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It’s strange how access to information has sped up the self-education of the general public to a point where I think it is becoming a problem for the ruling class. Maybe that’s why they’re becoming insane and trying to make the public discourse so insane. Let’s talk.
My uncle is an previous-college conspiracy theorist; he toiled away breaking coal with a pickaxe searching for diamonds in contrast to how spoiled we are now. An clever man, former Army Ranger turned lengthy-haul trucker. Self-educated, an autodidact sort of man; the “anon profile”.
He was constantly gobbling up information in the pre-internet era. He’s basically my subject matter expert on tap for anything to do with the trilateral commission or militia movement stuff from the ’90s; he’s my guy. But learning these things was so laborious back then.
Having to meet people in person and accept information from them, like at gun shows etc. Reading books you had to go buy or physically check out, because e-books didn’t exist and neither did the internet (or what did exist, there wasn’t much anyway).
He filled the rest of the gap with talk radio and CB radio with other truckers. It’s fascinating how truckers are either dumb as bricks or are wandering sages with astronomical IQ. They’re truly both ends of the bell curve, much like Combat Arms in the military.
My main point I wanted to address, and other 30-something or 40-something anons can attest, is that access to information moves so fast and has become so effortless that people are going down the information waterslide at breakneck speeds.
It used to be that you were a normie, and at some point you got activated into some kind of “alternate” political or belief “tunnel” that was gatekept but a bit off the beaten path. Maybe you became a libertarian or even had a Marxist phase or something.
Eventually, that stopped being enough, maybe you became more of a generally conservative type, then a RW type, then more of an esoteric type once you get in there nice and deep. But this used to be a process that took a decade or more.
I’m seeing zoomers go from lolberts who were buying Hawaiian shirts and larping about the “boog” two years ago who are now reading esoteric and political theory books. Four years ago they were pretty close to normie, and now they’re reading Evola and Uncle Ted material.
This is additionally bleeding over into the true world in a really significant means. @MogTheUrbanite was talking earlier about how dudes at his church are just openly talking about Klaus Schwab/WEF/Great Reset shit and demons, out in the open, in a non-conspiratorial matter of fact way.
Younglings might not appreciate how utterly significant that is. I gained political awareness in an area where most people just thought George Soros was a hedge fund manager and if you said the name “Rothschild” or “Soros”, people called you some tinfoil anti-Semite crank.
For example, that live clip of Newt Gingrich literally getting yanked mid-interview for talking conspiratorially about Soros. This wasn’t even that long ago, but enough people knew by then.
Now, it’s just a household fact. This is something that is a major change when observed in a decade-long timescale. This is a big fucking change to the status quo. Information accessibility has, from the POV of traditional gatekeepers, completely spun out of their control.
That’s why suppression of conspiratorial nodes has, for the most part, capitulated. In electronic warfare terms, the enemy has switched from jamming the specific frequency their enemy is using to just jamming *all* frequencies with white noise. Just lunacy across the board.
I think this is most easily observable on the chans and specifically /pol/. Reddit had central points of moderation they could easily control. Conde Nast executives at the strategic level and subreddit moderators at the tactical level. They were easy.
But 4chan was another beast. There’s no “karma” and there’s no “downvotes” and with everyone posting anonymously, you can’t just ban the accounts that other people hold in high regard and replace them with your own. It’s “pissing in an ocean of piss”, as we used to say.
What really did the site in, and probably costs the powers that be a pretty penny, is just constant info-ops, trolling, board sliding, and stupid BBC threads. But making 4chan suck did what anons always said it would do, which is drive us off our containment site.
The chans essentially fell on the sword and lost their hermeticism that let deep autistic discussion and ops occur, which was a great loss for sure, but in doing so the “anon actuality tunnel” broke the guardrails and went off-road, in every single direction, integrating with others.
It was like there was a massive, dangerous cyst that was causing problems for the host, so they popped it and infectious frogposters burst out in every direction. Covering the walls, the windows, the door, just a big nasty mess that they can’t clean up or put back in the box.
Now we’ve got zoomers speedrunning political theory that millennial anons pioneered through an experience that took almost a decade. 22-year-olds Kaczynski posting and chuckling with their friends with niche in-jokes about long dead philosophers and ancient rites. Beautiful.
I just want people who think resisting the regime is “shifting too slowly” to realize how much has changed in the last 25 or so years thanks to the internet. Especially for the zoomers who just haven’t been around long enough to see it; it is crazy.
In the mid ’00s, not many people owned ARs or any other semi-automatic rifles, very few people casually owned body armor or night vision, and almost no one was training to gunfight as a casual hobby. We were all arguing “Is the Iraq War actually vital or one other cynical oil play”?
That was the extent of discourse then, “Is this new war necessary? Do muslims really want to destroy us? How much money is this gonna cost?” and arguments over the PATRIOT Act had been akin to right now’s skinny blue line cult arguing with the individuals who need you canceled now.
Now the complete nation is brazenly questioning, by means of one aspect or one other, the legitimacy of varied appendages of the federal government. The libs on the left are now calling SCOTUS illegitimate, whereas most on the appropriate are calling 2020 illegitimate and that congress is outright corrupt.
Even if the world bought a hell of much more clown-y usually, most of the people is like 4 occasions as knowledgeable now as they had been again then. It makes my head spin to actually give it some thought. I see random contacts from IRL on my cellphone popping up with “Welcome them to Signal/Telegram!” 24/7.
My nice aunt reads The Epoch Times, my spouse talks about demons, my nice grandma who is 91 thinks we’re heading for Weimar Germany, the 22-yr-previous who mounted {an electrical} situation on my range casually talked to me about adrenochrome ffs.
There is a lot consciousness now in contrast to how there used to be nearly none. There’s no such factor as “fringe” anymore, you possibly can solely be cringe. The world is fucking loopy and something is doable.
This is nice as a result of you possibly can’t resolve an issue individuals do not know exists.
There is no conquering this ideological battlespace for the regime. Conquering it *all* like they did within the days of TV and Radio is simply too goddamn costly. It’s all break up up into one million totally different ideological fiefs. At nice price, you possibly can conquer a fief, however not all of them.
So they fireplace out digital chaff frantically in each path, they play whack-a-mole with excessive-engagement nodes that are or might be threats. The enemy is now reactively defending themselves, not proactively steering the course. This is the Titanic and we are the iceberg.
Every time they pop chaff within the type of a brand new psy-op, sample recognition kicks in and fewer individuals fall for it; lots of people recuperate and cease being fooled sooner and fewer individuals fall for the subsequent one.
They’re basically caught in a sheared reactive OODA loop that they aren’t keen to get out of, a demise-spiral of hubris and the crows are coming residence to roost.
They simply fucked up so dangerous ruining the chans, it is like they exiled a bunch of web inexperienced berets to each neighboring nation to prepare proxy forces. So right here we are.
If 9/11 occurred right now, what number of Americans would query it and what number of would implicate our authorities on day one?
Repeat that to your self two or 3 times; that is how a lot has modified.
If you loved this thread, you possibly can examine me out at aristophanes.substack.com the place I overview fiction and youngsters books for anons and principally *by* anons.