Guiding principles for resisting the digital tyranny

[Clayton]

This was a great YT recommendation:



[NOTE: I do not support Github and recommend staying away from it after the M$ purchase. However, alternatives like Gitlab are able to do most or all of the things you can do with Github.]

This is basically a restatement of one of the principles of Unix philosophy: "Write programs to handle [plain] text streams, because that is a universal interface."

The wisdom of this principle has been robustly proved over time as virtually every data-format except unformatted ASCII plain-text has been turned into a walled-garden of some kind or another. I try to regularly download my bank transactions in CSV format, because I know that if the banks ever get the chance to kill CSV, they will. However, it seems to be pretty universally supported, despite its many flaws, because it's the only thing that reliably works regardless of what financial software you happen to use. So, it turns out that the tragedy of the commons ends up working to advantage in this one particular space... we prefer the worst file-format precisely because nobody can figure out how to productize it and, thus, turn it into their own private walled-garden.

Going forward, this formula is going to shift. Large-language models have permanently changed the landscape of technology. Keeping your data in plain-text format is more important than ever, because all the AI frameworks use CSV, plain-text and other dead-simple formats to ingest and process data. Just as with banking and CSVs, I predict that this will inevitably turn out to be the game-theoretic equilibrium.

I actually use this video's advice on maintaining repositories. I have a couple critical text files and CSV files on my computer. These files have a cron job that runs and performs an automated check-in to a git repository every time I make a change to them. It's a dead-simple solution to the point that a more elaborate solution would be preferable in certain ways. Nevertheless, it's a sufficient minimum-bar, and that's the minimum requirement I place on all aspects of my life nowadays. I more or less try to live MVP (Minimum Viable Product).

@Atruepatriot : I know the issues related to the future of technology are important to you and this is one reason I've written this post. I think the principles explicated in this video are extremely important. Going forward, we're going to need systems that are so robust that they literally can't fail. I mean, all the way down to typewriters. I don't think a post-technological world will look anything like how it is normally envisioned. I think that most people will experience "hard-fail", but the disappearance of these people would fundamentally shift the resulting population dynamic. In other words, if we really are going into an apocalyptic scenario, we have to take into account that the post-collapse population will no longer have many of the kind of people who hard-failed in the first wave of infrastructure collapse. Instead, the remaining population will be the drifters, the off-gridders, the preppers, etc... the diehards. And this is the question I think we don't take seriously enough: what financial software will such people be using? "None" is not a correct answer, it's like saying people would stop using petroleum after a collapse in the oil industry. Such a useful technology will never stop being used until it becomes literally impossible to use, meaning I Am Legend or World War Z levels of impossible. Short of that level of total collapse, digital technology will continue to be used and, in fact, will become the single most valuable currency of all (knowledge is power). Even in Mad Max world, there will be digital technology... as long as someone can charge a battery by any means, there will be digital technology.

Given these considerations, we need to assess alternatives on the basis of their robustness to real demands. I strongly and pointedly avoid all forms of "digital police tarpits". I'm not interested in getting around the FBI's latest cockamamie censorship scheme. I'm not even that interested in strongly de-Googling phones and those kinds of things, mainly because it's impossible to ever be completely sure you've succeeded. You'd really need source-level access to the entire design to be able to verify that you have disabled all their various fallback mechanisms... and that's not going to happen. Thus, the future is a world where we're using burner phones and "laundering" them between each other so it doesn't matter whether it's de-Googled or not, there's simply no way to track which phone goes to which identity. Yes, they want to turn mobile devices into little NWO fantasy spy machines that take your retina scan and fingerprint every few seconds in order to keep working. But that's just evidence that these people are trapped in a headspace that is somewhere in the vicinity of Pinky and the Brain -- they're quite literally looney tunes. I don't care if Klaus Schwab likes to eat bugs.... let him eat bugs. I don't care about his other fantasies, either. They are just fantasies, and I'm not going to invest energy into shadow-boxing the mad schemes of the insane. Rather, I am going to situate myself to land on my feet as the infrastructure of society collapses beneath me, imploded by the DS/NWO maniacs.

For these reasons, I want bombproof tools. I want tools that can't not work. That is Linux. That is plain-text. That is Vim. That is C. And so on. I reject tools that are trying to play the "network effect" game in reverse... Truth, Gab and other tools like this might be the exception, but what is driving their success is really political flight from DS-controlled tech like (former) Twitter, Facebook, and so on. In other words, I can anticipate that these tools will be used because a lot of non-technical people have political reasons to flee the alternatives. But tools like Urbit, Zeronet, etc. are -- in my opinion -- really shadow-boxing the madness of the insane. "You can't trap us because we're going to rewrite the Internet and, in fact, the entire Personal Computing platform from the ground up" is not viable. I do think we are eventually going to have to rebuild these things, but I also think that is a very far-off scenario and there are some fundamental insights into the relationship of physics and computing that people (in general) are going to have to understand before we will be able to embark on those rebuilding projects. For now, my focus is more on durability. I want tools that can't not work. And a tool I know how to use, is worth 100 fancy-schmancy tools I don't know how to use, or would have to read a 1,000-page manual to use. And the bigger my toolbox of such tools, the happier I am. And I think this is the path that digital/tech-preppers would do well to follow. I'm not saying other side-trails are bad or wrong, but the only trail that is going to get us through to the other side is technological indestructibility. Tools that require a lot of servicing/maintenance and fancy design schemes are not going to survive what is coming...

[Macaque Mentality]

Really cool thread, @Clayton.

It should be obvious that I really like mini-PCs, particularly tiny cheap ones with little power draw. Sounds like cheap USB storage with data, mini-PCs, power supplies, monitors, and input devices stored in Faraday cages might be useful to invest in as high-end bartering goods (along with other key electronics like radio transceivers).

[Clayton]

Really cool thread, @Clayton.

It should be obvious that I really like mini-PCs, particularly tiny cheap ones with little power draw. Sounds like cheap USB storage with data, mini-PCs, power supplies, monitors, and input devices stored in Faraday cages might be useful to invest in as high-end bartering goods (along with other key electronics like radio transceivers).

Absolutely. The trend is miniaturization, and this isn't going to stop. We're not quite to "desktop in your palm", but we're almost there. Intel did make a PC in a stick form-factor that could plug directly into an HDMI port on a monitor. We need to not allow the DS psychopaths to redefine computing to be something that only their proprietary black-box mobile spy devices can do. Computing is an abundant resource and the urge to monopolize computing is truly psychotic. But these are the same people who are trying to figure out how to make freshwater scarce or even sell you fresh air. While I pray that all men will be saved, I cannot wait to be free of these psychos once and for all. In the meantime, we have to strategize how to survive their various plans to collapse the whole world in on itself, and that's what the OP was partly about. I've been thinking for some time that prepper folks need to get familiar with "plain-text computing", meaning, how to use a computer without relying on so many proprietary tools. Some changes are so simple literally anyone can do it... don't use M$ Word, use LibreOffice instead. You can download and install on Windows, so it's really just a matter of doing it. You don't even need to convert your old Office documents over since you can just use LibreOffice to open them. But once you open an old document and edit it, just save it to the open-source format. That's one less document in the M$ walled-garden. PDF is the dark-horse in all of this and I admit that I have gobs and gobs of PDFs. There are converter tools out there that can convert PDF to PostScript and, if I ever get enough free-time, that's somewhere on my practically endless TODO list...

[Atruepatriot]

"For these reasons, I want bombproof tools. I want tools that can't not work. That is Linux. That is plain-text. That is Vim. That is C."

viewtopic.php?p=106635#p106635

It is written in C and uses plain-text for the websites. "Gemtext" is plain-text with their own label put to it. Sure wish you would find a few minutes to go research it to get a better idea how it is constructed and why I am attracted to it. It is retro and going back to the old basics. My own search is for a P2P protocol that goes beyond just file sharing or messaging. I am after a protocol where folks can build websites to create their own secure private internet network with mail, blogs, file sharing, image galleries, BBS boards, search engine, directories, Etc.

With everything personal and local without any need for any third parties, it is not even a node network going through other parties like TOR does, it uses true end to end encryption P2P TLS certificates. The client is self browsing without a 3rd party browser, and it self serves locally if you want to publish a website. Old school stuff, back to when the net was born and folks self served up their own personal dial in servers with minimalistic static webpages and BBS boards. It doesn't even use HTTP or WWW addresses, it has it's own address system which I highly suspect could even be customized if one wanted to for their private network.

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