I lived most of my life sitting in front of a computer screen. For myself and others, social media and video games became avenues of escape in a decaying society. Worlds saner than the chaos and destruction of the physical, and whose digital currencies, in addition to others such as cryptocurrencies. became a means of survival in a real world consumed by hyperinflation.
Survival also meant dealing with the growing digital presence of the socialist regime, bypassing its censorship and dancing around its hate speech laws.
When my mom and I first connected to the internet in 1997, we did so using these pre-paid time cards from a long-defunct Internet Service Provider. At the guidance of a cousin of mine, we both signed up for our very own email with Hotmail, a name that nine-year-old me meant it was a naughty thing because I knew “hot” was the Spanish word for Caliente.
Still, I browsed Nintendo’s website in search of video game information and stumbled upon some cheat codes while my mom mostly focused on looking for medical information for her work and whatnot — all of it, of course, in all of its 28.8 Kbps dial-up glory.
30 years later, in 2017, give or take a couple months, I was using the internet as a means to survive the collapse of Venezuelan socialism, using a VPN login provided by a kind stranger to bypass censorship and to have some sort of protection against the regime’s scrutiny. Most importantly, I played a near-daily MAC address spoofing Russian roulette and other archaic workarounds to circumvent the regime’s traffic shaping nonsense that slowed down the outbound flow of information to a crawl in times of intense protests.
Keep in mind that Hugo Chávez and his Venezuelan socialist regime rose to power in 1999, a simpler era before the iPhone and social media ruined everything. A time in which the internet was this niche novelty, not everyone had a computer, and cyber cafes were still a few years away from becoming common locales.
Thus, for the longest time, at least during the first seven to nine years of the revolution, the regime didn’t really have a need to censor the internet in Venezuela. The priority was, first and foremost, television, radio, and then the printed press shortly afterwards. The first two were censored with legal instruments such as the infamous 2004 “RESORTE” gag law, revoking and not renewing broadcasting licenses, and coercion tactics to force media to self-sensor. The printed press was most notably censored through economic asphyxiation, as the regime controlled the imports of paper and other supplies, and thus decided who and how much they got to print.
Later on they could seize newspaper, radio, and tv offices and infrastructure, leaving a limping, mutilated traditional media in Venezuela.
Now, for the internet, many around the country largely relied on CANTV, a once state-owned company that got privatized in the past and then re-nationalized under Chávez in 2007 as part of his plans to transform Venezuela into a socialist state. CANTV, by far, had a quasi monopoly of internet access and infrastructure in Venezuela — made worse by the fact that, quite simply, the private alternatives sucked, and they sucked hard.
Unfortunatedly, but fortuitous to Chávez and his plans, the nationalization of CANTV came right as the massification of smartphones, social media, and the perpetually connected world of today spread throughout the globe. Now people had phones with cameras, which could record anything from cute kitties to gruesome police repression, and then upload it to the internet. Nope, can’t have that unchecked.
The regime also started to establish an online foothold to monitor and suppress dissent, making people way of what they said under their real names on social media — and one of the many, many examples of why I’m a fervent defender of the sacrosanct concept of online anonymity, something I casted away off for personal reasons back when I asked for financial help in 2017.
At the same time, the regime started setting up bot farms to peddle pro-regime propaganda on Twitter, Facebook, and other places. Socialists also rallied up on “troops” that would work together for the same purpose — often clashing with online opponents of the regime, and leading to many virtual battles that saw the weaponization of social media’s report systems for the mutual assured destruction of accounts across both factions.
I myself didn’t have CANTV broadband access up until 2002, after I became more and more a recluse, the internet became my haven. As the years went by I got myself a “PhD in CANTV bullshit” as I started learning how to work around the ever collapsing and obsolete ADSL connection and bypass their shoddy censorship tactics while my connection became slower and slower.
The regime’s first attempts to censor free access to the internet in Venezuela were one of the sloppiest things I’ve seen in my life, and anyone with a modicum of computer knowledge would cringe at how hilariously ignorant the socialist lawmakers of that era were. Some of them made open calls to “regulate” internet content in Venezuela and establish “parental control hours” similar to those imposed to traditional media through RESORTE (long story short, they implemented content hours not because of they “thought of the children” but because it was a discrete way to reduce the hours in which protests and other “violent” stuff could be shown).
Another, more ignorant lawmaker, reminded his peers that censoring the internet wasn’t enough, because there’s also the “Mozilla,” as in, Firefox, the browser. He in his absolute ignorance thought that Internet Explorer and Firefox were two completely different “internets.”
Later on, he would make calls to replace Google and the Chrome browser with a regime-made search engine. Other, more recent calls involved the creation of their own social media, as if one would be that naive to fall for that bait. That said, one such regime-made social media platform, VenApp, was retrofitted with features to persecute dissidents.
All those nonsensical ways to “regulate” internet were justified around this one website that tracked the exchange rate of the U.S. dollar in local black markets — something highly illegal at the time, to the point that traditional media was prohibited from even mentioning the mere existence of parallel, free exchange rate markets outside of the regime-controlled rates.
Websites such as the one I described, and international outlets were among the first that the regime censored by blocking them via DNS. A simple solution was to use Google, Cloudfare, or any other DNS provider.
Newer forms of “soft-censorship” began to make their appearance from 2013 onwards. First and foremost, the regime, which basically controlled most of the country’s household internet connectivity, started doing traffic shaping, severely slowing down connections to a crawl, and with an insane latency that made anything beyond basic web browsing essentially unusable, including gaming, of course.
Their censorship tactics evolved as time went on, and anything from apps to harmless services like Pastebin were caught in the crossfire so as to deprive protesters of online tools they used to pass information. Ultimately, Venezuelans became quite knowledgeable in the use of VPNs, with certain providers such as ProtonVPN going as far as to offer free access to their service in times of need.
Selectively blocking websites became the norm too. Take for instance YouTube, the regime would often block access to it minutes before an opposition politician was slated to deliver a speech. Access to it would be restored right as the broadcast finished, thus saving face — since they hail themselves as paragons of free speech and all that nonsense.
As for the traffic shaping, me and so many others started to find some sense out of it in the hopes to overcome it. The phenomenon was commonly referred to as the “11-11” due to the fact that the traffic shaping and lag would start at 11:00a.m. and end at 11:00p.m. like clockwork. In rare cases, some where afflicted with a “reverse 11-11” instead.
At times, this could be bypassed if you used an “atypical” VPN connection to a server, say, not to a “United States” server but one with an IP/country that the regime wasn’t interested in throttling. This personally resulted in funny scenarios where using SoftEther VPN to connect to a server in Japan made my internet work better than without it.
But the one, tried and true way to overcome the throttling was to simply spoof the MAC address of your router, forcing CANTV’s old ADSL infrastructure to assign you another IP (they used dynamic IPs) in the hopes of landing in a non-throttled IP. To my understanding, the regime did not throttle every single IP/gateway at once, so as long as you kept trying and with enough luck, you’d be unthrottled, at least for a couple days.
Maybe it’d only take you 2-3 tries, maybe it’d take you hours of trying, it was all up to luck. I never knew 100% why this worked, it just did. Maybe they had some gateways not throttled for their own use, who knows.
Another trick that I largely relied on was to use old ADSL connection methods, which due to how obsolete CANTV’s platform was, made your connection work better and smoother. The gist of it was to switch your modem from ADSL mode to g.dmt and tinkering with other related settings. Since the speeds were so low (1-4mbps), you wouldn’t see a difference in performance, but you would see a massive improvement in latency, crucial for online gaming.
The modem tinkering + the 11-11 MAC address spoofing roulette was the bread and butter that allowed me to play online video games amidst the collapse of it all — leading to the infamous World of Warcraft gold saga and the online notoriety I accrued through it.
Perhaps it might be a superfluous thing to worry about online gaming in a country gone awry, especially during the collapse of Venezuela during the 2010s, but hey, everyone needs a break from doing the third bread line of the week, or and video games was how I blew up steam, more so since I couldn’t afford Steam games at the time.
Maybe World of Warcraft had a contributing factor in me flunking college, maybe not (the main and most important reason was me flunking math), but it sure was the main reason for some barely sleeping for a couple hours before going to class, since I used to play with my friends up until some late midnight hours.
But hey, playing WoW paid off for me, not because I’m a successful and famous WoW streamer, but because the wow gold sage and its consequences had a huge cascading factor into other important things, such as obtaining Italian citizenship. It all paid off, maybe everything does happen for a reason.
That said, I cannot confirm for a fact that my actions may have been what led to Blizzard Entertainment disabling gift purchases through their own storefront for Venezuelan accounts — one of the ways in which I “laundered” virtual WoW gold into local Venezuelan bolivars.
While WoW was my haven, area of expertise — and a crucial means for survival once the country collapsed and I lived the darkest years of my life — Venezuelans became infamously known for similar antics in Runescape.
Another, rather personal obstacle I had to overcome was the fact that my ADSL wiring was wearing out, and I often had to rewire it, but that only solved the problems in one end. The building’s 20+ year old wiring forced me to tinker with my modem and sacrifice much of my already slow speed for some stability — but that could only go for so long, and I ultimately had to pay for a CANTV worker to connect me to another terminal, only for that to start falling apart too weeks later.
The regime’s online surveillance and persecution of people who posted dissident content became worse overnight after they passed the 2017 “anti-hate speech law.” This made people more wary of what they said, and take more necessary precautions such as anonymity, avoiding posting certain keywords, and dancing around words, which is the main reason why I’d publicly refer to Nicolás Maduro as “Empanada Man” not because of the incident in which he ate an empanada on live tv while the country starved to death, but to avoid mentioning him directly by name.
I’m not going to claim that I’m super ultra famous or even an online “celebrity” in Venezuela, but a considerable portion of say, my Twitter audience, comes from Venezuela. The online censorship became much, but much worse, months after I left Venezuela in 2024 and within the context of Maduro’s highly fraudulent July 2024 presidential election.
Since then, the regime has banned a lot more websites, including that of VPN services. Twitter was outright banned, and so did TikTok, at least for a while.
It’s rather peculiar to see how my Venezuelan audience “plummeted” overnight according to Twitter’s metrics. It’s also rather peculiar to see how this vanished Venezuelan audience was instantly replaced by what the metrics see as an increase in Americans, Mexicans, Argentines, Canadians, and other nations. There was no such drastic change in audience, it’s just that Venezuelans were forced to get a VPN to access Twitter.
Cryptocurrency played a crucial role in my survival and that of others during those years, it still does for thousands of Venezuelans back home. It is not everyone’s cup of tea, yes, but it sure saved my butt and got me out of a few pinches here and there.
I also received some financial aid through crypto, and since I didn’t had a working payment method for international or online purchases (due to the regime’s draconian currency control laws), I managed to convert crypto into other assets such as gift cards, and then use those to get some stuff for my mom via Amazon — nothing fancy, but small things like socks, ointments, and other locally hard to find supplies. These helped her get a bit more of comfort in her final days, and that’s something I’ll always be grateful for.
A provocative joke meme of mine, in combination with crypto, also helped me overcome a dental emergency that my brother had in December 2021.
Back in, I’d say June-July 2021, a lot of terminally-online people (mostly kids) got seriously offended at this one meme for some reason. Those were the years of the dumb NFT craze, so to add insult to injury I turned a screenshot of the meme into an “NFT” and put it up for sale, getting more people riled up in the process.
I got a bunch of offers to buy it, a couple dollars at most. What I could have not foreseen at the time is that minutes before the auction was over, someone straight up purchased it for a rather nice sum of Ethereum that, by December 2021, was worth a bit over $500 — which effectively makes me a “successful artist?” I don’t know.
Either way, I actually got interviewed by it on a local Venezuelan outlet, and explained that I wasn’t actually a serious NFT seller and that the whole thing spawned as a joke at the expense of those offended by the original meme.
The cryptocurrency proceedings were supposed to go towards our escape from Venezuela, but I had to cash in on them in December 2021 to pay for my brother’s dental work and to save his broken molar.
To add one final insult to injury over all that ordeal, I publicly thanked the anonymous buyer first and foremost, but also thanked everyone that got offended, as their collective rage would do some good in the end and help save my brother’s tooth.
Staying safe and maintaining basic telecommunications security is paramount when it comes to living in regimes such as Venezuela’s. Ever since I was a kid and my family started having cellphones towards the late 1990s, my uncle, a retired Venezuelan Army Colonel, used to seriously stress upon the need to keep discretion with what was said over phones, he repeated this to my grandmother, mom, uncles, aunts, and me and my other cousins as we slowly started having devices of our own.
Time proved him right. Take for instance Movistar, the cellphone carrier I used for over two decades other than between 2006 – 2009 In 2022, Spanish company Telefonica, of which Movistar is a subsidiary of, admitted that, as of 2021 it had tapped 20% of all of its cellphone lines in the country — one in every five clients.
“[But] you can’t say that over the phone” was a recurring phrase espoused among the members of my family. My dad became very wary of saying “spicy” political things over the phone, more so as he got older — and definitely after one of his brothers and cousin was arrested in 2009 for allegedly “hoarding” the people’s food.
Things have gotten much dire these days, and it has become common practice for Venezuelan police and National Guard to arrest people if they find dissident or anti-regime media/messages on their devices.