This is crazy what is happening with the US. Trump, Musk, Palantir, Crypto, it’s absolutely insane. I think Im more and more attracted to the offline as much as possible, not that it would make a difference anyway.
I've been thin-client pretty much all my life, starting with college where I didn't own a computer and everything lived somewhere I "went to", then when I bought my first Windows laptop but would ssh into university servers to do anything (I'd already burnt out on installing Linux for other people). When I built my own website it seemed natural (but with hindsight, not the ideal security posture) to treat it as my home.
Over time I started saving a backup of my digital home locally. But for a long time it was just a backup. The source of truth in my mind was in the cloud. Most of what has happened recently is a piecemeal inversion where I start thinking of the local copy of various things as the ground truth. Eventually I noticed my cloud server was altogether too beefy for a tiny website and a glorified backup server. I moved the data to a dedicated backup service and started pushing backups up from my laptop. Then I downsized the server; all it needs to do now is run the website.
The appropriate use of the cloud is communications and backups. Everything else should be local.
In terms of crypto, I imagine their plan would involve the fed. Powell isn't out until 2026, but maybe they have a way around that. Crypto aligned figures like Balaji who have a similar worldview are seemingly starting to try to manufacture consent for a "reorganization" with respect to the fed.
> enact Yarvinism
> carbon-copy of RAGE
Is there someone who can translate this obscure set of references?
Yarvinism - the political ideals of Curtis Yarvin. Openly a friend of Thiel and Vance. I don't know about Musk, he may be a more recent convert.
RAGE - Retire All Government Employees, the first step of Yarvin's plan.
Further reading: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/026327642199943...
Journal: Theory, Culture & Society
Date of publication: 2021, Vol. 38(6) 143–166
Title: Software, Sovereignty and the Post-Neoliberal Politics of Exit
> This paper examines the impact of neoreactionary (NRx) thinking – that of Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman in particular – on contemporary political debates manifest in ‘architectures of exit’. We specifically focus on Urbit, as an NRx digital architecture that captures how post-neoliberal politics imagines notions of freedom and sovereignty through a micro-fracturing of nation-states into ‘gov-corps’. We trace the development of NRx philosophy – and situate this within contemporary political and technological change to theorize the significance of exit manifest within the notion of ‘dynamic geographies’. While technological programmes such as Urbit may never ultimately succeed, we argue that these, and other speculative investments such as ‘seasteading’, reflect broader post-neoliberal NRx imaginaries that were, perhaps, prefigured a quarter of a century ago in The Sovereign Individual.
>Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right...
- NRx = New Reactionism
- Yarvinism = replacing democracy with “accountable dictatorship” (resembling corporate governance, with a hopefully benevolent dictator + a board)
- RAGE = Retire All Government Employees
Sounds like a Peter Thiel wet dream
crypto is just a carbon copy of money with all the same downsides and upsides
Have currencies been a "net" benefit?
What do you think money is other than a tool for exchange?
It's bizarre how defensive people get about something so basic. What is the net benefit of gold, credit cards, paper cash? What is the net benefit of the stock market?
Do you really care? I never see this pearl-clutching over other currencies or even stocks.