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.

Paddy Ashdown: The Global Power Shift

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 1 day ago 

Only a Sith deals in absolutes.

[–]lastgamer789 1382 points 1 day ago 

• Obi Wan, dealing in absoutes

[–]staytaytay 853 points 1 day ago* 

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 1 day ago 

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 1 day ago 

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.

Out Loss of Wisdom - Barry Schwartz

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.

END CIV Resist Or Die

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.

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.

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!

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!

Biochar- Return to Ancient Wisdom

AllanSavory: How to green the world's deserts and reverse climate change

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.

Chasing Ice (2012)

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.

The New World Order - with Russel Brand & Bill de Berg (RAP NEWS 30)

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.

Love, Reality, and the Time of Transition

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.

Routine Republic | 2015 Taco Bell® Breakfast Short Film

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?

Robert Anton Wilson on conspiracy theories

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.

Martin Seligman: The new era of positive psychology

The Power of a Mind to Map: Tony Buzan at TEDxSquareMile

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.

Garbage Warrior ALL ABOUT EARTHSHIPS - Full Length Documentary

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.

Pia Mancini: How to upgrade democracyfor the Internet era

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.

Eric Liu: Why ordinary people need to understand power

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

Clay Shirky: How the Internet will (one day) transform government

Chris Hedges "Strategy for Radical Change" [FULL]

Engineers vs. Thugs: the Power of Bitcoin, Cryptography & Tech

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

CryptoTown Day 65 - Institutional Isolation

Let's say you had an idea, or two or three which you believed could have a great positive impact on the world. What would you do? Do you think its as easy as telling people and sitting back as it spreads like wildfire throughout the world?

If the idea would carry any real positive change with it, this would automatically disqualify it from the above scenario. I would like to explore the two major obstacles that I encountered in the last few months while I explored my ideas through creative expression. One is the industrial mind, the other is meticulous domination of communication tools.

In my last post, I covered some relevant history which will help to understand who we are. The vast majority of our modern human form has lived in societies based on cooperation and clever use of our environment. More industrious activities such as agriculture and domestication of livestock set the stage for our own domestication. It was not long before we made obedient tools out of ourselves, as competition replaced cooperation. A simple strategy of divide and conquer.

We are solely dependent on government and corporation to meet all of our needs, and we call this independence. Indigenous wisdom traditions show us how to relate through cooperation and interdependence, while competition isolates us for the purpose of appropriation. When you lose your job, you quickly find out just how this illusion of independence is actually extreme dependence, without the traditional community support as backup.

In the exact same way as the gold standard was used to bankrupt nations who had plenty of other resources, dependence on income straps us to a single method of survival. Bills may only be paid in dollars, they do not accept trade or skill. Our minds are warped so hard around this idea that we do not believe it is acceptable to earn a living in any other way than to be told exactly what to do in a situation of directed labor aka employment.

"Oh," but you say, "we can own our own business and this is freedom!" Not so fast you are still playing the game of divide and conquer known as competition. You will inevitably deceive and exploit others, or quickly find yourself overrun by those who do. How many ways have we been subconsciously shaped into these perfectly manageable tools is beyond comprehension for most. Our most core beliefs make us cold and pessimistic, and even encourage deceit on a subconscious level.

The point that I am getting at is that we have been so far divorced from the idea of individual initiative that it is nearly impossible to achieve cooperation, even in the interests of the community. We are waiting for instructions, to be processed. We do not listen to understand, we listen to reply. The leap from production to creation is a great chasm for most. It can be as simple as sharing or liking a post, but it will not happen, the message crashes upon the rocks of dead patterns which make up the whole of each of us.

If this is not sinking in perhaps we should give this clip some thought. It is about the manufacture of consent. It is no longer seen as acceptable to rule by physical force, and with democracy came a need to instead control what we think.

Manufacturing Consent: Thought Control in a Democratic Society

So if we are born and raised in this society to take orders and thoughts, how does an idea spread which relies on individual initiative? If we are to be honest, it has to involve some level of manipulation, because tools do not act on their own, they are designed to be manipulated. However, in an open knowledge society, access and participation to the reasoning behind initiatives is available to all who are willing to look.

When we look at society and politics, we see the surface which tells us that everything works as we think it does. When we look at what kinds of things must go on to create this illusion, we are looking at what has been termed realpolitik.

Realpolitik (from German: real "realistic", "practical", or "actual"; and Politik "politics", German pronunciation: [ʁeˈaːlpoliˌtɪk]) is politics or diplomacy based primarily on power and on practical and material factors and considerations, rather than explicit ideological notions or moral or ethical premises. In this respect, it shares aspects of its philosophical approach with those of realism and pragmatism. The term Realpolitik is sometimes used pejoratively to imply politics that are coercive, amoral, or Machiavellian.

 Let's experience. Here are three TED talks which were banned:

Rich People Don’t Create Jobs

Is it shocking to hear that trickle down economics involves piss and not money? It seems obvious that if we want to develop our yacht and bunker economies that we should give money to those who buy that, and if we want to develop our human needs sectors we would find ways to help people who buy for that. At any rate, we can see how easy it was to pull this off. We actually support our own poverty willingly. How could it be possible in a thinking population?

The Science of Delusion

Our default worldview. Scientific Dogma. An interesting look at some of our closely held beliefs. Scientism is a wildly successful method of thought control which plays very well into the meaningless exploitation of each other. Science is our only hope! We can escape this doomed planet and find a new home (like the aliens in Independence Day)

Manifesto of the Committee to Abolish Outer Space

[...] This society depends for its existence on the presence of a frontier, a blank homogeneous space to be settled and transformed by the desires and fantasies of an entrepreneurial libidinality, one whose open freedom can’t help but transform in turn those settled societies back East. The old frontier has been closed for a long time, and the results are clear to see: “the spread of irrationalism; the banalization of popular culture; the loss of willingness by individuals to take risks, to fend for themselves or think for themselves.” Our manly vigor has been sapped, but we can regain it if we take a new lover. We must inseminate Mars.

Already in this argument you can smell the blood and slaughter, feel the slow tugging dispersal that leads to an utterly empty world. Our uniquely enlightened society in which human life is valued beyond measure could only achieve this feat through the free labor of tens of millions of slaves. That blank gaping frontier was, inconveniently, also someone’s home; tens of millions more had to be brutally exterminated. Still, Mars is different, Mars is lifeless. 

Naah, fuck Mars, and fuck the Moon if we think that we will ever have a meaningful existence in space on the basis of competition and exploitation.

The War on Consciousness

We are unconscious. Our behaviours are made up of dead patterns of society. We are not alive. In an instant this life will be over without having ever broken out of the course prescribed and set by our collective slumber. Seriously, hallucinogenic substances are illegal because of the damage they might cause to this perfectly functioning tool. Alcohol is legal because it destroys and divides us, marijuana is illegal because it can show us how we are connected.

Even those who become aware of their surroundings, who have "woken up," seeing the dead patterns which drive us, have only attained power over the highest levels of control. Even if they wanted to change with their community, they may find there is no community to be had. Even if there was, they would find that they cannot escape their dependence on private hierarchy. There are bills to be paid, they must be paid in dollars. Debt payments suck up all potential to invest in local sustainable abundance (permaculture).

I devised a way to reach people while at the same time bringing awareness and participation to the local community. I shouldn't have been so surprised when hardly a single flinch or response could be detected in any of my peers. I do not have the network reach to even play the numbers game in hopes of a few bites. Check out this crowdfunding campaign for an idea of what it might look like to bring massive participation to meaningful community projects.

I believe it failed because of my small network, because people respond to instructions not participation, and because it's inconceivable that capital should be spent on vague meeting of human needs with no specific capitalistic exploit or employment. Or maybe I just suck at organization (randomly came across this just now, might be useful). At any rate, it may help to serve as a template, for someone who has the funds to do something like this in their own town.

Hopefully this has begun to convey the brick wall of dead patterns that is our modern society. Let's look at another layer of stagnation, the tools we use to communicate with.

The Internet is part of a massive shift towards network and peer based behavior. At its heart, it is incomparable with old broadcast techniques such as book, radio, and television used to blast propaganda. Should we be surprised then to realize that it has been subverted? Again, we are going to centralized websites such as Facebook and Reddit and we just sort of trust that they aren't screwing with us.

The Revolution Will Not Be YouTubed

So Facebook manipulates our newsfeed. They maintain a ban list, which I have encountered, prevent the sharing of disruptive material. Youtube can remove your videos from suggested area (or sitewide), never to be encountered. Reddit is notorious for moderator abuse and divides communities. Our tools are corrupted. Movements can simply be turned off through central ban lists. Let's take a quick look at reddit

A while back I made a post to the /r/Buddhism sub, hoping to find some people willing and conscious enough to look at themselves. The post was a total failure simply because it did not conform to known patterns and expectations. One would think this should not be a problem for those claiming to value self-awareness.

Case Study: Samsara the current event. - To encourage inward thought and expansion of possibility through encountering our environment. - A Reddit experience.

[...] Where does one post a political joke on Reddit? You can not post it to /r/Politics because it is a joke: “No satire or humor pieces.” Humor is a form of creative expression, it bypasses the ego (bored, offended, distracted, etc) in a snap. You can not post a political joke to /r/Funny : “No Politics – Anything involving politics or a political figure. Try /r/PoliticalHumor instead.” Politics and Funny combine for a readership of 10 Million redditors, while Politlcal Humor is relegated to a mere 50'000.

Destroying all potential synergy. Dividing communities. The entire post is a really great compliment to this post as it explores very deeply the mind structures which lead to our collective complacency, our dead unconscious patterns. If you found the above video about the War on Consciousness interesting I would recommend checking the entire post.

How Reddit Was Destroyed (ver3.0)

1) The first thing they did was take away r/reddit.com.
This took away the only tool for communicating with reddit about reddit. If you had any concerns about the website as a whole, you could address them through r/reddit. Taking that away was the first step.
2) The power now resided in individual subreddits, obviously the most popular ones. There was a power grab to become moderators of these subreddits.
3) Once the default subreddits were controlled, drastic changes began to occur.
I remember when r/IAma was open to anyone and the popularity was decided by voting. Now it is nothing more than a cheap place for celebrities to whore out their products and you need to be "approved". Someone named Victoria[2] is involved and how does that makes any sense whatsoever? Celebrities have entire teams of branding/PR/social media teams that work for them. Why do they need to be at reddit HQ and/or required to have a reddit rep? Because these AMA's are extremely organized and sponsored with money.
There are plenty of subreddits that are now covertly controlled. Check out this post which was pushed into r/undelete for identifying a list of keywords banned from r/technology.[3]
4) The appearance of shills soon became VERY apparent.
All of a sudden new accounts started popping up out of nowhere. Cue the birth of r/HailCorporate. "Feel good" military posts started appearing, like a soldier coming home to his dog. New users entered AMA's to lob softball questions "Mr Burns, your campaign has the momentum of a runaway freight train, how does it feel to be so popular?" [4] From brand new accounts that never posted again.
Anyone who tries to convince you that shills don't exist is either grossly uninformed or a liar.[6] Protip: the big political subreddits can’t seem to keep the seal on the circlejerk during weekends, almost as if an entire team of manipulators is suddenly on weekend hours.
5) Now we have blatant censorship on r/news, r/worldnews etc... saying that X site is not allowed.
What ever happened to letting people vote on the content of this website? Trash tabloids constantly go viral on political subreddits due to sensationalized headlines and the fact that most Americans are unaware of different overseas publications.
Major politically-charged subreddits now insist on exact titles or quotes because that stops users from being able to post the important point summary of the article as the title . Using only official titles from only approved media has turned reddit into mainstream media.
6) Speaking of voting, they changed that too.
We now have an entirely new way to view upvote/downvote scores. A user used to be able to see their score. But now, everything is fuzzed. For example, if you made a semi-controversial comment before, but many people agreed, you may have a score like (47/45), leaving you with a -2 next to the comment. Now you just get a -2 and nobody knows if anyone agreed with you.
9) Reddit is not a meritocracy[9] .
tl;dr: Your votes do not matter. The front page is not decided on merit. Different subs are given different algorithms. There is a behind the scene ranking system that gives certain content a "head-start". As we have learned at r/conspiracy, if they don't like our sub, then we are banished from the front page, forever. Just like we were banished from r/bestof, after this amazing comment[10] that was gilden 8X and received over 3000 upvotes. They actually gave that user the boot.[11] How dare you bring your unique, first-hand perspective to a web-forum!!!
10) The arrival and subsequent take over of r/undelete.
Due to the now rampant censorship on the site, users took it into their own hands to bring the truth into the light. They created a part of reddit where users could see what was being deleted. Nope.[12]
11) Now we are seeing a new site-wide trend that is designed to make it even harder to call out shills.[13] Which is interesting considering that nobody seems to care when the accusations are sponsored by the mob: “This guy is a Putin-bot! Everyone must think the exact same way about complex geopolitical events.”
12) All of the proper "checks and balances" are now in place.
R/worldnews has become the ultimate modern-day version of the Two-Minutes Hate[14] from George Orwell's 1984:

a daily period in which Party members of the society of Oceania must watch a film depicting the Party's enemies and express their hatred for them.

But when we really want to drive a point home, the entire front-page gets in on the action!!!
Look what happened in the immediate aftermath of the Boston Bombing, while users were pooling resources, the website was DDos attacked to stop the momentum[15] . Good thing to, since moments later, our honest government said “Hey everybody, these two guys did it!” For arguments sake, despite anything that followed, it should be extremely alarming that millions of people suddenly decided they were guilty based on nothing more than a picture, the government’s word, and the manufactured consensus of their peers. I was on reddit in the exact moment the shift happened and NOBODY could tell me why they suddenly believed, without any other evidence, that two people attending the marathon with a circle around them was evidence of guilt. And I was gang-downvoted every time I asked.
And speaking of the BB, reddit will apparently never live down the fact that someone was wrongly accused. Why should a community be demonized for aggregating information and doing something that has proven to be successful in 90% of cases, particularly disasters? Why? Because the government can’t have people doing their own detective work, that would make their cover-ups way more difficult.
13) Online guerrilla tactics.
When reddit changed the voting system and people were on their last nerve with this site, a place called Whoaverse (now https://voat.co/[16] ) became popular overnight. It is basically a reddit clone and at the time was run by one guy. He was happy about the surge but mentioned it was going to be hard to keep up with, but was committed to making it happen. Guess what happened next?
Did you guess: “Thousands of targeted spam attacks to overload and destroy the website”? Then congrats, you now understand how far these fucks are willing to go to keep the herd in their pen. Hijacking a cool brand and using it’s facade to conduct propaganda games is extremely profitable, just ask VICE.[17] And once you have the customer, it costs much less to keep them than to acquire new ones[18] . So we are seeing online guerrilla tactics designed to destroy the competition by any means.
I believe this can essentially be boiled down to not just greed, but controlling and manipulating the information that the millions of people see on a daily basis. Reddit gets billions of views. Manufactured consensus[21] is very real and doing it through social media is the gold standard because people are hard-wired to value the opinions of their peers.

We should be supporting decentralized p2p projects which aim to replace centralized social networks because its an obvious weak link. How do I know if my site is on a slowball list or if I am shadowbanned in certain places where only I can see my comments? How do I know if people have actually started ignoring me or if my messages never made it (seriously wondering...)?

Communication Security Establishment's cyberwarfare toolbox revealed

Canadian cyber-spy capabilities that go beyond hacking for intelligence, including:

• destroying infrastructure, which could include electricity, transportation or banking systems;
• creating unrest by using false-flags — ie. making a target think another country conducted the operation;
• disrupting online traffic by such techniques as deleting emails, freezing internet connections, blocking websites and redirecting wire money transfers.

Leaked Documents Reveal False Flags Used By The Canadian Communications Security Establishment

It's not just social media. The internet is compromised on so many levels. This is why its so important to support blockchain technology such as Ethereum which is capable of removing the intrusions and corruption of third party trust in many aspects of daily life.

The real value of bitcoin and crypto currency technology - Bitcoin Properly

Who will build this cooperative society? The capital is not coming, it's not interested in subverting its own domination. We don't even hear the words that are spoken: "it's up to you."