I opened my PayPal account in the year 2000. I closed it today. Humanity must find a path around censoring, cancelling, narrative controlling, de-platforming, and centralizing entities, and work towards transparency, openness, dialogue, free movement and commerce, decentralization, and exposure of power structures.
Bad ideas are driven out with better information and transparency. Centralizing and controlling forces tend to entrench bad ideas, if they aren’t, in fact, the very source of them. Of course, it is apparent to me that the supposed desire to control “bad ideas” or “dangerous” information is merely a fearmongering excuse to attempt to mass-control narratives, opinions and behaviors towards preferred political and social agenda. The PayPal de-platforming of dissident voices is merely one more in the incessant stream of de-banking, de-voicing, and de-activating attacks against ideological foes.
From Matt Taibbi’s insightful article: “In the last week or so, the online payment platform PayPal without explanation suspended the accounts of a series of individual journalists and media outlets, including the well-known alt sites Consortium News and MintPress.”
Caitlin Johnstone also wrote on the topic. Both of these are independent writers and journalists (like Glenn Greenwald) that moved to substack in order to escape the controls of editors and censors.
From Caitlin’s interview with the Executive Director of MintPress News, Mnar Adley: “In the era of a declining US empire, censorship has become the last resort of an unpopular regime and its forever wars to make the truth disappear and critical thinking all but dead. With the war in Ukraine raging on, we’ve entered war time and Big Tech giants, including Paypal, are working hand in hand with the New Cold War architects themselves to sanction dissenting journalists.”
Here, Jimmy Dore (yet another of the previously left-leaning podcasters and journalists that was abandoned as his political group veered to bizarre extremes over the past few years) discusses the de-banking/de-platforming topic on his show.
I will continue to search for ways to free and decentralize my finances, interactions, relationships, employment and information flows. Cryptocurrency (NOT centralized bank digital currencies!), independent journalists and open source social media are part of that quest.
Extracting ourselves from government dependence and controls, mainstream legacy media, corporate influence, and the non-stop stream of socio-politically driven narratives, official-only explanations, selective data sharing and intimidation tactics will serve us well for the advancement of humanity, peace, prosperity and personal development.