♖

Gf Application youtu.be/iuZd5S8QdBo?si… via @YouTube

Dreamscape - 009 Sound System (2008)

"The prudent man rule is based on common law stemming from the 1830 Massachusetts court formulation Harvard College v. Amory"

In a certain sense I am more attracted to particular forms of poverty than I am wealth, especially certain forms of poverty which utilize those very same levers which generate massive amounts of wealth, what is interesting to me is a certain form of self-imposed Limitation, also Undergroundness and The Hermit, scale

When I was in the club in China, the bouncer heard me speaking English and he comes up to me and says " Please come with me now.", and I'm thinking " ahhh shit, they going to kick me out." So he pulls me aside and takes out his phone, and just shows me a video of him saying the N-word over and over again. China truly is 1000 years ahead of the west.

The social media black market. (You know the one: where people buy followers, likes, engagement — harmless vanity metrics for the digitally insecure, right?) Oh, if only it were that simple. This seemingly innocuous underground economy, a playground for influencer wannabes and attention seekers, didn't just *exist*. It was meticulously cultivated (a petri dish), then *weaponized* by state-sponsored actors, morphing from follower inflation into a sophisticated engine of geopolitical manipulation and disinformation. I started digging into the banal economics of digital popularity contests (a fascination of mine, the absurd lengths people go to for validation), and ended up in the chilling rabbit hole of the Internet Research Agency (IRA). Remember them? The Russian state-sponsored troll farm. They weren't just dabbling; they started their operations against Ukraine as early as **2014**. (Let that sink in: a decade ago, this wasn't some recent innovation.) What most people missed (or, *ignored*), was that their Instagram operations, for all their supposed low-brow content, often *outperformed* their Facebook campaigns in raw engagement. Why? Because the very metrics we used to gauge "success" were being openly, brazenly gamed. This wasn't theoretical. Companies like Devumi (now defunct, their legacy lingers) sold follower counts and engagement to *anyone*: politicians, celebrities, and, tellingly, *state agencies*. (Expected, I guess, the eternal quest for public adoration). They bought artificial engagement cheaply, not just on some hidden dark web corner, but on the open internet! (Yes, the same internet you’re using right now.) This wasn't about boosting ego; it was about leveraging "follower ecologies" – a term that should make your skin crawl – to game platform algorithms, creating an illusion of widespread support or outrage for narratives cooked up in some shadowy, state-funded propaganda factory. The irony (and this is where my blood pressure spikes) is that the platforms themselves, designed with lofty ideals to "connect people" and "prioritize engagement," inadvertently created the *perfect* conditions for their own weaponization. Metrics intended to measure popularity became precision tools for deception. (It’s a design flaw, a catastrophic flaw, and we’re still living with the fallout.) The consequences? "Open digital borders" for foreign disinformation. Our platforms, once seen as neutral conduits, became (and still are) active agents in information warfare. Campaigns that appeared organic, legitimate, and widely supported were anything but. And when the mass removals of suspect accounts finally happened (a paltry attempt at damage control), the sheer scale of the fake engagement exposed was immense. The "commercialization of influence" persists. The "IRA blueprint" isn't a historical footnote. It’s a living, breathing strategy manual for state-sponsored information warfare, still leveraging readily available black market tools. The very metrics designed to measure popularity proved to be their greatest vulnerability, and in turn, ours.

⠀　　   ︎︎ ︎︎╭╮　　╭╮ 　 ︎︎  ︎︎╭━┛┗╮╭┛┗╮╭━╮　⁠ 　 ︎︎  ︎︎╰╭┛┏╯╭┛┗╮┃　⧸ 　　  ︎︎ ︎︎┃０┃　╭┓┏╯┃ ⧸ 　　  ︎︎ ︎︎╰╯┃　┃╰╯╮╰╯ 　　 ︎︎  ︎︎╰━╯　╰━━╯♡

soon.

Finally watched this, fell asleep to it in a groggy twilight zone state of consciousness last night, it was pretty good...

Lately instead of reply guying I follow a foid, like a bunch of her posts, perhaps DM her "hey" and then proceed to mute and block her immediately afterwards just to get it all out of the way and speedrun the inevitable with all of my would-be Victims

My Wife And I After Opening Our Mom And Pop Shop, Selling Antiques And Books And Such…