Hello all. The subject of this audio essay is my absence, the tech platforms, the 2020

election, Gene Seaburg, and oddly enough, Article 58 of the former Soviet Union's Russian

penal code. I don't want to say too much about what I've been up to, but suffice it to

say that I'm fine, or at least as fine as anyone is in 2020. Also rest assured that I've

not forgotten about you all or lost interest in the podcast, or more importantly our community.

Far from it. In fact, it's the exact opposite of that. I want to ensure that we can continue

talking and building the community that is sprung up around the podcast. Portal Nation,

if you will, is a place where I choose to spend my own free time with perhaps less distance

than I should have with my audience, as many of you have become my friends.

Some time ago, I started warning many of my friends to be very careful on the internet

and the immediate run up to the 2020 US election. In particular, I warned people associated

with the Intellectual Dark Web that they should be very careful not to lose their accounts.

In the time since, we have seen new levels of bizarre behavior on Twitter and Facebook,

which seem to be catching up to Google in terms of naked attempts to manipulate the national

conversation. Not all of it is sinister mind you. I don't hate having actual facts checked

by true fact checkers, although the words actual and true are doing a lot of heavy lifting

in the sentence. The idea for the warning was simple. Back in November of 2016, I started

commenting on the idea that the quote, fake news, close quote, panic was not authentic.

It was likely constructed in November of 2016 as a placeholder to be used by institutions

stunned by the results and rocked in their fate that they could broadly control every

election, to make sure that both candidates were broadly acceptable to the institutional

class, with no Ralph Nader's, Ron Paul's, Ross Perot's, or Bernie Sanders to worry about.

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