaim that such benefits are not automatic. Unless you take steps to purify your digital environment, it’s not going to become clean. Your data is not going to be given back to you and accounts are not going to close unless you close them.
Technology will always need the human touch to work.
But you have to use it, not the other way around.