Tela Network

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.

I see the term "late-stage capitalism" everywhere online. Its persistence is proof of Marxism's staying-power as a tool of critique, but I question its usefulness beyond that. Because of its symbolic implications. Words shape and reveal our beliefs. And each belief allows us _not to think about something_. "Late-stage capitalism" is fatalistic. The system is spent but can’t die. It lets us avoid alternatives. It aestheticizes collapse. It turns politics into content. Absurdities into punchlines. Organizers into grifters. "Welcome to late-stage capitalism. What did you expect?" Full ironic detachment. It dissuades _action_. I’m searching for other terms - ones that accurately frame what is happening but also ask "What is to be done?". "Techno-feudalism" does both. It breaks the liberal frame of profit through commodity exchange for one of rent extraction. It implies that we rank somewhere in a feudal hierarchy. It also suggests change: feudalism has come and gone before.

Borges: Here's Mark Carney's speech from Davos yesterday. He basically lays out what I think the new world order is going to look like (although quite an idealised version of it). https://youtu.be/btqHDhO4h10?si=-Anc4WkOHt66G7_w StJohn: So new world order would be: a handful of hegemons with monopoly structures, and a loose highly layered set of networks among middle-tier countries... Definitely a change in the water. To say "Let us accept the new reality" at the World Economic Forum - that probably annoyed a number of people who would prefer not to think about the change in reality. I view progressive capitalism, so to speak, as the Catholicism of our time. It's the default way of thinking. So Mark Carney struck me as a good Catholic, but one who is facing a great change and has become highly advanced and pragmatic. And as he was describing these multilateral deals, notably not mentioning the US, it reminded me of Richelieu making his alliance with the Muslim Turks.

"The proof-of-work is a Hashcash style SHA-256 collision finding. It's a memoryless process where you do millions of hashes a second, with a small chance of finding one each time. The 3 or 4 fastest nodes' dominance would only be proportional to their share of the total CPU power. Anyone's chance of finding a solution at any time is proportional to their CPU power." - Satoshi Nakamoto He also refers to the proof-of-work as a "partial pre-image of zero", which is an interesting way to think about it. https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/014858.html "... Political freedom is the resultant of unresolved conflicts among various sections of the élite. The existence of these conflicts is in turn correlated with the interplay of diverse social forces... " - James Burnham, The Machiavellians So: Bitcoin produces a species of political freedom via a cyclic (by which I mean permanent & dynamic) Burnham unresolved conflict between its miners.

Hi, I'm Guillermo Pablos Murphy. I'm English / Spanish. I move frequently between Madrid and Valencia, in Spain. I'm a market research and project management consultant with a MA in International Relations and I'm expanding my skillset to include UI/UX and data analysis (Python, R) skills. My primary interests are artistic. I'm an award winning photographer, I write poetry, and I paint. My current project is called CATALYST - a magazine answering the question: "What is to be done?". We're currently publishing its digital print run at readcatalyst.org. I think a lot about stories and politics. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guillermo-pablos-murphy/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@gpm1507

- Man needs a faith. - (Which do you practice ?) - I practice Christianity. - Jesus is the right man to follow. - The worlds that flow from following Marx, Mohammed, Mammon, or Moloch ... are wastelands. Nothing grows there. - The world that we live in grew from Christianity. - Atheists still believe in Christian morality. They do not really want to live in a world without it. They would mostly not survive. - Am I a good Christian ? No. - Do I believe as a Christian should ? No. - Do I try to believe ? Yes. Sometimes. - And sometimes it seems as though it could be real. Sometimes God is sitting on a bench nearby, just outside the frame. - Is it the correct faith to try to believe ? For a European, yes. - But be as wise as a serpent. A man is hated most for his weaknesses. - A man should read the Greeks, Schmitt, the Buddhists, Sun Tzu, etc. Truth emerges from the tension of opposites. - Which rituals should you teach your children ? Correct action, communion, penance, forgiveness.

The current meta for social platforms selects for platforms that optimize for emotional engagement. The core mechanic is "reaction", as reified in likes, shares, comments. Posts are simply the raw material. Reaction is what keeps people coming back. Humans have a powerful anxiety-driven need to perceive the social currents - "what are other people saying about X ?" (what should my opinion be ?) Reaction maintains regular engagement, which allows the business of adverts to exist. I propose a new core mechanic: Validation. A person's social profile would showcase the posts that they have validated - verifiable record of what they judged to be true / insightful / useful. The value proposition: That this profile would increase the user's professional reputation. The overall result: The platform produces few posts, but each post supports a cloud of confirmations. Highly-validated posts are then republished on existing platforms, with the validators featured alongside the author.

- Great post. Very true. - Where I'm at mentally: Human activity can be so bad that it's preferable to believe in God in order to have a defense against demonic behavior. - To go one level deeper, and to turn the focus away from other people, I understand my own proclivity towards evil / sin, which is quite strong, and the church offers a remedy, which is significantly better than the only two real alternatives: buddhism & nilihism. (I don't consider Nietzche's Ubermensch a viable alternative.) - That said, i still think the faith should be held in balance / tension against instinct / thor / odin / zeus / darwin. Sanity / truth emerges from the tension of opposites. - Incidentally, this is a way to avoid the temptation to try to justify christianity in the terms of scientific proof. I watched a lot of people try to do this. It's pointless. Cedes frame. - The faith is the faith. It needs no further justification. - cf "I am who i am" / ipsum esse

MVC (Model-View-Controller) is a pattern in software design for building user interfaces. Key benefit: It keeps code modular - models don't deal with presentation, and views don't contain business rules. 1. The model defines what data the app should contain. 2. The view defines how the app's data should be displayed. 3. The controller contains logic that updates the model and/or view in response to input from the users of the app. Scenario: A user writes a new post on an online forum. - Model: Receives and validates the post data. Handles saving to and loading from the database. - View: Builds the page shown to the user. Either the "New Post" form with validation errors, or the "Post Details" page showing the freshly created post. - Controller: Handles the "create post" request. Flow: - User makes post - Controller receives post data - Model saves to database - Controller chooses a View - User sees result