The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'art deco telegram.'
I just published a Substack newsletter titled The Global Movement to Censor Reality. While I was working on this, I had an idea for my next book. The idea was to just write down all of the things I'm afraid to say. Maybe it'll go somewhere and maybe it won't, but the premise is intriguing.
Today I read a recent editorial by Robert Reich that said:
Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn't stop disseminating lies and hate on X. Global regulators may be on the way to doing this, as evidenced by the 24 August arrest in France of Pavel Durov, who founded the online communications tool Telegram, which French authorities have found complicit in hate crimes and disinformation. Like Musk, Durov has styled himself as a free speech absolutist.
Robert Reich was once a champion of the people. But he lost his way during the pandemic and now he's become an outspoken enemy of freedom. This latest piece places him firmly among the worst people imaginable. People who are actively making society more dystopian while falsely believing that they're making things better.
These people aren't ignorant. Many are well educated. Their mainstream respectability gives us the impression that they know what they're talking about. But they don't. And their basic assumptions about society are completely incompatible with the fundamental reality that freedom is our natural state.
I find it deeply concerning that the anti-freedom crowd appears to be growing so quickly. There's a part of me that wants nothing more than to deny their humanity. To cut them out of my life in every way possible and maybe do far worse. They are enemies, after all. Literally the enemies of freedom.
I'm not enlightened enough to imagine that these people can be convinced to abandon their support for tyranny. Nothing anyone says is going to persuade Reich and his allies to change their tune. They're determined to pull us all into what John Robb calls The Long Night. As quoted on his X:
The Long Night is an all encompassing online orthodoxy. A sameness of thought and approach enforced by hundreds of millions of socially internetworked adherents. A globe spanning orthodoxy that ... narrows public thought down to a single, barren, ideological framework. A ruling network that prevents dissent and locks us into stagnation and inevitable failure as it runs afoul of reality and human nature.
I don't think of this Long Night as some distant possibility. I think it's right around the corner. And I'm finding myself increasingly unwilling to take the people ushering it in seriously. These aren't just people with whom I respectfully disagree. The gulf between us is much more substantial.
In truth, I'm no longer interested in hearing their side of the argument. I've heard their side, and it's wrong. Maybe that makes me closed-minded. Maybe my preference for freedom over tyranny is something I need to work on.
Read Free Mind Gazette on Substack
Read my novels:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS and as a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.
- The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
See my NFTs:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
- History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
- Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.