My Hotspot
Late October 2018
I’ve got a little over a year to go using my cell-phone Hotspot for a residential Internet connection. It will be an interesting duration of time!
In early May of this year, I moved to a more rural location in the northern Sierra Nevada foothills and became dis-connected from my usual Internet provider. Through the wonders of AT&T, I am now transported in digital time to an other-worldly ether-sphere each time that I link Laptop to Hotspot.
The sites that I once frequented on a routine, typically daily, basis, somehow just are not the same — in ways I never would have imagined!
News, retail, language research, historical primary source material, photo caches: the online sources are not many; in fact, they are monotonously few, but that’s how I work. And I go with what works for me.
Since discovering, almost six months ago, that any “local” Internet provider does not provide much of a reliable service, I’ve been using my cellphone Hotspot minutes at a fairly regular pace each month. About 1 week before the minutes go poof (or slow to a digital c . r . a . w. l), I get a text message from Provider that I’ve used up 75 Percent of my paid-for Wireless Minutes.
I can almost set my watch by it, but my watch, or watches, are in my top left dresser drawer, all awaiting new batteries. It’s a task I shall accomplish with the move to the New House currently under construction.
I am counting the months until I move into the Dream House and access the Internet through land service. I shall be staying with the Phone Cops, otherwise known in my household as AT&T. There is another provider named “Sudden Link” but the word is out among small business and residence owners that their consistent experience has caused them to re-name this dud of a service: Sudden Drop.
I am also counting those months until I get my hands on access to an Identity that used to be mine. You see, my Hotspot thinks I am in San Francisco. I can now write a book on How Things Operate in that cesspool, but I will spare myself the labor and the time because there are so many better things to write about.
An essay suffices for this subject of the online heist of your Identity by the idiot marketers, the people who know best what should be peddled, and how, in which part of the country called the United States of America.
I go to Woolrich or Imdb or Brooks Brothers or Zappos or even Target and, voilà — I am detected as being in SanFran. The clothes and the models do not quite match my zip code or what I recall any zip code looking like.
I go to any of a number of non-Socialist opinion sites and things get very murky, very fast. I must go through hoops to access the page, or OOPS, PAGE CANNOT BE FOUND.
I wonder when PAGE got lost? I think I understand why though.
Years ago, I dumped that gulag of a search engine and went with the Duck. It has since become crystal clear to me that the Digital Revolution is about to begin in the Flyover Country that I anticipate entering with anticipation, much anticipation next year.
An elephant never forgets and this elephant will never forget this brownshirt attempt to skew not merely information, facts and data, but shoes, shirts, shampoo, coats, even dog food — to a demographic that best fits their algorithm.
My Hotspot has told me a lot about the slicing-and-dicing of the demographics of America by the fascist fools who think they own capitalism, or even invented it. I’ve one comment for them:
A fool and her debit card are soon parting ways from the Lords of the Internet.
