9 ms·

If the news is fake, imagine history

120 points by hunglee2 4y ago

spread_love 4y ago
> The Intrepid Reporter [TV Tropes link] is as much of a stock character as the Evil Corporation. You don’t hear much about the evil reporter, though Er, like the Immoral Journalist? https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ImmoralJournalist https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ImmoralJournalis... The article itself supposes the conclusion "the news is fake." > You don’t hear much about the evil communist, either. Uh...the Red Scare? This one is incredibly easy to refute: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DirtyCommunists https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DirtyCommunists The author's counterargument? > I’d bet the world has seen a >1000:1 ratio of scenes featuring evil capitalists to scenes featuring evil communists They'd bet. Ok?
- dmix 4y ago
  >> I’d bet the world has seen a >1000:1 ratio of scenes featuring evil capitalists to scenes featuring evil communists > They'd bet. Ok? The context was "in the past several decades", if this means 3, that goes to 1992. I'd say that's a very, very safe bet. I'd take it too. If it was to 1982 it would be less so but still safe. Otherwise it's been a long time since the cold war. The 'Red Scare' even longer. I can't even think of a major movie since 2010 that had a villain who was socialist besides The Interview, Team America, and Red Dawn 2012 but those aren't even fake examples. Even in your "Dirty Communists" TVTropes links all the examples were Cold War era, the only two modern films I found were also using historical real references: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/TheDeathOfStalin https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/TheDeathOfStalin https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/BridgeOfSpies https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/BridgeOfSpies I could list a countless modern films/shows where the enemy was an evil billionaire entrepreneur or faceless corporation. A wealthy capitalist in a suit is pretty much today's standard cliche villain trope.
  - spread_love 4y ago
    The author hasn't provided any reason this is correct besides "betcha". Was there a more common insult than "communist" by the American right in the last decade? Most using it think it's synonymous with "socialist" and means Obamacare. All the examples were NOT cold war era; Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Salt, Kundun, lots more. The Death of Stalin is a poor example, along with praise, it was criticized for making light of great suffering.
  - TMWNN 4y ago
    >I can't even think of a major movie since 2010 that had a villain who was socialist besides The Interview, Team America, and Red Dawn 2012 but those aren't even fake examples. >A wealthy capitalist in a suit is pretty much today's standard cliche villain trope. This was true during the Cold War, too. In the Bond films, Soviet Russia is the enemy in exactly one film, For Your Eyes Only. Red China is the implied power behind the throne in two, Thunderball and You Only Live Twice. In every other entry in the series, the villains are SPECTRE and a variety of madmen, predominantly the billionaire type. Another example is the frequently made claim that "Muslims are always the villains in Hollywood". It is far, far, far easier to name films in which "Islamophobia" is the greater evil than the opposite, both before and after the September 11 attacks on the US. The Sum of All Fears is one example in which the book's Islamic villains are explicitly replaced (by "neo-Nazis") for the film.
- fennecfoxen 4y ago
  > Er, like the Immoral Journalist? "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war." — Hearst, apocryphally
- yucky 4y ago
  >Uh...the Red Scare? First, that was before most of our lifetimes. Times have changed quite a bit on that front, which is the point. Second, thanks to the Venona Files we know the "scare" had a large basis in reality. > The article itself supposes the conclusion "the news is fake." As posted elsewhere, this should be sobering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9rbHpA_6W4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9rbHpA_6W4
  - spread_love 4y ago
    > Times have changed quite a bit on that front When's the last time you heard the right use "communist" as an insult? Thank you for the youtube link, it's ANOTHER example of the Immoral Journalist trope to add to my list.
    - yucky 4y ago
      >When's the last time you heard the right use "communist" as an insult? I dunno, they've been relegated to AM radio & FOX News so I never hear them anymore. The mainstream news sources continue to be cleansed of wrongthink. There is no fleshing out of contrasting ideas in the news, only competing echo chambers for people to mainline their confirmation biases directly in toe their veins with no challenge to their preexisting thoughts and ideas. Carefully crafted into 7 second soundbites of course. > it's ANOTHER example of the Immoral Journalist trope to add to my list Then you don't know what a trope is. These are actual clips of real "journalists" dutifully reading their party-line scripts. This isn't a portrayal.
      - spread_love 4y ago
        Oh, that explains why you're totally our of the loop on how often "communists" are painted negatively in mainstream American media, you didn't see it. > Then you don't know what a trope is Oops, I sure do, it's when an element recurs in a piece of art. The piece if art you posted (the youtube video) was created by an artist to portray the message "the news is fake." Thus, ANOTHER example of the Immoral Journalist trope.
ge96 4y ago
History on a Blockchain
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  ... Would do nothing to solve the issue as all it tells you is if that information was indeed once put on the chain. It doesn't ensure the information is actually correct.
  - gfodor 4y ago
    of course not - it just remains visible and also tells you that it wasn't altered after that time which is a big deal
    - adhesive_wombat 4y ago
      Neither of those things requires a blockchain. Uploading a signed copy of the file to the Internet Archive is probably more effective.
      - gfodor 4y ago
        A blockchain is relevant in cases where there needs to be an actual chain. But in any case, you're focusing too narrowly here. Instead of honing in to try to disprove that a given technology is the proper solution, it's smarter to try to understand what happens when such a solution is widely deployed, and what pre-conditions are present today to help predict if, when, and how it will happen. Regardless, Bitcoin-like blockchains are already dated technology even within the cryptocurrency space.
eruleman 4y ago
Title is originally from an @AmuseChimp tweet: https://twitter.com/AmuseChimp/status/906147488582787073?s=20&t=8V98P_Tg28g48moFHPDERg https://twitter.com/AmuseChimp/status/906147488582787073?s=2... Probably one of his best.
davidgerard 4y ago
taf2 4y ago
A lot less money to be made from history
- tr1ll10nb1ll 4y ago
  Moulding people's opinions via a version of history that pushes an agenda... I think there's much more than money to be made from history. Specifically, recent history (not referring to 5000 BCE).
tablespoon 4y ago
These guys appears to be pushing a pretty radical kind of political change, which doubtlessly influences whatever they're writing about "the news" and "history." This is apparently what they're about: https://book.thenetworkstate.com/the-network-state-in-one-sentence https://book.thenetworkstate.com/the-network-state-in-one-se...: > The Network State in One Sentence > In one informal sentence: >> A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states. > ... > Here’s a more complex definition that extends that concept and pre-emptively covers many edge cases: >> A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition. Tl;dr: another verbose anarcho-libertarian fantasy. I'm glad I had JS disabled so it started me on page 1 of 3,440, instead of in the middle.
- dougmwne 4y ago
  Oh dear lord, the United Microstates of Reddit Meme Subs is definitely going to nuke us all the first chance it gets. This wins my bad idea of the year award.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Maybe the Brits will sell them some old oil rigs or flag towers in international waters... I hear those are great to run pirate raduo stations from!
  - kgwxd 4y ago
    > Oh dear lord, the United Microstates of Reddit Meme Subs is definitely going to nuke us all the first chance it gets. r/BrandNewSentence
- dataflow 4y ago
  > and an on-chain census Sounds like yet another problem that blockchain ingeniously solves.
beebmam 4y ago
>Put another way, what’s the most powerful force on earth? In the 1800s, God. In the 1900s, the US military. And by the mid-2000s, encryption. Because as Assange put it, no amount of violence can solve certain kinds of math problems. So it doesn’t matter how many nuclear weapons you have; if property or information is secured by cryptography, the state can’t seize it without getting the solution to an equation. Yeah, I stopped reading here. It's incredible how confident this person tries to sound when it's clear that very few of these statements are supported by evidence and also don't follow from each other. Bizarre stuff.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  >> if property or information is secured by cryptography, the state can’t seize it without getting the solution to an equation > Bizarre stuff. Yeah. No matter how much cryptography you have, a gun or bomb will still kill you. This idea that that state really cares about whatever junk you've encrypted sounds like the McGuffin in a cliche thriller.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Also, authorities confiacate quite some crypto all the time...
    - deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
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- tsimionescu 4y ago
  > if property or information is secured by cryptography, the state can’t seize it without getting the solution to an equation. This sort of reminds me of the Eddie Izzard "Flags" bit, except that someone is trying to claim the land without the might of the British Empire behind them. Like, imagine the police coming to evict you from a house, and you confidently showing them that this ledger here says that it's actually your house.
ryanschneider 4y ago
I find the Network State manifesto laughable for a couple reasons: - I don’t see how existing nations will ever allow “dual citizenship” with a network state. - and by extension how will these Network States actually defend themselves? - and based on this section they seem to be forecasting a Peter Zeihan style end of the current world order. If that happens cryptocurrency will be the first victim, not the savior: in a world where microchips are rare no one will want to waste them on anything not directly related to food or energy supply. Don’t get me wrong: I highly recommend Zeihan’s “The End of World is Just the Beginning” (caveat I’m only halfway done) but see it’s predictions totally incompatible with the IMO wishful thinking of The Network State.
- dakial1 4y ago
  > I don’t see how existing nations will ever allow “dual citizenship” with a network state. Aren't churches sort of network states?
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Aren't churches sort of network states? They are networks, of a sort, but usually not states. Though some are subordinate to states and some have states subordinated to them. But even in those cases the states are fairly conventional, not discontinuous sovereign pockets peeled off piecemeal from other states. While compactness isn't required and there are some oddities, the problems and ultimately difficult to resolve warfare resulting from patchwork states was a big motivator for the Westphalian nation-state model becoming a norm, and while that model might fall to some newer model, a regression to patchwork states isn't something I can see existing states going along with easily.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    No, they lack recognition. The exception being the Vatican, which hapoens to governed by the Oope and the Cathlic church but is not the Chatholic church itself. That churches act like they are a seperate natuon state so is a different story...
    - 4y ago
TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
I upvoted this because I think it has some interesting parts, but there's also a lot of culture war and borderline conspiracy-theorist stuff that would have gotten it flagged off the front page if it were all the article contained.
- bshepard 4y ago
  Nice motive, seriously, very prosocial -- which parts seemed most culture warrish to you? The whole network state program feels very unhinged to me from what an actual state is, but I also don't have a nice phone.
bshepard 4y ago
While I understand the desire to claim that bifurcation has reached the point where the "America is not really a single “nation state” anymore" it is, in fact, still a nation state, in the same way that a family that fights a lot is still a family. Only this family, uh, rules the world. And unfortunately it also rules the world while pretending it doesn't rule the world. Acknowledging that you rule the world would be a good first step towards doing a better job at ruling it, but this acknowledgement is impossible within the given parameters of discourse, so a new discourse will likely emerge?
- shlurpy 4y ago
  If they did, it would suddenly become that much more clear that the system is deeply antidemocratic, due to people not having any say in the institutions that govern them.
- dllthomas 4y ago
  https://acoup.blog/2021/07/02/collections-my-country-isnt-a-nation https://acoup.blog/2021/07/02/collections-my-country-isnt-a-...
99_00 4y ago
Historians use historians from the past as secondary sources. They have never assumed that those sources were bias free. They don't assume the history they write is bias free. History is constantly being rewritten with different perspectives. This is History 101. Many people have forgotten that bias is the rule not the exception. Our institutions are built assuming bias exists and try to remove it to get desired outcomes. In our justice system: A court trial is two parties trying to present their own self interested and biased version with a judge enforcing predetermined rules. Scientific method exists in part to combat assumptions and bias. Experiments are constructed to remove bias. Papers are reviewed to remove bias. Why would the news or anything be bias free? In my mind, if you are assuming it's bias free, that's big red flag. Maybe you are just happy when your biases are confirmed and unhappy with any information that goes against your biases. Almost everyone is, after all. That's how human beings are wired and it's the duty of people who want to be more rational to constantly combat that.
jzellis 4y ago
I got really excited about Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong when I read Snow Crash when I was fifteen too. :-D
crikeyjoe 4y ago
baybal2 4y ago
ricardobeat 4y ago
Adding to the conspiracy stew here, the post missed (puts tinfoil hat on) the possibility that this vast divide in the USA, and other western countries, is a result of foreign psyops that started preparing the terrain long ago.
deleted 4y ago
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reshie 4y ago
not only interpretations of it but those writing it. look at archeology and how we interpret those from a those who wrote something down. there is of course other interpretations from other indications of more direct evidence but a lot of times we do not get those in conjunction with written records.
darth_avocado 4y ago
Coming from India, I already know how much of history can be inaccurate. This can happen at two levels: at a national level and at an international level. Like at a national level a lot of history that showed the not so good side about Gandhi is mostly missing and at times forcefully removed from public access. And at an international level, a lot of history around the extent of British brutality and its effects are intentionally left out of history books. History is truly written by victors.
- ardit33 4y ago
  That’s a bad phrase. History was written by those that could write at all! Most of ancient history is not documented as most peoples didn’t have a written system at all. Also, for many other battles and events there are other parties (third parties) that wrote about them, but they were neither the losers nor the victors. Third parties has their own biases so that is often needed to take account into history. In the case of India, the bias might be into minimizing conflict and trying to minimize bad sides of previous figures. This happens in many other countries as well.
superb-owl 4y ago
There's a lot wrong with this article, and it's obviously steeped in bias. But there are some interesting ideas to be picked out from between the nonsense. In particular, I'm very sympathetic to the sense that the predominant styles of government prior to 2000 (esp Western Democracy) are obsolete in an era where there is instant, open access to information (and disinformation). The author's main point seems to be: unless the establishment can manage to regain control over information flows (a la the Chinese government) we will see a drastic reshaping of society.
justinzollars 4y ago
This is solid. I read the entire posted section, and now I'm going to read the full text. I recommend carving out a part of your day and reading this. The books he recommends are also fantastic recommendations (those I have read). They all have changed my perspective in serious ways.
m0llusk 4y ago
Conceptually kind of interesting, but not clear how to make it work and this writing has a lot of distracting slop. Blockchain coins have proven to be extremely volatile and as such are probably not a good foundation for anything. Seasteading as an idea goes much farther back than Patri Friedman but turns out to be extremely difficult to actually pull off. It seems like any real progress in this direction would have to be very clear and solid.
AzzieElbab 4y ago
Reading responses, is this site supposed to be populated by luddites with communistic tendencies? I mean yeah, crypto ppl kind of forgotten about building any value into the whole thing to make it imperishable but network state is still way cooler than North Korea
- AzzieElbab 4y ago
  Judging from downvotes, many Kim Jong Um supporters here
tonymet 4y ago
In the past the fake narrative was used to bolster our institutions (church and state). Now the fake narratives are used to dismantle them.
dkarl 4y ago
My father was a history professor who specialized in American history. I don't think the author of this post gives sufficient credit to history, historians, and people who teach history. These "shocking" facts, whether they're scandals, little ironies, or just things that contradict our present prejudices, are not secrets. They aren't hidden. Some people will trumpet them more than others, depending on various biases ideological, partisan, national, etc., but nobody is being silenced. The main problem is that it's hard to get people excited about them for more than a few seconds. One thing I pointed out here recently is that all the "things they didn't you in school" books are populated with exactly the facts they taught you in school. Similarly, all these "shocking" facts here -- will you recognize them if you run across them a year from now? Two years from now? With that in mind, can you be sure that you haven't seen them before? Maybe multiple times? The strongest distortion of history is our limited ability to pay attention and then remember.
- orsenthil 4y ago
  > The strongest distortion of history is our limited ability to pay attention and then remember. Well said. Also some events that become popular and persist over time, just like memes.
- lend000 4y ago
  Do you think your father would disagree that history is written by the victors? Even today, there are two major factions in the US where the two sides not only disagree about what to do, but why, how, and even what things happened this year. No person is without bias, so clearly your father has to pick one of the viewpoints to write into history. Sure, major conflicts with two viewpoints are discussed in history class (like the Civil War), but what about the less obvious viewpoints? I see this especially in writing about economics and markets, where 90%+ of the things people read, including the predominant views, are in my opinion partially or completely incorrect. You will often see a bunch of articles describing how the bear market has a ways to go at the very bottom, and vice versa, not to mention the pattern of headlines writing "Dollar falls 3% as <unrelated event happens today>." So aside from charts, I find there to be little else of use in studying economic history. Although Ray Dalio has some good data and a pretty reasonable first-principles based analysis of major historical economic cycles.
anon291 4y ago
A good example of this is the Black Legend [1]. A lot of the anti-Spanish colonialism sentiment we see, even today, is due to the war between England and the Spanish empire and anti-Catholicism. For example, even some of the accusations against Columbus are not the product of 'wokeness', but old polemics reasserted in a modern context. Non-English accounts tend to be less critical, which makes sense, since England had everything to gain from painting Spanish colonial efforts in this way. Contrary to popular belief today, many of Columbus's contemporaneous regular citizens would have been appalled at some of the allegations levied against him. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legend_(Spain) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legend_(Spain)
- int_19h 4y ago
  But, conversely, much of the support the Black Legend theory sees today is just whitewashing of actual historical atrocities.
jcranmer 4y ago
> wtfhappenedin1971.com — how many economic indicators went off track in 1971, around the time the US got off the gold standard. Oh god, how can anyone seriously recommend this site. It lists lots of economic indicators, prominently indicating 1971, insinuating that everything was caused by the Nixon Shock... when it's clear from several of the graphs that the inflection point was closer to 1980. There's just so much bad pop history and other stuff here, but that site really has the chutzpah crown for telling you a "truth" while simultaneously presenting facts that nakedly debunk it.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  More important is the plan laid out in the Powell Memorandum, detailing how the right wing of both parties would work over decades to claim power in the US. Where we live now is exactly where it charted.
jarek83 4y ago
I always thought that 'History' should never be considered as a scientific subject. It should be more like 'what somebody heard about something and what slice of it that person decided to share about it' thing, where people would have their starting point calibrated to "it's more this person version of what could have really happened" instead of "that must be true, let's kill in the name of it".

120 points by hunglee2 4y ago

> The Intrepid Reporter [TV Tropes link] is as much of a stock character as the Evil Corporation. You don’t hear much about the evil reporter, though Er, like the Immoral Journalist? https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ImmoralJournalist https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ImmoralJournalis... The article itself supposes the conclusion "the news is fake." > You don’t hear much about the evil communist, either. Uh...the Red Scare? This one is incredibly easy to refute: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DirtyCommunists https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DirtyCommunists The author's counterargument? > I’d bet the world has seen a >1000:1 ratio of scenes featuring evil capitalists to scenes featuring evil communists They'd bet. Ok?

dmix 4y ago
>> I’d bet the world has seen a >1000:1 ratio of scenes featuring evil capitalists to scenes featuring evil communists > They'd bet. Ok? The context was "in the past several decades", if this means 3, that goes to 1992. I'd say that's a very, very safe bet. I'd take it too. If it was to 1982 it would be less so but still safe. Otherwise it's been a long time since the cold war. The 'Red Scare' even longer. I can't even think of a major movie since 2010 that had a villain who was socialist besides The Interview, Team America, and Red Dawn 2012 but those aren't even fake examples. Even in your "Dirty Communists" TVTropes links all the examples were Cold War era, the only two modern films I found were also using historical real references: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/TheDeathOfStalin https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/TheDeathOfStalin https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/BridgeOfSpies https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/BridgeOfSpies I could list a countless modern films/shows where the enemy was an evil billionaire entrepreneur or faceless corporation. A wealthy capitalist in a suit is pretty much today's standard cliche villain trope.
- spread_love 4y ago
  The author hasn't provided any reason this is correct besides "betcha". Was there a more common insult than "communist" by the American right in the last decade? Most using it think it's synonymous with "socialist" and means Obamacare. All the examples were NOT cold war era; Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Salt, Kundun, lots more. The Death of Stalin is a poor example, along with praise, it was criticized for making light of great suffering.
- TMWNN 4y ago
  >I can't even think of a major movie since 2010 that had a villain who was socialist besides The Interview, Team America, and Red Dawn 2012 but those aren't even fake examples. >A wealthy capitalist in a suit is pretty much today's standard cliche villain trope. This was true during the Cold War, too. In the Bond films, Soviet Russia is the enemy in exactly one film, For Your Eyes Only. Red China is the implied power behind the throne in two, Thunderball and You Only Live Twice. In every other entry in the series, the villains are SPECTRE and a variety of madmen, predominantly the billionaire type. Another example is the frequently made claim that "Muslims are always the villains in Hollywood". It is far, far, far easier to name films in which "Islamophobia" is the greater evil than the opposite, both before and after the September 11 attacks on the US. The Sum of All Fears is one example in which the book's Islamic villains are explicitly replaced (by "neo-Nazis") for the film.
fennecfoxen 4y ago
> Er, like the Immoral Journalist? "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war." — Hearst, apocryphally
yucky 4y ago
>Uh...the Red Scare? First, that was before most of our lifetimes. Times have changed quite a bit on that front, which is the point. Second, thanks to the Venona Files we know the "scare" had a large basis in reality. > The article itself supposes the conclusion "the news is fake." As posted elsewhere, this should be sobering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9rbHpA_6W4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9rbHpA_6W4
- spread_love 4y ago
  > Times have changed quite a bit on that front When's the last time you heard the right use "communist" as an insult? Thank you for the youtube link, it's ANOTHER example of the Immoral Journalist trope to add to my list.
  - yucky 4y ago
    >When's the last time you heard the right use "communist" as an insult? I dunno, they've been relegated to AM radio & FOX News so I never hear them anymore. The mainstream news sources continue to be cleansed of wrongthink. There is no fleshing out of contrasting ideas in the news, only competing echo chambers for people to mainline their confirmation biases directly in toe their veins with no challenge to their preexisting thoughts and ideas. Carefully crafted into 7 second soundbites of course. > it's ANOTHER example of the Immoral Journalist trope to add to my list Then you don't know what a trope is. These are actual clips of real "journalists" dutifully reading their party-line scripts. This isn't a portrayal.
    - spread_love 4y ago
      Oh, that explains why you're totally our of the loop on how often "communists" are painted negatively in mainstream American media, you didn't see it. > Then you don't know what a trope is Oops, I sure do, it's when an element recurs in a piece of art. The piece if art you posted (the youtube video) was created by an artist to portray the message "the news is fake." Thus, ANOTHER example of the Immoral Journalist trope.

ge96 4y ago

History on a Blockchain

adhesive_wombat 4y ago
... Would do nothing to solve the issue as all it tells you is if that information was indeed once put on the chain. It doesn't ensure the information is actually correct.
- gfodor 4y ago
  of course not - it just remains visible and also tells you that it wasn't altered after that time which is a big deal
  - adhesive_wombat 4y ago
    Neither of those things requires a blockchain. Uploading a signed copy of the file to the Internet Archive is probably more effective.
    - gfodor 4y ago
      A blockchain is relevant in cases where there needs to be an actual chain. But in any case, you're focusing too narrowly here. Instead of honing in to try to disprove that a given technology is the proper solution, it's smarter to try to understand what happens when such a solution is widely deployed, and what pre-conditions are present today to help predict if, when, and how it will happen. Regardless, Bitcoin-like blockchains are already dated technology even within the cryptocurrency space.

eruleman 4y ago

Title is originally from an @AmuseChimp tweet: https://twitter.com/AmuseChimp/status/906147488582787073?s=20&t=8V98P_Tg28g48moFHPDERg https://twitter.com/AmuseChimp/status/906147488582787073?s=2... Probably one of his best.

davidgerard 4y ago

taf2 4y ago

A lot less money to be made from history

tr1ll10nb1ll 4y ago
Moulding people's opinions via a version of history that pushes an agenda... I think there's much more than money to be made from history. Specifically, recent history (not referring to 5000 BCE).

tablespoon 4y ago

These guys appears to be pushing a pretty radical kind of political change, which doubtlessly influences whatever they're writing about "the news" and "history." This is apparently what they're about: https://book.thenetworkstate.com/the-network-state-in-one-sentence https://book.thenetworkstate.com/the-network-state-in-one-se...: > The Network State in One Sentence > In one informal sentence: >> A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states. > ... > Here’s a more complex definition that extends that concept and pre-emptively covers many edge cases: >> A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition. Tl;dr: another verbose anarcho-libertarian fantasy. I'm glad I had JS disabled so it started me on page 1 of 3,440, instead of in the middle.

dougmwne 4y ago
Oh dear lord, the United Microstates of Reddit Meme Subs is definitely going to nuke us all the first chance it gets. This wins my bad idea of the year award.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Maybe the Brits will sell them some old oil rigs or flag towers in international waters... I hear those are great to run pirate raduo stations from!
- kgwxd 4y ago
  > Oh dear lord, the United Microstates of Reddit Meme Subs is definitely going to nuke us all the first chance it gets. r/BrandNewSentence
dataflow 4y ago
> and an on-chain census Sounds like yet another problem that blockchain ingeniously solves.

beebmam 4y ago

>Put another way, what’s the most powerful force on earth? In the 1800s, God. In the 1900s, the US military. And by the mid-2000s, encryption. Because as Assange put it, no amount of violence can solve certain kinds of math problems. So it doesn’t matter how many nuclear weapons you have; if property or information is secured by cryptography, the state can’t seize it without getting the solution to an equation. Yeah, I stopped reading here. It's incredible how confident this person tries to sound when it's clear that very few of these statements are supported by evidence and also don't follow from each other. Bizarre stuff.

tablespoon 4y ago
>> if property or information is secured by cryptography, the state can’t seize it without getting the solution to an equation > Bizarre stuff. Yeah. No matter how much cryptography you have, a gun or bomb will still kill you. This idea that that state really cares about whatever junk you've encrypted sounds like the McGuffin in a cliche thriller.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Also, authorities confiacate quite some crypto all the time...
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tsimionescu 4y ago
> if property or information is secured by cryptography, the state can’t seize it without getting the solution to an equation. This sort of reminds me of the Eddie Izzard "Flags" bit, except that someone is trying to claim the land without the might of the British Empire behind them. Like, imagine the police coming to evict you from a house, and you confidently showing them that this ledger here says that it's actually your house.

ryanschneider 4y ago

I find the Network State manifesto laughable for a couple reasons: - I don’t see how existing nations will ever allow “dual citizenship” with a network state. - and by extension how will these Network States actually defend themselves? - and based on this section they seem to be forecasting a Peter Zeihan style end of the current world order. If that happens cryptocurrency will be the first victim, not the savior: in a world where microchips are rare no one will want to waste them on anything not directly related to food or energy supply. Don’t get me wrong: I highly recommend Zeihan’s “The End of World is Just the Beginning” (caveat I’m only halfway done) but see it’s predictions totally incompatible with the IMO wishful thinking of The Network State.

dakial1 4y ago
> I don’t see how existing nations will ever allow “dual citizenship” with a network state. Aren't churches sort of network states?
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Aren't churches sort of network states? They are networks, of a sort, but usually not states. Though some are subordinate to states and some have states subordinated to them. But even in those cases the states are fairly conventional, not discontinuous sovereign pockets peeled off piecemeal from other states. While compactness isn't required and there are some oddities, the problems and ultimately difficult to resolve warfare resulting from patchwork states was a big motivator for the Westphalian nation-state model becoming a norm, and while that model might fall to some newer model, a regression to patchwork states isn't something I can see existing states going along with easily.
- hef19898 4y ago
  No, they lack recognition. The exception being the Vatican, which hapoens to governed by the Oope and the Cathlic church but is not the Chatholic church itself. That churches act like they are a seperate natuon state so is a different story...
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TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago

I upvoted this because I think it has some interesting parts, but there's also a lot of culture war and borderline conspiracy-theorist stuff that would have gotten it flagged off the front page if it were all the article contained.

bshepard 4y ago
Nice motive, seriously, very prosocial -- which parts seemed most culture warrish to you? The whole network state program feels very unhinged to me from what an actual state is, but I also don't have a nice phone.

bshepard 4y ago

While I understand the desire to claim that bifurcation has reached the point where the "America is not really a single “nation state” anymore" it is, in fact, still a nation state, in the same way that a family that fights a lot is still a family. Only this family, uh, rules the world. And unfortunately it also rules the world while pretending it doesn't rule the world. Acknowledging that you rule the world would be a good first step towards doing a better job at ruling it, but this acknowledgement is impossible within the given parameters of discourse, so a new discourse will likely emerge?

shlurpy 4y ago
If they did, it would suddenly become that much more clear that the system is deeply antidemocratic, due to people not having any say in the institutions that govern them.
dllthomas 4y ago
https://acoup.blog/2021/07/02/collections-my-country-isnt-a-nation https://acoup.blog/2021/07/02/collections-my-country-isnt-a-...

99_00 4y ago

Historians use historians from the past as secondary sources. They have never assumed that those sources were bias free. They don't assume the history they write is bias free. History is constantly being rewritten with different perspectives. This is History 101. Many people have forgotten that bias is the rule not the exception. Our institutions are built assuming bias exists and try to remove it to get desired outcomes. In our justice system: A court trial is two parties trying to present their own self interested and biased version with a judge enforcing predetermined rules. Scientific method exists in part to combat assumptions and bias. Experiments are constructed to remove bias. Papers are reviewed to remove bias. Why would the news or anything be bias free? In my mind, if you are assuming it's bias free, that's big red flag. Maybe you are just happy when your biases are confirmed and unhappy with any information that goes against your biases. Almost everyone is, after all. That's how human beings are wired and it's the duty of people who want to be more rational to constantly combat that.

jzellis 4y ago

I got really excited about Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong when I read Snow Crash when I was fifteen too. :-D

crikeyjoe 4y ago

baybal2 4y ago

ricardobeat 4y ago

Adding to the conspiracy stew here, the post missed (puts tinfoil hat on) the possibility that this vast divide in the USA, and other western countries, is a result of foreign psyops that started preparing the terrain long ago.

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reshie 4y ago

not only interpretations of it but those writing it. look at archeology and how we interpret those from a those who wrote something down. there is of course other interpretations from other indications of more direct evidence but a lot of times we do not get those in conjunction with written records.

darth_avocado 4y ago

Coming from India, I already know how much of history can be inaccurate. This can happen at two levels: at a national level and at an international level. Like at a national level a lot of history that showed the not so good side about Gandhi is mostly missing and at times forcefully removed from public access. And at an international level, a lot of history around the extent of British brutality and its effects are intentionally left out of history books. History is truly written by victors.

ardit33 4y ago
That’s a bad phrase. History was written by those that could write at all! Most of ancient history is not documented as most peoples didn’t have a written system at all. Also, for many other battles and events there are other parties (third parties) that wrote about them, but they were neither the losers nor the victors. Third parties has their own biases so that is often needed to take account into history. In the case of India, the bias might be into minimizing conflict and trying to minimize bad sides of previous figures. This happens in many other countries as well.

superb-owl 4y ago

There's a lot wrong with this article, and it's obviously steeped in bias. But there are some interesting ideas to be picked out from between the nonsense. In particular, I'm very sympathetic to the sense that the predominant styles of government prior to 2000 (esp Western Democracy) are obsolete in an era where there is instant, open access to information (and disinformation). The author's main point seems to be: unless the establishment can manage to regain control over information flows (a la the Chinese government) we will see a drastic reshaping of society.

justinzollars 4y ago

This is solid. I read the entire posted section, and now I'm going to read the full text. I recommend carving out a part of your day and reading this. The books he recommends are also fantastic recommendations (those I have read). They all have changed my perspective in serious ways.

m0llusk 4y ago

Conceptually kind of interesting, but not clear how to make it work and this writing has a lot of distracting slop. Blockchain coins have proven to be extremely volatile and as such are probably not a good foundation for anything. Seasteading as an idea goes much farther back than Patri Friedman but turns out to be extremely difficult to actually pull off. It seems like any real progress in this direction would have to be very clear and solid.

AzzieElbab 4y ago

Reading responses, is this site supposed to be populated by luddites with communistic tendencies? I mean yeah, crypto ppl kind of forgotten about building any value into the whole thing to make it imperishable but network state is still way cooler than North Korea

AzzieElbab 4y ago
Judging from downvotes, many Kim Jong Um supporters here

tonymet 4y ago

In the past the fake narrative was used to bolster our institutions (church and state). Now the fake narratives are used to dismantle them.

dkarl 4y ago

My father was a history professor who specialized in American history. I don't think the author of this post gives sufficient credit to history, historians, and people who teach history. These "shocking" facts, whether they're scandals, little ironies, or just things that contradict our present prejudices, are not secrets. They aren't hidden. Some people will trumpet them more than others, depending on various biases ideological, partisan, national, etc., but nobody is being silenced. The main problem is that it's hard to get people excited about them for more than a few seconds. One thing I pointed out here recently is that all the "things they didn't you in school" books are populated with exactly the facts they taught you in school. Similarly, all these "shocking" facts here -- will you recognize them if you run across them a year from now? Two years from now? With that in mind, can you be sure that you haven't seen them before? Maybe multiple times? The strongest distortion of history is our limited ability to pay attention and then remember.

orsenthil 4y ago
> The strongest distortion of history is our limited ability to pay attention and then remember. Well said. Also some events that become popular and persist over time, just like memes.
lend000 4y ago
Do you think your father would disagree that history is written by the victors? Even today, there are two major factions in the US where the two sides not only disagree about what to do, but why, how, and even what things happened this year. No person is without bias, so clearly your father has to pick one of the viewpoints to write into history. Sure, major conflicts with two viewpoints are discussed in history class (like the Civil War), but what about the less obvious viewpoints? I see this especially in writing about economics and markets, where 90%+ of the things people read, including the predominant views, are in my opinion partially or completely incorrect. You will often see a bunch of articles describing how the bear market has a ways to go at the very bottom, and vice versa, not to mention the pattern of headlines writing "Dollar falls 3% as <unrelated event happens today>." So aside from charts, I find there to be little else of use in studying economic history. Although Ray Dalio has some good data and a pretty reasonable first-principles based analysis of major historical economic cycles.

anon291 4y ago

A good example of this is the Black Legend [1]. A lot of the anti-Spanish colonialism sentiment we see, even today, is due to the war between England and the Spanish empire and anti-Catholicism. For example, even some of the accusations against Columbus are not the product of 'wokeness', but old polemics reasserted in a modern context. Non-English accounts tend to be less critical, which makes sense, since England had everything to gain from painting Spanish colonial efforts in this way. Contrary to popular belief today, many of Columbus's contemporaneous regular citizens would have been appalled at some of the allegations levied against him. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legend_(Spain) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legend_(Spain)

int_19h 4y ago
But, conversely, much of the support the Black Legend theory sees today is just whitewashing of actual historical atrocities.

jcranmer 4y ago

> wtfhappenedin1971.com — how many economic indicators went off track in 1971, around the time the US got off the gold standard. Oh god, how can anyone seriously recommend this site. It lists lots of economic indicators, prominently indicating 1971, insinuating that everything was caused by the Nixon Shock... when it's clear from several of the graphs that the inflection point was closer to 1980. There's just so much bad pop history and other stuff here, but that site really has the chutzpah crown for telling you a "truth" while simultaneously presenting facts that nakedly debunk it.

ncmncm 4y ago
More important is the plan laid out in the Powell Memorandum, detailing how the right wing of both parties would work over decades to claim power in the US. Where we live now is exactly where it charted.

jarek83 4y ago

I always thought that 'History' should never be considered as a scientific subject. It should be more like 'what somebody heard about something and what slice of it that person decided to share about it' thing, where people would have their starting point calibrated to "it's more this person version of what could have really happened" instead of "that must be true, let's kill in the name of it".