“I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this, anymore!”

~ Howard Beale (played by Peter Finch) in Network 1976

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Everyone has their proverbial “line in the sand.”

While it’s undoubtedly different for each individual, it’s there.

It may be lying dormant, unbeknownst to you, but it’s there.

Even the most mild-mannered person like myself, or the Dalai Lama, has one. (Not that I put myself on the same moral playing field, let alone in the same professional league as the renown spiritual leader.) But trust me, it’s there.

And I know it’s there because mine was just crossed. That line is Freedom.

Let me digress a bit…

Having been an avid consumer, support specialist and trainer of technology for a majority of the decades I’ve lived and breathed on God’s Green Earth, I of all people am very cognizant of both the pros and cons of the Digital Age. How technology affects our lives, improves our efficiency to complete tasks, and the pitfalls on our reliance of it when it crashes, have intertwined seamlessly into my personal and professional life. As much of it by desire as by necessity.

Admittedly, even though my initial love affair with all things pixels started with the entering of LOAD “Ghostbusters”, 8, 1 on my sleek grey Commodore 64 keyboard, my true passion with hi-tech started with the high-pitched squealing and squelching of static heard by my 14.4Kb baud modem as it logged onto the vast inter-webs of America Online.

It was the opening of new doors. The beginning of a new age.

I could chat via a keyboard from the comfort of my own home with someone located over 3000 miles away. This incredible new service and technology connected people like nothing else before it. With the click of a mouse and the typing of a password, random people across the country became immediately more accessible. The world became more accessible. The world as we knew it grew and shrunk, all at once.

Fast-Forward to 2021.

The sheer quantity of people who are interacting online has exploded and the number continues to grow. The Internet has evolved from a source of entertainment to an infrastructure on which we survive. From banking, ordering groceries, to earning a paycheck, a great majority of our society has gone all in on the net. It’s not to say the net doesn’t make certain aspects of life more efficient and rewarding, but our heavy reliance on it also renders it as our crutch. Specifically, to those whom control the Terms of Agreements, what we purchase and the news we read.

In what can only be described as a coordinated effort, the mainstream media and big-tech have chosen to become a PR extension of our newly Communist dictate-loving political leaders by limiting our access to information and the ability to share our voices.

It feels as if almost overnight, the United States of America went from the ideals of keeping an open mind and exploring all diversities of thought, to censoring, cancelling, blocking, shaming, blacklisting, and downright vilifying anyone who ever so slightly wanders of the “Narrative of the Month” script regardless of any facts, science or examples that may support their differing information.

The titans of media no longer provide two sides to a story free of bias so you the viewer can do research and make a decision for your own best interest. Now, so-called “news reporters” pick and choose details and blatantly report one side of a story while also interjecting their own opinion with an arrogance that they are the definitive knower of all things, end of conversation.

They report what they want you to know. More accurately, what they want you to believe.

Fun bumper sticker slogans once shouted from the roof tops by those with left leaning ideologies, such as; “My Body, My Choice”, “The Right to Protest” and “Freedom of Speech” have been commandeered for selective use only when it pertains to their issue. Freedoms are not freedoms if you have to twist yourself into a pretzel to explain why some are granted certain rights and not others. The hypocrisy that comes from the left is rich enough to make Jeff Bezos do a double take.

Selective freedom is not freedom. It’s intellectual imprisonment. For some, it’s turned into physical imprisonment, and for some, physical torture. Ask those who non-violently, marched on the Capital on Jan 6th, 2021. (And yes, a vast majority marched NON-violently.)

With the latest news that the “current” US administration will now try to require most employed U.S. citizens inject themselves with an experimental gene therapy that has zero long-term safety studies, just to be able to feed their families, we’ve now moved to medical imprisonment, which per the

As a result, per the VAERS vaccination adverse reaction website, at minimum hundreds of thousands, if not millions are suffering from internal physical torture. An alarmingly higher than normal percentage of that number have have paid with their lives. All for something with a 99% survival rate. Although maybe that survival rate only applies to thousands of unvaccinated illegal aliens being allowed to pour across the U.S. Mexico border without even being given a box of tissues, let alone a COVID shot.

You don’t hear much from tech and media about that tiny little inconsistency because it destroys the narrative of the need to force every legal US Citizen to inject themselves with an unproven substance.

As scary as that might sound (see Big Media, I can play the fear game too), the most frightening aspect is the silencing and disparagement of those suffering, or who might suffer, from this infringement on our freedoms.

Big Government, Big Tech and Big Media are pitting Americans against each other by changing the rules on what our Constitution actually calls freedom. These days, entertaining a different ‘thought’ on a topic not in line with the aforementioned almighty three, is deemed extremist.

Ask uber-popular (although I’ve never heard of her) rapper Nicki Minaj how the free thought is treating her. She didn’t dissuade others from getting the shot, but just told people to do research and make the best decision for themselves, and she was removed from Twitter and cancelled faster than The Chevy Chase show. Just expressing her thoughts on having the freedom of choice got her exiled. Apparently her following and influence is so large, she was summoned… err, invited to the White House to “educate her” on the shot.

And there within lies the rub. More so than ever, we are a country divided. At first by politics, then by speech, and now literally by our freedom to think.

That is what brings me here today.

Several years ago, after almost 25 years of working with technology in the IT field in some capacity, I decided I needed a change. My goal was to follow a career path where tech was the tool to complete an objective, instead of being the objective.

In addition to moving my career goals, I moved from a state constricting freedom to one that fosters it. I also moved away from social media platforms that decided controlling information was more important than people sharing it in order to make their own informed decisions.

I sacrificed relationships and proximity to family and friends and my career endeavors to try and maintain my freedoms.

Now the big three don’t care where you live or where you work. Full control is the goal.

I’m done moving. I’m done avoiding. I’m done being selfish.

More importantly, I’m done with those who now control the communications trying to mandate how we live, what we inject into our bodies, and how we need to think. With each passing day they are tightening the vice and on my wife, family and the people in my life I hold dear.

Last I checked, our freedoms don’t come from bureaucrats, Twitter or Google. They come from God and from being born into a world full of other beautiful creations that are also free. In the United States, the people we supposedly vote into office are there to protect our freedoms, not make decisions about which freedoms they think we need at the moment.

Even for those who don’t believe in the ‘Man Upstairs’ or that there is any spiritual entity above our own, I’m assuming most believe all animals born into the wild should be able to live free, or no? Should one grizzly bear be able to tell the other grizzlies they will need to separate until all of them have their rabies shots thanks to an outbreak in Alaska? An outlandish straw-man full of holes, I know, but just think about it in human terms for a second or two.

Alas, I still love technology, but there is no doubt it’s being used in nefarious ways against We the People. It used to be subtle and unobtrusive, but now longer is that the case. Companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, FOX and almost every major newspaper have become the new de facto collective hive feeding the people a diet of what they think we need to hear.

It sounds like doom and gloom. It sounds dire. It sounds hopeless. I know there are others that feel the same.

But all is not lost.

There are alternatives, and they are growing by the day!

That is why I launched Freedom of We.

I’m stepping back into the technology industry ring to help people move away from big tech and big media. Granted, my mission is not to disconnect people from society so they can drive around in a horse drawn carriage and work by candlelight (although I will happily attempt to provide that service).

My overall hope is to let others know there are options, and help to implement them if requested.

Believe it or not, the world spun on its axis perfectly fine before Facebook, and somehow, someway, people found a way to communicate and share their lives with loved ones. People also looked things up on the Internet before Google, so if the Alphabet Company were to suddenly vanish into thin air, I’m confident humankind could still muster the will to move forward.

My point however, there are many viable technical alternatives out there. Some are very easy to suggest (like try using www.DuckDuckGo.com or www.StartPage.com instead of Google for web searches.) Other projects are more complicated and overwhelming for some, which do require a bit more technical assistance. Be it email, shopping, internet searching, network security, PC software or Smartphone apps, there are several options out there to patronize companies who better respect your privacy, security, values and most notably, your freedoms.

The more people that move away from big-tech, big media, and those paying their advertising fees, the less power and control they will have over us.   

I started my career within the scope of technology began because I wanted to help people connect with loved ones who might not live so close, for their jobs, or just try to make daily tasks more efficient in general. God willing, I’m going to end it the same way.

Only this time with the goal of helping We the People free ourselves from the chains of censorship and cancellation, one key and screen at a time.

Your Slayer of Silicon Valley,

H. Lawrence

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