People keep on sending me pics of pink things that remind them of my challenge. This is my favourite one!

The paranoid’s lament

We regard freedom and independence of media as a crucial civil rights. In recent years we have witnessed freedom of expression on the Internet being violated and threatened at an alarming rate. We have come to realize that it is our collective responsibility to protect what is being demolished in front of our eyes. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the fundamental importance of media freedom. We watched the screen as the richest doubled their net-worth while others continued to suffer and die. How immensely perverse and immoral the hegemony and its endgames! We should depart from such dominating neoliberal platforms as FB and YouTube, and distribute the fruits of technocracy amongst competing home-grown platforms. Today the Internet is infested with divisiveness, intimidation, and fear-mongering. Media censorship will continue to intensify the inequality in our world. Let’s collectively counter these dominant trends and share with the world our own sustaining vision of openness and honesty. An eminent shift in social consciousness will conserve our agency and freedom. Resist global technocracy, liberate creativity from all exploitive systems!

“O well”, says my mom, “it wasn’t different in our days. They struct the fear of God into us, terrorizing us with tales of the ‘rooi gevaar’ (red danger). When the government detected inspired potential in you, they recruited you to leadership camps where you were programmed with nationalistic propaganda on how to combat communism. And you know what? We survived it all”.

Doulien (Van der Merwe) Knopjes