Censorship, AI Memecoins, 100K BTC, Time & the Ruliad (Issue #193)
Bitcoin & geopolitics, money history, India shorting USD, etherium 3 way war, Apple AI, censorship industrial complex, Irish elections, Saylor & Elon, AI memecoins trending, $100K BTC
Hello and welcome to my newsletter!
Another season 2 instalment…
This week felt a bit like we were slowly returning to normality following the US elections. I’m not convinced normality has been completely restored yet, but there was a bit less emphasis on tangled world politics and interesting tech stuff has started to reappear.
Oh and of course the big news in crypto is that Bitcoin broke through $100000 per coin! That’s pretty huge. The bull run continues. Bitcoin has quadrupled in value in just the past several months.
Loads and loads of awesome podcasts in this week’s selection.
From crazy, jaw dropping, even chilling large scale state censorship in the US and globally, to futuristic seemingly sentient AIs building, shilling and pumping memecoins, through to $100K bitcoin happiness, and on to the mind bending realities that underpin why exactly you should get a watch, and why talking to clouds is probably off the cards, at least for a little while.
The big eye opener was Rogan’s Mike Benz interview. It’s totally mindboggling, I’m still trying to get my head around it. He lays out in plain english the censorship industry that has developed over the past few decades, but that we’ve only really become fully aware of during this last US election cycle.
He outlines the structure and dynamics of a web of institutions, NGOs, universities, government agencies, organisations, foundations, programs, civil society non profits, insurgent groups, research centres, psychological operations, public relations shops, councils, and narratives that together form what he refers to as the censorship industrial complex. A sort of society wide immune system that controls what information we can consume, initially built and aimed to promote US interests abroad, but that has been repurposed to control things domestically, favouring those in power.
I imagine it would be a little bit like discovering for the first time that films have special effects, having never been allowed to watch the end credits, and then reading that there are companies and institutes and networks of thousands of people working on each film, with very specific job roles creating 2D & 3D fake graphics, except it’s not a film, it’s that but with real frigging life! WTF world?
One thing to note, Marty Bent from the Rabbit Hole Recap podcast mentioned that Benz had gotten some of the details about Telegram’s encryption wrong. I didn’t hear that part, it was hectic where I was listening in some places so could have easily missed it. I haven’t had a chance to go back and listen to it. It’s a bit odd to get that sort of detail incorrect if you are putting out this massive thesis. Also worth mentioning that the epicness of all this is somewhat odd. Wouldn’t you expect this sort of information to come out in drips and drabs? I dunno, maybe it has been.
It’s a really crazy world. Very curious to see what the general reaction to all this is.
AI memecoins feature in this week’s issue again, they are definitely trending. It’s all certainly very interesting but it feels kind of fringe to me, and very very speculative. I think something like nation states and companies starting Bitcoin strategic reserves would have a bigger impact right now. Worth being aware of though.
Bitcoin breaking through $100K has been quite special. So many people had been working towards this for many years. It’s almost like there’s a whole industry that has built up around it or something. I’m getting a strange sense of dejas vue. That doesn’t very often happen all within a single issue of the newsletter! How odd. Normality next week hopefully. Then who knows maybe the much fabled season 3. Funny old world isn’t it?
Then there’s Stephen Wolfram and his theories about time. His stuff is kinda out there. It’s firmly in the tech and science spheres, but it’s far out enough to be bordering with science fiction and even religion. I struggle with some of his ideas, especially the notion that space has atoms, distinct from the atoms that make up matter. That seems very odd to me. I think it’s a bit like if the universe was a giant cardboard box that contained all the matter in the entire universe. So what he’s saying is that the stuff is made of matter, which is made of regular atoms, and if you thought that the cardboard box was made of matter too, well maybe, but turns out there’s another secret box that the cardboard box is inside, and that secret box is made of totally different kinds of atoms. Space atoms! It’s a box for the box!
I’m probably getting that wrong in some way, I’m not a physicist, but it’s still fascinating.
I’m not trying to be funny, but there’s definitely a strange fractal thing going on in this issue. Don’t you think?
Anyway, as well as the double box thing, there’s a whole thing about what he calls the Ruliad and rulial space. That I have less issues thinking about for whatever reason. It’s a the space of all possible simple base rules that give rise to what we observe the universe to be. The fascinating thing is that it takes into account that we ourselves are inside the ruliad and makes predictions that there could be other entities that exist in totally different parts of rulial space, and in fact it might be very difficult to speak to those entities. Anyway if you want to chat with aliens you’d going to need a ruliad. Or at least vaguely understand what they are. Worth listening to even if you don’t fully understand it all.
By the way the Irish politics stuff is buried away in the Syria Rest is Politics episode. I have no idea why they neglected to mention it in their show title and description. It’s a great segment, very informative, even if Rory and Alistair hate the Irish so much they would try to bury their elections underneath the battle for Syria. I hope they were just been dumb arses.
As for me, I’ve actually gotten quite a lot of development work done this week. I managed to finish the big website feature I had been working on the past 2 months. All posts on the everything page now have hash links that look like #. They link to the article in the archive and are a way to tell that it’s the end of the article. It’s a small but very important feature. I’ve also completed about 6 smaller follow on features. So I’m feeling pretty good about that.
Just one blog post this week. It goes into a bit of depth on the item hash links feature I just mentioned:
Finished the item hash link feature https://markjgsmith.com/blog/2024/12/02/finished-the-item-hash-link-feature
I’ve also been writing daily notes on the website. They are kind of mental, as life is kind of mental for me at the minute. And so it goes.
If you are feeling a bit out of sorts with all this fractal craziness, a great way to get over it is to donate to the newsletter. The knowledge that you have made a huge difference in somebody else’s life actually stabilises the fractal! For everyone, because the newsletter will get loads better. It will also help massively with my posture. I really really would like to be typing this with all my fingers on an actual keyboard with real physical buttons. That would be a dream come true. Please donate! :) Thank you.
https://markjgsmith.com/donate
Podcasts
Interview with Tuur Demeester (Peter St Onge Podcast) https://podcastindex.org/podcast/6327831?episode=30721606150
Danes, Dykes and Denarii: How Did the Pound Come About? (Flying Frisby Podcast)
India is MASSIVELY Shorting the Dollar (Here’s What You Need To Know) (Eurodollar University Podcast) https://podcastindex.org/podcast/276832?episode=30724351963
Etherium’s 3 Front War | Justin Drake (Bankless Podcast) https://www.bankless.com/podcast/ethereums-three-front-war-the-beam-chain-justin-drake
‘A Good Duck Butt’, With Allen Pike (The Talk Show With John Gruber Podcast) https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/12/02/ep-415
Mike Benz (Joe Rogan Podcast) https://podcastindex.org/podcast/550168?episode=30795926864
The Battle for Syria (The Rest is Politics Podcast) https://alastaircampbell.org/2024/12/346-the-battle-for-syria
TWiST News: Bitcoin, Saylor’s Microsoft Pitch, and the Delaware-Tesla Fight Ep#2054(This Week In Startups) https://podcastindex.org/podcast/788244?episode=30807079500
AI ROLLUP #2: Virtuals $1B | Zerebro LLM | Ai16z Comeback? | Bittensor Toa | Freya $50K Game (Bankless Podcast) https://www.bankless.com/podcast/ai-rollup-crypto-x-ai-latest-news-updates
$100K Bitcoin (Rabbit Hole Recap Podcast) https://podcastindex.org/podcast/5436375
What is Time? Stephen Wolfram’s Groundbreaking New Theory (Into the Impossible Podcast) https://podcastindex.org/podcast/324783?episode=30750902603
That’s all from me…
Best regards,
Mark
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