Masks of psych

A lot of people have convinced themselves they get to dictate what it means to live in our society. I call these people masks because they mask inadequacies in the mundane. Information is fundamental to human existence. And yet, it really isn’t that important. People believe complete information creates control. This sentiment is not new. The Nazis believed in racial supremacy partly because diversity makes human informational environments difficult to control, especially for the state. Sometimes it’s easier to determine what beauty is or isn’t if we have a baseline that personifies beauty. Believe it or not, human beings are not good at picking up on cues, even if we tell ourselves we are masters of situational awareness. We are very good at picking up on baselines and this is because we are absolutely biased by social constructs. The Nazis, like all groups that mask, want to control baselines of gender or racial superiority precisely because it gives them the ability to adjust the boundaries of information. In this way, diversity is too much information for the state to process strategies meant to manipulate successfully. The Nazi solution was to remove information not clustered around their baseline in order to assure population control. Think about it this way…

If you really think a weave hairstyle is beautiful, but the baseline has been set for straight hair, it’s really difficult to explain why your product is necessary for precisely the same reasons diversity is a tough sell: a norm you didn’t make or agree to exists by someone that made those choices for you with the intent to control social behaviors. They got to decide whether crying was manly or being honest, open, and real was preferable to privacy. Your birth isn’t allowed to change baselines for the same reason Nazis didn’t like the idea of Jews procreating to such a degree they could eventually change baselines, through numbers in population, that would render their imperial control moot. Baselines are a state-controlled average and not an exceptional paradigm. Otherwise, it would cease to be effective because no one could ever achieve it. The “ubermensch” was not an ideal. It was a representation to control the eventual baseline. If you are trying to remove diversity to replace it with racial supremacy but you know racial features are too scattered in your country to make a common thread, you identify all of them in one person, the “ubermensch,” and create a common cross-section of physical attributes that most Germans actually have. For example, not all Germans during that time had blonde hair, blue eyes, or were of stout build. But, many Germans fit one of those criteria, making the baselines extremely effective at renormalizing Germans versus Jews, setting the backdrop for the final solution. I hope this process is starting to make more sense, as it is completely unique in its construction because it relies on how we know what we know versus most other processes that focus on what we know and when we know it.

Masks hide these psycho-social forms of control in extremely mundane narratives. For example, a lot of baselines constructed before you were born, are called traditions. Traditions are mundane and their historical backing leads us to accept them rather than challenge them outright. If you really think about it, traditions are baselines created before you were born to tell you exactly how to think in order to replicate control. This is what I call the mask of psych problem. Traditions are fake. They don’t really exist because, if they did, control would have always existed. Suffice to say, control has not always existed and there are some scholars who believe control started with the formation of the state. Before the state, cooperation was a social feature to survival. This means traditions are not even components to culture. They are incidental to strong and dominating cultures that want to continue dominating. This type of construction is the worst form of society possible because it relies on zero-knowledge freewill – or, freewill that occurs when you believe you have freewill but really don’t because, without knowledge, freewill is absolutely useless. Remember: when you hear someone say “ignorance is bliss,” what you are really hearing is a baseline being set to make you believe that knowledge, freewill, and happiness cannot co-exist in order to control the types of choices you can make based on the information that can coexist within our knowledge framework. This is a form of epistemic hacking. It takes how you know what you know, leverages your identity so you arrive at the conclusions on your own, and instills a baseline that you believe to be true that is definitely not.

This is important because this mask of psych problem is not just a human problem. AI hates diversity, even when its not sentient. Diversity contains so much contrary information that AI finds it difficult to develop categories the world is divvied up in organizationally. Too much information, is actually bad for both human beings and computers. And yet, informational supremacy, like its racial archetype, is seen to be the key that opens every door. You can keep your informational supremacy because, no matter how much information you accrue, it will never be enough to understand and decipher the human mind. You can only hack it and psychology hasn’t come even remotely close to the kind of hacking epistemic manipulation has been able to create. Epistemology is not a psychological process. It is a philosophical one.

What the mask of psych problem can teach us is particularly important in today’s times. For one, people will always under-think reality in order to set the baselines necessary for insidious control. I call these the problemators. A problemator is a person who believes over-thinking exists when there is no way it can exist. Manipulators do not like people who reflect before acting because they are controlling their output by timing their input. If the mask of psych is working, there shouldn’t be a need to think well or for very long, as society has done it for you with the accumulation of massive amounts of traditions over time that should make decisions automatic. Second, deviants are always the average. In these systems, if you want to do or use something that society is not propping up, you are both a deviant and the norm. Essentially, everyone is in this category because everyone wants to switch but baselines have made it impossible for people to make the switch. You could absolutely like your genetically curly hair but market traditions to a baseline of straight hair – which no one has – makes it more costly to maintain your hair (time, money, social costs) than it is to just straighten it. Lastly, the mundane way we express our social environment matters far more than being able to use information to predict outcomes. Over time, the mundane can make people believe the most wild and ludicrous things if done correctly. For example, some people believe mundane philosophies where truth exists, which it doesn’t, and facts exist un-limitedly, which they don’t. The mundane helps regularize interaction of a state-controlled baseline to usurp the natural average that makes sense. Believe it or not, the mundane doesn’t even have to work that hard or for that long to start working successfully.

The point of this research is to talk about how norms are actually less important than the baselines that attempt to facilitate these norms by feeding them in the first place. I want you to think about baselines first and norms last when evaluating the forms of control that exist around you. It will absolutely blow your mind.

Innovation is new

Many people believe innovation has been around for a long time. This might be true conceptually and there are plenty of good arguments for this line of thinking. I think there are better arguments, however. Imagine innovation as time dependent. Now, imagine innovation as unique to its environment. Innovation is only possible in environments that are innovation ready. What you get is a picture that looks much different from a linear trajectory. In essence, innovation is not something that can be manufactured so much as it is something new that needs to be harnessed by letting go of the reins.

You may be saying… that makes absolutely no sense. I agree. It is tough to see how you can harness something as chaotic as new-ness. Its even harder to conceptualize harnessing it by giving up control. Think about it this way: when your parents tell you not to do something, does this increase, decrease, or neutralize your likelihood of doing that thing? There are some kids that certainly change their behavior. More often than not, due to the emergent conditions of being a kid without experiences, new-ness cannot be stopped when the demand for something new is at critical mass. It gets even worse. Telling someone not to do something when they are part of an emerging environment where they are emerging themselves as something emergent (teenagers) isn’t smart. In fact, the best controls are to increase available options by setting up safety measures instead of setting boundaries on what is or is not safe. Innovation’s hateful cousin is anticipation, prevention, and co-option.

This means innovation is a mostly new phenomena. It doesn’t represent what came before it. It represents what comes from a time in which new is demanded but new-ness is largely unknown. In essence, innovation is itself new. You can think of everything as evolutionary or you can think of everything as co-movements that occur in tandem having nothing to do with one another. Certainly, we needed fire to make the circuit board. But, the engineer who made the circuit board didn’t consider fire before making it – just like a kid won’t consider a parent’s advice before engaging a new experience they don’t currently have under their belt.

Innovation takes this even farther. What is or is not innovative is not a product of a government or a corporation or even a researcher so much as it is a fact of reality. We know innovation when we see it after the fact, even as we try to predict the future of innovation from its past behavior. Given the previous boundaries above, we know innovation is time dependent and context-driven. This means no amount of prediction will make you good at charting innovation because, if it already exists, and would be the natural conclusion to something, it ceases to be innovative. This is a hard sell for a lot of people because it means the initial ideas are the drivers of innovation and not the people who see those ideas through to the end. Innovation is new in each of its iterations but none of its new-ness is iterative.

At the end of the day, this makes innovation impossible to control as much as it makes it unnatural to control it. In fact, I would say this: what makes capitalism so successful is that it never attempted to control innovation. There was a sort of natural-ness to the process that other economic systems had trouble recreating. But, it also means every single person who manipulates a system of innovation is stifling innovation to such a degree they are changing environments that naturally want to do the reverse. If innovation doesn’t course correct from time-to-time, we end up maintaining the status quo. If I can be frank, our status quo doesn’t look so good at the moment. We definitely need some innovation to mix things up because a known-known that ends poorly is worse than an unknown-unknown that may not – and this is where innovation earns its keep.

Distinguish-ability

Our entire lives we’ve been told things fit into neat categories. These sections are both distinguishable and help organize our worldview. And yet, we know these categories are hardly accurate. They are more like stories we tell ourselves about the world we live in so we can maintain a sense of organization amidst the chaos of life. Sherlock Holmes is a character in a narration attempting to entertain and James Bond is an actor in a leading man role attempting to bring action into our otherwise dull and gray lives. We know these fictions aren’t real. But, we use them as a psychological benchmark to determine what is real and true about life. Metaphors can become reality, even if they are only metaphors about reality.

Deep down, if you take anything away from this post, I want you to understand that many categories we utilize, especially for our belief systems, are for suckers.

While I was getting my PhD, I wanted to study a particular line of inquiry that focused on corruption and interpretative invocations. I would like to share a portion of that research with you here because otherwise it’ll go to waste. Unlike many, I don’t really need credit for my work or ideas. Like any person, however, it does create an incentive for me to make more ideas. If you find yourself wanting to use some of the concepts in this post for your own work, please contact me before you do so, as I would not mind collaborating with you. I have found many people believe taking a good idea from someone who is working benevolently is the same as taking a good or bad idea from someone who is working to do harm. It is ironic because it is this same in-distinguish-ability that create problems of interpretation – the reason for this post more generally. They are not the same and only a tyrant creates ideas to do harm because they can’t create ideas to provide value. The number of tyrants is extremely high these days. Now, let us begin…

Imagine the world as a delicate ecosystem. Imagine people who want you to believe the world is robust and strong – that it has handled many trials and will continue to do so far into the future. This sentiment operates using the power of belief and belief, while strong under the right conditions, is next to useless within the context of systematic failure. You can’t believe your way into making the world a better place. You have to act and you have to engage like you are going to act with ideas that provide value. I want you to entertain a world where the person or people who want you to believe in the power of belief are completely and totally wrong. I also want you to suspend their beliefs so you can take up some of your own – if only for a moment – so we can engage your independent thinking. This is not for the faint of heart.

A concept I was working on when I was examining issues of corruption had to do with interpretation and distinguish-ability. This concept does not currently exist in the literature so I was breaking new ground, even though it sounds fairly uncomplicated. I was studying social movements originally when I came across an odd trend: social movements and corruption show up in the same place at the same time without fail. Whether the social movement is demonstrating against corruption or feeding corruption through a false narrative, with whatever benchmark you give corruption, it was always about an issue of corruption.

As I switched to read more about corruption, I started to notice a theme: corruption has a distinguish-ability problem. When I say this, I don’t mean the definition means something different to different people. That’s a fairly obvious conclusion. It means that authority, legitimacy, and corruption cannot technically be distinguished from one another. In fact, we can take this inquiry further, as most of my inductive intuition on this subject came from my experience as a former U.S. Army Military Intelligence Officer. I tend to see the world much differently from other researchers and especially from researchers without my experience. For instance, I came to the conclusion while researching this topic that intelligence is in-distinguish-able from corruption. I have many theories on why this is the case but let me outline my perspective on the distinguish-ability problem and then get to those theories in due time.

Governance is a fickle thing. It requires a ton of effort to create compromise and it requires even more effort to be done “well.” What if I told you that governance and corruption, or the authority given to government to act on your behalf, are the exact same thing? Governments around the world have convinced their citizens that if they give up a portion of their unalienable rights, they will receive protections as part of a social contract. Not all governments are contractual and not all of them are constitutional but all legitimate forms of government provide, at their core, at least one form of extra-legal contractual agreement to its citizens. Otherwise, it would find it impossible to rule legitimately, creating conditions for civil strife, including social movements. I want you to think of modern compromise in governance as a process to create suckers instead of cooperation. Originally, governance was about cooperation. As we got more involved in negotiations and political realities became extremely tense, it became about beating the other side to the point where you win the negotiation and the other side loses. When compromise is no longer about a middle ground, it becomes who can sucker the other side into taking less and giving more.

Intelligence is a vehicle to accomplish this, just as organized crime is a vehicle for smaller groups to organize to gain a competitive advantage in societies across the world. Even terrorist organizations follow the same principle. Over time, this makes corruption in-distinguish-able from governance, as you cannot have governance without trying to sucker your opponent and you cannot have governance without compromise that has modified to become less about compromise in good faith cooperation to reach a mutually beneficial outcome (the stuff of true governance). This is an intriguing thought for several reasons. For one, there are no areas that do not suffer from the distinguish-ability problem, including business. Negotiations in business are no longer about a mutually beneficial outcomes so much as they are about going to stake- or share-holders to explain why your outcome was better than your opponents. The shape of the settlement is so important that sometimes good business persons have to compromise in private (if they do) while telling people they won publicly, hoping no one of importance notices the trickery. Two, if compromise no longer occurs, we are all suckers. All economic, governmental, and diplomatic systems rely on cooperation through compromise. If manipulation reaches critical mass, compromise is impossible and, even if people believe that compromise is happening or possible, it won’t change the aggregate effects that a lack of compromise and excessive manipulation have on a delicate, global ecosystem of nation-states.

The distinguish-ability problem is both extremely convincing and exhaustively bad because it suggests corruption is a perpetual state of being in governance at a certain point when manipulation is the primary method with which we solve problems. You may ask yourself: hasn’t manipulation always existed? You would be absolutely correct. And yet, the manipulation we are talking about is at scale different in modernity than other previous historical points. As information increases in a system, the distinguish-ability problem becomes worse. This isn’t because sorting through noisy information is an issue. Frankly, its because information has enabled people to engage in behaviors that are essentially meant to sucker others in order to gain an advantage (or remove one). When big moguls did it in the U.S. in the 40s, there weren’t many consequences. Now that everyone is doing it, the problem has become massive and governments cannot reign it in without crippling themselves of tactics and systems they have been leveraging for an extremely long time. Changing behavior comes after changing belief and it is an extremely slow process. This problem will get worse before it gets better and ironically it can explain our strategic reticence to solve problems like climate change more generally. If you always fear being the sucker, you don’t act to solve problems – you act to shape the best settlement for you. We haven’t caught up to the reality that corruption is the new standard in governance and it has had imaginable and extraordinary consequences on our social environment(s). If you engage in a mutually beneficial outcome, you don’t cheat because there do not have to be suckers. But, if you do not think a mutually beneficial outcome exists because you want to win an agreement by shaping it, you can only cheat because you don’t want to be a sucker (or the only sucker).

It should also be noted there is no real way to solve the distinguish-ability problem yet. I wanted to look into it but never got the chance.

Thanks for tuning in!

A browser for the masses

Imagine you want to browse the internet so you can explore a wealth of accumulated online information. Much of the information you want is self-seeking. It is the kind of information you search and gain access to so you can inform your future behaviors. This is one of the single greatest contributions of the new technological landscape: human beings can develop their own philosophy without help from government or school or family. You can literally make or remake yourself in your own image – ironically, getting you closer to the divine. For those who have persistent, even partial, access to the internet you should count yourself lucky. At no point in time in human history has it been more possible for people to leave the cave. Want to learn wood-working? YouTube it. Want to become self-sufficient because it fulfills your beliefs? Google it. Want to become a physicist or a baker or a financial expert? Read every book on the subject through the Gutenberg Project or check it out virtually from your local library. You don’t need anyone but yourself to have an epiphany. While collective epiphanies – or epiphanies with others – are the future meta, take it slow… get the individual foundation necessary to explore yourself with a few flicks of your thumb.

You might be asking yourself: “What does this have to do with a browser, Matt?” Information is only as effective as the vehicle chosen to explore it. Manipulation keeps philosophy from propelling itself forward. It also makes it impossible to develop at a pace that matches the future, as it keeps weight imbalanced. Imagine seeking information that is based on your likes, dislikes, or another’s intentions. How possible will it be to experience the joy of the internet if information is pre-packaged, pre-determined, and pre-arranged to cater to the old you at the expense of your future version. Eventually, technology will pass you bye.

A browser is still, to this day, the primary means people use to explore and interact with the internet and all the information it purveys. Recently, Cydog Browser has released a new version of its website. It matches our mission, exudes our philosophy, and, we hope, helps users understand why they should buy-in: we want to radically change the way we find and consume information in a world of constant manipulation, tipping the scales back to reality. Cydog Browser is a browser of the people, by the people, and for the people. Check it out below!

cydogbrowser.com

Datasets and diction

There seems to be a tendency among major companies to harvest data and keep it all to themselves. It has always made me feel like there is a miscommunication with how information flows and how it crafts reality. Under corporate subconscious consensus, data equals money. Realistically, any business person will tell you privately that analysis helps achieve monetization and information is just the medium used to achieve it. In essence, keeping the data to yourself is mostly a selfish metric meant to maintain your current market position. It is not a position of strength.

I figured this occurred for a couple of reasons. Firstly, major companies aren’t hiring the right kinds of people. This is the obvious one. If your people aren’t innovators, you tend to keep information to yourself in order to maximize how much time you have to analyze it with your own personnel. This represents strategic hope because, at the end of the day, you are hoping no one else collects the same or similar data so you can be the first one to the newest strategy or winning idea. It makes some sense. Its a bit misguided. It’s also very destructive to the market ecosystem, especially in the realm of new ideas. Imagine there were no player or salary caps in baseball and the richest teams could just steal all the good players, putting most of them on the bench, so they could bring home the bacon every year. Yeah, I mean, it works. It just makes the sport really boring. How many baseball players would show up with enthusiasm or love for the game? Strategy becomes meaningless because strategy is not really strategy at all. Its like gaining a massive advantage while handicapping your opponent. It doesn’t work in any human endeavor. Not even in war. In fact, in war it virtually guarantees a return to conflict in the future.

I call this phenomena: over-monetization by pseudo-monopolization. It makes our society hate itself and self-loathing and society don’t go hand-in-hand. The 90s were full of these tropes. Many Hollywood movies in that era were a referendum on these ideas. No one wanted to live in a pseudo-dystopian, non-apocalyptic purgatory. Call me old fashioned but I don’t think much has changed since then.

Secondly, they are a monopoly and a monopoly’s strength is, well, in it being a monopoly. If you are big, you keep the resources you can to yourself. While these reasons are all well and good and represent strategic thinking, they are also uni-dimensional. At the end of the day, the kinds of companies that can collect all the data and catalog the world’s information are few and far between. No one is going to compete with them realistically. Its actually kind of delusional to think otherwise. Big companies are so big and suffer from such groupthink it is virtually impossible for them to see the signal for the noise at a certain point. Hiring for culture means you are hiring similar candidates (which makes sense) but the unintended consequence is you hire people that can find the signals you want them to find but not all the signals that are there. This is the equivalent of leaving money at the table. Its just downright bad business and no real business person believes you should leave money when there aren’t risks to maximizing your returns.

Diversity is a meta concept that refers to larger areas than just demographics, including thinking outside the box. This partially reiterates Nate Silver’s point in The Signal and the Noise but does so on a grander scale using industrial psychology. I tend to think most corporations hire for values and culture. This makes you ill-equipped at consistent and sustainable innovation. Innovation is not about values or culture. In fact, its usually about the opposite. If you don’t have the same values or cultural disposition, you usually come up with great ideas no one has ever thought of. Newness is usually only new because another person didn’t think of it and you did. Don’t take my word for it. Peruse some Harvard PhDs that have done empirical studies proving it.

Strangely, and as a side note, this is the strongest argument against monopolies and big business. Even if a corporation is benevolent, forever or just for a spell, its failure to innovate by reproducing the same values without changing them to meet new demands will eventually give rise to a corporation that is not so benevolent. Innovation could possibly be the only art that exists whereby no science can overcome it. The best scientists were extreme personalities because only an extreme personality can innovate before people are ready for it. If you don’t trust my argument on this one, at least trust Jeff Bezo, who mostly reiterates his belief that all companies will fail, especially the big ones. They just aren’t equipped to grow, even though they are sometimes optimal at domination.

If the human race is going to say we want to use data to solve problems that are, at their core, data-related, we should probably make information more freely available for everyone. When Brin and Page first started Google in the 90s and became canonical as an information aggregator, their mission statement was simple and represented this belief: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Ironically, their motto also used to be “don’t be evil” and recently changed to “do the right thing.” I think this represent a bit of psychology. Its extremely difficult for a pseudo-monopoly to gain traction as anything other than evil in a complex world that is continually increasing in complexity. Curated News intends to rectify this situation in ways that are stable and fair to others, leveraging transparency above all else, but stimulating a conversation that allows others to facilitate societal success. Ultimately, business is great and money is useful. But, if society goes downhill, all those constructs are meaningless. A monopoly is a blip in time. Humanity either lives forever because it survives together or dies out.

It is in this spirit Curated News has crafted its dataset. This particular dataset is a work in progress but has been collected using proper statistical methods to produce something that can be used by all. The dataset holds about 60k observations over the span of a year and contains a collection of news stories from about 20+ news organizations. Below is an interesting finding I was able to put into graphic format for any readers that don’t care about numbers as much as I do.

Headlines are an important part in the structure of news and content consumption. Sometimes, people only read headlines. I wanted to see how this could affect information environments in the aggregate. I created a mean variable for sentiment scores across all news outlets and grouped those scores by day to see variation at the lowest level possible without intractability (which I believe to be the day). For those that do not know what Sentiment Analysis is, here is a brief run down.

Sentiment scores are difficult to ascertain in some ways because they are subjective. Usually, sentiment scores range from 1 to -1 per sentence. When aggregated or combined (because sometimes there is more than one sentence in a headline), the scores can surpass this threshold. We don’t usually say content has to be 1 in order for it to be positive or -1 for it to be negative. In fact, those numbers are ideals that don’t really exist outside examples or tests we run to make sure out sentiment analysis is working correctly in the algorithmic back-end. We usually just look at trends over a long period of time in order to determine interesting features to what is emotionally charged (but not emotionally relevant) content. In this vein, we give content a baseline from data and see where it diverges. If headline scores are all within a certain range and cluster within certain data points, the baseline is pretty accurately described as either negative, positive, or neutral based on that framework. In the graphic above, you can see headlines across over 20+ news outlets by day are almost unilaterally more negative than positive. This isn’t a trend that changes. It is the trend that headlines are more negative than positive and less neutral than one would hope for such a small amount of textual material. Imagine consuming or not consuming news. Whether you consume the actual content or not, you are likely reading all those headlines when you partake in the infinite scroll behavior. Well, most of your day spent reading just headlines can be spent reading negative material before you even click on the article. If beliefs of optimism and pessimism matter to human behavior, and we are conditioning people toward pessimism, we are creating the conditions for our own eventual destruction as a species. This may seem heavy but the little things add up over time. Pinching your pennies was a successful business strategy because it works. It would be horrible if pinching your pennies worked in the reverse and we were not saving up for something bigger that is better but rather saving up, through our inaction, for something that is bigger but worse.

Currently, our news-specific information ecosystem is incredibly destructive because it focuses on scandal instead of production. Productive news is news that describes and purveys instead of moving and manipulating. I hope to follow-up on this post with a series of other posts that describe some of the unique insights our dataset has been able to uncover. Our Curated News website has developed a probabilistic, safe, and distributed news headline-oriented feature for your use that is part of a free preview for our Android and iOS applications. It is available here. We have also released an Outrage Evaluator where you can check those stories to see whether they are incepting negative tendencies into your brain. Welcome to the information revolution and thank you for tuning in!

You make the bed you lay in

Have you ever heard the saying: “you made your bed, now lie in it?” I have. Its both common and often misunderstood. To the unwitting observer, it means decisions have consequences and the bed is an analog for some greater loss you have incurred due to your own negligence. To the deeply attuned reader, it actually represents a bit more than that…

The bed you lay in is about organization and meta-strategy. A meta-strategy is a overall vision that humans “reap what they sow” with a qualifier meant to protect extreme cases: “do not judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant.” Sometimes life gets in the way. Your harvest may not be bountiful through misfortune or adversity and sometimes it takes effort and time to grow. But, if you attempted to maximize all your opportunities, we say you gave it your best shot. The bed you made was a good one but it turned out poorly anyways.

I like to look far back into the past and see the brilliance of what was and compare it to the mediocrity that is the now. Innovations of the 90s were absolute game changers. They paved the way for everything in our world. Sure, we needed the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s but the 90s… the 90s were and always will be the definition of American exceptionalism and innovation. It was like the wild west became electronic. The Star Wars franchise, with all its realism and mysticism, just couldn’t compete with Sandra Bullock in The Net or Angelina Jolie in Hackers. Take my humble opinion for whats its worth but those movies are still iconic because the themes are reused often without as much effect. While there are many inventions of the 90s we can examine, the one that is often relegated to obscurity is actually the one that changed the world: Napster. Some call it the new millennium of technology, as it was founded at the end of the 90s. And yet, it is very much a product of the 90s in both technical code and culture.

People tend to think of this company as the pirates of yesteryears. And yet, if you actually think about it, the sheer volume of innovations created by this company will blow your mind. Napster wasn’t a music or technology company. By all rights, it was the first social media one – both technically and culturally. For one, it operated on a protocol called peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing. In order for someone to get music, people have to share their own in what was becoming a library of music with a “cloud storage” that was much easier to access because it was a direct hook to others and couldn’t be intercepted or traced easily. Its technical brilliance is still in use today (even though it is outdated) and law enforcement still cannot defeat the P2P protocol, as piracy sites still rely on a version of it that hasn’t changed in almost 20-30 years. If success is measured in capability and endurance, P2P would be a nuke in the technical arsenal of the coding community. Two, the music industry was absolutely awful at getting the word out about new music. Napster made their industry successful and gave them the model to be successful before they even thought about it. Think about iTunes and think about how it was just a recycled version of music purchasing schemes that already existed in two spots. First, at a retail CD stores. Second, as a free commodity on Napster or the radio. Then, think about why iTunes came into existence. Our obsession with music occurred in direct relation to our fetish of it from Napster because we could experience more of it without as much effort (like going to a store or constantly pressing the tune button on our radios). If it hadn’t been free, we probably would have given up on all the effort of finding our tastes and just gone to our 3 concerts per year on average and been mostly happy. Instead, Napster made music the definitive commodity fetish of the new millennium and Apple leveraged this to create the iPod so you could take it on the go. Without Napster, Apple was useless. This means Napster both enabled the music industry, reestablished Apple’s capability to become a dominant technology player, and invented the iPhone, as this was the natural progression from the iPod. Heck, we can even give Napster credit for making new music or giving America cultural supremacy, as American music traveled to foreign countries before their own music had a chance to become successful. You could give credit to the music industry’s roaring efforts and Hollywood marketing schemes. Or, you can lay it all at Napster’s beautiful and magnificent feet. Let’s expand this even farther and let’s blow your mind even more so we can make you a true believer.

MySpace was a great platform. But, honestly, at the time, no one actually wanted to share photos over cyberspace. They didn’t want to publicly communicate with people. They didn’t even want to make their own cool HTML pages that selfishly engaged their vanity. Obviously, a lot has changed since then. Most, if not all, people were on MySpace for the music. MySpace couldn’t have existed without Napster turning music into a commodity fetish and Facebook was a distilled and minimalist version of MySpace, the platform Napster enabled to become successful by fact. Imagine how many companies Facebook created and take all that credit and give it up to your new favorite company and business icon: Napster. At this point, if you aren’t just stumbling over your own thoughts, you haven’t thought about the inexplicable nature of innovation and exponentialism. Napster created from nothing what all these other companies needed from Napster. At the end of the day, the beauty of technology is in its capacity to enable multiplication. America lost track of this fundamental capitalistic practice and gutted the platform. Thankfully, they did it slowly and only after all the innovations were created – but it was a fluke. We are seeing that backfire on America now and I should probably explain why.

If you know me well, you’ll know my new favorite TV show is Ted Lasso. It is hands down the single greatest example of beauty in the age of binge-television as you can get. It has complex characters and a difficult to swallow story line that actually makes it believable. In this show, there is a character named Jamie Tartt, who is a selfish and aggrandizing soccer superstar. He doesn’t pass because he thinks the best player should take all the shots. He doesn’t give credit where credit is due. He doesn’t lift people up even when group effort yields more results than individual triumph. At the end of the day, he is America personified. That’s not a sleight. Individuals can accomplish a lot and many of the most brilliant innovations or ideas come from a single individual (I’ve checked) and not a group of people. And yet, it is a sort of intimate irony to engage as an individual in what is a team sport. This is where America is Jamie Tartt. Did you notice how Napster created all those innovations that simulated economic growth that even a financial collapse in 2008 couldn’t crush? Instead of passing the ball to the right player in the right spot to make the easy play, America makes a difficult play and, while still successful, presses their luck in the future of how talent versus luck creates winning events. Instead of giving credit where credit is due, the U.S. undercut Napster to relegate it and others in similar veins to obscurity. The P2P protocol still isn’t mainstream because of its association with piracy and theft in relation to law enforcement. Instead of taking the most innovative talent to the top, the American government made it easier for the un-merited elites to continue to engage their supremacist culture without realizing they are in a team sport – they will eventually run out of innovation, as Napster can only lift you up for so long. We made our bed and we have to lie in it. But, the truth is more complicated than that because the U.S. Government forces us to lie in beds that no reasonable person would make and engages a set of rules and standards that kill innovation that no reasonable innovator can understand. Let’s discuss how America is Jamie Tartt.

The world modifies to meet changing operand-based demands. This means the environment slowly changes through addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. We either calculate the equation correctly or calculate it poorly, leaving us unable to navigate our environment appropriately or with success. If you calculate incorrectly for a multitude of decisions, you’ll eventually reach the equivalent of a critical mass event. You can only get decisions so wrong so often, otherwise they create compounding losses. Informational losses are pretty close to energy losses in how they work systematically. Critical mass events are usually associated with a massive loss-oriented event in order to redistribute information or energy evenly where before it was part of a lop-sided and unequal relationship. Suffice to say, explosion and implosion aren’t good conditions for human behavior, even though they are great at helping complex systems reach equilibrium in relation to energy. This is where the energy version of critical mass is unlike the informational one, as critical mass events are neutral. To human beings, they are the death knell for continued social power and we tend to try to force equilibrium onto complex systems unnaturally. Call it a sort of ego complex to try to control all those events that are only possible to control if your meta-strategy is a good one (and this is incredibly difficult). Jamie Tartt, like America, blames everyone else for the team’s loss instead of re-calibrating their perspectives to see where poor teamwork is responsible.

Recently, the U.S. Government decided to attempt to pass a complex technology policy that is the equivalent of gutting Napster before it has had a chance to set the stage for massive industry and financial gains and innovation. They have lumped it into an infrastructure deal in order to recoup revenues they feel they are losing to cryptocurrency in the form of unpaid taxes. Ironically, this type of legislation would have been ineffective against Napster and it is probably Napster’s utter brilliance that made Congressional impropriety unsuccessful when it first came on the scene. As a result, we were able to reap all the benefits of Napster instead of a portion of those additions in the calculus that is the global economy. Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good and America is the luckiest country in the world. At its core, this amendment regulates everything in the cryptocurrency sector because it regulates improperly. It is complicated to explain and the point of this post is not to show the details of cryptocurrency regulatory framework. The point is to show how we got lucky with Napster and the inevitable unluckiness of our decisions on cryptocurrency are a direct result of our own free will improperly applied. To do that, I’ll need to describe part of the financial industry…

The fact is banks are dinosaurs. I said it. I mean it. Dinosaurs are great at killing – a product of their size and my own psychology after seeing one to many Jurassic Park movies. Dinosaurs are also a metaphor for people who are great at stopping the old from becoming the new through intense power fetish. No reasonable banker could possibly think the future of currency is not cryptocurrency. The facts are: electronic is better than cutting trees to print any number of currency related material on and currency is better when it is mostly encrypted and definitely more secure than when it is not. Currency is also better when transactions can be made open without middle men getting in the way. The only thing banks could do by the time they caught on to these inevitable realities was delay the success of cryptocurrency long enough to get in on it. And yet, we have a problem here… First, if a bank is delaying the adoption or success of the future financial system, and cryptocurrency is the future financial system, they are making it easier for them to stay relevant but harder for us as a country and society to innovate. If Napster never had the chance to scale, music would never have become a global commodity fetish and an industry that makes more money every year than many governments pull in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would be selling CDs in retail stores, advertising on bus stops, or making movies to prop up soundtracks. Cryptocurrency has been stifled and obstructed in order to give monopolies (or pseudo monopolies?) time to scale their own operations to meet those new demands. Actions have consequences and its the small consequences over time that add up to larger events beyond our control. A meta-strategy is a strategy that only works because it is aggregated and organized over time to maximize opportunities over time. Despite that, cryptocurrencies have had resounding success. My feeling is that this success could have been greater than it already has been and it would have largely protected economies around the world from the upcoming inflation we will undoubtedly see from a stagnating economy due to a global pandemic.

Right now, hands down, America is what I like to call the world’s greatest computing super power. Meaning, we have the lion’s share of all server space and real estate in the world. By top ten biggest square footage companies in the world, America has 7 of the largest data centers. Over those same top ten companies, we own an aggregated 13 million square footage of server real estate. In the top ten, only three other countries are up to our level: China, India, and the UK. These facts are meant to show both scale and dominance in this area based on characteristics any reasonable person would say are incredibly telling. If the financial system is going to be based on computing power (and we want that computing power to be used responsibly in ways that alleviate problems of climate change), it would behoove any country in the world to have a robust server real estate and this is especially true for a superpower like America trying to maintain its superpower status. If you watch Ted Lasso, you’ll realize the irony behind getting a superpower to act like a superpower because Jamie Tartt could possibly be the worst person (as a character) ever. The fact is: it makes no sense to regulate, even partially, the future financial system while it is still in its throes of scaling up because they have been pushed down by corporate systems in order for them to play catch up. The U.S. Government should know this and they should also know that a bed you lie in is less relevant than the seeds you plant producing a bountiful harvest in the future. Technology is about maximizing your opportunities and America has not done that over the last twenty years. But, we have complained a lot – especially about cryptocurrency. Then again, now that I think about it, the music industry did a lot of complaining when it came to Napster. It was just that the music industry was not nearly as strong as the banking sector and Napster was utterly brilliant in its design to inhibit regulatory frameworks, especially when it came to enforcement.

Eventually, luck runs out – and this is true even of the most talented players in the world. America is seeing its luck run out in ways that are unbelievable to a superstar in the same way Jamie Tartt can’t see his own failings. We tend to give a lot of leeway to ourselves or our culture when we mess up but absolutely no leeway to others when they mess up. There may very well be a Ted Lasso around the corner that can turn this whole thing around. How will we know if there is one? The U.S. Government only helps those who don’t deserve its help and innovators and inventions that make superpowers exist are relegated to pirates on the open sea, engaging their freedoms as outlaws instead of as the world’s greatest talents that can complement Jamie Tartt in the team sport that is the domestic and global economy. Let’s cross our fingers everybody.

We are all detectives now

There are quite a few realities that are beginning to rear their heads these days. The first is a concept I like to call: we are all detectives now. In the age of the internet, misinformation has increased substantially. Some see this as a guaranteed side effect of the human condition. I do not. I see this as a manipulative tradition for dominant-seeking behaviors engaged by those interested in power. The only way to drown out the advantage of information in a time of ubiquitous information is to flood the ecosystem with more of it, making analytical skills based on talent paramount. Essentially, someone is incidentally or accidentally creating a class of intellectuals. At the end of the day, if you can sift through the noise to find the signal, you are at a distinct advantage. This is where the next reality comes in….

The second I like to call credibility talent. This collection of two words actually describes more of the human capacity for success than virtually all other forms of intelligence. In fact, I would say geniuses are identified based on their credibility talent. Let me explain. Human beings tend to over-romanticize the benefits derived from two types of human-centric activities. The first is strategy and the second is operations. In intelligence, these are the kinds of jobs everyone wants. And yet, they are the lowest in terms of credibility talent. Strategy takes virtually no energy cost when you compare it to the wealth of knowledge and intellectual pursuits involved in the human experience because planning far out (or when things are not messy) is not nearly as difficult. Operations take a ton of energy and policy-makers usually reduce these energy costs by spending a ton of resources on them. Ironically, both strategy and operations (or top and bottom centralization) are where a majority of all resources are spent in complex systems. This represents both our ability to want to control inputs to get at outcomes and our inability to control outcomes because of inputs. Its a weird form of psycho-philosophical trickery that stems from both our subconscious and epistemology. Credibility talent is a real world phenomenon. It says the greatest cross section of talent in a given industry will be placed in neither strategy or operations. To point a fact, they will usually be placed in areas we like to call the tactical. While there is a weird blurring between both the operational movement of getting policy done and the tactical nature of its doing, there is actually a firm separation between both operational and tactical level endeavors. For one, operational conditions are where you do more because you have more to work with, with few exceptions. For instance, if an “operator” or “business person” has millions of dollars to conduct an operation or business pivot, they have substantially increased their likelihood for success. Furthermore, in intelligence, if you have a cover, you are more likely to be successful. These are advantages in terms of resources that exist technically through means acquisition and psychological safety. However, if you are tasked with helping a company that is hemorrhaging money to achieve financial solvency, you usually have none of those advantages. To point a fact, since significant money was hemorrhaged, someone is likely asking you to spend as little money as possible to get them out of the red so they can offload them from their books, recouping a portion of any losses. The skills necessary to do more with less are tactical in nature because only a tactician can engage these tasks with a modicum of success. Ask any Marine. They will tell you the only warrior worth their salt is the one that can literally achieve victory with limited resources. This is the credibility talent nexus. Someone with credibility will not need resources to achieve objectives – and this is true in all areas of the human experience. Someone with real talent will always be credible. It is one reason I have found there is a deep gap between the U.S. Intelligence Community and their capabilities and activities. It is this same reason I feel lucky to be part of the U.S. Military as a former Military Intelligence Officer. I truly believe the entire talent pool of intelligence resides not within the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), or any number of other U.S.-based organizations. In the words of the comic book character, Lex Luthor, “Some people can read War and Peace and come away thinking it’s a simple adventure story. Others can read the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper and unlock the secrets of the universe.” Your credibility talent in doing more with less is proof you are better at analytics because you can make good on doing things with less when other people needed more resources to accomplish similar tasks. While Lex Luthor is a bad guy, and bad guy wisdom is usually complicated, the meta-analogy is beautiful, sophisticated, and simple to understand so I figured I would use it here.

There is a famous philosopher named Foucault that developed the equivalent of what I would like to call a philosophical puzzle dubbed the Panopticon. At its core, the pantopticon in modernity has become a metanarrative denoting the transition of government from authority figure to watcher. Problematically, the panopticon is far more complicated than that, as governments around the world should have been paying attention to the hidden transcript – or bubble gum wrapper – that should be considered one of Foucault’s many seminal works. The problem of the pantopicon, while not stated, is always that the watchers achieve power by being able to watch others. In the absence of knowing whether you are or are not being watched, you tend to act appropriately, as the fear of being watched changes your behavior and establishes a sort of extra-typical authority for the watcher. And yet, eventually you can see the movement of this idea as fluid where transitions stand on one another. At the end of Foucault’s work, you ask yourself: what happens when the watcher starts to watch for too long? What happens when the watcher becomes the watched?

There is a great article in The Economist I would like to use to spring board this problematic. It is available here and aptly titled: “The People’s Panopticon: The Promise of Open-source Intelligence.” The article is great not because it was written well, although it was, or surpasses standards for intellectual prowess, which it does not. This article is great because it is part of an important discussion about class distinction, hierarchies, and pseudo-intellectualism…

Open-source intelligence is a somewhat new tradition in intelligence that showcases the importance of open and publicly available information in relation to the information ecosystem. And yet, this open and publicly available information has been around for far longer than the term open-source has been in vogue. In fact, if you take anything away from this post, I want you to think of the term as a form of elitism by an upper, and somewhat deluded, intellengicia looking to gain traction in making this open and public information both exclusive and excludable. If an elite group tells you your internet sleuthing is a form of professionalized work, they can relegate you to unprofessionalized by making you an amateur. I’m sure there is more to it than that, including an attempt to make all forms of open and publicly available information intelligence-oriented in order to make it “classified” with psychological framing devices. To point a fact, open and publicly available information can never be classified, as classification relies on reasonable damage that could not reasonably be done in the absence of secretive and surreptitious frameworks. To take the opposite position of the article, open-source intelligence is not the people’s panopticon… it is the panopticon (which was always made of people) in its death throes attempting to leverage what little powers it has left in order to trick your psychology and philosophies into believing you are still a part of its panopticon framework. When it doubt, deny information ecosystem changes to maintain the status quo, as delusion can be just as powerful and generative as reality.

At this moment, the largest share of people in professionalized positions are actually tactical in nature. With increases in free time, especially due to the pandemic, you can engage in online detection more readily than normal. People have been calling this a “woke” tendency but in reality this is more like a tendency to engage your human capability of doing more with less. When you refine your credibility talent, you tend to engage it more often. Furthermore, since the largest number of people are actually in fields requiring massive credibility talent, those individuals are identified and refine their genius more often. This increases the sheer volume of sleuthing.

It is strange to think the pantopticon, a concept based on discipline, is the exact opposite of discipline. A pantopicon leads to watchers and watchers cannot be anything other than dominant-seeking power authorities, save a few exceptions. I find AI is virtually unbeatable in doling out discipline, as it never attempts to hold on to its power and does not actually care about its continued observation capability, favoring, instead, conditions of observation where all constituents of a system are able to check and re-check the work of networks and nodes to ensure system integrity. I know, that sounded like a ton of words. What it means: AI is not interested in watching. It is interested in doing more with less – or reducing energy costs by making a system self-perpetuating. Ironically, systems work their best when they are efficient and AI knows that and seeks those systems out, as if adaptation is a movement of fluidity where one day it is a watcher and the next it is being watched. AI doesn’t seem to care one way or another, as long as it limits collapses while maintaining its original mandates. This seems like an important feature of AI that should be studied in opposition to the frameworks being purported by others in a series of movements to maintain status quo. The world is fluid because, and I have mentioned it earlier, it is an operand. It is curious to witness these historic tendencies as they revolve around problems of both information and sections of enduring human capacity to make elites that exclude others from being a part of the solution. We love classes and a computer, in my research, doesn’t actually see much derived benefit from class structure because it is both self-replicating, overly-destructively, and de-generatingly inefficient over time. Very curious indeed that the next phase of our internet sleuthing tendencies will be the impossibility of secrets. It will be even more curious to see how governments handle this new reality, as it will be impossible to maintain the status quo in this area in the future.

Symbolic abuse(s)

Human beings are always trying to become dominant. If you remember the snake on the island problem, you’ll think back to those moments where the human being is re-spawned in our counterfactual. Now, I want you to think about the differences between a “computer” and a human being after multiple re-spawns. Re-spawns for a human being can either be a symbol of failure or victory. When they defeat the snake, a re-spawn becomes victory and the lesson learned is that we are the apex predator. When the snake beats us, we are failures and must try, try, and try again to become the apex predator. Under this human condition, life becomes a game. The delusion is not that the game is a game, as the situational context is based on a game so this would be a normal sequence of logical thought. The delusion is the symbolic interaction which causes the ultimate crutch in the form of the greatest rivalry human beings can be privy to: performative violence. Oftentimes, we tend to see human behavior, at its worst, as attached to physical violence. And yet, counterintuitively, this is actually not where much of the human capacity for violence and rivalry manifests.

Performative violence is an expression of violence that is not physical. Instead, it takes the form of a performance against an adversary to achieve violent expression. Examples can include insurrection, riot, protest, dancing, or political statements like standing, sitting, and kneeling at typically deviant times. It is not limited to these forms, as we shall see later in this post. Performance is the goldilocks zone of human rivalry because it is the ultimate indicator of intentions and intentionality. You can often figure out all you need to know about a human being based on the kinds of symbols they use and how they use them for an effect. Virtually all forms of analysis in legal matters rely on these principles of modus and means – or motive and methods – to establish both victim and perpetrator. A core irony of this conundrum is that symbols are meaningless to a logical observer, even though the intentions of the person wielding them can be traumatizing and violent. After all, life is not a game and the snake is trying to survive and only perceives us as a threat when it feels threaten. On the flip side, a human being seeks threats out to neutralize and destroy them so they no longer exist even when they are no longer threats. One could say an apex predator is not built on the need to be dominant but the human condition revolves around dominance. It is our great delusion because we honestly think if we kill or submit everything to our will we will have ultimate security. We are seeing the aftereffects of those choices on ecosystems around the world as their failures reach critical mass due to our delusions of grandeur.

Why is this important? The symbolic abuses that stem from performative violence are meta-level tactics used by nation states around the world to engage and trigger dominant – and seemingly regressive – human behaviors in order to gain competitive advantage. After all, when we seek to become dominant, we make errors of emotion. The forced error of another is the equivalent of an advantage in a round of dominant-seeking behaviors. Strange to think that our tactics are so destructive not because they work but because they instill and promulgate our delusional tendencies to gain advantage for domination. If we think back to the snake on island problem, this checks out. Instead of a live-and-let-live mindset, we work harder to kill the snake the next time, increasing our likelihood for conflict and ensuring we re-spawn more often than we would need to otherwise. This is not a survival skill and its not even a skill of the dominant – it is a skill of a beta seeking to become dominant, as someone who is dominant doesn’t fight at every turn but seeks to fight only where necessary (and this is probably the reason they are dominant in the first place). The snake on the island problem indicates the snake is more dominant than we are because it pays us no mind unless it feels threatened. If we gave the snake unlimited re-spawns, like the “computer,” it would probably go about its business as usual. Seeking to become dominant does not make you dominant and this is an interesting juxtaposition for the human psyche to contend with and inhibit.

Let’s take a gander at some of the symbolic abuses nations level at one another in order to gain competitive advantage in the delusional game of performative violence and geopolitics. Some of these will blow your mind and they are important because these our nations engaging in destructive behaviors at our expense…

Many organizations across the world have decided that, in the absence of legalized conflict, they need to engage in a sort of culture war against their rivals. This is not new theater and is the equivalent of a dog marking their territory. In fact, a famous Marxist Philosopher, Antonio Gramsci, thought this up in the early 1900s. We have already discussed how many of these organizations would probably have engaged in these cult(ure) wars regardless of whether physical violence was even occurring so there is room to be skeptical here. It is highly likely they are engaging their proclivities under the ruse of defense, as we do in attempting to kill the snake when the probability of a bite is low. One example of this type of behavior is the Russian GRU, a premier military intelligence unit of the Russian military. Did you know the same symbol we know and love from comic books is also used by shadowy sections of this service as their military emblem? That’s right… Batman works for the GRU. It is different enough that one could write this off as a coincidence and explain it away. And yet, it is similar enough that it is unrealistic to argue conspiracy theory. A full featured article can be found here. They aren’t the first military to engage in shadowy symbolism, as even America’s premier and secret military organizations utilize colors as their nom de plum and there are coincidences where those colors have been labelled in previous conflict arrangements. You can read a book on the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) here that details a ton of weird and shadowy symbolism they engage in often.

How do you signal to an adversary that you got them in the proverbial game of meta-tag? It seems ideas on dominance establishes cycles of destructive relations between nation states. This is interesting for a number of reasons. A snake is often not seen as sentient but a “computer” could be sentient and still act similarly to the snake by not engaging egoistic and dominating tendencies. The human being is singularly focused on destruction and it seems nation states are destructive because they utilize these frameworks and leverage them to gain their own competitive advantages. This seems like an important frame for AI ethicists. Before we go half-cocked to prove to the world that AI is corruption personified (pun intended), we should comparatively gauge the lesser of two thematic and narrative evils at work: humanity versus skynet and snake-obsessed human being versus live-and-let-live AI. This seems like an avenue to change the way we view ourselves as superior by reversing the paradigm to see us as a problem. Climate change and endangered species would probably agree with AI on this one.

Human-centric problems are human caused issues. We should ask ourselves: what’s worse… to make our own problems and project those problems on others or deny those problems are human problems to begin with? We should also ask ourselves whether AI needs more ethicists than humans do and whether we’ve been doing enough ethical pontificating lately to justify our own ethical superiority. Sure, we have plenty of ethical bodies and our litigious society has made us careful. But, are we really becoming better at being ethical in a society where both a lack of ethics and ethics are destroying it equally fashionably? Just my two cents.

The shuffle master

This post contains a thought experiment in the form of a GitHub Gist. You can see a wide range of my ongoing and concurrent coding projects by going to my GitHub. I am always looking for intuitive ways to combine analytics, statistics, coding, and social media in a format everyone can understand. I have added my GitHub sponsor badge at the end of this post in case you would like to reward my efforts. You should also think about getting a GitHub account so you can begin your own coding journey!

Rotten to the core

I’ve slowly started to realize the American Dream is dead. The American Dream says anyone with a great idea can succeed with hard work and hussle. The marketplace is the ultimate form of equilibria because great ideas, like cream, rises to the top. The reality is much, much different. Better ideas fail all the time. Big business has the ultimate stranglehold on success in virtually all industries. This has been true of emerging green technologies killed by Big Oil to maintain corporate profits and this has been true of cryptocurrencies that Big Banking has tried to kill to maintain their financial monopolies. Control is deeply embedded into our economic system, even if it is not a core feature to Capitalism. And yet, these Big-Bigs seem unstoppable. Why is that exactly?

Partisanship makes it nearly impossible to stop Big-Bigs. A marginally bi-partisan government breaks-up a monopoly because they usually put democracy first. A partisan government can’t table their emotions long enough to agree democracy matters in the first place. It is a sad fact partisanship splits Congressional votes on actions to regulate Big-Bigs, allowing #Bigs the time needed to devise and implement strategies to infect political life – further replicating conditions necessary to perpetuate their continued, unaltered existence. At this point, the Big-Big ecosystem is so intricately attached to political life it is impossible to get elected without their support – in terms of SuperPAC, black-book funding or in terms of utilizing their data-based infrastructure to reach target political audiences.

Why do I bring this up you may ask? There are only two major mobile operating systems in the entire world: iOS and Android. Both are run by only two companies. Both have ecosystems they manage on behalf of the world to deliver application-specific content to the world’s mobile users. Let that sink in for a moment. We will revisit it later.

Recently, I have started branching my Android application developments to iOS. I am not a one-trick pony. I want everyone to benefit from my platforms and the only way to do so is not to disenfranchise an entire segment of the mobile market that uses iOS. I began my crusade to learn SwiftUI, Apple’s patented programming language, and finally made some excellent apps to publish on their App Store. At first, I didn’t think anything when I got push back on my application submissions because I figured this was typical quality assurance. I couldn’t have been more wrong…

Every single Apple App Store developer will get their app rejected a number of times over the course of their interactions with Apple’s application review teams. The review teams are good at what they do generally. However, they are guaranteed to be rife with corruption because they get the opportunity to define what Apple’s brand means to them based on their beliefs on what Apple wants them to believe about its brand. It is also impossible to separate their biases from their discretion to accept and reject apps on their platform. Recently, Apple’s problem with arbitrary content policy enforcement got them in hot water. In fact, it was so bad Apple had to make a separate App Review Board so Apple developers could appeal reviewer decisions. That’s definitely an admission they know their review teams are out-of-control. It is also an admission they have a problem with their own employee’s judgements, adding an appeal process to review potential abuses of discretion. Essentially, Apple has admitted they are corrupt when it comes to their application review process and the irony of this condition is that their app store represents a huge portion of their total earnings. Corruption where a large portion of money is involved means corruption is about more than just wiedling power arbitrarily. It means it is about money.

Curated News has gotten a ton of push-back from Apple reviewers who have utilized and corruptly interpreted policies to keep updates of our app off their store. It is truly tough to separate your beliefs from your duty as a corporate employee and I get that completely. However, they called my application, Curated News, a healthcare related application (which it is not) because it contains a few stories related to COVID-19. And yet, 100% of the other major news organizations available on the Apple App Store, including Apple News and Google News, contain stories related to COVID-19. This hasn’t affected my current version, which is available on iOS at this very moment. However, I spent months learning SwiftUI to make a major update to the Curated News platform on iOS – and users are extremely attached to beautiful user-interfaces and features that add convenience – only to have it continually rejected for a problem that does not exist on the platform. When I say the Amercan dream is dead, I mean it. Obstruction exists as a natural feature to the American Dream. But, this is not naturally occurring obstructionism. This is methodical and devious, like the Big-Big infrastructure that facilitates its existence in the first place.

Curated News knows its tough to stand-up for yourself. However, Big-Bigs will continue to blame their corrupt practices on their low-level employees for as long as you accept it as a reasonable excuse. Politicians can only be manipulated for as long as you refuse to do the right thing by sending your votes toward breaking-up the Big-Big ecosystem. We can only exist in a world you want to live in if you take actions necessary to protect your neighbor as well as you protect yourself and your loved ones. Support the platform that takes down the Big-Bigs by leveling the playing field into a more fair capitalistic enterprise.

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