Invisible Invasion
The war on normies, the war for the noosphere.
In the last ten years the West has copied China and Russia in order to fight them. We copy China with half-measures in online censorship and Russia with half-measures in managed democracy and persecution of dissidents.
Jacob Siegel wrote a great piece for Tablet in 2023 describing how we got a de facto martial law online after Trump’s victory in 2016, that was blamed on Russian election interference. The result was that the whole world was censored online to fit into very niche and progressive values of Berkeley and San Francisco.
The war on disinformation started a bit earlier, in 2014 and got to another level of algorithmic mass pre-censorship after Trump 1.0 and during Covid. Mike Benz talks about many of the same aspects of the censorship industrial complex on X and in his numerous podcast appearances.
One egregious example was blocking of New York Post, a 200 year old newspaper, from twitter for a week because of a Hunter Biden laptops’ story that was later proven to be true. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was an unexpected blow to the censorship industrial complex that wanted to put the Internet genie back in the bottle.
To gain power, any group needs to form an effective Left-Right synthesis, thinks Balaji Srinivasan. The Left provides moral justification and the Right provides effective execution. Therefore the Great Awokening since circa 2012 is the other side of what I call NATO versus normies - the Blob abandoning free speech and interests of the median voter and worker, while using loud woke activists as a moral police on dissidents.
Normal people, the normies, want cheap electricity, cheap gas, clean and safe streets, low inflation and interest rates, and affordable high quality public services, like education and healthcare. The more products and services are on the TV price curve, the better for normies.
The Blob, the security state that is at the core of the uniparty in the US and the blue tribe globally, has been openly against free speech since the twin populist uprisings of Brexit and Trump in 2016. Curiously, Britain after Brexit got a raw deal and went even more into an unmanaged decline. I think this is due to language and network proximity to blue America.
America is Europe’s last colony, and the EU is a satellite of the US at the same time. An example of the former is Thierry Bretton writing Elon Musk not to discuss with Donald Trump on X - an EU bureaucrat threatening two US citizens, the richest man on Earth and a former president who is also running for office in 2024. An example of the latter is the EU’s silence over the blown-out Nord Stream 2 pipeline or EU members like Germany and Poland complying with the US-Russia prisoner swap in 2024.
This paradox is resolved through network proximity of the transatlantic Blob and old establishment elites in the West. EU is just another app of the Blob, something like Lyft or Bolt, if Uber is busy in your area. If the First Amendment prohibits certain actions in the US, the Blob uses the EU or Germany, or any Five Eyes country to regulate the US Big Tech companies indirectly, through global harmonization of regulation.
An Orwellian entity from the UK, CCDH was key in organizing an advertising boycott that was meant to “kill Musk’s twitter”, an objective they explicitly stated in their leaked presentations.
Elon Musk with his purchase of twitter for 44 billion dollars have saved free speech as a core Western value for now. But a weakness in conservative mindset of prevalent in the red tribe is the hero worship. Why we have so few people like Elon Musk is an interesting question, but an insufficient decentralization is a key issue in defending free speech.
Twitter described itself once “as a free speech wing of a free speech party”. But some two years ago it was almost entirely overtaken by the Blob. To fight the invisible invasion of the blue tribe we need more pro-speech services like X, Farcaster, Nostr, Rumble, Substack.
Balaji Srinivasan has created Nakamoto Coefficient to measure degree of decentralization by number of entities that need to be compromised to get to 50% of control of a certain protocol or project.
Balaji also talks about social war, a war waged on a network - where the goal is to turn some nodes of the network graph from red to blue or switch some nodes off - by canceling them from certain platforms or by pre-censoring (shadow-banning) them.
We have witnessed a war on the normies and a war for the noosphere for at least a decade. We saw an invisible invasion of institutions - done by the woke activists and journos working in tandem with the digital censorship of the security state (the Blob) - as a Left/Right fusion that underpinned the blue tribe dominance globally.
The sublimation of war is politics and the sublimation of politics is alignment. We need a new uniparty built around techno-optimism and free speech.
There is a danger of a single story and the blue monoculture is making our noosphere fragile. Let a hundred flowers bloom, let’s regenerate our noopolitics (maybe with something like Balaji’s techno-democracy and market for votes) and let’s make our societies work again for the (median voter) normies.