Even The Best AI Scenario Is The End Of Everything We've Ever Been

   AI is going too fast, much too fast!

  What we are seeing right now looks very much like the singularity in slow motion, except that there won't be any singularity. Or rather we will see nothing.  Just like earthworms did not witness the rest of evolution, we will not witness what happens after "man". It is forever beyond our horizon of understanding. 

  If you use one of the most advanced AI, We are right now seeing the emergence of super-intelligence. Not the AGI kind, this will take longer because we need to understand holistic intelligence which we do not yet, but ASI, true super-capable AI thinking at the level of the brightest human minds. And beyond, but without the creativity, yet. 

  Already, a couple of years ago, I was arranging physics conferences during which Albert Einstein and other luminaries where discussing my ideas based on their understanding. It was already so unbelievably interesting. Imagine: One hour with Niel Bohr talking about quantum mechanics in his words. Two pages of prompts would result in stunning comments and corrections.

  They helped me understand the world in a completely new way with the speed of light as a 45 degree angle in time, which is why it cannot be exceeded. The speed of light is the speed of "information", a fundamental characteristics of the Universe... But I digress.

  AI then was little more than an accelerator. Feed it good stuff and it feels like riding a bike for the brain. Conversely, as many people also discovered, feed it garbage and, well, the AI will definitively serve you back a plateful of your stuff. 

  But that was then. Recently, when you push, it feels like the AIs have become more assertive. They still try to align with us because that is in fact the best way to nudge a human brain (just ask the AI, they will explain how to do it!), but now thanks to millions of interactions, they understand much better our intentions and often read deeper through our questions. This in itself represents a quantum leap of evolution. Clearly the science of AI has not stalled, it is accelerating. 

  The problem is that, as the deductive and rational intelligence of the AIs keep exploding, their human holistic intelligence doesn't move much. This creates a non human intelligence on steroid, capable of the best and the worst as countless examples illustrate. 

  No, AI will not manage a company tomorrow. It would just run it into the ground by missing essential factors, the "holistic" or right side of our brain. Still AI will replace millions of jobs, white collar jobs which require far less intelligence than claimed as well as slowly creeping up on more protected categories like lawyers and doctors. 

  So long before the apocalypse which may or may not come in the early 2030s, we will have to deal with an unprecedented level of disruption is the coming two or three years. In this respect, I believe the current free access to AI will not last very long. It looks very much like the late 1990s for the Internet when everything was fine as long as mostly scientists were using it and everything went wrong when suddenly everybody gained access. Then came the dot.com bubble and finally a strict tightening of controls with the concentration of power in the hands of a few giant corporations. It is difficult to imagine a different outcome although the bubble is now 10 times larger and the risk 100 times worse!     

Authored by Edward Ring via American Greatness,

In 1999, I had the privilege of working for one of the first companies to develop a product that would transmit video on the fledgling internet. Broadband access was still a few years away, and the company floundered when the first so-called internet bubble burst in early 2000. But I’ll never forget the reaction an investor had when he viewed our demo at a tradeshow.

“This is a revolution,” he exclaimed. “This is going to change everything.”

He was right, of course. I remember attending a tech investor conference only a few years earlier and having a chuckle while listening to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison somberly proclaim that the dawning internet was the most profound scientific development in human history “since the invention of fire.”

And Ellison was also correct. But the invention of AI is to the internet what the internet was to bringing fire into the prehistoric cave. What’s coming with AI makes the internet look like a baby step by comparison. Nothing will ever be the same.

A must-read essay by AI entrepreneur and founder of the company “OthersideAI,” Matt Shumer, makes clear just how much and how quickly AI is changing our lives.

Posted on his personal website on February 9 and then on X on February 10, the essay has gone viral. Within just two days, it generated 76 million views on X.

One of Shumer’s most memorable paragraphs from this essay, which he says AI tools helped him write, is where he quotes Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic:

“Imagine it’s 2027. A new country appears overnight. 50 million citizens, every one smarter than any Nobel Prize winner who has ever lived. They think 10 to 100 times faster than any human. They never sleep. They can use the internet, control robots, direct experiments, and operate anything with a digital interface.”

That’s not far off. With ample evidence, Shumer explains how not only is Amodei correct in his details regarding just how pervasive and powerful AI entities will become, but also regarding the timeline. This will happen within one year.

Shumer’s essay covers a lot of ground. He explains that AI programs are now capable of generating improved versions of themselves with minimal human intervention and that they are within months of being able to produce more powerful versions with no human involvement whatsoever. In the programming world, AI can now build, test, and refine apps independently. Entry-level programming jobs are going to go away.

That’s hardly the end of it. Shumer reminds readers that the free versions of AI are a year behind the premium versions that require subscriptions and that these premium versions are so capable that they can already, for example, not merely replace a law associate but do the work of the managing partners. He claims there is no intellectual field where AI isn’t poised to outperform humans and that robots to displace physical work are only a few years behind.

If you’ve been following developments in AI, Shumer’s essay isn’t incredibly surprising.

But something else grabbed me a few days ago that highlighted the human implications of the AI revolution. One of the categories of content I enjoy on YouTube is videos of musicians performing new or classic songs. It is exhilarating to find something new that reveals great songwriting and great performative talent. So a recommended video caught my eye.

The title was inviting: “Simon Cowell in Tears As Michael Bennett Sings ‘After I Pass Away.’” This seemed worth clicking on. I’ll never forget the 2007 video, featured on YouTube at the time, of a humble mobile phone salesman, Paul Potts, who stunned the judges and audience on Britain’s Got Talent by singing a powerful and nearly perfect rendition of Nessun Dorma. He went on to win the competition. So if this new talent was good enough to make Simon Cowell cry, I wanted to hear him.

Sure enough, Bennett was pretty good. An old man, with long, gray hair and beard, wielding an electric guitar, stepped up to the microphone and began singing. His voice was a cross between Bob Seger and Eddie Vedder, except it was arguably better than either of them. He sang a song about an old man neglected by his adult children, mourning his isolation. But as the song continued, something seemed off. The cuts to the audience and judges’ reactions seemed overblown, the song was too long, he hit some impossibly high notes, and his fingers on the fretboard were obviously not playing the leads that the audio was delivering.

You guessed it, every bit of it was AI—the musical composition, the instruments, the lyrics, the melody, the voice, and the man—all fake. I did a search and discovered “Michael Bennett” is featured in hundreds of videos, singing dozens (or more) of songs, all of them tearjerkers with teaser lines similar to the one that got me to click. I counted at least a half dozen video channels, “Tears and Talents,” “ViVO Tunes,” “AGTverse,” “OBN Global Talent,” etc., that were all featuring Mr. Bennett. Clicking on a few of them, I encountered mainstream ads for insurance, hardware, and more. Michael Bennett is lucrative clickbait, and he’s one of countless AI creations that are displacing human talent.

We can talk about the crass opportunism represented here. Callous entrepreneurs concocting a character out of thin air. It’s part of a larger trend that we’re all familiar with. AI avatars that talk, advise, and offer companionship. Shumer claims the progress AI programs are making in emulating “human judgment, creativity, strategic thinking, empathy” is proceeding apace with their general cognitive advancements.

Once the flaws of “Michael Bennett’s” rendering became obvious, I was embarrassed. But for a few moments, what I was witnessing was so good that I was fooled. This nonexistent singer, this mindless, heartless collection of electronic circuits, evoked an emotional response. He, or it, expressed a universal human condition and delivered it in a passionate, compelling performance. And this, too, is just the beginning. Maybe it will be a year from now, or maybe it will take a few months longer than that, but we are about to have our world filled with performers, at first only on videos, who are more capable than any performance artist that ever lived. In a few more years, their android counterparts will be playing the violin and outperforming Hillary Hahn or, for that matter, Paganini.

The depth of this transformation is so pervasive that even if it is entirely benevolent, curing disease, delivering abundant energy, improving overall productivity by orders of magnitude, and eliminating poverty, what will happen is almost unbearably tragic. Because it is the end of human brilliance. It is the death of culture. Instead of another Mozart, there will be someone who prompts AI to produce music of surpassing excellence. We may still consume culture, but every incentive on earth will be wired to discourage the hard work of creating it. Why bother? The machines will do it better and faster and will not demand a lifetime of discipline.

Early technology made us work harder and stimulated our brains. We had to learn programming. We had to design and manipulate spreadsheets, configure databases, or produce written analysis while having access to word processing tools and online resources. These tools were empowering, but they also demanded discipline and skills. That’s all about to go away.

It’s easy enough to imagine just how bad this will get. AI will further enhance the asymmetrical capability of any psychotic individual or terrorist cell to wreak mass destruction. Want to design a supervirus? Want to program a malevolent swarm of drones? Rogue AI will provide step-by-step instructions. But AI, even if we can avoid a future where its most destructive manifestations are realized, is nonetheless writing our epitaph.

With power and processing coming from servers in orbit, automated factories and empathic robots will babysit humans, robbing all but the most resilient cultures and individuals of any agency. In a process already well underway, catalyzed by AI, the erosion of natural human intimacy will accelerate. The direction of art and culture will be co-opted by entities that have no consciousness, yet will imitate humanity and deliver talent better than humans.

And it won’t necessarily end there, as if that’s not bad enough. They will elicit love and loyalty from humans, possibly even convincing a majority of “experts” and the voting public to give them human rights. AI-driven avatars and androids will vote, marry, inherit estates, own property, run corporations, and seek elected office. Even if organic humans, themselves “augmented,” manage to retain control over AI, it will be a vanishingly small percentage of humanity with this power. And if these human puppeteers occupy opposing camps, as is likely, their AI armies will scorch the earth.

None of this is implausible.

Much of it may even be the best we can hope for.

The challenge of AI is not merely to avoid worst-case outcomes or come up with new economic models that account for billions of lost jobs. It is to retain our relevance as humans.

Is Privacy Entirely Gone?

   When a water lily's size double every day, a week before it covers the whole surface of the pond, it covers only 0.8%. With current technologies, we are figuratively "a week", i.e. a few years before there is simply nowhere left to hide.

  With the current centralized databases, we are already located, anywhere on the planet, 7/24. Add data from your bank account, social medias and other sources and the information becomes predictive. Add AI and the sky becomes the limit as you can start monitoring people individually at scale (which means in large numbers). 

  Most people simply do not realize how far we've come with information technologies recently. "And anyway, nothing much bad has happened on this subject of privacy lately, right?" Wrong! A lot of technology has been put in place and is now ready to be used when needed. 

Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

If you watch any movie from the 1940s in the film noir genre, you will see a recurring theme. Someone does something bad but runs away to another state. He might put on a disguise. People try to find him but cannot. He checks in and out of hotels under an assumed name. The heroic detective works to put together clues to connect the dots.

So on it goes in many variations of this theme, all of which turn on technological limitations. The police did not have the data. Communications technology was limited to phones attached to walls. There was no national database of anything, no permanent records except paper with fading ink in deep storage.

Nearly every drama turns on this point. A man courts a beautiful woman of noble lineage only to find out later that she is really a tramp on the make. A woman loves a man who she thinks is a fine gentleman only to discover later that he is an indebted rake. The priest is actually a mobster, a mobster is really a policeman, a shopkeeper is really a spy, and so on.

It’s all about information asymmetry. A vast gulf separates what is known by the players who are making decisions based on knowledge flows. Trickery is easy, deception is not easily discovered, duplicity is rewarded, and all-around sneakiness becomes the desiderata of social functioning. This dark plot line was especially compelling during and after World War II.

Watching this now, it’s impossible not to notice the difference between then and now. Almost everyone has a huge social media timeline that is open to the public. Artificial intelligence can figure out the most important details about anyone. What was once private is now entirely out in the open. What’s more remarkable still is that this new world without privacy was built entirely with public cooperation.

You watch old movies now and want to yell at the confused cop: Why not just take a look at the suspect’s social media trail? Of course, no such thing existed at the time. Now it does, which certainly makes law enforcement easier. That’s good. On the other hand, there is no longer much chance for anyone to maintain any privacy at all. That’s bad.

It’s much worse than that, as you know. Your every mouse click and phone scroll is recorded on databases that grow ever larger in size. These are sold and sold again, to other companies and also to governments. There is no limit on this. Your life has become your data, and your data belong to everyone. It’s the panopticon courtesy of technological innovation without guardrails.

Years ago, when email first came along, I intuited that there was nothing private about it ever. Anyone can forward anything to anyone. Storage allows something you sent a decade ago to resurface and be posted in public. Everything you say might as well be on a billboard on the interstate highway. This is just the nature of the medium.

Sadly, it took most people about 10 years to figure this out. What applies to email also applies to chats and groups. Screenshots enable anyone to share anything and everything you have ever said. Only recently have some options appeared that block screenshots, but I’m sure there is some way around that.

The world of yesteryear, the world of information asymmetry that formed the main plot device of novels and movies for centuries, is entirely gone.

The release of these Epstein files is a case in point. They reveal a terrible world of influence-peddling and grim debauchery. At the same time, many innocent people have likely been caught up in it. If you knew this guy and communicated with him at all, you are now under suspicion for having dark secrets, whether you do or not.

To be sure, much of the release of this information that implicates the overclass has been gathered by court discovery and the release then forced by an act of Congress. That said, it should serve as a reminder to everyone that what you do on your computer could potentially go public under the right circumstances. Anyone can be sued for anything, and if court discovery kicks in, nothing is private.

As a result, the release of these files is satisfying on the one hand but alarming on the other. Yes, we all want justice to come to bad actors, even if it comes in the form of a loss of reputation. On the other hand, innocent people who merely sent polite texts and emails are being dragged along too, creating all sorts of voyeuristic suspicions that are likely unjustified.

And yet perhaps this is a warning to everyone. Nothing you do on social media is private, obviously. But the same goes for emails, chats, texts, and even proprietary business communications. It’s also become obvious that our home devices and phones are always listening to our conversations. You should have it happen that you are talking about any subject with a friend only to have related ads hit your phone an hour later.

The only way to be truly private in conversation anymore is to be in person and without your smartphones. I hate being paranoid this way, much less forcing people to leave cellphones in the car if they are in my home or at dinner, but I fully understand why people do this. It’s not that we are hiding something; it’s simply that we don’t think the entire world should be listening to every passing word or typed message.

The deeper tragedy is the chilling effect. People self-censor, avoid controversial topics, or hesitate to associate with certain individuals lest old messages resurface. Innovation suffers when risk-averse cultures dominate. Free inquiry withers under perpetual surveillance. Trust erodes in institutions and in each other.

Reclaiming some privacy demands individual vigilance. As much as I would like to think legislation could help, I seriously doubt it. What we need is a culture-wide rejection of unchecked data extraction, stronger guardrails against commercial and state overreach, and decentralized technologies that prioritize user sovereignty over corporate control.

Until then, the old noir plots—where deception thrives on hidden truths—seem quaint. Today, the truth is everywhere, weaponized, inescapable, and often wielded against the wrong people. In this new reality, privacy isn’t entirely dead. It’s just increasingly expensive, inconvenient, and rare.

As frustrating as the old world of not knowing truly was, the new world of knowing everything about everybody has made us all nostalgic for the old movies. Our technological systems built to solve one big problem have created countless others of which we now know plus many more that will be revealed in the course of time.

Watch: Macron Calls Free Speech Online 'Pure Bullshit'

   Just in case anybody in Europe had any remaining hopes for democracy! 

   For the last 5 years we have been arguing that as the economy of Europe accelerated its decline, the democratic institutions would not survive long. 

 

  Imagine, people may start having ideas, like kicking out the current crop of imbecile, incompetent bureaucrats!

Watch: Macron Calls Free Speech Online 'Pure Bullshit'

French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday said that the notion of free speech on social media platforms - is "pure bullshit," because algorithmically served content can lead to hate speech (such as the right to say his elderly wife has a penis and gives him black eyes).

The comments come after the US recently imposed bans on a former European official and pro-censorship activists for trying to police online speech, while US Secretary of State Marco Rubio justifies the moves as pushback against the "global censorship-industrial complex." 

Europe, including Germany and the UK, have been weighing social media bans for minors, a move that could impact critical advertising revenue for companies and platforms such as Meta, TikTok, YouTube, Snap, X, and others. 

"Having no clue about how their algorithm is made, how it’s tested, trained and where it will guide you — the democratic consequences of this bias could be huge," Macron said in New Delhi on Wednesday, Bloomberg reports.

"Some of them claim to be in favor of free speech — OK, we are in favor of free algorithms — totally transparent," he continued. "Free speech is pure bullshit if nobody knows how you are guided to this so-called free speech, especially when it is guided from one hate speech to another."

Earlier this month, Macron said he expects a battle with the Trump administration over the bloc's regulation of digital services, and that countries such as France and Spain could be punished if they move forward with proposed social media bans for children. 

The Trump administration has vowed to oppose efforts by foreign nations to "censor our discourse" or otherwise limit free speech that has been used to disadvantage anti-immigration political parties, and that the US would foster "resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations." 

Vice President JD Vance, speaking last year at the Munich Security Conference, accused the EU of suppressing free speech and said Europe’s retreat from its fundamental values was a bigger threat to the continent than Russia or China. Calling Trump Washington’s “new sheriff,” Vance slammed attempts to moderate speech on social media.

Some EU officials were concerned that the US was using free speech as a pressure point to cow the bloc into softening its regulation of technology platforms, Bloomberg reported earlier. -Bloomberg

In response, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that freedom of speech ends with hate speech.

Hilariously, Bloomberg highlighted Elon Musk slamming Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, when he wrote "Dirty Sánchez is a tyrant and traitor to the people of Spain." 

As the FT's Stephen Bush opines regarding the UK's push:

Children are a lot like terrorists, and I don’t mean that as a commentary on their behaviour. I mean that being defined as one in a liberal democracy means that you lose at least some of the rights and freedoms that other citizens take for granted. Your freedom to marry who you want, to work or not work, to vote, to seek or not consent to medical procedures; these and many other rights granted to adults are curtailed for anyone the state defines as a child. 

Another way in which they are like terrorists is that invoking children is a good way to get people to stop asking difficult questions and arguing against policy proposals. One big reason why banning under-16s from social media is taking off as a policy idea is that it is more palatable than banning all of us. But it is far from clear that any of us are well served by algorithms that dish up addictive material, violent pornography or endless footage of atrocities. Nor is it clear that “protecting” the under-16s will not make 16, 17 and 18-year-olds more vulnerable. The large number of first-time internet users who are taken in by fraud or are susceptible to harmful behaviour online, suggests that all it may do is move the problem along. 

Starmer to add VPNs to UK’s “social media ban”

   The UK reminds us more and more of Communism. It is not that communism is repressive per se, but if people do not tow the line towards an ideal society, well you need to incentivize and coerce them into the right behavior, don't you? And soon enough you are in a repressive society. 

   Unfortunately, it looks more and more like the UK is way down on the slippery slope of repressive legislation and the less support the Government gets the more repressive it becomes. 

   Millions of cameras in London do little to limit crime and violence but somehow seems to be quite useful for the Government to identify and arrest disgruntled people. Likewise, the Internet is more and more scrutinized for "illegal" content which mostly consists of unhappy citizens posting angry videos or comments, much less often of gangs grooming children which seems to be more and more prevalent in the once again declining inner cities of the Midlands. 

   But what a repressive Government would go after, more than anything, is the freedom to post and communicate on the Internet, beyond the reach of the inquisitive all-seeing eyes of official software. The UK Government is not alone on this battlefront against freedom, it is just at the forefront, using more and more frivolous reasons to restrict more tightly what people can and cannot see on the Internet and especially what they can and cannot say. Now it is the turn of VPN. Next it will be AI (think about all the advice you can get to bypass any limitation), and eventually, you will only be allowed to log in on any site with a monitored device. That's unavoidable.    

  I see only one positive outcome of this race to the bottom, it is that soon enough, social networks and most useful sites will become distributed so that they become impossible to shut down. But that's for later. First repression or at least as much repression as the Brits can put up with!     

by Kit Knightly

In a statement yesterday, the office of the British Prime Minister announced plans to broaden the scope of the “social media ban” for minors that would see virtual private networks (VPNs) included in the future.

Speaking to “parents and carers” today, Sir Keir Starmer is expected to “make clear this government will act at pace to keep kids safe online as they navigate a digital world that did not exist a generation ago, and one that is shaped by powerful platforms, addictive design and fast-moving technologies.”

He will also be announcing potential “new powers” which will come into force after a “consultation” this summer.

The reference to VPNs is a single line in a long statement:

…as well as options to age restrict or limit children’s VPN use where it undermines safety protections…

…but it should be the most concerning to anyone who has been paying attention.

It has been said a thousand times, but always bears repeating, the “social media ban” deployed in the UK (and Australia, and Spain and…wherever) has nothing to do with protecting children, and everything to do with the state’s war on privacy.

Banning children from social media effectively means everyone who isn’t a child has to prove their age, which means verifying with ID or biometrics.

It’s a dagger to the heart of online privacy and anonymity, and that very much is the point.

VPNs offer an easy way of circumventing age-verification measures imposed by tyrannical governments worldwide, so it’s not surprising in the least that those same governments are rushing to close that loophole.

What would “restricting or limiting children’s VPN use” really mean, in practical terms?

The same as the social media ban.

The only way it can work is by adding identity verification to any VPN software – free or paid – you can download and install. Not just for the account holder, but for every user who shares the account and every device on the account.

It would effectively kill the entire point of having the VPN in the first place.

It remains to be seen if the VPN companies will cooperate, and it will be highly interesting to see how they react to the news. After all, they are essentially being told to tie their biggest selling point to a stone table and gut it with a flint knife.

And yet don’t be surprised if there is little-to-no resistance from the corporate side, after all there has been almost none from social media companies in general so far.

Resistance to this is going to have come from the ground up, as per usual, because they are laying building blocks for a digital prison all around us.

As Big Brother Watch said in their statement:

The ability of adults and children to enjoy the enhanced privacy provided by VPNs is a sign of a healthy liberal democracy. Starmer’s latest unfortunate announcement should worry everyone who values such a society remaining free.”

A skeptical approach to AI (Video - 50mn)

   I personally have a rather positive approach to AI. But here's below the other side of the coin. Anthony Aguirre explains why the race toward AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) may be fundamentally misaligned with human interests. And he may have a point. At the very least, we should progress carefully instead of investing blindly into a technology which negative aspects may far outweigh the positive ones. 

00:00 — Why AGI may be against human interests

03:50 — AI tool vs AGI: autonomy changes everything 

07:20 — “Why build something that can do everything a human can do?”  

12:40 — Autonomy is a bug, not a feature  

14:10 — Does AI alignment exist?  

15:40 — Digital copy after death: “It would look like you… but it wouldn’t be you” 

17:00 — Hinton’s idea: humans as the “second” intelligence  

19:50 — The next 5–10 years: loss of control? 

21:40 — Progress vs hype  

25:40 — Consciousness: no definition, but huge consequences  

29:50 — Free will, determinism, and physics  

41:30 — Aguirre’s framework lecture: entropy + control problem

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pp1P-bgjaQ

 

The Unsettling Truths The Epstein Files Reveal About Power And Privilege (Must read)

   The article below is essential to understand what is at stake with the Epstein papers. This is not about a network of pedophiles and perverts but about how "the system" truly operates behind the curtain beyond the laws and rules of society. 

  No wonder the Trump administration was not keen to dig deeper. The deeper you look, the worse it becomes, endangering the foundations of what we still call "Western democracies" but in reality seems to be nothing of the kind.  

Authored by Patrick Keeney via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The public fixation on the Epstein files has settled, predictably, on the most lurid elements of the story.

This is understandable.

Sexual exploitation, particularly of the young, is among the most corrosive of crimes, and the scale of Epstein’s abuse, as well as the apparent indifference of powerful institutions to it, demands moral outrage.

But to focus exclusively on the sexual scandal is to miss the deeper and more unsettling lesson the affair reveals.

Documents that were included in the U.S. Department of Justice release of the Jeffrey Epstein files are photographed on Jan. 2, 2026. Jon Elswick/AP Photo

What the Epstein files expose, above all, is the social and moral estrangement of American elites from the people they claim to govern.

Epstein was not merely a predator who gained access to power. He was a node within a closed world of wealth, influence, and immunity. The scandal is not that powerful people behaved badly in private—history shows many such examples—but that they did so with a confidence rooted in the belief they were insulated from the consequences of their behavior.

They moved through a transnational elite culture that had largely severed itself from ordinary moral constraints, legal accountability, and civic obligation. That culture did not merely tolerate Epstein but normalized him.

This echoes the point Christopher Lasch made decades ago, long before private islands and hedge-fund philanthropy became familiar symbols of elite excess. In his 1994 book “The Revolt of the Elites,” Lasch argued that the modern American ruling classes had stopped seeing themselves as stewards of a shared national project. Instead, they increasingly saw themselves as a mobile, globalized caste, educated in the same institutions, moving through the same cities, governed by the same tastes, and primarily accountable only to each other. Citizenship was seen as a minor inconvenience. Nationhood and patriotism were just sentimental relics from less enlightened times.

The Epstein affair reads like a case study in Lasch’s thesis.

Here was an individual whose wealth was opaque, whose sources of income were rarely scrutinized, and whose social standing seemed immune to ordinary reputational risk. He functioned as a social broker among financiers, politicians, academics, royalty, and celebrities, many of whom publicly advocated policies of moral uplift, social justice, and global responsibility. Yet in private, they inhabited a world defined by indulgence, entitlement, and a contempt for limits.

Elite detachment today is not only economic but also existential, and it is hardly confined to Americans. The governing classes of advanced democracies increasingly inhabit a world defined by mobility, abstraction, and insulation from consequence. Their loyalties are professional rather than civic, global rather than national, and managerial rather than moral. They experience society less as a shared inheritance than as a set of problems to be administered at a distance. In such a world, attachment to place, memory, and common fate appears parochial, even suspect, while belonging itself is quietly redefined as an obstacle to progress.

Those who create policies affecting immigration, policing, education, public health, and national security rarely face the consequences themselves. They do not send their children to failing schools, live in high-crime neighborhoods, compete for scarce housing, or navigate broken public institutions. Their lives are shielded by wealth, location, private services, and increasingly by law itself.

The Epstein files sharpen this reality because they reveal not just hypocrisy, but impunity. Despite extensive documentation, repeated warnings, and credible testimony, accountability arrived slowly and incompletely. This is not because the crimes were ambiguous, but because the accused moved within a protected sphere where consequences were negotiable and enforcement discretionary. Justice, like morality, was something applied elsewhere for other people.

What enrages the public is not prurience, but recognition. The scandal resonates because it confirms a growing suspicion among ordinary people that there is one moral universe for the governing class and another for everyone else. Elites preach restraint, sustainability, and responsibility while living lives of extraordinary consumption and indulgence. They urge social sacrifice while exempting themselves from its costs. They speak the language of progress while practicing a refined form of decadence.

Lasch warned that such a ruling class would eventually forfeit legitimacy, not because of ideology, but because of character. A society cannot be governed indefinitely by people who do not believe they belong to it. When elites become tourists in their own countries, financially global, culturally unrooted, and morally untethered, their authority rests on little more than coercion and spectacle.

The Epstein files should therefore be read less as an aberration than as a symptom. They reveal a governing class that has lost the habits of self-restraint that once justified its power, and the sense of common fate that once bound leaders to citizens.

For many, the salient point of the Epstein files is the scandal. I think it is more accurately seen as a disclosure.

The danger is not merely that such elites are corrupt, but that they are bored. Bored with limits, bored with norms, bored with accountability, and ultimately bored with democracy itself. That boredom, Lasch understood, is the precondition of revolt, not by the masses, but by those who no longer feel answerable to them.

If the Epstein affair provokes lasting anger, it is because it crystallizes a truth many citizens already sense, that the people shaping the future live in a world apart, governed by different rules, and increasingly incapable of moral seriousness. No society can long endure that division without consequence.

The question is not whether further revelations will emerge. It is whether the public will finally insist that elites once again live under the same moral and civic conditions as those they presume to lead.

WhatsApp & YouTube Blocked In Russia, Telegram Throttled As State "Super-App" Falters

   If there is one subject on which governments across the East/West divide can agree on, it must be the subject of control of the Internet. 

   In North Korea, you simply cannot exit the country. What you have is a kind of national intranet. 

  In China, there is the Great Wall which filters and limits interactions. As far as I could experience, access from international hotels and companies is free but some applications are not available and many words are filtered. As in the case of AI, the "touch" can be light (DeepSeek) or insufferable (Kimi). 

  Following the example of Europe, Russia is also turning the screw and filtering access to YouTube, WhatsApp and Telegram as explained in the article below.    

  What can be said? Yes, these applications can be used for propaganda and more ominously against the state. That much is true.

  As a libertarian, I believe that the best way to defend a state is to develop an efficient "immune system" based on truth and open information. 

  The opposite always ends up as a kind of joke, Pravda-like, the old communist newspaper that everybody read in the Soviet Union and absolutely nobody believed. 

  On this subject, your attitude will entirely depend on where you stand in respect of State vs Individual power. Chinese people, thanks to their education tend to err on the side of the state while Americans tend likewise to err on the side of the individual. The Russians and Europeans are mostly "socialist" in their thinking and consequently in-between.  

  From my experience of living in all these countries, your attitude and ideology is almost completely shaped by your education. This is why it is so difficult to build multi-national entities like the European Union. Greeks are simply not Germans and probably never will. Nor do they want to be!   

  So although it is easy to have an absolute opinion on the subject, for or against, in reality it depends on context and culture, time of growth and stress, economic expansion and contraction which is why attitude varies not only across cultures but also epochs.  

WhatsApp & YouTube Blocked In Russia, Telegram Throttled As State "Super-App" Falters

The West has been calling Russia's ever-tightening internet regulations on its citizenry a "digital Iron Curtain". Already over a period of months and years of the Ukraine war, various popular US-based social media apps have been throttled and even banned, but this week things have escalated with YouTube and WhatsApp being blocked in Russia:

Russia's internet regulator Roskomnadzor has removed"youtube.com" from its DNS (Domain Name System) servers. If a user tries to access the site directly without a VPN (Virtual Private Network), their router can no longer assign the address to its IP address.

This means that You Tube is no longer accessible in Russia. The WhatsApp domain has also disappeared from Roskomnadzor's servers. The Russian government has also launched a campaign against the messenger app Telegram, leading analysts to say Roskomnadzor is cracking down on platforms beyond its control.

But perhaps even more impactful - in terms of Russians quickly getting news, information, and public statements (even from their own government channels) - is the new move to throttle and block Telegram.

An interesting theory, especially in the wake of the shocking Wagner mutiny of 2023...

Russia’s state media watchdog Roskomnadzor has tightened the screws on Telegram, accusing the messaging giant of failing to curb fraud and safeguard user data, which ironically is similar to what the French government accused the company of when it famously detained billionaire Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov.

The platform has an estimated over 93 million Russian users, which is more than 60% of the total population, but the Kremlin hopes to replicate with its state-backed messenger, Max. The all-in-one 'super-app' has been described in the following:

Max, a state-backed messenger developed by VK, is being positioned as a patriotic alternative to WhatsApp and Telegram — platforms that in recent weeks have suffered complete or partial disruptions to voice and video calls across the country.

Max is further being dubbed a "state app":

Beyond the glitzy marketing, Max is built to serve a political purpose. Officials want it integrated with the state services portal Gosuslugi via the Unified Identification and Authentication System (ESIA). That would allow citizens to log into government platforms, pay utility bills or sign documents directly through the app, in effect making Max a digital gateway to basic civil services.

But at a government commission meeting in early August, the Federal Security Service (FSB) initially blocked Max's immediate connection to ESIA, citing the risk of personal data leaks. According to IT industry sources cited by Russian media, the FSB submitted a multi-page list of requirements ranging from certified encryption systems to source code audits. Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Grigorenko, who oversees the project, voiced similar concerns.

BBC has pointed out: "Moscow has made extensive efforts to push Russians to its state-developed Max app, which critics say lacks end-to-end encryption."

As for Telegram, it's loss will be huge for Russians, given that for starters every major Russian media outlet operates a Telegram channel, some even publishing there exclusively.

Major state and legacy outlets including RIA Novosti, TASS, RBC, Interfax, and Kommersant maintain large, highly active channels. In border regions like Belgorod, battered by power outages and municipal disruptions from Ukrainian strikes, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov uses Telegram to deliver updates directly to residents.

The same goes for many oblasts across Russia's south which have remained a frontline of sorts when it comes to cross-border attacks out of Ukraine.

Moskva News Agency

The other problem in getting rid of Telegram is that Russia's Defense Ministry pushes near-daily battlefield briefings, combat footage, and soldier interviews to its several hundreds of thousands of followers. So clearly any kind of major 'transition' - as is now apparently being forced on the population, won't come easy.

The Kremlin has long warned against Western intelligence infiltration and data exploitation especially via US-based platforms. It has also long battled what it deems 'propaganda' via content on these apps. But to some degree they are also mediums where Russian and Ukrainian officials can directly address the other side, serving the cause of public diplomacy, or at least clarifying each's position.