Digital censorship reflects the paranoia of élites, not those who oppose them

At the risk of sounding tediously bonkers, I am moved to report that since I posted this piece earlier today, my laptop has once more been bombed by a virus that expensively employed ISP geeks ‘don’t recognise’, and thus conclude is down to ‘user error’…..something of a coincidence given that this only ever happens when I blog in English in the eurozone area about things the nutters don’t want to be discussed.

I now have no backspace, enter or paragraph function on the keyboard – and this applies across all programs. Equally, when I inadvertently press those buttons, asterisks, backslashes and endless rows of sevens (as in 777777s) pop up at random. Only by painstakingly removing these using the del key can I produce gibberish-free prose such as the preceding, and following.

I have discussed this with two commercial cyber-counterattack professionals, and they are as one in saying that they don’t know how it’s done, but it clearly is being done. Both concur that the word content of the posts is key: that’s to say, if the robots pick up above a certain number of trigger references, they will request action.

The idea is clearly to f**k up the opinion sender by either getting the post taken down (easily overcome now by changing the post title and revising key words/references) or – more and more in 2015 – via the use of virus disablement targeting the IP address of the internet sender.

The loss of these keyboard functions may seem to you a minor disablement. If so, I suggest you try doing without them yourself.

Another informant has written to me saying that the quality of a site’s readership is also central to the process of deciding what action to take. But even so, I remain mystified as to why censors would bother with a site like The Slog….which at best reaches 9,500 regular readers. I’d love to believe that George Osborne, Prince Philip, Barack Obama, Wolfgang Schäuble and Vladimir Putin read these columns, but I very much doubt it.

My preferred interpretation of this – right from the start of the occurrences some 18 months ago – is that the pinched goblins go into Warp overdrive whenever the threat level to their fantasy belief-system goes above a certain pre-agreed level. But I don’t know for sure: all I can tell you with any certainty is that I can’t go on affording two new laptops a year in response to these attacks. And I would add this: if I was a schizoid paranoiac, I suspect the condition would’ve shown up in personality tests long before now.

All I can do is take this as a signal to add to the signals I was trying to point out in the original post itself. I phrased it thus:

‘Although it may have passed 95% of humanity by, yesterday – 11th June 2015 – was a turning point in the silent war between neoliberal control and citizen fightback. The signs were relatively small, but I think telling.’

Maybe the time has come to ask who really is paranoid here: the censors or the soothsayers?