The Profit of Control

A: Welcome to Liminal Frequencies – a transmission from the edge of reality. Absurd, isn't it? Imagine a government, the president himself, calling on unions to orchestrate a 'chess strike' across Europe. Not to protect workers, mind you, but with the explicit goal of manipulating and raising the price of gasoline.

B: A government forcing a strike... to make things more expensive? That sounds like something out of a particularly grim satire. What's the logic there, beyond pure sadism?

A: Ah, logic is a luxury, my friend. This is more a bizarre, almost ritualistic parable for how economic and political systems often treat citizens. We're talking about an experiment where the people are reduced to pawns, their movements dictated, their wallets squeezed, all for some grand, cynical outcome.

B: So, the idea is that they want to see how much control they can exert, how much people will endure, even when it directly harms them? It's like watching mice run a maze they didn't even choose.

A: Precisely. The theatre of it all. The ironic spectacle of leaders demanding you 'obey,' to drive your cars whether you want to or not, just to inflate a market. It's control as performance art, with us, the public, as the unwitting, unwilling cast members.

A: But let's pivot from that theatrical absurdism for a moment, and consider another, perhaps more insidious, contradiction we're facing. We have a technology called IPFS, the InterPlanetary File System.

B: Okay, IPFS. Sounds ambitious. What's the big deal with it?

A: It’s essentially a decentralized way to store and share data, to manage 'memory' across the internet. Think of it like a global, distributed hard drive that doesn't rely on any single server or company. It's designed to be censorship-resistant, to give us freedom from the traditional choke points of the internet, satellites, centralized servers, all of it.

B: So, a truly free and open internet, no single point of failure? That sounds... ideal, almost utopian. So why isn't everyone clamoring for it, then?

A: Precisely the paradox. Despite its potential to free us from vulnerabilities and centralized control, it remains largely ignored. And the reasons you hear? They're quite telling. Things like, 'Oh, it's too messy, too complicated for the industry.'

B: Too messy? Or is it that it makes it harder for certain entities to, you know, keep an eye on things? To maintain their grip?

A: That's exactly the cynical truth offered in our script: 'They need control. They want the leash, not the freedom.' It’s not about complexity; it’s about a deliberate choice for profitable control over inconvenient liberty.

A: So, we've journeyed through this frankly bizarre scenario: a government orchestrating a gasoline strike purely to manipulate prices. Then, we pivoted to the astonishing reality of IPFS, a technology promising true decentralized freedom in how we store and access memory.

B: And the cynical dismissal of that technology: 'too messy,' 'they need control,' 'they want the leash, not the freedom'.

A: Indeed. When you lay these two absurdities side-by-side, they're not disparate at all, are they? The phantom strike and the ignored technology... they spring from the same root. Centralized control, predictability, profit... these are the things valued above all else.

B: It paints a pretty clear picture: freedom, actual distributed freedom, just isn't as lucrative as keeping things locked down.

A: Precisely. The script captures it perfectly: 'Freedom exists, but control is profitable.' Whether it’s gasoline prices or global data, the underlying ritual of power remains constant. Which then leads us to the narrator’s final, unsettling question, echoing at the end of the broadcast...

B: Are you sure this is just fiction?

A: Think about it.