Thread by @CultStateDotCom

THE LOGIC OF BLACKMAIL INFLATION: A thread

The story on how Blackmail Inflation got invented is a convoluted one, full of people you may be familiar with, and many you are not.

It really starts with the Bronfmans 🧵

The Bronfmans are a powerful Canadian family with deep ties to the Jewish mafia elements that grew out of Prohibition (Think Meyer Lansky)

America might have banned alcohol, but the Canadians didn't

The Bronfmans come from Bessarabia

The same Bessarabia where the Kishinev Pogrom took place.

The same pogrom that spurred Jacob Schiff into the actions that would lead to the complete German takeover of Tsarist Russia (Until Stalin rebuffed it)

Edgar Bronfman Jr. oversaw Seagram’s purchase of Universal Music Group.

After Seagram was sold to Vivendi, Bronfman led a group that bought Warner Music Group in 2004.

As Warner's CEO, he was a key figure in the RIAA's fight against piracy and was vocal during Napster era

Napster impacted the complex network of kickbacks the music industry made possible

For example, mechanical royalties are generated when a song is copied or reproduced

Let's connect that to how money laundering works in this space:

Record labels, often shell companies, could fabricate or inflate sales figures of albums or singles.

Example: Pressing 100,000 CDs, reporting that 80,000 sold, when in reality only 10,000 moved—laundered money shows up as legitimate music income.

Criminals could set up a music publishing company, register original (or plagiarized) songs, and use a connected label to claim mechanical royalties

Since royalty reporting was manual or semi-automated, and audits were rare, false or inflated royalty claims could pass undetected

And most importantly, independent record stores often dealt heavily in cash, especially in urban areas.

Launderers could buy their own CDs with illicit cash, disguising it as legitimate revenue, then cycle that money back through royalties or artist advances.

Napster and music piracy in general significantly disrupted money laundering operations and only those in the game knew it.

This is a lens you have to keep in mind when looking at things like the Sean "Puffy" Combs trial

The Bronfmans are involved in all kinds of shady stuff

For example, they even have overlap with Julian Assange!

Here's Assange's defense fun posting the "Paper Airplanes" song by MIA, a person who dated the heir of the Bronfman estate

https://x.com/DefendAssange/status/947664148376182784

And many of you know this already, but Clare Bronfman would get dragged into legal mayhem due to activities through the Hollywood sex cult NXIVM

Clare is Edgar's sister

timesunion.com/nxivm/article/…

The Bronfman family played a key role in purchasing arms for the Jewish Haganah (the underground military organization that would later become the Israeli Defense Forces)

Solomon "Solly" Bronfman was associated with an arms dealer named Marc Rich, a well-known financier

This long preamble to establish backstory is important because ten years ago, I was hired to be the Director of Web Technology at Warner Music in the last year Edgar was CEO of Warner

Our job was to figure out how many albums a tweet sold

That's harder than it sounds

We had to correlate a lot of different data points.

They opened the kimono and I saw everything a tax auditor would see. The Oracle databases. The SoundScans.

I even saw that their sales spiked whenever Republicans were president, clearly laying out political weaponization.

I went in there with a plan: All charm, no beef.

First day I met all my daily contacts and bought a bottle of their favorite drink, and left it in my office

If they ever needed to solve a problem, stop in my office and lets sip to a solution

I was popular :)

We never could figure out the correlations and attribution problem

So I got moved to a special project from Edgar himself: they found a video sharing project that they wanted to lawfare into oblivion and they asked me to do a technology examination of it

This was in 2014

While Warner is a big media beast, it was odd that the Music Group division would find a threat in video sharing

Maybe they were being vigilant after Napster, but I did what was asked and found that even under sustained lawfare, the open source parts of this project would endure

When presenting my findings, I was told "You cannot talk to Edgar that way"

I was fired a week later, then my boss was fired, then half the company was fired, and Edgar gave up his controlling position at a $1B loss

reuters.com/article/us-war…

Also, a typo, i said 2014 here, I meant 2011

https://x.com/CultStateDotCom/status/1925006425475916265

I would later move on to another job after that (A fun gaming company involving one of the luckiest millionaire's I have ever met, sup Adam!)

I didn't think much of the mafia elements of Warner at the time because I wasn't nearly as jaded as I am now.

It was only after the Trump election and the arrests of Allison Mack in 2018 did I finally figure out why Edgar was afraid of widespread video piracy

web.archive.org/web/2018042208…

It never made sense from a money standpoint. To the music industry, music videos are just line items in a promotion budget. They aren't intellectual property that yields net.

Then Clare got busted in a blackmail ring, and it all made sense

They were afraid of the blackmail videos going uncontrollably viral through channels they couldn't easily squash

There are all kinds of problems with this that are not obvious, so let's explore them.

The first is blackmail needs to be exclusively held

If it ends up in the hands of other people, then those people will try to shakedown the blackmailed target

This results in lots of problems for all involved and often gets violent

The second is that blackmail, once expended, has significantly reduced value

The threat of revealing it is more powerful than actually revealing it

Ask the FBI about that, they know all about holding on to Epstein's kompromat stash

The third is not so obvious, and I'm not confident this was understood at the time, but it's about inflation

Video sharing itself won't lead to inflation, but the AI that does what we now know was available at the MIT Media Lab around this period

The same MIT Media Lab that Epstein funded, btw

media.mit.edu/posts/my-apolo…

If AI gets powerful enough to generate videos on demand and is widely available, then channel suppression and censorship by itself won't be enough to stop the other two problems

And it leads to the inflation problem

The premise of blackmail inflation is this:

1. An already blackmailed target has tens of thousands of videos made of them doing disgusting stuff.

2. The target denies those videos are him

3. The target also denies the real video

4. The handler no longer can control the target

I had been studying AI since around 2005, mostly through the works of MIRI/SIAI, which was founded by the famous @ESYudkowsky of the "nuke all rogue datacenters" policy

So I was aware of what was possible even if the tech wasn't ready yet

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_I…

@ESYudkowsky The Bronfmans aren't the only shady people I've worked with. 14 years in Hollywood, man. I've seen things. I've helped a lot of rich people with their problems.

This kind of tech affects all blackmails globally at the same time, and that is a very unique opportunity window

@ESYudkowsky Nearly every major decision-making body across all societies utilizes blackmail to keep business as usual humming along

Banking, military, governance, technology, science

And with a little bit of steering, AI deepfakes had the ability to unravel all of them at once

@ESYudkowsky Okay. So I figured out the opportunity of a lifetime: blow out all of the world's blackmail at the same time

That's not a thing you can iterate on. That's an all-in move that cannot be undone. Even pursing this course of action will get you killed.

@ESYudkowsky That means it's REALLY IMPORTANT to plan out all contingencies and evolution before you do a single action

The death of blackmail to many seems like a "get out of jail free" card, allowing pedos to walk

That's a first order conclusion. Look deeper to see how untrue that is

@ESYudkowsky The blackmailed are aggressively protected

But if the blackmail fails, those people are no longer protected

Which means all kinds of pent-up vendettas they've accumulated from their powerful position can be finally unleashed upon them.

@ESYudkowsky For those pursuing justice and closure, you're probably never going to get that through any serious court system because these people own those, too

You'll just have to settle for these people getting picked off, one at a time, once their protections are eliminated.

@ESYudkowsky More importantly, what do the handlers do, now that they can no longer make society dance on command?

Well, what did they do before blackmail could be filmed?

When soft power is removed, all that remains is hard power.

I could, effectively, start a world war with this.

@ESYudkowsky That's not good

I'm super not interested in unproductive and needless genocides

So I needed to ALSO find a way to undermine their reactionary pursuit of hard power

Thus, my proposal of robotic nationalism

cultstate.com/2014/09/09/The…

@ESYudkowsky Once I ran the game theory, and compared it against the resources I had access to, I saw the battle space as it was

All I needed was one domino to get the party started

Depending on how stupid the handlers are being right now, we may or may not get around to that domino

@ESYudkowsky The death of Virginia Giuffre basically ensured the recent Trump/Qatari play

Look at all the people with Trump at KSA last week

All of them control massive GPU and datacenter capacity

With a request, they will point it at the blackmail center of the world and end it

@ESYudkowsky "The Guild and the entire universe depends on spice. He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing."

~Paul Atredies