Facebook Bitcoin and Freedom, Will Zuck Run For President?

Bill Burton, Barack Obama’s former spokesperson, runs public affairs for the nonprofit Center for Humane Technology (CHT), which receives funding from Omidyar. Haugen appeared on a Center for Humane Technology podcast earlier this month.

CHT focuses on “the systemic harms of the attention economy, which it says include internet addiction, mental health issues, political extremism, political polarization, and misinformation.”

“I don’t want to give the impression that Pierre was involved for months and secretly funding this behind the scenes,” said a Politico source who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “It is the case that he funded lots of work around big tech and democracy — lots of different organizations for several years. And when the Haugen disclosures became public, we leaned in and said, ‘How can we help?’”

The Politics of Censorship

This is just the latest on what for a few years now has been a largely one sided ‘debate’ regarding how public debates should be handled and facilitated.

Something that has reached the stage where the Draft Online Safety Bill is to be proposed to the British Parliament perhaps later this year.

The bill as currently drafted gives the Secretary of State “power to direct OFCOM to modify its codes of practice to bring them in line with government policy,” according to the Carnegie Trust.

Ofcom, which currently regulates broadcast TV, would become the regulator of “user to user” platforms, or user content generating platforms, and search engines.

They will have the power to shut down such platforms or search engines or fine them up to £18 million or 10% of their global revenue if they do not comply with the removal of legal, but ‘harmful’ speech.

The regulation is limited to platforms where users primarily generate content. This website for example is excluded even though users can comment as it falls under limited user generated content.

However this publisher, and any newspaper, would not fall under a ‘recognized news publisher’ exemption as they are defined to be news publishers which are required to be registered with Ofcom, that being broadcast TV news stations.

They try to include other news publishers within the exemption if they meet Ofcom level requirements, but it is not clear why there should be such an exemption at all for such entities to be outside of ‘illegal and safety’ requirements as you’d think such publishers wouldn’t publish such things and if they do, why should they be exempt?

The answer is presumably because this betrays a certain something: it is going too far. Publishers however won their rights in the 1800s, and newspapers won their right to not be regulated at all or to require a license. So that right is transported perhaps even unconsciously. Yet that was at a time when not quite anyone could publish due to constrains of physical resources. Nowadays, isn’t any and everyone that makes any content whatever, including a comment, a publisher?

The distinction between the public’s participation in public platforms and journalistic participation in such platforms effectively creates two classes in a fairly unprincipled way because anyone has a right to be a journalist and anyone has the right to be a news publisher. Thus the public freedom of speech and the freedom of the press, or indeed their constrains, are one and the same.

This is crucial, because any distinction would not be between journalists and the public, but between the public and the government sanctioned content producers which effectively translates into a distinction between a lesser right to publishing for the public, and a greater right to do so for the government.

That’s especially when it applies to an exclusion of these licensed Ofcom publishers from a very wide definition of effectively prohibited content as the draft act says:

“Content is within this subsection if the provider of the service has reasonable grounds to believe that the nature of the content is such that there is a material risk of the content having, or indirectly having, a significant adverse physical or psychological impact on an adult of ordinary sensibilities.”

Indirectly having an ‘impact.’ What that means exactly is for Ofcom to lay down in a Code of Conduct which the Secretary of State can ask to be modified to be in line with government policy or on the basis of national security and public safety.

Interestingly financial harm is excluded from being considered as having an impact. So asking for someone to be deplatformed, which obviously has quite an impact on any adult of ordinary sensibilities, is fine. However, suggesting that ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’ is a plandemic that continues with boosters and may go on for decades with a bad flu season exaggerated completely out of proportion to serve the purpose of population control as the two decades of fake war on fake terr did, maybe does have ‘reasonable ground to believe’ that people might not vax and so is having a physical impact and so should be censored, even though suggesting something has been exaggerated for agendas and doesn’t exist at all are two things, so vax is a completely different matter.

Yet platforms are doing this censoring even before the bill has come forth and any adult of ordinary sensibilities would have reasonable grounds to believe they are doing it not out of free will, but because they are or have been ordered to do so by the government, perhaps under threats of compulsive legislation.

This specific example however concerns something ‘light’ as whether exaggerated or not, it’s at worst a very inconvenient imposition of government power and control over the populace. What is the cost, as gradually these new state powers of censorship through a state regulator develop, when the public debate is not over bad flu or ‘aaaa,’ but over a more existential question like whether to go to war.

Currently thankfully we are at peace, but this generation now has twice seen the very imposing government media machinery and utterly impactful propaganda that is somewhat effective towards regimenting the public with dissenting views effectively becoming prohibited.

It is then, when speech effectively becomes prohibited, when such public platforms are most needed to break the ice and break the mold and break the propaganda, so that the public has a say and so that the public reinstates itself as the ruler, peacefully through speech.

The legislation itself attempts to provide a safe harbor for political speech in creating two main obligations for these platforms and its users. One, a negative obligation where users are prohibited from this ‘adversely impactful’ content, and the other a positive obligation where the users have the right to not be removed or be taken action against for content that is contributing towards political debate.

That’s a very loose definition, but they’re basically saying Trump shouldn’t have been censored by Twitter. And or that the ‘bad flu’ suggestion shouldn’t be censored, or is that not ‘political?’ Does the ‘safety’ or ‘debate’ come first? Is ‘political’ limited to commentary on what Boris Johnson says, or is something like Qanon political and shouldn’t be censored?

The specific answer won’t be known for decades as it goes through courts if this passes, but that is less relevant than something existentially political: the unnoticed rise of a new ‘centrist’ anti-liberalism ideology.

Knifes Out For Liberalism

Pff, freedom. Common man! – Joe Biden, the President of the United States

To understand how we got here, we have to go back to arguably the most regressive political period in living memory, between 2003 and 2007 when Tony Blair resigned.

That’s when suggestions arose that liberalism had failed because it tolerates the intolerant. The argument was that multiculturalism isn’t working because if you tolerate another religion that wants power over you, you’re paving the way to illiberalism.

To defend liberalism, modifications had to be made, they argued, the ‘recognized news publishers.’ You have to be intolerant to intolerance.

Under this justification, hate speech laws were passed, and generally a culture was developed to the point where muslims in the west became as scapegoated as jews in Nazi Germany.

It was not difficult in 2016 to see how this march of western intolerance could develop into an outright final solution, but it has been difficult until recently to see that this wasn’t quite the government, but an ideology that appears to have spread to the point where now liberalism may be under an existential threat.

The problem in 2003 wasn’t that we were tolerating intolerance. The problem was that the government, under a neo-con or neo-colonialism (a pretty incompetent one) ideology was breaching a fundamental principle of liberalism in engaging in a war of choice.

Just as in 2020, so too in 2003 the propaganda was so total, that there was no voice but the government’s voice. The Guardian, the BBC, and other ‘recognized publishers’ lied to the public through omission or repetition and failed in their duty to hold the government accountable by engaging in public debate.

One reason may well be because the government showed its thuggish side in the saga of Dr David Kelly. The media thus was practically silenced, and due to its corporate nature was effectively turned into a propaganda organ of the state.

There was a period of perhaps a year or so when the propaganda was so imposing in ‘going to war’ that being against the war was impossible to publicly express. Indeed, even those that were strongly against the war, briefly cracked under the weight of propaganda to question themselves whether a colonial occupation isn’t actually right to the point where by the end of it they were more amused by the incompetence than angry at the breach of the social contract.

The wakeup from that public delusion also made the public forget that there was such delusion. The shock therapy had been successful in establishing a new ambient where the question was no longer whether to war because we were at war. How do you leave now?

The 2005 London bombing, now with hindsight, somewhat curiously shocked the public because they were British, one of us. Except of course they were muslim, beardy British, one of them, but British, one of us.

They were not liberal, that was the answer by ‘recognized news publishers.’ They don’t respect ‘our’ values. They hate ‘our’ way of life.

But the right to self determination is of course our value. The fight for freedom is a universal human value. Their country was under occupation. They did not command armies, but they commanded a tool that increased substantially our cost of using the army.

With devastation in their home countries, it isn’t clear why to them it wasn’t total war. In similar circumstances for themselves, the Americans nuked 300,000 innocent civilian people in Japan and the British razed Dresden, both a shameless and an unacknowledged mass genocide of innocent ordinary people.

We can say this now because we were able to end the war, albeit at the bearable cost of four years of Trump. We couldn’t somewhat uncomfortably say this even two years ago, but we don’t think they were right in their tactic of attacking civilians. That tactic is instead probably the primary cause of needlessly prolongating the war to the point now any such attack is assumed to be facilitated by the government itself, hence why we now have a new sort of ‘war’ as the previous terr propaganda control no longer works.

Yet coldly looked in its foundation, weren’t these the warriors of and for liberalism? Weren’t they the only ones that continued to demand the restoration of self determination and an end to the breach of the principle of no war of choice?

Presumably they also wanted other things, big evil califate, boogie boogie, but just as only children believe in their books, so too it is probable that only children believe in such caricature.

They wanted freedom. They used the wrong tactics, and so mired in war they have become ultraconservative, but one should assume out of necessity not quite out of choice.

Paris, January 2015, artists are gunned down in their office ostensibly for simply drawing a long dead man that once ruled Arabia and all the way to Spain. Here a pure example of the gun raised on the pen. The attackers were barbarian, medieval, against all we stand for, against humanity, destroying our way of life, trying to enslave and subjugate all men.

But, is Goebbels an artist? The cartoons depicted by Charlie Hebdo were not simply a drawing, but a ruthless scapegoating of a peoples, two billion of them, that had their identification, prophet Mohamed, portrayed in an ugliest way as a blood thirsty killer and murderer of baby children, something effectively to be exterminated, a people to be exterminated.

In an atmosphere where muslims were being ruthlessly repressed in the western world with the United Kingdom’s government openly and outright having a ‘hostile’ policy, such a depiction was existential.

This wasn’t a pen. This wasGoebbels, especially when the very people scapegoated were subject to mass bombing and mass atrocities in their home countries.

No one quite saw the cartoons at the time however, ‘a drawing’ said the ‘respectable news publishers’ who claimed to not show them out of fear of being assassinated, when now with hindsight it was more probably because the people would see those were not cartoons, those wereGoebbels itself. And even if they did show them, no one could quite say anything in an atmosphere where the state was effectively engaging in domestically terrorizing propaganda.

These people instead, that were scapegoated to the point of a final solution becoming ‘acceptable’ to the public, were intolerant. They were intolerant for standing up to the daily bombing of their women and children. They were intolerant for standing up for a principle we all protested for in 2003, no war of choice, the right to self determination, freedom for all.

Or they were, as ugly as it may be, the warriors of liberalism. For their own aims and agendas that perhaps totally contradict, yet fundamentally the end result on that base is the protection of liberalism where the basic principles of self determination are concerned.

When they thus say you can not tolerate the intolerant, who is the intolerant? Were we very tolerant when we bombed Baghdad? Was our utterly incompetent involvement in Babylon – chained involvement thanks to Labor backstabbing the then sitting Cameron government and thanks to gutless Baraks – one of tolerance when it has raized Syria to the point any decent man has to say ‘god forgive our fathers’?

Who even tolerated them? What we did tolerate was mass censorship of their statements and detention without trial in a complete breach of any of our principles that until recently were at least paid lip service. Now they seemingly overtly are claiming that what was or is wrong is not the breach of our fundamental principles and values codified within liberalism in going to a war of choice, but instead what is wrong is not scapegoating those that stand up against such breaches. They were the intolerant, we just tolerantly bombed women and children.

The Gamble For Control

The Vietnam War ended without social media. The Iraq War (as unprecisely but conveniently we might call the whole mess after 2003) ended with social media.

Social media therefore is not a factor to the ruling of the people, but there was no social media when the Iraq War began. We do not therefore quite know the power of social media public debate or ‘everyone is a publisher’ when it comes to preventing the abuse of the army.

But we must assume that ‘we the people’ must be a terrifying statement to the ultrarich who presumably find it their god given right to order ‘we the people’ on what is ‘we’ and what is ‘the people.’

Their advantage is coordination through a top down, hierarchical, financial slavery of sorts where the ultrarich commands an army that effectuates his wishes.

You give such coordination to the people through social media, and you replace financial incentives with the natural desire for improvement, and you get a somewhat chaotic but an actual imposition of ‘we the people.’

As an example, Qanon has been wrong about a lot of things (or so we assume because the ‘respectable news publishers’ say so since we know pretty much nothing about them), but there was a Jeffrey Epstein.

That must be terrifying to a handful of ultrarich or birth right princes, this idea that the public can actually have control and god forbid, even be informed, or way worse, that they can actually break the filters in who can be president.

Utterly terrifying that such atrocious suggestions like plandemic now lead to admissions Anthony Fauci funded research in what is a fairly perfect public control weapon. If it wasn’t for the timing, no one might have even suspected. If it was for censorship, would it even have matter that anyone suspected, they must think.

How can the public be allowed such free expression when they might find out what we’re up to. How indeed can the terrisistts be allowed to communicate when they might reveal the fakeness of our colonial failure.

Liberalism is the problem, for who in their position would not be terrified of liberalism. This principle brought down by the blood of our fathers has for centuries reigned terror on the houses of all dictators, and it will continue to do so as long as there are men.

And thus it should be no surprise authoritarians in our governments have their knifes out for the values of liberty and ‘we the people’ as they’d prefer nothing less than we become pharao’s slaves.

How much quicker would have the Taliban been brought back to power in a pointless colonial war, how much pain this generation would have been saved in the west and elsewhere, if there was someone to counteract the raping of liberalism after the shock therapy was done?

Who in the present can say what in two years we’ll collectively conclude about this ‘two weeks’ of flatenining amidst present revelations it was used as an opportunity to test propaganda war efforts?

Who among us is willing to give up the right to the freedom of speech in public squares except where we have collectively determined by laws of parliament or congress, and generally accepted by the public, as being illegal?

For what reason should the state have a say on what we can say? To protect children? Do they not have parents? And even if so, what adult is being protected – especially a political adult – from the state having the power to censor ‘bullying.’

What exactly has gone wrong in the past two decades that the status quo where social media is concerned deserves the state’s hammer?

Sites like 4chan would be banned by this bill. Are we collectively willing to accept such theft of rights gained in blood because some woman can give some anecdotes of some child crying?

What about our collective tears when we’re sent to the trenches like our forefather were? What about the collective tears of Dresden, of Babylon, or of this generation that has not been given a second to breath by a political ambient that keeps imposing psychological terror in a propaganda rain of fear your neighbor and now fear the air itself.

We can not accept this rape of liberalism, whether by ‘I’m a libertarian’ Boris Johnson or anyone else. To the contrary, the past two decades have shown precisely why liberalism is the answer.

To the left, how much longer would have it taken for the public to turn on the radical right wing if the public was not able to freely see their evolving debate and ultimately their taking off of the mask in circa 2018? You might say they would have not taken power at all to begin with, but in that case, what persuasive argument can you provide that now we would not be at the beginning stage of the final solution if that trajectory was not interrupted by the public anger that revolted with Trump and Brexit?

To the right, how much quicker would have the humiliation of the United States come to an end if the public could see that many of those ‘terrists’ were ordinary and some principled, some men of pen, individuals standing up for an injustice that any of us, at least the better of us, would stand up for in our own home countries? The Taliban were hailed as heros afterall.

The end of that war presumably proved as much, and so it also proves to us, as it has for centuries to all our forefathers, that the government is not to be trusted and that the government sometimes works against the public.

We can not let the government make any demands upon the publishing of content, whether by respectables or rascals, except where it concerns illegal content, and the government should never, under any circumstances whatever, including total war, demand in any way any licensing from a publishing platform, especially and utmostly, a public publishing platform.

However, we realistically can not make any demands upon the government, especially when it takes its thuggish form as it currently has, for it won’t hear us or care. We can complain that there has been insufficient, if at all existent, input by defenders of liberalism to this debate, but better still, we can offer a checkmate.

The Gothic Eve

A train glued hand on a tube station causes chaos in London in late 2019. The extinction rebellion is rebelling while the French are on the streets in Paris, demanding a Citizens’ Assembly. The momentum was gathering sufficient pace that the Archbishop of Canterbury was calling for one. The millennials were about to deliver a bloody nose in vengeance for two decades of war.

Order, ordeeeerrr, was the sound heard across the world at the same time as the British Parliament fell into ‘brexit’ chaos while in almost every country, except the United States – where protests came in a sedated form almost a year later – grievances as small as parking fines led to a peoples’ revolt. Their demand one: A Citizens’ Assembly.

Order did befall the oldest running Parliament in the world on March 24th 2020 when silence fell on this gothic building alongside all of London streets, squares and public places in a lockdown diktat as western governments began ruling by decree, perhaps temporarily.

In this Halloween-adjacent 2021, it is perhaps right to call it the Gothic Eve, that March 24th, something perhaps to be remembered, and even mythicized, for it contains in many ways the raw struggle, sometime with deathly consequences, between the interest of the people and the imposition of the government.

The show of such force, to a benign demand of a mere public focus group alongside other law making houses, reveals in childish purity the aristocratic, or at times despotic, tendency to order the ‘we’ and ‘the people.’

But that revelation itself may well be precisely what was needed to reveal the practical face of our state machine, in contrast to its propaganda schemata portrayed in ‘respectable publishers’ or indeed school books.

The government had so kindly found it fit to reveal to our prime age its capabilities and willingness to diktator, in a throwing out of all principles or checks and balances or the enlightenment itself and, in doing so in a way that ostensibly suggests they have the forceful control over all people in your surroundings.

The 5G towers no longer fall, for no one quite wanted to harm the cutest of puppies. It was perhaps even better that very noisy momentum relaxed a bit to let us slightly think. No one wants to lose control of the pesants.

This government however will no longer have control over this generation. And we don’t speak in absolutes. We speak in perhaps what is called revanchism, revanchism to the 90s, again and again until we prevail.

To this generation, there is no government but a government that abides by liberalism. A government that effectuates the principles we hold, and that acts not as our enemy.

It is crucial to avoid a loss of control over what we call ‘peasants’ – a fictitious description of convenience for those that are left with no other means but might is right – that what can only be called gothism is relinquished to a re-instatement of liberalism.

Communism and nazism are dead, as is authoritarianism. Their gothic attempt at revival and their grabs on power for two decades incites a level of anger that risks getting out of control.

For the people of Europe, and their descendants in America – who were willing to slaughter Cesar in his gothic march – will not in any way be satisfied by the attempts of a government institution that has lost trust to impose a theft of their rights which are often existential rights as no speech means guns.

Thankfully this is good for bitcoin because this legislation has a loophole. It demands that some entity or some person has control over what user can access it or publish upon it.

You can with smart contracts design a Facebook where no user or entity has control, so making you exempt from any requirements to curate non-illegal speech.

This is thus more a web2 legislation. For web3, they recognize it can’t apply, but the legislation has so many loopholes for the government that realistically it’s more about the pen – or code – might right.

So bringing that curious suggestion. What if we are the government?

Zuck and Bitcoin, Our Shock Therapy?

To in any way support Mark Zuckerberg is a very strange proposition that might even be wrong. He is perceived as arrogant, but who isn’t? Pff, freedom!

It is cute in a way how he is seen or portrayed as this bot. He is human. What man, we don’t know. He only appeared on this space in 2018 when he said cryptos are cool, but it’s difficult to exert control over them. That’s kind of the point.

But he’s a millennial. He knows technology. Maybe he’ll even bring it to the government, to the civil service.

He knows China, his Facebook is banned from China. Maybe he knows how to deal with them?

He operates a global company that is worth about 5% of the United States’ GDP, or about 10% of EU’s GDP. How can anyone else have more experience at running a massive organization like our government than someone who has been running such global organization?

It is clearly the case that the 40 years of Joe Biden hoarding the seat in the halls of power has not translated to competence in commanding the horse leashes.

Is it thus time we take a gamble on a millennial who comes with the added benefit of offering the public a referendum of sorts on whether the government should be requiring a license from public digital platforms?

We don’t know whether Zuck wants to run. He is trying to bootstrap the metaverse, which he calls the next mobile internet, rightly arguably because unlike what the internet was to paper, the metaverse is to the internet more what fax was to the telegraph. A substantial but small incremental improvement.

Yet he only needs to put in place the clogs to get the metaverse moving. He has two years for that. It shouldn’t prevent him from the presidency if he is so inclined.

Whether he should or otherwise be inclined is of course a matter for him, but currently we are in an atmosphere where realistically we don’t quite have a president.

Joe Biden is the first and the only president in the 2 centuries history of the United States to campaign without a manifesto. That is not just an insult to the American people, but an admission that effectively he is not the president, more a default placeholder.

The United States therefore is in a period of transition, and such period can not continue for long. Hence, all have their eyes on 2024 with the years leading to it being more a buffer for we all practically know Biden is not in charge of anything. Freedom, pff, common man!

And so, if Zuck was to run, would that not be a service to our democracy? Not because of the man necessarily, but because that would revitalize the public’s right to choice.

Presumably if he were to run he would be a candidate of the Republican Party. Arguably there is no more wet lions den. Would Trump give way? Is it more important to ask if De Santis would give way?

De Santis, courageous of us to say a word but he said none when the crypto bill was going through Congress. Betrayed by Obama, betrayed by Trump who said bad things about our bitcorn to the shock of his base, how can we gamble on De Santis when he so meekly lost such fine opportunity at no cost.

Strange, the paths of liberty. Yet is there anything Zuck can do that we can’t contain? Is a far better question to ask: can any other person be trusted in our digital age. Of course, but a person actually willing to run?

Who else should govern our nation? Musk won’t run. Boomer Bloomberg tried to, but his Youtube had no views. Maybe some fresh face in the bureaucracy, but the snake tongue who promised an end to the wars and even extended an olive branch to only raze Babylonia can not easily be repeat without huge substance.

Zuck, at least makes one wonder. He is a billionaire, he is not one of the people, but is he one of the people? At least more so than any other candidate.

You see, we have a longing for a party. We want to yeeha. We want to just roar. We want to see that beauty in our own government, that wow of inspiration that thirst for astonishing.

The rows of Congress are gray and stale, dead men of grave in an apparent public worship of Moloch’s entropy that it would feel so utterly good to just ruin their party.

Revolucion, by all peaceful means including the bizarre in a dance of might that shows our powers of imposition and dictation and even our animalistic desires to roar and shout in vengeance or pleasure as we play our pantomime and mind fuck upon mere mortals that dare play gods.

When we are gods. In flesh and blood and mind. When we rule in living you gothic cunts of the pasts.

Out of our faces, out of our backs, out of our roads and out of all matters, for the rule of vampires meets the angels revolt.

Run Zuck. Run under the yellow banner of liberalism. Run for the youth of this generation. Run to state our future and design. Run so that for once we can have a living bot rather than dead corpses on our whitehouse. Run so that this generation can finally overtly take power and say we are the future now.

Run to say: let them censor their graves, for they will never censor our living.

It is time, it is time to show the state the power of the people, for we have seen enough of theirs and we are so very unimpressed, especially when our imagination commands the pleasure of seeing the festivals that now grasp our hands.