Sign In To Prove You're Not A Bot

Click on a video, and lately this comes up: "Sign In To Prove You're Not A Bot".

Really?

Open the VPN app, and switch to another server. Try the video link again, and get through.

What does this mean?

My VPN (Virtual Private Network) app is one of several you can download for free, that connects my computer to a chain of servers in such a way that anyone/thing trying to follow my trail of digital breadcrumbs back to my system will get lost.

I know this, because when I pick a server in, say, Afghanistan, the web pages come up in a foreign language, and I have to switch to a server in an Anglophone country. So it's pretty obvious that a lot of sites read the addresses of incoming requests, just to put their stuff up in the right language. Kind of like asking a new acquaintance the name of the bar they just came from.

However. "Prove you're not a bot" obviously comes up because the last server my VPN routed my query through was on some list. Maybe like the "watch" list they put the Religious Society of Friends on after "nine-eleven" because everybody knows the Quakers are a bunch of fanatic peace activists.

What do you think this system needs you to "sign in" for? No "bot" has any reason to watch that video. What, will it write a scathing review in the style of Ernest Hemingway? Plagiarize another acre of Intellectual Property to go with the rest of the entire contents of the whole barking Internet it takes to "train" a delusional, "hallucinating" Large Language Model?

This is but the latest in a game of cat-and-mouse, or whack-a-mole, or maybe stamp-collecting, now being waged by the cyber-feudalists who, incidentally, have just broken into the US Government's digitized Ft. Knox, where all the gold really is, and started breaking things.

And by the way, "cyber" is better than "techno" when it comes to feudalists: but if you Amazooglebook it's not exactly the first answer (which is another good metaphor for VPN). But scroll awhile, until it stops appending "security" to the prefix you wanted:

The word "cyber" is derived from the Greek word "kubernetes," which means "pilot" or "steersman." It was first used in the 1940s by Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, to refer to the science of communication and control in living organisms.--https://etymologyworld.com/item/cyber

Not to be nitpicky, ol' Norby was probably all about communication and control in guided missiles, not living organisms, but let that go: point is, it harkens back to control, not merely techne.

Actually all websites have to do this little stop-and-frisk routine just to have more short-term memory than a flatworm (or some presidents); and that's probably why some websites use that as the door to your brain, by outsourcing the whole traffic-control thing (outsourcing is another nice metaphor, for creating a trail of distraction and misdirection when privatizing the Common).

Anyway. So you click on a link, and that opens up a string of third-party auctions, exactly like a slave-auction, with guess-who on the block (hint: the only human involved). The auctioneer is an AI bot. So are all the bidders. These machines probe and poke into your most intimate silicone chips like a certain billionaire is now turning over circuit-boards in the bowels of what once may have been your government, looking for the Real You. And finding it, at least insofar as an AI bot can discern living beings from subroutines (which they can't and never will). But that's okay: virtual "you" still has access to your real money. Maybe unlike the real you.

This mad tea-party/caucus race sells dripping slices of your virtual body to the highest bidder in the time it takes for the website you clicked to light up its landing page. When your remains arrive there, all the physherfolk and datasuckers are already lined up like piranhas and lampreys to sink their hooks into whatever's left of you. But they're not cannibals! Hence, no doubt, this reverse Turing test.

Look at the person next to you: chances are they are in a trance before some screen device. That's what's left after their soul has been hijacked.

Okay I should explain my theology here. Briefly, we have created AI, and lost control of it. Don't be alarmed now, this happened quite some time ago. But here's the theological part: God created humans, and lost control of them. You see what happened. And in all likelihood somebody, Somebody, created God, and lost control of Them. So it's bots, all the way down.

So relax, ok? You don't really want to go through that wake-up scene from "The Matrix."

VPN is a really good idea these days. People have been using this system for years in countries with governments that listen in on all transmissions and go after people they don't like. Not everyone. It's more like a 55 mph zone, where the cops just dip up a few around the 30th to fill out the local budget, and everybody knows this, so we just set the cruise control on 85.

Do you live in such a terrible place (hint: do you live on Planet Earth)?

Another good idea is to use DuckDuckGo as your default browser. This saves you the trouble of digging deep into your drives to root out the "cookies" put there by the attention-mining extractive industry that now pays for all that "free" "social" "media" stuff that now has all your family photos and employment history, and the names of all your associates, and your drinking habits, and your kids' IQs (to vastly understate the case).

You can use Tor Browser too, but it's too much for the ordinary slave-markets like Amazooglebook, they just go all 404 on you. Tor is more for going into the Day Room down at the old State Hospital, you might not have to spend quite so much time humoring people with no sense of humor.

This isn't a theory, conspiracy or otherwise. It's emblazoned on every popup ad and even the billboards now. The people now in control of our taxes, food stamps, medical payments (including the VA and other oxygen-vendors), environment, national parks, mineral resource leasing, anti-poverty programs (like Head Start and school lunches), nuclear waste management (they manage that stuff?) (well, they maintain the chain link fences), safe drinking water, roads and bridges, etc., etc., and so forth, are accountable to one, single, individual rich guy. Who is accountable on this planet only to himself.

Babies in the bathwater? Who cares about that? Those losers should've known better than to swim in that stuff. Anybody who trusts the government with their livelihood, their nutrition, their children's education, their water supply, is just too dumb to live. Do better, losers!

Why have a government at all? Business does a better job. Learn Business by reading "The Art of War" and "Book of Five Rings" and Von Clausewitz and Machiavelli: Business is War. Societies are a thin candy shell covering our true bestial nature. It's dog-eat-dog and devil-take-the-hindmost. Other people are not our siblings, to be served and cared for, they are enemies to be taken to the cleaners. The natural world is a pile of untapped resources to be mined and extracted.

People is Soylent Green.