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We live in a time where it is not only possible—but increasingly profitable—to criminalize poverty. And we need to ask, not as a theoretical exercise, but as a matter of urgency: Who benefits when basic survival becomes a crime?

Step One: Build the Incentives

Let’s start with the American prison system. It’s no secret that the U.S. incarcerates more people than any country on Earth. While private prisons house only a fraction of the population (about 8%), they’re just the visible tip of a much larger, much more insidious iceberg. Behind them is an entire economy of profit-seekers: prison food contractors, telecom companies charging $1 a minute for calls, healthcare providers delivering substandard care at premium prices, and logistics firms that treat inmates like cargo. Then there’s prison labor—a legal form of slavery under the 13th Amendment—that creates products for both government and corporations at pennies per hour.

It’s not a conspiracy; it’s a business model.

The deeper you dig, the clearer it gets: there are financial incentives at every level to keep incarceration numbers high. More inmates means more contracts, more overtime for guards, more federal grants for policing and surveillance technology, and more jobs in otherwise economically stagnant rural communities.

Step Two: Criminalize Poverty

Now pair that with a systemic assault on the poor. Cities across the U.S. have passed laws criminalizing homelessness—anti-camping ordinances, bans on sleeping in cars, sit/lie laws that make it illegal to rest on sidewalks. Some of these were struck down in court, but the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision to let cities penalize people for sleeping outside (even when there’s no shelter available) opened the floodgates.

The timing isn’t coincidental. Housing prices are exploding, driven by investor speculation, AirBnB-ification, and chronic underbuilding. Meanwhile, wages haven’t kept pace. More people are falling through the cracks, and the official response is to criminalize their existence.

It’s a perfect storm: manufactured scarcity meets punitive enforcement.

Step Three: Blame the Victim

At the same time, inflation—partly driven by tariffs, poor Federal Reserve policy, and unchecked corporate price hikes—is squeezing every last dollar out of working-class families. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to legally exist unless you own assets. If you fall behind on court fees, child support, parking tickets, or even library fines in some jurisdictions, the state can revoke your license or throw you in jail.

This isn’t a bug. It’s a feature of a system that treats poverty as a moral failure and wealth as virtue. The deeper into poverty you sink, the more punitive the system becomes.

The Mechanics of Control

This goes beyond prisons. Modern carceral systems are diffuse: ankle bracelets, electronic monitoring, predictive policing algorithms, automated surveillance, and probation regimes now manage millions of Americans who are technically not in jail, but have virtually no freedom.

And it’s growing. Police departments buy military-grade equipment. Cities invest in AI-based surveillance. Governments fund software that scans faces, predicts behavior, and recommends arrests.

This is incarceration by other means.

So Who Benefits?

Follow the money. Here’s a breakdown:

• Private prison corporations like CoreCivic and GEO Group, obviously.
• Telecom companies like Securus that charge inmates exorbitant rates to call home.
• Municipal governments that rely on fines and court fees as revenue streams.
• Surveillance and software firms that sell behavioral analytics and facial recognition tools.
• Property developers who profit from gentrification after encampments are cleared.
• Rural economies propped up by prison jobs.
• Politicians who run on “tough on crime” platforms, deflecting attention from economic failures.

It’s a whole ecosystem. And like any well-oiled machine, it doesn’t need a master planner—it just needs inertia and a lack of resistance.

Who Pays the Price?

Everyone else. Not just the unhoused or the poor, but anyone without assets. Anyone vulnerable to a single crisis—job loss, health scare, eviction. The carceral state is metastasizing, and it’s not just targeting criminals. It’s targeting the inconvenient, the unprofitable, the ones who don’t fit into the narrative of growth and productivity.

We are seeing the gradual construction of a system in which failure to keep up with inflation is grounds for incarceration.

Final Thought

This isn’t just a critique. It’s a warning. If we allow economic policy, law enforcement, and corporate interests to align without oversight, we are walking into a future where freedom is conditional on wealth. Where inequality is enforced not by accident, but by design.

Ask yourself: when survival is illegal, and jail is profitable—what kind of society are we building?

How AT Protocol and intentional community building can transform superficial connections into genuine relationships

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The Follower Trap

You know the feeling. You’re scrolling through your Bluesky timeline, seeing posts from your 847 followers, and you realize something unsettling: you wouldn’t actually want to have dinner with most of these people.

This isn’t meant to be harsh—it’s just honest. Somewhere along the way, social media convinced us that collecting followers was the goal. More followers meant you were winning at the internet. But winning at what, exactly?

The dirty secret of modern social media is that most of our “connections” aren’t really connections at all. They’re content relationships. We follow people because they post interesting things, not because we want to know them as human beings.

The Question That Changes Everything

Here’s a simple test that reveals the gap between our online and offline social lives:

Look at your following list. How many of those people would you actually invite to a dinner party?

If you’re like most people, the answer is probably somewhere between 5-15% of your total follows. The rest? They’re strangers you find entertaining, informative, or amusing. Nothing wrong with that—but let’s call it what it is.

This isn’t about being antisocial. It’s about recognizing that social media optimized for the wrong metrics. Instead of helping us build meaningful relationships, it taught us to optimize for reach, engagement, and follower count.

What Real Social Networking Looks Like

Imagine if your social media platform asked different questions:

• “Would you grab coffee with this person if they were in town?”
• “Do you know their actual name, not just their handle?”
• “Have you had a real conversation that went beyond replies and likes?”
• “Would you trust them to bring a good bottle of wine to your dinner party?”

These aren’t metrics you can game. You can’t buy your way to having genuine friendships. You can’t automate authentic human connection.

This is where the AT Protocol—the decentralized foundation that powers Bluesky—opens up fascinating possibilities. Unlike traditional social platforms that trap your data in corporate silos, AT Protocol lets you own your social graph and use it across different applications.

The Bridge Between Digital and Physical

What if there was a way to take your online social connections and discover which ones had real-world potential? Not to replace digital interaction, but to enhance it with face-to-face connection.

Picture this: You’re planning a dinner party using an event planning app. Instead of manually typing email addresses or scrolling through your phone’s contacts, the app shows you:

“Friends from Bluesky who live nearby:”

• Sarah (@sarah.bsky.social) – You’ve exchanged 23 meaningful replies over 6 months, she posts about cooking, lives 12 miles away
• Marcus (@marcus.wine) – Mutual friend with 3 people you trust, passionate about natural wine, frequently visits your city
• Elena (@elena.creates) – You both attended that virtual design meetup, she’s been wanting to explore your neighborhood

Suddenly, your social media connections become a resource for building real community, not just consuming content.

Making Connections Intentional

This approach would fundamentally change how we think about following people online. Instead of defaulting to “follow because interesting,” we might ask “follow because I’d enjoy spending time with this person.”

It creates a natural filter that separates:

• Content creators you want to read but not necessarily meet
• Genuine connections you’d be excited to hang out with in person
• Local community members who share your interests and values

The beauty is that both types of connections have value, but they serve different purposes. The problem with current social media is that it mixes them together and optimizes for the wrong metrics.

The Authenticity Renaissance

We’re seeing the early signs of a social media authenticity renaissance. People are tired of performative posting and algorithm manipulation. They want real connection, real community, real relationships.

The AT Protocol makes this possible because it’s built on different principles:

• User ownership of data and identity
• Interoperability between different applications
• Algorithmic choice rather than corporate manipulation
• Decentralized infrastructure that can’t be captured by any single company

This means we can build applications that prioritize authentic human connection over engagement metrics.

From Followers to Friends

Imagine if social media success was measured differently:

Instead of: “I have 10,000 followers” We celebrated: “I have 50 genuine connections who enrich my life”

Instead of: “My post got 500 likes” We valued: “Three friends reached out to continue the conversation”

Instead of: “I’m building my personal brand” We focused on: “I’m building my local community”

This isn’t about abandoning online connection—it’s about making it more meaningful. It’s about using technology to strengthen human relationships rather than replace them.

The Network Effect of Authenticity

Here’s what gets really interesting: As more people start optimizing for real connection instead of follower count, the entire social media ecosystem begins to shift.

When someone follows you, they’re not just saying “I want to see your content.” They’re potentially saying “I’d be open to meeting you in real life.” That changes the entire dynamic.

Content creators might focus more on building genuine relationships with smaller, local audiences. Community builders might prioritize depth over scale. Event organizers might discover rich networks of potential attendees right in their existing social graphs.

Building the Bridge

The technology to make this happen is already emerging. AT Protocol provides the foundation for portable social identity. Event planning tools are becoming more sophisticated. Location-based services can help identify geographic overlap.

But the real work isn’t technical—it’s cultural. We need to collectively decide that authentic connection matters more than vanity metrics. We need to value depth over breadth, quality over quantity, real relationships over parasocial ones.

The Future of Social

What if the future of social media wasn’t about getting more followers, but about turning the followers you have into friends?

What if instead of optimizing for time spent in apps, we optimized for time spent together in person?

What if social media became a tool for building local community instead of global audiences?

This isn’t just wishful thinking. The infrastructure is being built right now. The cultural shift is already underway. People are hungry for authentic connection in an increasingly digital world.

The question isn’t whether this will happen—it’s whether you’ll be part of building it.

Making It Real: Party Minder

This vision isn’t just theoretical—it’s being built right now. Party Minder is pioneering exactly this approach, creating AI-powered social event planning with deep AT Protocol integration. Instead of asking you to collect more followers, Party Minder asks: “Which of your Bluesky connections would you actually want to invite to your dinner party?”

By connecting your AT Protocol identity to real-world event planning, Party Minder transforms your social media connections into potential dinner guests, party attendees, and genuine friends. It’s social networking with intention—where every connection has the potential to become a real relationship, and every event strengthens your local community.

The future of social media isn’t about getting more followers. It’s about turning the ones you have into friends. And that future is available today at social.partyminder.com.

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The next time you follow someone on social media, ask yourself: “Would I invite them to dinner?” If the answer is yes, maybe you just found your next friend.

Why losing Google Drive would eclipse the destruction of the ancient Library of Alexandria

In the year 391 CE, a Christian mob led by Bishop Theophilus stormed the Serapeum in Alexandria, Egypt. As flames consumed the daughter library of the legendary Great Library of Alexandria, centuries of accumulated knowledge turned to ash. History remembers this moment as one of humanity’s greatest intellectual tragedies—the destruction of the ancient world’s most ambitious repository of learning.

But imagine, for a moment, if tomorrow morning every file stored in Google Drive simply vanished. Over one billion users worldwide would lose access to more than two trillion documents—a collection that dwarfs anything the ancient world could have imagined. Yet this hypothetical catastrophe would represent something far more complex and troubling than the loss of Alexandria: the erasure of humanity’s first truly global, democratically accessible knowledge base.

The Library That Never Was (Quite What We Think)

The mythology surrounding the Library of Alexandria has grown more magnificent over time than the institution ever was in reality. Modern historians estimate the library contained between 40,000 and 900,000 scrolls at its height, with the most conservative estimates placing the collection at around 40,000 volumes. The library wasn’t destroyed in a single dramatic fire, but rather succumbed to a slow decline over centuries, with various incidents contributing to its gradual demise.

More importantly, most of the library’s major works were also held by other libraries throughout the ancient world. When we lament the “lost” works of Alexandria, we’re often conflating the library’s destruction with the broader decline of classical culture. The most important works were widely disseminated elsewhere, meaning that the burning of Alexandria, while tragic, didn’t represent the complete erasure of ancient knowledge that popular imagination suggests.

The Digital Alexandria of Our Time

Google Drive presents a fundamentally different scenario. With over 1 billion users and 47.4% market share in file hosting services, it has become the de facto digital repository for an enormous swath of human activity. Companies using Google Drive store an average of over 100 data fields including documents, spreadsheets, images, and presentations. Google Workspace, which includes Drive, has over 3 billion monthly active users.

The scale is staggering. While Alexandria might have held the equivalent of a few hundred modern books, Google Drive hosts over two trillion documents—representing an almost incomprehensible volume of human knowledge, creativity, and communication. This includes everything from family photos and personal journals to cutting-edge research, business plans, and artistic works.

But here lies the crucial difference: most of this content is private.

The Privacy Paradox

The Library of Alexandria was designed as a universal repository—knowledge collected for the benefit of scholars and, by extension, humanity. Ptolemaic rulers demanded that all ships entering Alexandria’s harbor surrender their books for copying. The library represented an early attempt at comprehensive knowledge preservation and sharing.

Google Drive operates on the opposite principle. While the platform enables sharing and collaboration, the vast majority of its content remains locked away in private accounts. Family photos, personal documents, proprietary business information, creative works in progress, private correspondence—all stored in individual digital vaults.

This creates an unprecedented paradox in human history: we have assembled the largest collection of human knowledge and creativity ever created, yet almost none of it contributes to our collective intellectual heritage. The “burning” of Google Drive wouldn’t just destroy information—it would erase the private thoughts, memories, and creative works of over a billion people, most of which exist nowhere else.

What We Stand to Lose

Consider what a complete Google Drive loss would mean:

Personal Heritage: Millions of families would lose their digital photo albums, home videos, and personal documents. Unlike physical photos stored in multiple family homes, many digital memories exist only in the cloud.

Business Continuity: Over 1,000 organizations, including major companies like Salesforce and Whirlpool, rely on Google Drive for core operations. Entire business ecosystems would collapse overnight.

Research and Development: Countless research projects, academic papers, and innovative ideas exist primarily in private Drive folders, never published or shared.

Creative Works: Musicians, writers, artists, and creators often use Drive as their primary workspace for works in progress that may never see the light of day if lost.

Educational Resources: Teachers and students worldwide have built vast repositories of educational materials and coursework.

The Cultural Cost of Privacy

The Library of Alexandria’s tragedy wasn’t just the loss of specific scrolls—it was the failure to preserve knowledge for future generations. Today, we face a different but equally troubling issue: we’re creating vast amounts of knowledge and culture, but keeping most of it private and therefore culturally useless.

This raises profound questions about how we handle digital knowledge in the 21st century. Should personal data and creative works be treated purely as private property, or do we have a collective responsibility to preserve human knowledge and creativity for future generations?

The current system means that when individuals die, retire, or simply forget passwords, their contributions to human knowledge often die with them. Unlike the physical books that might survive in multiple copies across different libraries, digital works stored privately in cloud services represent single points of failure for irreplaceable human creativity.

A Risk We Cannot Afford

The potential loss of Google Drive would represent something unprecedented in human history: the simultaneous erasure of both personal memories and collective knowledge on a global scale. While the Library of Alexandria’s destruction was tragic, it didn’t erase the personal histories of millions of individuals or disrupt the daily operations of thousands of organizations worldwide.

Moreover, the centralization of so much human knowledge in the hands of a few technology companies creates systemic risks that dwarf anything the ancient world faced. Server failures, cyber attacks, corporate decisions, or geopolitical conflicts could trigger losses that make the burning of Alexandria look like a minor footnote.

Toward Cultural Data Protection

Perhaps it’s time to reconceptualize how we think about digital preservation. Just as we have systems for preserving physical cultural artifacts—museums, libraries, archives—shouldn’t we have robust systems for preserving digital culture?

This doesn’t mean violating privacy or forcing people to share personal information. Instead, it means:

• Redundancy: Ensuring that important cultural and intellectual works exist in multiple, geographically distributed locations
• Cultural Archives: Creating systems that allow creators to voluntarily contribute works to long-term cultural preservation
• Digital Estate Planning: Developing frameworks for what happens to creative works when individuals can no longer maintain them
• Institutional Independence: Reducing dependence on any single company or platform for knowledge preservation

The New Alexandria

We’ve built something far more magnificent than the Library of Alexandria ever was—a global repository of human knowledge, creativity, and memory accessible to billions of people. But we’ve also created something far more fragile: a system where most of our collective intellectual heritage remains locked away, vulnerable to loss, and culturally inaccessible.

The question isn’t whether we’ll lose our modern Alexandria—it’s whether we’ll learn from history and build systems robust enough to preserve not just the knowledge we create, but the human experience itself. The ancient Library of Alexandria was destroyed by fire and neglect. Our digital Alexandria faces threats of centralization, privacy paradoxes, and systemic fragility.

The choice is ours: will we let our digital knowledge repositories suffer the same fate as their ancient predecessor, or will we create systems that truly serve humanity’s long-term intellectual and cultural needs? The stakes have never been higher, and the collection has never been larger. We cannot afford to lose this Alexandria.

Originally published on LJHoliday 2025-07-14

Timothy Leary, Trinity, and the Programmable Mind

At some point in the late-stage collapse of the American education system, while we were all pretending that debt, dropout rates, and diminishing returns were simply problems of policy or funding, Timothy Leary was already somewhere else entirely. He wasn’t trying to reform the classroom. He was trying to replace it.

Leary believed that the mind could be programmed—like software. That learning wasn’t about rote repetition, but about triggering the right neural circuits in the right order, using the right tools. In a time most people still saw education as a pipeline—child in, diploma out—he was imagining pharmacological upgrades, designer nootropics, and personalized neural accelerants. “Education in a pill” wasn’t a metaphor. It was a vision. One pill, one target—language retention, musical fluency, emotional intelligence, pilot training, you name it.

Fast-forward a few decades and you land in The Matrix. That moment when Trinity scans the rooftop, sees the helicopter, and radios, “I need a pilot program for a B-212 helicopter,” is more than just a slick cyberpunk trope. It’s the visual embodiment of everything Leary was pointing toward. Skills as downloadable modules. Learning as instantaneous adaptation. No teachers. No tuition. No curriculum. Just pure, focused injection of capability. “Loading,” Tank replies, and Trinity learns to fly in seconds. It’s absurd on its face, but the premise isn’t science fiction. It’s an aspiration—one that still haunts anyone who thinks seriously about the future of cognition.

We’re already dabbling in the periphery. Nootropics and cognitive enhancers are a cottage industry. Neural interfaces are inching toward clinical applications. Machine learning is pushing tutoring platforms into something eerily close to personalized mentorship. But we haven’t crossed the line yet. We still pretend that knowledge has to be earned through effort. That understanding must be a moral process. That cognition is sacred, and shortcuts are dangerous.

Leary never had patience for that kind of moralizing. For him, consciousness was a territory to be explored, reprogrammed, hacked. If pills could open doors, then doors were meant to be opened. And if code could rewire the brain, then it was only a matter of time before someone started writing their own operating system.

It’s tempting to laugh it off as techno-utopian fantasy, but we’re closer now than anyone expected. Not in terms of delivering pilot training via Bluetooth to your cerebellum, but in rethinking what learning even is. What happens when the barriers to skill acquisition fall away? What happens when you don’t have to learn slowly—or at all? What happens when a “user manual” for the brain isn’t just a metaphor, but an interface?

We’re not there yet. And we’re certainly not ready for what it means. But the scaffolding is starting to show. Whether through chemistry, chips, or code, the idea of direct-to-brain learning is no longer science fiction. It’s just waiting for someone to break the taboo.

This isn’t a manifesto. I’m not pitching a solution. But if the collapse clears the stage, and we have a chance to build again, we might want to remember that Leary was there first. And that Trinity didn’t just dream the impossible. She asked for it—and got it.

Street tacos are the best. Sure, tacos and a liquada sitting down in a restaurant can be nice, but standing on the corner in the sun downing a couple fresh street tacos with a friend can’t be beat.