Howdy,

I'm Paul Kulas, the founder of townhallcitizen.

Circa 1967 Denver, CO. My mother is talking about politics - the Kennedy's, Martin Luther King Jr., the Vietnam war. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones are blasting out of my sister's and brother's rooms. Their music sounds great. I sneak into their rooms when they're gone, play their records. I watch The Monkees TV show every Saturday morning.

There's so much going on. It's all very cool. I wanted to get older fast, so I could drop in. Back then I was always older than my age.

Circa 1975. I drop out of the 10th grade. I start smoking pot, doing LSD. I'm a teenager living on my own. We're partying, going to concerts at Red Rocks, watching Saturday Night Live. Denver was the coolest.

It's now 1984. The partying was fun, but now I'm thinking, "What am I going to do with my life? How am I gonna make a living"?

About this same time my Mother is harping on me about politics. Asking me about voting. I vote, but only as a reason to get her off my back - and as an excuse for being late or leaving early at whatever job I had.

In 1986 I'm working as a waiter at a Chinese restaurant, the hippest restaurant in Denver. I'm making bank. One hot summer night I go home with a woman I waited on. I married her not longer after. Then she divorced me 6 months later. But she turns me onto a guy writing software. I'd never heard of software, thought it was something you ate with.

I learn about the Minitel while reading microfiche at the Denver Public Library. Then I read United States V. AT&T, what that meant for me. I saw today's Internet. It was love at first sight.

BTW. For all those who think the Internet sprung from some version of Libertarian thinking: think again. Today's Internet was born from the work done by two Liberal Democrats - President Jimmy Carter and Judge Harold Greene.

My three biggest assets at the time were desire, primo marijuana, and naïveté.

So I started a restaurant information line, The Dine Line. Because I believed that touch-tone telephone information would be the beginning of what is now the Internet. I was right.

In 1991 I co-founded a service bureau (hosting service) that would host telephone information services. I did all the marketing and programming. My company hosted pay-per call apps of all kinds - sex, dating, stock tips, and psychic lines. I programmed what was at the time, the biggest sex line system known.

Pay-per call apps were the proving ground for today’s Internet.

While at my first company and throughout the 90's I designed killer apps. In 2002 sold that company to my ex-partner - primarily because he slept with my ex-wife.

In 2002 I founded my 2nd company. A couple more killer apps.

Circa 2005 when I heard about MySpace I couldn’t believe that people would fall for it. So we coded up what was the first privacy network. But nobody cared. People were into sharing everything. I told people then, what was going to happen. That one day our elections would be decided because no one would know what to believe. They said I was crazy.

social media is a social disease

paulie

Circa 2014. I'm no longer in love with tech. I want the good old days back, a bunch of hippies and counter culture types writing and sharing code. Social media is everywhere, the Internet I fell in love with in 1987 was long gone. Tech is the white socks crowd, so not my peeps.

By now Mom and I are talking about politics and culture all the time. I'm becoming a political junkie. Then Trump comes down the escalator.

In 2016 I hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton. But Trump wins. I wrote this on Mom's birthday, November 9, 2016.

Open Minds for President Elect Trump

paulie

Mom passed away a year later after working in government for years. She's rolling over in her grave.

I start getting into crypto on 2.22.20. I see it as a brave new world, all so promising. By October '21 my hope had faded.

The Important Role of a Crypto Gadfly

Gerald (“Gerry”) Armstrong is a legendary gadfly. Some say he wrote the book - although Gerry would scoff at the thought. He was also a mentor. Gerry was the former CEO of the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company in Denver. The New York Times first wrote about him [https://www.nytimes.

spinbackwardsspinbackwards

Now here we are. Crypto ended up to be not-much-more than something two-bit Wall Street, day traders, finance bros, and scammers capitalize on to make money. It's unsavory. Social media is a social disease. The Internet is controlled by a handful of oligarchs, it sucks. TV is better. Which is a strange twist of fate. Because when I started we said TV sucks, because there's only 5 channels. The Internet will be way better, because it'll have millions of channels.

But this isn't how it has to be. Remember that two guys in a Stanford dorm room started Google. We all thought we were stuck with Microsoft. Then Steve Jobs rejoined Apple. Remember the story of Lois Gibbs and Love Canal. Lois Gibbs was a housewife raising her family in Love Canal, near Niagara Falls in upstate New York, in 1978 when she discovered that her home and those of her neighbors were sitting next to 20,000 tons of toxic chemicals. Lois's grassroots efforts led to the relocation of 833 Love Canal households and the creation of the landmark Superfund Bill.

Trump has been elected President again. He sees himself as King. He wants to take away our rights, destroy democracy, and our country's founding documents. Trump, Musk, Zuckerberg and oligarchs want dominion over us. We the people are going to organize. It's what Americans do.

It's on.