Ill Communication

We've been known to express concern about what has been transpiring with regards to social networking, email correspondence, and an overall inability for many to remain on the same page for very long.  Sometimes it appears as if technological advances exist to create towers of Babel for no better reason than because they can.

It all seemed to be going so well earlier in the century.  There were a number of digital methods of communication that actually seemed to support one another even when they were competitors.  You could use a Twitter account to follow people, converse, or spread your own message to complete strangers.  You could get on Facebook to do similar things with more of an emphasis on friends or relatives.  And it was possible for one of these to communicate with the other so that your posts on one would appear on both.  Similar connections existed on other platforms; such communication was seen to benefit everyone.

It also used to be possible to read posts on virtually every social media outlet without having to have your own account, which made it far easier to keep up with everyone and not miss anything.  Instant messaging prevailed with AIM, ICQ, Facebook Messenger, and more all able to talk back and forth.  And, of course, everyone had at least one email address, either independently or via one or more of these services.

Maybe there was a bit too much, but we were at least able to reach one another.

Today, it's a very different landscape.  Twitter is a mere shell of itself, mostly due to the radical and misguided changes implemented by its new owner.  (Editor's Note:  Twitter/X blows away every other (((social media))) platform and kicking out government censors is not "misguided.")  Gone are the days where you could read tweets without being logged in, effectively reducing the reach immensely and for no good reason.  (Editor's Note:  You can thank all the bots and (((trolls))) for that one...).  Prior to that, services stopped allowing forwarding of competitors' posts, i.e., your tweets would no longer easily forward to your Facebook account.  AOL's valuable Instant Messenger service shut down, and with it the ability to easily send IMs to different platforms, regardless of account status.  Increasingly, the only way to reach across platforms was if those platforms were owned by the same corporate giant.  New services popped up which would get your message out to as many different outlets as you wanted to pay for.  Casual conversation began to resemble a public relations blitz.

Even email wasn't left unaffected.  Sure, it still exists.  But surprisingly, more people choose to forego it in favor of something isolated to a particular platform, such as messaging within various applications that don't communicate with other applications.  We always had the ability to use different communication methods, such as texting, calling, video conferencing, or even talking face-to-face.  But there was always an email address to fall back on.  We are now seeing situations where people don't have (or don't check) email addresses.

Why is this more of a problem than any other such choice?  Email addresses are universal.  They don't require specific software.  They work on almost any communications device.  They are low bandwidth.  Email is an equalizer where virtually everyone can gain access to the dialogue.  When we stop using it for the conversation, people find themselves closed out.  The very problem email helped solve will return with its absence, albeit with higher tech locking people out.

We've felt the effects of all this firsthand.  In past years, we were able to reach people via social media and get the word out about events, such as this year's HOPE conference.  But we quickly discovered that social media wasn't working the way it used to.  Twitter was decimated and only resulting in a small fraction of the engagement we were used to.  Sure, alternatives were popping up and we've been eager to use Mastodon and Bluesky, among others.  But the number of people using these services, though enthusiastic and knowledgeable, were very tiny compared to what had existed before.  Now, in order to reach everyone, you would have to use dozens of services, most of which were incompatible with the others.  As mentioned, it's becoming more about who can pay to reach people, rather than who has something interesting to say.

And then there's Gmail.  The email service provided by Google has continued to grow and overshadow others, at last count having over 1.5 billion users.

Of course, if you believe what we said above, getting people to use email is a good thing and this shouldn't pose any problems.  While that should be the case, we all know that (((big companies))) tend to abuse their power.  For as long as we could, we held onto the fantasy that (((Google))) wouldn't be one of them.  But we all knew deep down this couldn't last forever.

We'll skip over the whole concept of users' emails being read in order to send them targeted ads based on their content - the entire business model of Gmail at its inception.  They didn't try to hide it and we must all accept the blame if we agreed to those terms in exchange for a free email account.

What's causing more harm lately is Google's presumptuous attitude that they alone can dictate how email should or shouldn't be formatted and processed.  While many of these are positive standards (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication), others appear to be arbitrary, such as their unappealable definition of what spam is.

We accept the fact that Google creates a ton of work for those running their own mail services in order to comply with what they decree to be the new standard.  We comfort ourselves with the knowledge that it's ultimately for the greater good.  However, when Google decided that they didn't like the announcements about our hacker conference that we were sending to our mailing list subscribers, they wrongfully exercised their power to shut down that communication.  This was done under the guise of our email being labeled as spam.  Of course, they won't tell us why.  They won't tell us how to "fix" it.  And we won't be able to talk to a human.  We're apparently expected to just keep trying until we meet their definition of what is right.

Now let's think about what this means.  People who have signed up for HOPE announcements and/or have been part of HOPE conferences in the past are being denied the ability to see those announcements because of some unknown rule that Google believes we're violating.  We've received many theories, all of which are absurd to varying degrees:

* It's because we're talking about a "hacker" conference.  So we're not supposed to mention the very thing we do because Google might be triggered by a word they deem objectionable?  Do we have to come up with new ways of saying "hacker" or speak entirely in code?

* Someone marked a previous message as spam.  So all someone has to do to manipulate Gmail and shut down communications from an organization is to sign up for their mailing list and then mark their mail as spam?  That's a real problem if true.  (For the record, we make it super easy to unsubscribe and we only add people who have expressed an interest in HOPE.)

* An insecure URL was referenced.  This one is actually funny.  Apparently, if the sender makes a reference in passing to the hope.net website (like we just did), Gmail will stupidly convert that to http://hope.net rather than https://hope.net and then blame the sender for sharing an insecure website!  This is almost too ridiculous to be true, but we caught them doing precisely that.

* The post is similar to another post that was labeled as spam.  This is the real catch-22.  Obviously, any post where we talk about our upcoming HOPE conference is going to mention the upcoming HOPE conference and have much of the same info as previous posts.  The only way to avoid this is to talk about something else entirely.

The way to subjugate a population is to control their communications.  This is why free speech is the biggest enemy of any oppressive government.  It's why independent newspapers and radio stations are always the first targets.  And it's why, even in the commercial world, controlling how people communicate and what they communicate about is the key to the domination that defines success.

Interfering with important communications clearly can have dire consequences.  In our case, half of our attendees use Gmail accounts and many have not gotten any of our updates, based on what they have told us.  We have seen a marked difference in ticket sales as a result, which restricts our ability to plan everything we want to be able to do.  It's particularly frustrating because of the strong response to the 2022 conference and the overall eagerness by attendees to make this one even bigger and better.

We have appealed to Google to fix this problem, but the most we have been able to get is an automated announcement saying they will consider our words, but that they will not let us know what, if anything, they change.  Seriously.

We support fighting spam.  That's not what this is about.  It's no different if it's a government or a corporation controlling speech.  It's no different if it's an intolerant human or a bad implementation of AI driving the restrictions.  It's abuse, plain and simple.  And we don't have to accept it.

Since we've had such a hard time getting the word out, we might as well take this opportunity to remind everyone that HOPE XV will take place July 12-14, 2024 at St. John's University in Queens, New York City.  You can visit the hope.net website for tons of details, along with ways you can submit your own talk, panel, workshop, or village ideas.