We Are Still a Threat to the Establishment

This morning I read an article from one of the few blogs I still follow closely, The Sentinel-Intelligence. Jessica clearly cuts through the bullshit of what the algorithms are feeding us. Mainstream online platforms are designed to keep us engaged at all costs. We know this, but we still get caught up in the intricacies of trying to convince others to agree with us.

But how often does someone respond to your comment and say, “You’re right, I never thought about it that way”?

Jessica’s latest piece is called “It's Not Avocado Toast. It's Not Boomers. It's Not Even Algorithms.”

The answer is explained in very clear terms: they are using these algorithms to divide and conquer us.

In a way, this is encouraging. It means we are a threat to them. There are a LOT more people struggling than there are billionaires. Like, we’re talking more than a million to one. There are about 3,000 billionaires in the entire world. There are over 8 billion people, total. They know that if we could agree on a way to deal with them, it would be over for them very quickly. So they spend most of their time managing…us.

I’ve noticed lately that it’s harder to see new content. I’m not on most social media (though I recently got back on Bluesky), but YouTube seems to want to grab my focus so fast, I’ll forget why I even opened it. Sometimes I open the app and it just starts playing shorts, and I need to figure out how to navigate to my subscriptions. Then it sorts them, and it’s hard for me to find where the most recent uploads are. If I didn’t see a video within 24 hours of the upload, I have to navigate to that individual channel to find it.

This makes content creators work so much harder to continuously upload. It frustrates those of us just trying to support them. It definitely doesn’t serve either group. It only serves the people who make money when we spend more time on their platform.

All of this is why I’ve been working for months on curating a different approach to using the internet. I’m not proposing something that will make me any money. I just want to empower the people within my circle to utilize the internet for themselves.

Ultimately, the internet itself was once a threat. I remember back in 2011, during the Egyptian revolution, Twitter worked a lot differently than it does now. Tweets refreshed at the top of the page. New information was rolling in by the minute. People were using Twitter to organize protests and help each other. It was incredibly hopeful.

That doesn’t happen anymore. “X” is a complete trash heap of Nazis where the world’s biggest loser has to keep training his pet AI to stop making him look bad. Truth social is a thing. All major social media platforms use algorithms to bury the most important, relevant, and up-to-date information.

We don’t get to know what’s happening as it happens. We hardly get to know what’s happening at all, while spending even more time hooked on our screens.

Nevertheless, the Internet itself is an empowering place. We have instant access to so much information. They must work to keep us distracted with anger and infighting. The want us engaged and enraged, not informed and empowered.

Meaningful and useful information exists online. It’s harder to find it now because the algorithms and endless feeds keep us scrolling. We’re digging for what matters.

As one of my favorite YouTubers, Struthless, said when he analyzed the phenomenon of how people reacted to the Epstein files in February: “If you can’t hide a needle, pour a haystack on top of it.”

The best thing we can all do right now is stop fighting each other, and turn our attention to them. My enemy is not someone who left a YouTube comment who is either just as angry as I am, or a bot designed to elicit my rage. It’s YouTube, which is owned by Google, a major data farming operation. Google is owned by Alphabet Inc., worth $4.69 trillion today.

The words “million,” “billion,” and “trillion” are too similar for us to comprehend how vastly different they are. What would you do with a million dollars? Now imagine you had that much money times one hundred. That’s still only $100 million.

We can’t really visualize that much money.

But here’s a video that helps a little bit with visualizing how massive these amounts of money are, and the direct impact it has on the people whose labor it exploits:

This video is part 2 of a discussion on the Met Gala 2026, and the first video discussed how it capitalizes on Black men who used clothing as resistance. That's another very important topic, and you can watch Part 1 here.

Ali compiles some of the most compelling information I’ve ever seen. She does in-depth research on wealth, banks, inequality, and the strategies being used to destroy us all for profit. I’m in her Discord, and her videos are being heavily suppressed by the algorithm. That’s because the information she has to share is harmful to the establishment.

I’m not saying you should leave all social media and never watch videos, or turn off all your electronic devices. Personally, I need modern technology for accessibility as a disabled person. I’m able to stay far more connected than I would otherwise, and I have a dozen alarms set on my phone every day.

What I am saying is that to combat the distraction machine, we need strategy. We are up against machines trained on manipulating our own habits.

One thing I did recently was create my own linktree and make it my homepage on my web browser. It contains my different email inboxes, and direct links to the tools I use for my files and publications. Inside it, I have a link to a second linktree for leisure. That one has my home library website and goodreads pages.

Linktree is free. You can create your own linktree at linktr.ee and you don’t have to share it anywhere. You can just put in whatever links you want, and make it your personal homepage.

My resources page started as a linktree, but it became unwieldy with so many different links, so I moved it to my own website. This acts as an alternative launching point. It doesn’t force content into your face. It provides a menu instead.

What are you looking for? Do you want to learn about something that interests you? Do you need mental health support? Could you use specific advice about a legal case?

All these questions, and more, can be answered online. But the people who want to manage the masses don’t want you to find those answers.

That would empower you, not keep you distractedly scrolling.

We are still a threat to the establishment. We can get control of our own Internet use back, and that scares them. That’s why there’s so much mass surveillance of what we do and say, both online and offline.

Check out the resource page here.