“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices - to be found in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own - for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.”
-Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone
*I lifted this from a John Whitehead book. : )
As of today my mind is made up to leave the USA for as long as possible, hopefully forever. As a resident of Portland, Oregon, I feel I may have simply gotten the short straw, winding up in the least free place within the least free country. There is nowhere I’ve traversed on this planet so utterly, unanimously obsessed with the delusional and now-extremist ideals of safety, prevention, and deterrence (this goes for both “Liberal” Multnomah County residents and Conservative suburban residents, in whose neighborhoods and public spaces I am utterly and completely unwelcome, feared, and seen as very, very, very crazy and dangerous according to systems and culture which reward complainers, “official reports,” nonsensical appeals to fear, pathologization, medicalization, and all the things that would enable cowards to destroy one’s life from the comfort of their chair without ever being tasked with presenting evidence, ground-truthing unfounded suspicions, etc.
I understand that I am literally on numerous “lists,” which are shared at every airport, bus station, retail store, hotel, customs agent, shipping employee, security guard, etc etc all over the planet, and that the road ahead will be supremely bumpy. I’m afraid I won’t survive it frankly.
But with that, I’m out, as I want to hope that there is just one nation out there where I even have a chance to be reassessed in anything resembling good faith by stakeholders, community members, and yes, government agents. That has flat-out not been the case at all in the USA.
I am not crazy, I am not dangerous, I am regarded as such officially by the most powerful public and private institutions in the most powerful nation on the planet, and it’s very difficult to win people over when their choice is The USA (and all the many benefits imparted upon those who “play nice” with the USA even if they disagree) and ….. That Crazy Dude Over There.
Here’s hoping the better members of this planet, however few may be left, see the truth for what it is and offer me the long overdue protection, not persecution, I so badly have needed for the past 10 years.
Special shout-out to all who supported and showed love for Toketee, my foray into entrepreneurism these past 7+ years which, along with my running, was a method by which I tried to retain control over what little I could control in American society, with so much else being thrust upon me without regard for civil rights or my safety. I took all my product pages down (obviously I can’t ship you anything from my little hut in a faraway land) but am re-posting my “fan pics” and “adventures” page. Like Brody’s beautiful and tragically short life, I feel I never got adequate documentation of the Toketee street market vibe. This was mostly due to how unsafe it was for me to ever carry a locatable cell phone on me. Anyhow … our little booth was quite the hoppin’ spot on a summer Saturday at our downtown Portland streetfair and along with Brody I hope we helped put some smiles on people’s faces and represented Portland well, not that Portland deserved or was owed that from us. I only regret that Brody literally always hurt my sales and secretly resent him for this. ; ) I learned that due to being the sweetest little man on the planet, customers would skip over my table and immediately go down to pet and kiss the dog underneath it, thereby converting my souvenirs-for-profit booth into a non-profit community petting zoo.
Sadly, as of today, I have been found guilty by market management of doing something “not nice” to one of the setup guys … namely, tossing a flyer with “joeleineweber.com” at his feet (can anyone guess why I might have done that? Let’s just say the setup crew was always SO unbelievably kind and fair to me). In fact the incident played out exactly like this video, with me calmly dropping a piece of paper and the other Neander—- I mean individual in the scenario got unreasonably mad for an unreasonably long period of time. According to the manager, the man filed several complaints and has said he is planning to sue me for dropping paper. Again, exactly like the video.
Or perhaps metaphorical memes are a better way of expressing how this non-incident, and so many just like it, have taken from me all that I’ve earned so many times in America.
Here’s what really happens / happened (like, every single time):
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/23/us/video/terrell-davis-united-airlines-digvid
Here’s what “they” say happened (accusers always representing a conspicuously narrow band of ideologies and industry affiliations - watch the VIDEO haha):
It’s comical to view the contrast, but the fact is it’s my reality, it’s not a joke when I go out there and I have to face these abuses, knowing how it’s done, how I’m being located, why I’m being targeted, etc. And my name is not Terrell Davis by the way. The only thing that saves him is his celebrity, which is absolutely not how it should be. There are countless others who lose it all over these malicious setups because 99.99999% of the rest of us people are “just some dude.”
In fact another great one that I found highly relatable was the old Masai Ujiri video right after the Toronto Raptors won the 2018 NBA Championship. It’s one of those ones that’s so flagrantly malicious, but the public didn’t know just how egregious the claims, and conduct, of the officer were until bodycam footage was released a while later. That’s exactly the level of intentional malice I have felt applied to me by so many security, government, private proprietor, employees and community members in the downtown Portland core for so many years even in the midst of my “happy moments.”
For 7 years Toketee was the best selling booth at the market, the byproduct of more resilience on my part than is generally understood, not just running the booth but getting the whole thing going from scratch while simultaneously having every possible societal playing field tipped practically vertically against me. Proud though I am of this great run, it was a humbling reminder of how much I’m valued in my community and society to learn that this morning, I was asked not to set up my table while one of the setup guys (my apparent victims) was noisily disrupting the entire scene by drunkenly, loudly shoving two homeless people to the ground and beating them with a traffic cone (you can’t make this s*** up). These guys got to stay today, and will remain forever. Joe the popular and articulate entrepreneur loses his livelihood. To the awesome setup and security people, and certain vendors, congratulations, you are now free to resume spreading your ignorant and obviously fraudulent rumors about me being a “drug dealer” and a “kidnapper” or just a plain old “weirdo” without any resistance whatsoever. One thing I do keep in mind as I deal with this exile is that at least I’ll never fall as low as you. I literally can’t, I already know who I am, what I’ve done and what I’ve seen, what I believe in, and what I support. And you are what you are, you’ve revealed that in clear terms, and you always will be no doubt.
THANK YOU sincerely to tourists I got to meet and talk to, many of whom were not only supporting an awesome dream come true of slingin’ art for a living, but who also inspired so many of my “escape plans” and kept my hopes alive of life abroad, fed me all the ideas I put into practice when I trotted the globe running marathons in 2023. Big thanks to wholesale peeps who kept things going outside of Portland as well!
To all you Good Patriots in the USA, good job, you killed my baby, undermined every single attempt I ever made to train and race, study, work, create a business, invest, adopt, recreate, drive, even get medical care for God’s sake, you turned every cell phone and laptop into extremely compromising and dangerous tracking devices, and forced me to live normal life like a fugitive or refugee for absolutely no reason that I can see other than a very perverse love of human sport hunting I suppose … and in general attacked virtually any possible behavior I engaged in that would serve to better myself or my position in society. There is very real fear now instilled in my mind, real urgency, and while I hope the future reveals this to be further blown, I would rather, in your words, “rather be safe than sorry” and get out while I’m still able to, as the last thing I would ever want for myself is, sadly, what wound up being Brody’s last moment as well, surrounded by people who hated him, who refused to treat him fairly or equally, who hunted him in a cruel and cold calculated manner, who pulled every lever or power for the sake of his destruction. I regret that I failed to find a way to shepherd him to safety and that I feel strongly this very webpage proved the final “transgression” these monsters needed to justify what they really wanted to do to us all along.
Oh, and to the Skidmore Market goons and apparently, shockingly, most of the vendors I would soon learn … I’m glad I got a bit more insight just before I my departure into who I was standing among. There was a day shortly before my removal where this guy came through with a mic and a cameraman, and several of the setup guys and vendors lost their freaking shit. They were so excited! “who is that?” I wondered aloud. “TYLER OLIVERA!!!!!!!!!” I was told. He’s a legend apparently. 8 MILLION FOLLOWERS!!!!!!
I eagerly gave him my interview about “decriminalization of drugs in Portland” and offered my own experience - that it had had absolutely zero impact on my sales, and that the only thing holding our dying streetfair back is us, the collective messaging about drugs and homelessness that is overblown, politically motivated, and an obvious pretext for corporate interests and/or Rene Gonzalez to seize power. I added that my sales were in fact way higher back when we had a real “homeless problem” and that unloading my car amidst tents lined up along the sidewalk only conjured one emotion in my mind - gratitude for what I had and sympathy for what the people in the tents do not or never did.
Obviously I didn’t make the cut! Amazing video you guys, it’s very difficult work going to the downtown core of a city, singling out the inevitable few homeless strung out people, and narrating that “you’re shooting up” when someone is not, or “those are gunshots” when there are no gunshots, and close-cropping the scene so nobody can see how peaceful and normal - boring and totally utterly dead and devoid of passion, zest, and life (that is Y’ALL’s contribution, not mine, me and Brody did all we could to lift the place up a notch) in fact - the setting actually is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWFlpCBMyIk
Anyway, my point - I forgot - simply that I assumed that because I was selling in downtown Portland that I was standing among “hippies,” only to learn that I was actually surrounded by closet MAGA People who sell to largely Liberal tourists but secretly hate them the entire time and never realized it, nor did they that I was actually a normal decent human being aka “radical leftist extremist.” My bad for making that known via this page.
I think at the end of the day, I’m just tired of being around that element. I don’t want to engage with populist morons for any reason in any environment for extended periods of time. I’m also tired of “high class” Conservative American HOA culture, the kind I fight when I come home from trips to downtown, which unlike my market peers know better, and have more options, and choose to discriminate, segregate, isolate, target, hunt, with cold calculated precision. I think of these people when I travel to foreign countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, and you can immediately tell where the Americans live - the development surrounded by concrete walls, spikes, sharp cyclone fencing, surveillance cameras, and hired security guards to ward off the real local residents of the country whose culture and language they condescend to - “moss sirvaysuh seen-yore!!!”. I guess running gives me a break mentally from that, while paradoxically also physically putting me on more of their radars via illicit real-time location tech tied to my face and voice and devices. So I don’t know where “escaping” is realistic or if it is realistic at all, so long as I’m in countries whose cellular and internet systems are all tied in with the servers accessed by the Imperialist American private-public surveillance industrial complex. I’m probably just fucked frankly. I know this and so I just sit here wasting time, not even wanting to travel anymore because I know how it’s going to go, and how crushing it always is when I find out, and how I seem to be the Common Enemy that unites the worst of the worst the world over and they show no willingness to abandon that mindframe or modus operandi. I think from the perspective of government, example-making centered on me, and people like me, helps distract their idiots so that they don’t organize to rise up against their own masters who fed me to them while, fittingly, starving them of any real sustenance. You can obviously tell I love dogs if you scour my page. One thing I never really did was operant or classic conditioning, I wasn’t big on treats for behavior (oh I fed and “treated” the shit out of them but it wasn’t necessarily “sit! heel!” treating, it was just “I love you dude, want a snack?”) I think that’s how the masses are basically controlled by the so-called elites in America, and the most underrated issue is how the paycheck, and the strings / cultural expectations attached to it, is the clearest means by which Americans, and maybe people in general, are being radicalized.
You’re going to get bombarded over the coming decade with plenty of messaging from the industry about “data for good.” The most likely use case for Big Data is simply “data for money,” which is more than sufficient to indoctrinate and/or seduce or otherwise bind you (already your 401Ks, college funds, mortgages, etc, are heavily dependent on the performance of a select few data traffickers) to its siren song.
But there’s a barely-fully-realized dark side which is “data for social control” which is only just getting rolling and, like our current air pollution crisis, will come home to roost long after you’re dead and gone and can be present to say “it was a mistake for our generation to put its short-term best interests above the long term interests of our family members.”
I’ve seen ethical concerns either deliberately suppressed by the worst actors (see “data for good” link above), or nonchalantly ignored by those benefiting financially (aiming messaging at “marketing and sales” but knowing it can and will fall into a far broader and shadier net of very bad actors, to say nothing of marketing/sales ethics dilemmas). Perhaps a way I can put it that’s personal for me, and brace yourself for a Random Ass Metaphor - if I had to watch the chicken get its head cut off I would be a vegetarian, but I don’t and so I’m not. Most of those people trafficking in data benefit somehow, and obviously don’t feel the pain of their mistakes or failures to safeguard their products - so like me dipping those nuggets in honey mustard, it’s easy for them to rationalize the negative externalities and pretend they don’t exist because they don’t have to look their victims in the eye.
There was a whole lot of data that was bought and sold consistently over 10 years (and counting) of my life, especially pertaining to locatable movement, which literally took innocent lives, wrecked livelihoods, destroyed psyches, stole freedom, facilitated robbery and extortion, and sapped the joy out of countless thoudands of once-anonymous and private routines or simple pleasures. You could say it broke me. So there’s that, in addition to the fact that the vast majority of the data economy’s purported benefits to date have proven to be snake oil.
Beyond my personal experience, there was the data that facilitated mass deportations, targeted assassinations, unjust incarceration, or various forms of social manipulation / engineering whose aim was not aligned with my values to say the very least.
For some reason, and here comes an even Random-er metaphor, which in and of itself was a metaphor … I keep thinking of “The God’s Must be Crazy” the movie. How cathartic it would be for us all if we could just toss this proverbial Coca-Cola bottle off of the edge of the Earth and resume living as we were. Things weren’t perfect before the data economy but they are obviously less perfect post-big-data so who really gives a flying crap?
There is such a thing as data for gain, data for gratification, data for power, data for advantage, data for exploitation, but I don’t genuinely think, even in a restructured and regulated form, that there really is or ever can be such a thing as “data for good.”