55 - Prophetic Prophetability

Ask me not what color I root for, I play in shades of grey. That I’m happy to see a big, beautiful, blue sea before me, is unrelated to who won, but that we’ll mostly have gridlock moving forward and that maybe we can slow down the conversation and start cleaning house on the corruption side of things. I doubt it, but it’s nice to dream out loud. I’m also spiteful, and think the red team needs a time out for doubling back on campaign promises that were important to me and many Americans while advancing only the worst and most divisive of his vision.

The success of [prediction] markets, Nate Silver’s latest forecasting model and the lag of legacy media as coverage and intelligence points throughout the blue tsunami were fantastic shares from the team over at blockworks. Worth a read on its own.

As it plays out, Nate Silver’s model called it over the weekend, prediction markets called it on average 2 hours before legacy media, calling blue advantages and holding, and was also more stable compared to last election cycle which had endless cases of last minute flipping across the board.

Speaking of flip flopping, it's been two election cycles of promises to release the epstein files now. Which, like the panama papers before them, implicate a lot of wealthy, powerful people in gross behavior and have led to a lot of side characters seeing stage left. But this is a decentralized internet newsletter and we should talk about what I’m worried will come about as a result of this election cycle and the lack of critical thought it has truly been given by people on the shades of blue team. And it's a recurrent theme for longtime readers.

REGULATORY CAPTURE. The lack of nuance that is being brought to the conversation about regulating digital assets, cryptography, and artificial (STOOPID) intelligence is eating at my core. At least with President Carrot Face we got insane maxi deregulation, too bad it mostly gave us ponzis and illegal trading schemes operating as self regulated casinos, giving the space a bad name. 

Meanwhile the th0t leader founders over on twitter have flip flopped between AI and web3 so many times that nobody wants to do the actual work to build a crypto punk solution with all the parts laying out in front of us, a quantum threat looming, and other dystopian nightmares on the horizon. And the people i know, who are blue in the face with pride this week, are refusing to actually confront the technology frontier we are on the precipice despite being regular users of the technology delivering it. 

We need to be confronting what a free and open internet requires: learning the emerging tech, which like every other art form can be combined in novel non obvious ways to make interesting solutions.

Except regulatory capture most likely will happen first. And the calls for it from the top all the way down is deafening, sentator warren is absolutely salivating at the thought of destroying web3. But to crown Sam, Dario, Elon (AND Google & Meta & every big guy bad actor) who will be able to afford the insane compliance regimens being proposed, the winners of American AI, would be one of the dumbest short sighted decisions available to us. 

Chinese open source models will obliterate ours on shear non hallucinated recursive training size alone, while the public subsidizes the brain rot our privatized labs will continue to lazily pump out.

But more than that, its the digital id systems that will roll out with them for proof of humanity in contrast to the increasingly sophisticated bots polluting our metaverse. And I am staunchly against a centralized version of that. Whether it’s the red team’s citizen surveillance state infrastructure or the blue team’s digital health id software backdoor, the orwellian future is already here and more people should stand up and do something about it.

To play the game of regulation, is to chop a hydras head. Play a different game, maybe we can get different results. I implore you to learn how cryptography can be applied as a quantum secure solution for sovereign identity data management, and flip the script on our surveillance driven future internet of everything, that i think relatively few people actually want.

- el Prof