Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
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836 Followers
Tech wasn’t a neutral bystander in the collapse of academia, media, and the arts. The same voices now clutching their pearls over what tech is enabling—what Trump is leveraging through tech—were the ones who helped build the system that made this possible. To pretend otherwise is pure naïveté.
Even as bloated, compromised, and gameable as they could be, media, the arts, and academia weren’t just passive victims. They were imperfect but essential checks on technological authoritarianism. By undermining these institutions, tech dismantled its own systemic counterweights—like ripping out the immune system while claiming to be providing healthcare.
There’s no such thing as neutral technology, only a deliberate mechanism of institutional erosion. The “neutral arbiter” pose is itself a strategic move—tech doesn’t just accelerate contradictions, it exploits and weaponizes them to expand its own power and control. 1 reply
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Cyberpunk isn’t just about dystopian futures—it’s about the failure of successive faith based systems, each of which once promised order, progress, or salvation but collapsed under their own contradictions. The genre layers these failures, showing societies where techno-optimism, corporate paternalism, state control, and even countercultural resistance have all failed to create stability.
Thats why Solarpunk and similar optimistic sci-fi strains struggle to gain traction because they assume a level of societal self-correction that feels increasingly implausible. The weight of history suggests that institutions—whether state, corporate, or ideological—rarely self-reform in a meaningful way. Instead, they tend to calcify, collapse, or get subsumed into new, equally flawed structures layering over each other, creating a world where belief systems persist past their usefulness, unable to dissolve yet incapable of stabilizing 1 reply
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People keep talking about inflation—can you believe it? They say, “Sir, prices are up.” Well, guess what? The stock market, folks, has never been lower. Just tremendous, really. Stocks are down! Way down! Some of the lowest numbers in history—since I’ve been president, at least. So really, shouldn’t we be celebrating? I mean, if you think about it, everything is cheaper… if you’re buying companies instead of groceries. Very simple. Basic economics. But the fake news won’t tell you that! Very dishonest people. Very sad! 0 reply
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The thing about crypto being immutable is that it's a digital problem, not a real one in the sense of Philip K. Dick's idea of reality. Reality is what doesn't go away when you stop thinking about it.
Cold mediums like records, paintings, and sculptures don't need that upkeep. They persist whether or not someone maintains them. A vinyl record warps, a painting fades, a sculpture crumbles, but they don't disappear the moment a network goes down or a consensus protocol fails. Crypto, by contrast, is built on digital fallibility—what's called "immutability" depends on an infrastructure that demands constant energy, maintenance, and belief.
It's a forever subscription model. The moment you stop paying into the system—whether in attention, in computing resources, or in raw belief—it starts slipping away, like a lapsed domain name or an abandoned MMO. 1 reply
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Imagine you’re a fisherman on a vast, unpredictable sea. Some days, you’re out in a small, sturdy boat, anchored close to a rocky island where you know the fish are plentiful, but the weather is slow to change, and you can’t catch much until the tides turn. Other days, you’re on a fast sailboat, darting across open waters, chasing schools of fish that seem to appear and disappear without warning, sometimes only to find out they weren’t really there to begin with. You might find yourself believing there’s treasure on the horizon, even if it’s just a mirage. In this sea, you can’t always rely on the currents to guide you, and what you think is a sure catch might be nothing more than a wave of excitement that vanishes as quickly as it appeared. Some boats sail with certainty, but the rewards are slow, while others seem to fly with the wind, promising riches, but their direction is often as fickle as the breeze.
Steady waves roll by,
Chasing winds on restless seas,
Truth lies in the drift. 0 reply
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Just a few years ago, under the golden dusk of late-stage empire and the gig economy, the vampire was a vibe. They stalked the night murmuring Baudelaire under neon rain. They were gentrifiers with fangs, lurking in curated lofts, sipping plasma spritzers, whispering about the aesthetic of the hustle. You were supposed to want the job and you wanted them to bite you. Queue Orlock/Nosferatu rising again, rat-faced and ravenous, creeping through the rotting infrastructure. He doesn’t need permission to enter. He does not do brooding glances or existential regret. He feeds. You, in turn, wither. Your friends don’t get a sexy leather-clad eternity. They get hollowed-out husks, drained in alleys, discarded like expired product. Then there’s plague. 2025 vampires don’t love you. They don’t even like you. They are here to consume, and no, you will not be transformed into some midnight demigod. You will just be someone’s sustained nutrition. 1 reply
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