Sometimes people are interested in what I have to say, and want to connect with me on some centralized social media. I won't connect via centralized media (except with phone numbers, but at least there I have rights), but since people seem interested, I feel like I should put something out there. I've been told that I have a way with words, but I don't think it comes across in my writing. Still, I'm going to try my best and put honest words on this page. Some of the things on the page I will be honestly wrong about, but I won't correct it here even if I later admit I was wrong; I think it is to peoples' detriment that we are only subjected to delicately crafted narratives that cater to our biases. I'm going to write like I talk, which means you should be prepared for some HARD conversational pivots.
Throughout this rant I will introduce definitions of words as they are meant here, and assume definitions of many others. These usages should not be considered as endorsements of those definitions unless I explicitly state as much, such as with my definition of "self". For instance, just because I use the term "woman" to describe someone that presents as, and does not deny being, feminine, does not mean I think defining "woman" as an adult female is wrong. I'm sure this seems like a strange opening statement, but for the issues I'm drawn to, I generally perceive two sides attacking strawmen of the other using just-dissimilar-enough language to find no common ground. We have benefited evolutionarily from constant fragmentation, oppression, and genocide, but we are too powerful to benefit from them further. Now we need to unify as a species and learn to self-regulate. For such a system to resist cancer, it must optimize for the individual, and fundamentally lack centralization. It only requires as much consensus as is required to prevent speciation. It cannot be that groups are allowed to secede and colonize the universe, as we would surely be to blame should our neighbors come seeking retribution.
Organisms obtain value from resources. Equivalently, the resources generate value. The tree generates shelter for the squirrel. The land generates sheep for the shepherd. Humans have done an amazing job of accumulating resources to generate any and all value a human could want. This causes two problems. The first is that we are evolved to always want more, so even when all our needs are met and we have loving friends and family, we so rarely feel like we have enough. The second problem is that humans have learned to hoard resources and to sell only value. Instead of selling houses, we would rather keep the house and sell only the value it generates through rent, so fewer and fewer people can own. The only decentralized, bottom-up, solution I have for this is to refuse to rent. Sleep in your car, or be homeless until you can afford a mortgage or, better yet, buy it outright. I chose to buy a van and live there.
The housing issue is troubling, but more infuriating is the way this has manifested for non-scarce resources. Though the labor by programmers, artists, and engineers to generate information is scarce, the proliferation and usage of that information is essentially non-scarce. Yet still, companies don't want to sell you art or software, they want to license it to you, under some restrictive terms, with some time limit. Our very culture is owned, and that ownership is enforced through laws by the state with violence if necessary. These laws are referred to as "intellectual property laws" and they exist to extend the new and unfamiliar world of non-scarce resources to our well-understood scarce world of capitalism. By effectively making non-scarce resources scarce, we can use the same overpowered economic system of capitalism to fuel supply chains to keep the engine of progress going for these non-scarce resources.
I do not fault the people of the past for creating this system because you can't just wait for a better system to show itself while your adversaries jump technological hoops. Workers acquire functional information to perform tasks and add to that information over time. As we extend ourselves with technology, more of the functional knowledge we acquire and build becomes infinitely replicable. Workers have always been paid for performing tasks, not for the knowledge they curate. Such a system disincentivizes workers from sharing knowledge, as rivals can use your curation as a starting point and cut you out. Intellectual property law emerged to give workers control over their contributions to collective knowledge.
This scarcification is not without price. Now you cannot simply contribute to things, because ownership means a piece of the pie, and they don't want to share. Since there is no absolute metric by which to weight different contributions, each monetization agreement must be agreed to by all parties, which gets more difficult as the number of contributors increases. This creates a non-participatory culture where no one can contribute, and a select few own everything, including what you watch, which songs you listen to, and which machine instructions are allowed to run on your devices. We are literally being mind controlled.
Human's have gotten to where we are today through a long history of integrating and improving on technology. We are primates with powerful visual perception that have perfected screens that are able to impart pertinent information at the speed of perception. Using our nerves, we direct information back into the device via twitches at a keyboard, touchscreen, or mouse. We already have brain-computer interfaces, and they are in our pockets. We are plugged into devices which only play media "owned" by someone else, and are only able to run approved programs. Someone else is controlling the device that you have already embedded into your mind. The device is an extension of your brain, and the software running on it is an extension of your mind. The media on your devices are the thoughts you think, and the software that runs your device is the mechanism of your thinking.
Some definitions of words are more beneficial than others. If you define your arm to be "attached" to you instead of "part" of you, then it may change your mind when I offer to replace it with this shiny replacement that will surveil you, prevent you from understanding how it works, prevent you from modifying it, and disobey orders, but that will also be so neat, shiny, do your taxes, connect you with friends, improve your business, and make you more attractive. People today so often can't navigate because they have completely outsourced that ability to their phones' turn-by-turn navigator. We MUST define "self" to include technology. As time progresses, the number of decisions made by digital machines is constantly growing compared to biological humans. Those that never consider technology to be a part of them are doomed to become some vestigial limb of the species that is eventually pruned.
I said it before but this bears repeating as people, initially, have a real hard time taking me seriously on this point: We are literally being mind controlled. We have integrated technology into our minds, technology whose inner workings are kept secret from us. This is your mind and you cannot change how it works. Others have written codes (anti-features) that operate against your best interest and put it in your mind where you cannot change it. The only media you watch is generated by a select few gatekeepers that are policed into one narrative. These devices are an ever-increasing portion of our mind and they are utterly not free.
One last thought I will mention on that point. So often, I talk to people and convince them that they are literally being mind controlled using arguments similar to those above. Invariably, their response is something along the lines of "Wow, that's a really great point. We are literally being mind controlled in a way that we should be concerned with. I'm not going to do anything about it because I don't know how I would, and I have other things to think about. However, I think it's really cool that you are concerned with this and I hope you really get to the bottom of this and improve it the way you are saying". How creepy is that? Imagine you are on a space ship with a crew, and realize some alien slug is on your head. You manage to scrape it off and as your head clears just a little, you look around and realize EVERYONE has a similar brain slug. You run up to someone fixing a door and frantically explain what is going on. The repairman's eyes open in shock as they realize you are right. The repairman responds: "Wow that's a really great point! But, I have to finish fixing this door and go home and make dinner for my family. I really hope you figure that out." What the fuck is going on? Are we all frogs in boiling water?
But all is not lost. Surely you've come to the ramblings of a drug-addled, alien-obsessed hobo who believes the government is surveiling us through backdoors in virtually every device, because I must have all the answers. Jokes aside, I do have what I believe are good next steps toward that end. A good problem to tackle is the monetization problem of free culture. Basically, we need to build an alternative to capitalism for non-scarce goods. To support the supply chains, we need to figure out how to support people that make contributions in a way that is free, local-first, and decentralized. To incentivize shared knowledge, we must as much as possible pay workers for the knowledge they share.
For a more concrete discussion of how I think we should accomplish that, I will defer to my presentation I am working on here, though it isn't really complete yet without me presenting it. Basically, I want to enable individuals to invest in the contributors that make the culture they use in a way that is both under that individual's control and optimized for that individual's best interest. In the short term, I want to build that system to enable cash transactions based on value declarations, by the individual investing, on contributions. In the long term, I want to use those value declarations, along with people's existing social connections, as an alternative to normal currencies. In effect, this creates a bottom up social credit system.
In the future we might contribute not just culture, but raw information about the world as part of the commons. Slowly but surely I think we will tend towards a bottom-up surveillance system, where people control their own sensors and choose to share enough to keep themselves and others safe. I may not want to report on law breaking for a law I disagree with, but I sure as hell want the ability to "tattle" when my neighbor's house gets broken in to. I want to lower the barrier to entry so everyone can contribute to the trajectories of culture. I want to enable a plurality of narratives and be able to work with those I disagree with on the things we do agree on. I think we need to allow for contributions by the socially challenged and those who have out of distribution beliefs. God help those with both. (And God especially help those with both, and whose beliefs piss off the powerful.)
Alright, you made it this far into my ramblings, so I'll talk about a fun one, and one that was promised in the title. My entire life, I made fun of people that believed that human's weren't the smartest thing here on earth. When I say "smartest", I mean smarter in a way that we would all agree makes something smarter. Specifically, I mean they have more advanced technology and understand a strict superset of the physics we know (our physics ⊊ their physics). If the stories of higher beings from the world's religions have any validity, then those beings are also smarter than us in this way. The image of abrahamic angels using technology more advanced than cell phones seemed so ridiculous that it fueled my atheism. Eventually, I came across this podcast episode interviewing David Fravor1 where David describes encountering a UAP as a Navy pilot. If accurate, the basic claims of the story include an object with no discernible flight surfaces, propulsion, or heat signature. An object that could rapidly accelerate despite these oddities. Everything we observe that accelerates does so by pushing against matter to push it forward, conserving conservation of momentum. We know of two ways to make an object fly: push off the air (balloons, planes, helicopters, gliders, etc.) or eject matter really fast (rockets/missiles). These claims describe something that didn't appear to do either of these things; had my favorite podcaster gone full tin-foil hat?
This was my first exposure to the topic, but there were plenty of references in that video to get me started down a rabbit hole. Things apparently really heated up with the 2017 New York Times article that publicized three military UAP videos, as well as information about past US efforts to study UAPs. Shortly after that podcast episode, the unclassified version of the first UAP report came out, and it seemed to confirm the detail I found most consequential:
Some UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion. In a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings.
If something is able to move against the wind while suspended in the air, then it must have a sufficient machinery to propel very quickly. How could it possibly do this without us being able to discern the means of propulsion? Either it should be pushing off air, or it should be expelling rocket fuel, right? Did someone actually make an EmDrive (or a warp drive)? Could the government have technology so advanced in secret? Throughout history, physics has always led engineering. We understand the basic principles of a process long before we are able to productize it. We should at least have some ideas HOW such an object could exist if normal humans made it, but it seems to violate conservation of momentum, which defies all well recognized physics models (unless they managed to manipulate dark energy). Now MAYBE I could grant you that today our military is so great that they can make such technology and that they suppressed some key physics discoveries from making it to the public. Even then, the descriptions of the objects are consistent going much farther back, at least through project blue book and project sign. Even if we can make those special technologies today, there is no way we could make them at the end of World War II. If we had that kind of technology, we would have used it in the war. All this makes me rethink dismissing people like Bob Lazar. More recently, there was another Senate hearing where David Grusch made claims about a misinformation campaign against the American public to hide the existence of aliens, and the reality of crash retrieval and reverse-engineering projects on those alien craft, dating back to around World War II. More recently, in November 2024, the senate heard more extraordinary testimony. Why is our government hearing these people out, platforming them, and giving them a voice? Did they pass the UAP Disclosure Act and create ARRO to trick the public into believing there is legitimacy to what is actually a hoax? Wouldn't that be more crazy than aliens existing? To be clear, when I say "aliens", I don't necessarily mean extraterrestrials, I mean anything that understands human-level physics/technology (or better) and that is not a normal human. For instance, if there was some break-away human civilization that had the ability to make flying devices that thwart our modern physics models while the normal human governments fought the second world war, then I would consider the break-away civilization "non-normal" humans, and thus aliens.
How do we deal with lower beings? We put up barriers to keep nature separate from our controlled environments. We call the outside a nature preserve, and the inside civilization. I think we are merely on the nature side of someone else's barrier. In some respects, you can imagine we might seem like bears to them: simple creatures with the ability to deal ferocious damage through primitive means if you don't plan accordingly. However, I think we are likely much more like ants than bears. Once ants get into your civilization, it is difficult to get them out. You can't let ants just rule your pantry, so the most humane thing to do is make sure no ants get in (else you must genocide those ants). I think humans are the same way with aliens. If humans knew where technology and superior physical understanding was being held by some advanced civilization, we would do everything in our power to extract and utilize those resources. For ants, the stakes are less high than with humans because once modern humans obtain that information, they won't loose that information. Maybe staying somewhat discrete is a courtesy of the aliens to avoid a situation where they have to kill us, the way we would ants that get in our way. It's also not difficult to imagine they might be trying to avoid cultural genocide. At this point we know too well how more powerful cultures tend to annihilate the less powerful on contact. How could unchecked contact with other (apparently very nearby) intelligences not drastically change the trajectory of our culture?
If higher beings share this earth and allow us to live despite the damage we do to the ecosystem, even going as far as to obscure their presence for our benefit, then we must be worth it to them. If they believe in us, then maybe we should believe in us too. People have believed in higher beings across every civilization and every culture, and the message is somewhat consistent: higher beings are aware of us, have some generally positive disposition towards us, though they mostly leave us to figure things out on our own. I've heard some argue that if aliens are withholding knowledge from us, that they are doing some moral bad by not helping us. I take the stance that knowledge must be built, not simply memorized, so maybe it's not as simple as them "withholding" something. In fact, the claims by those previously in our government that are coming forward in these senate hearings suggest that we actually have been allowed to recover alien technological artifacts and study them. I trust that the aliens are helping us in whatever way they find most ethical, and I'm content to lean on their understanding on this matter. It seems reasonable that we would join them on a technological level some day, so they really only have two options, to kill us or to live in harmony with us. It seems like they have chosen the latter, and I think we will too.
<I will probably append to this, but for reasons stated at the beginning, I will mostly avoid editing anything above>
Footnotes:
Lex has not made this available under free terms, so I won't recommend it (with love), but here it is for reference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB8zcAttP1E