From Gats to GatGPT
In a post earlier this week ("Digital Second Amendment Unveiled: Anti-Woke AI Bot Equips Users With 'Newest Weapons Of Digital Age'"), Zero Hedge wrote about Cody Wilson's new alternative to Open AI's ChatGPT, GatGPT ("Gat", from "Gatling" is an urban colloquialism for "gun"):
The team that built GatGPT, led by Cody Wilson, contends AI safety is a pretext for censorship and political control. They have declared a "[[Digital Second Amendment]]" that pledges to protect and distribute "the newest weapons of the digital age, not just to defend ourselves against corporate and government depredation, but to defend our civic identity and humanity."
Cody Wilson has also led the fight for another kind of Digital Second Amendment, one that overlaps with the First Amendment: the right to distribute software that enables citizens to 3D print their own guns. That fight is the subject of an upcoming documentary called Death Athletic: A Dissident Architecture. Director Jessica Solce explained the "Death Athletic" part of the title in a Vice interview this week:
Death Athletic comes from the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijl. He's talking about “death athletes” as martyrs for religious purposes, but I kind of modernized it. To me, it is the idea of someone who looks death in the eye, and death is no longer tyrannical. It becomes emancipatory. Being death athletic, to me, is someone who is steadfast in their motivations and stands for their principles, despite the obvious retribution or anger they're going to inspire.
There are plenty of forms of retribution the current left-liberal establishment has to work with against rebels like Cody Wilson, as Adrian Vermeule noted on X yesterday.
This thread vividly illustrates that we *already* live in an ideologically integrated constitutional order, dominated by one faction. It has an official political theology, American left-liberalism, that it enforces by a range of legal, non-legal and institutional sanctions. https://t.co/k6ZVXfF5uI
— Adrian Vermeule (@Vermeullarmine) September 21, 2023
Below is the just-released trailer for Death Athletic, along with a post elaborating on it by Dylan Allman of Interlinked.
Before we get to that though, a quick reminder to subscribe to the Portfolio Armor trading Substack if you haven't already, as we have a trade alert set to go out later today on a potential short squeeze.
The Death Athletic Trailer
DEATH ATHLETIC - A DISSIDENT ARCHITECTURE
The sword and shield in the hands of free-thinkers who dare to subvert the stultifying orthodoxies of a decaying regime
We are at an inflection point, a tectonic shift in the chronicles of resistance and liberty: a period so saturated with surveillance and suffocated by stifling, authoritarian norms that any deviation from the script is deemed an act of insurgency. Welcome to the era of DEATH ATHLETIC - A DISSIDENT ARCHITECTURE, a documentary film by Jessica Solce that offers an intimate study into the 8-year journey grappling with the complex legalities surrounding this monumental fight. The film serves as both sword and shield in the hands of free-thinkers who dare to subvert the stultifying orthodoxies of a decaying regime.
Look around you: we're enmeshed in a vast surveillance state, a perverse circus of bureaucrats and governmental marionettes that seeks to calcify thought, disarm intent, and quarantine the very essence of individuality. These are not just garden-variety functionaries; these are zealots for a new religion—totalitarianism disguised as bureaucratic competence. The message is simple, and it's shouted from every news channel and governmental pulpit: "You are under our watch, you are under our rule, and woe unto those who forget it."
Yet, amid this tempest of control, DEATH ATHLETIC arises not as a simple lament but as a seismic challenge to the foundations of a society that has sold its soul for the illusions of safety and conformity. The film doesn't ask for permission; it scoffs at the very idea. We are beyond asking for concessions from a system that believes our individual liberties are commodities to be bartered or eliminated at their discretion.
The bureaucrats think they can entangle us in their web of regulations, mandates, and red tape? Let's be unequivocal: their thickheaded dogmas and their contempt for our freedoms are not just laughable, they're a declaration of war. They don't merely dislike our ethos, our culture—they want it buried, erased from the collective consciousness.
What these governing charlatans fail to grasp is the indomitable spirit that fuels our movement. We are not just idle spectators in the unfolding tragedy of a crippled democracy. No, we're the playwrights, the directors, and the actors in a drama that will either end in subservience or herald a new era of individual empowerment and liberty. George Orwell once said, "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four." In our case, freedom is the right to upload, download, and spread the codes that power our very essence as a movement. And if the arithmetic of our struggle upsets their delicate sensibilities, so be it.
Our actions are more than just a footnote in the annals of civil disobedience. We are the progenitors of a new cultural lexicon. We are revolutionizing the Second Amendment for the 21st century, injecting it with new life, and transporting it from the dusty pages of history into the pulsating, digital nerve centers of the Internet. This isn't just a political or technical innovation; this is cultural transmutation.
DEATH ATHLETIC is a beacon in this revolution, a defiant stance against a system that's long overdue for an overhaul. Its message isn't constrained to the parameters of some art-house conversation; it is a war cry, a rallying point for a generation that refuses to bow to the crippling orthodoxies of a state bereft of moral and intellectual rigor.
Now more than ever, we're confronted with the necessity to make a choice. Do we become the next line in the casualty report of their war on our liberties, or do we rise? Do we become passive consumers of our own demise, or architects of a new, audacious frontier?
The equation is brutally simple: capitulate or engage, obey or resist. There is no middle ground, no sanctuary for the undecided. You're either part of the solution or part of the problem, part of history or its footnote. The time for equivocation is over; the era of insurrection is upon us.
To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, when tyranny becomes law, resistance becomes duty. DEATH ATHLETIC is our manifesto, our Declaration of Independence in the digital realm. The future is not set in stone; it's written in code. And it’s time we start writing our own.
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