My first open source psyop - postmortem
[Information asymmetry is not only about lies, but whether someone can hear the correction or feedback.]
My first open source psyop - postmortem
[Information asymmetry is not only about lies, but whether someone can hear the correction or feedback.]
For many people, terms like ActivityPub, Fediverse, bridge, protocol, server, toot, boost, and Webfinger are alienating and confusing. They subtly imply that unless you understand what all these words mean, this might not be the place for you; in the same way crypto terms—blockchain, web3, wallet, keypair, nonce—are a wall of jargon that scream "you don't belong here" to normal people.
To send an email, you don't need to know what SMTP, IMAP, POP, DKIM, SPF, or DMARC are. To browse the web, there's no requirement to understand HTTP, DNS, servers, SSL, TTL, load balancing, or caches. The most significant impact these protocols have is perhaps that users never have to think about them.
Over time, you start repeating yourself, rewriting the same paragraph for different people, reposting the same message in different groups, reframing the same problem with different jargon. And when something finally connects, it often feels like luck. Like you just happened to be visible at the right moment.
This is the system we pretend works: discovery as noise, identity as content, and visibility as a full-time job.
Zero-sum Thinking and the Labor Market
Boomers could trade 4 years of college for 40 years of middle-class security (more or less). Today's 25-year-old faces a negative net-present-value on that same deal. When the fundamental economic bargain breaks down, it flips everything - your discount rate, your risk tolerance, your entire worldview, again, leading to zero-sum beliefs.
Back in 2019, I applied to over 150 jobs when I graduated Western Kentucky University. LinkedIn had their little QuickApply feature, but I wrote so many essays, did many projects, and endless interviews. The entire process made me better, but I was rejected from most of the jobs.
I had a 4.0 GPA, was valedictorian with three majors, worked three jobs for most of my time at university, sold cars, ran D1 Track and Field for a year, and yet, I only got into my first job because the recruiter and some people at the company took a big chance on me (and I only got there because they had a blind resume process where they hid the school. Says a lot about a lot).
The only reason I got my chance - a truly lucky break - was because people bet on me. A computer would have instantly rejected me because I didn’t meet some arbitrary qualification. AI has spurred us right into the depths of what David Brooks calls the rejected generation - endless nos from platforms that are meant to serve as human interfaces (slot machine grabs across dating, investing, and now jobs), but really end up dehumanizing the whole process.
This is the casino economy in action. Again, just like dating apps and meme stock trading, the job market has created the illusion of abundance by replacing meaningful friction with meaningless volume. It has become a dopamonster, to borrow Scott Galloway’s word. More applications, more swipes, more trades - but every extra option raises the noise-to-signal ratio, making the median outcome worse for everyone.
The Web is a cool thing because anyone can just put stuff on it. It is the largest town square bulletin board ever devised. Back in the day, your ISP would even give you your own website! I don’t think they do that so much any more, but there are more cheap or free options than ever — hell, you can host a little website on GitHub.
And it used to mostly consist of little things made by people, and that was pretty cool! You would see more than four websites in a day. Websites would have colors! They wouldn’t all be designed for a three-inch-wide screen and then just scaled up when you’re at your desk! Twitter once let you set your own background image for when people looked at your profile.
Look at it. Look at it, you stupid baby. Look how outlandish or shocking or extreme or dramatic, Whatever it is. Just shut up and look at it, so Home Depot will give me a quarter of a tenth of a cent.
At least when I write a lot, you know it’s because I wanted to write it. Also I’m probably not lying to you because someone paid me to do it!
But we didn’t really get that. We got, I guess, sparkling autocomplete — a fancy chatbot that can string words together in the most inoffensive people-pleasing customer-service voice you’ve ever heard.
What even is this thing we’ve invented? Stack Overflow, but you only get the answers people scramble to type first so they can get the points? Oh and they just lie to you sometimes? Why would I want this?
Knowing what I want to offer is more important than knowing what another person expects.
I don’t want to reward myself with things that undermine my efforts.
My empathy extends beyond my capacity; therefore, my boundaries should not exist at the edges of my empathy.
When I feel self-righteous and sure of myself: tone it down about 25%. When I feel uncertain and hesitant: crank it up about 25%.
The Hero as Flexible Bureaucrat
[Bureaucrats that are incorruptible become like machines (until they're replaced by machines), and this inflexibility counterintuitively makes them anti-human.]
“I’d bend the rules too, if I knew it would save millions of lives”. Yes sure of course so would I, but would you bend the rules to save someone an hour of unnecessary paperwork? Knowing that if your boss found out he might use it as a pretext to fire you? That’s the kind of subtle, small-scale heroism that, repeated millions of times, creates a more humane society.
Corporations and governments are already rushing to replace many customer-facing jobs with language models. This makes a lot of sense if you take the State-eye view and see human bureaucrats as faulty robots. But if you see the work of a flexible bureaucrat as noble, sometimes even heroic - these are precisely the jobs we should protect.
The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction
we have a world where friction gets automated out of experiences, aestheticized in curated lifestyles, and dumped onto underfunded infrastructure and overworked labor. The effort doesn't disappear; it just moves.
The economic signal (the diploma) still circulates as if the underlying work has occurred. But the work isn’t there. We’ve just shifted the friction offscreen, and have outsourced it to a chatbot and let the system pretend nothing’s changed. So at this moment, we are credentialing fluency with tools that do the thinking for you.
friction has become a class experience. Wealth has always helped smooth over bumps - but when the physical world is such a mess and the digital world is so easy, it’s simple to curate the digital into the physical if you have money.
The American economy has been running a decades-long experiment in removing friction, both through technological advancement and through financial engineering that pushes costs into the future. The resulting prosperity has been very real, but it's been built on the proverbial kicking the can down the road.
When Mark Zuckerberg's Meta builds frictionless social interfaces, that cognitive smoothness is subsidized by somewhere, somehow, right? The same economy that produces simulated friends for the lonely American also produces understaffed air traffic control towers. The same investor class that funds "never think alone" startups also lobbies against infrastructure spending, or perhaps, housing.
Amazon's one-click ordering creates a seamless customer experience by offloading friction onto warehouse workers and delivery drivers.
Compliance is the New American Dream
a world built on compliance might function for a while. But it will never lead. And right now, we really need people who can lead.
You are NOT right if you stand a man on his head JUST to get attention. You ARE right if you have him on his head to show how your product keeps things from falling out of his pockets.
The Technium: Better Than Free
[When copying makes things free and infinite, 8 'generative' values that people might pay for include: immediacy; personalization; interpretation, support, or guidance; authentic versions; easy access on multiple devices, and backup; physical representations or in-person events; appreciation through patronage; discoverability and distribution.]
You don’t go to Satan’s Discounter for your golden lute. Don’t use our evil overlord to buy something (gasp) REAL—something you’ll use forever and that will become a part of you. That would be like using a dating app to find the love of your life…
I found a pen shop. A little hole-in-the-wall. The kind of place I’m surprised exists, glad too. It has probably been in the family for generations, passed from papa to son, while the neighborhood around them has slowly been turned into an outdoor luxury mall.
It doesn’t matter if you have 100 attachments or one attachment. You still have attachments. There’s no practical distance between one and 100.
Ideally we should try to notice and hold our attachments with an open hand. Ready to let them go when the time is right.
When you live out of a backpack, you can’t have favorites. You need to survive. If I weren’t walking all day, I could wear jeans, mosey around cafes, and twirl my mustache. Unfortunately, my current (self-assigned) profession involves walking seven days a week.
On Funding Agencies and the Third Sector
The gruelling applications, tens of pages long and unnecessarily complicated and repetitive, were clearly meant for insiders and I soon realised that this was precisely what was being assessed - how ‘insider’ I was.
When every project has some funding agency’s logo on the footer, this is what is communicated, there is an officialisation of a sector which is, by definition, unofficial, a sector which arose to bridge the gaps of officialism. That’s when I made the ‘NOT in partnership with’ banner.
[When funding is normalized as a kind of approval, the agencies become filters who thwart anything that challenges their preferred narratives, while simultaneously supporting those narratives through their agents.]
People on the inside of these organisations are just ordinary people - some with the strength to see but not the awareness, others with the awareness but not the strength, and fewer with both. Many begin with genuine dreams to change the world, others to be seen in the image of someone who is doing just that.
Recently, a phrase I have been saying has been, “One hand cleans the other,” and that’s how I see it in many ways. I need to continue on my Way. I have to get rid of things one way or the other. For me to give them to people who need them, who will use them, who will love them, that’s a huge bonus. It’s like 1+1=3. Like there are cheat codes in the game of life. Helping you find a copy of Snowcrash you’ve been looking for helps me get rid of a book I haven’t finished reading in 8 years. And along the way, joy and gratitude are created from nothing.
There is a place beyond words and beyond understanding; don’t run away from it. When you rest in it, not knowing is knowing. Good is bad. Right is wrong. I am you. The space between objects shrinks to nothing. To grasp it, let go. To control it, surrender. To succeed, fail. To know, don’t.
We're trapped in an era of fatalism, unable to envision alternatives to the models of ownership and funding beyond current extractive defaults. We've agreed that innovation can touch every aspect of our lives — except the structures that shape them. This isn't just a failure of imagination — it's a feature of those very structures.
Proposals require us to answer difficult questions that protesting alone does not: Who will build it? How will it be funded? How will it compete and self-sustain? What trade-offs are we willing to accept?
A book cannot do something for you. Instead, reading a book can change you into someone who can do something for yourself. The role of a great medium is not to help people get things done, but to help people become deeper people — by providing a context in which they grow their skills and knowledge, broaden their context and perspective, and deepen their awareness and discernment.
[We did this three-session activity three times during the year: first for cars, then the internet, then generative AI.]
[Global impact doesn't lend itself to simple numerical representations, as what the numbers represent may not be evenly distributed.]
[Generative models are often discussed in terms of potential impact decades from now, so to start by measuring something that has already existed for decades helps ground discussion in less theoretical terms.]
[If we network homogeneously, our surrounding opinions will tend to conform similarly.]
The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber on Blinkist.
[Technical skill alone is insufficient to kickstart a successful business and can easily lead to unsustainable models where the founder does everything.]
[Turnkey businesses are popular because they have a far higher success rate; they consider and plan all aspects of the business beforehand so that the owner doesn't need to be present.]
[Every single process needs to be documented in order for someone to run the business without you.]
[Structure all aspects of the business to support your personal objectives.]
[Your marketing should consider the customer and ignore everything else. Get to know their profile as best as you can and market in ways that are appealing to them. Adapt your strategy as they change.]
[All of this 'business development process' never stops, continuing as you learn while in motion and understand through testing.]
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche on Blinkist.
One must be a sea to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.