Wednesday 1 April 2015

CryptoTown Day 71 – The Crew of Spaceship Earth

This blog post is brought to you by the Open Knowledge Command Center. “Sign up, and take full command of your own unit!”

Captain psd here representing the sub-unit for Universal Basic Income Studies. This post is intended to convey a number of key ideas including: no one is piloting spaceship earth, hyperstition – subconscious collective beliefs of society shaping perceived possibility, inner awareness and deconstruction – unbinding, and finally, what it looks like to creatively express positive vision.

The OKCC is an intergalactic source founded upon the strictly precise laws of nature. All recruits are immediately promoted to captain upon completion of this sentence. Congratulations.

“But why did they have to stick me in the writing department?” I thought. “Here I am, a fresh new captain, able to do anything, and they got me writing the next paragraph of the story?” The desk looks the same, but it doesn't feel the same. The whole space – I can feel the fractal contour of possibility – w-what's...





“So, who's running this place?” a rhetorical question from one captain – “a dead algorithm. Without the technology to communicate, large groups of people had to be automated with competition amongst themselves.”

*bling* – the filter on your tablet has alerted to preference matching for the keyword phallus. You have already heard talk of this piece as the most prized accomplishment of our species, the essay which matches cocks with the private hierarchy, the infinite forms of appropriation. Your tablet picked it up with the data-wave that supplied the local mesh. In an utter coup of retro neoposthipster fashion, it was finished as a deconstruction of modern society in the mode of a bar fight insult.

Subjective Social Capitalization of Spectacular Phallus: A Comparative Analysis of Your Relative Deficiencies
But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.
-- Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity
One can tell in an instant that we do not have significant global coordination towards meeting of human needs. It should come as no surprise that our individual behaviors and ways of relating to one another, form the society we can see around us and complain about. When we look at the overall premise of competition and stratification based on accumulation we can see that its a system which runs deeply, subconsciously, on exploitation.

We have to find alternatives to private hierarchies including corporation and closed government. No tax without representation is an old system. We want participation. So no representation without a conversation. No meaningful conversation without open data! Horizontal subsidiary democracy allows full participation at any level one wishes to participate.

There is actually a lot of work to be done to improve our quality of life, but if the profit motive does not find value (ie. exploitation), how do we “sacrifice” capital to meet human needs? I find this to be a curious problem to address. How is it that an entire civilization is slumbering away not even willing to support creative new ways to approach problems. Why do we continually react to fix everything with bandaids, while letting it all fall apart?

Its simply the unconscious patterns that we must be executing to account for the way that civilization appears as it is. One of the most powerful thing that we can do is support those on the “front lines” of experimentation. Those who are encountering the edges, and therefore do not have the comfortable support of the center.

We need more captains, those willing to work to replace competition with cooperation. The rest of this post is already too long so I am going to keep my trap shut for most of it, except in phallic comparison.

Let's look at some of the awesome things we know about agriculture and reversing desertification and capturing CO2 back into the ground!






We are also going to look at the ongoing devastation that we allow to continue, while NOT even using these methods which have been used in the Amazon's poor soil conditions for thousands of years as indigenous wisdom traditions!

Paradise Lost: Aerial Images of Deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest - Photo Journal - WSJ


A view of illegal logging in sawmill area in Rondon do Pará, Pará, Brazil. November 2011. - Rodrigo Baleia

Deforestation: Facts, Causes & Effects
There are many causes of deforestation. The WWF reports that half of the trees illegally removed from forests are used as fuel.

Some other common reasons are:
  • To make more land available for housing and urbanization
  • To harvest timber to create commercial items such as paper, furniture and homes
  • To create ingredients that are highly prized consumer items, such as the oil from palm trees
  • To create room for cattle ranching
Common methods of deforestation are burning trees and clear cutting. These tactics leave the land completely barren and are controversial practices.

Clear cutting is when large swaths of land are cut down all at once. A forestry expert quoted by the Natural Resources Defense Council describes clear cutting as "an ecological trauma that has no precedent in nature except for a major volcanic eruption."

Burning can be done quickly, in vast swaths of land, or more slowly with the slash-and-burn technique. Slash and burn agriculture entails cutting down a patch of trees, burning them and growing crops on the land. The ash from the burned trees provides some nourishment for the plants and the land is weed-free from the burning. When the soil becomes less nourishing and weeds begin to reappear over years of use, the farmers move on to a new patch of land and begin the process again.



The forest is ashen after a fire process in Southern Pará, Brazil. July 2010. - Rodrigo Baleia

 This is climate change. It's something that anyone can get behind. We understand that putting CO2 into the atmosphere causes changes, and we know that we put a lot into the air. Why then do we not even practice totally economical solutions which have been in place for a long time. Who could possibly be in charge of the destruction of our environment? If there was even a bit of order in the service of the common people of our planet, surely we could share technology on a viral basis. But its not about local sustainable abundance (permaculture), its about the highly impotent – flaccid even, persistent though it is – top-down appropriation structure.

slash-and-burn agriculture | agriculture | Encyclopedia Britannica
slash-and-burn agriculture, method of cultivation often used by tropical-forest root-crop farmers in various parts of the world and by dry-rice cultivators of the forested hill country of Southeast Asia. Areas of the forest are burned and cleared for planting; the ash provides some fertilization, and the plot is relatively free of weeds. After several years of cultivation, fertility declines and weeds increase. Traditionally, the area was left fallow and reverted to a secondary forest of bush. Cultivation would then shift to a new plot; after about a decade the old site could be reused. By the early 21st century, however, cleared areas were typically maintained in a deforested state permanently. Although traditional practices generally created few greenhouse gases, slash-and-burn techniques are a significant source of carbon emissions when used to initiate permanent deforestation. (See also shifting agriculture.)
Carbon Dioxide 400kyr - Carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



It's never a good day when something goes exponential or blows away from historical bounds. There should be an official cork board somewhere we can stick that to until we get er sorted out. Here is a doc which is visually helpful to notice some of the changes on spaceship Earth.



So we come to the question of who is piloting spaceship earth? If everything is private corporations and private government how do we even know anything at all? People feel that society isn't right, and they begin to project the views that society has placed in them, as a victim, helpless. We are not actually at the bottom of the pyramid we envision. Here begins the mind trip section of this essay, we'll see you again at the shit sandwich section.



We are going to have to drop a lot of our preconceived ideas about stuff. An apocalypse is the revealing of truth (by definition) and it does not happen all at once. Almost person by person a picture emerges, and many can remain completely ignorant and disconnected for a long time. The word illuminati simply means enlightened, or perhaps counter-enlightened. Even to divide that into good and bad will not be true, its the divisive mind that is at the heart of our self-delusion.

The Paradox Inherent in Any Slave Nation Revolution | Two Ice Floes blog by Cognitive Dissonance
[...] This brings us to an important corollary to my theorem. With a global and local population thoroughly conditioned with the slave mentality of respect, or just plain fear, for self declared (elite) authority along with severe generational Stockholm Syndrome, even before the revolution begins to take hold the revolutionaries quickly realize in order to win the population over, or simply to neutralize it, they must employ the exact same herding and bullying techniques as the present, and soon to be previous, status quo leadership uses to control the native population.

[...] The ultimate enemy of a revolution is not the oppressive government it is attempting to overthrow, but the general population it is trying to 'free'.

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” - Wolfgang von Goethe

[...] The endless variety of news and information sources available at our fingertips virtually assures each of us will be told exactly what we wish to hear, see and think.

[...] Because the general population lives within the fiction of the controlling meme, meaning the mostly false narrative deeply embedded within our minds of what is real and what is not, as long as the changing of the guard produced by revolution remains within the controlling mind meme narrative nothing really changes for the slave population other than in the most superficial manner.

When this is combined with an often falsely perceived close proximity to the soon-to-be mad-as-hell hungry hoards when first light is involuntarily thrust upon them, this bitter cocktail goads my mind into believing something must be done right now or all is lost later.

With the brain now effectively short circuited and disconnected, and the body operating solely on fear inducedadrenaline, hence the high frequency vibration, we become our own personalized sub sect of the mindless masses. And right there my friend is the ultimate source of history’s rhyme, the co-opted revolutionary mind leading the forever blind.

The dirty little secret dear reader is glaringly obvious once accepted; this ‘belief’ that we must fight fire with fire, that lines must be draw - this far and no further, that time is of the essence and the end is so near, is part and parcel of the overall controlling mind meme. To paraphrase the Architect as he spoke with Neo, “You think you are the first, but you are not. There is a long line behind you and an even longer line ahead.”

[...] Either we create our own reality or we exist as subjects in theirs. To deny these basic and self evident truths is to deny us our ultimate freedom, the freedom from self. This is the source of our power and the elite know this, thus the reason they are so desperate to ramp up their subjugation and control. Their power is simply our power brilliantly co-opted, and all we need do to take it back is snap our collective fingers and they are suddenly naked and exposed. I love the smell of elite desperation in the morning.

This is not false hope, but rather obvious truth. However, unless “We the Individual” can overcome and surpass our thoroughly conditioned and manipulated ‘self’, the game will never change other than at the most local of levels and for the shortest periods of time. There is a reason we rats are always caught in the trap. When we finally ask of our ‘self’ the only pertinent question that matters - why do I continue to play the fool in the slave master’s game - then we can begin to recognize the only path out of this maze is to be found when we finally look within.






According to the sub unit for Divisional Appropriation Studies annual report, the profit motive is a crude technology to transplant competitive consumption back on to the intelligent mind so that it will perform as a unit of the self-immolating hierarchy. It's an old way of relating to one another which can be summed up as "divide and conquer," fit for order of private competition, deception and exploitation.

If its individual self interest driving any order then its a constant possibility of double-cross and deception all throughout all structure. The private hierarchies will always be in flux, unstable. Open knowledge society taps viral resources, mass participation. From the view of meeting human needs, capital is sacrificed. We don't need to have exploitation built into our life as bills. Our infrastructure is heavily warped to the arrangement of exploitation. General population is the only group in the position to make some kind of arrangement which is beneficial to the local population and participated in with a sense of ownership.


The Death of Hope and Belief | Two Ice Floes blog by Cognitive Dissonance
[...] Once we accept something as ‘true’, essentially a non specific condition arrived at with minimal critical thinking and even less logical reasoning, rarely if ever do we revisit the subject to check our premises. And why would we since we ‘believe’ what we want and not what is actually there. Since the only unchanging ‘truth’ throughout the universe is that change is constant, ‘We the People’ often hope our beliefs still hold true………assuming we honestly question our beliefs in order to discover if they ever rang true.

Often we pig pile falsehoods, misconceptions, hearsay and the ‘trusted’ opinion of authorities and acquaintances on top of each another and call the resulting mishmash our opinion, a cleverly encrypted carrier signal demonstrating the true genesis of our underlying hope and belief. While we bitterly complain about mainstream media reporters all repeating from the same contrived script, we might just be the most egregious of all serial repeaters. After all, it takes one to know one.

Since so few of us have the actual courage to walk the path alone and be truly contrary to the dominant groupthink, why then would we expect ourselves to take the first step and think deviant thoughts in blatant opposition to the consensus of the hive mind? Even when we finally do break from the majority, both exhilarated and frightened by the audacity of hope that personal salvation could be found elsewhere, we immediately seek out the comfort of the nearest like minded minority.

Nothing soothes the savage ego beast quite like collective affirmation and psychic reintegration into a colluding collective. Our desperate attempts to be perceived as unique and special in the eyes of our fellow herd members is the egoic trap that keeps us chained to false hope and belief and all its various complications.

[...] We are our own worst enemy simply because we self identify with our ego, the ultimate slave master. If we were to recognize and then fully embody this ‘truth’, suddenly the mind and spirit soar to heights unimagined but easily attainable. Completely ignorant of our enemy, in a cognitive judo match with our ego we are the perpetual white belted novice pitted against the black belt sensei. The only way to win is not to play at all because the egoic sensei knows us so much better than we know ourselves.

Since few will actually withdraw when their ego is egging them on, all the sociopaths need do to manipulate and control us is to remotely leverage the power the ego already commands. And that power is exercised primarily through our mostly false hope and belief. I often say we are only as sick as our deepest darkest secrets. How better to control us than by accessing those secrets via the ego and leveraging them against us, sort of spooky blackmail at a distance.

While there are always exceptions to every rule, one merely needs to examine the mindset of both the children and adults of any household to discover where many long held and cherished ‘truths’ (aka ‘hope and belief’) are formulated before going forth to multiply. Born of pride and prejudice, fired in the crucible of stereotypical hatred and ignorance, then cemented firmly in place via constant repetition and familial affirmation, for the most part we are the product of our upbringings, be they the good, the bad and the unimaginably ugly. It really doesn’t matter if the propaganda we integrate when young comes from mother dearest or fascist Fatherland. In practice it winds up being a toxic stew of both.

Particularly with regard to personal relationships (and make no mistake about it, our cultural ‘hopes’ and ‘beliefs’ are extremely personal in nature) rarely is logic or reason employed when rushing out another label carefully disguised as knowledgeable fact. All this is done to demonstrate our steadfast conviction in truth, justice and the American way less we appear weak and indecisive to our fellow egoic slaves. Believe what you want, but never let them see your sweaty indecision. Labels are the lazy man’s prodigal thinking, the more derogatory the better to feel superior while fanning the flames of self righteous indignation or despondent victim-hood.

But alas hope springs eternal, especially for those of us who are a product of our rigid belief system and the certainty we are the exception to the norm, therefore we alone can see what no one else is able to behold. Banishing all doubt from our mind, steeled with the singleness of our purpose to bestow upon those poor unfortunate others not blessed with our insight, we echo each other when declaring the utter ruination we’re all headed towards. Endless doom porn is such an aphrodisiac that I’m a bit surprised we aren’t all walking around permanently aroused. On second thought, maybe we are. After all, there is an ever so fine line between titillation and terror.

Even those who have lost all faith in the ability to correct the present state of affairs and are simply awaiting the ‘inevitable’ collapse and re-set, still retain hope and belief that once the collapse is complete and the debris has been cleared a new beginning will emerge. Thus it is indirectly but clearly inferred those most responsible for the Empire’s fall will be purged from the system, paving the way for sanity to return and a new era to follow, a renaissance if you will, a cleansing of the filth, decay and corruption that rejuvenates the mind and body politic.

[...] We are desperate to believe ‘they’ alone control us in order to absolve us from personal responsibility. It is our blindly proffered hope and belief which nourishes the sociopaths who then peddle their insanity, the ultimate symbiotic codependent dialectic speaking louder than words ever could.

‘Believing’ ourselves powerless (because we want to be) we blithely and blindly empower those whom we ‘know’ are already powerful (because we want them to be). Conceding defeat before the blade is even drawn, the battle is over before it ever began. One must admire such brilliant tactics, so Sun Tzuesque even he would stand in awe of the majesty of such total and complete self defeatism. Then again, it is the only way the few can control the teaming masses and still reap the rewards of the plebs ever increasing productivity. Welcome to the new slave plantation.

The system as presently constructed thrives on mindless zombie consumers and disgruntled malcontents/disaffected souls (as well as everyone else in-between) because what is most important to the perpetuation of the system is not actually physical in nature. The sociopathic system controls us not by subjugating our physical bodies, bound as they may be by their fictional fiat chains and by their threats of fatal force. Rather their power is derived from our ‘belief’ in those chains and guns and their declared divine right to use them.

[...] Regardless of whether I recognize the lead psychopathic dogs as evil or inspiring, what is my responsibility when stepping on those below in order to gain advantages from above? Do I declare it a dog eat dog world simply to get in the first and last bites? What is ‘evil’ other than maximum self interest run riot? Just because I tithe ten percent doesn’t wash my hands clean of the blood.

In the ultimate act of victim-hood we solemnly declare force majeure via evil doer, which neatly absolves us of any responsibility for the state of current affairs and our supposed ‘coerced’ participation. When viewed with hope and belief, material science completely and competently explains all there is to know about how the physical and metaphysical world ‘works’. Confidently assured that our present paradigm is just human nature, there is nothing left to do but wash our hands of the entire affair and bunker down to await the global blast and follow-on shock wave.

And there is no doubt some will be crushed under the falling fiat landslide, thereby lending perceived credibility to the idea bunkering is the best and only option. However, dug in deep like a tic while screaming at the computer monitor about some anonymous asshole commentator whom we claim knows nothing only perpetuates our support for the system. Do our childish minds really think those whom we blindly empower will scurry away like cockroaches exposed by the refrigerator light and leave us be after the fall? Really? Are we serious?

The playbook employed against us is thousands of years old and consists of one simple rule. Leverage the plebs’ hope and belief against them time and time again. When the cycle ends in a flash of self-immolation, start it up all over again with fresh actors and a whitewashed stage. Rinse and repeat endlessly because no matter what, the mind memes deeply implanted within the survivors of the present generation spawns the next generation, creating new zombies needing only small adjustments to fit the present day circumstances. WE are the problem, an insight glaringly obvious since our children become part of the next problem and we raise our children to be little replicas of us.

Only when patently false hope and belief are thoroughly uprooted and destroyed, then replaced with awareness of our personal responsibility to be honest with ourselves in all our affairs, will these self destructive cycles come to an end. I am not suggesting the reader is responsible for all that is wrong with the world today nor is it his or her responsibility to fix all of it. But I am suggesting we are responsible for cleaning up our own house.

Once we begin this process we quickly discover we have been carrying around dozens of pounds of needless cognitive and emotional weight, a needless burden which has obscured our vision and understanding from birth while leaving us cognitively impotent, emotionally immature and growth impaired. As individuals we cannot change the world today. But we can change ourselves, and in so doing we plant the seeds that will change the world tomorrow. It all begins within.


Far out | From the Guardian | The Guardian
[...] As the book's title suggests, Cooper felt that the family was over. He described it as "that system which obscurely filters out most of our experience and then deprives our acts of any genuine spontaneity". It was a merciless space in which its victims were petrified, dehumanised and systematically stripped of their critical faculties. Far from maintaining the sanity of its members, the family drove them mad. "The family," asserted Cooper, "since it cannot bear doubt about itself and its capacity to engender 'mental health' and 'correct attitudes', destroys doubt as a possibility in each of its members." What the family teaches, Cooper declared, is that "one is not enough to exist in the world on one's own". This leads to a passivity that submits to invasion. The invaders are, of course, members of the family. If one reacts to this too noticeably, perhaps by becoming paranoid, one of the family's most insidious protectors will intercede to defend the family against the autonomy of its members. Its name is psychiatry.

Cooper and his colleague, Ronald Laing, were the champions of anti-psychiatry. In the widely read books that they produced in the 60s and 70s, they not only laid waste to complacent notions about the nature of madness and badness but articulated an impulse that lay beneath the dope and love beads of the era's stereotype. The anti-psychiatrists saw that some of the participants in the decade of love and revolution were caught up in a determined attempt to deconstitute reality. At a personal level, this entailed finding out just how mad you could sanely be. The anti-psychiatrists offered a context and an itinerary.

[...] Crucial to the maturation of the emerging beatnik was the regular inhalation of pot. I should say that, in those days, the word "pot" was very cool, like "digital". That it now sounds like something your uncle would say is because we are uncles now. In addition to unlocking the synaesthesia of the inner cinema, the cannabinoids bestowed the gift of Transparency. This was really quite something. With Transparency, you could think about your life, or the society in which you lived, or the values you had absorbed, and you could see right through them. Some years later, it would become appropriate to say this was a form of deconstruction, but that hadn't been invented yet. There was a difference, however: you didn't have to be clever to deconstruct in this manner, you just had to be stoned. Truths were made apparent, they were not worked out.

So I saw through it all. Saw it for the charade it was. Saw its falseness. Unfortunately, I also saw through myself. My falseness.

[...] It was so very hip to be mad in those days; a beatific craziness was to be worn like Tommy Hilfiger. This helped make the 60s exhilarating and revolutionary, while producing a credulous generation intoxicated by relativism. For many, this condition proved impossible to shake off and paved the way for the fog of New Age vagueness, energised by consumerism, that seems to be going global. The extraordinary energy released over 30 years ago has contributed to the state of affairs in which we now have magazines about feng shui and our avant gardists can be identified by the Nike swoosh tattooed on their calves.

These days, madness is to be avoided at all costs - it is neither big nor clever. The energy invested in suppressing madness and chaos sometimes erupts, though. It can produce hysterical displays, such as the Dead Diana festival or the Portsmouth Paedophile rampage. David Cooper knew very well the price to be paid for such a denial and used his own being as a guinea pig for purgation. While the benefits of his wisdom seemed not to avail him personally, it is hard to forget one of his favourite maxims, frequently delivered with a wry chuckle: "If you're going to go mad, then do it discreetly."
SLS · Colloquia · The Language of Madness
[...] One would erect a mockery if one were to attempt to write systematically about a discourse that dismantles systematic thought. Perhaps however one can show the truth-force and finally the periodic necessity of this dismantling by alternating apparent rigour of expression with significant moments of its ridiculization.

We exist within the context of a language that is our own invention but which controls us in so far as we have lost sight of its origins in our day-to-day practice, and that of our forebears, extending back in history over some 6,000 years or so ... a very small bite out of time's apple, but that is the sort of time it has taken for our language progressively to control us.

This 'language', which means all that is in common, and present communicatively, as regards structure and the ways of forming new structures, includes all the actual languages that we speak like Icelandic, French, English, Japanese. But it also includes large elements of sound, the ways we look at each other, ways of moving, guessing in our actions, that introduce an uncertainty, a necessary uncertainty, about exactly how and how exactly we are expressing ourselves and what this expression, whatever it is, means for the person who we suppose receives it or who supposes that they receive it. We act as if we understand much of the other person's communication as if it made sense whereas for us it doesn't at all - that is to say we make our own sense out of the communicated non-sense (to us) of the other.

Perhaps 'exactitude' is the problem. One considers certain structures that imply definable laws of logical ordering (laws perhaps not clearly formalized that are special to these types of structures as well as more general laws) in a sequence in which the laws in turn imply the structure themselves. This closed system as a basis for analysis defeats itself when it denies the variability of history (recorded willed human change), which makes any sort of exactness impossible, not even desirable.


This concludes the mind trip and now there should must be only one question on your mind: how do we ensure that we are not simply serving ourselves up another shit sandwich?



Simply, we have to get over all of that mind crap and just take a look at what is developing around you. Do not search for ways to react to anything here, but meditate on it and see how your views apply. Participation, sharing, co-piloting, take command of your unit, captain!
There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew. - Marshall McLuhan
Read Me First: Tools for Critical Activism
“Critical activist” is not a group or a trend, not an identity you can be--it’s just a phrase that describes someone who attempts to think clearly (critically) about their political activities (or lack thereof), in order to be sure they are actually helping people and not accidentally or unknowingly making things worse. Sadly, uncritical activism--activism that doesn’t help or actually makes things worse, even though it thinks or pretends to be helping--is all-too-common, and helps to consolidate the power held by corporations and government.

This is  a bunch of stuff that is very rare in that its clearly breaking away from standard competition protocols. Here is a talk on positive psychology which illustrates the difference in positive healthcare negative sickcare.







Decentralizing science: Local Biohacking

[...] Stigmergic Science
The magnitude of creative productivity is most strongly correlated with the number of researchers, and less with the talent of the individuals involved, and fortunately the positive feedback loop (or virtuous cycle) of technology continues to lower the cost of instrumentation. That is, happy accident probability is proportional to time invested rather than just skill.

Establishment science institutions are somewhat impeded from developing groundbreaking, disruptive or revolutionary technologies, for three reasons:

First, they need to be able to monopolize them. Anything that lends itself to decentralization (solar power, self-replicating 3D printers) threatens the established order and will be resisted to the end. If a modern-day Nikola Tesla were to invent a disruptive energy technology, s/he would likely be suppressed, just as J.P. Morgan and Edison suppressed Tesla.

“Science is but a perversion of itself unless it has, as its ultimate goal, the betterment of humanity.” - Nikola Tesla

Here is an excellent example of what mother nature tries to do through diversity. When regulations restrict and shut down and subvert creative expression to the logic of capital it stifles the type of innovation found in nature. Diversity is resilience, but law and order is counter to certain progress which undermines special private interests.



This is an awesome talk which is right on the point of civil participation in the processes of society. They have created DemocracyOS which is an interface for citizens to participate and vote with cooperation between various levels of government. Its time to upgrade our institutions to the internet age. Voting once every 4 years and going to sleep for the rest is so much a token activity, the illusion of participation.



Some great examples of the direct interface that government can have with their communities. Enabling the viral nature of ideas, connecting communities together, sharing resources.

Jennifer Pahlka: Coding a better government



Movements of Radical Imagination; How Ordinary People Are Building A New World | The Cryptosphere
[...] In recent years, new waves of resistance against the commodity economy that restricts the autonomy of the common people began to emerge. Spontaneous creative action of the net-generation helped the decentralized network of peers to blossom into an online culture of sharing. BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer file sharing protocols challenged the copyright industry and Hollywood monopolies. Creative Commons licensing chartered an alternative to intellectual property rights that enforced information propriety and ownership. The Open Source Movement fostered peer-to-peer production and collaboration. Wikipedia challenged the orthodox top down writing of history through horizontal creation of knowledge, with people sharing ideas with no claims of ownership. All this brought new alternatives to the closed hermeneutic circle of peer review encrusted with corporate or government interests.

[...] While many traditional social movements interface with the existing infrastructure of the corporate state and struggle to gain economic sustainability to create real effects, Bitcoin’s new monetary features create a viable alternative to the existing parasitic incentive structures of the corporate state.

In this crucial time of transition from the overarching ambition of corporate oligarchs, the blockchain based cryptocurrencies allow anyone to more fully connect with their own principles and ideals and to act on them without permission. This is a new social ecosystem that fuels innovation and activism on the edges, providing new ways to fund projects and aspirations that have traditionally been rejected by a monolithic vision of the world conceived by the few and dictated from above.

Through open source and peer-to-peer value exchange networks, people are coming together to build new social forms. This is creative direct action; if one doesn’t like the existing system, instead of fighting it, they can now simply innovate a better one. For example, OpenBazzar, a decentralized alternative to Ebay, brings the power of the market back to the common people. Fair Coop aims to create online transnational cooperatives. Envisioned by Enric Duran, cofounder of Spain’s Catalan Integral Cooperatives (CIC), the cryptocurrency called FairCoin offers a means of value creation and exchange suited to those around the world who support economic equality, fair trade and a sustainable way of living.

These new waves of independence from traditional structures of power can redirect the current that is now used to carry corporatist values to prefigure a different world. Collective efforts of divesting from the logic of profit at any cost can starve the beast of neoliberalism. It releases public wealth and what belongs to the commons, which has been increasingly swallowed up by vulture capitalism. Networked flow across borders can creatively disrupt the hierarchies of domination. It has potential to decolonize and reorganize society at a global scale

As the mind begins to free itself from the confines of the market, the force of control will desperately try to infiltrate new opening cracks in order to reassert power. A new digital war is being fought, with the unprecedented level of mass surveillance revealed by Snowden’s NSA files, government efforts to outlaw cryptography and continuous assaults on net neutrality. Corporations like IBM aim to centralize the blockchain by shifting an old payment system into this new digital platform in order to preserve the old levers of power. Through governments and firms like Goldman Sachs, there will be many more attempts to regulate or compromise Bitcoin’s core innovation of decentralization to turn it to the benefit of the few.

The Internet of human creativity is being turned into a battleground. Yet, the imagination of everyday people has already arisen. From the ashes of a dying world, we are seeing a new horizon. Our willingness to dialogue and connect across boundaries of differences ushers forth a new power of consensus. Around the world, networks of our radical imagination are becoming a shield against a cold abstract thinking that freezes the current of the heart. We are opening the world to diverse pathways chosen by each person’s self- determination into a confluence of our common dreams.
I think that the idea of the city is probably the group that most people would find they are able to identify with. There is a certain amount of pride, and a shared continuous space that binds residents together. Remember to think global but act local.



The next three talks each hit on some very excellent points about actually causing change. Enjoy!






This concludes my exploration of the relative deficiencies of the profit motivated dominator society when compared to the human needs motivated cooperator society. They can coexist until we don't need to compete for anything. This is a total change in mindset from competing for scarcity to cooperating to abundance. It doesn't happen all at once, the apocalypse takes a long time for very dense people. So we should be trying what we can in our local places and sharing the knowledge in an open source manner.

captain psd

tracking anomalous occurrences


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