Skibidi Speech

Intimacy doesn't scale.

OK so here’s my unpopular opinion, and of course it’s unpopular because this collection of essays only has a few thousand subscribers.

Censorship doesn’t matter.

OK let me qualify that. What do you absolutely know to be true about COVID all these many years later? Did you finally find out the whole truth? How did you get it? Whose life did it save? How many people know what you know? How did they figure it out?

The answers, my friends, are blowing in the flatulent wind. As many times as we talk about The Somme, The Ardennes, Iwo Jima, Stalingrad, The Tet Offensive and Fallujah, we weren’t there. But we’re here. And what is so goddamned special about us and our historical ignorance? In other words, how is social media supposed to prepare us for the inevitable cruelty of human nature or preserve our knowledge of how we survived human cruelty? It’s going to take a very long time for us to erode back to 4 billion human beings on this planet, and censorship algorithms are not going to be the cause. I’m just being hyperreal here.

Do you remember Google Orcut? I do. It went Brazilian and Google dropped it. I can imagine some conversation at GHQ where Schmidt said, you know our investment in Facebook is outpacing our revenue from Orcut. Let’s drop it. I felt the bump, but maybe you didn’t notice a ‘community’ of 300 million suddenly going dark. AFAIK Telegram, has not gone dark. How about Truth Social? My favorite YouTubers all love Ground News, but it’s still Left vs Right, and I don’t need to care about that. With all of the publishing freedom we have, all the blogs and the tweets and the pre-press servers and the university speech codes and the sovereign citizens and Greta Thunberg and President Xi, have we improved the quality of American political speech? Do we have the best of all possible candidates in the best of all possible worlds?

You make me sound stupid just asking the rhetorical question. So WTF are we preserving? For whom?

Oh wait, you do remember Eric Schmidt don’t you? Nevermind. Well, now that I brought it up, I ask you the following question. Do you know how he goes to jail? Two words: Qasem Soleimani. You know what to ask.

So what I’m saying, my dear peasant friends, is that your love and your children are what you get to control in this global middle class. Your mind, your concepts and your memories and all that stuff that can be abstracted into computer mediated communications are far beyond your control. This thing I’m talking to you through right now? It’s a hotel lobby. We won’t always be welcome to tea.

More importantly, when and if we are the Gentleman in Moscow and our poetry actually gets noticed by the Bolsheviks, that’s when we are in danger. What we meant when we meant it is irrelevant. At that point, it’s not censorship any longer, it’s armed repression. I don’t believe there’s a slippery slope. I believe there’s a jagged, dislocating cliff.

In the meantime, in peacetime, in the days of Simone Biles and blue satyrs, all of the algorithms seem to be wide open. But what are we saying? What do we actually know? How safe are we in our Mojo Dojo Casa Houses?

Speech or Cringe
I have never in my entire life of watching Hobo Kelly, Wonderama and Bozo himself seen such a parade of clowns as I have since the invention of Tiktok. And why do I even have it? Beats me. This morning it was Malibu Mom, and a bunch of Millennial parents showing off their GenA kids’ new lingo. Yeah. I know that it’s Ohio. Sus. Skibidi. George Carlin was right, and in the end he wasn’t funny. He was pissed, and I think he finally realized which audiences were paying him and his head imploded.

My TV died last week. My subscription to Consumer Reports gave my replacement a score of 87 which is as good as they went. I did the deal at the local Best Buy, and yes I paid the extra $299 for the Geek Squad five year guarantee, because they don’t make ‘em like they used to. The first thing we did, the Spousal Unit and I, was watch Lawrence of Arabia. I put Kubrick’s Space Odessey on pause to finish this essay this morning. I must say, OLED is spectacular.

Elon’s Tesla Model S autos are the safest the NHTSA has ever crash tested, but he’s being reported as being an international pariah because of some legal battle he’s having with Brazilian authorities who cannot stand being disrespected by their subjects.

I think we were evolved to move, not sit still and talk. At least not to strangers over networks we don’t control. But even talking is better that sitting still and watching, unless it’s David Lean or Stanley Kubrick, both whom have pretty good taste in music as well. That’s art. It fires the imagination. Most of the rest is Cringe. Cringe is getting more difficult to avoid, but we can still move. I’m not going to sell my Toyota FJ in exchange for an EV, I still like to move the old fashioned way. I can live without the extra margin of safety. I still have airbags and I used to drive a 1968 Karmann Ghia with 42 horsepower and bad brakes.

---

Brain Spew
As a data engineer, I’m familiar with the infrastructure on the backend of what the interwebz do. Just because idiots road rage and wrap their cars around poles doesn’t mean interstate highways are a bad idea. Just because we get monkeys in the Oval Office doesn’t invalidate the Constitution. Just because your kids can’t do math doesn’t mean KH-11s can’t see you. Good people know how to do all of these things correctly and pay the appropriate amount of respect to what has gone before. Their work is just not going to be found in the bins at TJ-Maxx or the shiny windows at Balenciaga. That’s where your dilligence comes in, even though you’ll get smeared as an elitist. I called myself a ‘formalist’ to avoid the slur, but perhaps I shouldn’t have spared the middle finger.

So this is a sideways introduction to what I think is necessary for Stoic Observations, which is a shared archive of brain spew. Having maintained several terabytes at home and backing things up via multiple avenues, I’ve been able to maintain continuity over a large amount of stuff for a long time. That would include but is not limited to storage facilities like S3, B2 and DS224. Add to that, the Microsoft property of Github which, if it were allowed to fail and go dark, some of the most clever people on the planet would become hella pissed. Or put another way, if the toilets in Congress started backing up, that’s one kind of shit that would not be tolerated.

Here it is.

That said, I can’t tell you what the first 126 documents are besides Brain Spew which are things that catch my attention and I feel I may have to refer to at some point in the future. This collection is probably only from this year and I may break it into years as I go get my historical set from Evernote, which I now hate. These are all in Markdown which, next to PDF is the most robust and widely accepted document format. Plus the entire archive can fit nicely into Obsidian which is the Evernote replacement that the cool kids are using these days. I didn’t zip it, so that you can read it in place. There’s nothing particularly spicy and certainly nothing private so nothing is encrypted.

Have at it, but don’t forget your physical mobility. When they censor your actual ass, it will be war. And here is an explainer.