The Wild

The lava lamp, a 70’s cultural Icon.

The first lava lamp was created in 1963 and after reaching peak popularity in the era we know as the 70’s, it has quietly waited in the shadows for its time to shine once more. My friends, that day has come!

This story begins with a company called Cloudflare. What is Cloudflare? Here is the TLDR from the company website:

Cloudflare is on a mission to help build a better internet.

Cloudflare is one of the world’s largest networks. Today, businesses, non-profits, bloggers, and anyone with an Internet presence boast faster, more secure websites and apps thanks to Cloudflare

More secure? How does cloudflare achieve this?

With lava lamps of course! Don’t believe me? Here is a link to the story which covers how the company uses a wall of lava lamps (the wall of entropy) to create strong encryption. Check it out here:

How do lava lamps help with Internet encryption? | Cloudflare

As I was reading through the above story I could not help to draw an unusual connection to another principle that I came across in a book not so long ago. That book is “The 48 Laws of Power” by Robert Greene.

Personal note: I found the book not to my taste, and was tempted to compare it to a more mature political work – “The Prince” by Niccolò Machiavelli. Both of these works seem to me a particular type of psychic poison.

The specific law I thought of while reading about lava lamps and encryption was law 17:

The 48 Laws of Power: Law 17: Keep Others in Suspended Terror: Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability

Unpredictability. Or as a cryptographer would call it – entropy. Not ideal in our daily lives ie. among family, friends, and the workplace. It runs contrary to a very real virtue: reliability.

What about online? Beyond creating strong encryption is there a place for law 17?

At this point my mind strayed to a conversation about how to mess with a social media platforms algorithm. The term used was data poisoning. This practice (data poisoning) can apply to a large number of subversive activities, but at the most basic level some people have used it to create unpredictable and incongruous patterns in their online activity, with the express purpose of corrupting the data being collected on them.

While your family, friends, and fellow employees do not deserve to be subjected to intentional chaos, I would offer no such defense for out modern mega corporations and techmonarchs. The increasingly invasive, and pervasive practice of cyber surveillance and data collection has reached a level of creepy that is hard to ignore.

Changing gears for a moment, can you believe that there is a list of the top lava lamps of 2024? You betcha: The best lava lamps of 2024 | Popular Science

I’m not sure that popular science really knows their lava tbh. I might spend some time investigating the lava lamp community here: Communities – The Lava Library before I invest in my own little vial of entropy. They even have a discord, but I have not as of yet explored it.

Live free,

Stay Wild!

Oh, and remember, if you are not paying for a product, then you are the product.