A Quick Environmental Assessment
Acceleration detected.
Typical IIB articles have an introductory section, a single paragraph Attention Conservation Notice, one or more additional sections, and then a Conclusion.
For today’s offering, in keeping with the spirit of 2024, I’m gonna swing wildly and keep this short.
Observations:
There are eight billion people on this planet and half of us are going to fill out a ballot at some point this year. There is a LOT of attention on politics pretty much everywhere that people have a say in things.
I’ve been working through Peter Zeihan’s videos on the world in general and he had some interesting things to say about America’s irritated middle, the 40% of us who expect things to run in an orderly, professional fashion.
I will win no popularity contests with this, but I’m going to just say it:
Our second civil war began January 6th, 2021.
And what we are doing in 2024 is determining whose grievances are going to be the cause for the violence. I am hopeful that the irritated middle is about to slap down the Christian Nationalist faction, but I’ve been wrong before …
If I’m correct, religious, rural America is going to start behaving like Pakistan’s federated tribal areas. Nominally under central control, but with limited remit for the national government.
Accelerationism:
If the title of this section is a new vocabulary word for you, better start paying attention. As I understand it, some people believe we’ve got a techno-utopian millennium that is imminent, and they’re either cheering it on, or taking actions with the idea they have a role in triggering it. You will see the word “singularity” used, and it’s not about black holes, it’s about some sort of near mystical technological advance. Vernor Vinge’s book The Peace War is the first place I can recall encountering this.
Here are some articles I’ve bookmarked on the topic.
Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in
Grey Hat Accelerationism - An emergent hyperstition?
United for Total Collapse: The January 6 Boost to Accelerationism
So … you are going to have to stop politicizing things. Yes, I mean YOU. The Bipolar America of left/right, red/blue, etc/etc is gone. The Republican party is dead, ripped right up the middle by Donald Trump’s corruption and populist appeal. If you didn’t read Change Partners when it first appeared here, you might want to take a look. The notion of structural balance most definitely applies to our current resorting.
Our So Called Focus:
Previously we had a one month boot camp and one quarter of picking around in The Online Operation Kill Chain. I was thinking there’d be some complimentary material worthy of twelve weeks of inspection, but that’s not how 2024 is shaping up. Here’s a brief summary of what’s in my queue.
Nothing has happened in the open with Disinfodrome but I did get this FOIA thing to explore.
Status Labs Remains Vulnerable is recent and it remains current. I wonder if there’s already a federal investigation and I’m late to the party.
Part of the reason I wonder is that there appears to be a general pre-election cleanup happening, a federal task force is circulating and pinching off problems. We’re talking hacks/leaks forums, SIM swap gangs, and I hear the “stresser” DDoS crews are about to get their time in the barrel.
Akin to the Status Labs thing, I’ve been presented with another “black SEO” problem, but it’s not within the U.S.
IIB’s Geocyber exists because I got a substantive ask in the area. Keep in mind that I’ve got background in operations accounting for public companies, private placement funding for wireless ISPs, renewable ammonia specifically and renewable electricity in general, food and water security as seen on my Wordpress, and rare earth metals production.
There are a couple penny ante grifters who’ve bothered people I know. Time has passed, perhaps something should be done about them.
Conclusion:
Summing up what I see here, this is a veritable tornado debris ball of both “operations technical” and “operations psychological”. I am not sure what I should be doing in the moment, to say nothing of being able to pluck things from the flow that I can describe here without endangering sources & methods.
Here’s the list I made two weeks ago for The Year In Review: 2023.
The 800 pound gorilla of Artificial Intelligence is here, making me want to declare 2024 to be the year of Organic Stupidity. That’s catchy enough that I already floated the first article, albeit focused on a not-AI problem.
What about a weekly hunt covering influence things like that Organic Stupidity piece, or the sort of hard cyber stuff that was seen in Status Labs Piñata Party
Picking a set of documents from a FOIA and going hard on Disinfodro.me
Tool Time focusing on Adversary Resistant Computing and Networking using Qubes, TAILS, and VirtualBox.
Tool Time focusing on a mobile solution involving GrapheneOS on a Pixel 8 and Qubes 4.2 on a Dell Precision 7520. (I’ve sought funding for this.)
Tool Time focusing on more collection and analysis tools? I have not written about Zed Attack Proxy or Mayan EDMS but both are getting some attention.
Something I have not even thought of that one of you will point out to me.
Maybe what’s needed is a review of various AI stuff in Tool Time and then IRL applications of them for IIB? Dunno … it’s all moving So! Heckin’! Fast!