The Network State

Cryptographic Verification > Official Confirmation. Perhaps the most important arena in which the Network is stronger than the state is in the nature of truth itself. As incredible as it may sound, the blockchain is the most important development in history since the advent of writing itself, as it’s a cryptographically verifiable, highly replicated, unfalsifiable, and provably complete digital record of a system. It’s the ultimate triumph of the technological truth view of history, as there are now technical and financial incentives for passing down true facts, regardless of the sociopolitical advantages any given government might have for suppressing them. To foreshadow a bit, this ledger of record is history written by the Network rather than the State. (Location 1028)

Power over truth. In these incidents, if you stop to count, you often realize that the reports were off not by say 50%, but by 1000X or more. Why do these “reporters” still have their jobs, then? Because their job wasn’t to make money, but to make power. That is, they weren’t trying to predict the future correctly for the sake of making good investments, but to repeat the party line to keep people in line. They’re like actors, in that their role was to say (or write) the right thing at the right time, to manufacture your consent, to misinform you about everything from weapons of mass destruction to the probability of inflation, and to then claim democratic legitimacy after people voted on the basis of their official misinformation (Location 1737)

is only because the State’s filtering of social media is not yet complete, that their downranking of dissident voices not fully efficient, that their late-breaking attempt to impose speech and thought controls on a free society not fully consummated, that (a) the initial refutations were even published and (b) that you are seeing some of them combined into one document. (Location 1750)

Recall that Gell-Mann Amnesia refers to the phenomenon where you read something in the paper about an area you have independent knowledge of. Suppose it’s computer science. When you read articles on the topic, you see grievous falsehoods, and inversions of cause and effect. Then you turn the page and read about, say, Palestine as if the reporting on that topic was trustworthy. You forget what you just saw, that the reporting was flawed in the area where you could independently check it. You get amnesia. (Location 1784)