Morning, back to the old routine.
Dark days for Boeing, the contract they have with NASA worth $916 million ended in September and looks from this news that it’s not being extended and can you blame them. Boeing is the senior element financially on a deal they share with Northrop Grumman to supply NASA’s ‘space launch system’, a key part of the Artemis program returning humans to the moon. Considering they couldn’t manage to make sure a capsule could undock and had their astronauts had to be rescued by SpaceX, there have to be questions being asked now about if they’re the right partner for the Moon return. SpaceX’s focus skips the Moon for Mars, but should Trump win Elon Musk’s influence is likely to be felt more at NASA and future deals.
As I’ve said repeatedly your brain is built for pattern recognition, some people’s more than others, but it’s part of what enabled our ability to survive and thrive. In the modern day it can be as irritating as it is useful and these post car crash Fox interview headlines are an example of that. Once you notice that this is happening you will see it in other places too, as we say often, you can’t unsee it. That’s because your brain has locked on to it as something useful for you to navigate the world. But it’s also irritating for that reason, the more you see it, the more obvious it is that your perception of the world is being broadcast and sold to you in easy chunks that don’t always reflect reality. You’re too busy to find out what’s really happening or to watch that interview or read that book yourself, so you plug into the people whose stated job is to inform you, and memorise those soundbites and talking points to regurgitate later so you can appear informed. Everyone does this to some extent. When I’ve spoken in the past about curating your information feed, researching and selecting trusted nodes, this is what I’m talking about. There are many times I don’t either initially understand or don’t have time to research something myself so will check to see what those people I consider trusted nodes are saying and then until I know different, adopt what they say as the likely truth. You shouldn’t do this all the time, but occasionally you’re going to, that’s just human nature. Where this differs in an important way from what most people do is that they have no curating and reassessment filter for their nodes. They will watch TV, read the papers, listen to mainstream podcasts, and rarely step outside of that information sphere. The assumption is that what comes from that channel, that author, that podcast is prefiltered because they couldn’t be at that level -mainstream- if it wasn’t. You’re outsourcing your filtering to those platforms, not conducting it yourself.
My process is ongoing, you have to really perform to keep your seat on my information node team. There are many reasons you can lose your seat, but they all amount to the same thing, I can no longer trust what you say. The most common reason I see for people losing their seat is probably as a result of what’s happening in their personal lives that I can’t see but can spot the effects of, and it’s usually related to finances. When people are building a reputation as a small account on social media or as an unknown author, they’re generally at their best because they need to hone their skills and perform to stand out from the crowd. You can recognise this I’m sure from experiences and people you know. They have a huge motivation to succeed and likely want to - if they’re doing what they’re doing part time as is often the case - earn enough from it to leave the day job. During this period they’re usually fairly unknown, but have a decent sized and likely loyal ‘fanbase’ for want of a better phrase. Even if their following is very large, depending on the topic, they’re often effectively hidden away in the dark corners of the internet as a anon, only known to their niche audience. Many people will stay at this level because they have genuine love for the game, it’s nice to get some money from what they do and maybe they can support themselves with it, but they’d do it anyway, money isn’t the goal. They’re fairly few and far between. The other type is happy stepping in to all the major information spaces and actively tries to have their work seen and spread in the hope that someone with a big platform takes an interest, shares it or mentions them, giving them a huge influx of new subscribers and a great financial boost. Now they can leave the day job, but this is where the problems can start. At first you have an incentive to keep performing, you need to prove to these new subscribers that you’re worth the hype. But all of these new people won’t be fully onboard with your opinion, they’re like tourists, they’ll come for a bit because they heard you name mentioned, but perhaps don’t like what they see once they hear you, so they unsubscribe. This never used to bother you too much because you were in it for the game and the cash was just pocket money, now though, every subscriber lost is momentum towards you losing what traction you have, this huge opportunity and now you don’t have a day job to support you and your family. This is the point you have to watch for and I’ve seen it many times. It happens subtly at first, but the content produced becomes watered down, the willingness to say what they actually think -based on previous stated opinion- becomes less and less until they fall into what effectively becomes a type of dissident mainstream. Not completely regime line, but at the naughty edge of it. It’s at this point they are often picked up financially by a backer and given bigger opportunities, this is when ‘normies’ tend to notice them. How did this person who was a tiny account a couple of years ago suddenly end up as a panelist on a mainstream current affairs TV show, playing the safe dissident? There to say the naughty stuff, get faux attacked, but come off none the worse. The answer is that the influence they have over their now captured following is being leveraged to perform a ‘narrative policing’ function. For example: Here is your naughty right wing personality, look at the troubling (but effectively harmless) opinions he holds, but even HE wouldn’t say ‘X’ - insert probable truth that would be damaging for the regime if it gains traction. Can you think of any examples of this type of character?
Now to be clear, I have no real negative opinion about these people. I don’t judge them particularly for getting themselves some financial security on the gravy train and ending up where they always do, just saying the words for the money, regardless of what the talking points are. But from my perspective, once I see this start to happen, my willingness to have you on my team of nodes gets less and less. You’ll often still be useful for me to see what your financial backers want the truth to be, but I cannot trust you anymore. There are other variations of why you can be kicked off my team, such as audience capture. This is where your audience want to be told a certain thing and often the more extreme the better. You find that by leaning in to this your subscribers grow in line with the crazy and your content effectively becomes slop to feed them, but your income grows catering to the lowest common denominator of human type. A further variation is when I spot that your analysis will apply to all situations except your own protected groups, this basically amounts to dishonesty and hypocrisy. As previously, you may still be useful for me to see where the acceptable narrative lines are drawn by the group you seek to protect, but I will always take your version of events with a pinch of salt. A final example is rarer, but one that always amazes me that people miss, it being so obvious to me. This tends to happen to the well known celebrity types who always seem to have either stayed away from espousing their views publicly or have always appeared to have had one world view, but then switch suddenly and become vocal in a certain direction. The catalyst for this is usually rumours beginning to surface about something they’ve done or some kind of direct accusation of criminality. A subtler form being they go from being viciously attacked for their views, to joining the ranks of the ‘safe dissidents’ with seemingly no resolution of why they were attacked. A very good and obvious example of this is Russell Brand. Starts talking about things unhelpful to the regime, rape allegations surface (not saying they may not be true), it appears he’s going to be hung out to dry, then it all seems to go away overnight. After a short period out of the spotlight he returns in a new form, suddenly a Christian, talks only about what’s safely inside the naughty overton window and brings his audience with him. This happens time and time again. You are allowed to think outside of the regime narrative, but those acceptable public proponents of that view, will also be supplied by the regime.
One thing to note about the above is that just because ‘truth’ becomes popular doesn’t mean it’s corrupted in some way and you can’t trust it. You want that after all, for the public to understand reality and make their own judgments about it. It’s important not to fall into your own version of narrative policing.
As you can see, who the fuck has got time to do any of that!? Hence why we’re in the state we’re in. It takes work and a lot of mental sorting of people and events which comes naturally to some more than others.
An constant fight to remain a real human and not the guy above 😂 - I can’t be him anyway, I think I’m 45, or maybe 44, no idea really.
Have a good day.