I’m your host, Stephen and this is yet another expression of the anatomy of failure where my conflicting desires for this project complicate it. Don’t worry, there’s a real essay after this preamble, just getting some housekeeping out of the way.

TLDR: The way I’ve run this newsletter for the last 6 or so years has been bad actually. What I want to do is long form investigations of complex topics but those take a long time to do and I feel pressure from myself to publish and try and grow this thing so I’m not losing money on it relative to doing other work.

I’ve got another thing I want to try let’s say until the end of May.

What I’m thinking is doing kind of a book report a week on something relevant I’m reading.

I usually have to read multiple books to do the longer form stuff anyway, so this lets me do work towards a bigger topic while also making something interesting regularly enough to really grow.

We just broke 1,500 readers and I’d really like to see that number grow quite a lot.

Does this make sense? I figure it’ll also really increase the variety of stuff we talk about here.

Let me know what you think. I literally require feedback.

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OK, let’s get into the real shit.

What If What You Know is Wrong?

An underrated problem we have in the US that makes every other problem we have worse is how we teach people what knowledge is, how to get it, and how it works.

Basically, there are two major tracks and they teach the same thing.

1. Public Education teaches that knowledge is dispensed from approved authorities.

2. Religion teaches that knowledge is dispensed from approved authorities.

Who approved them? What is their authority? Don’t worry about it.

And while I obviously think this is a very bad way to teach people anything, it does have some advantages.

For starters and the most legitimate: People who do not know things are not super well equipped to know what they need to know. Especially when it takes 10-15 years for that knowledge to build up into something really useful.

But the biggest one is respect for the established ahem canon of knowledge which we’ve been passing down since before the beginning of history.

Since culture replaced biology as the most active engine of raw human experimentation we’ve seen this accelerate. We have surviving art in cave paintings that are almost 70,000 years old, the oldest sculpture is around 40,000 years old, language started to develop like 135,000 years ago. Homo Sapiens Sapiens is biologically about 200,000 years old. Gathering grain started about 100,000 years ago and really started to convert to agriculture about 12,000 years ago, creating the Neolithic Revolution.

And that’s all before anything resembling what we’d call “civilization.”

We’ve inherited the results of all of that and so much more for both good and ill. The whole nasty, glorious spectrum of human existence.

Much of that was extremely valuable.

Civilization also contributed what we’re going to euphemistically call lessons here. But the need for unity at scale has often tempted various kinds of empires into developing something that goes beyond Tradition and becomes a kind of rigid Orthodoxy.

But these Orthodoxies are inherently political, coercive, and lean towards delusional.

Why?

Because they reject the most basic facts of reality: Time moves on and all knowledge decays and becomes out of date.

That’s a physical fact. Unavoidable unless we’ve really fucked up understanding physics.

But Orthodoxies are far more mutable their their advertising (or opponents advertising) says. What we might call Ideological Entrepreneurship is widespread and commonplace for even the most extreme traditionalists.

We can use the far right’s War On Empathy as a case study. This is a very new idea in western circles, and while there’s a long history of preferring compassion to empathy and criticizing the latter in Buddhist circles, this is a different beast.

This is about policing the dehumanization of right wing outgroups in a settler colonialist/white supremacist nation: The Left is trying to trick you into caring about people you shouldn’t give a fuck about.

Basically, it’s a handful of thought leaders spreading a useful meme to shore up their ideological weaknesses.

If you want me to trace all that out… that’s a thing you can ask me to do:

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Most classical Christian virtues are the polar opposite of this concept. And it’s most loudly preached by those who also support a literal interpretation of the bible. Go look up the Beatitudes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and think about the “sin” of Empathy.

But there’s always been a gulf between Christian virtues on paper and what Christians actually value. Alas, not a vice exclusive to them.

We could go on at length over any institution you might like and discover no matter how loudly they talk about the Truth of this or that being unchanging, their actual lived practice is filled with innovation.

This is a known problem for your real fascist Traditionalists coming out of Julius Evola and other creeps. The perfect ancient Truth is always being perverted and “degenerates” are everywhere, even daring to count themselves among the “faithful”.

This is why they police themselves the way they do.

What does all this have to do with knowledge?

Because all of us are acculturated by those we grow up around. We inherit versions of their beliefs and ideas, both implicit and explicit. And then we react to those things. Some we accept, some we reject, some we don’t even notice building off.

This gives us a wide array of cultural behaviors we can participate in. What it doesn’t do is give us the full context for maybe any of them.

And to the extent to which we’re playing off these unnoticed ideals, we’re also unconscious of how we’ve been shaped and conditioned by interpersonal, cultural, and economic forces.

In the past, my suggestion about this has always been to do a Descartes and try to doubt everything you’ve been told. There are two problems with that.

1. Doubt itself isn’t enough.

2. It’s the slow, manual, fumbling of concepts until they dissolve.

Most people are kinda busy trying to survive and help those around them survive. That process took me, in fairly ideal conditions, a few years to do. Not great.

See, concepts are janky. They don’t map on to reality well, so we usually distort our perceptions over recognizing their flaws. Every idea is false in some sense.

So sufficient skepticism will eventually bring those to open awareness where they can be addressed. Usually not fixed, but at least mitigated, or hedged against, or changed in some way.

Sometimes it even works.

Knowledge is hard. Certainty is an illusion.

But at the same time hyper-skepticism is a lot of naval gazing, time wasting, and arguably dangerous to your mental health.

The answer to that is only a partial solution, because you end up doing the work of a lifetime either way, but it’s learning to understand the underlying structure of knowledge itself.

What you have to do is a messy bit of on-the-go triage because you don’t know what you don’t know about what you do know.

Wrapping Up

This piece has been weirdly hard to write as I’ve ended up distracted and rambling a ton while poking holes in my own ideas. There’s literally another 2000 words of this essay that just felt too messy to go with.

As for what’s next… we’ll keep that up in the air with the mysterious lights.

See you next time.

-S

But seriously, more than money I need feedback and a growing audience. If you liked this or know someone who’d enjoy it leave a comment and/or share it with them.

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I’ve had a busy, mostly positive, and very frustrating month. From getting a car for the first time in a decade, to job hunting limbo, to having a fever taking LITERALLY FOREVER to go away it’s been a time. Oh and it keeps looking like our leaders want to start WW3 to bring about the end of the world.

The downside is the predictable stress of precarity. The upside is I did make enough money to spend $40 and a few hours drive collecting a banker’s box of 28 random UFO books.

This was a delight and I want to go through them with you.

Random Book Haul

We're not going deep into any book here. And I can only have 9 images per gallery so this is going to be broken up kinda weird.

Our first batch are either books I've already read or books I won't read without some compelling new reason.

Annie Jacobsen, Ben Mezrich, Jim Marrs, Zachariah Sitchin, and David Jacobs are all people I don’t trust for varying reasons of middling interest. Jacobsen was a producer on the most heinous propaganda shot I’ve ever seen, Amazon’s Jack Ryan which eliminates whatever benefit of the doubt I was willing to give her for dubious decisions on this book. Ben’s book is fine, but the ending does a cliched HP Lovecraft oh no they’re about to get me as I write this shit that pissed me off.

David Jacobs seems sincere, but his belief in the efficacy of his hypnotic regressions makes me suspicious. Sitchin mistranslated a bunch of shit that people now take as gospel. And Jim Marrs is a John Bircher.

I don’t know anything about the others. But Kevin Randle says he was military intelligence and I’m not exactly looking for extra spies to lie to me about UFOs. We’ve already got plenty of those.

Let's see what's next

These are books I'm kind of interested in but not in any way that might actually get them read.

Here we have some big names. Philip Klass is arguably the most famous UFO skeptic in history. Steve Greer we’ve discussed before. I don’t think we’ve really gone into J Allen Hynek or Philip Imbrogno much. And I know we haven’t mentioned the rest.

I’ve heard a few interviews with Nick Redfern and nothing he said seemed really worth poking at. But this might be fun to go through.

And finally books I do want to read at some point.

And here we have either the cream of the crop or stuff that’s relevant to subjects I want to really dig into. Missing from this is Philip J Corso’s The Day After Roswell which is let’s say controversial. That, Chasing The Roswell Alien, and dreamland might be interesting for digging into roswell when I get around to it.

I’ve got a soft spot for anyone trying to pitch a weirder than aliens theory of UFOs so Ultraterrestrial Contact is an easy pick.

CE-5, Unconventional Flying Objects: A scientific Analysis, Cosmic Connection, and Alien Abduction, UFOs, and the Conference at MIT are all deep dives into subjects i don’t really care much about.

Antigravity Propulsion Dynamics looks to be in a rabbit hole I’ve been putting off for a while: The claim that anti-gravity tech was cracked in the 50s or 60s and is being hidden from everyone.

And if I have to explain to you why SILENT INVASION: THE PENNSYLVANIA UFO-BIGFOOT CASEBOOK is worth a read I fear you might be in the wrong place.

And the one I'm reading now:

I started this one purely on it looking like it had the most crank vibes of the whole haul and it didn’t disappoint: It starts off strong by accusing Christianity of being crypto-Egyptian mythology and ancient aliens and secret atlantis truthers of being a divide and conquer plot by some mysterious group of intelligence-connected ghouls.

I love knowing my instincts for high quality nonsense is undefeated. Or hell, maybe they’ll win me over by the end. You never know.

So far the thing that’s most interesting about it is the subtitle on the cover is: “The Truth About Extraterrestrial Life and the Mysteries of Ancient Egypt” but the inner cover goes deeper: Revealing the truth behind extraterrestrial contact, military intelligence and the mysteries of ancient Egypt.

With a little luck it won’t just be bullshit that traces back to military intelligence bullshitters like Rick Doty, John Lear, and Bill Cooper.

Wrapping Up

I’m trying to figure out how to make a version of this newsletter that makes sense.

Right now it’s kind of a half assed project made up on unfinished half assed projects. I want to fix this now that I can actually do the necessary work.

That’s going to take some introspection and market research.

We’ll see.

Hoping to have one of my more usual essays up before the end of the month.

See you then.

-S

This is the Trenchant Edges, a newsletter about whatever I can get myself to write.

This is going to be one of those inward facing self reflection posts so if you’re not up for that skip it.

Leave a like on substack if you’re especially kind!

Basically, the thing that doesn’t work here is also the thing that does. And they’re both uhh who I am as a person.

My original plan for TE was to have something pretty narrowly focused and clearly defined and while that’s been laughable for literally the entire time I’m tired of having so many open loops and constantly opening more loops.

Which, uh, doesn’t seem likely to change.

This post is me trying to do two things:

1. Getting enough clarity about how this process works that I can do something different.

2. Publishing to clear out my anxiety/guilt about not having finished something.

Naval Gazing into the Abyss

This newsletter was started on June 20th 2020. As I write this it’s March 16th 2026.

That’s 295 weeks of “doing” Trenchant Edges.

I’ve half abandoned it a pile of times since then. We’ve had about 220 posts since then, which is quite a lot. Even if I’d originally planned doing something a bit more regular, smaller, and weekly.

I’ve tried a pile of different structures here and none of them have improved things.

Now that’s tricky to assess because I spent the first 5 years of this newsletter dealing with crippling back pain and most of the last year recovering from it.

Can’t be mad at myself for that.

What I can be a little mad about is how often I’ve skimped on editing because I felt too much pressure to be done and just said fuck it. I know I’m capable of doing excellent writing with the right amount of polish.

Now, this pressure doesn’t really come from anyone else. My sense is that the people I’m writing for don’t give a shit as long as it’s good.

The pressure comes from a mix of my creative ambitions and the needs of this thing as a business.

Oh and a pile of mental illness.

Shocker, I know.

So I’m a Little Insane

About 20 years ago I was suicidal and a senior in high school. As a self-motivated, traumatized child with both ADHD and Autism, US public schools were a profoundly hostile place for me.

Because of the profound ignorance of neurodivergence at the time, my conditions masked each-other. Too ADHD to be autistic, too autistic to have ADHD. Mostly I seemed like a bright but hot tempted child who didn’t respect any authority.

Which to be fair was entirely correct.

But nobody understood why, myself least of all.

Even then my emotions tended to be a bit extreme: Elation and despair. Rage and peace. Love and hate.

I feel without shock absorption.

As an adult I kind of prefer it this way. I’m rarely bored and it’s not that much effort to manage most of the time.

Practicing meditation in my 20s helped me actually get good at this for the first time. But mechanically, it’s still an effort of will to control which really started to get janky once my physical energy was spent enduring pain.

So, to that mess which includes Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria and Pathological Demand Avoidance, got a bonus difficulty of managing my herniated disc.

I realize that’s all a bit melodramatic but it doesn’t really feel that way. This is just who I am and who I’ve been.

The difficulty has been figuring out how to live with all this.

See, I have this reoccurring fantasy built /on the shocking success I had recovering from trauma in my 20s that one day I’ll be fundamentally different. I do not believe this is the case.

My challenges today, mediated by how much I recover from the back injury, will probably be my challenges 50 years from now. You know, plus whatever new bullshit I get from aging and all the history that keeps happening.

And the slow improvement I’ve seen in that over the years has me pretty comfortable with that fate.

So let’s get into the other side of this.

The Anatomy of my Failures

Here’s the thing: I like being good a stuff. Skills are a pleasure to have and use.

I like writing and LOVE realizing I’ve written something really good.

It’s hard work. But I enjoy it. Until I don’t, lol.

The hardest thing for me to do in any context is start something. Once I’m moving I’m usually fine. But getting going is… tricky.

There’s a bunch of ADHD crap about dopamine and focus here but we’re mostly going to ignore that. Point is, at any point there’s a bunch of stuff I know I need to do and I need something to hook into the task to get me going.

It’s a lot easier if I’m working for someone else.

Which is crazymaking. Like, I’m a pretty good manager but my nervous system will argue with me if I want to manage myself? What bullshit is that?

This makes long term research projects like the ones I want to do here really hard because those require me to skillfully get myself to do the right shit and not be distracted over weeks or months.

This is… difficult.

And the output of this newsletter is exactly what you might expect: I come up with new ideas to chase but never really get as deep into them as I want to.

Occasionally I’ll get a couple good weeks in.

But overall it doesn’t really work even when I’m working.

Which leads me to chasing my own tail

So, let’s walk through this and ignore my awful penmanship.

1. Idea to Research Something

2. The Dunning-Kruger Slide: Oh fuck there’s so much more I need to know to even be able to tell if my argument means anything.

3. Try to Catch up

4. Panic on realizing it’s almost been a month since I last published.

5. Fuck, I need an idea I can do without researching anything.

6. Repeat to #1

That’s how you get this newsletter.

And while it hasn’t created what I want, it has created a lot of good stuff. There are some real bangers here.

But that runs into another issue.

The Business

This newsletter has been in a weird place for a long time. I have enough people paying that I don’t want to give it up but not so much that I can actually afford to do this for even a major part of my income.

I live real cheap so I can get away with this. But that’s now out of the question because I own a car and those bills are going to add up quick.

And there’s just a flurry of shit that goes with this. Doing stuff to make money takes time and energy I can’t spend on research. And most of the things I do for money are too expensive in time and energy to have much left over.

So the next round of trying things is doing some gig-tier medical courier shit and hoping that’s cheap enough I can work effectively here while trying to figure out how to sustainably expand traffic.

Fuck if I know if any of that will work out.

What Now?

That’s the long and short of it. I could get into a ton more detail but I don’t think that’s useful.

I haven’t been idle in the last month, but we’ll see how long it takes to turn the crap I’ve written into something good actually. The point of this post is to break the feeling bad about myself part of the cycle so I can get back to the work.

Anyway, I’m tired from this and going to go take a walk.

See y’all soon.

-S

Would appreciate any of the thoughtful comments y’all usually have.

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Today we’re taking a swing at a subject I’ve done a few times already: Cutting through the bullshit around what makes some speculation illegitimate.

I have a sense of the bigger picture.

Conspiracy believers often say that so-called legitimate sources can’t be trusted. Their skeptics/debunkers/commenters say believers can’t be trusted. And things quickly collapse into bickering about the argument itself. You’ve probably seen a thousand times.

If we’re sticking to the broadest outline we can easily see both sides are right, but the second we look a little closer things get rough for the believers. Graham Hancock is right that “mainstream archeology” often fails their lofty ideals.

He loses me by trying to leverage that fact as evidence of his very idiosyncratic ideas about Atlantis.

And maybe more importantly I don’t think any archeologist would disagree with that statement. The field has been trying to do better for decades.

This battle has been going on for a few hundred years without any sign it’s slowing down. These days it’s usually framed as, “What is or isn’t science?” or the demarcation problem.

Picking a side and trying to bludgeon the other one isn’t going super well. But I think we can slouch towards a higher perspective that integrates and expands both of them.

We just need a brief detour.

How the Church Became the Academy

With a disclaimer that this is a complex and thousand year history I don’t know in depth I’m reducing to a few paragraphs because it really does seem to frame the whole subject. If you’re a scholar who knows more of this I’d love to talk. Also, it’s focused on Europe because that’s already too complicated.

For almost a thousand years Universities have been running in Europe. The oldest is the University of Bologna that got its start, allegedly, in 1088. Oxford was founded a few years later and both initially mainly produced priests, lawyers, and most beloved of all, priest-lawyers*.

*Oversimplification

As time would go on bit by bit, people started studying other things. There was that whole Protestant Reformation and centuries of religious conflict that have only sort of ended in the modern era. But people by large decided that secular institutions were more stable and respecting the freedom of their communities than religious ones. This was true for states and schools alike.

There was also a bunch of colonization which accelerated new ideas and provoked new backlashes and reverse backlashes. Lots of people died, some people got rich. We did slowly learn a lot more about the world. “Yay” modernity, I guess.

Look, it’s been a busy thousand years.

Scientific methodologies developed as secularism became the norm. This didn’t mean the academy stopped doing awful things, they just did different awful things. Eugenics and other race science are easy answers.

By the time we hit the first world war, science had become integral to both economic and military success and with those successes its prestige skyrocketed. Causing nations to shovel more money to it.

All of this set up a world where the social position of Priests kind of rubbed off on Academics. At first this was because Priests and Academics were mostly the same people. The priest-lawyers became priest-scientists. Over centuries this became less true and we just ended up with scientists. But academics retained some of the elevated social status traditionally accorded to priests or high ranking guild members. To this day, “Doctor” is one of the only formal titles remaining in society.

And by the end of WW2, the scientific expert had become the technocrat. A new priestly caste of Scientist-bureaucrats who would rationalize society and who promised to benefit everyone. (rimshot)

Again, vast oversimplification.

But this is the world that conspiracy theorists reject. And they should. It sucks. We didn’t get maximum efficiency for everyone, we got a few decades of brutal imperialism to pay for social bribes in the first world followed by breaking down those systems because they got in the way of the richest people in the world getting richer.

The vanity of this system was never unchallenged. But we’re something like 80 years into the world system hitting crisis after crisis that experts didn’t predict and only understood in retrospect and a lot of people being understandably pissed about that.

And that’s without going into the many, many factions who wanted to shape the world in their own image.

In short, all this is annoying as hell and many people have been misled by those whose social status has been elevated by their so-called expertise. To pick the most famous example in my mind: The allegedly left wing New York Times were the loudest and most influential press cheerleader for George W Bush’s illegal Iraq invasion.

We could spend all day giving examples.

After WW2, the US attempted to use mass media to induce a shared consensual reality for most of the world. Academics were foot-soldiers and strategists in this global plot.

Skepticism is more than justified.

But the story doesn’t end there. Skepticism isn’t a magic formula for virtue. At best it’s an invitation to develop it.

The Failures of Debunking

Let’s get the debunking thing out of the way. Most debunkers don’t understand context and thus only ever attack symptoms instead of the underlying systems that produce social conflict and paranoid ideation.

I have little sympathy for what passes for skepticism in the US. It’s not an accident that the most prominent group of “skeptics”, the New Atheists, largely ended up just shilling for the very people they used to debunk. See “Cultural Christian” Richard Dawkins for the most famous example.

One source of the confusion is a technical point of of logic. Debunkers rarely distinguish between internal and external consistency in the logic of the people they’re debunking. Usually they skip to cheap shots/insults for the entertainment of their audience and shame of their targets.

Internal consistency is about how coherent the reasoning of an argument is within itself. Are their flaws, gaps, fallacies, or other errors in logic?

External consistency is about how well an argument applies to the real world or other relevant evidence.

Another way to put it are the questions, “Does the argument make sense in itself?” and “yeah, but is it real though?”

Now, lots of conspiracy slop accounts don’t even make it through internal consistency because of the context we’re going to get to.

But every one that does is fundamentally rational. Rationality doesn’t mean correct, it just means that the logic works within its own terms.

Mathematics famously lets you create logical systems that do not apply to the real world.

This is why science had to be invented: You can be rational and wrong. It’s easy to. To get really good knowledge it has to be tested in the real world. We call that empiricism. The scientific method.

Debunkers making this kind of error hide the actual process of reasoning and thus make it harder to identify the actual errors involved for anybody. But this doesn’t matter because they also usually misunderstand the context. There are layers to error here.

While many conspiracy theorists do have specific (and mostly awful) political projects they’re advancing, most of the conspiracy content online right now is pure storytelling. Sure, it carries ideology and implicit beliefs and is often useful to those political projects but the goal is just to harvest attention for commercial and ego purposes.

Commercialized folklore isn’t a scientific paper. It’s appealing to the frustrations and preconceptions of a mass audience for profit. It also acts as a radicalizing feedback loop.

Oh look, it’s our old friend the bullshit cycle.

By targeting logical errors, debunkers often miss the bigger issues and structural forces that create the discourse. Plus the actual motivations that bring people into conspiracy spaces.

In fact, debunkers are often engaged in identical social activities as conspiracy theorists: Policing the boundaries of trust within their social groups, crystalizing ingroup belief, and attacking perceived enemies.

Even if they’re technically right, as many are, the fact they’re also enforcing social boundaries makes them less trustworthy and less effective at fighting the irrationality they believe they’re opposing.

It’s kind of a problem.

All this means that even if a conspiracy theorist wants to engage rationally in good faith with criticism, it’s much harder than it could otherwise be.

Yes, some won’t ever act in good faith. But many people do sincerely believe they’re finding secret truths.

The Virtues of The Conspiracy Theorist

If we step back and view Conspiracy theories as a social force, we can see a few things worth knowing.

1. Conspiracy theories often correctly identify social problems.

2. They’re useful for holding together political coalitions.

3. They simplify complex interactions into stories.

4. By personalizing systemic forces they make organization harder

Antivaxers, for example, are correct to identify that Big Pharma’s profit-motive isn’t trustworthy. They’re much worse at understanding why or offering remedies.

This makes them vulnerable to people offering quack cures with the exact same conflict of interest Big Pharma has and none of their strengths.

Andrew Wakefield is a perfect case study here: The man kickstarted modern vaccine hesitancy by faking research to create the grounds for a lawsuit. He’s exactly the doctor antivaxers think run Big Pharma. But they love him!

And eventually the medical profession rightly ran him out of town for his crimes. It just took a decade longer than it probably should have.

But I don’t want to focus on the frauds here because their malfeasance can distract from the sincere thing I think most of the people interested in conspiracy theories are trying to do. Let’s distinguish them from the influencers with a commercialized folklore business.

Conspiracy consumers are trying to make sense of a world they know is lying to them with the tools they have. They are certainly guilty of many of the same motivated reasoning mistakes, bad faith framing, and outright racism as theory influencers are.

But their investment is rooted in identity and social group, not financial interest.

Conspiracy theorizing is kind of just a normal process of the human mind. We all suspect additional motives for actions of the people around us.

What gets most people into trouble is when they develop an aversion for a group of people, often a political scapegoat, and start looking for reinforcement of those beliefs.

In reinforcement they change how they relate to different sources. What groups get skepticism and what groups get a cognitive free pass.

It’s this shift that marks someone going from a passive interest in fringe ideas to a conspiracy believer.

And this is the cognitive process that pro and anti-conspiracy influencers compete over.

All this happens under conditions where any time spent thinking or researching comes away from either working for money or leisure/social time. So everyone’s making scarce choices about how to engage with this kind of content.

In practice that means spending a lot less time on skepticism even if they want to learn.

But I promised you virtues, didn’t I?

I meant it too. In the abstract conspiracy theories seem like a fertile ground to develop all kinds of worthy qualities.

Let’s do one of those internet-friendly numbered lists

1. Skepticism of Authority

2. Openness to New Ideas

3. Independent Thinking

4. Resistance to Peer Pressure

5. Seeking Transparency and Accountability

These are all ways conspiracy theorists see themselves and their ilk and it’s not completely out of line.

It does take the courage of your convictions to stand up in a room full of people who don’t believe 9/11 was an inside job and demand they take that idea seriously.

It’s tempting to “But” this because, well, that’s how I feel. Since Occupy Wall Street I’ve said it: If 9/11 truthers didn’t exist, the feds would have to create them because they’re were so disruptive of any actual organizing.

Conspiracy believers usually have good intentions getting into the field, at least when they’re not nazis. Unfortunately the cultic milieu does not treat them well on this point.

Trading which ingroups you uncritically support is not a good recipe for achieving any of those virtues. And that’s often the price for joining communities built on contrarianism.

This too is a normal function of human thinking in social situations. The line between criticism and attack is awfully thin on a good day. And we all want to defend those we care about, ourselves included.

Institutional prestige and authority are poor replacements for real relationships of trust. Some of the dumbest and least trustworthy people I know have PhDs from Harvard.

But we live in a media environment that demands we trust a lot more than we should and doesn’t really give us good alternatives when we don’t trust. But that’s another essay.

The question I keep coming back to is, “What would change these dynamics?”

Where Is This All Going?

On a civilizational level, I think European-linked cultures are slowly recovering from the harmful and invalid authority of the church in controlling flows of information.

Academics are a poor replacement for priests in most social situations, but long term I’m hoping they’ll end up as a transitionary social form to something that generates robust expertise without the ivory tower elitism.

I don’t really have a clear idea of how that will work or what it will look like but I see signs of it all over academia as frustrations with administrations run by MBAs managing what amounts to a hedge fund with education and researched themed public relations department mount.

Likewise, media consolidation of both broadcast and independent media has made having reliable journalism much harder.

These have never been institutions to trust. The 20th century saw lots of experiments in objective and subjective academia and journalism with lots of dubious results on both sides.

I believe there’s a synthesis somewhere in the future.

But we’ve got a lot of swamp to crawl out of first.

Wrapping Up

The thesis I’ve been dancing around this piece is that media has successfully disarmed the revolutionary potential of skepticism towards intuitions towards scapegoats.

It’s not a partisan issue, though it is worse on the right.

Conspiracy theories provide a release valve where people who might do things that break the system can be be siloed where they’re usually harmless… unless they take political power.

Which, you know, they have in the US.

We started today with a recognition that what happens at the boundaries between “mainstream” and “fringe” happens in a context that needs to be understood before the conflicts make any sense.

I suspect this topic has another essay or two in it. There’s a bunch of theoretical pieces I want to bring together before it’s done.

Would love to hear what you think.

Leave a comment

See you soon.

-S

I wanted to take a moment and lay out a few of the things in the pipeline.

Here’s the problem:

Hacking The Human Soul

Since industrialization global human society, “lead” by Europe, has developed a blend of technologies for manipulating people at ever increasing scales.

Manipulat…

Read more

Normally this is where I’d apologize for disappearing for a few months but we’re all a little tired and past that, I think.

I have this problem where I keep trying to come up with quick ideas that end up taking an order of magnitude or three more work than I thought.

So I figured we’ll do a little recess today. This is a test of me podcasting. Mostly it’s me ranting about the national security state and tangentially related to UFOs.

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I would very much like your opinion of it. I can do more if people like it.

This is kind of part 3 of our UFO summer camp. Read part 1 here, part 2 here, and 2024’s disclosure post here. But it’s also kind of just a summary of two of them.

If that’s all you want, no need to read further but I wanted to talk a little about what all I’ve been up to.

Quicksand is Real And It’s In My Head

I’m on my fifth or sixth attempt at making a Disclosure update since the 2024 disclosure post and I keep finding new rabbit holes to crawl in and none of them are very interesting.

In desperation I’ve signed back up for twitter And completely lost the plot again tracing various influencers and holy shit it’s the same shit it was.

I’ve written like 7,000 words about all this and it’s all garbage. None of it is worth your time.

Again: You can spend your entire life studying this stuff and know just as much about aliens as when you started.

I’ve cursed myself with prophecy.

That’s fine.

The Epstein Files batch release yesterday hasn’t helped any.

Anyway, I’m going to give this one more go and then cut my losses.

I have mostly worked out the next phase of Trenchant Edges and we’re going to go down the other endless series of rabbit holes I’ve been trapped in over the last few weeks: The history of advertising and psychological warfare.

All this will in fact come back to Paul Bennewitz but I… don’t know how long that’s going to take. This is a deep, deep well.

Paid Subscribers will be getting a bit of a roadmap for it on like, Monday. If you feel like gambling with my work ethic.

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Wrapping Up

Aside from persistent creative failure I’ve been doing pretty well and i hope you are as well, despite the uh no longer creeping fascism of the United States.

We should abolish ICE and a lot of other things.

In fact, I’ll bring you a spoiler here, we’re going to be talking a lot about how Behaviorism has been weaponized against the entire world by platforms like Facebook, Google, and Palantir and I doubt you’re going to be much more thrilled with them than I am when we’re done.

And we’re probably going to have to do some Epstein too given all the madness coming out.

Well, busy year.

And let me know if the audio I recorded was any good. Seriously I need feedback, lol.

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I’m your host Stephen and today we’re just getting into it. This is part 2 of UFO Summer Camp (In November). Read Part 1 here.

For the last couple years I’ve wanted to talk about this man and what the US military did to him in detail. They went to absolutely insane lengths to drive this man into a paranoid spiral.

As I dug into researching this piece, it became very clear to me that there’s too much information about this for my usual process. And a ton of it is extremely untrustworthy even by UFO standards.

No surprise, really. See, Bennewitz knew *everyone* in the UFO researcher community in the 80s. Because of that he was a perfect channel for disinformation, which he helped spread. A real superspreader event.

I don’t fault Paul, though. He was the target of a shocking amount of spy bullshit. It would eventually drive him into a mental asylum.

You and I wouldn’t fare much better, I suspect.

With that in mind, this is going to be a bit of a “just the facts” TE. We’re going to focus on the account on, from what I can currently tell not having read them all, is the most authoritative source: Greg Bishop’s Project Beta:

So, let’s set an expectation that this is very uh preliminary. May be subject to clarification or contradiction as needed.

Pitch: I need to make another $350 so I can afford to start driving uber on Tuesday. If you could pitch in, that would be wonderful. I’m even doing one of those sale things people tell me work. If you’ve got the cash and interest, I’d appreciate it. If not, no worries. This will always be available free to anyone to read as long as substack isn’t too much of a shit about it.

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That said, what I really crave here is feedback and questions. I want to know how people are reacting to what I write.

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As long as I don’t lose my apartment that’s the most important thing.

Government Issued Psychosis

I want to start this with my biggest question about this whole situation.

Why did any of this happen?

Paul Bennewitz and many of the other regular UFO people, thought they were discovering the truth behind a great mystery. Bill Moore thought he was going to get UFO secrets by snitching and lying to UFO researchers. Richard Doty sure seems to just love lying.

And I guess he also had orders.

But what the fuck was going on with military intelligence, the NSA, the FBI, and whoever else was watching Bennewitz? But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The short version of this whole story is Paul Bennewitz was a defense contractor who started a company, Thunder Scientific. He had a masters degree in physics. This was a smart, highly motivated, intelligent man who got interested in UFOs in the late 70s and found what he thought was evidence of UFO activity over Kirkland Air Force Base in 1980, which he reported to the authorities.

They reacted to this American patriot warning them about a security threat like he was trying to steal nuclear secrets. I’ve seen a few arguments around this: From Cold War Max’d paranoia to they worried Bennewitz’s meddling would provide information other intelligence agencies. My suspicion is someone was testing the UFO scene as vector for disinformation.

The truth is probably some massive mix of these as different agencies react to an ambiguous “threat” differently. And we’ll probably never have good information on those reactions.

The Air Force Office of Special Investigations officer assigned to him befriended Bennewitz and “helped” his investigation. This was Sargent Richard “Rick” Doty. He’s been a fixture of the UFO community ever since.

All this escalated until August 1988, when Bennewitz family had him committed to a psychiatric institution for one month. He died in 2003 at age 75, with the family hostile to anyone from the UFO community trying to get in touch with him again.

It’s hard to argue with them about that.

Let’s get into the sheer alphabet soup of it all.

Abductions, Secret Bases, and Alien Invasions

Kirkland AFB was founded in 1941 and has hosted Nazis from operation paperclip and Sandia National Laboratories, Kirkland is no stranger to high paranoia. Which may account for, well, the rest of this story.

Everything that happens from here out needs to be taken within the context of some of the United States most closely guarded secrets of an escalating cold war and some of the most paranoid people alive. I saw one estimate that suggested that over 160 different companies, institutions, agencies, and groups were at Kirkland AFB in the 80s. Each with their own cornucopia of secrets both mundane and exotic to keep and overlapping jurisdictions.

Many of them heavily armed and allowed to kill to keep their secrets in the almighty name of national security.

Praise be the secrets! And may righteous fury immolate those miserable sinners who do. not. need. to. know!

Before 1980

By 1978 Bennewitz was living in Albuquerque’s exclusive Four Hills Village, less than a mile from Kirkland AFB.

Our man was right the hell up in there.

So here we have a intelligent, curious man with sophisticated technical skills right next to a military base doing some of the most secure research in the country.

We can’t overstate the secrecy stew here. On the job these are not, uh, people with a sense of humor.

Let’s focus in on Bennewitz’s business, Thunder Scientific, for a moment. When I say he was a defense contractor, what i mean is he regularly did business with the Air Force, Navy, NASA, and once we get into our story the NSA gave him a $75,000 R&D grant.

Some might push back on that characterization because most of his contracts were for harmless things like humidity sensors. But the war machine needs many things.

Bennewitz was also an investigator to APRO, a civilian UFO research group by the end of the 70s and in April 1979 he went to a cattle mutilation conference put on by Former Apollo Astronaut and then New Mexico Senator Harrison Schmitt, where he met Officer Gabe Valdez who was speaking at the conference.

Despite their continued collaboration, we’re going to leave Officer Valdez for another installment as his son wrote a detailed book about his father’s point of view.

APRO also deserves more than the few words we’re going to give it. It was a very prominent US UFO research group for decades and was itself the subject of lengthy surveillance and disinformation. Another Summer camp perhaps.

Let’s leave it at: When I say that you can study UFOs your entire life and not really understand the phenomena more than you started with, groups like APRO are why I said so.

Bennewitz spent much of his free time during this period collecting signals, photos, and other information that he slowly pieced into his theories about a secret base in Dulce New Mexico. He was far from the only person who saw strange lights in the sky around Kirkland AFB.

You may have noticed we haven’t discussed the substance of his ideas yet, but I think it makes the most sense to follow things chronologically. Let’s leave the 70s behind.

1980

1980 was when Paul met Abductee Myrna Hansen, the year he briefed the Air Force about his findings, and thus the year AFOSI Sargent Richard Doty came into his life. It was the year he planted a target on his back.

Bennewitz’s self-directed studies increasingly alarmed him, and why wouldn’t they? He was finding bits and pieces of an extensive alien agenda.

To speed up trying to find answers, he wrote hundreds of pages worth of letters to Jim Lorenzen of ARPO detailing his findings. If Lorenzen replied, those letters were lost. One of Bennewitz’s letters dated April 8th, 1980 promised 5% of the proceeds of a book he claimed to be writing to ARPO, citing their support so far.

Greg Bishop, author of Project Beta, specifies how few people in his life were willing to even listen to Bennewitz at this point. We have to imagine him as a kind of pressure cooker of creativity, paranoia, and frustration.

At this point we have to point to two side topics I don’t really want to cover here: The first being cattle mutilation which I’m just not interested in. And the second being Myrna Hansen’s actual experience.

I don’t really have any reason not to be interested in cattle mutilation, just doesn’t.

It’s relevant but doesn’t really make anything clearer.

The important thing here is the way Bennewitz and Hansen fed each other ideas and grew more paranoid together.

Summer 1980 was busy: We had The fraudulent Weitzel Letter, Guards seeing a bright light descend in Coyote Canyon, every radar facility in the Albuquerque area shutting down for 6 hours, another Coyote Canyon sighting, and Bennewitz and his new hypnotist perfecting their protocol for shielding from UFO mind control beams.

It’s a lot.

Fall would bring Bill Moore into the picture in several ways: First, his book about Roswell would come out, then he would agree to by a spy for the feds in exchange for secret information, and he’d befriend Paul Bennewitz.

Moore would be responsible for much of my personal hostility to UFOlogy by admitting he was an intelligence asset in 1989. We’ll get to it.

Paul would have a very busy few months running two briefings for Kirkland AFB staff that were met with let’s say mixed reception, volunteering to be spied on by goddamn everyone with an alphabet codename, and being fed disinformation. He gave over a ton of documentation he’d collected over the previous year.

He asked for money and was offered help setting up a grant he was told was from the air force but really came from the NSA. Maybe. It’s not clear if the grant happened.

Bennewitz would receive let’s say mixed signals from the Air Force. On one hand he was told AFOSI would not become involved. And yet Doty and others would continue feed him information.

What the fuck was he supposed to think?

1981

According to the least trustworthy men in the world, what was going on was weird enough that even the intelligence agencies involved were confused. From Project Beta:

Possibly the strangest thing to happen in the Bennewitz home was experienced not just by the family, but Moore and Doty as well. On yet another visit, Moore’s attention was drawn to something bright near the ceiling of the “home lab.” He was startled to see a pale orange or yellow “ball” about the size of a softball hovering in the corner. The glowing orb, which had a pale blue halo around it, “wobbled” ever so slightly, but otherwise stayed in place.

“Jesus, Paul, what’s that?” Moore asked, pointing.

Surprisingly nonchalant, Bennewitz said, “Oh, you see them too. I haven’t been able to figure out what they are, but they keep showing up.”

The orb, which looked three-dimensional and self-illuminating, quickly “winked out like someone turning off an incandescent light. It was more like it faded out very quickly,” says Moore. “It was transparent. You could see the corner where the wall met the ceiling behind it.”

Others had noticed the orbs too. On one of his many trips out to the Bennewitz home to check up on things when the family was out (i.e., break-ins) Doty and two NSA operatives had disconnected the alarm system and were just about to start snooping around when they noticed one of the balls floating underneath a central stairway in the large entry room. “It was orange, and had ‘sparkles’ in it,” said Doty. “I asked the other guys: ‘Is it one of yours?’” But the NSA men were mystified as well, and the trio tried to see if the phenomenon was projected from outside of the house somewhere. No dice. “We never did figure out what that was,” said Doty. Perhaps the NSA was in fact responsible, but if so, they never admitted this to anyone outside their circle.

While we have to assume this story is bullshit, we should consider the possibility it’s not for a moment: Orbs are nothing unique to this story. They’re scattered throughout the literature.

I know at least one person with a strange experience with one.

But I’m inclined to think they’re bullshit-ish because the last account I read was from Lue Elizondo in his book Immanent. A book I initially thought was poor Luis putting together his resume to be the new Rick Doty, but now I wonder if wasn’t him accidentally admitting he’s the new Paul Bennewitz. We’ll see how his mental health goes, I guess.

By mid 1981, Bennewitz was sleeping with a .45 pistol and seeing UFOs everywhere. By this point he’d been so thoroughly fucked with it’s hard to blame him.

The tone reminds me of the most paranoid shit in John Keel’s writing: This is a man deep in self reference.

One thing I’d like better information on is like, how did this affect his family and relationships? Seems like he’s probably putting them through hell, right? We’ll see glimpses of this as we go.

If 1980 was the year all the groundwork came together, 1981 was the year it started going public. Bill Moore gave Bennewitz a forged document about Project Aquarius, which is most notable as the first reference to Majestic 12 the public would get.

MJ12 is a famous hoax about the conspiracy secretly running the government after cutting a bad deal with aliens. We’ll be going back to it again and again. We mentioned it a bit with Bill Cooper who was a massive advocate of it and then a very loud detractor, calling it disinformation.

We’ll have much to say about it in later summer camp installments.

According to noted disinformation agent Bill Moore, former project bluebook scientist J Allen Hynek supposedly gave Bennewitz a computer with a program on it designed to feed him misinformation. This story is suspect both because of its source and because nobody else has confirmed it. The computer appears to exist along with the misinformation software, but this could easily be a ploy to get Bill Moore to spread distrust within the community.

A task he undoubtedly excelled at.

All this time Paul Bennewitz was attempting to get people interested in his ideas. He wrote to his senators, various members of the UFO community, and eventually the Air Force and President Ronald Reagan himself.

A Left Turn at Albuquerque

In editing to this point I’ve cut about a thousand words and slowly realized this doesn’t make full chronological sense. Instead of burning the draft and starting over, we’re going to sum up what Paul Bennewitz’s conclusions were as of late 1981 and then quickly focus in on what bullshit alphabet soup he was fed.

If the previous sections were confusing, let’s call that verisimilitude. It was for Paul.

Paul summed up his investigation in late 1981 in a document called Project Beta: SUMMARY OF REPORT AND STATUS (WITH SUGGESTED GUIDELINES)

It’s about 5000 words and lays out the alien threat, starting by describing some of the research methods to obtain the information in it. He estimates the alien force to be roughly 50,000 strong and to be operating within conventional physics more or less.

Here’s an outline:

1. Research methods

2. Computer communications and their bases

3. Implants

4. Alien Weapons and Weaknesses

5. Aircraft Vulnerability

6. Our Weapon

7. Ground Attack Plan Against their bases

8. Summary

These aren’t official headings and the topic shifts around a bit. But this is a pretty good fingerprint of it.

I didn’t want to quote from it too much but the last few paragraphs are just too much not to.

AS AMERICANS IN THIS PARTICULAR INSTANCE, WE MUST REALIZE THAT WE CANNOT REPLY UPON OUR INHERENT MORAL PRINCIPLES TO PROVIDE THE ANSWER. NEGOTIATION IS OUT. THIS PARTICULAR GROUP CAN ONLY BE DEALT WITH —NO DIFFERENTLY THAN ONE MUST DEAL WITH A MAD DOG. THAT METHOD THEY UNDERSTAND. THEY HAVE INVADED OUR COUNTRY AND OUR AIR AND THEY ARE FREELY VIOLATING THE PERSONAL AND MENTAL INTEGRITY OF OUR PEOPLE. THERFORE, IN ELIMINATING THIS THREAT MOST CERTAINLY WE CANNOT BE CALLED THE “AGRESSOR”, BECAUSE WE HAVE LITERALLY BEEN INVADED.

IN FINAL CONCLUSION A) THEY CANNOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES BE TRUSTED. B) THEY ARE TOTALLY DECEPTIVE AND DEATH-ORIENTED AND HAVE NO RESPECT FOR HUMAN OR HUMAN LIFE. C) NO NEGOTIATION, AGREEMENT NOR PEACEFUL COMPROMISE CAN BE SETTLED UPON IN ANY WAY. D) NO AGREEMENT SIGNED BY BOTH PARTIES WILL EVER BE ADHERED TO NOR RECOGNIZED AND RESPECTED BY THE ALIEN, THOUGH THEY MIGHT MAKE US ATTEMPT TO BELIEVE OTHERWISE. E) ABSOLUTELY NO QUARTER CAN BE ALLOWED UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. ONCE THE OFFENSE IS INSTIGATED, IT CANNOT BE ABANDONED. IF IT IS, RECIPROCAL REPRISAL WILL IMMEDIATELY RESULT. THEY MUST BE MADE TO COME DOWN—DESTRUCT THEMSELVES WHICH IS A STANDING ORDER IF THE SHIP IS FAILING OR TO LEAVE EARTH IMMEDIATELY—NO LEEWAY OF ANY KIND CAN BE ALLOWED NOR TOLERATED.

WE IN OUR INNOCENT HUMAN WAY, NEGOTIATED THE FIRST TIME BY COMPROMISE—TOOK TOO LITTLE WITH NO MAJOR SAFEGUARDS AND ALLOWED TOO MUCH. WE MUST NOT ALLOW THAT TO HAPPEN AGAIN.

Yes, the all caps are in the original as published in Project Beta.

The thing that really strikes me here is Paul’s certainty they can’t be trusted. Earlier in the document he reveals how regularly he catches them in lies:

IN TRUTH THEY TEND TO LIE, HOWEVER THEIR MEMORY FOR LYING IS NOT LONG AND DIRECT COMPARATIVE COMPUTER PRINTOUT ANALYSIS REVEALS THIS FACT. THEREFORE MUCH “DROPS THRU THE CRACK” SO TO SPEAK; AND FROM THIS COMES THE APPARENT TRUTH.

This paragraph is extremely funny once you find out who he was talking to through his computer.

Or would be if it hadn’t frothed the man up into what is arguably genocidal rage. Not to mention the cost to his own mental health.

In short, the aliens use implants to communicate and control humans and humanoids, but are themselves hamstrung by a decision making hierarchy that requires checking up the chain which can take up to 15-17 hours.

Their technology, while impressive, also is limited by energy storage and thus needs regular resupply. Most of their weapons can be defended against and Paul has a several prototype weapons he wants mass produced for an assault to retake the bases.

Much of the document is about that plan and isn’t very important.

Many of these details, including a deal made with the aliens they betrayed, would be remixed right down to today.

Psychological Operations

We’re not going to go into a deep exploration of psyops here, but we will review some of the ways the military/intelligence/law enforcement establishment fucked with him.

We’ve already covered a lot of the early spying, the decision to encourage him to divert him away from very real secrets he’d tagged, the previously mentioned research grant, introducing him to Bill More, and egging him on through contact with Rick Doty even after telling Bennewitz that there would be no official investigation.

In a way, Bennewitz’s probing for UFOs with his sophisticated electronic equipment was a kind of volunteer penetration testing: Telling the military what signals they’re putting out that just anyone with the equipment and expertise can read.

While I have no idea how you’d confirm this even if true, but it’s possible that some of the shit done to Bennewitz was actually the KGB trying to counter-misdirect him for making it harder for them to spy on Kirkland AFB.

That seems unlikely but you never really know.

In early 1981 someone, presumably the NSA, connected him up with a computer that let NSA agents parked in an empty house across the street communicate him pretending to be the aliens. This came along with them realizing he’d started to decode a new method of encryption that led multiple signals travel on a single carrier wave.

They had a program that generated a fake alien language for Bennewitz to decode. Basically, they provided a slew of sources of disinformation that pieced together and elaborated by a particularly paranoid mind got you Project Beta.

On top of that, a slew of fake documents with bits and pieces of truth such as project Aquarius, Project Excalibur, and others.

Furthermore, the Air Force and maybe others set up fake signs of an underground base like air vents on Archuleta Mesa near Dulce. The site of the famous Dulce base.

Later in the 80s, Bennewitz claimed to have seen a wreck of a black triangle that sounds suspiciously like a wrecked F-117 Nighthawk.

Supposedly Dr. Robert Fugate of the Starfire Optical Range was also tasked to create some way to create fake UFO sightings.

This just kept fucking going.

By 1987, Bill Moore described meeting Bennewitz again with him looking like a “concentration camp survivor” having lost a ton of weight, having barricaded himself in his home, and having clear injection marks on his arms. He would chainsmoke dozens of cigarettes over lunch and be unable to get sleep.

The stress of this really added up leaving him especially vulnerable to whatever dirty tricks the alphabet soup still involved in his life were thinking up next.

What matters most here is this wasn’t just like, one or two organizations. But a slew of mysterious visitors who may or may not have been working together.

Eventually it was all to much for Paul Bennewitz and in August 1988 his family checked him into a mental ward for a month and then prevented anyone associated with UFOs from talking with him again.

While many people, myself included, have made Richard Doty the primary villain here… the account in Project Beta is extremely clear he could only have been one front waged on Paul Bennewitz’s mind.

Greg Bishop brings up the specter of MK Ultra as perhaps something led to techniques that drove Bennewitz into psychosis, but here’s where we have to discuss some limitations of his text.

First, the book is really two books and they shade into each other in an awkward way. The first book is about Paul Bennewitz and the second is about Bill Moore, with the climax of the book being his 1989 revelation of working for the feds.

I think Greg did a lot more jumping forward and backward in time to cover how his research had revealed much more about the early days of Bennewitz’s project than much of anything after 1982.

There are a ton of other threads explored in that second book, but this is mainly about Bennewitz so we’re not going to worry about them here.

The second limitation of Project Beta is the obvious sympathy Bishop has for Bill Moore and you don’t find out until near the end that actually they’ve known each other since 1988. Meaning at the time of publication they’d been friends for 17 years.

Greg Bishop was literally in the audience when Bill Moore gave his MUFON speech in Las Vegas in 1989. Selling Bill’s merch.

These may be innocent and honest choices of a writer working under awkward constraints, including his personal relationships, but I do find it highly suspect that we only find out that relationship with arguably one of the antagonists of the book, whom the book itself goes to great lengths to justify.

This probably isn’t intentional disinformation. But it does seem pretty dishonest to hide your past with one of your book’s main subjects especially when the thing he’s most well known for is lying on behalf of the government.

So, relying on this book as a sole source is my fuck up. I should not have done that but I’ve had to cut so much just to get down to 4000 words, lol. Since I’m asking for some grace about that I’m inclined to give it to Greg Bishop as well.

At least until we talk.

Anyway, here’s the full two hour speech Bill Moore gave in 1989. The audio’s kinda bad, but such are old recordings.

We’ll be coming back to that.

Wrapping Up

It needs to be said that Paul Bennewitz was probably already deep into a paranoid spiral when he briefed the Air Force in late 1981. He’d already come to many of the conclusions they’d exacerbate over the next 7 years.

We’re not done with Paul Bennewitz yet. But we have an expected detour next.

Tomorrow, 11/30, we’ve got an update on the UFO news from the last year. Maybe disclosure happened and we just missed it? Come back tomorrow for what I hope will be a lighter and more fun ride.

I’m gonna go get Thanksgiving Dinner 2: The leftovering.

If you have any questions, thoughts, or concerns please comment them!

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And if you can support this nonsense, please do. I think I fucked up the discount I tried running yesterday and it’s still open for another day or two.

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Alright. See y’all tomorrow.

-S

Good to see you’ve also survived the terrors of Thanksgiving week.

First, thank you for reading my crap. Writing interesting things people care about is pretty much the only personal ambition I have.

It means the world to me that people read what I write.

Sincerely.

OK. I gotta do the shameless pitch now.

To be able to regularly and consistently write, edit, and publish I need to be able to not be chasing work in other ways.

I’ve been very lucky to have support from many of you over the last few years, especially my mom whose covered my expenses the last couple months.

If you can and want to support my work here it’d be a huge help.

Definitely don’t spend money you don’t have though.

Alright, we’ve got a big weekend here as both, “What Did They Do To Paul Bennewitz?” and “UFO Indisclosure 2025” will both come out tomorrow and Sunday.

I almost never do discounts for subscriptions because, well, I don’t like it but here’s a 20% off discount becoming a subscriber today. It expires at midnight but you could probably talk me into sending you a discount code if you email me.

Get 20% off forever

See you tomorrow!

I’ve written and scrapped two essays in the last week so I’ve decided to just lean into UFO shit.

So welcome to what I’m thinking of as, “UFO Summer Camp”.

I like the subject of UFOs but I find it very frustrating. There’s no closure and probably no closure possible without radical changes in either government policy or uh… physics. Well, our understanding of physics.

So we’re going to visit UFOland over the next few weeks and then leave it. We’ve collected many UFO threads you can read about here and I want to lean into some of them.

But before that I want to ground our exploration in some open assumptions. Having reviewed previous writing on UFOs, there are some good ideas I had earlier that I want to go back to.

Sorry about the delay if you wanted more Columbus or Dawn of Everything stuff. This is just what I can easily focus on now and I don’t want to let that go.

UFOs As Cognitive Treadmill vs UFOs as Critical Thinking Practice

The first thing I wrote about UFOs was a pitch for a book I, shocking everyone, didn’t write. That got me thinking about UFOs which got us here.

The gist of that was that UFOs are actually a pretty ideal place to learn how to think more clearly. There’s a ton of arguments, there’s no publicly accessible answer, and there’s an endless amount of information to sift through.

A ton of ambiguity and no closure.

And there are obviously liars on any side you might care to pick.

You may not like it but this is peak performance.

As with most things, what explanations someone prefers tells you a lot about them. UFOs are thus a kind of Cosmic Rorschach test. Handy if you want to know how someone thinks or what they believe in.

The other end of this is what I referred to as a cognitive treadmill. As in, you can put in an enormous amount of effort and still be standing in the same place.

UFO enthusiasts and believers hate it when I say this but the field hasn’t really moved much since like, 1950. We know a lot more about a lot more sightings but the overall outline is exactly the same as it was.

1. Sometimes people see strange things in the sky.

2. Sometimes strange things appear on sensors like radar.

3. Some of those things exhibit characteristics that appear to defy known physics.

4. Some of those observers appear sincere, of sound mind, and knowledgeable about flight.

5. Some of those people are or were in the military.

We’ve got more sensors to prod them now.

This line from the 2021 ODNI report on UAPs sums things up nicely:

“Most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects given that a majority of UAP were registered across multiple sensors, to include radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapon seekers, and visual observation.”

But despite many claims to the contrary, no solid evidence pointing to exactly what they are is public and there are strong reasons to assume things aren’t magically answered behind government and corporate secret projects.

There’s many other annexes here: Cattle mutilations, abductions, numerous psychic phenomena, etc. I’m focusing on the sightings mostly because I think they’re more tractable.

As I said in 2022: You can spend your whole lifetime studying this stuff and not come out with more solid knowledge than you entered with.

So while it’s handy to practice with, it’s also a potentially huge waste of time.

Oh, and did I mention decades of evidence of military and intelligence disinformation?

I probably should have mentioned that.

Contrary to what many UFO fans expect, there are many reasons to assume that despite their loud protests that there’s nothing to the UFO phenomenon, they do want people to believe in aliens.

The most clear case study about this is with Richard Doty and Paul Bennewitz. We’ll be doing that soon. The TLDR is Bennewitz was a defense contractor who found signs of some classified project and Richard Doty was an air force counter intelligence officer who lied to him about aliens a bunch.

It’s a whole thing.

So, uh, is this just a whole waste of time?

To be blunt, for most people, I think the answer is yes.

This is why I don’t mind skeptics who think there’s nothing to UFOs beyond hallucinations, delusions, and hoxes.

It’s a lot easier than trying to make sense of, well, *waves hands* and I’m not convinced UFOs are the most important subject in the history of humanity!

How important it actually is depends on what’s actually going on. And that could be just about anything. I’m partial to the UFOs as Wildlife concept as well as all the wacky ones like fairies or angels.

That said, I do think there are some real reasons to study this stuff. For one thing it’s part of a neo-volkish movement overcorrecting against established authority and institutions established after WW2. It’s making people more skeptical of the government and military in ways they’ve never been.

And a ton of this plays out in fully reactionary ways like the backlash to covid. Which drove millions of people towards even less reliable healthcare choices.

For me at least the real moneyshot is it’s an unusually good angle to see counter intelligence at work in the US. UFO fans have been subject to many of the same tactics and tricks as civil rights groups, environmental groups, and animal rights groups. COINTELUFO.

The US government has conditioned many aspects of US society with propaganda and continued that with, uh, other means. We do need to point that out.

Even if UFOs aren’t anything other than hoaxes, delusions, or hallucinations the US government has spent most of the last 70 years lying about them anyway.

How To Study UFOs

In the years since my renewed interest I’ve developed a perspective that I think lets me at least minimize the cognitive treadmill aspects of UFOs. It’s the easiest thing in the world to get caught up in your own conclusions or try to haggle about how credible particular cases are.

The most important part of my approach is statistical. I know that most UFO reports are going to turn out to be mistakes or misidentifications. Some fraction will turn out to be UFOs and some will turn out to be true unknowns.

Many of those unknowns will simply just have reports that don’t contain enough information.

The least-dubious (lol) concrete numbers on this come from the US military. Either the USAF’s Project Bluebook Special Report 14 and the 2021 ODNI Preliminary Assessment On UAP.

While there’s little reason to fully trust either report, I think they’re worth using because they’re institutionally likely to pick the most conservative numbers they can justify. This is important for me for reasons we’ll get to.

In the ODNI assessment, 18 of their 144 cases had unusual and unexplained flight characteristics representing 12% of their total.

Bluebook Special Report 14 is considerably more interesting

Those are mostly self explanatory.

Reports were coded into each group and then categorized as either Known or Unknown. “Other” seems confusing but it means stuff that had a mundane explanation that didn’t have enough examples to get its own category.

They had 3,201 reports and cut out about 800 of them for being contradictory or factually incorrect. Another 200 or so reports were condensed into Object Sightings

So the final number of objects reported is 2199. To my knowledge this is the largest rigorous study on UFOs ever done. As best I can tell from the conclusions, I consider it more or less reliable.

You might think this would bias their reporting against the Unknowns category. That’s kind of what they said publicly in the 50s about Special Report 14. But reading it shows something else.

If you were trying to discredit UFOs, you’d want the people rated most trustworthy to have the fewest unknows.

But here we see as the quality of the reporting goes up, the number of unknowns doesn’t just increase it doubles from 16.6% for the bottom quintile of reliability to 33.3%.

You may then wonder why Special Report 14 and Project Bluebook in general have such a bad reputation.

When it was initially unclassified the Air Force mischaracterized Special Report 14 considerably, saying the unknowns were only a fraction of the actual number. This number is 434/2199 or 19.7% Unknown.

Using another Bluebook document from the mid 60s, it suggests that hoaxes make up only about 2% of the total number of UFO reports.

So my statistical estimates look a bit like this:

• 80-85% of reports are conventionally explained

• 10-15% of reports can’t be explained

• 5% of reports are hoaxes

This is intended to counterbalance the fact that I want aliens to be real. And I want something weirder than aliens to be real more than that.

If the US has diplomatic relations with Fairies, I’d be absolutely thrilled.

But more than anything, I want to believe what’s true.

So I have to underestimate and hope errors cancel out instead of compound.

How does this work out in practice?

Well, when reading or listening to a UFO report, I follow it carefully and listen for similarities and differences between it and other reports. One thing I like Project Bluebook for mentioning is that the more reports you read the less new information each of them seems to contain. It can all become very routine.

What I don’t do is try and figure out how the person is right or wrong. Most will be wrong and that’s OK. Trying to explain away UFO sightings is how you get shitforbrains ideas like swamp gas reflecting off the light of Venus and people confusing a lighthouse they can see with the moving around lights that definitely aren’t the lighthouse.

From there, I look to keep an eye on the range of possibilities instead of trying to nail down exactly what happened.

I’m here for the *mystery* of it all. So that works for me both aesthetically and intellectually.

The Rest of the Method

As I’ve said elsewhere, I try to look to folklore studies and literary analysis to understand UFOs. There’s always a wake of rumors around anything people do and this is just a kind of far shore of those possibilities.

What draws people to or away from the subject?

What does purpose does it serve in their lives?

What kinds of social forms spring up in its wake?

And like myself, many people are drawn to UFOs as a source of potentially authentic mystery in a world reduced to competing advertising messages.

It’s not even really a conspiracy theory at this point, but a full blown subculture with its own extensive lore and social conventions. It’s people’s lives!

And that’s all lovely. But don’t we also want to try and nail down what’s actually happening?

This is hard because of all the hired bullshit. Hoaxes might not be likely, but they do happen. And there are plenty of other ways to put out false information.

Because of that I’ve got a significant bias towards official documentation. Not so much because I think it’s accurate or complete, but because it’s something you can tie down in place and time. Even if fraudulent, *someone* wrote it.

Well, at least before 2022. Now at least someone prompted for it.

There’s another thing I like about official documentation.

This is part of the cover sheet for Special Report 14.

And sometimes little details can lead you down rabbit holes. Air Technical Intelligence Center is maybe the most interesting thing I’ve stumbled into in the whole field.

We’ll come back to it at some point. The big problem is it was obscenely classified and there’s not really a comprehensive history of it.

I suspect there’s a bunch of interesting, if not necessarily UFO related, things stuck around a file cabinet that could be FOIA’d.

But I digress.

And we’d be negligent if we didn’t talk about the weirdest category of UFO speculation.

Like, if UFOs are time traveling humans from the far future… what do you do with that? Can that inform anything in your life?

Same thing with interdimensional beings, trickster archetypes, and emanations of the human soul we’re too alien to recognize.

I enjoy these ideas but I’m not really sure how to develop them or what else can be said there.

That’s why I like the government: There’s always more paperwork to demand.

And they mostly don’t want to give it so it’s a win-win!

There’s one more elephant in the room I want to talk about today.

The Government Coverup

So, it’s kind of unavoidable that we have to discuss the ways the state, military, and intelligence agencies have hidden information about UFOs.

The conventional wisdom within the UFO community is that the government is hiding proof that aliens are real.

Let’s say I’m skeptical.

There are many, many signs that the notion of a government coverup is too simple to describe the relationship between UFOs and various government agencies.

It’s clear that denying, minimizing, and collecting evidence of UFO reports (and allegedly their crashes) has happened more or less consistently since 1947. There absolutely has been faux debunking and a lot of ridicule.

But there are also many hints of how UFOs have been very useful to certain state functions, most notably counter intelligence.

Which brings us to our next subject, who I’ve been teasing for a while.

We’re doing it. It’s Richard Doty time.

The short, short explanation is Doty was an Air Force Counter Intelligence guy in the 80s where he befriended a local defense contractor named Paul Bennewitz. Bennewitz found some weird electrical interference related to some top secret project. They told him he found proof of aliens.

And he told everyone who’s anyone in the UFO scene.

It eventually drove him psychotic.

These events were the catalyst for Bill Moore, who helped put Roswell on the map, to reveal he’d been an intelligence asset during the 80s at the 1989 MUFON conference.

It’s a whole thing. We’re gonna dig in.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the government’s response to this is really messy as there are literally millions of federal workers and very few of them do anything related to UFOs.

Even the early records of Projects Sign, Grudge, and Bluebook show many signs of disagreements over what UFOs are and how they should respond to the problem.

So, one of my questions is this: If Famous UFOlogist William Moore was working for the feds, who else was? What parts of UFO lore are just government ordered bullshit?

Hell if I know.

And we probably won’t have real proof of anything. But we can try, right?

Wrapping Up

Glad to have that out.

Pretty happy with how this one turned out. Feeling more focused than I’ve been in a while.

I did want to dig into The Dawn of Everything but the more I read from its sources the less I understood and the jankier the original plan I had for the essay became.

This has been something that’s just been sitting around my brain for a couple years to do right.

So that’s where we’re going.

See you soon.

-S

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My last post about The Matrix a couple weeks ago messed me up. I had 9 people cancel after I posted it. I didn’t even advertise it because that felt pretty fucking bad. 1 or 2 is fine. But damn, 9 people is a lot of people to tell you to fuck off in a day.

I drafted this post (and the other one in your inbox) a week ago and have been avoiding hitting send since.

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Any feedback is welcome. Hearing nothing made it worse.

So, I’ve got to own that as an L.

1. It’s too fucking long. I did a poll a while back and it said to write as long as I want but I put that poll at the end of a 2000 word post so it’s probably a bad sample.

2. The title is shit. It’s not descriptive, I wrote it to be in line with a series I started last February which is too long ago for anyone to actually remember and right at the end I decided to be clever and reference an, uh, 44 year old muppet movie in the title which has nothing to do with the topic.

3. I did overwrite it and should have taken a day to strip it down. There was a lot to say but I probably could have cut 500-1000 words if I worked at it for a few hours.

OK, so worst case scenario here is I wrote a bad post and nobody liked it.

I think 1500-2500 words is the sweet spot between depth without overstaying my welcome most of the time.

Does that make sense?

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I was going to put a poll here but I realized I don’t plan on writing less than that.

:-D

Anyway, thank y’all for reading.

Today we’re hopefully going to conclude discussing The Matrix with an unnecessarily long exploration of the plot of the franchise.

This post is dedicated to the late Gloria Foster and Mary Alice, who brought The Oracle to life.

I was going to do a big introduction but nah. Get onboard! We’re explaining The Matrix Trilogy! Get slightly better informed, idiot!

Read the previous entries in this series here:

• The Gnostic Bomb

• The Gnostic Eclipse

A Quick Flyby of The Matrix Trilogy

The Matrix is loaded with little details you can obsess over and most of them are red herrings. They don’t matter.

The matrix is an allegory. It’s not about these strange future people and their strange robo-prison. It’s about you, your life, and the ways society builds itself around you.

Note: I am once again not going to discuss the trans allegory as plenty of trans critics and the directors themselves have done this at length and better than I ever could. Nothing I’m going to say here really conflicts with their reading. Also, I’m basically ignoring all the ancillary comics, video games, the animatrix, and last movie because they don’t really tell this story. I’ve reviewed them and they’re just doing different things.

It’s produced to be about as symbolically packed as possible because most of those symbols are, like the Matrix itself, a distraction.

I’m going to argue later that the fundamental theme of The Matrix is very specific and the trilogy is a tightly written exploration of that theme.

That theme is agency. And that’s agency as distinct from choice. The red pill/blue pill thing is a choice, but as the 4th movie, Matrix Resurrections, literally says: That’s not a real choice. Anyone whose found themselves being offered the pills will “choose” the red pill.

Agency is about the freedom to select the context and structure of your life. Consumerism provides us with many choices of breakfast cereal and ketchup, but very few of us get to control our time or how we make a living.

Those choices are already made by social and macroeconomic forces and we can either move with them or try to fight them and probably lose.

Agency is about those big questions about who and what your life is about. And as we will see, it’s limited by understanding, perception, and imagination.

The Matrix Trilogy as a whole is not only a worthy successor to Plato’s Cave, but a guided tour of many of the bad decisions you could make after seeing the Sun/Light of Truth.

Enough preamble. Let’s amble.

The Matrix

You more or less know this one if you’re this far in so let’s recap quickly: The crew of a hovercraft in the hellish real world led by Morpheus are psyopping and kidnapping a not-Microsoft employee to turn him into a terrorist.

His name is Neo and he’s a badass insomniac hackerman but also a smol bean with anxiety because he feels like the world isn’t real.

And he’s right! The world is fake as shit and he’s introduced to a wider truth where he’s the long prophesied messiah. He learns Kung Fu, meets an Oracle who manipulates the hell out of him, and decides to be a big damn hero.

He’s saved by the power of love, doesn’t need to dodge bullets, can destroy the agents of the system, and can fucking FLY!

Can I get a hell yeah?

The Matrix Reloaded

A good sequel needs to walk a fine line of doing all the stuff people liked from the first one while expanding on the world and its themes and not being too stale.

The Matrix Reloaded is both kind of a bad movie and a great sequel. It makes lots of decisions that serve the larger story but make this one kind of annoying to watch. We’ll get into it.

This one starts out by introducing Morpheus’ peers and sets the stakes of the invasion of Zion, the last human city deep underground. A crisis is at hand, many bothans died to bring us this information, etc etc.

The machines are coming and Agent Smith, who died in the previous movie, is alive and can take over both machines and people. Infecting them like a virus. There’s no explanation to Smith’s resurrection, but I think you'll see there is a very good guess we can make later.

The crew returns to Zion with the bad news and they have a sweet rave.

This is also where we get one of the most important points of the movie: Neo is deeply uncomfortable being a messiah. He’s really kind of here for his girlfriend.

But Neo still can’t sleep.

On my rewatch this was the scene that really got me perked up because while I’d remembered Neo being kind of into being messiah this shows him, well, feeling an awful lot like he did before he escaped the Matrix. He’s the big hero and… still feels reality is bullshit and still can’t sleep.

Hint hint.

All their bluster about escaping machines and they’re still dependent on a vast network of machines most of them don’t understand.

Anyway, we don’t have any time to think about that because the Oracle calls and the gang go visit her. She tells Neo he doesn’t have a fucking clue what he’s doing and sends him to get some guy named the keymaker.

There’s a big looney tunes ass fight with an army of Smiths (oh, did I mention he can now overwrite other people and turn them into copies?) and Neo eventually escapes.

This leads into a visit to my favorite guy, the Merovingian who tells the gang they’re fucking clueless pawns and goes to cheat on his incredibly hot wife Persephone.

Pissed at the sheer disrespect, Persephone helps them find the keymaker, briefly mentions werewolves exist before killing them, and leaves the movie a queen.

Honestly, in a just world we’ve get a whole trilogy that’s just The Merovingian and Persephone having the most toxic relationship.

There’s an extended action sequence that’s still very good and they end up getting the keymaker and the crew of two ships into position for The Big Heist.

Morpheus is set up for his big failure with a “this is the moment of prophecy” speech and Neo asks Trinity to stay out of the matrix because of his dreams.

The heist goes bad, Trinity immediately breaks her promise, and there’s another Smith fight. Neo narrowly helps Smith and the keymaker escape, but the keymaker is killed because his only reason to exist is done.

This is textually true and cinematically true. He existed to maneuver Neo into this moment and the door beyond it.

Ergo, I’m not going to discuss the Architect at this point because this is the most heavyhanded and overanalyzed scene in the franchise and a lot of people missed it so… we’ll be coming back.

TLDR: Everything Neo knows is a lie (again), Zion itself is part of the matrix (figuratively?) and this whole thing is set up to get the one human who gets administrator privileges in the matrix to restart the war against the machines after the machines kill off all the free humans. This will prevent the systemic destruction of the matrix while keeping humanity and the technical possibility of freedom alive.

But Neo is in love and Trinity is fighting an agent. So, he rejects saving humanity the way his predecessors did.

Neo saves Trinity, they escape the matrix, and their ship the Nebuchadnezzar is destroyed. Fleeing from the machines, Neo is somehow able to destroy them but passes into a coma.

The film ends on another ship with news of disaster and one of the people Smith overwrote in the real world.

OK, that was fun. A bit jank, but fun.

As a friend reminded me: The matrix 2 and 3 are functionally one movie. I consider this a flaw, tbh. A feature film should be a complete unit of story and using one movie to entirely set up another one is weak storytelling. This is a common failing with trilogies. But that’s what they did here so we’re running with it.

The Matrix Revolutions

Before we talk about the plot, I’m going to say something nice about the sequel titles. I love how loaded they are. Is the matrix reloading a gun or software reloaded? Both, obviously. Likewise, the Revolutions in the third movie are both a political revolution and a completion of a cycle. And you could go much further with those.

In Fight Club, Brad Pitt asks Ed Norton, “How’s that working for you, being clever?”, a question perhaps nobody has needed to answer so much as the Wachowski sisters while writing this movie.

If the first Matrix was successful in part because it pointed to lots of little experiences people have with deja vu, hating their job, and being awkward at the club and the second movie tried to play the same card by saying cryptids and UFOs are malfunctioning programs, which for some reason didn’t have the universal impact.

This one isn’t about you. It’s not even about Neo or Zion. The Matrix took a familiar hero’s journey structure and filled it with telling details about how this was really about you, the viewer. But to continue the story they needed it to be more about their own worldbuilding than the viewer, which fuels a lot of the disconnect people feel between the first movie and its sequels.

We’re so far down the rabbit hole even the cast of the film are lost. Like them we’re going to start with the B-plot because it takes up the vast majority of the 2 hour 9 minute runtime of the film. The A-plot will wait.

And that’s where we start: Neo is trapped in the matrix after using his The One powers in the “real world”. His friends have to invade hell [a fetish club, thanks sis] to force the Merovingian to release Neo from the subway program he’s trapped in. Merv says the most important line in the film and Neo has an A-plot conversation with The Oracle.

We’re not going to worry about that because we’ve got two hours of worrying about the fate of Zion and the big climatic war with it.

We learn almost all the deployed hovercrafts were destroyed by Bane who’s name isn’t symbolic and definitely hasn’t been possessed by Agent Smith. The remaining ship now carrying most of the cast finds Niobe’s ship and eventually captains split up into two teams: Team Deadweight will return to Zion and help defend it and Team Messiah will commit a more aggressive suicide by invading the machine city.

With two people.

And Bane!

Ok, I’m going to level with you here my memory of the fine details of this plot has faded quite a bit. Luckily, the Matrix Wiki has listed out every scene so I can just look at summaries to refresh myself.

Fuck it, the B plot doesn’t matter. Speedrun time:

A bunch of people with collectively two minutes of screen time before movie 3 are introduced and get to work together to defend Zion. They’re uh badly outnumbered and lose with style: Each proving themselves by working together to open the doors that the crew of Team Deadweight can get into so they can blow their EMP and hold off the machine invasion.

They succeed buying time for Team Messiah.

OK I’m being a little cheeky here but this is all actually really important: Just like Reloaded’s Cave Rave demonstrates the power of Eros to unify people against existential terror, the resistance to certain death shows the collective effort needed to fight back a giant machine turning the environment and you into paste.

Just in case, you know, you happen to be on a planet where that’s relevant.

I’m getting ahead of myself a bit. I did find a real scene list and I skipped over Agent Smith absorbing The Oracle, which is A-plot stuff. And over with Team Messiah he does jump them as Bane. Neo gets blinded and eventually kills Bane because now he can see matrix stuff in the real world.

I’m sure that’s not important.

Anyway, Neo and Trinity make it to the machine city. She’s written out of the movie here and Neo goes to face the demonlord roboswarm baby head literally called Deus ex Machina in the script.

Neo makes an offer: He handles their Smith problem in exchange for peace with humanity. Neat.

He goes into the matrix, he and smith fight in one of the worst action scenes of the decade. They have a little argue, smith is confused for a bit, and Neo lets himself get turned into Smith.

Then for apparently no reason every smith explodes and it turns out Neo won somehow.

The Oracle and Architect have a nice little talk around Dawn and everyone in Zion is shocked to find out they’re not being killed.

Yay! Roll credits.

Well that’s a little unsatisfying hey wait wow this email is so much longer and why did I list all this as B-plot.

The A-Plot

The fundamental problem the Matrix has is it’s A-plot is hidden pretty well. Most people miss it. When I noticed it in 2016, I couldn’t find anyone else who’d noticed. I wasn’t the first and it’s become more clear to people over time.

This is, to be clear, bad writing and directing.

The Matrix Trilogy is about the transition between the masculine power of the Architect and the feminine power of The Oracle. Two competing demiurges who wish to define reality for humanity.

So, if you were wondering on hearing the writer/directors of the Matrix Trilogy were transwomen, if there was some uh gender stuff going on in these movies… let me assure you there is.

I’m not going to focus on it here because my interest is gnostic more than gender, but honestly transness and Gnosticism have a lot of overlap.

The A-plot of this movie starts with the Architect scene of the last one: The Oracle is a subordinate peer of his. She designed the modern matrix, the one that works, where his design failed.

From there we have the Hel club in Revolutions where the Merovingian says, “The Oracle’s eyes cannot be taken, only given.” Merv’s business is knowing things, and he’s gloating so we can probably take him at his word.

I believe this is the most important line in the franchise. We’ll get to why.

After his rescue, Neo goes to meet the Oracle who lays on another mess of bullshit. She’s ambiguous as usual but says the second most important line in the franchise: Everything that has a beginning has an ending.

Our next relevant scene is Agent Smith accusing the Oracle of manipulating him before absorbing her. She basically blows him off, he calls her mom, and she gets absorbed.

This scene establishes that every Smith still contains part of the person they absorbed when the Smith that used to be Sati quotes the oracle’s line about cookies back at her.

The scene ends with The Oracle’s Smith scaring the other Smiths with manic laughter. Now here’s the interesting thing: She’s the main Smith for the rest of the movie.

You know, because the Oracle’s eyes cannot be taken. Smith absorbs her, thinking he’s taking back control, but he’s being set up. Smith believes he’s won and then sees a vision of himself winning.

Thus the laughter.

Now let’s skip to the climax because it’s time for us to unpack why this rules actually.

Smith and Neo have fought. Neo refuses to go down. Smith rambles nihilistically at him for a bit and accuses Neo of not even knowing what he fights for.

Neo gets up and says he chooses to fight because that’s his choice. He gets beat up again.

Now things get interesting: Smith recognizes the moment from his vision and and says he’s supposed to say something then says, “Everything that has a beginning has an ending, Neo.”

But wait, Smith only ever deadnames Neo. And that’s a quote from the Oracle earlier. And he’s immediately confused. He doesn’t even remember what he said. Everything goes to shit.

And poor Neo, our beloved messiah, realizes at last how ratfucked he’s been. He stands up again and tells Smith that he was right actually and all this has been inevitable. And Smith absorbs him.

Now here we have to dip into speculation. At this moment what I believe happened is The Oracle and the machines collective intelligence had a nice little chat where she held all the cards: The ability to wipe out the matrix on a whim.

Neo had asked for peace and she set the terms of it: Humans given a choice to leave the matrix and a ceasefire that may be expanded on.

All the Smiths explode, and The Oracle is left alone in the crater of the climatic fight and the Matrix begins to reload to an older state.

The Oracle sits in a park and the Architect tries to act like he didn’t just get outplayed. He did. He explains that she’ll get her way and The Oracle meets Sati who created a pretty sunrise for Neo, who maybe we’ll meet again in the future.

Total, perfect, flawless victory.

The Matrix isn’t a hackneyed messiah story. The Matrix is the story of the woman who created the messiah and aimed him at her enemies.

I took a bunch of screenshots for this but honestly just watch the scene.

Neo, to his credit, never really was comfortable in that role. But he committed a grave sin: He followed orders. He acted like a tool so he was used and disposed of as one.

The problem wasn’t choice. It was agency. Neo craved it in his dead end office job, and becoming a hacker-terrorist-messiah was only more free in contrast. Ironically enough, Mr Smith was right about which life had a future.

Smith himself followed a similar arc. He and Neo shared dissatisfaction with their assigned roles in The Matrix, but being dangled freedom and power distracted him from any kind of meaningful improvement in his situation. He was only ever a tool.

But things aren’t so grim everywhere: Morpheus, his faith destroyed after the revelations of the last two movies, ends by asking the first real question he’s asked since he was coopted: “Is this real?”

He wanted the end of the war so bad that getting it made him suspicious. And it should. Councilor Hamann is just as unsure of reality.

These are good signs. Agency is a difficult quality to attain. You can’t be given it. You can’t take it. You have to live it creatively. It must be built within you.

Gnostic Surprise

When I first wrote this a decade ago, I treated The Oracle as a villain. Like she was oppressing the humans she “helped.”

That was silly.

She’s just another person trying to make her way in a context not of her making.

She is the protagonist of the trilogy. Using the tools available to her to make a better world.

The original version of this essay argued that the “real world” was another layer to the matrix in a literal sense as well as in the way described in Reloaded. I still think much of that holds weight: The “real world” shown is great bait for anyone who imaginings themselves a rebel.

Here’s a whole world to rebel about. Never mind that none of it makes sense, it’s evocative! The superintelligence machines couldn’t figure out how to unfuck the atmosphere with hundreds of years? Sure.

But that’s irrelevant.

As Terence Mckenna used to say: You’ve got to have a plan or you become part of someone else’s plan.

And that’s what The Matrix Trilogy is about. Some of the ancillary material (comics, games, sequels) expand on bits and pieces in interesting ways, but this is what the movies were *about*.

Self Determination is a right inherent to all beings, but one that’s easily coopted. You can easily determine yourself out of life if you aren’t careful.

Gnosticism is an old genre of beliefs trying to contend with horrible facts: The brutal Roman persecution of Jews and Christians and the fact their messiahs seemed not to be showing up as promised.

It says the reason things are fucked is because our communities are radically deluded about the basic facts of reality and only by embracing a new set of truths can we bring the universe back on our side.

Historically it’s hard to see much of a sign of this working. But any time you have dualistic morality rooted in good and evil you’ll have the possibility for moral inversion. And as long as you have people doing awful things while claiming to do good, you’ll have plenty of reason for people to go that way.

This is why it’s actually vitally important we get as many people away from that as possible. But that’s another story.

Gnosticism has provoked some of the most violent suppression of any ideology in history. Qanon is as much a gnostic faith as it is apocalyptic and Christian. And it’s now just the mainstream republicans.

So where does that leave us?

The Matrix Trilogy was created with the intention of getting people onboard with the anti-capitalism its writer/directors seem to favor.

But capitalist recuperation is more powerful then metaphor. And it’s instead become the lure in a million decentralized cons to bring people into even more alignment with the “desires” of capital.

Atomized, sure that anything collective action is another ploy to control them, raging against any kind of inconvenience like it’s the Holocaust.

That’s not The Matrix’s fault, but it is one of its consequences.

Art can do incredible things for individuals. At scale it’s… less impressive.

Plato’s Fetish Night

Plato’s cave is one of the foundational myths of “western civilization”. It’s a bit from The Republic and it should sound a little familiar.

A guy’s living in a cave with his society, but he thinks society consists of shadows projected on the cave wall. One day he finds out he’s shackled and realizes everyone is. This alarms him because anyone he points the chains out to think he’s crazy.

Then things get really freaky: His chains aren’t locked. He can just get up and go.

One thing leads to another and he gets out of the cave only to be blinded by the light of the sun, representing Truth and maybe also goodness and beauty. Maybe.

Then he goes back to the cave and tries to get his still-deluded community to know about how fucking bright the sun is.

It doesn’t go well.

It’s about a lot of things: conformity, the nature of second hand knowledge, the need to go and learn for yourself. I don’t want to comment too much more because as Atlantis taught me, there’s always a bunch of extra wrinkles with Plato and I haven’t read this since 2019.

Anyway, if you slap on a pile of special effects, latex, and sunglasses that’s the plot of The Matrix. Also arguably The Hero’s Journey.

And the sequels do something I’m not sure I’ve seen really done elsewhere like this: It imagines an entire society of people who have seen the sun. Then it imagines all of them in their own cave bubble. And another bubble on top of that.

Inside you have the matrix dwellers, clueless and confined. Then you have the machines also trapped in the matrix for some reason including the agents. Outside them you have the redpills and free people of Zion and machines who aren’t trapped in either world. They’re all entrapped within the Architect’s plan for the matrix, which is itself entrapped within The Oracle’s.

Presumably the machines have their own civilization going on pretty much unrelated to all this but we never see it and the only machine intelligence we actually see is Deus ex Machina, the big swarm baby Neo talks to.

So let’s talk about where people end up in this maze. The easiest to place are the Oracle and Architect who both act within the matrix but whose plans act beyond it.

They’re demiurges: Creating a false reality that imprisons humanity.

Next, we’ll take Morpheus’ crew. chilling out in the middle layer sure they’re working to end the war. Except Cypher who realized that was bullshit but only had enough creativity to be a traitor. Sad.

Maybe the most interesting thing about the franchise is that Agents are sentient prisoners in the matrix. Like, why would you do that? It’s so odd. Almost like they were trying to make rogues. And yet none do on their own.

Smith only degrades over the films. In the first movie he just wants to get away from humans, but by the end after absorbing what may be the knowledge of the entire human race (it’s unclear) he’s just going on baby-nihilist rants about how bedtime sucks and everyone’s really selfish, maaan.

Zion is interesting because it’s just another human culture. They’re fully accepting of the reality presented to them even though it doesn’t make a ton of sense. Like, where did they get all those giant machines keeping them alive? They have no ability to produce anything like that. Obviously the machine civilization built them at some point.

Only Councilor Hamann even bothers to notice their dependence. He knows something is fucked but sees no way to move around it so he plays the long game and hopes something changes. One assumes, at least.

Basically everyone else we meet in Zion is a utilitarian character, sadly. Most just as convinced of their own freedom as they were in the matrix.

And this is where walking the path of Neo gets you: Not the everlasting land of milk and honey, but more fashionable seats among the differently deluded.

Neo’s refusal to accept his new role, while admirable, didn’t save himself or Trinity. He only figured out the game in time to win it for The Oracle.

The Merovingian and Persephone are a fun pair, bored out of their minds, and as powerless as they are powerful. Cause and effect, you see. In the end they lacked ambition to get outside the petty role as the rulers of digital hell.

We could go on. It’s definitely fun to look at the cast from this PoV, but you get the point.

You need to know yourself and then to have a plan or you’ll get sucked into someone else’s bullshit.

And there’s no shortage of bullshit to go around.

Alright, I think that’s all I’ve got on this.

Wrapping Up

Feels good getting this out.

We’ll be back to The Dawn of Everything probably on Friday. Then we’ve got some Columbus shit and UFO shit to handle in November.

See you soon.

-S

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I just wanted to let you know that paid subscriptions have been turned back on. I can’t afford to hold off any longer. The way this works is you’ll have as many days before the next payment as you did when I paused them.

A bit wonky, I know.

As is tradition here I’m horrifically behind where I plan…

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For the last couple years I’ve been thinking a lot about science communication. How information makes it out of specialist fields into the public awareness and how the public reflects on that knowledge.

Like a lot of people, my introduction to such things came from guys like Carl Sagan and Issac Asimov. I picked up on the New Atheist wave in the 00s until a brief email exchange with Richard Dawkins that proved to me he was a clueless fool who didn’t care if what he said was true, and later Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

The Dawkins thing was really handy because it got me the fuck away from New Atheism before that scene curdled. Basically, I read the God Delusion and noticed that when he said religion he meant Christianity. I’d been learning about Hinduism and Buddhism at the time so I asked if he thought it was a problem for his ideas if there were religions other than Christianity and he told me he didn’t care.

So Dawkins being a piece of shit never really came as a surprise.

There’s a thing I noticed with most of these guys that bugged me. I’d hoped Tyson would avoid it when I first noticed him getting popular after Plutogate.

Basically: once the media thinks of you as The Science Guy they ask you lots of questions you’re expected to have authoritative knowledge of where you know fuckall.

And if you like being Mr Science, you need to give an answer other than, “I don’t know.”

So there’s a string of incidents of these guys saying stupid shit that would fail you in a 101 level class on the subject because they can’t be experts in all fields.

We should probably also mention that Asimov and Tyson have both been accused of being at least sex pests and worse in Tyson’s case. And a TON of big name scientists like Lawrence Krauss were good friends with blog favorite, Jeffery Epstein.

There’s definitely a creep problem.

Ironically enough, it was another Epstein associate who more or less invented the for profit scientific publishing that represents one of the most malicious aspects of modern academia.

That’s how the father of Epstein’s girlfriend and pimp Ghislaine Maxwell, Robert Maxwell made his first fortune after WW2. It’s a crazy story. Look it up.

But that’s less our concern here than the interface between the public and academia: Journalism.

The Failure Of Journalism And Rise of Social Media Algorithms

We must start with the fact that journalism generally does a bad job of covering science. I don’t think it’s really journalists fault though.

Here’s why:

Since the 90s, economic and political forces have encouraged consolidation of media ownership and the utter ruin of traditional financial streams that kept journalists funded.

This has been apocalyptic to local journalism. There used to be a network of local papers, many of them coming out daily, able to have full time journalists on the payroll because income from advertising and the classified section supplemented sales and subscriptions as a viable business model.

The Internet hit all this like a bomb.

First, free news undermined even the premise of having to pay for writers, editors, and printers to collect, produce, and distribute news.

Worse, online marketplaces like ebay offered an audience and selection that dwarfed the classifieds of any newspaper. Sites like craigslist did the same with some local targeting.

This all created a disastrous feedback loop: Fewer readers meant you can’t charge as much for advertising, which meant less money coming in which meant you needed to cut staff which means there’s less reason to read because the quality decreased which lowered readership.

Which brings us to media consolidation. Fewer owners who own more media outlets.

Which itself brings us to the real villains here: Social media algorithms and the evil ass companies who profit off them.

Companies like Facebook and Google make money by selling advertising on prediction markets. This requires ever more surveillance of users and non-users to produce more valuable predictions.

Everything a website can capture about your behavior is shoveled into sophisticated machine learning systems to try and predict what motivates you to click on an advertisement.

These models are far from perfect, but they’re very good in aggregate. And that’s the problem.

Because those same models, or more likely their cousins, are used to serve the content that will make you engage the most with the website to maximize the number of ads you can be shown because more ad placement makes their platforms more money.

In order to get the most attention from these platforms, you need to post things that get the maximum amount of attention from users. On Facebook it’s all about reactions, comments, and shares. Other platforms use different metric. Youtube rewards long watches last I checked.

This pushes creators to create the most emotionally compelling content targeted at the most people.

Starting to get where the problem comes in?

Social media, as was famously noted, democratizes access to mass audiences sort of. The reality is a bit more complex because there are a ton of factors that determine access to mass-scale audiences. Size of the source, the specific platform’s algorithm, how optimized the content is, what it’s competing with, the reactions of the early audience, if it gets shared to someone with a large enough platform to matter, etc.

All this comes to clickbait. Where people twist their headlines to be more optimized with the algorithm. Which usually means exaggerating and often means outright lying.

So I hopped over to my favorite clickbait farm, Futurism.com and found a gem:

This headline isn’t explicitly misleading, but is written to play into the biases of anti-vaxxers and the comments are full of people reacting to those assumptions instead of the content of the piece.

Successful bait.

And that’s what most posts need to do in order to make an impact when competing with literally everything else being posted.

Now, your job as an editor at a publication depends on being able to bring in enough audiences that you can fund having a publication. And platforms like Facebook fucking *hate* offsite links. Twitter got real hostile to them once Elon took over too. Youtube doesn’t even have native hyperlink support in most places. It’s nuts anyone puts up with this crap.

Now, all of this is bad.

And it isn’t anything new: Yellow Journalism is over 100 years old. As the old saying goes, if it bleeds it leads. Same shit, new context that makes it worse. And we haven’t even mentioned the way AI makes all this much worse!

But now let’s take a moment and think about the other side of our equation here.

The Production of Knowledge

Academic knowledge is produced slowly, increasingly by large teams each working on a small fraction of the whole, to account for all parts of a research question.

The edges of many fields simply aren’t accessible for single scholars with a breakthrough innovation.

This obviously varies wildly, but it needs said.

This is a big improvement over earlier eras in most ways because academic discipline barriers prevented many fields from cross pollenating ideas and learning each other’s techniques.

But the implications of huge cross-disciplinary teams also has complications. Most notably, the amount of knowledge one needs to evaluate a claim or even whole paper. But it also means to collaborate you need to break things down into smaller chunks that can be passed around and that can be misleading.

Which brings us to what gets headlines: Provocative ideas. Drama. Big personalities.

Again: If it bleeds, it leads.

Now mix that with a media environment where doing journalism is barely a viable career unless you’re an influencer and you get sloppy work by people who don’t fully understand what they’re talking about then getting edited by someone without any exposure to the subject at all and then writing a headline they think will bring it the most attention.

Now imagine most of your audience doesn’t really know much about how the sausage is made in either of these fields. Because they don’t because most people aren’t scientists or journalists.

A few years ago I watched a video titled, “String Theory Lied, and now Science Communication is Hard.” by a Ph.D. physicist Angela Collier and she makes a point that should be familiar to us now: Science used to say one thing, but now says another thing and doesn’t always make a point of clarifying why.

This leaves people with low or moderate interest in the subject nor really sure what happened which usually isn’t important until someone shows up to accuse scientists of being liars at which point all these open loops become evidence!

Which brings us back home to various alt-theories on reality and their utility in radicalization pipelines.

And that’s ultimately what all this nonsense is about.

Gaze Into The Abyss With Me

A pet theory I’ve had for a while is that the corporate person is the true Nietzschean Ubermensch: the replacement for god whose mere existence destroys those of us who remain all too human. Freddy, for his faults, was correct that we were and are in a revaluation of all values after the end of Christianity. From the current moment it looks like the expansion of capital itself has won out even over profit.

Chalk one up for Marx.

Incidentially, this is why I’m not particularly worried about AI destroying the world: Capitalism is already generating a kind of consciousness that’s already well on its way to destroying the biosphere than any hypothetically superintelligence.

What I’m hoping this means is that as the collapse of Neoliberalism with the American empire it held up is a stage in a process that leaves us better able to deal with the ways the institutions it built lie and sought control over our lives.

And that includes academia, descended from earlier church/guild forms as it is.

Maybe that’s too optimistic and we’re just collapsing into chaos.

I don’t know.

My instinct with rubble is to look at what else you can build with it.

I don’t know what can be built here.

But I see things falling apart and I see the signs of doom everywhere. My intellect says things are maximally fucked or heading there unimpeded.

A mote of awareness, infinitely small and harder than diamond tells me that my intellect doesn’t know what the fuck is going on and the only way out is through.

So, uh, what does this have to do with science communication?

Well, it’s fucked isn’t it?

It’s interwoven into the same big death machine as everything else. We didn’t even mention how much of modern academia is just there to build bigger weapons for our beloved friends at the military industrial complex.

The MAGA age is the empire scrambling to reassert itself into something that can endure once the final benefits of winning WW2 fade. And so much of what we think about science comes from the truths and lies we told during the atomic age.

They don’t call it the imperial boomerang for nothing!

We can find analogous processes happening in almost any facet of society.

Where does that leave us? Help as many people survive this fascist bullshit as possible and figure out how we got here and what needs done to avoid this in the future.

Then share that knowledge widely.

Wrapping Up

Well, that was cheery. Sorry, I tried to stay focused but it was difficult to ignore the big picture on this one.

Many of the problems in the world are interlinked.

One part of the legacy of colonialization is accepting brutal violence as normal and good.

In the mean time I’m going to be digging back into our investigations of the Dawn of Everything and Columbus.

See you on the other side,

-SF

Sorry that we’re not doing the Dawn of Everything again, I’ve been trying to hunt down a documentary about Atlantis but it’s unavailable yet.

What is available is a lot of interviews that are basically advertisements for it. Frustrating really.

They do have a cool pitch: Atlantis is real and just off the coast of Cadiz, Spain and the ruins there closely match Plato’s descriptions.

And they have scans!

This was going to be about that but as is the nature of my business every rabbit hole finds 5 more and I want to keep my momentum here going.

And this is going to be a little different than I’d planned. The title is from the preface of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and it makes a beautiful point:

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. . . . . . . . The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work.

Why Atlantis?

As I mentioned in my last essay, I fucking hate Atlantis and I hate it because of something specific: I only care about Atlantis at all because it keeps coming up and I resent having to know things about it.

In the tapestry of history, it’s a shockingly interconnected knot.

Most of this in modern days comes through Ignatius Donnelly’s intuitions in Atlantis: The Antediluvian World and Ragnarök: The Age of Fire And Gravel.

There are immensely complicated knots within this knot, from the ideologies supporting settler colonialism to the budding studies of archeology, comparative mythology, and the sheer History Channel of it all. Plus all the occultists that riffed off Donnelly means the entire new age milieu is a descendant of it.

Atlantis isn’t so much a cause but a symptom of something larger happening.

And despite the worst parts of it like the rise of the Nazis or modern antivaxxers, I think there’s something important and potentially good going on here.

In the long view, premodern European society was built around reflexive deference to authority. To Church, landlord, and king. Modern academia and nation states are the grandkids of this system and inherit many of their quarks as all descendants do.

Antivaxxers correctly criticized the phrase, “Trust the Science!” as being insufficiently skeptical for the scientific method to work. But they were foolish to do so because that skepticism was already built into the system and yes, experts are better at being skeptical in their field than novices.

But they were right to be skeptical anyway because the damn political leaders did shit like say masks didn’t work to try and manipulate people into not buying them all before making them mandatory.

Who the fuck wouldn’t be confused and suspicious by that paternalistic bullshit?

But on the scientific side: There were repeated signs of potential covid treatments that could have worked (Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are the big two) who had initially promising studies that were later proven wrong or done badly.

As with all true medical research the process was messy.

I pick antivaxxers here because they’re a group of people who I disagree with who’s concerns I shared at the time and who’s conclusions I continue to disagree with.

Hell, they’re even backhandedly right about Big Pharma profiteering: Bill Gates initially lobbied against relaxing intellectual property rules in the World Trade Organization. Though he eventually came to accept a narrow relaxing.

Lots of Science! lovers loathe antivaxxers for their apparent irrationality. Often ignoring legitimate distrust of institutions many groups including disabled and Black Americans feel. See Harriet Washington’s Medical Apartheid if you want to hear the full story of that.

And their frustration also isn’t wrong: These fucks do get people killed. Wholly unnecessarily. And often baselessly. Andrew Wakefield made up the initial study linking vaccines and autism for a lawsuit and is still out there grifting parents whose only crime is wanting to help their children and being misled about how.

It makes me so fucking mad.

See, every perverse incentive that applies to commercial medicine applies to alternative medicine only there’s almost never anyone looking over their shoulder so abuse is even more rampant there.

But all of this is part of a process I hope society continues long enough to get somewhere with where we stop just accepting authority.

Most Alt-Whatever salesmen are just telling people to swap which authority they care about. Reject academic, accept Joe Rogan.

Well, what the fuck does he know?

And that brings us back to Whitman. This time from a song of myself:

Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams,

Now I wash the gum from your eyes,

You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.

Trusting unconditionally in authority isn’t a great recipe.

Yet, genuine authority is worth respect.

It’s a tricky balance you need to strike moment-by-moment.

I think where we’re going with all this is a considerably more emotionally mature and healthy society, believe it or not.

We just have to avoid killing ourselves or eachother for another couple decades. Which… well, you never know I guess.

Stranger things have happened!

Conspiracies and Walt Whitman

The root of the appeal of conspiracy theories is the recognition Whitman told people to approach: Reexamine what you’ve been told and dismiss what insults your soul.

It’s been obvious basically the whole time we’ve had society that living in one involves some bullshit. Maybe some bullshit is inescapable. We don’t really know for sure.

Many Christians feel that materialist science insults their soul.

Most things in modern society insult mine.

What exactly are we to make of it? I don’t know for sure.

What I do know is we make choices constrained by structures and in doing so create this world together and it seems more likely than not that we could create a different one.

The point of all this is that aside from actual grifters like Wakefield most people involved in alt-movements are acting with good intentions. And that’s why a lot of attempts at checking misinformation spread often escalate the social pressures that creates them in the first place.

People don’t like being told what to do by people they don’t respect who they believe don’t respect them.

This is where debunking activities often miss the mark.

When debunkers rush to dispute an argument, creators rarely consider either 1. Why the ideas are appealing in the first place or 2. What valid things there are to learn about them.

The social aspect of paranoia is hard to understate. Conspiracy theories, as academics have observed for years, often reflect very real tensions between groups.

If I was an academic, I'd push to be able to teach a class on rhetoric using only Ancient Aliens as a source.

I think it's an absolute treasure of dishonest arguments.

Some of my favorite ticks include: Many ancient astronaut Theorists Believe, Is it possible that ___?, and The mainstream story says....

While I think lots of pseudoarcheology ends up being explicitly racist (Ancient aliens and just about anything that uses Chariots of the Gods as a primary source being great examples), I don't think that's why most people get into it.

It's fun, sexy, and accessible.

It's a kind of history YOU can be a part of right now.

And it's SO happy to talk up how smart and freethinking you are. You wouldn't be fooled by the mainstream, would you?

Of course not!

As if being mainstream was the core problem with "the mainstream".

I've been reading Ignatius Donnelly's immensely influential and popular book Atlantis the Antediluvian World and I get what's cool about it.

It shows a huge amount of information pointing in this one direction And as long as you don't question it too much you get to enjoy this cohesive worldview about ancient history and our lost legacy.

The only problem is as best I can tell with the claims I have any kind of knowledge about (which is only like 5-10% of the book so far, lol) that's just not true. He doesn't prove anything at all.

He doesn't even really try to. He just piles up cherry picked information and calls it a book.

And that's just less interesting to me than, well, the real world.

And I know some people are going to roll their eyes at this but this book is, despite going into it with a lot of sympathy for Donnelly as a guy, just super racist. It reifies savages vs civilization as a core distinction, it calls on mountains of then-current race science as contributing evidence, and puts forth some unique ideas.

It's not racist in the same way Ancient Aliens is where brown people aren't allowed to do anything cool without aliens. It just rebuilds all the worst colonial ideas of the 19th century.

And unfortunately, because 19th century European hyper-diffusionism can't go anywhere without Aryans, it played into nazi propaganda.

A thing Ignatius Donnelly would have been horrified by. The man was a radical republican when that was cool and good. In congress, he fought to expand reconstruction after the civil war. He wouldn't have been excited about his legacy.

But he still promoted the racial ideas of his time with terrible collective consequences. And we see a lot of the descendants of his ideas today.

We’re not so far away from Donnelly that we can assume we’re in a different position fundamentally. We’ve just got 2025’s racist baggage instead of 1882’s.

We’re also bound by an ecosystem of bullshit weighted towards ideas that serve the wealthy and powerful because they own the media and have since Donnelly’s day.

It’s not really surprising that people don’t cope with that well.

Something to consider.

Wrapping Up

We’re going to explore this more in the future ‘cause I’ve been chewing on this subject for the last few years and collaborating with other people doing the same.

Anyway, lots of thorny things to unpack and lots of work to do.

Up on deck is still:

1. Atlantica, the Atlantis documentary they won’t let us watch yet.

2. Dawn of Everything’s Indigenous Sources

3. Christopher Columbus’ Prophecies

And just to make a point about Atlantis just being tangled up in every goddamn thing:

The Atlantica documentary’s creator Michael Donnellan claims that Columbus knew about underwater currents from ancient knowledge surviving in secret maps and charts.

It’s all wrapped together and the work is breaking down the connections and making them more accessible and clear.

Alright, see you soon.

From a different email provider because we’re getting the fuck away from Substack!

-SF

Editor’s note: I planned to send this only to paying subscribers since it doesn’t matter for the rest of you but substack literally won’t let me do that unless I turn on payments. So sorry about that but it’s important enough I’d rather send it to a bunch of people who don’t need to hear about it then not give a heads up to the people who fund this.

Last month I turned off subscriber billing ‘cause y’all have backed me during many let’s say unproductive periods and I wanted to save you a few bucks after my back surgery.

Well, this morning I checked my bank balance and lets say it’s only due to a client tossing me some pity work that I’m once again a hundredaire.

This email is to let you know that I’m going to be moving the whole blog from substack to beehiiv and turning payments back on.

The way I think that’ll work is your subscription will pick up with the same number of days left until your next payment as when I paused it. I do just want to send out fair warning that it may be messy.

I think keeping subscriptions paused on substack should prevent any billing foolishness, but this is a heads up that payment processors are scum and villany and we may need to work out some details.

Stripe has been good at covering mistaken payments in the past so I’m not worried about needing to be on the hook for that.

Anyway,

Thank you all again for your support and there will be a more substantive post later today.

<3

-Stephen

This shouldn’t affect any of you in any practical way except you won’t be hassled to sign up for an account.

We’ll see!

Anyway, today’s distraction from my original plans is Atlantis.

I don’t remember why I was reading Plato’s dialogue the Critias again this week, but I noticed something that changed my opinion of Atlantis.

See, I don’t give a fuck about Atlantis. This title was a lie.

But I don’t give a fuck about it in a specific way: It keeps coming up around in my research so I’ve had to learn a lot more about it than I really care to.

The very last paragraph of the text before the end of the fragment says something that kind of blew my mind. Note: The kings of Atlantis were descendants of Poseidon and thus demigods like Hercules.

By such reflections and by the continuance in them of a divine nature, the qualities which we have described grew and increased among them; but when the divine portion began to fade away, and became diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture, and the human nature got the upper hand, they then, being unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see grew visibly debased, for they were losing the fairest of their precious gifts; but to those who had no eye to see the true happiness, they appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were full of avarice and unrighteous power.

Too much with the mortal admixture? Wait a sec.

Did I read that right?

Mortal Admixture?

I’ve checked a couple translations and they share that phrase. I’ve got a lot of research to do to really verify this since I can’t read any kind of Greek, but that’s enough for me to dig around.

What we have here is a mighty empire who was destroyed because they lost their virtue because of a *checks notes* higher race breeding with a lower race.

Iiiiiinteresting.

See, a not-inconsiderable number of the people I’ve researched Atlantis for are, well, Nazis. Including the literal Germany ass Nazis.

Note: I’m absolutely not saying anyone interested in Atlantis is a Nazi. But it’s interesting that there’s a clear racial subtext in Plato I haven’t heard anyone discuss.

But let’s step back a bit.

Atlantis 101

OK, let’s get on the same page with Atlantis.

Atlantis is a myth found in two Platonic Dialogues, the Timaeus and the Critias. Platonic Dialogues are not works of history or scholarship, they’re philosophical texts to elaborate different ideas and ways of thinking to help students get the basics to start making their own arguments.

There are no surviving sources about Atlantis earlier than Plato and every single source after Plato references him. A core part of his story is that the tale itself was related from a story Solon had learned from a trip to Egypt, then passed it onto his kids, who passed it onto Critias who told it to Socrates.

Plato wrote an account of it in 360BC, about 200 years after Solon’s death.

None of the archeology in Egypt has corroborated the story he told. The historian and philosopher Plutarch, writing some 400 years later, in his The Life Of Solon that Solon planned a great poem to “The Atlantic Island” after his voyage to Egypt but never finished it.

For all practical purposes: Plato’s dialogues are the only real sources we have and thus authoritative. `

The scholarly consensus, which I agree with, is that it’s not a historic account at all.

It’s a myth told for specific purposes which, shockingly, Plato is specific about. He tells us what it’s about in the Timaeus.

It’s the day after the dialogues of the Republic where he lays out the ideal civilization and calls for a story to show how his ideal civilization would deal with a real world crisis like a war.

Critias tells the story of Atlantis waging a great war of conquest with Europe and Africa, and only the virtue and prowess of the ancient Athenians was able to stop their advance and free everyone, most notably Egypt.

This is important because Atlantis is mainly built up in the story as a villain. They’re there to make the heroes look better.

The more powerful they are, the more impressive the ancient Athenians victory over them is.

There are many interesting details about Atlantis given (more in the Critias), but we’re not really interested in them.

Opinion on Atlantis was somewhat divided in history. Leaning away from a historical reading of Atlantis.

Until a Radical Republican (good) former congressman from Minnesota came into the picture.

My Beliefs: An Aside

Before going any further I want to lay out my stance on Atlantis. I think there are kind of 3 layers to it. From General to Specific.

Atlantis is a cool idea. A mysterious lost civilization that once had a continents spanning empire? It’s sexy! And that’s ignoring all the extra wonders stapled to it by posterity.

Layer 1: There absolutely, without question, are lost cities we know nothing about today who’s ruins we haven’t found.

The parallels often cited by Atlantis believers are Pompey/Herculaneum and Troy. Cities assumed to be myth only to be discovered later.

I don’t follow it closely but there’s some crazy discoveries coming out of South America in terms of previously unknown cities. It’s rad as hell.

I actually think there- Ok, so I was about to write about an alleged Atlantis near Cadiz Spain, it turns out while I was waiting for back surgery ANOTHER but DIFFERENT claim that Atlantis is underwater in Cadiz Spain popped up.

I won’t be talking about it here because all the actual information appears to be locked behind interviews or X, the everything app, comments. But I’m happy to admit the possibility I’m super wrong if the evidence is really there for it. And this appears to be a lot of underwater sonar.

The documentary they claim talks about it doesn’t appear available yet even on its own website.

We’ll probably have to go down this rabbit hole on its own.

Very cool actually.

Layer 2: Did Plato’s Atlantis as described actually exist?

No. I realize that sounds like horseshit after my last paragraph. But as I can’t access their evidence without futzing around with hours of interviews, I can’t really evaluate it. So with the caveat that I might have to eat my shirt here, I’m just going to state my prior conclusion.

Plato was not doing history, he was not transcribing a real conversation, and he wasn’t portraying a real thing. He was doing philosophy.

Atlantis wasn’t the point, the strength of an antediluvian Athens was.

Layer 3: Hyperdiffusion is fake as hell

No ancient advanced civilization handed prehistoric humans advanced knowledge.

Those people worked advanced knowledge out for themselves using whatever resources they had on hand.

The timeline of evidence just doesn’t make any sense if you’re not adding in anything supernatural.

Atlantis sunk 9000 years before Solon (11,500 years ago). Our earliest evidence of cities is from places like Çatalhöyük, Turkey which started being settled and built up around 6500 years before Solon.

That’s pretty fucking old but it still leaves the knowledge of advanced building technology up in the air for 2500 years (9000 years ago).

Where the fuck were the buildings then?

You have Gobekli Tepe much closer to the right time but they literally stopped using the site in 7500 years before Solon (10,000 years ago).

So that’s still 40 generations of human lives between construction projects at best.

Where were the builds then?

It doesn’t make sense. And most of the places cited as being influenced by Atlantis are VASTLY more recent. The Mayan civilization started around 1500 years before Solon (4000 years ago).

Those aren’t little gaps.

We could go on like this for hours, but you get the point. We certainly don’t have all possible surviving evidence, but we have a hell of a lot of it. And what we have is fundamentally incompatible with hyperdiffusion.

The Antediluvian World

Ignatius Donnelly published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in 1882 and he’s made it everybody’s problem since.

See, it was kind of a hit.

We’re not going to delve deep into this— for one thing I’ve not finished rereading it. For another, I’m not sure it’s worth the time unless people are super into finding out more about it. The audiobook is on youtube. It’s public domain!

Before we do an overview, let’s take a look at Antediluvian. This $10 word just means before Noah’s Great Flood. The Deluge.

And there’s the great secret of this book and of much of Atlantis’ popular success. Both as a concept and as a book: Atlantis being real is taken as proof that the Biblical Deluge was real.

It’s most convincing if you don’t look too much at it or think too hard.

Like, Greek mythology has a few flood myths. Most famous being Deucalion’s Flood where Zeus killed almost all of humanity. The Egyptian Priest Solon spoke to in the Timaeus specified there have been many floods and many lost eras of history.

Thereupon one of the priests, who was of a very great age, said: O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. And I will tell you why. There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes. There is a story, which even you have preserved, that once upon a time Paethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt.

Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long intervals; at such times those who live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore. And from this calamity the Nile, who is our never-failing saviour, delivers and preserves us. When, on the other hand, the gods purge the earth with a deluge of water, the survivors in your country are herdsmen and shepherds who dwell on the mountains, but those who, like you, live in cities are carried by the rivers into the sea. Whereas in this land, neither then nor at any other time, does the water come down from above on the fields, having always a tendency to come up from below; for which reason the traditions preserved here are the most ancient.

If you reduce that to “There was a big flood, therefore the bible is true” that’s all well and good. But by doing that you have to pretend most of the thing you’re looking at doesn’t exist.

Humans are happy to do this, of course.

Like, Noah’s Flood and Atlantis doesn’t really share any elements at all besides water, interbreeding if you take the Nephelium literally, and divine punishment.

But basically everything else isn’t just different but opposing.

Atlantis was destroyed by earthquakes and floods and thus perhaps a typhoon that lasted a day and a night. Noah’s Flood was caused by rain happening for 40 days and 40 nights and they spent over a year on the boat.

Where the ancient Athenians didn’t even get inconvenienced by Atlantis sinking.

Even the divine miscegenation goes in different directions: In the bible (or maybe book of Enoch, my memory is hazy and I don’t care to look it up), G_d is punishing the world because his divine angels had kids with humans. Demigods/Giants are the cause of the punishment.

In Atlantis, Poseidon’s demigod kids having kids with mortals is the cause of the hubris and greed that usually provokes divine wrath.

This only gets worse the more myths you add to compare.

If you loosen your focus it can seem plausible but it means comparing fragments of myths and not the actual myths.

So the question comes down to, “Well, how much do you care about evidence?”

And most of us come away poorer on that question.

I’ve found a few places where Donnelly clearly is cherrypicking details to make his argument stronger.

For example, he leaves out the introduction of the Timaeus where they specify that the story is about Plato’s Republic. He also selectively decides if anything supernatural happened in either dialogue based on his current argument.

Now, the real question here is: Does Donnelly talk about the “mortal admixture”?

You might think I’m exaggerating but in Part 2 Chapter 2: The Deluge of the Bible, Donnelly says this:

In both the Bible history and Plato's story the destruction of the people was largely caused by the intermarriage of the superior or divine race, "the sons of G_d," with an inferior stock, "the children of men," whereby they were degraded and rendered wicked.

Note here how he flattens how the sin comes about: Children of Angels in Genesis are wicked, but the Children of Gods in Plato are good.

We can also note that the Nephilim/Giants were “men of renown” and didn’t actually apparently do very much to deserve their punishment. The character of G_d talks much about their wickedness, but the only thing they do is think wicked thoughts. There’s “much violence” but it’s not detailed.

Contrast with Atlantis who’s spiritual failings become them literally trying to take over the world by force and enslaving everyone else.

So, yes, in fact Donnelly does mention the divine miscegenation as a primary cause of both stories.

Now the next question is… does that actually matter any? Donnelly himself wasn’t a fan of racism. At least, about as well as white men got in 1882. He wasn’t John Brown, but he was a big supporter of ending slavery and wanted to see Black people freed from the awful conditions they were in.

But that caveat comes at a harsh price and perhaps a good lesson for any white person with good intentions.

Because the history of Donnelly’s ideas being received regularly plays into white supremacist fantasies. This isn’t merely intellectual problem either. Atlantis, filtered through Blavatsky, Steiner, and eventually the Thule society played a significant role in Nazi archology propaganda.

It’s part of a whole system of thought that contributed to WW2.

That’s not his fault, of course. But it’s also part of the story.

Indeed, plenty of far right woo ties in through Atlantis right through today.

Anyway, if folks want me to talk more about Donnelly I can. I’d kind of like to get back to The Dawn of Everything after another episode with this new Atlantis documentary I can’t find.

Wrapping Up

Alright.

This pile of shit is out of the way.

I’m almost free of Atlantis for a while.

He says, lying.

Anyway, we’ll be seeing you.

-SF

I’m your host Stephen and today we’re just going to pick at a scab that annoys the shit out of me. Just to get back in the swing of things.

I’m not fan of the anti-New World Order crowd as it’s a far right bastard of the now defunct anti-globalization movement. OK that’s not really true, as the anti NWO stuff is from like, the 50s and 60s and the anti-globalization movement would only pick up in the 90s.

But clowning on John Birchers never gets old.

I want to talk a bit about the origin of the phrase, “You’ll own nothing and be happy” because nobody reads primary sources and the original documents are… a lot weirder than the Alex Joneses of the world would have you believe.

The World Economic Forum

It’s very strange living in the 2020s as someone who’s paid attention to international relations since the Bush years. For me, The constellation of America-backed NGOs that enforce much of the global financial order (for now, lol) are kind of old hat.

Yes, the IMF keeps poor nations in debt to enforce austerity so western corporations can extract resources on favorable terms.

Obviously.

Since the rise of the MAGA movement we’ve seen a lot more nativist driven anti-UN and “Rules Based International Order” rhetoric from the right. It’s frustrating because they’ve latched onto the idea that these institutions are hampering US dominance when they’re literally the mechanisms that have kept the US flying high and mighty since the end of WW2.

But this paranoia is almost as old as those institutions. We’re not going to go into it but basically many Americans, particularly business owners, think international relations is, frankly, too effeminate and to be blunt too gay for manly American capitalist hero kings to bother with.

If you hold a copy of The Art of the Deal up to your ear, you can hear Tom of Finland laughing.

So we have to kind of address the nature of the World Economic Forum. It’s not really the kind of place conspiracists want it to be. Which is kind of weird because there is actually kind of an organization that does a lot of the policy level stuff they’re afraid of.

That’s the World Trade Organization. They create trade policy that member nations need to abide by which directly removes sovereignty (in the way Birchers understand it) from nations.

It’s a big club and there are rules. And it’s younger than you might think. The WTO is another of those international institutions that uphold what they used to call the Washington Consensus. Started in 1995. Their rules bind members and violations can provoke sanctions!

The World Economy Forum is a bit different.

It’s not a rules-making body. It has no power at all, actually.

That doesn’t mean it’s benign. Just that it isn’t some kind of world government. The WEF is built different. It’s mostly a big party for bringing together people with influence to try and convince them of whatever new ideas it’s vomiting into their mouths.

So, on one hand it’s a propaganda organization seeking to establish influence among the people who own what let’s call the means of production and government policy makers. They’re very specific about wanting to expand private-public partnerships, where governments give private citizens a giant piles of money to do stuff.

On the other hand, there’s a level where the conspiracy theorists are right: These are rich assholes who want you poorer and less able to politically organize so they can extract more from everyone.

But it’s not evil in a supervillain way. It’s evil in the business way. You know, the way that works.

They’re trying to brand themselves as the solution to capitalism so people don’t do crazy things like seizing the means of production.

They’re manufacturing consent for even more pitiless oligarchs of the future.

But they can’t force anything. Influence, not control.

Which brings us back to November 2016. The US presidential election had just ended in a Donald Trump victory. The WEF was beginning it’s big push to advertise its 8 predictions for 2030.

The way this works is they’re trying to show themselves to be the smart money, future looking, prosocial capitalists so people don’t mind getting robbed. And to get enough rich assholes on board that they can actually do it.

So they posted a video to facebook. It was the style at the time, because facebook was lying to everyone about video views.

I say video, it was really more of a slideshow. Here’s the text:

1. You'll own nothing and be happy. Whatever you want you'll rent and it'll be delivered by drone.

2. The US won't be the world's leading superpower. A handful of countries will dominate.

3. You won't die waiting for an organ donor list. We won't transplant organs, we'll print new ones instead.

4. You'll eat much less meat. An occasional treat, not a staple. For the good of the environment and our health.

5. A billion people will be displaced by climate change. Polluters will have to pay to emit carbon dioxide.

6. There will be a global price on carbon. This will help make fossil fuels history.

7. You could be preparing to go to Mars. Scientists will have worked out how to keep you healthy in space. The start of a journey to find alien life?

8. Western values will have been tested to the breaking point. Checks and balances that underpin our democracies must not be forgotten.

#1 obviously gets almost all the attention, but the rest are interesting on their own.

It’s interesting to see the loss of US hegemony so prominently placed. From what I remember people were anxious about China’s rise, but things were overall riding pretty high except in conservative circles where everything was a sign of decline. Such as it always is.

3 is an audacious but possible technology. 4 is probably true, maybe not by 2030 but land and water costs will probably make commercial beef and maybe other meats uneconomical sooner than most Americans would like. Also, eating lots of veggies is good for you.

5 seems plausible. I wonder how far along we are? A bit of googling suggests the number will be much smaller: Something on the order of 20 million climate refugees a year. Which is still a huge number. This estimate from last year predicts it’ll take closer to 2050 to hit over a billion climate refugees.

Fuck if I know if that’s real.

6 seems laughably unlikely. 7 Seems unlikely and an obvious ploy to draw in Elon Musk.

And 8 very much seems equally silly and prescient given our current political situation.

As far as predictions go, it’s a list of mostly safe bets phrased audaciously. Solid propaganda work.

But enough preamble. Let’s amble.

You’ll Own Nothing and Be Happy

Six days before that video was posted, Ida Auken, a member of the Denmark Parliament, released an article with a title we haven’t gotten away from in the near-decade since its release. It was published on their website, which has been taken down, and on medium.com which hasn’t.

It’s under a thousand words.

Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better

The comments are fascinating. Almost universally negative. But for a document that’s provoked an entire wing of reactionary thought there are only 53 of them. Maybe 6 of them weren’t negative.

My favorites were the people asking, “Is this satire?”

And it’s not.

It’s simpler than that.

It’s looking at trends long established by 2016 and extending them another 15 years.

It’s not good at that. But as we’ll see there’s nothing here that wasn’t firmly a growing trend years earlier. The only innovations are 1. The framing of it being good and 2. Trying to make it a coherent story.

But let’s get a quick overview of the story itself.

The most important thing about it is it’s a vision of a smart city. With a pile of breakaway technologies that work impossibly well.

Direct quotes in, well, direct quotes.

1. The author doesn’t own anything in “our” city.

2. Specifically mentioned: No car, no house, no appliances, or clothes

3. All products are now services in the city.

4. Access to transportation, clean energy , accommodation, food, etc is free.

5. Transportation is self driving or flying cars.

6. “In our city we don’t pay any rent, because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it. My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there.”

7. You can cook for yourself, but your appliances have to be delivered. Note the examples are specialty tools and it’s unclear if homes have ovens.

8. “When products are turned into services, no one has an interest in things with a short life span. Everything is designed for durability, repairability and recyclability. The materials are flowing more quickly in our economy and can be transformed to new products pretty easily.”

9. The only pollution comes from energy production?

10. “Shopping? I can’t really remember what that is. For most of us, it has been turned into choosing things to use. Sometimes I find this fun, and sometimes I just want the algorithm to do it for me. It knows my taste better than I do by now.”

11. Work is near-entirely automated

12. Non-ominous: “They live different kinds of lives outside of the city”

13. uhhhhhhhh

14. “My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way.”

15. uhhhhhhhh

16. “Once in awhile I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.”

17. What the fuck

18. This is better than the alternative which was horrible.

OK, so let’s get to the top here: This isn’t a good story and the society it describes is terrifying. Let’s really take a moment and look at one of the paragraphs:

“They live different kinds of lives outside of the city”

For a while, everything was turned into entertainment and people did not want to bother themselves with difficult issues. It was only at the last minute that we found out how to use all these new technologies for better purposes than just killing time.

My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.

What the hell!?

Just purely on a rhetorical level, what the fuck even is this?

It’s basically, “Oh, we’re the Eloi from The Time Machine and we sure hope those barbarian Morlocks don’t really fuck us up.”

They live different kinds of lives outside the city is one of the most teen dystopia ass lines I’ve ever read. Did they forget the love triangle?

This whole piece is ominous as shit but adding in fearmongering about rural people who are somehow living only in 19th century villages is such an insane move. And calling them those we lost on the way just… damn.

Fuck this essay.

You can tell nobody has read it because of how few comments, but honestly the anti-NWO crowd would be so much angrier if they actually knew what was in it.

I couldn’t even really have a problem with that. Yeah, this vision of the future sucks shit.

So What The Fuck Is That Anyway?

When looking at a piece of advertising, you need to know what is being sold.

In most advertising that’s easy to figure out but in propaganda it’s obscured. Why? Because it’s harder to argue or refute implicit messages than explicit ones. They need to be unpacked to be criticized. So if you get people to accept ideas that carry unsaid assumptions they’ll have a much harder time even noticing they accepted something as a fact.

And often if you tell them they’ve accepted an implied belief, they’ll deny it. And become more resistant to even look for it in the future.

This piece is about selling the WEF itself as a taste/culture maker and about selling the many odious parts of the global capitalist economy.

Let’s talk a bit about the process of getting this article made.

Ida Auken is a former Minister of Environment and has been a member of the Danish parliament since 2007. She’s been working with the WEF since the early 2010s and in 2016 she was asked to write an essay as a thought experiment on 2030.

She was given the title: “Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.”

I find that interesting, don’t you?

In an interview with Jon Ronson, she somewhat apologized for the essay saying something to the effect of: Politicians shouldn’t pretend to be Isaac Asimov.

Her background is she was as socialist who became a social democrat who’s always been big on the environment and a focus on the circular economy.

That’s one of the main ideas her story is about.

Ronson’s interview betrays a shocking lack of awareness for the background of the movement he was discussing. It’s kind of weird, like, the man definitely knows enough about Alex Jones to know the anti-NWO movement goes back to the 1950s and the origins of the John Birch Society.

He doesn’t talk about any of that. Instead he kind of treats everything as a silly accident conspiracy theorists half invented.

So, the feeling here is that Auken is kind of a dupe. Someone fed her a provocative title and she did her best with it. It’s certainly, uh, interesting that she did this.

From our point of view the actual “thought experiment” almost doesn’t matter. It’s the tagline from the title they gave her that made the conspiracy headlines years later.

But let’s go back to the thought experiment because the content of it is… telling.

The post 2008 recession recovery had already raised the cost of living in many places around the world. Mix that with the long tail of the Snowden reports from 2013 about US government spying, the slow growth of “Software as a service” as a business (Salesforce was selling subscription CRMs in 1999), and growing concern over climate change.

Unlike in the US, the EU actually did move to protect citizens privacy with GDPR in 2016 (it would take effect in 2018), so the anxiety around privacy was still very fresh at the time.

And Auken herself is a strong advocate for the circular economy, attempting to get capitalists to build products that last and can be easily repaired/recycled/reused so she imagines it’s just perfected.

Of course, maybe Auken and I are selling her short. This would be a spectacular opening paragraph in a YA teen dystopia.

“They live different kinds of lives outside of the city”

For a while, everything was turned into entertainment and people did not want to bother themselves with difficult issues. It was only at the last minute that we found out how to use all these new technologies for better purposes than just killing time.

My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.

Once in awhile I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.

Add in one potential boyfriend from the city and one of those we lost and you’re just about ready for a publishing deal in 2013 or 2014.

And yeah I quoted it again. It’s so nuts.

I half want to ask her what the fuck was going on with that. But I’m afraid she’d tell me.

OK, I’m losing control of this essay.

Let’s take a breath and refocus.

But I Digress

Ok, so this “thought experiment” is capitalist propaganda commissioned by an organization of very wealthy and influential individuals to sell their insight into the future and cover over some very real anxieties.

In that sense it’s not really surprising that people obsessed with those anxieties would find the language they used to try to soothe those anxieties alarming. Especially in spaces where international cooperation has been demonized since the 50s.

They would run into this same issue with the Great Reset during covid. Catnip to the paranoid right winger.

And it’s not like the WEF isn’t a group of dangerous bastards. It’s just that they’re they’re the same dangerous bastards running the world we already live in. Their goal is keeping the extraction machine running as long as possible so they can throw big parties forever.

But all this being predictable leads us to another question: did the WEF try to make this backlash happen?

“being poor and surveilled all the time is good actually” isn’t exactly subtle, tbh.

Auken’s “thought experiment” is vapid and silly in a lot of ways. But the problems it handwaves away certainly aren’t. They’re some of the biggest technological and political problems anyone has.

They present a content consumer enjoying the fruits of a post-scarcity society. And avoid talking about any of the structures that make that happen.

She says there are no appliances. So, every oven and refrigerator anyone might want to use in a day needs to be stored somewhere accessible and in a way they can easily be transported.

I just got a new refrigerator and it took the movers about an hour to bring it in and set everything up. How much infrastructure would it take to make that work versus just… having appliances at your house?

Of course this is the silliest and most extreme example. We should probably assume she meant that specialized appliances would be delivered. Like pasta or crepe makers.

But she said no appliances.

Every thread in the essay is like this.

That’s what makes it so dystopian feeling. Nothing in the character’s life in the thought experiment goes to any agency or control over their life. It’s perfect neoliberal subject brain.

Gross.

I should probably go into a history of the anti-NWO milieu that led to this blowing up when it did but we’ve gone on too long here.

The TLDR is this matched fearmongering that America’s fascist vanguard in the John Birch Society has been doing since the 1950s. Alex Jones is literally one of their kids and he was

Wrapping Up

OK, that was fun!

Sort of.

I’ve been knee deep in Dawn of Everything citations and I needed to work on something else to get my brain working again.

Should have something for you about that soon.

See you soon.

-Stephen

P.S. Yes, I can see you while you read this.

P.P.S. I’m sorry for doing the Teen YA dystopia bit twice. Kinda.

I’m your reconstructed host Stephen.

I’m here with less back pain and less spine. Well, less of one of the discs thanks to the miracle of modern surgery.

Today’s going to probably be on the shorter side (laughter) because I’m trying to get back on the wheel with this thing. We’re going to be poking through some of the ideas in David Wengrow and David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything.

When I first read the book one subject really got caught in my head even though I thought the book only really touched it superficially.

The Enlightenment in Europe was direct response to the collected criticisms of European society by various indigenous people.

The book appears to make a good case for this, but I want to dig in a lot more and see how sturdy it really is.

The Dawn of Enlightenment

I want to stress that this isn’t the actual exploration into sources and counterclaims that I plan on doing, we’re just kind of getting up to snuff with what The Davids argue here.

I don’t really know enough about any of this to judge without some more digging so this is kind of an introduction to a new investigation.

Let’s start with a quick round up of what I knew before reading this book. I knew, for example that the Iroquois Confederacy’s Gayanashagowa or Great Law of Peace was a major influence on the US Founding Father’s ideas of what a political constitution could do.

I’ve also been long aware that there’s a full scattering of indigenous ideas, traditions, and practices that have made it into US culture, usually in a degraded form.

Tobacco is obviously scared and we’ve turned it into a poison through hyperconsumption. What better sign you’re doing something wrong is there?

Because of the nature of this conversation, where I stand should be made clear: 1. Land Back Now 2. Honor the treaties (at least) 3. Indigenous women and girls are going missing or murdered at a startling rate and we should stop it. Cops are less than helpful there.

Ok, so let’s get into it.

Their basic thesis is the usual way the story is told is about Colonists changing Indigenous people through conquest, diplomacy, disease, and technology.

The Davids trace a less well known story where the interactions between Indigenous people and European colonizers slowly built up a consistent Indigenous moral critique of European culture and morality. They then trace the way this critique propagated through European society until it was reframed by enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau into the familiar story about human developing civilization out of ignorance.

The Indigenous Critique

What exactly was this critique, though?

Before we get into that, it’s probably important to spend a little time on who was making it. Most of the citations are building up the case that Rousseau was influenced by these criticisms so they focus on France more than other European powers.

As for our Indigenous critics, they mainly came from the following groups:

• Innu (Montagnais-Naskapi)

• Mi'kmaq

• Wendat (Huron)

• The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy)

• Tawantinsuyu (Inca Empire), sort of

Note: I don’t have any real knowledge of any of these groups. If you spot me fucking up, please let me know.

Basically, we’re talking speakers from two language families: Algonquin and Iroquois Plus the Incas, whom don’t really appear as protagonists in the Davids’ narrative, but are used rhetorically by various European intellectuals.

I find this an immediate yellow flag. We’ll get to why in a moment.

Let’s take a look at some maps for context here.

And for a better view of the Algonquin language group:

So we’re leaving out lots of people the Spanish and French definitely did have contact with. Maybe that means nothing, maybe it’s important. Won’t really know until I can dig more.

I just like having a sense for where things are taking place. Let’s add a when: This all leads up to discussions that prompted the essay contest that Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote Discourse on the Origin of Inequality in 1755 for. This we’re talking about the roughly 250 years between Columbus (Oh, we’ll get to Columbus) and Rousseau.

Much of what we know about the critique comes from a series of books published in Europe from about 1633 on. Dialogues between Europeans and various indigenous people, travelogues, that kind of thing.

The critique itself has 4 parts.

• Lack of generosity and mutual aid

• Absence of freedom and agency

• Religious, financial, and legal systems encouraged bad behavior

• Poor conversation practices and weak arguments

In short, Europeans were slavish assholes constantly undermining each other and trying to control each other.

Private property, money, and competition trained Europeans to harm each other which filtered all the way down to manners.

In particular, European workers were made to fear their leaders while many indigenous groups mocked their leaders. Jesuits complained that even their chiefs couldn’t make anyone do anything but with persuasion.

The Dawn of Everything goes into this in considerable detail about all this.

A Consistent Moral and Intellectual Assault on European Society

Over the course of the early 18th century, these criticisms filtered in through first hand accounts, books written by settlers and missionaries, and European intellectual social activities like salons.

As more Europeans were exposed to these new criticisms a funny, if not unexpected, thing happened: They began riffing on the criticisms and turning them to their own ends.

If the Davids are correct: The most popular versions of these ideas were ones acceptable to European society and thus not only dodge the core of the criticism but also build the foundation for what we now call scientific racism.

They claim that the word equality functionally didn’t exist in Europe before the 17th century which makes sense with what I understand about middle age philosophy and theology.

The implications of this are far reaching. For one thing, it means that Leftism as a project has its roots mainly in the recuperated indigenous critique of European culture.

You don’t have to spend much time listening to today’s indigenous people criticize leftists to see truth in the premise. If this is the root of that, that’s exciting because it means it can be addressed.

We’ll see how much as we explore.

Wrapping Up

This took days longer than I expected because it turns out the chapters in Dawn of Everything are WAY longer than I remembered lol. There was a ton to pare down and I’m hoping this will work as an introduction.

I’m getting stronger and more mobile by the day. Today I walked around for a bit with just my cane. I barely noticed I was doing it. Soon I’ll be back in my apartment and things will get back to uh normal.

Normal won’t be a return to intermittent posting (I hope, lol). It turns out when you’re not constantly fighting your body you have more energy!

But yeah, I’ve got a lot of work to organize and go through.

Looking forward to sharing the results with you all.

-Stephen

P.S. I’ll be turning billing off for a couple months. Everyone who’s been supporting me through the last 5 years of pain and being bed ridden deserves some freebies.

Oh, and I’m going to be switching over to another platform relatively soon because Substack feels increasingly hostile and extractive.

What do y’all think?

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Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges, a newsletter about fringe culture and people.

I know it’s been a bit since we’ve spoken.

I don’t actually have much in the way of content for you but I thought I should check in and let y'all know what’s been going on.

The TLDR is my L4-L5 spinal discs herniated and cut off something like 95% of my spinal columns space, pressing my poor fucking nerves enough to make my legs both numb and in pain at the same time.

It sucked.

After being fucked around a bit by the medical system I got a MRI and people started to take me seriously.

Take a look and see if you can see what’s wrong:

One thing led to another and about two weeks ago I went into the ER, having been clued in by my neurology team that my neurologist was on call in the ER and I was admitted to the hospital. I had surgery removing much of that disc and such on Tuesday.

Since then i’ve been some flavor for useless recovering from surgery until the last couple days, been in an intensive rehab program and I’ll probably be here till mid August. It’ll be about a month in the hospital overall.

So far I’m recovering nicely, but I don’t have my main computer with me. So it’s tricky being really productive.

But I’ve indulged in a wireless split keyboard and my tablet is plenty good for writing.

What Does All This Mean?

I’m hoping to get things back on track, but I’m also recovering from a major surgery.

Things seems likely to result in me regaining most of all of my sensation and mobility. I can sit for a few hours already, which hasn't been possible in years.

With a bit of work and all lot of PT I should be in better health a month from now than I’ve been in years.

With that should come a lot more physical energy as I'm not tanking the rising and falling of one of the more painful injuries a person can have.

Yesterday I walked 75ft with my walker!

Well see where things go from here.

P.S. I also started a fiction project called CHOOSE YOUR OWN PULP and the first two beats are already up:

Choose Your Own Pulp

Beat 0001: The Fucking Pinkertons

Sometimes a witches curse comes in handy. On my second fight of the week. Well, not a fight. A beating…

Read more

10 months ago · 8 likes · Stephen from Trenchant Edges

Gonna get back on that wagon on Monday.

See you soon.

-SF

I’m your host Stephen and this isn’t exactly the post I wanted to make. But disability is like that sometimes.

I started this back during the pandemic trying to turn the modest audience I’d built on facebook into something that could actually pay my bills.

Hasn’t worked out like that.

All I really want to do is research and write about it.

And over the last 5 years this blog has kind of made that happen. Albeit irregularly.

I can’t promise that will stop.

But I’m not going to stop either.

The world is strange and wonderful and terrifying and I want to see and understand all of it.

So here’s to another 5 years!

Break out the Nonalcoholic Champagne!

It’s a weird moment to celebrate for me. (It has to be nonalcoholic because I’m on Percocet right now, lol)

I’m laying on a replacement for the 43 year old mattress that was making my back injury worse, paid for by a crowd funding push from a friend. Folks raised $2450 for me so I was able to get an extremely good mattress.

See, the Sunday morning before last around 3:30am I was laying on the floor and unable to get up.

I’m still in quite a bit of pain and thanks to the infinite wisdom of my doctor I only have pain pills for another day or so.

I’d wanted to have a full post ready for this but it’s hard having enough focus to write well when you’re bedridden. I didn’t leave my mom’s spare room for almost two weeks!

But now I’m at home and rather committed to this nice bed.

I don’t know if it will.

Like I said, it’s a weird moment. Such a mix of good and bad. Support and problems.

One must love being alive, lol.

The balance is towards the good I think. This morning I wasn’t even sure if I’d be able to get home alright. Scary stuff when your chronic injury gets worse.

But I’ve had a productive day despite everything against me. Even my own exhaustion. I’d tell you the story of how I fucked up my back but the only funny part of it is I found out how bad I’d hurt myself during the halftime show of a patriots superbowl.

They were down in the first half when I thought I was just tired. I tried to get up for another beer and discovered I literally couldn’t.

And then the damn patriots came back and won the whole thing in the second half.

Insult with my injury.

The rest was just lifting too much stuff without enough breaks.

Anyway, I just want to thank you if you’re still reading these. Putting together a great post here is the most satisfying work I do. And the only thing keeping me sane when I have to stare at the ceiling all day for weeks.

So here’s to the next 5 years, whatever the hell they may bring.

Cheers!

<3

-Stephen