The image above was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'Julian Assange holding a lamb.'
I noticed something funny the other day. When sending a text, the letters RCS appeared where SMS used to be. Apparently, RCS is the new Android standard and it's completely insecure. This change may bother some people, but I've never considered texts to be a secure form of communication. The government has always spied on us, though as the privatization of mass surveillance continues to unfold, private companies are increasingly the entities collecting and trading our private data.
If that bums you out, here's an authentic picture of Julian Assange holding a lamb. That's right, the man who endured years of confinement for publishing inconvenient truths is free and interacting with livestock while trust in the system dwindles further. These days, only about 23% of Americans trust the government. Confidence in our judicial system is also very low.
We may no longer trust the machine, but it's the still only game in town. And our postindustrial capitalism will continue seeping through our grossly distorted markets, with more and more of the human experience commercialized with every passing minute. Venture capitalists are now even investing directly in individuals to turn a profit on their successes. Entrepreneurs Daniil and David Liberman are popularizing the practice by selling shares in themselves.
At first glance, this seems a little dystopian. But the theory behind it is sound enough. Younger people need money to establish their lives and their future earning potential is largely determined by the financial support they receive early on. Instead of turning to traditional student loans and credit cards, a person could raise the funds they need to get started or advance their career by selling shares in themselves which entitle their holders to a discrete fraction of the person's revenue.
I considered doing something like this to raise funds for promoting my novels and making audiobooks, but I couldn't figure out how to tokenize my potential without creating a security that could only be sold to "qualified" investors. In the US, the SEC requires these investors to be accredited, which is to say worth over a million dollars. I only know a few people like that, and I'm not sure any of them would be interested in a share of a fringe writer's theoretical future revenue.
The whole idea of qualified investors is one of the control regime's best tools for preventing average people from accessing profitable opportunities. When combined with the SEC's other onerous regulations, we're left with a marketplace that effectively excludes most people. The official story is that people like me need to be protected from financial risk. But in practice, we're not protected at all. We're captives who are continually fed on by the parasitic financial giants that own both the government and most financial markets.
Heading into the New Year, I'm trying to find better ways to disconnect my finances from the machine, if only in small ways. So I'm reducing the money I feed to cigarette companies by returning to whole leaf organic tobacco that I shred myself. And I'm further increasing my participation in the blockchain economy. A third of my income was delivered in crypto this year and I want it to be two thirds or more in 2025.
Beyond economics, I'm committed to finding better ways to talk about the big picture we're facing, both with WantToKnow and in my other projects. The technological transformation of society will continue accelerating, with social and political consequences, and staying on top of this might be challenging. One thing I'm hoping for as the next year unfolds are more opportunities to mae sense of our shared circumstance in person, instead of just online.
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