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

Young people in the modern world are being asked to act as heirs when they are actually tenants. They were raised on expectations of: autonomy, self-expression, mobility, romance, meaningful work, home ownership, and gradual upward movement. What they got: High housing costs, delayed family formation, wage shrinkage relative to assets, bureaucratic job markets, credential inflation, social atomization, and: an online world that floods them with stimulation and eliminates real status, real community, and real purpose. They are surrounded by immense wealth, advanced systems, and unprecedented flows of information, but they have no prospect of ever owning any of it. Without the old established pathways into meaningful levels of agency + ownership, they cannot develop into social adulthood. History suggests several different outcomes to this situation. One thing is for sure: The current setup is not a stable state and will not continue. It will change into a new state.

In the modern West there is not much reason an average woman would want to pair-bond with an average man. This doesn’t necessarily imply any moral fault of the individual female, although it does have catastrophic social consequences. She doesn’t need his work, she isn’t attracted to him, she also isn’t coerced to accept him lest she remains a spinster. Sure, she would like pair-bonding and children with a high-value male: but a woman cannot pair-bond with a man she doesn’t find attractive. Because woman are hardwired to be attracted to men firmly above them, in a gender-equal society the pool of attractive men is necessarily small. Emancipated women don’t see average men as suitable partners for family formation. The few guys women would start a family with would rather enjoy being the minority of men who get to have copious sex than found a family with any of the applicants. Without pair-bonding and stable relationships, birth rates crater. https://substack.com/home/post/p-201446551

In 1991 Georgy Arbatov, Gorbachev's diplomatic adviser, said: "We are going to do you the worst of services: we are going to deprive you of the Enemy." In response to this, General Maisonneuve, Canadian Army lieutenant general and NATO chief of staff, wrote: "The Soviet Enemy had all the qualities of the good enemy: solid, constant, coherent. Militarily, it resembles us and is built on the purest Clausewitzien model. Disturbing, yes, but known and predictable. Their disappearance weakens our cohesion and renders our power useless." - Elvira Roca Barea, 'Imperiofobia y Leyenda Negra. Roma, Rusia, Estados Unidos y El Imperio Español'. Chapter 5. (2016) (Translation and minor edits are mine)

" 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

An exploration of how to make a new, productive online forum that improves the professional lives of its members. https://chatgpt.com/share/683c0e22-e854-800b-ae9d-c89b2784b4ac Selected points: - Let users build recognizable profiles with credibility signals. - Auto-generate a public user portfolio from high-quality posts. - Stronger credibility signals come from traceable, structured, exportable proof of value, not just social likes. Make every user look like an author worth citing. - Require public sponsorship by an existing user for a new user to join. - Treat reputation as a slow-earned, high-stakes currency, not a social freebie. Make it traceable, limit its issuance, and watch the graph. - Meta-Point: You’re not building a “forum.” You’re building a reputation graph with social context and visible lineage. - Data Science is a good target field. Content-rich, collaborative, shareable, professionally helpful.

[excerpt from private chat] None of this is going to work. It's simply impossible to maintain individual freedom to not reproduce and modern economies. The only options are social collapse or social change. But: For the citizens to reproduce, the state must offer a genuine long-term deal. The only real strategy is: A small state declares a network citizenship and allows men under 40 in other states to join and claim sole tax residency (i.e. they owe no taxes to any other state - and this is backed up with force - other states, heavy with old people, won’t be able to fight back easily). Taxes payable in crypto. You can bring a woman with you if she’s under 30. That sort of thing. But you can't leave - you owe allegiance for life. You also owe the state the production of 3-5 kids. The legacy welfare states then collapse under their own weight, with the concomitant effects. You'll need automated gun turrets on the border etc etc.

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.

There are eras of media, and each era has its own rules for how to craft an effective message. / There was a time when brands or individuals could rely on the organic reach of their efforts, but the pay-to-play model has been standard for years. / There exist several networks which gather freelancers to produce and distribute podcast clips. / There are of course creators who achieve this by partnering with a talent agency offering essentially the same services under the hood. / Creators can also replicate this on a smaller scale by employing a team to chop, bedazzle, and post clips designed to punish the algorithm with exposure until something hooks. / there is a dollar rate, there is frequency, and there is duration. It operates like any other campaign. / It should be noted that this isn’t a cheat code and the content itself must be remarkable in some way. Source: https://substack.com/home/post/p-197483620

https://substack.com/home/post/p-165004319 Israel has become a “spiritual anachronism.” It is a nation very much of the 1930’s and has been scrambling to find a justifying principle, or at least some public relations principle, outside of that world that is now gone. ... The definition of evil, the opponent, of the Western world is national socialism; a national socialism that is the dominant intellectual strain in Israel’s foundation. ... public principles have to correspond to feelings, not to intellectual demands, and there’s no feeling like the desire for survival. ... Israel is hardly a theological state now, nor could it be unless it is ruled by judges of the Talmudic law. But public authorities as well as the people at large seem to have settled on a religious flavor, if not exactly a full or clear religious justification, let alone a pious religious life, for Israel’s existence.

(Chatting with a friend:) Sadly, games are by necessity “un-productive” - you’re not producing anything unless you add a layer of effort on top of it (e.g., making content). That doesn’t mean gaming is useless. I find its best use is giving us a focus/reason to talk. Men like having something to do when they hang out - going on a walk, stoking a fire, grilling, or playing a game together. However, most modern videogames want you to have a relationship with the game itself, instead of with the people you play it with. Games are no longer the recurrent “30 seconds of fun” that Bungie devs talked about with Halo. I think at some point devs begun emulating social media and their social validation feedback loops. Games don’t have the same mechanics - no likes and comments - but they give you just the right amount of dopamine to keep you playing. Like with Sean Parker at Facebook: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”