this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
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Owch, I should start a blog. My chain of thought went from this to meshnets and presumption of innocence, and in the dispersed intersections of these to communications control and totalitarianism, and there I wrote some kind of socio-political rant (again) for a fiction book or movie.
I can't erase that much text, so it's under a spoiler tag.
spoiler
We live in a pretty usual time. We grew up in an unusual time, though, fueled by anti-colonialism, WWII experience and Cold War, and then some optimism over its end. When some kind of justice could really be had in the West and even the second world.Soviet dissidents would use Soviet laws in Soviet courts against the Soviet system with their defenders honestly working for that goal, and the only way the system was able to confidently close them was by inventing a non-existent kind of schizophrenia and then forcibly putting them into mental institutions.
One can say those formerly privileged parts of the world are turning into some kind of Turkey as shown in Midnight Express, and hopefully the third world is moving in a different direction.
When I was 12+, I would talk pretentiously and vaguely how all this won't last and we are seeing the last decade of it in any notable form (while in fact it was dying when I was a baby), and that the solutions are in decentralization and preparation for underground communication and asymmetric warfare, keeping in mind that the enemy won't be using anything conventional or predictable either.
I think this is symmetric to why we are seeing such decay - because for information people have lost understanding that you should always read between the lines, and for justice people have lost understanding that it can never be had by the law without spending blood, sweat and tears, and that this is not end of history and neither information nor justice are something we can reliably have in any matter in any moment.
So that advice is simply about being more humane, rejecting absolutes and burning idols, and knowing there'll always be a situation where you are morally right, but the whole world, the law, the opinions, the public morale and the balance of power - they will all be against you and you should still fight and shouldn't accept it. And also that civilization is similar to Ouroboros eating its tail - you have to ruin some parts for it to live, and those parts don't want to be ruined and have that supported by laws and popular opinions ; you have to be destructive.
The culture of resistance. Something old Star Wars EU had (literally, in the WEG guidelines from 1994 PDF I have, comparing the Empire to the "civilized world" and saying that Empire's civilians generally don't feel any different and don't know about Empire's atrocities, unless they are personally affected).