Växẍ Säbbäth on Nostr: it would seem important to make a distinction here: the odds of ***you personally*** ...
it would seem important to make a distinction here:
the odds of ***you personally*** being targeted, specifically, as an anon, by any fragment of the Globohomo Panopticon, is low; you are correct about that
for basically everyone reading this, the world in which a polished oak table with SES's sitting around it debating how to finally penetrate your secret identity is not really real
that said, there are automated tools out there whose purpose is to identify you, backfill connections, ***and store that information for later use***, and they are scary-efficient - especially now, with the advent of large-scale LLMs and inference tools
there are also tools in use to interject noise and friction into online communications; the goal is to make it difficult to effectively organize, because of the two pathways that are catastrophic for Globohomo ("ubiquitous army-of-one leaderless chaos" and "organization beneath the banner of Funny Mustache Man 2.0"), the one they worry about the most is the latter
the existence and operation of these toolkits has been publicly admitted to in part, several times, and is continuously being reiterated; (((they))) ***really are*** stalking around as lions, looking for anons to eat, or at the very least neuter them so they are no longer a threat
I agree that part of what makes these toolkits effective is the induction of hypervigiliant paranoia that generates lots of false positives, but it is also important to realize that there are ***true*** positives there in the pile as well - "it isn't paranoia if they really are out to get you"
the odds of ***you personally*** being targeted, specifically, as an anon, by any fragment of the Globohomo Panopticon, is low; you are correct about that
for basically everyone reading this, the world in which a polished oak table with SES's sitting around it debating how to finally penetrate your secret identity is not really real
that said, there are automated tools out there whose purpose is to identify you, backfill connections, ***and store that information for later use***, and they are scary-efficient - especially now, with the advent of large-scale LLMs and inference tools
there are also tools in use to interject noise and friction into online communications; the goal is to make it difficult to effectively organize, because of the two pathways that are catastrophic for Globohomo ("ubiquitous army-of-one leaderless chaos" and "organization beneath the banner of Funny Mustache Man 2.0"), the one they worry about the most is the latter
the existence and operation of these toolkits has been publicly admitted to in part, several times, and is continuously being reiterated; (((they))) ***really are*** stalking around as lions, looking for anons to eat, or at the very least neuter them so they are no longer a threat
I agree that part of what makes these toolkits effective is the induction of hypervigiliant paranoia that generates lots of false positives, but it is also important to realize that there are ***true*** positives there in the pile as well - "it isn't paranoia if they really are out to get you"