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Everyone talks about the Technocracy, but no one does anything about it.
That paraphrase of a memorable old quote about the weather may not be completely true. But there’s no doubt that most people opposed to the deeply elitist technocratic agenda can be doing more in their everyday choices to cut off its life blood.
That life blood is participation, and money.
Rejecting technocracy doesn’t have to mean rejecting technology. But it does mean trying to support projects, people and vendors that respect human dignity and liberty.
With that in mind, what follows is a brief “Top Ten” review of some projects, technologies and platforms that aren’t controlled by elites. Many of them aren’t as slick or versatile as the controlled alternatives. But the only way for an alternative ecosystem to have a chance to evolve is to support it.
Of course, it goes without saying that the Trends Journal and other select independent news sites have been at the forefront of fighting for freedom of speech, conscience and medical consent that is central to enlarging general freedom, peace and justice for all people. No other publication or news outlet in the world called out the dangers that would come with an overreaction to the COVID virus earlier than Gerald Celente.
And feel free to suggest other items and projects in the website comment section of this article.
#10 The Health Ranger Store
Natural health products at healthrangerstore.com are of consistently high quality, and the site is well worth supporting, compared to Amazon or other choices.
Mike Adams has managed to build a site that offers a growing selection of products that offer true natural health alternatives to big pharma “drug pushers”.
Honorable Mention: Infowarstore.com
Infowarstore.com also has excellent water and air filtration products, natural supplements and special deals on emergency preparedness foods.
#9 MyPillow and MyStore
Yes, the commercials are hokey, but at least they’re understandable. And Mike Lindell is one of the few CEOs of an unabashedly made in America, America-first company. His support of RightSide Broadcasting has helped keep that network afloat, in the face of YouTube crackdowns on its videos.
There are lots of products to be found at mypillow.com besides pillows. Lindell is also working to attract vendors to a “MyStore” site that he hopes can expand offerings and eventually offer more competition to sites like Target and Amazon.
#8: GAB
GAB, a social media platform built to resist the ability of companies like Amazon and Google to take it down, proved its resilience during the 2020 election.
Parler, an alternative backed by Dan Bogino and used by General Michael Flynn and others, was shut down at a crucial moment in the aftermath of the election, as President Trump and others pointed to election irregularities and widespread allegations of fraud. Parler relied on Amazon Web services, and those services were cut off.
GAB, on the other hand, remained available. That’s because it was built as a fork of open source Mastodon Project decentralized social networking software. Utilizing a decentralized peer-to-peer architecture means no one person or company can control the network, and it can be implemented on any computer.
According to the GAB website:
“At Gab, we believe that the future of online publishing is decentralized and open… Originally forked from the Mastodon project, Gab’s codebase is free and open-source, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPL3).”
Andrew Torba, CEO of GAB, has been outspoken about the need for liberty minded Americans to create an alternative ecosystem of products and services to combat censorship and technocratic control. Some of his views on that subject were previously highlighted in the 4 May 2021 Trends Journal article “ARE AMERICANS HEADING TOWARD A SILENT SECESSION?”.
#7: RUMBLE
With a Roku app, monetization options and a good interface, more freedom-minded content creators are turning to the Rumble video platform as an alternative to YouTube.
Rumble, founded by Chris Pavlovski, the current CEO, has actually been up and running since 2013, and has ranked as one of the top 100 fastest growing tech companies in the U.S..
Undeterred from his problems keeping Parler up and running during the 2020 election cycle, Dan Bongino has backed Rumble as part of his efforts to break the de facto monopoly of big tech on communication.
Honorable Mention: LBRY
The LBRY project (https://lbry.com) has employed bitcoin network inspired decentralized blockchain technology to build a video platform network. According to its organization website, LBRY aims to provide an alternative to censor prone site like YouTube. Users can interact with content and upload their own content on the LBRY blockchain by using sites like odysee.com, or downloading the LBRY app (macOS, IOS, Windows, Linux and Android).
LBRY founders have made all project code open source, which not only provides transparency, but allows virtually anyone to use the same technology to build their own network, if they so desire. According to its website, LBRY chose to implement not just a peer-to-peer network, but a blockchain based index database that no single entity can control:
“For the same reasons that nobody can prevent a Bitcoin transaction from taking place, nobody can prevent a transaction (like a publication or a tip) from appearing on the LBRY blockchain. Other sites exist that share their content from a peer-to-peer data network. However, the index of available content is still centralized and can be easily censored.”
LIBRY uses a blockchain database to store an index of what content is available and how to download it, as well as financial transactions (such as tips, and purchases of paid content) using the Bitcoin-like currency LBC. When a creator publishes something on LBRY, an entry is made on the LBRY blockchain.
#6: PURISM LIBRE 5 USA Phone
Purism is intent on building phones and other hardware that pay attention to detail when it comes to privacy.
Their latest Librem 5 phone uses PureOS, a free open source operating system not based on Android or iOS. In addition, the company pays close attention to where it sources components, and with their Librem 5 USA version, they are attempting to source as many of those components as possible in the U.S..
ITPro website ranked Librem 5 as their number one choice for a security focused phone in a June 2021 roundup. Unfortunately, supply chain problems are currently affecting the availability of the phones.
Honorable Mention: The Freedom Phone
The Freedom Phone bills itself as a free speech and privacy first focused alternative to Google and Apple ecosystem products.
It uses its own flavor of open source android OS called FreedomOS (which receives regular updates), and sports features like tracking blockers and pre-loaded free speech friendly platform apps from Rumble and and Parler.
It’s not perfect, and not cheap. But as an out of box solution, it may appeal to a lot of users who are fed up with Google and Apple censorship. One of the best features of the Freedom Phone is its use of an “uncensorable app store”, where apps that have been banned on iPhones and Google Play are finding a home.
Erik Finman, the 22-year-old entrepreneurial force behind the start-up, has been called “The Youngest Bitcoin Millionaire”.
The young entrepreneur certainly has the financial wherewithal to help the Freedom Phone compete with censorship prone alternatives. Finman has said he wants to “create a future where free communication is not banned by Big Tech.”
#5: Telegram Messaging App
With the Biden administration basically announcing they’ll leverage taps into phone communications to snoop on and alter or add messages to private SMS text communications, there’s no better time to switch to a messaging app like Telegram.
Telegram has a host of privacy features built-in, including robust encryption and the ability to set messages to erase. There are video chat and other features, including Groups, which can contain up to 200 thousand members.
Telegram has a focus on messaging privacy. How do they specifically achieve that? Here are some details, from their privacy policy:
“3.3.2. Secret Chats: Secret chats use end-to-end encryption. This means that all data is encrypted with a key that only you and the recipient know. There is no way for us or anybody else without direct access to your device to learn what content is being sent in those messages. We do not store your secret chats on our servers. We also do not keep any logs for messages in secret chats, so after a short period of time we no longer know who or when you messaged via secret chats. For the same reasons secret chats are not available in the cloud — you can only access those messages from the device they were sent to or from.
“3.3.3. Media in Secret Chats: When you send photos, videos or files via secret chats, before being uploaded, each item is encrypted with a separate key, not known to the server. This key and the file’s location are then encrypted again, this time with the secret chat’s key — and sent to your recipient. They can then download and decipher the file. This means that the file is technically on one of Telegram’s servers, but it looks like a piece of random indecipherable garbage to everyone except for you and the recipient. We don’t know what this random data stands for and we have no idea which particular chat it belongs to. We periodically purge this random data from our servers to save disk space.”
#4: GiveSendGo
Crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe, Kickstarter and Patreon have offered a way for people to attract support for projects and causes. But as with most tech platforms, political bias of the platforms have resulted in disfavored users and causes being banned and taken down.
After the January 6 Washington protest, GoFundMe banned Trump rally travel fundraisers, citing “Capitol violence”. They also banned fundraising for Kyle Rittenhouse, following an incident where he defended himself from several attackers during riots in Kenosha Wisconsin.
Rittenhouse ended up raising money for his legal defense utilizing GiveSendGo.
A Christian-based site, GiveSendGo has helped with funding projects that otherwise would have been censored. According to its founders:
“We wanted a site [where] crowds of Christians could come together and support other Christians in their endeavors. We believe that when we live the life God wants us to – we will be living to share the hope we have found.”
#3: Cornerstone Payments and Pro-Life Bank
This one is a tie between two important areas that sorely need more censorship resilient players.
With PayPal and other payment processors growing more brazen in their political bias and denial of service to dissident businesses and persons, the existence of Cornerstone Payments marks a welcome alternative.
Brick and mortar businesses and online stores can use Cornerstone for processing credit and debit card payments. And they offer special programs like the “Processing With A Purpose” program, which guarantees a lower processing cost than a business’s current processor (with certain conditions applying).
According to its website, Cornerstone is one of the nation’s leading Christian owned and operated independent sales organizations in the merchant processing industry.
Pro-Life Bank is still in its pre-launch phase. It’s being established by Nick Vujicic, after he was cut off from services at his bank due to his pro-life activism.
Known as a motivational speaker who toured the world to talk to millions about his Christian beliefs, Vujicic experienced financial de-personing first-hand, after speaking out against his bank’s support for pro-abortion groups:
“I was thrown out of a bank without notice, and it froze my credit cards and debit cards. They performed an evaluation of me as a customer and they don’t want anything to do with me.
“Most banks contribute philanthropically under social responsibility to give to groups that supply [to] the biggest abortion clinics in America.”
Vujicic, who was already creator, president, and CEO of Ministry of Life Without Limbs, decided to head up the formation of a bank that would not ban users for their po-life beliefs or activism.
ProPay earns an honorable mention as a payment processor with a decent record of supporting free speech minded interests.
#2 Unstoppable Domains
Taking down users and channels from YouTube and Facebook is one thing. But the ability to take down websites by cutting off storage services on Amazon AWS, or commandeering a domain, has now become part of the censorship reality that dissident publishers and organizations are facing.
One answer to the problem is Unstoppable Domains. The initiative has created a decentralized system of domain naming that allows people to purchase – not just rent – a domain that is written to a blockchain and virtually impossible to revoke.
Blockchain domains can be pointed to decentralized storage, allowing websites that are difficult indeed to summarily cancel.
According to Unstoppable Domains, blockchain domains are what’s called alternate roots. They are not part of the current DNS system. But several browsers including Brave and Opera web browsers offer native support. And extensions allow other browsers like Chrome and Firefox to get to blockchain domain websites.
The blockchain domains initiative is very focused on integrating things like crypto wallets and payments together with domains, which represents a lot of interesting streamlining. One innovation allows the blockchain domain name to replace the public address hash for a payment. They currently support over 276 cryptocurrency addresses to map to a domain name to make payments easier.
There are limitations of the technology, which is still very new. For example, major search engines don’t currently index blockchain domain websites. For now, they can be searched for at unstoppabledomains.com, on partner applications that integrate an unstoppable domains search bar, or on blockchain apps that index blockchain domain websites.
Honorable Mention: Epik
Epik gets an honorable mention as a traditional domain registrar and website hosting company that has supported organizations banned by GoDaddy and other companies.
#1: Decentralized Blockchain Technologies
There’s more than just money at stake with decentralized blockchain technology.
The ethos of decentralization has always been to create a way of exchanging and communicating that can’t be taken down by attacking any one locus. The internet itself was designed as a decentralized protocol, with packets that could be rerouted around failure points, and replicated DNS servers, etc.
Decentralized databases that eschew server-client frameworks and intermediary controlling authorities, are the backbone of an exploding number of projects creating efficiencies and building resiliency to take downs and censorship.
Bitcoin was the first serious implementation. And it remains the big fish, with 47 percent of the entire market cap of decentralized blockchain projects. Many are predicting that Bitcoin adoption, especially by developing nations, will ensure that it continues to lead.
Activists on the front lines battling human rights abuses of governments, including Alex Gladstein, Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation, have argued that “Bitcoin Is The Revolution.”
For more on that, see our article in the 29 June 2021 Trends Journal titled “HUMAN RIGHTS FOUNDATION HEAD SAYS “BITCOIN IS THE REVOLUTION”.
But for those who believe Bitcoin doesn’t offer enough privacy, or doesn’t have demonstrated value, there are plenty of alternatives covering a vast array of use cases. DeFi is the obvious area experiencing exponential growth right now, and a lot of that is happening on the Ethereum network, thanks to its smart contract dapp abilities.
Without a doubt, care should be taken in investing in blockchain projects, with a view toward the long term potential upside.