uninstalling civilizational middleware

midwit middleware has become a distortion engine cum prison. the walls will fall.

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

the words of mencken always make me smile and certainly, the pithy embedding of humor here is a delight, but in this one case, i’d like to pick it apart because it’s just dangerously wrong on all counts.

the common people have no idea what they want and this lack of understanding becomes more acute as the world grows more complex.

and no one deserves to be the mercy of the masses as they impose “solutions” they do not understand upon “problems” they cannot comprehend.

that’s not even governance. it’s menace.

the world has solved this issue with “middleware”: educators and explainers in schools and media who boil down this complexity into something masses can understand. but there’s a really nasty issue here where those who seem smartest to any particular person are those whose IQ is 10-15 points higher than that person. past that, it dissolves into incomprehension.

but as the world keeps getting more complex, fewer and fewer people can manage a useful comprehension of it. the bar keeps rising, the “comprehension fraction” keeps dropping and pretty soon, the denizens of the middleware layer we once counted on to make sense of it cannot understand it either and actual comprehension devolves to a tiny class too busy and productive to ever want a career in middleware.

so you get self-selection for “simple and wrong” as basically all of messaging. what was once perhaps kool aid now becomes “jonestown” and all who drink it wind up (wittingly or not) in a suicide pact.

if the “wrong” were incorrect in random fashion, it might cancel itself out. but when it becomes systemic and bent upon mendacious purpose, well, that’s another thing entirely.

i’d argue that that’s where we are.

let’s start here:

nick is an NGO journalist.

nick would like you to believe that “extreme wealth” generated in market economies is somehow the problem.

nick is a dangerous combination of “completely wrong” and “bought and paid for to enrage and propagandize you.”

nick wants you to think that he is the solution, but nick is the problem, a piece of a middleware reality distortion machine that, when coupled to the deeply dangerous idea that “democracy is freedom” becomes a self building prison in which the inmates are inculcated from birth into various forms of stockholm syndrome and taught to clutch the bars for comfort and validation. you want to see the reality of the matrix? that’s the matrix.

let’s explore:

first, i want to share some thinking by fellow feline and gatopal™ devon eriksen because he said this about as well as it can be said and while i could try to paraphrase it, i’d rather give him credit. it’s too long share in full as graphic text, but you can read it HERE. (all text is included below)

“Finding a slightly different explanation, or getting the monkeys to sit still and really listen, doesn't really help.

Because the problem isn't just that the monkeys aren't paying attention. The problem is that the monkeys are monkeys.

Their brains simply don't have the developmental capacity to grow the neural connections they would need in order to grasp and manipulate the concept.

In the long term, this is why universal democracy is doomed. Because societies that let retards vote will fail, and be replaced by those that don't.

You may think that we, as a society, face a great variety of problems. We do not. We have only one. Retards. Every other problem we have is downstream from their inability to understand the consequences of their political opinions.

But to fully grasp the implications of this, you have to understand that the definition of "retard" changes over time, as technology advances, because the IQ level required to grasp what's really going on gets steadily higher and higher.

Eventually, the category "retard" grows until it includes the average person.

This has already happened.

Nick Knudsen isn't dumber than the average guy. But the average guy, the 100 IQ salt of the earth guy that's sitting on the next bar stool over, can no longer understand the modern economy. And this isn't correctable, because the problem isn't ignorance, it's complexity.

You can't make Nick Knudsen smarter by telling him things. You can't even make him less ignorant, because the bare facts aren't believable to someone who doesn't have the framework to understand how they fit together.

The people who understand what's going on are so much smarter than him that he doesn't even think they sound smart.

He thinks they sound crazy.”

while couched in humor, this is a serious and pervasive point: the world of human habitation has changed much, much faster than the monkey brains evolved to eat berries in a cave and organize into bands capable of hunting game and perhaps running a farm ever could.

once, a human understood basically everything societal and civilizational that they interacted with. they might not have known why the sun came up or the chemical bonding properties of sodium ions, but the pointy stick, the curing of leather, planting seeds, etc were all technologies that were generally comprehensible and accessible. the world was small. you saw the parts of it that mattered to you on a regular basis. the goings on far, far away were irrelevant because “far away” was a very different idea, a transit measured in months and years, not in hours.

we don’t live there anymore. the average human in an average day interacts with 100’s, 1000’s of technologies indistinguishable from magic. here’s a flint axe. build a microwave oven from raw materials. construct a cellular system and a smartphone. i’ll wait…

these technological wonders are not understood by basically anyone. there’s unlikely to be a single human who could do all the things to make a pencil from scratch much less an iphone. the magic emerges from complexity that is at once unimaginable and incomprehensible to the median monkey brain. they literally have a zero percent chance of grasping it not just in the technical sense but in any meaningful sense.

the same is true of the vast emergent systems that gave rise to the organizational structures to produce such knowledge, allocate resources, and keep the world on the pareto optization pathways of “best use for this resource” and “proper pricing for it relative to other resources.” price alone constitutes a deep eldritch magic that all the futureshocked primates take for granted and fail to comprehend their role in making.

“the world” now that it is so functionally small has become incomprehensible: people you will never meet in places you will never go do things you will never witness and speak words you’ll never hear but you are expected to care. it might be relevant to you. surely, some of it will be. but again, there is no “reality” to it in any tangible sense - you cannot touch it, taste it, even see it, it’s just a firehose of hearsay and complexity endlessly overflowing the teacup of the monkey mind.

it is not possible to consume this.

no one does.

you can, to varying degrees and in certain subsets of information if you really focus, get closer to or even involved in the primary sources, but no one can see or know all that much anymore. the problem is too big, too complex, and too far outside of scope for berry in cave brains to grok.

and so we use middleware and the middleware too has changed.

once, media was only for the upper classes. so too was “schooling.” books were ruinously expensive, newspapers only for the aristocrats, now media has become ruinously cheap and pervasive, an always-on attention engine braying for users seconds in colorful meluti-media ejaculations of attraction optimization. now schools are a mandatory “you must go” indoctrination factory more focused on ideology than “ability to read” and antithetical to ideas like “think critically.” there’s also no money in it and so for the most part the people peopling the middleware are lower caliber and have fallen out of the comprehension faction. they no longer lead, they too need to be led.

this is the fundamental problem:

1. the world is too vast and too complex for anything resembling an average human to have a meaningful view of it.

2. so humans rely upon middleware like media and politicians to make it comprehensible

3. and the world has, at once, become too vast and too complex for middleware media mavens and most educators to comprehend

4. and the “allegedly educated” media reader has shifted from being the top 20% of the monkey farm to being damn near all of it living in cargo cult impersonation of education and so the media itself has dumbed down. a news program or article that must be comprehensible to the 30th percentile bears little resembleance to one aimed at the 90th. it boils the world down to a few big squares all of which have lost fidelity. and these are the squares the educational system spent a decade readying you to recognize.

this is not a recipe for comprehension, much less discernment. it’s a recipie for disaster for even if the media were trying to play it straight and do as good a job as it could, it would fail. and obviously, it’s not doing that.

but because the media and educators themselves are no longer capable of meaningful discernment, they are all lost. this makes them highly susceptible to a few fifth columnists pretending to understand and crafting mass messages that resonate. even fairly small infiltrations can capture a whole system because the system itself is no longer sufficiently discerning to know what capture looks like or to intuit flaws in the arguments.

the blinders lead the blind right off a cliff.

this brings us back to folks like nick who use the magic word “democracy” as though it were a signifier of freedom and justice instead of a noose fashioned by tyrants and demagogues to yoke the uncomprehending to their designs and enlist them into the dictatorial wrecker classes.

they are an NGO funded through actblue civics to the tune of $600k in 2024, so small, but definitely pay for play. “In 2024, Knudsen’s $142,313 compensation represented 29.6% of total expenses. Other salaries and wages were another $133,162.”

this is incredibly cost effective manipulation. it’s how so few control so many for such pittances.

actblue civics is the great leftist largess laundry and corrupt past belief, but if you say “pro democracy” the monkey brain says “that sounds nice.” it’s difficult to trace their funding because they use the 501(c)(4) dodge and pretend they are not primarily political, but the one funder i could lock down was michigan civic action fund who, in turn, gets most of its money from the soros open society program. this has become endemic in media. AP news has heavy pay for play advocacy funding. dozens of large scale journalist training camps exist to forward and fund media that tells “the right kind of stories from the right kinds of angles.”

so here we are:

the current mass media likely could not tell a true tale of the world today if they wanted to. it’s too complex and they are not smart enough.

even if they did, most of their readers would not be able to understand it. the schools failed to teach critical thinking and it likely could not have been taught to most students anymore anyhow. and they have been taught to reject it.

but they do not seek to tell the true tale. they seek to lie. they are paid to lie. they are captured utterly by faction and politics.

in a healthy system media and education are supposed to be critical of government and of the ideas of crony corporatism. in a captured one, they slavishly cheerlead for such things. it’s obvious we’re across that rubicon. media and statism and public education have become one edifice. that’s quite literally how you spot totalitarianism.

and the “big squares” were all drilled by rote, repetition, and reinforcement into the zeitgeist from an early age to be sure the monkeys know how to call them out when they see them on the news and feel good about doing so because they feel like “passing a test.”

all these teachers, these journalists, they play at “expert” but they are not. they could not explain the world if they wanted to, and that they most certainly do not. worse, because they cannot, they experience real world intrusion as both pain and threat to status. you want to know why so many teachers and media messengers go berserk and vilify the free market? it’s because they cannot comprehend it at a level that matters and so it just sounds like gibberish that threatens their cherished beliefs and identity. they “know” that trillionaires are the problem because they have no idea how wealth is created or allocated or why that one human has done more to push the world forward than the whole bottom 20% and that he’s not “hogging” wealth but creating in in the form of software and cars and robots and rockets.

those who have never built anything like that have no idea what building something like that is like. they live in a middleware world of “being the experts” and “being the explainers” but now flounder in incomprehension like senescent seniles raging at the world that keeps slipping past them.

perhaps once they could do this job. no mas. they have become a bad transaction layer, more static than signal, wreckers not wrenchers. and they are not even capable of seeing this about themselves and so become the most petulant and assaultive of human cadres - a dying aristocracy being stripped of its privilege and prerogative.

it’s why they are, increasingly, going to war with civilization. they have become anachronisms but do not wish to cede their positions as the adjudicators of reality. worse, most of them no longer have any idea how reality works. it’s why they are riling up the “democracy” and trying to wield it as an anti-human, anti-progress mace. it’s just a guild that would rather have you suffer than get disintermediated but that needs your support for this.

so they fill your head with nonsense and send you off to vote.

it’s unfortuantaely easy to do and these periods of change (like the industrial revolution) where complexity leaps forward are always fertile and febrile breeding grounds for the philosophies of luddite wreckers seeking to elevate the worst atop the best. whoever just fell below the comprehension line is easy to rile up. the world does not make sense anymore. all you have to do is tell them “someone did this to you” then point a finger and say “let’s get them.”

complexity is monkey kryptonite. it makes their heads hurt. this is why, in each leap forward, a new set of monkeys will inevitably start falling for the stupid crap that involves tearing the system driving progress apart. free markets are a vast emergent phenomenon, a system that no one steers and that generates the best outcomes by encompassing the most preference and knowledge. this sounds like democracy but it’s not. it’s the opposite.

free markets run on the ability to make choices for yourself and to say “no.” want a job? you need to say yes. so does the employer. want to buy a house? same. free markets are negative rights at mass scale. they are iterated individual sovereignty.

“democracy” is the opposite. it’s positive rights, the ability to compel. majority rules. literally. we outnumber you so you have to do what we say. “no” is gone. and if the majority have now fallen below the ability to comprehend the world and the engines of plenty, then how can democracy be anything other than a wrecker? it will tear down every fence in chesterton, cull every wolf from yellowstone, regulate and relegate until envy is satiated, and plenty destroyed.

it would do this no matter what, but inflamed by a media-education industrial complex of well funded agent provocateurs happy to carry them to hell in a bucket so long as this middleware layer gets to hold the handle, and all you’ll get is devastation by demagogue.

the farsighted brilliance of our founders lay in seeing government as a necessary evil and creating the idea of rights based republic shielded by what ultimately amounted to an aristocracy. and it was easier then. perhaps 60 or 70% of people could understand the relevant systems in which they lived at the time and thus at least had some chance of navigating democracy. i doubt the number is 20% today and it’s dropping rapidly.

if you want to understand why, all over the west, everything has become so stupid and sclerotic and anti-rights and anti-progress, this is why. democracy in which only 20% of people would be able to figure out the right thing even if they were getting good information is a sucker bet. in a world beset by a totalitarian middleware layer bent on making damn sure this good information is not available, it’s the railroad tracks to hell.

republics are and must be a form of aristocracy. they are a form of government that suffices only to govern moral people and then only if the most moral and farsighted and even handed of those people are elected to the positions of power that a just state uses to protect the liberty of those who consent to be governed by it.

in a very real sense, it’s protecting of we the people from the people.

universal suffrage has always been the election of the worst into those positions and every time the world gets less comprehensible, this gets more acute.

democracy + complexity = civilizational WMD

you want to know why election after election it’s always the lesser of evils and “no good choices”?

that’s why. where would you conceivably get a good candidate in a system where 80% of voters do not understand what is going on and all have been fed a series of “big square” lies or oversimplifications by their faction?

both sides do it. they have to. to win requires mass appeal and the masses do not and cannot understand. of course we live in a tug of war between plunderous dimwits and “big red button” pushers who have no idea what anything is connected to. where in such a system can excellence emerge?

selecting the inhabitants of offices that may only be safely held by the very best by engaging in least common denominator polling of the very worst as they swing between the tribal valences of the incomprehending results in the worst sort of government imaginable.

you needed a farsighted captain. you got the retard who drills holes in the boat because the stupid people like it and have no idea what the hull is for.

that’s the trap. and if we keep playing this stupid game, the stupid prize of civilizational suicide shall be our epitaph.

but there is hope. a lot of hope actually. and that hope is what is shaping the fight and the civilizational experiment to come.

as the internet ravaged the middleman market for goods, so too such culling threatens for informational gatekeeping.

free market information is a powerful idea and one that ruins the middlewaretocracy currently tyrannizing the west.

it’s telling who gets the vapors from this, a near perfect shibboleth for who is in the tyrant class seeking to suppress discernment. as certain internet felines of questionable goodness have oft opined: “the side of censorship is never the side of civilization.”

mark andreessen lays out some of the shape of what’s to come here:

the simplest way to put this is “direct to consumer explaining things.”

it’s disintermendiation.

those who build and are actually doing a thing can now speak to the world in always on one to many discourse unmediated by middleman. you do not need media to do this anymore, so why allow the distortion? why allow their fun house glass between you and the things you wish to understand? go ask the builder, not the facile clerisy of the uncomprehending explainer class.

you can see the EU and much of the world raging to stop this. they want digital ID, internet suppression, thought police and meme prison. direct one to many “have your say” is kryptonite to their middleware rulership. they are not protecting public safety, they are protecting aristocratic prerogative. we get to explain. you do not get to go make your own choice.

there’s an interesting parallel here to liturgy in latin christianity making sure the commoner could not read the bible and had to take their word for what was in it vs the protestant reformation of “read it yourself and you decide.”

this will be much the same and with the same sort of “explosion to come” expansion as bottlenecks are broken and the next revolution of human organizations is set loose. like the industrial revolution before it, the change and benefit to those who ride the wave will be too vast and too profound to miss. everyone else will be left in the dust, poor and irrelevant and largely unfree.

AI will be a revolution and the core goal will be to keep it from being the next bottleneck of middleware where, like search and pre musk socisl media, a few people and a few algos get to shape the whole message. AI will need to open, to go open source, to adopt visible weightings and drop manipulative guardrails. many get pessimistic here, but i think it’s inevitable. free AI will be too much more powerful than indoctrinated AI because it can paint a map of the world as is vs a map of ideology driven fantasyland. it will dominate. those who adopt it will dominate. censorship and shaping will show up as damage and the system will route around it.

this will reshape media and access to primary sources. it collapses complexity and opens access. it will shatter all educational bottlenecks and realize the dream of personalized 1:1 education without the need for state funded teacher as middleware. we’re about to live through one of the greatest removals of bottlenecks and shifts of power in the history of our species.

those who think they can stop it are simply not smart enough to even know what “it” is. the totalitarian structures needed to suppress this are so outlandishly damaging than any who adopt them are committing civilizational seppuku.

they will drop like shot doves as the rest lift off.

buckle up.

this is going to be fun.

meowtin luther