Gray Mirror

I like this description of the problem and the suggestion:

> Today on Twitter, as on most social media, justice works in a roughly Stalinist style. The normal penalty is permanent execution. There is no transparent explanation for why an account is executed, before or after the execution. It has simply “violated the Twitter rules.” The public rules are extremely abstract and could theoretically justify almost any execution. The private rulebook by which the secret police, or “Ministry of Trust and Safety,” operates, is of course as secret as everything about the secret police.

> Of course, it is easy to observe that a two-day-old spam account does not deserve a six-month trial, with lawyers, before getting the bullet it needs in the back of the neck. Due process in this context must not be a clone of the IRL judicial system, which is more broken than anyone can possibly imagine.

> And there is a simple solution to the problem of scaling due process: *scale the level of due process to the size of the account*. An account with a million (real) followers might well deserve a six-week public trial, perhaps even with some kind of counsel. The spammer with 20 followers? Any cop can shoot him, as at present, and leave the body by the side of the road as a warning to others.

> There is a use for online Stalinist justice—it is only an injustice when it is disproportional to the user’s investment in the service. When Twitter is your career and any cop can just shoot you, an eerie…

>though I don't know how you want to argue that the world isn't mostly run by capitalist forces. Again, if this is something you want to question I'm not sure we're going to get anywhere.

I believe that the world is primarily run by academia and journalists, and this is best described as a clerical oligarchy. In 1890 the US was definitely a capitalist/commercial oligarchy, in 2020 the US is definitely not one and is instead a clerical oligarchy where institutions with most power are intellectual ones rather than commercial ones. There are reasonable and well thought out arguments for this being the case https://graymirror.substack.com/p/3-descriptive-constitution-of-the.

>The factoid in the piece is that a lot of mobile games are built with the intent of being addictive and getting people to spend a bunch of money on micro transactions. Is this another thing that doesn't fit in your view of reality?

I don't believe mobile games are any worse than other types of games when it comes to addiction. Just because mobile game addiction focuses on certain traits, games that are addictive but focus on other traits are not any better. To assign a negative moral character to mobile games alone is a mistake that people currently make that I disagree with.

>Most importantly though, if they added your joke instead I still wouldn't rally to have them take it down. I'd just think it's awkward and embarrasing.

Yes, that's exactly what I think of the original joke.

> the idea is deeply terrible, and implements a sort of feudal network with kings, lords and peasants (galaxies, stars, planets)

That’s what we have today, except it’s profoundly more disturbing.

Urbit would be like if you were under the care of Facebook, but you genuinely owned your data. Facebook just routed connections for you if you weren’t already connected to someone. And you retain the ability to move from Facebook to twitter for that service if you choose.

Meanwhile today you live on facebook’s land (you don’t own any of your data or identity), and you can’t leave unless you blow everything up.

> who believes life was better when we had monarchies in charge of everything.

Yarvin actually does not believe that. His whole project is more about not resisting the inevitable, which is that humans will organize in hierarchies no matter what. So it’s better to not pretend otherwise and just be honest.

Again, this is better than what we have today. Do you even know who your “lord” is today? Vaguely Zuckerberg. Who is under him? Do we know who to be upset with if a decision is made that we don’t like? No this is all a mystery because it’s anti-hierarchy theater. It’s there but they tell us it’s not.

Here is an article where Yarvin basically endorses Urbit without mentioning it by name: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/how-to-regulate-the-tech-platforms

You are completely correct, I didn't mean to argue against the Dems, just noting that I hear this critique raised against them a lot.

>Arguably by the same reasoning, republicans benefit from legal abortion and their finally getting Roe v Wade reversed was terrible for their electoral performance.

Indeed, the far-right has raised exactly this criticism of overturning Roe v Wade:

>If you have limited energy and a limited number of possible wins, it is important to focus your limited energy on one kind of win: wins that make future wins easier. By definition, these are the kinds of wins that augment your power. These are real wins.
>
>There is another kind of “win,” wins which expend your power in order to achieve some result you want. These are sometimes called “Pyrrhic victories.” Pyrrhus took the battlefield, but after the battle his chances of winning were reduced. His tactical “victory” was a strategic defeat.

Source: You can only lose the culture war (https://graymirror.substack.com/p/you-can-only-lose-the-culture-war)

This kind of thinking isn't partisan, I think it describes the a problem that occurs with institutions in any society. I'm not sure what the solution is, other than to be collectively vigilant against institutions succumbing to these tendencies. Which seems woefully inadequate.

read curtis yarvin, find the weaknesses in his arguments, and use those weaknesses against their ideology.

for start, he thinks FDR was a dictator but the only reason FDR had such power was because the support of labor and some parts of capital. he would know that if he was a historian instead of LARPing as one.

so organizing and supporting the labor movement would be a good place to start, since a organized labor could become a powerful poltical force. otherwise everybody is fragmented on both sides which further enables their ideology.

a recent blog of his gave me this idea: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-pleasure-of-error

he legit thinks trump is about to be FDR 2.0 but his mistake is ignorance about how the power worked during that time. you can even use his "differential" idea in that essay against him. the differential now is labor against wealth. always has been, especially when FDR wielded all the power yarvin thinks was a dictatorship since a lot of that power was given to him by the support of the massive labor movement at the time.

more practically, this blog has some good insight into the "what do i dooooo?????" question https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/11/10-things-to-do-if-trump-wins/

More precisely, we have an aspirational world government led by the American Empire which is run by a few extremely wealthy and powerful elite families, including the ones you've alluded to. Of course, these powerful families own all the media companies and thus control how they are covered in the mainstream media, which explains their absence and subsequent emphasis on politically inconsequential billionaires like Musk.

The American Empire is run via these families through a distributed influence network of private companies, NGOs, think tanks and PACs [1]. Although made up of many entities, they are funded by the same few individuals. Thus, this is a very difficult system to reform without immense capital expenditure.

The countries which do not submit to this order are the designated public enemies (we have always been at war with Eastasia). Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea being the most prominent of these.

Disclaimer: I am a deeply committed conspiracy theorist who also believes in the Earth being flat, so please take everything I say as the ramblings of a kook (especially any hardworking federal employees perusing HN)!

1. https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-brief-explanation-of-the-cathedral