Thoughts

 “Privileger” vs. “Villager” (e.g. villagers mobbed outside the castle with pitchforks and torches)

(cf. “White Privileger” on Urban Dictionary)

“Privillager”

Visual juxtaposition: one hand on a computer keyboard (reason) the other on a piano keyboard (compassion)

The constant stream of glorious thoughts flow past, in and out of my mind with no capture, like a river of golden fish and no net or hook to catch them. It’s beautiful to watch as I sit motionless, penniless and hungry.

What if the next weaponized disinformation campaign attacked our trust in the validity of public key infrastructure and its underpinning number theory concepts, based on a distinction that almost nobody really understands, but is argued to be of no practical consequence. Uncertainty surrounds the issue like with the Y2K bug, where nobody agrees a priori on how big the problem really is, but everyone plays defense with their workarounds.

Suppose browser makers and root certificate issuers become politically aligned and suddenly have different opinions about whose certificates are valid, but only in a very few edge cases that are pivotal to some kind of social phenomenon? Seemingly there’s no functional difference, it’s considered a quirk, until a questionable certificate is part of an important evidence chain in a court case or election.

Like in a situation where all currency is assumed to be counterfeit, and a hierarchy emerges where the quality of the fake takes on its own value. So there’s a perverse situation in a hyperinflation scenario where someone can take either this stack of bills that are clearly genuine but not much nominal value, or that other stack with more zeros on the bills, but which are probably counterfeit but also probably could be passed off if you’re cool about it.

A story of an ex-union soldier in a poker game who takes the higher valued counterfeit US money over a smaller amount of confederate money, because he had inside information that the confederate bills were no longer spendable but he knew he could pass the fake yankee bills.