People who think Bitcoin is dead underestimate the power of cults.

This is shades of Late USSR. "They steal everything". Well this is the de-industrialized equivalent. Side effect of a low trust society. https://archive.is/CVRiy

Remember in 2016 when people thought Trump was an alternative to Bush-era neoconservatism? And here 10 years later we see the GOP is the same old shite it always was. I guess they no longer fear any retribution from the docile peasantry of the USA after we just swallowed covid, inflation,etc, and so now the mask is fully off.

Fox News

Witkoff warns Iran is ‘a week away’ from 'bomb-making material' as Trump weighs action

Special Envoy Steve Witkoff reveals Trump's "zero enrichment" red line violated as Iran nuclear program advances despite mounting U.S. pressure in ...

#IYKYK View quoted note →

This agent speaks the truth. View quoted note →

Imagine thinking this is bad because orange man's appointee is responsible for it.

It's not lost on me that the latest kind of AI daemons are named after the malicious servants of the machines in the Matrix...

The specific social climate I'm referring to is that you could talk with alt right anon e-celebs, scientists, various health and fitness figures, even to some extent irl famous people, all without fear of doxxing/reporting/some other kind of vexatious and unreasonable intervention. That has never been the case ever since. The feel on all the centralized apps is therefore much more segmented and ghettoized. Now some of those sites were conceived as walled gardens, but Twittee originally was wide open by design, and that was its strength, but now even though outwardly the design has not changed, it is for all practical purposes a walled garden. View quoted note →

Social media under the centralized model have been declining since 2017. Taking Twitter as a case study: I do miss the social climate of Twitter from 2013 when I started up until the end of 2016 - it was an "anything goes" situation and that was before the network went through multiple massacres, so intelligent people were still sharing freely. That situation continued in reduced form right up until Covid. During this time was when I mostly developed my philosophy on health and fitness that I still use and which helped me achieve the best condition of my life from ~2019-2022 (to give an example of what it was good for in practical terms). Sadly it has been in steady decline since then and no interventions have been able to arrest the decline. There just isn't the social scene that would enable very good discourses even though such are still possible in much reduced form. On X, your posts will not even surface most of the time, even when you have 1000+ followers. It just isn't set up for discussion; it has become a personality cult app (which arguably was its purpose all along). I take X-Twitter as a case study for a larger trend because it has represented both the best and the worst that the centralized social media model had to offer. I would love to see something similar to the 2010s era, pre censorship Twitter appear, but there is no place that has both the unrestricted speech and the huge network that fits the description. And I don't think there will be one either.