Jonathan S

The CIA overthrew governments and you found out decades later. Now they can't even hide a laptop. Bay of Pigs was secret for years but Afghanistan withdrawal was livestreamed. Vietnam casualties got managed but Ukraine casualties get posted hourly. The 1960s government could hide anything. Today's government can't hide anything. The information asymmetry that created elite power has inverted. WikiLeaks, YouTube, X, etc gave everyone surveillance capability over everyone else. The powerful used to watch the powerless. Now it's mutual. And the powerful look worse because they have more to hide. But here's the risk: having this exposure without alternative will increase nihilism. We will become (if we aren't already) world-class at *destroying* institutions, but no clue how to build them. Now, the responses from the elites we've seen to this shift is predictable and pathetic. They're getting more defensive, more contemptuous, more desperate to control narratives that already escaped. Every attempt to reassert authority just generates more mockery. They're used to managing perception not reality. Now reality is unmanageable and perception is worse. I remember this feeling from when I was working at Universal Music during the late aughts when torrenting changed the industry. First the execs ignored Napster. Then they sued teenagers. Then they begged Apple for help when iTunes launched. The pattern is always denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Except institutions never reach acceptance. They just die angry. People may think exposure means "we won" but we're tearing down load-bearing walls with no blueprint for what comes next. The French Revolution had the same energy. They knew what they hated but not what they wanted. That ended great. /s Bitcoin is the only constructive response to this dynamic. Instead of just exposing the Federal Reserve's failures we built an alternative. If you take a look at the current left/right "war" these movements are just mobs with smartphones instead of pitchforks. The elites deserve the contempt. The public deserves better than contempt. But deserving and building are different things. The information revolution gave us X-ray vision into power structures. And what we're discovering is they're all hollow, true. But the point isn't whether they'll collapse. It's what we're building in the ruins. Chaos is just the gap between destroying and creating. We're living in that gap. And it's getting wider.