The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt '"Web 3.0" vast network colorful over a dark cityscape.'
Julian Assange is finally free and he looks surprisingly good in the footage going around. Unfortunately, the Australian government is forcing him to pay over half a million dollars for his plane ride home, so his wife is raising money for that. The Wikileaks founder's newfound freedom is cause for celebration. But I can't help but think that if a new Wikileaks started today, no one would ever hear about it, because search and social media are so thoroughly censored.
In other news, the former head of the NSA is now on the board at OpenAI. My sense is that there's a global arms race on to develop machine superintelligence, and this is more than anything part of that. Imagine the mountain of mass surveillance data that the NSA is currently sitting on, then consider what would happen if this were used as training data for next generation AI.
And in an unambiguous win for the control regime, the supreme court just put its stamp of approval on continued government censorship of social media. Here's a quote from a Washington Post article about it:
State leaders in Missouri and Louisiana, in addition to individual social media users, filed a lawsuit accusing the Biden administration of violating the First Amendment by operating a sprawling federal "censorship enterprise" to improperly influence platforms to modify or take down posts related to public health and elections. In a 6-3 ruling, the court said the states and individuals could not show they were directly harmed by the communication between federal officials and social media platforms.
The ruling essentially said that government censorship efforts were indistinguishable from standard corporate media censorship, so there was no way to hold anyone responsible for the elimination of free speech online. What this means for us is a likely escalation of the censorship and propaganda we're now all subjected to. Personally, I'm processing the news as increased motivation to use decentralized alternatives to mainstream systems.
Along these lines, my Rstory token is now listed on Alcor Exchange. Alcor is a dex that anyone can trade anything on, so the actual listing was very simple. The hard part was developing the token's value basis, which is that possessing it makes it easy to access my scifi novels for free. Realistically, I don't expect many people to buy the token in the next few months, but I will be giving it away to people that contribute to the project. And now they can easily go on Alcor and try to sell their Rstory for EOS if they want.
Technologies of Liberation
Working in a news media job that focuses on society's darkest corners has probably distorted my thinking. At this point, I'm pretty sure all of our systems are hopelessly corrupt so I'm anticipating the future through that lens. And through that lens, it looks to me like the powers that be will continue to repress us by increasingly sophisticated means in order to extract more and more value from our lives. Their technologies of repression are powerful. But maybe we can devise technologies of liberation that are more powerful.
In a technical sense, many of these technologies already exist. But for social and psychological reasons, people aren't using them. If the Web 3.0 vision of individual empowerment through decentralization is ever to materialize, it will be because someone figures out how to talk about the tech in a way that overcomes the broad social and psychological reluctance to engage with it. I think this could happen.
Read Free Mind Gazette on Substack
Read my novels:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS and as a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.
- The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
See my NFTs:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
- History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
- Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.