In a world of blanket surveillance and censorship by Big Tech, the rules of online promotion need to change to promote alternative content. Otherwise, alternative content will be buried.

A long time ago, in the internet's infancy, it was quite possible, if you knew what you were doing, to get to the top of search engines in front of even large companies and other large organisations. In those heady days of new frontiers, the internet was a true democratic space where all website owners — large or small — had a fairly level playing field. This was linked to equality in data delivery — so called net neutrality.

Three decades later, we live in a very different online world, structured, defined, controlled and censored by Big Business — principal corporations including Google (Alphabet), Facebook (Meta), Microsoft, Amazon and Apple. On the surface, the development seems positive, with a slew of new online services and interactive websites. But underneath, in the code, there has been a seismic change whereby everything we do is being surveiled, and then censored if it does not conform to the standard government narrative.

The data gathered on us is being used to build up a virtual model of ourselves — a data avatar — allowing the system to predict our behaviour and desires. This is being done not only for commercial reasons but also for government “security” reasons. Governments have always enjoyed spying on their citizens and now they can do it with impunity.

At the same time, censorship is now out in the open. None of the main social media platforms even pretend to support free speech. YouTube is the most censorious video platform, making it a poor choice for anyone producing any content remotely outside the box. If your message contradicts Government right-think, then you will be censored at some point. So do not even bother building up a channel with alternative content. You are wasting your time. Big “sharing” sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter are NOT “public square” platforms, and they are accepting money to control public thought.

These Big Tech companies, like Google, Facebook and Microsoft, are primarily surveillance services, working closely with government secret organisations. Their whole raison d'être is to gather private information and sell it to the highest bidder, including the government. To do this, they provide free or low-cost services as bait — email, online calendars, browsers, music streaming, search services, office software, app repositories, analytic services, online advertising, social networking services, messaging services, photo/video editing and storage services, operating systems, coding education, virtual drive and storage services, wearables, tech implants, 2fa systems, biometric security systems, payment services, online shopping, map and direction apps, augmented reality, health services (including vaccine development and gene therapy), gene testing, genealogy services, website building apps, online forms, fonts etc. — all services that are so useful, polished and inexpensive that most simply can't resist using them. This allows Big Tech to get its sticky fingers on ever more of our personal data, modelling it virtually in order to maximise its value. And with the arrival of the capacity of quantum computing, this virtual modelling will mean that Big Tech will soon be able to construct a virtual and accurate copy of reality in total — a reality map detailed enough to predict and control both the individual and society. That is where it is all headed: to the construction of a virtual counterpart to the world.

While this reality counterpart will mark the enslavement of humanity, it is ironic that Big Tech has managed to persuade most of us to help it in this project of data-mining and system modelling, a process that is decidedly not in our interest in the bigger picture.

Take, for instance, Google Analytics or Google Console (the former being a more complicated and comprehensive version of the latter). We encode these services into our websites to monitor visitor traffic, fix issues with our website and optimise our site for Google Search. Such information is useful, especially for commercial sites, which want to track their visitors and to optimise their content for optimum search-engine ranking.

If we are playing this surveillance game, we need to make Big Tech happy so we can maximise our profits. In this way, we help grow Big Tech surveillance by inviting it onto our platforms with the understanding that it will share some of its intelligence on our visitors that we can then use to manipulate them into visiting more often or buying our products. On top of this, if we are putting out information exposing anything remotely controversial or anti-establishment, we are actually jeopardising the safety and privacy of our visitors by “reporting them” to a surveillance system.

Another ubiquitous service that we inadvertently use for websites is Google fonts. By calling up free fonts from Google servers, we allow Google to again monitor our visitors. Indeed, looking at the website recommendations on this site, many of them use Google fonts without probably realising that free services like that come at a cost, and that cost is your visitors' privacy and possibly safety. So Google has wangled its way into the site set ups by offering these sorts of “free” services that website builders love. On top of that, Big Tech is directly involved with coding education, ensuring future integration of its products by the tech community.

So why do we play this game of integrating Big Brother when we build sites that oppose Big Brother? A site like this one has no chance of getting anywhere in Google searches (or indeed most other search engines — even DuckDuckGo is not what it used to be), so why following the rules of search engine optimisation and thinking that Big Tech will somehow still give us exposure online?

Often what happens is that creators of alternative content are not particularly tech-savvy, so they create the content and go to a tech person to give that content exposure online, or, they use a pre-set-up blogging service that could, at some point in the future, report them for “questionable” content and/or delete that content. The new generation of coders are notoriously laissez-faire regarding privacy, and do not seem to understand its significance or the dangers of its erosion.

Once a website with alternative content (such as anti-vax or anti-NWO) is established, it will no-doubt be shadow banned from ALL search engines. This means that the search engine programs stuff your listings way down in their results, effectively making you invisible to anyone using search engines. (Who looks past the first few pages of a search result? Most don't even look past the first page!)

So if your site is quite alternative, what is the point in following the rules of SEO? You may as well stop trying to collude with Big Tech in the hope you can get something for selling out your visitors to Big Brother monitoring, which is what you are effectively doing.

This is why there is now a need, again, for “directory sites” that allow visitors to find other content that they will find useful. These types of site, which were popular in the pre-Google days, must make a comeback so that we can effectively promote alternative ideas again. Directory sites create another node in a bespoke alternative network that we the people specify… not Big Tech. Social networking platforms can be a part of these networks, but not the traditional sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. And forget any YouTube channels, if you want to watch any channels, use a private client like FreeTube app (freetubeapp.io). In this way, we build up an online presence consciously, avoiding most of the Big Tech censorship and control.

For too long we have given our content to Big Tech to categorise and display, hoping that it will favour our “offering” to this silicon god. This obsequiousness to Big Tech must stop… we must wake up from this sleepwalk before it turns into a Big Brother nightmare.

With enough of these networks, people can start bypassing Big Tech offerings. And any Bit Tech services that are deemed useful to a network can be deliberately hidden behind a firewall that blocks or confounds the surveillance-side of that service. It can be done with the right will, but that starts with rejecting classic SEO, which can be disconcerting when that is synonymous, in our consciousness, with the successful distribution of our ideas and other content online.

So if you have a spare domain lying around, use it for a directory site and share it with your friends, all the while trying to stay away from Big Tech surveillance services. You can mirror that directory on more than one domain because you do not care what Google or another other search engine company will think of duplicate content. You are bypassing them and their rules, and all that matters is that you will have another node in a growing free network.

One criticism often raised is that government organisations can identify computers and their users no matter what security is being used, and so we should not bother blocking Big Tech. But that is like saying that, as professional burglars can break into almost any home, we may as well not bother with home security. But why make it easy for Big Tech to commodify us? Taking just a few basic security steps (by avoiding their free “bait” services) is likely to downgrade your “data avatar”. And this makes you less of a commodity in the eyes of Big Tech, reducing their ability to model your future behaviour and thus manipulate and control you.

Given the new orthodoxy displayed by search engines in their results, and in social networking and video sites regarding their increasing censorship, it is time to rethink how we create and promote content online, and opt out of playing the Big Tech game that has mesmerised us into thinking it is the only game in town. We need to build new hand-built networks away from Big Tech, freeing ourselves and humanity from its clutches.