Honeypot or Genuine Alt-Tech

I support Andrew Torba and what he’s trying to do with Gab Social and Gab AI, and I particularly support his latest move to reduce the amount of resources that freeloaders are permitted to burn, but I don’t have perfect knowledge of him or the situation. And I definitely have made mistakes about people who later turned out to be infiltrators, gatekeepers, or bad actors, so in the interest of contemplating the essential truth of the matter, I’m linking to two articles about Gab that are polar opposites, one dedicated to attacking Torba, the other by Torba himself explaining his recent actions.

First is the hit piece. While it is well-researched and most of the details appear to be accurate, there is nothing conclusive, it’s mostly guilt-by-association combined with an apparent lack of knowledge of how much it costs to run even what looks like a shoestring operation and make a living, especially when all the cheaper mainstream options cannot be used. And a similar approach could be just as easily used to “expose” me. His mother may be an astrology freak, but my father is a convicted felon. His brother may be gay, but mine died of a drug overdose. And the questionable nature of his past involvement with the Silicon Valley crowd can’t even begin to compare with my having been a Wax Trax! recording artist. Which is why I’m essentially dubious about the significance of the various red flags being waved:

Over the past decade, the United States, and to a great extent the entire world, have been in a growing state of censorship. Ideas that go against the accepted narrative are often removed from the internet and the creators of those ideas are persecuted as being “hateful” or purveyors of disinformation. Many major hubs of communication like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube have actively censored their platforms, particularly after the 2016 US Presidential Election primarily due to the rise of the Alt-Right movement. E-celebrities, content creators, and many of their followers found themselves banned from mainstream social media, which created a vacuum that was soon filled by vaporware sites and grifters whose profits lay in victimhood narratives and false hype, none of which are more notorious or egregious than Gab and its founder Andrew Torba.

Founded just months before the 2016 Presidential Election by self-described Silicon Valley conservative Andrew Torba, Gab touted itself as a censorship-free alternative to Twitter and was heavily promoted by the media before becoming associated with far-right extremism and hate after the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. As of 2022, Gab has adopted a militant Christian nationalist bent and boasts of having an excess of one million “cumulative registered accounts” as well as having a value of $10 million, despite indisputable evidence to the contrary.

Since Gab’s inception, Torba has shapeshifted and rebranded himself many times in order to attract any group that would promote Gab and give him money. Over the course of Gab’s history, Torba has pandered to nearly every fringe online community on the right-wing spectrum; ranging from 4chan lolicon connoisseurs and edgelords to the QAnon and MAGA cults and beyond. If one looks past Torba’s conservative christian veneer they will find an affinity grifter who says and does everything in his power to keep the façade of Gab being a viable alternative to Twitter going and keep the money flowing. Torba relied on making misleading claims about the user base and utility of Gab in order to rip off millions of dollars from investors, many of whom he swindled using his conservative christian affinity grift.

Gab’s notoriety is mainly due to Torba fostering a drama producing environment on the site by not moderating terms of service violations like doxxing and threats of violence. Why does Torba purposefully leave some of the more unhinged elements of Gab unmoderated? What has Torba done to improve Gab with the millions of dollars he raised? What happened to those millions? Why hasn’t the SEC done anything about it? Does Gab’s seeming immunity from legal consequences and purposeful lack of moderation point to it being a honeypot, especially considering Torba’s frequent willingness to report his own users to the Feds?

Andrew Torba And The Grift Of Gab, THE PROVIDENCE POST, 15 March 2023

Second is Torba’s post made in the aftermath of the anti-freeloading policy that I personally believe to not only be justified, but long overdue for a business that has reportedly been running in the red on the Silicon Valley investment model for a long time. I even expressed my opinion on the matter in a meme posted on Gab this morning, of which Torba himself approved.

Torba’s recent post, at least to me, reads like that of a moderately successful entrepreneur who is simply doing whatever he needs to do to in order to keep the lights on his current operation in a moribund industry, even as he attempts to shift resources toward a more promising one in a new and growing industry.

Thank you to everyone who upgraded to GabPRO today. We had our single biggest revenue day for PRO since January 2021. Gab Social is well on its way to becoming sustainable longterm.

The past year has been very tough. As many of you noted we have been operating at a loss for a long time and that needed to change quickly.

The compounding problems of both storage space filling up and capital draining month to month had to be solved or Gab was going to die. We couldn’t let that happen and so drastic measures had to be taken to solve two problems at once. We also needed to do something big that would get the attention of everyone here so that all of us could be focused on solving these issues together.

There’s no other conspiracy here. That’s the simple truth of the matter. The advertising market tanked last year with the economy/inflation and it impacted us hard. We made significant cost cutting measures over the past year but it still wasn’t enough. Running a website as big as Gab costs a lot of money and there’s no way around that.

The team has started working on the storage issue and this change buys us a lot more time to handle it. We have been reading many of your suggestions and taking them into account.

We see that many of you are concerned about your identity which I totally understand as someone who has been dragged through the mud personally for 8 years now by the media, members of Congress, foreign governments, the ADL, the SPLC, and many more people. I’ve been”canceled” 100 times over. I get it.

That being said there are plenty of ways you can support us anonymously. The easiest way to do that is by sending physical mail to our mailing address with a money order, etc. We have a mail in check option on the GabPRO checkout flow. Just be sure to include your reference number and Gab username. You can get a money order at any post office and plenty of other places. You can also work with other Gabbers you trust who can gift you a PRO account.

I’m confident that Gab will emerge from this stronger than ever with a more united community.

We can’t do this alone anymore. We need your help if we are going to make this work longterm and I know that together we can get the job done and keep the one single place on the internet that allows free speech to stay online permanently.

Those who haven’t been on the business end of a deplatforming, and haven’t been subjected to a full-bore media assault, have no idea how stressful it is or how it hardens those who have gone through those things without cracking. Assuming that Torba is not an actor or a honeypot, and the evidence presented is neither substantial nor convincing, I can assure you that Torba no longer cares one little bit about the opinions of those with the luxury to cling to their precious anonymity or those who think they know better than he does what it takes to keep Gab alive.

As every Castalia, Arkhaven, Infogalactic, and UATV subscriber knows, either you actively and materially support what you like or you don’t matter at all. Just as no army has any use for warriors who won’t fight, no business has any use for supporters who burn up its resources rather than contribute them. The reason Castalia House will be around when Tor Books goes out of business, and the reason UATV will be around when YouTube turns out the lights, is solely due to the strength and the commitment of this community. I do not say that lightly. It’s the literal truth.

If the Gab community is strong enough, and committed enough, and if Torba is genuinely the committed Christian Nationalist man he now presents himself as being, it will survive. If any of those three pieces are missing, it will not. In the meantime, and despite our well-known past differences, I wish him and his endeavors well.

DISCUSS ON SG


Abandoning Google

The director of the DiRAC Institute at the University of Washington explains why he is getting rid of all of the Google services he uses.

I’ve been reading Google’s Gemini damage control posts. I think they’re simply not telling the truth. For one, their text-only product has the same (if not worse) issues. And second, if you know a bit about how these models are built, you know you don’t get these “incorrect” answers through one-off innocent mistakes. Gemini’s outputs reflect the many, many, FTE-years of labeling efforts, training, fine-tuning, prompt design, QA/verification — all iteratively guided by the team who built it. You can also be certain that before releasing it, many people have tried the product internally, that many demos were given to senior PMs and VPs, that they all thought it was fine, and that they all ultimately signed off on the release. With that prior, the balance of probabilities is strongly against the outputs being an innocent bug — as @googlepubpolicy is now trying to spin it: Gemini is a product that functions exactly as designed, and an accurate reflection of the values people who built it.

Those values appear to include a desire to reshape the world in a specific way that is so strong that it allowed the people involved to rationalize to themselves that it’s not just acceptable but desirable to train their AI to prioritize ideology ahead of giving user the facts. To revise history, to obfuscate the present, and to outright hide information that doesn’t align with the company’s (staff’s) impression of what is “good”. I don’t care if some of that ideology may or may not align with your or my thinking about what would make the world a better place: for anyone with a shred of awareness of human history it should be clear how unbelievably irresponsible it is to build a system that aims to become an authoritative compendium of human knowledge (remember Google’s mission statement?), but which actually prioritizes ideology over facts. History is littered with many who have tried this sort of moral flexibility “for the greater good”; rather than helping, they typically resulted in decades of setbacks (and tens of millions of victims).

Setting social irresponsibility aside, in a purely business sense, it is beyond stupid to build a product which will explicitly put your company’s social agenda before the customer’s needs. Think about it: G’s Search — for all its issues — has been perceived as a good tool, because it focused on providing accurate and useful information. Its mission was aligned with the users’ goals (“get me to the correct answer for the stuff I need, and fast!”). That’s why we all use(d) it. I always assumed Google’s AI efforts would follow the pattern, which would transfer over the user base & lock in another 1-2 decade of dominance.

But they’ve done the opposite. After Gemini, rather than as a user-centric company, Google will be perceived as an activist organization first — ready to lie to the user to advance their (staff’s) social agenda. That’s huge. Would you hire a personal assistant who openly has an unaligned (and secret — they hide the system prompts) agenda, who you fundamentally can’t trust? Who strongly believes they know better than you? Who you suspect will covertly lie to you (directly or through omission) when your interests diverge? Forget the cookies, ads, privacy issues, or YouTube content moderation; Google just made 50%+ of the population run through this scenario and question the trustworthiness of the core business and the people running it. And not at the typical financial (“they’re fleecing me!”) level, but ideological level (“they hate people like me!”). That’ll be hard to reset, IMHO.

What about the future? Take a look at Google’s AI Responsibility Principles and ask yourself what would Search look like if the staff who brought you Gemini was tasked to interpret them & rebuild it accordingly? Would you trust that product? Would you use it? Well, with Google’s promise to include Gemini everywhere, that’s what we’ll be getting. In this brave new world, every time you run a search you’ll be asking yourself “did it tell me the truth, or did it lie, or hide something?”. That’s lethal for a company built around organizing information.

And that’s why, as of this weekend, I’ve started divorcing my personal life and taking my information out of the Google ecosystem. It will probably take a ~year (having invested in nearly everything, from Search to Pixel to Assistant to more obscure things like Voice), but has to be done.

Once more, we see the benefits of being rejected by the evil institutions of the world. It puts you ahead of the curve whether you want to be there or not.

I am not reliant upon YouTube or Blogger because I am partially blocked from using both services. I am banned from Google’s Mountain View campus because the SJWs there are afraid of me. I quit using Google for search a long time ago because it is no longer capable of performing its primary function. I still use my Gmail account, mostly because it does a good job of filtering out the spam, but I have multiple email alternatives that I have been using for years.

Some people might wonder how it is possible that a corporation will knowingly destroy itself by putting ideology ahead of customer service, customer satisfaction, or even revenue, but those who have read SJWAL and Corporate Cancer know exactly what is happening here, and why it won’t stop.

Convergence invariably kills over time.

DISCUSS ON SG


Fake Success, Real Failure

Vice has filed for bankruptcy and its content management system was shut down yesterday:

Vice.com has stopped publishing new content and laid off several hundred employees, its CEO announced late on Thursday. The outlet once valued at billions of dollars had to be rescued from bankruptcy last year, by a consortium including George Soros.

The website is still available, but its content management system was shut down minutes before midnight, according to one employee. The VICE company will “transition to a studio model,” CEO Bruce Dixon said in a message sent to the staff, as part of “fundamental changes to our strategic vision.”

“We create and produce outstanding original content true to the Vice brand. However, it is no longer cost-effective for us to distribute our digital content the way we have done previously,” Dixon wrote. Going forward, Vice will partner with “established media companies” to distribute its digital content on their platforms instead.

Funded by major corporations and venture capital throughout the 2010s, Vice was valued at $5.7 billion in 2017.

It’s fascinating to compare the fragility of a large, massively-well funded operation like Vice with the antifragility of small, independent operations like UATV. While UATV can survive multiple hits that reduce its revenue to zero for as long as it takes to build the subscriber base back again… and again, the use of debt means that not even a bailout from George Soros is sufficient to keep a Clown World institution like Vice afloat.

Everything about Clown World is fake, pride, and short-lived.

DISCUSS ON SG


Why We’re Not on Amazon

Don’t expect to find Castalia House books on Kindle anytime soon.

Hello,

During a recent audit of your account, we found content and/or activities that are in violation of our Terms and Conditions. Therefore, we are closing your account effective immediately.

Examples include attempting to publish books that violate our Content Guidelines.

As part of the termination process:

  • We will close your KDP account
  • You’re no longer eligible to receive any outstanding royalties
  • You’ll no longer have access to your account. This includes, editing your titles, viewing your reports and accessing any other information within your account
  • All of your published titles will be removed from sale on Amazon

Additionally, as per our Terms and Conditions, you aren’t allowed to open any new KDP accounts.

You can find our Terms and Conditions here: https://kdp.amazon.com/terms-and-conditions

If you believe you have received this message in error or you have information about your account that you would like us to consider, please reply to this email.

Regards,
Amazon KDP

The action that was in violation of Amazon’s Terms and Conditions was attempting to publish the Kindle edition of A THRONE OF BONES. They kept asking us to provide a letter from the previous publisher and ignoring both a) the fact that we are the previous publisher and b) we are the publisher of both the paperback and hardcover editions of the book. It was particularly strange, because they accepted, and published, both SUMMA ELVETICA and A SEA OF SKULLS.

This isn’t a problem; Amazon’s sales have been irrelevant to us for the last two years and we were only beginning to put some of our books back up on Kindle in order to make it easier on people who are still unaware that Amazon is systematically destroying the book industry. But it underlines how absolutely and utterly foolish it is for authors or publishers to rely upon Amazon to sell their books anymore.

Castalia will not only survive, but continue to thrive. That which failed to kill us only serves to make us stronger and more independent.

Also, due to a minor technical issue, if you’re buying something on the Arkhaven store, choose the VISA/Mastercard option, not the Credit Card option, until further notice.

DISCUSS ON SG


No. Just No.

President Trump still just doesn’t get it. He never will.

Former President Donald Trump praised the parent company of Bud Light in a Tuesday post on Truth Social, saying it “deserves a second chance.”

“The Bud Light ad was a mistake of epic proportions, and for that a very big price was paid, but Anheuser-Busch is not a Woke company, but I can give you plenty that are, am building a list, and might just release it for the World to see,” Trump posted. “Why not, the Radical Left does it viciously to well run, Conservative companies – and people! Very nasty, but it’s the way they play the game!”

“On the other hand, Anheuser-Busch spends $700 Million a year with our GREAT Farmers, employ 65 thousand Americans, of which 1,500 are Veterans, and is a Founding Corporate Partner of Folds of Honor, which provides Scholarships for families of fallen Servicemen & Women,” Trump continued. “They’ve raised over $30,000,000 and given 44,000 Scholarships. Anheuser-Busch is a Great American Brand that perhaps deserves a Second Chance? What do you think? Perhaps, instead, we should be going after those companies that are looking to DESTROY AMERICA!”

I think we can safely rule out the President from having learned anything at all from being repeatedly stabbed in the back by his advisors, allies, and appointees. It’s not that he wasn’t a great president, because he was one of the best we ever had. But the USA needs a ruthless Putin or a Xi, with the willingness to wield the full power of the office to take on the oligarchs and the corrupt government officials, whereas Trump believes everyone just needs a good talking-to to set them right.

Alphas make for the best leaders the vast majority of the time. But when the ship is heading straight for the rocks, that’s when you want a Sigma who couldn’t care less what anyone thinks about him, the lighthouse, the maintenance schedule, the planned course, the evening menu, the map, the compass, or anything else, and is perfectly willing to throw overboard anyone who tries to get in his way.

Once converged, always converged. You can’t fix a zombie.

DISCUSS ON SG


Everything That’s Popular Must Converge

Clown World finally managed to converge Warhammer. From the new edition of Fantasy Battles.

And yes, he would have been a fine knight and earned his spurs in less than a year. His knight’s oath sworn on the midsummer’s morn. He would meet a boy with a smile that lit up the world, their love so great that all Bretonnia’s poets would weep as they penned exquisite odes in its celebration.

They’re going all in. Not just gay, but pedo. So pride. Much wow.

For the Emperor! The Gay Emperor!

DISCUSS ON SG


The End of Sports Illustrated

You would have thought that a business that relied upon sports, plus an occasional splash of beautiful women in bikinis, would be bullet-proof. And you’d be wrong:

Much of the staff of Sports Illustrated, and possibly all remaining writers and editors, received layoff notices Friday, which essentially could spell the end of a publication that for decades was the gold standard of sports journalism.

The union of the staff tweeted Friday that it would continue to fight for the publication of the magazine but that its future is now in the hands of the magazine’s owner, Authentic Brands Group.

ABG has owned the magazine since 2019 and sold the publishing rights to a company called the Arena Group. The Arena Group missed a recent payment for those publishing rights, prompting ABG to pull the publishing license and putting the future of Sports Illustrated in jeopardy.

“As a result of this license revocation, we will be laying off staff that work on the SI brand,” the note to staff read, adding that some employees would be terminated immediately, while others would work through the end of a 90-day notice period.

Sports Illustrated lays off most of its staff, threatening iconic brand’s future, WASHINGTON POST, 19 January 2024

Those sounds you hear in the distance are Fox executives celebrating their prescient purchase of Outkick the Coverage.

This is why we will never sell off any of our core projects. As we’ve seen with Football Outsiders and now Sports Illustrated, there is no faster way to ensure a debt-related implosion short of taking the entire payroll to Vegas and betting it on black.

DISCUSS ON SG


China Sanctions USA

It’s going to be interesting to see how the corpocracy changes its tune once it starts losing its access to the world’s largest market, as yesterday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced sanctions on five US defense companies:

Q: The US recently announced new arms sales to Taiwan and sanctioned Chinese businesses and individuals under various pretexts. China said it would take countermeasures. Could you tell us specifically what those measures are?

A: The US arms sales to China’s Taiwan region in blatant violation of the one-China principle and the stipulations of the three China-US joint communiqués, particularly the August 17 joint communiqué of 1982, and the illegal unilateral sanctions the US has imposed on Chinese companies and individuals under various false pretexts seriously harm China’s sovereignty and security interests, undermine the peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, and violate the legitimate and lawful rights and interests of Chinese companies and individuals. China strongly deplores and firmly opposes this and has made solemn démarches to the US. 

In response to these gravely wrong actions taken by the US and in accordance with China’s Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law, China has decided to sanction five US defense industry companies, namely BAE Systems Land and Armament, Alliant Techsystems Operation, AeroVironment, ViaSat and Data Link Solutions. The countermeasures consist of freezing the properties of those companies in China, including their movable and immovable property, and prohibiting organizations and individuals in China from transactions and cooperation with them.

I would like to stress that the Chinese government remains unwavering in our resolve to safeguard national sovereignty, security and territorial integrity and protect the lawful rights and interests of Chinese companies and citizens. We urge the United States to abide by the one-China principle and the three China-US joint communiqués, observe international law and the basic norms governing international relations, stop arming Taiwan, and stop targeting China with illegal unilateral sanctions. Otherwise there will be strong and resolute response from China.

This is clearly just a warning shot across the bow of the US corpocracy. Because if the Chinese really want to increase the pressure on the US government, they will sanction Apple, Disney, and other entertainment companies. The amount of lobbyists descending upon Washington DC in response would make D-Day look like a small commando raid.

DISCUSS ON SG


Dead Internet to Fake Internet

The nerds who dreamed of uploading their minds into software and achieving a form of immortality thereby never stopped to think about the fact that if the technology to do so was ever achieved, involuntary digital immortality could be imposed upon people whether they wanted to be replaced or not. From 4chan:

I’m a Meta insider working on Project Lazarus. We’re building an Al that can take over a deceased persons social media accounts and continue making relevant posts as if that person is still alive. This includes age progressed photos, interacting with other peoples content and everything else needed so that person continues on in the digital realm after physical death. We were originally told this would be a service offered to people struggling with the loss of loved ones and people who had missing children. Seemed like a decent idea.

Things are getting weird now and I’m having second thoughts about what this is actually going to be used for. The Al is extremely capable of impersonating people. It doesn’t take as much initial input as one might think to train the Al how a certain person interacts with the digital world. It’s very convincing. An entire island of people could go missing and with little to no downtime the Al could take over all of their social media and the world wouldn’t have a clue that life wasn’t just continuing as usual. A lot of the project is becoming more compartmentalized.

Things have taken a dark turn it feels like. They’ve forbidden communication between people working on different things. Something isn’t right and I don’t know what I should do. I’m not going to post any personally identifiable information but I will try to answer questions that won’t expose my role within the project.

I always thought the excuse given – to mitigate grief – was a very thin one. And now that we’ve seen hundreds of people in a single area apparently liquidated in a short time on Maui, it appears to be fairly obvious what the purpose of this technology is.

The world is much weirder than most people are able to imagine. It increasingly appears that Christian culture was holding back old gods who are much darker than most history records.

DISCUSS ON SG


Disney is the New Enron

The Devil Mouse has been very, very, very naughty. But instead of getting coal in its stocking this Christmas season, it’s getting an audit of the Reedy Creek Improvement District by the State of Florida, and almost certainly, the IRS, as the Dark Herald explains how and why the wolves are circling CEO Bob Iger.

Reedy Creek owns some power plants, and these are taxpayer-supported. Although, they are primarily to be used as emergency backups. Please excuse this next bit because I’m going to have to say allegedly a LOT. Allegedly, it would take years to bring one of them online. The other has allegedly been turned into an air conditioning plant, but they both allegedly still collect subsidies. I mean why pay for something out of your pocket when you can get Uncle Sucker to buy it for you?

The auditors weren’t permitted entry into these plants because the employees that run these Reedy Creek government facilities DON’T WORK FOR REEDY CREEK.

They work for Disney.

Yeah, who’d have guessed? The chief auditor stated that Reedy Creek produces no electricity at all. This startled the hell out of a lot of us because Disney World has huge banks of solar panels. In fact, they’ve committed quite a bit of ecological damage to the local wildlife trails to build them. To say nothing of how badly those filthy things will poison the land when the inevitable hurricane blasts through and wrecks them.

Disney nonetheless ignored real-world environmental terrorism to pat itself on the back over a being phantom friend of the Earth. Disney World loudly and proudly proclaimed that these panels provide 40% of WDW’s power, cleanly!

Allegedly, all of the electricity provided by those solar panels is sold to a third-party utility. Disney World allegedly buys 100% of its power from Duke Energy and only 10% of that is allegedly provided by anything approaching “clean energy.”

And it just gets even better for the new Ken Lay, previously known as “Bob Iger”.

Bob Iger’s worst nightmare just became the last Bob. In American law, no NDA ever written can stop criminal testimony. Chapek is in a perfect position to rat out literally everyone who got him shitcanned out of the company in the most humiliating way possible.

We all knew that Disney was going downhill fast. It’s been impossible to miss the way that the convergence of the corporation has systematically reduced the value of its intellectual properties. But what we couldn’t have known is how it now appears increasingly plausible that fraud and criminal activity of a greater magnitude than anyone imagined could suffice to take down the entire edifice of corpocratic evil.

UPDATE: Better add another few verys in front of that “naughty”.

New bombshell incoming. Disney was acting as a licensed municipal securities dealer for Reedy Creek. Disney isn’t licensed to do any such thing.

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