INTERNET — Today in a defiant press conference at the golf course, Donald Trump said, “Bitcoins are the ultimate in value. We’re going to end this shutdown by purchasing many million Bitcoins. I know, I have some great information, and the coins fix everything. It’s an easy decision.”
Trump pointed at a CNN reporter and said, “Faker,” when asked if he was using taxpayers money for criminal market manipulations.
“There are no rules in bitcoins as far as I know.” Trump imperiously dismissed all mainstream news reporters, including Fox. “We’ve already made the deal, people, the shutdown’s over. Go report something real for once. Bye bye.”
Internet Chronicle reporters were given exclusive access to insider gossip on the golf course in a no-camera interview at Mar-A-Lago on the same basis as Michael Wolff.
Trump crushed the golf ball, raging and even barking like a hound dog, “The MORE I buy, the LESS China gets!”
QAnonymous, the Q-clearance NSA hacker and golfing buddy of Trump chipped a ball from the rough to complete a birdie. “This is some good shit right here. THIS will be for EVERYONE. We can rig it to $1 TRILLION DOLLARS A COIN. It’s happening already. The storm is here and it’s the power of Bitcoins. Quantum supercomputers exist and in another year we’ll have easy control of any existing blockchain. We’re going to drive the price so fucking high and then milk ’em for as long as we can. WE’VE CRACKED THE CODE TO INFINITE WEALTH FOR EVERYONE, FOREVER!”
Dr. Angstrom H. Troubador of Canterbury said, “Thanks to Donald Trump’s decree in recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the end days are now upon us! Read Revelations and Pray! Prayer without bitcoins might mean ruin.”
If Julian Assange were only retweeting Pope Francis out of the usual convenient messaging, it would be more of the same wry humor from the atheist hacker. However, in the past months Assange has retweeted Pope Francis more than anyone else, suggesting deep changes in his character of the profound kind usually associated with a religious conversion or epiphany. This far-out, science fictional prophecy from his Twitter last week gives flesh to the hunch:
It is well-known that mystics, shamans, and monks seeking proximity to the vast expanse beyond endure incredible isolation or physical stresses, and Assange has incidentally undergone a special and new trial, a digital stylite preaching to the world from the cramped office he can never leave.
Assange’s message suffers badly from a laughable popcorn-munching hype where computers are not sophisticated tools in the hands of the 1%, but rather more clever versions of their creators. Of course The Matrix and Terminator would be so much less sensational with a few computer nerds and Jeff Bezos behind the curtains, but Assange is one of them in spirit, and he does not want to give Dorothy the balloon ride home. He is a mad villain who wants to breathe sentience into computers, another Dr. Frankenstein with the mantras “Publish and be damned! Information wants to be free,” in spite of his sudden religious enlightenment.
Wikileaks and Julian Assange are the vanguard of an infectious planetary discourse that appears terminal to the world order. For all its oppression, lies, and terror, it is too easy to look back only ten or twenty years and see a golden age of civility, socialism, and geopolitical harmony. Democrats who once hated George W. Bush already look back at his wars of aggression with nostalgia, a totally morbid symptom if there ever was one.
Assange’s mystical revelation has the kernel of truth in that we’ve entered a new era by which the domination of the 1% is cemented by dehumanized technology and uncivilized discourse. Black Mirror’s The Waldo Moment is too terrible to watch. Some might say this is the end of the neoliberal era, but perhaps Assange has made its ultimate and final expression. The phony naturalism of the classic liberals now takes a singularitarian bent, and Dr. Frankenstein’s threatening, neofascist AI monster is already in power, controlled by men like Julian Assange who bogart all its gifts for themselves, cowardly cheapskate wizards behind the curtains. There is no good reason to struggle against the “AI” tools of the 1%, to wear strange makeup for surveillance and encrypt every byte of online presence. The quaint Christian message of Pope Francis that makes the poor and the powerless sacred again is enough.
Celebrated hacker and satirist Jaime Cochran made the world a better place
This afternoon we learned our beloved best friend, Jaime Cochran, passed away at her home in Oakland, California.
The headline of this story, and the words in the body do not make sense on the screen. We are grieving her loss with everyone right now. We have proven nothing we write here matters, so we won’t pretend like these words do. Nor do they help. There’s nothing we can say that will make the pain of this loss go away, and anyone who knows Jaime understands anything short of a novel simply doesn’t do justice to the life she lived. If you’re reading this, Jaime probably affected you the way she did so many others who had the pleasure of knowing her.
Jaime did whatever the hell she wanted to do, she was good at what she did, and she became successful doing it. She did her own thing, and it worked. She is a legend. People idolized her.
She was a genius, and working with her here was a privilege. She was like a gift from the Internet.
Jaime came into Internet Chronicle when we were still relatively new, when the .su domain was maybe only a couple years old. She instantly identified with us, understood what we were doing, and ran with her ideas, taking the website to new places and making everybody laugh very hard. Most people laughed.
Jaime loved trolling and messing with people’s minds, but then her work was filled with positive, joking messages that were funny to read. She took the medium and made it her own, and brought it to you all, and the quality of her work made us better just by association. This place is still a shithole, but I honestly can’t imagine what it would have been without her.
She is the funniest person I know, and we were privileged to have befriended her, and we enjoyed her friendship from the very beginning. Jaime was one of us.
When we met Jaime, we were going after dirty people, corrupt leaders and hypocrites on this website. [We’ve since stopped doing that, and now mainly just focus on basketball.] We went after hate together with the very animosity and hatred of the targets we ridiculed. She was like us in the way she thought that was a fun thing to do on a Saturday night.
Anyway, that’s how she named me hatesec.
I asked her ‘what are we doing here?’ I said, “We have lulzsec, antisec and prosec. What are we?”
She said, “youre hatesec”
I changed my pen-name on the spot and, until today, I never looked back.
I took our good times for granted. I thought there would always be more, more phone calls, more chatlogs, more love, more time and more everything, and I just knew I’d look forward to even more after that. I would always be looking forward to the next time I might hear from Jaime. Now I sit here in my bedroom, listening to her favorite version of Birthday Boy, and there is only looking back.
Those good times and laughs are burned into our minds.
But hey. Hysterical fits of laughter are the lifeblood of our bodies and souls, and proof time doesn’t exist, putting a big hot black punctuation mark on the howling pain of existence. When everything around you is lost in a dense fog of intense laughter, you are experiencing the physical manifestation of happiness itself, a permanent change in your body chemistry that takes place after you laugh so hard that you lose control of yourself and evolve against your will. Laughter is the mind’s lasting memory, and Jaime came here to show us there is only this moment, and it is fucking funny.
Jaime Cochran was fucking funny.
Thank you for everything, Jaime. You made the world a better place.
INTERNET — Today in a defiant press conference at the golf course, Donald Trump said, “Bitcoins are the ultimate in value. We’re going to end this shutdown by purchasing many million Bitcoins. I know, I have some great information, and the coins fix everything. It’s an easy decision.”
