The 3-Step Plan to End Cancel Culture

Plus a Very Important Second Thing

Have you ever been selected by an idea? This may strike you as an odd question if the answer is no; but the thing is, all the solutions to our problems exist right now- they just need to be discovered. If you point to some seemingly intractable problem you have no idea how to begin to address, there is *some* combination of words that could be neatly arranged on a paper that would give you exactly what you were looking for. These concepts and abstractions dwell in some alien plane just beyond the bounds of cognition- whether ideas are plucked from it or dropped remains a matter of some debate, but in either case, it seems to require an intermediary: a daemon to traverse the membrane of consciousness and the void to convert a concept, notion, or quasi-hunch from “N/A” into “What if?” After that, it’s the recipient’s responsibility to bring it into existence.

I have- it’s why I started this Substack. It’s evolved and been refined, smelted down, reforged, and refined again many times over. Over that time, the issue it’s meant to combat hasn’t been combated. Not really. The need to solve it is indistinguishable from two years ago and irrespective of the talent, brains, and virtue directed towards it, the needle’s barely moved. Before proceeding, I should emphasize that although I freely dip into the self-aggrandizing, it is not my intent to paint a messianic picture- messiahs save everyone, and this will not accomplish that on its own. But it’s better than anything else that’s been thrown out combined and as best I can tell, if I don’t do it, no one will. So that makes it simple. 

The good news is that of the three steps this entry will cover, Step 1 already exists. Some more good news is the near future is extremely promising. The challenging and relevant news is I need more time to get the party started than I currently have- there are personal consequences to this succeeding, and to make sure I can’t take an off-ramp, I burned my boats. Unfortunately, my rent is paid in boats (we’ll loop back to that point toward the end). This entry is going to provide a full overview of the 3-Step Grand Plan to enable anyone to insure themselves against a potential cancellation, and hopefully leave you with the impression these three steps can be brought to fruition.

That first thing is usually inadvisable in the business world- and I used to fear these ideas being stolen by someone with more resources- but to my genuine surprise, I don’t think they can. I tried explaining why here a few times, but they were all too masturbatory so for your sake, let’s just skip it. I’m also not going to really “pitch” it because the supporting context and logic for the idea is literally what the majority of the rest of the Substack is for. The point of this one is to simply say what I’m going to do and dare the world to stop me. Alright, here we go::

Step 1

This has already been laid out before, but I can’t just start at Step 2. Who is most vulnerable to cancellation yet also best positioned to use a network to defend themselves from the costs? Creators with large audiences. How do you bootstrap a network? Creators and audiences. The thing is there’s a whole swath of creators that aren’t large enough to generate meaningful protection. Onto Step 2:

Step 2

This is where things get fun. You can say the numbers in the example are absurd, but you can play around with variables for a week, and that’s going to be an appropriate term to describe the numbers it spits out. One goal I have is to generate $25k each for a group of creators (3 months of pay for a $100k job), and another is $50k each (median American salary, roughly speaking). It’s more convenient for users to just make one pledge to a “crew” or faction as opposed to going through them one by one and also the way for smaller to mid-sized creators (who often still have day jobs) to generate a game-changing amount of money.

Distributed pledges dramatically amplify the capacity of crowdfunded insurance by harnessing the inherent social dynamics & network structures of the most valuable members across various subcultures being supported by the remainder of their subculture, which manifests digitally as their followers/audience/subscribers/etc. Put more simply, this provides a means for the bottom 90% of any online social pyramid to protect the top 10% against forces that threaten (or are perceived to threaten) their respective group interests. 

“But what about the guy off the street with little to no following to support them?” Onto Step 3:

Step 3

I used to call this a DAU (Decentralized Autonomous Union) before, but I like MMA better. Again, let’s call the numbers I used bullshit and go down to something reasonable like 3 months salary. You need even fewer participants and it gets even more affordable. The quickest application is for occupations like academics or doctors that are liable to be attacked by the administrative apparatus manned by the most parasitic members of their respective professions, but this is meant to be accessible to everyone. Or at least anyone successful enough to have a job that can be dangled over them as a point of leverage by threatening to take it away. Here are some markets for Multiplied Mutual Aid:

Synthesizing My Superiors

Now- why would I risk sharing all that? Let’s pretend you're someone who doesn’t want to help me, but use this info for yourself (maybe you don’t even have to pretend). Human beings are very fucking difficult, and making sure all the above actually works is a whole different story than knowing about it. It’s like the delicate interior of a watch constructed from behavioral economics and adjudication mechanisms instead of gears and springs- one that’s taken me a handful of years to figure out- and I’ve realized throughout many conversations the connections and implications between theories I’ve made are essentially illegible outside of myself. Not entirely, but definitely in their entirety.

There’s also the standard phenomenon of projection, where people read what I’ve shared and unconsciously assume I have the same level of knowledge as them despite that being an illogical thought. I said it’s standard for a reason, but it's still bizarre to experience. “You didn’t account for X.” Yes I did, it’s just not included on the slide. I keep it in my Things I’ve Accounted For folder next to my solutions for Y and Z and the rest of the alphabet. Another funny thing is that it’s widely known that entrepreneurial breakthroughs often come from a novel combination of ideas- with that in mind, I thought that synthesizing the thoughts of some of the best minds of our time like John Robb, Curtis Yarvin, and Balaji Srinivasan would make people go “Oh cool, you did the combination thing” but it turns out it generally just makes the picture even more illegible.

This is understandable; I don’t see many people even attempting to answer most questions they’ve posed, let alone in the form of reasonable proposals. Take what Balaji is saying about defending against cancellations in the first part of this clip. He mentions paying some % of one’s income toward cancellation insurance. It's a good start and the final picture will obviously be a combination of existing ideas and new ideas, so perhaps we can take the existing mechanism presented there and merge it with the three new ones I invented. The concept of a Network State is brilliant and deserves billions of dollars over dozens if not hundreds of projects working in that direction, but Network States will be entering a hostile world. I introduced the concept of the Militarized Network State to rethink the militia for the 21st century in the same way Balaji’s rethinking the state precisely because I think the latter is so important.

Now listen to Yarvin in the last part of the same clip:

“The ability to make that circulation (of the elites) happen with the energy from non-elite forces. Is sort of the interesting problem of how to kick this off.”

This is essentially a re-phrasing of one of Jonathan Bowden's famous quotes, "The trick is to link the vanguard to the popular will." What do you think "Giving the silent majority the means to subsidize the risks of those willing to represent their interests" meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Help is the first-order effect, change is the second. You should help people because one voice on your shoulder tells you it’s the right thing to do. You should want change (i.e. taking away power from those you don’t like or “Destroying your enemies” if you prefer to be more blunt about it) because it’s what the voice on the other shoulder tells you to do. End your internal civil war and listen to both.

How about the patronage problem of connecting those with resources to the talent that could use them that Yarvin is discussing with BAP in the second half of this clip:

"There are other people who maybe going to write better books than I do, and they don't because their families will starve if they get doxxed, these millionaires and billionaires you're mentioning could provide some kind of insurance for these people"

Here you go (keep Step 2 in mind for that bottom part):

One of John Robb's primary concerns is what he's dubbed The Long Night (permanent totalitarian censorship). Implementing his concept of an open-sourced insurgency in a novel fashion using "Countering Cancel Culture" as the Plausible Promise that unites disparate factions to do it is one of the best hopes of avoiding it. Yarvin is correct that “A strategic victory is a victory that makes other victories possible.” A system that makes other victories possible by producing victories itself while facilitating strategic victories that produce even more victories would be quite useful, to put it mildly.

The niche this fills is straightforward, as is the need to fill it. The folks doing American Dynamism are doing great work getting the country working with its hands again, but its brain is still rotted. You have Anduril for threats abroad and nothing for threats at home. People are happy to combat threats from the Chinese Communist Party and they’re happy to fight Russia from the mere fact it used to be communist 30 years ago. Meanwhile, the gay race communism that's crippling the very foundation of the country allowing anything to keep running in the first place continues to go unaddressed. Although San Francisco has become so fucked up, the foreign and domestic angles kinda blur together.

We don't need to keep it at the narrow "culture war" angle, let’s take a broader look at the ongoing struggle. If the overarching conflict of our time is centralized legacy institutions attacking decentralized emergent networks, network-mediated security would seem valuable to the latter, would it not?

Me And You (Maybe. If You’re Cool.)

I got into two fights in elementary school: one was to protect a kid smaller than me, and another was because a kid said a cheetah was faster than a peregrine falcon and was being an asshole about it like I was the dumb one. The lesson is I hate bullies and I hate people that are wrong while being arrogant assholes toward the people who are right. I was daydreaming about how to solve the Thucydides Trap and severing China’s economic arteries to undermine their ability to challenge the US  when I was in high school. Now I daydream about how to make it through the Great Filter and avoid humanity going extinct in my lifetime and all day every day I’m forced to watch arrogantly wrong bullies take a blowtorch to the human capital capable of saving humanity from itself. I’ve been destined to fight these people my entire life. 

I truly pity the apathetic. I’m filled with so much love that I run a surplus I continually convert into hatred. I’m not in academia; let me attack the parasitic academics. I’m not in medicine; let me attack the parasitic doctors and pharma vultures. I’m not a teacher, let me attack the parasitic and predatory teachers. And let me do that by defending the non-parasitic members of all the above professions (as well as others). Your society is being deliberately destroyed by rabid malignant narcissists. Let the benevolent narcissist you have in your corner off the chain so he can cripple them before gunning for the psychopaths holding their leash. 

In regards to release from “The Chain” (not the wonderful song, the metaphor I just used for personal finances): I’m not referring to medium or long-term “freedom”- aside from being insane if I was, there are institutions for that. I’ve talked to and continue to talk to VC’s that are interested once this gets further along, I just need a bit more time. Getting people self-selected by their independence and disagreeableness is obviously like herding cats. They are indeed being herded, and while I obviously can’t drop names I expect to herd soon, being in Austin provides absurd accessibility. To provide one of many examples, I go to the same gym as multiple influencers whose names you’d almost certainly recognize- yes dear reader, I have been in close proximity to one or two of your favorite political commentators without our pants on¹. 

To be serious, I believe down to my bones that what I’ve outlined here can set things into motion that will seem like magic in hindsight. I’m betting my life on it. That said, I’m not actually a wizard- I’m a difficult person attempting to get other difficult people to move in the same direction and it’s taken more time than my allotted runway to get them to do so at the requisite level for VC’s to come into play. A handful of months should do the trick, and my underestimation of the timeline opens up an opportunity that certainly wouldn’t be provided otherwise.

If you might be interested in helping to provide that time in exchange for equity, feel free to email me at harry.bergeron.1984@gmail.com and I can share more details to discuss. For most readers this won’t be relevant, and I don’t need to convince anyone already chomping at the bit, but for those on the fence, I’d politely ask the following question: Do you want to bring this evil house of cards masquerading as an unbreakable prison crashing down for fun and profit or not?

1. That’s not true, but saying “shirts” was boring