Bravo Johnson pfp

Bravo Johnson

@bravojohnson

164 Following
868 Followers


Bravo Johnson pfp
Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
Watching the Texas floods on the Fourth of July while boomers deny climate change and give themselves a $1 trillion tax cut is beyond parody. Insurance companies—hardly known for liberal overreach—are bailing on Florida, parts of California, now maybe Texas. Not because they “believe” in climate change. Because they’re pricing it. The Chamber of Commerce and Abundance types are out here dreaming of cutting ribbons on new developments in floodplains while insurance companies are cutting losses. The invisible hand is slapping them across the face, but still treat it like a vibes-based attack on freedom. “Don’t tread on me,” they say, ankle-deep in seawater. And yet, the same duopoly that swears by free markets can’t seem to hear the fire alarm ringing from the heart of competition lalaland.
2 replies
0 recast
7 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp
Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
The fix? It’s not hidden. It’s just unpalatable. Everyone’s been silently pushed a mental firmware update that trips a kernel panic the moment you suggest legislation might belong in the loop. And that’s the joke: every civic failure gets framed like a product bug. Like we just need the right A/B test, the right growth hack, the right startup to “reimagine” public infrastructure. Anything but laws. God forbid we touch policy. The real move? Roll back some of the platform protections. Reboot the media stack to pre-Consolidation—before the ’93 Telecom Act gutted the commons, before Section 230 turned every site into a liability-averse panic room monetized through outrage. But you bring that up and people glitch. Not because it’s wrong—because they literally can’t run it. It’s not in the stack. The OS chokes. Hard fail.
0 reply
0 recast
4 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp
Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
Caveat: Let’s be careful not to overdo “the emotional manipulation gap.” The thing is, most people still aren’t media literate—to spot frames, not with long-ass podcasts, not with cable, not even with old-school TV. So expecting them to decode short-form video, especially at scale, is not realistic. But yes, it’s probably going to disrupt the disruptors. The tech world still hasn’t cracked how to replicate the algo at scale. And that makes it potentially as disruptive to the U.S. as Facebook and early Twitter were to the rest of the world.
1 reply
0 recast
4 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp
Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
The platform architecture itself demands different skills. A TikTok creator who can hold attention for three minutes understands pacing, hooks, and emotional beats in ways that would mystify a traditional speechwriter. They know how to layer surface entertainment with deeper commentary—because that’s what survives the algorithm. Mamdani understands that this is just changing their entire relationship with the audience. Instead of delivering messages, they’re creating content that people actually want to consume and share. The power dynamic flips from “here’s what you need to know” to “here’s what’s interesting enough to keep you watching.”
1 reply
0 recast
4 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp
Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
The gap between Obama’s 2008 simulcast strategy comms and today’s meme-and-livestream environment is as wide as the gap between Bush Sr. Top down broadcast and Obama’s. It’s generational. It’s not just about tone—it’s about the platform itself. A whole generation is listening to creators, not correspondents. West Wing-style messaging—faux elegant, rhetorical, top-down—doesn’t translate into creators 3-minute clips, chaotic livestreams, or algorithm-driven virality. Authenticity isn’t performed; it’s demonstrated through vulnerability, mistakes, real-time reactions. The audience can smell manufactured gormlessness from a mile off.
2 replies
2 recasts
12 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp
Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
People love larping as iconoclastic visionaries until they discover the ‘untrained rebel’ could recite stacks of Shakespeare and Tolstoy from memory
0 reply
0 recast
4 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp
Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
If crypto wants to matter in media start small — Fund indie artists transparently. Skip the revolution and attack real pain points — Automate residuals & royalties. But avove all prove value — Build one project that outperforms Hollywood — not just out-hypes it. Otherwise, it’s just libertarian fan fiction.
1 reply
0 recast
3 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp
Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
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.
2 replies
0 recast
4 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp
Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
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.
2 replies
2 recasts
23 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp
Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
A lot of conservative people think Hollywood studio heads are ideologically left-wing. But the truth is they’re not even especially progressive. They’re just ruthlessly good at capturing attention. They’ll greenlight shows they personally dislike, fund creators who challenge their values, and bet on narratives that make them uncomfortable—if they think it’ll get views, go viral, or generate cultural momentum. That’s not political conviction; that’s media savvy. Crypto, by contrast, often refuses to fund anything that doesn’t align with its own narrow ideological comfort zone doubling down on aesthetics and narratives that only resonate internally—NFT drops, libertarian themes, recycled in-group memes. So if you’re building a crypto social network and refusing to back culture that might actually connect outside your bubble, you’re not failing because the world doesn’t get it. You’re failing because you don’t want to meet the world halfway.
2 replies
0 recast
13 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp
Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
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.
0 reply
2 recasts
17 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp
Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
So you get this weird dynamic where people are larping about revolutionary decentralization on platforms designed to identify and elevate the most institutionally compatible voices. The algorithm doesn’t need to explicitly censor anti-institutional content—The opportunities flow to whoever can code-switch between revolutionary rhetoric and institutional palatability. It’s not a conspiracy or a deliberate design choice—it’s just that when you build on existing structures and fund through existing capital networks, you get existing outcomes with. The selection pressure toward institutional compatibility is built into the foundation, not the algorithm.
0 reply
0 recast
6 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp
Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
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.
2 replies
2 recasts
9 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp
Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
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.
2 replies
4 recasts
10 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp
Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
We should be grateful the military/media dodged full wokification. HR proved the pattern: justice frameworks get digested into compliance algorithms—defanged, then weaponized as ‘equity.’ Solidarity becomes metrics. But the miracle? Through sheer institutional inertia, the military industrial complex stand as 19th-century gargoyles on a planetary skyscraper: archaic, exposed, and too brittle to hide their bones. Their failure to modernize is our strategic gift.
0 reply
0 recast
0 reaction

Bravo Johnson pfp
Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
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
1 reply
0 recast
5 reactions

Bravo Johnson pfp
Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
The core problem isn’t just “propaganda”—it’s the dark pools of money made possible by deregulation, monopolistic tech structures, and Section 230 protections. These conditions allowed platforms to become unaccountable engines of engagement, where invisible money flows with zero obligation. Foreign propaganda isn’t some outside force invading our discourse—it’s just another form of special interest astroturfing. The system enables both equally.
1 reply
0 recast
1 reaction

Bravo Johnson pfp
Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
To clarify K-cycles follow the money Fourth turning is psychological retconning these aren’t competing theories of the same phenomenon - they’re describing two different layers of the same process. The economic disruption is real and measurable. The generational/psychological interpretation is the meaning-making mythology we construct around it. The retconning isn’t neutral observation, it’s motivated reasoning
0 reply
0 recast
1 reaction

Bravo Johnson pfp
Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
It’s a Thucydides trap. I don’t think it can be won in this version of “the west”
1 reply
0 recast
0 reaction

Bravo Johnson pfp
Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
I’m not a fan of Fourth Turning theory. It’s a poker-table vision of history: dramatic, clean, and mythic. If I had to choose I’d lean more toward Kondratiev cycles with nukes. The K-wave hasn’t vanished—it’s just been indefinitely delayed and distorted. Nuclear deterrence, financialized capitalism, and digital fragmentation don’t resolve crisis—they prolong it, mutate it, and monetize it. Renewal doesn’t come—not yet. And it won’t arrive through some grand, cleansing crisis. If it comes at all, it will come from a change in global polarity
1 reply
0 recast
1 reaction