This Gen-X guy spent a lot of time contemplating the universe. He concluded that Personal Freedom is baked into it, and that comes with ethical implications.
PA, USA
Joined April 2022
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John Lockeson retweeted
Here's what folks need to understand:
1) America has not been operating under it's Constitution of 1791, as originally understood since about 1913. It is a *partially collapsed* constitutional order.
2) Subverting this Constitution in favor of Federal power is primarily a Democratic party project, with the Republican party operating as complicit junior members.
3) Systems are what they do: our Federal government extracts ~35% of value from the most productive society that has ever existed, and converts that value into power, personal treasure, and votes.
This is the single largest coherent economic activity on the planet.
4) A system's first priority is always to ensure its continued existence. Therefore, the FIRST priority of the Democratic and Republican party is to ensure their Gravy Train remains stoked and on track.
John Lockeson retweeted
DM-out, in answer to an evidently nice and sincere young person who really wants to help with the propagation of rational ideas, and invited me.
I'm pretty sure that I am too radical for the project.
~~~
"I am a bit nervous about who to invite."
You have nothing to fear from me.
I'll tell you this: I am almost, in my own constitution, viscerally averse to "organization" of any sort. I am so radical an individualist that I flinch at every collective of any sort that I see.
This is hard to describe.
My age has to do with it, too. I have watched this wretched disaster for fifty-two years of voting eligibility (and never, ever voted, for solid moral reasons). I now find it virtually impossible to impart to younger people that decades-long failure of electoral politics. It's all they know, however: "organize and vote!"
I'm not here to burn your groove, but mark my words: that is never going to work. It's fighting on the enemy's moral and political ground.
I hope you will not live as long as I have and get to that point realizing that I was right, but remember what I said and that I'm the one who told you.
This thing requires an entirely, radically, different outlook, and my big idea is massed, passive, civil disobedience. Flood the courts, and embrace the prisons.
That's what it's going to take: millions of individuals standing up and saying, "No."
Nobody is ready for that, though. Some people will talk about shooting wars all day long, but nothing like this, first, ever occurs to them.
~~~
I don't know what to tell you in answer to your query. I don't know how to help.
John Lockeson retweeted
I'm an atheist, and I understand evil as anything deliberately inimical to human life.
This is easy for me.
And: I score all of it as the consequences of *shitty philosophy*, beginning with the summary dismissal of metaphysics in the late 19th century and resulting disintegration of epistemology. It all goes downhill from there.
This is the general reason for my blazing contempt: there is no good reason why entire generations have lost their goddamned minds, and I hate them for it.
John Lockeson retweeted
Elon Musk a écrit ce matin une phrase que l’école vous a appris à trouver obscène : « McCarthy was right (obviously). » On vous a enseigné à haïr ce nom comme on apprend une table de multiplication, sans jamais vous dire ce qu’il avait vu, et c’est précisément pour ça que la phrase dérange encore.
Il faut comprendre ce qu’était sa thèse, parce qu’on l’a réduite à une caricature pour n’avoir pas à la regarder. McCarthy ne disait pas seulement qu’il existait des espions assez stupides pour voler des plans dans un tiroir. Il disait que le communisme avait compris quelque chose de plus décisif : qu’un pays se prend moins par ses frontières que par ses institutions, moins par ses usines d’armement que par ce qui fabrique, dans la tête des gens, le réel lui-même. Département d’État, universités, syndicats, rédactions, bibliothèques, écoles : non pas pour piquer un secret, mais pour orienter ce qu’une civilisation croit être vrai, juste, enseigné, publiable.
Le scalpel était souvent imprécis, les chiffres bougeaient, la méthode était sloppy, et une partie des noms qu’il agitait n’aurait jamais dû l’être. Cela ne change rien au diagnostic. Quand les câbles de Venona ont été déclassifiés en 1995, on a retrouvé ce que l’intelligentsia avait passé quarante ans à traiter comme une hallucination : Alger Hiss, les Rosenberg, Harry Dexter White, et des centaines d’Américains qui travaillaient pour Moscou pendant qu’on expliquait aux collégiens que le seul danger, c’était l’homme qui osait le dire. On a utilisé ses erreurs pour enterrer le phénomène. On a brûlé le thermomètre. La fièvre est restée.
Car voici ce qui s’est passé ensuite, et c’est cela qu’on refuse encore de nommer. L’URSS est morte en 1991. Le logiciel, non. Le communisme a perdu la guerre des tanks et gagné la guerre du compilateur. Gramsci l’avait écrit avec une clarté que nos manuels ont préféré noyer : tu ne prends pas le palais d’assaut, tu staffes le palais. Une fois que tu tiens l’école, l’université, la presse, le syndicat, la culture et demain la RH, tu n’as plus besoin du KGB. Le bâtiment travaille pour toi.
Le virus a simplement changé d’enveloppe. La première portait le parti, la carte, l’espion, Moscou ; on l’a reconnue, le mur est tombé, et tout le monde a conclu trop vite que c’était fini. La seconde n’a plus besoin de faucille : elle avance avec un vocabulaire moral, des victimes permanentes, une rareté qu’il faut administrer, des intermédiaires qui se rendent indispensables, et un soupçon généralisé contre tout ce qui construit. Même charge utile, nouveau packaging. C’est pour cela que l’Occident a l’air rongé. Pas parce qu’un colonel russe est assis dans ton rectorat. Parce que le logiciel tourne tout seul, dans une école qui enseigne d’abord à soupçonner, dans une université où la question n’est plus « est-ce vrai ? » mais « qui a le pouvoir de dire que c’est vrai ? », dans une entreprise où un fait devient une violence, dans un État où allouer le capital est un droit et où le créer est presque une faute. La France teste cette architecture à 57 % du PIB. Ce n’est pas une coïncidence culturelle. C’est le même système d’exploitation.
Le mot a disparu. La fonction est restée. Et ceux qui portent ça ne sont pas des monstres : ils ont reçu un logiciel, souvent par générosité, souvent parce que le mot justice sonnait mieux que le mot responsabilité. Les mauvaises idées tuent d’abord ceux qui y croient. Une génération entière a appris à déconstruire et n’a jamais appris à construire. Une génération entière sait soupçonner et ne sait plus admirer.
McCarthy avait raison sur l’essentiel : les institutions peuvent être prises, les idées peuvent coloniser un pays plus sûrement qu’une armée, et ceux qui le disent en premier sont toujours traités comme le problème. Une civilisation se reconstruit par les bâtisseurs, pas par les commissaires du récit. Par ceux qui croient que la vérité existe et qu’elle vaut qu’on s’y consacre.
Et au travail.
John Lockeson retweeted
I lived oversees for a substantial portion of my childhood, and consider myself a well-traveled cosmopolitan who has no trouble adopting a Canadian or European perspective on world events. And about the piece of furrowed-brow concern trolling I have quote-tweeted, let me just say:
<LOUD, CONTEMPTUOUS FARTING NOISE>
It never ends, and it never changes. The impotent, dimwitted anger that is actually a manifestation of weakness and failure in the cultures that produce it. The patronizing, pseudo-sophisticated tut-tutting from people who presume to instruct us. The poorly concealed demand that the American taxpayer perpetually remain the world's daddy while everyone who benefits from our largesse gets to act out like a spoiled teenager.
I've been listening to this crap for 60 years. And every single exudation of it sounds stupider than the last.
unavailable
John Lockeson retweeted
This is so bad ass. :D
LET'S FUCKING GO!
🚨BREAKING🚨
GOA, @SilencerShop, @TheAKGuy, & @WesVirdellTX have officially notified ATF & DOJ of our intent to transfer suppressors tonight, at 12:01AM CDT on 8/13/26, without complying with the currently enjoined requirements of the National Firearms Act of 1934.
John Lockeson retweeted
Ludwig von Mises sat down in 1920 and published a paper that ended the intellectual case for socialism, even if the socialists took another seven decades to notice.
The argument was precise. Mises showed that without private ownership of the means of production, there are no real prices for capital goods. Without prices, you cannot calculate profit and loss. Without profit and loss, economic planners have no way of knowing whether they are creating value or destroying it. They are flying blind, spending real resources with no feedback mechanism telling them whether the factory, the railway, or the grain depot was worth building. Every allocation becomes a guess dressed up as a decree.
This, he called the Socialist Calculation Problem, and nobody answered it. Oskar Lange tried in 1936, proposing that socialist planners could simulate prices by trial and error. Mises read this and was unimpressed (charitably put). Lange assumed you could reproduce the function of market prices without the institution that generates them: private property, genuine exchange, real skin in the game. You cannot fake the signal and expect accurate information.
The Soviet Union spent seventy years proving Mises right. Chronic shortages, misallocated steel, surplus winter boots in Georgia in July, famine engineered by committees convinced they understood grain supply better than the price system. The USSR collapsed in 1991 under the weight of precisely the inefficiencies Mises predicted in Vienna in 1920.
You are watching this play out again today, every time a government sets energy prices, rent ceilings, or pharmaceutical price caps, and then expresses shock at the resulting shortages. The calculation problem did not expire with the Soviet Union. Bureaucrats who override price signals recreate the same blindness Mises identified. Mises told you exactly what would happen.
John Lockeson retweeted
Switzerland has 26 cantons, each with its own constitution, tax rates, and laws, and the result is one of the wealthiest, most stable countries on earth. That is not a coincidence.
You want to understand why Swiss GDP per capita sits around $92,000 while the EU average hovers near $37,000? Start here. Cantons compete for residents and businesses the same way firms compete for customers. Zug kept its corporate tax rate at roughly 11.9%, attracted commodity traders and crypto firms, and watched its population and tax revenues grow. Cantons that taxed aggressively lost mobile capital and productive citizens to neighbors with lighter burdens. This is Tiebout competition working in real life, not a textbook diagram.
The federal government in Bern handles defense, monetary policy, and some foreign affairs. Everything else defaults downward. Cantons set income taxes. Communes set property levies. Citizens in Appenzell Innerrhoden voted on local laws by a show of hands in the Landsgemeinde, an open-air assembly, until 1990 for most matters. The feedback loop between decision-makers and the people paying for those decisions stays tight. That tightness disciplines spending in ways no central auditor ever will.
Free market thinkers have stressed this for generations: political units must be small enough that exit is credible. When the cost of leaving a bad jurisdiction drops, politicians face real consequences for bad policy. Switzerland kept that cost low by design. A business or family in Basel-Stadt dissatisfied with cantonal policy drives forty minutes to Baselland. No visa. No language barrier. No bureaucratic labyrinth. Just a move.
The EU spent decades building the opposite architecture, consolidating regulatory power in Brussels and eliminating the jurisdictional diversity that forces governments to stay honest. Switzerland refused to join. Its per-capita wealth, its low public debt, and its functional civil society arrived because the Swiss preserved the one institutional feature every centralized state destroys first: the credible right to leave.
John Lockeson retweeted
You have been lied to about tulips for nearly two centuries.
Charles Mackay published Extraordinary Popular Delusions in 1841, and journalists have been recycling his tale ever since: crazed Dutchmen trading mansions for flower bulbs, a whole nation losing its mind, ruin everywhere. Almost none of it survives contact with the archives. Peter Garber went through the actual price records in the 1980s and found something boring and beautiful: markets doing exactly what markets do.
Consider what a Semper Augustus actually was in 1636. A single bulb infected with a mosaic virus that painted flames of crimson across white petals. Nobody could reproduce the pattern on demand. Breeding a broken tulip took seven to twelve years, and one prized bulb yielded only a couple of offsets annually. You were not buying a flower. You were buying the breeding stock for a luxury good with genuinely inelastic supply and roaring demand from the richest merchant class in Europe. Rare hyacinths in the 1730s followed the same price arc: enormous premiums for novelty, steep decline as propagation caught up. Nobody calls that a mania. That is just how prototype pricing works.
The famous February 1637 crash? It hit a thin futures market conducted in Haarlem taverns, where traders signed contracts requiring almost no money down. When Dutch courts later converted those contracts into options settleable at roughly 3.5 percent of face value, the "catastrophic losses" evaporated. No banks failed. No depression followed. The Dutch economy sailed on toward its Golden Age peak.
Now ask where the money came from. The Bank of Amsterdam and free coinage policies had pulled a flood of precious metal into the Republic through the 1630s. Doug French traced this: swelling money balances chased assets, and tulips were the asset of the moment. People responded rationally to monetary conditions the way they always do.
The tulip myth survives because it flatters the people who tell it. Regulators, central bankers, and financial journalists need a parable proving that free individuals bidding on prices go insane without supervision. Strip away Mackay's fabrications and you find merchants pricing a scarce novelty under uncertainty, then repricing when facts changed. Speculation is how prices get discovered.
John Lockeson retweeted
Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act on December 23, 1913, two days before Christmas, while half of Washington had already boarded trains home. Woodrow Wilson signed it into law that same evening, at 6:02 p.m., using four gold pens. You should notice the choreography. Men who believe in what they're doing pass laws in daylight, in spring, with the galleries full. Men creating a banking cartel pick the week when nobody's watching.
The bill itself was drafted in November 1910 at a private club on Jekyll Island, Georgia, by Senator Nelson Aldrich, Paul Warburg of Kuhn Loeb, Frank Vanderlip of National City Bank, and a handful of other men who traveled under fake names in a sealed rail car. They spent nine days designing a lender of last resort for their own institutions. Then they spent three years marketing it to you as a reform that would tame the money trust. The money trust wrote the bill to tame itself.
Here's what the Act actually did. It handed a private banking cartel the legal power to expand credit in unison, socialize the losses when the expansion collapsed, and backstop the whole arrangement with the printing press. Before 1913, a bank that inflated recklessly faced runs and bankruptcy. Market discipline worked. After 1913, it faced a discount window.
You know the results because you live in them. The dollar of 1913 buys about three cents' worth of goods today. The 1920s credit boom, the 1929 bust, the Depression that Hoover and Roosevelt turned into a decade, the 1970s stagflation, 2008: every one of these traces back to a committee setting the price of money by decree. Free market economists from Mises onward explained the mechanism. Push interest rates below the natural rate, and you get malinvestment, a boom, then a bust. Every time.
The rushed Christmas vote wasn't an accident of scheduling. Charles Lindbergh Sr. stood on the House floor and called it "the worst legislative crime of the ages." He got a nearly empty chamber for an audience. His grandchildren got the Fed.
John Lockeson retweeted
On communism – in summary:
1. Communism no longer comes for your property. It comes for your reality. The West still pictures bread lines and gulags, a failed economic theory safely buried in 1989 – that was only ever the surface symptom. Leftism-communism is the most insidious destructive force in our world today, and it survives every empirical refutation for one reason: it was never really an economic theory. It doesn’t care about the truth. It only seeks power.
2. At its core it is a civilizational cancer – a machine for distorting reality through constant lies, rewritten history, and the systematic corruption of truth. It practices negative selection: it promotes the ambitious sociopaths, the ideologues, and the conformists, while the honest and the competent are sidelined or destroyed. Talent, integrity, and productivity become liabilities. The body count runs to roughly a hundred million. But the deeper kill is spiritual – trust eroded, excellence punished, reality itself subordinated to raw power.
3. What has changed is the method, not the logic. Tanks and gulags were crude, visible, self-defeating. Today it does not confiscate – it destabilizes. Chaos is the new collectivization. Every manufactured crisis follows the same structural logic: disorder is produced, fear is maximized, and in the panic that follows, transfers of power occur that would have been politically impossible in calm times. You do not notice the expropriation, because you are too busy surviving the emergency they built for you.
4. The fuel running this engine is the Systemic Lie – not ordinary propaganda, but a managed reality in which the categories of thought themselves are corrupted. Productivity is renamed exploitation. Order is renamed fascism. Resistance is renamed hate. A population that cannot name extraction cannot resist it – that is the design, not a side effect. Polish has a word for what results: zakłamanie, a society so saturated with lies that truth becomes almost inaccessible. Obłuda is the mask of falsehood worn so long it begins to feel like a face.
5. This is why the ideology did not die in 1989. It mutated, migrated, and entrenched itself inside the institutions of the civilization it had set out to destroy. Under a system of institutionalized lying, the loyal are promoted and the honest are pushed out, until the institution fills, top to bottom, with people selected specifically for their unreliability. That is not inefficiency. That is institutional rot at the genetic level. People learn to say the words, attend the meetings, sign the statements – and inwardly check out entirely.
6. The damage was never only in the ideology. It was in the people – the habits of mind that decades inside a system of lies produce, habits that do not evaporate with a change of government. The decisive terrain now is institutional: the schools, the media, the corporations, and above all the artificial intelligence systems being trained at civilizational scale on values that half the civilization never chose and was never consulted on. Whoever writes the values into the machines will have more influence over the next century than any election result.
7. This is where civilizations are actually won and lost – not in grand gestures, but in millions of daily, invisible decisions about whether to say what you actually see. Every person who refuses to perform the lie one more time is doing something larger than they know. Name the chaos. Name the lie. The naming is the resistance.
Tell the truth, have courage, and build.
What the West Still Doesn’t Get It:
Communism’s True Core: The Systemic Lie
Most people in the West think they understand communism. They picture bread lines, gulags, failed five-year plans, and the collapsed Soviet Union. They treat it as a discredited economic theory – an experiment that proved that abolishing private property doesn’t work. Case closed, history moved on.
This misunderstanding may be the most dangerous intellectual failure of our time.
Communism was never primarily an economic system. Economics was the surface. Beneath it lay something far more insidious: a total, systemic, institutionalized commitment to lying. Not occasional dishonesty. Not spin or propaganda in the ordinary sense. Something deeper – a civilizational war against truth itself, waged through every institution, every classroom, every newspaper, every conversation, until reality itself became negotiable and the lie became the air people breathed.
The Words We’re Missing
The Polish language, forged by decades of living under this system, produced words for this phenomenon that English simply cannot match:
Zakłamanie [zah-kwah-MAH-nyeh] – a state of total, pervasive, socially embedded falsehood, a condition in which an entire society is saturated with lies so thoroughly that truth becomes almost inaccessible.
Obłuda [ob-woo-dah] – a deep, performative hypocrisy, the gap between what is proclaimed and what is actually practiced, the mask worn so long it begins to feel like a face.
These are not words for individual liars. They describe a system – a mode of social organization built on organized mendacity, where the lie is not the exception but the foundation. English has no single word for either concept, and that linguistic gap is not a coincidence. It reflects a gap in experience. Cultures that did not live under communism lack the vocabulary because they lack the wound.
And because they lack the vocabulary, they struggle to recognize the thing when it reappears in new clothing.
The Continuity: Communism, Leftism, Wokeism
What we call wokeism today, or the broader radical left, is not a new phenomenon. It is the same operating system running on updated hardware. The specifics have changed – instead of the proletariat, we have marginalized identity groups; instead of bourgeois class enemies, we have racists and transphobes; instead of socialist realism, we have DEI statements. But the deep structure is the same.
That deep structure is this: truth is not discovered, it is assigned. Reality is not something to be understood honestly but something to be narrated strategically. Language is not a tool for communication but a weapon of power. And anyone who resists the approved narrative is not simply wrong – they are dangerous, and must be silenced, shamed, or destroyed.
This is zakłamanie in its modern form. This is obłuda wearing a human rights badge.
The same movement that insists men can become women will insist, with equal fervor, that questioning this is an act of violence. The same institutions that claim to champion free inquiry systematically suppress dissent. The same people who invoke tolerance as their highest value are among the most intolerant forces in public life. The contradiction is not accidental – it is structural. It is the system working as designed.
Why the West Still Doesn’t Get It
People who grew up in freedom tend to assume, at some level, that bad actors know they are lying. That somewhere behind the ideological performance, there is a cynical operator who privately acknowledges reality. This assumption is wrong, and it is why Westerners consistently underestimate what they are dealing with.
The totalitarian lie, at its mature stage, is not cynical. It is believed. Or rather, it creates a condition in which the distinction between belief and performance collapses entirely. People learn to say things they do not believe so fluently, and for so long, that they lose access to what they actually think.
1/2
John Lockeson retweeted
Niccolò Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513 as a practical manual for power. For five centuries, polite society has pretended to be shocked by it. Meanwhile, every successful political operator — on every side — has been quietly following it. The only people who haven’t read it are the ones who keep losing.
1. Machiavelli’s central insight is not that the ends justify the means. That is the misquote that lets comfortable people dismiss him. His actual insight is simpler and more disturbing: power has its own logic, independent of morality, and those who refuse to understand that logic will be defeated by those who do. The Prince is not a villain’s manual. It is a description of reality that makes virtuous people uncomfortable – because reality doesn’t care about their virtue.
2. The current progressive system applies Machiavelli more fluently than any of its opponents. His first rule: the appearance of virtue matters more than virtue itself. The DEI statement while systematically excluding dissent. The democracy rhetoric while suppressing opposition. The compassion branding while destroying careers. This is Machiavelli’s prince – not good, but performing goodness to maintain legitimacy. The performance is the power.
3. His second rule, which the current system also applies perfectly: cruelty, when necessary, should be delivered swiftly, completely, and early. Cancellation is Machiavellian – total, swift, exemplary. The point isn’t the individual being cancelled. The point is the ten thousand people watching who quietly adjust their behavior. One public destruction purchases a million private silences. Machiavelli would have recognized the mechanism immediately. He invented the theory.
4. Communism applied the fear side of Machiavelli with full conviction – Stalin made the explicit choice Machiavelli described: better to be feared than loved. The show trial is pure Machiavellian theater – a public demonstration of power functioning as a warning to everyone who isn’t on trial. But communism made his fatal mistake: it destroyed the people’s goodwill so completely that it generated not just fear but hatred. And Machiavelli is unambiguous – you can rule through fear, you cannot survive through hatred.
5. His most important democratic insight — the one nobody quotes — is that the prince who builds his power on the people is more secure than one who builds it on elites. Elites are few, demanding, and treacherous. The people are many, ask only not to be oppressed, and are a more stable foundation. The political movement that actually connects with ordinary people against the credentialed elite is applying Machiavelli more correctly than the elite relying on institutional capture alone.
6. What should we do? Stop bringing virtue to a knife fight. The chronic error of the opposition is the naive prince Machiavelli explicitly warns against – the leader who assumes truth wins automatically, who believes that being right is a strategy. It is not a strategy. It is a precondition. Being right gives you something worth fighting for. Machiavelli tells you how to fight: build your own power base, never rely entirely on others, control your narrative before your enemies do, and treat fortune as something to be seized, not waited for. Fortune favors the bold. Not the righteous. The bold.
7. Machiavelli is taught in universities as cynical amoralism – the thing decent people reject. This framing is itself Machiavellian – it keeps the manual out of the hands of the people who most need it. The current establishment didn’t reject Machiavelli. It institutionalized him, rebranded him in the language of social justice, and uses him daily. The opposition reads Augustine and loses. The system reads Machiavelli and wins. Until the side that is actually right decides that understanding power is not a betrayal of principle but a precondition for defending it – the result will be the same. Virtue without strategy is just a dignified way of losing.
“I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
Howard Beale says this on live television in 1976, in the middle of a nervous breakdown, in a film called Network. The network keeps him on air. Not despite the breakdown – because of it. The breakdown gets ratings. This is the whole film in three sentences. It is also the contemporary media in three sentences.
1. Beale is not wrong. That is the point. His rage is genuine, his diagnosis is accurate, his targets are real. And we know what he means – because we are mad too. Mad about institutions that stopped serving the people they were built for. Mad about media that manufactures reality rather than reporting it. Mad about governments that regulate everything except themselves. Mad about a system that tells you to be outraged about the right things, in the right direction, and then sells you the outrage back as content. Beale opened the window and screamed. Fifty years later, ten million people are screaming with him into their phones.
And the system is just taking ad revenue from all that…
2. This is the discovery that makes Network one of the most prophetic films of the 20th century: authentic outrage is the most monetizable product ever invented. The system doesn’t fear your anger. It would only fear your action. The moment Beale starts screaming the truth, Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) — the programming executive who is the film’s real villain — sees not a crisis but a format. She feels nothing. Not corrupt in the old sense, not cynical in the obvious sense – simply unable to perceive the difference between a human being and a content category. She is the algorithm, fifty years before the algorithm existed.
3. Paddy Chayefsky wrote this in 1976 as savage satire. It is now a documentary. Every podcaster raging against the system, every mad prophet with a Substack and a loyal audience, every genuine breakdown that became content – Network described the mechanism fifty years before it became the operating model of the entire media ecosystem. The system will platform, package, and sell your genuine anger right up until the moment it stops paying, at which point it will cancel you just as efficiently. Howard Beale wasn’t silenced because he was wrong. He was silenced because he got boring. Diana Christensen does that in the film. She existed before the algorithm. The algorithm just scaled her.
4. The rage was real. The wound was real. The system took the rage, repackaged it, sold it back to the people who felt it, and used the revenue to fund the next cycle of whatever produced the rage in the first place. This is the perfect machine. Input: genuine human suffering. Output: engagement metrics. Byproduct: the suffering continues, because the suffering is the supply chain.
5. Beale is eventually assassinated on live television when his ratings drop. Not silenced by censorship, not broken by the gulag – cancelled, efficiently, the moment the numbers no longer justify the airtime. The audience watches. The show goes on. This is presented as satire. It is a user manual.
6. We are all watching the television. The television is now in our pockets, personalised, always on, feeding us outrage calibrated to our exact psychological profile. Howard Beale got one channel. We got ten thousand. The rage has never been louder. The system has never been more stable.
7. Because screaming, it turns out, is the safety valve – the pressure release the system deliberately leaves open, because rage expressed is rage exhausted. You open the window, you scream, you feel better, you go back to consuming. The system continues unchanged, slightly more data-rich, already building tomorrow’s outrage cycle from tonight’s comments section. Network was not a warning about television. It was a warning about what happens when the medium learns to feed on the message – and discovered that the safety valve is the most important part of the machine. I’m as mad as hell. The algorithm is grateful.
John Lockeson retweeted
Everyday, I am reminded that being ridiculed by fools is the price I pay for refusing to become one of them.
John Lockeson retweeted
My ancestors were slaves, two hundred and fifty years ago as well.
I'm not going to spend my life acting like history happened to me. It didn't. I'm living a life that my ancestors couldn't have imagined: safer, wealthier, freer, with opportunities they never had. Whatever horrors they endured, they led, eventually, to me standing here today.
You weren't a slave. Neither was I. At some point you have to stop treating inherited grievance like it's a personality.
The reality is that today we all have the opportunity to succeed or fail on our own merits. In some ways, if anything, modern society bends over backward trying to compensate for the sins of people who died centuries ago, people who had no connection to anyone alive today except by accident of ancestry.
Carrying around someone else's chains long after they've rusted away is volunteering to stay in a prison that no longer exists. It's stupid. Stop.
The only thing you're actually being held captive by is your own resentment.
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