(Wolf Blitzer, then and now).

I may have mentioned this before, but I have been startled this week. Having come from a career that involved actual warfare, rather than the virtual version we have seen in the Plague Year it almost passed me by.

I had a piece of humorous writing from one of Socotra’s favorite contributing authors, but I held it, thinking I wanted to talk prior to publishing. As you know, I have never been particularly shy about casting an occasional irascible comment onto the cyber sea, and it has been fun all the years it has been possible. That would be after the carbon-paper age, anyway.

I knew, as you did, that this would be an interesting and entertaining year. I decided to try to capture it in an approachable and entertaining way, day by tumultuous day. I don’t know if I have succeeded, since the morass is so deep and deliberately obscure. It has been entertaining in spades. But there is something new in the flying digits this week.

I shouldn’t say ‘new,’ because it is only our awareness of it that is recent. It has been going on for a while. I remember the debut of the Cable News Network- ‘CNN’ they called it- in the Gulf War twenty years ago. I was on the Joint Staff in the Pentagon. Cable news was a cool innovation for information sharing. It featured live commentary from correspondents embedded in actual places of danger. We were inspired enough to even try to do a classified version of it on a little program that resembled what we know today as ‘Podcasts.” The value being, in our view, that we could show classified imagery on a secure network and say, factually, what it actually meant, rather than what a journalism major thought it meant. I gave CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzer a tour of our little production facility. He smiled, but the story of what we were doing never made it out of the Pentagon.

I think we all knew that there was motivation behind what was presented as ‘news.’ The standards of the day still included what we understood to be the basics of ‘journalism.’ That included the litany of Who, What, Where and When. It also included ‘Why.’ That last word was where there was an opportunity to shape the story to fit what the originators believed. It has been the way of journalism since the beginning.

There is something else going on now. I told you the Daily Socotra got censored by the nice people at Google last week. They said the infringement on my First Amendment rights was done in the interest of ‘public safety’ or something. I wondered at that moment by what authority it had been done, and why. Then I moved on, since there was other entertaining stuff to talk about.

I had mentioned in the Daily about the impending demonstration in DC on the day of the Joint Session of Congress. To show it was real, I used a small screen shot of one of the posts advertising the event. It was intended to show that people were really intending to do something large in our home town. My intent was- factually- to alert readers who live and work here that they might want to stay alert, avoid crowds, and expect dislocations in Beltway commutes. Sort of a matter of public safety, you know? If you have ever been here for one of those disturbances you know there have been times it would have been quicker to walk home from the airport than fight the traffic.

Google blanked all of it out, and replaced my picture with a modest red box filled with plain text indicating what it replaced was ‘dangerous.’ That is aa powerful word. I wondered briefly what might be dangerous about warning pals to avoid something potentially dangerous, but the implications didn’t hit me until this morning. There is commentary flowing about the tech giants and their joint decision to banish smaller competitors from use of their server farms, network connections and applications stores.

I didn’t connect things until this morning. It isn’t about Parler, the alternate Twitter service. It is about all of us.

I had that neat piece I was going to run this morning, but I wrote him/her back and said we needed to talk. I didn’t think about it beyond the moment of transmission. A few minutes later, I realized I was going to talk to a pal about what might appropriately be said in public without being censored by a huge corporation. That is to say, what Wolf Blitzer decided was the truth. In America. In this year and these times.

Now that is entertaining.

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com