Behold this One Strange Trick

Societies don’t cope well with technological innovation that changes the way people live every day. Because once you change the way people live every day, you’re changing the way people interact, which means the structures of society are going to start not working the way they were intended to.

Right now we’re in a time of catastrophic innovation. What does that mean? It means that we’ve reached a point where innovation is building on innovation — which is to be fair what innovation does. First someone figures out how to dig in the ground and plant some seeds and next thing you know someone is planting kale, and then you have to kill them and… ahem… — and the new one is dropping before we’ve even started to process the effects of the last one.

Honestly, the Heinlein time line (not that one. I was told I can no longer mention that particular story here, not without doing the whole Black Adder dance for when someone mentions the Scottish Play) would have been easier on our institutions as they were when he wrote the juveniles. Going to space would just be a continuation of the westward expansion, and at least on earth there was no big innovation on communication and putting the power of communication in the hands of individual to counter the centralized big media. (Or the power of manufacturing, to counter centralized big industry. Okay, we’re on the early stages of that, but it could easily be the next big break through.) In fact, he had Earth become more and more the worst aspects of FDR, to be honest.

But no. We weren’t allowed to go to space (no, you can’t possibly convince me it wasn’t deliberate. The way the left hates any attempt at space exploration and becomes insane with their FEFer (Fix Earth First) bullshit, you know they did what they could to prevent us leaving this rock.) And so some geeks in garages created the internet revolution. Yes, yes, I now. Government, but be real. If it hadn’t escaped into private lands and cat memes, it would still be unimportant to all but defense geeks.

And that… well, that escaped containment again, at least in the US right after 9/11, when a lot of us trying to figure out what was happening and what should happen hit the internet and a lot of the big blogs now originated. And then there was social media, and then–

Well. Here we are.

And not only haven’t governments and institutions processed the internet, but they haven’t even started to realize the paradigm (remember how fond they were of the word in the nineties? Well, it actually does mean something) has shifted under their feet.

Their last two normal political campaigns (Biden doesn’t count. Nothing about that was normal) they got all the celebrity endorsements, paid all the networks, and sat back and waited for victory, and are still confused it didn’t work. With Biden they were in the middle of a massive psi-ops campaign with the help of China (as we now know, and honestly always suspected) that included memorex riots, memorex race war, memorex pandemic, memorex campaigning and very definitely wholly memorex campaigning with a character whose mind was definitely not real or at least not present.

But even with having locked the entire country to tank the economy and run a major psi-ops to distort everything and control all the information, the only way they “won” that election was to cheat massively in front of G-d and everybody.

And then, despite their attempts to follow the good old play book of the Bolshevik revolution (they only have one playbook, really) it didn’t work, and people pushed back on things like their attempt to establish a ministry of truth (how very dare they.)

Now of course they’ve decided what they really need is more foreign communists and crazy people in charge. And yes, of course they’re counting on fraud.

What they’re not counting on, though, is that everyone has a movie camera in their pocket to film any shenanigans, or that everything they try to cover up comes out or–

Honestly, as flat footed and wrong footed as they are, as snake bit and struggling, it makes me wonder how much they were hiding from us in the days of centralized media. Some of it of course I knew, like the immediate tarnishing of the Reagan economy when Clinton took over, or all the lies about how things had worked in the eighties or… But– really?

How much were they hiding from us in the past?

It’s hitting mostly the left, because the left had control of the old establishment story-dissiminators, be they “news” or fiction or songs or movies or… well, any of it. They had the old system completely under their control, and knew how it worked and what they could do. Which means that they partly refuse to believe it’s not working, and partly have absolutely no clue what works. The right — which let’s face it, at this point is everyone to the right of Lenin — on the other hand had found themselves slowly pushed out of every form of mass media until they were out in the wilderness. In the wilderness, you adapt faster to innovations, because it’s the only chance you have. We were, in fact ready.

Would we have been without Rush Limbaugh, who in fact used an old form of communication to get around the lefty-lock on everything? I don’t know. In a way he primed us to hit the internet running. We both knew there were distortions in the mainstream narrative and knew we were not alone. In fact, maybe that’s the difference between the right’s adoption of the internet in the US as opposed to the rest of the world. Perhaps Rush Limbaugh was the thumb on the scales we needed.

It would have got here, mind you, but maybe in another twenty years or so.

In fact, you’re seeing, abroad, where we were twenty years ago. The governments cracking down on memes are at the beginning or a long road of pain where they lose more and more control of the people. And the invasion that is supposed to replace them? Well, far more advanced there (by percentage) than here, or at least it looks like (None of the numbers are reliable, either side of the Atlantic, people. Yeah, they might be worse here. Or not. Again just by tracking “magazines in Spanish in the checkout stands” the peak was around 2010, because the Obama economy caused the first Gran Salida. And they needed to bribe the next waves with welfare, just to get them back.) But irreversible? I don’t know. I kind of doubt it, in fact. If they hurry up and catch up on the communication front, well, it will get ugly in Europe (Europe specializes in really ugly once they get pissed off enough) but they might yet save themselves. Or put it another way, when governments are trying to ban memes, they’re not winning.

Do I know how this will play out? No. But…

Look, it helps if you remember everything has two sides. Some crazy person on Twitter assured me that because of AI we’re going to be in a robot tyranny or something like. Sure, the potential is there. If we let things get centralized and controlled by bad actors. (Oh, Hello China!) BUT not if we let the free market handle it, all elbows and chaos.

Is AI disruptive? Oh, you bet your beepy. Majorly disruptive. And weirdly some of the professions that seemed like they would be the most immune to it are the ones who are getting hit hardest, like most of the liberal arts ones. And no one knows what it will come for next, so preparing for the future is difficult at best.

BUT it’s also disruptive the other way as well. In the hands of good guys, it might help us figure out answers to things like “what is really happening” and “where is our money going” as well as help small companies and individuals compete with the monopolies that are now almost all controlled by the left.

Used properly it can easily put Hollywood out of business. And it won’t even take long. Used properly, it can help you learn anything you want to learn without giving money to universities that have become pits of foreign influence and communism.

(No, seriously. On a lark I had it outline a course for me to learn Classical Greek and Latin from free materials on the web, and I think it will work, though I don’t intend to try until I’m done with the looming move. I very much think it will work.)

What else can it do? I don’t know. But if you think the establishment that hasn’t even yet coped with the fact they don’t have the only megaphone in the room can cope with the further disruptions about to eat them, you’re out of your mind.

Sure “it will be used for evil” — that’s a given — but not just for evil.

Orwell saw how the tech of his time could be used to lock society down. It could. In many places it was. His error was to think it would last forever.

Behold this one strange trick: we too have ability to create, to disrupt to innovate. (In fact, we have it far more than the left, because we have the need to.)

Let’s get to it, and use everything to build over, build under, build around.

And throw the stars ontop of that, because we’re going there too.

Set backs? of course there will be setbacks. And I guarantee the left will get crazier and more malignant as we continue to break their little (eh) red wagon.

Don’t let that deter you.

In the end, we win, they lose.

Ad Astra.