Notes On Our Digital Gulag

Sayonara Twitter and Elon Machina V.4.17

Preparing Elon Machina V.4.17 for dispatch.

Elon! Elon! He’s our fren. If he can’t save us, no one can!

— Chant of the Conternative Normie Brigades of Pillow Discounters (2022)

By now the National Enquirer has hit your local inbox newsstand with the hottest tales about Twitter declaring war on Substack.

The basic facts:

• Three days ago I noticed that Tweets could no longer be embedded into a new post here without getting a popup message that should have read Error: Free Speech Absolutist Elon Forbids This Action

• I was going to do a post about it but kept to my Year Zoo resolution of not rushing to “be first” on the latest hot gossip until at least a few facts trickled out

• The day before Twitter blocked access to their API for Substack, the latter had announced the (Private Beta) launch of their Twitter copy called NOTES. Elon Machina V.4.17 didn’t like that. (more on notes at the end)

• Then yesterday he erased Substack from Twitter. Well, not entirely, but you can’t retweet Substack posts and when Substack was trending on Twitter at #3 it magically disappeared.

• Steve Kirsch and Jordan Schachtel who have hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers had their Tweets mentioning Substack get throttled to Turtle speeds, or shadowbanned.

How does the censorship sauce still work behind the scenes at centralized controlled Twitter HQ still filled with former CIA spooks and FBI agents?

1. Shadow Banning: Any mentions of the words Sub or Stack will trigger automated suppression. Autofill is also disabled and Substack’s official Twitter profile is also semi-dark. Any criticism for Our Fren Elon and his heavy-handed anti-trust violating deep state whoring ways, cannot be liked or retweeted. Substack properly raked this buffoon yesterday, but you aren’t permitted to like it.

   

2. Any posts will appear dark. Nobody can retweet or like any Substack posts shared on Twitter. Whether it’s an article on cooking Crème brûlée with organic gluten-free goat’s milk or drafting your team for the next Lesbian Lingerie Fantasy Football Season in Vanuatu, nothing can be publicized.

Some of us around here warned others about Elon Machina V.4.17 last March, June, and December. If only Bari Weiss, Michael Schellenberger, and Matt Taibbi did some due diligence on who was inviting them into the hornet’s nest, maybe they wouldn’t look so silly this week.

Not that they ever gave a damn. They all made out like bandits on here from their peep show invitations.

As I wrote in The Swatter Flies late last year, outside of internal emails, nothing they revealed hadn’t already been disclosed by Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai in 2021—a full year before the limited hangout called “The Twitter Files.”

The following is one Good Citizen theory about what’s unfolding now in greater detail, and yes some of this is gossip and speculation, and some of it is just common sense. Not Bari Weiss’ readers’ type of common sense, but actual common sense.

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Herding and Controlling Minds

Twitter and all the Big Tech fascist state colluders have always practiced Surveillance Capitalism tactics. That old saying “If it’s free you are the product” was just a normie slogan for marketing mid-wits who missed the big picture because it was always this: If it’s free, you are the target.

The CIA and FBI (and MI6 and 5-eyes) have been embedded inside them for a decade feeding their servers directly to the NSA (and 5-Eyes partners) so that every user is politically and psychologically profiled and their entire digital history recorded and saved to be used against them when their social credit system is unveiled.

The Uniparty will claim that TikTok is a threat to American citizens’ privacy with one breath while laughing about their Silicon Valley Pravda partnerships for total surveillance with the next. They don’t care about your privacy or mine and they never have. They’re paid a lot of money to perform congressional “hearings” that serve as laughable PR stunts to get their constituents to believe something will be done to stop the surveillance, censorship, blacklisting, tracking, and banning.

Nothing will stop it.

These platforms have been hijacked and are used as algorithmic herding machines. The bias of their algorithms creates a world of informationally and psychologically deceived humans, atomized to their own digital pseudo-reality completely unaware of the schemes behind the techno-curtain responsible for manipulating and marooning them to an island of misinformation for a lifetime of ignorance.

Mao, Stalin, and Goebbels could only have dreamed of having access to these platforms and their manipulative technological capabilities. They have cloaked propaganda distribution and consumption in a digital facade of social gamification and every idiot on the planet always wants to upgrade to the latest version of self-brainwashing.

The Past Year

Elon buys Twitter, with help from other investors. He does a limited peep show about the past censorship regime so people believe things will actually change. The red-blue divide gets nastier and the “left” whines about Elon and the “right” laughs at the whiney libtards. Nice distraction and con game.

Meanwhile, all the shadowbanning and de-throttling are still ongoing. There are still at least a dozen former FBI agents working at Twitter HQ and who knows how many more spooks. All data is still being siphoned up by NSA servers in the Utah desert. The centralized nature of the network means that there will never be “free speech” or open access to information. The entire platform is controlled, an illusion for perception management.

Every user is a sheep being herded in one direction or another, some of them paying $7 per month to have that stupid blue check next to their name while they are psycho-socially engineered for temporary dopamine rewards.

Substack Introduces NOTES

While only in private (beta) right now, this new addition to the Substack family enraged Musk, at least he’s pretending it did. It looks and functions a lot like Twitter without the obnoxious ads, the retarded recommendation algorithm, or crypto butt bois schilling their latest rocket mooning shit coin. Last night I posted my first tweet note.

They will be opening up Notes for all users and writers on Substack next week, but they shouldn’t. It’s nowhere near ready. A lot of fixes and adjustments are needed including having a “follow” button for Notes only instead of having to subscribe to that writer’s Substack on Lesbian Lingerie Fantasy Football Leagues in Vanuatu.

Targeting Substack

Last month Substack’s bank—Silicon Valley Bank went belly up. It was triggered by a depositor run from Elon’s PayPal CIA Buddy Peter Thiel. While the FDIC and Treasury will insure all depositor money, including Substack’s funds, it served the purpose to send a message to Substack and Circle, the second largest Stablecoin with $3Billion parked at SVB, that their financial path forward will not be smooth and perhaps unviable.

Recently Substack held the equivalent of a start-up bake sale by crowdfunding $2 million from their own writers and subscribers. Some called this tackey, and others speculated about just how financially dire the situation is for this platform in the wake of the SVB collapse, while others reached into their wallet and bought some cookies.

Others are speculating that Elon used the normie journos around here—Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, and Michael Shellenberger, who all thought they were handed the scoop of the century—in order to send millions of more readers to this platform so that Elon could scoop in and buy it soon.

If that were true he would have been smart to tender an offer before the Twitter Files peep show sent millions here, and perhaps he did but Substack’s founders declined his offers.

Then came the SVB collapse.

And now this direct war on Subtack.

The fact is Substack is not a viable alternative solution and never was. It was always just another placeholder like Locals, Minds, Telegram, Bitchute, Rumble, and a dozen others on “Web 3.0” protocols most of which do not solve the problem of privacy since blockchain is permanent.

Substack is just another centralized temporary plug in another hole of our digital sinking ship.

One of three outcomes awaits this platform:

1. They run out of runway ($) because they weren’t smart enough to fire another 30% of their workforce and they set up shop in the most expensive market in the U.S.—San Fransicko where salaries and cost of living are truly sickening. Nobody bails them out when the funds run dry, and they host bake sale after bake sale, hat in hand begging writers to give more of their revenue to keep this ship afloat.

2. Demoralized from hosting more bake sales, Substack founders shoot for a last-ditch attempt to raise capital through an IPO (apparently they’ve already filed) but find out that Elon’s buddies at the SEC have some extra hurdles for them that they just can’t get over. Now even more demoralized they relent and sell this place to Elon Machina V.4.17 for half of what it was worth prior to Elon scuttling Substack on Twitter. Perhaps Comrade Yuri will soon bless us with his version: How To Do A Hostile Takeover of Substack.

3. They hold a successful IPO and get their company listed on the Nasdaq where the owners and shareholders make out like bandits and after they cash out for their Megayachts and Lambos they get bigger and are infiltrated by the same Intel pigs still controlling Twitter.

Scenarios two and three portend the inevitable arrival of censorship f**kery here and by then I’ll be well entrenched in my own home over at…

thegoodcitizen.live

As long as there are executives, boards of directors, stock IPOs, KYC, and all structures that inhibit the liberties of users once scaled up, there will be no chance to escape the digital gulag.

Without truly decentralized platforms that redistribute the value of users’ attention back to them through an automated tokenized self-amending (right to delete content and right to be forgotten) ledger-like network based on a new consensus mechanism which I’ve been developing the past few years called Proof of Network Value (PONV), we are always going to be repeating this same censorship tyranny shit show.

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Pre-Postscript: For five years as part of my Ph.D. I’ve been working on developing an automated tokenized self-amending (right to delete content and right to be forgotten) “New Internet” (No VCs, No ICOs, No IPOs, No KYC, No banks, No ads, No cookies, No trackers, No shit) that distributes the attention labor value of people based on certain variables back to creators via a privacy token and is not run on servers but powered by users around the world. I will be publishing a series on attention as labor and value and digital self-governance after I defend my dissertation. It will explain how nothing yet exists that meets all the criteria necessary to leave their digital gulags for good. (note: please don’t plug your favorite blockchain or shit coin projects in the comments unless you’re prepared to have me tear them to shreds.)

This project has been six years in the making. It all started with a simple question in 2017 when I was standing on a bluff of the Papal Palace Gardens of Avignon overlooking the Rhône River:

What if we could creatively destroy Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, et. al and take their trillions of dollars in market capitalization and distribute that back to the users, whose attention labor is the actual source of their value and who they exploit, pilfer, surveil, abuse, profile, ban, censor, and do it without ads or subscriptions and with total encryption and privacy that is beyond the reach of any state or regulatory body?

Imagine having no VCs, no CEOs, no Subscriptions, no IPOs, no mergers, no payment processors or banks or advertisements or affiliate marketing garbage or any of the parasites or filth that pollutes the present attention network paradigm. Imagine something beyond the reach of the EU, the UN, the WHO, the DOJ, SEC, IRS, FED, FBI, CIA, NSA, and on and on. There would be no company to infiltrate, no stock to manipulate, no executives to bribe or threaten, and no chance for any of the f**kery we have today.

It would be a true declaration of digital independence and to them a declaration of war.

Why can’t we have that while also having privacy, autonomy, anonymity, and all the liberties of the “old” Internet?

We can and we will.

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In conclusion, for this fluffy Ram, it’s Sayonara Twitter for good.

You’ll never see me there again and don’t waste your time sharing Substack posts from anyone on there. They can’t be reshared or liked.

Until this place goes, I’m embracing Substack’s Notes and look forward to the arrival of Good Citizens on there perhaps as soon as next week when it will be opened up to all readers and writers.

Hopefully, they improve it before then, but they probably won’t.

Also, get ready for endless Taylor Lorenz Tweets Notes.

The “tech” reporter for the Washington Compost is still learning to crawl.

This is gonna be so much fun.

I look forward to being the first writer banned from Notes.

(Rubs hoofs together. Adjusts Ram jock strap.)

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