Tela Network

/ When you communicate because you engage in local trade and you all share economic bonds that will continue from generation to generation, you will become cohesive. This bond is broken when the federal government allows companies to relocate their foreign workforce into your neighborhood, destabilizing local cultural bonds and disrupting the intergenerational structure; the entire community becomes atomized. People stop participating in civic life because if their children will not inherit their efforts, why should they continue to put in the effort? / https://tompnoid.substack.com/p/part-2-white-people-dont-exist

Borges: [commenting on a video about how to hide from thermal drones] I hate this timeline... StJohn: It has some definite bad parts. Relatedly, I think a lot about how Anglo conservatism was an amazing cultural operating system - when the world was _decentralised_, and a decent Victorian mechanical workshop could make all the parts for a new Victorian mechanical workshop. Like bees splitting off to make new hives. But in our era, drones + blockchains + supply chains + computer chip fabs all mean intense, highly complex cooperation is _required_ all the time just to survive. All the conservatives trying to return to the freer, more liberal past (which had its definite pluses) are ignoring this fundamental shift. Now we all have to be significantly more collectivistic. Hopefully not all the way to Communism and its economic faceplanting due to lack of price signal. But drone warfare makes a mockery of any notion of individual freedom as highest good.

This is an interesting idea mentioned recently by Balaji Srinivasan. I'll expand it here. - The shapes of current countries are partially (perhaps mostly) due to the constraints of agriculture. Single contiguous areas, in which people grew similar crops and raised similar animals, were zones in which people could move easily and share useful technologies. This often led to similar customs. - Today, in modern economies, only 1% of the population works in agriculture. Marriage customs, ethnic and cultural boundaries, and political boundaries are much less constrained by the agricultural requirements. - The hot zone of a polity is its information exchange hub. This is where all other activity is organized. - This is constrained by _timezone_. Within a single timezone, potential political / economic / cultural coordination is maximized. - It may now be much easier for a powerful polity to expand _vertically_. Source: https://youtu.be/VSVOQl-vFKk

"Modern politicians and becoming a man" - New article on Tela Blog It contains two quotes that I found striking. Issues: - The effect of a constant audience on a politician - The default state of man absent the cultural imposition of masculinity "... Mature masculinity is artificially induced through culture...." https://telablog.com/modern-politicians-and-becoming-a-man

Podcast summary: Dr. Dani Sulikowski argues that "wokeness" can be understood as _manipulative reproductive suppression_. Key points: - Once societies become wealthy and infant mortality falls, elite women lose their normal reproductive advantage. - To restore it, they promote cultural norms - e.g. career-first feminism, abortion rights, body positivity, gender ideology, toxic masculinity - that will lower the reproduction rate of other women. - This behavior is not necessarily conscious. - These movements are framed as progressive or compassionate but effectively make other women less fertile. - This pattern is cyclical across civilizations. Male competition is dominant until an inflection point of high wealth and success is reached. Female competition then becomes the dominant force in mating outcomes, and birth rates decline, setting the stage for societal decline and replacement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRY_1JRRcNU

Brains (or brain regions) undergo model collapse just like AI systems. ... Urban people often behave as if they’re retarded. Socially (they’ve never been punched in the face), Geospatially (they have no idea how to navigate by the sun or shadows), Culturally (without some pop-fiction touchstone, culture doesn’t exist), etc. They’re entirely bound to a world of artificial ideas: human-produced data, and unable to accurately model from first principles anything outside their extremely limited sphere of artificial experience. The bugman’s neurological model of reality is divorced from reality. They hallucinate truths that make no sense, and they delude themselves into provably false ideas, and violently attack anyone with a model of reality more accurate than their own. They don’t understand violence, hunger, or (real) social organization because they’ve never encountered those things. https://substack.com/home/post/p-178113467

Bozeman, Montana is about as far away from the US urban / coastal cultures as you can get. Nonetheless, urban people displace Bozeman people, not the other way around. I find myself concluding, yet again, that owning a house is no protection against the economic currents of our time. Economic networks are the powerhouse. People hooked into an expanding network simply displace those who are not. So one’s focus must always be one’s network. (Even if you acquire a house, your neighborhood is displaced and restructured, and your kids grow up in the new environment, and themselves are obligated to leave - so you only put off the defeat for one generation.) I think we could think of the phenomenon today as “internal colonization” by different networks. The focus is now Montana instead of the Congo. A model: Networks process transactions. Skills are valuable economically if they allow you to help a network process more transactions.

I enjoyed this post. I particularly like "Superman is a modern myth" and "Art reveals". Yes, the fear is correct. Any future with resurgent masculinity is one in which the women are just captured / acquired / attracted, often quite willingly, and the average man today, with no spirit / thumos / strength / network, gets - nothing. Actually nothing. The fact that this harem fear was expressed indicates that we (correctly) see ourselves as weak. When watching the film: - I noted that the only way Superman makes sense as a character is if he has rural American Christian parents, and that this film accepted that. A small change in the zeitgeist regarding Christianity ? - I highly enjoyed the new message from his birth parents. It's a striking twist on Krypton's culture that I don't think has been done before. - I appreciated Lex Luthor's recognition and acceptance of his envy, and his use of it as a source of strength.

‘Halo: Reach’ is about losing completely. You play as a member of an elite team that discovers an alien invasion of humanity’s second Earth – Reach, and tries to defend it. It ends in catastrophe: the planet is glassed, its people decimated, and your team killed. The last level has a single (impossible) objective: “Survive”. You win every firefight, complete every objective, but losing, while tragic, isn’t ultimately frustrating. It’s an impressive subversion of the power fantasy typical of shooters like it. The helplessness of individuals to prevent defeat is at the heart of Reach’s tragedy. It’s anti-heroic. The military is American, mechanised, and competent (!). The enemy are infinite, religiously-fanatical, _alien_. Like other 2000s sci-fi, Reach looked at the past, but instead of an origin story it looks at a past _collapse_. It’s post-9/11, post-Iraq, post-2008, and post-Fukuyama. Culture had lost confidence in heroes, in the future, and in agency.

" Once God is subtracted from life, Man is starved of significance. His life no longer makes sense, and he is stricken by the absurdity of his condition of being born to die between two oblivions. ... man’s appetite for identity and transcendence can be satisified, said the liberals, by the packaging of liberal politics as the higher spiritual purpose of mankind. ... This is the reason these viral cults of feverish zealotry seize the minds of millions in hypnotic cycles of mass hysteria. They are not only partnered with the State - they are the means of the production of belief. ... The liberal system ... is a total system, seeking to reform man within and without, and everything around him. All that was, is and will be is to be recast in the liberal image. It is the attempt to replace reality with a permanent illusion of utopia. ... Under these terms and conditions there is no reality but that of the manufactured consensus. " https://substack.com/home/post/p-177004462

" These are the last days of social media as we know it. ... Social media was built on the romance of authenticity. Early platforms sold themselves as conduits for genuine connection: stuff you wanted to see, like your friend’s wedding and your cousin’s dog. Even influencer culture, for all its artifice, promised that behind the ring‑light stood an actual person. But the attention economy, and more recently, the generative AI-fueled late attention economy, have broken whatever social contract underpinned that illusion. The feed no longer feels crowded with people but crowded with content. ... The difference between human and synthetic content is becoming increasingly indistinguishable. Earlier this year, CEO Steve Huffman pledged to “keep Reddit human,” a tacit admission that floodwaters were already lapping at the last high ground. " https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media