Tay Zonday

@tayzonday

98 Following

3170 Followers

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This is a great question. I have purchased hundreds of Chinese-produced consumer goods from Chinese Amazon sellers and while I presume my deep data lies in Amazon’s Customer Relationship Management system, I’m not sure how much those sellers can access. I know that many Chinese Amazon sellers, at minimum, get my e-mail because a few actively bribed me not to leave negative reviews during the pandemic. One Chinese air filter manufacturer even false flagged my Amazon account for “racism” and I had all reviews deleted (“community privileges suspended”) because noting their terrible product was Chinese was “racism.” Also, American companies outsource more and more customer data management to India, the Philippines and jurisdictions that are presumably easier for foreign intelligence to compromise. I’m not sure that ownership location within China materially increases the Chinese Communist Party’s American consumer surveillance capability. Vectors are prolific and poorly monitored.

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There are so many things besides Tiktok owned by Chinese companies that aggregate American customer data. The recently launched Marvel Rivals game (made by NetEase) is one of them. Banning TikTok would be digging a hole in the water.

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I trended yesterday, but reach on @farcaster does feel like American real estate: The closer you began to the founding and Diamond-handed a theme, the more exponential the outcome. I’m also 47 different content genres here. The appeal Venn diagram is smaller than if I spun biz analysis, corny jokes, mental health, social policy, music, philosophy, history and non sequitur platitudes into separate umbrellas.

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Thunberg tweeted numerous damaging, context-free statements about NFTs such as “NFTs are destroying the Earth.” Because the environmental impact of fiat economics can be easily characterized as disastrous— one has to ask: Did Thunberg select NFTs as a target of ire— and not zillions of other equally valid “are destroying the Earth” targets like golf courses or iPhones—because it was a new and trending topic that was still being defined in the public mind? When movement-building, we must be very careful when we use “othering” language. If I say, without context, “blacks commit crime!”— I am making an objectively true statement. It is also objectively true that proof-of-work cryptocurrency (Ethereum NFTs) had an environmental cost. Both are true. However, “blacks commit crime!” is an irresponsible, diabolical thing to utter by itself. It’s predatory. It’s manipulative. It appeals to the worst in mob psychology to exile and degrade. So is “NFTs are destroying the Earth.”

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“Twitter left” probably cost me $10 million or so by hysterically attacking innocents for “destroying the Earth” during 2021’s NFT bull market, if the earnings of similar meme projects like Nyan Cat are an indication. At the behest of Greta Thunberg (who I agree with on vision but not tactics)—“leftists” using cell phones with 1. Raw material mined by child slaves in Congo because of fiat money 2. Shipped to China for inexpensive assembly because of fiat money, and 3. Wastefully packaged for western consumers because of fiat money ALL at apocalyptic environmental cost— . . . Used those phones to attack Ethereum NFTs as the most toxic environmental vice ever because Ethereum was temporarily Proof-Of-Work. Or because rage-bandwagoning on a trend builds clout. There are many reasons the right-wing DNC lost to righter-wing MAGA at the expense of genuine leftist advocacy. Innocent people losing jobs, careers, and businesses in misguided attacks did “leftists” no political favors.

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Critiquing “liberalism” is great. We should understand attitudes and terms that can be used to erase and oppress. However— any “leftist” talking about “liberalism” the same way a KKK Grand Dragon talks about non-Aryan blood should make you wonder: You should wonder why they preach black and white “purity politics” rather than aspirational consciousness that offers to further any individual on their journey; You should wonder why their “revolution” reduces your family, friends and role models to a eugenic identity defined by the oppressor; You should wonder why their loyalty to a dogma resembles loyalty to a religion, and why that loyalty sounds like right-wing theocracy with a wardrobe change. If you see a “leftist” like this, remind them that the revolution has room for the willing. Remind them that loudly signaling “leftism” with a bullhorn is an unequal privilege denied to many who are marginalized and oppressed BY liberalism—and not a character attribute.

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Enslavement remains legal in the United States as punishment for crime. While it’s not selling human bodies on an open market like chattel slavery— the prison industrial complex has historically had a range of commercial and oligarchic motives that are divorced from public safety and rehabilitation. Douglas A. Blackmon’s history book “Slavery By Another Name” dives into this history in the eight decades after the Civil War.

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I dislike identifying as leftist, liberal, centrist, conservative or right-wing. I prefer to identify as the truth. That being said, I also dislike identifying as “black” in a discursive vacuum, but there’s a combination of historical realities that has made declining to do so untenable. Like blackness, leftism is a set of epistemological assumptions with real-world power dynamics. When in Rome, one may not always do as the Romans do but one sometimes has to speak as the Romans speak. It just so happens that species goals grounded in moral and socioeconomic truth are sometimes described as “leftist” the way that certain dermatological melanin lineage is “black.” My humanist goals can be articulated with modern monetary theory, poststructuralism, socialism, libertarian individualism and a range of other things— just like an application can be written in C++, Java or Swift. “Leftist” is where my humanist goals frequently fall in taxonomy by others just like “black” and “male.”

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I tend to be attracted to fierce critiques of my flaws. It’s probably one of the most reliable ways to appeal to me. That’s not to say I relish abusive or baseless criticism. However, criticizing me when the criticism has noble passion or factual merit primes my mind for hypergrowth, even if I don’t agree with the entire critique. This may be a characteristic where “treat others as you would have them treat you” isn’t always the best practice for me. There are times when I am thrilling in discursive head-butting and the thrill is not mutual. If I thrill the opposition with what thrills me— they aren’t necessarily energized nor inspired. One flaw I’ll openly admit— and one not unrelated to my experience of being autistic— is missing social cues when the type of passionate, earnest discursive conflict I non-judgementally thrill in is not mutually desired. I can be doggedly parliamentarian and not notice when parliament— as a mode of conflict with decorum and goodwill—is closed.

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If I eat a big meal, I often burp loudly. If I see a person burp loudly and say “you seem like you ate a big meal”— it’s an effort to empathize. If I am desperate, suicidal, homicidal and boiling over with rage—as has sometimes been the case because my 42-year life is a human life with a spectrum of experiences—I express ideas with a certain tone. If I see that tone and casually note “you seem like you’re desperate, suicidal, homicidal and boiling over with rage” it’s an effort to empathize just like my followup when I see a loud burp. The person who burps loudly might not have eaten a big meal. The person using tones I’ve used in some states of mind might not have those states of mind. Empathy and attempting to connect about common human experience is inexact and imperfect. Empathy involves using one’s own feeling references to try to identify with what a person feels. Empathetic dialogue is a back-and-forth of non-judgmental earnest description and earnest correction.

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I just grabbed a fork from my kitchen drawer and scratched my back with it. For 45 seconds. I’m NOT apologizing!

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These are fantastic thoughts. One question that comes to my mind: With roughly 750 American military bases in roughly eighty countries outside of the United States, is any global struggle divorced from American hegemony geopolitically, historically and culturally? I can casually connect almost any American headline to any global justice struggle. Pick a U.S. headline topic and a global struggle out of two hats at random. For example: Flint, Michigan lead poisoning and repression of Iranian leftists? Post World War II war manufacturing capacity and oil dependency got re-appropriated as gluttonous consumerism for which Flint was both a design aesthetic and auto industry factory town. Racist bank covenants evacuated non-white wealth from Flint during and after auto-making’s heyday. Eisenhower’s CIA overthrew Iranian democracy at the behest of those same banking and oil interests in 1953. Those interests abandoned Iran’s Shah when he challenged their hegemony paving a path to theocratic takeover.

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Kids today will never know the thrill of walking through a parking lot with no backup cameras. When backup lights came on, we had to be psychiatrists and make eye contact to assess the driver’s state of mind. Now we just make sure to be three feet back from the bumper in a 165 degree pie slice.

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When I reach far back in the grocery self to get the latest expiration date and it looks like my whole body is being enveloped by a cereal box monster, I want the intercom to announce “LOOK AT THAT GREAT LIFE DECISION ON AISLE SIX!” with a fake cheer track to validate me.

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Every driver has played the game where they try to match the blink of the turn signal in front of them to the click their turn signal makes.

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It’s weird how being called a “vegetable” means you’re unhealthy but eating a vegetable means you’ll live to one-hundred.

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Every shower knob has a mile between “freezing” and “warm” and a fingernail-width between “warm” and “rotisserie.”

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I am so tired of picking bicycles, staircases, bridges and busses to verify I am human— only for a computer to tell me I don’t know what those things look like.

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I always look for historical analogs. There was a time when consumer adoption of intranets (AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy) exceeded consumer adoption of the Internet. Proximity to blockchain architecture rather than centralized Web 2.0 architecture is crudely analogous. The historic disruptor was the utility and adoption of the World Wide Web as a decentralized protocol. The Internet had numerous early protocols: Telnet, Usenet, IRC, Gopher, etc. None of these drove adoption with irresistible cost savings through merging of labor and objectives. What is 2024’s World Wide Web equivalent? Is it Farcaster itself and we’re just in the year 1990 on the WWW adoption curve? Where does a flexible Layer 1 social protocol solve problems that are created by needing to appeal to X/Twitter, Threads, Layer 2’s like Lens and more closed architectures like BlueSky? Crudely put, what causes today’s investor to say “Fuck it, use Farcaster” the same way investors slowly gave up on building in Compuserve and Prodigy?

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Thoughts on BlueSky VS. X/Twitter VS @farcaster VS Threads: I favor blockchain tech infrastructurally. My biggest issue with X has nothing to do with common complaints about its perceived political shifts or aggressive monetization . . . It’s that X’s recommendation engine tech— its ability to thinslice demand and deliver niche post matches to users—is worse now than when it was a public company. Threads is deploying Meta’s world-class interest targeting IP. Its recommendation engine is wiping the floor with every competitor now. I’m loquacious, so my biggest dislike of Threads and BlueSky compared to Farcaster are their shorter character limits. Farcaster also has a more interesting API and software development ecosystem right now than BlueSky, but it can also trip over that resulting cornucopia. It needs to lubricate adoption in order to scale.

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