Bitcoin Tech Talk #509
Interesting Stuff
Mice Utopia and the Projects - Ed Latimore draws a haunting parallel between his childhood in the projects and Calhoun's Universe 25 mouse experiment, where mice given unlimited resources still collapsed into violence, withdrawal, and extinction. Once factories left, schools failed, and fathers disappeared, residents shifted to immediate status markers like reputation and visible wealth and violence emerged from that broken hierarchy. There are many similarities popping up to this experiment from over 50 years ago, including Calhoun's “Beautiful Ones” or male mice who withdrew to obsessively groom themselves, which looks suspiciously like the looksmaxxing phenomenon.
China's Cultural Controls - Nathan Baker traces how Chinese censorship cracked down on microdramas depicting poor women marrying wealthy CEOs, part of a broader war on content depicting desires that the state disapproves of. State interventions range from Tencent's alternate Fight Club ending (police “prevented the bomb”) to suppressing the doomerish “lying flat” movement. The most insightful point was that vices are on one end censored and on the other end commercialized. Neither seem like satisfactory ways to deal with the vices themselves as they both rely heavily on manipulation through propaganda.
Why the USSR Failed - Mark Atwood writes about an alternate explanation of why the USSR failed. The conventional narrative is that Communism fell from its own inconsistency. Yet we see regimes like North Korea continuing to go strong despite essentially the same doctrine. What he points to is Stalin's purges which brought to power a generation in their late twenties, promoting people like Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko, who then spent their careers ensuring no similar turnover could ever happen. Brezhnev granted lifetime tenure to an entire generation which eventually just aged out. Three General Secretaries died in 28 months (1982-1985) and Soviet TV became a continuous funeral broadcast. The collapse of the USSR was an indictment of gerontocracy, not communism, which, given how old the politicians and bureaucrats are in the US system, should give pause.
Pittsburghizing of America - Aaron M. Renn observes how over 2,000 American counties which is two-thirds of the country, now have more deaths than births annually. Only 14 of 56 major metros added white residents last year; just Nashville and Charlotte added more than 10,000. This was a phenomenon which was only really observed in Pittsburgh and other rust-belt cities in the 80’s, but has spread to most of the rest of the country. The white population isn't being “replaced” by immigration as it's dying off through below-replacement fertility. Fiat money was a large reason for manufacturing moving abroad, devastating significant parts of the country.
Lazy Gen Z - Librarian of Celaeno agrees with Karoline Leavitt’s conclusion about Gen-Z laziness while eviscerating her credibility. She obtained positions through donor-funded make-work jobs, married wealth at 24, and lectures on bootstraps from zero hardship. Boomers preach self-reliance while receiving more from Social Security than they contributed and engineering an economy with H-1B floods and astronomical housing costs. But the real laziness problem is fatalism and hopelessness, of young people adopting victimhood and giving up on life itself. His proposed solution is decentralization to lower-cost areas, homeschooling families, small-scale operators using technology to avoid institutional compliance.
What I'm up to
Bitcoin Well - I was on this podcast to talk about Bitcoin, Christianity and the relationship between them. The idea I enjoyed talking about the most was the Girardian interpretation of what happened between the era of Judges and the era of Kings. The desire for a king was a desire for a scapegoat, a way to avoid responsibility and it required a perfect king, a truly innocent scapegoat that could take all the blame to put that mechanism away. The main idea being that individual responsibility is ultimately decentralized, and the scapegoat/king mechanism is centralized.
Origin Seoul - I will be in Seoul, Korea for this event on Saturday. There’s a gathering of Christian Bitcoiners followed by a more general (secular) one afterward. Sign up and come on by if you’re in town!
Nostr Note of the Week
