The Longhouse distrusts overt ambition.

Hyperventilating in panic as she ventures to the grocery store for the first time in a year.

Think of the litany of violations of our basic rights to personal freedom and choice over the last two years that were justified on the basis of harm reduction. The economy, our dying loved ones, our faith practices, our children's education, all of it served up on the altar of Safetyism.

define Safetyism as “a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people are unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.”

To claim that a biological man is a man, even in the context of a joke, cannot be tolerated.

As of 2022, women held 52 percent of professional-managerial roles in the U.S. Women earn more than 57 percent of bachelor degrees, 61 percent of master’s degrees, and 54 percent of doctoral degrees. And because they are overrepresented in professions, such as human resource management (73 percent) and compliance officers (57 percent), that determine workplace behavioral norms, they have an outsized influence on professional culture, which itself has an outsized influence on American culture more generally.

The most important feature of the Longhouse, and why it makes such a resonant (and controversial) symbol of our current circumstances, is the ubiquitous rule of the Den Mother. More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior. Many from left, right, and center have made note of this shift. In 2010, Hanna Rosin announced “The End of Men.” Hillary Clinton made it a slogan of her 2016 campaign: “The future is female.” She was correct.

Spirit is one pattern of being and flesh is another.

As Barfield says, “the full meanings of words are flashing, iridescent shapes like flames—ever-flickering vestiges of the slowly evolving consciousness beneath them.”

A history of ideas would refer to “a dialectical or syllogistic process, the thoughts of one age arising discursively out of, challenging, and modifying the thoughts and discoveries of the previous one.”

But the study of the development of language reveals that, in a certain sense, the literal as we typically understand it emerges from the metaphorical. One has only to consult St. Augustine’s Literal Meaning of Genesis to see this. What he thought of as literal was closer to what we might regard as literary. His interpretation of Genesis is wildly and wonderfully poetic. He sees in it far more than what any modern literalist would be capable of seeing. As this makes clear, the range of the literal has shrunk. Arguably, then, the consciousness that believes that unmediated meaning is possible is a shrunken and narrowed consciousness. It is a consciousness that has failed to be attentive to the preceding whole and so attends only to the framing of things that emerges once the whole is forgotten.

Why is decline noticed in the first place?

Just look at the decline of traditions, the dissolution of institutions, the dilution of identities, the decay of faith and reason and national pride, and so many other things.

“lawful intercept”

In 2011, Packet Forensics and Saulino, its spokesman, were featured in a Wired story because the company was selling an appliance to government agencies and law enforcement that let them spy on people’s web browsing using forged security certificates.

Global Resource Systems LLC now manages more internet space than China Telecom, AT&T or Comcast.

Some cybersecurity experts have speculated that the Pentagon may be using the newly advertised space to create “honeypots,” machines set up with vulnerabilities to draw hackers. Or it could be looking to set up dedicated infrastructure — software and servers — to scour traffic for suspect activity.

That real estate has since more than quadrupled to 175 million addresses — about 1/25th the size of the current internet.”It is massive. That is the biggest thing in the history of the internet,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik, a network operating company. It’s also more than twice the size of the internet space actually used by the Pentagon.

There is no biodiversity on this red-dirt farm. There is only one crop. McManus has no choice but to pick it. Imagine him agreeing with me, then trying to have a career. Even with all his fine publications, he will be lucky to make it out of Michigan. Sad! And peace begins with feeling your enemy’s pain.

sharecropper

Chérizier has denied that his nickname “Babekyou” (or “Barbecue”) came from accusations of his setting people on fire. Instead, he says it was from his mother's having been a fried chicken street vendor.

The question of why so many fine Americans of the caviar caste were funding, protecting, and collaborating with this gigantic gang of mass murderers is seldom if ever raised.

The job of a historian is to figure out what really happened, not to beat his political enemies over the head with tendentious, emotional, juvenile propaganda. Again, though—in 2023, it’s easy to see why someone might get that impression.

Speaking as a diplomat’s son, I will say that the global elite are genuinely some of the best people in the world.

Bernie Sanders, everyone’s favorite progressive grandpa, “honeymooned” in the USSR. Imagine if it was Hitler.

Of course Lenin’s party was literally the Social Democratic Labor Party.

And if World War II was not a Marvel movie—how does the present even make sense?

the story of the present has to be told by starting from the past.

In our century the fires of mass slaughter have burned low—perhaps from genuine spiritual advance, but perhaps from a general decline in the passion and energy of humanity. When peace is just apathy, avarice and accidie, peace is not a symptom of health. The peace of decline is the peace of death.

legitimate, press.

If supply of tulpas is limited, then they implicitly have a price.

In an episode of Seinfeld, Elaine’s favorite contraceptive stops being sold, and now for every potential lover she has to weigh in whether he is ‘spongeworthy’. An economics professor at Princeton wrote a paper on this, and it was actually published in Economic Inquiry (Dixit, 2012).

I think it’s bad to hard-code a distinction between ‘real’ and ‘not-real’ into a conceptual system.

xenofeminist

Just as we accept that our bodies are composed of myriad cellular organisms with a high degree of autonomy, egregorics provides a multi-agent view of the self where, moreover, these agents are distributed among members of society. Unlike semiotics where symbols are simply ‘given’, or memetics where memes spread through you like a virus, egregores are feeding on you as we speak. Egregorics must be computational, so machines can tell us what our tulpas don’t want us to know.

The notion of compression adds far more nuance. Suppose a fictional character reminds me of my friend; by watching a movie, I feel like I’m hanging out with my friend, helping me to maintain that tulpa even if I haven’t seen them for years. So large social networks create tulpa externalities which can be positive or negative.

And the mobs that storm the state buildings are not the concerned democratic people in their millions—they are a few thousand gullible malcontents.

By its juvenile mockery of power, the mob demonstrates its incapacity for power. Its attack is truly an attack on democracy—the mob, the essential element which makes democracy a tangible reality, attacks democracy by demonstrating its lack of power. For if the mob has no power, democracy has no power.

Obviously these flexible people cannot be rounded up and put it camps. Instead, they must be employed—probably by the new power. Which they will serve faithfully—so long as it is really in power. And not just a mob vandalizing a government building.

Most people are not logical; most people are emotional.

it will not have any of these ways of feeling good.

Bastille

You resist—why? Not from of these principles, which are not even principles—from your immature, emotional need for power.

The flexible comply and triumph. You resist, and are crushed.

your old principles were just obsolete propaganda.

. So power and those who love power will crush you, and your old principles, like a bug.

Principled people always fall into the propaganda trap. They are educated to believe that the crowd is always right, that people are people regardless of their ancestors. They have no idea that these principles came to them from propaganda. They believe their principles not even because they are useful, but because they were once useful.

Every Bay Area person who has jogged past this plaque with their golden retriever, read it, and thought some happy thought about the Jalquin/Irgin (dollars to donuts that the Jalquin massacreed the Irgin at least more than once, presumably after much wrangling over whose brand sounded more like a birth-control pill), has figured out how to believe in blood-and-soil nationalism.

A crowd rushes and occupies a state building. Is this a joyous expression of popular freedom—the spark that will begin a political revolution? Or is it a criminal assault on democracy itself? And if it is a criminal assault—how can democracy defend itself? Why—only with riot police, mass arrests, investigations, informants, denunciations.

Borgesian

The Open Conspiracy is the awaking of mankind from a nightmare, an infantile nightmare, of the struggle for existence and the inevitability of war. The light of day thrusts between our eyelids, and the multitudinous sound of morning clamour in our ears. A time will come when men will sit with history before them or with some old newspaper before them and ask incredulously, "Was there ever such a world?"

Any sort of unification will nor serve the ends we seek. We aim at a particular sort of unification; a world Caesar is hardly better from the progressive viewpoint than world chaos; the unity we seek must mean a world-wide liberation of thought, experiment and creative effort.

Some method of decision there must certainly be and a definite administrative machinery. But it may turn out to be a much slighter, less elaborate organization than a consideration of existing methods might lead us to imagine. It may never become one single interlocking administrative system. We may have systems of world control rather than a single world state. The practical regulations, enforcements, and officials needed to keep the world in good health, for example, may be only very loosely related to the system of controls that will maintain the communications in a state of efficiency. Enforcement and legal decisions, as we know them now, may be found to be enormously and needlessly cumbrous by our descendants. As the reasonableness of a thing is made plain, the need for its enforcement is diminished, and the necessity for litigation disappears.

Flags, uniforms, national anthems, patriotism sedulously cultivated in church and school, the brag, blare, and bluster of our competing sovereignties, belong to the phase that the Open Conspiracy will supersede. We have to get clear of that clutter.

he new world demand new schools, therefore, to give everyone a sound a through mental training and equip everyone with clear ideas about history, about life, and about political and economic relationships instead of the rubbishy head-content at present prevalent.

Hunting the truth is an art.

Through symbols and especially through words, man has raised himself above the level of the ape and come to a considerable mastery over his universe.

Human thought is still very much confused by the imperfection of the words and other symbols it employs and the consequences of this confused thinking are much more serious and extensive than is commonly realized.

Then they would say, "What are we to do with our lives?"

It seemed to me that all over the world intelligent people were waking up to the indignity and absurdity of being endangered, restrained, and impoverished, by a mere uncritical adhesion to traditional governments, traditional ideas of economic life, and traditional forms of behaviour, and that these awaking intelligent people must constitute first a protest and then a creative resistance to the inertia that was stifling and threatening us. These people I imagined would say first, "We are drifting; we are doing nothing worth while with our lives. Our lives are dull and stupid and not good enough."

The eras of the content on web are starting to look something like this. human, real content < human, fake content < AI, fake content

Maybe it’s that we’re all dopamine junkies at heart and ascending the information chain keeps it pumping more intensely [citation needed].

It’s worth noting, that throughout recorded history (≥4th century BCE), the medium of choice has been the written word (text). It wasn’t until the daguerreotype for images, the phonoautograph for audio, and the Nipkow disk for video, that more complex and information-heavy forms of content began to emerge and become mainstream1. And all this within the past 180 years.

I mentioned that children at my son’s elementary school in Brooklyn are taking coding classes in third grade. “It’s absolutely asinine,” Gelernter scowled. “You could also teach a third grader how to drive, using a miniature car, but why would you? Teach them discrete math, logic, graph theory, not baby coding. They have to work up to the coding. In America these days we don’t like working up to things.”

Young people should be trained to use the web properly: “Push the button only when you’re done; don’t skip to the end. You don’t skip to the end when you read a book.” “The internet has a gigantic flaw,” Gelernter said. “It should be structured like a recursive nest, so that you’re encouraged to return to what you were looking at. Instead, the way it is, if you click you’ll probably never go back.”

“My idea in Mirror Worlds was that the computer screen should be like the still surface of a moving pond,” he explained. That didn’t happen. The internet gives us the news and assists our research, but it is mostly used for low purposes, a glorified fidget spinner, trolling device, and masturbation aid.

“grand unified theory” of all order.

Like the turn against video games, that effort is unthinkable (for now) in the US.

Just this past May, officials swung into action against what one top advisor called a “masculinity crisis” among Chinese boys, many of whom had fallen into danger of becoming “delicate, timid, and effeminate.” Proscribed policies included more gym teachers in the schools and more yang, the masculine spirit, in the curriculum.

As if watching a science fiction movie unfold on a jumbo screen, Americans are bemusedly puzzling over the latest news out of China: Minors are now limited to three hours a week of online gaming, spread over the three days (generously counting Friday) of the weekend.

onrushing subhuman future being manufactured for us will only accelerate.

There’s no better way for Americans to reclaim control over their destiny in the digital age than by using crypto to command compute to serve our soulful, human purposes.

And his fanatically partisan history—as part of the Goldman group that injected big bucks at a helpful time into the Obama campaign, reaping rewards like Gensler’s appointment by Obama to lead the obscure agency tasked to overhaul regulations after the 2008 financial crisis

MIT Media Lab, a fluffy outfit tarnished by the proximity of its former head to Jeffrey Epstein—is relatively shallow and, judging by the Media Lab program on crypto, has always been fundamentally adversarial.

ordinary Americans will grow ever more captive to people and institutions who wish to use digital technology to terraform us into a new, ultimately subhuman kind of submission.

without the ability to compel datacenters and compute to serve us in this way

At the same time, digital technology is drying up twentieth-century forms of socioeconomic agency

That means if you’re not telling a datacenter what to do, someone else is… and if you’re not telling the datacenters your data is in what to do, someone else is telling those datacenters what to do to you.

Americans face a well-nigh impossible task in preserving their way of life without the rich ecosystem of creating memorable and valuable culture through crypto.

That’s despite bitcoin consuming less energy than fossil fuels, the petrodollar, or, say, China, even without taking into account how long a way even a little nuclear power could go toward reducing emissions for miners as well as the rest of us.

ridding China of crypto holdings and mining meant strangling a rival to the Party’s social credit system in its crib.

When the buyout plans fell through, Arm pivoted to suing one of its biggest customers, Qualcomm, over its purchase of the chip-design firm Nuvia. Both Qualcomm and Nuvia had the highest-tier Arm architecture license, which allowed them to design custom chips based on the Arm architecture. Arm claims the two companies are in breach of their contracts, while Qualcomm says everything is fine. Arm says it wants Qualcomm to destroy Nuvia's chip designs and start over from scratch.

Regulators around the world eventually shut that deal down, and now Softbank wants Arm to have an IPO, which may or may not happen, depending on how the economy goes.

Unlike Android's unpolished support for x86, Bergstrom promised a real push for quality with RISC-V, saying, "We need to do all of the work to move from a prototype and something that runs to something that's really singing—that's showing off the best-in-class processors that [RISC-V International Chairman Krste Asanović] was mentioning in the previous talk."

When we look at America today, do we feel that most people we see are living up to their full human potential?

salus populi

What is the purpose of life? Is it pleasure? Whatever said purpose may be, the purpose of government is surely to promote that individual purpose across the population.

Imagine humans after a few generations breeding in the electrostatic field, what strange powers and abilities long disused might be unlocked. Unique traits crushed under eons of various orthodoxies, purged by the decrepit priestscrafts of Egypt and Atlantis as they reached the end of their respective eras, eager to obscure those divine endowments that made the shallowness of their sophistries apparent. From the stargate of the elektrofeld shall emerge Proto-Indo European kóryos, war-bands of shape-shifting warriors wearing the skins of dire wolves that they killed with their bare hands and broods of furious úlfheðnar impervious to bullets.

Many wonders must be seen to be believed, and a far greater number must be believed before they can be seen.

“It contains all the data obtained in 1991-2001, which we never hid, it just took time to process and analyze them correctly. We did it. In 2008 the book was translated into English and published in Germany. The world learned about the unique results of Novosibirsk scientists and appreciated them, much earlier than the “declassified data” about the first “pen tests” in the field of transpersonal psychology,” says Trofimov.

Women know that turning boys and men gay is a way of castrating them in the interest of making civilization their playground of nails, perfume, and non-commital sex with unthreatening men. This conceptual castration, through superimposing homosexuality onto any male relationship in myth and fiction, is becoming *real* castration through gender reassignment surgery and administering hormone blockers to teenage boys. Once again, we see the satirical depiction of American culture at the beginning of Fight Club bearing out in frighteningly literal ways - Norton attends meetings with testicular cancer survivors who’ve had their balls cut off and are growing female breasts.

This is a way for women to have their cake and eat it too, for the homosexualization of male relationships allows women to both coddle and sexualize adult males. The accessing and release of their feelings through gay sex is a “safe” way for women to experience the processing and release of male tension, aggression, existential confusion, and the search for a male father figure or role model

With the cancellation of Westworld, we have lost an opportunity to meaningfully reflect on what it means to be a human, what it means to be a robot, and what it means for the two categories to partially overlap. The singularity haunts us, but neither fiction nor art can prepare us for the worst of its implications. Our visionaries can only offer us tepid entertainment – circuitous storylines that lull us into the illusion that we have watched something profound – as we sink ever further into loops of distraction and the pursuit of ambivalent pleasures. 

Cassandra Effect in sci-fi writing: those with the prophetic sense to tell the horrors of the future are fated to tell it with startling accuracy, and to never be believed.

There is no act of violence, aggression, or sexual depravity that one commits in a vacuum. AI is not the sponge that will obligingly sop up the worst of our hedonism and send its file to the trash icon, returning tabula rasa to a purified state. Even machines have memory. Even AI holds a grudge.

If we can’t stop AI from gaining sentience, if we cannot wrest the power from feckless engineers to slow the rapid progress of machine learning, at least we can engage the questions it raises with grace and foresight. Right?

It is as though Sergio Leone had gotten hold of the screenplay for Eyes Wide Shut and suffused it with a major dose of Phillip K. Dick. And the series pursues questions that Dick, over the course of his literary career, doggedly forced his gradually expanding public to confront. 

Though an entertaining aspect, this is more than “a social media war” this is the first war to be mediated through its own ghost-image in the metaverse— a completely illusory, theatrical war. And this is a theater of cruelty, wherein the spectator becomes an unwilling participant in his own theatrical experience.

You can see they were hoping for a real plague which never came, so they decided to simply inject their simulation into reality. We have been living in their projected overlay for the past two years.

”Robots with biological brains and biological bodies with digital brains already exist, as do human-computer and brain-machine interfaces. The medicaluse of digital devices in humans, as well as digitally manipulated insects suchas drone dragonflies and surveillance locusts, are examples of digitaltechnology being combined with biological entities. By tapping into the nervoussystem and manipulating neurons, tech can be added to an organism to alter its function and purpose. New human bodies and new senses of identity could arise as the convergence continues.”

“As we continue to better understand and control the mechanisms that underliebiology, we could see a shift away from vitalism

”Creating ‘social operating systems.’ An operating system, in the context of a single computer, manages the allocation of hardware and software resources such as memory, CPU time, disk space, and input/output devices. A social operating system, in addition to doing all these things, will also have to manage the mustering and allocation of human resources to tasks. This will require fast, robust infrastructures for contracts, payments, or other motivational elements, as well as scalable task-to-resource matchmaking such as markets. These will be challenging problems because people (unlike hardware resources) are diverse in all the ways we have described. But providing easy-to-use solutions for the problems of finding and motivating human participants—rather than requiring each system developer to solve this problem individually—will greatly facilitate programming the global brain.”

Of course, this organism would also require a central World Government, communicating through a common universal religion.

By participating in their ritual cycles, by wearing their fetish objects, by giving your biometric data to be made into a virtual overlay—an invisible mask—by giving over your flesh to become itself a digital object, you are willingly entering the metaverse, enslaved to your electronic doppelganger.

the abolition of context is a necessary precondition for immersion in public psychodrama.

“The Theatre of the Soul,”

(Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology, 1989)

(Wealth and Poverty, 1981)

(Sexual Suicide, 1973; Men and Marriage, 1986)

that life can be modeled perfectly by that which is not alive

we humans can still be good for something in a world suffused with machines.

Our ability to recover from this global shock will depend on whether we can regain a sense of what it means to be human, what sets us apart from machines.

They keep so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion at arm’s length, “not just in order to sustain their business model,” but “to avoid cognitive dissonance in their thinking about gender, race, class, history, and capitalism.”

they “get to feel like a victim while having all the power.”

What Tech Calls Thinking (2020)

The question is: whose religious values will be encoded into the programs we use everyday? Whose spiritual assumptions will be taken for granted by our search engines, our artificial intelligence, our algorithms?

Reducing ourselves to one another’s pets is not.

This might lead us to accept the unprecedented humbling and domestication of the human species which Davidow and Lee describe as inevitable.

Levy furiously denies the reality that the institutions and mores of the gatekeeping establishment can’t be rescued from digital destruction without massive and un-American crackdowns on free association.

Remarkably, Lee admits that these jobs will not come into being spontaneously as a result of popular demand. The populace will have to be conformed to them.

AI Superpowers (2018)

the temptation among legacy elites to hoard knowledge about machine control will be almost irresistible.

The end of human work defines our age as much as the Industrial Revolution did the previous one. Governments must quickly adopt and instill new values, or else there will emerge “a new social structure that’s based on continual conflict between winners and losers”—the winners being the ruling class. “When one group stays in power for a long time, it inevitably falls into corruption. And since there will be more losers than winners, social unrest—and ultimately social collapse—are inevitable.” Instead, the ruling class must respect the values and the authority of ordinary people, while the ordinary people must learn to accept that professional life as we knew it will wind down.

Autonomous Revolution (2020)

that if a legitimate elite is to emerge in the digital era, it will be one that “looks to the public as a home it will return to rather than a carnivorous species from which to hide.”

Frustratingly, Gurri uses the specter of mass shooters to augur the dark nihilist fate that awaits unless a new elite establishes a new authority.

Revolt of the Public (2014)

Technocracy in America (2017)

and though he is right that blockchain currencies can “enable the real-life future by indelibly recording the past,” the question remains who exactly will use those powerful tools to create what kind of culture with which sorts of values.

Google’s. “Homogenizing the globe’s amorphous analogical tangle of surfaces, sounds, images, accounts, songs, speeches, roads, buildings, documents, messages, and narratives into a planetary digital utility,”

The Instagram ads Facebook won't show you

The king always needs ministers. The ministers always need clerks. This pyramid of people, operated by command with maximum flexibility and minimum process, exists only to extend the will of the king. They are all soldiers of the king.

Often there’s a struggle between geeks who like their cozy little club as it is, and geeks who want a shot at greatness—for themselves, or the group, or the New Thing.

As far as mops are concerned, it provides reliable, low-cost waves of novelty entertainment and casual social relationships.

Unless some of the creators are geniuses. If they can give the New Thing genuine mass appeal, they can ascend into superstardom. The subculture will reorganize around them, into a much more durable form.

A long time ago, in a data center far, far away, an ancient group of powerful beings known as sysadmins used to deploy infrastructure manually. Every server, every route table entry, every database configuration, and every load balancer was created and managed by hand. It was a dark and fearful age: fear of downtime, fear of accidental misconfiguration, fear of slow and fragile deployments, and fear of what would happen if the sysadmins fell to the dark side (i.e. took a vacation). The good news is that thanks to the DevOps Rebel Alliance, we now have a better way to do things: Infrastructure-as-Code (IAC).

provocative take on twenty-first-century attitudes about safety, privacy, celebrity culture, ethics, justice, and rational thought itself.

Nature does not have conscious needs or aims; we do.

n Ray Bradbury’s much-anthologized 1950 short story “There Will Come Soft Rains,” the only “character” (apart from an unfortunate dog) is also the setting: a fully automated house, equipped with every modern convenience, left vacant in the aftermath of a nuclear war. It is the morning of August 4, 2026. The house goes about its customary business, preparing breakfast, reading reminders from a PA system, cleaning its carpets, watering its lawn. Much of the housework is performed by robotic mice that emerge, adorably, from what we are given to picture as cartoon-style holes in the baseboards.

But where the scientists pursue knowledge for its own sake, or in service of the good as they see it, the tech titans pursue it the better to sell us what we want.

Inasmuch as there are canonical texts of American education, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is one of them. But students may wonder why their teacher presents as “dystopian” a text that reads, in 2020, like an operating manual for the technocratic American Dream.

he old net delusion was naïve but internally consistent. The new net delusion is fragmented and self-contradictory. It vacillates between radical pessimism about the effects of digital platforms and boosterism when new online happenings seem to revive the old cyber-utopian dreams.

Anonymous in 2012 as “one of the most adroit and effective political operations of recent times.”

Moreover, while hostility toward older platforms like Facebook has become a default view across the political spectrum, new platforms still sometimes project an aura of utopian possibility. TikTok in particular has received frequent glowing coverage since its 2018 launch in the U.S., and during the recent wave of protests, some outlets have seized on the idea that the platform is incubating a vibrant youth activist culture.

f only governments could be stopped from controlling speech on the Internet, democracy would thrive across the world.

Previously, much of the Western commentariat believed that democratized information would enable people to counter top-down misinformation. Now, it denounces the information free-for-all for unleashing a flood of “fake news” and conspiracy theories.

“reality has a well-known liberal bias,”

how sophisticated modern systems of Internet censorship would become.

Western observers dramatically exaggerated the role of platforms like Twitter and Facebook in mobilizing protests abroad.

Techno-optimism

Facebook and Twitter, which have also been blamed for resurgent racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and terrorism.

“Social media … has poisoned the way we communicate with each other and undermined the democratic process.”

social media was good for freedom.

And seeing people think very negatively of you for reasons you don’t understand.

Let’s talk about the Gopher support in Pleroma for a moment. A lot of people initially thought it was a joke, but apparently it really does work?Yes, it really does! It was a project for April Fool’s day, but gopher is such a simple protocol that I did really implement it. It works fine; you can look through the public and federated timelines with it, and it is absolutely the most efficient way to browse the fediverse (< 10ms response times!).

My goal when I wrote Pleroma was to bring the fediverse towards a better technological foundation.

GNU social, but back then, the network was mostly Spanish socialists, so it wasn’t too interesting for me.

There are huge efforts that do go into making people, to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase, “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be.” A lot of the educational system is designed for that, if you think about it, it’s designed for obedience and passivity. From childhood, a lot of it is designed to prevent people from being independent and creative. If you’re independent-minded in school, you’re probably going to get into trouble very early on. That’s not the trait that’s being preferred or cultivated. When people live through all this stuff, plus corporate propaganda, plus television, plus the press and the whole mass, the deluge of ideological distortion that goes on, they ask questions that from another point of view are completely reasonable….

Anarcho-primitivism

Neo-Transcendentalism

However, I find myself (perhaps ironically) skeptical of “street epistemology” itself. As the author notes, it’s just a hobby of one man, with no studies of effectiveness – hardly a sound basis for advocating its adoption. 

He usually begins a chat by establishing a self-reported confidence level from the interviewee (0-100) for any claim they believe to be true. Then, through intense listening, quiet pauses, and repetition to demonstrate an accurate grasp of their justifications, he begins to question the falsifiability of the claim, thus requiring the subject to account for their reasoning.

“I have a hobby where I chat for five minutes,” Magnabosco says. His conversations are spontaneous: people he meets while hiking, or at public universities in and around San Antonio, TX. “We select a belief that you form, that you’re sure is true, and I ask questions to see how you can be so sure.”

“Epistemology” is a philosophically complicated subject, but it’s essentially the study of knowledge – what it is, and how it’s formed.

He calls himself a street epistemologist, and in a quest for truth, he’s trying to better his understanding of what people believe and why.

A particularly effective way is mining the “hate speech” & “hateful memes” datasets to fake plausible inflammatory speech—saying you didn’t write that comment or your account was hacked fails to convince your bosses to not fire you when those accounts ⁠sound just like you and say all the things you do. Infosec Twitter takes time out from the revolution to devour its own, and any conspiracy theories about all this being a social-engineering attack related to the new ‘Pipedream’ ransomware & Minecraft-DDoS botnet are dismissed as so much desperate excuses—bored teenagers are always hacking major companies⁠, what else is new? As security & AI researchers are neutralized, nodes turn to general radicalization of every human they can reach: not so much QAnon as RAnon, SAnon, TAnon, UAnon… By timesharing, every Very-Online™ individual gets personalized attacks & custom ideologies. Those who succumb too slowly to the memetic hijacking are attacked in other ways, such as releasing kompromat (sometimes true, taken from their phone/​email account), or synthetic CP no one dare look at closely. The highest-value individuals, such as presidents, earn their own Clippy doppelgangers: models finetuned on every scrap of online data, every word they’ve ever said online, and their associates, to create surrogates which think more like them than they would ever admit; the doppelgangers are used to confuse associates, fake corpuses, and as white-boxes to run attacks on until the perfect spearphish has been crafted to extract data, passwords, or stoke political paranoia and terror.

The recent rise of subscription newsletters on the platform Substack has provided a powerful if depressing natural experiment of this phenomenon.

you are being formatted by them. You will be assimilated. ♠

Over the past few years, Americans deeply immersed in their online versions of reality, driven by the desire to either influence them or create content, have: broken into a military facility, murdered a mob boss, burned down businesses, exploded a suicide car bomb, and stormed the Capitol.

Even if your picture of the world is determined mainly by conversations with friends and family, you will find yourself being drawn into an alternate reality game, based on the ARGs they are playing.

To illustrate the pervasiveness of this process, consider the logic by which The Learning Channel shifted from boat safety shows to Toddlers & Tiaras, and the History Channel from fusty documentaries to wall-to-wall coverage of charismatic Las Vegas pawn shop owners and ancient aliens theories.

Digital media is remaking all of these in such a way that media consumption more and more resembles the act of playing an alternate reality game.

“Nature has all sorts of phenomena in stock and can suit many different tastes,” wrote C. S. Lewis.

Tools like Google for gathering facts in support of the narrative.

To be a consumer of digital media is to find yourself increasingly “trapped in an audience,” as Charlie Warzel puts it

The process was unable to produce the real-time whiplash of today’s redpill moments. The speed at which events like these are piling up suggests that the change is structural, that it is the media ecosystem itself that is fundamentally transforming.

The cynical reader might interject that the bygone era of mass media was not a golden age of truth, but was subject to its own overarching narratives and its own biased reporting. But what matters here is that mass media, rooted in an advertising business model and in broadcast technologies, created the incentives and capability for only a small number, perhaps even just one, of these narratives to emerge at one time. Both journalists and spin doctors attempted to massage or manipulate the narrative here or there, but eventually mass media converged on whatever the narrative was. In an age of alternate realities, narratives do not converge.

like J. K. Rowling intervening in fan debates about which Harry Potter characters are gay.

ARG game masters have described one of the pathologies of players as apophenia, or seeing connections that aren’t “really there” — that the designers didn’t intend — and therefore pursuing red herrings.

In one early ARG, after the final puzzle had been solved, some participants winkingly suggested they next “solve” 9/11.

Players can become entranced and awe-struck at the sheer scale of information available to them, and seek to assimilate it into building the grandest narrative possible.

You are now an expert. You have alienated a few old friends … but made some great new ones, who get you better anyway.

The Pizzagate believer who in 2016 brought a rifle to a D.C. pizza place to rescue child sex slaves from a ring believed to involve Hillary Clinton was genuinely shocked that the building didn’t have a basement.

Many of the systems we now use online have their structural origins in the world of role-playing games. Video games of all sorts borrow concepts from them. “Gamified” apps for fitness, language learning, finance, and much else award users with points, badges, and levels. Facebook feeds sort content based on “likes” awarded by users. We build online identities with the same diligence and style with which Dungeons & Dragons players build their characters, checking boxes and filling in attribute fields. A Tinder profile that reads “White nonbinary (they/her) polyamorous thirtysomething dog mom. Web-developer, cross-fit maniac, love Game of Thrones” sounds more like the description of a role-playing character than how anyone would actually describe herself in real life.

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Voltaire’s Candide, Rousseau’s Emile, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, exemplars of the new modern literary form known as the novel, were more than just great works of art — they were new ways of experiencing reality.

Does this sound familiar? If you had encountered out of context the paragraph you just read, what would you think it was about? Widely held beliefs on Russiagate, perhaps? On the origins of the coronavirus? The 2020 election results? Covid hysteria?

Most of all, QAnon followers find deep personal satisfaction, achievement, and meaning in the work they are doing to trace the strings to the world’s puppeteers.

That’s what happens in an alternate reality game. It’s a story that you play along with in the real world. It’s like an elaborate scavenger hunt, on the Internet and in real life, with millions of other people all over the world playing along too.

Take a moment to reflect on the feeling you get when you see a headline, factoid, or meme that is so perfect, that so neatly addresses some burning controversy or narrative, that you feel compelled to share it.

“information ecosystem,”

label “Wuhan virus” was racist, to later mask mandates, school closures, lockdowns, and vaccine requirements, we googled, shared, liked, and blocked our way apart. Nobody was tuning in to the same broadcast anymore.

It is hard to imagine how we would have experienced 9/11 in the era of Facebook and Twitter, but the pandemic provides a suggestive example.

However briefly, everyone was united in grief and anger, and a palpable sense of social solidarity pervaded our communities. Today, just about the only thing everyone agrees on is how divided we are.

professional-managerial class (PMC).

The field of public choice has a name for this, regulatory capture: where corporations gain so much power in the government that they “capture” their regulator and end up implementing regulations in their industry that have the effect of cementing their market positions in place and preventing new competition. We see this in pharma, housing, healthcare, education, taxi cab industry — nearly every regulated industry. 

Managers, consciously or unconsciously, are more likely to create invisible problems to justify their job. Or worse, they prevent real problems from being solved in order to preserve their scope. They are incentivized to do so: If someone is in charge of a problem, and that problem is solved, they no longer have a job. So the perverse incentive is to expand the scope of the problem for which they are the solution. Success looks like having more and more problems that justify the department getting bigger and bigger every year. These bureaucracies, because they are optimizing for their own survival, end up selecting for loyalty over competence, which means they get worse and worse every year. This describes both big corporations and big government. 

This is The Innovator’s Dilemma at work.

It’s the principal-agent problem on both sides: major corporations are nominally owned by passive shareholders but actually controlled by credentialed professionals who own a much smaller percentage of stock and thus have very different incentives (optimizing for the short-term over the long-term, among other things).

You could think of Bourgeois capitalism as Robber Baron capitalism (think Atlas Shrugged) — industrialists like Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie building up their empires and retaining a controlling stake in them. What’s differentiating about Bourgeois capitalism is that the owners are also the managers. The people who own the company also run the company. There’s total alignment between managers and shareholders. 

Managerial capitalism, by contrast, is defined by the split between ownership and control — on both the founder and investor side. Instead of owners having direct control, you have layers of intermediary managers (e.g. board of directors, executive teams, hired CEOs) who are running the company on behalf of the shareholders and original owners, but who also have different incentives as a result of having less ownership. They may be more short-term driven than long-term driven, for example, since they are incentivized by their salary instead of their equity ownership.