Nostr "culture" is an extension of Bitcoin "culture", which is an extension of libertarian-type "culture" 's tendency towards the deep LARP. Libertarians latch onto a compatible idea or movement, world-build around it, and proceed to do nothing but use it as a dreamboard or a radicalization funnel -- nothing gets done.
Seasteading used to be an oceanic engineering problem. And then the libertarians saw it was ideologically compatible and spent years dominating the dialogue. The whole thing became a hollowed-out space of unlaunched boondoggle projects.
Bitcoin used to be a digital momey software project, and then the libertarian-types used it as an incubator for influencers who seem to avoid the subject of bitcoin-as-software in favor of dreamboarding about how bitcoin is going to fix food, music, architecture, art and people. These narratives are sold as a sponsored babysitting service to buyers of bitcoin, who endlessly listen to the podcasts while they wait around to get rich. Hardly any of these people use bitcoin out of necessity, but just as an extension of their ideological LARP.
Eventually, the dominant social media platform wasn't ideologically compatible enough with many "bitcoiners", and that brings us to why nostr is the way it is.
A handful of devs tirelessly try to make nostr a thing, and any traction in adoption is quickly squashed when the the tourists see the bitcoiners doing their babadook-why-cant-you-be-normal thing.
Replies (38)
I'm convinced that libertarianism is purpose built to be a controlled opposition that you voluntarily enroll yourself into. And your role is to destroy freedom while you think you're encouraging it. It's being woke for non-woke people.
How should Libertarianism look like for you to think that it's not controlled opposition?
Stop being gay for a start.
Being a libertarian is to be the ultimate victim. The state is always oppressing you, and all you want is to be left alone. But you have been domesticated out of considering violence as an option, so you cannot actually achieve any of the ideals you spend all day talking about. It's 100% a larp and equivalent to being woke.
So basically overthrowing the existing government with guns would be the necessary step it seems. And then what?
If you try with guns, you get faced with nukes so in a sense, libertarian and woke despair is a real thing. Bitcoin is the first system that exists outside the control of any state politician or king that can empower people to defend their property.
It can be used to coordinate commerce outside the state, but I don't think that's where it's utility ends. Remains to be seen, but there's a lot more than just money where Bitcoin can oppose a state.
This is deeply out of touch with actually libertarian operatives actively working in traditional political structures to dismantle state power.
You wouldn't know by listening to libertarians speak that they actually do anything effectual or lasting. I'd rather not put my eggs in that basket even if I do have to be out of touch with libertarians.
Big L vs little l
I'm on a mission to ban flock cameras, implement nostr for transparency and end zoning regulations withinm my county. This shit will likely take a decade, but I've actually made decent progress and influence in the past 6 months.
Quite the trip you’re on guys, and verbose to the extreme. You’re basically describing consumerism, fads, and the get-rich-quick people, but sprinkling “libertarians” on every paragraph
Keep fighting the fight.
I think you've won when you can simply not recognize the state as having ligitmate authority and survive.
I wrote a paragraph but if that's verbose I challenge you to read a book.
That assertion isn't practical tho.
If you don't think the mafia has a right to exist, but you spend 100% of your profit defending your business from their extortion, you lose.
I don't believe the state is legitimate, but if you shrink it back down to a legitimate size where it isn't involved in your day to day activities, then you've won and it's up to the next generation to continue that battle and your grey beard years need to be teaching and prosyltizing those principles. In the same way that there is no "perfect parent" there is no "anarchy", there is just a succession of more and more libertarian swaths of land.
Verbose in this context meaning saying little while writing alot. He's saying you aren't succinct in your point.
It's the general stance of libertarians that if you can win an argument, you can overthrow the government. But because arguments are completely pointless and ineffectual, the state will not be overthrown by them.
The rational end point to human relationships is Anarchy. Libertarian ideas are when people who are anarchists realize that the average person is not ready for that shit. They then modify the philosophy for soft fat normies and that makes the ideas sound dumb. Libertarian ideas are transitional not end goals.
No, that is the normie view of libertarian philosophy.
It seems we're at an impasse. Was great talking
Read my comment to the OP for more clarity.
Yes, we agree libertarianism and the idea spaces they co-opt is a radicalization funnel.
No I don't think I will
Libertarianism generally has no clear goal or definition of what it even is. You can see that even amongst themselves in their arguments. That's not to say I don't agree with some of them in principle, only that I can't tell you what it is and neither can most of them from what I've seen. And if they do have some idea, it'll vary wildly between who you ask. It's all super disintegrated, which is probably why their political arm is always choas and makes very little progress. This is the main reason I left the movement. One of my favorite examples is the "libertarian socialists"
Lol, k.
🤜🤛
However,
@JackTheMimic, it kind of sucks watching your idea space move from bitcoin-as-software to praexology and tiny little ideological battles that have literally fuck all to do with bitcoin-as-software.
Unfortunately the state has a very efficient brain capture mechanism in place that has to be fought at every turn. We COULD just say fuck the normies and use our money in secret but there are many more of them and they tend to be easy to sway to violence.
Yeah but can we not get endlessly tripped up trying to do civilizational level fixes and focus on bitcoin. I don't really give a fuck about wellness goops and regenerative farming and carnivory. I'd rather people focus on bitcoin.
Bitcoin is money, money is a debt for service or goods. These services and goods are people's needs and interests. Money absent needs and interests is useless.
If there's something specific about the money you'd like to focus on, we can. But talking about money for money's sake is pretty pointless.
Yeah uh using it, as software. Using it will prepare people defensively for a world that the libertarian thinkbois and their tiny army of retards are not going to be able to fix.
LOL
What isn’t ”Deep Larp” then?
GOP? DEMs? Boomer Con? libtards?
Not participating is the only winning move, from an integrity standpoint
When you participate you are part of the eventual horrors that will be unleashed
View quoted note →The funny thing is that the wokes do this too, to greater deleterious effect. They find a compatible idea space and consume it with their endless ideological horseshit.
Occupy Wall St originally was about holding bankers accountable until the wokes moved into Zucatti park and demanded that access to the megaphone adhere to the progressive stack, prioritizing people with maximum intersectionality. Shortly thereafter, Occupy turned into a miasma of intersectional grievamce, and everyone forgot about jailing bankers.
Black Lives Matter was originally about holding police accountable for violence, and somehow it quickly morphed into Trans Black Lives Matter and adding lots of new stripes to the rainbow flag.
> Seasteading used to be an oceanic engineering problem. And then the libertarians saw it was ideologically compatible and spent years dominating the dialogue. The whole thing became a hollowed-out space of unlaunched boondoggle projects.
I think you've got it backwards. Seasteading may or may not be workable, but the handful of people who've tried to do it have all been libertarians. If it had remained an engineering problem and nothing more, I don't think you'd see any attempts at all. Maybe an ego project by the UAE that gets abandoned in a year.
Proceeding on from this, Nostr is a system with high barrier to entry (relative to Twitter) and no network effect helping it out. Plenty of reasonably famous people who'd have thousands of Twitter followers if they were there have dozens of followers here, and single-digit like counts.
Libertarianism (or, more broadly, the libertarian impulse to try to outthink tyranny with a series of rules that make it impossible) is the reason Nostr has any users at all, or exists in the first place. There is no demographic of "normal" users who would pick Nostr as their social media site of choice absent other factors.
You seem to think that a book is of the same nature and quality than a social media anon rant. You also seem to imply that you know for a fact whether or not I have read any books lately, quite condescendingly. Then abruptly storm out by mentioning “libertarians” again. Like Jack said, lol, k.
It seems Rich is not interested in talking about money per se, but about bitcoin-as-software, which makes his argument a bit weak: if you want people to focus on bitcoin as “digital money software” you can’t expect them to not see btc as money! With all the utility and ancillary industries of money. To blame libertarians—whom I couldn’t care less about—for nostr adoption issues is just polemic, tendentious, and frankly fallacious.
I started using nostr today, and the first thing I search after typing libertarian is this, lol. But this hits deep, it's totally true, even as a self critique and critique of the "movement" is that it's funny how the movement centered around individuality doesn't seem to have individuality or originality at all.
And the thing about it is that the ideological passion doesn't seem to be great enough that we actually see people breaking through their respective fields, atleast the marxists actually want to make the revolution and end up actually occupying all these fields, I'm leaving out a lot of variables like the fact that leftism isn't an organic movement, but still, libertarian types in theory should produce passionate people focused on their own thing that turn out to be libertarian after you look into them.
And it's very different from how leftists act, since they have mainstream pillars, when they say stuff like "capitalism bad", they're just repeating what a good chunk of the population already accepts. But when a libertarian says his view, it turns into a chore since it's so obviously anti mainstream, so now you turn into a proselytist, the time you spend explaining theory after saying "capitalism is not bad" the marxist/leftist just mutes the post after saying "capitalism is bad" and goes make his art or whatever the fuck that actually wins a culture war.
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