I’ve spent a lot of February working on formatting and layout and talking to illustrators and cover designer. My goals right now are to get all three of the current books published as soon as possible with the new covers, formatting and illustrations you have helped me get so it’s probably about time I started showing you all that. This month, we have the (still in progress) new release of Binding Chaos!
It’s an amazing feeling to finally be proud of the appearance of my books – over a decade after Binding Chaos was first published. I can’t wait to have audio and translations one day soon! Thank you all so much for all of your support and help to make this happen. I hope everything is going well for you all.
Most of this month’s emails and messages have been about Twitter. I have already written so much about social media and communication but I guess it’s been a few years so we can revisit it. At this point I’m going to assume you all know what I think is wrong with social media as it is.
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The thing that needs to be recognized first is that we are talking about the form of governance we live under which has really nothing to do with voting, no matter how life and death that act is portrayed as. Real change comes from convincing enough people that something is necessary so that they will force politicians to change it. That comes from information control. This is the form of governance we have always lived under and it is still nominally played out in parliamentary debates but it has been superseded for centuries by, first pamphlets, then news media and now social media. People need to be willing to look at this as How do we want to be governed? or How do we want our information to be sourced and presented? instead of just the endless platitudes about free speech. Then it needs to be recognized that governance is the job of governments, not organized crime or compromised billionaires.
I prefer the pain of change to the bleak despair and silence of totalitarianism.
I’m still not sure what you all want to hear in these newsletters so please do reach out and tell me! I’ve heard from a couple of you that analysis of current events would be interesting. I don’t think it’s of much benefit for me to talk about what is going on in Ukraine in a monthly blog post though. There are a lot of other things going on that are devastating all the people I know: endless health concerns, a giant overwhelming wave of addictions and mental health breakdowns and the death and violence that brings, the equally overwhelming increase in organized crime, both in government and without, the powerful fat on Covid money and the poor desperate from social collapse – and of course the ongoing and still ignored environmental catastrophe.
But what I would like to talk about is the increasing relief I’m feeling each year. It seems very paradoxical since we seem to be watching the world crumbling but for me, it is a rotten old structure that is crumbling and it is being lifted by new growth. It feels like spring thaw – all the beautiful ice is melting and a winter’s worth of garbage is emerging into view but things are also appearing that we haven’t seen in a long time. So here is what I can see and smell in the spring air and what it looks like to me.
So after over six years of wishing I still had you all to talk to, I’ve decided to do something about it. Social media is exhausting, threatening, annoying and time-consuming, but interesting people are necessary and fun. Writing in an absolute vacuum is not fun and what I am writing is probably now unintelligible because I am so in my own head. So here’s my plan and it’s open for discussion.
For those who don’t know, I am writing a series of books all at once. It is kind of like being pregnant with a dozen babies at once but only being able to birth them at a rate of one every year or two. I’d give a lot to be able to speed up the process and get at least the first quartet finished and out there in months, not years. I also think I’d better start getting feedback before I hit publish on some of this.
In order to move at a reasonable speed, I need more time writing. Since my writing is (ahem) only appreciated by an exclusive audience, it doesn’t exactly pay the rent. Neither does it pay for such luxuries as decent book covers, translations, audio etc. If you’d like to help me deliver these books faster and in better form it would be very appreciated.
How I’d like to accomplish the above is by bringing back the Binding Chaos community and giving it a place to grow. I know a lot of you are very frustrated because you like the ideas but you have no one to talk to about them. A lot of you also would like to clarify some points or provide feedback and your emails and messages go unanswered far too often (sorry!).
So I am going to use a lot of the tools that Patreon now has (Discord, Discourse, WordPress limited access) and create a Patreon community where we can experiment with more open, two-way communication, where people can get involved at the level they choose but without the trolls and imaginative death threats of social media. Kind of like an epistemic community! Here it is, check it out.
I’m excited, I hope you’re excited and we can build something that really works for all of us.
I had hoped to have more published at this point in 2020 but life has been a little distracting. Most of what I have written that applies to the political upheavals being manifested in current events is written in Autonomy, Diversity, Society, a book which is not even next on the list to be published, so I thought I would write a short tl;dr. This is especially for those of you who have heard me go on about 2020 for ten years now and have read bits of my still unpublished work about the economy and fourth ages of nations. I apologize for taking so long to get this series out but hopefully this helps as a preview.
We are, or will be, going through the most radical transformation the world has ever seen; people are justly terrified, excited, depressed, heartbroken and hopeful, all at once. It is very tempting to stop everything and live in the moment, but some things need us to be alert, careful and creative. One thing I have been saying for years is the US, China and Russia (and others) are all headed for a major crisis in 2020 (which is here now!) and so is the world generally. While some states are undergoing terror and totalitarianism, others are seeing unprecedented opportunities for healing. The key point is that we are scaling up into a mono-empire from a system of two rival economic ideologies (cold war communism and capitalism). In terms already introduced in The Creation of Me, Them and Us, this means our two dominant authoritative endogroups are being sublated to one transcendental endogroup. There will be three major things to watch for in this transition.
One, the economy is not going to be nearly as important as it was before. This may be unimaginable to people who have been accustomed to framing all of our problems in terms of economics, but think of how religions and states faded as the dominant endogroups when new transcendental endogroups appeared. Things that appear essential to society can fade into irrelevance if they are based only on endoreality, as economics is. The crash we started the year off with will not simply produce a depression and then recovery. Instead, it will illustrate the fact that economics now is simply an abstracted power structure with no underlying support in universal reality (like all endoreality). Economics as we know it, is dead. This does not mean it will disappear completely overnight, or that it will not remain in some form in some places, but, like religions, states, families, and other formerly dominant endogroups, it will no longer be the dominant or authoritative power structure in our lives. This is explained in great detail in The Approval Economy which will be published one day.
Two, in accordance with the law of the last circle, also explained in The Creation of Me, Them and Us, places like the US, and China are going to try to fall back to old real or imagined endogroups such as those around states, religions, etc. as the economic endogroups weaken. We have already seen this in the global reversion to various forms of endogroups producing widespread nationalism, sexism, racism, religious cults and every other form of endosocial extremism. This will continue in some regions, and we are still at risk of civil wars and other endogroup atrocities from this.
Three, and this is by far the most interesting – the world is attempting to transition into a mono-empire. It is already very evident, and has been for years, that the form of this mono-empire would feature totalitarianism beyond any of our wildest nightmares. This nightmare future has a very substantial implementation problem, however. An endogroup, as explained in The Creation of Me, Them and Us, is an emergency power structure that humans instinctually create and support in response to external threat. One of the six components of every endogroup is an existential threat from external forces. Another is an identity which enables exclusive membership. An empire which includes everyone cannot be exclusive or have plausibly threatening external forces. If there is no external threat, the equally inherent human tendency to egalitarianism creates a counter force which will dismantle any endogroup power structures created in times of emergency. A mono-empire has no external endogroup to act as an existential threat and so a mono-empire cannot form or maintain its defensive structure. It dissolves even as it attempts to form. This will become increasingly apparent this year as the last vestiges of dominant economic ideology weaken. The projected and planned-for mono-empire will never be able to fully form or hold its power, although it will be dangerous as it fights to do so.
The response to the lack of an external endogroup threat has been to create, or use, anthropomorphized natural threats, similar to the recent War on drugs, War on terror or US president Trump’s anthropomorphizing of a virus into a ‘brilliant Invisible Enemy’. We are certainly all facing plenty of existential threats from corporate destruction, climate change, pandemics and more. We have definitely seen the usual suspects using all of these crises to institute more extreme totalitarianism. There is a difference that is becoming more obvious every week, however.
An external threat that is not a rival endogroup does not produce an endogroup power structure to combat it. A naturally occurring environmental threat creates widespread exosocial collaboration, as is seen in every disaster. The first thing that happens in a disaster is the breakdown of endogroups and hierarchy and the establishment of altruistic exosocial aid. This has happened around the world in response to all of our current environmental threats. Instead of helping to entrench endogroup power, these disasters are creating exosocial opportunity.
Given all of this, we have three goals we ought to pursue right now. One, consider collaboration free of trade economy norms. We don’t need cryptocurrency, or even basic income, as much as we need institutions of sharing and free services like transit, medical care, education, food and housing. Develop these ideas, even if they seem far-fetched right now – they won’t for long. We really do need Getgee – it’s a shame it received no support because it would be very useful right now. It is long past time to disrupt the Silicon Valley vapour capitalists and put collaborative economies under control of local networks.
Two, watch out for and combat the still present and very dangerous endosocial extremism arising in places of collapsing economic power, including the desperate attempts at transcendental totalitarianism. Do not confuse shared responsibility for keeping us all safe with totalitarianism. Infecting your neighbours has nothing to do with exosocial collaboration or combating tyranny. Autogenocide in the name of the old god Economy is a sign of endosocial extremism and cruelty, not exosocial connection and altruism.
Three, we have never in the history of humanity had an opportunity like we do now to be free of endosocial extremism. This is the moment I have been waiting for, and hopefully you have as well. We can prevent power structures from returning by establishing exosocial collaboration and refusing to allow autogenocidal actions like pollution to be re-normalized. It is futile to weed without planting; now is our window to plant the seeds of a better world. Here are a few of the opportunities we are being given in various parts of the world and which we can try to establish and defend in all parts.
The fact that pollution increases COVID-19 deaths has been used to limit vehicle traffic and reclaim city streets for physical distancing of bikes and pedestrians. Vehicle traffic has always increased deaths from pollution, not to mention the astronomical amount of deaths caused by vehicle accidents; reclaim all city streets and never give them back.
Pollution is so unhealthy every day that the COVID-19 shutdowns of industry have, in some regions, potentially saved more lives than were lost to the pandemic. Pollution needs to continue to be recognized and treated as a global health emergency on par with the pandemic.
Public transit is free in some places to reduce contact with bus drivers. Don’t ever let it be unfree again. Providing free streets for vehicles and charging for public transit is taxing the necessities of the poor for the autogenocidal luxuries of the wealthy.
Food banks are receiving more government funding in places; food stores ought to be free, filled with healthy, locally produced food. Think of the carbon footprint reduction, medical care reduction, and general increase in happiness and competence that would be caused by universal access to fresh, healthy food and universal ability to grow and share food locally, perhaps in the laneways and parking lots freed from vehicle traffic. Why should every child have a right to education but not food? How is free health care effective if healthy food, air and water are unattainable?
Evictions have been stopped in some places and those without homes are suddenly being housed to prevent COVID-19 deaths. Poverty and lack of housing has always been lethal; eradicate poverty and universalize access to homes.
Some people have acknowledged that releasing the majority of prisoners will create no social ill and prisons are inhumane. Some are even acknowledging the extreme mental distress and increased tendency to violence caused by social isolation. Use this opportunity to re-examine the goals and methods of archaic and cruel prison punishments and construct rehabilitative alternatives which focus on harm prevention.
The Canadian government and others have rejected IP protection for necessary COVID-19 treatment and supplies; abolish IP while crediting creators and we will see an explosion in creativity and scientific advancement. COVID-19 is hardly the only emergency facing the world.
The vital need for knowledge emanating from transparent, two-way, epistemic communities and facilitated by knowledge bridges is finally being recognized. Ignorance is lethal. Knowledge needs to be a human right. Establish protection and support for this right in all areas of social collaboration, including corporate and governance activity.
Health is, at least for a moment, being prioritized over industry. This is a sign of the weakening of industrial endo-idealism. This must be recognized as the moment of sublation it is; do not allow this moment of victory over industrial endo-idealism to blind us to its potential replacement by a transcendental mono-empire. Be aware of these attempts, such as Google and Apple surveillance justified by the pandemic, and instead, seize the moment to establish exosocial collaboration.
Transparent, collaborative knowledge with two-way epistemic communities are providing the information on health guidelines. All science needs to be open and collaborative and unfiltered through political and corporate interests. Cancer and many other diseases could also be greatly reduced with the same transparency and prioritizing of health over industry.
We are seeing an example of governance by epistemic communities, Knowledge regarding the pandemic is global and transparent. Policy implementation is under networked regional authority which consults and defers to regional experts informed by that global knowledge. This is the new method of collaborative governance that I described a decade ago and wrote in Binding Chaos. For this method to work, knowledge (not simply speech or information) must be a human right.
Tourism has all but halted. Some states, such as the US, and China, will attempt to use this to entrench totalitarianism and greatly restrict ability to move. Let’s instead try to create a new habit of slow travel; let’s forfeit the social media selfies and work on creating true links of friendship, mutual aid, trust and discovery when we are guests in other people’s communities and homes.
Worry about supply chains is suddenly causing questioning of international forced dependency on trade. This is a window to encourage collaboration through networked development of strength and support, not hierarchical development of enforced dependency.
Airbnb and others have taken a huge economic hit. This could be an opportunity to develop Getgee and networked control of our own service industries, instead of apps controlled in Silicon Valley.
These and many other opportunities for great social change are being presented where just a few months ago the same ideas were dismissed as utopian and unrealistic. These aren’t even the biggest opportunities, however. The greatest social change of the last months has been the redirection of social approval from endosocial destroyers to exosocial creators. Instead of powerful endo-ideals and men with guns, the world is looking to actions coming from caregivers. The focus on essential services has highlighted the real contributors to social health. Saving lives is finally being recognized as more valuable than ending them.
The crisis conditions highlighted now have always existed for some. It is time for the world to see and acknowledge those that are always required to live in circumstances deemed unacceptable for the majority. In Canada, the federal government provided a temporary relief payment of $2000 a month for many people. Ineligible were the majority of those who are always forced to live far below the poverty line on pensions, disability payments and social assistance. The latter are still expected to live on a payment as low as $593 a month (depending on the province). The poor are the negative image who are dehumanized every day under wealth endo-idealism. Also dehumanized are those who are victims of the industrial endo-ideal. In Korea, that is victims of Samsung, and in Canada it is victims of resource corporations. These victims are not only not compensated for their injuries, they are silenced by media and the public and ignored by government. In a world free of endosocial extremism, all have equivalent value.
The pandemic we are facing is indeed a huge disaster. It is not the reason we are seeing these great social changes, however. I have been presenting huge social disasters in the hopes that people may be inspired to social change for years, and it has never worked. The world has clearly understood for many years that we are facing extinction, Genocides and atrocities, including caging children in concentration camps and state organ trafficking, have been ignored all over the world. Everyone knows that corporations are killing people and the earth for no apparent reason. The world is finally convinced that every single institution of power is involved in atrocities towards the most vulnerable, such as child rape and trafficking. As was my worst fear, exposure simply normalized it instead of stopping it. It is not the size or horror of this pandemic that has brought social change. The change is a direct result of the collapse of endosocialism under what was intended to be a global mono-empire. A mono-empire cannot hold its shape as an endogroup, even with the support of the most extreme totalitarianism.
As long as we are trapped in endogroups, people have proved throughout history that there is no atrocity or horror they will not normalize and justify. The fact that this current pandemic is suddenly creating sweeping changes in most populations is because of the lifting of the veil of endoreality. Those who were the invisible negative image of industrial or wealth endo-idealism are finally being seen as those endogroups weaken. The most industry-worshiping states still devalue our elders and instantly cast all those who are ill as the negative image. This has produced attempted terrorist attacks on hospitals and blocking access to them which we have seen in Brazil and the United States. As explained in The Creation of Me, Them and Us, the act of falling ill is enough to cast a person as the negative image in an industrial endogroup. This has been obvious for years through the condemnation of the ill to poverty and social ostracization but it becomes more evident as hospitals are threatened with bombs and hospital workers are evicted and shunned. The violence and disinformation attacks are a domestic escalation of the attacks by foreign interests suffered by caregivers in organizations such as MSF and the White Helmets for years. The current domestic escalation is a sign of the extreme effort being expended in trying to hold the last endogroups together. Every threat to an endogroup results in increased violence towards its own weakest members, the negative image. All externally directed atrocities eventually come home to roost, including genocide.
Unfortunately, endogroups are not the only major social problem we need to contend with. We have also created a large population of people who can only exist on secondary euphoria, that obtained from destruction and the suffering of others. Exosocial collaboration greatly increases during times of disaster, but so does the feeding frenzy of those who have an overwhelming craving for the suffering of others. The shame killings described in The Creation of Me, Them and Us, and in much more detail in AbstractingDivinity, are a feature of every endogroup collapse.
Those who crave the pain and destruction of others exist freely due to the cloak of endoreality which shields them from accountability. Their actions are depicted as necessary and unavoidable instead of the simple cruelty they are. We can combat these people by naming their actions and their guilt. Those that block transparent information and try to instigate an autogenocide of as many people as possible through encouraging uninformed action are cruel for their own gratification. This applies not only to COVID-19 but to all the branches of autogenocide we are facing.
Their reflectors, those who attribute all virtue to their endo-ideal and reject all guilt by their endo-ideal will have a very difficult time attributing the correct motivation to these lethal actions and will diminish such cruelty as much as possible. We are governed by information and our belief in and acceptance of that information. Transparent, verified information and knowledge bridges are the most important tools available to us today. Endoreality, which assigns all ownership, virtue, credit and victimhood to the endo-ideal and all vice, guilt and punishment to the negative image, acts to shield the endo-ideal from their own guilt and persecute the negative image. Endoreality is the primary tool of tyranny and the means to keep the world in chains of our own creation.
We are seeing the darkest part of the night before the dawn. It helps to understand what we are seeing and the desperation driving the current extreme actions of those upholding the last endogroups. The most dangerous time in any endogroup occurs on its destruction. We are living in a time of potentially unprecedented global exosocial collaboration but also a time of great danger. We need to understand the danger but also to understand that it will pass. The world is living through a time of great pain but great pain is always a motivator for exosocial expansion. The tearing of endogroup bonds and former euphoric connections results in a global need to create new connections. We have an opportunity to create those connections with discovery, with creation and with each other, through altruistic and power-free interactions. Let’s care for each other, beware of dangers and, at the same time, plant the seeds for the new world we want to grow.
Most of these concepts are elaborated in the two published books in the Binding Chaos series. There is also a glossary here which may be of some help.
I was invited last year to speak at the Oxford Union, and the event, held last February, perfectly illustrates the current faux debate between hate speech and free speech. The Oxford Union is the self-proclaimed “world’s most prestigious debating society” and “last bastion of free speech” and it rides on a who’s who list of past speakers such as the Dalai Lama, Mother Theresa, Malcolm X, Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein. Membership is open only to Oxford students, and lifetime membership includes a very large selection of the world’s politicians and media moguls. Past Union presidents who went on to lead states include Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, and UK Prime Ministers Heath, Asquith and Gladstone. The current UK cabinet has more former presidents of the Oxford Union than it has minority ethnicities. This platform is as far as you can get from the egalitarian access of social media.
The Oxford Union serves as a safe space where powerful men who do horrible things can go to speak and be appreciated. Despite the protestations that a platform at Oxford Union is meant to allow unpopular views to be challenged, it doesn’t happen. Speakers ranging from O.J. Simpson after his trial to Oswald Mosley, who led the UK Fascist Party until it was banned in 1940, are welcomed on their own terms. This is the free speech that Boris Johnson (former Oxford Union president) and Jacob Rees-Mogg (current Oxford Union trustee and son of former Oxford Union president) are fighting for. The UK has recently passed a law against Union members or other students exercising their own free speech and expressing opinions on who comes to speak at their club, threatening fines against universities who refuse platforms to those assumed to have a right to one. At the same time, UK lawmakers and media have been fighting against free speech access on every more egalitarian platform. The misogynists who upskirt teenagers on the pages of British tabloids deplore the misogyny of social media. The lawmakers who refuse to conduct a competent inquiry into UK child rape cover-ups by politicians imprison accusers instead. The Official Secrets Act, libel and ‘intellectual property’ laws which protect only the powerful, and non-disclosure agreements available only to those who can afford them, ensure a class strata dictates who may and who may not be criticized or offended.
The Oxford Union is the public face of the Bullingdon Club and the Piers Gaveston Society and looks it, but even this last bastion of entitlement is lately feeling pressure to embellish itself with a sprinkling of darker skin and female pronouns. Identity politics provides the branch managers of tyranny. The endless twaddle of Tories and Trumpkins which usually fills Oxford Union term cards is now supplemented with occasional Serena Joys and Gileadian aunts in the name of ‘feminism’ and occasional corrupt politicians for ‘diversity’. Polite demurs from careerist NGOs and journalists paid to politely demur are occasionally presented as ‘balance’. It is in this context that I was invited. For students of a prestigious university, they have no research skills at all.
Diversity of opinion, or even irrefutable facts, are not acceptable to the “world’s most prestigious debating society”. The purified thought bubble surrounding Oxford students welcomes derision against any weaker members of society but does not permit criticism of those in power. I shared a panel with David Shedd, a former CIA operative who also held the posts of Director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and Deputy Director of U.S. National Intelligence. The entire panel was censored from Oxford Union’s YouTube channel at his order, despite their contractual obligation to publish it there and the prior release forms signed by all involved. “It is ironic that we are censoring a Whistleblowing Panel!!” chirped their bursar, Lindsay Warne. Shedd’s objection was not to anything he said, but what I said – a third-party censorship demand which has been granted and upheld by three successive Oxford Union presidents: Laali Vadlamani, Gui Cavalcanti and Stephen Horvath. Those names will no doubt be found in UK parliament and media in five or ten years, drafting even more draconian laws to protect the powerful against speech.
The speech of tyranny is always upheld by tyrants as free speech. The speech of anyone in opposition to tyranny will always be silenced by every means possible. Harmful speech has never in history meant anything other than speech which offends the powerful and it does not today. From the Malleus Malleficarum through to the upskirting tabloids, media controlled by the powerful has existed to uphold the powerful and persecute, threaten and control the weak. It has never been subjected to censure over this. Indeed, protection of the media has been a fundamental pillar of advocates of free society since media was invented and that only increased with the invention of the Internet as a place to stalk and humiliate women and children. Suddenly, this has changed, and I think I can put a date on when it changed.
In 2012, Gawker (before it was permanently silenced by billionaire Peter Thiel) published a story on Michael Brutsch, aka reddit moderator Violentacrez. In 2012, reddit was a cesspool that reflected the free speech of powerful men at the expense of the human dignity and privacy of anyone weaker, and Violentacrez was its most prolific bottom feeder. In the words of journalist Adrian Chen, “His specialty is distributing images of scantily-clad underage girls, but as Violentacrez he also issued an unending fountain of racism, porn, gore, misogyny, incest, and exotic abominations yet unnamed.” Brutsch moderated hundreds of the most predatory sub-reddits, including Creepshots, Jailbait, Chokeabitch, Beatingwomen, Picsofdeadjailbait and even worse, to the glee of reddit users, who voted the child predator site Jailbait as 2008’s “subreddit of the year”. Four years later (as part of a growing reaction) he was outed by Chen, and reddit exploded in outrage, banning all Gawker links from the traffic generating behemoth. The privacy of a man to anonymously violate the privacy of women and children was itself violated, and the balance of power on the Internet was never the same again.
The Internet become a place where, for the first time since the printing press was invented, women and other marginalized people could fight back and get overwhelming results. It was the place where Pax Dickinson, CTO of Business Insider, lost his job for misogynist tweets and was followed by so many others. It was the place where #takedownjulienblanc first created global awareness of the toxic internet manosphere which has spawned such movements as incels, PUAs, MRAs and more. It was the place where victims of sexual assault have rallied again and again, from the #DelhiGangRape to #paedobritain and #opDeathEaters to #MeToo and #Cuéntalo. And it was the place where the powerful libertarian men who controlled all the international media, academia and speaking forums, first decided that free speech should have limitations. This newly commended censorship is presented as a measure needed to protect ‘the marginalized’ even though it was the powerful and their media who marginalized ‘the marginalized’ in the first place and the censorship is directed solely at the forums accessible to ‘the marginalized’. The new censorship, combined with forced public acceptance of platforms for the powerful, is meant to ensure the continuation of the freedom of speech that powerful people have always enjoyed and more easily enforce immunity from the social consequences of either their speech or their actions.
Does anyone really think the current howls for censorship of social media will include censorship of the NY Times writers excusing incel violence or the Atlantic writers who want women to be hung for exercising bodily autonomy? Social media is the only reason these writers are challenged now – censorship of social media will remove all opposition to them. The business model of Facebook and Google is to enable states and corporations to coerce public opinion for the powerful. Tech CEOs are now being ordered to decide which speech and which people are socially acceptable. Does anyone think billionaire tech CEOs will defy their funders and enablers to defend the powerless or censor the powerful? Powerful men who have sadistically raped, tortured, trafficked and murdered women and children are unironically presenting themselves as victims of a witch hunt. Free speech for victims of powerful men is not a witch hunt. A witch hunt was when powerful men and their exclusive access to media inspired a genocide of up to a million women and indigenous people and terrified community and land caregivers into centuries of silence. Today’s social media campaigns are the accused witches finally fighting back, countering the media which called them all ‘crazy’ with sheer numbers.
All genocides and all bigotry begin with hate speech. Hate speech is countered by open communities and communication, never by one-way powerful platforms and definitely not by state or corporate control and manipulation of dialogue. Nazis and fascists in the street are countered by community rejection, never the states which instigate and profit from hate and division. If there was any doubt that this is conscious state policy, that doubt should be removed by the relentless state and corporate campaigns currently sowing hate and division on social media. Civility and the institutions of civility were invented to control voices opposing the powerful just as the institutions of justice were invented to control defence against the powerful. It is always the voices of women and the lowest classes that civility demands be kept well-modulated and profanity-free.
Identity politics has played a crucial role in the new fight against egalitarian speech. An endless parade of female pundits have been given bylines and panel seats to insist that social media silences them. Censorship is being marketed with the faces of women and children. Now that we finally have a megaphone, we are told it is more than our weak selves can handle. The women who are acceptable to places like the Oxford Union tell the world that the rest of us can’t handle free speech and must be protected by gatekeeping bastions such as … well, such as the Oxford Union. If “the last bastion of free speech” will censor what I said, they will censor anyone who draws outside the lines. Community and land caregivers will be told they are represented by identitarian tokens parroting the words and agenda of fascists, a rainbow of totalitarians silencing all diversity of views. The next time women feel inclined to accept censorship on the only somewhat egalitarian platforms we have had since the invention of the printing press, remember what you will be left with: corporate media musing whether women should be publicly hung for exercising bodily autonomy or required to provide ‘redistribution of sex’ to men who want to kill them, and representation of us all by Ann Coulter and Marine Le Pen.
Anyone who seeks to represent you will be your tyrant. Your own voice is the only one that can represent your ideas and your ideas are the only part of your voice that matters. When you accept that women and other marginalized people are not capable of defending ourselves on the first platforms where we actually had power, you are accepting an all-powerful, patriarchal, protection racket which has never in history protected women or anyone marginalized from hate. The face of censorship is not women and children. It is Michael Brutsch and Pax Dickinson, Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
The primary problems with social media today are caused by state and corporate interference and the personality centred structure, not free speech. It is state and corporate funded social media astroturfing campaigns, libel laws, ‘intellectual property’, non-disclosure agreements, official secrets, state and corporate propaganda, and all other cloaks shielding the powerful which need to be destroyed. Egalitarian access to public platforms must be protected above all, not for identity groups but for every individual voice.
Anyway, this is what you cannot say at “the last bastion of free speech” “the safest space for punching down”. Pay attention, because this is what you will not be able to say anywhere if free speech continues to be restricted to exclusive ‘bastions’.
Here is the current Standing Committee of Oxford Union if you would like to confirm their free speech boundaries for yourself. The presidents (so far) who have supported the censorship are Laali Vadlamani, Gui Cavalcanti and Stephen Horvath. Here is Oxford Union on social media:
Transcript (more or less) of keynote at RMLL, June 2017: We have free software. We need free databases. Discussing how to create a software ecosystem by decoupling information from applications with a universal database.
My name is Heather Marsh. I am a writer and a programmer and I have been studying and experimenting with methods of mass collaboration and the technology we use for 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 tying leaks to current news as a catalyst to create informed action. In 2012, I concentrated more on social media collaboration and I wrote a book called Binding Chaos about the methods of mass collaboration that were used to create mass movements. I am currently writing a book called Autonomy, Diversity, Society about some of the social issues and institutional structures preventing effective mass collaboration, particularly those involving knowledge industries like journalism, science and academia. And I am also developing a universal database and trust network called Getgee which will hopefully help with some of the issues I have been having for years around online collaboration.
So today I would like to first talk about how we collaborate online and then I would like to look at the technology we develop and how that affects collaboration. And then I’d like to review what a universal database is and why we need such a thing. These are all very big topics and I want to leave room for discussion at the end so I am going to touch very lightly on some areas. If you would like to know more about them, you can find me on youtube or my blog where these topics are explained in more detail, or read the books which are free online or send me an email.
What was it about the Internet that was so important and world changing?
Very often we think of the answer in terms of communication, but we don’t really communicate with all the people on the Internet on a one to one basis and reach consensus. This is a picture of what mass collaboration usually looks like, both online and offline. This method is called stigmergy as it says on the slide and I have written and talked a lot about stigmergy so you can find more information in my writing if you like, but basically, it is a method of action based collaboration that follows an idea.
If you look at this, there is no formal structure. There is just an idea or a goal that is reflected to everyone. This is the type of mass movement that can happen more or less spontaneously, sometimes very suddenly and very very effectively. Once this idea is released publicly, if people believe in it, they will follow it across cultures and generations and language barriers and it will be truly unstoppable. We have followed stigmergic movements throughout history for mass migrations, for adopting new technologies like pottery or Facebook, or for instilling moral principles or beliefs.
This isn’t the only method that can cause mass migrations and huge collaborative projects. For the last several thousand years, we have headed very relentlessly towards a very hierarchical and controlled structure for collaboration that happens very formally through appointed official channels and uses a system of sticks and carrots with coercion from military and money as rewards and punishments to drive us through these channels and direct our behaviour.
But the Internet allowed a sudden proliferation of stigmergic movements to spring up instantly and globally and scared a lot of powerful people very much and even removed some of them.
Imagine if these swallows were people – you can see why those trying to maintain authority would be very concerned, it doesn’t look like there is any sort of structure or predictability here. Communication on the Internet allowed us to return to this form of swarm movement which is really powerful, but at the same time very scary. In many ways, this looks like a new age of collaboration. We went from small local collaboration to highly structured so-called civilization and this is a whole new thing, even though stigmergy is a method of collaboration that has been with us forever, it has never been at this scale or speed. So it is important we learn how to help these movements guide themselves, and when we design tools that assume we are going to use direct communication or votes or consensus, they are not going to work for us, not for mass movements.
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 leading 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. So this initial seed that makes up the idea is the key to every mass movement.
If you look at this as a form of governance, we aren’t going to be governed by people, we are going to be governed by ideas. So our job in information technology is world governance. How we present and filter ideas directs these mass movements far more than politicians do. People will run in the mazes we give them to run in, so when we are designing tools for collaboration and communication it is very important that we get this right and think about the implications of what we are building. We have to allow people the freedom to rise above these mazes of official channels but still protect themselves from being coerced by propaganda and ignorance.
Coercion
So with our new scary power of mass collaboration we have also seen a change in how powerful people are attempting to coerce these mass movements. The old way, or the most recent way, of directing movements was with hard coercion. You will follow this idea or you will be burned at the stake. And we can put money in there as hard coercion as well because you will work in this mine or you will starve is pretty violent as well. In this structure ideas were very carefully controlled. After the printing press was invented, only those ideas approved by someone with a printing press got mass dissemination and it was much easier to control what was distributed.
Once we had mass communication, on the Internet, that all changed fairly overnight and took a lot of existing power by surprise. So we instantly saw powerful people attempting to use all the usual hard coercive methods to control these ideas that are starting mass movements, like murdering bloggers and censoring the Internet, but it was pretty apparent that this was not going to be a sustainable long term global solution to keep people in power. So for the last several years we have had a huge focus put on what I call seductive coercion, manipulation of how we think and how we react to these ideas. Seductive coercion uses fear, belonging, shunning, all of our most deeply felt emotions to drive us towards or away from ideas.
The first and easiest way to counter ideas is to conflate the idea with a person or ideology. If someone puts up an idea and other people say oh, that’s funded by so and so, or that’s neoliberalism or Marxism, many people will turn away from the idea before they even try to understand it. Alan Turing once described the campaign against him as: Turing believes machines think. Turing lies with men. Therefore machines cannot think. Anyone who has been on social media long enough can recognize his frustration.
Another favourite counter is noise, you can’t follow an idea you never hear so if you have an idea that powerful people don’t like, they can just drown it out. And another counter is confusion. If an idea is at a level of expertise too specialized for the average person to prove whether it’s true or false, someone can just say it doesn’t work or it has been rebutted. If most of the public can’t prove it one way or another, they can just call it fake news. We are overwhelmed right now with seductive coercion as well as noise and confusion on our current social media platforms and the purpose is to try to control these ideas that are all important in seeding stigmergic mass movements.
I don’t think seductive coercion and noise is a long term solution for guiding people away from or towards ideas. I think most of us are thoroughly fed up with fake news and bot farms yelling at us every time we go near the Internet. We need information we can trust for stigmergic organization to work and we need stigmergic organization because that’s the only way we are going to progress on a large scale in the future. Misleading information will encourage people to act against their own interests but a lack of trust in any information will immobilize them or encourage them to blindly follow demagogues or ideology.
We can’t afford to waste time like this and I think even many powerful people are starting to realize that maybe a very easily led public is not such a great thing after all. Theresa May keeps saying “Make no mistake, the fight is moving from the battlefield to the internet.” but she and others are recommending fighting with the old methods of hard coercion, they are calling for even tighter control over information and more official channels. This is an attempt to go backwards and we have burnt that bridge, we have no path open now but the one forward.
So the third method here is auto-coercion, coercion of each other as an informed society, which is a swarm method of reaching consensus. This is where I would like us to head and this is what, in my opinion, we need to be building technology for. We may or may not have reached a technological singularity yet but we have certainly reached a societal singularity. We need to collaborate with others even just to understand the news. We can’t all be experts at everything. So we can’t keep berating voters for not spending all of their time studying everything that affects them or electing politicians and expecting them to have all the answers. It’s impossible. We need to find a better solution. We need technology that allows us to put our faith wisely in information and this is going to require a completely different set of rules than the hierarchical official channels we have used in the past.
Ideas need to be audited and promoted by people qualified to understand them so I use this structure of concentric circles with epistemic communities in the centre and knowledge bridges to assist information flow and auditing. 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. Unless you don’t, in which case experts can also be created by the system itself as users develop knowledge and reputation and move towards the centre. Disagreements can result in a separate concentric circles being formed around the same problem to explore a different solution. If this all sounds familiar, it’s because this is exactly what happens in open source software communities.
Currently, other knowledge communities act like closed, internationally linked, affinity groups at a level of expertise not accessible to the general public. Science, academia and journalism are very far from acting as concentric circles and knowledge bridges integrating ideas back and forth with wider society so stigmergic action rarely results from their work and without stigmergy, their progress is not nearly what it could be. A people with no confidence in either their epistemic communities or their knowledge bridges is a people with no belief in ideas, and with no belief in ideas we will be immobilized or ruled by demagogues or ideology. Science, academia and journalism require two way knowledge bridges, transparency and free information if they are going to truly act as epistemic communities for us all and stimulate and inform mass action and they also require information focused technology to support them in that. So let’s look at where we went wrong.
We no longer live in a world dominated by either resource capitalism or industry. We live in a world dominated by information capitalism and information control.
“Data is the new oil” is a quote that has been going around investment circles for over 10 years now but data is more than just a product. With oil you could acquire money to drive people along the paths of hard coercive structures. With data you can lead far more people with seductive coercion or block them with noise and confusion. But even for people who haven’t quite grasped that information in this form can be used to wag the tail of an entire mass of humanity behind it, most people realize data is lucrative.
The last I checked, Alibaba was worth 265 billion US dollars. Amazon is worth over 400 billion. Even Uber is still worth 60 billion. Who has any idea what Facebook and Google are worth because they actually have mastered the true value of information. What makes all of these corporations so powerful and valuable is their control of information. When the world wide web was designed, it was a picture of academia. It was meant to allow isolated papers to cite other isolated papers, but the internet does not look like that. Those early pages have been used to create an Internet as a series of sealed wells. Even if we have access to everything on the surface, we do not have access to the information in these wells and to add insult to injury, we created all the information in those wells. And that data is used for public manipulation and seductive coercion, in ways ranging from monitoring our shopping habits to Facebook deciding to what mood we are in or whether we vote. That data under corporate control decides whether we are talking about political failures or Romphims and whether the resulting stigmergic actions are related to community support or consumerism.
No one should be gifting their innermost thoughts to allow coercion of public opinion by undemocratic entities who have only maximum profit for their shareholders as a guiding principle. No one should risk storing their personal data on a platform that sees their data as ‘the new oil’. Of course, this is not news to anyone here, but even though we all realize this, we haven’t been able to stop it.
The failure to replace the existing data mining platforms is partly the failure to differentiate between different types of data and their different requirements, so let’s go over that first.
Personal data: The goal here is security against dissemination. Ideally, we want to keep this off the Internet and if that is not possible, encrypt it and keep it under your control and easily deleted.
Personal messaging: The goal here is to know who you are talking to and keep your conversation private, so we treat this like personal data and add the fact that we need to be sure of who we are talking to.
Personal information and private messaging have both had had a lot of investment and thought put into them over the years. If we can get this data split out from the corporate data wells, we have a lot of options for this, like personal online data storage, and many similar options. These work but …
The idea here is you keep all your personal information in your own little PODS and it is always under your control and you choose where to share it and what to share, which is as it should be. But in a way this reminds me of when people were told they no longer had to work as slaves or serfs because they were free and could choose when to work for money. But then they found out that all the food and shelter was controlled by the money sources so it became not much of a choice, work or starve. And if all we do is take control of our own personal information, if we want to access other information and it is controlled by corporate interests, we will end up giving over our keys. And there will be no legal protection because we will be doing it voluntarily. Supposedly. We see this already in data access, we have the ability to block ads or cookies but then we get our access to information blocked so we don’t. So it is not enough to address personal data, we have to address public data as well.
The answer for public data is the same as personal data, we need to decouple application software from the data to regain control and we need some sort of a data commons. There is a huge wealth of data on the internet right now that is not personal data but it shouldn’t be corporate data either, it is our information that we have produced collaboratively over many years. If we are ever going to move towards an open information system with concentric circles and knowledge bridges and collaboration open to everyone, we are going to have to achieve this, off a corporate web platform, so let’s look at our data types again.
Personality focused we don’t really need to look at, we’ve got that covered. The goal in a personality focused platform is promotion of personalities (or brands), so official blue checks and followers assembled around social media reality shows. Social media is almost universally personality focused and that is why social media is so frustrating for anyone attempting to collaborate around information.
With Information focused data, the goal is research, auditing and dissemination of information. At best we can use Wikipedia, mainstream media sometimes and specialized research platforms. There is a huge need for information centred solutions, especially when you consider how many people are trying to facilitate this work on personality focused social media and how frustrating this is. Social media was created in a time when we left all information focused work to the experts, but especially twitter immediately became a place where everyone got involved and tried to create concentric circles of auditing, feedback and amplification, but because it is focused around personalities instead of information it is forever frustrating for this use.
Public data. The goal here is freedom from censorship or other deletion or modification. So the dead opposite of what should be the goals for personal data and if someone is offering you the solution to both on one platform, run as fast as you can. Most applications with a primary goal of making data public use peer to peer with or without blockchain, or censorship resilient platforms of some sort. It is very easy to put up public data in a very resilient and even semi-immutable way on a peer to peer system.
The problem is, if you combine this need with Broadcasting we have an added goal of wide dissemination. You can put information up, but getting a lot of people to find it is difficult unless traditionally you have some sort of index that will search through this data and offer some sort of centralized list. The last time someone did that on a large scale they called it Google. As soon as you have a centralized index like that, your data can be as decentralized as you like, all that means is you get to pay for hosting. If you still can’t be found except by going through the indexing server then we still have a problem of centralization. There are other methods of finding each other, but with other issues, which we’ll get to under collaboration.
Broadcasting is also where we get too much misinformation, spam, noise, confusion, seductive coercion, all those things we talked about earlier. The way many information producers and politicians, and sadly some regulatory bodies, want to tackle this is to attach DRM at the data level with the goal of preventing copying or facilitating built in micro-payments. This is again an attempt to take us back to that highly regulated structure that we already burned the bridge from and the implications in this case are too seriously dystopian for me to even start to get into here.
If we want a world where the general public is both participating in and trusts expert information – and we do, the lack of an informed public is the biggest issue facing us today – we need to get away from this idea that anyone is going to own information or the access to it. Information has to be a basic human right for all, it is our key to understanding our world. There is no point in being able to vote if we don’t understand what we are voting for.
Another point we have to deal with for public data is the typical peer to peer application is Read only for fairly obvious reasons. If you want to design a Collaborative platform that can scale, your concerns are going to be things like latency compensation, optimistic UI, speed, and the ability for multiple simultaneous editors. All these goals of a seamless collaborative front end performance do not correlate with a back end trying to serve peer to peer data. So broadcasting collaborative public data is a tough one.
Then we have the whole structural issue. A lot of people feel the solution to the data mining wells we saw earlier is federation or a form of decentralization that allows everyone to run their own instance of an application. First of all, we can all stand up our own wikis but Wikipedia exists, centralization happens. Second, the goal here is to escape dependency on one server or platform, but most of these solutions just create multiple little centralized servers or platforms, each with their own tyrannical or benevolent admins. They also make your data impossible to delete if they are linked to other instances and by eliminating central control they also eliminate central responsibility that you can complain to.
These alternatives are usually addressing technical issues and ignoring the personal ones. A microblogging instance, a sub-reddit and an irc channel are all technically very different but they all feel very alike and they are all trying to be all things to all people. Their users do not have control of the data, but it isn’t truly public either. They aren’t the right choice for private messaging, but neither are they the best choice for public broadcasting. They are personality focused and hopeless for information gathering but they are not a good celebrity vehicle either. They are decentralized by server (theoretically) but the data is not decoupled from software. They don’t support mass collaboration and they create thought bubbles where outside opinions aren’t welcomed.
So Decoupled data is where I think we need to go before anything to handle all the very different and frequently opposing requirements of these different types of information. The goal here is freedom from corporate ownership of data, freedom from software dependency, data reusability and versatility of use. Data is separated from application software and is agnostic to what applications are used to access it. For this we need a universal database which is why I am working on that.
Our greatest need is for a collaborative information commons, for open journalism, for open science, and just for fun. We need a place where the data is not personal data but it is not corporate data either. We need a place where the application software is decoupled from the data but the data is all still linked. And I really believe that this isn’t a “here is a great marketing opportunity” need it is a “will we avoid human extinction” need, we are completely programmed by the information we receive and if we want to avoid errors on a massive scale we need to provide our new mass movements with accurate information that they can trust.
Now we have covered what we need and why we need it, all we have to is design it with the technology available to us today.
We need a set of core data objects to be in a public data commons. These are the objects that link all of our information together. In my research with existing applications, there are five types of data object that we deal with which are Person, Event, Organization, Idea and Thing. In addition to this there are media objects which we use as sources for our information. So our public, universally accessible, read only, data consists of these objects.
We also have classification standards of different types of these data objects and the possible relationships between them. Again, anyone can create classification trees but once they are used by a third party they can’t be deleted or modified. Once you share an idea you can’t delete it from anyone else’s brain, it is now commons data.
Universal data objects are pretty meaningless if we don’t actually say anything about them. So constellations are a collaborative space where we establish relationships between data objects, link media sources to support the relationships and classify data objects and their relationships. This is our own autonomous space but if you click on a universal data object it will show you all the constellations that have used that data object. If you clicked on an event node for this conference, it could show a constellation for all free software conferences this year, all software conferences in France, all events in St Etienne in July, any constellation that included this event node would be listed. So even though this is a collaborative space which allows you to decide who you want to work with, the results are transparent and easily found by anyone looking at any topics that you’ve referenced.
Which is nice except we really don’t want to see all the data on the Internet. Neither do we want to leave it up to a centralized index what we see, so we need a trust network to help us filter spam and people we don’t find very knowledgeable and that trust network needs to be under our control. A trust network means if we set our search to 0 degrees of trust we will only see data that we personally have explicitly trusted. If we set it to one degree we will see data trusted by those we trust and so on. This is great for those people who say they want open science and open knowledge but really they are uncomfortable without official accreditation. They can filter their own information by whatever accreditation they choose, but they can’t stop the other information from existing and they can’t stop anyone else from seeing it.
This also brings mass collaboration back because we don’t have to personally know everyone we are working with if we are careful with our trust network. If someone sabotages a work project, obviously they are going to be untrusted very quickly by whoever brought them in or that person will be untrusted themselves, but there is no need to reach consensus over who is or isn’t trustworthy and assign them a blue check, we all decide for ourselves whether someone else’s network is worth linking to our own.
So now we have all of this information in a data commons which can be linked together and sourced, so we have transparency and multiple viewpoints. No one can create a thought bubble and filter out information but they can choose not to see it themselves or work with it if their network deems it untrustworthy.
So now we have broken everything up and we no longer have a web page or an app, we have an ecosystem. At the bottom we have a universal data commons of public data which contains all of our core data objects. Also universal are the classification trees which data analysts can create to help us provide more meaning and classification standards. Then we have our collaborative space where researchers, journalists, scientists, lawmakers, organizers, or anyone else can create meaningful information from all this data without harassment from spam but with full transparency to the public. And we have our personal trust networks where if we choose, we can set filters on what we see.
Now you can search, merge, and filter that data to get only the information you need. Suppose you want a taxi driver. You can merge taxi driver collective constellations, you can search for ones in your area and then you can filter them within two degrees of your trust network. Then you can download that read only galaxy onto your phone, download an app that shows you which of them are near and pays them. And we just took the last sixty billion dollars worth of value from Uber and put local control back with taxi driver collectives. Software application become simply that, easily replaceable applications which provide some functionality such as paying a taxi driver or buying a product. They have no control over data any more and they can be easily replaced.
Applications
Instead of transient news, new information is added to a permanent knowledge repository so it encourages deeper research over trivial updates. There is no need to cut and paste the same news repeatedly if it is all linked. We can have more fluid collaboration between journalists because they retain autonomy and credit for their own work but their research is automatically linked with everyone working on the same topic and it can be combined in galaxies. Because the data is in a usable format instead of just wall of text articles, we can import it to other applications and combine and filter it to create more information. So we get far deeper meaning and more context and usability and collaboration from the same research effort.
Organizations can use constellations and galaxies for dynamic reorganization. The responsible person can change at the constellation level and the change will be instantly reflected in all associated galaxies. It is also easy to plug in collaborative apps at the galaxy or the constellation levels to allow groups to work without outside noise but remain completely transparent to the public.
Rather than relying on site reviews and trust algorithms we can rely on our own personal trust networks for recommendations. Local or specialized merchants can create constellations to link each other together in a trust network as well, adding another local layer of accountability and control over industry and the ability to allow regional diversity for local laws or customs.
Instead of relying on NGOs, charities and non-profits, we can use our own trust networks to provide aid directly where it is needed and receive feedback directly from those receiving aid.
We can establish direct trade relationships between communities which will allow consumers to see the immediate impact of our trade choices.
Instead of a closed circle of academia in which paper citations can be reflections of power or reciprocity, Idea nodes can be set up around any topic and all contributions heard.
Principles of a society from constitutions and bills of rights can be easily accessible for every member of society and we can then ensure that all law in that society flows naturally from the accepted root principles. It is also possible to use accepted principles to choose association, for instance to refuse trade with a corporation that refuses to accept certain environmental or human rights practices.
With a universal data commons we can collaborate effectively and intelligently and solve the problems we are facing with far greater speed and accuracy. We can all be much better informed and able to easily see the original sources and all related information on a subject from all perspectives. This will provide us with the ability to be self correcting, even in our mass movements. We can have auto-coercion.
The Internet is being redesigned. This is a moment when we urgently need to design our own Charter of the Forest and establish our rights around our commons information. We had this moment before when the Internet first appeared and it seemed destined to become a corporate controlled platform and we made possibly the best decision in our history by having the Internet be a global commons, which is now recognized as a universal human right, but the only reason access to the Internet is important is because it provides access to information. The only reason freedom of speech is important it it allows us to transmit information. We need to recognize information itself as a universal human right and write code that facilitates that. I think I’d better stop here so there is hopefully some time for questions but if anyone is interested in this project, or you know someone who may be interested with this project, please contact me.
When a baby is born, they are assigned a gender, a generation, an ethnicity, a citizenship and a health rating. They are assigned a class by the neighbourhood, professions and income bracket of their parents. As children, they are sent to educational institutions where professionals examine and categorize them every day. Instead of providing sufficient teachers and adequate training and options to manage diversity in schools, many governments now provide extra funding only after schools have classified educational difficulties in the students. The underfunded schools are motivated in this way to classify as many students as possible with the preferred learning disabilities so they can be streamed into special programs and used as product by the pharmaceutical industry. Students who escape this are streamed into narrower and narrower paths towards their future assigned roles.
The sectarianism initiated at birth intensifies throughout adolescence until teenagers are expected to spend all of their time worried about what they will become. When they finally attain adulthood, they will be confident in their assertion of what they are: professional, unemployed, educated, ignorant, married, single, a success or a failure. These classifications are added to the ones they received at birth, and then still more. They will become liberal, conservative or apolitical, gay, straight, or asexual, criminal or law abiding, addicted or not. They may belong to churches or fraternities or professional groups. Simply losing a physical object can cause them to drop into the bottom class, and become part of the homeless. They are not simply the same people without homes, the loss of an object changes their class identity and who and what the world sees them as.
Pundits of media and academia will all scramble to classify them further, to be the first to coin a new category. They will become hippies or yuppies or NEETs, emos or hipsters or millenials. They will be set against each other as proletariat and bourgeosie then further excluded as lumpenproles and petit-bourgeousie. They will submit to divisions as binary as black and white, to subdivisions so detailed they require acronyms like WOC, to gender and sexual orientation coalitions that include half the alphabet and an asterisk. They will probably enter online thought bubbles of gaming or social media. They will begin to classify themselves and others by opinion, as SJWs and MRAs, as fascists and anti-fascists and as every hyphenated ideology imaginable. In the obsession over group affiliation, actions and ideas are completely lost. People are accepted or shunned by entire category, not individual actions and ideas.
Societal institutions relate to each person by their assigned category. Legal systems and media will call some people in countries they weren’t born into expats and others immigrants or illegals leading to vastly different treatment for the same situation. The same actions are crimes or not depending on social standing and whether or not the perpetrator is an agent of the state. Murder is unlawful killing. The law only objects when the lower classes kill, so killing is not murder if it is by police, militaries, judges and presidents. Taking property is only stealing for the lower classes who don’t write property laws and disobeying the rules is only a problem for those not making them. Credit cards, banking institutions and so many others pay the wealthy and charge the poor for the same services. People can be forbidden freedom of movement based on citizenship or refused the right to survival income based on education. These class based differences which result in everything from lifelong misery to death are far more easily accepted if they can be abstracted by categorization.
The historical creation of difference between religions from the same culture, coloured by the same ancient myths, who accept the same texts as authority, pray to the same god and preach the same morality, helped to divide international populations for exploitation by the trade economy. The idea that these are three or more different religions instead of three sects of the same religion is a stretch. When compared with religions from completely different regions, it is apparent that these three ought to be considered one. It is only through a history written from the perspective of practitioners of these/this religion(s) that the differences were inflated to justify separate labels. Language was eventually used to separate the religion(s), with Hebrew common for Jewish texts, Latin for Christian and Arabic for Islam but all texts were still available in all the regional languages and the name of god is the same and prayers are very similar in the same languages. The inflated differences under this religion were combined with academic depiction of all other religions on earth as cults or in some way not real religions. The definition of a religion (vs a cult) usually includes qualifiers that limit religions to only sects of this one religion. Common qualifiers for a religion are a belief in God, a formalized hierarchical structure and written religious texts. This has left most of the world under the moral directive of one religion, that of the Silk Road.
Left to right: Christian woman, Jewish women, Muslim woman
Even the surface differences pointed to today in different practices of the trade route religion are really not different. The fashion of the time and place where all of these religions were born dictated very similar dress and that regional dress became encoded in the religious texts as the proper form of dress. Islamic, Christian and Jewish faiths all dictated that women should cover their hair and women in the devout sects of all three major religions still cover their heads in a very similar manner. As well as the more traditional sects of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, the most permissive Christian churches still required women to wear hats in the 1960s, Christians still veil at religiously significant events like funerals and weddings and both traditional nuns and Mary are always depicted in head coverings. Despite this, and the fact that many Muslim women, especially in the west, do not cover their heads and many Christians and Jews, especially in the Middle East, still do, popular sentiment has decided to associate head covering with Islam. An idea that most people’s grandmothers or any but the most narrow experience could tell them was certainly not unique to Islam has been used to persecute Muslim women. Predictably, head covering in the United States then became a cultural property of only Muslims, which would ignite a fury of Medium blogs if worn by anyone else.
The Indo-European trade route religion(s) followed prophets who looked at the same culture in roughly the same era and provided guidance for how to make that culture more humane. Instead of taking the spirit of those prophets and applying their same humanitarian impulses to our societies today, some people use these religious texts to demand a return to the same societies these prophets were trying to lead people out of. The message of all of the prophets was one of evolution, not regression or violent restriction of evolution. After two millennia or so, either the spirit must be followed ahead of the texts or this religion(s) is no longer useful. This religion(s) gained huge followings along the trade routes because of the hope it gave of something better than the life that was experienced there. Demands that all societies return to the same patriarchal trade cultures that these prophets provided guidance away from is in opposition to the religions these demands emanate from.
The patriarchal model itself was a symptom of the trade routes. International trade created a very dangerous time and place where strangers were more likely to be a slave raid than potential friends. A patriarchal structure provided an outer shell to protect the weaker members of society even while it also gave the patriarch ownership over those weaker members. A patriarch could sell a wife or child to pay off debt, but he was also responsible for the survival of the entire extended clan. Women and men had extremely defined roles. Women could not usually make leadership decisions but women were also not expected to risk danger by meeting with strangers and the men arranged all travel, alliances, war and other dangerous social activity. Women were frequently sold or stolen as slaves or in marriage, but so were men and boys and the boys were often castrated, a horrific and barbarous practice with a survival rate of possibly ten percent. To depict such a system as simply one in which men oppressed women is incorrect, as is any suggestion that it proves men are superior to women.
Patriarchy was a horrific structure, necessitated by the world created by the trade routes. Gender was invented as a set of social norms divided between the classes of men and women. The primary features of gender supported the roles assigned to men and women. Men were to be brave, powerful, and in control. Women were to be loving, giving and submissive. Women were constrained by a gender designed for lifegivers and caregivers and men were coerced into a gender designed for killers and protectors. Today, women are as able to be protectors as men, men are have as much right to be caregivers as women, and any justification of a patriarchal structure is obsolete. The trade route prophets were using the culture that existed in their time and place as reference. Patriarchy is a cultural phenomenon, not a moral or religious ideal. The part of patriarchy that remains morally relevant is the fact that society needs lifegivers, caregivers and protectors. In these days of less dangerous societies, birth control and weapons which do not rely on strength, the roles remain but are no longer gendered or exclusive. In times and places not on the major trade routes, men and women shared these roles. That is our human impulse in societies not being violently coerced.
The scientific obsession with human categorization attempted to justify a stratified society without religion. Categorization imposes an abstract construct based on perspective. It is not scientific fact. Archaeology and DNA continue to find almost no differences between nations. Both knowledge exchange and genetic mixing are shown more clearly with every archaeological find around the world. The ancient mixing of migrant Homo Sapiens with Neandertals and Denisovans is still used as an excuse for racism despite the fact that “the greatest genetic diversity is still found within sub-Saharan Africa” where this mixing would indicate the least.i The caucasian Tarim mummies in China, dating from as early as 1800 BCE, have caused discomfort both in China and outside. The Chinese state, like many other nations that have current land claims to establish, prefers a history of an isolated empire which developed entirely by itself to a history of near constant global trade and migration. A simple archaeological find is also made politically complex by the idea of citizenship. The Chinese Uyghers have taken to calling themselves the caucasian Chinese in a fight against the Chinese state’s policy of considering them recent immigrants. Evidence that Polynesians and others may have landed in the Americas long ago is also politically distasteful to some who feel threatened by a more complex view of history and are trying to establish national land claims. Rights which depend on defective categorization of humans are put in jeopardy by more accurate information. Those rights should never have been dependent on these categories in the first place.
While differences between sexes are being denied and attempts are made to eradicate them, differences between ethnicities are being exaggerated and attempts are made to manufacture them. With no scientific basis for race and no correlating national identities, there is not much to go on. People around the world look extremely similar. Ethnicity is not separated along lines of physical appearance and neither is it any longer separated by location or even ancestry which is too mixed to divide neatly. Neither is there any kind of a rational spectrum in appearance. Melanesian blondes have blonde hair with very dark skin and black Irish have black hair with very pale skin and the curliest hair is found at both ends of the skin tone spectrum. Claiming different cultures for people frequently raised in the same neighbourhoods or even families is beyond ridiculous. Claiming a similar heritage based on appearance is factually incorrect. While race was created for class segregation, that is no longer a reliable grouping either. Religious groupings created systems of beliefs which turned into laws which separated each other but race has not even that to go on. Groupings by so-called race are solely political.
Race was created primarily as a way to easily assign ingroup or outgroup status by class within societies. In the earliest stratified societies, it was customary to wear distinguishing clothing, jewelery or tattoos to easily identify class. With the spread of the international slave trade, ethnic appearance was used instead. The Dutch East India company and many others transported slaves back and forth from India, Southeast Asia and Africa, resulting in slave populations which had no community ties to defend them and were a highly visible class. Not only were the traders and purchasers able to dehumanize these slaves as an ethnic outgroup, the local populations saw them as an outgroup as well. The imposition of class barriers was far easier when a class could not hide from their own physical appearance, whether that was sexual or ethnic appearance.
The imposition of ingroups and outgroups by class is a powerful construct with multi-generational effects. In most of Africa, the word racism is usually replaced by tribalism but it frequently relates to class as well. Former slave and slave owner classes are as divided in Africa as they are in the rest of the world, whether the cause is depicted as racism or tribalism. Some people descended from the Incan empire still treat those descended from former slave tribes as an inferior outgroup and they are also still relatively economically disadvantaged. The Dominican Republic deports its low income workers by deporting Dominicans of Haitian descent. Once race and gender have been established, their use becomes a shorthand meme to remind people of who their outgroups are, even when no one remembers the reason. Race and gender have become a hereditary slave collar.
Despite the endless classifying of people, ostensibly and paradoxically in order to combat sectarianism, bigotry by class is not only tolerated, it is inherent in every institution. Every institution from education to the economy would collapse without classism. It is the height of hypocrisy for legal systems to claim to have laws against bigotry and hate crimes when the entire legal system is institutionalized bigotry and hate by class. Legal systems which deny the poor the basic essentials of life and condemn people of all ages to misery based on class are built on hate. Any laws which pretend to protect people based on gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity are a distraction from this foundational sectarianism.
Gender and race have a correlation with class, they are not a cause of class. Removing gender and race will have no impact on class divisions. Promoting gender and race will strengthen both sectarian and class divisions.
If women as lifegivers and social caregivers are under threat and indigenous people as ecosystem caregivers are also under threat, the most persecuted people on earth are indigenous women. In Canada, 1200 to 4232 aboriginal women have gone missing or been murdered since 1980ii. Canada’s former Prime Minister told the media “it isn’t really high on our radar.” Particularly in formerly matriarchal nations, the degradation of indigenous women and their social invisibility is necessary to ensure they do not regain or remember their former power. In most nations, from Central America’s Caravan of Missing Migrants to Argentina’s Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo, to Nigeria’s Bring Back Our Girls, it is the mothers and grandmothers who have formed the resistance movements against the ongoing genocides.
Violence against women has little to do with gender relationships or sex and everything to do with class. When someone destroys another human’s intestines with a metal rod and throws them from a moving bus with their intestines falling out, as in the The 2012 Delhi gang rape case, it is not because the male to female ratio in India is out of balance or because Bollywood encourages men to think of sex. This is murder, brutality and sadism, and it is the kind of violence applied to outgroups. The same violence has been seen around the world towards ethnic groups who have had roles forced upon them that the trade economy teaches contempt for.
The reason women were and are persecuted is their ability to give birth and their assigned role as the essential but unpaid labour in society ruled by trade economy. The reason indigenous people were and are persecuted is their occupation of land and resistance to exploitation of that land. Solutions that simply offer compensation to persecuted groups within the paradigm of their persecution do nothing to shift the balance of power away from the merchant class and back to society. Solutions based on ethnicity and gender do nothing to protect the roles which were the actual reason for persecution.
In the fight to regain their power, women and indigenous nations have lost themselves. The personal stories and professional pride of women have been erased, their own bodies have been used to enslave them and their economic and social relationships are removed from the structure we live in. The only current path to autonomy for women is to join the trade economy and the primary path to the trade economy is through mind and body altering pharmaceuticals, politicized access to health services and rejection of lifegiving and caregiving roles. Indigenous nations have been made to prove their history and genetic purity in international courts in order to qualify for indigenous legal rights such as free, prior, informed consent to exploitation of their land. The path to autonomy for indigenous nations is through racism, exaggerated and purified history and permission to exist accorded by ancient history and forbidden evolution.
Allowing women and indigenous people media attention only when they accept corporate ideology ensures their messages in other roles are not heard. Lifegiving and caregiving are social roles, not genders or races. Diverting attention to how many female or ethnically indigenous people are represented in corporate roles distracts from all the lifegivers and caregivers who are not being heard and replaces the urgent conversations we are not having about the caregiving roles being vacated by women and indigenous people. Demanding roles for women and formerly indigenous people in the ponzi schemes of power supports and upholds those ponzi schemes and drains resistance movements.
Gender and race are social constructs and exist on a spectrum. Until we can be partly pregnant, the roles we fulfill do not. The founder of Y-combinator, the source of the most funding and influential advice for tech startups, did not tell startup founders to not hire people wearing dresses and makeup. He told them they would be crazy to hire anyone capable of giving birth.iii He did not specify a point on the spectrum of relative maleness called male to female or man to woman, he specified lifegivers, those with uteruses who may one day use them, those with bodies potentially capable of growing a second autonomous human body inside of them, giving birth to it and then nursing it and those who society expects may do that. All the neo-pronouns and non-binary genders in the world are not going to change this bigotry against role.
Alongside the antipathy to real diversity, fake or surface diversity has become a lucrative corporate product. Corporations which refuse to respect the earth or allow the safe and supportive communities required for caregiving, congratulate themselves for hiring women and people whose ancestors are from diverse regions. Indigenous people who run their own mining corporations and are hailed as a great success in gaining indigenous rights are equivalent to women who work for corporations as a strike for feminism. Replacing a culture that respected the land with a culture reduced to blankets, beads and suspect DNA is like replacing lifegiving and caregiving with the birth control pill and calling it a success for maternal rights. If autonomy is solely used to give more people the ability to act exactly like the merchant class, it does not support the diversity of roles we need. A destructive mine is a destructive mine no matter who profits from it and there is no community support for lifegiving and caregiving whether some women are able to opt out of it or not. Instead of begging legal and economic permission to act as ecosystem and community caregivers based on DNA, the roles of ecosystem and community caregivers and protectors must be recognized and empowered. Instead of standing outside begging for admittance to power, lifegivers, caregivers and protectors need to reclaim their own power, on their own terms. Instead of fighting for all to join an economy rewarding those who serve the powerful, we need to design one rewarding those who serve society and our ecosystems.
The solution to the class war is not to be found in some binary division between proletariat and bourgeoisie and a revolution which flips the two. The proletariat and the bourgeoisie were never as clear cut as depicted and they long ago transformed into new social roles. Instead of a subordinate or dominant peasantry, we need interlocking nations of ecosystem and community caregivers and protectors. Instead of a class of powerful scientists, we need open and transparent epistemic communities. Instead of gatekeeping and hoarding of knowledge by academia, we need an organic ecosystem of auditers, knowledge bridges and amplifiers of information from epistemic communities. Instead of roles assigned and protected by ethnicity or gender, we need free choice to seek the work most fulfilling to each of us. Instead of a hierarchical valuation of those roles, we need equivalence.
Identity politics requires an acceptance of a very simplistic history where group affiliation is pure and all of history has good guys on one side and bad guys on the other. Identitarians teach that if humanity can be divided and we compensate the good guys, our conflicts will be over because we will have equality. We don’t need equality. We need diversity, supported by equivalence. Our diversity is necessary, not in a variety of shades and genders performing the same roles but in a great diversity of roles, each open to all regardless of skin tone or gender. We also need equivalence for diversity of ability, where the great spectrum of aptitude encompassed by humanity results in a great diversity of roles, not a stratified system of valuation.
The violence against both women and indigenous people is caused by society’s contempt for the roles they are cast in or perceived to represent. The answer to this violence is not to demand equality for all performing the same destructive roles for the trade economy. The answer is to demand respect and widespread acceptance of the lifegiving and caregiving roles so desperately needed and encourage these roles for all. The violence directed against people for the social constructs of gender and race are not even in the same world as the violence directed at them as caregivers and protectors, no matter how much identity politics wants to conflate the two. Genocides have been committed the world over to clear populations off of land for industry or competing groups. The violence against people based on role will stop when the roles of lifegiving and caregiving are recognized and accorded the approval of the whole society. Violence against people based on the social constructs of race and gender will only be resolved by abolishing race and gender, which will never happen while people are still profiting from these divisions.
Diversity is not attained solely by allowing broader spectrums of social constructs such as gender or race in the same corporate roles. Diversity must also allow equivalent social acceptance for the variety of roles required in a healthy society.
“In 1968 people like Habermas, Marcuse, and Roszak invited us to see the role of scientific rationality in the maintenance of the existing social order and to examine critically whether that was the role which we wished expertise to play…. On the whole, we failed. … What was just about escapable then seems inescapable now.” – Robert Young, 1984i
The discouragement of those who have been in the trenches of the radical science movement for over half a century is understandable. Accepting defeat is not an option, however. Society without science, and without an effective way to integrate epistemic communities, will always be a society dissociated and easily controlled. Society with integrated scientific and epistemic communities may even yet save itself.
For years, science fiction writers and scientists have been enthralled with the idea of a technological singularity. They have looked forward to a day when technology will be beyond the scope of human understanding and artificial intelligence will be programming itself. Instead, we have reached a societal singularity where no one can understand every aspect of society which affects them We need to collaborate with others to create or develop products and 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. We need to somehow create nuanced and detailed information we can trust and coordinate goals with people we will never speak to.. Our societies are all connected now at some level with all of the other communities in the world, including even uncontacted tribes. This singularity is both unacknowledged and a core part of our societal functioning (and malfunctioning). Not only knowledge based industries but every level of governance depends on our management of communication and trust. The lack of integration between knowledge and the public is crippling our progress.
Representative governance and both the Great Man and the identitarian views of history present all human interaction as personality based. If there are community conflicts, our institutions assume the problem is one of personality management which can be solved by law enforcement. If social issues aren’t addressed, representative democracy assumes a demographic is under represented. Collaboration in a personality based system can only be by authority or consensus. Most workers do not enjoy authoritarian systems as they lose autonomy, mastery and creative control over their own work and rule is by coercion, not choice. Consensus is ideal for small, local, like-minded affinity groups, but it only works in groups of under twenty-five people, preferably two to eight. Consensus is not useful for large scale collaboration or collaboration that is separated by communication barriers or over time.
Neither knowledge based industries nor governance ought to be personality based and neither can operate effectively in that way. The goal of all knowledge industries, including governance, is to stimulate the public to action. The only effective and voluntary large scale method of action based collaboration is stigmergy1 and stigmergic action follows ideas, not personalities. Since knowledge industries want to trigger stigmergic actions, they ought to be focused on ideas.
Currently, knowledge communities act like closed, internationally linked, affinity groups at a level of expertise not accessible to the general public. Affinity groups are personality based and allow expertise to be held by gatekeepers controlling information flow between groups. While local, self-governing, affinity groups should have the ultimate authority of acceptance or rejection of ideas, they all need access to the expertise of international epistemic communities in order to make the choices which are right for them. A structure which allows gatekeepers to control information flow will create both demagogues and an easily manipulated public. Epistemic communities that develop and audit ideas should use transparent and permeable concentric circles to integrate ideas from the epistemic communities directly with the public.
In a governance context this means we won’t be electing personalities, we will be electing ideas. We won’t have representatives for groups of people, we will have concentric circles around ideas.
Academic and scientific journals were created so that everyone would publish and build off of each others findings, guiding stigmergic action. In reality, most research is not open source, it is frequently corporate IP property and it does not allow permissive copyright or even access. Outside contributions and auditing is not rewarded or even allowed. Science and academia are very far from acting as concentric circles integrating ideas with wider society. Their closed communities allow their work to be easily controlled by politicians and industry and very little stigmergic action results from it. Without stigmergy, their progress is not nearly what it could be. Science and academia require knowledge bridges, transparency and free information if they are going to truly act as epistemic communities for us all and stimulate mass action.
Stigmergy is a method of collaboration for mass movements, not organizations. The civil rights movement in the United States was a stigmergic movement which retained its clarity through successive generations because it set specific goals in each cycle, whether that was to end slavery, end segregation, or end police violence. When feminism meant fighting for the vote and legal personhood it also had a clear goal and was also a stigmergic mass movement, but second wave feminism allowed its goals to become very loose. Because there wasn’t a clear goal, second wave feminism 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. When feminism stopped following ideas, it stopped being a stigmergic movement and became a competitive, personality driven organization which then became completely divided, as is typical. Personality based organizations do not scale.
Stigmergy is made up of collaborative actions, not identitarian organizations or people. All identity politics results in personality based organizations which is why so many resistance movements, especially in the United States, collapse due to infighting. If mass movements rallied to stop rape, or street executions by police, or contamination of water, they would be very widely supported and unstoppable. Personality based organizations claiming victimhood as the exclusive product of one identity group have succeeded in stopping mass movements around all of these these stigmergic goals.
Stigmergy can scale to an entire population if support for an idea is unanimous and identity politics is not used to drive people away. Because stigmergy follows ideas, ideas are as important in stigmergy as personality management is in organizations. The single biggest factor for whether or not someone will participate in a stigmergic action is whether they are sure of the idea behind it. Whether it affects them, or if its simple to grasp or easy or even safe to do matters very little compared to their belief in the goal. This means the easiest way for someone to prevent action is to sow doubt in the goal. Finding the information we need for conviction in our goals in the collaborative structures we use today is not easy.
Most of the tools we have to help mass communication simulate direct democracy and look for popular ideas, the most shares and the most readers. 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.ii The more easily understood and the less challenging the message, the wider its appeal will be. 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. We need both expert and diverse knowledge. 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 again the exact opposite of what we ought to be doing. This is what direct, representative and liquid democracy do however, so of course it is also what the tools for democracy have been doing. We have tools for voting, tools that are very useful to find out what a population thinks and tools that are great for discussing things in affinity groups and coming to consensus, but we need to also go to where 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 people qualified to understand them both to allow diversity of ideas and to prevent the process from being dominated by celebrities without the expertise required. 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, like we have now. 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 findings will be audited, amplified and explained to the general public by outer circles. Concentric circles 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 an idea receives no amplification, it is just an idea that goes nowhere.
“I wonder if the world is full of middle-aged people still waiting for their peers to take in the full range, depth, subtlety, and profundity of their work.” – Robert Youngiii
With knowledge bridges, everyone does not need personal expertise on every aspect of society. As long as there is a transparent concentric circle, everyone can see the activity and get feedback if necessary. If there are a lot of people auditing and a lot of discussion and if the observers trust some of the people in these circles, they can trust the process and the ideas. 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. This happens increasingly if users lose trust and they realize they need to start auditing a circle.
The vast majority of scientific and academic work is ignored as the public has no access or understanding and the scientific community has no time to examine everything. With a wider circle of auditors, outside the community of competitive peers, this work would not all be lost. Instead of doctors ignoring their patients for the latest paper from their colleagues or funding from the powerful, knowledge bridges would encourage community driven knowledge and research. Psychologists should not have the sole authority to decide what is normative. Anti-social or social acts should be decided by the society itself. Pharmaceutical industries and medical professionals cannot be allowed to ignore the lived experience of groups such as the Hearing Voices Network and Aphrodite Women’s Health forum. Science, even where it uses isolation, must also be tested as a part of the whole, and even where it relies on peer review, must be fully open to review and contribution by the wider society.
Science will tell us that the population of an isolated community has shrunk 3.5 centimetres in the last century. If they asked the people in the village, they may hear that one man was 5’4” and had 27 children and almost the entire town are now his direct descendants, but in today’s structure they rarely ask. Science will tell us that a woman died of a heart attack. Her village could tell us that she died of a broken heart because her son died. Science tells us how, but without the village, we will never understand why. Science today is not asking the village. They are too busy telling everyone that people can’t die of a broken heart and sneering at superstitious villagers. As Paul Richards outlines in Ebola: How a People’s Science Helped End an Epidemic, ebola was not being spread by eating wild meat as the international experts claimed. Villagers noticed it was the people who attended funerals who contracted the disease and adjusted their behaviours more effectively on their own. If the international epistemic community studying ebola had been communicating with the local affinity groups dealing with ebola, they all would have been a lot more effective. Instead of providing a one way flow of near useless information, researchers could have been acting as an integrated epistemic community and a valuable resource.
No one is or should be more afraid of the mob, of mob norms and mob decisions, than those outcast on the fringes. For those accepted into the scientific community, it is frequently the first social gathering where they can share their knowledge and interests and the only place they can speak freely with others at their level of knowledge on their topic of interest. If they guard the borders of their nation it is not solely from xenophobia. Without isolation from the public, scientists and other specialists have a very valid fear that they would no longer be permitted to work. The marauding hordes which some fear would overrun science and persecute a scientific minority do pose a very existential threat. With no society which understands their work, scientists would be marginalized, their social approval stolen by demagogues and their work misunderstood or lost. In a larger community, all would demand equal and democratic amplification on topics far beyond their understanding. The wider public will always be resentful of any research support they see as self indulgent and this resentment will be used politically. Particularly where there is no public access or obvious public merit, the public will never willingly fund science or elite knowledge. When information is controlled by demagogues, what is important loses to what is popular.
When left out in isolation, user groups can be as guilty of group narcissism as the scientists they criticize. As psychoanalysts looked to parenting as the cause of scizophrenia and other illnesses as part of their vilification of mothers, feminists seized anorexia nervosa and anorexia bulimia as evidence of the body shaming culture women and girls lived in. The physical areas of investigation such as hypoglycaemia and associated yeast infections and digestive issues were spurned as reams of paper and mainstream media was filled on this far more lucrative and politically satisfying line of inquiry.iv Any scientific finding that endorses popular bias will receive far more media attention, approbation and funding than that which discredits popular bias. Scientific or academic findings which strengthen identitarian groups will be spread and encouraged by those identitarian groups. Even science likes being appreciated and will respond to public acclaim. Wider community influences on science must guard against the biases of scientists, not promote their own. Science and all specialized study requires autonomy from popularity. Complete transparency is required so media does not selectively report and science does not selectively research in response to political pressure.
Any specialist epistemic community cannot produce any work of value if they are expected to be in constant communication with people at a level of understanding far below their own. Neither can they produce work if they are fending off political attacks by demagogues. Communication should not be the full responsibility of experts. The current demand for people in knowledge industries to go on speaking tours, delivering sound bites like performing monkeys, is a waste of their expertise and forced crowd pleasing for survival. Epistemic communities should be allowed to work and to communicate only when they choose, to whom they choose.
While every epistemic community requires a quiet place to discuss work with those at a similar level of understanding, and no expert should be required to submit themselves to the “lol. Fake news.” level of Internet discussion, their work should be both completely transparent and accessible for others to discuss and build on. Their 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. In addition, the epistemic communities themselves must be completely permeable to anyone with valuable input. It is only by allowing oppositional thought and transparent auditing that expert communities can protect their ideas from being blocked by uninformed demagogues.
Popular instances of political demagogues overthrowing expert recommendations rely on simple sabotage. The opponents to the Colombia peace deal and Brexit had no better alternatives devised, any more than most politicians seeking election have reasonable platforms. Platforms are less and less a focus in elections in any case, as media and public attention is taken over by discrediting attacks instead of alternative solutions. Science cannot be allowed to be discredited by ignorant demagogues. Like free software, existing science should only be opposed by alternative theory which can meet the same standards of scientific rigour. Science cannot prove that vaccinations are safe, so vaccine safety should only be opposed by those who can prove they are not. It is only possible for science to be opposed by worthy rebuttals if it is within the power of everyone to make worthy rebuttals, if their work is also reviewed and they have the access required to audit and investigate.
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, and 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 is how people are learning to code. Good ideas from forum discussions can be read and possibly implemented by the developers as well. Transparency goes both ways.
Open source software projects 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, input, 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. This means existing ideas can only be opposed by another fully developed, open and transparent epistemic community which also must be audited by knowledge bridges. They can’t be attacked just by demagogues and rhetoric. They 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. This is only possible if the information is free for anyone to use or modify. Ownership of ideas is in complete opposition to both stigmergy and concentric circles, so it is in complete opposition to rapid progress, finding the best solutions and self governance.
The open software movement has driven most technology based fields into a flat and accessible relationship with the public and social media has done the same for journalism. As people become more accustomed to real and participatory news and culture, they will demand the same of science and academia. As science and academia develop their own direct relationships with their user communities, they will be in a position to shun those in industry or politics who refuse to support them or attempt to manipulate them. Politicians and industrialists are not necessary in a fourth age societal structure. Knowledge industries are and it is essential that local affinity groups learn how to communicate and support them directly.
We can never have idea and action based governance without the reliable information provided by fully open, transparent, epistemic communities and knowledge bridges. The ability to create a body of knowledge for review must not be restricted to one class. Access to and ownership of our knowledge must be a human right.
1 Stigmergy is explained in greater detail in both Binding Chaos and Releasing Chaos.
People think that our sole object is to amass gold. No one believes what we say. Like insolvent tradesmen we are without credit. – Pope Pius II, 1460i
The very justified resentment against science as a classist system of control and manipulation is being used as propaganda by the same corporations and politicians who used science as a tool of oppression. With the necessary public examination of science and academia has come an anti-elitist backlash where people are encouraged to trust no one: not science, governments, media, politicians or any authority. While misleading information will encourage people to act against their own interests, no information will immobilize them or encourage them to follow demagogues. This rejection of expertise has been used repeatedly in recent democratic votes to encourage the rise of uninformed or dishonest demagogues globally. The rise in misinformation and demagogues has in turn encouraged calls for even tighter control over information and official channels.
Now science itself, like journalism, is struggling to be heard over the demagogues and struggling even more for the trust of the classes below them. The trust and faith of the jaded and confused public is the most fought over resource today, with billions or trillions spent annually to procure it. Scientists and journalists understand even more than most that the very existence of humanity is in the balance. The corporate demagogues are (correctly) depicting intellectualism as bourgeoisii and (incorrectly) telling the public that ignoring experts is the same as overthrowing the elite and refusing to be manipulated. This blocks even the prior filtered access to knowledge the public used to receive and leaves people at the mercy of personality based governance and demagogues. Even ideas are conflated with ideology and people are discouraged from thinking about ideas because of previous massacres in the name of ideologies.
“Ironically, while this work should serve to improve the quality of scientific medicine, it is being used by some cranks to attack the scientific basis of medicine.” – Dr. Steven Novella, Are Most Medical Studies Wrong?
When a force which should be productive is under attack by a force which is certainly destructive, it is a natural feeling to delay criticism which may be used by the forces of destruction and to insist that now is not the time to suggest improvement. In the case of science and academia, immediate critique is not only necessary, it is crucial and urgent, but critique alone is not enough. Every time scientists and academics have taken a stand against power, they are threatened, expelled, imprisoned or executed. It is almost impossible for scientists and academics to reach the public directly without media and politically vulnerable appointments. Science can be undermined by demagogues because demagogues control communication between science and the public. We have to establish direct communication between epistemic communities and the wider public in order to remove power from demagogues. We have to build a protective network for knowledge preservation, auditing and dissemination. A time when knowledge is already under assault is the best time to establish this network.
In this era of no traditions, science in particular and information in general control our actions. Our true governance is through information. We will destroy humanity or save it based on information. Governance by the people requires knowledge as a societal right and a global commons. It should be the duty of all members of a self governing society to audit and share knowledge and promote and support its development. The ponzi schemes of academia and science shun anyone not in the citation circle and block access entirely to ideas and critique from outside of their class. Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook and Google all serve as propaganda control for states and corporations. Our collective knowledge should not be directed by corporations or exclusively available to a tightly guarded class, either for access or for contribution. We live under a supranational empire. We do not need secrecy over borders to protect knowledge from our enemies. The classes on top are the enemies of those below and they are maintaining their positions by the secrecy and idea ownership we allow them.
The solutions being recommended to the lethal ignorance of the public are headed in the wrong direction, towards more corporate control and a more accredited expert class. Journalists are wanting the internet reconstructed to give themselves credit and funding for each piece of information posted while they still grant neither to their subjects or sources. Scientists are encouraging even more secrecy and delayed publishing and less communication with media, much less the public.
The scientific class encourages those admitted into it to listen to their peers ahead of their patients and listen to local and unsanctioned knowledge only to steal credit. Science encourages binary division and branding of people and nature as mad / sane, dangerous / harmless or normal / abnormal according to the needs of industry and the powerful and to the detriment of the public. Science, academia and the media together encourage a cult-like devotion to pronouncements of one truth at a time instead of reflecting the nuance and uncertainty inherent in most research. Science views everything through a lens of corporate interest. Elite knowledge is still a product of wealth, leisure and access.
While the world has now amassed a vast quantity of knowledge and progression of that knowledge has grown exponentially since science and academia began, there is no reason to believe the creation of a scientific class brought the growth instead of the slope of progression we were already on. If instead of a closed class of scientists we had created open, permeable, epistemic communities, it is hard to not believe we would have made far less mistakes and far more progress in directions more beneficial to all of humanity. If the epistemic communities were open to the people, our information would not be so easy for demagogues and corporate interest to intercept and manipulate. Canada teaches mining to children as a ‘sustainable resource’ and bans scientific research as ‘anti-oil’ opinions. This and other Lysenkoism and educational propaganda is only possible if we do not all have direct access to all expert information through transparency and knowledge bridges.
Oral history taught us that people can accumulate knowledge in the collective mesh network of their brains and retain it with detailed accuracy for thousands of years. Guilds attempted to hoard that knowledge away from other stratas for their own enrichment and power. The new intelligentsia has often tried to be open and evolve but failed miserably because of a hierarchical classist structure that blocks input or access from the lower classes and puts knowledge in service to a tyrannical corporate empire. From the first age we can learn that if people have information they own, they will happily spread it, preserve it and use it in their daily lives. The second age guilds taught us that knowledge is power and if it is not shared, it is a recipe for tyranny. The third age has taught us that the public has no trust in information outside of their own class strata and they are justified in that lack of trust.
Whenever knowledge has helped secure an economic advantage it has been a source of conflict. Even old family recipes or other skill that might improve marriage possibilities have been guarded as tightly as guild secrets. Methods of preserving food, fishing spots and the ability to sew and maintain mukluks have in other times and places been as valuable to their possessors as silk, ermine or tulips. These secrets are no longer necessary for the survival of any person, just corporations.
Artists and all creative or knowledge based professions have fought to criminalize their audiences since copyright was invented. All recording technology since the player piano has had to fight artists who insisted their professions would be ruined by it. Rap deejays were the first to force mainstream acceptance of using other artists’ music in a mashup, opening up a huge pool of creativity that is still fighting for legal acceptance. As soon as people in both the free software movement and social media, started freely sharing their knowledge, industry found itself too dependent on the open source commons material to maintain their exclusive control. In all cases, the removal of exclusivity and knowledge gates brought an explosion of work and far greater diversity and expertise. Instead of responding to the obvious societal good in removing copyrights and patents, as the reasonable time for either has shortened, the time of ownership has been lengthened under international law.[cite]
There have been many suggestions for science to follow the lead of open source communities.iii In 2009, The Tropical Disease Initiative and several others attempted to encourage unpatented, open source drug discovery. Some initiatives such as Sci-Hub, an open access library of scientific papers established by neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, have had better success by just ignoring the intellectual copyright laws and allowing the public access.1 Lately, the Open Science movement has been gaining traction, especially in the European Union with projects such as Facilitate Open Science Training for European Research (FOSTER) and various other initiatives and calls to action. The problem with all of these movements is they only involve publishing scientific data. Knowledge is not accessible unless the public can understand it. Epistemic communities require knowledge bridges to communicate with the public.
Science and journalism must evolve into systems for producing open, transparent, verified knowledge, free of powerful influence. Academia and journalism must become fully open, transparent methods of transmitting verified knowledge.
Our industrialized society has given us a backwards world where ideas are owned and personal data is not. While societal knowledge is held away from the public by gatekeeping laws and institutions, the personal details of the public is a product being examined and manipulated for politicians and the trade economy. The current goals of knowledge based capitalism continue the progression of supranational empire. The billionaires of silicon valley, like the financial and commodity industries, exist to create a new corporate ruling class overseeing a new age of corporate empire. What they produce is in service of empire, not greater society. The financial and commodity industries were set up to rob resources and enslave the rightful owners. The technology industries have created a global governance system designed around control and manipulation of information.
Academia is the primary institution where people are sorted and taught to sort each other, where the class systems are created and perpetuated. Those that decry the anti-intellectual tendencies of those on the bottom refuse to acknowledge the class system behind the hostility. It isn’t knowledge these people disdain, it is the class of people who refuse to allow them input or entry into the halls of debate. Knowledge and certification are hoarded behind a series of obstacles, only accessible after years of hazing to determine whether the recipients are suitable for entry into a homogenized class. Academia, like science, is a knowledge dictatorship. The wider public are barred from seeing the source of knowledge and expected to accept the filtered and packaged versions as truth. They are expected to acknowledge the superiority of the keepers of knowledge, when that superiority was granted by an external authority with no mandate from the people to create a superior class. This is not the same as an epistemic community that the people promoted themselves.
Academia is not a member of the communities it dictates to by virtue of the class floor built between them. Academia is used to bar people from the organizations which profess to speak for them. Human Rights Watch and many other organizations protecting the rights of those on the bottom demand a PhD for applicants seeking employment with them, barring entry to most of the people they are speaking for. Academic standing is used not just to bar people from economic classes and knowledge. Most borders are also open or closed depending on academic credentials and the laws dictating that were created by political and legal academics. Academia provides the majority of the visas to the supranational classes and so acts as the bureaucracy for a global eugenics program. While massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been an amazing development in bringing knowledge to the wider public and creating concentric circles of expertise and knowledge bridges around epistemic communities, the accreditation is still withheld by institutions and accessible only to those with money and time.
Not only does academia categorize students, it also spends far more time on assigning ideas and actions to categories or Great Men than it does in initiating or evaluating either. Students are rarely given ideas to audit and test and translate to action. They are instead given ideas to attribute by Great Man and categorize by ideology. They debate with sources and quotes instead of opposing ideas and actions, encouraging a public which follows personalities and ideologies instead of testing ideas and creating action. They are taught to worship solitary geniuses instead of being taught mass collaborative processes and how to use them. Academia is conducted like religious study, focused on what the great men said and meant instead of whether or not they were correct. The printing press created a rigor mortis for debate which the Internet should have cured, but academia slogs on in its old path with the same methods.
We no longer live in a world dominated by resource capitalism or industry. We live in a world dominated by information capitalism and information control. Industry had a direct source of conflict between workers and owners. Information simply has manipulation at the top and those at the bottom are largely unwitting and passive consumers. The intelligentsia is depicted as a meritocracy, a victimless elite as opposed to the industrialists victimizing factory workers.
Science hoards knowledge and uses it against the people and for the profit of corporations. Academia acts as gatekeepers to allow filtered streams of knowledge to a selected few. Journalism acts as a marketing agent for information which benefits the powerful. Academia sorts the people for future valuation by the trade economy and the law punishes those they deem without value. None of these institutions are by and for the people as they are all imposed by an outside class. None have a right to the confidence of the people and they receive none.
A people with no confidence in either their epistemic communities from the scientific class or their knowledge bridges from the academic and journalist classes is a people with no belief in ideas. With no ideas to follow in confidence, people will become cults following personalities which will become demagogues.
Societies do not transcend classes. If all knowledge is removed to a higher class, the lower classes will neither trust nor follow it. Without reliable knowledge, action will follow class demagogues.
1 Go to sci-hub.cc if you have difficulty finding any scientific papers cited in the endnotes of this book. Also consider supporting Elbakyan and the site in any way you can, she does not receive nearly the support or recognition deserved for her brave and extremely important work.
Heather Marsh 