tags: serious

On what happened

I made a thread on bluesky about the insane happenings inside the DOGE government happenings at the treasury.

In short, this was a constitutional crisis. We live in unprecedented times.

I think this is worth noting here forever, and maybe expanding upon later.

Interesting things that came from this

In the original thread from Nathan Tankus Bill Bo spoke about some of his time working around those COBOL systems.

He also spoke of many other wild things in tech throughout his days which I will elaborate on in another post.

The distillation I made of all this felt very widely shared, Tankus and even Anil Dash reskeeted it. I want the people to see and understand this affront to our society and freedom that is happening.

We need to organize. We need to be active. We cannnot rest.

This must be stopped, and there are things worth fighting for. And things to love all around us.

The thread

So, what happened today? I am going to try to explain it in brief as best I can for my non-tech friends.

A statement for the beginning: we are living in unprecedented times, and this is very real. I am a person who is generally not very serious. But this is. So here is what I can distill for you.

Over the past 7 days, many things have happened. And the chaos was part of the formula to ensure that people would notice less things. But something very big, and very bad happened.
There was a time here, where a 25 year old, with no credentials, unelected, via Elon Musk, had keys you cant imagine.

What were those keys?

Well, he had _read and write access_ to the treasury payments system.

What the fuck does that mean?

Well, the United States moves a lot of money. The dollar is the currency the world measures against. Pretty big deal. And. Somehow. Somehow. They gave access to this entire system to this person. 

What does that mean?

For a brief moment, this could have collapsed the world's economy. This could have compromised the United States in more ways than I could ever write down. It was functionally *a constitutional crisis* that this happened. With no oversight. And no balances or checks.

This is insane. We cannot live like this. This is how fascism starts. And you cannot sit quietly. We need to organize. We need to push back. We need to restore the real pride of what it used to be when you had pride to be an American. The system is not going to be destroyed by a bored sycophant.

This is one step in a sequence of what will be many. We have had a fundamental victory, in that they have fired one of the accessors who had the access was fired today. There is hope. There is something to fight for. There is something to love.

Talk to your friends. Make them realize that this is happening and that we will not take it lying down. Tell your family. Love them. Educate them. Work together to build a world we want to live in.

This Bobby Kills Fascists. I am a passive person. But there are lines.

If you have any questions at all, DM me. I am also available on signal. Do not be quiet. Do not let this be taken from us. Love one another and destroy the machine. A chaotic evil is evil, and to spend time trying to understand chaos is a fools errand. You must just stop it yourself.

This story was broken by 
@nathantankus.bsky.social
 and taken on by 
@wired.com in the next moments after. I am not exaggerating or kidding, and the reporting on this will try to minimize what has actually happened. If you want to continue to be informed, I can help with that, too