Thread by @leashless

I've had an opportunity to do a bit of thinking and reassessing recently.

My value system continues to simplify. I think that's a sign of the times, a gradual refocusing as the game board becomes increasingly black and white. Or maybe red and blue. Let me pull out a few axioms.

Firstly, after decades of denials, UFOs are real news.google.com/search?q=penta… nobody's really adapting to this, but seriously (and mark this date for later on) WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON? Clearly there's been a shift in policy in the Deep State.

You may have Trump to thank for this.

Now UFOs being real, this is not a small change in the American Way of Being - bigfoot's always out there kinda-sorta, but if the US National Parks Service starts putting them on maps and asking for fur samples if you see anything on the trail, you better believe Kansas is gone.

So the new normal is that THE US GOVERNMENT IS TELLING YOU IT REGULARLY HAS CONTRACT FROM FORCES UNSEEN and, well, you know for damn sure that's not the limit of what they've got in the files. Something is happening. Do we know the limit of it yet?

Hell no. Expect a slow reveal.

Next, secondly, let's do politics. Here things get messy. The gradual, "something is very wrong here" feeling we've gotten from the far left for years finally takes form: odds-are it's been COINTELPRO ALL ALONG to make you associate taxing billionaires with ABSURD SOCIAL POLICIES

I am literally suggesting that a lot of the "lunatic left" adoption of stupendously stupid and divisive political positions is probably funded by the far right billionaires. If that seems absurd? Remember that the CIA funded Jackson Pollock gizmodo.com/how-the-cia-sp… and it worked.

You can pretty much see how this went: probably early, classified studies showed how public opinion on the internet could be manipulated by scientific means. Propaganda plus big data. Divide and conquer. You know for damn sure some of these splits were created on purpose by $$$.

So now The Algorithm. Everybody's social media stream is prioritized by an algorithm; this is Nudge for social control en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_the… and, of course, it'll dampen down the Nazis, but it'll also shut up the labor unionists, or people remembering Certain Events We Forgot.

Orwellian doesn't even begin to describe The Algorithm which prioritizes what you see: The Algorithm is the perfect blend and completion of Brave New World and 1984. You don't need to burn books that no-one reads. You can shape people, stimulus and response. Voiceless, faceless.

Now this is no small thing, but factor in the social control required to manage decline, and the (likely) oncoming hardship of failed harvests and perpetual bad weather. It's 50C (122F) in India right now independent.co.uk/news/world/asi… and they're not air conditioning the slums you know

The internet was born of academic privilege. The golden age of absolute freedom of thought in the early 1990s was heavily policed by university and lab system administrators: it had limits on free speech, but *academic norms of free thought* prevailed - the Internet was Academia.

As the internet expanded outside of academia, the norms of the real world washed in. Early internet people pretend not to know what happened, because they pretend the internet wasn't just Academic Privilege wrapped around a new communications technology. That was ALL THE MAGIC.

There was no magic in the technology: if the internet was inherently magical, so was Minitel. No, the magic was liberalism and free thought in universities, with an agora which was strictly policed by the discipline of the brotherhood of university sysadmins pulling your access.

Now this puts us in a tricky position. The founding myths of the internet are lies (perhaps all myths are.) The guild of system administrators created the civility the early internet was known for: admins were templars of this intellectual culture: @disappearinjon taught me this

Now once you can see it, everything else starts to make sense: a set of practices grow up in a tightly policiced space with dedicated guardians of academic privilege (sysops.) People lie to themselves and say this is human nature around high technology: the Californian Lie begins

Once you realize that the early internet was only civil because [e-mail] pulled internet access for anybody they disliked, and these guys were mostly bearded 70s hippies who'd done LSD and were implementing university guidelines *as they saw fit* it all makes sense

The internet was civil because *power* kept it civil - the universities set the rules, the sysadmins implemented them as slackly as they could get away with, but anything egregious got you kicked off the internet.

The internet was safe space because it was jealously guarded.

This is the great hidden secret of the early internet: it wasn't great because people were angels, it was great because there were enough guards that nobody got assaulted in the intellectual scrum. We had *protection* from each-other. It wasn't HUMAN NATURE, it was The State.

When we turned the internet over to capitalism, sysadmins couldn't keep up with hordes: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_S… and this is what happens when capitalism takes over functions that had been run by the best, highest, most functional bits of the State: to preserve what has no price.

This gets into a whole bunch of political philosophy. The Brotherhood of Sysadmins had virtue ethics, they were smart-smart, they were the old shepherding the young, and they weren't *that* heavily monitored or performance managed. The best kind of "let the wizards sort it out"

And of course this gets to the crux of the matter. The social structure of a wizard elite that ran the internet by consensus, with funding and loose oversight from a laissez faire State produced miracles. I suspect you saw the same thing in moon-NASA, in the SR71 team, and so on.

Conan, what is best in life? "To let the nerds manage their own affairs, with distant oversight from a not-terribly-interested State, which maybe picks up the bills from time to time."

And this, of course, is bitcoin and it's subsidized access to electricity. It's the nerds man

And this, of course, is the dream of the space nerds too: a chance for the technocrats to escape the oppressive clamouring masses, and get into space, and get permanent control of their own destiny again, with a distant relationship with some old world space bureaucracy back home

Once you can see that pattern, it's everywhere: Los Alamos, moonshot-era NASA, the SR71, the golden age of think tanks, the internet, all of it. Government-paid nerds who weren't watched too closely, and so were permitted to produce miracles. It's the HABITABLE ZONE for The Smart

Librarians were/are this way - huge seas of underworked smart people with the internet in front of them all day, busy editing wikipedia or otherwise curating the hell out of human knowledge just to stay busy. It used to be a big thing: librarians' pet projects were legendary.

Now let me tie a few threads together. Once you understand that The Internet isn't going to save you, that was just academic privilege plus benevolent neglect (APBN) not digital magic, you can *snuff out that batch of false hope.* IT ALL COMES BACK TO POWER. And this is your key.

So let me give you three thoughts to complete tonight's sermon.

1) The US government clearly feels we are ready to hear the UFO stories. What does this tell us?

2) If the internet is just APBN, then *in what do we place our trust*?

3) Bitcoin was banditry; Robin Hood, for sure

There are very few sources of legitimate hope in politics once you start doing Five Whys and root cause analysis for the good things that we have seen. Labor unions were mostly held in place by the fear of revolution, or by the USSR funding them: a golden era for workers, BUT

Here we must contrast unipolar good, good which is just good (say the Smallpox Vaccine) and the good which came as a side-effect of other ills. Academic Privilege + Benevolent Neglect was a place and time only. Try that recipe today and you get soft authoritarianism. That sucks.

The bar for being *good* in this world is higher and higher with each passing year; the further I look into the root causes of the good in my life, the more I realize how incredibly unsustainable it all was. It was like the last logs thrown on to a failing fire, early in a storm.

Here you have to ask yourself: "what are we fighting for, really?" If the Golden Age of the Internet was just APBN, it explains why the modern internet (and even more the cryptosphere) is such a hell-hole for women, with roving bands of nazis inciting huge: no Benevolent Neglect.

And this thing which generates the Benevolent Neglect, the protection for the wizards to eat and have pensions, what was that? It was the War Machine spending so much on education and research that the Wizards could live on the Slack. It wasn't efficient: efficiency kills it dead

Now you have the outlines of the system, of what we are birthed by and fighting for: a narrow margin of academic privilege and high idealism running on the waste heat of the war machine, a brief and fleeting vision of a better human race. Now over to @iwelsh for the rest, friends