My high crime that warranted being de-platformed?

In the wake of the election aftermath, lots of rumors have been flying around about the efficacy of the electoral process and results. In fact, do we actually know who is President yet via the Constitutional rule of law-based process?

(as opposed to the un-Constitutional declaration of a winner via market efforts by corporate media conglomerates)

A lot of the election protestations via social have been labeled as “conspiracy theory” at even the most extreme levels like Q, which was banned from Facebook along with 3% militia types and even sitting Libertarian Party communications directors and official Libertarian Party groups.

I made a morning post that included a link to a PDF document resource from the CISA (cisa.gov), the United States Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency.

You know, like a real, bonafide Federal Government Agency.

The PDF shows watermarking of physical ballots as a recommendation, even though state and local governments actually print the physical ballots under the election boards and Secretaries of State.

This resource is linked to under a wider umbrella of Rumor Control resources published by the agency.

My Facebook post was removed several hours later with a notice from Facebook that it was spreading potentially harmful information. Linking directly to a U.S. Government website is “spreading harmful information” in 2020’s topsy-turvy, upside down world.

Then later that evening, I was sitting on my couch chilling out with the kids when my mobile popped up an alert that I needed to re-authenticate my Facebook account. Upon logging in, I was presented with a “This account has been deactivated” message with a link to support wherein I could appeal the decision by uploading a photo of my government ID — which I did and have yet to hear anything from Facebook.

Call me a cynic, but I’m not particularly optimistic.

I guess I have been relegated to the ranks of people like Alex Jones and such…

But other than a couple of minor exceptions, I’m not necessarily all that upset about this.

I would’ve certainly appreciated the opportunity to download an archive of my decade long body of work.

I would have also appreciated the opportunity to nominate replacement admins for pages and groups that were deleted and orphaned.

In fact, any offboarding process could easily be created to automate these things as a halfway cordial send off. Not necessarily any reason to create enemies, yet that’s precisely what Facebook is doing. This guy seems pretty salty…

And this commentator…

Now the irony here is that I’d already been thinking for a while about the various implications of shutting down my Facebook account anyway. In retrospect, I’m sort of surprised I made it 11 years. If Facebook indeed went on an ideological purge, I’ve got a decade worth of Libertarian, small government, Austrian economics expression for them to draw from — all the way back to me posting Ron Paul memes.

I submit the following as evidence to my depravity:

Sick.

Vile.

Twisted.

Plus there was evidence that I’d used the platform to engage in highly successful operations involving grassroots political efforts to promote and enforce individual rights including the 2nd Amendment. I think they hate it when people figure out how to do things like that.

So given the well-documented issues with Facebook’s subcontracted moderators, any drug addled, sex crazed subcontracted moderator trying to enforce some policy could go through my decade of content and determine that I’m probably not their target audience any longer.

I get it. Seriously.

See, one of the things I’ve got a lot more experience in than most is building and running “digital communities.”

I’ve run them since sysop chats on mainframe networks. By the time Facebook came along, the concept of an extemporaneous community of people connected via digital technology had already been through several lifecycles of evolution and maturation.

• Sysop chat on mainframe
• Telnet
• Dial-up BBS (Wildcat, telephony)
• Dial-up Email Services
• Dial-up Networks (Compuserve, AOL, etc…)
• NNTP
• WAIS
• Novell Terminal Chat
• Internet / WWW
• Website-centric Discussion Forum sites
• 6 Degrees / MySpace
• Mobile SMS Text
• Mobile Responsive “Web 2.0”

And then finally… “Social Media”

The major social media networks are a product of the expansion of the mobile device market and adoption. LinkedIn, Twitter & Facebook caught a particular wave that created the influx of mass consumer users to drive growth. For the first time in history, a hand held consumer computing device was powerful enough to run social apps 0n top of communication networks and protocols.

It was literally that expansion that created the major networks, not because they’d invented anything new or novel.

And quite frankly, if anyone could do anything to curb the advance of social media platform power, it’s the mobile networks. I’m surprised they haven’t already made those moves considering they’ve previously rattled the sabre at other high bandwidth consumption sites like Netflix.

So as we’ve traversed this path of advancing technology powering human communication and communities, there’s another dynamic that I’ve observed — the cyclical centralization and decentralization of the communities themselves.

Sysop chats were centralized on the primary mainframe cluster. You had to physically be connected to the system via a hard wired terminal. Then Telnet came along and changed this around. People could access remote computer installations. Dial-up BBS services were centralized until other replication schemes came along to create a wide network of BBS systems. Compuserve and AOL were highly centralized, but the web came along and decentralized content and interaction.

phpBB and other discussion forum websites popped up all over the internet. There was a plethora of topic-specific destinations and communities for every conceivable niche. These ruled for almost a decade until the Web 2.0 mobile social wave hit.

Of course, social media sites like Facebook & Twitter became the modern iteration of Compuserve and AOL — and will likely go the same way they’ve gone as we’re now seeing a migration away from the legacy social media networks to specialized, demographic and topic specific platforms.

As decentralization themes make their way into other areas of computing like sovereign identity and information governance, I expect fewer people to tolerate the Goderator attitudes that blew apart many other communities long before Facebook caught the mobile wave.

There’s literally nothing new here, including the demise of legacy community platforms.

So no, I’m not really all that concerned about being dismissed from the Zuckerborg. It has actually been fairly inspiring as I delve into the myriad of newer, niche communities that continue to thrive outside of the walled garden. I realize I got lazy, gave them they keys of ownership of my own content. Not happening again!

Tom, we miss you.

The post Online community lifecycles and my de-platforming from Facebook appeared first on HilesFiles.

So to put my abject nerd status into perspective, I have been coding for four decades.

40 years.

At 50 (an unemployable fogey by Silicon Valley ageism standards LOL) I have worked my entire career on technology spanning from switch-gated mainframe computers and green bar impact printing to machine learning and embedded finance.

I should be in a museum or something.

And all the kids will be like “who let the old fucker on here”

The post I’m a technology relic appeared first on HilesFiles.

So literally all of my thought leadership, writing & publishing, and content creation in general has been focused on establishing the 10XTS brand and company as a whole.

What extra time I had to spend on content, well… I just got lazy and mostly just leveraged the major social media platforms. That has recently changed for me with my “de-platforming” from Facebook, which I’ll write about in detail here soon.

Suffice it to say it was a wakeup call reminding me that if you don’t publish on YOUR OWN platform, you are at risk of being literally deleted.

That’s sort of the antithesis of the entire concept of “the internet” as a whole.

Yeah, definitely more about all of this later, but suffice it to say I am back.

The post Hey look at the calendar, where did I go? appeared first on HilesFiles.

Most recently, he collaborated with his son, Alex Tapscott, to write another interesting read, Blockchain Revolution. Once again, they describe an amazing future based on the emergence of blockchain tech – which technically isn’t all that new. It’s just becoming mainstream.

When you look at the implications across industries, including technology itself, there’s a massive rewrite coming of nearly every code base in existence. As protocols like IPFS come online, a new, truly distributed internet will be achievable.

What does that mean?

While the internet is “distributed” in a sense, it is a connection of many networks. Those networks exhibit varying degrees on a sliding scale of centralized to distributed. You still need a server to house a website’s code or an application database. This server (or clustered servers) represent a destination that a user must connect to in order to access the content or code.

In a distributed web, every computer connected to the internet becomes a node that stores a portion of all the data and content that exists on the network. Every computer a server in a way. This is called a peer-to-peer (P2P) network – where every system has a fragment of the objects on the system.

The entire internet, working as one integrated system. No more servers to get hacked. No more inaccessible content that gets a 404 error because the server was down.

This will create a radical transformation of tech as we know it. I’m excited!

The post Blockchain eating Wall Street? How about eating the world? appeared first on HilesFiles.

Cornell created a one-off project called Temple of the Dog with the remaining members of the band. Cornell introduced Eddie Vedder to the masses on this album, and the rest was Pearl Jam history as Vedder continued forward with the remnants of MLB to create the legendary, multi-platinum 10 album.

If it weren’t for Cornell paying tribute to his friend and the band, Pearl Jam would likely have never existed.

I mourn the loss of a bit of my angst-filled, grunge-laden GenX youth. Crowd surfing, cutoff plaid jams and combat boots. We made long hair and beards cool again after the gloss of the 80s. Meaningful, enduring music.

Say hello to heaven Chris. Your amazing, once-in-a-lifetime voice will be a welcome addition to the choir.

Please, mother mercy
Take me from this place
And the long winded curses
I keep hearing in my head
Words never listen
And teachers never learn
Now I’m warm from the candle
But I feel too cold to burn
He came from an island
And he died from the street
He hurt so bad like a soul breaking
But he never said nothing to me
So say hello to heaven
New like a baby
Lost like a prayer
The sky was your playground
But the cold ground was your bed
Poor stargazer
She’s got no tears in her eyes
Smooth like whisper
She knows that love heals all wounds with time
Now it seems like too much love
Is never enough, you better seek out
Another road ’cause this one has
Ended abrupt, say hello to heaven
I never wanted
To write these words down for you
With the pages of phrases
Of things we’ll never do
So I blow out the candle, and
I put you to bed
Since you can’t say to me
Now how the dogs broke your bone
There’s just one thing left to be said
Say hello to heaven

– Chris Cornell

The post Say Hello to Heaven appeared first on HilesFiles.

One of the world’s foremost leaders in the actual science behind persuasion is Dr. Robert Cialdini, who wrote the best-seller.

This animated video describes the six universal Principles of Persuasion that have been scientifically proven to make you most effective as reported in Dr. Cialdini’s groundbreaking book, Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion.

Check out this video below, then order the book from Amazon!

The post The Science of Persuasion appeared first on HilesFiles.

Defy Ventures is an entrepreneurship, employment, and character development training program for currently and formerly incarcerated men, women, and youth.

Watch the VR 360 video below, learn, be in awe. They have nearly ZERO recidivism by the participants in the program, who go on to build awesome business trajectories and pay it back in their communities after release.

Follow and support Defy Ventures!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQM4yelE58o

The post Defy Ventures – Step to the Line appeared first on HilesFiles.

Greene takes a historical context approach to illustrating each of the laws. There’s much to learn and incorporate into your everyday life from this awesome book. Read the video and then buy this book.

The post The 48 Laws of Power appeared first on HilesFiles.

I’ve made it a point to learn how to bring those subconscious signals to the conscious front vs. leaving something to intuition that can be more easily ignored.

This is an interesting discussion by a former CIA officer, who takes a different approach from the normal things like scratching the nose, closed body language, etc… I’ve always thought that was a bunch of subjective bullshit – what if someone has a sunburn on their nose or stands with their arms locked because they were cold? Great video to learn a different perspective.

The post How to Spot a Lie From a Former CIA Officer appeared first on HilesFiles.

Austin busts through these ideas, demonstrating how rehash and integration become an artform all unto their own. Even the best artists have influences and there’s literally nothing new under the sun.

Kleon’s talk “Steal Like An Artist” is a creative manifesto based on 10 things he wish he’d heard when he was starting out. Austin is a writer and artist. He’s the author of Newspaper Blackout, a best-selling book of poetry made by redacting newspaper articles with a permanent marker. Austin’s talk was delivered as part of the TEDxKC presentation of TEDxChange.

“Steal Like An Artist” has been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, PBS Newshour, and in The Wall Street Journal. He speaks about creativity, visual thinking, and being an artist online for organizations such as SXSW and The Economist. Check out the video of Austin’s TEDx talk below and buy the book!

The post Austin Kleon: Steal Like an Artist appeared first on HilesFiles.