On top of my road accident last week I also had my Stripe account, which is linked up to Substack, frozen. The reason? Unclear. Now they are asking for all this extra documentation that I don’t have because I’m not a company. Also, their support email appears to be run by an AI and I have to ask the same question three times in three different ways to get an answer. The answers I’ve gotten so far are maddeningly unhelpful, although I think I may be able to sort out the problem in the coming days. Maybe.
For now, that means that until I get things sorted, I can’t get my paycheck, which sucks because I need money to live in society and most people do as well, generally speaking.
I think all of it is related to the Biden regime starting to squeeze Americans harder via the IRS. I also heard some related news about how COVID dissidents have had bank accounts shut down and Nigel Farage and his supporters from ex-UKIP were de-banked as well. I had my old bank account closed about a year ago because I hadn’t been in the US for so long even though I still used it and I have no idea why that happened, so I chalk it up to these new measures.
In my case, I would think that I’d get a warning from Substack first before getting the boot. So, I want to be cautiously optimistic and say that it really is just some IRS-related bullshit and not Stripe, the payment processor, giving me the boot. I’m 100% sure though that I will be de-banked in some way in the future for what I have written in the past and it is only a question of “if” and not “when”. Er … flip that.
Either that or because I am unvaxxed or identify as a “Rashist” or something like that.
So will you, by the way, eventually.
Funny enough, the only way to beat the censorship and de-banking is to accumulate enough of a support base to be able to keep working despite the intellectual sanctions. Once you incur one ban, the information is shared, and a cascading network effect of concurrent and coordinated bans and suspensions ensues. From there, it becomes a cat and mouse game of constantly switching to alternate platforms and dragging your supporters along with you. A lot of people I’ve known and worked with over the years have had to go through this process and it isn’t fun, let me tell you. But, if worse comes to worst, and I can’t process payments here or even blog here eventually, I’ll just move to Telegram. Sadly, the Russian government is so pro-West and stupid that despite talking about it for decades at this point, they still haven’t set up an alternative internet infrastructure of core services like registrars, cloud services, payment processors, media platforms and so on. The few Russian internet tech giants with potential have either been chased out of Russia by Putin’s oligarch friends (VK, Telegram) or have been sold off and moved to Israel (Yandex) or moved to Dubai last year to avoid the sanctions as part of the big tech exodus from Russia.
Imagine if Western dissidents had a support network of backbone services that they couldn’t be kicked off of. Wouldn’t you provide something like that if you were serious about standing up to the West? Do you know how much damage such a simple measure would do to the power of the Western elites, who rely on sophisticated methods software supremacy to shadow-ban, surpress and silence their opposition? Rhetorical. You know the score by now and shouldn’t be surprised that the Duma embezzles the money or spends it on building the digital gulag according to WEF standards.
Anyways, the only problem with me moving to Telegram is that most of you do not have Telegram and will categorically refuse to download the app on either your phone or your computer, even though all the best info and commentary is on there in both English and Russian (which is translatable). Likewise, literally none of my readers appear to know what crypto is or how to use it either. I know this because while I didn’t have a bank account during the early days of the blog, I asked for donations to my crypto wallet and I got literally zero donations. But, the moment I was able to get Stripe up and running, people started signing up and supporting the blog. Now, I’m grateful for the support, truly, but I do think it is kind of funny that people who consider themselves to be dissidents don’t know how to use an anonymous (or semi-anonymous) financial tool like crypto because they say they will be tracked or that it isn’t perfect or think that it is illegal to own Bitcoin, but feel comfortable handing over their credit card info instead.
This, to me, is just further proof of how hopeless and yet also how unserious the whole situation is because even regime-critical people cannot be bothered to take even elementary measures to a) support de-banked dissidents and b) conceal their support for these dissidents in some way. It also tells me that if tomorrow I got kicked off Stripe (usually they ban you for life) and de-banked and de-Substacked, I could, in theory, just open up my own blog for a time, old-school style, but I would not be able to pay rent with it. Why? Well, because even though the tech now exists to basically allow people to pay for stuff online using crypto (which you can’t be banned from because it goes directly from computer to computer) in a very similar way to paying for stuff on Amazon (I know, I just bought some tobacco online using crypto this way on a Shopify-like clone), the vast majority of people will refuse to actually use such a service because it would involve like, what, maybe an hour tops of work upfront learning how to use the new tech.
Now, me, I support anti-tech sentiments and am even reading David Skrbina’s Metaphysics of Technology right now which seems to be driving towards the final argument that technology is literally Demiurgic/Saturnic and should be treated in the same way we do radioactive waste or Jehova’s Witnesses missionaries knocking at our doors. If you don’t know, Skrbina is Ted Kazinsky’s (RIP) editor and former pen-pal while he was in prison and I’ve even emailed him for a podcast interview, which would be really cool if he agrees to it.
So, I get tech-ludditism and I support it generally.
However, even Mr. Blow-Up-Computer-Scientists himself said in his anti-tech manifestos that luddite-warriors would need to use tech to defeat their pro-tech opponents and that they would need better and more cutting-edge tech to do so. So, frankly, this stalwart refusal to adopt tech-tools on the part of dissidents is as frustrating and counter-productive as it is totally predictable. Our side wants to copy the semi-fictional example of the doomed Samurai rebellion that refused to use firearms against the Meiji modernizers taking over Japan.
Believe me though, I totally get the sentiment. I think the Nipponese and the ancient Greeks had the right approach and we should outlaw most technology and the castes that produce it. The Mark Zuckerbergs of the world ought to be lower than slaves in the social hierarchy, not the boyars leading society.
Funny enough, Mark Zuckerberg revealed in an interview with his distant cousin Lex Fridman that he used the god in Genesis as his guide while creating his “Meta” virtual reality nightmare-scape. He believes himself to literally be following the example of Yahweh, he said.
This is funny for several reasons. The first is because all the villains in “fictional” cyberpunk dystopias (our world now) are basically oligarchs who want to become god or think they already are god through the use of their tech. For example, both Tyrell and Wallace are portrayed this way in the Blade Runner films. In the second film, Wallace is trying to engineer a slave-race of Replicants with which to populate the galaxy. He monologues about fallen angels and storming heaven. What’s more, he is blind.
The gnostic themes are so readily apparent, but the vast majority of people don’t pick up anything that isn’t stated explicitly, so here goes: Wallace is supposed to be Saklas or Samael or the Demiurge, the blind creator-god who oppresses us here on this fallen plane of existence.
Also, Phillip K. Dick, the guy who wrote the precursor story to the Blade Runner franchise and is one of the most influential writers in sci-fi was a gnostic and a mystic himself. He experienced a full mental breakdown or a spiritual epiphany depending on how you look at it near the end of his life which led to him claiming that he was concurrently living in Pontius Pilate’s time and in our day and age as well.
You get the same themes in Neuromancer, that came later in which William Gibson also talks about AI becoming sentient and merging with the cosmic consciousness of the universe. This was then borrowed in Ghost in the Shell which kept the same themes and expanded upon them, but which had a kind of more materialistic, tech-reductionist view of soul and consciousness. But you can still see the theme of literally finding god in technology in the movie. Notice: all these stories have an actual Deus in the Machina, a god that comes out of the machine.
So the idea that technology is somehow related to god (ah, but which one?) in a very direct way is quite well understood by many in both the artistic and now the tech-oligarch worlds. And the reason why Mark Zuckerberg and others think that they are gods is because they are creating techne. They seem to literally believe that they are following the example of the god in Genesis, who created this little sandbox virtual reality we live in now before Zuckerberg ever got to work on his.
Do you see the connection? Do you get it now?
Now, the ancient Greeks thought that the creation of techne was basically the process by which ideas floating around in the warp/noosphere/nous/pleroma, were plucked out of the metaphysical higher realms and manifested in ours. The process of inventing computer chips, for example, is therefore akin to the summoning of daimons/demons. What’s more, even internet-schizos are already picking up on this connection on their own even though none of them even know what the word “metaphysics” means.
Techne is the act of summoning warp-daimons and manifesting them in the matterium.
The ancient view on the original creation act of the creator-god was that we, higher beings, were plucked out/tricked out of the higher realms and committed to this material prison. Since the pre-Platonic (Socrates was probably Plato’s invention) ancients were anti-Demiurge and skeptical of the intentions of the gods, to put it mildly, this was not considered a “good” thing. That is also why they did not value tech-creators in their society and focused their efforts on philosophy, science (not to be confused with technics, which is the invention of various toys and gadgets), war and spiritual self-becoming.
Well, at least the elite did. The slaves worked the fields, of course.
The alleged writer of the Torah, Moses Zuckerberg, took this metaphysics and inverted it with the creation myth of Genesis. What we call gnostic heresy is the original, earlier interpretation and what we now have in Nicene Christianity is the coarsened, materialized, inverted, perverted, poisoned version of Greek metaphysics. Then, the concept of bodily Resurrection, given to us by Matthew Zuckerberg, is a materialization of the older Greek concept of Anastasis, which was about spiritual rebirth. Then, Marx Zuckerberg did the same thing in the 19th century when he took Hegel’s ideas concerning ideas and geist (i.e., immaterial things) and materialized them to apply to history and class conflict. Even the transsexual craze of our time is a materialized understanding of the occult principle of alchemic union of male and female, the manifestation of the spiritual hermaphrodite that is the merger of the divine female and divine male essence, synthesized to create a higher being in a higher realm.
Naturally, the pioneer of trans surgery in Weimar Germany, a certain Magnus Zuckerberg, materialized this spiritual concept by physically removing and splicing on genitalia onto mentally-ill patients.
I hope you guys are starting to sense a pattern here?
Now, I believe that the point I was driving at here was that you should get Telegram and learn how to use crypto, but then I got a bit distracted. So, seriously, go do that, please.
The process is fairly similar to using a credit card, and even old-timers have learned how to use credit cards to shop for things online, haven’t they? Strangely enough, the era of CBDC electronic currency has dawned on us, and the roll-out is already underway in countries like Kazakhstan, China and Russia, which lead the pack in many ways, and yet people like to pretend that they can just not learn how to use these currencies. But this is a very naive view of things. The technocrats sure seem to be confident that they can make their crypto ubiquitous in society and they are optimistic that they will achieve this by simply making it mandatory to use these electronic currencies and outlawing all cash by 2030. Actually, these new CBDCs will be pretty much identical to older currencies like Bitcoin it seems like. So, in a weird way, the globalists pushing for their funny money will at least spur adoption of this new tech, which might mean that myself and other more important de-banked people would finally be able to receive financial support from the masses who will be forced to adopt the new tech by the use of a stick instead of a carrot.
We will see I guess.
Regardless, my primary back-up plan for now is to retreat to Telegram because they have regular payment processor functions up and running on the platform which means that people can subscribe in the same way that they do here. Sadly, I’d lose all the pledges that I’ve gathered over the last year + of work though, I’d have to ask people to sign up again and I strongly suspect that only maybe 20% of my casual audience is tech-literate enough to download a new app and follow me there. Also, Telegram isn’t really a blogging platform but one better suited for basically long-form Tweets. The benefit of Telegram is that it lends itself to sparring with other channels easier though, so the content would be more vitriolic and dynamic. The drawback is that the depth of analysis would suffer.
All in all, I hope it doesn’t come to that and I can stay on here for as long as possible. But yeah for now with my foot injury and my Stripe account down, expect the posting to pause until we get that sorted out. Hopefully, it will be resolved in a matter of days now.
These tech-demon-oligarchs got me all worked up and bent out of shape.
I have had Telegram for a few years , I was hoping my boomer friends would move there too so we could exit the Zuck Fuck messenger but unfortunately everybody is stuck in their old habits and don't even recognise what F'book really is. I got banned there so many time I have ceased to use the website for a couple of years now but as all my friends and relatives are still there I have to use F'book messenger to stay in touch. Not to mention that Telegram is RUSSIAN , shock horror we cant' support Putler you know! So sad how dumb the majority are. Let's hope U can get this Stripe , never heard of it , sorted out and we can continue on the sub stack. Buck up , Ihope your foot is improving but no sympathy as I believe you were driving sober when you crashed.
Boomer here. Have Telegram but seldom use it. Have put off learning crypto just as you observed. Will be rethinking both. Best of the Fates to you.