The evolution of democracy

Transcript (more or less) from The evolution of democracy: Explaining Trump, Brexit and the Colombia peace deal, a keynote to launch the Inteligencia Colectiva para la Democracia in Madrid, November, 2016.

My name is Heather Marsh. I am a writer and a programmer and I have been studying and experimenting with both local activism and methods of mass communication and collaboration for many years now. From 2010 to 2012 I was the administrator and editor in chief of the Wikileaks news site Wikileaks Central where I experimented with creating knowledge repositories, tying that information to things that were happening in the news and creating action based on that information. News without action is just voyeurism and action without information creates a very easily manipulated public, so I was trying to bring the two together in one place. In 2012 I concentrated more social media collaboration and I wrote a first book called Binding Chaos about all the problems I had seen while working with Wikileaks, Occupy, Anonymous, M15 and many other mass movements in recent years. We all seemed to be coming up against the same issues with hierarchy, direct democracy, consensus and collaboration. As I kept working on various projects it became apparent that we as societies had been butting heads for millenia on these same issues which really come down to trying to create a balance between autonomy, diversity and society, which is the title of my next book. And along the way I have been thinking of what tools we would require to help us achieve this balance, and the primary one I have been working on is a universal database and trust network called Getgee.

So today what I would like to talk about are some ideas from Binding Chaos and a little bit from Autonomy, Diversity, Society which will hopefully help when we are thinking about creating products for mass communication and mass collaboration. The focus is on creating a balance between personal autonomy of those doing the work, diversity of ideas and solutions and allowing the participation of the whole society.

How many people here have heard of a technological singularity? A technological singularity is something IT people and science fiction writers have liked to talk about for years. The idea is that we will reach a point, or have already reached a point, where technology is beyond the scope of human understanding and artificial intelligence will be programming itself, in a Skynet sort of world. It’s funny, people have been talking about this for years, but not many have noticed or acknowledged that we have instead reached a completely different type of singularity which is a societal singularity. We have reached a point where no one can understand every aspect of society which affects them. If you go back in history, crafts people could know everything there is to know about their jobs and people could know everything that went on in their villages but this is just not true any more. And even our villages and neighbourhoods are not autonomous, they are all connected now at some level with all the other communities in the whole world, even uncontacted tribes.

We need to collaborate with others not only to develop tools but even just to understand the news. We have to put our faith in other people and believe in what they tell us or trust in their skill to create their components if we are building a product. As programmers we have been used to working as an ecosystem like this for years, we always have to incorporate other people’s work and their bugs into our own, but this has spread to almost every aspect of public life. And this is one of the biggest challenges in creating tools for democracy. We can’t have real direct democracy or self governance any more because none of us can understand every aspect of everything. We need to rely on collaboration instead and this is going to require a completely different set of rules than we have used in the past. We need more than simple referendums and voting to govern ourselves this way. We need to somehow create nuanced and detailed information we can trust and we need to coordinate goals with people we will never speak to.

There are two main areas to talk about which are idea based collaboration and action based collaboration. The challenge in a societal singularity is how to allow all people to participate and communicate but still be able to filter signal from noise and how to allow people democratic choice but still retain worker autonomy.

First of all, let’s look at mass action based collaboration.

For action based tasks, the model that has become almost ubiquitous is the competitive hierarchical model. Most of us are all too familiar with this model. The typical response to a situation which requires an action is to create a noun, in the form of an organization, government body, or an official person and the focus is always on the organization and the personalities involved instead of the action. The hierarchy creates what I call personality based systems, as opposed to idea or action based systems. A new idea in a personality based system remains completely bound to the owner until it is legally transferred to another owner. All contributors work for the owner, not the idea, and you have to wait on one specific person for approval or direction at each level so there are bottle necks everywhere.

Most workers do not enjoy hierarchical systems as they lose autonomy, mastery and creative control over their own work, they just become an instrument under somebody else’s direction. The orders come from the top down and so there is very little diversity of ideas and we lose all the talent and ideas downstream. Because it is a closed system, collaboration between people does not happen unless they are hired by the same project. Competition is the opposite of mass collaboration. It’s really people working against each other, not together. So there is no autonomy, no diversity and no society.

The alternative to competition has traditionally been cooperation. Cooperative groups try to replace the top down hierarchy with a group consensus driven system which allows diversity of opinion at the top.

This is most effective only in groups of two to eight people. For groups larger than 25, cooperation is extremely slow. It is still a personality based system. An idea in a cooperative must be approved by the entire group, both on initiation and at each stage of development. The majority of energy and resources are spent on communication, persuasion, and personality management, and a power struggle can derail the whole project.

It can be dominated by extroverted personalities who make decisions to control the work of others and are very justly resented by those doing the actual work. Cooperatives frequently use consensus or votes to make decisions for the entire group. These methods may not produce the best results, particularly in large groups, as many people may not understand the work if they are not actually doing it and they may demand things they would never be willing to do themselves. The feeling of the workers at the bottom is no different whether there is a horizontal or a hierarchical structure making the decisions, the workers still have no personal autonomy.

Both competitive and cooperative projects will die if the group that runs the project leaves and both will attract or repel contributors based on the personalities of the existing group. Both are hierarchical systems where individuals need to seek permission to contribute. Both focus on the authority of personalities to approve a decision instead of focusing on the idea or action itself. So we have a society, at least within the group, but not without, but we still have no autonomy and because of the need to reach consensus there is also no diversity of product.

This isn’t in any way to say that cooperative and consensus driven systems are bad. They are actually the most comfortable way of working in small groups who know each other and have similar styles and share a goal, but they are very difficult to scale. As soon as you have a very large group of people with opposing viewpoints and personalities that don’t mesh, it is very difficult to get anything done.

I use stigmergy to describe a method of action based collaboration that is suitable for mass movements. I didn’t make up this awful word by the way, it is lifted from biology where it describes indirect communication and collaboration among ants and termites and various other creatures. In human movements, it allows diversity of methods and autonomy for workers while still putting the ultimate authority of choice with the whole society, to try to achieve that balance we talked of earlier. It is neither competitive nor cooperative. It is action based collaboration instead of personality based.

A system is stigmergic if

– it follows one goal

– it is completely transparent

– it is open to everyone to participate, at least within the user group

– the output is free for anyone to use and improve on

Stigmergy gives people autonomy over their own work. With stigmergy, an initial idea is freely given, and the project is driven by the idea, not by a personality or group of personalities. So no one needs permission, like they would in a competitive system, or consensus like they would in a cooperative, to initiate a project. There is no need to discuss or vote on the idea. If an idea is exciting or necessary it will attract interest and the interest attracted will be from people willing to contribute so those with more involvement in the idea will automatically have greater influence through their contributions.

There are no official authorities but the power of the user group still exists in the ability to accept or reject the work.

Workers are free to create regardless of acceptance or rejection. Drastically innovative ideas almost never receive instant mainstream acceptance so leaving control of work to group consensus only cripples innovation. When we allow anyone to contribute we also have a great diversity of talent and people can step up to further the goal in ways the originator never imagined.

So here we have full autonomy and diversity but the entire society still has the ultimate choice.

Where is stigmergy? We have always had stigmergy in our social lives and it has been behind most mass movements that have had any success. You can see it wherever groups of diverse people who do not belong to any formal organization or have any formal communication with each other are all working together to carry out a goal.

If you look at something like the civil rights movement in the United States, that is a multi-generational movement of so many people and so many different methods and everyone who has contributed, whether they are groups or individuals, has decided for themselves how they can be most effective. If this stigmergy chart was for that movement, that big group can be the Million Man March, the square is Malcolm X and his followers, the heart can be MLK, and between them all by themselves is Ruby Bridges or Rosa Parks, none of them had to communicate or come to consensus but they are all trying for the same goal and are more or less aware of each other’s activity. The US still hasn’t reached that goal so they go through periods of great upheaval followed by periods of more calm working, depending on whether an event sparks more action or something blocks progress for a while.

A stigmergic movement will continue as long as the goal is not reached and people still share it, even if it dies down or goes dormant for a bit. That is the advantage to an idea based system over a personality based one, you can’t kill an idea.

Or another stigmergic idea is freedom of information. This has everyone from the free software movement, creative commons and similar open copyright groups, Sci-Hub which liberates scientific papers, other filesharing sites, Wikipedia, even the Internet itself in its original inception might be considered a node in that stigmergic movement.

What keeps these movements from burning out, like so many do in the massive assemblies, is the fact that they are not spending all their energy communicating except in small groups and they are following one clear idea.

It is not often you find one organization or group that is purely stigmergic, but Anonymous is one. This is why they say they are not an organization or group. They usually say they are an idea, but they aren’t really one idea either, they are a method of mass collaboration and the method is stigmergy. That method allows everyone to follow whatever ideas they choose, in groups or individually with perfect autonomy. Anonymous never tries to reach consensus. Anonymous is not unanimous. And there is no organization you can order to do something, Anonymous is also not your personal army. You have to just put an idea out and see who follows it.

It may seem difficult to figure out how stigmergy can be used in a corporate setting where everything is set up around organizations and official people, but it helps if we remember that each of those organizations, no matter how they are organized internally, can be a node under a stigmergic idea. I am often asked if Wikipedia is a good example of stigmergy and no, it is not. Wikipedia is a cooperative. You may contribute work without asking anyone but your work can be thrown out and you can be locked out of contributing, or the topic locked, and there is a definite personality based hierarchy and a need to reach consensus around one final product. There is no diversity of product tolerated and there isn’t any real autonomy either.

But Wikipedia is still one of many nodes under the idea of Freedom of information because what they produce is completely free for anyone else to use or modify. I said earlier that Anonymous was stigmergic but Anonymous very frequently works with other people like news or human rights organizations or other hacking collectives such as Redhack who are themselves internally communist. It doesn’t matter what the internal organization of each node is as long as they are all following the same idea and their work is available for everyone else to use.

So the same methods can be used for corporate work. The key is for corporate style organizations to recognize what stigmergic ecosystem they are a part of and follow the guidelines to make their work contribute smoothly to that idea. One place where stigmergic development has really taken off is in the IT industry because free software has meant that the output is available for everyone to use and improve or modify. If we look at one stigmergic idea: We need better web development tools. If we had left this to Google, and Google had been acting like their competitive corporate selves, we would have just had the Angular framework, and progress would be Angular 2.0. And we do have Angular 2.0, but we also have Facebook’s React, Ember and many others. As long as the user group has not reached consensus over what tools we want for full stack development we have many contributors creating different frameworks for us.

When we start to reach wide consensus in some area, like yes, we don’t want any more black and purple websites with green sparkles and the vast majority of us are going to create websites that are very uniform, we start to see more and more conformity around standards like Twitter’s bootstrap styles but as soon as someone has a very divergent idea that people find interesting again, like Google’s material design, many people will start hacking on it and trying to create different solutions again. The same periodic upheavals of innovation and change are apparent here as in the social movements driven by stigmergy. In this case HTML5 and ES6 stimulated a rush in web development tools in general.

Of course this example of corporate stigmergy has some major issues., first in who is getting paid and who is not. Google employees are and free software programmers frequently are not. And even with free software, when you have players like Facebook and Google and Twitter it is going to be a bit hard for anyone without their development team budget and user groups to compete so it is not a level playing field for all to participate, but as long as the code is commons property we can have consensus without monopoly which is a huge improvement. It is starting to approach stigmergic organization, just from the addition of this one change, of software that is free for anyone to use or modify. You can see this especially as you move away from the big corporations to the later development add ons, in all the diverse people writing packages and tools for React and Angular and the other frameworks.

This is better than academia and science manage. They are supposed to be stigmergic as well, the idea in science and academia is that everyone is supposed to publish and build off each others findings, but because they do not have open source and permissive copyright or even access, their work is frequently corporate IP property, and they don’t allow or reward outside contributions, they are very far from stigmergic and their progress is not nearly what it could be. If we look back at the principles of stigmergic organization, the last three of four points do not apply to science and academia so they both need to change if they are going to truly act as epistemic communities for us all. Which brings us to my next point which is about idea based collaboration.

We have stigmergy for action based collaboration which follows an idea, but what if we want to collaborate on ideas themselves, to build knowledge and find some most reliable facts? If we look at the 2010-2011 movements, like M15 and later Occupy and all the rest, they were fine with action based collaboration, especially when they used stigmergy, but they really struggled when it came to idea based collaboration, like setting goals. This is kind of important since without the ideas, you don’t have the action. Stigmergy follows ideas and information, so management of the ideas and information here is as important as management of personalities is in competitive or cooperative systems. If you think of this in a governance context, we won’t be electing personalities, we will be electing ideas.

To see what happens when an idea loses its clarity, or its idea has been co-opted, look at feminism. The civil rights movement in the US retained its clarity because it has set specific goals in each cycle whether that is to end slavery, end segregation, or end police violence. When feminism meant fighting for the vote and legal personhood it had a clear goal and was a stigmergic mass movement but second wave feminism allowed itself to become a noun instead of an action, its goals became very loose and because there wasn’t a clear goal it was used to advertise corporate product and promote prominent personalities, primarily from the United States, who felt they could speak for every woman in the world on every topic. A noun is not a stigmergic goal, a noun is an organization, so when feminism became a noun it stopped being a stigmergic movement and became a competitive, personality driven, organization which became completely divided, as is typical, these types of organizations do not scale.

The single biggest factor I’ve found for whether or not someone will participate in a stigmergic action is whether they are sure of the idea behind it. Not whether it affects them, or if its simple to grasp or easy or even safe to do. I have created many actions where the audience was completely removed from the people affected or where the action was dangerous or very difficult to understand or even initially believe. None of this mattered. All that mattered in whether the action was a success was whether people could be sure the goal is sound. And the easiest way for someone to prevent action is to sow doubt in the goal. That initial kernel that makes up the idea looks simple but it is everything. But finding the information we need for conviction in our goals is not easy.

If we think of a large population creating a knowledge repository stigmergicly, we have a picture of a bunch of ants sifting and sorting information and putting the best in a pile. And that’s probably how we thought we were going too do things on Twitter. But that’s not how expert knowledge, like the kind we have in a singularity, works and it’s why a bunch of people in a horizontal group can’t just do that. Especially a personality dominated horizontal group like Occupy or any direct democracy that starts from the premise of all voices and opinions being equal. This goes back to the idea behind a societal singularity, we can’t all be experts at everything and we don’t want to be either. We don’t have the time and we may not have the interest. We can’t keep berating voters for not spending all of their time studying everything that affects them, it’s impossible and it’s not fun either. We need to find a better solution.

I love this chart because it illustrates exactly why we need concentric circles in a democracy. This space between innovation and acceptance is where demagogues and gate keepers lie in wait to control information before it reaches the public. Like little trolls under the bridge. This is why we need knowledge bridges to replace the gatekeepers because most ideas can’t make it across this chasm on their own.

If you think of recent examples of elite working groups whose ideas were rejected by the wider society, like Brexit in the UK or the peace deal in Colombia, it was because of a failure of the working group to establish effective knowledge bridges between them and the public. The public did not see their viewpoints being heard and responded to and they did not see or understand or trust the decision making process, which gave demagogues on the outside of the process the ability to derail the acceptance of their recommendations. The people had information that was too difficult to audit themselves, and they had no faith in the people offering solutions. People in the UK said repeatedly they were sick of being lied to by the media and experts.

When people lose faith in those who are supposed to be their experts, like politicians, or those who are supposed to be their knowledge bridges like the media, they lose faith in any stigmergic goal these people present and they will block it, as I said earlier. The information from the opposition in both cases was certainly no better, nobody was offering a fully developed and audited plan for an alternative peace deal or a detailed plan to exit the EU, but even very poorly supported information and hyperbole is sufficient to overturn an idea that the public doesn’t trust. We can see this also in most elections, there are just demagogues and hyperbole on both sides, there is no process of reconciling any issues with the public or providing information people can rely on. In fact, the goal seems to be to deliberately confuse and immobilize the public and then just give them a binary vote in the hope they vote against the establishment which has lost so much trust. This is why both sides seem to only be interested in painting the other as the most corrupt establishment.

[On May 8 2017, former US Director of National intelligence James Clapper suggested the solution to the misinformation of the US 2016 election was to further fund USAID and spread more misinformation against US enemies. Those are exactly the actions that caused people to lose faith in information emanating from the US in the first place.]

You may have seen a lot of people blaming this current state of low information on social media and they are partially right but corporate media certainly doesn’t get a free pass either. Most of the tools we have to communicate simulate direct democracy and look for popular ideas, the most retweets and the most readers, but not only is popular not innovative or expert, the two are mutually exclusive. Popular ideas are riding the peak of the wave of socially acceptable opinion. They already appeal to the widest audience. They are not new ideas, by definition, and they aren’t at a level of elite expertise that is difficult for all but a few to understand also by definition. This is why we now elect politicians on the basis of their tweets and this is the secret for politicians like Donald Trump who speaks at a grade 3 level. The more easily understood and the less challenging your message, the wider your appeal will be so an age that amplifies the most popular information, as we do now, will be an age of demagogues.

It is counter intuitive to think popular ideas are what we need to give us the best information. If we need some specialized level of knowledge to explain something like Brexit or a peace deal or the issues in an election, or if we want those making the decisions to hear the voices that are seldom heard, that may expand their Overton windows and give us some fresh perspective, or represent a rare case that will cause their solution to break, amplifying the most popular ideas or people is the exact opposite of what we ought to be doing. And really this is what direct democracy, representative and liquid democracy do, so of course it is also what the tools for democracy have been doing.

We have tools that are very useful to find out what a population thinks and tools that are great for discussing things and coming to consensus, but we need to also go to where their opinions are formed. Opinions are based on information. We need to be able to find expertise and accurate and diverse information that we can trust before we form our opinions and long before we measure them.

Ideas need to be audited and promoted by those users qualified to understand them to allow diversity of ideas and prevent the process from being dominated by celebrities without the expertise required. But if we have an elite discussion group with only elite experts or ideas in it, we are at great risk of having an elite oligarchy based on control of information. This is what we have now. We don’t maintain the necessary balance between autonomy, diversity and society unless this quiet place to talk remains a fully associated part of the wider group. So to avoid a hierarchy and leave control with the entire user group, I use a structure I call concentric circles.

Concentric circles relate to sound amplification. In a concentric circle, people or ideas promoted to the center by their peer group receive greatest amplification and their findings will be audited, amplified and explained to the general public by outer circles. They are not hierarchical as they have no direct control over the actions of anyone. An epistemic community is a knowledge resource only, authority remains with the entire user group which provides a good incentive for the epistemic community to ensure transparency and knowledge bridges so their ideas are accepted. As in stigmergy, votes in a concentric group are frequently replaced by actions. If this little drop receives no amplification, it is just an idea that goes nowhere.

With knowledge bridges, you don’t have to have personal expertise on every aspect of society. All you have to do is have a transparent concentric circle that you can look at, you can see the activity, you can get feedback if necessary, and you can say yes, there are a lot of people auditing, there is a lot of discussion, I trust some of the people in these circles, I trust that they know what they are doing. Everyone can review the work of the experts both directly and through the review by their peers. Experts can also be created by the system itself as users develop knowledge and reputation and move towards the centre and you will find this happens increasingly if users lose trust, they will realize they need to start auditing this circle.

Communication should not be the full responsibility of the experts in the centre, which is where government initiatives like Brexit and the Colombia peace deal have failed. Ideas should be carried over expertise bridges by full transparency and user participation. The epistemic community in the centre should not need to protect themselves from demands or attacks from completely uninformed users or demagogues. The circles of expertise which promoted them to the centre should also verify and explain their findings to the outer circles. And, concerns and arguments from the user group should be carried back to the epistemic community if the user group finds the points valid. So the epistemic community can work without noise but still receive ongoing feedback from the users and acceptance is a process, not just a binary vote after the fact.

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because this is exactly what happens in open source communities.

In open source software, the code for each project is available for all to see. Even if the end user cannot understand the code, they can go to discussion groups or listen to programmers who have read and audited the code, they can read the bug reports. Any urgent bugs will be broadcast to the general population and amplified by media as we have seen many times. The people with the greater knowledge of the system will provide knowledge bridges for people at a more novice level and increasingly, that’s how people are learning to code. Good ideas from forum discussions can be read, possibly implemented by the developers as well. Transparency goes both ways.

Open source software with forums open to all are a perfect working example of fully transparent and audited systems of elite knowledge. While the decisions are made by the developers, review and acceptance or rejection of the software is the right of the user group. If the developers refuse to listen to the user group and another development team is willing to work on the project, the original code can be forked and modified to meet the user requirements. Which means you can only be attacked by another fully developed, open and transparent epistemic community which also must be audited by knowledge bridges. You can’t be attacked just by a demagogue and rhetoric, you can only be opposed by another working solution so the user group has a choice between two or more working solutions instead of simply rejection or acceptance. Which means we need the final most important point for concentric circles – the information is free for anyone to use or modify.

Imagine if HTML and Javascript were corporate products that were not available to the public to use, like Bill Gates wanted programming languages to be back in the day. We would not be talking about web development frameworks as a stigmergic system. They would be just one proprietary product delivered by one corporation, probably Microsoft. The fact that we won this fight against Bill Gates and those like him is the single biggest reason that programming and IT have progressed so incredibly far and quickly and the reason IT is the best place to look for corporate examples of stigmergy. Just imagine if we had this same freedom to use the end products of other industries, like pharmaceuticals for instance which Bill Gates is currently pushing oppressive IP laws for.

Intellectual property in a stigmergic system is like an ant that finds food but doesn’t leave any pheromones to tell the other ants. Or worse, actually blocks the other ants and that idea is so ridiculous I can’t even think of a stigmergic example of it. Ownership of ideas is in complete opposition to stigmergy which is to say it is in complete opposition to rapid progress, finding the best solutions and democracy.

So what we have been looking for here are methods of collaboration that bring us a balance between autonomy, diversity and society. We want to allow the maximum amount of autonomy to those doing the work so we can include all of their ideas and abilities. We want to allow as many diverse solutions as people are inspired to try for each problem. And then we want to allow the entire user group to easily make an informed choice of which solution is best for them as is their right in a democracy. So our methods are stigmergy, which we use for mass action and concentric circles which we use to audit, teach and amplify information.

The best part of stigmergic work and transparent concentric circles for knowledge is our work doesn’t get wasted. When you come to an event like this with a specific project, it is easy to feel as though you are in a competition where you are only associated with one project and your success or failure is tied to that one project and the group around it. But even if you organize your own team in a completely different form, if you follow these principles you will still be contributing to progress as a node in a stigmergic idea. For this two weeks the idea is: Let’s develop better tools for democracy. If you follow these principles, if other people are free to contribute to your project and you to theirs, if you add what you learn to the epistemic community of ideas and act as a knowledge bridge to those learning and most of all if your code is open and free, you will still be part of the community around this idea contributing to the goal we are all working towards. You will be part of the ecosystem.

Q and A not translated.

More information: http://www.getgee.xyz/

How we came to be ruled by Death Eaters

There are two primary methods of coercion used to enforce societal norms. The most visible is hard coercion, apparent in militias and police as well as courts, prisons, and institutional force of all kinds. The far more powerful form, without which the hard coercion would not be tolerated, is seductive coercion.

Seductive coercion comes in two forms. The first is used to create society and involves social acceptance and approval as motivators. This form of seductive coercion produces love, loyalty, and other forms of social bonding.

The second form is used to create hate and enmity and to reject another society, go to war against them or persecute them in another way. This form of coercion uses group affiliation, fear, dehumanizing propaganda and dissociation.

There are well known, although poorly understood, hormonal responses which help build both hate and love. Both are intense responses to others which are dependent on some shared experience, even if only through propaganda. Often the most intense hate is produced in the same populations which formerly experienced the most intense love, such as in civil wars or familial breakups. 

Both hate and love and the lesser emotions around them are measures of social approval. In the past, all societies used an approval economy to measure acceptance or shunning of each other. Acceptance was not simply an emotional boost, it was inclusion into the social circle which allowed access to essentials of life such as shared food, shelter and procreation. Rejection by shunning was very frequently a death sentence or at least condemnation to an extremely difficult, stressful and shortened life. At best it would mean starting all over again by trying to gain acceptance into a new society.

Dissociation

In order to create the dissociated ponzi schemes of power currently governing society, human relationships had to be replaced with the trade economy. Trade economy replaced societal approval with approval based on each person’s ability to be of service to the powerful. The trade economy eventually interrupted almost all social relationships and replaced them with industry. Social approval was replaced with currency to the point that a person’s worth is now commonly given as a currency value. Currency is a powerful seductive tool because it allows acceptance into the most privileged spots of all societies with no effort required to gain social approval or accept the norms and values of the society.

In those cultures where women and children had autonomy, patriarchy had to be instilled at the family level as the essential building block to patriarchal governance. As the trade economy created waged labour only for those who were serving the wealthy and left community and family service unpaid, women were placed at a huge disadvantage under the trade economy and made to rely solely on a father or husband for the currency which had become social approval. The marriage partnership became dissociated and turned into a master-slave or employer-employee relationship instead of one built on mutual social approval. Matriarchal societies were destroyed as the approval or ability to shun which had been the power of the women in those communities was now worthless and whoever possessed currency needed no one’s approval for societal acceptance.

The industrialization of jobs meant that work is no longer a shared and bonding community experience. The commodification of goods and services has taken sharing and giving out of communities. The state run defence militias claims to remove the need for community solidarity and loyalty. NGOs commodified human empathy, state education commodified respect for community history and tribal knowledge, official government and process dissociated community from governing councils. All of these dissociative structures have removed community bonding experiences.

Cultures which do not greet by kissing and hugging, who handshake (the old greeting to show your enemy you held no weapons) or maintain distance with cold body language, are not producing the hormones necessary to create love and empathy for each other. In a dissociated western world where partners and parents spend little time with each other, much less their community, children are raised in physical bubbles and no one except close family and friends are supposed to touch, it is hard to imagine oxytocin and other hormone levels being socially optimal for bonding. Every transaction of approval, even between parent and child, has sometimes been replaced by an exchange of currency instead of a smile, a hug or a reciprocal gesture of approval. Social shyness and waiting for approval to be gifted has been replaced by taking approval as a right, demanded by all who possess currency. Social shyness is also strongly discouraged by the trade economy which rewards aggression and demands.

Although the exact combination of hormones optimal for bonding is still poorly understood, touch and psychological support are known to be essential for oxytocin production and less oxytocin usually results in more aggression and less caring. Patients with autism and psychiatric disorders have been found to improve with increased oxytocin levels. Cultures with common physical contact such as holding hands or maintaining less personal space, which share community jobs and local jokes and stories and are heavy sharing or gifting cultures, have far more bonding opportunities.

Sex, both social and anti-social

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover … the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. – Aldous Huxley to George Orwell

When waged labour created a class division between men and women, they became rivals and the so-called war of the sexes began or was entrenched. There is a gender divide in coercion, with hard coercion typically considered the power of men due to their physical strength and seductive coercion considered the power of women, both because hard coercion was not usually an option for women and because they were primarily responsible for the care of society during its formative years. There is also a gender divide among sociopaths. Robert Hare estimated seven times more male sociopaths than female and it has been historically easier for male sociopaths to climb to positions of power. There is an even greater predominance of men within sexual sadism disorder which seems to be manifesting in the establishment wide torture and death cults of the UK and elsewhere.

Societies ruled by seductive coercion used talking, councils and shunning, while patriarchy ruled primarily by hard coercion, police, laws and prisons. A patriarchal power structure had to take control of seductive coercion, partly by demonizing and infantilizing women and  and partly by perverting seductive coercion for their own uses. Seductive coercion has increasingly become a powerful tool of the sociopathic oligarchy.

One of the most important tools in both social and anti-social seductive coercion is sex. Sex has been used to bond couples for communal support in child rearing, but it has also been used as a weapon of war throughout history. There are evidently two distinct types of sex, one bonding and social and the other extremely anti-social.

Oxytocin, believed to play a significant role in bonding, is produced by physical closeness such as breastfeeding, everyday physical contact, massage, tantric or Taoist sex, non-orgasmic sex, cuddling, relaxation, mental closeness, social acceptance, approval and emotional support.[1] Oxytocin is also produced by stress and orgasm, and while it will help bond allies, it will also increase hatred and a lack of empathy for those perceived as outside the social group.

Rape has gone from a by-product of war to a deliberate strategy of war, whether by militia commanders in the DR Congo telling their fighters that rape will bring them magic powers or by Israel and their constant sexual war imagery and orders for war rape. It is one thing to look at the supposed motives for rape in destroying the targeted population, but we must also look at what is causing large populations of men to obey orders for mass raping and whether it is also being used as a tool to condition them hormonally to dehumanize, kill and torture their enemy. Is rape being used simply as a tool against the victims, or is it being used more to raise the level of hate in the fighter? It is possible that the DR Congo militia’s idea of rape as a tool of war for obtaining magic powers to beat their enemy is closer than the NGOs who describe it as a simple war crime.

Dopamine, is a very powerful hormone associated with addictive substances such as cocaine, mental illness such as schizophrenia, and the release of a reward hormone on learning or experiencing novel stimuli. Novel sexual experience causes a surge in dopamine, but the experience must keep changing which leads to a search for more and more extreme stimuli. After orgasm, dopamine levels plummet, leading to the addictive endless search for ever increasing levels of dopamine. The pornography that is the most popular is that which produces the dopamine highs and crashes and is therefore addictive. That is also the type which requires ever-increasing stimulation to reach the same dopamine levels and produces no bonding hormones. While sexual sadism disorder has probably been with us forever, child abuse and snuff film industries were almost exclusively created, not born. 

State and corporate control of women’s sexuality was necessary because it was a powerful coercive tool. Misogyny centres around hatred of coercion, particularly suspected but poorly understood female coercion. From the first ruling of the Catholic Church that sex should be for the purposes of procreation only, sex has been changed from the type that releases bonding hormones to the type that more closely resembles anti-social rape. Non-orgasmic sex, once used for birth control and enjoyment, was decreed sinful by the church and male orgasm became the only point to sex. Sexual contact outside male orgasm was frequently eliminated completely, which would hypothetically greatly reduce the amount of bonding hormones produced between a couple. At the same time, breast feeding was also strongly discouraged and hospitals and other institutions removed infants and children from parental care, reducing familial bonding levels still further.

Heavily dopamine producing sex, from brief encounters with sex workers, rape, pornography, and any other form of ‘hate-sex’ continued and increased as the bonding community and family life was removed. Corporate advertising removed sex progressively farther from a form of approval to a product of the trade economy. Military produced games and movies conflated sex with every form of war and violence as did the news media and the military itself. The UK media call torture, murder and dismemberment of children ‘child sex’ and ‘paedophilia’ as does the UK government’s Child Sex Abuse inquiry. Dissociated populations which no longer produced hormones at community bonding levels were taught to crave dopamine with increasingly violent and risk-taking behaviour, drugs and consumerism.

The same gratification conditioning is fed by addictions of all kinds, from drugs to addictive, harmful, and sometimes anti-social foods. The US military is developing an ‘anti-suicide’ hormonal nasal spray which is suppressing guilt, presumably through suppressing empathy, in militia members who have seen or committed atrocities. It is as ridiculous to deny the importance of stimulus choices in determining our social development as it would be to deny the importance of exercise choices in determining our muscle development. Seductive coercion and behaviour conditioning is present in every aspect of life worldwide. There is nothing at all new in this, it has always been this way. What is new is seductive coercion is now being controlled by an all-pervasive, sociopathic oligarchy who keep both their methods and their goals as state and corporate secrets and remove all choice from the society.

Freedom

“Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.” – Marquis de Sade

The freedom espoused in the rhetoric surrounding both the French and US revolutions was a very anti-social freedom. What began as a rejection of the patriarchy or state, continued as a rejection of society and a promotion of extreme freedom for those best suited to a trade economy. The pursuit of happiness became a right of any who could command it through strength to survive in an economy completely rigged in favour of the small fraternity steering both the French and US revolutions. The hated patriarchy was overthrown and replaced by the fraternity, a decentralized patriarchy without the responsibility inherent in the role. Social approval was necessary for nothing as the fraternity used currency as their dissociated approval to command all of society’s benefits. Social obligation became so dissociated from the now monetized approval that it was left to the charitable intervention of the vilified patriarchal state and fought against alongside the rejection of the state.

The sex life of the Marquis de Sade is a perfect metaphor for the actions of both his compatriots at the Jacobin Club during the Terror and the sociopathic oligarchy of today. De Sade was against the death penalty and insisted no one should ever be found guilty for anything done in the pursuit of pleasure, while his idea of pleasure involved escalating levels of torture and murder of unwilling victims. Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness was always intended for the fraternity only, and the rhetoric has never matched the actions toward any outside the fraternity.

In lieu of any other understanding of the nature of the motivations of our current sociopathic oligarchy, it is not unreasonable to expect they get the same gratification from the torture, murder and destruction of their day jobs as the Marquis de Sade did from his pursuit of pleasure. With the revelations of the current ‘child sex’ inquiry into the UK establishment death cult it seems almost certain they do. Those with sexual sadism disorder do not have to indulge in any behaviour that normative people would consider sex, and do not even have to be directly involved in an act, so it is very likely that ordering wars and mass guillotine executions worked just as well for their arousal as individual torture. For those with lesser power, ordering a snuff film would also work. It is impossible to look at the war horrors combined with media sexual imagery and not see the mirror image of the child torture and death cult and media sexualization of it.

The trade economy decreed that all was for sale and everyone has a right to anything they can purchase, with no social obligations. The requirement of approval from society is presented as a horror, social obligation is depicted as robbery. ‘Freedom’ advocates were outraged at the recent #takedownjulienblanc campaign because his anti-social behaviour was restricted by a societal right to associate or not and his currency approval was not enough to buy him acceptance and access to all the privileges of belonging to all the nations in the world.

Instead of researching known contributors to dissociative personality and behaviour, societies are encouraged to embrace dissociated behaviour as ‘diversity’ and ‘freedom’, to look for unconditional acceptance instead of understanding. Any suggestion of understanding or coercing individual behaviour triggers memories of CIA brain-washing, Clockwork Orange, or Thought Reform and produces revulsion in the same populations that accept the extremely coercive and behaviour-modifying death penalty. Talk of open, societal, behaviour coercion is greeted with the same horror that once followed any suggestion of heart or brain surgery. Meanwhile, those same agencies responsible for the earlier state horrors of behaviour modification experiments have progressed to the point that no one even acknowledges their coercive social engineering.

Free will is a deeply cherished myth for many. The idea that free will is real and social auto-coercion is an attack on freedom has allowed seductive coercion to be completely controlled by an invisible corporate oligarchy which modifies everyone’s behaviour through games, food, drugs, media, dissociative structures, anti-social laws, propaganda and more. Social approval has been replaced by currency, control of social coercion has been taken by an invisible oligarchy of intelligence and corporate propagandists, control of mental health has been usurped by those feeding drugs, foods and environmental conditions that cause mental disorders.

In the past, the practice of shunning was sometimes abused and there were always people considered lesser or not accepted into certain societies for reasons most would deem unfair. Any form of coercion that can be influenced by popularity or power is corruptible. Today, people who do not feel welcomed or appreciated by one society should have freedom of movement to join another. Societies which unfairly persecute one of their members are susceptible to being shunned themselves. In OpMaryville, Anonymous retaliated against a community which had shunned a rape victim and her family in favour of her far more locally powerful rapists. The BDS and BlockTheBoat campaigns allow outside nations (independently of states) to shun Israel for their genocidal and apartheid policies. Today we have the ability to provide an instant global appeal court for any individual who feels their rights are being violated by their society.

It is impossible to deny that those in power globally are both sadists and sociopaths. It would not be difficult to manage the world peacefully, with enough resources, autonomy for all and aid in times of disaster. It is not necessary to continue to destroy the environments we live in. The horrific and genocidal big three criminal industries of human, drugs and weapons trafficking are all enabled and run by those in power. It is not enough to replace the sociopaths in power, the system which created them rewards and creates both sadism and sociopathy. Nothing less than a completely new system with new social motivators and norms will remove sadism and sociopathy from the seats of power.

Seductive coercion is a constant in society. To reject social auto-coercion is to accept tyrannical secret coercion.

– – –

See also:

Free will and seductive coercion

Witches and how they were silenced

An economy for all

Society vs dissociation

Sociopaths, Psychopaths and Death Eaters

[1] Discussion of social hormones and the types of sexual and social interactions producing them is both grossly oversimplified and poorly cited here out of necessity. It is important to recognize their role in society, but studies are far too incomplete and contradictory to give any definitive statements or cite any particular study as a final authority. There are many other hormones and environmental combinations at work than those suggested here, and research and beliefs regarding the connection between sex and hormonal balance is found in many places outside science. In lieu of specific citations, I would encourage the interested reader to conduct independent research into Taoist sex, tantric sex, sex therapy, various forms of ritual magic, magick, satanism and other occult practises related to gaining power through sex, porn addiction, sex in advertising, oxytocin, dopamine, prolactin, androgens, seratonin, cortisol, endorphins and more. I do not endorse the claims found in any of those places. The point of this article is not to point to definitive answers but to suggest where we should be looking for them.

This article has been stigmergicly translated into French.

Sociopaths, Psychopaths and Death Eaters

It is now an undeniable fact that the UK establishment has, for decades, been run by people who tortured and killed children for entertainment, for political power, and just because they could.

The cognitive dissonance that statement produces in the majority of the population has provided the cloak of invisibility that has kept these people in power and their actions unpunished for all these years. When faced with an undeniable proof of any part of this, people’s shock was easily comforted by soothing assurances that the person was only one, that no one around him had been aware, that this would be taken care of. The idea of a society of torturing murderers, openly known to each other, controlling not just the UK but embedded in the upper echelons of many (if not all) countries was the stuff of conspiracy websites, those prolific disseminators of unbelievable truths well mixed with repellant bigotry and obvious falsehoods, presented as a whole to discredit all ingredients. Human trafficking is the largest criminal industry in the world. It is far less reasonable to believe it is conducted without the full knowledge and co-operation of those in power, but the power of deeply anti-social behaviour is how unwilling anyone is to believe another human is capable of it.

The propaganda arm of this international ring of torturers which attempted to normalize abuse of children and babies as ‘sex’ is still very apparent in the corporate media coverage of the CSA inquiry which depicts the torture and murder of children as “sex attacks on kids”, “child sex” or a “sex scandal”. Sex is not an attack. This is not sex. The fact that these people tortured and murdered children in their recreational hours does not make them simply pedosadists, or what corporate media still likes to call pedophiles in acquiescence to PIE’s demands that they be depicted as ‘child-lovers’. Their recreation may have revolved around torturing children, but their office hours as UK media and government establishment revolved around torture and mass murder of people from all demographics. It is not sufficient to call them psychopaths or sociopaths since very few of those seriously harm others and almost none to this extent. These people who want to be known as child lovers are death eaters. They feed on the agony of others. They torture and murder not because they have to, but because it feeds something in them. The only reason they are attracted to children is the increase in pain, horror, power, and taboo. They are no less attracted to mass slaughter than they are to the torture of children.

Sociopaths are attracted by what repels others. They seek filth, horror and destruction. Using the torture of children as bait to blackmail political opponents is a natural act for death eaters, as is destroying populations with ‘drug wars’ and ‘terrorism’ or using the slaughter of populations to advertise the weapons industry. People are products in the trade economy, and if death eaters are in control, people are their products to use as they wish. They are presiding over the destruction of the planet and beating back any who try to stop them because mass destruction is a compulsion for them.

The attempt to conflate torture and murder with sex is not unique to the UK establishment. “Our definition of sexy was something like Khadr.” said the man who decided to prosecute a tortured child. Militias in the DR Congo are promised magic power from raping women. Israel uses sexual imagery to promote the destruction of Palestine and rape is a constant in wars, torture, imprisonment, everywhere death eaters act. Death eaters gain power by manipulation of others. Hard coercion such as the control of military and police is theirs when they gain power, but until they have attained it they rely on seductive coercion. An insistence on hard coercion to control society is a denial of the power of seductive coercion. Conflation of torture and murder with sex is a perversion of that power. An attempt to depict deeply anti-social acts as sexual freedom is an attempt to normalize deeply anti-social behaviour.

Death eaters are not child lovers. Torture and murder are not a sex scandal. Sex is not an attack. Seductive coercion is used to create society. Its use in dissociated populations to incite acts of violence is a perversion of its power used against society.

Societal auto-immune disease

In industrialized states sociopathy is not only normal, it is normative. Industrialized society is the replacement of human relationships with corporations where people are products and human need is industry. To be dissociated from the approval economy is to be dissociated from society. A trade economy consists of sociopaths connected only by money. Antisocial personality is a natural trait of anyone who climbs to the top of a ponzi scheme built on systems of dissociation. Sociopaths cannot relate to others as human. They see them as products, the perfect outlook for success in the predatory trade economy.

Most definitions now define psychopaths as those born dissociated, and sociopaths as those created (and both categories are best used only for sweeping generalizations which this is). While psychopaths have always been with us, dissociated populations are producing sociopaths in unprecedented numbers. Huge populations of sociopaths and apathetics are necessary for death eaters to survive in power. ‘Shh, we need to torture children for your safety,’ say the death eaters and the sociopathic and apathetic public nods and turns away. Without the disinterested and complicit buffer, nothing would save the death eaters from the torches and pitchforks of those at the bottom.

Antisocial personality is a societal auto-immune disease. It manifests as the most obvious horrors in society. Self-identified narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths generally would like theirs to be an accepted part of the spectrum of human behaviour, as PIE lobbied to have abusing babies an accepted ‘liberation’ in the 70s. Trying to divert focus from their anti-social behaviour to a discussion on sexual orientation is part of their continual efforts to normalize their behaviour or at least to divert attention to understanding for them instead of protection for their victims. Depicting action against them as a feminist attack on male normative sexuality is an appeal for both sympathy and broad acceptance and a dismissal of the existence of their victims.

If anti-social behaviour was widely accepted, society would not exist (as it largely does not today) and human and most other life on earth would not survive much longer. It is not logical to accept self-destruction as a normal part of society or evolution. We cannot kill sociopathy, it is part of us. Like cancer, it will probably always be a part of us in small amounts and it would be very unwise to attempt to eliminate it entirely. Humanity cannot divide neatly into these categories, and there are a variety of factors that cause dissociated behaviour, all ‘normal’ but all unacceptable in a society that wishes to continue existence.

The UK media depiction of the subjects of the so-called Child Sexual Abuse inquiry as paedophiles is a very deliberate propaganda exercise and attempt to manipulate public opinion. People who rape, torture and murder are not child lovers. The victims of these people were not only children. The phrase ‘paedophile’ brings the focus from the vicim to their assailant, and the pseudo-medical op-eds claim a right for understanding for death eaters, not the children. The use of the word paedophile individualizes the problem and is an attempt to pretend there are a ‘few bad apples’ instead of an entire ruling society complicit in the cover up and normalization of the torture and murder of others.

Societies do have the right to shun those who seek to destroy them. This fairly obvious principle has been perverted beyond all recognition by states who use it as an excuse to destroy others as they have perverted every other personal right to endorse corporate tyranny. States are highly militarized economic markets, not societies. Societies can shun harmful and anti-social behaviour in all forms, whether it is normal or not, as we do every day in all of our social norms. We do not need to build society according to an anti-social structure or create society that feeds anti-social behaviour at the top of the power structure. We do not need to accept death eaters as child lovers. We do not need to accept their hopeful norms in our coercive media propaganda.

Societies have the right to associate or to refuse to associate. 

This article has been stigmergicly translated into French and Spanish.

A mythical Manichean world

“I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil.” ― Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands With The Devil

In Shake Hands with the Devil, Romeo Dallaire, former head of the UN mission to Rwanda, described shaking hands with commanders of the Hutu militias responsible for the 1994 Tutsi genocide. He felt he was in the presence of evil, or, to his Christian outlook, the devil. When faced with incomprehensible savagery it is hard to find human nature behind it and natural to look for some invisible hand of evil. The same outlook is understandable to some in west African countries, where the leaders have for years been suspected of complicity in ritual killings, or torturing their own citizens and using their body parts as amulets for power. Compulsory membership of politicians in certain Masonic lodges and the undeniable power and wealth wielded by the powerful, support both the cult rumours and the presumed effectiveness of evil forces being invoked. These so-called powers are also sought by some militias.

If a person is thought to embody evil in themselves, the person is demonized in the eyes of the other. Once a large group has designated another entire group as evil, actions no longer matter. The ensuing war will have nothing to do with good actions and bad actions and everything to do with one side exterminating the other. Those facing the side designated as evil are then depicted as Good, and any behaviour of theirs will be justified thereafter as can be seen in the excuses made for Rwanda actions even today. Some groups can carry their indestructible Good status in the face of all evidence of their actions for generations and against completely different opponents, as we see with Israel and the fact that they still have defenders justifying their ‘right’ to torment and murder others.

Countries that have had an acknowledged atrocity are much more self aware and able to recognize and stop new ones. If an atrocity is outside the Overton window of what a people will believe about themselves they will deny it happened or ignore it. For Canadians, the pull of the manufactured self-image of ‘nice’ is too attractive to confront, even when faced with human rights and environmental disasters Canada is responsible for worldwide. To acknowledge that global mining atrocities are a fundamental part of Canada, that a Canadian child has now been tortured and imprisoned for the thirteenth year, that these actions cannot be blamed on one government but are part of Canada itself, is an attack on their self-image that many Canadians refuse to face. The US was previously the same with their acceptance of ‘freedom’ propaganda and their refusal to see their own police state as anything but protection.

A good guy / bad guy, personality based morality is very helpful for any who wish to wage wars or destroy the lives of others. No one has to think, just identify the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, be for the one, beware the other. We really don’t need legions of security analysts, militaries and intelligence to sort out Good Guys from Bad Guys. Bad Guys are destroying, killing, enslaving and robbing, Good Guys are creating, researching and caring for others. Bad Guys are capable of becoming Good Guys as soon as they stop the actions harmful to society and start the ones helpful to society.

The myth of free will and the myth of equality

I was one of those children forced into fighting at the age of 13, in my country Sierra Leone, a war that claimed the lives of my mother, father and two brothers. I know too well the emotional, psychological and physical burden that comes with being exposed to violence as a child or at any age for that matter. – Ishmael Beah

In order to designate someone as evil and deserving of any horror that the powerful wish to inflict on them, they must be held personally responsible for the actions of themselves and their ‘side’. In order to hold people personally responsible even for their own actions, the public must believe they had free will, something that does not exist. The idea of personal responsibility also depends on an assumption that people have equal access to information and the ability to process it. Propaganda and coercion which comes from the top is denied and blame is cast to those at the bottom who acted upon it. The propaganda masters convince the public that the weak-minded and the vulnerable must take responsibility for acting as the zombie army of the powerful who are absolved of responsibility.

For punishment to be applied equally to all, the public must believe that all are equal, which is also false. The myth of equality is essential for sustaining this binary outlook and careful censoring of information is essential to maintaining the myth of equality. ‘Hamas is evil, bomb Gaza’ cannot stand in the face of relentless social media pictures of babies, beautiful children and wonderful people well-known to the online community being blown up by Israel. ‘Boko Haram is evil, Nigeria military should kill them all’  is shocked by images of little boys fighting and being killed on both sides or Nigeria military torturing a little girl working for Boko Haram. Hillary Clinton deplores the loss of imperial control over information and Netanyahu bitterly calls his victims “telegenically dead“. The old media control which depicted all enemies of militias as adult men with guns was essential to justify any war.

We have a tendency to think of our villains as geniuses or assume they at least have the ability to predict the outcome of their actions but for those filling prisons and dying in wars that is not always the case.

While most people recognize the ability to rehabilitate child soldiers, what of those who are not rehabilitated? If they do not bear responsibility as children, why does the responsibility for their formation descend upon them as adults? How can anyone presume to know what has happened to the mind of anyone who has lived completely different experiences than them and possesses a completely different mind?

If it is agreed that charges should only be applied to criminals who have attained a certain standard of cognitive ability, why is the same penalty applied to all at that point? If the spectrum of ability and advantage continues above the line labeled competent, should the penalties not be a corresponding spectrum? If they must attain a standard of cognitive ability, why are moral imbeciles judged by the same standards as the socially normative? Why is sociopathy not recognized as a mental illness if insanity is? What if sociopathy is a physical disease? What of those with fetal alcohol syndrome and other forms of physical brain damage that currently fill prisons and militias?

The role of drugs in convincing militias to commit atrocities and overcome guilt is seldom reported. Not only non-state militias employ drugs, the US military even has a follow up anti-guilt nasal spray to prevent troops from feeling natural remorse.

Not all opponents are worthy of hate.

Social auto-coercion

Few believe that all of their own ancestors should have been wiped out, but everyone has ancestors who displayed what we like to call inhuman characteristics. Why do we believe they are absolved from the personal responsibility we bear today if not because we accept the power of social coercion and social norms? If social coercion and social norms applied in the past, why is their power denied today? The US government acknowledged the power of seductive coercion with what they cynically called the battle for hearts and minds in Iraq. They of all people understand coercion and knew that their actions would have the opposite affect.

Any suggestion of deliberate social auto-coercion is met with howls from free will advocates, especially from the US, that bastion of personal freedoms perverted to suit corporate ends. Every intelligence agency in the world, all corporations and all militaries constantly manipulate public norms and behaviour, but an attempt for a community to regain control is depicted (by corporate media) as an attack on freedom and autonomy instead of the assertion of it.

People can somehow become convinced that if we only kill enough people, inherent goodness will shine from the survivors. In the end, we can’t kill enough people to make the world a kinder gentler place. We have proven enough times that there is no time and place immune to an outbreak of human savagery. UN peacekeeping is incompetent, political, and after the fact. We need societies resilient to violence. In the end we will need to understand each other and use social auto-coercion as we do after the horrors of every war in order to return to normal life. We need to start using it before the outbreak of any violence, not to stop Bad Guys but to stop bad actions. Instead of spending vast sums tracking individuals and their connections in the search for Bad Guys, we need to strengthen social auto-coercion and fight the coercion coming from sociopathic power.

For those who insist societies will never function without military and police hard coercion, societies worldwide did, very well. For those, usually the same people, who insist that seductive coercion is immoral, seductive coercion is what creates a society out of a group of disconnected people. For those who do not believe that coercion ought to be in the hands of the people, coercion ought never to be anywhere else. The only way to prevent coercion by a secret oligarchy is to use it as community.

“If we don’t harness their potential for good, their societies will continue to reap their capacity for evil.” ― Roméo Dallaire, They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children

—

Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands With The Devill: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (2003)

Ishmael Beah, Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007)

Roméo Dallaire, They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children (2010)

This article has been stigmergicly translated into French. 

The revolutionaries

The last shall be the first and the first last. – Frantz Fanon

The objective of a revolutionary is to keep everything exactly as it was but replace those in power with themselves, to become what they hate, to gain the approval of those they despise. The mark of a successful revolutionary is recognition and acceptance into the circles of oppressors.

A typical revolutionary is driven by a desire for justice and no imagination. They can see injustice, they see oppressors and oppressed, and they follow the obvious impulse to reverse the two without changing the system that allows for oppression. Revolution almost always sounds like a new system because revolutionaries almost always call themselves The People, or at least The [oppressed category] People, but in practice there is no change. Revolution follows a Good Guy / Bad Guy, Manichean morality and the goal is to kill all the Bad Guys until there is nothing left but Good Guys. Fanon replaces white with black, Marx replaces master with worker, no one replaces the paradigm. Malcolm X and Robert Mugabe desired a perfect negative image of the apartheid state. Feminists celebrate ‘what women have achieved’ along their path to be exactly like caucasian men.

A revolutionary outlook is binary. They see themselves, as they are usually elite or part of the large, cohesive block of powerful commoners required to keep the ruling class in power, and they see the ruling class. Anyone else is outside their consideration and will remain so. “I know nothing about her,” [1] says Fanon of indigenous African women as he derides the work where they detail their experience and describes the revolutionary desire to be a white woman’s master. Marx sees those below the proletariat and calls them “The “dangerous class,” the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society.” [2] When Marx speaks of the abolition of class, he means the abolition of all class except the proletariat.

Since people are never binary, revolutionary theory almost immediately has to start addressing the classification problem, who is black, who is white, who is bourgeoise or proletariat, who is male or female, and the rush to be at the extreme end of your side creates a new class war within the class war. If the last shall be first, the almost last have a new fight to be last. “Since the sole motto of the bourgeoisie is “Replace the foreigner,” … the “small people” of the nation… will be equally quick to insist that the Dahomans go home to their own country, or will even go further and demand that the Foulbis and the Peuhls return to their jungle or their mountains”[3]

If, as Fanon said, “The black man wants to be white”[1] then the justice sought is a very personal justice, for themselves only as Malcolm X proposed in his desire for a new black state within the US which would leave indigenous and others as unseen as always. Colonized revolutionaries seek to decolonize by becoming the colonizers as women seek to end subjection to men by entering masculinist establishment. Even if they have no wish to enslave their former masters, the revolutionary oppressed wish to master someone, to sit atop the patriarchy, to claim their turn as a matter of justice. As long as the paradigm remains, it matters not at all if those on top become the former oppressed, they are just branch managers for the empire and oppression continues uninterrupted. In no way did it make the world a better place or change the paradigm for the better to have Barack Obama as Commander in Chief of the world’s largest military or Condoleeza Rice as US Secretary of State. In no way did women holding 56% of the seats in Rwanda’s parliament, or having Louise Mushikiwabo, as Rwanda’s Minister of Foreign Affairs & Cooperation, make Rwanda a kinder, gentler state. In the end, the problems were not tied to gender, race or class, but to the paradigm itself.

In the middle of a revolutionary frenzy it is unwise to point out that oppressed may become oppressors as they are the Good Guys who must never be accused of wrongdoing, but we really don’t need any more Israels or Rwandas to prove the point. ‘You can’t be racist/sexist against the oppressor!’ shrieks the illogic from the revolutionary top, and any who question it are condemned as reactionary, racist and sexist regardless of their race or sex. Those lower in the revolutionary ponzi scheme of power are permitted be part of the revolution only by exact adherence to the utterances of power. Deviance is dangerous in a binary world.

Since the new power wants to be exactly like the old power, continuing revolutions have created a world where everyone of every race and gender strove to prove they were the same as powerful caucasian men. A world where everyone sought the top of the ponzi schemes of power, celebrity and wealth, where their desperate effort towards the centre created the centripetal force that kept the Great Men in power, that upheld the ponzi scheme of empire for all these years. Everyone is defined in relation to the caucasian man of power. It is the revolutionaries as much as the reactionaries that refuse to let the old system go.

A dual spotlight and those in the shadows

The history of revolution is the history of Great Men overthrowing Great Men. The revolutionary stories of oppression tell of the oppressiveness of unsated envy and covetousness. The glory that follows these revolutions is the glory of the new Great Man. Unheard forever are those condemned to just get on with it, the so-called lumpenproles who are understandably disinterested in who is currently atop the ponzi scheme they have no entrance to. 

Fanon overlooked completely the effect of European patriarchy meeting matriarchal societies and what that did to class relations between men and women. He exhaustively examines European attraction to African indigenous men but he speaks not at all of any attraction to African indigenous women despite admitting almost all mixed race children had indigenous mothers. He attributes European fear of the African to a repressed homosexuality in the men and a desire to be raped in the women, but finds no such cause in the Antilleans fear of the Senegalese. Everything pivots around the point at which he exists. His myopic, binary gaze at the balance of power between African and European in a patriarchy disregarded the imposition of the patriarchy in the first place. Fanon described men who wished to overthrow other men and sit in their place.

Marx ignored the fact that his proletariats were part of a system of dissociation that recognized as workers only those who served the powerful, not those who served the weak or themselves. He also wanted to overthrow the oppressor without acknowledging the first oppressed or the true size of the oppressive structure itself. His ambition to flip the proletariat with their masters required that autonomous individuals be locked in an even more solid and cohesive block of commoners than before. His failure to recognize the block of commoners as a creation of oligarchy caused him and all communists after to strengthen the club which held oligarchy in place.

Engels felt women lost their social power due to their loss of property ownership[4] instead of seeing that property ownership was created to remove their social power. The masculinist lens of Engels and Morgan was used to reinterpret matriarchal indigenous cultures as communist, as societies where everyone was assigned property and a place in society as birthright instead of as social approval. This owned property and its allocation must then be controlled by a patriarchal power or mini-state. The approval of First Nations women that for generations was essential, was suddenly to be disregarded as men were taught that to be a man meant to humiliate and degrade their own source of approval. The vicious degradation of women in formerly matrilineal societies served to destroy not just the old power but the old structure. Indigenous women were now last, their approval was replaced by control of currency, and colonial government structure was taken over by property thieves both petty and grand. Autonomy for First Nations in Canada now means following a colonial construct of band councils revolving around communist allocation of funds and property in formerly (mostly) moneyless gifting cultures. Management of nations no longer includes the most important authority, acceptance or rejection of individuals from the nation.

A perpetual motion pendulum of revolution

As long as it is people, not actions, which are classified as Good and Evil, we will maintain a perpetual motion pendulum of revolution. As every revolution is a simple reaction to the initial action, they are mirror images. Slave morality is a reaction to master morality, revolutionary militias are a reaction to a police state, feminism is a reaction to masculinism, men with guns are a reaction to men with guns. The centripetal force that creates power also creates the centrifugal force that destroys it. In every case, reactions will become what they destroy.

If you define yourself in relation to your enemy, you’ve lost. You cannot believe armed militias are a solution unless you believe in the worth or inevitability of a police state. You cannot be a Feminist without endorsing the gendered world of the Masculinist. The death penalty for murder reaffirms the right to murder. Mirrored reactions are a result of a lack of imagination to see outside the paradigm we live within. A reaction adds force to the initial action. Overthrow by men with guns will be followed with rule by men with guns. Justice through institutionalized bigotry will result in institutionalized bigotry. “The violence of the colonial regime and the counter-violence of the native balance each other and respond to each other in an extraordinary reciprocal homogeneity.”[3] We will have equilibrium when we step off the pendulum.

Those that protest the revolution are told they must be reactionaries. Any criticism of the left brutality and you must support the right brutality. Self-professed US anti-imperialists are even more rigid than the imperialists because they discovered the second spotlight and think they’ve seen all that there is. Those that scream for solidarity ‘on the same side’ attempt to hide the fact that a ponzi scheme has no sides, only a top and bottom. They will cling to the messiahs of revolution and support revolutionary ponzi schemes until it becomes absolutely indisputable that the two are one again. As the revolution fights for and wins seats on the same panels and the same international bodies as the reaction, the same dark alliance is formed once more. Empire remains intact.

Revolutionary replacement of authority will co-opt resistance. Revolution looks up not down. It seeks approval and acceptance from the spotlight, not the shadows. Not only does revolution not bring change, it brings progression down the same path and frequently widens the window of acceptable oppression. All revolution has simply entrenched and strengthened the hierarchy of power, all revolutions will need to be followed by more revolutions unless they are immediately replaced with resistance.

Between reaction and revolution there is nothing to choose. Neither leave the track, they just allow different people to drive while the same people are run over.

Revolution fights tyrants, resistance fights tyranny

It is not revolution we need, another turn of the same wheel along the same path, it is resistance. Resistance uses the tyrant’s own power against them rather than strengthening that power by reaction. Resistance fights all forms of oppression and bigotry regardless of source by building and defending a tolerant society. Resistance to patriarchy is not feminism, it is removal of masculinism. Resistance to bigotry is not bigotry, it is diversity and tolerance. Resistance to capitalism is not unions, it is dismantling of the trade economy. It is not enough to weed, a new system must be planted or the old seeds of tyranny will instantly grow again.

Oppressive power of the size in place today will not be removed by the creation of revolutionary power. Even if one chooses to think a new leader would stop the oppression it is no longer in the power of a leader or leaders. Mass disobedience and a refusal to acknowledge the authority of the powerful are the only hope to collapse the current empire.

Anyone who occupies the old places of power in a hierarchical ponzi scheme is an enemy of those below, even if they just fought alongside them and ‘earned’ their place. It is the position that is the enemy and it must be constantly collapsed by a removal of support from every ponzi scheme of celebrity, wealth and power. It is not enough to remove oppressors, the system of oppression must be dismantled. 

– – –

[1] Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952

[2] Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Das Kommunistische Manifest), 1848

[3] Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre), Grove Press, 1961

[4] Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State: in the light of the researches of Lewis H. Morgan (Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats) 1884

This article has been stigmergicly translated into French.

The other Battle for the Internet

In 1974, a group of sociopaths decided to change the world. They had ridden the wave of social activism pushing for equal rights for minorities in the 60s to conflate pedosadism with homosexuality and fight for its acceptance as just another personal choice of sexual preference. They (adults) fought for “children’s sexuality” as though children were a persecuted minority group fighting for their sexual freedom. In 1974 they formed the Pedophile Information Exchange, a propaganda movement that was more powerful than hasbara in dictating media coverage and influencing public dialogue. They campaigned for the complete removal of the age of consent (legalized sex with babies).

PIE was joined by The North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) in the US, the Paedophile Action for Liberation in the UK, the Australian Paedophile Support Group and others. They promoted terms like ‘moral hysteria’ for their opposition and ‘child-lovers’ for themselves. They worked with the UK National Council for Civil Liberties to direct media coverage of pedosadists and rape, normalizing guidelines still used today. They provided legal aid to those facing charges of pedosadism. They worked to conflate documentation of child abuse with pornography and free speech rights and they promoted pedosadism as the ‘sexual liberation’ of children and ‘free love’. They used the UK’s unequal age of consent of 16 for heterosexuals but 21 for homosexuals to push their issues through beside the fight for homosexual equality. They were the major propaganda arm of an international ring of pedosadists which has grown exponentially since then. Any doubts that their abuses were motivated by sadism, not love, and that they were part of the fabric of power, have been put to rest by the recent UK investigations. PIE was probably funded by the UK Government in the 1980s and they had an office address at the UK Home Office.

If you call a pedosadist a pedophile you are accepting their propaganda. Corporate media still very frequently write ‘sex with a child’ instead of rape and ‘child porn’ instead of child abuse documentation. The words rape and rapist appear in quotes constantly, and in conjunction with the words ‘accused’ and ‘alleged’ even after convicted far more often than words such as ‘murder’. UK media still use the term ‘rent-boy’ for victims of child abuse.

In the mid-1980s, and escalating dramatically into the 90s, something the pedosadist activists called the ‘sexual abuse movement’ and a ‘sexual inquisition’ created widespread revulsion for and awareness of pedosadism. Pedosadists were convinced that the media, which they and their sympathizers largely controlled, were persecuting them and blamed women as their primary ideological opponents. A 2005 paper argues the concept of paedophilia was a feminist attack on male normative sexuality. In 1984, PIE ostensibly ‘disbanded’, but in actuality retreated to primarily online and mailing list activity. A primary objective of PIE since its formation was networking between pedosadists for exchange of child victims, pedosadist houses, documentation of child abuse and related support. Online tools were used immediately for ‘secure’ networking.

By the mid-1990’s, this group and their propaganda were a very large influence on what became known as ‘Internet culture’. Their decades of immersion in propaganda techniques to change social norms overwhelmed disinterested others in online forums. Their rage at being ‘censored’ from mainstream media and not achieving their “utopian goals of the dissolution of the nuclear family and the abolition of the age of consent” was directed at both women and those of the LGBT community who shunned them. They promoted dehumanization of both along with normalizing child abuse documentation as ‘free speech’ and ‘porn’.

Unofficial PIE stalked online forums and worked constantly to challenge social norms against them and instil hate for their opponents. Moral imbeciles taught the dismissal of moral ‘hysteria’ (that word used to dismiss anyone with a uterus since Hippocrates) and lately ‘social justice warriors’. They used their security knowledge, acquired of necessity to protect themselves from legal repercussions, to impress young boys newly arrived on the Internet and claim their position as elders to be emulated and shielded from criticism. The old talking points from the 70s were wrapped up as freedom and anarchy. New ideas of morality and rejection of adult norms were exciting to those just of an age to form their own principles. The wall of hate encouraged as ‘free speech’ against their old opponents protected their forums from outside influence. 

Unofficial PIE are the trolls who ‘attempt dialogue’ every time pedosadists are mentioned on the Internet. Their scripted 70’s talking points are everywhere. They co-opt every initiative which tries to counsel pedosadists with attempts to normalize it instead. So many people have absorbed PIE propaganda that most don’t even know the origin of what they are quoting. They use reason in public forums and hate in their safer forums, but the end goal is the same. 

Some media and politicians still leap to defend child abuse documentation under the banner of free speech with no concern for the continued trauma and invasion of privacy of their victims. Pedosadism advocates still maintain great influence and power. The exact same powerful people who have allowed human trafficking to become the most lucrative criminal career in the world, ahead of even weapons or drugs, have used ‘combating child porn’ as their excuse to restrict Internet freedom for everyone else, ensuring the wider population is suspicious of any attempt to combat pedosadists. The UK establishment which supported and attempted to normalize pedosadism is now conducting massive sweeps of people who accepted their propaganda while still refusing to investigate the high level complicity which promoted it. The criminalization of consumers of an industry created by the governing class is a reaction very reminiscent of the drug war or the war on terrorism.

Meanwhile the boys, and the girls who pretended to be boys, in the old pedosadist retreats have grown up. Many left for the more mainstream acceptable but still completely closed and moderated thought bubbles of reddit where feminists and masculinists go to percolate in closed forums of hate and othering which social auto-coercion cannot reach and where empathy cannot be learned. The same media which fostered and nurtured the division between men and women since its inception gleefully promote a he-said-she-said ‘Battle of the Sexes’. The thought bubbles have now produced self-proclaimed “pick up artists” who teach that the way to a woman’s heart is to use violence and humiliation against her.

But horrifyingly to the pedosadist propagandists, some of their most receptive protégés not only rejected their principles when they expanded their social group, they now openly combat pedosadists or use their principles against them. NAMBLA bemoans “Anonymous hipster vigilantes”, and their “partisan and paranoid” anti-pedosadist and anti-sociopath actions and old pedosadist Anon and their disciples do as well. The Internet hate machine they encouraged to mob little girls is deplored when it hates adult men. All the rules about free speech which are so sacrosanct when dehumanizing the weak collapse into hysteria when anyone says “white man”. The admonition to always disregard feelings is not to be applied to their feelings. ‘Anonymous is dead’  proclaim the few remaining apologists of the old PIE rules while thousands around the world carry on Anonymous without them.

Free will does not exist, there is always coercion. Representative democracy, NGOs which divide people into groups competing for advocacy, sensational corporate media and protected online thought bubbles create myopic societies with no empathy for those outside. Societies formed in these thought bubbles will always be challenged and perceive themselves as persecuted when they attempt to enter wider society. Censorship which prevents all voices from being heard is a tyranny of the majority or the powerful. Amplification controlled by corporate media and celebrity is governance by oligarchy.

The only way we will attain self-governance by auto-coercion is through free and open forums where every person is allowed to speak and the crowd chooses both who to amplify and what actions to shun.

An interview with #GazaRebirth: a New Paradigm for Recovery Activism

The Cryptosphere

GazaRebirth for the Children

After the most recent Hamas/IDF conflict, the people of the Gaza Strip had a heavy job to rebuild, never sure if THIS was the ceasefire that would hold as so many did not. #GazaRebirth, a new initiative by activists both inside and outside of Gaza, seeks to help with specific aid to a small number of local families in need. If this iteration works, the model will be used in other hard-hit locations around the world to bring direct aid to those who need it most.

We spoke to participants in GazaRebirth including The Cryptosphere contributor Heather Marsh via a collective exchange on Titanpad.

The operation seeks a total of $10,000 via Indigogo, to be divided among five families personally known to the organizers, and to be spent specifically on housing, food, and school supplies for the children. By using direct aid, the organizers are hoping…

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There are no nation states

Nation has always been a fuzzy term. Even in times when distance, mountains and rivers posed insurmountable barriers to assimilation, when nations were divided by language, dress, laws and beliefs, both the customs and the populations of these nations were constantly evolving.

States have no resemblance to nations. States are created by the highly militarized partitioning of societies into economic markets and property ownership completely regardless of who the people in those states are or how the creation of the state divides and restricts our nations.

While nations are living and fluid and variable depending on context and perspective, states are an attempt to freeze one official historical viewpoint for all time. States preserve culture to prevent it from living, keep it steeped in formaldehyde unable to breathe and grow. Nations as defined by states are inviolable, to suggest change is sacrilegious, to question perspective or boundaries is deemed intolerable.

The reality of layered and overlapping nations, of intersections, of cooperation and flexibility is denied by the rigid borders and uniformity of states. Traditions of fluid property custodianship, sharing and merging are rejected for one tradition of rigid ownership clamped down and made law for every region on earth. Ethnic and societal realities of no fixed lines between groupings are ignored for false categorizing. While nations are gathered for community, cooperation and sharing, states are imposed for segregating, competing and allocating.

Nations create Us, states create the Other.

While nations reveled in their diversity, states decree a homogenized sameness, a world where everyone wears the same grey suits, international law assures uniform belief systems worldwide, the trade economy is the one god all must serve to survive. Like agricultural crops, people are raised in the manner most efficient for industry, the same worldwide. Nations are people, states are corporations.

States insist partitions between identical blocks of people are necessary for safety. States seek to divide and categorize. Diverse nations already do live together and overlap peacefully everywhere. Nations have fought over resources many times in the past. The problems associated with trade economy are applicable whether ownership is international, national, regional or private and will only be addressed by addressing trade economy. It is no less awful for people to be killed by a foreign corporation pillaging resources than by competing local nations. States did not bring peace to these problems, they brought totalitarian rule by global resource mafia. People in different nations sometimes oppose each others values to the point they wish to shun each other. International boycotts such as the BDS campaign against Israel prove this solution does not require states and indeed, states only boycott for economic interest, not human rights.

Nations are ideas and traditions which exist across borders and generations and they cannot be killed. States are tied to the property they control and they die without militaries and coercive laws to keep them in power. States attempt to present themselves as prefab nations, as if control of property and written laws and constitutions can be applied to populations and everyone in a geographical region will suddenly become bonded with national identity. Everywhere in the world nations such as the Kurds, Kachin, Catalan and many others refuse assimilation and states such as the five eyes prove they will never be anything but corporations.

Kill the states. Let the nations breathe.

Heather Marsh: government as mass collaboration

Originally published on Loomio’s blog.

Heather Marsh is a human rights and internet activist, programmer, political theorist, and former Editor in Chief at Wikileaks Central, and the author of Binding Chaos, a compelling blueprint for 21st century governance. An excerpt:

Binding Chaos – book by Heather Marsh We can do better than [representative democracy]. We can govern by user groups, respect individual rights and global commons, and collaborate using stigmergy. We can belong to overlapping societies voluntarily by acceptance of social contracts. Where necessary, elite expertise can be contained and used through transparent epistemic communities with knowledge bridges while control remains with the user group.

Loomio co-founder Richard D. Bartlett had the very good fortune to interview Heather recently, as part of our ongoing interview series: Inspiring Disruptors.

I’m really excited about your concept of “stigmergic collaboration, epistemic communities and knowledge bridges”. How would you describe these ideas to my 8 year old niece? (She is pretty smart).

Stigmergic collaboration is what happens when people who don’t have to talk to each other or know each other work on the same project and build something together. There has to be one idea that everyone understands and agrees on as a goal but beyond that no one is the boss or telling anyone how to work or even if they should work.

If you go into your doctor’s office and she has a puzzle on a table that other patients have been working on that is an example of stigmergy. You don’t know who has worked on it before or after you, but you know what to do and you are free to add a few pieces if you like.

There are much bigger ideas too, like “Information wants to be free”. There are many nodes under that stigmergic idea, everything from whistleblowers, MOOCs, file sharers, projects such as Wikipedia and Telecomix, open source everything and much more. Everyone is free to further the idea in their own way, the only commonality is the goal.

Epistemic communities are a way to provide elite expertise for projects without relinquishing control to an elite oligarchy. People or ideas are peer promoted from within the user group and communities remain transparent and permeable to everyone. Acceptance or rejection of the ideas is always up to the user group to avoid an unassailable oligarchy.

Knowledge bridges are people who help disseminate information from an expert to a novice level of understanding and collectively audit what the epistemic community is doing. Besides being essential for education and auditing, this is important to avoid demagogues who have the ability and time to develop mass appeal but are not the source of expertise at the level the world needs. Epistemic communities and knowledge bridges allow elite expertise a direct path of communication to the entire user group and provide a path for anyone in the user group to achieve elite expertise if they wish.

Your niece would understand this if she has ever looked up math games on the Internet. The Internet provides many knowledge bridges which help lead her to the epistemic community of elite mathematicians and allow her to become one if she chooses to study that hard.

Where are you seeing these ideas take hold? What do you see happening in the world that gives you hope?

Anywhere information can be very rapidly disseminated, verified, audited and acted upon is fertile ground for stigmergy, epistemic communities and knowledge bridges. I love the way MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) forums sometimes act as a job seeking forum with employers and collaborators finding talent by watching people work in a real setting instead of relying on official certification, like musical collaborations used to result from jam sessions. I also love the local affinity groups and friendships created from those courses.

The progress that gives me hope is in the areas which strive to get more people connected to collaborative networks and more amplification to silent voices. Stigmergy has always been our most powerful collaborative method and stigmergy follows ideas, so efforts to bypass control by corporate media, politicians, thought leaders and other representatives and allow people to contribute ideas directly with their own voices are essential.

Your conception of government as mass collaboration has really influenced my thinking in designing for Loomio. Do you have any ideas about the practice of making this idea real for people in their everyday lives?

Governance to me is action not an organization. It is something people have to just do. It is only after governance by the people is established that politicians can be lobbied into supporting it until it makes them obsolete. My first goal is to enable every person to participate, to write software, platforms and guides and provide outreach of all kinds to help people participate wherever their interests lie.

Unofficial ministries for each system should be set up as permanent open epistemic communities regardless of what government is in power. Currently, lobby groups are sometimes formed to attempt to influence policy but what is needed are full and permanent shadow cabinets by the people. When this shadow cabinet is established and effective, there will be no need for any other. The unofficial ministries which represent the will and peer promoted expertise of the people will guide policy or the elected politicians will face the consequences. The power of the voters is in the contribution of their ideas and actions far more than their ballot vote every four years or so. Official organizations and positions can be replaced by communities which are open to all to participate in. The unofficial ministries can call their own referendums and submit their own bills to elected MP’s when needed. In many cases the involvement of elected officials is not necessary, epistemic communities can guide policy through education and participatory discussion instead of official government policy.

Binding Chaos maps out a pretty compelling blueprint for a new way of structuring society; can we iterate towards it? Do you have ideas about fertile places to start? Whose job is it?

We have to start everywhere. It is everyone’s job to fight for their own autonomy and their own freedom to participate where they feel most excited and fulfilled. The world right now is full of people breaking out of the boundaries set for them, whether they are joining plenums in Bosnia or autodefensas in Mexico, scaling borders between Morocco and Melilla, breaking into a US nuclear weapons plant like 85 year old Sister Megan Rice, making themselves personally responsible for feeding and sheltering homeless people like OpSafeWinter, or fighting for justice for another human like the Free Omar Khadr Now group. Every person who decides to conduct their lives in a way that makes better sense to them and refuses to accept the status quo is participating. Not all ideas will be good, but if we all try we can iterate towards something that is better. And if we all try we can’t be stopped.

Have you had any thoughts about tools to enable this transition? Have you seen any promising approaches?

Collaborative problem solving tools like Loomio, etherpads and many others emerging now are a great help in shaping the way we work. Our methodologies need to change, and these tools will teach the new methodologies to a great extent. We need tools which are free of corporate or centralized control, which are part of their user communities and responsive to them. Organic community cooperatives like Loomio and Lorea are wonderful examples of responsive tool development.

I talked a bit in Binding Chaos about Twitter, Klout and other social media and their tendency to replicate and exaggerate our societal tendencies towards oligarchies. Digital currencies also currently facilitate our trade economy with almost all of its flaws intact. The social influence and currency algorithms both need to be re-examined to not just replicate our old methods but create new ways of interacting and relating to each other. An expiring currency would help to create a more sharing economy. A social influence algorithm that rewarded less on attracting celebrity attention and more on boosting unheard voices would change the impact of celebrity influence. We need more experimentation with the fundamental concepts behind influence and currency.

One of the key areas I would love to see progress is in knowledge repositories as global commons. We can’t have open, permeable epistemic communities on platforms with centralized control. The news will remain as transient spectacle until we have the tools to build knowledge from that information. Wikipedia by itself is not stigmergy, it is a tightly controlled cooperative. We need innovation in data modeling tools that will scale and connect and are not under centralized or corporate control.

What do you think can be done to create safe spaces online? Where have you seen this work well?

We have a lot of work to do first to decide what our definition of safe is. There is a sliding scale between free speech and freedom from the hate speech which is paradoxically a form of censorship. It is interesting to see different populations gravitate to different tools for playing with public influence, amplification and interaction depending on their ideas of where the ideal position on the scale is. I don’t think comfort levels are ever going to be uniform for different people and applications. Diversity of options and freedom from outside spying and control are essential.

Despite the obvious issues with Twitter it is the most interesting place to watch for global political communication, the only place you can publicly see politicians and participants in wars communicating with their opponents. Watching Twitter fights between Israeli forces and Gazans, the M23 militia and the FARDC military in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Rwanda politicians and the son of the man they are accused of just assassinating pushes the boundaries of communication about as far as I can imagine. To see these conversations cut short by censorship would be a huge loss.

There has been a great deal of discussion about trolls on Twitter and elsewhere, but they are to some extent the bottom feeders that keep the pond clean and are very self correcting in a troll eats troll platform. In a platform designed around celebrity and majority influence the unpopular opinions are left to the trolls so they are essential. The worst offenders in the name of free speech are those posting child abuse and other violations of privacy and personal integrity. In a self governed and open platform they can be dealt with by either the majority or a vigilante minority with support from law enforcement where crime is committed. The vigilante aspect is quickly reversed and turned on the vigilante if the public feels it is not justified. If a society agrees that certain behaviour cannot have anonymity it won’t for long. It is possible to design a platform where proxy routing anonymity can be tied to social approval so it would not be up to centralized control to decide.

A society with extreme free speech is too uncomfortable for many so it is essential to have both quiet places to work and open forums uncensorable by anything but public opinion and existing laws against child abuse and similar. Also essential is permeability, especially to influential forums. We now have a permanent Nemesis in astroturfing campaigns and attempts to game influence, plus spam. We have to somehow detect and block all that white noise while still maintaining both anonymity and ease of entry. This is definitely one of the most challenging puzzles we have to deal with right now, both socially and echoed in our tools.

How can we support your work?

In the interest of practicing what I preach, I have tried to not trade any of my work by manufacturing scarcity or withholding effort. It is my hope that people will one day pay for value already received by using the donate buttons at the top right on my blog instead of expecting a Kickstarter type campaign or funding drives. I also hope ideas will one day travel through peer promotion and knowledge bridges, not through personal brands or corporate promotion, so I do nothing with my work besides posting it on my blog. People who donate, share my work, use Amazon to share with prisoners, talk about it, translate it and encourage others to support it, leave me free to write and are very appreciated, even more since they are actively changing the world by using the methods described in Binding Chaos.

News, analysis, action

Donate

In the past, media was protected in most democracies because in order to govern themselves, people need access to accurate and timely information on all topics relevant to their governance. The news needs to be the match that starts analysis and action which doesn’t stop till we have change. Otherwise it is silly to pretend that news has anything at all to do with governance. If news requires no action, it is probably not the news we require in order to govern ourselves. If activism requires no analysis, it is probably not informed or effective.

News

The first right of all people must be the right to communicate. Without communication there is no way to safeguard our other rights or participate in society. Everyone needs a voice and the ability to call for help in emergencies.

Corporate media was long ago co-opted as a propaganda vehicle for corporations and governments, but people still supported it for three reasons: it provided a paying job for reporters, it provided access to an audience and it loaned official credence to the news.

The laughably small amount news media pays for most stories now (if they pay at all) is no longer tempting. Having to write material to fill a slot instead of writing because a story needs to be told, writing only on topics and only to audiences dictated and then having work butchered by editors who have less knowledge of the topic than the author is not the path to job satisfaction or quality information. Editors decide their audience must be fed the exact same story in the exact same way every day. Every story that brings different information or perspective is considered ‘biased’ and modified to reiterate the standard line. News must have an established audience before it is told, which defeats the purpose of news. Articles are produced as quickly as possible, are not interactive like micro-blogging and are seldom thoughtful and crafted like the best blogs. Corporate media reads like advertising copy, inoffensive, unsurprising, unoriginal.

Once this journalism at least brought community respect. Now it is more likely to bring open contempt and public criticism. Many bloggers have received far more recognition and respect by creating their own work and publishing it their own way on their own blogs. They sometimes manage to earn an equivalent or better living as well through a combination of donations, grants, paid appearances, website ads, etc.

The audience provided by official platforms online is now largely driven by online sharing and authors are expected to push their stories on social media when they are published. This could easily be (and sometimes is) replaced by promoting personal blog posts directly to social media instead. For those who are not interested in domain values and page hits, it is far easier to create viral media without restrictive copyright and pay walls. The unrealistic delays in publishing on official platforms make them obsolete as breaking news platforms.

The official status once brought by publication in corporate media is starting to bring the opposite result. Unless the official status is needed to update an archaic resource such as Wikipedia, there is little benefit.

There are many reasons to argue that journalism as it is practiced ought not to be a profession. While a good writer or investigator is always valuable, stories should be published when there is something important to say, not to fill a slot on demand. The people news is happening to seldom need others to translate their experience. First hand interviews and affidavits should replace journalist viewpoints. Our voices, not our votes are what gives us the ability to participate in our world and the people who tell our stories instead of just amplifying them are acting as our representatives with no mandate from us. The best articles are written by people actually affected by the news. They are the ones best able to answer questions and explain to us why their news is important. They should not have to beg some western man to find their story newsworthy and tell it through a western man filter.

Whistleblowers are journalists. The sight of whistleblowers and witnesses explaining what they found and why it is important to journalists who then turn and repeat what they have heard to an audience is a strange leftover from a long gone era. Expert opinions can also come directly from the experts, they do not need an intermediary.

In an interactive, decentralized world, the voiceless do not need someone to be their voice. They need a megaphone.

Analysis

The idea that news must be constantly new makes it an impossible option for deep ongoing analysis. Once an atrocity has been reported there is not much new to say. With no analysis or action as standard responses to news, the atrocities continue in silence and the audience attention wanders. The occasional bits of isolated investigative brilliance that make it past editors and accountants are left floating on isolated, seldom read url’s where only those that know they exist will find them.

Action

Journalism is a tool to an end, not an end. Investigators and writers who are not journalists may do their work for any or no reason; journalists are meant to bring information that the public needs to know in order to govern themselves into the public domain. The claim that journalists ought not to be activists is completely counter to the purpose of journalism. The only reason an item is newsworthy is if it requires action.

Reporters who are not activists are voyeurs. Their reporting is not journalism to aid self-governance, it is a distraction from self-governance.

There is a reason it is citizen journalism that terrifies governance. Only activists will do journalism for free and it is action that creates change, not passive reporting. Activists are not simply replacing corporate media, they are also replacing corporate NGO’s, those leeches that lie between those that need help and those that provide it and turn those in need into products to be owned and marketed.

NGO’s bring the bureaucracy and the official channels into giving. They stifle the voices of those in need except as pre-packaged marketing gimmicks and they block access to direct aid. They siphon large amounts of the aid for their own empires and spend the rest frequently without consultation with or in the interest of those it is intended for. They are also easily corruptible by political power which gives them their mandate, their access and their funding.

The huge amount of people working in NGO’s because of a desire to help those in need would be far more effective acting directly, responding to voices of those on the ground instead of power points by those who have commodified their need. Direct relationships between activists around the world have built trust and reputations. People in a position to help receive instant feedback on whether their help was effective.

Direct action and investigation can also provide real shadow cabinets to monitor and lobby government ministries and user group regulatory bodies to monitor corporations.

The future of journalism

The future of journalism is not in official platforms, page views and registered domains. The future of journalism is not in Exclusive! and Scoop! The future of journalism is not in celebrities with no knowledge of the topic who are begged to help activists aid citizen journalism. The future is not in Invisible Children or Falling Whistles style plastic-bracelets-to-stop-genocide-in-Africa commercialized snake oil dressed up as activism. Or in the centralized nodes of unofficial-official channels created out of formerly horizontal movements. Or in celebrity journalists. Or in lists of Who to Follow and Thought Leaders.

The future of journalism is in a stigmergic mesh network of amplifiers, investigators and activists who can filter and fact check news in real time, combine it with investigative global knowledge resources and create appropriate local and / or global action. The future is in collaborative investigators sharing knowledge to map everything we need to know to govern ourselves. The future is in activism and aid requested directly by the people who require it and responded to directly by the people who can provide it. The future is in the right and ability of every single person to broadcast their own voice and call for amplification when needed.

The future of journalism is in all of us.