2023 in review

It’s that time of the year again, when you count your blessings and retweets, and claim the moral high-ground on social media.

The wildest era of the old West is over. With the creation, publication and global adoption of normatives, processes and regulatory bodies aiming to the international global homologation of knowledge and procedures (e.g. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library), Information Systems are controlled to the detail by huge corporations and nation-states.

Long gone are the days when foreign actors offered Saddam Hussein remote access to the US railroad system, or a minor disgruntled insider wiring millions of dollars to bank accounts outside country. There’s little space for cowboys and shinobis, you live in a world of contractors and certifications, schedules to meet and reports to complete. Cyberpunk life is here, it’s just not as good as we expected it to be.

But rejoice, my little friend, the long shadow of war is upon us. As if waiting for spring, it is possible in the short-term that from the flesh of thousands of anonymous heroes dying in Eurasian and Middle Eastern trenches, the foundations of a new, more dynamic, fluid, compartmentalised and intrinsically decentralised international order will rise. Let’s raise our glasses for that.

This year can be summed up this way:

The line between stupid people and animals becomes more and more blurred every day.

Best

• Movie watched this year: Charly, 1968, the story of an intellectually disabled man undergoes an experiment that gives him the intelligence of a genius. Based on the Flowers for Algernon short story by Daniel Keyes.
• Movie of the year: I don’t usually watch movies made after 2015 (especially Western-made) unless I have very good reasons, but Three-Body was an amazing TV series. Just don’t watch the new Netflix junk, kids.
• Music album listened this year: Эхопарк by Sirotkin.
• Song of the year: Black Seminole by Lil’ Yachty, with Выше домов by Sirotkin a very close second.
• Book read this year: The Betrayal of the West, by Jacques Ellul.

Worst

• People, social media, art, literature, cinema, society, governments, po{RN}litics, the Internet.

Website

• 91 articles, 61,898 words worth, up from 82 articles and 35,578 words in 2022, including posts, projects, reviews, music and excluding bookmarks and notes, of course.
• 816 notes, 43,414 words worth, up from 464 notes and 30,270 words in 2022.
• used 1,15GB of disk space, up from 609MB in 2022.
• more website statistics.

As for me, I believe in whatever political ideology kills the most people. I’m joking, or so you’d think. Onward to the new year.

Oh, and pray for a world where our children become wolves.