Every platform, like every state, is or will be weaponized. That does not mean platforms should be "banned." It means they should be used with awareness and caution. That is what "digital literacy" means. It is impossible to have a free society that is not literate--that is, competent to navigate information presented in a variety of channels and forms. Any attempt to police "misinformation" is robbing the people of their rightful capacity to navigate information for themselves. In a culture of truth, information that is truthful and stands up to public scrutiny will eventually prevail over lies and falsehoods. This cannot happen if information is refereed to begin with. Ultimately, we need to create alternatives to platforms by building peer-to-peer services that cannot be captured. But this doesn't mean platforms will go away. Platforms are digital territories and jurisdictions that will continue to serve some purposes, and people will have to navigate them in a literate manner. We don't relativize the power of the state by "banning" states, and we don't relativize the power of the platform by "banning" platforms. We relativize the power of both by empowering individuals. The remedy for concentrations of power at the top is power that moves bottom-up.

Things are dark and they are going to get much darker. Our moral and intellectual North Star must remain functioning from principle instead of identity and expediency. Thinking and acting from principle is revolutionary. It transforms the world. Cheers to all fellow travelers on the road ahead. #Bitcoin

If “non-custodial software” is a “money transmission service,” then every person holding cash in their house or wallet is a “money transmitter.” They should be honest about what they are really trying to outlaw here: people holding their own cash.

Now seems as good a time as any to revisit one of the classics of American political theory: "Civil Disobedience," by Henry David Thoreau (1849). (It was originally titled "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.") Thoreau's essay influenced the giants of human rights movements around the world, including Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Thoreau himself was a lifelong abolitionist, and his opposition to slavery inspired the speech that became this essay.

Uprising 13/13

“When the devaluation of the mark started during the war and especially during the postwar period, only a few people thought of the consequences which resulted for the affairs of learning. And yet it was after all perfectly clear that the foundations of German scholarship rest not only upon the researchers’ idealism, but just a much upon the solid rock of a gold currency and an active balance of payments. But what has been built with gold marks cannot be maintained or yet extended with paper marks. For all learning and all science requires progress to give it content and to enrich and stimulate it. Years of paper currency therefore mean no more and no less than the distress of learning and, if the sickness of the currency lasts a long time, the death of learning and science. Such meager years bring about the dismantling of our culture, which in turn leads to pseudo-culture.” - Georg Schreiber, “The Distress of German Learning,” published during the hyperinflation of 1923

These are the new PNAC guys: PNAC 2.0. They will smile and chuckle and “aw-shucks” their way to complete global destruction as they cheer on “regime change” in countries far more powerful than Iraq was in the early 2000’s. When they—inevitably—fail, they will disappear with whatever they’ve been able to grift as their countrymen die and have their livelihoods incinerated as the “collateral damage” of their literally, descriptively stupid power games. They have zero imagination—they just want to play “Cold War” over and over again because it’s a playbook they think they know. But not only do they not know either their “enemy” or themselves (which guarantees they lose), they don’t even have the basic restraint and questionable level of moral character of many Cold Warriors. They are literal fools and should be laughed out of or booed in every room they enter.

It should be obvious that there is no way for America to “win” in the world if her adversaries “lose.” “I win, you lose” is the logic of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, in which the Allies sought to “contain” Germany by redistributing its territory and industry, eviscerating its military, and imposing punishing war “reparations” which it could not repay. This led directly to the German civil war, hyperinflation of the German currency, the rise of National Socialism, and the Second World War. Finding the win-win, although never “perfect” from anyone’s perspective, is the only way to avoid catastrophe. If your “enemy” has nothing to lose by fighting you, the game conditions are clear—and war is inevitable. As Sun Tzu said in The Art of War, “When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard. Such is the art of warfare.”

I am often asked by people new to #Bitcoin   , “What about its volatility?” There is, of course, the standard answer about how a new asset never before seen in human history will inevitably experience ups and downs during its first few decades of parabolic monetization. But what is more disturbing and far more impactful in the long run is the global social volatility that we are living through as the system of fiat-based central banking, only one part of a governing apparatus “led” by a floundering, careening, and incoherent political class, dispenses with any rhyme or reason as it implements contradictory policy moves across all domains. We are witnessing personal, idiosyncratic, and sentiment-based exercises of power driven by a sprawling and factionalized administrative state. This is chaos. It does not end well. Plan accordingly.

The state has to be aware that if they push, society will push back, and that creates the opportunity, the opening, for freedom. https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/bitcoin-human-rights.

Congress is using their displeasure with specific types of protest as an excuse to give the administrative state more unchecked power. Nonprofits are already prohibited by law from supporting terrorism and face intense scrutiny about this. This performative bill, however, gives an unelected Treasury official unilateral power to decide whether or not a nonprofit “supports terrorism” and strip it of its nonprofit status. Don’t like it? You can appeal to the IRS. I am angry that Senator @JohnCornyn of Texas has sponsored this unnecessary, tyrannical bill specifically to target speech he dislikes. But it is a reminder that the “War on Terror” era never ended—the same people are still in power, and they have the same dismal view of democracy and free speech today that they did back then. (bipartisan legislation the House passed last week (382-11) & that was intro'd last week in the Senate -- HR 6408 & S. 1436.) https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/4136

Just wondering if any of the “AI alignment” people have solved the problem of “human alignment?” … (TLDR: No, of course not, neither are “problems” to be solved; they’re manufactured moral panics to justify absolute state power.)

The questions this poster is genuinely asking Alec unfortunately reflect profoundly FALSE but widespread beliefs underpinning the tragically popular “degrowth” movement: - That wealth cannot be created (it’s a zero-sum game in which the more powerful extract resources from the less powerful) - That energy consumption and carbon emissions will be directly correlated forever These two beliefs alone create a catastrophic worldview that brings about the very apocalypse it seeks to avoid. They must be relentlessly and systematically countered.

A few dozen, largely unknown, functionaries of humanity quietly keep the world's internet infrastructure functioning. I like to think of them as "marenauts"--sea astronauts--engineers trained to repair equipment in extremely hostile conditions in the alien world of the Earth's oceans. But maintenance isn't sexy, and it's not profitable. The costs of maintenance ships go up, not down, over time. Who will take up this responsibility in the future?

The Verge

The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat

How one crew risked radiation, storms, and currents to save Japan from digital isolation.

As the world moves increasingly toward identitarian nationalisms, countries that display a commitment to being multi-ethnic, multi-religious republics with no legally privileged racial or religious classes will have an advantage. I hope the United States can stay on this trajectory.

The world is perhaps only now beginning to appreciate the uniqueness of the American Bill of Rights. Instead of defining rights as the *positive* rights of individuals or groups, as do most other constitutions around the world, the Bill of Rights places *limits* on the power of government to restrict those rights. “Congress shall make no law …” This is a night and day difference. It means that, for example, even in democracies where freedom of speech is a constitutional right, “bad” speech can still be criminalized, and people can be put in jail for it. There is no constitutional mechanism to stop the state from carving out exceptions to rights. If America can recapture its legacy of limiting the powers of government—arguably its most important contribution to political economy—it has the chance to flourish again.

To be a peacemaker, you first have to have moral courage and conviction. Peace is a positive project; it is not the absence of violence.

This should go without saying, but democracies don’t pass “secret” laws, and they don’t pass laws based on “secret” (classified) information. The will of the people cannot be expressed by their elected government if that government rules based on secrets that are kept from the people.

“Now clearly there exists the distinction between energetic thriving and atrophy, that is, one can say, between health and sickness, even in communities, peoples, states. Accordingly the question is not far removed: How does it happen that no scientific medicine has ever developed in this sphere, a medicine for nations and supranational communities?” - Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man” (“The Vienna Lecture,” 1935)

We just wrapped up the “Bitcoin and Political Economy” panel at the #BitcoinPolicySummit in Washington, D.C. I asked my colleague @avik about the relationship between Congress and the administrative state (esp. federal regulatory agencies) and how that impacts American democracy. He said something important: the ballooning of federal agencies and their powers has been a result of elected members of Congress wanting to evade political accountability (punishment at the ballot box). If an agency does something unpopular, the Congressman can always point to the Administrator and say, “Hey, it wasn’t me who made this rule! This guy or gal did it!” This offloading of legislative responsibility is a dereliction of duty on the part of those who were elected to make laws on behalf of the American people. Authoritarianism is as much a function of people wanting to evade responsibility as it is a desire for power. Many elected officials are perfectly content having virtually no power as long as they keep the prestige (appearance of power) of their position.