Monday 11 May 2015

CryptoTown Day 111 - Throwing in The Towel



Of course, the Matrix is just a story. You can tell this because at the end Neo flies off into the sky screaming "Wake up!," when in reality he still has bills to pay. "Mr. Van Harper, I know I was always late before but I have really changed and accepted responsibility." Hah! To be clear, Neo represents no one special or rare, and this movie was actually meant to show the overall theme of our society in a way that we could understand.

Actually, almost any way that you can think of to fight whatever you think the system is, only feeds it, because that kind of thinking is just a part of it. We would have to go so far as looking inwards to see that we are agent smith already, just waiting for moments of expression. This is the ego, the unconscious patterns of society, ready to fabricate territorial boundaries, to discriminate, to obey the parts of our mind which are the territory of foreign power, their dead patterns, secured long ago.

I have added some relevant context on the subject of Taoism. It turns out (yet again) that nothing is new in this world. This will help to understand my work and the rest of this post.

OSHO | Tao: The State and the Art (book)
[...] Taoist masters only talk about "the Way." Tao means the Way - they don't talk about the goal at all. They say: The goal will take care of itself; you need not worry about the goal
[...] The way has no map, the Way is not charted, the Way is not such that you can follow somebody and find it. [...] The way is a pathless path. It is not ready-made, available; you cannot just decide to walk on it, you will have to find it. You will have to find it in your own way; nobody else's way will do. Only by walking, only by living your life, will you find the Way.  
[...] You can be a Taoist if you simply live your life authentically and spontaneously; if you have the courage to go into the unknown on your own, as an individual; if, not leaning on anybody, not following anybody, you simply go into the dark night not knowing whether you will arrive anywhere or whether you will be lost. If you have the courage, that choice is there. It is risky. It is adventurous.  
Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism are superhighways: you need not risk anything - you simply follow the crowd. With Tao you have to go alone, you have to be alone. Tao respects the individual, not the society. Tao respects the unique, not the crowd. Tao respects freedom, not conformity. Tao has no tradition. Tao is rebellion, and it is the greatest rebellion possible.
This is neither uncommon nor unexpected that good ideas or works based in human needs (not profit) have such a difficult time finding expression (funding). I did not expect the level of failure I had, launching every campaign with great hopes. Actually the need for money to live partly affected my tactics to focus on crowd funding. My work would have probably taken a different shape without the fear of economic death.

We should be able to see that capital has no motive to fund this kind of R&D. I have tried to connect with various groups, but there is still so much work for me to do. Its kind of a chicken and egg problem. A well developed site and fully explored material would encourage participation, which would help to develop such content.

I had originally planned to give it my best for up to three months and call it quits, but I was thankfully able to get some help from close family to continue my work up to this point. Now we are able to look back at so much and look at what I have managed to highlight.

I have been searching online for jobs for about a month now. Applied to a few low-wage places near by. A friend hooked me up with an alcohol delivery job for his friend's business (still waiting for smartserve card in the mail...). Another offer came in through my wife's business network to do temporary night-shift shelving reconfiguration (but it keeps getting delayed). Hopefully this should get the flow going until I can find something better.

Last week I launched the campaign: "choose your own adventure. my reality. cryptotown." The purpose for any over-dramatization is to expose the reality just below the surface cracks. Our industrial mind is trained to the self-centered worldview necessary to cope with the systemic suffering we impose on ourselves. This gives us a sort of tunnel vision and we think that our life is normal or average. sonder, n. the realization that everyone has a story.



We all seem to maintain a comfortable pessimism to dismiss looking into uncomfortable topics. What can we do anyhow? Why bother?.. We are able to accept knowledge of radical conflict in our way of life, yet carry on with our comfortable patterns. This dense psychological mess provides an avoidance mechanism (ego defenses), as well as a coping mechanism (cognitive dissonance). But we can do something.

If it seems like I am complaining at any point throughout my work, the point is not just to say "poor us," but to highlight areas at the core of our societal institutions which need to be looked at. I am trying to show you that something is not right. The only reason I even bother to do this much is because I have tapped our collective vision and see that there is a very powerful shift coming which I believe can effectively address these issues. Some examples can be seen in my work to get an idea of what I mean by that.

My work has shown that the mechanisms for actually tapping the power of the network are not here yet. If they were, it would be easy for me, or anyone with something to contribute, to quickly get noticed and integrated. I have shown that not only the social media is warped to exploitation, but also the individuals behind the screen. We need upgraded tools, better software for our infrastructure, and for our minds.




We have trained ourselves to respond to spectacle, where illusion or appearance is the ultimate signifier, not "reality." If one were to direct their awareness inwards to deconstruct the dead patterns of society, the industrial mind would crumble to reveal real as unreal and unreal as "real." For real.

Society is like a tar pit where private/closed hierarchies in a competitive culture attempt to secure their flow of benefits. It can be plainly seen how stunted and hollowed out things are. I am just going to take the liberty of my own blog and actually complain and cry like a baby.
  • Why, in the age of automation, do we raise our children to follow instructions and produce like a machine?
  • Why should we have to pay for education which should be a benefit to society?
  • Why isn't education free and open with fluid student/teacher relationships and a global network of peers?
  • Why have the increases in productivity over the last 30 years not resulted in a 3 day work week but instead have been appropriated as profits?
  • Why does virtually none of the work we do benefit our local surroundings and community?
  • Why is it normal to borrow money to exploit others for profit but not normal to meet basic on-the-ground human needs?
  • Why is it that private corporations are allowed to hold fractional reserves and lend money that they create on the spot?
  • Why is a select few private hierarchies given the ability to direct economic spending by approving money creation only towards certain asset bubbles?
  • Why do we keep borrowing money but never spend it on removing recurring expenses like bills?
  • Why do we vote one day every few years and sleep for the rest? 
  • Why do we invest in endless talk and posturing when we can actually be doing stuff?
I hope to do much more whining and complaining later but that's enough for now.

Exposure to these kinds of questions could be a part of initiation if one were to take more time to look inwards. In ourselves we can see what larger system our patterns create as a whole. I am going quote from a few different places to introduce some slightly more complex ideas. This might be confusing at first, but further down the road we can use these passages as signposts to compare experience.

OSHO | Tao: The State and the Art (book)
[...] Why can't the truth be said? What is the difficulty? The truth cannot be said for many reasons. The first and the most basic reason is that truth is always realized in silence.
When your inner talk has stopped, then truth is realized. And that which is realized in silence, how can you express it through sound? It is an experience. It is not a thought.
All language is futile. Truth cannot be expressed. 
Then what have all the scriptures been doing? Then what is Lao Tzu doing? Then what are the Upanishads doing? They all try to say something that cannot be said in the hope that a desire may arise in you to know about it. Truth cannot be said, but in the effort of saying it, a desire can arise in the listener to know that which cannot be expressed.
A master like Lao Tzu knows well that truth cannot be said, but the very effort to say it will provoke something, bring the suppressed thirst to the surface. Once the thirst surfaces, a search, an inquiry starts. And he has moved you.
The Tao that can be told of is not the absolute Tao.
[...] The second reason that truth cannot be expressed is because it is an experience. No experience can be communicated, leave truth aside.
[...] Only words will be conveyed. The container will reach you, but the content will be lost. An empty word will travel toward you, you will hear it, and you will think you understand because you know its literal meaning, but you will miss it. The real, authentic meaning comes through existential experience. You have to know it; there is no other way. There is no shortcut. Truth cannot be transferred. You cannot steal it, you cannot borrow it, you cannot purchase it, you cannot rob it, you cannot beg it - there is no way. Unless you have it, you cannot have it. The Tao that can be told of is not the absolute Tao.
I have been working with an internet friend of mine by the name of Anders. He is one of the mods of /r/sorceryofthespectacle and recently launched the Internet School of Magic. Here are a few interesting quotes referenced on the site:
“As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its flavor; as men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world: we barely remember our dreams, and make little sense of them when we do; as for our bodies, we retain just sufficient proprioceptive sensations to coordinate our movements and to ensure the minimal requirements for biosocial survival—to register fatigue, signals for food, sex, defecation, sleep; beyond that, little or nothing. Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of unlearning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.” —R. D. Laing, "Normal alienation from experience",The Politics of Experience
“Most people live dejectedly in worldly sorrow and joy; they are the ones who sit along the wall and do not join in the dance. The knights of infinity are dancers and possess elevation. They make the movements upward, and fall down again; and this too is no mean pastime, nor ungraceful to behold. But whenever they fall down they are not able at once to assume the posture, they vacillate an instant, and this vacillation shows that after all they are strangers in the world. This is more or less strikingly evident in proportion to the art they possess, but even the most artistic knights cannot altogether conceal this vacillation. One need not look at them when they are up in the air, but only the instant they touch or have touched the ground–then one recognizes them. But to be able to fall down in such a way that the same second it looks as if one were standing and walking, to transform the leap of life into a walk, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian–that only the knight of faith can do—and this is the one and only prodigy.” —Søren Kierkegaard, Fear & Trembling
He is in the process of writing a number of relevant books, of which I have seen some of the material and find it to be relevant to this work on social media, such as: Illuminati Dialectics: Tribal Politics in a (Post)Postmodern Age and Illuminati Networking: Protocols for the Welcoming of New Initiates; Handbook to Activism in the New Age.

Our work seems to be intersecting on the idea of creating a social media network which is completely decentralized/p2p, secured by blockchain tech, etc, designed to actually boost grassroots signals rather than systematically drown them out. I would like to bring the latest in p2p tech together to address the problems that I have encountered through my epic journey. We also collaborate with a small group of experts and leaders on a variety of powerful topics, tapping the pulse.

I would like to continue writing my blog. It started really big, but out of necessity (just trying to live) has kind of narrowed down to my little personal space. I would like to be able to work on more interesting stuff but the fact of the matter is that I now spend an increasing amount of my time trying to avoid the ravages of poverty (it comes in so many ways).

I lost hope the quickest on this last campaign. It only runs for two weeks, but its already half done and not even 100 people have seen the post. To all my friends and family I hope that you weren't too stressed out sharing in my experience and finding that you are as helpless as I to actually do anything. Most of us have no spare money even to be able to help each other. That leaves sharing as the major way to help but we cannot because the ego prevents it. We do not want this embarrassment on us. eg.


The industrial mind, or ego, is a set of patterns which perform all of the functions needed in the competitive environment of civilization. One point is to assume that everything is a scam, since it is. There is no economic activity happening inside a competition based profit motivated society that is not a mixture of deception and exploitation. So for me to offer nothing tangible in return looks like an instant scam doesn't it? You don't even get anything. Scam!

It is also offensive to the ego to even ask for money without being a part of some recognizable exploitation scheme. The profit motive is legitimate, certainly, but is it more useful to us than a motive of meeting human needs? We should realize that what engine drives us will determine where we are capable of going. I am encountering the gears.

I don't care what it looks like for me to fail. I have realized that the quickest way to ride the upward spiral is to put yourself out there so much that you fail constantly. This is the immediate lesson of each failure leading to rapid progression. Anyhow, I was a late bloomer so I have decided to have my mid-life crisis early.

Madness is what they call it when you have seen through too much of the dead patterns of society. It means to have an experience outside the established confines of industrial thought. We can go our entire life discussing ideas and never breach the comfort zone.

I wonder if the mid-life crisis is an institution built up as a catch-all for those who have snapped deeply at their roots, leading to a marked tilt of the entire structure. The subject has become lucid, this is all a bunch of bullshit. This is just what the ego has been waiting for: a reason to finally satisfy the most crazy of desires in the final attempt to understand if having can ever replace being.

Unprepared for anything different, we follow our patterns. How could an existential crisis lead to liberation if the imagination has no ammunition? While I am on the topic, I cannot help but recommend a movie called the Animatrix (no link). It will immerse you in an empowering world of possibilities (further reflecting our world). Collecting and sharing great art is important because it seems like it has all been said before.


Many pieces of artistic expression such as this, I have seen throughout my life and the meaning has changed. Understanding on a deeper level is a sign of something called synchronicity. Intuition gives us a picture that logic cannot, and the pattern is bolstered with further experience.

I will give an example. I had only really looked into Taoism in the last couple days, and it already resonates so well with my experience that I have included two passages in this post. These are the signposts. The fact that I have seen 11:11 a whole bunch on the clock lately and now this happens to be CT Day 111 is not synchronicity.

I am more prepared now to turn over some strange rocks. A post made to reddit yesterday on /r/showerthoughts. The quote is interesting because I used to feel that it adequately classified people. Now I see that you cannot classify people. There is more than this: "Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people" is a quote that discusses people. (self.Showerthoughts)
[–]zahnza 2081 points  
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
[–]lastgamer789 1382 points  
  • Obi Wan, dealing in absoutes
[–]staytaytay 853 points  
I always hated that about the star wars universe.
Dark side is supposed to be the emotional side, I.E. you follow your gut in the individual situation.
While light side is meant to be the logical, detached side. I.E. you follow the rules.
So really only a Jedi deals in absolutes; a sith is all about shades of grey. But because it sounds evil to deal in absolutes, it must be a property of the dark side to do so.
[–]filthy_casul 671 points  
The argument people make for that line is that it shows how similar both sides are at the end of the day, but that puts a little too much faith in Lucas' writing if you ask me.
[–]zorbiburst 1087 points  
Well I find your lack of faith disturbing.
Let's become disturbed by filthy casual's lack of faith. Is Star Wars really about emotion vs logic? Is that the dichotomy they set up? (really I don't know). Its a massively popular franchise so lets assume its intentionally deceptive. Emotion vs. logic is not following the patterns recognized for countless ages.

It actually seems to correspond more with Heart and Mind, but there is one problem, only the mind can discern a conflict (self-and-other). In this case Heart is cast as evil, where Mind is cast as good (how surprising). The competitive/hierarchical civilization is about order, logic, reason, ambition. It is no wonder they cast civilization as order, but this order (pure mind) is death itself, it is anti-life, it is the unconscious patterns, the dead patterns of our society. They act against the chaotic expression of nature, that force which while opposed, builds explosive purifying strength.

Instead of Heart and Mind, we could use the words non-duality and duality. The Mind calculates division, self-and-other, borders, its carved into territories, bound to foreign powers. A dualistic worldview is like taking the patterns of the mind as reality, when it is a fabricated fantasy, not solid but empty, not actual.

Find an object in your environment with a straight edge. When we look closer and closer (and closer), we find that the edge was only in our mind. There is no edge. There is no spoon. When I grab your hand and ask what you feel you say a hand grabbed you. What did you feel??? You slept through the entire experience: the shock of contact, the sensation of friction and pressure as well as the heat of another body, not to mention the psychosocial interaction of contact!!!!! I am showing you portals beyond the mind.

I am not concerned with being right or wrong, just as I don't bother trying to take the words of others as truth. When we realize that even our language is not as solid as we thought, and philosophy as an endless flux of meaning, it makes sense to just loosen up and stop looking for instructions, for logic, for that one piece of data you need to go back to sleep.




I have no idea what has to happen for my life to stabilize. Hopefully I can find some income. I was going to receive $1000 as a tax refund but the CRA put it directly towards my student loan instead (thanks). By the way it takes about 9 months of non-payment to hit your credit rating. I also had plenty of available repayment assistance (where they put loan payments on hold) when they sent to collections (Revenue Canada). Why not just put it on hold? Oh right. Cause paperwork and such.

I want to complain some more but I will make it quick. You are either in society or you are getting a boot up the ass on the way out. It is a walled garden, and the price of entry is forfeiture of the fruits of your labor. I no longer go to the dentist because I cannot afford it (no benefits), I am getting reamed with NSF fees because they can't stop their archaic system from trying to withdraw.

Once you start getting screwed its like an army of technicalities and speedbumps descends upon you to swiftly remove you from view so that the illusion can be better maintained for the productive ones. I think I lost a job opportunity when my phone was disconnected, and have missed out on other opportunities because I had no money to do anything. Death by 1000 cuts.



Most of us have no reason to feel secure anymore. One or two paydays away from disaster. You never know when you can lose your job. Then you will see how independent you are. This will happen to many of us before we figure out how to organize ourselves on the premise of cooperation to meet human needs. It would be in our best interest to send some pioneers ahead, to support them...

These posts sometimes take me a really long time to make. It is no simple matter. I am not analyzing and compiling data, but searching through my experiences for the story which you might understand. I can never do it justice but I can try, and perhaps my effort will stir a desire in you to discover that which cannot be expressed.

I realize that many of us are not ready yet even to entertain some of these ideas, but I think that there is something for anyone who is looking. It is very difficult to write because there are so many potential readers. Also, the real connection is in discussion, not in broadcasting of ideas.

I am hoping to expand the website further and go into details on memetics, high leverage points, etc. I also am planning to have the campaign page set up as a monument to my efforts by the time it closes (this Sat). I wish I had more time to reach out to people during my efforts here, but the material had to be developed first, and I had to focus a lot on not dieing. I would like to invite anyone out there who is interested in my work to contact me at papersheepdog@gmail.com.

Friday 1 May 2015

CryptoTown Day 101 - choose your own adventure. my reality.

CryptoTown Website

CryptoTown Tracker blog

I have launched one, perhaps final crowdfunding campaign.This will all be continually and heavily updated!

choose your own adventure. my reality. cryptotown.

http://igg.me/at/cryptotown-adventure

I need your help to write the next chapter of my life: disaster or recognition? blog'n it either way. 

##Updated Intro:

“Open-Source Everything makes truth, rather than violence, the currency of power” -Robert David Steel

“You never change anything by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete” -Buckminster Fuller

“Without deviation (from the norm) progress is not possible” -Frank Zappa

You Choose the Next Chapter!

Guys, I screwed up big time. I am hoping to raise $3000 to soften my landing and transition from my full-time efforts with CryptoTown. This represents the two months of mortgage payments that are behind as of today, and the month of June.

But how did it come to this? -Wait.- Before we even get into that. Let's clear a few things up!

Wtf is this?

Welcome to my mid-life crisis? In December, I actually realized the systemic suffering and destruction inherent in our society and I thought I could help to change it. I feel that I have a unique set of skills and experiences which can help a lot of people. Trust me that there are no words for me to use to explain the magnitude of my work to you, this is why I turned to art. So I have been working for the last 5 months to express myself and experiment with ways to transition to a more open and cooperative culture.
 This work is so important to me that I sacrificed my career, almost ruined my life, worked harder, and under the most stressful circumstances I have ever experienced, just to materialize my ideas and share them with you. The most difficult part of discovering important things in life, is trying to express them.

"It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled." - Mark Twain
So, now, howcome people who actually work for a living have to pay for someone who doesn't? 
Ok. I know some of my other campaigns were focused on income replacement (wage delete) and working for the greater (common) good. I am just looking for help this time.
I know that people have to work for their money, and I have been through hell and received nothing for it. Had I been working my job, I would have taken home $15k in this time.
I messed up big and I am asking for help to get back on my feet, but hoping at the very least that perhaps you can click share. If I am lucky, my wife will never let me pull a crazy stunt like this again so please, SHARE MY WORK. Let it not be all for nothing.
 
Alright! So. How did it all come to this???
##original post:

You Choose the Next Chapter!

I am at a point where I could lose my house. I am hoping to raise $3000 to soften my landing and transition from my efforts with CryptoTown. This represents the two months of mortgage payments that are behind as of today, and the month of June. But how did it come to this?

Check out how many times I have shifted gear at the CryptoTown Tracker blog.

This could mark the end of my relentless over-work and overthought of the last five months since I left my job in December to express my ideas.

This isn't the first crowdfunding campaign I attempted. There is also:

Jan 20: Wage Delete | Open Memetics: CryptoTown - Civilization 2.0

This was a broad net, with some of my biggest ideas packed in. The only hope for this was the miracle that someone with a big social media account takes notice and shares.

Feb 25: Bring Positivity and Social Awareness to Barrie

Moving to a more local focus and exploring my immediate networks, connecting with other like minds on the ground.

Apr 01 (live): okcc sub unit for Universal Basic Income Studies

The third one was kind of a joke, but isn't industrial civilization a joke? The scope has begun to hit home, because, well quite frankly, I have nowhere left to go. This inspired this current campaign that you are reading. I also got the idea to sell my paintings as a gesture of closing up shop and liquidating my precious (to me ;) art to fend off the threat of violence, the force which kicks one out of one's house for failure to compete on the market.

Apr 23 (live): barrie's 1st decentralized dance party. cryptotown

Relaunched campaign due to interest.

So why the focus on crowdfunding?

Capital doesn't just walk up to stuff and say "here, let me help you become decentralized and self-sufficient." This is because it always expects a return. If I take out a loan to do my activities, I must struggle even more feverishly to squeeze a penny out of whatever I do with that. This is the never ending appropriation in a competitor/dominator society.

If we want to build local sustainable abundance, we have to find ways to sacrifice capital on the altar of decentralization. We need to lift all boats, not just the yachts. It will require a major cultural shift towards participation and cooperation.

For a quick dip into my world, check out this rather long comic, and then watch this youtube video.

The Choice

$0 - Continue the trend of the last four months. House likely foreclosed
$3300 - Help me not lose my house as I transition to likely minimum wage labor
+$_____ - Check out my previous crowdfunding attempts. I have ideas.

My Story

  • Schooling, debt, stress
  • musician - guitar, harmonica
  • gauntlet of fear (old youtube videos)
  • active with crypto
  • awakening to non-duality, emptyness of material
  • mid life crisis. the systemic, inherent structural suffering of hierarchy
  • CryptoTown Tracker blog
  • Encountering the machine, debt, bills, notices, relentless calls
  • Trying to find work now and now lose my house

My Innovations

  • Connect Everything | CryptoTown Supermovement (who speaks for Earth?)
  • CryptoTown On The Ground
  • GeoTabs offline internet and metadata
  • Open Memetics. Cultural self-engineering
  • Civic Crowdfunding. Wage Delete

What Else I have to Offer

My Wife and I live a fairly simple life, and have a lot of experience with gardening, preserving, cooking, knitting/sewing, health and wellbeaing, plants and herbs, etc. I would love to be able to explore hydroponics, 3d printing, permaculture techniques, etc and share with you all.

My Urgent Dilemma

  • unhealthy stress, health issues
  • career down the drain
  • house on edge of lost
  • wife next?
  • I can not keep up the work load that I have been under the last 5 months.
  • my work is incomplete, but I must secure income to not die (looking for job).
  • in the mean time I need help to pay two months past due mortgage + next

Social Media Strategy

  • Close friends please follow me on my fb page by hovering over friends and clicking "get notifications"
  • I hope that my friends will tell me every last reason why they think this won't work. (and then tip me anyhow, pls)
  • I will be contacting gatekeepers, public figured, groups, etc to ask them to look at my work and maybe share some of it.
  • I will strive to post daily and continue to keep everyone engaged for 2 weeks!