Balaji

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“All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you…” - President Donald J. Trump

BUILD THE SWITCH Ok. I see the “just flip the switch” thing a lot now from the right. But while I’m sympathetic to the desire for law and order, and agree that is a direction worth pursuing, there’s an illusion that should be addressed. Leftists think you can get money without working for it. Just flip the switch on the money printer. Just flip the switch to tax the rich. But in reality, resources are scarce. Rightists often similarly think you can get political power without working for it. Just flip the switch to throw the criminals in jail. But in reality, votes (or political supporters in general) are scarce just like resources are. So the hard part is the invisible part of building that political base. Why were those criminal gangs on the streets of El Salvador? Because they had a drug dealer business model, and because Western leftists were paid by NGOs to support them. They were actually politically powerful. Thus, what was needed to disrupt them? A better political business model, one that actually generated more political support than the legacy model. The Internet was critical for this, as it allowed Bukele to build an audience with social media, align with Western centrists, conservatives, and libertarians via Bitcoin, recruit tech companies to El Salvador, and directly rebut anarchy-spreading Western leftist NGOs through a channel they couldn’t censor. There’s way more to it than that, but the point is: there was no switch that Bukele inherited to flip, anymore than Elon inherited the switch to launch a SpaceX rocket. Bukele essentially had to build a new state from scratch, via the Internet. A new state that was loyal to the people of El Salvador rather than the criminal gangs. This was nontrivial. He had to build the switch.

Cuadra por cuadra... tardará un poco, pero quedará hermoso.

Founders: take my advice... do not talk to the press, go direct and do long-form podcasts. Wired and the NYT are as biased as Fox News and MSNOW these days This is a function of their need to pander to one side to survive, be it through $ 3-a-month subs or rage-baiting ad-based stories. Attacking tech gets views (see Karen Swisher)... and views get advertisers (paradoxically, tech advertisers support the folks trashing tech! let that sink in!) Founders: If you talk to the NYT or WIRED, they will trash and misrepresent you 95% of the time in order to get more subscribers and page views It is what it is...

I agree with all this. However, we do have an issue that we’ll need to address with cryptography and AI. While legacy media was on the back foot from 2022-2025, thanks to Elon uncensoring X and permitting basic truths to be voiced…the combination of AI fakery and ideological filter bubbles has recently allowed the journos to regain some ground. Some outlets have pulled back on extreme wokeness to start reporting facts, particularly on the war, that users are citing because their presence at a legacy outlet’s URL indicates implicitly that they aren’t AI. In other words, AI is, in part, subsidizing legacy written news media at the expense of social media. Even as AI is disrupting Hollywood fiction, it’s increasing demand for verifiable facts. So the journos are adapting, and dialing down a decade of wokeness in an attempt to regain their role as arbiters of fact. We can and will respond, but the journo adaptation is to be expected. A truly committed rival rarely simply goes down for the count. And the journos have been pushing communist revolution since John Reed, Walter Duranty, Edgar Snow, and Herbert Matthews. We have to realize that the verbal political journalist is essentially the ancient class enemy of the mathematical technocapitalist. And so the journo’s goal in the next cycle is to just dispense with pretense and flat out expropriate the fortunes of technocapitalists. Hence the Californian, Bernie, Warren, and European wealth taxes. In this they will be aided by this disastrous war, by the scarcity and seizures it will drive, by the general anti-AI backlash, and by the specific issue I just mentioned of verifiable digital facts. Now, there are technical and social countermeasures to this issue. It starts with establishing a higher standard of cryptographic truth, with verifiable chain-of-custody for digital facts. It includes funding citizen journalists around the world to write to a ledger of record. And it requires a higher purpose than mere political combat. But the point is that winning this next cycle will require more than simply going direct. We’ll need to regain the factual high ground in the age of AI. I know we can do that because cryptography will always be more reliable than a mere media corporation. But we have to do it.

What's interesting about Bukele's rule is that it's all so obvious. You can just flip the switch and make your country powerful, be beloved by the people, get rich, etc. That this is not widely regarded as something worth striving for shows a deep sickness in Western politics.