this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2026
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Inventing Reality
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that'd ultimately depend on what they can get from these conflicts, and i get the feeling people have been underestimating them. they can afford to make so many mistakes until they hit because they are spending all their power and influence on it and it shows (and they can).
the epstein files barely matter in the sense that the owner class will never see consequences for it in their own courts, ever. this one is up to you, actually.
you are not distracted, you are afraid. which is understandable because we all are to varying degrees, for many reasons.
Yes, you could put it that way. However, I’m more concerned that the conditions in the U.S. will eventually take hold here in Europe as well. While we certainly have a powerful class of billionaires of our own, our system still functions to the extent that even they wouldn’t get away with such blatant and terrible crimes unpunished.
In that sense, one must almost be grateful to the U.S. regime for having now dropped the mask and very impressively demonstrating where the inhuman turbo-capitalism that the U.S. has always stood for leads.
i think europe is gonna be seeing similar mask-off fascism, but because its own imperialist billionaires are dependent on theirs, and because many people there and everywhere have been lurking and dying to take their masks off too.
i've heard of mask-off movements already getting traction beyond the usual mask-on ones but i guess i'm more worried with our own fascists atm. up to us again.
i wonder how much of the us change in tone is serving to embolden and normalize the others. whatever the case is, we are in for some interesting times in a bad way.
Oh yes, definitely. In Germany, for example, it’s the far-right AfD, which is essentially a direct copy of MAGA. Unfortunately, the AfD is also very successful, as it receives massive support from the very same billionaires who made MAGA big in the U.S.—such as Musk, who gives them significant reach via Twitter and also financial support.
To me, this seems to be the dark side of the internet: The logical centralization of services that comes with the medium has unfortunately led to an even smaller group of unscrupulous billionaires now controlling the most important information platforms used by people worldwide.
I believe that what we are witnessing today—in my view, a kind of new monarchy of the super-rich—is the direct consequence of the network effect inherent in the logic of the internet: This effect has not only made these people astronomically rich, but also ensures that they can now influence public discourse even more extremely to their advantage than was the case in the days of traditional journalism.
This was already a significant problem with the rise of social media, but with the increasing prevalence of cloud-based LLMs, it is inevitable that, sooner or later, the discourse will shift in a way that benefits billionaires on an unprecedented scale. This is simply because deploying the relevant cloud AI models is so expensive that only multi-billion-dollar corporations can offer them—giving them full control over what people experience as reality.
The impact on democracies will be significant.
Democracy, after all, requires informed citizens. But if that is no longer guaranteed—because all the essential sources of information that the average citizen uses have been brought into line with the billionaires’ agenda—democratic processes can no longer function. Then people will simply vote for those fascist parties that serve as the billionaire class’s henchmen and get their support for doing so.
I am convinced that this is the explanation for the resurgence of fascism worldwide: this ideology is ideal for diverting attention from who is actually the citizens’ worst enemy. So that's what the billionaires want.
you are conflating the internet with capitalism and its old propaganda though.
the internet was initially idealized in a decentralized way, and the problems of profit-driven, proprietary, centralized and monopolized software were being talked about for decades now.
i've been hearing about facebook testing out emotional manipulation, addictive designs and personality profiling for the better part of a decade now to little fanfare.
democracy was never a thing in the west, it's just that we just reached the find out stage where they don't need to hide it anymore.