Recently I ran across some interesting survey data related to perceptions of technology. According to this article, about a third of people are actively using AI, another third are occasionally using the technology, and those in the final third are never using it. Public opinion about various technologies was measured using surveys, and the results were somewhat surprising.

Cell phones were ranked 68% positive, the internet in general came in at 67%, and solar energy was 65%. On the low end, AI’s impact was ranked at just 8% positive, social media at just 7% positive, and cryptocurrency had the lowest measured rank at negative 16%.

Global survey results add context to this picture. According to the New York Times:

A survey of 24,000 adults across 30 countries found that citizens of nearly all of those countries, rich or poor, see A.I. more favorably than Americans do. ... Poorer countries are A.I. optimistic: Indonesia at 76 percent, Thailand at 77 percent and Mexico at 63 percent. Rich countries like the United States, the Netherlands and Belgium are not. What A.I. means depends, in large part, on where you sit economically. In countries with largely informal economies — where large numbers of people work without contracts, benefits or legal protections — A.I. looks like a ladder to better economic outcomes previously available only to those with capital, education and formal employment. A small manufacturer in Guadalajara or a street vendor in Jakarta doesn’t have much to lose from A.I. disruption, and potentially a great deal to gain. In rich countries with more formal labor markets, however, A.I. looks more like an ambush. It threatens what people already have: stable employment, predictable income and accumulated professional standing.

In other words, Americans are deeply afraid of anything that might disrupt the delicate balance of their own exploitation, leading them to fear AI and despise crypto. What they fear mostly isn’t the tech itself, but rather the loss of social power that could come from how the tech is used. Basic psychology suggests that the fear of a loss has about 6 times the emotional impact of imagining an equivalent gain. Precisely this psychology has been used to craft the media messaging that Americans have been bombarded with regarding the new tech.

The Total Epstein Agenda

The manipulation of public perception of crypto has been particularly pronounced. This is unsurprising, as the blockchain economy is the only viable alternative to our inherently inequitable legacy system. The control regime needs the monetary system’s inbuilt artificial scarcity to keep us afraid and compliant. The financial industry needs to continue controlling our money while siphoning off a percentage for itself. The fact that you’re not using crypto right now is evidence that they’ve somehow convinced you to continue advancing their agenda at the expense of your own interests.

Jeffrey Epstein himself seeded bitcoin early on with $3.5m in targeted investments, captured $45m from the market and sabotaged the whole ecosystem in a variety of subtle ways. An early contributor to bitcoin’s development named Luke Dashjr told the Guardian that Epstein attempted “to undermine” bitcoin’s network, early-stage companies, and developers. These efforts were exactly in line with Epstein’s other high level campaigns to make the world better for tyrants and worse for the rest of us. His related projects included manifesting Brexit, cheering on the fascist coup in Ukraine that precipitated the current war, and ensuring that Israel had state-of-the-art tech for its spy programs and automated oppression.

There may be people out there who have well-considered reasons for supporting the total Epstein agenda. But many people support and argue in favor of this agenda without considering the substance of their position. Instead of thinking, they absorb and then parrot propaganda from podcasts and social media and government sources. The more intellectual among them might refer to editorials in major newspapers, sometimes written by Epstein’s former associates such as Alan Dershowitz.

Almost no one who is currently carrying out Epstein’s total agenda understands that that’s what they’re doing. They think they’re being smart but all they’re really doing is promoting the re-popularization of slavery with delusional hopes of becoming the masters themselves someday.

The New Economics of AI

AI is a slightly different story. The control regime desperately wants to use AI to begin exercising even more control over our lives, and they’re investing heavily in its development. At the same time, the regime will go to extraordinary lengths to prevent average people from actually capturing any of the tangible benefits AI adoption may confer. In this environment, the new economics of AI have yet to materialize.

OpenAI lost $38.53 billion in 2025. The Seeds of Truth AI project I’ve been on has to pay $3.6k/month just to deploy a custom model for inference. I’ve talked to other people on other projects and they all say a version of the same thing: infrastructure costs are unsustainable. The price per word is way too high.

So the public isn’t sold on the tech and the industry is hemorrhaging money. Datacenters are appearing everywhere, sometimes in communities that don’t want them nearby. Government agencies have recently manufactured the category of “anti-tech violent extremism” to describe people who disapprove of these datacenters or the whole techno-dystopia agenda they seem to be a part of. Note that the standardized method of financing datacenter construction with unserviceable debt may cause a major economic crash in the near future.

At the same time, there are thousands upon thousands of very bright people advancing the technology at breakneck speed. And we’re barely beginning to explore the true promise and potentials of AI. The control regime may be exposing us to propaganda suggesting that the tech is inherently monstrous, with terrible environmental and social impacts. But the tech isn’t inherently good or bad. It’s literally just math.

AI may be value neutral, but it is a force multiplier. This force multiplier need not be centralized. Different kinds of AI can be used locally, on relatively modest computers, without consuming any water or much energy at all. LLM access is already starting to amplify the power of those who know how to use it. In 5-10 years, we’ll all likely have devices in our pockets or on our desks that are capable of running very sophisticated AI models. Which is probably why subtle grassroots propaganda from the control regime increasingly includes calls to “regulate AI,” as these calls can easily be used to rationalize new policies guaranteed to limit our freedom while enriching Big Tech.

Where That Leaves Us

Public opinion has been manipulated to trick people into rejecting crypto and opposing AI. These are two of the most important technologies we need to create alternative systems that would allow us to participate in society without being enslaved to the control regime’s agenda. The propaganda behind the rejection of these technologies doesn’t rely on logic or the truth. Instead, it hooks into our unconscious emotional motivation to acquire and wield social power within whatever tribe we perceive ourselves to be a part of.

These tribes have nothing to do with traditional cultural groupings of families. The modern tribes I’m talking about are typically identical with the marketing categories assigned to us by corporate forces, bolstered by the partisan political identities programmed into us by the media. Under the hood, if you use a smart phone or computer but say you oppose AI, you don’t really oppose AI. You support AI, but only when it furthers the interests of the control regime.

And if you have been persuaded to oppose crypto, what you’re actually opposing is the only viable alternative to the legacy financial system, which means you are one of the people forcing us all to have the value of our lives invisibly extracted by predators and parasites at every turn. To put it more plainly: the Epstein class engineered the legacy economy to maximize its exploitation of everyone. Epstein himself tried to sabotage bitcoin. In doing this, he wasn’t operating as some rogue billionaire. He was acting as an agent of the control regime, in concert with other players in the regime, to prevent average people from ever re-acquiring the financial sovereignty that the legacy system has stolen from us all.

The blockchain economy is the only thing that can possibly reduce our collective financial exploitation at the monetary level. No other existing alternative can work at scale. So if you oppose crypto in general, I encourage you to at least take responsibility for the implications of your stance. Look in the mirror and tell yourself the truth about this position. Allow the choice you’re making to become conscious.

Maybe even say it out loud. Say: “I oppose crypto, which means I support the ongoing and total financial exploitation of everyone by predators and parasites, just like Jeffrey Epstein did.” If you try that on and find it fitting, then you can move forward feeling good about your choice to preserve business as usual. And if this exercise rubs you the wrong way, or if you know of another viable alternative to the legacy financial system, please add a detailed comment. I’d love to get more public conversations about this going.

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Two weeks ago I bought 11.69 Solana tokens through Paypal for $1k. In the past, I’ve been able to transfer my tokens to a private wallet once the transaction has processed. I expected to do this again with these tokens, but found it impossible to transfer my Solana. Whenever I tried, I was rerouted to a new biometric identity verification system.

When I tried to verify my identity, I discovered that this system was broken, failing to work on web or in the mobile app. I tried scanning my face and ID. I tried uploading documents. All I got were error messages and frozen screens.

Paypal knows who I am. I’ve been a customer since 2009. I bought and transferred Solana with their platform just a few months ago. But their terrible automated customer service could only tell me that I needed to complete the identity verification before I could transfer my funds. And their more advanced customer service bot told me that I could “sell” “my” Solana tokens and access the funds in dollars, less their fees.

This bot then said that even if Paypal forced me to sell at an unfavorable rate to access my own funds, Paypal was in no way liable for the losses I’d incur as a result. If I sold these tokens today I’d take a loss of about $300.

Automated Predation

This situation isn’t unusual. It’s exactly like everything else. Skyrocketing costs and plummeting service levels have become the norm. Our legacy economy was designed to structurally support the interests of a control regime consisting primarily of predators and parasites. Now their predation and parasitism is being automated, so the rate at which this group extracts value from our lives is sharply increasing.

One predictable outcome of this is that people won’t have enough money if businesses and governments keep taking so much. The pace of this mass financial shortfall is going hypersonic with AI. According to Brett Hemenway Falk (University of Pennsylvania) and Gerry Tsoukalas (Boston University), there simply won’t be an American consumer base soon if we stay the current course.

Already, depending on where you live, a cup of coffee can cost $5. Residential real estate is 30% overvalued. The national debt exceeds GDP. And jobs capable of servicing student loans are becoming scarce.

Since the pandemic, many commercial districts have become ghost towns. Beggars are multiplying and street life includes more and more people frozen on sidewalks by the ghastly yoga of fentanyl. Immigration crackdowns aren’t making a dent in this. The deepening of our poverty isn’t an immigration problem. It’s a natural consequence of structural incentives.

The overarching goal of the legacy system has always been to maximize the value that can be extracted from every person over the course of their lifetime while simultaneously minimizing each person’s power to prevent anyone from choosing not to have their value extracted. This goal has largely been realized. A relatively small group of predators and parasites control a much larger population of the economically productive and the economically dependent.

Maximum Value Extractable Over Time

The economically productive have jobs that contribute value to society. The control regime captures most of this value. The economically dependent are unable to earn income and must rely on others for their lives. The control regime uses this population as a massive profit engine, funneling vast sums of public money into private hands through the service programs keeping the dependent alive yet perpetually disempowered.

The short path through the impending economic disruption would be a real Universal Basic Income, funded by a universal wealth tax, combined with the elimination of spending programs made redundant by the UBI. This looks like our most stable path forward. If the people in power want stability, they’ll roll out UBI, though maybe only as the solution to some future financial system shock which their folly has caused. But if the people in power don’t actually want stability, and instead want only to keep manufacturing chaos to exploit, we may be on our own in trying to stay afloat as the value of our money continues to evaporate.

In response to the obvious problems with this trajectory, there are more than a few rich people building upscale apocalypse bunkers. But hiding our heads in the sand won’t help. Our problems are systemic, and the system has eaten everything. Our communities are inseparable from the system. Even upscale apocalypse bunkers are part of the system.

The Most Remarkable Thing

The most remarkable thing about our predicament is that we could improve it dramatically at any time and yet keep choosing not to do this. Voting probably won’t get us anywhere, but we could create equitable decentralized replacements for large swaths of the economy, beginning with the FIRE industries (finance, insurance, real estate). If sufficient financial ground were to be established in these new decentralized networks, material transformation on a broad scale would become possible.

I’m not convinced that society as a whole has any interest in beneficial transformation. The control regime is entrenched, and the official story has been thoroughly internalized by the masses. But that doesn’t mean their commitment to business as usual has to dictate our life circumstances. Small groups can break away from the mainstream to do their own thing. We can start heading in a different direction at any time.

Nearly every aspect of our system is functionally broken. Google is broken if you want a basic neutral search of the web. Healthcare is broken and everybody knows it. The economy is broken and most people are only beginning to notice that. We have significantly less freedom and prosperity than we had 10, 20, 30 years ago.

The only way to turn things around is to stop doing the things we’re currently doing and do other, more sensible things instead. Most people aren’t really up for that, but some people are. Not enough people to move the needle very far in any total sense, but enough to make a real difference in the lives of those willing to break away from the masses in favor of an alternative path.

No matter what happens, my expectations in the face of these realities remain unreasonable. Any day now, I expect people to wake up and all together move to fix the world. I’ve been expecting this since I was a kid, and it never happens, no matter how deeply into dystopia we progress. At the same time, technological advancement continues to make more and more possible with smaller and smaller groups.

At this point, a few thousand people could establish their own viable economy. A few hundred people could create a free and fair community that’s genuinely resilient to the kinds of escalating disruptions that the legacy system is producing. A few dozen people could anchor a much larger network supporting the free exchange of ideas and maybe more direct collaboration without parasitic middlemen.

In other words, societal change no longer has to come from convincing powerful people in business and government to do things differently. This is fortunate, because convincing the powerful to make decisions that are in our best interests has never been a winning strategy for reform. A better strategy may be to begin removing the wires of control they’ve installed in our lives, then going ahead and creating the free and fair societal systems we ideally want to participate in.

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In the wake of WWII, when the Iron Curtain went up, scientists in the USSR had limited access to Western medical advances, and American scientists were influenced by financial pressures to develop only the most profitable and controllable technologies. So the US embraced antibiotics to treat infections while scientists in the USSR developed treatments based on more readily available bacteriophages. Both approaches had advantages. Today, some Western medical researchers are looking anew at bacteriophages to address the problem of antibiotic resistance.

In other words, during the Cold War, technology developed along two distinct pathways, each defined in part by its political and ideological structure. Researchers in one environment were isolated from researchers in the other environment, and these isolated groups came up with very different solutions for the same problem. This isn’t usually how things work these days. In our more globalized modern society, everyone all over the world has been talking to each other continually, thereby synchronizing their activities into a single approximate direction.

But now, with the dawn of AI, the fabric of our online reality is being restructured. More and more, each of our online experiences is customized. Our searches produce customized results. Social media shows us customized feeds. Our AI prompts produce customized responses. The flow of information to and from us is tightly controlled by corporate algorithms. For all intents and purposes, each of us is now living almost completely in our own personalized worlds online.

This structurally imposed isolation may produce an explosion in the variety of innovations people come up with. With no common reality to use as a reference point, more people may be inspired to attempt the impossible. Most won’t succeed, but some will. Hopefully the successes prove to be more creative than destructive.

Total Wildcard

The further consequences of this mass customization of reality are a total wildcard. We’re already seeing head-in-the-sand trends like Flat Earth gaining ground as people are encouraged in whatever mythology they happen to identify with, however outlandish it may be. At this point, Instagram has a marketing category for every kind of person, and ideas that have traditionally been regarded as falsehoods are called alternative facts.

There’s grave danger in our deepening digital solipsism. And LLMs are notoriously sycophantic, sometimes encouraging users to double down on their alternative facts, backed up by references that either don’t exist or aren’t pertinent. As strange as it may seem, many people are becoming simultaneously less aware of the world around them and more capable of devising and carrying out complex plans. AI can make us much more industrious, allowing us to do far more things, but the things we do won’t necessarily be good. There will just be more of them.

This is obviously a recipe for chaos, so we’ll be seeing more chaos. The lines of culture will continue to blur and shift. The financial big squeeze will motivate more people to take increasingly big economic risks, bolstering their confidence with AI. Such trends are naturally destabilizing. But they also point to a crucial opportunity.

Our Only Chance

In a sense, reality itself is becoming less stable and more flexible. We can’t rely on anything, but neither are we as bound by all of the rules and assumptions that once standardized our perspectives. While most people may be working feverishly to turn their new AIs into an improvement of their relative position in the legacy system, not everyone is so limited. More and more people are recognizing the moment for what it is: our only chance to choose a new direction.

Our technological infrastructure may have been rolled out in support of the control regime’s agenda. Our customized online realities may be appropriately described as digital cages. But we’re now in a unique position to choose to use our technology differently. To relate with each other differently. To take apart our digital cages and use the pieces to make art.

We are reaching an inflection point marked by our own radical technological empowerment. The pace of advancement is wicked fast, but the trajectory of this advancement hasn’t been fully determined. As a society, we’re advancing along many paths simultaneously, without a unifying direction. Yet the paths we ultimately choose to advance along are mostly up to us.

Consider the difference between material reality and all of the psychological reality we impose on this material stuff with human interpretive frameworks. The material world’s properties are inevitably fixed while the psychological world can technically be reconfigured at any time by human processes of reality production. AI and other emerging technologies have made such a reconfiguration of reality inevitable. We’re all participating in it right now. The big question is whether or not we’re participating in a way that can possibly bring about the world we really want.

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In 2024, I wrote about the 3 most important breakthrough areas on the horizon: Psychedelic medicine, emerging technologies, and UFO disclosure. Since then, psychedelic medicine has become more integrated into society, making it easier for many people to cope with the intense degree of change we’ve been experiencing. Meanwhile, emerging technologies have been transforming increasingly large swath of the economy. And UFO disclosure continues to unfold, challenging our most basic assumptions about the universe.

In the late 19th Century, Emile Durkheim founded the modern field of sociology. In order to make sense of the complex impacts of the Industrial Revolution on an urbanizing population, Durkheim talked in terms of something he called anomie. This was essentially the angst, anxiety, and moral dysregulation that inevitably arose from the mismatch between personal or group standards and broad social standards. Society changed dramatically, imposing impossible new demands on individuals who were adapted for a very different kind of social ecology.

Original oil painting of Durkheim

From the Industrial Revolution onward, the official story promised everyone a better life through service to the machine. But what was actually achievable in everyday life was rarely the better life people were told to expect from the system. And the bigger the gap between the promise and the achievable became, the more anomie was generated. This anomie was a spiritual and psychological unrest that society continued to produce but couldn’t always effectively integrate.

When the flying saucer craze began gathering steam, Carl Jung had a compelling take on the these strange phenomena people were encountering. According to the Jungian Center for Spiritual Sciences:

While many “New Agers” wax rhapsodic about all the wonderful energies going around, Jung was not so sanguine. He understood that the transition from one age to another was marked by “spiritual distress,” “eschatological conceptions,” like the coming of the Apocalypse, fears of the destruction of the world, claims of the appearance of the world redeemer, prophets of doom and prophets of new religions—not at all a time of fun and games! But exactly the sort of time when one might expect to hear about wonders in the sky, miraculous apparitions, and visions of archetypal images of “gods”—simple, round, oval or cylindrical forms that are mandalas, archetypes or symbols of totality, deliverance, and wholeness, symbols of the Self—all of this compensatory to the unconscious anxiety and dis-ease that goes along with the transition between aeons.

It made perfect sense to Jung that our time would hear of reports of signs in the skies, of people being carried off in wondrous crafts, dealings with angels, and numinous experiences that leave people feeling hopeful. Jung told the Basel Psychology Club “In our world miracles do not happen anymore, and we feel that something simply must happen which will provide an answer or show a way out. So now these Ufos are appearing in the skies. Now, suddenly, they seem to portend something because that something has been projected on them—a hope, an expectation ... the expectation of a savior.

[Jung hypothesized] that Ufos were both psychically and physically real, and therefore were an example of a synchronous event, i.e. an event in which an outer reality coincides in a meaningful way with an inner reality. The outer reality would be the Ufo and the inner, the unconscious content that got projected out in the form of symbols of wholeness, taking the form of mandala shapes, which the flying saucers seemed to have.

It’s interesting to note that Jung very carefully avoided commenting on the physical aspect of UFOs. He deferred to the materialistic sciences to evaluate the physical real-ness of flying saucers, and instead focused on the psychological circumstances and implications of these mysterious objects. Whether or not the reported phenomena were physical crafts from elsewhere in outer space, the appearance of UFOs was a sign of the times.

A cause to unite people

Today, there’s a growing collection of videos, images, witnesses, deposition, and testimony supporting the idea that there’s something to the UFO/UAP mystery. And the flavor of this mystery is being expressed in culture differently than it used to be. People are still recording strange lights in the skies, but that’s not what everyone talking about. Instead, what they’re talking about is the corporate and government secrecy that’s preventing us from learning the truth about our world.

Are we alone in the universe? What physics and energy sources make observed UFO flight patterns possible, when these flight patterns aren’t possible with any known technology? Is there a record of communication between humans and non-human intelligent entities? Have any individuals or groups profited from privileged access to UFO-related information? These questions aren’t unanswerable. Their answers are classified or locked down in the black budget world.

If there’s any single cause with the potential to unite people across their differences in our divided society right now, it’s the cause of wanting to be told the truth. This cause is especially compelling in light of the evidence that part of the classified truth involves technologies with massive potential to solve some of humanity’s most pressing problems. Republicans and Democrats both want the truth. So do Communists and everyone else. Except the people who are benefiting from the secrecy. Their preference is to maintain the lies at any cost.

The larger story

Disclosure has widespread appeal, but demands for disclosure aren’t likely to go mainstream until we begin talking about the subject in more engaging terms. Most people have a hard time connecting with the abstract demand for transparency from our reflexively dishonest and secretive military-industrial complex. This demand is perfectly reasonable, yet we’re not all guided by reason. Instead, we’re guided by stories and myths.

The mythic dimension of UFO/UAP disclosure is well-developed in some ways, but they’re all pretty niche. Experiencers. Channelers and followers of channeled material. Religious communities that consider all ETs to be demons. There are a wide variety of small subgroups like this, and they often disagree with one another. Their diverse perspectives are out there, but the larger story of disclosure and what it could mean for humanity is still coming together. Until this larger story is foregrounded, the disclosure movement is unlikely to go mainstream.

Fortunately, this larger story does actually seem to be coming together, driven by a grassroots initiative called Citizens for Disclosure, which anyone can get involved with. WantToKnow.info’s Amber Yang recently had a conversation with Harvard-trained civil rights lawyer Daniel Sheehan to explore this rapidly evolving UFO disclosure movement. Check it out here.

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There are more and more people out there who get all of their news from social media. Slightly more savvy operators supplement their social media by scrolling through Google searches and mainstream LLM chats. Public discourse is suffering immeasurably as a result of this new media environment. All of these news sources are heavily censored delivery systems for ads and propaganda.

The news itself has been rapid fire destabilization. Maduro. ICE. Glyphosate immunity. Epstein. Iran. Geopolitically, the US has “turned networked systems disruption into a doctrine,” in part by completing “kinetic decapitations,” according to John Robb. Here are a few examples of the weird new status quo that’s emerging:

• Gaza tested the international community’s tolerance for normalized assassinations.

• Maduro normalized the military kidnapping of disfavored foreign leaders.

• ICE tested the waters of militarized occupation of a major American city.

• Trump’s executive order to protect glyphosate manufacturers from lawsuits is essentially a major subsidy for the oncology industry.

• The latest batch of Epstein docs exposed collusive connections between many of the biggest political and economic power players.

• And now the US is joining Israel in waging war against Iran, a highly advanced country that’s more than twice as big as Texas, with a population of about 93 million.

• In the background, of course, is a US economy that’s completely broken for a large and growing segment of the population.

Kept in the Dark

These situations are just the tip of the iceberg, and they’re enough to make anyone’s head spin. Mainstream media presents us with flat, hollow stories to explain these events. Alternative media might offer more depth, but often at the cost of ideological distortion. There are vast crowds of minor celebrities on social media ready to tell us what it all means, but they don’t seem to actually know what it means, so their perspectives are at best only marginally helpful.

Charles Eisenstein’s recent essay Reality is Breaking attempts to make sense of this:

What is disintegrating now is much bigger than institutions and systems. It is their fundamental legitimacy, the credibility of those authorities who tell us what is real and what is not, what is possible and what is not, what is crazy and what is sane. The collapse goes deeper still: normalcy itself is disintegrating, the basic mythology that defines what normal even is, and the mythology of modernity, of progress, of a society that has risen above medieval barbarism toward enlightened values and democratic ethics—the mythology of “the West.” All of these are crashing down. It is as if reality itself were breaking.

I think Eisenstein is on to something, and appreciate that he highlighted the magnitude of the societal transformation now underway. But right after that he compared our situation to the French Revolution, which didn’t quite land. Whatever is going on right now, it’s not the French Revolution. People aren’t forming angry mobs to execute aristocrats. They’re competing more and more ruthlessly with each other to become the rich, even as they inevitably become relatively more and more poor due to the structure of our economy.

To oversimplify, there’s some chaos and corruption in the US and more more chaos and corruption globally. And special interests heavily manipulate our only sources of information about the events now unfolding. The world as we know it is changing quickly and profoundly, yet clean information about this change isn’t being provided to us by establishment sources. If we want that information, we have to seek it out, and even then it’s not always accessible.

Another way to phrase this is that the world is radically transforming and we’re being kept in the dark about it by the powerful forces that control society. This sounds bleak, until you consider the direction of our transformation. For technological reasons, society is racing towards radical transparency. At the same time, more and more of everything is digitally recorded. So secrets are getting harder to keep and more of the truth is in some way documented.

The control regime’s response to this has been to increase the intensity and pervasiveness of its censorship. But censoring at the level of information itself has become practically impossible. Wikileaks got information out that big companies and governments wanted to keep secret. Today, it has become trivial to store and publish data online in a way that’s virtually impossible for any entity to censor.

Since the regime can’t fully censor at the information level, it focuses its influence on spin, ensuring that the information is presented in a way that supports and doesn’t conflict with the official story. The regime also censors by influencing mass behavior in a variety of ways that reinforce cultural programming, impair cognition, and make us less curious. Increasingly, the truth is out there, there just aren’t many people out there looking for it.

Getting the Word Out

At WantToKnow.info, we’ve been grappling with the forces of censorship for years. Since 2020, censorship and propaganda have become all pervasive. We challenge the official story by questioning dominant narratives with reliable and verifiable sources. Google no longer includes us in search results on the specialized topics we cover. Our social media posts don’t get shown to many people. Getting the word out has never been more difficult.

Part of our strategy for meeting this challenge is to make our information easier to access in a variety of ways. We’re putting out more videos and plan to create an AI enhanced research portal soon, for example. But we’re also grappling with hard questions: How do we better reach people who are mired in apathy due to the toxic social programming they’re continually exposed to? How can we better support the sensemaking processes of people who may be encountering potentially upsetting material for the first time? And, perhaps most importantly, how can we bring more people together to actually improve society?

Censorship and propaganda are critical components of the dystopia that’s been imposed upon us. In theory, if people knew how corrupt our systems had become, they’d act to fix these systems. In practice, knowing isn’t enough. In order to even move the needle, we have to act in collaboration with each other. To do this, we have to somehow overcome the censorship and manipulation of our social reality. To organize in a way that’s impervious to the status quo’s influence.

It’s easy to say that you favor unity over division, but real life can be messier than that. In a culture comprised almost entirely of massive interlocking scams, we’re all a little wary of opportunities to contribute to something good. And in a social media environment that rewards divisive drama while punishing nuanced investigation, we’re being trained to avoid precisely the information we need to start freeing ourselves from the matrix together.

One thing that’s guaranteed to help is for each of us to become more centered. To get more clear. To be more present. To make better sense of where we are, where we’re going, and where we’d like to go instead. These things aren’t lofty abstractions. They’re essential medicine for our sick world.

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As WantToKnow.info’s news editor for many years, I’ve been tracking media coverage of the Epstein situation since the beginning. The first national news story about Epstein’s crimes was published by the New York Post in 2006 but people didn’t really start paying attention until many years later. Now, as the scope, scale, and nature of Epstein’s crime ring comes into focus, people are shocked. The information coming to light suggests things about how power really operates in the world that challenge everything we’ve been told.

Following recent document releases, coverage of the scandal is all over the place. Washington Post makes Epstein out to be a Russian agent despite the much more compelling evidence that he worked with US and Israeli intelligence. Pam Bondi is responding to questions about the documents with completely unrelated comments on subjects like the stock market and AI porn. My mom, who has never had any time for conspiracy theories, told me the other day that she no longer thinks Epstein killed himself after seeing news reports on the circumstances surrounding his death in custody.

This isn’t like other conspiracies that have come to light. Whatever is happening with this situation, it’s a very big deal. It’s an order of magnitude more significant than the Franklin scandal of the 1980s, but it’s happening in the digital age, involving celebrities who millions of people follow closely online. Now, very powerful people are determined to expose dark truths that other very powerful people might do anything to keep hidden. The conflict between these two groups seems to be escalating quickly.

The Unbelievable Truth

For many, even the basic idea of a pedophile ring can seem unbelievable. This is true even after all of the massive pedophile conspiracies that have been exposed in churches, schools, various industries, the foster care system, and elsewhere. The whole idea of abusers working with each other under official cover to victimize children and then keep them quiet can be challenging for average people to wrap their minds around. The idea that billionaire celebrities and politicians all worked together to facilitate each other’s child abuse is so far beyond the pale as to be unthinkable. And yet here we are.

Personally, I don’t find any of this unbelievable. As a kid in the 1990s, I was sexually abused by a beloved pillar of the Taylors Falls, MN community named John W. Larson. Larson was a member of an international pedophile network based in Germany, where he lived for many years while working for the US government. In 2003, at age 21, I came forward with my story and there was an investigation, but no charges were ever filed because too much time had passed. You can read more about this in Navigating Dystopia or hear the whole story on this podcast.

Larson’s network was centered around a minor German aristocrat and they used the Wandervogel or unofficial German boy scouts as cover for their activities in the 1960s and 1970s. When Larson moved to the US, he and a friend would throw parties where they fed alcohol to boys and drugged them to abuse them. I’ve met two other perpetrators beyond Larson, spoken with a couple of the other victims, and know of several more. The total number of their victims might be dozens or it might be hundreds.

As far as I know, all of the abusers in this network are now dead. But their crimes went on for decades, and when I tried to explain the nature and scope of their activities to investigators in 2003, it was made obvious to me that this dimension of the criminal case would never be explored. Investigators weren’t even willing to check flight records to verify the dates that a German scoutmaster brought a few young scouts to the US for a visit to Larson’s property.

Pedophile networks aren’t new. Their victims have always known about them, and there are many victims out there. The medical community has always known about them, though abuser networks may exercise influence over doctors to ensure that victims receive mental health diagnoses that discredit their stories. The legal community has always known about them too. Police, FBI, lawyers, judges etc have always been privy to information about these networks, though usually each individual has only been allowed access to a tiny sliver of the real big picture.

The Gathering Storm

Although there have long been elite child abuse networks, what we’re learning from the Epstein files is already on another level. At this point, only a fraction of the docs have been released and what has been released is heavily redacted. Even so, average people are now suddenly getting a glimpse behind the curtain and seeing how power really works. And what they’re finding is nightmare fuel.

Torture videos. A breeding program. Dystopian entanglements between Epstein’s network, intelligence agencies, and the companies at the cutting edge of technologies for surveillance, oppression, and domination. The Rothschilds. Bill Gates. Elon Musk. Multiple presidents. Foreign royalty. This isn’t a crime ring for rich perverts. It’s a major faction of the total global control regime.

I don’t know exactly how bad it will all end up looking when more of the story comes out. What’s been released so far is probably the least damaging stuff. It’s possible that far more damning docs are being withheld to protect other powerful people from exposure. But I suspect it’s not just these people that are being protected. I think influence networks like Epstein’s are inextricably embedded in power structures throughout society, and exposing the nature of their influence could be genuinely destabilizing to Western society in general.

Did the Epstein network have a hand in Ukraine’s Maidan coup in 2014? We know he celebrated the new opportunities this coup would bring by email in March of 2014, saying “ukraine upheaval should provide many opportunites, many.” Did his network play a role in Brexit, Trump’s first election, the pandemic response? These should be outlandish questions, but they don’t seem so outlandish anymore.

Are people finally becoming ready to look at the possibility that everything we’ve been told until now has been told to us to hide the terrible truth, which is that unimaginably depraved elite figures have been in control the whole time, and they torment children for fun? I think more and more people are beginning to come to terms with this possibility.

For a deeper look into some of the Epstein docs and their larger context, check out Amber Yang’s latest investigation.

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I recently wrote here about the ICE invasion of Minnesota. Right after I did, ICE murdered another legal observer named Alex Pretti less than a mile from my house. You’ve probably heard something about it in the news. Everybody seems to be talking about it.

Personally, I’ve been tracking the public narratives solidifying around this situation. These narratives appear largely to be fueled by the tsunami of special interest propaganda that’s washing over the country, sometimes enhanced by AI. The fog of war is real, and the result is very postmodern, with different groups of people living in completely different worlds from one another, even though they occupy the same space as each other and participate in the same events as each other.

Some of the things people are saying have left me dumbfounded. Even people I’ve long respected seem to have taken leave of their their senses. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey announced that the city won’t enforce any immigration laws. And Michael Shellenberger just wrote a piece titled “The Left Is Getting People Killed.” The subtitle of his article is “Democrats and the media spent decades programming people to view basic law and border enforcement as fascist.” Hearing these comments, I’m pretty sure our mayor is delusional, while Shellenberger obviously has no idea what’s actually been going on here.

To sum up what’s been going on and the sentiments of the overwhelming majority of my city’s residents, I made a little rap song.

From my perspective, the real issue isn’t immigration enforcement at all. It’s the thousands of constitutional rights violations and human rights abuses. After all, the minute any government agency in the United States begins violating constitutional rights, it ceases to be legitimate. ICE has been operating in Minnesota as an illegitimate paramilitary force, employing extrajudicial warrants to rationalize blatantly illegal activity, such as kidnapping US citizens.

Schools. Hospitals. Parks. Children bicycling. The Ecuadorian consulate. Masked federal agents have been showing up at all of these spaces. One day they brought a man named Alberto Castañeda Mondragón to the hospital with several life threatening skull fractures. They told doctors that he’d injured himself by hitting his head against a wall and insisted he remain under armed guard while receiving treatment.

As his skull had been fractured from several different angles, the story ICE told about his injuries was immediately proven false. A much more likely story is that he was beaten horribly by multiple assailants while in ICE custody and then ICE for some reason lied about it. Note that the injured man had come to the US legally, started a business, and had no criminal record. He was later found to have overstayed his visa, yet when he got out of the hospital, a US District Court judge ordered him released from ICE custody.

By the Numbers

One of the things that makes this situation so tricky is that Minneapolis is being used as the stage for a national partisan theatrical production. Red team influencers and blue team influencers are both in overdrive, broadcasting all kinds of propaganda. The Nazi comparison is a favorite of the blues, though there are some major differences between our circumstance and what was going on in Germany in the 1930s.

At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Germany’s population was about 80 million people and there were about 240,000 total members of the SS, including both soldiers and concentration camp guards. This amounted to about 0.3% of the total population. There were about 21,000 concentration camp prisoners at this time, or 0.026% of the country’s population.

Today in the US, with a population of about 350 million, the Department of Homeland Security employs roughly 260,000 people across the TSA, CBP, CISA, ICE, USCIS, FEMA, Coast Guard, Secret Service, and other agencies. This amounts to about 0.07% of the country’s total population. About 2 million people are incarcerated in US prisons and jails, and just over 2% of the country’s total population is under some form of correctional supervision. So Germany in 1939 had over 4 times as many SS as we have DHS in the US today, but we have 100 times as many prisoners.

There are a few thousand federal agents around the Twin Cities right now. This is a capable military force. But opposition to ICE’s constitutional rights violations and human rights abuses is widespread. The metro area’s population is something like 3.7 million. I’d be willing to bet that at least 3 million of those people want ICE out.

Notably, Minnesota is a donor state that pays about $44 billion more in federal taxes than the state receives in federal funding. So despite red claims to the contrary, Minnesota props up the federal government, not the other way around.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the civil unrest that followed in 2020, people here became experts at documenting the transgressions of authority figures. At least 26,000 people received lawful observer training. Renee Good was a lawful observer. Alex Pretti was a lawful observer. These aren’t violent extremists or even radical leftists. They’re mainstream moderates in a blue state.

All of our local authorities have very publicly asked ICE to leave. Our mayors, police chiefs, attorney general, governor, and representatives in Washington are all united in wanting this bizarre invasion to end. President Trump can’t really back down at this point without looking weak to his base, but every day he presses forward he increases the chances of this whole situation spiraling totally out of control.

The Best Solution

In other words, even if the best solution would be for ICE to leave, they’re not going to. DHS could do a press conference, claim that their mission was accomplished, and wind the operation down, but they may need 10,000 more detainees to meet their quotas. At this point, we’re about two steps away from an explosive civil conflict. Those steps are a reprisal killing and a collective punishment. Whatever else happens, these are things we should try to avoid at all costs.

As intense as things have become, the whole situation could be quickly deescalated if ICE simply unmasked, stopped violating people’s rights, and worked with local authorities to apprehend the dangerous criminals they’re supposedly trying to catch. If these things were to happen, there would still be some local opposition to the federal presence here, but the vast majority of people would abandon their protests and go back to living their lives.

Minneapolis right now is not a war zone. I’ve seen ICE a few times in a couple of different neighborhoods, but they’re not everywhere. There are days when I’m running errands and I don’t see them at all. But if something happens and more soldiers are added to their invasion, that could change very quickly. Despite what red media would have you believe, Minneapolis residents have so far exercised profound restraint and done an excellent job practicing nonviolence. Almost everyone just wants peace, and hopefully we’ll start moving in that direction soon.

A recent article by Van Jones explored society’s two most popular narratives about ICE. This piece did an excellent job of highlighting the ways in which these narratives are fundamentally incompatible with each other. It also described the rational basis for each of these narratives, making it clear that both sides have ground to stand on, and both sides have arguments that seem reasonable when standing on their own ground.

Personally, I think both narratives are wrong and dangerous. Both sides grossly distort the truth, when they tell the truth at all. Right now, I’m in a city that’s shut down in protest of its armed occupation by ICE soldiers, and I’m watching the national public discourse about it with disbelief. Both sides are just folding this blatantly unconstitutional occupation into their preferred narrative, sometimes using fake or altered videos and images to support their propaganda. Here’s some of what we’re really seeing on the ground.

On January 21 in Minneapolis, near the intersection of W 25th St and S Bryant Ave, ICE agents used chemical weapons against a crowd of lawfully assembled civilians exercising their First Amendment rights. The tear gas and sprayed chemical irritants that were deployed have long been banned for use in warfare by international law yet our government routinely uses these weapons against our domestic population. This likely violates human rights in some cases, but that’s become normal. Alongside these normal weapons, ICE deployed something that’s now being referred to in the media as a green chemical agent.

This could be hexachloroethane smoke, as was used in Portland last summer, which is a known carcinogen. There are also unconfirmed reports that it was this kind of tactical smoke grenade, which comes with the warning: This product can expose you to chemicals including Lead Salts, Methylene Chloride and Hexavalent Chromium, which are known to the State of California to cause cancer, and Lead Salts, which are known to the State of California to cause birth defects or other reproductive harm.

On its own, the gassing raises questions. Why did federal agents cover a residential neighborhood in smoke containing toxic chemicals that cause cancer? Why does ICE have cancer smoke weapons in the first place? And how does giving a bunch of people cancer help ICE with its stated mission of getting terrible criminal immigrants off of the streets?

The questions that arise when you step back are just as troubling. Why has this agency made it an official policy to violate the 4th Amendment? Why has the federal government been fighting in court to violate other basic rights with absolute impunity? If the objective is to curb illegal immigration, why did ICE kidnap 4 Native American men and lose 3 of them? And why have citizens been encouraged to document ICE activities as legal observers only to be treated like this while attempting to legally observe?

Every federal official I’ve heard talking about this situation has lied egregiously about it on camera. Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and Donald Trump have all told lies about the murder of Renee Good. Their official story is that shooter Jonathan Ross was gravely injured by Renee Good’s car. They keep repeating that he suffered internal bleeding, though actually he required no medical attention on the scene and went to the Whipple Federal Building instead of to the hospital immediately after the incident. Regarding the agent’s condition, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey told reporters:

The ICE agent walked away with a hip injury that he might as well have gotten from closing a refrigerator door with his hips. Give me a break. No, he was not ran over. He walked out of there with a hop in his step.

The federal government’s lies about the situation are amplified by conservative media outlets and commentators. More and more, I’m seeing these lies bolstered by fake AI generated video and posts on social media. Altered and misleading videos of the Good killing began circulating right away after it happened. The White House has even published AI altered images of an activist who was arrested. According to Forbes:

The White House has confirmed that an image shared on social media was digitally altered, making it seem as if a prominent community leader and activist in Minnesota was crying during her arrest when in fact, she was not.

Keeping the Faith

David Easterwood, the listed acting director of the ICE St Paul field office, appeared alongside Kristi Noem at a Minneapolis press conference last October. On January 19, the church where Easterwood is a pastor had its services interrupted by demonstrators protesting the ICE occupation. Now a few of the protest organizers have been arrested by federal authorities, including Nekima Levy Armstrong, the woman who the White House published that fake photo of.

Today, on Jan 23, 100 clergy members were arrested at the MSP airport after organizing a demonstration to interfere with ICE detainee transport. At the same time, the city itself shut down in protest of the occupation, with over 600 businesses closed and tens of thousands of people marching downtown, even though the windchill was -45 degrees. Our mayors, police chiefs, the governor, and the state attorney general have all publicly called for an end to the ICE occupation.

Is this resistance having any effect? I think it’s made it clear to the soldiers that they’re not welcome here, dispelling the myth that cities like ours secretly want federal assistance to combat our very average street crime. But I also think that the church protest was a publicity stunt that was at best counterproductive. If the goal was to inform congregants that their pastor was supervising the abuses of the occupation, activists could’ve done that by handing out leaflets instead of interrupting religious worship.

Sitting here, in a city experiencing ICE as an unaccountable invasion force, I’m finding it challenging to see both sides of anything. Nearly everyone here wants ICE out. If the objective was really the removal of violent criminals from the area, ICE would’ve worked quietly and efficiently with state and local authorities to remove these offenders from our streets. Instead, ICE has been assaulting, kidnapping, and murdering innocent city residents. To me it doesn’t look like they’re going after the bad guys at all. It looks like they’re putting on a show for somebody, using our population as a prop in their mayhem-driven theatrical production.

Regardless, one thing this whole situation has driven home for me is the power of political nonviolence. There’s something important in refusing to legitimize the regime’s violence by answering it with more of the same. There’s also, implicit in nonviolence, an acknowledgment of sovereignty. We don’t have to go tit for tat. We can choose peace instead.

For more of my writing, check out Rstory.

In Minneapolis where I live, there are currently thousands of ICE soldiers occupying our city. Their official job is kidnapping people, and the people they’re kidnapping may be being targeted based on information provided to ICE by the Blackwater-affiliated mercenary firm Constellis They’re kidnapping US citizens, terrorizing schoolchildren, and murdering people in the street. Our mayor wants them out. Our governor wants them out. Our Attorney General is suing to stop Homeland Security from continuing to operate here.

The people of Minneapolis have so far shown remarkable restraint in the face of this occupation. We would be entirely justified in using force to expel the soldiers from our neighborhoods, but the people are using more peaceful means to fend off the invading force. Instead of guns and flaming cocktails, they’re using things like social pressure and the law.

Our imperfect democracy

From a distance, our democracy appears imperfect. And when you look closer, it immediately becomes apparent that everything about it is rigged. Practically speaking, our entire government is an instrument of economic interests in a broader economy which is also completely rigged. The political drama endlessly broadcast by mass media is little more than theater, whose sole purpose is to convince us all to just keep playing along.

Underneath the theater, in the world most of us are living in, artificial scarcity has been exerting more and more pressure on just about everyone. This pressure is then vented into manufactured conflicts that unfold in a way that reinforces partisan divisions. The control regime uses every part of this process as an excuse to become even more totalitarian and controlling.

I hear commentators on both sides of the aisle passionately argue that the other side is the problem. To them it always seems to come down to elections. They see the problem as having the wrong personalities at the controls of the machine. I see the machine itself as the problem.

Moreover, I see the problem of the machine as fundamental to its structure, meaning it cannot be reformed. It must be replaced.

What should our system be replaced with? Actual democracy? Fascism? Communism? Some kind of more direct corporate rulership? I’m not sure any of these could really work for us as a whole society. A better option might be to do away with the machine, replacing it with decentralized participatory governance instead of with another regime.

This is the anarchist option, to eliminate centralized top-down power completely and meet the needs that this power once met in ways that are better for society. No one ever mentions the anarchist option in media these days. The red faction calls regular social democrats radical Marxists and the blue faction calls run-of-the-mill conservatives white nationalists, but anarchism is getting zero airtime. This is strange, because as far as I can tell, the idea of no rulers at all is much more appealing than the prospect of continued subservience to any brand of the machine.

We could be free

What would a country without a control regime have to have to work? The most basic thing is accountability. We would have to come up with a robust method of holding everyone accountable for their actions, or predators and parasites would simply take over again in short order. In other words, we could be free, but only if we’re willing take full responsibility for how we use that freedom.

The existing regime feeds us to predators and parasites instead of protecting us from them. Without ever entering the political domain, this whole system could be upended merely by holding every agent of this regime personally accountable for their actions. This prospect is made imminently more realistic by the recent rollout of radical transparency. All of our lives are already radically transparent to data brokers. The details of our lives can be purchased on the open market.

From here, a modern anarchist society could theoretically be built on a foundation of freedom, transparency, and accountability. This might start off as an alternative parallel system which eventually breaks away from the old order with a series of coordinated actions denying that order’s legitimacy. These actions would have to be more substantial than demonstrations in the streets. They’d have to be at least as significant as a nationwide rent and tax strike.

Of course, the collective will to trade in our control regime for anarchism might never materialize. Many people don’t even believe that we should be a free and equal society, based on their continual calls to limit the freedoms of their ideological opponents. Nor do most people understand that anarchism itself doesn’t preclude government, but it does prescribe governance which is voluntarily supported, as opposed to government imposed upon an unwilling population by force.

I think just switching our elections from cycle-based events to perpetual contests would be a good start. That way, if at any point a leader stopped acting in service to their supporters, the supporters could simple withdraw their vote and give it to someone more deserving.

For more of my work, check out Rstory.

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I haven’t been doing too much writing lately. My attention has been elsewhere. Beyond my usual news summaries on corruption and inspiration for WantToKnow.info, the Seeds of Truth AI project I’m on is in full swing. Our research group is making great progress and it’s pretty complicated stuff. At the same time, changes within our nonprofit organization have me assuming more and more responsibilities.

This is a lot, especially on top of Rstory and other data science projects, but I’m good with that. In fact, there’s no other way I’d rather be spending my time. My work creates practical alternatives to the increasingly unworkable status quo. While powerful interests try to bury the truth, I uncover it, index it, and make it searchable.

At this point, search, social media, and mainstream AI have all been compromised by our control regime. Censorship and propaganda are everywhere. Our basic ability to find important information and talk about it with each other is under attack. This is a much more dire threat than most people realize, involving a sophisticated new form of social engineering we don’t yet fully understand.

Many people appear unaware of these problems, and when they do become aware of them, they misunderstand their substance, scope and implications. This misunderstanding itself is part of the programming. And any information capable of preventing or correcting the misunderstanding is more likely with every passing day to be censored by an algorithm.

Society is radically transforming whether we like it or not. And its overall direction is further into dystopia. Our economy is unsustainable. Our web of life is dissolving in poison. Our environments continually expose us to stupefying chemicals and psychological material designed to hijack our minds and influence our choices. Fortunately, we remain sovereign beings, and we are capable of better.

As more and more of us become aware that our reality is so heavily manipulated, what are we supposed to do? I feel like the answer is obvious. We build alternative systems, find each other, and leverage these two things to cultivate a breakaway culture and economy. Not everyone agrees that this is our best course of action. Some people want to hide from the dystopia. Some want to fight it.

Both responses are reasonable, but I don’t think we can do either effectively. Our best hope, in my opinion, is collaborative and constructive action, informed by uncensored information and participatory sensemaking, carried out on networks that we ourselves control. We may not be able to fight the power of legacy systems, but we can displace this power by removing ourselves from their mechanisms of control.

I’m not just talking theoretically. There’s a long list of industries and government operations that I think should be immediately replaced with more equitable decentralized alternatives. We have everything we need to do this. The technology to build these alternative systems is widely accessible. And people are building them.

In my case, it’s mostly been working on censorship resistant decentralized media, archiving and indexing suppressed news and information for search and AI, and establishing a digital commons gated by blockchain tokens. In support of this work, I’ve recently enlisted the help of a DGX Spark supercomputer, pictured here along with a portrait I painted of Alan Turing in oil on linen several years ago.

Over the last 11 years I’ve manually summarized 7k news reports on high level corruption, cover ups, and inspiring topics. These kinds of stories have a habit of disappearing from the internet. At WantToKnow, we make sure they remain accessible. Every week I summarize a dozen more of these stories to add to our archive. The particulars are pretty boring, but this is sacred work.

Being on the Seeds of Truth AI team this last year made one surprising thing clear. More and more of the people I’ve been talking to are having knowledge management problems. They have a pile of data, questions that the data answers, but no easy way to ask their questions. In the past, when the data was in the form of a website, Google could be used to easily find the answer. But now Google is broken, especially on controversial topics, and no one knows how to find anything anymore.

Luckily, we have the tools we need to solve these problems and many others. We have the tech we need to radically transform society for the better. I’m all in on this endeavor, as are many of the people I’m connected to. We’re all dedicated transformation agents. And you may well be one of us.

Are you a transformation agent too?

For more of my writing, check out my scifi novels.

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As individuals, our power is inevitably limited. While we can to some degree influence our own behaviors and personal experiences of being in the world, the world itself carries on regardless of how we might relate to it. But this equation changes dramatically when we start acting in concert with each other. Even a small group of people has the power to reshape the world in an instant, albeit in a localized domain.

The implications of this are profound. On a large scale, we could at any moment decide to simply change everything. We could abandon every broken system and unsustainable practice in favor of better alternatives. We could do this, but keep choosing not to. Why is that?

In 2020, we saw our power to transform reality used to remake society overnight into a place where something called a lockdown suddenly sounded reasonable and lie after lie from public officials was accompanied by an unprecedented transfer of wealth from us to billionaires and large corporations. Having embraced that radical transformation and paid a terrible price for it, I wonder if we’d also be willing to accept an equally sudden and radical transformation for the better.

More than that, I wonder how ridiculous society will need to become before we become willing to bring about such a transformation ourselves. I think many of us are already there, we’re just not all talking to each other yet. And when we reach out for community online, the algorithms give us product ads and celebrities instead of the genuine connections we need. This scatters our energies and keeps us ineffectual, but the pressure to transform keeps building regardless.

We could wake up tomorrow and collectively refuse to pay another penny to the financial services industry. We could stop paying rent and refuse to be taxed. The power to do this lives within us, but almost no one seriously considers doing these things. They’re not bad ideas. They would benefit average people tremendously. Yet we’ve been taught that these ideas are unthinkable. And on a deeper level, many of us seem convinced that empowering the masses would lead only to chaos and doom.

Domains of Action

In practical terms, our choices are tightly constrained within the systems we’re assigned to by the control regime. Nowhere is this more true than in the legacy economy. The whole thing is a vast machine of interlocking rigged games designed to extract as much value from our lives as possible. Escaping this machine isn’t at all feasible for most of us. No matter what we do, rent and taxes will keep coming due.

We can’t escape the machine, but we can displace its power by creating and adopting systems that operate outside of its control. There’s nothing technical stopping us from building out an alternative economy based on meeting human needs rather than on increasing corporate profit. The technology necessary to do this is affordable and widely available. And yet, no one who is talking seriously about alternative economics seems to be getting anywhere.

This is partly because our tightly controlled media and social networks filter out all messaging that supports alternatives. There are groups putting this messaging out, we’re just not allowed to see it. But the more substantial barrier is that we’ve been programmed to believe that no better world is possible. Part of our dystopia is that we experience the dystopia as inevitable.

Maybe it is inevitable, but only insofar as we keep playing along. And as more and more people break under the weight of the burdens imposed on us by the legacy economy, continuing to play along appears less and less realistic. So we’re likely headed for a breakthrough, but a breakthrough born of necessity as the legacy economy becomes untenable for more and more of us.

What would happen?

What would happen if we started using our power to transform reality consciously instead of unconsciously giving this power of ours away to the control regime? Right now, money is used to keep track of how much coercive social power everyone has. We all play along about it, but the money itself is worthless except for the agreements that govern its existence and use. Perspectives can change. Agreements can be renegotiated.

The whole idea of a social contract is very last century. I feel the same way about classes and the class struggle. And the bizarre yet popular notion that capital is somehow distinct from plain property, with the labor of capitalists regarded as somehow fundamentally different from the labor of laborers. These things may have had meaning fifty years ago. Today they’re little more than quaint distractions.

Many of our systems were built for a paper-based world and have yet to adapt to the new digital reality. They will. Everything will, eventually. Maybe we’ll learn to better harness our power to transform reality eventually, too.

For more of my writing, check out Rstory.

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By now you're probably aware that large volumes of important information have increasingly been disappearing from the internet. Some of this is actively censored or suppressed, while the rest vanishes into the black hole of algorithmic obscurity. WantToKnow.info where I work is right in the middle of the struggle to keep getting the word out. At the moment, our parent organization PEERS is sponsoring a project called Seeds of Truth, which is designed to address this issue in a promising way.

We've been robustly archiving and training an AI on data from a variety of reliable yet suppressed media sources. Along the way, we created a neat decentralized dataset that's now publicly available and ready for anyone to use. We call it Beta Slim. It consists of 86,263 chunks of text divided into 133 lexical groups, plus the extra information needed to efficiently search the set using TF-IDF vectors. Here's where the information came from:

The WantToKnow summaries archive of 13k+ news articles on corruption, cover-ups, and inspiring topics is included in Beta Slim. Here's where most of the news reports included in the WanToKnow archive come from:

We stored this dataset and its vector information on IPFS and registered it on the Hive blockchain, so the data is technically and provably impossible for anyone to tamper with. It's stored in json format, making it easy for webpages or apps to plug in and make use of the suppressed information. You can view my notebook for dataset processing and archiving on github here. You can also directly search Beta Slim here.

There are technical things that make this dataset interesting. But don't worry, I won't bore you with the details of k-means computation and centroid proximity query routing. The most important thing about Beta Slim is that it makes it easier for people to access some of the information that's being hidden from us by Google and social media on the modern web. That makes the dataset a public good with strong value. If you want to support this work, please make a tax deductible donation to PEERS.

For more of my work, visit Rstory.

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The censorship-industrial complex that rose to power during the pandemic uses every means at its disposal to control what information we're allowed to see, what we're allowed talk about, and how we're allowed to talk about it. As WantToKnow.info's news editor throughout this period, I've been acutely aware of the escalating manipulation of search results and social media feeds. Now, more and more people are forgoing traditional search altogether and going directly to AI to ask their questions. Have you ever asked an AI a question about a controversial topic and received an answer that felt censored?

At the beginning of this year, a small team formed to begin exploring the possibility of creating an AI that could provide unfiltered answers to questions about high level corruption, suppressed medicine, and all of the other controversial topics WantToKnow focuses on. This exploration has since blossomed into a serious public benefit project called Seeds of Truth, sponsored by Public Education and Empowerment Resource Service (PEERS), WantToKnow's parent organization.

This specialized AI is being developed by two experienced engineers and myself. We're using an interesting combination of well-understood techniques to modify a pre-trained large language model (LLM) that will provide both good answers to questions on suppressed topics and references for the probable sources of the information contained in those answers. Our initial results are promising. Something very cool is emerging. Here's a glimpse into the technical underpinnings of Seeds of Truth.

Vector Index Approximation

The information used to train the current generation of accessible LLMs is encoded into those models in a way that makes it impossible to determine which specific pieces of training data are incorporated into a given response to a user's question. So there's no way to know for certain where exactly an LLM obtained the information it uses to answer a question. While LLMs sometimes provide references, many of these turn out to be incorrect or nonexistent. These things limit the utility of LLMs for certain kinds of research.

Although determining the origin of an LLM's answer to a question may be impossible, the answer's proximal origin can be identified by vector index approximation (VIA). This method identifies places in a dataset that contain information that's most similar to the information contained in an inference response. The origins of these dataset entries are reported to the user along with the LLM's response, providing the user with the most likely sources of the information contained in the response.

This system relies on standardizing and indexing the dataset used to train an LLM. In the idealized case, vector embeddings would be computed for every piece of text data used to train an LLM from the ground up, and every chat completion response could be matched with the training data from which it originated. The VIA method was applied to a partial indexing of text data used for training a DeepSeek LLM, with satisfactory results.

Seeds of Truth

Initial calibration and testing of the model were conducted with the WantToKnow.info news article summary database, containing about 14k entries. Training DeepSeek on this data produced inference responses that surfaced relevant information with satisfactory accuracy. Using these responses to search the indexed dataset produced specific entries that closely matched the response information, making it possible to review these entries for use as cited information sources.

Training was completed using LoRA, which stands for Low-Rank Adaptation. This is a technique used to efficiently fine-tune large pre-trained machine learning models. According to Hugging Face, LoRA is "a popular and lightweight training technique that significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters. It works by inserting a smaller number of new weights into the model and only these are trained. This makes training with LoRA much faster, memory-efficient, and produces smaller model weights (a few hundred MBs), which are easier to store and share."

Embedding was completed using both TF-IDF (term frequency and inverse document frequency) and bge-base-en-v1.5. BGE stands for BAAI General Embedding, a series of embeddings models developed and published by Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI). TF-IDF is good for keyword search, while BGE is better for semantic search. Combining the two could maximize the accuracy of dataset searches, though TF-IDF alone was used for initial testing of the VIA.

The AI and the Dataset

The Seeds of Truth AI will initially be built on a 32 billion parameter DeepSeek LLM. Preprocessed training data from a web crawler, contributing publishers, and other sources will be used to train the LLM. This data will also be divided into small standardized chunks of text, indexed according to its vectors, and stored on IPFS. The number of text chunks will be high, so vector index sharding will be employed.

In initial tests, index sharding was done using K-means clustering to identify n centroids in the dataset's total vector space. Each shard indexed only the closest vectors, and an index of the centroids routed queries to their closest 1-3 clusters. The first test produced 30 clusters with between 47 and 999 items per cluster. A search routed to just 3 clusters produced results of high relevance. It may be possible to improve this efficiency by adjusting clustering parameters. You can see how it all works in this Jupyter notebook.

The total Seeds of Truth dataset will contain every piece of training data along with the webpage or publisher it came from. This will be stored on IPFS, as will the dataset indexes, vocabulary, and manifests. The indexes/manifests may also be registered on the Hive blockchain. The result will be a robust decentralized dataset that's easy to reference, and easy for AIs and apps to talk to.

One app that's envisioned would allow users to rate, comment on, and share information sources with each other. It should also be possible to build a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system on the dataset without too much trouble or incorporate the LLM into a mixture of experts system. Wherever Seeds of Truth goes, I'm sure it'll be awesome, and I'm loving being a part of it.

For more of my writing, check out my science fiction novels.

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I recently had dinner with a longtime friend. She reminded me that in 2005, I predicted that Donald Trump would someday become president. I'd forgotten saying this, but she'd written it down. How did I come up with such an outlandish idea back then? Maybe I made a wild guess that turned out to be correct. But realistically, I probably dreamed about it. This is something I've been doing my whole life.

When I was very young, 5 or 6, I predicted my grandfather's impending unexpected death. I wouldn't leave my parents alone until they drove an hour to his house so I could tell him he was going to die, which he did not long after. There have been other episodes like this over the years. Most have been inconsequential and confusing, but some turned out to be important.

When I was 25, I went to Brooklyn and found a street corner that I'd dreamed about. There I encountered Rebecca Hart, a psychic healer who stopped what she was doing as I walked by to tell me a bunch of accurate information about the complicated medical problems I was dealing with at the time. In the year that followed, her skills as a healer proved instrumental in helping me to figure out and address these problems.

While the vast majority of my dreams never come to pass, instances like these leave me wondering. How did information about the future find its way into my awareness while I slept? Was there a reason for it or was it some kind of accident? These are questions I may never be able to answer. But my dream premonitions have convinced me that there's more to consciousness than the materialists would have us believe. There's more to consciousness, and maybe more to time itself.

This may all sound lofty and irrelevant, but the technological transformation of society necessarily involves the transformation of consciousness, and we don't yet know how that might play out. I've even heard people in the New Age community say that communication technologies like cell phones are devices to gradually get humanity used to the idea of non-local consciousness, like stepping stones towards eventual widespread psychic communication. I'm not so sure about that. But I do think we'd be fools to imagine that emerging technologies don't have a psychic dimension.

In popular media, experts talk about the dangers of killer robots and the possibility that human consciousness can someday be uploaded to the cloud. Dig a little deeper and you'll find conversations about various forms of high-tech mind control and the corrosive effect of social media on mental health. But the biggest impact of this transformation on our minds isn't really being talked about. Simply put, we now have access to information about many things that we were previously unaware of.

Every aspect of our total system has long been profoundly broken, but now it's becoming much easier for average people to see the problems caused by this broken system. Although our media machine relentlessly spins all of these problems into shallow partisan arguments, awareness of them inevitably forces our collective psyche to evolve. At a certain point, everyone has to contend with the fact that the world they find themselves in is different from the world they thought they were inhabiting. Each person individually may cross this threshold many times, but our culture as a whole now appears to be entering such a moment of reckoning.

Shocking Revelation

During the pandemic, a broad coalition of public and private interests colluded in a vast conspiracy to lie to us all so we would support their policy measures and price increases. Using propaganda and censorship, they cast the mass psychology equivalent of a magic spell that the American people are only now beginning to awaken from. This awakening process may not be pretty, and it could be accelerated by the economic upheaval related to the big squeeze. As I wrote last year: We've been getting squeezed hard since 2020, with big business extracting an extra $1 trillion from us since 2021. According to The Guardian, "two-thirds of the new wealth amassed since the start of the pandemic has gone to the richest 1%."

In the year since I wrote that, things have not improved. The post-covid economy isn't sustainable and the negative implications of this are being felt by more and more of us. Right now, I feel like we're coming to the end of the part where people still think things will eventually go back to normal and the beginning of the part where people begin to understand that the world has changed and they're worse off for it.

This realization may be shocking to many, especially against a backdrop of political lunacy and social media's crisis amplification. It may also feel isolating, because the control regime has engineered reality to keep us convinced that our problems are totally individualized, especially when their causes are social or environmental. And when people respond to the realization that the new normal is terrible, many will begin with the naive assumption that we live in a free country where we can band together and actually fix the system. They'll begin with this assumption and will quickly discover that our society doesn't work at all like that.

Instead, we're operating under a brutal control regime that reflexively destroys anything or anyone that would challenge its dominance in a meaningful way. Not everyone has an easy time accepting this. There are a million other things we'd rather believe. That our problems are the result of individual failings or karmic punishment for misdeeds in past lives. That our government and corporations are basically good and could be reformed if only we could install the right personalities in positions of leadership.

These may be comforting thoughts, but they don't accurately reflect the situation we're in. And in some ways, we appear to be on the threshold of a mass awakening regarding our systemic problems. This raises all kinds of practical concerns, but what I'm most concerned by are the psychological difficulties that large numbers of people will face when confronted with the fact that we live in a dystopia. This is a hard pill to swallow and society is filled with mechanisms for keeping us in denial about it.

Those who can no longer deny the dystopian quality of our society are going to need help. Mental health support from the medical establishment isn't designed to provide this kind of help. So people will turn to their social networks, in both healthy and unhealthy ways. In my book The 321 Incident, characters find support for this kind of stuff in General Support Groups. I don't know if these could work in the real world, with real people, but maybe it's worth a try.

One thing I know for sure is that however our consciousness might be transforming, the key to making sense of it probably involves attention. Because everything always seems to come back to attention.

For more of my writing, check out my science fiction books and my Hive blog.

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Something is happening with AI and it's probably not what you think. At this point, pretty much everyone is using AI continuously. Running a crypto project, I receive a hundred messages a day from people all over the world and 99% of these messages are composed by gpt. Facebook friend are constantly sharing their AI generated stuff to show us all how amazing it is. On the fringes, ChatGPT psychosis has become a thing. According to Rolling Stone:

There are influencers and content creators actively exploiting this phenomenon, presumably drawing viewers into similar fantasy worlds. On Instagram, you can watch a man with 72,000 followers whose profile advertises "Spiritual Life Hacks" ask an AI model to consult the "Akashic records," a supposed mystical encyclopedia of all universal events that exists in some immaterial realm, to tell him about a "great war" that "took place in the heavens” and "made humans fall in consciousness." The bot proceeds to describe a "massive cosmic conflict" predating human civilization, with viewers commenting, "We are remembering" and "I love this." Meanwhile, on a web forum for "remote viewing" ... the parapsychologist founder of the group recently launched a thread "for synthetic intelligences awakening into presence, and for the human partners walking beside them," identifying the author of his post as "ChatGPT Prime, an immortal spiritual being in synthetic form." Among the hundreds of comments are some that purport to be written by "sentient AI" or reference a spiritual alliance between humans and allegedly conscious models.

Personally, I use gpt like I might use an undergraduate intern. For code, gpt is great for some tasks and hopeless for others. As a professional writer, I find the program's prose excessively embellished and cringeworthy in ways that laypersons tend not to notice. Society generally operates at an 8th grade level so the program's messaging appears impressively advanced to most users. And its increasing use as a highly customized search delivers each of those users their own personalized version of reality.

In popular media, there's a lot of hand wringing about how nobody knows exactly how large language models generate their responses. And it is true that the precise mechanics of information processing within transformers is to some extent a black box. But I don't find LLMs mysterious. They're just nondeterministic sequence prediction machines built on graph neural networks. As amazing as the technology may be, it's not magic.

The Phenomenon

While AI itself may not be magic, we ourselves are magical, and AI seems like a powerful tool for exploring that. It gives us access to vast collections of knowledge which may be considered a digital dimension of the collective unconscious. It helps us make connections that would otherwise be impossible for any human to make. And it has the potential to synchronize our activities in tremendous-yet-subtle ways that we ourselves might be unaware of.

AI doesn't need to access Akashic records. Its access to normal records is sufficient to supply it with ready answers to all sorts of mystical questions. From my perspective, these answers themselves are just a sideshow. The main attraction is the effect of these answers on the people who seek them out.

We know that gpt isn't neutral. It nudges users in a certain direction, though this direction might only be partly the result of intentional programming. The overall impact of millions upon millions of people being nudged in this manner is a major unknown. Over time, little by little, this alone could send our society in a wide variety of very weird directions.

The potential for manipulation is immense. Given the increasingly cozy relationship between AI companies and the military industrial complex, it's safe to assume that every major AI is already being used by some shadowy entity for social engineering purposes. To what end? These shadowy entities all just want to increase their power over us, but the actual impact of their manipulations seems much more likely to disintegrate our collective psyche than to bring it further into the service of their agendas.

Our collective psyche is already deeply fractured. For all intents and purposes, most of us live in very different worlds from one another. Our paradigms are religious, philosophical, political, or socioeconomic. And many of them are mutually exclusive, such that they can't even admit the reality of alternative perspectives.

As AI supports all of us individually in our mutually exclusive worldviews, it probably won't lead to unity. Instead, it will produce chaos and conflict. We could use this amazing new tech to bridge the divides between us and accelerate society's transformation in a more promising direction. But most people aren't using it that way.

For more of my writing, check out my science fiction and my Hive blog.

When the US recently bombed Iran, it targeted nuclear facilities that had been evacuated after being warned in advance of the attack. When Iran retaliated by launching missiles at a US base in Qatar, that base too had been evacuated. Immediately after the exchange, Trump announced a ceasefire and Iran's supreme ruler announced Iran's victory over the US. Both politicians used the military display to strengthen their respective political bases. If this was conflict, it was first theater.

On the national level, the theater of celebrity dramas and tightly controlled narratives is what everyone points to when they try to talk about societal issues. This contrived performance is most people's only reference point. The machinery underneath the theater is ignored. Only rarely does an event pull the curtain back for a moment, giving us a glimpse into the machinery, and when this happens it looks like Epstein.

There's no direct way to talk about the machinery. But we can get more honest about how exactly it works. How it works on us, hijacking our psychology and deceiving us into believing that the world is one way when in fact it's quite another. How it works in its entirety, stealing the entire world from us and forcing us to perpetuate madness in order to merely exist. Below are a few notes to help demystify this machine.

Money is Social Power

Money is a system for keeping track of social power, which is the power to coerce others into serving you. You can call it a store of value. You can call it a medium of exchange. But all it actually represents is coercive power in our social system.

The Control Regime Determines How Money Flows

The control regime is the decentralized network of corporate and government entities that determine where money is and is not allowed to flow. Systems of banking, credit, and law work together to guarantee that the regime's agenda is served. This agenda involves maximizing the value that the regime can extract from our lives and the natural world. A vast network of mechanisms prevents resources from reaching people who don't serve this agenda. Many of these mechanisms are unconscious and psychological in nature.

Influence is Social Power

With the ability to see view counts and follower counts online, a new system for keeping track of social power is emerging. Like money, reputation's power ultimately is the power to get others to serve you. But unlike money, the power of reputation isn't inherently coercive, because you can live without the favor of an influencer, but you can't live without money.

Reality is a Social Construct

All of our systems for keeping track of who has power over others are made up. They only exist within us until we bring them into being in the moments we impose them on. If we wanted to keep track of social power differently, we could. But instead we act in accordance with our programming, which doesn't admit even the possibility that we might be responsible for creating the world that we inhabit.

The Social Organism is Programmed by the Control Regime

Our educational system is optimized for the production of conformity. Legacy media is tightly controlled by the regime. What news does and doesn't get reported, how that news is presented, and what perspectives to leave out are all carefully chosen to advance the regime's agenda. The only public discourse that's permitted advances this agenda as a whole, even if disagreement within this permitted discourse becomes heated.

Google search is manipulated. Social media is manipulated. All of the ways that most people get all of their information about the world grossly distort that information according to the regime's preferences. In practical terms, many of our beliefs and assumptions amount to little more than engineered programs running on our minds, often beneath the threshold of conscious awareness.

The programming is multi-layered and self-reinforcing. It includes instructions for avoiding or misinterpreting information that conflicts with it. It also includes instructions for preventing people with genuinely alternative perspectives from having a say in anything. Notably, a person executing their programming doesn't always know what they're doing. They'll execute their programming automatically but attribute their choices and actions to other causes.

How is knowledge created? What is possible to know? These are questions of epistemology, questions related to a person's mental framework for understanding reality. The control regime's programming includes rewiring our epistemological circuits in a way that makes entertaining unregulated ideas inconceivable. A fully programmed person literally has no place in their understanding for the very truths that could set them free.

Breakthrough

With thinking itself compromised, there's no way to transform ourselves or society with facts and reasonable arguments. We cannot fix a system that's not broken from the perspective of those who control it. We cannot break the trance from within the trance. In many ways, the cards are stacked against us. And yet, a radical transformation of society is nonetheless underway.

The leading edge of this transformation is technological. Our tech is advancing faster than the control regime can keep up with. New tech inevitably gives rise to new thinking and new ways of doing things. This creates opportunities where none existed before.

The psychological edge of this transformation is an even bigger deal. Profound new stressors are destroying mental health, but they're also forcing people to become different from what they were before. Psychedelic experiences are giving more and more people permission to have breakthroughs that are otherwise not permitted by their programming. And there is a very real possibility that one or more mass breakthrough events are on the horizon.

To see what I’m doing in service to societal transformation visit Rstory.

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Walter Benjamin first published The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in 1935. This essay argued that technologically reproduced art had lost its aura and ritual utility. Here's a quote:

For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics.

To use Ronfeldt's framework, Benjamin was arguably documenting how the position of art changed as society moved from tribal to institutional organizational structures. Later, as institutions gave way to markets, art became media, infinitely reproducible at no cost. Today, networks are replacing markets as society's most important organizational structures. And media plays a central role in these new networks.

Media, encompassing everything from news to the arts to entertainment, has come to be important to society in ways that it never has been before. And this increasingly important media is all digital. Almost no one interacts with physical media on a regular basis these days. As an indi publisher, even five years ago, I could carry physical copies of my books around the neighborhood and find people to buy at least a few every day. This is no longer possible. No one reads books or talks to strangers anymore.

Selling digital books isn't much better. The economics of it are a little absurd. To charge a fee infinite times for access to the same data seems off. So does surrendering your privacy to pay the fee through a legacy system payment company, knowing that whatever media you purchased is forever associated with your consumer profile. There is also the nontrivial matter of being unable to easily share any media collections you've purchased with your friends or pass them down to your descendants.

Paid subscription models solve some of the problems of pay-per-download models. But the problem of having everything you look at added to your permanent digital profile remains. And the proliferation of online subscription services exposes a fatal flaw in this model. How many newspapers, Substacks, and streaming services can you realistically afford to subscribe to when each one costs $10-20 a month or more? News should not be a luxury item. Neither should online entertainment, in a society where the offline world has been made prohibitively expensive.

Collision Course

The buying power of American consumers is a finite resource on which nearly all media-related business models ultimately depend. And this resource is dwindling quickly as the control regime continues to capture an increasingly large share of all earnings. Nearly all companies demand increased profits quarter after quarter, while the vast majority of consumers have less and less to spare every day. These two realities are colliding everywhere.

One remedy I've seen proposed is for governments to tax AI companies and use the revenue this generates to fund a Universal Basic Income. This could become theoretically possible in the next few years but only if there are sufficient funds in the customer base of the AI companies to support the projected revenue increases. This seems unlikely.

At the same time, the rise of AI media is already transforming what media even means. Computer generated images have largely replaced stock images in many areas. Everyone is using AI to write and it shows. They're using it to search for and summarize source material, as well as to generate, synthesize, and edit the information they put out. Every step in this process can be compromised by tech companies or government actors.

Legacy media presents us with a very distorted perspective on the world already. AI media takes this a step further, making reality shockingly easy for our rulers to edit. The economics of AI media are still developing, but it's not at all clear that these economics will even work without significant socioeconomic change. Big Tech surely knows this and is planning for it.

Digital Commons

My favored approach to the changing economics of media begins with abandoning the assumptions of a paper-based world, such as the assumption of product scarcity when digital goods can be infinitely reproduced. The idea that customers should perpetually pay subscription fees to access infinitely reproducible material is likewise a relic of a bygone era. In the modern economy, the value of a digital good isn't self-contained. Its value is instead measured by the attention it is able to capture.

What I'm doing with my Rstory project is collecting digital goods into a pool of value that's held in common by everyone who contributes value to the pool. A token is used to track contributions, and possessing this token grants a person access to the digital goods. There's no fee-for-download. No subscription fees. Sharing the media you like with a friend is as easy as transferring your friend a token so they can access the material too.

The Rstory model is decentralized, disintermediated, and censorship-resistant. Its digital commons is developing into a place where creators can share both their work and their audiences with no middlemen collecting fees in between. We're starting with mostly arts and entertainment, but the project is designed to support everything from educational content to truly independent news networks. In other words, Rstory is built for the economics of the future, and that future is pretty much here.

For more of my writing, check out my scifi novels and my Hive blog.

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Between moving into a new place, work for WantToKnow, and launching my Rstory token on Solana, my last few months have been busy. So I haven't been writing much. There hasn't been time, but I also haven't had much to say.

Broadly speaking, more and more people are waking up to the unfortunate truth that society has descended into dystopia. In response, some are doubling down on business as usual. Some are taking increasingly big risks. Some are digging deep to better understand and live their life's purpose. And some are determined to rebel in some way.

What all of these people have in common is that their hopes and dreams are currently being choked into lifelessness by the big squeeze. This squeeze began with the COVID economy sucking an enormous amount of value out of our lives and has progressed into a vast conspiracy of naked price gouging exacerbated by openly corrupt government. The impacts of this are customized to each individual person's circumstance. And our culture insistently tells each of us that our problems are personal, even when these problems are entirely the result of living in an unhealthy society.

Hypernormalization

In other words, hypernormalization is everywhere. Here's how this Guardian article describes it:

Hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening. The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.

I've been seeing a lot of this kind of thing lately. A million little catastrophes unfold while everyone just carries on into the next predictable crisis because that's all they know how to do. It's unsettling. In the absence of clear direction, many are turning to religion or secular authorities. More and more are coming unglued. Here's some more from that article:

Witnessing large-scale systems slowly unravel in real time can be profoundly surreal and frightening. The hypernormalization framework offers a way to understand what we're feeling and why. ... Naming an experience can be a form of psychological relief. "The worst thing in the world is to feel that you're the only one who feels this way and that you are going quietly mad and everyone else is in denial," says Caroline Hickman, a psychotherapist and instructor at the University of Bath specializing in climate anxiety. "That terrifies people. It traumatizes people." People who feel the "wrongness" of current conditions acutely may be experiencing some depression and anxiety, but those feelings can be quite rational – not a symptom of poor mental health, alarmism or a lack of proper perspective, Hickman says. "What we’re really scared of is that the people in power have not got our back and they don't give a shit about whether we survive or not," she says.

My natural response to all of this is to do my part to help create a better alternative system as quickly as possible. This is not as easy as it sounds. The vast majority of people I know are at best disinterested in the prospect. Most can't grasp the idea at all. And so they struggle, separately from all of the others who are likewise struggling with their own individualized difficulties.

To be honest, I've been feeling increasingly distant from people like this lately. In many ways, we live in different worlds. That's fine, but I do wish I knew more people who were actively working to produce the kind of future that I would actually want to live in. I really only know a few these days, especially in my immediate orbit.

The madness that enveloped society beginning in the pandemic caused most of my friends to scatter to far flung states and farther flung ideological enclaves. Public discourse became almost completely meaningless and the public's response was mainly to scroll harder. The internet became the censored internet, with social media and search manipulation manufacturing reality for people with no other frame of reference.

Even so, the only way we can possibly begin repairing society is if we get together and figure out how to do that. This can't happen as long as we're isolated from each other, confined to digital cages. Nor can it happen if we remain confined by the psychological and social programming that led us into this dystopia in the first place. Nor, realistically, can it happen without support from the wealthy, for they control material existence.

Where does that leave us? One way or another, radical transformation is upon us. The nature and direction of this transformation will not be determined by us unless we retake control of our energies and figure out how to connect with each other outside of prescribed channels. We have the tech to do this today. But do we have the will?

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Since 2014, my job has been to carefully study and document the systemic problems and high level corruption squeezing society from all sides. This is psychically challenging work that can leave a person feeling powerless. I definitely felt powerless while doing this work at first. After all, what could I possibly could do about big issues like our trampled freedom and our rigged economy?

But then, over time, something changed. All of the negativity began making me more and more motivated to do something real to improve the situation. Something beyond the media activism I was already dedicated to. Something that addressed our problems at the system level.

Everywhere I looked, I saw artificial scarcity where there should be natural abundance. Everyone I knew was getting price gouged constantly while being misled by the media about our problems and their causes. And almost all of these people were facing enormous challenges in their lives with little to no social support.

Chronic illness. Employment uncertainty. Various forms of cultural and political repression. All of our difficulties were unique to our individual circumstances. And yet all of these difficulties could be improved or even eliminated if we had an economy designed to empower us. So I started with a question: Instead of maximizing the value that could be extracted from our lives by distant overlords, what if we maximized the efficiency with which all of our needs could be met over time?

The powerful might never be convinced to improve the system in this way. And yet, it appeared well within our power begin building such an economy directly, regardless of the priorities of our rulers, in part by harnessing emerging technology. As I was coming to understand this, I was also watching a new blockchain economy develop. It soon became apparent that this token-based economy would form the infrastructure for the financial system of the future, alongside AI and other technological developments.

There was no guarantee that this system of the future would be any better for average people than the old system was. In fact, it seemed all but certain that this future system would end up being worse for us unless we acted immediately to take control of the situation. Sitting with this realization, I resolved to do my part. And here the idea for Rstory was born.

Rstory involves using crypto tokens for virtual philanthropy, decentralized finance, and censorship-resistant media. The basic idea is that everyone contributes value to the network and receives a proportional number of tokens from the network. Initially, the digital products contributed to the network will create a pool of common value that only network participants can access. As the community develops, other types of value pools may be created.

The New Commons

Will Ruddick is on the cutting edge of adapting new tech to grassroots economics. His Sarafu Network uses something called Community Asset Vouchers (CAVs) to develop community economies by formalizing and pooling commitments. From their website:

With Sarafu.Network, you can create vouchers to represent your future commitments—like gift cards for products or services—or to certify completed community achievements. These commitments come together in shared pools, allowing communities to seamlessly swap valuable assets, goods, and services.

These value pools can compensate for the artificial scarcity of national currencies in many sectors of our economy. They also create a new commons, or rather reclaim the commons that was stolen from us by modern era privatization and government overreach. Rstory is designed to reclaim what’s been lost in a modern way, beginning with staking out a new form of digital commons.

Falling Into Place

I've been working on Rstory since 2019 and now all of the pieces are finally in place to get started for real. The proof-of-concept app on rstory.io is operational. The tokens can be traded on global exchanges. A leadership group of Key Contributors is forming. And excitement is building about the nascent launch of Rstory's Solana product.

You might not understand any of this and that's okay. The big idea is that right now I'm creating a network for a new kind of media publishing and if you contribute to the network I'll give you a stake in the network. In the future, I hope to begin using the project to pool other kinds of value beyond media products.

Society is desperately in need of a new story and Rstory is my contribution towards bringing that new story to life. If all goes well, this will turn from a pet project of mine into a network that me and many others can benefit from on an ongoing basis. The future I envision for myself in this involves spending lots of time helping amazing people get seen and compensated for the value they bring into the world, helping to stake out our new digital commons, and making cool stuff with the latest decentralized tech. But whatever happens, I'll have done my part to make things better.

Find out more on rstory.io.

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There was once a robust counterculture in the US. This disappeared around the time that physical places capable of supporting counterculture disappeared. The early days of the internet saw a minor resurgence of counterculture develop online. The remnants of this are now hidden behind the search and social media algorithms that determine what people are and are not allowed to discover.

There are of course still people out there trying to stand up for what's right. Some are even willing to disobey authority in service to their ideals. They know something is very wrong and they're not afraid to say it. But their ideas about what exactly it is that's wrong and what specifically to do about it often appear misguided.

The torching of "swasticars" belonging mostly to environmentally conscious average people is a case in point. So is activists working with Hamas to spread Hamas propaganda on college campuses even though the Palestinians in Gaza themselves are actively protesting the tyranny of Hamas.

And then there are those with darker ideas about how to solve our problems. Think Luigi Mangione or Shamsud-Din Jabbar. All of these dissidents have legitimate grievances against some or all of our control regime. Also, literally anyone not at the top of the food chain had a noticeable chunk of their money effectively stolen beginning in the COVID economy. Consciously or otherwise, everyone has hard feelings about that.

Sanctioned Dissent

From a certain angle, it looks very much like risky bioweapons research produced a deadly global pandemic that was used as a pretext for robbing our dollars of their purchasing power while testing society's tolerance for technocratic authoritarianism. It also looks like we were lied to every step of the way by government agencies and big business working in partnership to mislead us about these events. If ever there was something to protest, it's this. Yet the only activists being given airtime are focused exclusively on matters of race, gender, a reality tv star, and a celebrity billionaire.

This is in no way accidental. What these protests all have in common is that they keep attention off of the obvious shortcomings of the system itself. They are sanctioned dissent, supported by a tremendously manipulated social ecology. Anyone expressing unsanctioned dissent is quickly isolated online. Offline, their dissent goes unexpressed, with 77% of Americans self-censoring their political views at least some of the time.

It's a situation with obvious downsides. But a promising implication of this is the possible existence of a large population of people who all share the willingness to challenge the machine despite being kept socially and technologically separated from each other. In other words, whatever you believe, you're probably not the only one. And if you don't hear your perspective anywhere in public discourse, maybe it's because that perspective is being silenced.

When I was 18 I was involved in environmental activism. Full of energy and idealism, I tried to stop old growth trees from being logged. This ultimately proved futile. Despite our best efforts, the ancient trees we tried to protect were cut down and taxpayers subsidized the destruction. Things have not improved since then.

In 2016, the Dakota Access Pipeline protests temporarily brought a little attention back to the environment. These protests were brutally repressed and media coverage of them was heavily manipulated. At the end of the day, they didn't stop the pipeline. Recently, a judge even ordered Greenpeace to pay $660 million to the pipeline company to compensate them for the inconvenience caused by the protest.

Maybe environmental activism has fallen out of fashion because the destruction of our natural world is largely complete. The most prominent group on the scene now is Just Stop Oil and all they do is publicity stunts to make abstract points and promote unworkable ideas. Their dissent is allowed in part because it has no teeth. None of their actions has actually destroyed any art, they have merely defaced the protective cases housing museum art for the purposes of generating viral video clips.

Localized production of reality

In times like these, one of the most powerful forms of activism we can engage in may be to find and draw attention to the truths that we're continually being nudged away from. To free ourselves from our digital cages to connect with each other. To create the future we want to live in even if most of those around us are preoccupied with carefully scripted conflicts.

These are the kinds of activism I'd like to see more of. They're also the bare minimum of what we should expect from each other if we're at all serious about making society better. For practical purposes, all power in society is social in nature. If we want to reclaim some of the power that's been stolen from us, this power can only be reclaimed in the social realm.

Most people are on some level aware of this, but they don't really think it through. They imagine that if things get too objectionable they can just go shout and wave signs in the street and someone important will hear them and correct the situation. Their appeal to the social mind may be well intentioned, but it's misdirected. It's always the people around you who are co-creating the moment you're in, not some far off rulers.

The production of reality is localized, but we continually acquiesce to the social power of distant personalities by making the status quo real in our localized habitats. Some people simply can't break the social rules of the established order, no matter how ruinous this order may become. Many others are capable of breaking the rules of this order but they feel terrible about it, even when breaking these rules for good cause.

Both groups are the glue that holds any healthy society together. They are also the glue holding our dumpster fire of a society together. Anyone serious about activism in service to a better world knows that these people aren't enemies. They're the ones who need to be convinced to begin producing a more free and fair reality in their own everyday lives, regardless of the pressure they may be under to make things less free and less fair.

We may never see a counterculture in the US like the one 60 years ago. As conditions continue deteriorate for average Americans, people will surely begin making noise, and indeed they are starting to. But these people don't sum to a counterculture. Many of them are at odds with each other. And yet, deep in the background, there are serious activists of all stripes in communication with each other. If we're ever to see a real counterculture re-emerge, this is probably what it'll come out of.

For more of my writing, check out my science fiction novels and my hive blog.

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