image is the most expensive addiction and the poorest investment

Bitcoin didn’t fail. Bitcoin’s fine. We need to check who we hand our trust to.

Never trust a person who's obsessed with money because for the right price, they'll completely go against their morals and values.

We live in a world where the smart people at work are being silenced by leadership in order to avoid offended less competent people

It’s cheap to be righteous about someone else’s failure. It’s expensive to be honest about our own. View quoted note →

View quoted note → View quoted note →

Done #lasereyes View quoted note →

Reflections of a different kind… An agenda driven “actor” in a visibility economy almost never announces themselves. They don’t show up cartoonishly villainous. They show up helpful. Early. Generous with their time, generous with their zaps, quick to defend people publicly when it costs them nothing and quick to build goodwill that they can spend later, when it costs them something real. They learn the language of the community faster than anyone, because sounding like you belong is the actual product they’re building, long before you find out what they’re selling. And critically, they understand something most sincere posters never think about strategically. They understand that once you’ve been visibly, generously present in a community for long enough, people extend you a form of credit. Doubt gets suspended. Benefit goes to you, automatically, because you’ve paid into the social account for years. That credit is exactly what gets cashed in when something eventually goes wrong, when a decision needs defending, when a silence needs explaining, when a question needs to not be asked too loudly. This week, watching a real security failure unfold in real time, I saw this play out in miniature, over and over. People who’d built years of goodwill got the benefit of the doubt automatically, reflexively, from people who otherwise pride themselves on verifying everything. Meanwhile people with zero history, zero followers, just a technical finding and a GitHub link, got picked apart line by line before anybody took them seriously. That’s backwards. That’s exactly backwards from how verification is supposed to work, and it happened because visibility had quietly become a stand in for credibility somewhere along the way, for all of us, myself included. I’m not telling you to distrust everyone with a following. That’s paranoid and it’s also just wrong, plenty of people earn a following the honest way. I’m telling you that a following is not evidence of anything except that a lot of people were willing to engage. That’s it. That’s all it proves. It doesn’t prove honesty. It doesn’t prove competence. It doesn’t prove the person doesn’t have something they’re not telling you

I am a nobody with a very small percentage of people of the world who read what I have to say. With that being said, if I ever advocate for something or someone and I fall into these dumbass influencer traps, please call me out or unfollow me. I will have fallen from my own ethics and morals.

What’s not cool is when my coworkers finally found out about this CC fiasco and come to me looking like I did this. Then give me that sideways look like I’m the one to not be trusted.

There’s a real upside to how visible this all is. You comment on the right post, zap the right person, show up consistently, and people actually see you. Opportunities open up that never would have in a closed room. That part’s genuinely good, and it’s part of why this space works the way it does. But that same visibility also has a cost. When you’re chasing being seen, liking, zapping, commenting to stay in someone’s orbit, it’s easy to stop asking who you’re actually orbiting. Attention becomes the goal instead of the relationship. And that’s exactly the gap people with an agenda are looking for. They don’t need you to trust them completely. They just need you distracted enough by the visibility game that you stop checking who’s using who. Not saying don’t engage. Just saying know why you’re doing it. There’s a difference between building something with someone and performing proximity to them for what it gets you. One of those protects you. The other one is how people get used without ever noticing it happened.. My 2 Sats this morning