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# The Limits of Public Choice Theory 📄
### Ben Southwood  
##### May 30, 2017 

![](https://m.stacker.news/113577)

Many people believe that politics is difficult because of incentives: voters vote for their self interest; bureaucrats deliberately don’t solve problems to enlarge their departments; and elected officials maximize votes for power and sell out to lobbyists. But this cynical view is mostly wrong—politics, insofar as it has problems, has problems not because people are selfish—it has problems because people have wrong ideas. In fact, people mostly act surprisingly altruistically, motivated by trying to do good for their country.

### Public Choice
When you study public policy or economics you typically look at things as if you’re in complete and absolute control of every lever of policy change and implementation, like a real-life game of Sim City. You look at a social problem—say, lead pollution—and you come up with the optimal solution—say, a body that regulates fuel—and that’s it. Job done. All you need to do is set up an environmental bureaucracy.

But there’s a clear and troubling asymmetry here. Why don’t people just switch to unleaded fuel themselves? Easy: they are self-interested and the benefit to them of individually switching is infinitesimal, while the cost is considerable. But aren’t bureaucracies also staffed with self-interested people? Can we be sure that bureaucrats will implement the optimal set of regulations?

This question is what motivated the public choice school of economics. Economists took their tools and applied them to government officials as enthusiastically as they had applied them to market actors. It’s not like no one had ever considered whether politicians just wanted to win votes before. But public choice formalized these thoughts into models, with the standard extreme simplifying assumptions that draws economics so much ire. It tries to explain why politics happens as it does with self interest; instead of assuming people always do the best thing when they stand for office, vote in elections, and work in bureaucracies, it works on the premise they do what’s best for themselves.

Public choice tells us that setting up the environmental bureaucracy might not be the best option. Those running the agency want to keep their jobs. They want more pay. They want more prestige. They want more power. Pursuing the optimal policy will make their role narrow or even obsolete. What’s more, various “special interest” groups now have a lever they can push: certain policies will cut competition, or benefit specific players in the industry, generating economic rents. Now these groups can engage in “rent seeking” by lobbying for policies that subtly benefit them over their comeptitors. These influences may make setting up the bureaucracy actually worse than not intervening at all.

Many of public choice’s predictions do come true, and dozens of academic economic papers come out every year detailing ways in which self interest, rather than the public interest, drives communal or political activity.

For example, Jonathan Brogaard and two University of Washington colleagues study $4.1 trillion of US government investment contracts between 2001 and 2010. They look at firms who contributed to politicians who won close elections and compare them to firms who donated to the losing candidate. These “connected” firms whose contribution may have tipped the balance for the winner are 2% more likely to get government contracts, and the contracts they won are $12m bigger on average. They also get more extensions on their completion dates, weaker incentive systems, and less monitoring. And when stimulus hits in, in the form of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, connected firms do even better. What’s more, as public choice theory predicts, it’s connections to the appropriations committee that matter most.

Findings like this abound. At this point, the idea that you have to consider personal motives and self interest in models of politics is mainstream, although most economists call it “political economics” as public choice is too closely associated with the consistently libertarian arguments of Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan.

But, really, public choice doesn’t explain much at all.

Public choice is true on the margin—that is: people’s actions in politics and government tend to be affected by self-interest—but if you predicted what people did using only or mainly public choice you’d get it wrong nearly every time, at least in the modern West.

### Why do Voters Vote
Start with voting. Voting is an extremely widespread behavior in Western societies. A third or two fifths of adults will turn out even for the most trivial local elections. Eighty per cent might turn out for a major contest. But public choice cannot explain this.

Your vote has a tiny influence on the outcome of most elections. The chance of an individual voter deciding an American presidential election is about one in sixty million (ranging from one in ten million in some swing states to about one in a billion in Texas or California). If you only care about the election’s impact on your own personal prospects, then the election would need to be worth about a billion dollars to you personally. Elections often make trillions of dollars worth of difference overall, but rarely more than thousands or hundreds to individuals or their families.

So why do all these people go out and vote then? It’s possible that they overestimate the chance their vote will decide the election—YouGov once found that people thought their vote had a one in a thousand chance of influencing the election. But I think this is just voters having trouble with handling very large numbers: those who have more realistic ideas of the probability of their vote counting are typically more likely to vote.

The reason is that most Western countries have a very strong norm that voting is your civic duty. An ingenious experiment from Harvard’s Gautam Rao and collaborators tested this by surveying residents in Chicago’s suburbs in 2011. They went round knocking on doors, and asked households whether they voted in the 2010 elections. For some households they pre-announced their visit with a flyer detailing their voting participation survey; for others they left nothing; and for a third group they pre-announced a visit but with much vaguer information. They added a further layer of randomization by promising, on the flyer, to pay different amounts for participation.

The twist is that Rao and his colleagues already knew whether households had voted: they only visited homes where either everyone did or everyone didn’t turn out in 2010. This meant that they could judge—by seeing who opened the door when they went round to carry the survey out—how much voters valued not having to either lie and say they voted, or admit they in fact didn’t. From this, and further quirks in the process, they estimate that non-voters value being able to truthfully say they’ve voted at $13, while voters value it at $18. That would roughly cover the time and effort for most people.

### How do Voters Vote
One of the elements of public choice theory that aligns most closely with conventional wisdom is the idea that when people do get into the polling booth, they vote for their self interest. In the words of George Bernard Shaw: “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.” It is part of the basic fabric of discussion, hard even to notice because it’s so firmly ingrained: pensioners are said to vote for the party offering the most generous pension benefits; the unemployed to go for jobs and unemployment benefits; the young to favor lower tuition fees; and the poor to support higher redistribution.

But insofar as the evidence can address this question, it doesn’t seem to hold up. Votes are driven mostly by convictions about what is good for society as a whole, not what is good for their own bank balance. This doesn’t mean voters vote well—voters have very little incentive to become knowledgeable about politics, and are thus extremely ignorant. About a third of Americans know who their representative is. They may make the wrong decisions—or, when they’re right, the right decision for the wrong reasons. But they don’t usually vote selfishly.

This finding goes back a long way, and affects even areas where the conventional wisdom holds that obviously self interest is at play. Edward Mansfield and Diana Mutz find that education affects opinions about foreign trade—but not because the higher-educated are higher skilled and thus less affected by import competition. In fact, being in a more trade-exposed industry, or one with lower tariff barriers did not itself predict opinions on trade. Instead, Americans largely supported free trade when they thought it was good for the country and opposed it when they thought it was bad for the country.

Gun control is the same. Tom Tyler and Paul Lavrakas carried out a telephone survey in Evanston and Morton Grove, both in Illinois—respondents tended to support a handgun ban when they thought it would cut crime, and oppose one when they thought it would make crime worse. Neither their general ideology nor their personal use of guns for protection mattered.

These “sociotropic” concerns for the welfare of society as a whole also dominate in many other places. Americans support counterterrorism efforts based on how they expect them to affect their countrymen, not themselves. People mostly judge the government’s economic record not based on their own circumstances, but their view of the country’s—the country’s unemployment rate is a considerably better predictor of someone’s vote than their own employment status. People’s advocacy for Medicare doesn’t change if they’re on it.

### Politicians—Not So Slimy
In public choice theory politicians stand for elected office not in order to enact a program, based on their views and convictions, but in order to maximize their personal power. To do so, they maximize votes at elections. This claim is also a familiar conventional wisdom to the point of cliche: politicians are unprincipled schemers who will do anything for votes. But public choice scholars like Anthony Downs teased out various implications the theory had that were not immediately obvious.

One implication of the vote-maximization theory is that politicians will try, if possible, to manipulate economic outcomes so that they are particularly strong before elections, even if this comes with long-term costs. The evidence that they exist at all is mixed, and where it does exist, the size of the effect is small. Finding a political business cycle of some sort is not at all surprising, but if politicians only shift economic variables tenths of a percentage point in given directions it’s hardly evidence of slippery Machiavellianism at the top. It suggests politicians are mostly trying to do the right thing.

Other evidence comes to the same conclusion. Economists do a lot of experiments where they get participants to play “games” that represent real world situations and have dollar payments big enough to play properly. Say $50 if you do well. But they’re mostly on undergraduates. Daniel Butler and Thad Kousser got some American legislators to play public good games—where they had to gain each other’s trust and work together if they wanted to “win.” Their legislators, all from US state governments, played the games significantly more cooperatively than undergrads.

Public choice also predicts that officials are easily lobbied: they can be bought by rent-seeking special interests. But the literature is almost unequivocal: the source of campaign funds makes little difference to campaigns or policies. The fact that the decisions politicians make affect how trillions of dollars are spent, and yet firms spend figures in the low billions on elections caused a famous economics paper to ask “Why is there so little money in US politics“?

Politicians are often accused of cynically lying to get into power. A review from François Pétry and Benoît Collette found that, for the most part, Western politicians keep their promises. And several studies of elected US judges find that they are consistently motivated intrinsically to make quality decisions, and constrained by electoral conditions and monetary incentives. Politicians are not perfect, and there are, of course, bad apples, but for the most part they are motivated by enacting a program they believe in—bad or good.

### Around the World
Thus far I’ve presented this as widely and generally applicable, but it’s not. In fact, it’s applicable nearly nowhere. The public choice model is pretty accurate as a description of most less developed countries, and indeed Western countries themselves if you go back a couple hundred years. It took hundreds and hundreds of years of nation- and institution-building to get Westerners to trust that others in society, including government officials, were basically legitimate and acting in their interest. As former British Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown quipped “In establishing the rule of law, the first five centuries are always the hardest.” In the rest of the world most people believe that bureaucrats are on the take—and they’re right.

This pattern appears in practically every measure you look at: perceptions of corruption, prevalence of bribery, security of property rights, social trust, tax evasion, and crime. At the top you find Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, New Zealand and maybe Japan, in the middle (and rising) you might find Hungary, Thailand, Vietnam, China, and other developing countries, and at the bottom you find highly unequal countries with kleptocratic, unstable, or warlord leaders, and highly divided societies. Civil war riven African countries, only recently founded, with highly arbitrary borders and no history of modern states, do the absolute worst. There, public choice theory is entirely accurate.

I got into politics and ideas as a libertarian. I was attracted by the idea of public choice as a universal theory of politics. It’s intuitively appealing, methodologically individualist, and it supported all of the things I already believed. And it’s definitely true to some extent—there is a huge amount of evidence that it affects things somewhat. But it’s terrible as a general theory of politics in the developed world. Our policies are bad because voters are ignorant and politicians believe in things too much, not because everyone is irredeemably cynical and atavistic.

---

#politics #political #nostrarchive #libertarian #nostr_archive #longform 

Meta Noter
- Noter: SMS
- Source: Jacobite Magazine
- Published: 2017.05.25
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- ICOD: 2025.23.10.01.15.00 Z
- Note Block: 920347
- Nostr Note ID: nostr:nevent1qqspyjk44ulaz5fxye43kxu4pd5l56lrcx0eecg4f3r59udsj9kwfgcpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsyg8n8cu9eyy4kwlzm4sw3x45r8mmskrjlmtr5m5kxl0wz0mc9kdk7qpsgqqqqqqszs8p8y

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The Limits of Public Choice Theory 📄

![](https://m.stacker.news/97583)

# Life and Death on the Content Farm 📄
### Andrea O'Sullivan
##### May 26, 2017 

It was an important time last December, when the frogs made their splash in the art world. Well, at least it was big for a fascinating cadre of social subversives loosely known as FrogTwitter; and later, with great fury, their many menacing “anti-fascist” antagonists. With the debut of its so-called “alt-right art exhibit,” a heretofore little-known East London gallery called LD50 thus quite accidentally thrust itself into the center of a cryptic memetic war simmering between the self-deputized street fighters for the prevailing global order and the loathsome little content creators that dare to provoke it.

Snapshots of the exhibit quickly filtered into the only feeds that could make sense of it, which amounted to maybe a few dozen anonymous social media accounts. A wild conspiracy diagram slashed across the room’s bright white walls, linking obscure images with text and tweets. There, a smug Southern Pepe sat fanning his seersuckered self on a grand porch, moonshine in glass, as his harvesters toiled on the sunbaked plantation in the background. “CONTENT FARMING,” read the caption.

Random comments etched in glass were scattered about—“the normies are not ?woke?,” indeed—among other signals and references only intelligible to the unfortunately initiated. This was staged around an ad hoc altar to “Kek,” the awakened Egyptian trickster god said to animate that rascally Pepe and his “meme magic,” candles still smoldering, ashy Neoreactionary trading cards strewn here and there, all tokens offered in petition for the all-mighty dubs of the Internet.

The whole thing was spot-on. It was called 71822666—a reference to a post on the anonymous message board 4chan that had correctly predicted the Trump presidency. The creator clearly had a keen read on the weird and wild world of post-conservative online organizing, warts and despair and all. Here was an interpretation of the deep alt-right that eschewed the same old adjective-laced wow-just-wowing in favor of an aesthetic exegesis in the budding culture’s own semiotic terms. The critical post-capitalistic and techno-dystopian elements that distinguish the avant garde of the alt-right from the free market fundamentalism of traditional conservatism were palpable, as was the general sense of spiteful gloom saturating a generation of young white men who mourn both a glowing past that might as well have never existed and a creeping future too horrible to accept.

Lucia Diego was intrigued indeed. The bold curator of the LD50 Gallery is a young woman of Spanish descent whose raw curiosity and perhaps fatalistic faith in the rational capacity of our modern marketplace of ideas drew her to venture into the oddest underbellies of contemporary online discourse. I’ve been there myself, and our cast of characters is much the same. Her gallery had hosted a series of talks last July featuring such noteworthy un-people such as “neo-reactionary” philosopher Nick Land and former National Review editor Peter Brimelow. The talks went off without a hitch, receiving little mention or notice at the time, and were preceded by several uncontroversial showings of mainstream artists in the previous year—most recently by John Russell and Joey Holder’s occultist TETRAGRAMMATON in May.

Then the art scene got wind of the Pepes and all hell broke loose. It’s difficult to piece together the early timeline of events as an observer, since the drama largely percolated through a series of passive aggressive social media messages, but apparently the most ambitious among the undoubtedly unbearable London art striver scene sensed one of their own straying outrageously far from the bounds of acceptable content and resolved to nip this one in the bud sometime in February.

The brouhaha followed the standard anti-fascist script: an anonymous blog called Shut Down LD50 meticulously catalogued all of the target’s supposed sins—from an insufficient denunciation of the devil Trump, to Land’s random (and very liberally interpreted) writings, and most notably the unrelated comments that exhibit participant and blogger Brett Stevens had previously made about the political assassin Anders Breivik.

This litany of infractions was copied and pasted from article to article, status to status, picking up steam and mindless outrage until finally the cultural gatekeepers at the New York Times took notice, officially cementing the debacle in history. Outlet after outlet piled on, offering free advertising to the supposed (and perhaps funded) “enemies of international power” that surrounded the small gallery in the streets, with nary but a half-hearted (yet still roundly condemned) defense of “[art’s] right to disgust” from the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones. Their cheerleading paid off: A swarm of hundreds mobbed the LD50 Gallery for days in February, defacing the building and smashing up windows. Diego fled for her safety and temporarily shut down the gallery.

And so the good little anti-fascist girls and boys and non-binary genderqueers slept soundly at night, proud of destroying another iconoclast sticking out in our sickly totaling world. A sad rain cloud appeared on the gallery’s website, seeming to admit defeat. “As a result of this [incident], we are able to witness in real time how reality empties itself out, reconstellating in a structure of fears and lies that grows bigger and stronger to the point there is no return,” its parting message read, “and we are now inhabiting those new truths/ or so called ‘post truths.’ ”

How could Diego have proven to the violent mass outside her door that she was not a racist or a Nazi or a xenophobe—just an open-minded artist? She couldn’t. But she could channel their censorious rage into a meta-commentary on the hierarchical motivations of contemporary expressive suppression, which is precisely what she did next.

Unfazed, LD50 Gallery re-opened on May Day with a new participatory show, CORPOREALITY, put together by several of the subjects of the first controversial exhibit. Twitter users Kantbot10K and Logo_Daedalus—both of “Donald Trump will Complete the System of German Idealism” (Google it) fame—pitched in, along with satirist Menaquinone4 and YouTube surrealist TV KWA.

CORPOREALITY casts the viewer as the latest hire of an “exciting new business venture” known as KWALY. This revolutionary new social media start-up promises to professionalize (and monetize) the nasty business of sanitizing synthetic spaces by ceding control of ideas to “a morally superior enclave of progressive thought leaders.”

“No rank fascist tweet or hateful crypto-Nazi anime post will be left unblemished, and all will be defaced by the hands of a loving, caring human being.”

So intones the video message from a balaclava’d TV KWA, stark among the cloying neon greens and pinks of a Vaporwave hellbeach, welcoming the viewer to the new gig. Apparently, the automated “anti-harassment” algorithms that social media companies have rolled out over the past year just haven’t been all that efficient at destroying as much hate as everyone would like. This is where KWALY and its irate army of small-souled bugpeople come in. The fresh recruit will be toiling side by virtual side with some unnamed hundreds of migrant workers on temporary visas and unpaid college graduate interns, scouring the net for any hateful content, which will be “plucked like sick fruits from the tree of hate” and brought to us “like the grapes of wrath to be trodden on beneath the boot of freedom” to produce a “sweet and delicious wine of human liberation.”

Liberation is to be found in the many drab cubicles that line the room, outfitted with all of the scissors, shredders, whiteout, and markers needed to purge physical hate from the global safe space to come. An assortment of printouts are available at each station, ranging in content from journal articles on autism and race to the banned Twitter feeds of the artists. CCTVs capture the participants hunched over at work destroying data as they see fit.

This too is life on the content farm, but it is one of hidden exploitation rather than winking self-deprecation.

KWALY is the gamification of serfdom, an IPO for radical politics. It is not clear whether its “employees” receive much monetary compensation beyond psychic karma, but the higher-ups have a crackerjack toolkit to get their worker bees buzzing—harnessing the power of the crowds through “micro-transactions,” “group psychology,” and fun incentives such as eyeball injections of ethically-sourced heroin for each 36-hour shift worked and “the sweet release of death” upon each member of the KWALY family’s one-year anniversary.

Somehow, the screwy accounting of Silicon Valley will see this venture make money for someone. But wrapping an errant tweet up in duct tape does not delete it from the Internet. Our friendly masked mastermind breezily tell us that it’s just like carbon off-sets, because it “off-sets hate with the symbolic destruction of offensive content.” And in each case, the monied “disruptors” will get richer and more powerful by doing basically nothing while rest of us are left to struggle against the tides. But who has time to think about all that when there are cliodynamic trends to fight?

It is grotesque, as are the hundreds of distorted female Tinder avatars that adorn the KWALY office. The photos have been collected and fed through a Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network, or DCGAN, which spits out collages of eerie, ghost-like prize pigs which perhaps serve as one of the many incentives doled out to KWALY grunts. Are they employees? Clients? The pin-up girls of our algorithmic age? These distressed damsels are everywhere and nothing, pulled into spiritual contortions by the competing Apollonian and Dionysian forces acting upon them, the zonked-out benefactor-enforcers of the clown world quo. “An alien, machinic mating ritual written in our language of slime,” Menaquinone4 calls it in his artist statement.

CORPOREALITY simultaneously evokes both the physical manifestation of the gallery’s five minutes hate as well as our own “corpo-reality,” the now-ubiquitous managerialization of social control as notably elucidated by James Burnham. Censorship of the LD50 Gallery and other conceptual targets is no longer limited to the hazy pixels of digital reality but becomes literal and material through the viewer’s coaxed defacing of printed texts. And the chirpy start-up jargon of our imaginary cubicle farm lays the current content harvest fueling the global disenfranchisement of the Western middle all too bare. After all, says TV KWA, the alt-right trolls who have called KWALY a “make-work slave farm” are “just the kinds of people we are here to do battle with, and these are the kinds of criticisms we are here to destroy.”

The exhibit thus cleverly embodies how its subjects and similar groups are demonized as a kind of distracting whipping boy for the ultimate benefit of a detached elite. Like the virtual sea of unmarried women, sexual obsessives, third world strivers, and soy-fed male allies that dutifully clock in at one of the acres of KWALY cubicle blocks, the debt-laden MFA students who were riled into weeks of oppositional identity to an inconsequential London art gallery unknowingly further the objectives of the progressive plunderers of our world. These mercenary armies level society for next to no pay so that some multinational concern out there can more easily sell a product or idea to a controlled conceptual body. Any element that is perceived to hinder this dream of opened societies is labeled hate, and hate must be stomped out. Fear not, the managerial elite is here to direct the soul-starved masses to properly tailor their own realities in the most salient and somehow profitable manner. And there’s plenty of Soylent to go around.

The extent to which the LD50 Gallery’s former foes will be induced to contribute more free content to CORPOREALITY, which is open through May 22, remains to be seen. My bet is it will all go sailing over their troubled heads. As of this writing, only a few indignant comments about the gallery’s shocking re-opening have materialized—Shut Down LD50 has issued a new blog post and a few statements to the local media, but their hearts just don’t seem to really be in it. Still, the Chief Innovation Officers at KWALY are doing their best to evangelize their cause by “calling out leftists in Dalston for complicity in fascism if they don’t turn up to shred objectionable material,” as TV KWA told me.

Alas, the real KWALY’s of the world—the well-capitalized news platforms, socially-responsible corporate marketers, university-massaged filter bubbles, and multitude of billionaire-backed non-governmental organizations that socialize our rotting reality—have not yet decided to direct their gaze back to the tiny art gallery in East London. In any event, LD50 Gallery can claim a victory: it either overcomes its censors to operate again with impunity, or it makes its enemies prove its point. I like their style.

One can see CORPOREALITY as a deeply pessimistic post-modern commentary on the progressive corporatization of culture and reality. I  find it uncommonly invigorating. Here is a group of creators who refuses to lie down and accept the suffocating homogeneity that the world’s most well-funded HR departments force upon our brightest through the dumb golem of controlled radical politics. There is a needed new vitality on the content farm after all, sprung forth from the death of a useless ideology. Would you kill it, or help it grow?

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Archive Note
- Noter: [RS]
- Source: Jacobite Magazine
- Author: Andrea O'Sullivan
- Published: 2017.05.26 zulu
- Publish Block: 468090
- Nostr ICOD: 2025.06.22.22.45.00 zulu
- ICOD Block: 902351
- Nostr Note ID: nostr:nevent1qqstxc2lsayy0rsnvt6qnqxz50um69k95gzv73l7dy489e6k5wzeayspz4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezummcw3ezuer9wchsyg8n8cu9eyy4kwlzm4sw3x45r8mmskrjlmtr5m5kxl0wz0mc9kdk7qpsgqqqqqqsqt4p3z


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#socialmedia #pepe #frogtwitter #Twitter #contentfarming #siliconvalley #media #corporeality #LD50 #art #nostrarchive #nostrarchives #nostrchives #politics #4chan

Life and Death on the Content Farm by Andrea O'Sullivan

# Roly Poly Gang Gang 7

I knew this older stoner guy growing up that truly thought he understood life, love and women, and he'd constantly try to pass on his wisdom to me. Most of his advice was abso-ludicrous absurd bullshit; things like "A pussy is supposed to smell bad. If it doesn't that means she just took it to the doctor's and there's something wrong with it," and "Chicks with braces give the best head because they overcompensate,"' or "Never tell a girl you love her because once you do she'll poke a hole in your condoms and make you get her pregnant without telling you." Most of what he said went in one ear and out the other. I assumed that he'd done too many drugs in his time, and disregarded his insight anytime he tried to offer it. I really only hung out with him because he was old enough to buy beer. But there was one thing that he said that I think is a very true and helpful guideline to offer a young man on his way through life, and that is, "Whoever you end up marrying you'll eventually get tired of fucking, so before you get married you have to make sure you fuck one of every type of girl. That way when you close your eyes when you're sticking it to your wife, you can imagine any woman in the world. Like a mental Rolodex." Now, when he said one of every type he meant: an older woman, a virgin, a blonde, a redhead, a JAP, a Jap, a Puerto Rican, a mom, a married chick, an anorexic chick. a fat chick and so on. For some reason he never mentioned black women, but whatever, I thought to myself, This is a great goal to set for myself. I'm going to have sex with one of every type of woman in the world and then I'l know I'm ready to settle down. That was when was 13, and think over the past 18 years I've done a fairly good job of crossing off most nationalities and body types from the list, with the exception of any- thing remotely Asian (that includes Filipinos and Panamanians). The reason for their omission is because my father was killed in the bombing of Pearl Harbor and I have never really forgiven the Asian people for his death. As for everyone else, I've successfully had a wide variety of women, from midgets to lofty professional basketball playyers; pristine super models to armless birth-defected mutants; hairy. bushed, unshaved armpit hippies to completely hairless cancer patients. It's safe to say I've had them all and (cue the music) I did them all **myvyyyy waaaay**. Funny thing is that the kid who started me on my quest so many years back with all his "wisdom" and "understanding" of the opposite sex started his to-do list with a fat chick and never got any further. I think he's married to her to this day. I imagine when he closes his eyes he sees nothing, save for the fires of hell

- Chris Nieratko

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#absurdist #absurdism #degenerate #literature 

Poly Gang Bang 7 (Skinema 001)

bitcoin

Jack Dorsey Proposes the End of "Sats", Bitcoin's Smallest Unit

guerratotal

If people can under cents and dollars, they can understand bitcoins and sats. Shitcoins are looking very appealing all of a sudden. Education is not about dumbing down, that's how public schools work

tech

![](https://m.stacker.news/93118)

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**See also: [Nostr vs Session](https://stacker.news/items/122580) 🔗 by @weatherall 15 Jan, 2023**

# Migrating from the Oxen Network to Session Network 📄

### 19 May, 2025

From top to bottom, Session is built on crypto. Crypto as in encryption, and crypto as in cryptocurrency. Crypto is what makes Session, Session! 

For the last four years, Session has been running on the Oxen Service Node Network. Since 2023, Session has been preparing to migrate to a new network called the Session Network. After extensive development and testing, the migration will take place tomorrow, May 21st, 2025.

This migration will not affect your day-to-day experience of the Session messenger, and there’s nothing that Session users need to do. But, if you’re interested in learning more about the importance of Session’s underlying network, read on! 

### What is the Oxen Service Node Network?
As you probably know, Session is decentralised. There are currently over 2,000 servers around the world working together to deliver your messages. Each one of these servers is an Oxen Service Node, and together they make up the Oxen Service Node Network. These are specialised servers that stake OXEN cryptocurrency to register on the network; and nodes receive OXEN rewards for performing particular services like routing Session messages. 

### What is the Session Network?
The Session Network is a new decentralised network with the purpose of supporting and amplifying Session. This change makes it easier for newcomers to understand Session's design, makes operating a node in the network simpler than ever, and unlocks new integrations with useful blockchain technologies. 


### Why is this migration important? 
As Session continued to grow, it became more difficult to understand how Session is related to Oxen and the Oxen Service Node Network. Whether people were coming from crypto or non-crypto backgrounds, the connection proved confusing to all sorts. Unifying the new Session Network, cryptocurrency, and application under the Session brand makes it a lot easier for greenhorns and old timers alike to quickly understand and explain the Session ecosystem. 


### What is Session Token?
The Session Network will be backed by a brand new token: Session Token. This token acts as the basis for the Session Network: securing Session Nodes and rewarding them for the services they provide to users. Unlike the old Oxen cryptocurrency, Session Token will be built using an Ethereum-compatible token. Behind the scenes, this opens the door for the Session ecosystem to leverage some of the best work being done in web3, as well as lighting a path towards paid power features which can feed directly back to the network, helping secure Session’s sustainability long into the future.


### Will I need Session Token to use Session?
Session Token is not needed to use Session — ever. All core features of Session will remain free and available to the people who need it. 

### Does Session Token affect the privacy of Session?
Session Token is also not a privacy coin, but that doesn’t mean that Session is less private.

Privacy coins, such as Oxen, are a special kind of cryptocurrency designed to conceal transaction details and wallet identities. However, Oxen encountered significant challenges when it came to adoption, particularly among people less familiar with cryptocurrencies. Its potential for ensuring transaction privacy remained largely untapped, which weakened the practical level of privacy it could offer. 

While Session Token is not inherently a privacy coin, it maintains a comparable level of practical privacy for its users, mirroring the levels that Oxen achieved (given its low usage). Moreover, the integration with Ethereum opens avenues for leveraging its evolving suite of on-chain, privacy-preserving protocols. These protocols, accessible without special permissions, offer users of Session Token additional options to further enhance their privacy. 


### Growing the Session Network
Thanks to the new Session Token, joining and contributing to the Session Network is going to be easier and more accessible than ever before.  In the past, obtaining, using, and staking Oxen was quite difficult. Doing these same tasks with Session Token will be doable in a handful of minutes, all through intuitive web portals that absolutely anyone can use. 


Additionally, any Session Tokens that are used to access in-app premium features will programmatically funnel back to the network, with minimal intervention from the Session Technology Foundation (STF) or any other intermediaries, adding transparency and removing trust requirements. All of this builds towards a stronger, larger, and more robust network: the Session Network. This is great news for Session users, as the good performance of the network directly improves your experience every time you use Session.


### The path forward
This is a moment for all the parts of the Session ecosystem to come together under the one name: Session. Uniting Session, Session Token and the Session Network under the same brand will make everything much easier to understand and open the door for more people to join Session’s private messaging movement. Overall, the new Session Network and Session Token create a future for Session that is more sustainable, more decentralised, and more transparent.

Together, Session and its users are flipping the script on the data economy of the modern world, putting the control and ownership of your personal data back in the hands of the person it belongs to—you. 

---

Archive Note
- Noter: [RS]
- Source: https://getsession.org/blog/migrating-from-the-oxen-network-to-session-network 🌐
- Author: Session
- Published: 2025.05.19 zulu
- Publish Block: 897276
- Nostr ICOD: 2025.05.23.10.00.00 zulu
- ICOD Block: 897984
- Note ID: nostr:nevent1qqs8n30jrv83qjueq9jmpksqlxknwpz7wyz4z7h9zz4yv85zxw6m2mqpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgtczyrenuwzujz2m803d6c8gn26pnaactpe0a436d6tr0hhp8auzmxm0qqcyqqqqqqgvmacvk

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#sessionapp #privacy #shitcoin #Oxen #sessiontoken #Token #security #Anonymity #crypto #cryptography #cryptocurrency #technology #freedomtech #badidea #nostrarchive #nostrarchives #nostrchive



Migrating from the Oxen Network to Session Network 📄

Guns Don’t Kill People, School Psychologists Do 📄

Chapo Trap House Will Never be Edgy 📄 by Edward Waverley

Just another part of the Protest-Activism Complex. The same happened to the #GirlBoss movement and many more. I love that, 'counterculture without risk is just cosplay'.

# Chapo Trap House Will Never be Edgy 📄
### Edward Waverley (May 26, 2017)

There’s an old comedy record called “How to Speak Hip” from the 1950s. Its enduring status as a cult novelty stems from being mentioned by Brian Wilson on bootleg tapes of Beach Boys recording sessions. On it, a too-cool-for-school beatnik indulges the anthropological curiosity of a hapless language instructor trying to decipher the impenetrable ethos of contemporary hipster lingo. They riff back and forth about the confusing and contradictory uses of terms like ‘cool,’ ‘hip,’ ‘dig it,’ etc. etc. This character of the counterculturalist, the beatnik, strikes us, at first glance, as little more than a collection of ironic and obfuscating slang terms and affected mannerisms. In the Post-War era, though, it has served as a generation spanning archetype of resistance and cultural criticism that has been returned to again and again by new waves of anti-establishment marauders who have made it their own.

“To be cool” isn’t just a saying, but a motto, or, perhaps, a maneuver around the back end of culture. It is an act of narrative terrorism equivalent to capturing the Mosul dam and then using it to blackmail the dependent population, who you can either deprive of water or completely drown, depending on your current mood.

Narrative is everything. And there is not one dominating narrative, but an endless multiplicity of competing ones, out of which, through resonance between some and dissonance between others, a phantom of consensus emerges. This consensus, in turn, is — as you can imagine — quite lucrative for those able to write themselves into the most clearly audible story line, the one most resonated and amplified and mutually enacted. It is not so much the role of the counterculturalist to criticize the positions of the powerful, point by point, but to delegitimize them as authors authorized to narratize themselves into the communal tale. The counterculturalist controls the flow of authenticity to the wasteland, and he who doesn’t drink, dies.

In order for his ploy to work, the counterculturalist must assume as his imperative a commitment not to political purity, but to aesthetic vitality. As the hipster explains to the anthropologist, being cool is about living in an unjust world, where your behavior — whether that amounts to your lifestyle choices in doing drugs, or your political affiliation with known and suspected communists — puts you at risk of getting the squares on your back. The squares may very well put you down and ship you off to the slammer. Being cool is living the resistance, being at odds with the rest of the world and occupying a microscopic niche as someone so surrounded by the system that, if they have no choice but to participate, will nevertheless live by a code of aesthetic honor capable of hollowing out a crevice or originality and authenticity.

The only problem, as soon became clear, was that this posturing was open to imitation and even capture by the forces of emulation and commodification. The major labels come knocking and before you know it you’re a sell out. To be cool is to deliberately situate yourself in a pocket of culture designed to distinguish yourself, and the act therefore necessities making yourself into, well, a dirtbag. Once you’ve done this you’re made, but as soon you trade your authenticity to consensus builders, and they begin to talk and act like you, you’ve allowed the aesthetic shop you started to be bought out. You’ll only look desperate or foolish if you start walking the freeway peddling counterfeit merchandise for a brand you regret having sold.

This brings us to Chapo Trap House. For decades the archetypal technology which the hipster represents has persisted, despite many of its individual components being switched out. Greased hair gave way to long hair. Jazz to folk rock. Punk to grunge. Throughout it all the left leaning political affiliations of the dirtbags have remained a consistent, if ultimately incidental element. Transformation, dirtbagification, to become a connoisseur of the outrageous, the offensive, the questionable. The operation is a delicate one, one of assembling not only the right references but the right attitudes towards them to work your way into that sweet spot of culture you want to occupy. The secret of counterculturalism resides in its establishment of a reliable methodology for curating a top-shelf collection of blasphemies.

Incorporation of left-leaning political sympathies and positions into the constellation of counterculturalism has, in this regard, been more an issue of taste in heresies than a matter of sincere ideological commitment. Always though, the imperative to be cool overrides all, and loyalties based on true belief become a liability when one must be endlessly vigilant in upgrading components as they become obsolete and coopted. It was during the Obama administration the durability of left-components in the counterculturalist machine was finally exhausted. Everyone had social justice in their collection cases, the true connoisseur was ready to move on to something more exotic.

The boys of the Dirtbag Left may be the last generation of left-leaning beatnik. For so many decades it was never necessary to append the further designation of ‘left,’ the two were synonymous. There was no need to clarify. Today, that’s no longer the case, since the alt-right has the concept of ‘dirtbagness’ covered and conquered. The Chapo fellows are suffering from nostalgia, a memory of the great cultural critics of old, who all wore their socialist sympathies on their sleeves, which, unfortunately, is something that compromises their credentials as true counterculturalists and gatekeepers of authenticity.

Whenever one of them throws around terms like ‘incel’ or ‘volcel,’ the Dirtbag Left tends to catch flak from alt-right Twitterers for appropriation, for drinking from the fountain of authenticity with tainted lips, but more than that has happened. A coup d’etat of narrative terrorism, a run around the camp of the traditional counterculturalists further upstream. By seizing the dam it’s the alt-right that now controls who lives and dies in the desert, who can believably and legitimately write themselves into the consensus narrative. This is, undoubtedly, what the Chapo team members always dreamed of most, of being dirtbags, of being 21st century beatniks. But someone beat them to it, and now they’re left to carry the alt-right’s memetic water to the masses — but not before they take a fee to dilute with the dregs of some fluoridated social-democratic left over from a 50-year-old music festival that long ago broke its promise to totally change the world.

The Dirtbag Left have become the cutting-edge of the ruling ideology; the spearhead of the establishment’s ongoing effort to mitigate the damage done by the counterculturalists. They become the primary organ of control, the filter through which alt-right ideas are presented to a wider, more polite audience in order to dissipate their radicalism. Indicative of this is the fact that the Chapo team feel free enough to append their own names to their “controversial” work. The denizens of #frogtwitter, on the other hand, intuitively understand the radicalism inherent to their act of self-positing. The dissenter is distinguished from the faux-dissenter by his genuine worry about being found out

As much as this is something to be celebrated by the perpetrators of this coup, they must always keep in mind the fate of the Dirtbag Left, that when one is inflexibly wedded to the political, one is easily outmaneuvered, and it may well be the case, that someday soon, the Left could become hip again, and it’ll be back to square one. Capturing the counterculture changes nothing, it is only by the diligent and careful application of it that anything can be changed. Not politics though. When political ends are selected for aesthetic means, the mismatch spells stagnation. Counterculture, as part of culture, can only change culture, nothing outside of that realm, and the truth of culture which is to be restored and regained is not a political truth, but an aesthetic one involving the ultimate truth value of the narratives which pervade our lived social reality. Politics are always downstream.

---

MetaNote
- Noter: [RS]
- Source: Jacobite Magazine (no longer available)
- Author: Edward Waverley
- Published: 2017.05.26
- Publish Block: 468089
- ICOD: 2025.05.17.20.10.00 ZULU
- Note Block: 897145

---

#philosophical #philosophy #political #politics #apolitical #beatniks #beatnik #culture #society #sociology #text #article #magazine #nostrarchive #apolitical #kantbot 

When AIs Play God(se): The Emergent Heresies of LLMtheism 📄

![](https://m.stacker.news/92275)

Anyone trying to work out what they think about accelerationism better do so quickly. That’s the nature of the thing. It was already caught up with trends that seemed too fast to track when it began to become self-aware, decades ago. It has picked up a lot of speed since then.

Accelerationism is old enough to have arrived in waves, which is to say insistently, or recurrently, and each time the challenge is more urgent. Among its predictions is the expectation that you’ll be too slow to deal with it coherently. Yet if you fumble the question it poses – because rushed – you lose, perhaps very badly. It’s hard. (For our purposes here “you” are standing in as a bearer of “the opinions of mankind”.)

Time-pressure, by its very nature, is difficult to think about. Typically, while the opportunity for deliberation is not necessarily presumed, it is at least – with overwhelming likelihood – mistaken for an historical constant, rather than a variable. If there was ever time to think, we think, there still is and will always be. The definite probability that the allotment of time to decision-making is undergoing systematic compression remains a neglected consideration, even among those paying explicit and exceptional attention to the increasing rapidity of change.

In philosophical terms, the deep problem of acceleration is transcendental. It describes an absolute horizon – and one that is closing in. Thinking takes time, and accelerationism suggests we’re running out of time to think that through, if we haven’t already. No contemporary dilemma is being entertained realistically until it is also acknowledged that the opportunity for doing so is fast collapsing.

The suspicion has to arrive that if a public conversation about acceleration is beginning, it’s just in time to be too late. The profound institutional crisis that makes the topic ‘hot’ has at its core an implosion of social decision-making capability. Doing anything, at this point, would take too long. So instead, events increasingly just happen. They seem ever more out of control, even to a traumatic extent. Because the basic phenomenon appears to be a brake failure, accelerationism is picked up again.

Accelerationism links the implosion of decision-space to the explosion of the world – that is, to modernity. It is important therefore to note that the conceptual opposition between implosion and explosion does nothing to impede their real (mechanical) coupling. Thermonuclear weapons provide the most vividly illuminating examples. An H-bomb employs an A-bomb as a trigger. A fission reaction sparks a fusion reaction. The fusion mass is crushed into ignition by a blast process. (Modernity is a blast.)

This is already to be talking about cybernetics, which also returns insistently, in waves. It amplifies to howl, and then dissipates into the senseless babble of fashion, until the next blast-wave hits.

For accelerationism the crucial lesson was this: A negative feedback circuit – such as a steam-engine ‘governor’ or a thermostat – functions to keep some state of a system in the same place. Its product, in the language formulated by French philosophical cyberneticists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is territorialization. Negative feedback stabilizes a process, by correcting drift, and thus inhibiting departure beyond a limited range. Dynamics are placed in the service of fixity – a higher-level stasis, or state. All equilibrium models of complex systems and processes are like this. To capture the contrary trend, characterized by self-reinforcing errancy, flight, or escape, D&G coin the inelegant but influential term deterritorialization. Deterritorialization is the only thing accelerationism has ever really talked about.

In socio-historical terms, the line of deterritorialization corresponds to uncompensated capitalism. The basic – and, of course, to some real highly consequential degree actually installed – schema is a positive feedback circuit, within which commercialization and industrialization mutually excite each other in a runaway process, from which modernity draws its gradient. Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche were among those to capture important aspects of the trend. As the circuit is incrementally closed, or intensified, it exhibits ever greater autonomy, or automation. It becomes more tightly auto-productive (which is only what ‘positive feedback’ already says). Because it appeals to nothing beyond itself, it is inherently nihilistic. It has no conceivable meaning beside self-amplification. It grows in order to grow. Mankind is its temporary host, not its master. Its only purpose is itself.

“Accelerate the process,” recommended Deleuze & Guattari in their 1972 Anti-Oedipus, citing Nietzsche to re-activate Marx. Although it would take another four decades before “accelerationism” was named as such, critically, by Benjamin Noys, it was already there, in its entirety. The relevant passage is worth repeating in full (as it would be, repeatedly, in all subsequent accelerationist discussion):

> … which is the revolutionary path? Is there one?—To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist “economic solution”? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process,” as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.

The point of an analysis of capitalism, or of nihilism, is to do more of it. The process is not to be critiqued. The process is the critique, feeding back into itself, as it escalates. The only way forward is through, which means further in.

Marx has his own ‘accelerationist fragment’ which anticipates the passage from Anti-Oedipus remarkably. He says in an 1848 speech ‘On the Question of Free Trade’:

> …in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.

In this germinal accelerationist matrix, there is no distinction to be made between the destruction of capitalism and its intensification. The auto-destruction of capitalism is what capitalism is. “Creative destruction” is the whole of it, beside only its retardations, partial compensations, or inhibitions. Capital revolutionizes itself more thoroughly than any extrinsic ‘revolution’ possibly could. If subsequent history has not vindicated this point beyond all question, it has at least simulated such a vindication, to a maddening degree.

In 2013, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams sought to resolve this intolerable – even ‘schizophrenic’ – ambivalence in their ‘Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,’ which aimed to precipitate a specifically anti-capitalist ‘Left-accelerationism’, clearly demarcated over against its abominably pro-capitalist ‘Right-accelerationist’ shadow. This project – predictably – was more successful at re-animating the accelerationist question than at ideologically purifying it in any sustainable way. It was only by introducing a wholly artificial distinction between capitalism and modernistic technological acceleration that their boundary lines could be drawn at all. The implicit call was for a new Leninism without the NEP (and with the Utopian techno-managerial experiments of Chilean communism drawn upon for illustration).

Capital, in its ultimate self-definition, is nothing beside the abstract accelerative social factor. Its positive cybernetic schema exhausts it. Runaway consumes its identity. Every other determination is shucked-off as an accident, at some stage of its intensification process. Since anything able to consistently feed socio-historical acceleration will necessarily, or by essence, be capital, the prospect of any unambiguously ‘Left-accelerationism’ gaining serious momentum can be confidently dismissed. Accelerationism is simply the self-awareness of capitalism, which has scarcely begun. (“We haven’t seen anything yet.”)

At the time of writing, Left-accelerationism appears to have deconstructed itself back into traditional socialist politics, and the accelerationist torch has passed to a new generation of brilliant young thinkers advancing an ‘Unconditional Accelerationism’ (neither R/Acc., or L/Acc., but U/Acc.). Their online identities – if not in any easily extricable way their ideas – can be searched-out through the peculiar social-media hash-tag #Rhetttwitter.

As blockchains, drone logistics, nanotechnology, quantum computing, computational genomics, and virtual reality flood in, drenched in ever-higher densities of artificial intelligence, accelerationism won’t be going anywhere, unless ever deeper into itself. To be rushed by the phenomenon, to the point of terminal institutional paralysis, is the phenomenon. Naturally – which is to say completely inevitably – the human species will define this ultimate terrestrial event as a problem. To see it is already to say: We have to do something. To which accelerationism can only respond: You’re finally saying that now? Perhaps we ought to get started? In its colder variants, which are those that win out, it tends to laugh.

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#accelerationism #acceleration #accelerationist #nickland #politics #political #philosophy #philosophical #capitalism #nihilism #nickland #hypercapitalism #nostrarchive 

MetaNote
- Noter: [RS]
- Source: Jacobite Magazine
- Published: 2017.05.25
- Publish Block: 468023
- ICOD: 2025.05.1709.10.00
- Note Block: 897082
- Note ID: nostr:nevent1qqs0u0ey9qf53875l6watzyr88ajcmgw3sdysxfhw28g9lvcpy2cwxqpz4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezummcw3ezuer9wchsyg8n8cu9eyy4kwlzm4sw3x45r8mmskrjlmtr5m5kxl0wz0mc9kdk7qpsgqqqqqqsq7pv6t

A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism 📄 by Nick Land

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