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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Nick, Netscape, cloud-imperialism, McLuhan and Goes-both-ways bodies; Nils Gilman inset Saved source record associated with pictured writing; full saved record, not an exact pictured excerpt. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1881316876674060445 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. 2/ But what if the very same computer-mediated reality and force now being wantonly employed by global authoritarianism to slay entire social networks and populations and their dependent structures of consciousness and power, isn't as much a peerless as peer-to-peer capability? I once ran into @pmarca hawking a pre-release of Netscape Navigator 1.0. Already, my team had run the first WWW pipe into the U.S. Congress, on Mosaic. Then, as now, as always, if you can't see the paradigm for the trees for the point of it all, your dominative days are numbered. 1/2 Simultaneously, paralleling its colossal impetus, cloud imperialism's consolidation within and dependence upon an all-aggregating machine-abstraction, reveals the entire ontological edifice as, correspondingly, vastly more ephemeral and exposed than its engineers conceive. McLuhan was very fond of the phrase, "the Prince of this world, Satan, is a very great electrical engineer." And tailor to Emperors, too. The cyberspatial conglomeration of evil? A cosmic design feature, not a flaw, making it addressable, ultimately, in one fell swoop. 1 John 3:8 Technology is too often used as a stealth vector (often by private actors who control the tech) to enact, embody, or constitute quintessentially “political” matters — that is, matters concerning the allocation & legitimation of power & authority.   AI puts this pattern on steroids Goes both ways. Long before the Web, planetary Sages anticipated the advent of a cyberspace-actualized dimension of meaningfulness, constituting a 'quintessentially political' surprise positively addressing such base shenanigans at a totalizing, substrative, ontological level.