STEEM: A Blockchain Media Platform Which Could Finally Make Alt-Media Financially Viable

by Tom Luongo, Russia Insider:

“This is an ideological war. One in which those that feel they have a right, nay, a duty, to guide humankind to their preferred outcome for society.”

Just read a great article by Caitlin Johnstone over at Medium where she discusses the automation of censorship tools by companies like Twitter and Google.

Putting paid Julian Assange’s warning last year on this, Ms. Johnstone details just some of the abuses that Twitter and Google engaged in to subtly and not-so-subtly shift public perception of major issues that run counter to the narrative the power structure wants us to believe.

And it is for this reason that projects like Steemit are so very important.

I talked about how important Steem is after James O’Keefe’s latest expose of Twitter (read it here).  Watching people like Mrs. Johnstone wake up to the problem is great, but she also needs to take the next step.

You can’t hack something whose underlying content is stored in a distributed blockchain. Because the blockchain’s ledger is immutable, what you wrote is preserved in all of its glory (ignominious or otherwise) forever.

As she points out, type of censorship is far worse than simply throwing books into piles and burning them. With DRM and all digital assets, inconvenient truths can be memory-holed off your Kindle never to be seen again.

Abridged versions of books can be substituted for the original text and worse.

So, the blockchain as it pertains to how we communicate is a fundamental need to disrupt this communications super-state they are building.

I can’t stress enough how important this is today.

Now, more than ever, the information war is heating up. And the ability to control not just the validity of what people produce but what everyone consumes is the single most important issue of the age.

If we are to finally break the backs of the people working so hard to maintain their gravy train, we have to build systems that are beyond their control.

This is an ideological war. One in which those that feel they have a right, nee a duty, to guide humankind to their preferred outcome for society.

On the other side is the force of the individual and chaos and the beauty of decentralization to create order versus forcing it to.

The essence of the authoritarian mindset was expressed beautifully in the much-maligned film, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.

At his lowest point a paranoid, angry and bitter Batman is trying to kill that which he can’t control, Superman. And he says with all the fury of a frustrated villain, “The world only makes sense if you force it to.”

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