Censorship is never directed to specific groups, eventually it is applied to anything deemed threatening to the ruling class. So, while you wait for a decentralized, censorship-free internet, what can you do to protect your online privacy and your right to free speech? Here are a few suggestions:
Switch from Facebook and Twitter to free-speech alternatives41 such as Gab, MeWe, Minds (and Parler if they manage to come back).
Switch from YouTube to uncensored alternatives42 such as Bitchute, Brighteon, Banned.video and Thinkspot.
Download the Signal or Telegram app to encrypt your text messages. Telegram also allows you to subscribe to channels (read-only messages are sent to your phone from any channel you subscribe. This feature is starting to be increasingly used by individuals who have been banned on other social media platforms).
Use a VPN on your desktop, laptop and mobile devices to preserve your privacy.
For content creators and alternative news sources that no longer have a social media presence due to censoring, subscribe to their newsletter if available, and/or mark their website in your favorites and check back on a regular basis.
Stop using Google search engines. Alternatives include DuckDuckGo43 and SwissCows.
Uninstall Google Chrome and use Brave instead, available for all computers and mobile devices.44 From a security perspective, Brave is far superior to Chrome and offers a free VPN service (virtual private network) to further preserve your privacy.
Switch to a non-Google email service such as ProtonMail,45 an encrypted email service based in Switzerland.
Stop using Google docs. Digital Trends has published an article suggesting a number of alternatives.46
Don't use Google Home devices. These devices record everything that occurs in your home, both speech and sounds such as brushing your teeth and boiling water, even when they appear to be inactive, and send that information back to Google. Android phones are also always listening and recording, as are Google's home thermostat Nest, and Amazon's Alexa.
Ditch Fitbit, as it was recently purchased by Google and will provide them with all your physiological information and activity levels, in addition to everything else that Google already has on you.
If you're a high school student, do not convert the Google accounts you created as a student into personal accounts.
Decentralization Urgent as Big Tech Condemns Free Speech (rememner the 'free' web?)
In recent days and weeks, we've seen an unprecedented wave of censorship sweep across the internet. As noted by Coindesk.com,1 that we need a decentralized web is more evident than ever, and now's the time to advance such plans:
"Just as bitcoin redistributed power from the legacy financial system in favor of peer-to-peer electronic cash, the next-generation internet aims to redistribute power from corporate giants like Google and Facebook to sovereign individuals who own and control their own data.
To achieve this monumental goal, changes must be made to the internet's underlying architecture. Thankfully, the pace of progress is dramatically accelerating in three foundational components: storage, naming and database …
Obviously 2020 will be remembered for the immense amount of pain and suffering endured by millions around the globe. However, throughout history, moments like these are often accompanied by great periods of innovation and creativity.
It is through this hopeful lens that we see a world where the decentralized web eventually becomes 'the' web with fairness, freedom and individual sovereignty at its core. And, as the past year has shown, many brilliant people are laboring tirelessly to make this dream a reality."
Major Decentralization Advances Are in the Works
The Coindesk article points out that movement toward decentralized storage and databases has been fast and furious, and includes an extensive list of developments. Even changes to how the Domain Name System (DNS) functions are in the works. Why decentralize the DNS? As noted in the article:2
"Within the current system, the bottom line is you can be erased from the Internet at any moment, for any reason, by anyone with enough power. Decentralized DNS makes it virtually impossible for authorities to shut down access to the web and gives individuals real ownership over their digital identities, communication channels and means of commerce."
One decentralized DNS service is UnstoppableDomains.com, which uses blockchain technology. I recognized this early last year, which is why we purchased the mercola.crypto domain that we hope to launch later this year.
Additionally, I am currently in the process of connecting with the founder of Signal, Moxie Marlinspike, probably the best encrypted private communications platform out there, to strategize about how to decentralize a social platform like Parler.
Affirming the validity of this approach, one of my favorite crypto analysts that I subscribe to is Anthony Pompliano. In a January 11, 2021, blog post,3 he points out that literally everything for the decentralized web must be rebuilt.
"You can't simply rely on Amazon's AWS. You have to leverage Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and self-hosting in combination with each other to drastically improve the resiliency of what you're building," he says.
"Private companies can do whatever they want. And they are reminding us of that. But in doing so, they are also reminding millions of people that there can be a better world. A world where no single person or organization gets to dictate what information we receive.
No single person or organization gets to choose who gets amplified and who gets silenced. The power of choice was stripped from the user and is now being monopolized by the platform creators … The beloved tech giants are becoming villains. This will lead to a rise in new challengers.
This is the circle of life in technology. If you can't influence the status quo, just disrupt it. And I think that is exactly what we need at this point. We can leverage technology to take the power back from these monopolies and allow the user to choose who and what to consume."
Parler Takedown Proves Necessity of Decentralization
Clearly, many others are in agreement that a decentralized web — one in which monopolies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube cannot rule with impunity — has become an urgent necessity.4 Alternatives cannot be created fast enough.
While tech giants have brushed off accusations of monopolizing services saying that they welcome competition, they have in recent days proven they will accept no such thing.
Case in point: In what appears to be a coordinated attack, Google, Apple and Amazon destroyed Parler, a main competitor to Twitter and Facebook, literally overnight by yanking it from their app stores and web hosting service.5,6,7,8
January 10, 2021, Parler CEO John Matze announced the company had been "dropped by virtually all of its business alliances after Amazon, Apple and Google ended their agreements … Every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day."9 As reported by the St. Louis Discussing the recent social media purge and the destruction of Parler, Glenn Greenwald writes:10
"So much of this liberal support for the attempted destruction of Parler is based in utter ignorance about that platform, and about basic principles of free speech … The platform's design is intended to foster privacy and free speech, not a particular ideology.
They minimize the amount of data they collect on users to prevent advertiser monetization or algorithmic targeting. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, they do not assess a user's preferences in order to decide what they should see …
Of course large numbers of Trump supporters ended up on Parler. That's not because Parler is a pro-Trump outlet, but because those are among the people who were censored by the tech monopolies or who were angered enough by that censorship to seek refuge elsewhere.
It is true that one can find postings on Parler that explicitly advocate violence or are otherwise grotesque. But that is even more true of Facebook, Google-owned YouTube, and Twitter."
Greenwald is one of my absolute favorite journalists. His brilliant and deep insights into the progressive tyrannical destruction that is occurring is an important perspective that will open your eyes to what is happening to our world.
Glenn actually quit the publishing company he founded, The Intercept, because they censored him.11 This is a man of integrity, committed to the highest ethical principles. He started a substack newsletter to help fund his efforts and you can subscribe to it for $5/month.
Standards Not Applied to Big Tech Apply to Competition
The justification given by Google, Apple and Amazon for their takedown was that Parler had "the potential of spreading violent content" and had refused to censor its users over and above taking down posts that violate its stated terms of service.
However, can anyone with a straight face claim that violent content cannot and has not been disseminated via any other social media platforms or telecommunications services?
All communications services have the ability to carry this kind of information. It's inevitable, seeing how bad actors will use one service or another to communicate ill intent with others. They're hardly using carrier pigeons or paper bulletin boards anymore.
As reported by Vision Times,12 Apple told Parler it is "responsible for all the user generated content present on your service and for ensuring that this content meets App Store requirements for the safety and protection of our users." In response, Matze stated:13
"Apparently they believe Parler is responsible for ALL user generated content on Parler. Therefor [sic] by the same logic, Apple must be responsible for ALL actions taken by their phones.
Every car bomb, every illegal cell phone conversation, every illegal crime committed on an iPhone, Apple must also be responsible for," adding that "Standards not applied to Twitter, Facebook or even Apple themselves, apply to Parler."
Indeed, crimes occur on big tech platforms every day. The April 5, 2018, ABC News article14 "Mayhem and Murder: 10 Most Shocking Facebook Live Moments Ever" detailed some of the most stunning ones.
In 2012, The Guardian reported15 that social media-related crime reports had risen 780% in four years. Data from the British police showed 4,908 crimes in 2012 had been committed in which Facebook or Twitter was a factor. According to a June 4, 2012, article16 in Mail Online, 12,300 crime cases had been linked to Facebook, with a crime happening on the platform every 40 minutes.
News reports from 201417 and 201518 noted the number of crime cases linked to Facebook and Twitter was continuing to climb precipitously, including sexual offenses, harassment and outright death threats.
Of course, when we start talking about intelligence agencies' use of big tech services the stakes get even higher. The CIA, for example, which has a history of mind control abuses and secret assassination programs,19 uses Amazon web services, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM.20
Are these companies taking responsibility for atrocities committed by the CIA, such as its "deadly double tap" drone strikes in Pakistan that caused outrage in 2012?21 Is Amazon taking responsibility for the actions of DARPA, since it's hosting DARPA and provides them with cloud services?22
Parler Refuses to Censor Constitutional Rights
Matze also pointed out that the allegation that Parler can or should be held responsible for the January 6, 2021, violence in Washington, D.C., is false for a number of reasons. First of all, Parler does not have a group feature that will allow people to organize. In fact, Facebook groups were used to plan that and other protests that turned violent.
Secondly, peaceful protests are protected under the U.S. Constitution, and therefore blocking the planning of such events would be unconstitutional. "Bad actors" turned what was a peaceful protest into a riot. Incidentally, the same happened during many protests held during 2020.
In response to the Parler ban, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., is calling for a racketeering investigation into Big Tech, saying Amazon, Apple and Google's suspension of the Twitter competitor is "clearly a violation of antitrust, civil rights and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act."23
Indeed, according to an October 2020 report24 by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google all have monopoly power and are using that power to rid themselves of competition.
The Great Social Media Purge
Then there's the great social media purge, which began in earnest January 7 and 8, 2021, with the permanent ban of President Trump and a long list of other conservatives from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. According to some reports, Twitter suspended more than 70,000 accounts during its weekend purge.
Again, the primary excuse given was that these individuals may incite violence. Other justifications include posting "misleading information about the election outcome" or statements suggesting there was election fraud.25 Even signed witness affidavits and live testimony have been censored since election day.26 As reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:27
"In the Trump tweets cited by Twitter, Trump stated that he will not be attending the inauguration and referred to his supporters as 'American Patriots,' saying they will have 'a GIANT VOICE long into the future.'
Twitter said these statements 'are likely to inspire others to replicate the violent acts that took place on January 6, 2021, and that there are multiple indicators that they are being received and understood as encouragement to do so' …
In a lengthy monologue,28 Zuckerberg claims: '[Trump's] decision to use his platform to condone rather than condemn the actions of his supporters at the Capitol building has rightly disturbed people in the U.S. and around the world.
However, Zuckerberg's statement seems to deviate from reality. In an increasingly hard-to-find video29 by Trump on the day of the Electoral College count, the outgoing president asked both his supporters and the rioters to be peaceful:
'We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order and we have to respect our great people in law and order. We don't want anybody hurt.'"
Contrast this scenario with all the violence and property destruction that was done by the Black Lives Matter movement this past summer and was clearly orchestrated over the Google, Apple and Twitter platforms. The violence and damage was exponentially worse, yet not a word of censoring these platforms was ever mentioned.
Gab Strikes Back Against 'Mockingbird Media Complex'
The Gab social network also claims to be under coordinated attack. According to Gab CEO Andrew Torba, there's been a suspicious rise in violent content on the site that doesn't appear to be generated by real users. In a January 8, 2021, statement, Torba said:30
"Over the past several weeks I have been openly warning the Gab community to be on the lookout for fedposters and threats or encouragement of violence on Gab.
This PSYOP campaign started back in early December with newly created accounts popping up out of nowhere and making threats of violence. We have zero tolerance for this behavior and it is absolutely not free speech.
This has always been our policy. We have thousands of volunteers, customers, and longtime community members who helped us stomp out this PSYOP campaign over the past several weeks and expose it. After this week, it's clear why this PSYOP was started: to take down alt-tech platforms and frame them for the January 6th protests that ended with the police killing an unarmed woman.
Almost instantly after police allowed protestors into the Capitol the New York Times started a baseless narrative that this protest was organized on alt-tech sites, and in particular on Gab, without offering any proof, screenshots, usernames, or evidence to back these baseless claims.
I've recorded a video highlighting how this all played out. I hope you'll take some time to watch it to learn how the CIA Mockingbird Media complex operates. The way we fight back is with truth and by speaking truth to their power, which is quickly fading."
Antiwar Conservative Banned
While "incitement of violence" is being used as the justification for banning social media accounts, Facebook's suspension of Dr. Ron Paul, a former Republican congressman for Texas and presidential candidate in 2011, punctures that narrative. He's one of the most peaceful antiwar personalities out there.
"With no explanation other than 'repeatedly going against our community standards,' Facebook has blocked me from managing my page. Never have we received notice of violating community standards in the past and nowhere is the offending post identified. The only thing we posted to Facebook today was my weekly 'Texas Straight Talk' column, which I have published every week since 1976."
The article in question apparently discussed "shocking increase in censorship on social media," though,33 which may have tripped Facebook's blocking apparatus. Discussing the incident in an article on RonPaulInstitute.org, Jonathan Turley writes:34
"Paul, a libertarian leader and former presidential candidate, has been an outspoken critic of foreign wars and an advocate for civil liberties for decades … His son, United States Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) tweeted, 'Facebook now considers advocating for liberty to be sedition. Where will it end?'
Even before the riot, Democrats were calling for blacklists and retaliation against anyone deemed to be 'complicit' with the Trump Administration.
We have been discussing the rising threats against Trump supporters, lawyers, and officials in recent weeks from Democratic members are calling for blacklists to the Lincoln Project leading a national effort to harass and abuse any lawyers representing the Republican Party or President Trump.
Others are calling for banning those 'complicit' from college campuses while still others are demanding a 'Truth and Reconciliation Commission' to 'hold Trump and his enablers accountable for the crimes they have committed.'
Daily Beast editor-at-large Rick Wilson has added his own call for 'humiliation,' 'incarceration' and even ritualistic suicides for Trump supporters in an unhinged, vulgar column … Also, a top Forbes editor Randall Lane warned any company that they will be investigated if they hire any former Trump officials.
The riots are being used as a license to roll back on free speech and retaliate against conservatives. In the meantime, the silence of academics and many in the media is deafening …
The move against Paul, a long champion of free speech, shows how raw and comprehensive this crackdown has become … It is like having a state media without state control … As we have seen in Europe, such censorship becomes an insatiable appetite for greater and greater speech control."
In the video35 featured at the top of this article, Paul discusses the dangers of big tech censorship. Unfortunately, he falls short on solutions in that video. In my view, one key strategy that we must focus on is to uphold the Constitution. If you want to live in a free society, you must first understand what a free society is, so educate yourself about your Constitutional rights. As noted by Greenwald:36
"On Facebook and Twitter, one finds official accounts from the most repressive and violent regimes on earth, including Saudi Arabia, and pages devoted to propaganda on behalf of the Egyptian regime. Does anyone think these tech giants have a genuine concern about violence and extremism?"
What's Behind the Push for Censorship?
According to Big Tech, free speech is "dangerous." I guess a follow-up question to such a statement would be: "To whom?" As mentioned earlier, agencies such as DARPA are using the online services of private companies, and according to independent journalist Whitney Webb,37 the COVID-19 pandemic has given "a dangerous boost to DARPA's darkest agenda."
"Given this foreknowledge and the numerous simulations conducted in the United States last year regarding global viral pandemic outbreaks, at least six of varying scope and size, it has often been asked — Why did the government not act or prepare if an imminent global pandemic and the shortcomings of any response to such an event were known?" Webb writes.38
"Though the answer to this question has frequently been written off as mere 'incompetence' in mainstream media circles, it is worth entertaining the possibility that a crisis was allowed to unfold. Why would the intelligence community or another faction of the U.S. government knowingly allow a crisis such as this to occur?
The answer is clear if one looks at history, as times of crisis have often been used by the U.S. government to implement policies that would normally be rejected by the American public, ranging from censorship of the press to mass surveillance networks."
She goes on to review some of these historical events, and some of the DARPA-developed technologies that are now likely to come into play, from DNA and RNA vaccines to implantable biosensors and nanoplatforms said to detect disease.
If history is our guide, could the clamp-down on free speech be part of a bigger control and manipulation agenda — one that is directed not toward foreign enemies but the local population?
Might it be part of the Great Reset agenda, with its transhumanist bend? As explained by Webb in her article, DARPA has a transhumanist vision for the military, so why not for the general population? Especially seeing how its "health based" biotechnologies end up meshing so seamlessly with new surveillance technologies.
I believe there may be some truth in that. Most certainly, big tech and social media monopolies are playing a central role in the social engineering currently taking place to pave the way for the technocratic "reset" of the global economy and way of life. That plan simply cannot occur without a sufficient number of the population being onboard with authoritarian conduct.
Greenwald has been a longstanding progressive and no fan of the Republican party, yet he notes that Silicon Valley giants may also be catering to the Democratic party in the hopes they won't be regulated.
"The Democrats are about to control the Executive Branch and both houses of Congress, leaving Silicon Valley giants eager to please them by silencing their adversaries," Greenwald writes.39
"This corrupt motive was made expressly clear by long-time Clinton operative Jennifer Palmieri: 'It has not escaped my attention that the day social media companies decided there actually IS more they could do to police Trump's destructive behavior was the same day they learned Democrats would chair all the congressional committees that oversee them.'"
Just Wait — You're Next
While many appear to be caught up in the schadenfreude of the moment, basking in the perceived power of cancel culture, make no mistake — the censorship will not be limited to conservatives. Years ago, I warned that online censorship would not end at alternative health sites like mine, and guess what? It didn't. Then I warned it would not stop at questioning vaccine safety, and of course, it didn't.
In 2020, discussions about certain medical treatments for COVID-19, the sensibility of mask wearing and the origin of the virus all became targets for massive censoring and deplatforming. Next came bans on criticism against protests that frequently turned violent. Now one political party is being silenced en masse.
Make no mistake. Eventually, all will be targeted. Acceptable speech will continue to narrow until everyone has something to lose by opening their mouth and expressing an opinion. It's inevitable, which is why supporting censorship is so ill advised. As noted by Greenwald:40
"The liberal New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg pronounced herself 'disturbed by just how awesome [tech giants'] power is' and added that 'it's dangerous to have a handful of callow young tech titans in charge of who has a megaphone and who does not.'
She nonetheless praised these 'young tech titans' for using their 'dangerous' power to ban Trump and destroy Parler. In other words, liberals like Goldberg are concerned only that Silicon Valley censorship powers might one day be used against people like them, but are perfectly happy as long as it is their adversaries being deplatformed and silenced …
That is because the dominant strain of American liberalism is not economic socialism but political authoritarianism. Liberals now want to use the force of corporate power to silence those with different ideologies.
They are eager for tech monopolies not just to ban accounts they dislike but to remove entire platforms from the internet. They want to imprison people they believe helped their party lose elections, such as Julian Assange, even if it means creating precedents to criminalize journalism.
World leaders have vocally condemned the power Silicon Valley has amassed to police political discourse, and were particularly indignant over the banning of the U.S. President … Even the ACLU — which has rapidly transformed from a civil liberties organization into a liberal activist group … found the assertion of Silicon Valley's power to destroy Parler deeply alarming …
Yet American liberals swoon for this authoritarianism. And they are now calling for the use of the most repressive War on Terror measures against their domestic opponents. On Tuesday, House Homeland Security Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) urged that GOP Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley 'be put on the no-fly list' …
No authoritarians believe they are authoritarians. No matter how repressive are the measures they support — censorship, monopoly power, no-fly lists for American citizens without due process — they tell themselves that those they are silencing and attacking are so evil … that anything done against them is noble and benevolent, not despotic and repressive.
That is how American liberals currently think, as they fortify the control of Silicon Valley monopolies over our political lives, exemplified by the overnight destruction of a new and popular competitor."
Take Control of Your Online Presence
Censorship is never directed to specific groups, eventually it is applied to anything deemed threatening to the ruling class. So, while you wait for a decentralized, censorship-free internet, what can you do to protect your online privacy and your right to free speech? Here are a few suggestions:
Switch from Facebook and Twitter to free-speech alternatives41 such as Gab, MeWe, Minds (and Parler if they manage to come back).
Switch from YouTube to uncensored alternatives42 such as Bitchute, Brighteon, Banned.video and Thinkspot.
Download the Signal or Telegram app to encrypt your text messages. Telegram also allows you to subscribe to channels (read-only messages are sent to your phone from any channel you subscribe. This feature is starting to be increasingly used by individuals who have been banned on other social media platforms).
Use a VPN on your desktop, laptop and mobile devices to preserve your privacy.
For content creators and alternative news sources that no longer have a social media presence due to censoring, subscribe to their newsletter if available, and/or mark their website in your favorites and check back on a regular basis.
Stop using Google search engines. Alternatives include DuckDuckGo43 and SwissCows.
Uninstall Google Chrome and use Brave instead, available for all computers and mobile devices.44 From a security perspective, Brave is far superior to Chrome and offers a free VPN service (virtual private network) to further preserve your privacy.
Switch to a non-Google email service such as ProtonMail,45 an encrypted email service based in Switzerland.
Stop using Google docs. Digital Trends has published an article suggesting a number of alternatives.46
Don't use Google Home devices. These devices record everything that occurs in your home, both speech and sounds such as brushing your teeth and boiling water, even when they appear to be inactive, and send that information back to Google. Android phones are also always listening and recording, as are Google's home thermostat Nest, and Amazon's Alexa.
Ditch Fitbit, as it was recently purchased by Google and will provide them with all your physiological information and activity levels, in addition to everything else that Google already has on you.
If you're a high school student, do not convert the Google accounts you created as a student into personal accounts.
Fully experiencing our own hurt is the gateway to compassion toward other human beings.
Every day we hear stories of personal suffering and loss that far exceed our own. When we compare our situations to those of people living in war-torn countries or those who have lost their homes and livelihoods to natural disasters, it is tempting to minimize our own experiences of suffering. We may feel that we don't have a right to be upset about the breakup of a relationship, for example, because at least we have food to eat and a roof over our heads.
While awareness of the pain of others in the world can be a valuable way to keep our own struggles in perspective, it is not a legitimate reason to disregard our own pain. Disparaging your feelings as being less important than other people's emotions leads to denial and repression. Over time, an unwillingness to experience your own feelings leads to numbness. It is as if our internal systems become clogged with our unexpressed emotions. This in no way helps other people who are suffering in the world. In fact, it may do just the opposite because when we devalue our own sorrow, we become impervious to the sorrow in others.
Fully experiencing our own hurt is the gateway to compassion toward other human beings. Feelings of loss, abandonment, loneliness, and fear are universal, and, in that sense, all feelings are created equal. Regardless of what leads us to feel the way we do, our comprehension of what it means to be human is deepened by our own experiences. Our personal lives provide us with the material we need to become fully conscious. If we reject our emotions because we think our experiences are not dramatic or important enough, we are missing out on our own humanity. We honor and value the human condition when we fully inhabit our bodies so we can experience and feel life fully. Accepting our emotions and allowing ourselves to feel them connects us to all human beings. Then, when we hear the stories of other people's suffering, our hearts can resonate with understanding and compassion -- for all of us.
Expect more tech in your banking, but keep an eye out for fraud.
The coronavirus pandemic turned the world on its head, and some aspects of the way consumers conduct their financial lives will likely be changed forever. If there's any silver lining to it all, though, some of those changes will be positive as we head into the next year.
From policy improvements to advances in digital banking, here is what banking experts predict for 2021.
The Biden Administration Will Institute New Banking Policies
Over the past four years, several major policy changes were enacted that impacted the banking industry. Overall, the new Biden administration will likely exert greater scrutiny of the financial services industry at the federal level, according to Catherine Brown, advisor at advisory and investment firm Klaros Group.
However, the economic issues resulting from the pandemic will continue into 2021. The administration will likely be immediately focused on additional financial relief for individuals and small businesses, followed by a comprehensive infrastructure package, she says. Priorities will likely include undoing some of the changes made by the Trump administration, such as moves to hobble the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the reversal of certain payday loan rules.
Banks Will Get Creative About Encouraging Savers
In light of the financial turmoil caused by the pandemic, the Federal Reserve stepped in with emergency measures to keep the economy afloat. That included lowering the federal funds target rate to less than 0.25%, the lowest it's been since the Great Recession. The Fed stated it intends to keep rates near zero through at least 2023.
That's great news for anyone who wants to borrow money, but savers have seen their interest rates slashed to nearly nothing. As a result, banks will have to find other ways to encourage deposits, and prize-linked savings is one option that will see growth in 2021, says Adam Moelis, co-founder of Yotta Savings, which employs a lotterylike feature.
"Retail banking customers will be searching for new, creative ways to earn interest on their savings. … What you'll see banks do is gamify the savings experience, so instead of paying everyone a meaningless amount of interest, they will pool the interest together in order to offer exciting payouts to a smaller number of savers," Moelis says.
Contactless Payment Will Be More Popular Than Ever
During the pandemic, the ability to pay digitally and in real time was not only safer than using cash, but also more convenient, according to Allison Beer, head of digital at Chase Bank. "We expect consumers to continue to use digital payments even more frequently in the new year," she says.
In fact, according to data collected by Chase, 30% of peer-to-peer payment users signed up within the last six months, while 45% of long-term users are relying on this form of payment more often than they were a year ago. The use of tools such as PayPal, Venmo and Zelle will continue to rise in 2021 as consumers and small businesses become more comfortable with the idea of going cashless.
The Customer Experience Will Be Largely Virtual
It's not just payments that have gone digital. With social distancing a key measure against COVID-19 exposure, businesses have had to get creative about how they interact with customers – banks included.
"As more people, both consumers and commercial, are doing business from their homes, banks and financial institutions will continue to enhance the online experience so that it replicates the in-branch experience," said Priya Iyer, CEO of Vee24, a customer engagement platform.
According to Iyer, services such as live video chat and collaboration technologies such as high-performance co-browsing, secure form fill and secure file transfer will become commonplace next year. "These tools allow digital hand-holding during complicated processes such as mortgage or commercial loan applications, which reduces errors and friction for both the customer and the banking representative."
With heightened focus on mobile apps, contactless payments and other digital services, banks will be better able to meet their customers virtually. But even as successful vaccines for COVID-19 are developed and distributed, the convenience and speed of virtual banking will make consumers less likely to visit physical bank branches for their financial needs.
According to a PwC survey during the spring, the pandemic made about a quarter of consumers prefer online banking to visiting a branch, accelerating a trend already in place.
"With self-service technology that covers most of their needs, the average customer will likely be able to bank without a physical branch," Blake Morgan, a customer experience futurist, wrote at Forbes in March.
Identity Theft Will Run Rampant
Though the increase in digital services makes banking more convenient, safe and accessible for many, it also opens the door for more fraud. Because more Americans will conduct their financial lives online in 2021, there likely will also be an increase in identity theft stemming from data breaches and social engineering scams, says Giselle Lindley, principal fraud consultant for ACI Worldwide, a payment services firm.
"Many people are experiencing social isolation and unemployment, and are therefore susceptible to romance scams, fake employment ads, and stimulus or support payment offers," she says. "Others are simply spending more time with online entertainment, where fraudsters are lurking with fake giveaways and investment deals, all with a goal to convince unsuspecting victims to hand over financial details and other sensitive personally identifiable information."
The good news? According to Lindley, increasing pressure will come from consumer protection regulators for financial institutions to take responsibility for protecting customers from fraud and assuming liability for loss.
From this morning, a flight of awareness that landed in a sketchbook slideshow complete with narration . A pretty normsl mornjng reallyGlad ho bring it to the table
Day by day, the evidence is mounting that Facebook is bad for society. Last week Channel 4 News in London tracked down Black Americans in Wisconsin who were targeted by President Trump's 2016 campaign with negative advertising about Hillary Clinton—"deterrence" operations to suppress their vote.
A few weeks ago, meanwhile, I was included in a discussion organized by the Computer History Museum, called Decoding the Election. A fellow panelist, Hillary Clinton's former campaign manager Robby Mook, described how Facebook worked closely with the Trump campaign. Mook refused to have Facebook staff embedded inside Clinton's campaign because it did not seem ethical, while Trump's team welcomed the opportunity to have an insider turn the knobs on the social network's targeted advertising.
Taken together, these two pieces of information are damning for the future of American democracy; Trump's team openly marked 3.5 million Black Americans for deterrence in their data set, while Facebook's own staff aided voter suppression efforts. As Siva Vaidhyanathan, the author of Anti-Social Media, has said for years: "The problem with Facebook is Facebook."
While research and reports from academics, civil society, and the media have long made these claims, regulation has not yet come to pass. But at the end of September, Facebook's former director of monetization, Tim Kendall, gave testimony before Congress that suggested a new way to look at the site's deleterious effects on democracy. He outlined Facebook's twin objectives: making itself profitable and trying to control a growing mess of misinformation and conspiracy. Kendall compared social media to the tobacco industry. Both have focused on increasing the capacity for addiction. "Allowing for misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news to flourish were like Big Tobacco's bronchodilators, which allowed the cigarette smoke to cover more surface area of the lungs," he said.
The comparison is more than metaphorical. It's a framework for thinking about how public opinion needs to shift so that the true costs of misinformation can be measured and policy can be changed.
Personal choices, public dangers
It might seem inevitable today, but regulating the tobacco industry was not an obvious choice to policymakers in the 1980s and 1990s, when they struggled with the notion that it was an individual's choice to smoke. Instead, a broad public campaign to address the dangers of secondhand smoke is what finally broke the industry's heavy reliance on the myth of smoking as a personal freedom. It wasn't enough to suggest that smoking causes lung disease and cancer, because those were personal ailments—an individual's choice. But secondhand smoke? That showed how those individual choices could harm other people.
Epidemiologists have long studied the ways in which smoking endangers public health, and detailed the increased costs from smoking cessation programs, public education, and enforcement of smoke-free spaces. To achieve policy change, researchers and advocates had to demonstrate that the cost of doing nothing was quantifiable in lost productivity, sick time, educational programs, supplementary insurance, and even hard infrastructure expenses such as ventilation and alarm systems. If these externalities hadn't been acknowledged, perhaps we'd still be coughing in smoke-filled workplaces, planes, and restaurants.
And, like secondhand smoke, misinformation damages the quality of public life. Every conspiracy theory, every propaganda or disinformation campaign, affects people—and the expense of not responding can grow exponentially over time. Since the 2016 US election, newsrooms, technology companies, civil society organizations, politicians, educators, and researchers have been working to quarantine the viral spread of misinformation. The true costs have been passed on to them, and to the everyday folks who rely on social media to get news and information.
Take, for example, the recent falsehood that antifa activists are lighting the wildfires on the West Coast. This began with a small local rumor repeated by a police captain during a public meeting on Zoom. That rumor then began to spread through conspiracy networks on the web and social media. It reached critical mass days later after several right-wing influencers and blogs picked up the story. From there, different forms of media manipulation drove the narrative, including an antifa parody account claiming responsibility for the fires. Law enforcement had to correct the record and ask folks to stop calling in reports about antifa. By then, millions of people had been exposed to the misinformation, and several dozen newsrooms had had to debunk the story.
The costs are very real. In Oregon, fears about "antifa" are emboldening militia groups and others to set up identity checkpoints, and some of these vigilantes are using Facebook and Twitter as infrastructure to track those who they deem suspicious.
Online deception is now a multimillion-dollar global industry, and the emerging economy of misinformation is growing quickly. Silicon Valley corporations are largely profiting from it, while key political and social institutions are struggling to win back the public's trust. If we aren't prepared to confront the direct costs to democracy, understanding who pays what price for unchecked misinformation is one way to increase accountability.
Combating smoking required a focus on how it diminished the quality of life for nonsmokers, and a decision to tax the tobacco industry to raise the cost of doing business.
Now, I am not suggesting placing a tax on misinformation, which would have the otherwise unintended effect of sanctioning its proliferation. Taxing tobacco has stopped some from taking up the habit, but it has not prevented the public health risk. Only limiting the places people can smoke in public did that. Instead, technology companies must address the negative externalities of unchecked conspiracy theories and misinformation and redesign their products so that this content reaches fewer people. That is in their power, and choosing not to do so is a personal choice that their leaders make.
Familiar names such as Anolon, Calphalon, and Cuisinart do well in CR's tests—but so do a few newcomers
Is it time to replace your cookware? If the handles are loose or broken, or if the bottom of a pan is warped (which can create hot spots that burn food), it's time to shop. And when the coating of a nonstick pan is flaking, it's got to go.
Cookware is sold in sets—consisting of about five to 15 pieces—or as individual pots and pans, typically called open stock. But a 12-piece set won't contain a dozen pots and pans. "In boxed sets, manufacturers count a lid as a piece," explains Marion Wilson-Spencer, CR's market analyst for cookware. "Even utensils and a cookbook may be counted as pieces."
We buy and test cookware sets ranging from less than $100 to $600 or more, from well-known brands such as All-Clad, Anolon, Calphalon, Cuisinart, and Zwilling J.A. Henckels, as well as sets sold under the names of celebrity cooks like Ayesha Curry, Rachel Ray, and the Pioneer Woman.
In our tests, we evaluate heating evenness, speed of heating, sauté performance, nonstick durability, handle sturdiness, and more. To evaluate various pieces, we cook pancakes, fry eggs, boil water, and simmer tomato sauce.
For more information, see our cookware buying guide, which includes a primer on different types of cookware and the materials they're made of.
Below are the 10 best cookware sets from CR's latest tests—both nonstick and stainless steel—listed alphabetically by type.
The Third Self: Mary Oliver on Time, Concentration, the Artist's Task, and the Central Commitment of the Creative Life
"The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time."
By Maria Popova
"In the wholeheartedness of concentration," the poet Jane Hirshfield wrote in her beautiful inquiry into the effortless effort of creativity, "world and self begin to cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done." But concentration is indeed a difficult art, art's art, and its difficulty lies in the constant conciliation of the dissonance between self and world — a difficulty hardly singular to the particular conditions of our time. Two hundred years before social media, the great French artist Eugène Delacroix lamented the necessary torment of avoiding social distractions in creative work; a century and a half later, Agnes Martin admonished aspiring artists to exercise discernment in the interruptions they allow, or else corrupt the mental, emotional, and spiritual privacy where inspiration arises.
How to hedge against that hazard is what beloved poet Mary Oliver (September 10, 1935–January 17, 2019) explores in a wonderful piece titled "Of Power and Time," found in the altogether enchanting Upstream: Selected Essays (public library).
Mary Oliver
Oliver writes:
It is a silver morning like any other. I am at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone. Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.
But just as often, if not more often, the interruption comes not from another but from the self itself, or some other self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels and tosses itself, splashing, into the pond of meditation. And what does it have to say? That you must phone the dentist, that you are out of mustard, that your uncle Stanley's birthday is two weeks hence. You react, of course. Then you return to your work, only to find that the imps of idea have fled back into the mist.
Oliver terms this the "intimate interrupter" and cautions that it is far more perilous to creative work than any external distraction, adding:
The world sheds, in the energetic way of an open and communal place, its many greetings, as a world should. What quarrel can there be with that? But that the self can interrupt the self — and does — is a darker and more curious matter.
Echoing Borges's puzzlement over our divided personhood, Oliver sets out to excavate the building blocks of the self in order to understand its parallel capacities for focused creative flow and merciless interruption. She identifies three primary selves that she inhabits, and that inhabit her, as they do all of us: the childhood self, which we spend our lives trying to weave into the continuity of our personal identity ("The child I was," she writes, "is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave."); the social self, "fettered to a thousand notions of obligation"; and a third self, a sort of otherworldly awareness.
The first two selves, she argues, inhabit the ordinary world and are present in all people; the third is of a different order and comes most easily alive in artists — it is where the wellspring of creative energy resides. She writes:
Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.
Oliver contrasts the existential purpose of the two ordinary selves with that of the creative self:
Say you have bought a ticket on an airplane and you intend to fly from New York to San Francisco. What do you ask of the pilot when you climb aboard and take your seat next to the little window, which you cannot open but through which you see the dizzying heights to which you are lifted from the secure and friendly earth?
Most assuredly you want the pilot to be his regular and ordinary self. You want him to approach and undertake his work with no more than a calm pleasure. You want nothing fancy, nothing new. You ask him to do, routinely, what he knows how to do — fly an airplane. You hope he will not daydream. You hope he will not drift into some interesting meander of thought. You want this flight to be ordinary, not extraordinary. So, too, with the surgeon, and the ambulance driver, and the captain of the ship. Let all of them work, as ordinarily they do, in confident familiarity with whatever the work requires, and no more. Their ordinariness is the surety of the world. Their ordinariness makes the world go round.
[…]
In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world's working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook — a different set of priorities.
Part of this something-elseness, Oliver argues, is the uncommon integration of the creative self — the artist's work cannot be separated from the artist's whole life, nor can its wholeness be broken down into the mechanical bits-and-pieces of specific actions and habits. (Elsewhere, Oliver has written beautifully about how habit gives shape to but must not control our inner lives).
Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always — these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit. Nor can the actual work be well separated from the entire life. Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come — for his adventures are all unknown. In truth, the work itself is the adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is about.
No one yet has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more likely to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn't that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge.
Above all, Oliver observes from the "fortunate platform" of a long, purposeful, and creatively fertile life, the artist's task is one of steadfast commitment to the art:
Of this there can be no question — creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does not know this — who does not swallow this — is lost. He who does not crave that roofless place eternity should stay at home. Such a person is perfectly worthy, and useful, and even beautiful, but is not an artist. Such a person had better live with timely ambitions and finished work formed for the sparkle of the moment only. Such a person had better go off and fly an airplane.
She returns to the problem of concentration, which for the artist is a form, perhaps the ultimate form, of consecration:
The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work — who is thus responsible to the work… Serious interruptions to work, therefore, are never the inopportune, cheerful, even loving interruptions which come to us from another.
[…]
It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o'clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all.
There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
