http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YR4CseY9pk
"I don't have a flicker of doubt. This is the end. This is the time to
wake up."
So to summarise, we have a dire situation which just cannot go on. We
are approaching break-neck levels in the destruction of the
environment. Our global ecosystem is being dangerously unbalanced,
global diversity is flat-lining and the life that is thiving are pests
and parasites on humans. This is not some joke. It is the reality we
have to deal with now.
Our breaucratic system is expanding. Year on year, the political class
grows bigger. The military is expanded with bigger budgets, and more
secretive proxy wars. The language thrown about has veiled undertones
of self interest packaged as serving the public interest. And as the
politicos grow, more controls and limits are implemented.
On the flip side, we are making some generational leaps. The internet
has brought us a new front in the battle for freedom, and in this age
of hearts and minds, we are winning. Never before in history, have we,
the people, had such a fighting chance. Always the same story of the
cathedral imposing its frames on top of and against the will of the
bazaar. The people must seize this moment and construct the change we
want to see.
The economy teteers upon dangerous instability. Money put into big
banks goes to invest in derivatives on Wall Street instead of serving
needs of the local community. The flow of money is towards power.
Resources, wealth, profit and money all are serving the same gangsters
and extortionists who wage wars, implement controls, regiment your
life, and herd us around while wearing an array of standardised clown
costumes. Jackbooted boys in blue who will stomp your face because
"it's their job".
Look at this bullshit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_mass_surveillance_disclosures
When the Snowden leaks first came out, I thought it was cool that this
was now fact and not conspiracy. Hackers had been saying this stuff
happens for years, but nobody really listened or believed it. But with
every week, and the new revelations from Snowden coming out, it gets
crazier and crazier and crazier. And just when you think it can't get
even more mental, it does. We just heard this last week that the NSA
recorded 70.3 million french phone calls in 30 days. In fact, in one
document the NSA was even lamenting that they're reaching the limits
of their storage capacity (!) and need to make more targetted
searching of citizens using intelligent software.
Why exactly are people being spied on? Who do they think the enemy is?
Take a look at the 3 pictures from an NSA presentation on tracking
iPhones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_mass_surveillance_disclosures#Infiltration_of_smartphones
First slide: "Who knew in 1984..." (picture of 1984 movie)
Second slide:"...that this would be big brother..." (picture of steve
jobs with an iPhone)
Third slide:"...and the Zombies would be paying customers?" (picture
of normal people smiling holding iphones)
Now this is just ridiculous. The presentation is brazenly taking the
piss out of US citizens, calling them zombies. If you can tell me how
this relates to Islamic terrorists, then I really must know.
These leaks are a gift. Cameron, the UK prime minister, has been
calling for a criminal investigation against the Guardian and police
have been raiding their offices, seizing hard drives and harassing
journalists at airports. Even myself I've been questioned by police,
solicited by undercovers into doing stuff, been black listed from
banks with my accounts closed and they tried to recruit me once to
join them.
Now I'm not here to berate the role of security, and propose that our
world becomes every man for himself. Quite the opposite. I think our
needs must be integrated within more complete framework. How can we
move production locally? Can we source of food regionally? Can we
allocate resources on a local level to provide services rather than
relying on national governers (local resources -> local -> regional ->
national -> local investment)? And maybe our health can be more
personal and preventative? And security too can be done better.
And then there's Cameron, complaining how bad of Facebook that there
are videos of Saudi beheadings and that something must be done.
Motherfucker. Maybe you should stop supporting that fascist regime and
then there wouldn't be beheadings instead of trying to cover up the
evidence. And this is from a country where already the internet is
blocking pornography by default. You must call the company, show ID
and fill in forms "errmm,... yeah I'd erm, like to take off my, erm,
porn filter?...". How many people are going to do that, and how many
people are just going to passively accept the creeping censorship and
control? Note this is from a country with an odious history of
internet censorship, like with the implementation of the blacklist by
a government quango (fake charity) that has no public oversight of its
activities (and it's completely secret organisation). The blacklist at
first was because of the children, but it soon expanded to stop "hate
speech" and now the PirateBay is blocked too.
http://boards.420chan.org/detox/
I was shocked when reading this. Employers and schools in the US are
mandatorily testing people's bodies for substances. This is going too
far. It's not about having something to hide. It's about the fact that
you're a slave and being controlled. Even if you don't take drugs,
whose right is it to force you to undergo testing on your person and
threaten you with a loss of income if you don't match their
specifications. Sure, they have this right, but this isn't the world I
want to live in.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/10/23/1218253/white-house-official-tracked-down-and-fired-over-insulting-tweets
This is insane. Some diplomat is saying stuff on Twitter. The Obama
administration went to huge lengths to discover this guy's identity:
"After a probe that included an investigation into Joseph’s travel and
shopping patterns – parsed from over 2,000 tweets...". They were
spying on his shopping habits, tracking his travel patterns, probably
also looking at his payment history, ... This is scary and disturbing
stuff that he was found out. To discover his identity took some
illegal and unethical breaches of personal privacy. But this goes on
and on everyday.
Just to get a guy saying stuff on Twitter. So petty.
It's clear things must change. And looking up will not change anything
for so long as we keep seeking central authorities to resolve our
issues, we are going to be put into isolated boxes separate from one
another. The clear way forwards is collective and community action.
The power of Bitcoin is being able to build contracts based on
mathematics, not law between parties. Maybe you can put up collateral,
reputation or insurance (from an insurer that the counterparty is
willing to accept). you can use escrow as an arbitrer for dispute
mediation .etc There are even people on the BitcoinTalk forums
lending out money at 0%, investing in cool projects and lending based
on feel of the person (rather than collateral, reputation or insurance).
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=276416.0
We can link up communities where the people don't know each other.
Instead of people looking up to a central authority to provide basic
services, we can become self organised. This is the aim of the Catalan
Cooperative which wants to provide basic local services that are
better than the state's using the structure of a cooperative to shield
its internal economy (education, health, housing, transport, energy,
food, space, ...). Instead of looking up to the state and in return
people being put into isolated boxes, instead we can make something
more powerful.
unSYSTEM mission: people, community and passion.
Before we always tried to have OpenSource hardware, but it was
difficult because of the real costs involved to prefab stuff, buy the
parts, mistakes, .etc Now with Bitcoin there are lists of people
offering basic components, aggregate of components and end products on
an open and highly competitive market. And it works! Right now it's
only for mining, but the funding model has nothing perculiar that
lends itself especially to any single class of hardware.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=192860
We're about to start a crowd funding campaign starting with a basic
premise to build a Bitcoin wallet:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2013/09/dark-wallet-bitcoin.html?mobify=0
http://libbitcoin.dyne.org/darkwallet/
We have a passionate team of people who believe in creating tools for
the people (as embodied in the unsystem mission of people, community
and passion). It starts with a simple premise, but we will expand to
encompass a wide range of p2p, crypto and opensource infrastructure.
You see the blockchain doesn't start and end with Bitcoin. It is a
technological gift that is bringing about new research and interesting
developments. It's still too early to know exactly how they will play
out and what the final form will look like, but it's definitely the
edge of where things are heading.
* Distributed identity (auth with services/websites, e.g auto-login,
without needing password)
* Distributed reputation (not connected to your real-world identity).
* Distributed encrypted communication (anti-spam proof by design, can
be like a Facebook stream, see BitMessage or FlowingMail.com)
* Decentralised issuing of tradeable assets (BitShares, MasterCoin or
Colored Coins). MasterCoin recently raised $500k from random donations
on the BitcoinTalk forums.
* Semi-persistant distributed storage via DHT network and embedded
hashes in the blockchain. We can have a fast encrypted web better than
freenet and fast.
...
more is possible, still being discovered everyday.
We want to use the money to invest mainly in creating spaces and
infrastructure rather than paying salaries. Create a way for people
who believe in something to make their ideas happen - it isnt only
about programming but everything we want to combine together.
Also we can use this as a support network to fulfill the needs of
people involved in unSYSTEM and think how to support good projects. I
was reading the FAQ for Mailpile (a project to make simple webmail
software) which was raising $100k.
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mailpile-taking-e-mail-back
"After all costs and taxes, that's about $2091 each. Renting a small
apartment in Reykjavík costs around $1000 a month and a beer is about
$7 at a bar, so you can see how fast this money slips away."
What a waste! Instead I believe it's more productive to invest that
into creating a battery of small business, supporting people working
on cool projects we want to see happen and investing in spaces (buying
land, construction, .etc) so that we all can have a place to work,
sleep and throw events/parties.
Every month giving away all that money, and you have a landlord and
restrictions on your freedom. The thing I like about Calafou is that
you can have sex on the roofs, piss in the bushes and play loud music.
There is huge amounts of space everywhere for you to do whatever you
want. We are animals inside. Humans aren't meant to live doing 9-5,
mandatory testing, forms, bills, blaa blaa. We're meant to be with a
group of people, doing cool stuff, being happy.
It seems inescapable, like you can't try and dissect it, and you can
only try to exist outside of it like a cockroach.
Or we can start a movement. If our way is better, and it works then it
grows. We can use Bitcoin and other crypto/p2p/opensource tools to
build community and the world we want to see happen. We can gather
resources and put them towards what we imagine instead of complaining
about Facebook's privacy policy to the EU parliament or voting for the
state to change.
Too many Bitcoin developers are focused on Bitcoin as a cheaper
payments mechanism to make their lives more convenient, but I feel
this is like looking at the totality of the internet as simply a tool
to make shopping easier. It's worth so much more!
Mike Hearn recently did a talk about autonomous agents at the Turing
institute. In it he lays out a fantastical (and distant) future
scenario of flying vending machines and self-spawning/self-driving
taxis. He tells the story of Jane who walks up a hill and is thirsty
so she orders a quadrocopter to come deliver her a coke from the
nearby village. This stuff is so remote and unreal that it isn't
really worth our energy thinking about. Maybe it will happen in some
form, but not how we're imagining. Instead we need real tools for real
people. What are the needs of people now? How can we serve them?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu4PAMFPo5Y
But this is the mentality we face:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=306331.msg3286594#msg3286594
http://postimg.org/image/byd0d8v3x/
Now with the Wikileaks film (read that trash script) and the Silk Road
movie (which will also be crap) the fascists are controlling the
dialogue. The continuing agenda is polluting the minds of people, and
this is trash culture that is furthering the situation. Yesterday I
saw some little girl watching a Disney TV programme which was
basically just 15 mins of propaganda inserting vanity and trivialities
into a young mind.
But blame and finger pointing is unproductive. Fighting is counter
productive. Instead better is to construct superior alternatives and
place them on the open market. As Patrick Strateman once said to me:
"making a business is one of the most subversive things you can do".
The status quo hates competition. Especially when things get
comfortable and cosy, and the status quo starts to enforce its
position through coercion and force.
We mustn't let the fact that the FBI inserted an undercover operative
(read the court papers which explicitly state this) taint our
discussion around the Silk Road. Now it's all about Ross Ulbricht, the
hitman, not about the ethics of the Silk Road or the
cost/sustainability of drug prohibition. By falling into this trap,
they have set the frame and control the dialogue.
Anyway, think about it. You want to do a cool project. Oh... you need
to pay rent though. People take crap jobs, get a crap place. They want
better pay, become coopted, working on tracking or iphone toys.
Instead of working on worthwhile stuff they want to do. Slowly the
rationalisation takes over: "well I'm making stuff people pay for so
the market wants it so it's good for the world" - yeah don't delude
yourself. You're in it for money and that's that.
On 25/10/13 07:09, osirisx@??? wrote:
> "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the
> entrails of the last priest."
>
> Diderot, author of L'Encyclopédie
>
>
> Modern civilization is shaped by paper documents we called the law.
> We got rid of kings. But what do laws mean today? Consultants,
> lobbyists, corporations write the law. The capacity of the human
> being to think and to understand is extremely limited. The world of
> politics and media is a circus we are not concerned with. We are
> concerned with the future.
>
> What is the law? The fundamental rules we agree on. We have to
> understand history and praise the very few who had the right
> principles and a clear mind.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________ unSYSTEM mailing
> list: http://unsystem.net
> https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/unsystem
>
- --
Abolish the NSA