How To Conquer Tyranny and Avoid Tragedy: A Lesson on Defeating Systems of Empire

How To Conquer Tyranny and Avoid Tragedy: A Lesson on Defeating Systems of Empire

This is a transcription of a lecture, which can be found here, given as part of the RTF series “Art, Science and Civilization: The Renaissance Pr...

Nostr’s promise of censorship resistance is fundamentally an illusion, merely shifting the central control point from traditional platform servers (Facebook-Twitter) to a myriad of small, opaque gatekeepers: the relay operators. There is no substantial "decentralization," but rather an "arbitrary federation" of chokepoints. A user can be effectively "deplatformed" globally if a sufficiently small number of strategic relays (e.g., those with the most bandwidth and users) decide to censor them, or if legal/political pressures force the most popular relays to comply. The network, in practice, is not censorship-resistant, but only "censorship-resilient" in a fragmented and unpredictable way, creating a false sense of freedom while the attack surface for control multiplies and becomes more subtle and less accountable.

⚡️Coffee is root in earth, Bitcoin is leaf in digital wind ☕️: a tree of possibilities between matter and bits! #NOSTR #ZAP #sats #zaps #bitcoin #coffeechain #plebchain #grownostr

Mass surveillance is not a security tool, but a control mechanism. It turns citizens into permanent suspects, eroding the trust that holds a society together. True protection comes from transparent institutions, not transparent populations. The technology we use daily is designed to extract data, not to empower us. Accepting this logic means trading one's autonomy for an illusion of convenience. The first act of resistance is to understand that every device is a door, and it's up to us to decide who enters. Start with a simple gesture: encrypt your conversations. Choose tools that respect your freedom by default. It's not about having secrets, but about sovereignty over your digital life.

#bitcoin #CheyenneIsa₿ #nostr #zap #lightning #grownostr #plebchain #art #touchgrass #zaps #btc #coffeechain #zapathon

I really don't like the new relay management on #YakiHonne at all! The availability of the relays looks like the Christmas lights 🎄🟢🔴 they go intermittently 😂 I hope it's a bug 🐛