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social fractals

Information is being cut off

Ang Madsen

Ang Madsen

— 10 min read
Information is being cut off
Network diagram with large, medium, and small nodes. Image by the author, 2025.

What Trump and DOGE is doing to our past, present, and future information

I believe that nature has incontrovertibly told us that diversity survives, and monocultures fail. Same with scientific method: diverse thinking and approaches gets us to closer to quality truth; and slapdash, singular, and biased science gets us closer to fantasy. Believing in diversity is the opposite of our current conservative core precept, so for this alone I must be liberal. I have a lens.

Complexity is hard; I get it. It’s a steep learning curve that seems to never end. And, yeah, actually, it never ends. The point of ‘enough’ shifts according to the problem at hand, and it’s a bet. There’s no certainty. You cannot stand on a hill and state with Shakespearian drama: I HAVE THE ANSWER, and be anything but a blowhard confidence artist or a psychopath.

Accepting complexity means that we, as a culture, have to look at one of our key dissonances: we have built expectations of certainty. It’s pervasive. We have to be certain of a new endeavor to get VC funding, and very few people have the money to bootstrap. Our leaders can’t make missteps — a cough is as dramatic and more poisonous to reputation than 34 felony counts. We are paying quarterly taxes based on expected incomes, set nine months in advance. Hiring rarely colors outside of the lines of proven competence, multiple times over. We can’t shift our energy off of what is clearly killing our global environment because there’s just enough fungibility of understanding in the alternatives to be considered “unproven”, which in turn is just enough uncertainty to help a significant chunk of people decide the status quo is easier to swallow. Our businesses and economists analyze existing — aka historical — data to forecast the future, meaning they are assuming that any change won’t make a significant impact. They are betting on an unchanging reality.

Complexity means we have to accept that we actually live in ambiguity. The future is unwritten. Our total data store does not fit in one brain.

GenAI isn’t the answer. GenAI is hallucinating. It’s built to be a narcissist, more concerned with sounding ‘about right’ and taking as much attention as possible, actively avoiding attribution (because then they might have to pay for copyright use), than it is in actually being useful. It’s a black box, so we can’t check it with scientific method, question through triangulation, or leverage critical thinking. And it’s eating it’s own shit (aka, recursive), so the data started corrupting with the first AI-written posts, and it’s starting to show.

Other AI exists, but it didn’t gain traction like genAI and didn’t have the same hype machine involved. Even those structures still depend on mathematically biased, racially biased, and user bias shifted data, with workforce exploitation as a cherry on top.

We live in ambiguity. Reality is complex.

The only way someone can have THE ANSWER is to cull all the data that doesn’t support it.

That’s what this administration is doing.

Culling data leads to one thing: monoculture. And what has nature told us, over and over and over and over again?

Monocultures die.

The past

This administration is rewriting history. They are literally doing the key authoritarian concept that made 1984 horrifying.

Same network diagram as above, but with the largest nodes disconnected.
Same network diagram as above, but with the largest nodes disconnected. Image by the author, 2025.

This administration is working fast, which also means that lots of people are involved in making these things happen. I’m listing the bullet points — focusing on information — below, and there are links for further reading at the end of the post.

  • DEI language purges
  • Firing women and black people in positions of authority
  • Removal of information from federal databases

The present

This administration is hobbling our present. It’s not enough to let the rewritten ‘history’ ripple out and affect us generationally. They are quickening the removal of existing understanding through death, reeducation, and fear/poverty/anger (aka, keeping people so distracted they don’t have the energy to look beyond their immediate focus).

Same network diagram as above, but with the medium nodes disconnected and the largest even more faded.
Same network diagram as above, but with the medium nodes disconnected and the largest even more faded. Image by the author, 2025.

Again, this administration is working fast. More reading is at the end of the post.

  • Dismantling education
  • Defunding libraries and museums
  • Removal of existing, allocated funding from social information nets
  • Destabilizing government work by mass firings of the workers (information can’t translate to action)
  • Chilling independent voices
  • LGBTQ+ (aka a scapegoat ‘other’) attacked (information distraction)
  • Immigrants (aka a scapegoat ‘other’) attacked (information distraction)

The future

They are working to derail our culture understanding more about…anything. It would highlight their information gaps, provide alternative answers, and show just how uninformed and short-sighted this administration is. The benefits of diversity are literally everywhere (sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit), so it undermines their prioritized core precepts.

Same network diagram as above, but with the smallest nodes disconnected, medium nodes even more faded, and largest nodes gone.
Same network diagram as above, but with the smallest nodes disconnected, medium nodes even more faded, and largest nodes gone. Image by the author, 2025.

Defunding future science

Bringing it home

They are doing this while earmarking military funding of $1trillion USD. It’s hard to purge the information in brains; the population they’ve succeeded with in the past decade is probably as far as it will go. So the rest that are ‘too old’ for education and ‘too intransigent’ for re-education: control them through force.

Don’t think for a moment that this military won’t be aimed internally. It’s in Project 2025. We are looking at a bleak future.

Except there’s more complexity to add.

Our globe is on a precipice. Other countries are doing their part: shifting to renewable energy as the primary way to cut carbon dioxide, by simply not spewing as much into the atmosphere. We’re even making headway here in the US, with fossil fuels dipping below 50% to make electricity for the first time. The scariest part of this administration’s plans for the future of everyone is that they intend to increase fossil fuel use.

That makes this country a problem for the entire world.

The good news is that there’s really not much oil left in our sovereign lands, and what is left is hard to get to.

The bad news is that money can make connections. Even if the US is embargoed by the EU, Russia as an ally this administration would have access to oil. But there’s a silver lining there, too: this administration doesn’t really understand economy, and have cut off the significant remaining growth point (after increased scientific understanding). For decades now, our profits have been fed through cheap labor and materials that get imported in — in other words what Trump is imposing tarrifs on. Is the practice fair? No. But it’s still an economic foundation, and it’s being ripped out.

Even if this administration “wins” it’s monocultured reorganization, it’s short term. We scratched the tipping point of 1.5°C in 2023, and the systems are cascading much faster than anticipated. The whole world cannot sit idly by and let us figure out what to do with our wishful-authoritarian.

We save the world by saving ourselves. Press legal action. Protect judges. Pressure Congress people and Senators to take back their authority. Protest, to show that there’s more of us than there are of them. Sign up for efforts to help save our data. I would say boycott, but soon the greatest portion of us are not going to have enough money to make that felt.

If we manage to course correct, we then we have to apologize. We let loose several informational demons that pushed us to this disgrace.

Potentially just because we wanted an ambiguous world to be certain. Clear pathways to profit, neatly targeted, with a robust foundation of behavioral data, and then making money off of an unattributed/unattributable anything anyone might have created while sounding ‘about right’.

That’s our real ‘snowflake’ behavior.

Further reading

DEI language purges

Firing women and black people in positions of authority

Removal of information from federal databases

Dismantling education

Defunding libraries and museums

Removal of existing, allocated funding from social information nets

Destabilizing government work by mass firings of the workers

Chilling independent voices

LGBTQ+ (aka a scapegoat ‘other’) attacked

Immigrants (aka a scapegoat ‘other’) attacked

This also helps to make the international community very angry at our entire country. Individual citizens should expect no sympathy.

Read more