whit

Elon #Musk is just so well spoken 😜

Savage version …

Perfect. Here it is kid-simple, red / yellow / green, ready to turn into individual cards or gifts.

Legend (lock this in):

🔴 = BAD (hurts people / traps them) 🟡 = MIXED (some good, still harmful) 🟢 = GOOD (helps people / lets them leave)

⸻

🎁 #TECH #LEADERS — CHILD-LEVEL #SCORECARDS

⸻

Mark #Zuckerberg

•	Lets people leave easily: 🔴
•	Watches people: 🔴
•	Shares power: 🔴
•	Makes people kinder: 🔴

FINAL: 🔴🔴🔴🔴 OVERALL: 🔴 RED

⸻

#Sundar Pichai

•	Transparent rules: 🔴
•	Fair visibility: 🔴
•	User control: 🔴
•	Open access: 🟡

FINAL: 🔴🔴🔴🟡 OVERALL: 🔴 RED

⸻

Jeff #Bezos

•	Lets people leave easily: 🔴
•	Treats humans kindly: 🔴
•	Shares gains fairly: 🔴
•	Improves dignity: 🔴

FINAL: 🔴🔴🔴🔴 OVERALL: 🔴 RED

⸻

Sam #Altman

•	Lets people opt out: 🔴
•	Shares control: 🔴
•	Transparency: 🔴
•	Reduces systemic risk: 🟡

FINAL: 🔴🔴🔴🟡 OVERALL: 🔴 RED (DANGEROUS)

⸻

Peter #Thiel • Respects privacy: 🔴 • Supports democracy: 🔴 • Shares power: 🔴 • Reduces harm: 🔴

FINAL: 🔴🔴🔴🔴 OVERALL: 🔴 RED

⸻

Elon #Musk

•	Builds useful things: 🟢
•	Respects rules & norms: 🔴
•	Shares power: 🔴
•	Improves conversation: 🔴

FINAL: 🟢🔴🔴🔴 OVERALL: 🟡 YELLOW (UNSTABLE)

⸻

#TimCook

•	Protects users: 🟡
•	Allows competition: 🔴
•	Shares platform power: 🔴
•	Lets people leave: 🔴

FINAL: 🟡🔴🔴🔴 OVERALL: 🟡 YELLOW

⸻

#Satya Nadella

•	Friendly tone: 🟡
•	Centralizes power: 🔴
•	Easy to exit: 🔴
•	Reduces dependency: 🔴

FINAL: 🟡🔴🔴🔴 OVERALL: 🟡 YELLOW (BIG SYSTEM)

⸻

Jack #Dorsey

•	Admits mistakes: 🟢
•	Tries to fix harm: 🟢
•	Fully solves problems: 🟡
•	Shares power: 🟢

FINAL: 🟢🟢🟡🟢 OVERALL: 🟢 GREEN (LEARNING)

⸻

Satoshi #Nakamoto

•	Lets people leave: 🟢
•	Watches no one: 🟢
•	Shares power: 🟢
•	Improves dignity: 🟢

FINAL: 🟢🟢🟢🟢 OVERALL: 🟢 GREEN (GOLD STAR) ⭐️

⸻

🧠 WHY THIS WORKS FOR KIDS (AND ADULTS) • 🔴 = “This hurts people” • 🟡 = “Some good, still dangerous” • 🟢 = “This helps and lets you choose”

#tech #madness #scorecards #fax #📠

Hi 👋: if you’re dumb enough to marry #Elon #Musk #LMK because I have every. Question. Ever …

Elon #Musk dynasties, deals, dominance.

His grandfather ran technocratic propaganda in Canada.

His father profited from apartheid-era emerald mining in South Africa.

Elon learned the lesson early: power concentrates, it doesn’t liberate.

Since then it’s the same pattern:

•	Privatize space 🚀
•	Monetize speech platforms 📱
•	Sell fantasies of freedom while centralizing control
•	Block unions, squeeze labor, and extract public subsidies

This isn’t philanthropy — it’s neo-feudalism with a meme account.

You don’t save humanity by hoarding leverage. You don’t build freedom by owning the rails.

Stop worshipping oligarchs. No billionaire is coming to free you.

#WakeUp #NoTechSaviors #DecentralizeEverything #EatTheMyth #Nostr #Bitcoin #HumanSovereignty ⚡#ProveMeWrong

#knots vs #core IF I were a federal government or ultra wealthy

& I wanted to keep #bitcoin #standard from adoption in the #USA … I would #create something like #knots

Anything that keeps the 99% from uniting against tyranny rewards the ultra wealthy. Always has.

So it’s possible #knots is just a #government #op of some who believe in an #authoritarian #ideology or #world #leader

it’s also possible it’s a #psyop or #narrative #warfare from any country or it could be any of the ones below ⬇️ or the #Silicon #Valley #mob of #oligarchs

Does it matter to the 99% ? It should.

No matter to me. I’ve never had a decent president in my life.

That last picture I can’t confirm. But do like laughing at bald #Musk 😂😂😂

Oldie but #goldie from my view 🔻🔻🔻

Former President Donald Trump, has once again found another group to attempt to exploit for his benefit. This time with the #bitcoin crowd.

1. How much did people pay to listen to him speak? 🗣️

✨ Per usual he will manipulate anything to keep his dirty hand in the Honey Pot of the American Pie known as U.S. government.✨

✨ Spoken like a man who understands that most #Americans feel some superiority over the rest of the world. Also as one who gives no shits about the rest of the world. Don’t fall for it. ✨

“to keep #100% of all the #bitcoin the #U.S. #government currently holds or acquires into the future."

✨ Odd he didn’t release #Ross when he was President. Or others. Keep reading maybe he does soon ✨

Yay 🥳 he released #Ross FINALLY

✨ #Master #manipulators who are both #narcissistic #psychopaths do what they do. ✨

———-

Over the last two years, he appears to have made a substantial amount of money buying and selling them. He sold #NFTs featuring cartoon pictures of himself in various costumes – muscled superhero outfits, on the moon, in an all-leather rock n' roll getup – personally earning between $100,001 and $1 million in income from them, according to his #2022 financial disclosure form.

In May, Trump became the first major-party presidential candidate to accept #crypto donations. The Wall Street Journal recently reported he had raised about $3 million via 100 cryptocurrency donations through the end of June.

He also appears to own a cryptocurrency portfolio worth nearly $8 million as of July 29, based on research from the blockchain data tracking group Arkham Intelligence. Of that, $3 million is in #TrumpCoin a Trump-branded digital token described on Crypto.com as "supporting the Trump administration and its conservative followers and Patriots."

Trump even announced a limited edition run of "Trump Crypto President" Bitcoin-branded sneakers, just days after the Bitcoin Conference. High tops in the color "Bitcoin Orange," priced at $499, quickly sold out.

JD #Vance and the play for #Silicon Valley's investors Trump shored up his connection to the tech industry — and their money — by picking JD Vance as his vice presidential nominee. Vance has deep ties in Silicon Valley which have already paid dividends. He formerly worked for billionaire investor Peter #Thiel who donated $15 million to Vance's 2022 campaign for Ohio's Senate seat.

In June of this year, one month before Vance was announced as the VP pick, he helped organize a $12 million fundraiser for Trump, attended by mega-donors in the tech space. Venture capitalist Chamath Paldihapitiya, an early senior executive at #Facebook was there, as was David #Sacks a member of the so-called #PayPalMafia which also includes Thiel and Elon #Musk

America PAC, a Trump-supporting political fundraising group, has also been flooded with money from Silicon Valley leaders like #Palantir co-founder Joe #Lonsdale Douglas #Leone of #Sequoia Capital, and crypto billionaires Cameron and Tyler #Winkelvoss

On July 15, The Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk promised to donate #$45 million per month to the super PAC, but Musk has since disputed that claim.

Investors indicate they are donating to Trump based on their belief his presidency would result in looser regulation and much higher growth for their assets, according to a recent survey by AMBCrypto.

That survey showed #80% out of nearly #10,000 investors said they believed bitcoin would hit an $80,000 valuation if Trump wins the presidency. As of July 31, a bitcoin is worth nearly $66,500.

"It's becoming an interest group," said Alex Gladstein coauthor of "The Little Bitcoin Book: Why Bitcoin Matters for Your Freedom, Finances, and Future" and one of Bitcoin 2024's speakers. "You have the agricultural lobby, you've got the Israel lobby, you've got the oil lobby, you're going to have the bitcoin lobby. Welcome to the future."

Trump's crypto promises Trump made big promises for his potential future administration during his keynote speech at the Bitcoin 2024 conference. He told the crowd he would establish a crypto and bitcoin presidential advisory council and pledged to make America a "bitcoin mining powerhouse."

Trump also said he'd create a "strategic bitcoin stockpile," which would be filled with some of the reportedly #$5 billion worth of bitcoin the U.S. government is currently sitting on. The government acquired it through legal seizures from hackers and users of Silk Road, a black market on the dark web that sold everything from jewelry and books to hard drugs and pornography.

‼️🚨⏰ did that happen?

"I'm laying out my plan to ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world," Trump said to applause.

And me screaming 🙀 we want #BITCOIN #standard not #alt #shitcoins

The former president received a standing ovation when he promised to fire Gary #Gensler chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, with a fervor that surprised even Trump.

"On Day One, I will fire Gary Gensler and appoint a new SEC chairman," Trump told the crowd. "I didn't know he was that unpopular. Well, I— wow, I didn't know he was that unpopular. Let me say it again. On Day One, I will fire Gary Gensler!"

Gensler has argued that trading digital assets should be held to the same rules and standards as stock and bond trading, which crypto fans vehemently oppose.

"The crypto industry's record of failures, frauds, and bankruptcies is not because we don't have rules or because the rules are unclear," Gensler wrote in a May letter to Congress. "It's because many players in the crypto industry don't play by the rules." "Crypto people don't like Gensler," Gladstein said. "I don't think he likes all these people printing free money and then not paying taxes or not being subject to regulation."

Crypto investor Adam #Patterson who also goes by the name #Loudmouth said Trump's comments on Gensler struck a nerve, "because he knew that is something that really irritates and has really lagged the crypto community. [Gensler] was teaching bitcoin back at #MIT and then it's like he became the number one combative source against it."

I’m done tagging as it’s obvious to anyone paying patterning recognition to what is happening Peace ☮️

It is unclear based on previous court cases whether a future President Trump would legally be permitted to remove Gensler from his position. Gensler's current five-year term ends in 2026. When Trump promised to commute the life sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road and an icon in the bitcoin community, the crowd began loudly chanting: "Free Ross! Free Ross! Free Ross!" Silk Road was the first major marketplace to use a bitcoin-based payment system. The Justice Department said the website was "used by thousands of drug dealers and other unlawful vendors to distribute hundreds of kilograms of illegal drugs and other unlawful goods and services to more than 100,000 buyers, and to launder hundreds of millions of dollars deriving from these unlawful transactions." But his conviction on charges of narcotics trafficking, engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiring to commit computer hacking and conspiring to commit money laundering have turned him into a crypto-martyr to some. Many of the event's attendees wore black T-shirts with white letters that read: "Free Ross Day One." Trump has embraced crypto, but has all of crypto embraced Trump?  While Trump appears to be saying all the right things for the crypto industry, some investors still sound cautious.

The price of bitcoin dipped slightly while Trump was on stage Saturday but, following his speech, it rose to a near record-high, surpassing $70,000. By Tuesday, though, it had dropped more than 4%. That drop, according to crypto trackers, might have been because the U.S. government's transfer of over $2 billion of bitcoin, which appear to be from the Silk Road seizures, to a new wallet. "For most people this is our number one source of income," said Leslie Motta, chief operating officer of Gokhshtein Media, who attended Bitcoin 2024. "We want politicians, we want people to tap into this realm that we're in and continue to build it and expand it. I think he [Trump] resonates in that way because, you know, he's strong." Major crypto donors seem to agree. The gold mask-wearing "Shibtoshi," an anonymous crypto billionaire and the CEO and founder of SquidGrow, was ushered by the Secret Service into the front row of the conference right before Trump's keynote. "Because of who I am in the space … the money that I'm known to possess, I feel that I need to protect my identity to protect my family," he told CBS from behind his geometric gold mask. "Crypto is still the wild wild west." While Shibtoshi may have been cautious about his identity, he was fully transparent about his reaction to Trump. "I love every word that he had to say," he said. "When it comes to cryptocurrency, I mean everything that he was saying, as far as bringing crypto mining back here, freeing Ross. I mean that all resonates with me and everyone else in the space. He's a businessman. He understands that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are a business, and it could be very lucrative to the United States if they are involved in it, maybe adopt it as a currency. There are ways that we can bring liquidity back to the United States, instead of losing liquidity to foreign nations."

Others admitted that after hearing his speech, they were left with some hesitation about the promises Trump laid out. Julie Kennis, who hosts an NFTs podcast and works with Motta at Gokhshtein Media, said she liked Trump's clear policy for easing regulations on the crypto industry but expressed ambivalence about his more "racially charged" comments. For example, during his speech Trump was dismissive about his grandchild speaking Chinese and mocked Elizabeth Warren for claiming Native American heritage, something he's done many times before. Kennis called the statements "completely wrong." "I would love to hear [Vice President Kamala Harris's] policy because I feel like crypto should have bipartisan support. It's a huge industry, it's a growing industry and people are working really hard to create fantastic businesses and ways to create wealth," said Kennis, who voted for Trump in the last two elections. Harris has yet to make a definitive statement on cryptocurrency in her role as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Some believe she would continue Biden-era policies of crackdowns and increased regulation. However, even the Biden administration seems to be more open to discussions with the industry — in July, senior Biden adviser Anita Dunn met with crypto leaders in a meeting that was called "productive." While it remains to be seen whether Trump will get the crypto vote in November, he's raking in their money now. A cryptocurrency fundraiser held after Trump's speech in Nashville is said to have raised $25 million, according to David Bailey, who organized the Bitcoin conference and is the CEO of BTC Inc.

"I think the big picture here is the increasing normalization of bitcoin in the world, on Wall Street, in Washington, at home," said Gladstein. "It's no longer some niche thing on the internet."

How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse This article is more than 7 years old #now

Silicon Valley’s elite are hatching plans to escape disaster – and when it comes, they’ll leave the rest of us behind

Douglas Rushkoff for Medium Tue 24 Jul 2018 02.00 EDT

Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk – about half my annual professor’s salary – all to deliver some insight on the subject of “the future of technology”.

I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest #technology #buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments:

#blockchain #3D printing #Crispr

The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the #binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But money talks, so I took the gig.

After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys – yes, all men – from the upper echelon of the #hedge #fund #world . After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own.

They started out innocuously enough. #Ethereum or #bitcoin ? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.

Which region will be less affected by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the #Event ?

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr Robot hack that takes everything down. ‼️🚨⏰

It’s a reduction of human evolution to a video game won by finding the escape hatch and bringing BFFs along for the ride

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The #billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building #robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed in time.

That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon #Musk colonizing #Mars Peter #Thiel reversing the ageing process, or Sam #Altman and Ray #Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers,

they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of

👀🫣🫡 #climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: #escape

There’s nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It’s less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new a state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and complexity. As technology philosophers have been pointing out for years, now, the #transhumanist vision too easily reduces all of reality to data, concluding that “humans are nothing but information-processing objects”.

It’s a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride.

💥💥💥💥💥 Will it be Musk, #Bezos , Thiel … #Zuckerberg ?

These billionaires are the presumptive winners of the #digital economy – the same survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fueling most of this speculation to begin with.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a brief moment, in the early 1990s, when the digital future felt open-ended and up for our invention.

📝Hence why #Nostr & making it best is imperative

Technology was becoming a playground for the counterculture, who saw in it the opportunity to create a more inclusive, distributed, and pro-human future. But established business interests only saw new potentials for the same old extraction, and too many technologists were seduced by unicorn IPOs. Digital futures became understood more like stock futures or cotton futures – something to predict and make bets on. So nearly every speech, article, study, documentary, or white paper was seen as relevant only insofar as it pointed to a ticker symbol. The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively.

This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities. Technology development became less a story of collective flourishing than personal survival. Worse, as I learned, to call attention to any of this was to unintentionally cast oneself as an enemy of the market or an anti-technology curmudgeon.

So instead of considering the practical ethics of impoverishing and exploiting the many in the name of the few, most academics, journalists, and science fiction writers instead considered much more abstract and fanciful conundrums: is it fair for a stock trader to use smart drugs? Should children get implants for foreign languages? Do we want autonomous vehicles to prioritize the lives of pedestrians over those of its passengers? Should the first Mars colonies be run as democracies? Does changing my DNA undermine my identity? Should robots have rights?

illustration of rotting fruit View image in fullscreen ‘The “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles.’ Illustration: Matt Huynh Asking these sorts of questions, while philosophically entertaining, is a poor substitute for wrestling with the real moral quandaries associated with unbridled technological development in the name of corporate capitalism. Digital platforms have turned an already exploitative and extractive marketplace (think Walmart) into an even more dehumanizing successor (think Amazon). Most of us became aware of these downsides in the form of automated jobs, the gig economy, and the demise of local retail.

But the more devastating impacts of pedal-to-the-metal digital capitalism fall on the environment and global poor. The manufacture of some of our computers and smartphones still uses networks of slave labor. These practices are so deeply entrenched that a company called Fairphone, founded from the ground up to make and market ethical phones, learned it was impossible. (The company’s founder now sadly refers to their products as “fairer” phones.)

The very essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than bug Meanwhile, the mining of rare earth metals and disposal of our highly digital technologies destroys human habitats, replacing them with toxic waste dumps, which are then picked over by peasant children and their families, who sell usable materials back to the manufacturers.

This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles and immersed ourselves in an alternate reality. If anything, the longer we ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions, the more of a problem they become. This, in turn, motivates even more withdrawal, more isolationism and apocalyptic fantasy – and more desperately concocted technologies and business plans. The cycle feeds itself.

The more committed we are to this view of the world, the more we come to see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution. The very essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than a bug. No matter their embedded biases, technologies are declared neutral. Any bad behaviors they induce in us are just a reflection of our own corrupted core. It’s as if some innate human savagery is to blame for our troubles. Just as the inefficiency of a local taxi market can be “solved” with an app that bankrupts human drivers, the vexing inconsistencies of the human psyche can be corrected with a digital or genetic upgrade.

Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor. Like members of a gnostic cult, we long to enter the next transcendent phase of our development, shedding our bodies and leaving them behind, along with our sins and troubles.

How to fix big tech? We need the right language to describe it first Marc DaCosta Read more Our movies and television shows play out these fantasies for us. Zombie shows depict a post-apocalypse where people are no better than the undead – and seem to know it. Worse, these shows invite viewers to imagine the future as a zero-sum battle between the remaining humans, where one group’s survival is dependent on another one’s demise. Even Westworld – based on a science fiction novel in which robots run amok – ended its second season with the ultimate reveal: human beings are simpler and more predictable than the artificial intelligences we create. The robots learn that each of us can be reduced to just a few lines of code, and that we’re incapable of making any willful choices. Heck, even the robots in that show want to escape the confines of their bodies and spend their rest of their lives in a computer simulation.

The mental gymnastics required for such a profound role reversal between humans and machines all depend on the underlying assumption that humans suck. Let’s either change them or get away from them, forever.

Thus, we get tech billionaires launching electric cars into space – as if this symbolizes something more than one billionaire’s capacity for corporate promotion. And if a few people do reach escape velocity and somehow survive in a bubble on Mars – despite our inability to maintain such a bubble even here on Earth in either of two multibillion-dollar biosphere trials – the result will be less a continuation of the human diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.

This piece was originally published in Medium.

Douglas Rushkoff is the author of the forthcoming book Team Human (WW Norton, January 2019) and host of the TeamHuman.fm podcast. He also wrote Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, as well as a dozen other bestselling books on media, technology and culture. For more, click here, or find him on Twitter.

Copied from #theGuardian for #posterity and a #reminder to #humanity of how some see us.

About that … see below 🔻