Addressing and navigating the current hellish landscape of "ExtortionWare"...

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Extortion is the practice of obtaining benefit through coercion.

Racketeering is the act of acquiring a business through illegal activity, operating a business with illegally-derived income, or using a business to commit illegal acts.

Now it may seem to most people that software applications these days come nowhere near to the practices cited above because of how software is viewed by most people, but I can assure you (as a developer myself) that we are hurdling towards major issues in pretty much all aspects of our lives because of our rapidly growing dependence on software in almost every aspect of our lives.

I don't want to contribute to the cloud of doom forecasted for the infiltration of Ai into all of our lives, we've seen movies from Robocop to Terminator that already embellished the gloomy future that we're headed for... I'm referring to the actual people that are driving the grim outlook, through their need to please investors and their false sense that money will insulate them from the grim world they contribute to creating. Ultimately people (individuals) are responsible for corruption in our world, and increasingly for corruption in the world of software development.

I am using the term "ExtortionWare" here (not recognized by my dictionary) because there is an ever growing concern to me about software-driven things in my life that are turning against me... The things I used to use for free are increasingly limited and tied to monthly subscriptions, even for things that were once common. The day a music player app requires me to pay money to be able to skip music I don't like is here... And there are no simple music players any more apparently that just work as they did when Winamp thrived in the early 2000s FOR FREE... But don't get caught up in discussions about Mp3 players even though I am going to always keep my old not updated iPod and Mp3 collection no matter how much they assure me that streaming and "renting music monthly" is the future)... I'm talking about far more serious things here...

I have written previously about how my car tries to "upsell" me subscriptions to Sirius/XM radio by holding the car's remote start functionality for ransom, I have also written numerous times about how social media has limited visibility of my posts to encourage me to give them money for additional views (that ultimately doesn't work anyway). Now we're shown links to simple news stories online and then quickly ushered to a paid subscription link, as if that story is somehow going to change my life so much that ads could not fund the publisher. It seems like even now some of the most common things (of little value) are all being placed behind paywalls by large companies, while independent operators like you and I are not being paid for our contributions to anything online at all. We are living in an increasingly hostile "HellScape" in which we work furiously for free in (covertly) crowdsourced groups to build data resources for big industry that are turned around and sold back to us as services that require a monthly fee for access -- This is the extortion I speak of... The fear of failure (in non-conformity to the free work script of big industry) is also heavily imposed on us to make us complacent with working for free and to get all of us to structure our output/data so that it works better/is ingested and indexed more easily with their information harvesting tools.

For example, as Ai has become notorious for crawling social media (e.g. sites like Reddit, Instagram, and Twitter) to cobble together it's output, the companies behind Ai tools make money off of selling access to their services, while the original creators of the content that output was derived upon (You and Me) received only 4 views at the time we uploaded it and maybe one like, but then our content is recycled and re-sold by others after it is sliced and mashed together by any tool that wants to crawl the massive data volumes that serve as the back end for social sites we use... Not only that, as sites like Reddit and Twitter have amassed all of our intellectual data over years, they begin to close off their data (that we the people have created)... Suddenly it becomes harder and harder to find accurate and relevant information related to our searches because these social sites have now put our content behind firewalls and paywalls, that only these new Ai tools have access to... This explains why a certain major search engine is becoming overrun with invalid results, and why many sites now require a log-in before you can use them.

Now I don't want to come across as a conspiracy theorist, but if you know the Internet in the early days, and how it was not dominated by just a few billion dollar companies (back when 1% of the world's population didn't control majority of the wealth), you'd know that there were better times back when we didn't rely on software as much as we do now.

It's tough being an independent operator. Start up costs are higher than ever, scams are rampant, the economy is pretty FUBARED, we're all operating on limited budgets... THE LAST THING WE NEED is to be gaslighted by social media and work platforms to encourage us into working over years for free in hopes of building our business or in finding success. It also feels that if you quit tools like FaceBook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, or whatever else, that you'll fail because they have dominated the world of promotion so much over the last 10-20 years... I think it's vital for independent business makers and creators to understand though that this is truly our last opportunity to change how the playing field operates... By continuing to let these major social sites to dominate, gatekeep, and dictate what is seen, we only shoe-horn ourselves into more control, and a system that ONLY benefits scammers and already wealthy, super-funded, and well staffed individuals and organizations. By pursuing alternatives like building a personal web site, connecting with and sharing independent business links and content, we keep the more vibrant, affordable, and often more innovative smaller communities alive, and we greatly increase the chances of achieving success from the Independent level, rather than being shut out of success from above.

If you make a post on social apps/sites like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter these days, a community supposedly inhabited by MILLIONS of users, yet somehow you consistently get less than 1,000 views on a post combined with no leads, that says volumes about how you're being extorted for your labor and ideas... Many people get frustrated and embarrassed by low numbers, and resort to paying to boost visibility of their posts through an already flooded market for social media ads and sponsored posts. If you've ever noticed that same type of post being posted by a celebrity or a major company and garnering a lot more interest from the community, it was likely sponsored by a wealthy corporation or individual or by the platform itself to create a sense of liveliness on the platform, which feeds that drive for everyone else to keep grinding for free. This is the reality we live in now... A very abstract lottery system that is geared towards driving free labor, an upside-down model of slavery in a sense... That's why I refer to it as a HellScape... Luckily we have the option of withdrawing our work and regaining control over our labor, content, and ideas this time.

In a sustainable eco-system, every resident co-exists, functions, and can sustain themselves off of the community. There is no viable eco system that can thrive off of a system based on elitist-driven inequality, profit-bearing monopolies, and gatekeeping. Social Media apps and related Internet schemes are blatantly trending towards being unsustainable ecosystems... Many have begun to turn hostile towards their users in last ditch attempts to raise funding and to increase revenue year over year for their investors, but they are also in those steps cementing their demise *cough* Reddit *cough*. These social sites work furiously to cover negative feedback, dissent, and honest portrayals of reality concerning their operations, so I usually like to be as honest and to the point as I can here on this site, as it's pretty much as independent of social media services as one can be online now.

The path to navigating our current hellish landscape of ExtortionWare is to disconnect from contributing to it and from registering for it completely, to not pay for promotional ads, and certainly to not purchase any monthly subscriptions for any of it. Popular (given enough time without food) will usually eat itself if you don't let it continue to eat you.