Bravo Johnson

@bravojohnson

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Sure — but “morally” is doing a lot of lifting here. You’re framing media as a kind of moral shepherd, and the audience as sheep needing to be steered. That’s a top-down, almost sermon-like view of what art or communication is for. But media isn’t a one-way channel for delivering moral upgrades; it’s a space of negotiation, ambiguity, and mutual curiosity. In a decentralized landscape, authority isn’t supposed to be granted by default. There’s no pulpit, no captive audience. Refusing to meet the world halfway in this context risks not steering anyone anywhere — it just makes you inaudible. And again, morally is doing a lot of lifting. In decentralized media, “morally better” is not a fixed north star — it’s a contested terrain. If you’re not engaging in that messiness, in the polyphony of perspectives, you’re not guiding; you’re just broadcasting into the void and calling it a mission.

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It’s hilarious that New Yorkers elected Mamdani. Obama’s opponents imagined a radical, foreign-born Muslim boogeyman—so now here comes, actually born in Africa, actually Muslim, actually leftist… and he’s crushing NYC politics with exactly the sort of unapologetic progressive vision they feared Obama might secretly harbor. It’s like the birther fantasy accidentally willed itself into being—but 15 years later, and way more ideologically potent. Progressives win when they stop running from the insult and start owning the slur flipping it—whether it’s “queer,” “dyke” or “whatever,” or in this case “Muslim born in Africa”—the moral panic collapses under its own weight.

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If you’re looking for network effects without broadcasting value beyond the network, you’re mistaking internal motion for external momentum. The value proposition is conservative because it reduces culture to ownership, value to price, and participation to purchasing, and lets be honest there’not that many of you as differentiated consumers. Just replicating existing systems, with different aesthetics and worse UX but not with the creative risk needed to attract culture will not work. You can’t bootstrap a new medium with late-stage media assumptions. “We’ll tell you what to like.” You’re starting from zero. You don’t own the pipes. You don’t even own the audience. You have to earn every moment of attention.

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It’s like you’re building a LinkedIn masked as social media optimizing for professional signaling and network effects that ultimately serve capital allocation. The social media layer provides the ideological cover—all the discourse about decentralization, censorship resistance, community ownership. But the underlying architecture is designed to optimize for the same outcomes as LinkedIn: sorting people into hierarchies based on their access to capital, their ability to perform the right signals, and their willingness to advance narratives that serve existing power structures. The “social” part becomes a way to gamify compliance. Instead of explicitly asking people to conform to institutional expectations, you create a system where the highest status rewards naturally flow to those who advance institution-friendly narratives while maintaining the appearance of grassroots authenticity.

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From what I observe, most of Web3 leans anti-war in principle, but that ethos stays submerged because the space is heavily reliant on centralized capital—much of it Silicon Valley-based—which tends to be pro-interventionist, NRX-adjacent, and larping as guardians of “Western Civilization.” That alignment trickles down. Farcaster, for example, has major early backing from a16z, and one of its cofounders came out of Coinbase—the same Coinbase that just sponsored Trump’s military parade. That’s not a neutral backdrop; it’s a clear ideological signal. In that environment, openly anti-war stances carry reputational and financial risks. Most developers and founders stay quiet. The exceptions are usually theory-heavy adjacent communities—crypto-anarchists, regen weirdos, or degen enclaves—that raised neutral or ideologically unentangled capital and can afford to speak more freely.

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One of the things about requesting a better media is that if we’re not careful the y would create a more intelligent one being more difficult to dismiss. Same with crypto, you ask for a “better” system — more secure, more intelligent, more equitable — and you may get one that is harder to spot as a vehicle for consolidation, surveillance, or soft coercion. systems that could better mimic neutrality and quality while still driving engagement and shaping behavior. Because now it’s not just speculative. It’s intelligent, compliant, and socially aware. It’s even self-critical. It becomes a black mirror — reflecting your critiques back at you, neutralized

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We are already living through both World War 3 and a 1929-style economic depression, but unlike their historical precedents, these crises are unfolding in slow motion over 15+ years instead of the 1-2 year timeframes of the past. The 2008 financial crisis marked the beginning of our extended depression period, creating prolonged effects like asset bubbles, monetary distortions, and social breakdown through the opioid crisis and COVID-19, rather than the immediate economic devastation of 1929. Similarly, current global conflicts from Gaza and Ukraine represent the early stages of World War 3, but in a distributed form involving multiple flashpoints, hybrid warfare, cyber attacks, and proxy conflicts rather than direct military confrontation between major powers.

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What is striking is how each layer has just enough separation to avoid feeling directly responsible, yet each is essential to the whole. This creates what you might call “decentralized moral hazard” - the risks are socialized across society while the benefits concentrate among the first few layers. And because no single layer feels fully responsible, the system becomes remarkably resistant to reform from within.

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Nice infrastructure of irresponsibility we’ve managed to create. Fist you have first-order grifters:: weapons manufacturers, defense contractors, and logistics suppliers — Then come the second-order grifters — the think tankers, foreign policy fellows, and adjacent “experts” who don’t make weapons but polish the narratives that keep them flying. Then there are the third-order grifters: journalists, influencers, academic strivers, minor bureaucrats — people who echo second-order narratives because they need a seat at the table, a clip that lands, a fellowship, a consulting gig. They mimic the frameworks and language because that’s what gets rewarded. They don’t invent the grift, they just learn its rhythms.

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Apparently LLMists think there’s nothing to learn from twitter becoming a Reichstag fire echo chamber. A+ again for missing a fundamental point about concentrated power over information infrastructure

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The truth probably splits is that smartphones have created a tech-savvy but media-illiterate generation that can operate the tools but doesn’t understand metalanguages (all the cues that don’t require dialogue or exposition) That media illiteracy is probably a greater barrier to quality filmmaking than any equipment costs ever were.

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Scalable consensus is becoming less scalable and less consensual. People are actively seeking substance and rewarding it when they find it. Just at the moment tye industry was about to double down with AI slop, audiences got just about enough IQ points wiser to just to upset the balance

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The modern entertainment economy doesn’t reward personal satisfaction—it rewards scalable consensus. So if you truly enjoy something, but it can’t scale—you may have to evangelize it, or else it dies. That’s a pretty weird and unsettling inversion. I’m gonna call it zero-sum economics of cultural distribution: the idea that for certain mega-projects (like the MCU or AAA games) to be profitable, they must dominate to the exclusion of everything else.

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Obviously Bob Iger got to Elon with Andor

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We're still operating under the assumption that the bottleneck is production capacity rather than audience trust. But we've moved from an attention economy to a credibility economy. The scarcity isn't eyeballs anymore; it's genuine engagement and trust. The real question becomes: what does a higher per-unit quality look like?

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The deeper issue: LLMs were conceived in the ZIRP era, designed for an economy of cheap capital and captive audiences – conditions now gone, especially in media. Companies spent that easy money flooding us with algorithmic slop, mistaking cheap capital for a license to brute-force culture. Now capital is expensive and audiences have left. Better execution won't fix this. The core problem was architected assuming infinite runway and tolerant audiences. The entire system is fundamentally flawed for today's reality. The irony is perfect: execs are not being replaced because AI is superior, but because the conditions that sustained them—ZIRP economics and a docile audience—have collapsed. AI isn’t the threat. The end of cheap capital is. And AI can’t fix that. The real problem isn’t cost—it’s quality and retention.

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Heuristic would be treating great men as noise in the system rather than signal. What we call "greatness" might actually be interference patterns—ego-driven disruption that creates turbulence but not necessarily progress. The subsidized personalities that generate heat but not necessarily light.

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The 'great men’ are often chaotic forces who create unnecessary friction. We should automate their disruptive functions so we can evolve calmly toward true emergent intelligence without their drama. They’re obviously slowing us down with their pathos, and we need to clear the stage for something actually great to emerge

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We're living through the great technological regression of the early 21st century. While the rest of civilization spent two centuries figuring out that interoperability is the engine of prosperity, Big Tech decided to cosplay as medieval barons. This is *precisely* backwards. The entire project of modernity - from standardized shipping containers to telephone networks to the electromagnetic spectrum itself - has been about creating universal protocols that let anyone talk to anyone, ship anything anywhere, plug into any socket. We figured out decades ago that artificial incompatibility is just economic vandalism dressed up as competitive advantage.

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