Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced today that he does not want to celebrate his birthday because he recognizes that the era of free internet access is ending. He also stated that freedom and privacy will also soon be a thing of the past.
I started writing about this 3 years ago, and I am becoming more and more convinced that I am right. However, I continue to believe the cause is deeper: the general crisis of capitalism. The market has become global, and there’s nowhere left to grow.
Moreover, transnational corporations are gaining more and more influence. This is a very bad situation. A similar situation developed in Italy in the 1920s. In Italy, fascism was financed mainly by industrial and financial companies. And this is entirely natural and understandable. At the development stage, capital benefits from democracy and the free market. But with the emergence of large monopolies, corporations begin to benefit from restricting freedoms, both to prevent new competitors from physically emerging and developing, and to exert a more aggressive influence on politics. Unfortunately, a similar situation is now occurring not only in individual countries, but throughout the entire planet. In outright dictatorships, this became apparent earlier and more clearly. But countries that were once flagships of democracy are not far behind in the elimination of freedoms.
P.S. No less interesting is Pavel Durov’s post from September 28 about requests to remove channels simply for voicing unapproved political positions.