AutistoMephisto

I can agree with most of this. Capitalism, and society in general, banked rather hard on Galileo's old saying,

"Measure what is measurable, and make measurable that which is not so."

They took that to mean, "Give every facet of everything an objective measure in order to determine how make imaginary lines go up so imaginary numbers in our bank accounts go up.

They basically looked at the entirety of the cyberpunk genre and misunderstood it entirely. They want to be "cool". Like, pretty much everything Musk does is to get you to like him.

So, Behind the Bastards did a special on Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) and his "Butterfly Revolution" that's really good. One of my favorite takeaways was that this guy definitely got the everloving shit bullied out of him as a kid. However, like most incels he refused to believe that he was the problem. Coming from a background of privilege and wealth, he believed it made him naturally superior to everyone else. It certainly didn't help that his IQ got him recognized by John Hopkins University, and he was selected for a study on "mathematically precocious children". He was an early adopter of the Internet when he went to college, back when it was Web 1.0. He would post and congregate with other individuals like him on Usenet, before the Eternal September happened.

Google the following:

"Mencius Moldbug" and "Butterfly Revolution".

But to summarize it all: Gothic MAGA is basically about destroying America as we know it, government and all. Dissolve the borders and reform the nation as thousands of small countries called "network states". These "network states" would be owned and controlled entirely by oligarchs, and would compete for citizens the way corporations compete for customers. By necessity, the oligarchs will have total control within their borders. Massive, omnipresent surveillance apparatus to watch and control their citizen customer/workers, but if you don't like how one network state is oppressing you, you're free to leave.(Provided of course, the brutal tyrant doesn't have a rule saying you can't leave unless it's in a body bag.) At least, that's how Curtis Yarvin(aka Mencius Moldbug) puts it. And because he's also a racist far-right POS, he's also a eugenicist and thinks because he's got such a high IQ that naturally he and other high IQ individuals should be in charge. The POTUS would be more like a CEO who works on behalf of the oligarchy, who would be the country's Board of Directors.

It's a lot like the early "seasteading" movement, but repackaged because not everyone wants to live at sea.

For the landlocked, may I recommend the Dead Drop Protocol? Leave the message in a place that everyone knows about, but only the intended recipients knows a message is there to be read. Like the Message in a Bottle, it supports all encryption methods and is disconnected from the Internet.

There are a couple drawbacks, though. For one, unless you are watching the drop point, you have no way of knowing whether your message made it to the intended recipient or if it was intercepted. Vice versa, if you are the intended recipient of a dropped message, the only guarantee you have that the message is authentic is if the message uses a self-authenticating encryption method. Also, there is a potential that any drop point you use may be under surveillance, so make sure to not use the same drop point too often.

Removed the ability to communicate cryptographically. Our only tool.

Not entirely. The old methods still work. I'm talking about old fashioned pen and paper. OTP ciphers and dead drops. Messages, hidden where only the intended recipient knows it's there. The problem is, there's no dead drops in cyberspace. There's no place one can leave a hidden message that can't be seen by others in cyberspace. And while quantum computing might break OTP, it's too expensive to use for that purpose.

There's a certain artistry to the old ways. Invisible inks, dead drops, One-Time-Pads, and the like. Cryptography existed long before computers. Those who would be our rulers have bent so much of their energies towards preventing our communicating in cyberspace that they've neglected those of us who studied the pre-Information Age methods. And we can still use them. A guy walks by a trash can, and throws away a seemingly innocuous food wrapper, and a couple hours later another guy goes and collects it, knowing that there is a message written on it in ink that can be revealed with the use of heat and lemon juice. If their intent is to return the USA to the "good ole days", then let's use the spy tricks from the "good ole days".

Such a state of affairs can only continue for so long before it becomes untenable to continue.

The plan then is to literally bomb the competition until the biggest repeat customers have no choice but to come back to us. It's not listed on Project 2025, though. And the ones that can't be bombed will be turned into puppet states, so either way, they come back. I doubt that their plan will actually unfold how they want, but we'll see.

It's the sequel to the first one, and historical accuracy was like, at the center of of that one. Your character starts off the game not knowing how to read, because in medieval Europe, literacy was not widespread and the son of a blacksmith certainly wouldn't know how to read, so books you pick up in the game are total gibberish until you learn to read.

And why his current wreckage of government still has many conservatives approving: they believe he is answering, kind of.

Now, if only we can get them to see that he's got people in his orbit at billionaire techbros who think they're all going to be John Galt, and that the "capitalist utopia" he builds in Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" is what they're trying to build and it won't be good for them. They think they're all going to live in their own Galt's Gulch when it's going to be more like Andrew Ryan's Rapture.

Right, back when they were just a bookstore. All I really know about Amazon is that they focused on long-term profitability over increased short-term profits to expand and capture more of the market, and it worked. The problem is that not everyone can do that. They spent every year since 1994 operating at a loss, when anyone else would have been snapped up by another company in the space, and it's not clear how that didn't happen. The landscape of e-commerce would have been very different if it had.

Exactly. A systemic issue with capitalistic markets is that they inherently select for short term thinking.

Does it make sense to destroy 90% of your profitability 5 years from now for a 20% bump in profit this quarter? Well, yes, it does, because that's 20% more profit to expand and take over the market.

Even if a business were to try to make good long term decisions, it would immediately be crushed and pushed out of the market by all of its competitors willing to make those shortsighted decisions for immediate profits.

Except in the case of Amazon, thanks to AWS they were able to make good long-term decisions with their e-commerce platform by making short term decisions with AWS.