Rephrasing a common quote - talk is cheap, that’s why I talk a lot.

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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • instead I’m here boning up on the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.

    I mean, Ferengistan is Europe and in wider sense the West in Farsi, so - pretty logical.

    (Which is why I don’t subscribe to the theory that Ferengi are an antisemitic trope. They are a subversive futurist trope, “seeing ourselves through the eyes of others the same way we often see them”.)

    Everyone likes to see themselves as the heroes of some universe.

    It’s also true for some Soviet science fiction, like things by Strugatsky brothers communicate that deep painful wish for “us” to be that society of scientific workers and doctors, and the barbaric and lost people they visit and help to be “them”, but that’s not how the world is. Even the “approved” Ivan Yefremov with his “Bull’s Hour” shows a space colony which is supposedly a remnant of the “capitalist and imperialist” world, yet surprisingly reminisces USSR, while that team of heroes from heaven that comes trying to fix them doesn’t seem like anything from USSR.












  • Because it’s all trade and balance, so it’s probable that such a window into the world (which will have its own censorship) might be allowed. Probably throttled. Probably allowed and throttled depending on some kind of social rating and individual permissions.

    Unlike Tor, it’s not escaping censorship, it’s one portal (it’s in the name) somehow allowing access to a few select “free speech” (quotes mandatory no matter how you feel about actual free speech) directions.

    USSR had tourist permissions and allowed directions, and friendly socialist countries for which it was easier to get such a permission, and unfriendly capitalist countries for which it was pretty rare and involved state security following you, and so on.

    This might be similar.

    If you don’t see how something can be divided into levels of access for different citizens, then that’s just lack of imagination. They will think of a way.



  • In a world with tightly regulated Internet this might start making sense. Tor and its traffic won’t make it through AI-assisted censorship systems like China’s GFW and Russia’s whatever-it’s-called-but-they’ve-started-breaking-everything-here. While a portal managed by foreign superpower’s government might be allowed simply because of diplomatic pressure.

    Not too different from how radio became regulated all over the world.

    It’s a shame, but what can you do. We are not demiurges, we are grains of sand flying with the wind and floating with the current. Sometimes we get melted, sometimes split, sometimes wet, cold, hot.

    I’m not ashamed of dreaming of a different future and arguing in favor of it many years ago. But I’m also not ashamed to admit I was likely wrong.