At some point, you do have to trust your supply chain. There are projects that seek to minimize the dependencies (the Precursor, for example, is fully open source, and its designer, Sutajio Kosagi, has gone to great lengths to ensure that you can know what's running on your Precursor), but these are very rare and user-unfriendly devices.
Similarly, the Meshtastic project is trying to set up a fully decentralized mesh network running on cheap low-power devices like the ESP-32, but again, you have to trust that the ESP-32 boards you get aren't made of PETN instead of fiberglass. (You can probably trust the software running on the ESP-32, as ESP-32s are microcontrollers that run only one program, which you *could* inspect.)
That being said, however, something like Meshtastic is probably your best bet for building small-n survivable networks.
How hard would it be to step back 50 years in tech then take baby steps back to the future with trusted suppliers? I've been thinking about this for a while, buying old books on how to make batteries, radios, etc.
I can't say I enjoyed this read, but I appreciate you connecting some dots.
The thing I worry more about than "stuff" supply chains is energy supply chains. Your fictional rebels can make stuff - humans seem to have an innate propensity for tool development - but they can't make energy. Solar power helps to a degree, but you really need more to keep a rebellion up and running. I didn't have any solutions to this problem (plot point?), but I ponder it a lot.
Wicked ones in high places have ruled the Industrial Age with TRAUMA: 1. World War One. 2. The Great Depression. 3. World War Two. 4. Korean War. 5. Vietnam. 6. NineEleven. 7. 2008 Banking Crisis. 8. Covid. When Satan offered Jesus all the power & glory of this world's kingdoms (Luke chapter 4) no mention is made of peace or prosperity. Satan's game of Power & Glory is a dirty, bloody, crooked game of death. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/673336052f1e1a740d2ddf756093af22782481230e0c5271280e034a8970db50.jpg
That Alter short film was interesting. I particularly liked the world building of the alternate universe where it's perpetually the 1960s, when students weren't 1,000% indoctrinated and invested in the regime narrative.
Ok three things. First you are a top tier writer. I’m jealous-like really good. I look up the word haram and discover it’s Arab origin and get humbled, I’m dealing with a pro writer.
Third a copy/paste manifesto if you will of how to attack the blob the only way I can…
“I have dollars with a pyramid? Do I now? I’m not entirely in bitcoin and gold and live in the styx where I grow half my stuff and just trade favors with my friends? I pay what? King John says I have to use the pyramid for taxes but shucks darn it all, looks like I didn’t do any work or make any money this year, so in fact, Uncle Owes me! (earned income credit) Must be the darn economy. Fix your s–t and we’ll all go back to work.
Since I refuse debt except to buy Bitcoin, therefore ending the Fed, the Bankers, and the Dollar, I have no overhead and living under this bridge is cheap, leaving me plenty of time to write financial articles explaining this to others and giving them options besides being victims in life. With each person that grows food, drops out of the system and ends debt, the resistance grows larger, as it’s just another name for “success” and “not being a fool.”
I follow almost no laws as the police are too busy to deal with me, but since I have my own internal morality, that never gets me into any trouble. For the few laws remaining, I ignore those too, merely doing a cost/benefit ratio on breaking them, same as I would for crossing a high river or going into bear country: reality exists, you know. Law? What law? We all know it’s optional, I’m just taking them up on their fine example, and get a lawyer uncaring if it’s legal or illegal, same as they do. Or maybe I’m in a city, doing more or less the same thing, with far more action and exploits, breaking the law on purpose and getting rich.
What are you doing instead, shooting people? My guess is no, because that’s a serious business for serious people and would take up all your attention.
This is what I said to begin with: they are an occupation government, with no authority, so I ignore all their laws and resist. If you are in prison or on a chain gang, you’re not a slave, you’re a resistor. You can only be a slave if you accept that there is or could be any legitimacy to that. There isn’t.
“Mahatma Gandhi — ‘They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me. Then they will have my dead body, but not my obedience.” Slavery is the “Obedience” part, where they can sleep soundly not terrified I’ll escape and burn their house down while they sleep. I’m not very obedient like that. Sleep tight, Sunshine.” Dr D.
DN media group’s logo is uncannily similar to that of Palantir - what an improbable coincidence, a glitch in the simulation maybe.
That aside, you (rightly) note how shocking it is that an organisation like HA didn’t have anyone checking equipment for sabotage. Or maybe they did, and that person or someone in that process was also flipped by the Mossad? All the subsequent events of the pager attacks suggest that HA must have been infiltrated somewhere at a very high level. It would be equally shocking for the Mossad to pull an op like this simply sending the rigged devices out to the targets without any controls to avoid the sabotage being found out.
"This will naturally include the establishment of small-n comms-networks that can be independently secured"
I would be tempted to say that the original template already exists and that any other way wouldn't stand the tides of time. I am the first to be willing to set up alternative gears but a part of me tells me to head for the native goal. That's as well because the bad guys would pop up and argue about our disrespect of the native template - "so we grab it, we are allowed to destroy it". I know they do that.
In case of the pager event, do you feel that the blowing up of the node was enough to have some True breadcrumbs going through? I feel they have a solid structure. If some went through we'd need to grab it and make copies and brand it to the public, several times a day until it's acknowledged and identified. The public, for reason unknown, does not question the nodes.
"Damascus: Syria's official Al-Thawra newspaper claimed Thursday that more than 400 agents from Israel's spy agency Mossad are in Lebanon in the latest volley in an increasingly vitriolic war of words with Lebanon's new leaders."
"You have to recognize the danger of having more than 400 men from Israel's Mossad in Lebanon who are working with the other (Lebanese) agents who once supported the Zionist enemy and its militias," wrote editor Fayez Sayegh"
"Comment: At the present time, with Lebanon now effectively neutered and a pro-Israel management team installed"
*
I see those pagers fashioning the narrative's point of "where is the enemy located", while the above accounts for a real state of affair very different. "Enemy's location= this" ("and not this")
We'd tend to think that, now that they exploded, Israel has no foot any more. "He blew up his precious entry way"-"how stupid" etc
Following such mood, I see an over focusing in bringing up the diagram, something rings wrong to me. Cannot explain but we are "contemplating the 9/11 id passports that did not burn".
I suppose that the precise diagram of the battery is reaching a consideration too far. I accept I may be wrong. It's of course how it would be, a "pager's bomb" but do you see what I mean? It's shouting at loud "wrong way", to me there is a swelling of some sort and of course something tying overall to "wrong perspective" (and making us check things that are FAR from where we should be truly headed). An addition I may offer to that familiar feeling is that it sometimes tie to something evident, some elephant in the room not yet spotted.
To me some "lie transpires", there is some swelling everywhere because I believe that the Hamas attack was an inside job; I see that this pager event takes place very far in some psyop's chain of lies.
I am afraid that this won't be of help in a redpilling context.
I am very thankful and grateful that you adressed the cellphone issue. I spotted a problem with Substack; since the start they offer AI generated pictures for a post. I consider this in absolute term,s namely "there is" and not "it's a detail". While it's surely a detail and bound to the poster's free will, it does not prevent solid writers from using it, but of course "it's there". I mean we all saw Terminator 2 and people bypass the lesson. I wish Substack removes that feature. What does it represent in ponerological terms? Strictly speaking an undesirable matter, and an opportunity for opening. I keep precise with such points. There should be a constant and ininterrupted Skynet flow related to it, minimal of course, somewhere.
The other day I spotted some guy promoting AI with his Substack and mourning the points that were making AI yet weak. I mean what the heck?
As the car companies were pursuing electric vehicles like Ahab and his white whale, I said that it was time for a garage-based car manufacturing company. Something made locally, with no electronics but lights and a starter. I saw the opportunities because: 1) the legacy companies would lose their prominence through this folly, but the technology has merit; 2) if they could do it 100 years ago, we can do it today; and 3) not only will we need internally combusted engines, but also freedom from the modern supply chain that you describe. Maybe not all of the materials will be local, but at least the communicating features can be left off. (And more important now than a few years ago, it could survive an EMP pulse and still work.)
Good sleuthing. Shame it's a dead end for now, but then part of me thinks, "do the whos and hows really matter?" as with the coof in re the medical-pharma industrial complex, the key takeaway is the tech supply chain is fully compromised, or at least easy enough to compromise that you must act as if it is. Not that this should be news to anybody.
As for comms/tech alternatives, yeah this is something I think about all the time and have done a significant amount of research on, in anticipation of eventually doing a little hardware proof of concept. For a story, in Minecraft, of course. That project awaits time, space and equipment, but my take right now is that it's not entirely science fictional.
The catch is, you will always be using some components from the tail end of sprawling global supply chains. You cannot make SMT, or lithium batteries, OLED screens, etc. From scratch in your garage. At the bottom of every tech stack is something you have to trust. But trust can be a marginal, contingent thing, and you can constrain and safeguard and have backup plans.
For me the question is, how bad do people want or need this? Suppose someone spends 5 years of his life figuring out hardware and software to solve this problem. Does anybody use it? Does it help? In my look into prior art, the answer so far is no.
Maybe smoke signals and semaphores and carrier pigeons and hobo signs are all we actually need. Maybe they're even advantageous, in the same way the dying Navajo language was advantageous for secure comms once upon a time. If a protocol is so obsolete that nobody recognizes it, let alone knows how to interpret it, does it matter that it's "low tech"?
An epic piece of writing! Thank you!
At some point, you do have to trust your supply chain. There are projects that seek to minimize the dependencies (the Precursor, for example, is fully open source, and its designer, Sutajio Kosagi, has gone to great lengths to ensure that you can know what's running on your Precursor), but these are very rare and user-unfriendly devices.
Similarly, the Meshtastic project is trying to set up a fully decentralized mesh network running on cheap low-power devices like the ESP-32, but again, you have to trust that the ESP-32 boards you get aren't made of PETN instead of fiberglass. (You can probably trust the software running on the ESP-32, as ESP-32s are microcontrollers that run only one program, which you *could* inspect.)
That being said, however, something like Meshtastic is probably your best bet for building small-n survivable networks.
How hard would it be to step back 50 years in tech then take baby steps back to the future with trusted suppliers? I've been thinking about this for a while, buying old books on how to make batteries, radios, etc.
It seems like a solvable problem but the creators would have to pray to a different God than the money God.
I can't say I enjoyed this read, but I appreciate you connecting some dots.
The thing I worry more about than "stuff" supply chains is energy supply chains. Your fictional rebels can make stuff - humans seem to have an innate propensity for tool development - but they can't make energy. Solar power helps to a degree, but you really need more to keep a rebellion up and running. I didn't have any solutions to this problem (plot point?), but I ponder it a lot.
Modular nuclear reactors? New tech, very interesting.
Woodgas.
Wicked ones in high places have ruled the Industrial Age with TRAUMA: 1. World War One. 2. The Great Depression. 3. World War Two. 4. Korean War. 5. Vietnam. 6. NineEleven. 7. 2008 Banking Crisis. 8. Covid. When Satan offered Jesus all the power & glory of this world's kingdoms (Luke chapter 4) no mention is made of peace or prosperity. Satan's game of Power & Glory is a dirty, bloody, crooked game of death. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/673336052f1e1a740d2ddf756093af22782481230e0c5271280e034a8970db50.jpg
That Alter short film was interesting. I particularly liked the world building of the alternate universe where it's perpetually the 1960s, when students weren't 1,000% indoctrinated and invested in the regime narrative.
Ok three things. First you are a top tier writer. I’m jealous-like really good. I look up the word haram and discover it’s Arab origin and get humbled, I’m dealing with a pro writer.
Second - re being watched by the blob - here is my personal response https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iGOS4ZWg6mo&pp=ygUfT24gYSB3YXRjaCBsaXN0IHRodW1ibmFpbCBncmVlbg%3D%3D
Third a copy/paste manifesto if you will of how to attack the blob the only way I can…
“I have dollars with a pyramid? Do I now? I’m not entirely in bitcoin and gold and live in the styx where I grow half my stuff and just trade favors with my friends? I pay what? King John says I have to use the pyramid for taxes but shucks darn it all, looks like I didn’t do any work or make any money this year, so in fact, Uncle Owes me! (earned income credit) Must be the darn economy. Fix your s–t and we’ll all go back to work.
Since I refuse debt except to buy Bitcoin, therefore ending the Fed, the Bankers, and the Dollar, I have no overhead and living under this bridge is cheap, leaving me plenty of time to write financial articles explaining this to others and giving them options besides being victims in life. With each person that grows food, drops out of the system and ends debt, the resistance grows larger, as it’s just another name for “success” and “not being a fool.”
I follow almost no laws as the police are too busy to deal with me, but since I have my own internal morality, that never gets me into any trouble. For the few laws remaining, I ignore those too, merely doing a cost/benefit ratio on breaking them, same as I would for crossing a high river or going into bear country: reality exists, you know. Law? What law? We all know it’s optional, I’m just taking them up on their fine example, and get a lawyer uncaring if it’s legal or illegal, same as they do. Or maybe I’m in a city, doing more or less the same thing, with far more action and exploits, breaking the law on purpose and getting rich.
What are you doing instead, shooting people? My guess is no, because that’s a serious business for serious people and would take up all your attention.
This is what I said to begin with: they are an occupation government, with no authority, so I ignore all their laws and resist. If you are in prison or on a chain gang, you’re not a slave, you’re a resistor. You can only be a slave if you accept that there is or could be any legitimacy to that. There isn’t.
“Mahatma Gandhi — ‘They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me. Then they will have my dead body, but not my obedience.” Slavery is the “Obedience” part, where they can sleep soundly not terrified I’ll escape and burn their house down while they sleep. I’m not very obedient like that. Sleep tight, Sunshine.” Dr D.
DN media group’s logo is uncannily similar to that of Palantir - what an improbable coincidence, a glitch in the simulation maybe.
That aside, you (rightly) note how shocking it is that an organisation like HA didn’t have anyone checking equipment for sabotage. Or maybe they did, and that person or someone in that process was also flipped by the Mossad? All the subsequent events of the pager attacks suggest that HA must have been infiltrated somewhere at a very high level. It would be equally shocking for the Mossad to pull an op like this simply sending the rigged devices out to the targets without any controls to avoid the sabotage being found out.
"This will naturally include the establishment of small-n comms-networks that can be independently secured"
I would be tempted to say that the original template already exists and that any other way wouldn't stand the tides of time. I am the first to be willing to set up alternative gears but a part of me tells me to head for the native goal. That's as well because the bad guys would pop up and argue about our disrespect of the native template - "so we grab it, we are allowed to destroy it". I know they do that.
In case of the pager event, do you feel that the blowing up of the node was enough to have some True breadcrumbs going through? I feel they have a solid structure. If some went through we'd need to grab it and make copies and brand it to the public, several times a day until it's acknowledged and identified. The public, for reason unknown, does not question the nodes.
just a plain consideration, no redpilling at all:
2005 (!)
sott.net/article/106365-Syria-says-400-Mossad-agents-in-Lebanon
"Damascus: Syria's official Al-Thawra newspaper claimed Thursday that more than 400 agents from Israel's spy agency Mossad are in Lebanon in the latest volley in an increasingly vitriolic war of words with Lebanon's new leaders."
"You have to recognize the danger of having more than 400 men from Israel's Mossad in Lebanon who are working with the other (Lebanese) agents who once supported the Zionist enemy and its militias," wrote editor Fayez Sayegh"
"Comment: At the present time, with Lebanon now effectively neutered and a pro-Israel management team installed"
*
I see those pagers fashioning the narrative's point of "where is the enemy located", while the above accounts for a real state of affair very different. "Enemy's location= this" ("and not this")
We'd tend to think that, now that they exploded, Israel has no foot any more. "He blew up his precious entry way"-"how stupid" etc
Following such mood, I see an over focusing in bringing up the diagram, something rings wrong to me. Cannot explain but we are "contemplating the 9/11 id passports that did not burn".
I suppose that the precise diagram of the battery is reaching a consideration too far. I accept I may be wrong. It's of course how it would be, a "pager's bomb" but do you see what I mean? It's shouting at loud "wrong way", to me there is a swelling of some sort and of course something tying overall to "wrong perspective" (and making us check things that are FAR from where we should be truly headed). An addition I may offer to that familiar feeling is that it sometimes tie to something evident, some elephant in the room not yet spotted.
To me some "lie transpires", there is some swelling everywhere because I believe that the Hamas attack was an inside job; I see that this pager event takes place very far in some psyop's chain of lies.
I am afraid that this won't be of help in a redpilling context.
I am very thankful and grateful that you adressed the cellphone issue. I spotted a problem with Substack; since the start they offer AI generated pictures for a post. I consider this in absolute term,s namely "there is" and not "it's a detail". While it's surely a detail and bound to the poster's free will, it does not prevent solid writers from using it, but of course "it's there". I mean we all saw Terminator 2 and people bypass the lesson. I wish Substack removes that feature. What does it represent in ponerological terms? Strictly speaking an undesirable matter, and an opportunity for opening. I keep precise with such points. There should be a constant and ininterrupted Skynet flow related to it, minimal of course, somewhere.
The other day I spotted some guy promoting AI with his Substack and mourning the points that were making AI yet weak. I mean what the heck?
Great stuff, Mark. Thanks for sharing.
As the car companies were pursuing electric vehicles like Ahab and his white whale, I said that it was time for a garage-based car manufacturing company. Something made locally, with no electronics but lights and a starter. I saw the opportunities because: 1) the legacy companies would lose their prominence through this folly, but the technology has merit; 2) if they could do it 100 years ago, we can do it today; and 3) not only will we need internally combusted engines, but also freedom from the modern supply chain that you describe. Maybe not all of the materials will be local, but at least the communicating features can be left off. (And more important now than a few years ago, it could survive an EMP pulse and still work.)
“Ya best believe in cyberpunk dystopias, you’re in one”. -a meme
Osama Bin Laden was difficult to find due to his use of couriers. Genetic testing from a vaccine program found him, because he only trusted family.
I figure the cyberpunk equivalent of the pagers (and smartphone) bombs would be the “cortex bomb” from Shadowrun…
Good sleuthing. Shame it's a dead end for now, but then part of me thinks, "do the whos and hows really matter?" as with the coof in re the medical-pharma industrial complex, the key takeaway is the tech supply chain is fully compromised, or at least easy enough to compromise that you must act as if it is. Not that this should be news to anybody.
As for comms/tech alternatives, yeah this is something I think about all the time and have done a significant amount of research on, in anticipation of eventually doing a little hardware proof of concept. For a story, in Minecraft, of course. That project awaits time, space and equipment, but my take right now is that it's not entirely science fictional.
The catch is, you will always be using some components from the tail end of sprawling global supply chains. You cannot make SMT, or lithium batteries, OLED screens, etc. From scratch in your garage. At the bottom of every tech stack is something you have to trust. But trust can be a marginal, contingent thing, and you can constrain and safeguard and have backup plans.
For me the question is, how bad do people want or need this? Suppose someone spends 5 years of his life figuring out hardware and software to solve this problem. Does anybody use it? Does it help? In my look into prior art, the answer so far is no.
Maybe smoke signals and semaphores and carrier pigeons and hobo signs are all we actually need. Maybe they're even advantageous, in the same way the dying Navajo language was advantageous for secure comms once upon a time. If a protocol is so obsolete that nobody recognizes it, let alone knows how to interpret it, does it matter that it's "low tech"?