Someone mentioned "Code is Law" in some thread. Millennials might understand the reference.

I don't know if Zoomers understand: there used to be cause for optimism.

There was actually a period of time where working at a startup to change the world for the better was something sincerely believed. I believed it. Took my first startup to disabuse me of that notion, but the dream lived on for a while.

I don't know if I'm making it clear: people with independent minds and people who abhorred the corporate state had this option to go through some soul-searching, come back from it to say very seriously, "I think I want to start a company or join a company which is just getting going because I want to change the world for the better" and your family would be proud of you.

That was a thing that happened to people.

It makes me laugh too!

But all of these websites were going up and these industries were actually having their asses kicked.

The years turned. The corporate world recovered.

And the corporate world was let in by one group of people. One detestable group of people.

I am of course seething at the bleakly horrible individuals of YCombinator, whose extrusion online is known to the Wise as the Orange Site.

Never forget that it is a bastion of the enemy.

They provided the corporate state with its inroads into the old Silicon Valley, which I never saw, being a Millennial and now Internet Old Frick. And they found every corner of value and they made a mockery of the creativity and power which resided there.

The way it works is this: you pitch your idea, and they give you a dab of money in order to work nonstop for two years to build a company, and they take a small cut of the ownership. You'll hardly notice the first cut, but you should have walked away rather than enter into a deal with an Investor.

Because Investors... they are not human. And you must never, ever forget this fact.

It is the terrible truth of money that if you possess enough of it (and it's hard to say how much exactly), your soul collapses into a black hole and joins the Eldritch Horror which rules this land and acts through meat suits, and if your soul collapses into a black hole that is when the meat suit is fully occupied.

It's hard to say how much exactly it takes because people sell their souls, if they're not careful, to get even a touch of the money black hole. One touch might be enough to feed you and your family for the rest of your lives... but it also might be the touch which drags you down to heck.

Such was Life in America.

The first cut is how they get you used to the cutting, and that first dab of financial solvency is the delirious anesthetic taking hold.

The next cut is called a Series A. They already own you. You took their money. And if you take a little more your company will be more impressive, have more grand ambition.

So you sign away another piece of the pie.

Founding a company was a good way to get rich, if you were as good as you thought you were. But make no mistake: you are being had.

It's their company: they're just paying you to work it.

Every Founder is a serf. It's only after they walk away rich that they become barons: freeholding individuals. Until then, if they make it, they're sharecroppers working a virtual field. The parameters of that field are well defined, which is how the corporatism comes in.

If you're Series A, you're ready for your little minion of Magog, your Gog-spawn, to EVOLVE, and your pal the Investor knows the right tricks for your minion to perform to train it up a level. Some of the first people involved might see baron-level wealth, but they'll be driven out or replaced by the entrance of the corporatism: that's the point of making you apply for a series A.

Series A, then B, then C. Each an evolution, and if your fell contraption born of financial wizardry does not starve it emerges full-fleshed into the light with a C tier of executives and suits.

The system reproduces the elements of the system: that's how there got to be this system everywhere.

Baron-level wealth is really where the line of having your soul collapsed lives, though it's hard to pin down exactly where within: you have enough money to get more or less anything you want but you are a piece on the board at best and if you play your cards right you can exit the game altogether because you're mostly the uber-consumer. There are wealthy barons with pure-ish souls (for humans), and there are poor barons who are possessed entirely by torturing demons. They cannot be saved but by the destruction of their wealth, and this their wealth will. not. allow. (This is the first command of money, the god of capitalism: thou shalt not waste money.)

UMC isn't baron level wealth. If you live in a suburb you are not wealthy. If you live in a nice suburb you are not wealthy.

I'm going to hit UMC and grow my own food. If I've made it in time. If things turn out just right. "Buy the dip."

Might even disconnect the Internet. Who needs it? I have a duty to discharge what I might, but that's it.

UMC wealth isn't hard to obtain provided you are capable of reading books, which you might not be. Access might be going out of sight for a while. Key to UMC wealth is having a career. Complete dolts can have a career if they can be reliable workers in a trade. People need to pay other people, not because a machine can't be trained to do the work, but because people trust other people. The best defense you have against starvation is being useful.

But true wealth is being at the other end of the table: investing in companies. Some barons try their hand at the game. Angel investors. Some of them made it to true wealth that way.

And they enter the generational game, bound by the dragon Azmodeus to the clan of their birth. Feuds which play out over generations. Brilliant drama, all locked up behind silence bought with pricy lawyers. Fiction only contains normal realities.

Thus did the optimism of the early Internet die, caught captive on walled gardens operated by the fell egregores of the Ministers of the American State, servants only to almighty capital. You don't have to hate capitalism but you also don't have to perform oral fellatio on it online. The left may be full of self-righteous egotists but at least they can identify that which is righteous.

"Code is Law." The code that defines a space comprises the law of the place. Pay your homage to @Aevann the Even-Handed, for he crafts the law of this place and is a god unto himself while within this demesne. "Code is Law" read Satoshi before he wrote the code that became Bitcoin (I fricking guarantee you he read it) which led, incredibly, to the minting of some new barons.

"Code is Law" said the wise counsel Lessig, whose journey before the Judicial Council of the land was a major drama for those with the eye to watch, as were his regrets that he failed to make his case to the old relics of the institution that would prove stronger, in its overbearing inexorable sweep, than the Internet could be.

You still look to hope?

Well of course you do. Here there still lives some fragment of that old Internet, and what I want the zoomers to understand, though, is that hope isn't enough.

Optimism will just lead you down the wrong path.

We had hope and optimism then, when "Code is Law" came out.

And we ended up here.

We had hope and optimism then, when OWS rang loud.

And we ended up here.