Update mayday-essay.md

mayday-essay.md

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-title = "synoia crunch 1"
+title = "synoia crunch 2"
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-PARANOIA SUCKS 2K25 FUCKING KILL ALL SURVEILLANCE 
+When I talk to my friends about paranoia, the topics begin to blur together. The nuances and particularities of certain delusions come up just as often as the justified fear of mass surveillance carried out by neofascist states with access to untold power over our epistemologies, both inter- and intra- personal. The reliability of our institutions to accurately describe reality [has been questionable for a long time](link to seeing like a state), but the sundering of the consensus reality they create has thrown many into a trustless environment, adrift on the unsea.
 
-Paranoia: unbounded/intangible distrust\
-Psychosis: ungrounded belief in harm \[in this specific context]
-^ tab for redefining. This is Off. I don't like specifically defining words :(
-at some point the distinction feels useless beyond semantics but that may just be the paranoid psychotic in me
+I've seen common advice about this fail to land. 'Model your enemy' and 'check the sources' don't really hold sway over the constant, itching feeling that this, too, could be a lie. The world, regardless of its actual tractability, feels as though it is dissolving under your feet. If the powers that be cannot grasp at the truth of a situation, or perhaps have a vested interest in making sure you cannot, what chance do you have at understanding? Welcome to Naraka, we hope you hate your stay.
 
-So: how do you fight this?
+From here, there are two choices.
 
--- Basic best practices: Shut The Fuck Up. 
--- By doing basic best practices you have something to point to for the "this is factually incorrect". If you have Shut The Fuck Up this makes threat modeling easier--knowing what data you've put out there and where is going to simplify that
+One. You give up on trust. The only thing that you can possibly rely on is yourself, all else is suspect. Potentially enemies first, irrelevant otherwise. Or, maybe you give up on trust by abandoning it for blindness. You commit to go down with the ship, to die like a dog, no matter what. Your trust is broken, and so is your integrity, but your loyalty remains intact.
 
--- Understanding what distrusts are verifiable. Yeah the government spies on you. This is known. The unverifiable bit is are they spying on _you_, specifically, as a Plan of Action. This is something that I don't really know how I'd untangle beyond "if you Shut The Fuck Up, probably not, but you can't un-say the shit you've said in past"
--- I'm definitely on a watchlist of anarchists with guns there is NO way they have not collected that data, but I can also understand that's not verifiable and as such acting on it is going to leave me a little. well like how would i even act on that.
+Two. You decide to try anyway. This essay is intended for those of you who make this choice.
 
--- Recognizing when you are falling into unverifiable distrusts allows you to lean on folk you _do_ trust
--- Trust as a verb, not a noun: if you feel like you _can't_ trust you've still got the ability to choose to trust
--- Having a "trustnet" makes that choice easier
--- again unsure how this. falls with the unverifiable-but-very-likely distrusts. I gotta figure that shit out for myself anyways
+How do you know what to trust, or who? What can you trust beyond the information of your own senses, your own feelings? What even is this thing we call trust?
 
--- Building a trustnet involves finding folk who your threat modeling reads as Trustworthy, while you've got your marbles, and being able to at least look at the jar and read who you were choosing to trust with em when your marbles escape
--- Metaphor may have gotten away from me here ah well
--- Good point on this one is reliable sources!
+Trust, paranoia, and psychosis are intertwined pretty inextricably as concepts. Psychosis is the false _could;_ paranoia is the false _would;_ trust is the choice to reject _would_ in favour of belief in safety. When someone breaks your trust, they do that by proving the _would_ of paranoia true--the vulnerability in trust is to those who would, actually, really do what that little voice of fear says they're going to.
 
-Paranoia example one: Kathryn
+Zero-trust environments have their place, but to interact as though everything deserves zero trust is how you lock yourself out of meaningful coordination. Total-trust environments have their place, but to interact as though everything deserves total trust is how you get yourself put in one Forever Box or another, in this political climate pervaded by bad actors. There is a balance to be struck.
 
-I live in the same city as my childhood abuser. She knows where I live and could show up at any time. Rationally, I know she would never do that, and even if she did, she would not try to hurt me, and even if she did, I'm capable of defending myself now. The paranoia was in thinking that she was going to show up at any moment and try to hurt me. This was an unbounded distress--that she _would--_ extrapolated from soft data-- that she _could._ 
+So: how do you decide who and what to trust?
+
+The first rule of security is, always, Shut The Fuck Up. By posting less, keeping secrets, not talking constantly about what you're doing and where you're going, and the like, you deny data to bad actors. If your _default_ is to deny data, you can _choose_ to give data to specific parties in trust, but if your default is to give data, you don't know where all of that ends up. By Shutting The Fuck Up and closing vectors of vulnerability, you create an environment where you have evidence towards trust; if you haven't given data that's said you've \<done something>, nobody would hurt you for it, because nobody could know to.
+
+This leads into a whole thing on verifiable distrust. Yes, Big Brother is watching; we know governments collect ludicrous amounts of data on private individuals, this has been exposed to the public. However, in almost every case, you cannot verify that they have any reason to be paying attention to _you, specifically._ 
+
+When knowing what distrusts you have that aren't verifiable doesn't do enough, that's where building a trustnet comes in. By choosing friends you can rely on, that you can _prechoose_ to trust, you build a system that lets you check the labels on your jar when your marbles have escaped and you're trying to figure out where they might have went. This relies on threat modeling as a skill; knowing how someone could hurt you and knowing them well enough to know whether or not they would. My coauthors could hurt me in quite a few ways; I know them well enough that I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that they never would. 
+
+Paranoia example one: The Former Abuser
+
+I live in the same city as my former abuser. They know where I live and could show up at any time. Rationally, I know they would never do that, and even if they did, they would not try to hurt me, and even if they did, I'm capable of defending myself now. The paranoia was in thinking that they were going to show up at any moment and try to hurt me. This came from my trust breaking in them having changed for the better, and as such cascading down to breaking the trust of them having self-preservation enough not to show up and try to harm me.
 
 Paranoia example two: The Fucking Bugs
 
-this one's literally from a few days ago
-
-I had the psychotic belief that there were bugs under my skin. This was ungrounded--well not ungrounded it just was grounded in a false prior based on misinterpreted data. I wanted to ask for help, because I knew I was having a psychotic episode, but my psychosis told me that they _could_ kill me if I tried to get help, and so my paranoia told me they _would_. I was left asking for help in contradictions and soft ways and as such didn't receive it because I wasn't asking in. Coherently understandable. ways
+I had the psychotic belief that there were bugs under my skin. This was a false prior, in this case specifically based off a piece of sensory input that I misinterpreted--I thought something _could_ be happening that couldn't. I wanted to ask for help, because I knew I was having a psychotic episode, but my psychosis told me that they _could_ kill me if I tried to get help, and so my paranoia told me they _would_. This was fucking insidious--I ended up trying to ask my trustnet for help, but wasn't able to do so productively, because they obviously couldn't read my mind.
 
 This may be the good distinction between paranoia and psychosis: _would_ vs _could_
 if I believe the government is watching me specifically, that is paranoia, because they would not watch me specifically (I have given them no reason to)
@@ -44,8 +42,4 @@ the bugs being able to kill me was psychosis, kathryn being willing to show up a
 
 I'm not really certain how best to like. get in the weeds with them. I always just kind of use "I'm having an episode, what I believe right now is fragile and probably off a false-prior", and scrampling into my nearest trustnet member's DMs or physical vicinity and falling over metal pipe style with a request for help. The less you actively engage with the psychosis/paranoia loop the less you feed it the more likely it is to starve.
 
-I will note I do think it tends to be way easier to lever out of paranoia/psychosis loops the earlier you catch it. The Bugs got so bad because it went down like four or five layers from the raw sensory input.
-
-...personal side note I don't think the nerve damage helps with The Bugs as a thing, interpreting a point of contact as a movement is something I'm realizing just tends to happen with me
-
-This shit's easier to explain with a conceptual understanding of Mars kicking around, not gonna lie
+I will note I do think it tends to be way easier to lever out of paranoia/psychosis loops the earlier you catch it. The Bugs got so bad because it went down like four or five layers from the raw sensory input.