allen on Nostr: “I’M NOT IDEOLOGICAL, YOU’RE IDEOLOGICAL!!!” - every ideologue, ever 😂 you ...

“I’M NOT IDEOLOGICAL, YOU’RE IDEOLOGICAL!!!” - every ideologue, ever 😂

you are correct that I’ve thought a lot about it. I’ll try to keep the answer short(ish) rather than writing you a book.

whether you really are ideological or not, you will inevitably seem that way to others for a handful of related reasons. what you are proposing, even is solely positive terms, is so absurdly outside the Overton window most have trouble interpreting it at face value and think there must be something else going on here, you must be kinda crazy, etc.,

since you are implicitly (or explicitly!) rejecting enormous swathes of contemporary culture, politics, and economics, it’s difficult for people to see that as *anything other than* ideological. of course they don’t realise they are living and participating in a competing ideology, but its dominance is such that their attention is never drawn to it. having their attention drawn in that way is unpleasant and they’d usually rather pathologies the pest rather than genuinely introspect.

for what it’s worth I try to tap into this in how I communicate in public. as much as I see the place of the tribalism, memes, lore, etc., and hence am not at all knocking anybody who focuses on that kind of thing, I am wary of this coming across as overtly ideological and unnecessarily unpersuasive. I tend to focus my commentary on how stupid and evil the fiat system is, often veering into outright mockery and humiliation of those who believe in and propagate it. the goal is to make *them* look crazy, not us.

when I talk about bitcoin itself my tone is usually dry and the content purely factual. where possible, I play up the technical challenges both to be honest about the material and to fake my own humility to try to strike a contrast with fiat propaganda.

so something like, “bitcoin is the fastest and most secure value settlement mechanism ever created and lightning offers nearly free and instant simulation of “payments” by swapping cryptographically enforceable deferred settlement in this layer. contrary to every other fiat payment method in existence, it is a true debit. there is no counterparty risk and no credit extension, although maintaining adequate channel liquidity and protecting against malevolent channel partners are both novel and challenging … etc.”

rather than: “lightning can do a trillion transactions per second and is going to DESTROY card networks and bitcoinize the dollar.”

the latter is probably true but the former is how I’d prefer to communicate. so back to your question: I don’t think it’s a good or a bad thing about the arguments themselves, and it’s not even necessarily true - it’s just an unfortunate reality of how they are likely to be perceived by most. but depending on what you want to achieve, you can certainly affect that perception.

(sorry for the novella)