I’m shoveling more shovelware this morning.
After doing what amounted to an undergraduate thesis on Naked Lunch (I delayed an incomplete in Philosophical Ideas in Literature until it almost expired a year later. Gentleman’s B), it dawns on me that with all the snippets and bits in my Highland queue, maybe William Burroughs had ADHD. Besides, you know, being a herion addict and um, wife-manslaughterer…
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Hard Money
Geodesic Culture
Robert Hettinga
September 18 2021
Seafeathers Bay, Anguilla
The last time I popped a rant onto the cryptography list, a long-time correspondent and DCSB member, after a brief email exchange, ups and says, roughly paraphrased,
Holy fuck, you’re a **Trump** guy.
Well, yeah.
Radio silence. So much for the bright sunlit uplands of the free-market state-free internet future. Degenerate statist pressure reasserted itself around about the dot-bomb and Bush v. Gore, and it’s been very slowly and then all at once ever since.
One of the reasons I don’t write much in public. That and what I thought was I had access to enough fuck-you money to just hang out here in paradise, getting kicked off various social media platforms for my political opinions, ‘till I plant my feet in the sky like everybody else does. And, now, for several reasons, I’m going to have to start again. Which will be, problematic, lately. See ‘plant my feet in the sky’, above, for one of the usual ground-conditions.
Getting paid these days involves a very weak chain of financial operations, starting with going through a credit card processor, and a bank; and, as that’s gotten considerably easier than when I started thinking about this stuff in 1993-4, the last few years have shown us the usual problems with monoculturural financial hierarchy. Stop me if you’ve heard this before.
Yes, I’m ignoring the elephant in the room, well neigh unto Monero and Lightning, but, as usual, the trick is still getting paid the way everybody else does. F=MA. It’s not even my own dog-food, after all. And, as ZMan likes to observe, reader enthusiasm doesn’t pay the bills.
Which brings me to show-biz. I’ve been paying attention to movie production lately, blame Charles Murray, and I was listening to Amanda Milius this week talking about how she had to put ‘The Plot Against The President’ together. Amanda went old-school, because, being John Milius’ daughter, she grew up movie old-school.
One of her more outstanding hacks was distribution. The cardinal rule in the the movie business after ‘nobody knows anything’ and, ‘everybody thinks they know everything’, is straight from the junk and rag trades: ‘the first thing you do is get the money’. And the most important part of that is to secure distribution. These days, that’s streaming.
Amanda, after hiring her father’s agent, accountants and lawyers, figured out how to get distribution on Amazon Prime. No. Really. First thing you do is get the money. And in movies, money starts with distribution. And Amazon Prime will do, nicely, for distribution.
Of course she walked in the back door. With a title like ‘The Plot Against the President’, you don’t just throw the title over ur-libtard Jeff Bezos’ transom and ask for permission. Amanda threw money at lawyers instead. They figured out how to just put the film on Amazon Prime like everybody else did, obey the usual boilerplate, and fight like hell when the various Amazon woke-rage NPCs onked. It worked. The movie is still there. Amanda seems to have made her money back, lawyers first in line, blessings be, cough, upon them.
Of course, Amazon has shut that door now, moving to in house content production, like all the big-time streamers do. Meh. More lacunae where that one came from at other places. Shit, like GETTR, someone will just build their own version. Besides, :-), geodesic distribution someday, like cash-settled Bittorrent or something.
Which brings us all the way back to hard money. When Mark Twain Bank in St. Louis brought out their Digicash trial in the early 90’s, there was a flaw revealed by, of course, a pornographer, who tried to get an account at the bank so he could take Digicash. Mrs. Grundy at MTB rose up outta nowhere like one of giant paper-mache puppets, and, hey, presto, not so much with the Digicash anymore.
Porn people have their own credit card processors now, and since The Internet Is For Porn, it’s not so big a deal now, anyway. The internet isn’t for conservatives, though, so the problem remains.
Tim May nods, sagely.
Apparently, people are inherently evil and shit, and you can’t depend on their honor for nothing anymore. It’s enough to make you stop believing in the perfectability of the human race and become a, um, conservative or something...
Still, Bob’s Gotta Get Paid. If I start shooting my mouth off, I want to be able to keep shooting it off and lot lose whatever income, if any, I derive from same.
So, sure, in the absence of my own bearer-transacted dog-food, or even that of Satoshi, PBUH, I’munna need a bank and a credit card processor. Which, in my case, especially in my case, is going to be a Hard Problem. Being unbanked for a couple decades, and never had to process a credit card before. Square, etc., will cancel me. I don’t want to jeopardize my wife’s finances by using her accounts, which have my name on them.
Is a puzzlement.