them naive days

All the steps I'm now taking to secure my privacy and reclaim control over my data makes me reflect on the days when my digital practices revolved around porn, torrents, google, and routinely ignored software and OS updates.

How careless of me.

I used the web like a stooge from age 12 to age 30. That's a lot of frivolous internet use with practically no thought given to security, anonymity, or threat modelling. Big data thanks me. And I get Five Big Winks from the Five Eyes.

For so long I had waived my privacy without thinking hey maybe I should be smarter about this. Maybe I oughta learn more about this revolutionary tool I use on the daily. Maybe, just maybe, who I am, and what I do, has value—both online and offline.

I do wonder if the poor digital opsec of my past has compromised my efforts going forward. Perhaps only time will tell.

All things considered I take heart knowing that if my digital efforts to anonymize and agorize are in vain, at least I am cultivating a tactical mindset, a useful mentality as we plunge deeper into a “guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation,” as Marshall McLuhan so aptly put it in Culture is Our Business (1970).