Today, I’m publishing a time capsule from two years ago.
This October 20, 2023, video features my Digital Autonomy and the Arts conversation with Gabriel of Libre Solutions Network and Micro-dosing Failure: A health journey.
At the time of our discussion, the Israel-Palestine conflagration had just been ignited a couple weeks earlier, and now, we have the appearance of peace.
AI tools like ChatGPT were still relatively new arrivals, and Gabriel and I were grappling with some of the ethical and creative concerns associated with this paradigm-shifting development.
Fast-forward to today—a mere two years later—and AI is so ubiquitous, students are using it to write their papers.
Idiocracy’s prediction of an illiterate future by 2505 now appears half a century optimistic.
I can’t help but think of Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book Future Shock and the subsequent 1972 documentary in which Toffler warns about the psychological repercussions and cultural whiplash resulting from the rapidity with which technology was changing society. He writes in the introduction:
“The acceleration of change in our time is, itself, an elemental force. This accelerative thrust has personal and psychological, as well as sociological, consequences. In the pages ahead, these effects of acceleration are, for the first time, systematically explored. The book argues forcefully, I hope, that, unless man quickly learns to control the rate of change in his personal affairs as well as in society at large, we are doomed to a massive adaptational breakdown.…
“In 1965, in an article in Horizon, I coined the term ‘future shock’ to describe the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.…
“It became clear that future shock is no longer a distantly potential danger, but a real sickness from which increasingly large numbers already suffer. This psycho-biological condition can be described in medical and psychiatric terms. It is the disease of change.”
If that was true of 1970—whose pace of change appears as quaint as a horse-drawn carriage now—imagine how many more people suffer from “shattering stress and disorientation” in today’s exponentially changing landscape.
Sometimes shocking change can be good, though.
In that same two-year span since my chat with Gabriel, he has made dramatic lifestyle changes, achieving a MASSIVE weight loss totaling 240 pounds!
Whatever you want to change in your life, if you think it’s too big, too arduous, or too daunting, just remember what Gabriel accomplished in two years—and draw inspiration from his herculean example.
Digital Autonomy & the Arts: Part 3
October 20, 2023
Gabriel began our interview by playing Dr. Tess Lawrie’s reading of Mistakes Were NOT Made.
Gabriel:
Welcome, everyone. Today is the twentieth of October 2023, and I am Gabriel introducing you to the Libre Solutions Network. This is Part Three of my series on Digital Autonomy and the Arts. This is where I really want to communicate with artists who have been impacted by the same digital technocratic control that has taken over people’s lives, especially recently, but has been creeping in over the last couple of decades. This series first started with me having a conversation with Liam Sturgess, and also I had another excellent conversation with Liam Sturgess and Visceral Adventure joining me. Today, it is my honor and pleasure to introduce Margaret Anna Alice of MargaretAnnaAlice.Substack.com.
MAA:
Hi Gabriel. Thank you for having me.
Gabriel:
Thank you. And the real reason I want you on is because you are a scathing wordsmith. You have done an excellent job, especially in that poem Mistakes Were NOT Made, really cutting through honestly a lot of the confusion and BS that’s thrown people’s way.
Many people will comment about just how chaotic the information landscape is because not only is it overtly manipulated, but it’s also being flooded, which is just a horrible combination for somebody who’s honestly just trying to navigate the world. And so what I love most about your poems and writings is that not only are you addressing the real dark reality of what’s going on, but you’re also giving people hope and clarity that is so hard to come by these days.
I just want to feature your Wake-up Toolkit, which is definitely something that really anyone should start with. It is an amazing lexicon of information. It has so much to—I’m going to scroll up to the categories here because you have done a phenomenal job outlining all the major themes and aspects of the COVID crisis, as I like to call it.
Just from your perspective, how did you find that?
MAA:
How did I find—
Gabriel:
The process of going into this much detail and trying to get the word out?
MAA:
It began as simply—and really the process hasn’t changed—I’m absorbing all of this information; I’m critically assessing it; I’m trying to see who’s telling the truth, who’s telling lies, who’s telling half-lies. Anybody who has read my Substack knows I’m all about the evidence, so if I make a claim or a statement, I always try to link to substantiating evidence because for me, it’s not about me standing up and saying, “This is the truth.”
This is simply me pulling thousands of different references and resources that I have waded through, and I’ve pulled out the ones I feel are of value, and I’m presenting them in a way that is easily digestible for my readers. And those who have the desire to investigate further have those resources at their fingertips, and they can follow all those rabbit-holes I’ve opened up.
I have some readers who’ve told me that they will set aside entire days just to go through a single post and watch all the videos I embed and follow all the different references, which I am very moved that they actually take the time to do that, feel it’s worth doing that, and then they go on to share it.
Like Mike Yeadon always says, he can only reach the small group of people who are listening to him at that particular moment. He relies on the people who are listening to then go on and carry that information to the people within their own lives because we’re just trying to reach as many people as possible, and we can’t do that without our readers and our audiences.
Gabriel:
Precisely, and a big one for me is Are You a Good German or a Badass German?
This is something I’ve actually gone to revisit many times because in the context of—there are generally two obvious directions of, “Do you go with the herd?” People are all going in a major direction, whether it’s orchestrated, whether it’s even organic, and sometimes you can choose not to comply or to opt out or make a sacrifice to do something outside of what’s generally prescribed for everyone. And I like how you do such an excellent job at addressing serious moral topics. I don’t want to say without passing judgment, but making the choice clear and not making the reader feel too bad in the moment. You can reflect on your own decisions, but you’re really putting their moral compass at the front of the driver’s seat in many of your writings here. And I think that’s phenomenal. I’m curious if you have any extra thoughts specifically about this, the Good or Badass German piece.
MAA:
My whole letter series started with Letter to a Covidian, and that’s similar to this in that I am doing what CJ Hopkins says is holding up the mirror to the people, showing them their behavior, and trying to get them out of their current brainwashed mindset, helping them to step outside and see themselves more objectively. In Letter to a Covidian, I was saying think back to 2019 … “What would that person from, at the time, it was two years prior, think about the person you’ve become now and the behaviors you are exhibiting?”
And with Are You a Good German or a Badass German?, the Good Germans think they’re being wonderful, compliant citizens. And I think I mentioned this in my interview with Mickey Z., but their compassion has been weaponized against them, and the governments, the people, the behavioral psychologists, the propagandists, the people who are crafting this messaging are doing focus groups, they know what’s going to push people’s emotional buttons, and they know how they can contort people’s morality in order to accept things they never would’ve normally accepted if it were just stated plainly.
Gabriel:
Precisely.
MAA:
So they have to trick people who think they’re good people into becoming horrible people, really, and behaving in discriminatory, hateful, divisive ways. And we’re seeing that playing out right now with the whole Israel-Palestine situation. It’s all about getting people to take sides and pitting people against each other who may be otherwise aligned within the medical freedom movement even. And we’re seeing that division happen instead of people stepping back and once again seeing the puppeteers pushing their emotional buttons to get them to fight with each other and miss the bigger picture that really something like war is only there to serve the purposes of profit, power, and democide. As Göring says, the people don’t want war—of course, they don’t want war. What’s in it for them? They have to be dragged to the bidding of the leaders by telling them that they’re being attacked and then denouncing the pacifists who are trying to bring clarity to the situation as traitors.
It’s the same formula over and over and over again. Unless people can begin to recognize when those tools are being used against their own best interests, it’s going to keep repeating.
Gabriel:
And “tools” is a great word. My entrance into writing on Substack, which is where I discovered you, was writing the Tools of the Technocracy where I had noticed many of these same manipulative tactics being deployed programmatically through social media platforms and through a lot of the digital systems we interact with. My principal concern was really raising attention to the fact that it’s, “Look, these algorithmic feeds are manipulating you to get angry, to get enraged, to not only forget other people’s humanity but even your own.”
MAA:
Exactly.
Gabriel:
I’m sure pretty much everybody has a personal experience with it, but I can certainly admit to having some of my own. And it is a very difficult thing to confront. And so my reaction when I first started to personally notice that thing was I wanted to look into a different direction. How do you not get sucked into that?
And honestly, I took what I guess some people would see as an extreme step. I disconnected from most mainstream media, deleted Facebook, and lost a couple of friends from that first step alone. And a big part of it is there are independent ways to access information. There are more decentralized platforms than others, and I think platforms are a big part of the picture.
But when it comes to the inflamed tensions and the ways those are weaponized against people, this is the reason why I chose to do this series. I think recognizing each other’s humanity no matter what the issue is, whether it is conflicts over the COVID crisis, whether it is larger geopolitical conflicts, the fundamental truth that we need to recognize is that we are all human beings and that we need to at least try our best to peacefully find ways of solving our differences.
Because we’re always going to have differences. We’re never going to find a time where, “Wow, we got, everybody’s the same now, it’s all perfect!” But most people know that probably wouldn’t be perfect, either. And so this really does strike at just how deliberate a lot of this is because there clearly are people profiting off even just the division. There’s lots of money to be made if you just want to pump out fear porn and rage-based content. And the algorithms are more than happy to give you that engagement. Now, yes, there are certain parameters and certain limits to what particular forms that’s allowed to take, but have no illusions that I wholeheartedly believe that if you are tapping into that wellspring, there are definitely avenues that can be rewarded.
And so just from your own work and your own experience, how do you approach choosing one platform or another? You’ve got a broad presence on a couple of different ones. What brought you to Substack specifically and what would make you consider switching even to something like Mastodon or the Fediverse?
MAA:
Well, I’m an unabashed Substack evangelist, and I had learned about it maybe about a year or so prior before I actually started one. And just sort of in the back of my mind—and this was before, well, okay, so I started April, 2021 and maybe I’d heard about it in 2020, I’m not exactly sure. But it was just percolating in the back of my mind, and I knew very little about it except that it was an independent platform where writers can connect directly with readers. There’s no censorship, there’s no sponsors, there’s no pressure to abide by certain community guidelines or whatever. It’s just that direct relationship between the writer and the readers. And the readers then have the opportunity to support that writer if they feel that person is doing valuable work.
And that’s really all I wanted. I just wanted that direct communication between people who appreciate my work. I didn’t want any advertisements, any corruption, any corporate infringement. And it was quite clear, and I think it still is, that the Substack creators are committed to preserving free speech, and they have defended against the pressures to censor repeatedly. So I feel like their integrity has been tested, and they have shown their commitment, and they also have resisted offers to have it purchased, which is always a concern. This great platform may exist, but some corporation could come along and scoop it up and completely destroy it.
And I have had experiences with other platforms. My husband and I had an Open Salon blog, and I had a couple of other Open Salon blogs where I was publishing chapters from books in progress for a couple of different projects. And that was an amazing experience for the very intense month or so that we were doing it, but it then quickly started devolving into a lot of gossip, and the whole junior high school–type atmosphere of the popular kids picking on the unpopular—and just, we really didn’t like that aspect of it.
But it was like Substack took all the positives of that experience and the connecting with kindred spirits and the being able to write and connect directly with readers and stripped away—I don’t know how they did it, but all those, I know there are some ugly personality and narcissism issues that do crop up, which are going to crop up anywhere. But the overall atmosphere of Substack I feel is just very supportive of free speech, open debate, being respectful toward one another. Of course not everyone’s going to be this way, but at least in the circles that I travel in on Substack. I am biased, but my audience, I feel like these people who have gravitated toward my Substack are just incredibly brilliant. They’re people who care about the truth, and they are very voracious in terms of resources and references, and so they appreciate that I provide those, and they’re funny, and they just have a good-natured spirit to them, and they’re open to discussing ideas with people they may not agree with and being mutually respectful. And that’s just kind of the environment I’ve tried to cultivate at my Substack.
And then when people come in and try to be hateful and sow division and things like that, most of my readers are really good about putting them in their place with humor and doing it in a fairly respectful way. And I try not to get involved in too many of those tiffs. I just let them sort it out. I don’t really have time to deal with the comments. I’m also very strong free speech absolutist, and so there are things people will say in my comments that are offensive or that I disagree with, but I feel like they have that right. I know I have the right to shut them down if it’s something actually dangerous or if they’re calling for violence or something like that. But fortunately, I’ve never had the need to do that, and I feel like—let their words stand and condemn themselves. My audience is smart enough to be able to discern what’s wise and what’s bad, and they can filter out what they feel is not valuable.
Sorry, I think I went off on a tangent. I don’t even remember what your original question was.
Gabriel:
No, you did a great job. I asked why you specifically chose Substack, and a lot of that rung true to me. Because I’ve been harsh on the platform. I pushed that piece recently Is Substack a Trap?
And don’t get me wrong. I’ve got to be very harsh on any centralized service in general, but I recognize the value it provides. It is a very seamless way for somebody to join a newsletter. It has those great community features that support the great people that have come to the platform. There is a lot of robust discussion, and that really is incredible. And the thing that I’m grateful for is the fact that this conversation would not even be happening if not for said platform. So to me, that is at least a little bit of a testament that there is a lot of good that can come out of even some of these—it’s still a corporate platform in many ways. And don’t get me wrong, I do secretly hope that this is just a pit stop people take before really embracing more fully ground-up solutions.
But truthfully, if everybody just switched from Facebook to Substack, that alone would be such a big improvement for overall discourse that I’m not going to knock people for making that pit stop—which is a big problem I see, especially for people from my persuasion, people in the free software movement. We are really passionate about this stuff, and it is really easy to make perfect the enemy of good, which is where I try to constantly at least remind myself that incremental progress makes a big difference.
The challenge is, though, I will say it does have many similar problems as some of the other Big Tech platforms. For instance, it was really fascinating when Substack added Notes, which is their Twitter equivalent. And at the start—I didn’t know this because I don’t have that many readers or whatever—but apparently, once you were at say a few hundred thousand readers, you were put into this pool, and you could communicate with other people who are on that tier.
And so suddenly, you had all these really big well-supported artists, sorry, writers, having real arguments now. Now it’s like, oh, Substack decided it was cage-match time, and I guess that’s not really what they’re trying to build. So they did eventually get rid of it, but I thought, “Wow, this is going to be the best thing in the world.” If we can actually get different ideologues actually being—not forced because nobody was forced—but at least getting them to have those dialogues. And so that’s something that I think is kind of an open question, and that is something that drives me to go to the Fediverse because while it is still largely tech people, the funny thing is tech people as a group are not united on really anything else. I’ll go there, and I’ll read somebody who’s just as passionate as I am about independent websites and self-hosted solutions, and their politics is straight-up alien to me. I can’t even sometimes understand the points they’re making. It is that diverse a community. I have a feeling any hobby or any sphere of life is going to have the same thing. But it’s such a big thing where it’s like, I think one of the reasons I love the Fediverse in some ways is because I am really enjoying that I can learn from people who are so substantially different from myself. And as somebody who likes that and appreciates that.
Even on Substack, the explorer feed that they have, I find is not recommending people that are that different. And I hate to say it, if I just go to the trending or the top picks, I hate to say it, that’s like, “Well, everybody knows about them.” It is not particularly new or novel because I’ll admit, when you’re trying to go for mass appeal, you have a different strategy than large people. Now there are still people, you mentioned CJ Hopkins, who can get quite big despite being authentic.
And I do think one of the things worth discussing here is satire itself as an art form, whether it’s in a comic strip, whether it’s a video, whether it’s music, or whether it’s written words. And I do think satire is one of the most important tools in the tyranny resistance toolkit, especially in an age of rising tensions and actual hot wars because humor disarms people’s intellectual defenses, so to speak.
And if we can actually satirize warmongers in a way that isn’t downplaying the victims of them, that really is fundamentally the goal. Because we need, in general, as far as I’m concerned, for people to truly wrestle with some really dark stuff, no matter what problems we’re digging deep into, whether it’s the economy, whether it’s people’s health, whether it’s these broader conflicts, the truth is so incredibly dark, and it’s so hard to really raise awareness of that without well falling into the trap of just fear-mongering and making people depressed or just assessing the gravity without that air of hopelessness.
This is something I’ve seen come up in many discussions like this, but where do you find your hope to move forward? What is the thing that really makes you keep wanting to push out that next article or wants to really engage with any of this at all?
MAA:
My favorite Emily Dickinson poem is Hope is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul. And I call myself an Apocaloptimist—and I came across that, I think it was a Robert Malone meme. It wasn’t his, but he posted it in one of his meme posts.
And I immediately gravitated toward that term, although generally I eschew labels. But that one was just so perfect because I see and acknowledge the catastrophe unfolding around us, and it is dark. We’re talking about democide at a global scale of potentially 17 million people killed to date, and God knows how many millions if not billions vaccine-injured.
All of this in terms of the push for one-world government, the WHO’s machinations—all of that is very dark and might make people feel hopeless. But I am so inspired by the community that I’ve connected with, the free thinkers that I’ve met all over the world who are exhibiting such extraordinary courage. People like Tess Lawrie—she inspired me to launch my Profiles in Courage series before I barely knew anything about her. I just read the exchange that she had with Andrew Hill. The transcript was in The Real Anthony Fauci.
As soon as I read that, I thought, I have to celebrate this. This is exactly the sort of courage we need to see everyday individuals exhibiting when they’re faced with people who are complying with tyranny and people who are selling out their souls for what—who knows why Andrew Hill did what he did—but exposing that corruption I feel is so absolutely vital.
My hope comes from seeing people standing up to this juggernaut. Even though they are a relatively tiny percentage in the world, that courage is contagious. And when other people who are what I call swing thinkers—this middle 30 or 40 percent—who in their gut know that the propaganda is a lie, the coercion that’s going on is not right, but they are too afraid to stand up and say it. When they see other people doing that, they can work up the courage to do that themselves. I think it has blossomed in an amazing way where millions and millions more people are doing it, and it’s just spreading exponentially. Everybody, when they see the difference between freedom and tyranny—unless they are so menticided that they cling to tyranny because they’re so fearful and they need that sense of safety that they resist freedom.
People who are still reachable on a rational level recognize how much more wonderful freedom is. So when they see them side by side, they tend to gravitate toward that. And as long as they can overcome the fear of being nonconformists in a society that values compliance with tyranny, then they can make that leap toward freedom.
And the more people do it, then the more the people who are complying with tyranny become the minority. And that’s the tipping point that we’re looking for because once the people who are crying out for enslavement are the people who others begin to mock and criticize, then it’s much easier for those swing thinkers to come over and say, “Yes, let us reclaim our freedoms. Let us resist these tyrannical philanthropaths.”
Gabriel:
Well, that’s the thing. Not only is courage contagious, but creativity is contagious. And that’s what excites me about this discussion as a whole is that if we can get people to be courageous, I feel like the creativity itself will also follow.
I have spent so much time trying to up my own skills, especially in terms of content creation. And part of that, let me pull this up, is I’ve been trying to actually present some of the technological ideas that I want to educate people on and use free open-source software to actually build these things. A big one is that I’ll just go, where I started was there’s a software called Inkscape … and it’s free, open-source, works on Windows, Linux, Mac, the whole shebang. But I found it really helpful as somebody who is not particularly creative, it allows me to do stuff where if something’s not aligned, it’s very easy to just straight-up align it with this button here, last selected, bam. There we go, trying to do this while looking at two different screens. But the thing is that I really like the tools that are out there, and the thing I like about this as opposed to something like Canva or Figma or some of the other cloud-based solutions is I can just hand the file to somebody if they need to make changes. I think that collaboration is probably where it needs to go, but unfortunately, most of the collaboration happens on Big Tech platforms.
I think a big part of what makes this series important is that seeing is believing. I really like this one, though I did use an AI-generated image as a background here—where it’s like there’s so many concepts that are really just easy to have in our mind, and it’s great to be able to really just put it out there. And I love that the free open-source software ecosystem is, as far as I’m concerned, developed enough that people can really start getting involved and doing what they can do to just take their ideas and put them out there. And I think, like you say, there are so many more platforms now where people are avidly asking for more people to just stand up, just add their two cents, whatever. And you don’t have to be the expert yourself. You don’t have to be the best artist out there. You don’t have to be even the most eloquent. Find whatever it is that speaks to you, something you care about, what you think can be done. And I think that can pay a lot of dividends.
Going back to courage … being contagious. I want to just play your Ode to a Whistleblower.
I just want to say I really appreciate the lines there that really emphasize that it is all of our responsibility to carry the truth, especially if someone takes the risk to put it forward. And that’s a big job, whether it’s the person who originally is holding on to some classified information or even just somebody at a company is doing something wrong. It really does permeate all levels of society, but that initial person is taking on a particular risk. But even the first couple of people that really just recognize what it is and pass it along are also taking a bit of a risk. But the more people who stand up and the more people who participate in that tidal wave of change are the people who are really what makes this all work.
And don’t get me wrong, it would be amazing if one person just had the power to take it all on themselves, but I find—I keep saying this regularly where I say censorship is a demand-side problem. If people are not curious and want to actively reach out and find different sources of information, really they’re doing the censors’ jobs for them in many cases. And the only way to really counteract that is to be proactive in sharing information that is being suppressed and to be part of that discussion yourself by at least not adding to the silencing of somebody by refusing to at least understand the case. You don’t have to always fully stake your personal stake on it, but at least hearing people out, understanding, using your judgment, and figuring out what you can do about it.
MAA:
Definitely.
Gabriel:
I am just curious, and specifically, I know there’s a tribute at the end of that video, but if you could talk a bit more to the specific inspiration for Ode to a Whistleblower.
MAA:
The poem itself, I actually wrote and published, I think it was maybe December 2021, and I published it at the end of my Profile in Courage on Tess Lawrie. And it wasn’t about her specifically, it was more just generally praising whistleblowers and her being an extraordinary example, of course.
But then when Daniel Ellsberg passed away several months ago, I can’t remember the exact date, but it was also coinciding with Julian Assange potentially facing extradition to the United States, a maximum-security prison, almost certain death. And so the convergence of those two events—and also knowing that Daniel Ellsberg and Julian Assange were good friends and Daniel was very committed to freeing Assange—I republished that poem and wrote an article to accompany it, talking about both Daniel and Assange.
And for those who are unfamiliar with Daniel Ellsberg, he is the person who released the Pentagon Papers and leaked them to the press. He spent what I think may be a couple of years copying these classified documents, going through, I think it was at the Rand Corporation, and that’s why I have the imagery of the copy machine. He had to do this in a very secretive way. And prior to that, he was actually fully on board with the Vietnam War. But once he started being exposed to these documents and seeing the truth that the people in the government were aware of but were hiding from the public, he thought, “These have to be released. The public has to know.” The public has to know that the government knows there’s no way to win this war. That they’re just throwing these soldiers into the meat grinder and killing these innocent Vietnamese civilians, and there’s absolutely no point to it except for once again, profit, power, and democide. And the whole domino theory with communism, which was just a way of dragging the people to the bidding of the leaders like Göring says.
He took this enormous personal and professional risk to release these documents to people he trusted in the media—when there were still trustworthy people in the media—to publish the Pentagon Papers. And that almost singlehandedly turned the tide in the favor of peace. And once people realized how much the government was lying to them, that all this bloodshed really was senseless, there was an even more dramatic uprising and demand for peace and an end to the Vietnam War.
And so that just shows the power of a single person seeing something and having the courage to share it publicly, even though it meant his own arrest and the threat of, I think it was what, 127 years or something in prison for being a “traitor” or treason and revealing those classified documents. He only got off because of the technicality that the CIA had broken into his psychiatrist’s office to try and get dirt on him. So when that was revealed in court, that exonerated him, and he was able to get off on that legal technicality.
But Daniel Ellsberg always said, Julian Assange is being persecuted for the same thing. Even though he’s not a whistleblower, he is a journalist who is revealing the leaks of whistleblowers. He’s a conduit for those truths. And he has suffered just excruciatingly for not—he hasn’t even committed any actual, he hasn’t broken any laws, really. And so it’s just a travesty that he has had to suffer this and that he is still being held in prison in Belmarsh, and who knows what’s going to happen with his extradition.
I published that poem with that article to raise awareness about Daniel and Julian. Diane Perlman was organizing the Whistleblower Summit’s tribute to Daniel Ellsberg—this was, I think maybe around July 30—on Whistleblower Day—they had a tribute to him at the Whistleblower Summit conference, and she asked me to contribute a video, and so I just threw that together. She wanted me to read my poem, and it just came together very organically in a very short period of time because I just had to get it to her as quickly as possible. But it was very rewarding looking through those archival materials and seeing what an inspiring, heroic person Daniel Ellsberg was. And the courage that it took for him to stand up and say those things in the context of what he was experiencing at that time and all the propaganda that was going on then, pro–Vietnam War and from the pressure from the government and everything. He knew he could not remain silent.
Gabriel:
It’s so incredible that he had the desire to do that at that time. That’s definitely a unique attribute. I think if you put 100 people in the exact same situation, you probably wouldn’t have a high number who’d do the exact same thing he did. And what really gets me about this is that disconnect between what is actually happening that people are aware of and what the public is aware of, and how those two things don’t match up. Whether I have a personal belief that most people are fundamentally good and that really if people were making informed decisions about all kinds of things, the government or even corporations that we tolerate are doing, things would change substantially.
And that’s the challenge, fundamentally, is that not everybody does have the access, and the people who have the access in some roundabout way are benefiting from the fact that it’s ongoing. There is just the simple hush money if you’re getting well-paid in these positions, but you highlighted the fact that back then you could take something damaging to the government to the press and be reasonably confident that they would at least give as much of the story as they can. Whereas now, the media has really undermined its own trust in the public’s eyes, it’s been declining significantly. But I have a feeling the polls are probably underestimating how little trust there is in the media as a whole, and that’s a problem for everybody. That information channel, as far as I’m concerned, is part of the problem. I wrote a similar piece about Assange specifically talking about how this failure of intelligence, the fact that society as a whole is keeping itself in the dark by not having open, transparent discussions means that the censorship is actually working to undermine the very structures it’s supposed to be protecting, which is why I think so many things are so dysfunctional.
I think of people like Doomberg, the green chicken that talks about energy and economics. He represents a group of people from the energy sector who are saying, “Look, there are serious problems we need to address because there are problems on the horizon.” And they clearly noticed that talking within the normal confines of the approved channels for these things wasn’t working, so they also went to Substack, and they started really raising the profile of energy issues. And I think that’s just a solid testament to just how bad things are that when people in the know want to tell someone, oh, they also have to take it on themselves to self-publish the truth, and that really should be more scary than it is to most people. I don’t think people even recognize that disconnect. And part of it, I do hate to say it, but it is dangerous to speak the truth, especially these days on a wide variety of topics. And so it isn’t surprising that there’s so much self-censorship and that there is so much reluctance to really challenge orthodoxies across the board.
I know people are pretty divided on Jordan Peterson. I like some of his old lectures. He really does have some interesting points on philosophy, but like anyone else, there’s things you could like and dislike in general, especially in the context of what’s going on now, maybe he’s being a little—he gets in trouble for tweeting a lot, and I’m not terribly surprised about this. But he does have this excellent speech that I have clipped out somewhere where he says, “A lot of people are waiting for it to be safe to speak,” and he points out that you just have to accept it is not safe to speak. By choosing to speak the truth in whatever capacity you’re willing to do, you are taking on a risk. And that is the fundamental fact of doing that very behavior.
Now, I have a little bit of flipping that on its head. There is a little exception where if you can just present scenarios, present ideas, be abstract about it. If you recognize a problem, and maybe you’re not willing to take the risk to take the full brunt of, “I’m saying this is happening for sure.” Maybe you just want to put the pattern into people’s minds, and this is where fiction becomes phenomenally important. Suddenly, instead of saying, “Oh, I know this company that I worked for is doing this behavior, and it’s having these consequences, and that guy should go to jail.” Instead of making this huge public accusation, you could probably write a story. And that story may even be more popular than your company’s product, for all you know. You could be working databases for the government. And you could write a story about, “Oh yeah, there was this regime that had these databases and they were tracking everyone, and this is how they used it.” Because it’s fiction, you’re not levying any real accusations. And I think people do recognize these patterns.
For instance, there’s a lot of media that I watch, for instance, even some of the recent Star Wars stuff is really on the nose when it comes to even just challenging tyranny. Apparently, Star Wars is, the original material, the old trilogy was inspired by some of these old stories, which is why Star Wars content across the board, it’s about challenging authority, especially abuses of authority.
Just to really highlight this even more, you have this book here, The Vapor, the Hot Hat, and the Witches’ Potion: A Fairy Story. And would you like to introduce what happens vaguely and why you chose to write it?
MAA:
It was one of those—and this happens to me a lot—the words just start pouring out. It starts maybe with a sentence, and I write that, and then the rest just tumbles out. I feel more like a conduit than an author of it. And this was just one of those pieces that just came out, fully formed in a single sitting. For me, it was like, “Okay, the vapor, that’s obviously the virus, and the hot hat is the mask, and the witches’ potion is the vaccine, obviously.” But of course, I don’t spell any of that out because I want to keep it as abstract as possible. Like you said, I want people to see the pattern for themselves and see how the propagandists—the town criers in the story—are spinning the fear and getting people to believe in something without even any evidence in order to manipulate them to comply with these completely nonsensical regulations.
If you look at Biderman’s Chart of Coercion, which I talk about in my Letter to a Tyrant, one of the steps of that—and this is a brainwashing, coercion pattern—is to enforce trivial demands.
Even though we had all of the scientific evidence that we needed in 2020 showing that masks do nothing to prevent the transmission of respiratory viruses, and we had a century’s worth of evidence to show that, they wanted to enforce these trivial demands.
It was also to dehumanize us and to separate us. The social distancing, the lines in the grocery stores—all of that was about breaking our human connections and turning us against each other and tribalizing us into Covidians and people who refuse to comply with tyranny—the troublemakers, the conspiracy theorists, the anti-vaxxers. And so those became the defined enemy that it was safe to attack and to criticize.
In the story, I have the anti-hatters, the anti-drinkers—of course, they are vilified by the propagandists and ultimately suffer the consequences for standing up to tyranny. It’s a dystopian fairy tale, so it doesn’t have a happy ending. But for me, it was a cautionary tale describing what was unfolding at the time of the writing, which I think it was maybe September [August] of 2021, if I’m recalling correctly, and what would ultimately unfold if we don’t stop it.
When I published it, the response was completely, way more enthusiastic than I anticipated. OffGuardian picked it up. And people felt like it laid out what was happening so clearly and the dangers of the direction we were going that many of them felt that they could share it with people who were Covidians who were otherwise resistant to just straightforward fact-based articles. One person talked about reading it to his wife, and she was actually very open to it, even though she was very resistant to all of the statistics and details and things that he was sharing with her prior to that.
I felt like that was another example of how fiction, satire, and art can circumvent those cognitive defenses that people automatically have in place to protect themselves from truths that threaten their beliefs.
Gabriel:
The cognitive defenses are actually quite robust. For instance, there’s this phrase, I’ve come across: thought-terminating cliché. Quite a few years ago, I noticed there were people who, if you sent them a link from say a particular video-hosting site, they would be like, “Oh, it’s from this site, therefore, there is nothing possible that could be gleaned from a website where people could submit content. It’s user-generated.” It’s not even like this is like a publisher outfit where they have a pretty clear idea, this is a diverse set of whatever. And I actually saw—my other half sent me an Instagram video of this guy saying the same kind of thing. He’s like, “Oh, if your argument cites an article or a podcast, you don’t really know what you’re talking about.” To be honest, it is shocking to me how people have been conditioned and condition each other to disregard seriously giving anything a look. And this is tough because I will admit there is a lot of BS out there.
I’m not going to discount the fact that looking into any particular issue is difficult. And yes, people are mostly incentivized to share complete nonsense because that’s what gets the clicks, that’s what gets the desire, the rush to share, the urgency. And it is hard. It is hard to separate fact from fiction, but to me, you have to have that conversation and start it somewhere.
Now, yes, maybe not everybody’s interested in having every particular discussion in every particular comment they put out there. I understand, time and a place for everything. But where this line between fact and fiction gets really surreal is what I’m calling the collapse of the intangible. Because I believe AI-generation tools, they’re pretty powerful already. You can pull off very powerful things, but not only the AI, because AI tools themselves have a limit of what they can accomplish. But I hate to say artists themselves, whether they’re visual effects artists, whether they’re voice actors who can do phenomenal things, the ability to manufacture, again, BS, illusions, forgeries, that’s something that I think is only going to get easier.
I don’t think there will ever be a time where it’s impossible to find the truth at all, but I will certainly admit those who do want to either flood the scene or just trying to put something out there to put something out there, it does get easier over time.
I’m curious on your thoughts on these AI-generation tools in general, especially as a writer, for instance, ChatGPT people will be like, “Oh, what’s the point in browsing somebody’s website if I can just ask ChatGPT itself to write me a story about X, Y, and Z?” In your opinion, what’s your stance on using it? Do you think AI should be used at all? How do you feel about these generation tools in general?
MAA:
I think it’s like any other medium, any other tool—it’s neutral1. It just depends on the people and the powers that are using it, what their motives are, and how it is used.
I was listening to your discussion with Tonika and Liam, and I believe Tonika was saying she appreciates these AI tools as an artist, and she can see a way to accelerate her own creative productivity and use it to create something that is meaningful and useful. So just like when photography came into being, there were the same kind of discussions that were happening then—it’s like any form of technology brings about that conflict between the old way and the new way and the authentic way and the technologically-boosted way. Now, I do think AI poses special threats because of its ability to replicate voices, images, and videos in a fairly convincing way. So those tools can—when in the hands of nefarious actors and governments and propagandists—certainly be used for evil purposes.
And so the interesting thing is—one example being the whole “forty beheaded babies” claim. I was just astonished that anybody believed that because it is so common for baby atrocity propaganda to be released. And it has been repeatedly used to get countries into wars—from German soldiers bayoneting babies to the babies in Kuwait being pulled out of incubators. To me, it was just so obviously propaganda intended to emotionally incite a reaction that circumvents people’s reason, logic, so they will be pulled along to whatever narrative the propaganda want them to believe. But the reason I’m bringing it up is because AI was apparently used to generate the images that the Israeli government provided that were supposedly evidence of the beheaded babies. Well, on the flip side, AI was then used to debunk those images because there is a tool that you can use to submit images to, an AI tool, that determines whether the image has been AI-generated. And so that tool was used to prove that these were AI-generated images. So in a way, AI circled back and was able to be used as a tool by the people who were seeking the truth to expose people who used AI as a tool of propaganda.
Gabriel:
I don’t know the final result of that particular issue, but I will admit, one of the things I saw on the community notes at the time is that—and I myself am honestly skeptical that it’s easy for an AI tool to check whether an image is AI-generated, especially if it doesn’t have access to a whole bunch of metadata. If it downloads the file directly and can read a lot of the embedded information, I might be more plausibly convinced, but I can definitely understand why somebody—truthfully, with anything, if somebody has a tool out there that says this is or is not fake, ultimately that is a judgment call in many scenarios. So I don’t know for sure where that landed. I do know last I saw there was some back and forth about somebody pointing out that that tool doesn’t have the final say.
And I’ll admit, I honestly would recommend to people going forward, no AI tool that detects AI has the final say because how this works is their genetic algorithm. So what you’ll have is you’ll have your AI image generator, and then as part of its training function, it’ll have another AI tool that learns to detect fakes. And you kind of have this tug of war going on where they’re both making each other better. And so, truthfully, what could detect an AI photo or not or fail to today may not be able to do that in the future. And that’s where a lot of this kind of blurs together. And what’s tough about faking tragedy, because I’ll admit as somebody myself, I find it very easy to believe that horrible things would happen in war, very human warfare is an atrocious barbaric act on its own. There’s all kinds of horrible things going on, so I can definitely understand. It’s not really a willingness belief, but by default, it’s like, “Oh, what else is new? People are bad.” It was almost kind of the default, especially even on Twitter, where I was following some of the discussion.
One of the videos I came across, which I thought was fascinating, somebody had simulated a car fire, an Unreal Engine that I think illustrates this to a T, I’m just going to mute the video here, but it’s like he’s showing you, it’s like, “Oh, look, I can manipulate this in real time.” And this is the state of the art of the advanced stuff. I’ve had a casual interest in Blender, which is a 3D VFX software. I even use it for my own video-editing purposes because it’s so broad-based. But the thing is this kind of stuff, I’ll admit VFX has gone a long way in the last twenty-some years.
It’s the kind of thing where I have seen stuff being developed by following Blender’s development because it’s an open-source project. You get to see how this goes on. There are some great people who do tutorials about how to do some of these VFX scenes. One of the things I saw, Corridor Crew, Corridor Digital, they have a YouTube channel where they talk about VFX issues, and they were discussing how they would fake an alien video.
They did something really fascinating, actually, because—again, I mentioned metadata and embedded information—what they did is they got three Teslas to drive around a mountainy, hill kind of area, and they downloaded the recordings from those Teslas and got the proper metadata saved at the time so that then when they use their VFX knowledge to build the fake scene of a—because they could design it in 3D, they would have the cameras motion-tracked in these different areas. So they put physically—“physically” is such a weird way of talking about it—but a physically accurate UFO in their 3D scene and then rendered it to the three different videos, and then focused on making the metadata match.
So that is something that I tell you, if they had, “Oh, we had a forensic investigator investigate, this video is dead, bang on.” You can make a very compelling fake. And yes, right now, there isn’t just an AI that you hit a button and it does all that. That was a team of people working really hard.
But let’s be real, when we’re talking about governments and intelligence agencies, you can’t tell me they don’t have the budget to put that level of effort into faking things. And when it comes to simulating different dynamics, it’s really just a function of computing power. And the other thing that I would also caution people about AI models in general, it is really fascinating what these tools can accomplish. But I have seen in the image generator space and the language model space, there is a lot of effort going into—because Facebook was working on their large language model, their version of ChatGPT. And so somebody leaked the downloading file for all the model files into their GitHub as a Torrent. So people just started downloading it like crazy and developing on it. And that created a tool where somebody could, you could try running it. And I tried it myself. And what’s funny is all the AI safety people are freaking out. They’re like, “Oh my God, there is an uncensored language model out there. People are going to generate anything!” And it was built by Facebook, so it was trained on Wikipedia and a bunch of stuff. It didn’t quite meet ChatGPT standards, especially, at least with the version I ran. Because how these models work is they exist at different sizes. You can load thirteen gigs of AI memory into your computer, and you’re not going to be able to accomplish, say the same amount of effort and detail and all of that with a whole data center worth of effort.
One of the things I’ll caution you, AI is absolutely energy and compute-intensive and immensely so. And so there were offline versions of these tools you can use. And what’s fascinating about this is actually the Facebook model was technically licensed for commercial use. So some people were arguing that if you had that offline version, you could build your own product right off the get-go. And what was the most fascinating thing about that development, though, was that that was a huge AI language model was quite, I think it was like 300 gigs to download. And that would mean if you were to run the whole thing, it would take like 30 gigs in memory to, you’ve got to have a beefy computer, but you can actually reduce it.
They had a mechanism called, one of the developers was quantizing the model, which means you have this really big model that’s trained with so much content out there, whatever, and you could reduce the size of it. Now, yes, it’s like compression. There is a tradeoff between how much smaller you get, how much more accuracy it maintains. But for many purposes, this is where I’m trying to broaden people’s ideas on where this can go, because it doesn’t just apply to text generators. This applies to all kinds of things. And I actually think when it comes to whistleblowers of the future, I have a feeling a lot of whistleblowers in the future might just leak these AI models because it’s so much, so expensive to make, but so easy to share fundamentally.
I’m pretty critical about how Big Tech operates. So a lot of AI practices are downstream of that. For instance, a lot of these AI tools, whether they’re online video editors or online generators, they’re data-mining you while you’re doing that, and to me, that’s kind of a line that’s being crossed, and that’s what I’m opposed to. But the truth is, I actually believe the tool itself, the process of machine learning and mining insights from broad sets of information and building a tool on top of that. I actually do think that’s actually quite emancipatory. And to go even further than that, because it’s a make-once-and-then-easy-to-share kind of situation, it faces all the same dynamics of information on the Internet. They cannot stop people sharing copyrighted art, music, whatever, because people just refuse to comply. That’s just something they’ve never been able to do despite international cooperation, a whole lot of resources put into fighting piracy. And I think AI will have the same kind of thing in the long run unless they’re able to actually enact complete top-down tyranny.
And we know they’re trying, believe me, I know it’s certainly on the agenda, but it’s something that I think it will be more emancipatory over time. It is hard to separate it as it currently exists from the practices that are around it, especially because many of these image generators, many artists—for instance, the DeviantArt community had a freakout because DeviantArt was announcing, “Oh yeah, we’re training AI based off your content, and it’s opt out, not opt in.” So there was a lot of frustration over that back and forth.
Just to really hammer home, I guess, how nifty these tools are. I really like this video about—it’s faking Wheatley’s voice, which is a character from a video game.
Somebody yearns for StarCraft, I guess. It’s like this illusion blurring of real picture. You can add Wheatley saying whatever you want. And that’s what troubles me the most about how the technocracy is really clamping down on AI.
Today, I actually got a survey from Angus Reid where they were asking really leading questions, “Oh, what should Canada do to regulate AI?” And it would ask you if you are a person from different minority groups. I am a pretty heavy guy, so I guess I can put myself down as disabled one way or another. And also there’s a neurodivergent category, and I think every one of us in the COVID resistance can put ourselves down as neurodivergent in one way or another.
MAA:
Yeah, I have oppositional defiance disorder.
Gabriel:
Oh God, yeah, that one makes me mad. But yeah, so the questions were really leading. They’re all like, “Okay, so are you worried about AI? Yes or no?” And then it’s like, “Should this particular vulnerable group be consulted in development of these tools?” And the problem I have with this is kind of the presupposition. If I’m a programmer building this tool based off open-source information and there’s no untoward stuff regarding copyright or local laws, really I don’t see what’s wrong with that. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with somebody developing a tool because—especially as somebody, my eyesight’s kind of going in a couple of different ways. And so text-to-speech is something that’s really helpful. And honestly, if I could use that voice-cloning tool to read everything I read in either my or somebody else’s voice, I would love that because text-to-speech is something that is so helpful, especially with a broad range of content. There are so many books out there that are just a PDF file. I have saved documents, whatever, and I could definitely benefit from ingesting that through audio rather than having to work with it in pure text. That’s a limitation I have.
MAA:
Yeah, I’m addicted to audiobooks.
Gabriel:
So that’s the thing I find really struggling is that in the name of protecting people with disabilities, they want you to make them develop this infrastructure to control the development of AI, which I’m wholeheartedly against. But then the flip side of it is they’ve also got you from the other end. And this is where I do think there are real concerns where they’re like, “Okay, but what about institutions, whether it’s government, banks, whatever, should there be restrictions on how they use AI?” And truthfully, I can see why somebody would answer yes. If there’s a bank using AI to determine who’s creditworthy and who’s whatever. There are real discrimination issues to be worried about. But on the flip side, I hate to say this, I don’t believe the AI is actually the problem in this equation. I believe the problem is the diffusing responsibility through these tools instead of actually having procedures in place.
And the other real concern I have with this is that it’s not the AI itself in my opinion, that is actually the root of the problem. It’s the surveillance that the AI requires to do its task because when they’re asking, “Should there be human oversight over how banks use AI for transactions?” What that presumes is we are building large AI models based off an immense amount of customer data that I believe should be private, but who knows if it currently is. And that information can be correlated with so many things.
And that’s where, to me, AI use by the technocracy is absolutely a terrifying and staggering thing. And to me, I do see that as very separate from, “Oh, how should this be handled in development?” Because yeah, I don’t want them to use, “Oh, Big Tech is doing these bad things, therefore we need complete control over who has access to this.”
They’re already undermining people’s access to encryption with so many different laws. So I am so against this idea, but when it comes to the human oversight angle, they’re having you agree from a get-go, “Oh, it’s okay if this is done, we’re not going to raise any issues with all the surveillance that’s inherent with it, as long as there’s human oversight at the end of it,” which I don’t think will be sufficient.
One of the things I’ve been really railing—especially because here in Canada, we do have protected classes and protected class frameworks. I personally believe that in the age of AI, those are completely useless. You need to stand behind individual rights because what AI can do is—even if it’s got some kind of parameter where say, I’m a pretty heavy guy, so it’s like, “Oh, they have a rule that they can’t discriminate against overweight men.”
Let’s say that’s a parameter they have set in. There are things that correlate with that. Maybe buying a Coca-Cola last week is something that really flags you down to the system and oh, you just lit it up in to pass whatever arbitrary rule they put into place.
And that’s the thing I want to scream from the rooftops when it comes to AI in the broader technocracy landscape is individual discrimination is coming. That is the real threat people need to be aware of. It’s not so much that the AI is—that’s what they scaremonger about. They’re like, “Oh, AI is racist.” And to be honest, yes, there are disparities in data sets, there are disparities in how these tools are developing. Of course, nothing is purely in a bottle. Humans make tools, and that’s how they work. And I understand all of that, but the true application of this stuff is that it will be used to target you as an individual no matter what your particulars are.
You could hit all the right boxes, whatever the right boxes currently are or will be, but you as an individual may be targeted. And this is where the genetic side of it and the transhumanism side of it does get quite scary because we are seeing this overall cascade of all of this. And so my mission in a lot of ways when it comes to moving forward on these issues is I want to help those people who want to not feed into that data beast.
I’m noticing more and more, it’s hard for people to even realize it’s an option. I’ve still been kicking myself—I need to make a video. I run Linux, and a lot of people are like, “Oh, running Linux is the answer.” I’m like, “Well, it’s a start, but it’s not everything.” But it’s like I probably do need to just show off, “Oh, this is my workflow, this is how all this works.”
Because I am constantly hitting the fact that especially younger people now, they are kind of growing up in an environment where they were handed a tablet at what twelve or sometimes even six, depending on how young they are. And all they’ve seen are these highly commercial data-mining apps, and it’s normalized from a really young age. The idea of this conceptual thing, it’s like, “Oh yeah, there’s this box that doesn’t have a camera, and it has Internet access, and I can choose what it does” is so far away from what somebody growing up sees technology as these days. It’s kind of staggering. And I guess, as a Millennial, it’s kind of weird. I just saw the tail end of the analog stuff, but I’m young enough to kind of see where this is going.
I’ve even talked to people who are substantially younger than me, Zoomers, the younger generation, they are just as passionate as I am about self-hosting because they see just how ubiquitous it is. And so at minimum, I encourage people, take control of your own information, whether it’s your writing, whether it’s your work, whatever. By embedding your processes in machine-learning tools or Big Tech tools, there is a cost to putting everything on somebody else’s system. I encourage people to come together to really support things.
This is why personally, I think PeerTube is actually one of the best software that exists right now. It is our decentralized YouTube replacement. I try to walk the walk, and part of the purpose of doing this series is so that I have something to put there to show people, “Guys, it works. It’s here. We can participate.” And so this is where I think the kind of cooperation between people with different skill sets is so important.
I don’t think it’s a fair standard to go to every artist you know and say, “Oh, you should set up your own PeerTube. You should go through all the technical tasks securing, whatever.” No, we got to work together. If you are a person who has the ability to self-host, maybe offer some of your artist friends, “Hey, I’d like to host your music on Funkwhale or host your live concerts on PeerTube and these different decentralized options. ’Cuz we can help each other. We can work together. We don’t all need to do the same thing to be, “Oh, you better be doing what I’m doing or the high road.” It’s like there should be a high tolerance of this fight of resisting tyranny that we all kind of do our own thing and help each other out because I think that’s the only way we do this. I myself do not have the ability to learn this tech stuff and then also dig into the truth of all these different misdirections that are thrown people’s way.
I do have to trust some of the people I follow. You mentioned Michael Yeadon—that he knows this stuff and he’s quite serious and I trust him absolutely, especially considering a lot of this stuff he has really put forward. And it is our job to really share that information, which is why I like to highlight the good tools that are out there to really show people—it is a choice right now. We can take advantage of what exists and do what we can. And I think there is an immense amount of opportunity. Because yes, my latest article was about hardware vulnerabilities. If you really delve deep into the state of digital technology, it is bleak. Nothing is perfectly secure. There are always going to be vulnerabilities, a way somebody can be gotten, but I don’t think anyone should ever let that get in the way of just trying something out, getting it done. Because if we waited for a perfect option before getting those articles out, before getting the content out there and having those discussions, we would wait until it’s way too late. So really any incremental thing people can do is fundamentally important.
And so I’m really thrilled that I get to have you on here and you can talk about your stuff and your passion and part, perspective of this picture. And it can still be on PeerTube, be super-decentralized, and awesome, whatever. Working together is the way we solve this, which is why I call it Libre Solutions Network. It’s a network. It’s my project, but I want it to be about connecting people. We’re doing great, fantastic work because really that’s the only way we’re going to do this. This is it’s not just one person.
I kind of went a bit on my soapbox there, but is there anything else you’d like to share just to leave people with?
MAA:
What you said reminded me of one of the things that I often say about Substack, going back to Substack. It has enabled people like us to connect, and each of us brings our own particular expertise. And you offer unique expertise in technical information that I am not seeing elsewhere. So I’ve especially appreciated your voice and the knowledge you bring to it. And every single one of us, we are part of this spiderweb, and we are exponentially expanding our collective knowledge set. Say, for example, Jessica Rose, I consider her the world’s preeminent expert on VAERS data, the vaccine adverse events reporting system. She has deep knowledge of that particular issue as well as a number of other things, but just that being one example. And with each of us bringing our very deep expertise in particular areas and presenting it in a way that can be quickly digested by others who share our same passion for resisting tyranny and ending democide, I feel that it is incredibly empowering.
And the more people come to this—and I hate the term “collective” because of the socialist/communist connotations—but this communal sharing of knowledge where we are pretty much accelerating that process of learning. So many of us—I follow almost 600 Substacks. It’s impossible for me to keep up with them all. But even if I just see the headline flying fly through my inbox, I’m getting that little bit of extra information that I wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise.
And what you said earlier by you’ve given up mainstream media, most social media platforms, you have followed what I outlined in my Letter to the Menticided, which is a twelve-step recovery program from menticide.
We are getting away from the priesthood of the legacy media and the Ministry of Truth. And we all have the ability to access that information directly from the scientists, from the doctors, from the people who are true experts and not ones who play experts on TV.
And we can decide for ourselves what is valuable information, and we can apply our own critical thinking skills and decide who is trustworthy and who is not.
One of my pet peeves is the fact-chokers and the Ministry of Truth saying, “You do not have the right to assess this information for yourself. Trust us. We will be the ones who,”—as Jacinda Ardern says—“‘We are your single source of truth.’” That to me is one of the most enraging statements and philosophies I have observed because I want every single person to have the ability to look at this information naked without any opinions attached to it or manipulation and biases and let them decide for themselves. Because I do believe, like you, most people have that intuitive gut instinct. And when their critical thinking skills are intact, they have the ability to see through the lies and see when someone is authentic and see when this information rings true. And we just need governments and social media, Big Tech, all of them, to get out of the way between the people and the information and let the people decide for themselves.
Gabriel:
One hundred percent, and three cheers for that. I am wholeheartedly behind what you said there. And just to kind of finish off here, I want to play one of your videos. You have a lot of excellent videos on YouTube and Rumble, but this is another one of them: Do You Remember?
Thank you for that. And it was great to have Visceral Adventure on last time to share with us. If anyone hasn’t seen it, it’s a good reminder to watch Part Two.
And thank you so much for joining me, Margaret. I was very excited for this, and it means a great deal, honestly. You are somebody who I have looked up so much to in this time, especially, and it has been hard on so many people, so thank you for being a bright light to remind people of their and other people’s humanity in chaotic times.
Is there anything else you’d like to leave people with or anything you’d like people to check out as we bring this to a close?
MAA:
Well, first I want to thank you as well, Gabriel. Like I said, you bring a unique voice to this and that knowledge that so few of us have, but it’s very empowering. So I encourage everyone to sign up for your Substack and follow your tools of emancipation.
I do also want to say Tonika is the one who edited the video that you played. As you mentioned, she goes by Visceral Adventure on Substack. And that’s just another example of these exciting connections that lead to these amazing artistic collaborations. That has been one of the joys of this experience for me, and I have some more collaborations in the works that I’m excited to share in the future.
Note: I did some cleanup of the transcript for clarity and flow along with inserting relevant links.
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I no longer believe AI is neutral as it reflects the a priori “knowledge” of its programmers and the a posteriori “knowledge” of its users in a continually evolving state subject to the biases of its human sources.
