There's an aspect to this that I think is so significant and strangely never mentioned: the hyper-proliferation of incest-themed pornography, starting about seven years ago.
If you go to any of these free porn sites, the front page is dominated by porn that plays out sex between step-siblings, or step-children and step-parents, and the titles and excerpts seem carefully worded sometimes to imply blood relatives having sex, with maybe one reference to 'step-' something thrown in.
Incest is illegal in all 50 states, and I'm guessing an explicit depiction claiming to be such an act creates legal problems for these porn sites, hence the careful language. A lot of these videos seem to be completely generic sex videos with 'stepmother' added to the description for no apparent reason.
I can't find it now, but one of these Mindgeek executives did an AMA on Reddit years back and one of the questions was from a student and MIT, who said he figured out that the algorithm was pushing these themes on people despite lack of interest—in other words, the (step-)incest content wasn't becoming popular based on consumer demand but were being artificially promoted. The guy at Mindgeek just accused the student of antisemitism and didn't answer the question. If I can find the thread I'll post it.
I try not to look at these sites ever, and this might not be a meaningful observation, but it did seem to me that as soon as Trump took office in 2017 there was a hyper-proliferation of incest porn on the internet—that and porn featuring women with prolapsed rectums. The promotion of the latter seems to have subsided, and I'm guessing this backfired and the content was so repulsive that it made people stop visiting the sites, and so they removed it. I'm guessing a lot of people still watch the former because they know it's play acting, but you have to wonder how many adolescents see this stuff as their first pornographic content and how that imprints on them.
A lot of kids grow up in homes with remarried parents, and for all I know these step-relatives already wreak havoc on their hormones and impulses. I don't know, but the step-relative content is the most obvious example of porn as a weapon to inflict on society.
Note also that these sites can absolutely sequester content if they want to. I'm a middle-aged man, and I've seen plenty of porn in my life. I've accidentally seen man-on-man gay porn probably less than five times in my entire life. This tells me that these porn sites know straight men never want to see gay porn and know how to hide it—which means they could hide all the other repulsive content on these sites and they don't. Quite the contrary.
Good points, Martin, and I agree with you here. One of the "benefits" for globohomo of pushing free porn is to try to shift viewer's mentalities and sexual preferences in societally deleterious ways, even if the viewer has no interest in viewing the content. If you can find that Reddit AMA I'd be interested in seeing it. Re: your comment on timing, one can see abrupt shifts in globohomo strategies in all sorts of ways (not just relating to porn): there was a big shift about a decade ago phasing out whites from television/movies and promoting blacks (not Asians or Indians; just blacks), there was a shift at the start of the Trump era phasing out the Muslim terror attacks (which were almost all directed by the FBI), etc.
Well in the US, I assumed this was a colonial strategy of building up and pitting the second largest population against the first. But latinos are now the second largest population, yet they have been significantly under-represented in popular culture. "Latino" is admittedly pretty nebulous and I don't know how much of this is Mestizo, but assuming they're the largest segment of Latinos, you just don't see a lot of Mestizo representation. I haven't watched TV in decades so I might be wrong about this, but even back in the 90s all the Latino celebrities were Puerto Rican and the only time I saw a Mestizo on TV was in a local ad for a car dealership or something like this.
One possible reason for downplaying the presence of Mestizos is that you can send a message to whites that we're being "phased out" without us focusing on the group that is primarily displacing us. Whites understand that blacks have always been here.
Another, more innocuous explanation is that Jews, gays and blacks have a tradition in the performing arts in this country and this explains their existing over-representation, which has now been hyper-exaggerated for political reasons.
I can't find the AMA anymore but here's a separate example of someone complaining about the trend and a PornHub employee jumping in to accuse the OP of antisemitism:
I read somewhere that the uptick in step-incest porn getting pushed came around the time of COVID lockdowns. It would fit with the hypothesis of internet porn being intended to degrade interpersonal relationships
I'm not sure because I had blocked all adult content from my house by this point, but I noticed it a few years earlier. But I do know that in 2002, during the second intifada, Israeli troops locked down Ramallah in the West Bank, imposing a severe "curfew" in which Palestinians were only allowed to leave the house for about an hour a day, to get groceries and basic supplies. During this lockdown, the IDF took over Ramallah's 3 main TV stations and started broadcasting hardcore porn 24/7, in order to wear down and demoralize the population.
Yes it’s true. I’ve scanned the thumbnail images and nearly gagged when the algorithm literally puts a still of that! Btw. Happily married 20 years 2 kids etc. porn became a sedative when couldn’t sleep but now gives you nightmares!
I have no doubt that porn in general, but then it's inevitable move online, was and is the legacy of MK Ultra.
Stepping back, as you have, you can see that it is a refined version of the chemical control models (recreational/illicit drugs). It initially carries none of the stigma of the drug culture - the porn product has been glamourized for decades in print form and many a popular actress has graced the pages and centerfolds of magazines in the past. It was the longed for evolution of the suggestive necklines or short skirts of the hollywood bombshells. It also was not debilitating in it's early years. Men would probably spend 20 extra minutes in the bathroom fingering pages and stroking one out or go to the garage to tinker with something, but on the whole they still had no problem functioning at their jobs and being productive - where as a drug addict, while controllable, was not useful. And as you pointed out, it is free, so the addict isn't going into financial ruin to feed his habit - that is a game changer.
John Michael Greer, in one of his Dreamwidth post, said there are entities, I forget what he called them, flock to you while you are looking at porn. Something about it allows them essentially to cling to your etheric body, parasatizing your energy. He said masturbating is a negative release generally speaking, but he added, if you are going to do it, at the very least, don't use porn, use your imagination.
But overall, this all feels like boomer talk. We are incels, we cannot get waifus to cum for. The best case scenario is to become a findomme's paypig. And if you were to be relevant, you'd know that zoomers don't even cum anymore, they goon for days on end (or lock themselves in chastity - the proliferation of cheap Chinese cock cages has been a disaster for the whiteboi race).
Another brilliant and thought-provoking Substack - thank you very much.
Just through instinct and knowing human nature I agree with all the points raised.
The quotes about that "the system" takes over are spot on and similar concerns have been raised recently by both CJ Hopkins and Mattias Desmet.
There is no doubt that ejaculation through watching porn is draining billions of young men and domesticates them in a similar fashion as the castration of bulls. It also robs them of the bonding, relationship and family creating chemicals that are released in real love-making with a partner.
Therefore it is also a population control tool. It literally let go to waste millions of tons of sperm.
But worse, it robs these young (and older) men of spiritual energy. It is well known that abstinence from ejaculation over longer time periods will create the necessary energy to connect to higher states of consciousness.
Solutions?
I deliberately used the word "ejaculation" over "sex" or "orgasm". There is an old Taoist practice known as "Sexual Kung-Fu" that enables men to orgasm without ejaculation and therefore not only keep their sexual and ultimately spiritual energy, but dramatically increase their vitality and intelligence. Mantak Chia knows all about it and is promoting it for decades. He claims that this practice was kept secret for hundreds of years but that he had a calling that it is now time to reveal it to the masses to save the world. And he did. And it works. I have been practicing it for many years and know from first hand experience about the immense benefits to learn to control ejaculation. Porn is not the problem. Ejaculation is the problem. That is a relatively easy fix.
Other solutions?
I don't have any for society at large and I am neither able nor interested to save society at large. Many naive, sluggish and afraid people might perish. Being helpless, sick, obese and mentally ill will kill you first. I am focused to look out for myself, my family, my friends and my community - in that order.
I will adhere to my first principle of doing no harm but that doesn't mean I have to save people. I will help if I have left-over resources and share whenever I can, but only a strong person can help others. And the only help worth doing is a one-time help that will help them to help themselves e.g. you teach people to fish, you don't give them fish. Anyway, I digress.
I am convinced that they will steal our money from our bank accounts in the coming years so I will start to withdraw cash as long I still can. This brings new challenges to protect the cash. But this is only an intermittent step as we can't eat cash and it can be devalued or banned. We have to find ways to invest the cash in material real goods that help the survival of our bodies e.g. land, seeds, animals, fuel tanks, solar etc.
But by far more important than the physical survival of our bodies is our spiritual development because the spiritual mature person will not fear anything and will not suffer from anything. It is the only real and lasting antidote to technocratic capitalistic exploitation. Read up on Diogenes and how he lived his life. Or Nisargadatta Maharaj. We can be intelligent and brave and staunch all we want - we are just tiny extremely depended creatures with minimal power. If the winds of cause and effect blow us in the face, our physical forms will perish without any fault of our own.
To escape the technological surveillance and propaganda there might come a time where we have to let go of all our devices. I don't think we have enough "good" hackers that will protect us. We will lose that contest. We will only be able to let go of all our devices and escape the Matrix, if we established other means of surviving and networking and bartering with real goods in the real world. It will be very tough.
In general, not participating in the trans-human technocratic society might be our only option which would require to adapt to a very ascetic life-style in the hope that the technocratic society will eventually collapse from the inside out, as the communist East Germany did. Maybe we can get enough young people to survive long enough to rebuild.
We can buy some time and possibly better quality of life by immigrating to so-called third-world countries and wait out the collapse of the West there. These low-tech poor countries will become very attractive to intelligent unspoiled Westeners very soon.
And we can enjoy every day and make it a practice to live in the moment - the only time that really exists. Every other time (past and future) is purely mental and unreal. I hope this helps to lift the spirit of some in these doomsday times.
Thanks BNGN, nice comment. I agree with you that any solution to this global technocratic nightmare can only be found by focusing inwards on an individual level; we must first help ourselves before we can help others. It's possible that rejecting the technical system entirely by becoming luddites is some sort of answer - looking to the Amish, or Oriana in South Africa - but ultimately I think it comes down to the question of what is truth, how do we find it, and who do we trust to offer it to us - and whatever we have on display currently is not cutting it...
."...but ultimately I think it comes down to the question of what is truth, how do we find it, and who do we trust to offer it to us - and whatever we have on display currently is not cutting it..."
Once again, spot on - except the last bit - at least for me. Nisargadatta is cutting it for me - the only truth I need
I hope that his is the last long form article I am ever compelled to write again. I don't feel there is any more to say or any question unanswered. I feel blessed. Take care.
Kaczynski was clearly a hard-working meticulous thinker in the direction of inquiry that he followed, but he seems to me to be like many doctors and veterinarians I've met -- professionally and chronically dour and pessimistic. In the medical cases, this sort of person appears prone to making prescriptive errors for their patients because of their own negative cast of mind. By the way, I wonder -- given the particular richness of his dour insight trove -- whether there're any indications Kaczynski was framed/set up. Janet Reno, after all, oversaw an anomalously large number of unique Justice Department actions.
In Kaczynski’s case I think they nabbed the right guy. It was his own brother who turned him in, at his wife’s urging, after reading his manifesto (the Unabomber promised to stop his activities if the New York Times published it; they waffled, then did it, which is where the brother read it). Kaczynski never forgave his brother for this and never returned the endless letters the brother wrote him in prison thereafter…
Was watching Day of the Jackal yesterday evening with family... halfway through, no spoilers please. I told my adult son it's a documentary film of European cars from the 1960s; subplot is assassinations. So we're watching it for the Citroens. I will note that although the film targets the coveted 17-34yo male demographic by including nude women, we get to see the Jackal stuff the sketchy pornographer into a trunk and lock it.
It's yet another failing of "democracy," based as it is on "freedom," that it has no effective defense against ubiquitous porn. It's why nothing could be done about Playboy and such in their early days, free "speech" and the first amendment, dontcha know. Whereas a monarch, if he cared about his society, and was not as depraved and soulless as the entities running our "democracy," could effectively suppress somebody like Hefner from the beginning, so that porn could never really get much of a foothold. Since somebody like Hefner was necessary to lead the way to get us to where we are today. He was probably "with intel" all along, but that's another story.
I've never been able to wrap my head around the legal concept that video of people copulating qualifies as "speech," but I guess smarter legal minds than I have drawn that conclusion, so it's not really germaine what I think about it. But a monarch or dictator wouldn't have to bother listening to those pesky judges.
Yes, as part of my research for this article I tried bing'ing connections between Hefner and the CIA, but did not come up with anything. Just like how the whole postmodern art movement was sponsored by the CIA to push society toward empty secular nihilism, I would be pretty surprised if they were also not sponsoring Hefner early on for similar reasons.
I recall a little bit of discussion of this aspect of Hefner after he died, when his whores were suddenly spilling the beans about him, briefly, and then that was all hushed up real quick like.
Kaczynski’s highly acute vision confirms that humans need a God: something above them to exist for.
In the dawning age, the rising, chosen God is Tech; even science is taken seriously only as a tool for Tech.
Meanwhile, a narrow group stick to a tribal god, "dating back" some 3 millennia, all of it unseen by the rest, who can't imagine any god ≠ Tech to exist and be possibly believed to and served.
EDIT: Of course the sources of funding might be more miasmic than just 'the government'; WEF, Israeli govt, Soros, the banks, Bilderberg--even China and Russia--could all be involved; it's hard to separate one from another.
Nowadays one can hardly swing a cat without hitting a billionaire who's happy to throw his money into whatever he thinks will make the world conform to his twisted vision
The word "geek" likely originates from the English dialectal term "geck" (meaning "fool" or "simpleton") and is believed to be derived from the Middle or Low German word "geck" which also meant "fool".
A bit of levity, perhaps. When I was a kid, porn was magazine based and geting hold of some was like striking gold. Finding a stash in the park or the school playing field (yeah, I know) was a cause for celebration. Now the kids don't even have that. Robbed.
"There may or may not be an immaterial human soul, but if there is one it clearly is less powerful than the biological mechanisms of human behavior. For if that were not the case then researchers would not be able so easily to manipulate human feelings and behavior with drugs and electrical currents…"
While I think Kaczynski was brilliant, I do disagree completely that the human soul is less powerful than the "biological mechanisms of human behavior."
The spirit - which is intimately bound up with the soul - gives rise to our material biology. So our material biology cannot be more powerful than the spirit and soul.
I think TK would have been more correct to say that someone who is *disconnected* from his soul would be easily manipulated by drugs and electrical currents. Unfortunately, our current cultural norms encourage too many people to disconnect from their souls.
The regulation of vice has always represented a brightline societal test. Ultimately it always comes down to organizations fighting over control of it. Even, or possibly most notably, the psychology of wanking.
I think you underestimate the retail demand for porn. I'm sure Aylo (Mindgeek's current successor) and its even less savory ilk make all kinds of money selling user data, traffic, botnet resources, etc. But they don't mostly produce the content. They host and distribute. There is far, far too much amateur porn being produced by far, far too many self-employed people for there to be any kind of organized conspiracy behind it. Most of them aren't getting rich, obviously, but OnlyFans exists.
It's really just the re-emergence of the Oldest Profession in an even more dehumanizing form. I've seen estimates that up to 10% of the women in pre-modern London were active in the sex trade.
Which is awful. But there is nothing new under the sun.
Hi Ryan, even if they only host and distribute the content, the cost of hosting streaming free video for 30% of internet traffic is not insubstantial. Where is their revenue coming from? It’s not from advertisements, and from what it looks like only a small portion of internet porn is being paid for by consumers.
That's just it though: the purchase funnel appears to be really, really effective. I think you drastically underestimate both the number of people paying for porn, and how much they spend on it. I think that's where most of their revenue comes from.
Also, I think you overestimate the cost of porn sites' traffic. The figures you're using there appear to be measuring total data transmitted. But that's only one component of the cost of internet activity, and not necessarily the most expensive one. The other measure is processing user requests and activity. Rule of thumb: storage is cheap, but processing is expensive.
A single server with a single active user streaming HD video round the clock will move a ton of data. . . but potentially only have a handful of user requests to process. By contrast, a single server with a hundred active users on a text forum won't move all that much data, but will have a very large number of user requests to process.
In that respect, porn sites have a massiave advantage over straight-up social media sites like Facebook and Twitter: Porn sites are still effectively one-to-many sites, whereas social media is an inherently many-to-many operation. The cost of running a one-to-many site scales linearly with the number of users. But the cost of running a many-to-many site scales exponentially.
With a one-to-many site, data is only transmitted when requested by a user. Yes, users can upload content, but that content doesn't do anything until a user requests it.
But with a many-to-many site, any time a user makes a change, that change is immediately propagated, in as close to real-time as possible, to some subset of other active users, potentially a very large one. Any time someone leaves a "like" or posts a comment, that activity is pushed to every other user actively looking at the tweet/post/whatever. Which will generate additional activity, as those users interact with it.
So yes, porn sites undoubtedly account for an oversized portion of "traffic" when measured by the sheer volume of data they transmit. But those costs increase linearly, and most of the costs are just storing media files and serving them up, which is cheap. By contrast, social media companies undoubtedly account for the vast majority of user requests processed. Those costs scale exponentially, and most of those costs are processing user requests, which is expensive.
All of which to say that Twitter likely isn't a viable business model without extensive IC subsidy. You can't make up increasing marginal costs on volume. But porn sites' cost structure is different, and I'm pretty sure that a lot more people are paying a lot more for porn than you seem to think.
There's an aspect to this that I think is so significant and strangely never mentioned: the hyper-proliferation of incest-themed pornography, starting about seven years ago.
If you go to any of these free porn sites, the front page is dominated by porn that plays out sex between step-siblings, or step-children and step-parents, and the titles and excerpts seem carefully worded sometimes to imply blood relatives having sex, with maybe one reference to 'step-' something thrown in.
Incest is illegal in all 50 states, and I'm guessing an explicit depiction claiming to be such an act creates legal problems for these porn sites, hence the careful language. A lot of these videos seem to be completely generic sex videos with 'stepmother' added to the description for no apparent reason.
I can't find it now, but one of these Mindgeek executives did an AMA on Reddit years back and one of the questions was from a student and MIT, who said he figured out that the algorithm was pushing these themes on people despite lack of interest—in other words, the (step-)incest content wasn't becoming popular based on consumer demand but were being artificially promoted. The guy at Mindgeek just accused the student of antisemitism and didn't answer the question. If I can find the thread I'll post it.
I try not to look at these sites ever, and this might not be a meaningful observation, but it did seem to me that as soon as Trump took office in 2017 there was a hyper-proliferation of incest porn on the internet—that and porn featuring women with prolapsed rectums. The promotion of the latter seems to have subsided, and I'm guessing this backfired and the content was so repulsive that it made people stop visiting the sites, and so they removed it. I'm guessing a lot of people still watch the former because they know it's play acting, but you have to wonder how many adolescents see this stuff as their first pornographic content and how that imprints on them.
A lot of kids grow up in homes with remarried parents, and for all I know these step-relatives already wreak havoc on their hormones and impulses. I don't know, but the step-relative content is the most obvious example of porn as a weapon to inflict on society.
Note also that these sites can absolutely sequester content if they want to. I'm a middle-aged man, and I've seen plenty of porn in my life. I've accidentally seen man-on-man gay porn probably less than five times in my entire life. This tells me that these porn sites know straight men never want to see gay porn and know how to hide it—which means they could hide all the other repulsive content on these sites and they don't. Quite the contrary.
Good points, Martin, and I agree with you here. One of the "benefits" for globohomo of pushing free porn is to try to shift viewer's mentalities and sexual preferences in societally deleterious ways, even if the viewer has no interest in viewing the content. If you can find that Reddit AMA I'd be interested in seeing it. Re: your comment on timing, one can see abrupt shifts in globohomo strategies in all sorts of ways (not just relating to porn): there was a big shift about a decade ago phasing out whites from television/movies and promoting blacks (not Asians or Indians; just blacks), there was a shift at the start of the Trump era phasing out the Muslim terror attacks (which were almost all directed by the FBI), etc.
Well in the US, I assumed this was a colonial strategy of building up and pitting the second largest population against the first. But latinos are now the second largest population, yet they have been significantly under-represented in popular culture. "Latino" is admittedly pretty nebulous and I don't know how much of this is Mestizo, but assuming they're the largest segment of Latinos, you just don't see a lot of Mestizo representation. I haven't watched TV in decades so I might be wrong about this, but even back in the 90s all the Latino celebrities were Puerto Rican and the only time I saw a Mestizo on TV was in a local ad for a car dealership or something like this.
One possible reason for downplaying the presence of Mestizos is that you can send a message to whites that we're being "phased out" without us focusing on the group that is primarily displacing us. Whites understand that blacks have always been here.
Another, more innocuous explanation is that Jews, gays and blacks have a tradition in the performing arts in this country and this explains their existing over-representation, which has now been hyper-exaggerated for political reasons.
I can't find the AMA anymore but here's a separate example of someone complaining about the trend and a PornHub employee jumping in to accuse the OP of antisemitism:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D6ztEl4X4AELYGY?format=png&name=900x900
I read somewhere that the uptick in step-incest porn getting pushed came around the time of COVID lockdowns. It would fit with the hypothesis of internet porn being intended to degrade interpersonal relationships
I'm not sure because I had blocked all adult content from my house by this point, but I noticed it a few years earlier. But I do know that in 2002, during the second intifada, Israeli troops locked down Ramallah in the West Bank, imposing a severe "curfew" in which Palestinians were only allowed to leave the house for about an hour a day, to get groceries and basic supplies. During this lockdown, the IDF took over Ramallah's 3 main TV stations and started broadcasting hardcore porn 24/7, in order to wear down and demoralize the population.
"The guy at Mindgeek just accused the student of antisemitism"
Jewwwwwssssss!
"...porn featuring women with prolapsed rectums."
WHAT?! WOW. Just wow.
Yes it’s true. I’ve scanned the thumbnail images and nearly gagged when the algorithm literally puts a still of that! Btw. Happily married 20 years 2 kids etc. porn became a sedative when couldn’t sleep but now gives you nightmares!
Very good post and thanks for the mention.
I have no doubt that porn in general, but then it's inevitable move online, was and is the legacy of MK Ultra.
Stepping back, as you have, you can see that it is a refined version of the chemical control models (recreational/illicit drugs). It initially carries none of the stigma of the drug culture - the porn product has been glamourized for decades in print form and many a popular actress has graced the pages and centerfolds of magazines in the past. It was the longed for evolution of the suggestive necklines or short skirts of the hollywood bombshells. It also was not debilitating in it's early years. Men would probably spend 20 extra minutes in the bathroom fingering pages and stroking one out or go to the garage to tinker with something, but on the whole they still had no problem functioning at their jobs and being productive - where as a drug addict, while controllable, was not useful. And as you pointed out, it is free, so the addict isn't going into financial ruin to feed his habit - that is a game changer.
John Michael Greer, in one of his Dreamwidth post, said there are entities, I forget what he called them, flock to you while you are looking at porn. Something about it allows them essentially to cling to your etheric body, parasatizing your energy. He said masturbating is a negative release generally speaking, but he added, if you are going to do it, at the very least, don't use porn, use your imagination.
It's good that a small slice of thetruth-oriented... small slice of humankind has metaphysical awareness and intuition.
It would be much better if such people were not as tiny a slice as they are.
Wanking to porn, or to phantasized subjects, or to loved subjects, has vastly different impact on one's spirit (or soul).
Wanking to something perverted one imagines, or something essentially clean, also makes a vast difference.
Pelevin in his Love to Three Zuckerbrins (2014) mentions this chap talking about silicone entities enslaving humanity with pornography.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Lilly?useskin=vector
But overall, this all feels like boomer talk. We are incels, we cannot get waifus to cum for. The best case scenario is to become a findomme's paypig. And if you were to be relevant, you'd know that zoomers don't even cum anymore, they goon for days on end (or lock themselves in chastity - the proliferation of cheap Chinese cock cages has been a disaster for the whiteboi race).
Another brilliant and thought-provoking Substack - thank you very much.
Just through instinct and knowing human nature I agree with all the points raised.
The quotes about that "the system" takes over are spot on and similar concerns have been raised recently by both CJ Hopkins and Mattias Desmet.
There is no doubt that ejaculation through watching porn is draining billions of young men and domesticates them in a similar fashion as the castration of bulls. It also robs them of the bonding, relationship and family creating chemicals that are released in real love-making with a partner.
Therefore it is also a population control tool. It literally let go to waste millions of tons of sperm.
But worse, it robs these young (and older) men of spiritual energy. It is well known that abstinence from ejaculation over longer time periods will create the necessary energy to connect to higher states of consciousness.
Solutions?
I deliberately used the word "ejaculation" over "sex" or "orgasm". There is an old Taoist practice known as "Sexual Kung-Fu" that enables men to orgasm without ejaculation and therefore not only keep their sexual and ultimately spiritual energy, but dramatically increase their vitality and intelligence. Mantak Chia knows all about it and is promoting it for decades. He claims that this practice was kept secret for hundreds of years but that he had a calling that it is now time to reveal it to the masses to save the world. And he did. And it works. I have been practicing it for many years and know from first hand experience about the immense benefits to learn to control ejaculation. Porn is not the problem. Ejaculation is the problem. That is a relatively easy fix.
Other solutions?
I don't have any for society at large and I am neither able nor interested to save society at large. Many naive, sluggish and afraid people might perish. Being helpless, sick, obese and mentally ill will kill you first. I am focused to look out for myself, my family, my friends and my community - in that order.
I will adhere to my first principle of doing no harm but that doesn't mean I have to save people. I will help if I have left-over resources and share whenever I can, but only a strong person can help others. And the only help worth doing is a one-time help that will help them to help themselves e.g. you teach people to fish, you don't give them fish. Anyway, I digress.
I am convinced that they will steal our money from our bank accounts in the coming years so I will start to withdraw cash as long I still can. This brings new challenges to protect the cash. But this is only an intermittent step as we can't eat cash and it can be devalued or banned. We have to find ways to invest the cash in material real goods that help the survival of our bodies e.g. land, seeds, animals, fuel tanks, solar etc.
But by far more important than the physical survival of our bodies is our spiritual development because the spiritual mature person will not fear anything and will not suffer from anything. It is the only real and lasting antidote to technocratic capitalistic exploitation. Read up on Diogenes and how he lived his life. Or Nisargadatta Maharaj. We can be intelligent and brave and staunch all we want - we are just tiny extremely depended creatures with minimal power. If the winds of cause and effect blow us in the face, our physical forms will perish without any fault of our own.
To escape the technological surveillance and propaganda there might come a time where we have to let go of all our devices. I don't think we have enough "good" hackers that will protect us. We will lose that contest. We will only be able to let go of all our devices and escape the Matrix, if we established other means of surviving and networking and bartering with real goods in the real world. It will be very tough.
In general, not participating in the trans-human technocratic society might be our only option which would require to adapt to a very ascetic life-style in the hope that the technocratic society will eventually collapse from the inside out, as the communist East Germany did. Maybe we can get enough young people to survive long enough to rebuild.
We can buy some time and possibly better quality of life by immigrating to so-called third-world countries and wait out the collapse of the West there. These low-tech poor countries will become very attractive to intelligent unspoiled Westeners very soon.
And we can enjoy every day and make it a practice to live in the moment - the only time that really exists. Every other time (past and future) is purely mental and unreal. I hope this helps to lift the spirit of some in these doomsday times.
Thanks BNGN, nice comment. I agree with you that any solution to this global technocratic nightmare can only be found by focusing inwards on an individual level; we must first help ourselves before we can help others. It's possible that rejecting the technical system entirely by becoming luddites is some sort of answer - looking to the Amish, or Oriana in South Africa - but ultimately I think it comes down to the question of what is truth, how do we find it, and who do we trust to offer it to us - and whatever we have on display currently is not cutting it...
."...but ultimately I think it comes down to the question of what is truth, how do we find it, and who do we trust to offer it to us - and whatever we have on display currently is not cutting it..."
Once again, spot on - except the last bit - at least for me. Nisargadatta is cutting it for me - the only truth I need
I hope that his is the last long form article I am ever compelled to write again. I don't feel there is any more to say or any question unanswered. I feel blessed. Take care.
https://markusmutscheller.substack.com/p/find-yourself-first-and-endless-blessings
Kaczynski was clearly a hard-working meticulous thinker in the direction of inquiry that he followed, but he seems to me to be like many doctors and veterinarians I've met -- professionally and chronically dour and pessimistic. In the medical cases, this sort of person appears prone to making prescriptive errors for their patients because of their own negative cast of mind. By the way, I wonder -- given the particular richness of his dour insight trove -- whether there're any indications Kaczynski was framed/set up. Janet Reno, after all, oversaw an anomalously large number of unique Justice Department actions.
In Kaczynski’s case I think they nabbed the right guy. It was his own brother who turned him in, at his wife’s urging, after reading his manifesto (the Unabomber promised to stop his activities if the New York Times published it; they waffled, then did it, which is where the brother read it). Kaczynski never forgave his brother for this and never returned the endless letters the brother wrote him in prison thereafter…
Was Janet Reno a tranny or just dyke bitch lesbian? The murderous fool was not an intellectual.**
Was watching Day of the Jackal yesterday evening with family... halfway through, no spoilers please. I told my adult son it's a documentary film of European cars from the 1960s; subplot is assassinations. So we're watching it for the Citroens. I will note that although the film targets the coveted 17-34yo male demographic by including nude women, we get to see the Jackal stuff the sketchy pornographer into a trunk and lock it.
It's yet another failing of "democracy," based as it is on "freedom," that it has no effective defense against ubiquitous porn. It's why nothing could be done about Playboy and such in their early days, free "speech" and the first amendment, dontcha know. Whereas a monarch, if he cared about his society, and was not as depraved and soulless as the entities running our "democracy," could effectively suppress somebody like Hefner from the beginning, so that porn could never really get much of a foothold. Since somebody like Hefner was necessary to lead the way to get us to where we are today. He was probably "with intel" all along, but that's another story.
I've never been able to wrap my head around the legal concept that video of people copulating qualifies as "speech," but I guess smarter legal minds than I have drawn that conclusion, so it's not really germaine what I think about it. But a monarch or dictator wouldn't have to bother listening to those pesky judges.
Yes, as part of my research for this article I tried bing'ing connections between Hefner and the CIA, but did not come up with anything. Just like how the whole postmodern art movement was sponsored by the CIA to push society toward empty secular nihilism, I would be pretty surprised if they were also not sponsoring Hefner early on for similar reasons.
I recall a little bit of discussion of this aspect of Hefner after he died, when his whores were suddenly spilling the beans about him, briefly, and then that was all hushed up real quick like.
Kaczynski’s highly acute vision confirms that humans need a God: something above them to exist for.
In the dawning age, the rising, chosen God is Tech; even science is taken seriously only as a tool for Tech.
Meanwhile, a narrow group stick to a tribal god, "dating back" some 3 millennia, all of it unseen by the rest, who can't imagine any god ≠ Tech to exist and be possibly believed to and served.
Believed in*.
Well said sir
EDIT: Of course the sources of funding might be more miasmic than just 'the government'; WEF, Israeli govt, Soros, the banks, Bilderberg--even China and Russia--could all be involved; it's hard to separate one from another.
Nowadays one can hardly swing a cat without hitting a billionaire who's happy to throw his money into whatever he thinks will make the world conform to his twisted vision
The word "geek" likely originates from the English dialectal term "geck" (meaning "fool" or "simpleton") and is believed to be derived from the Middle or Low German word "geck" which also meant "fool".
A bit of levity, perhaps. When I was a kid, porn was magazine based and geting hold of some was like striking gold. Finding a stash in the park or the school playing field (yeah, I know) was a cause for celebration. Now the kids don't even have that. Robbed.
"There may or may not be an immaterial human soul, but if there is one it clearly is less powerful than the biological mechanisms of human behavior. For if that were not the case then researchers would not be able so easily to manipulate human feelings and behavior with drugs and electrical currents…"
While I think Kaczynski was brilliant, I do disagree completely that the human soul is less powerful than the "biological mechanisms of human behavior."
The spirit - which is intimately bound up with the soul - gives rise to our material biology. So our material biology cannot be more powerful than the spirit and soul.
I think TK would have been more correct to say that someone who is *disconnected* from his soul would be easily manipulated by drugs and electrical currents. Unfortunately, our current cultural norms encourage too many people to disconnect from their souls.
It doesn't have to be that way.
We made the tools and now the tools make us! Or at least modify.
Thanks for the shout-out!
The regulation of vice has always represented a brightline societal test. Ultimately it always comes down to organizations fighting over control of it. Even, or possibly most notably, the psychology of wanking.
I think you underestimate the retail demand for porn. I'm sure Aylo (Mindgeek's current successor) and its even less savory ilk make all kinds of money selling user data, traffic, botnet resources, etc. But they don't mostly produce the content. They host and distribute. There is far, far too much amateur porn being produced by far, far too many self-employed people for there to be any kind of organized conspiracy behind it. Most of them aren't getting rich, obviously, but OnlyFans exists.
It's really just the re-emergence of the Oldest Profession in an even more dehumanizing form. I've seen estimates that up to 10% of the women in pre-modern London were active in the sex trade.
Which is awful. But there is nothing new under the sun.
Hi Ryan, even if they only host and distribute the content, the cost of hosting streaming free video for 30% of internet traffic is not insubstantial. Where is their revenue coming from? It’s not from advertisements, and from what it looks like only a small portion of internet porn is being paid for by consumers.
That's just it though: the purchase funnel appears to be really, really effective. I think you drastically underestimate both the number of people paying for porn, and how much they spend on it. I think that's where most of their revenue comes from.
Also, I think you overestimate the cost of porn sites' traffic. The figures you're using there appear to be measuring total data transmitted. But that's only one component of the cost of internet activity, and not necessarily the most expensive one. The other measure is processing user requests and activity. Rule of thumb: storage is cheap, but processing is expensive.
A single server with a single active user streaming HD video round the clock will move a ton of data. . . but potentially only have a handful of user requests to process. By contrast, a single server with a hundred active users on a text forum won't move all that much data, but will have a very large number of user requests to process.
In that respect, porn sites have a massiave advantage over straight-up social media sites like Facebook and Twitter: Porn sites are still effectively one-to-many sites, whereas social media is an inherently many-to-many operation. The cost of running a one-to-many site scales linearly with the number of users. But the cost of running a many-to-many site scales exponentially.
With a one-to-many site, data is only transmitted when requested by a user. Yes, users can upload content, but that content doesn't do anything until a user requests it.
But with a many-to-many site, any time a user makes a change, that change is immediately propagated, in as close to real-time as possible, to some subset of other active users, potentially a very large one. Any time someone leaves a "like" or posts a comment, that activity is pushed to every other user actively looking at the tweet/post/whatever. Which will generate additional activity, as those users interact with it.
So yes, porn sites undoubtedly account for an oversized portion of "traffic" when measured by the sheer volume of data they transmit. But those costs increase linearly, and most of the costs are just storing media files and serving them up, which is cheap. By contrast, social media companies undoubtedly account for the vast majority of user requests processed. Those costs scale exponentially, and most of those costs are processing user requests, which is expensive.
All of which to say that Twitter likely isn't a viable business model without extensive IC subsidy. You can't make up increasing marginal costs on volume. But porn sites' cost structure is different, and I'm pretty sure that a lot more people are paying a lot more for porn than you seem to think.
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