As part of their successful military coup at Petrograd in 1917, the Bolsheviks were famously determined to first and foremost take control over the railway stations and bridges. It was crucial that the Bolsheviks took control of the communications.
As a Soviet kid learning history at school, I had that statement (“postal office, telephone, telegraph”) practically drilled into my head. It was supposed demonstrate the brilliant strategic thinking of Bolsheviks.
The point about taking over the communications came to my mind the other day when I was trying to send a private email, from my own domain, and it just wouldn’t even send because my server perceived it as “spam.” I had to make a few guesses and edit the text of the email in order for the server allow it to go through.
That we already know GoogleThey are censored incoming Gmail emailThey also have their Google Drive. And many of us have been dealing with our private emails from “politically incorrect” domains getting rejected by recipient servers, occasionally disappearing without trace, etc.
But the outgoing mail on my own domain (it’s a small hosting company, not any of those giants)? It seemed crazy to me. It was a private email, not a newsletter, not a “BCC,” just a regular private email that I wrote in response to something a reader had sent. And it wasn’t rejected by the recipient — it was rejected by my own hosting company’s mail server! Is that crazy?
It wasn’t an isolated occasion, either. It started to happen more frequently, sometimes a few times per day, recently. It is a new trend to censor private communications, and I want to talk about it. It is important to be aware of this trend to and object to it in real time, or else we’ll end up living with it, which can barely be called “life.”
