There is a particular annoying scent…

There is a particular annoying scent that you can't forget, it is a scent of regulatory capture. You can of course smell it out if politicians and bureaucrats, but when you recognize it, you can smell it also from "business people" (people who think they are doing business, but actually use the power of government coercion to capture whole industries with their frienemies - their big corporate competition).

Whenever there are conferences on "AI safety", "addictive apps", "disinformation", "energy crisis" and many other topics, you can feel the scent from the airport hotel ballroom where the conference takes place all the way out. The smell comes from the money trying to create regulations to limit competition and make the sponsors' products mandatory in one way or another (one very common way is "certification"), but you can smell it from the people. Everyone comes with well paid homework from these events. Bureaucrats write regulations that increase the power of the stamps in their hands. Politicians have new fears to talk about and new promises to make to make them go away. Corporations are buying small competition for bargain or let them go bust.

If you want to avoid the scent, avoid airport hotel ballrooms, all the conferences where industry experts talk about "we should self regulate and I'll tell you how".

Or even better yet, take a walk in the dark forest. It smells of connections, creativity and it is the home of mycelial networks that connect peer to peer parallel economies.

Cypherpunk evolved into Lunarpunk and lunarpunks manifest the dark forest.