#dystopian — Public Fediverse posts

Recorvia Episode 15

https://solaceem.wordpress.com/2026/09/06/recorvia-episode-15/

Recorvia Episode 15

https://solaceem.wordpress.com/2026/09/06/recorvia-episode-15/

Recorvia Episode 15

https://solaceem.wordpress.com/2026/09/06/recorvia-episode-15/

Recorvia Episode 15

https://solaceem.wordpress.com/2026/09/06/recorvia-episode-15/

Recorvia Episode 15

https://solaceem.wordpress.com/2026/09/06/recorvia-episode-15/

Free download codes:

Michael HERTER - GAMES. Vol. 4: Futuristic Synthetic Worlds

"Futuristic electronic and hybrid tracks for sci-fi games, cyberpunk worlds, and action trailers."

https://getmusic.fm/l/5XhBaw

#electronic #synthwave #soundtrack #cinematic #scifi #cyberpunk #dystopian #hybrid #futuristic #gaming #music

Free download codes:

Michael HERTER - GAMES. Vol. 4: Futuristic Synthetic Worlds

"Futuristic electronic and hybrid tracks for sci-fi games, cyberpunk worlds, and action trailers."

https://getmusic.fm/l/5XhBaw

#electronic #synthwave #soundtrack #cinematic #scifi #cyberpunk #dystopian #hybrid #futuristic #gaming #music

Free download codes:

Michael HERTER - GAMES. Vol. 4: Futuristic Synthetic Worlds

"Futuristic electronic and hybrid tracks for sci-fi games, cyberpunk worlds, and action trailers."

https://getmusic.fm/l/5XhBaw

#electronic #synthwave #soundtrack #cinematic #scifi #cyberpunk #dystopian #hybrid #futuristic #gaming #music

Free download codes:

Michael HERTER - GAMES. Vol. 4: Futuristic Synthetic Worlds

"Futuristic electronic and hybrid tracks for sci-fi games, cyberpunk worlds, and action trailers."

https://getmusic.fm/l/5XhBaw

#electronic #synthwave #soundtrack #cinematic #scifi #cyberpunk #dystopian #hybrid #futuristic #gaming #music

Imagine a future in which late-stage capitalism became able to scan cadavers' brains and transfer them into chatbots unless the deceased subscribes to a high-tier funerary services plan. Behold the ultimate wet dream of those who think Black Mirror is meant as an instruction manual: KadAIve®!

Alt-text contains important explanation about this absurdist art (such as, the deliberate mimicking of AI slop machine style and the hidden puns/messages within the text), but will likely end up truncated because it's way too lengthy (too many details that ought to be explained). Hell, it's even exceeds the 5000 character limit when I try to paste the alt-text here in the post.

#arsritualistemplii #meme #dystopian #scifiparody #mementomori

Imagine a future in which late-stage capitalism became able to scan cadavers' brains and transfer them into chatbots unless the deceased subscribes to a high-tier funerary services plan. Behold the ultimate wet dream of those who think Black Mirror is meant as an instruction manual: KadAIve®!

Alt-text contains important explanation about this absurdist art (such as, the deliberate mimicking of AI slop machine style and the hidden puns/messages within the text), but will likely end up truncated because it's way too lengthy (too many details that ought to be explained). Hell, it's even exceeds the 5000 character limit when I try to paste the alt-text here in the post.

#arsritualistemplii #meme #dystopian #scifiparody #mementomori

WEPA! Now THIS is the kind of indie comic I love finding in the wild, something with...
https://comiccrusaders.com/reviews/comic-reviews/the-plague-1-review-lucky-devil-comics/
#The Plague #The Plague #1 #The Plague comic #Lucky Devil Comics #Styles Pacheco #Nicky C #Daniel José Ruiz Jimeno #Miguel Ayuso #Josh Rodriguez #indie comics #independent comics #creator-owned comics #horror comics #supernatural comics #dystopian comics #New Orleans comics #comic book reviews #Comic Crusaders #Al Mega

WEPA! Now THIS is the kind of indie comic I love finding in the wild, something with...
https://comiccrusaders.com/reviews/comic-reviews/the-plague-1-review-lucky-devil-comics/
#The Plague #The Plague #1 #The Plague comic #Lucky Devil Comics #Styles Pacheco #Nicky C #Daniel José Ruiz Jimeno #Miguel Ayuso #Josh Rodriguez #indie comics #independent comics #creator-owned comics #horror comics #supernatural comics #dystopian comics #New Orleans comics #comic book reviews #Comic Crusaders #Al Mega

The #US is dragging #Europe back to the days of white #supremacism. Our leaders are playing along

if we want to protect multiparty liberal #democracy and push back against the #FarRight, we should be far more wary not only of #toxic speeches from across the Atlantic but of #Trump’s close ties to Europe’s #xenophobic parties and the many ways in which the US’s #Maga politicians are legitimising far-right ideologies...

#fascism #Trump #authoritarianism #dictators #dystopian #oppression

[1/2]

I saw this on Mastodon and almost had a stroke.

@davidgerard wrote:

“Most of the AI coding claims are conveniently nondisprovable. What studies there are show it not helping coding at all, or making it worse

But SO MANY LOUD ANECDOTES! Trust me my friend, I am the most efficient coder in the land now. No, you can’t see it. No, I didn’t measure. But if you don’t believe me, you are clearly a fool.

These guys had one good experience with the bot, they got one-shotted, and now if you say “perhaps the bot is not all that” they act like you’re trying to take their cocaine away.”

First, the term is falsifiable, and proving propositions about algorithms (i.e., code) is part of what I do for a living. Mathematically human-written code and AI-written code can be tested, which means you can falsify propositions about them. You would test them the same way.

There is no intrinsic mathematical distinction between code written by a person and code produced by an AI system. In both cases, the result is a formal program made of logic and structure. In principle, the same testing techniques can be applied to each. If it were really nondisprovable, you could not test to see what is generated by a human and what is generated by AI. But you can test it. Studies have found that AI-generated code tends to exhibit a higher frequency of certain types of defects. So, reviewers and testers know what logic flaws and security weaknesses to look for. This would not be the case if it were nondisprovable.

You can study this from datasets where the source of the code is known. You can use open-source pull requests identified as AI-assisted versus those written without such tools. You then evaluate both groups using the same industry-standard analysis tools: static analyzers, complexity metrics, security scanners, and defect classification systems. These tools flag bugs, vulnerabilities, performance issues, and maintainability concerns. They do so in a consistent way across samples.

A widely cited analysis of 470 real pull requests reported that AI-generated contributions contained roughly 1.7 times as many issues on average as human-written ones. The difference included a higher number of critical and major defects. It also included more logic and security-related problems. Because these findings rely on standard measurement tools — counting defects, grading severity, and comparing issue rates — the results are grounded in observable data. Again, I am making a point here. It’s testable and therefore disproveable.

This is a good paper that goes into it:

In this paper, we present a large-scale comparison of code authored by human developers and three state-of-the-art LLMs, i.e., ChatGPT, DeepSeek-Coder, and Qwen-Coder, on multiple dimensions of software quality: code defects, security vulnerabilities, and structural complexity. Our evaluation spans over 500k code samples in two widely used languages, Python and Java, classifying defects via Orthogonal Defect Classification and security vulnerabilities using the Common Weakness Enumeration. We find that AI-generated code is generally simpler and more repetitive, yet more prone to unused constructs and hardcoded debugging, while human-written code exhibits greater structural complexity and a higher concentration of maintainability issues. Notably, AI-generated code also contains more high-risk security vulnerabilities. These findings highlight the distinct defect profiles of AI- and human-authored code and underscore the need for specialized quality assurance practices in AI-assisted programming.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21634

Something I’ve started to notice about a lot of the content on social media platforms is that most of the posts people are liking, sharing, and memetically mutating—and then spreading virally—usually don’t include any citations, sources, or receipts. It’s often just some out-of-context screenshot with no reference link or actual sources.

A lot of the anti-AI content is not genuine critique. It’s often misinformation, but people who hate AI don’t question it or ask for sources because it aligns with their biases. The propaganda on social media has gotten so bad that anything other than heavily curated and vetted feeds is pretty much useless, and it’s filled with all sorts of memetic contagions with nasty hooks that are optimized for you algorithmically. I am at the point where I will disregard anything that is not followed up with a source. Period. It is all optimized to persuade, coerce, or piss you off. I am only writing about this because this I’m actually able to contribute genuine information about the topic.

That they said symbolic propositions written by AI agents (i.e., code) are non-disprovable because they were written by AI boggles my mind. It’s like saying that an article written in English by AI is not English because AI generated it. It might be a bad piece of text, but it’s syntactically, semantically, and grammatically English.

Basically, any string of data can be represented in a base-2 system, where it can be interpreted as bits (0s and 1s). Those bits can be used as the basis for symbolic reasoning. In formal propositional logic, a proposition is a sequence of symbols constructed according to strict syntax rules (atomic variables plus logical connectives). Under a given semantics, it is assigned exactly one truth value (true or false) in a two-valued logic system.

They are essentially saying that code written by AI is not binary, isn’t symbolically logical at all, and cannot be evaluated as true or false by implying it is nondisproveable. At the lowest level, compiled code consists of binary machine instructions that a processor executes. At higher levels, source code is written in symbolic syntax that humans and tools use to express logic and structure. You can also translate parts of code into formal logic expressions. For example, conditions and assertions in a program can be modeled as Boolean formulas. Tools like SAT/SMT solvers or symbolic execution engines check those formulas for satisfiability or correctness. It blows my mind how confidently people talk about things they do not understand.

Furthermore that they don’t realize the projection is wild to me.

@davidgerard wrote:

“But SO MANY LOUD ANECDOTES! Trust me my friend, I am the most efficient coder in the land now. No, you can’t see it. No, I didn’t measure. But if you don’t believe me, you are clearly a fool.”

They are presenting a story—i.e., saying that the studies are not disprovable—and accusing computer scientists of using anecdotal evidence without actually providing evidence to support this, while expecting people to take it prima facie. You’re doing what you are accusing others of doing.

It comes down to this: they feel that people ought not to use AI, so they are tacitly committed to a future in which people do not use AI. For example, a major argument against AI is the damage it is doing to resources, which is driving up the prices of computer components, as well as the ecological harm it causes. They feel justified in lying and misinforming others if it achieves the outcome they want—people not using AI because it is bad for the environment. That is a very strong point, but most people don’t care about that, which is why they lie about things people would care about.

It’s corrupt. And what’s really scary is that people don’t recognize when they are part of corruption or a corrupt conspiracy to misinform. Well, they recognize it when they see the other side doing it, that is. No one is more dangerous than people who feel righteous in what they are doing.

So, I am a Computational Biologist. Keep that in mind. I’m an actual scientist who works with ecological concepts, specifically the microbiome. One of the most insufferable reactions to the cyberpunk era we inhabit is the emergence of anti-science ideas from the left in response to techno-fascism. The strange part is that many people on the left do not even recognize them as anti-science, because they assume the left is aligned with science and the right opposed to it; ergo, if the left says it, it must be scientific. It is insane: washing your hands is technology. Medicine is technology.

I think, because the Internet has hijacked people’s brains, many conflate technology with electronics or machines. Anthropologically, technology consists of material objects, techniques, and organized practices through which humans intentionally intervene in their environments. Technology is culture, and human culture is technology. When someone learns a skill or a discipline from someone else, that is an extension of technology.

Technology encompasses craft traditions (blacksmithing), agriculture, and institutionalized processes of teaching and learning. Agriculture is one of the oldest forms of technology. Yes, farmers are tech workers. I write code, but I also spent a large amount of time on a farm, and I can tell you that many tech workers who pride themselves on writing code would not know what to do with farm equipment.

So, from that broad perspective, we can sum technology up in one word: education. A basic heuristic for determining if something is cultural or not is: can it be taught and learned? These words? I was taught English, and I am using an invented language to transmit knowledge to you; ergo, I am using technology to transmit cultural knowledge to you. Reading a book is thus using a piece of human technology. So, being anti-tech connotes being anti-education.

What got me thinking about this is a toot I read on Mastodon:

The truth is that society needs to develop ethically and ecologically more than it does technologically. That’s not to say that we should shun technology, but our development along other lines lags far behind our technological capacity.

↬ecoevo.social/@benlockwood/116052113455871454

Sounds valid, right? That is the distinct smell of bull shit.This is a clear example of what is called a platitude. Platitudes are memetically hijacking people’s brains. Memetics actually hijack your brain—they change it. It’s similar to how a retrovirus can alter the genome of its host. So, trying to have conversations with these people is pointless, which is why I avoid the chronically online Internet scene and arguing with them.

It made me want to scream. As I mentioned earlier, technology is basically a set of things you learn from other humans—typically within a culture—that helps you do or make something. You know what else is learned within human society? A normative set of cultural values about how we ought to behave. So, both technology and culture emerge from the same thing simultaneously and mutually. You cannot have humans intervening in things to achieve ecological development, because that is technology, and you cannot educate humans on ethics without an invented language. It is literally an anti-education argument.

Ethics and technology arise together from the same human conditions and social processes. It makes little sense to claim that technology is “outpacing” ethics. The two do not develop independently. We form ethical norms in response to new capacities and circumstances. There would be no cultural norms about how to use the Internet if the Internet did not exist. And, there would be no ethical debates about AI if AI did not exist. Ethical reflection emerges alongside technological change because both are products of human culture.

As new problems create new technologies that create new problems, societies respond by negotiating norms, rules, and expectations appropriate to those contexts. The same pattern appears in politics. Politics concerns who gets what, when, and how—it is the negotiation of power, rights, and resources. Without resources or competing claims, there would be nothing to negotiate. Ethics and politics are not trailing behind technology because they are co-emergent responses to the same underlying realities.

@benlockwood

Your BlueSky Feed Is Porn You Didn’t Ask For Because Your Friends Are Gooners With a Severe Porn Addiction

A common complaint I see people make on Bluesky is: why am I being served so much porn or things I am not interested in? They will incorrectly believe that the algorithm is broken. It’s not broken. You didn’t know the people you knew as well as you thought you did. Porn addiction is a thing, and porn addiction is especially common with weebs. You’re seeing deranged shit because people you follow have porn addictions and are into deranged shit. So, though you may not be consuming porn, people in your network are. That activity kicks into your feeds.

The issue I have with that is that it essentially normalizes being sex pests in a space on the Internet. That sets the expectation that it is good—attractive, even—to act like that elsewhere. That expectation alienates relationships. Bluesky creates a cultural space that offers an unrealistic, bizarre representation of social relationships, which isolates and alienates the users who stay on there consuming erotica and porn like they do.

So, user repos in Bluesky have a property for likes. Bluesky’s underlying AT Protocol stores likes as first-class structured records in each user’s AT Protocol repository. In the AT Protocol lexicon, a like is an app.bsky.feed.like record type. Unlike a simple boolean flag on a post, it is its own record with a creation timestamp and a subject field that holds a strong reference to the liked record.

That strong reference is composed of an AT-URI and a CID. The AT-URI identifies the exact record in the network by DID, collection, and record key. The CID is a cryptographic content identifier that uniquely identifies the exact content of that liked record.

These like records exist under the app.bsky.feed.like namespace in the user’s repo. Bluesky’s repo model is built so that these repos are hosted on a user’s Personal Data Server and are publicly readable through the AT Protocol APIs. Because of that, the like record and its fields can be fetched, indexed, and used by any client or service that can query the protocol.

The protocol exposes operations like getLikes. This returns all of the like records tied to a particular subject’s AT-URI and CID. It also exposes getActorLikes. This returns all of the subject references a given actor has liked. Those API calls return structured like objects with timestamps and subject references directly from the public repository data.

Various feeds hosted by different PDSs use the likes property to construct the feeds that you see. Since the likes of people you follow are included in your social graph, along with your own likes, you’re going to get served the porn they are consuming. Because likes are public and anyone can write an algorithm to see everyone’s likes, you can clearly see just how much porn people are consuming.

Honestly, what started to turn my stomach about the people on Bluesky is how they behave across different contexts. If you look through the records of the posts they interact with, you’ll see them engaging with political posts in the replies like a normal person. Then, when you look through their AT Protocol records, you see hours and hours of them interacting with every kind of porn imaginable. I am not exaggerating. Hours of likes for porn posts within 1–10 minutes of each other. Am I sex-negative? A prude? No, this site is filled with furry, gay bara porn, lol. You can have a drink without being an alcoholic. The problem with these people is like people who can’t have one drink without drinking the whole fucking day; they can’t consume porn in healthy ways.

I think people assume that their feed is customized for them and based on their likes. No—feeds are generalized based on what everyone likes and then served to your subgraph. It’s not just about who you follow; it’s about who they follow. So if you follow someone who follows a lot of people with porn addictions, you will see porn. Bluesky isn’t weighting the algorithm to do this. Basically, it’s the people in your social network with furry, hentai, or trans porn addictions who are driving it.

The pincer movement of authoritarianism: Europe is under pressure from Trump & Putin at a crossroads

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2025/12/the-pincer-movement-of-authoritarianism-europe-is-under-pressure-from-trump-putin-at-a-crossroads/

NEW EPISODE: Time for a quick, spoiler-lite review of The Newsflesh Trilogy. Trust me, this is worth your time! #SciFi #ZombieApocalypse #Dystopian #BookReview https://youtu.be/CJayQia7P5o

Um…omg? Sharing a top ten new release Teen & Young Adult Dystopian eBooks with #SuzanneCollins and #LaurenRoberts as well as other wonderful writers…What is life?? Get DOOMFLOWER today and laugh hard in dystopian!
#dystopian #horror #horrorromance #darkcomedy #scifi #yabooks #bestseller #books

CAW Weekly Writers Prompt - Monster
#CAW #CartersvilleAreaWriters #WritersPromptWeekly #WritingPromptWeekly #WeeklyWritersPrompt #WritersPrompt #WritingCommunity #Writers #Authors #WritingTips #WritingLife #WritersOfMastodon #WritersOnMastodon #AuthorsOfMastodon #AuthorsOnMastodon #MastoWriters
#Monster #Dystopian #Apocalyptic #WhoDoYouSave

Toiletgate. Student loos at the Isle of Wight Bay Secondary school locked up

Students at #Sandown’s The #BaySecondary returned to school earlier this month to find that floor-to-ceiling gates had been installed outside all #student #toilets, in a bid to combat vandalism and vaping.

https://www.islandecho.co.uk/toiletgate-student-loos-at-the-bay-secondary-locked-up-to-combat-vaping-problem/

#HumanRights #schools #authoritarian #England #IsleOfWight #bathrooms #Loos #dystopian

The next morning,
wrecked,
I put on sweatpants and a hoodie
and tried to smuggle myself out of the hotel without having to talk to anyone.

I gave my chit to the valet and looked around to find Vance and Yarvin standing there waiting for cars.

“How do you guys feel?” Yarvin asked.

Vance was wearing a hoodie too and looked like I felt.
“I feel horrible,” he said.
“Not good.”

Yarvin asked what I’d thought of everything.

I said it would take a long time for me to figure that out.

We all shook hands,
and they waved as I got into my car and we all resumed our usual battle stations in the American info-wars.

#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

“We are in a late republican period,”
Vance said later,
evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar.

“If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild,
and pretty far out there,
and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

“Indeed,” Murphy said. “Among some of my circle, the phrase ‘extra-constitutional’ has come up quite a bit.”

I’d asked Vance to tell me, on the record, what he’d like liberal Americans who thought that what he was proposing was a fascist takeover of America to understand.

He spoke earnestly. “I think the cultural world you operate in is incredibly biased,” he said
—against his movement and “the leaders of it,
like me in particular.”

He encouraged me to resist this tendency, which he thought was the product of a media machine leading us toward a soulless dystopia that none of us want to live in.

“That impulse,” he said,
“is fundamentally in service of something that is far worse than anything,
in your wildest nightmares,
than what you see here.”

He gave me an imploring look,
as though to suggest that he was more on the side of the kind of people who read Vanity Fair than most of you realize.

If what he was doing worked, he said,
“it will mean that my son grows up in a world where his masculinity
—his support of his family and his community,
his love of his community
—is more important than whether it works for fucking McKinsey.”

At that, we called it,
and the crowd of young men who wanted to talk to him immediately descended on the couches.

People kept bringing drinks, and there was a lot of shit talk, and it went on late.

I remember thinking at one point how strange it was that in our mid-30s
Vance and I were significantly older than almost everyone there,
all of whom thought they were organizing a struggle to change the course of human history,
and all of whom were now going to get sloppy drunk.

#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

Yarvin and Laurenson bounded out of the crowd as the cheers were still ringing.

They were giggling, seeming to have had some wine.

“Nixon—Nixon!”Laurenson said,
still laughing.

I couldn’t tell if she was delighted or horrified.

A couple of hours later I found Vance standing up by the bar,
surrounded by a circle of young and identical-looking fanboys.

I went over. He asked what I’d thought of the speech, and he suggested we find somewhere to talk.

He asked me to turn my recorder off so we could speak candidly.

I agreed, with regret, because the conversation revealed someone who I think will be hugely influential in our politics in the coming years,
even if he loses his Senate primary,
as both of us thought was possible.

It also revealed someone who is in a dark place,
with a view that we are at an ominous turning point in America’s history.

He didn’t want to describe this to me on the record.

But I can show it anyway, because he already says it publicly, and you can hear it too.

That night, I went up to my hotel room and listened to a podcast interview Vance had conducted with Jack Murphy,
the big, bearded head of the "Liminal Order" men’s group.

Murphy asked how it was that Vance proposed to rip out America’s leadership class.

Vance described two possibilities that many on the New Right imagine
—that our system will either fall apart naturally,
or that a great leader will assume semi-dictatorial powers.

“So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said.

Murphy chortled knowingly.

“So one [option] is to basically accept that this entire thing is going to fall in on itself,” Vance went on.

“And so the task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved,” waiting for the “inevitable collapse” of the current order.

He said he thought this was pessimistic.

“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left,” he said.
“And turn them against the left.

We need like a
de-Baathification program,
a de-woke-ification program.”

I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” he said.

“I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice:

Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,

replace them with our people.”

“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say
—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order
—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

This is a description, essentially, of a coup.

#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

On the last afternoon of NatCon,
a few hours before he was set to give the keynote address,
Vance showed up.

He spotted me drinking a beer at the bar and came over to say hello.

“I still have no idea what I’m going to say,” he said, though he didn’t seem worried.

I wandered down to the ballroom to wait and ended up sitting with the U.S. correspondent for the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.

I knew that some of the reporters there might have been under the impression that this was all mostly just tweedy MAGA pageantry.

He had a more complex view, having just spoken to Yarvin,
and asked me to explain his philosophy.

I found myself at a loss.
I said that there were these things called the regime and the Cathedral and that Yarvin was “sort of a monarchist.”

“A monarchist?”he asked.

He seemed taken aback to learn that what this hero figure of the New Right dreamed of was a king.

Vance showed up, wearing a suit and bright red tie,
looking relaxed for a person who was about to give a speech to hundreds of people who viewed him as possibly a last great hope in saving the American nation from global corporatist subjugation.

He’d shot up in the polls and at that moment was second in his primary, helped by regular invitations from Carlson.

I asked how he was feeling about the speech. He looked impish. “I think I’ve got a good topic,” he said. “I’m going to talk about college.”

What he meant was that he was about to give a genuinely thunderous speech, titled
“The Universities Are the Enemy.”

People immediately pointed out that it was a variation on something that Richard Nixon said to Henry Kissinger on White House tapes back in 1972.

Vance denounced elite colleges as enemies of the American people;

he has long proposed cutting off their federal funding and seizing their endowments.

The speech was later linked in alarmed
op-eds to “anti-intellectual” movements that had attacked institutions of learning.

But that doesn’t quite reckon with what an apocalyptic message he was offering.

Because Vance and this New Right cohort, who are mostly so, so highly educated and well-read that their big problem often seems to be that they’re just too nerdy to be an effective force in mass politics,
are not anti-intellectual.

Vance is an intellectual himself, even if he’s not currently playing one on TV.

But he thinks that our universities are full of people who have a structural,
self-serving, and
financial interest in coloring American culture as racist and evil.

And he is ready to go to extraordinary lengths to fight them.

#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

We drove a long way into the desert before we arrived at the campaign meet-and-greet,
which was being hosted by a former CIA official in a comfortable retirement community.

The crowd of a few dozen was mostly sweater-wearing retirees,
immersed in a media culture in which the people who repeated the most incendiary and Trumpist talking points tended to gain attention and political support.

This kind of groupthink was not just a phenomenon of the liberal media,
and this fact has hampered the campaigns of both Masters and Vance,
who are often seen as Trump-aligned culture warriors,
and who have had a lot of trouble working their more complicated policy ideas into our fervid political conversation.

He talked through his proposal to regulate tech companies as common carriers,
like America once regulated phone companies.

The crowd seemed interested but hardly electrified.

When he took questions at the end, they were mostly the usual ones about the supposedly stolen 2020 election
—a view that Masters did not push back on
—the border wall,
vaccine mandates.

One man raised his hand to ask how Masters planned to drain the swamp.

He gave me a sly look. “Well, one of my friends has this acronym he calls RAGE,” he said.

“Retire All Government Employees.”

The crowd liked the sound of this and erupted in a cheer.

#Kyle #Rittenhouse #Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

I asked Masters whether he thought the core of his project was a fight against a consumerist
techno-dystopia that many on the left have also come to fear.

He said yes.

I asked why, if this was the case, it almost never came across in his mainstream media appearances.

“That’s interesting feedback,” he said. “That it’s not coming through.”

“I go on, and it’s the tail end of the B block, and I’ve got two minutes to talk about #Kyle #Rittenhouse,” he’d said earlier,

talking about his spots on Fox News.

“And it’s like, ‘Well, the left is insane, and this kid shouldn’t have been on trial,
and they’re punishing him for being a white guy who defended himself with an AR-15.’ ”

Conservative media seems to thrive on culture-war touch points as much as all the rest of it.

“I feel like I’m willing to go there,” he said.

“But you can’t do that on Laura Ingraham sound bites.”

He was a little less rosy about the future with some interviewers than he was with me.

“We need someone with their hand on the tiller who understands where we’ve been and where we need to go,” he told the podcaster Alex Kaschuta recently.

“Otherwise we will get just totally owned by the progressive left.

And the progressive left just remains the enemy.

It’s the enemy of true progress. It’s the enemy of everything that is good.”

I asked if he could give me a vision of what he thought victory for his side would look like.

“It’s just families and meaningful work,” he said,
“so that you can raise your kids and worship and pursue your hobbies and figure out what the meaning of it all is.”

Pretty much anyone could agree with this. And pretty much anyone could wonder how it is that this sort of thing has come to seem radical,
or distant from the lives of many people growing into adulthood today.

“It just feels so networked,” he said. “It’s so in-the-matrix.”

#Unabomber #Kaczynski #Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

“ ‘The regime’ sounds really sexy, right?”
Masters said to me.

“It’s a tangible enemy
—if you could just grapple with it in the right way, you can topple it.
And I think it’s actually just a lot less sexy and a lot more bureaucratic,” he said.

“But I’ve read that stuff, and I see what it means.”

I asked him about the term
Thielbucks,
and how true it was that the Thiel Foundation was funding a network of New Right podcasters
and cool-kid cultural figures
as a sort of cultural vanguard.

“It depends if it’s just dissident-right think-tank stuff,”
he told me,
“or if anyone actually does anything.”

“I don’t know how that became a meme,” he said about Thielbucks.

“I think I would know if those kids were getting money.”

“We fund some stuff,” he told me. “But we’re not funding an army of meme posters.”

He told me that he and Thiel had met with Khachiyan, one of the cohosts of Red Scare.

“Which was cool,” he said. “Their podcast is interesting.”

I asked if there was a world in which they might get funding from Thiel.

“Maybe, yeah,” he said.

“We fund some weird stuff with the Thiel Foundation.”

We drove together to a campaign event, talking about everything from how technology is reshaping our brains to environmental policy,
both of us circling from different political directions to an apocalyptic place.

“I do think we’re at a moment of crossroads,” he said.

“And if we play it wrong, it’s the Dark Ages.”

Masters has publicly said he thinks “everybody should read” the #Unabomber’s anti-tech manifesto,
“Industrial Society and Its Future,”
which may sound strange for a young tech executive running to serve in the United States Senate.

But to Masters, #Kaczynski’s critique was a useful analysis of how technology shapes our world
and how “degrading and debasing” it could be to human lives.

#Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

A few weeks after NatCon, I drove from California to Tucson to meet Masters,
a very tall, very thin, very fit 35-year-old.

I wanted to see how all this might translate into an actual election campaign,
and I’d been watching a lot of Fox News,

including Yarvin’s streaming interview with Carlson in which he gave a swirling depiction of how the Cathedral produced its groupthink.

“Why do Yale and Harvard always agree on everything?” he asked.

“These organizations are essentially branches of the same thing,” he told a mesmerized Carlson.

“You’re like, ‘Where are the wires?’ ”

He sketched his vision of (as he calls it) a “constitutional” regime change that would take power back from this oligarchy
—so diffuse most people hardly knew it was there.

“That’s what makes it so hard to kill,” he said.

At a coffee shop near the house he’d bought when he moved back home to Tucson from the Bay Area,
Masters and I went through the tenets of his nationalist platform:

on-shoring industrial production,
slashing legal immigration,
regulating big tech companies,
and eventually restructuring the economy so that one salary would be enough to raise a family on.

I mentioned Yarvin and his line of arguing that America’s system had become so sclerotic that it was hopeless to imagine making big systemic changes like these.

“In a system where state capacity is very low…” I started the question.

“Alas,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye.

“Do we need a crisis to get there?” I asked him.

“Maybe, maybe, maybe,” he said.
It wasn’t where his immediate thinking was.

“I’ll have the proverbial machete,” he said. “But yeah, it may take some kind of crisis to get us there.”

He paused. “But we’re already sort of in one, right?”

Masters often says he’s not as black-pilled and pessimistic as some in the New Right spheres.

He seems, unlike many New Righters, to still earnestly believe in the power of electoral politics.

But he does think that the culturally liberal and free-market ideology that has guided America’s politics in recent years
is a hopeless dead end.

“A country is not just an economy,” Masters told the dissident-right outlet
IM—1776
recently.

“You also need a conception of yourself as a nation, as a people, and as a culture.

And that’s what America is increasingly lacking today.”

“It’s true that I’m incredibly hopeful,” he said to me.

“I think it’s really bleak, I think the default is continued stagnation, and maybe you get the crisis in 5 years or maybe it’s 30 years from now.”

He told me that he didn’t like to use terms like the Cathedral and used “the regime” less often than Vance,

although I later noticed that he used this latter phrase frequently with interviewers on the dissident right.

#Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

Like Levy, Milius is in the funny position of being at the intersection of many of these crosscurrents,

having worked in mainstream politics but appearing on so-called dissident podcasts

and being on the periphery of a cultural scene where right-wing politics have taken on a sheen approximating cool.

She said she was too “black-pilled”
—a very online term used to describe people who think that our world is so messed up that nothing can save it now
—to think much about what it would look like for her side to win.

“I could fucking trip over the curb,” Milius said, “and that’s going to be considered white supremacism.

Like, there’s nothing you can do. What the fuck isn’t white supremacism?”

“They’re going to come for everything,” she said.

“And I think it’s sinister
—not that I think that people who want to pay attention to race issues are sinister.

But I think that the globalization movement is using these divisive arguments in order to make people think that it’s a good thing.”

This is the Cathedral at work.

#Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook

March MADness launches at Film Seizure. This week, we get into the first chapter of the Mad Max saga with the 1979 dystopian action drama from George Miller.

Listen now at https://on.soundcloud.com/GviRG

#podcast #action #ozploitation #australian #dystopian #georgemiller #melgibson #madmax #70s #marchmadness

A triplicity of battlefleets for #DYSTOPIAN WARS - the Esoteric Order of Gamers checks out the #ScionsofJutland mercenary fleet for the Imperium, the #Abydos skimmer fleet for the Sultanate, and the #Couronne fleet for the Alliance!
https://youtu.be/u4IqGtQkSig

Defend right to protest

The Tory government is threatening a crackdown on any #protest

#Tory Home secretary has called the demonstrations “hate marches”

Govt also claim merely flying a #Palestine flag may be a crime

Plans for new definition of extremism target all protests – which will criminalise dissent

Stop the attack on right to protest in #Britain

Petition
https://r.ippl.es/palestine-protest/

#HumanRights #dictatorship #ToryFascists #FreeSpeech #ToryLies #Orwellian #dystopian

*PeterThiel:...*

(11/n)

...#RacialProfiling 3.0 for the #LAPD:

"The #ManhattanInstitute (#MI) created the #racist policy “#BrokenWindows” in the 1990s which was popularized by racist Mayor #RudyGiuliani. It involved “#PreemptivePolicing.” [a potential precursor to the #dystopian #MinorityReport.]

At MI, #PeterThiel took this idea, worked with the #NYPD, and translated it into #Palantir, one of the 👉most dangerous #surveillance and #psyops companies in the world...👈"

https://toad.social/@jimstewartson/109468729121412114

Centrespread, an odd 1981 ozploitation movie which consistently fails to go in the direction you expect.

An unconventional dystopian sci-fi film, but also a sex film. The sex is very restrained but the nudity is practically non-stop. And it's a love story.

A very offbeat film, the kind that just doesn’t get made any more. A pity since it’s offbeat in a very good way.

My review: https://princeplanetmovies.blogspot.com/2021/04/centrespread-1981.html

#ozploitation #cultmovie #cultmovies #SciFiMovies #scifi #dystopian #postapocalyptic