A Trump win would prove the Fermi Paradox

The 2024 election will determine if humans (at least in the US) can handle the greatest gift ever given to human kind — Democracy. If Trump wins, the answer is unequivocally NO. Especially if the Republicans also control Congress. And we won’t be able to blame it on the politicians. Autocracy will have been proven to be more effective. Why? Probably because anger, hate, division, illogical emotions, ego fulfillment etc. WINS vs. Logic and cooperation over social networks.

It is probably a mathematically certainty that we will destroy ourselves because we can’t organize. The power of Technology is growing at a geometric rate and our ability to control and manage it is crawling along at an arithmetic rate. We’ve wired people together so fast, and we’ve destroy our institutional controls and filters without replacing them with something more suited to the Web. Our filters and controls were institutions like:

• News Media: There used to be a few networks which although imperfect and subject to control by those in power, still prevented crazy ideas from dominating and overwhelming us. It has been replaced by entertainment and propaganda, much of it coming from dubious sources, some of whom are our enemies (e.g. Putin) and some of whom are just egomaniac idiot savants (e.g. Trump, Musk)
• Political Parties: They used to filter out crazy people, but with more direct primaries, that has gone away. It has allowed some fresh new politicians, but at what cost? Now many of our most powerful politicians have more in common with P.T. Barnum and Caesar Flickerman from the Hunger Games.
• NGO’s: They lobby the government on our behalf — and many people seem to not be aware how important they are, on both sides (I used to be a lobbyist). These are still somewhat intact. How effective they are is another story. It seems like many of the more dubious ones (e.g. Heritage Foundation) have more funding and resources than the ones that represent our interests (e.g. AARP, ACLU, etc).

Even though autocracy appears to be more effective (we’ll know after the election), it will probably crumble as more individuals (e.g. Elon Musk, a certified nutcase), gather power, and all the powerful egomaniacs fight each other. The best hope sadly appears to be China. Putin, although probably one of the key masterminds behind creating the wedge that takes us down, appears to be too egomaniacal to be able to do basic things like collect accurate information (The Dictator Dilemma)

What is the Fermi Paradox? In a nutshell, it’s a theory that there is no life out in the Universe that we can detect because they’re all dead and/or they always revert back to prehistorical barbarism like in Mad Max after nuclear war. They destroyed themselves. The only question is why, and can we avoid their mistakes — and make it through the Great Filters. We appeared to have made it though one filter, at least for now — nuclear energy. Can we make it through the next one — The Web?

Can people coordinate for the good of themselves in large networks? Can they do so in an autocratic environment? There are a few examples

• Scientific Community / peer reviews: They’ve been doing this for centuries, even during times when the Church tried to stop it
• Vulcans: Mr. Spock taught us how — by demoting our emotions and embracing logic. It was a bit extreme, but seems to have worked.
• Large Successful Corporations: I work in one, I’m in charge of cybersecurity. I’m able to FORCE people to be accountable and more or less do the right thing despite their CONSTANT protests, because I have the support of senior management and I’m really good and exposing risk in a very clear way and holding people accountable. And management owns stock in the company, and there are filters in who makes it into management — those in control had to deliver financial results in order to get promoted. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than putting anybody into management. Financial incentives aren’t perfect, but they work pretty well — better than probably anything else. For example, I worked with a huge Germany company that makes the chips that go into credit cards. I asked them how does anybody know if their chips are really secure and have no backdoors — the answer is that if they weren't, they would eventually get busted and their stock price would tank.

Can we do do this?

Well if Trump wins, the people who haven’t been brainwashed by Trump, Elon, and Putin’s propaganda (i.e. those who live in a world of hate which allows them to blame their frustrations and problems on other people), won’t be able to organize. And we will. We must.

How?

The $64M question! Well one possibility is to be like Vulcans, starting off with creating/using a different kind of social media platform where logic prevails. The closest thing I can think of is something like Reddit, but with more filters and controls so chaos doesn’t dominate. People in power can chose to use these platforms as their PRIMARY mechanism to engage with their followers (e.g. Politicians, celebrities, etc.). Here are some ideas in this video I created: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra7m_aCUE4w&list=PLltCWMwSKk4OU0IEAsUSOVURheCSdnQlW&index=20

And we must do this even if Trump loses. Because the problem won’t go away. Plus our democratic system has been broken for years. The Democratic party is infected with money interests (among other things). And so were/are the Republicans. The reason why we’re in this situation to begin with is most likely because the vast majority of our politicians are on the take or out to lunch — we just disagree on what to do about it.

Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe it will galvanize us to remind our politicians whose in charge.

A tall order, but we have no choice. We are in a cyber world war right now!! World War 3 has ALREADY STARTED.

Here’s some relevant music videos I created: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXIYDpFR8c0&list=PLltCWMwSKk4OU0IEAsUSOVURheCSdnQlW