Big Tech Runs Amok

A few short days ago, Paypal threatened its clients with punitive theft of their money should they dare say anything that Paypal didn’t like, publishing new Terms of Service which deviated markedly from those it had originally offered its clients in order to get them to use its payment services in the first place. Specifically, it announced that it would be reaching into client accounts and confiscating $2500 from any client who trangressed its political dicta. That’s when I wrote this article.

But before I could publish, Paypal did an about-face, pulled its revised Terms-of-Service “User Agreement”, and high-tailed it in the opposite direction. This was arguably a good thing, as it was not actually a user agreement, but more of a self-dealing bait-and-switch, i.e., a “We-hate-conservatives-so-hand-over-your-wallets-and jewelry-and-drop-dead!” ultimatum.

Nevertheless, I’m now publishing the article as originally written. That’s because this isn’t just about Paypal, but about Big Tech in general.

By “Big Tech”, I mean the whole range of online-service providers, everything from financial services to social media platforms and even “creator sites” like Patreon, which pretend that the artistic and intellectual freedom of their users means everything to them. Eventually, almost all of these bloated software-techie parasites con themselves into thinking that they own literally everything they touch, including your money, your intellectual property, your artistic creations, your personal opinions, your right to express yourself, your right to defend yourself from criminals and tyrants, and your right to enjoy a safe and secure existence in your own culturally, historically, and ideologically homogeneous (or at least self-consistent and viable) homeland.

In short, Big Tech has become a monster, a cancer, a blight on the world. It has no respect for humanity or human welfare or individual human beings or their values. While it constantly feigns empathy and concern for humanity, harping sanctimoniously on the rights and feelings of the public, its only real concern is to delude the public and/or itself that it is morally perfect, above all criticism, and legally invulnerable as it continues to fatten like a jarful of leeches at public expense.

Actually, Big Tech is in high-speed pursuit of everything we own and everything we are despite the clear correlation between its “revolutionary” online technology and the rapid degeneration of society. Big Tech hasn’t been doing us any favors, especially given the glaring inability of its owners to tell their limp PC wrists from their expansive, well-padded rumps.

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This is a public service notification.

Paypal has changed its business model. Now, like Patreon (a slimy platform which stole thousands of dollars from the Mega Foundation on a bogus pretext), Paypal has awarded itself the right to suck its clients' accounts for thousands of dollars if they dare to say anything its proprietors don't happen to like! (They know that most people are unwilling and unable to fight them in court - a victim would lose far more in legal fees than the amount stolen.)

The idea seems to be that by signing you on as a client, they are funding or otherwise facilitating everything you do and/or say, and that this entitles them to regulate not just your commerce, but your speech and behavior. [Look at 2(f), 2(j), and 2(k); then look at 5 in its entirety.]

Paypal can now snatch your money [Note: Paypal killed this link to its new Terms of Service agreement as soon as it calculated the probable repercussions. This is called “covering one’s tracks” and “pretending it never happened”.]

This is not an anomaly, but a very pronounced trend. Basically, Big Tech has become a criminal enterprise controlled by autocratic egomaniacs…not good people, but bad ones. Its proprietors, whose wealth owes to a combination of insider deals and the network effect, now clearly realize that they and their bankers and investors have already conned and stolen so much wealth from the rest of the world that we can no longer afford to defend ourselves from them. So they feel free to do whatever they please, and to hell with the US Constitution and our rights of free expression, privacy, commerce, and what have you.

It has also become obvious that Terms of Use agreements have become vehicles of shameless thievery. Big Tech knows that due to limitations of time, understanding, and eyesight, nobody can pore through 10 or 20 (or 30) pages of legal language just to use one of their crummy platforms or services, especially when they’re in a hurry. So in view of the fact that the government is obviously unwilling to defend the public from their predation and parasitism, they see no reason not to exploit this intentionally lopsided situation to the fullest possible extent.

Clearly, the Big Techies and their shysters are not what they pretend to be. They are neither coding geniuses who selflessly inhabit a cold maze of abstraction for the good of us all, nor courageous protectors of the natural environment and social order, nor technocratic good shepherds bent on improving society and making the world a better place. They are narcissistic, megalomaniacal, criminally inclined grifters, and they are busily spinning out revision after revision of their terms of service in an endless attempt to defraud their clients and rip off the public.

What they are doing cannot be denied or defended. No political statement you can make would actually damage them; their income has nothing to do with the political views of their clients. In contrast, their political views are known to have done immense damage to the public and the social order for years. Yet thanks to an increasingly corrupt "activist" court system sympathetic to the improprieties of market-controlling monopoly capitalism, they have reached the stage of “unlimited hangout”, revealing themselves to all the world as a worthless gaggle of nauseating hypocrites looking to get over on whomever they can for as much $$$ as possible.

It has now become a risk to do business through Paypal. It is not just risky for those who keep money in their Paypal accounts; it is risky for those making transactions through Paypal, as their money goes through Paypal en route to the receiving party. It is conceivable that Paypal could get away with intercepting and snatching thousands of dollars the microsecond it hits their servers. (In any case, I wouldn’t bank on its impossibility.)

Caveat emptor.

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Make no mistake: most proprietors of Big Tech, having been overcome by their megalomaniacal dark-triad danger-zone Dunning-Kruger complexes, imagine themselves to be key catalysts of utopian globalism, enlightened agents of social change and social justice, and iron-fisted PC enforcers born to rule over us all for the greater glory of atheism, materialism, and the Tech Singularity!

But the truth is far different. Aside from being bedbug-crazy amateur social engineers, as greedy and vicious as any cartel boss, and as bloated and corrupt as any dirty politician, tax-hungry agency bureaucrat, or tiger shark amid a roiling blood-red feeding frenzy, they are nothing special at all. They have no right or ability to rule, and they need to be stopped dead.

As go Quora, Patreon, and Paypal, so goes Big Tech in general. Even if you have no choice but to use it / be used by it, exercise extreme caution. Never assume that the odds are in your favor.

© 2022 by Christopher M. Langan