link to original reddit post by /u/GoldAndBlackRule
TLDR; I have had to become an "un-person" just to work. It will not be long before even that is not an effective way to exist with the outrage mob.
Read on for the details...
Many, many years ago, I made the decision to give away everything I owned except my laptop, a change of clothes and some critical documents (like passport, birth certificate, etc.) and simply leave the country. My electronics, furniture, musical instruments, cars, motorcycle, guns ... everything. Not even so much as a yard sale. A young QA lead on my team had just married. The newly-weds got my Lexus. For free. An intern and like-minded libertarian programmer got my guns, guitars, assorted musical instruments, electronics and my motorcycle. Similar story for everything I owned. What I could not give away, landed in storage. I needed to shed all the crap that was weighing me down like an anchor around my neck.
It was an extremely liberating experience. I travelled light. I moved from country to country, taking gigs where I could have a huge impact turning around massive projects. From Europe to UK to Asia, I went where I was needed.
Eventually, I went full-on tech-nomad, creating my own startup. Everything automated. Payments, accounting, sales -- apart from actually writing code, almost zero intervention was needed on my behalf except running annual general meetings and filing an updated chart of accounts once each year, automatically exported. Zero tax liability. I had a Slack integration that would ping me each time someone sent me a payment or signed up for a new account. I could be on a beach in Thailand with some Wi-Fi, get the notifications while pushing changes to my git repository. Complete virtual office. Living the dream.
Within 6 months, it was all passive income and semi-retirement bouncing around tropical islands in Southeast Asia. Whenever I needed to top up my personal account, I would simply make a tax-free transfer from the corporate accounts. (At a certain level, taxes would eventually kick in, but they are ridiculously low where the company operates).
I eventually went full-on stateless. I "fired" myself from my own company, staying on only as a shareholder and unpaid foreign director. I needed no long-term visas to live anywhere. No permanent residency anywhere in the world. I would land in a new country, have three months to chill out on a beach, then have to move on to another country with another island and another beach. All I cared about was great Wi-Fi/Internet access wherever I went, and I get some insanely great bandwidth even on remote islands in the tropics here (500Mb/sec is the worst I had). I often returned to a nice penthouse in [redacted, don't want to dox myself] with a roof-top personal jacuzzi looking up the mountain to [redacted again], right next to the beach, and a couple of scooters thrown in by the property developer that were nice to ride around the island when I wanted to break from whatever I was doing.
Then 2019 arrived. Cancel culture was ramping up. I didn't much care. I was free-wheeling around the tropics, but was deeply concerned about the cultural direction of "outrage-for advertising clicks" and the negative impact on society overall. Major social media and tech platforms had been hauled before congress for an old-fashioned shakedown: "you tech CEOs need to start dealing with problems on your platforms ... *or else*". The message here was: start censoring content that we congressmen do not like, *or else*. And the legislative and statutory weapons in the arsenals of politicians in USA and EU are broad and devastating. De-platforming started ramping up. We started seeing an increase in people losing their jobs over Twitter-mob outrage. This was not "The Dixie Chicks" taking heat for their positions. This was something new. Joe-Schmoe engineers and people nobody ever heard of were now on the chopping block if they got noticed by the new "woke" mob.
At the end of 2019/early 2020, while visiting family for Chinese New Year, news of the pandemic was already leaking to us on family video chats from Hubei province, especially Wuhan. I am usually not the paranoid type, but this was shaping up to be a new, global, "9/11" event. I cut the celebration short and headed straight back to my home base on an island in the Andaman Sea where I have 2GB fiber Internet and a nice condo on the beach. My visa expired 1 week after global lockdowns started. I went from being accused as some "tinfoil hat libertarian" to living in a world of global house arrest.
Unable to leave the country, I have overstayed my visa. Authorities assured visitors that they would extend the visas and not bother with them since everyone was better off staying put "just for 2 weeks" while hospitals were re-configured to deal with the looming pandemic. Then 2 weeks became 4. Then 8. Then another month. Welcome to the one year anniversary of "just two weeks". My original visa stamp is in my passport. I have not left the country in over a year now. I should have left a year ago.
My passive income from my tech company was focused on selling software in bulk to people working in large office settings. Well, it does not take a genius to notice that global house arrests tend to keep people from working in large office settings. Most sales were for one year seats, so coasting through "2 weeks" or "2 months" was doable. Not "over one year".
There was no believable deadline to the lockdowns. They simply persist indefinitely. The goalposts are always moving. There is no way to plan a business around that.
So, as a responsible adult, I decided to get back into doing work for hire (as a director/manager) on some large projects. These are high-profile roles. I have never had an issue pairing up with a project that needed me in the past.
Then a peculiar pattern emerged. I would be just about to seal the deal and start work, then suddenly, the entire process would halt without a word. This has nothing to do with my professional capabilities (if you have played any games on any platform in the last several decades, you have enjoyed or hated my work). It was as if the entire team and conversation "ghosted". The legal exposure for using personal media posts to disqualify a candidate means they can never openly say that is why the conversation ended. The financial and state-retribution exposure for hiring someone that expresses unpopular opinions means that firms MUST consider what potential liabilities they are taking on.
I reviewed all of my publicly accessible social media for anything that could be remotely considered even slightly controversial. Nothing stood out. Mostly cat pictures and programmer jokes. All of my political and philosophical opinions about a "live and let live" society were entirely private or anonymous. I was sure I was just being paranoid.
But this pattern persisted.
So, I nuked everything from orbit. Old school hackers and crackers will recognize this as a "file separation". A completely new social identity with no connections to a past social identity or my real identity. You will notice the age of my anonymous Reddit account.
Someone who *really* wants to do some digging could of course find out that I hold the "radical" belief that nobody should initiate violence or the use of force against other human beings, but it is pretty well buried from most cursory algorithms that would try to match my real-life identity with anything I may have said admonishing people to be excellent to one another. My old email accounts, Google accounts, Facebook accounts, even WHOIS databases, were scrubbed. I was thorough. It is not easily discoverable that I was a libertarian party chairman almost two decades ago or that I advocate the "non-aggression principle".
And suddenly the offers came rolling in. I am now swamped with options all over the planet and can pick and choose which professional relationship is of greatest mutual benefit.
I had to murder my public persona in order to work professionally. I have to censor my opinions (for now) not to have ***any*** position on social conflict theory. In short, I have to censor my interactions in such a way that I must *hide* from the mob in ways that only used to exist under totalitarian regimes.
And I foresee that having "no opinion" will not be enough in the not-too-distant future. You will need to be actively advocating for the Ministry of Truth and the Thought Police, not just be on their radar as a criminal. If you are not fighting *for* and *with* the new Social Vanguard, then in this culture of binary thinking, you may just as well be against them for withholding your effort.
This is a cancer on society. It is harmful to everyone. There is a rising intellectual and cultural force for ideological hegemony in the world where diversity of opinion is nearly a death sentence. As has happened in the past with this kind of fundamentalist zeitgeist, it *will* be a literal death sentence eventually. This tide really must be turned.
Nobody should have to become an "un-person" just to exist around other human beings.