The Intelligentsia




























Radical science














BSSRS cartoon about sexism in science



Cartoon from Science for People, issue 43













There are no nation states

A tribe’s faces are imprinted on their babies’ brains at earliest memory. The tribe’s smell permeates everything in the surroundings, their voices and music are heard in the womb, their dances are felt in the womb. The baby who has successfully imprinted their own tribe will cry or stare when they see a stranger. For those who were raised on it, leaving tribal land can bring a physical ache worse than the death of a family member. Tribal loyalty to their own land and people is the biggest obstacle to those who would exploit that land. The primary enemy of corporations everywhere is indigenous people. People with land and strong tribal bonds do not need money which is just an artificial, dissociated form of societal approval. Tribes already have their own source of approval in each other and that approval is contingent on them staying with their tribe and fighting for their land. There are still battles fought all over the world to sever or weaken any ties people still hold to their own land and their own nations, to somehow force or trick them into leaving their land and then destroy any chance they ever have of returning.

To remove power from families and nations and install a state governance system of law and corporate dependency, communities around the world were dismantled. Besides efforts to move, murder, terrorize or starve out indigenous communities, there has been a great deal of social destruction caused by state institutions such as schools and churches. The three largest criminal industries, human trafficking, weapons and drugs, are all genocidal in nature and are all deployed by state militaries and corporations in their war against indigenous people worldwide. Indigenous communities which are the most closely attached are ripped apart by social problems until many can no longer stand to watch their people destroyed and drift away. They sacrifice the possibility of the greatest joy through inclusion in a bonded community out of fear of the greatest pain through loss of that community.

The task of the trade economy has been not only to break the bonds between the humans in each society but also to uproot the society itself from any connection to its surroundings. The hallmark of indigenous cultures worldwide is not how long the same social groupings have remained intact (they haven’t) but how long these societies have remained connected to the same wider ecosystems. While nations can be transplanted or migrate to other territories, nations which are pulled from their ecosystems and made to live as landless workers in the trade economy immediately begin to dissociate from each other as they begin to rely on state or corporate institutions to meet their needs. Once people no longer have land, they are at the mercy of the trade economy and they have no choice but to use currency as a dissociated form of approval. This currency can buy them a simulation of everything their tribe once brought them, from acceptance to a comfortable home and food security. Removing people from their land cripples their resistance as the resulting dissociated nation, even when intact, is beset by the social problems which accompany grief, poverty and racism from the wider society and struggling to meet the demands of the trade economy. States then depict nations as ethnic groupings, which they never were, instead of a network of dependencies which was their true nature.

The original tribes and homes are replaced with larger societies grouped around churches, towns and cities. These are not real societies, they are a simulation given as a baby is given a plastic plug to suck on when they are weaned. There is no mutual dependency or shared labour to create community bonds. The cities are not real homes. Corporate downtowns of every city everywhere now have the same stores, the same clothes, the same music, the same factory smells. Houses are investments, not homes. Village elders are replaced by the church. Devotion to an abstract religion preaching slave morality and childlike worship of a Great Man-god replaces devotion to family (ancestor or clan worship) or devotion to ecosystem (animism, sun or solar system deities). Responsibility to your tribe is replaced by dependency on authority. Instead of duties that the entire tribe owes to each member, people are given rights, which must be enforced by a higher authority. Instead of talking to the tribe to ask for help, people are told to pray. Society does not have to be responsible because God is. If God refuses to help, ‘offer it up’ in the afterlife and God will add it to your salvation since humanity refused. If not the church, people are told to go to the union, the police or the Minister of Indigenous Affairs, and in all cases wait in a child-like state for solutions to be doled out instead of creating their own. Dignified, autonomous nations are reduced to children forever sitting in the waiting rooms of the powerful.

Centralized religion was very useful for creating a feeling of national unity across multinational states and was an essential component in establishing the second age structure of trading nations. The religions invented a remote control system where instead of dying literally by being shunned from your tribe, your soul would be condemned in the afterlife if you were shunned from your church. This allowed the churches to extend the power of shunning and inclusion far beyond the original reach of small communities and earthly life.

States attempted to create nationalist ingroup feeling for the state as well through propaganda and manufactured cultural trappings of music, flags and histories as well as outgroup shunning of everyone not in the state. State education taught children a history of state heroes to replace their own social memories and state borders to replace knowledge of their own land. Even corporations have attempted to use group affiliation to create ingroup loyalty in employees. Their chances of success are increased when church members suffer outside persecution, states are at war, or companies force employees to attend retreats and workshops which simulate dependency, but none of these nation-simulations have produced the solidarity of real nations as they are all imposed on dissociated populations with no real dependency on each other.

Allegiance once reserved for tribes has been destroyed and the people have been left dissociated and lost. Attempts to divert social allegiance into state nationalism, class warfare or corporate loyalty have not managed to fill the void left by the acceptance of a complete society. The more dissociation grows, the more vulnerable people are to self-destruction such as drug addiction or allegiance with any society providing unconditional acceptance and self-fulfillment, whether that society is a cult, a racist alliance, a criminal gang or all of them together in a group like ISIS or Boko Haram.

Nation is a concept and a fluid one; it is because its adherents say it is. Even in times when distance, mountains and rivers posed insurmountable barriers to assimilation, when nations were divided by language, dress, laws and beliefs, both the customs and the populations of these nations were constantly evolving. States have no resemblance to nations. States are created by the highly militarized partitioning of societies into economic markets and property ownership, completely regardless of who the people in those states are or how the creation of the state divides and restricts our nations. States attempt to present themselves as prefabricated nations, as if control of property and written laws and constitutions can be applied to populations and everyone in a geographical region will suddenly become bonded with national identity. Everywhere in the world nations such as the Kurds, Kachin, Catalan and many others refuse assimilation and states such as the five eyes prove they will never be anything but corporations.

While nations are living and fluid and variable depending on context and perspective, states are an attempt to freeze one official historical viewpoint for all time. States preserve culture to prevent it from living, keep it steeped in formaldehyde unable to breathe and grow. States seek to divide and categorize. Nations as defined by states are inviolable, to suggest change is sacrilegious, to question perspective or boundaries is deemed intolerable. The reality of layered and overlapping nations, of intersections, of cooperation and flexibility, is denied by the rigid borders and uniformity of states. Traditions of fluid property custodianship, sharing and merging, are rejected for one tradition of rigid ownership clamped down and made law for every region on earth. Ethnic and societal realities of no fixed lines between groupings are ignored for false categorizing. Nations extend families and states divide them. Nations are gathered for community, cooperation and sharing while states are imposed for segregating, competing and allocating.

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

Nations are ideas and traditions which exist across borders and generations and they cannot be killed. States are tied to the property they control and they die without militaries and coercive laws to keep them in power. Nations are primarily autonomous, states are corporate markets for the trade economy, fully dependent on other corporate markets. While nations reveled in their diversity, states decree a homogenized sameness, a world where everyone wears the same grey suits, international law assures uniform belief systems worldwide and the trade economy is the one god all must serve to survive. Like agricultural crops, people are raised in the manner most efficient for industry, the same worldwide. Nations are people, states are corporations.

Nations create Us, states create the Other.

As the European trade empires spread, they divided their newly conquered territory into states. Border enclosures were placed around the commons worldwide to more easily claim ownership over resources. At first these states were openly occupied or placed under the control of puppet head of states, as Machiavelli dictated. In time, after the population was fully dissociated and dependent on trade, all of these states won ‘independence’ from their imperial heads of state and progressed to democracies with supposed governance by the people.

In reality, imperial control floated to a level above states, into the supranational third age where real governance was by international trade agreements, debt and the almighty trade economy. The imperial heads of state went home but they left their banks and corporations. Every state is increasingly dependent on the trade economy which demands an insatiable global tribute. People have rarely caused the disruption of culture that the trade economy always does but we are forbidden the free movement of people while every part of the trade economy, from multinational corporations to cartels, operates above the power of the states. States have become a curtain to hide corporate governance, the imperial forces who no one has gained independence from.

Even where state government had power, it was easily controlled. Unlike monarchies, democracies had elections. It is no longer necessary to fight wars to remove rulers if they can just be removed in an election with no resistance from the people. Increasingly, it has cost money to be a political candidate anywhere and those with the money and the inclination to support political candidates are corporations. Merchants also own the most powerful media and drive the dialogue behind the main issues in elections. To people who see jobs as freedom, any suggestion that a candidate would ‘lose jobs’, ‘hurt industry’ or cause the almighty economy to falter is lethal.

Besides the political parties that openly represent corporations, there are supposedly opposing political groups representing the people. These are almost always dedicated to ‘the workers’, identified as those people employed by the corporations. Almost never is there a political party in a democracy that fights for the rights of lifegivers, caregivers, the land, or anyone not involved in the trade economy. If a leader is occasionally elected who does not obey their corporate masters, laws can be changed, courts can be rigged, media is controlled, coups do not have to be the messy business they once were. Just ask Paraguay or Brazil. The people may protest for a time but trading partners all recognize the coups as legitimate government and life goes on with people still pretending they are governed by their state.

When states pretend to respect indigenous governance, they respect indigenous rights to govern within the limits of the state and corporate box they are placed in. Even uncontacted tribes are placed in a state controlled box where they are considered consensual citizens of a government they have never heard of. Ecuador claims the Yasuni as its property to sign mining contracts for[cite] despite their government warning Ecuadorians of the dangers of traveling too far into uncontacted tribal land[cite]. Supposedly autonomous governance for some involves councils governing allocation of funds and property in formerly moneyless, gifting, commons cultures. It is not autonomy if people cannot choose their own economy, membership, and method of governance. Telling formerly borderless nations that they can govern as they wish within borders is ridiculous as the governance they wish is borderless. Living and fluid societies that used continual shunning and adopting, joining and leaving, for their economic and cultural health, have been converted to dead cages and economic markets, an architectured global caste system. Declaring autonomy within those borders is akin to declaring freedom within prison walls.

While societies have always fought to preserve their cultures and control over their regions, this autonomy can be preserved without militarized borders or states. In a democracy, a huge influx of people into a sparsely populated area can overwhelm the existing society and use democracy to change the laws and customs. It is easy and common to write regional constitutions preserving the character of a society and its laws to allow the free migration of people while still preserving the most valued aspects of a culture. This would also allow migratory people to remain migratory. To meet the demands of both regional autonomy and global society and to allow the diversity of lifestyles and societies that are a reality today, states must be replaced with layered and overlapping societies that agree to regional constitutions and specialized collaboration across regional boundaries. There are strains of this type of government appearing in many areas and states are getting in the way.[cite]


The lazy man’s empire

The trade empires were the lazy man’s empire. They acknowledged no responsibility for the people under them. All the benefits of empire were delivered directly into the ruler’s hands with none of the former trouble or effort. All the old Machiavellian difficulties of how to hold an empire were resolved as there was no need to hold it. The powerful could lay claim to a property and profit from it instantly. Noblesse oblige, never a popular idea among dictators, was replaced by the idea that the formerly childlike citizens had personal responsibility and responsibility meant accepting corporate slavery. There was no need to justify corporate rule as the trade economy ruled for it. Even the  rulers were abstracted away behind corporate names. Their was no need to justify their privilege as wealth was its own justification. Rebellions were subverted by convincing the people to compete with each other for trade dominance instead.

Dissociation gave the promise of free will and autonomy to those who had lost it. For those who remembered, it gave the promise of autonomous nations which could hold power without imperial occupation. For those who had long forgotten their tribal autonomy, it gave the promise of freedom from the child-like subservience of imperial citizens. For those persecuted by their own society, it gave freedom from social approval. People and nations no longer needed the approval or agreement of their government or neighbours for anything. They didn’t even need to know their neighbours. They just needed to sell them something and they would have all the dissociated approval they needed to survive, maybe even to build an empire of their own.

The trade economy promised that slavery could be abolished as work could be freely accepted or refused and those who worked hardest or best would receive the greatest reward. By making autonomy and social acceptance available only with currency and currency available to the lower classes only through jobs, the merchant class was able to equate slavery with freedom. Instead of managing a lower class of slaves who demanded freedom, they gave the lower class their freedom and convinced them to demand slavery. People who would never argue that slaves were better off under slavery as they had food and housing would spend the next centuries arguing exactly that for wage slavery.

The dismantling of society left lifegivers and caregivers isolated, overworked, despised and exhausted. They were told that dissociation was there to help them. You don’t have to look after dependents, they are better off in institutions, the authorities said. Dependency became a product for corporations to profit from and caregivers were given the freedom to be enslaved by corporations.

Stratification of society encouraged everyone to concern themselves only with the needs of their own ingroup, isolating those in greatest need from any social assistance from those with the power to assist. Any type of bigotry and sectarianism to prevent empathy with others was encouraged and promoted and ingroup loyalty was expected and rewarded. Entrenched group narcissism ensured that any dissatisfaction with the paradigm could easily be diverted into hostility towards a competing outgroup. The trade economy acquired the status of a religion with greater virtue assigned to those who succeeded the most and vilification for those who failed. The trade economy was presented as the only possible economy and any reality which negated that was erased from view like caregiving or declared illegal like potlatches.

The very poor are not free to reject work and in some cases it is impossible to distinguish the conditions from slavery. Instead of empires ripping out people’s hearts to sacrifice to gods, we have people voluntarily selling their organs and blood to the powerful in order to survive, or being attacked by others who wish to sell their organs. Peter Thiel can buy the blood of the young legally[cite]. West African politicians can buy amulets made from the young with impunity[cite]. Those who thrived in the trade economy did not turn out to have any greater merit, only greater proximity to power and less social obligations. Freedom to act without concern for social obligations created a system designed for the promotion of sociopaths.

Dissociation was a corporate strategy to prevent solidarity among societies and to exploit dependency as a means for states and corporations to control others. The dissociated structure established has allowed everyone else to exploit it in the same way. Any gang or terrorist state is now equally capable of controlling dissociated populations by controlling the hospitals, media, food distribution and all other institutions of centralized and dissociated societies. Stateless gangs around the world have noticed the ease with which dissociated people can have their dependency exploited and be manipulated by the gangs who control the structures of society and currency. Gang members are attracted to the family aspect of belonging. The ingroup loyalty and the outgroup violence are the same that all were encouraged to cultivate in support of the state endorsed trade economy. The anti-societies of today, typical of lawless towns during gold rushes or other migrations where large groups of people assembled with no established societal rules, have become the norm across entire states and regions.

The dissociated approval brought by currency was also dissociated authority and dictatorship every bit as cruel but less accountable than the former empires. The dissociation which looked so much like freedom was just sociopathy, the individualism was isolation and impotence. The equality under a trade empire was no equality at all, as any egalitarian system imposed on unequal populations must result in tyranny by those the system was designed for. For many years those who refused to let go of the trade economy dream have insisted the tyrants were there by personal merit, not design, and punished those who failed to excel by insisting they were defective and attempting to reform them. Those who failed to excel also refused to give up on the dream and just demanded it be modified to let them in, giving rise to an endless succession of reformers demanding their rights to succeed in a sociopathic system of oppression.

Economists have replaced philosophers, banks have replaced churches, searching for profit has replaced searching for knowledge. People have been reduced to human composters who live, consume and die. The artisans have not won, or the athletes, the philosophers, the caregivers, the artists or even the warriors. The parasites have won.

The trade economy is a ponzi scheme however, and the longer it is in place the more its true nature becomes apparent. The centripetal force which draws everyone to the scheme pushes those already on the top ever higher while those on the bottom fall farther and farther out of reach. As those on the top are standing on nothing more than an illusion, the trade economy must collapse like all ponzi schemes.


The profiteers of division

As nations progressed into the third age of supranational power, merchants who were formerly privileged servants to the aristocracy began to marry and socialize with aristocrats, giving new political power to the merchant class. Merchants had been holding the purse strings for the nobility for some time, but suddenly there was a path of social mobility from a ruthless commoner to the nobility, an idea which has intrigued social climbers and romance novelists ever since.

Banks and factories were established for trade speculation, not to feed the populations which had never needed either. Instead of just selling an artisan’s goods, the merchants used their new wealth to lock artisans in factories and extract ever more goods from them. Monumental architecture was now built not for trappings of civilization, royal palaces or edifices of state or religion, but as symbols of merchant power. Lawyers became more prosperous than ever, writing the new laws to transfer all imperial authority to trade and commerce. The new merchant politicians convinced the public that the new laws were freedom from imperial control and a path to equality with the aristocracy, which, for the merchants, they were. Stratification of society and all the intellectual prose required to justify it allowed slaves, indentured servants and waged labour to be owned by the merchant class, even as political rhetoric preached equality and human rights. Any law benefiting trade was said to benefit society and any law restricting trade was said to harm society. Discussion of society was restricted to only one strata of men as trade economy became synonymous with governance and merchants became synonymous with the people.

The abstract power of the trade economy, not military might, allowed Europe to finally conquer the Ottoman Empire. The Crimean War placed the Ottoman State in debt to European banks. When it declared bankruptcy in 1875, its economy was placed under control of a European council headed by France and Britain who ensured their trade ambitions finally prevailed[cite]. During World War I, Britain, France, and Russia planned the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire with the Sykes–Picot Agreement[cite]. Under the initial agreement and subsequent treaties and agreements, France and the UK established trade dominance in the Middle East for themselves and their allies. Part of the propaganda from the self-described Islamic State today is that they will remove the effects of these agreements and reestablish an Islamic caliphate throughout the region, fulfilling the prophesy in a hadith in Musnad Ahmad ibn Hanbal which predicted a caliphate would fall and be succeeded by corrupt tyrants which would eventually be succeeded again by return to a caliphate.

It takes no imagination to understand how unpopular it would be to the still very much in existence trade empires established after World War I if a caliphate were to rise in this region again and engage in preferential trade within the caliphate. The reaction of the world to the human rights horrors committed by cartels and militias everywhere else is almost non-existent, but ISIS is a constant fixture in western media. Besides the Islamic State group, Boko Haram have threatened to reestablish the Sokoto Caliphate in West Africa which would include Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer and largest economy. The fact that the leaders of neither Boko Haram nor the Islamic State seem to have even rudimentary knowledge of Islam shows how religion is still being used on both sides to motivate support for a very irreligious trade war. China and Russia have no claims to a religious goal but are as engaged as ever in conflicts over the old silk road and all the other trade routes. Secularism has done nothing to promote peace on trade routes where the real religion is the trade economy.

In the 16th century, banks funded trading companies regardless of nationality and those trading companies brought their goods to every part of the world, not just their own. In 1600, the British East India Company was formed and rapidly rose to control half the world’s trade[cite]. The Company’s board of directors ruled India for one century, supervising both government and military according to the wishes of its shareholders, until it was replaced by the British colonial government in 1858. The merchant class of the 16th century had become the first supranational class, above government and not bound by any laws created by governments.

From 1773 until 1860, the British East India Company smuggled opium illegally into China. Despite two wars fought over the trade, China was unsuccessful in stopping the smuggling until they legalized production at home in 1860[cite]. The trade economy’s claims to enrich the societies it engaged were no more real at its beginning than they are now that fentanyl dealers in China are returning the favour with unstoppable postal shipments to the outside[cite]. International traders not bound by the laws of those they trade with has always been a staple of the trade economy and a primary source of its wealth.

In 1602, the Dutch East India Company was established and became the world’s largest company during the 17th century[cite]. It was given near governmental powers, including the ability to establish its own colonies and armies, wage war and negotiate treaties. It printed its own currency and had its own judiciary, prisons and executions which the Dutch government recognized as legal. Under the Dutch East India Company, the Dutch empire was run with profitability for shareholders as its sole goal. Subsistence crops were replaced by crops with maximum profitability to the point that repeated famines devastated the local populations under Company control. The indigenous populations were replaced by slave populations from India, Southeast Asia and East Africa. The trade goods and the majority of profits were removed to enrich the Netherlands. In 1800, the company went bankrupt and the area it controlled was nationalized under the Dutch government as the Dutch East Indies until the people there gained independence after World War II.

With independence, Indonesians had control of their own government but the dependence on trade and the merchant pillage remained. Indonesia is a member of the G-20 forum and it now has the world’s eighth largest economy by gross domestic product at purchasing power parity[cite] but its income disparity is one of the highest in Southeast Asia. The Indonesian government reported 28.2 million people living in “absolute poverty”[cite] in 2016, on an income around US$25 a month. Food price stability is still a major problem. The tyrants went home but the tyranny remained.

In 1670, the Hudson’s Bay Company was formed in England and given a similar governing role. It claimed 15% of all land in North America, one and a half million square miles[cite], making it the world’s largest land owner at least in their own minds. The HBC also minted its own currency, the MB (Made Beaver), with a value based on a standard beaver pelt and paper money based on UK currency. The courts and legal system, operated by HBC managers, enforced the HBC trade monopoly. In 1867, the HBC chose to sell the land they claimed to the new Dominion of Canada.

There is very little difference between the former Hudson’s Bay Company and Canada. Both were primarily resource corporations. The stripes of the blankets the Hudson’s Bay traded to indigenous people are still as iconic a Canadian emblem as the maple leaf flag. The government of Canada and indigenous nations still negotiate at opposite sides of bargaining tables and court rooms.The beaver, the animal whose pelts the company was initially established to trade for, still appears on Canadian currency. The court systems under both were established primarily to enforce ownership and monopolies by the merchant and banking strata. Canada today has a structure of laws that is unequaled in the world at protecting resource corporations in their global pillage. It has been rewarded by 78%[cite] of the world’s resource corporations choosing to incorporate in Canada to take advantage of this protection. These resource corporations employ militias to force their pillage and destruction on people’s homes in 108 countries[cite]. Instead of appearing in court for their human rights and environmental violations, they conduct their own remedy frameworks[cite] and pay fines instead of receiving jail time.

As a state, Canada has the ability to lobby for resource corporations at international state organizations such as the UN and refuse to sign laws supporting free prior informed consent[cite]. As a state, Canada has embassies all over the world which it uses to strong arm weaker governments into intimidating and assassinating those who protest its resource corporations[cite]. The state has a pretty flag and nationalist sentiment and credibility the company could never have acquired. The people call themselves citizens, not employees, but there is no question that the government’s primary function is as an employer. The government is there to provide jobs, trade product internationally and protect industry. The Prime Minister in 2016 ignored the free prior informed consent of Canada’s own people and approved two oil pipelines widely opposed by the people who will be affected by the environmental damage from them. Canada’s interests are resource corporations interests. Within Canada, the government’s benefit to the public is to provide jobs by increasing corporate activity, not to protect the environment where everyone lives. The three major political parties traditionally represent nationalist corporations, free trade corporations and unions although it is impossible now to tell them apart.

The United Fruit Co (now Chiquita) chose a less direct path of corporate control. In the late 1800’s, a US business man built a railroad connecting Costa Rica’s capital to its Caribbean coast in exchange for a 99 year lease on the railroad and 800,000 acres of tax-free land.[cite] The company’s monopoly on land use rights and transportation by both rail and sea allowed him near complete control over the country’s economy and a near monopoly on employment in Central America that allowed him to treat employees almost as slaves. Their economy depended on producing one product for one corporation, leaving them no option to demand better terms from their one employer.

As United Fruit expanded, it did not bother governing the countries it occupied. It was enough to control them with bribes, lobbying and the threat of war. Puppet governments were put in place that would sign crippling trade agreements and destroy any autonomy which may have given them the ability to resist. The countries in Central America and the Caribbean under United Fruit were left with no autonomy and no control over their supposedly democratic governance since to vote in their best interests meant war with the United States. The might of the United States military supporting business owners from the US meant that any government which supported any benefit to its people was labeled communist and threatened or crushed. In 1954, United Fruit convinced the US governments under Truman and Eisenhower to oust the democratically elected Guatamala president with a coup for proposing agrarian reform and labour laws[cite]. Obedient politicians served the corporation that paid them, not the people.

Since multinational companies were created in the 1600’s, the people of the world have been living under state governments and the state governments have been controlled by a supranational merchant empire. It is a popular notion that the British empire died over the course of the last century, with almost all of its overseas holdings gaining independence, including the United States which is popularly considered to be the new power. The British empire did not die and the United States is not a new power. No one received independence from the supranational trade empire and anyone who attempts it will still be crushed today. North Korea’s Juche is seen as an affront to the world and they are regularly called a pariah state by United States media in apparent reference to their attempt at autonomy (since human rights abuses in trade partners do not provoke the same reaction). Most of the world, including North Korea, lives under the shadow of the supranational trade empire in the form of trade agreements, world banking and international law.

After World War II, the five main seats of the British empire became the five eyes and they are in every way one empire, even one state or nation. This is the special relationship the United States and the United Kingdom always referred to between themselves. The United States was never an empire because it appeared when the world had passed the second age of empire states. The five eyes states all answer to the same supranational power, they obey the same international trade laws and they have the same goals of maximum profit for their investors, as do the supposedly independent state satellites who are more numerous and more interdependent every year.

Every other European trade empire is also still intact. They have all just evolved past direct government control. Areva still plunders Françafrique to power France[cite]. West African dictators plunder their own states and launder the money through France[cite] just as dictators around the world plunder their own states and hide the profit in United States[cite] shell corporations or real estate in New York, London and Vancouver[cite]. The states which make up the so-called anti-imperialist alliance, the Non-Aligned Movement, are not in any way anti-imperialist either. The same corporate names are on the skyscrapers and in the government offices of Shanghai, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro and Mumbai. The same ugly corporate architecture, the same ugly corporate suits and the same bland, mass-produced products are on the streets of every city in the world.

State power has now been almost completely undermined by international corporate power. From international trade deals which override sovereignty and state judiciary to militaries owned by corporate mercenaries, the most important functions of states have been taken over by corporations. Corporations own nearly all of the world’s resources, including knowledge, and people work for the corporations, not the community or state. People are dependent on corporations for all of their societal needs which are now seldom provided by the community or state.

The wealthy are now wealthy for being wealthy. The former merchant classes have followed the old nobility of the second age in convincing the public to continue serving them for no reason except habit and the laws they wrote themselves. The third age supranational empire no longer belongs solely to the merchants but is attainable to any with the right connections. The imperial power is above states, which means power is just as attainable by stateless organizations such as militias, cartels or state intelligence as it is by merchants or states. As mercenary kingpin Erik Prince has said[cite], the US was founded by militias and as he proved, the militias do not owe allegiance to states but the other way around.

The third stage supranational empires are most often associated with Europe, but it is far too simplistic to depict Europe as the oppressor of the world or the creator of the trade economy based on one moment in history. Europe had the upper hand on their old rivals in the Middle East, China, Africa, and India briefly, but the others caught up again quickly and they were all joined by the merchant classes who had risen to the top of their regions in every part of the world. Those outside Europe were behind in, but no less part of, the oppression of indigenous resistance worldwide. The contemporary habit of ignoring both the present and the past to depict old empires like China, Russia, or Egypt as anti-imperialist is obfuscating propaganda. The recent faux communism practiced in China and Russia did not daunt the imperial ambitions of either state, even when they called it communist internationalism. At this point, all the old players are openly back in the same battle over the same trade routes they have been fighting over for two millennia as well as all the other resources on earth. Pretending otherwise has derailed resistance efforts since the beginning of the third age, as all efforts were spent attempting to replace bad guys (Europeans) with good guys (non-Europeans) while leaving the supranational trade empire intact. Puppet states which pledged allegiance to the trade empire were hailed as self-determination while any attempts to opt out of the trade empire were brutally crushed.

History as told by Europeans would like us to believe that Europeans were fully responsible for the conquest which established them in the seats of power but indigenous people worldwide were far more involved in choosing the trade empire than they are ever given credit for and the trade empire remained in power even where the Europeans did not. The so-called Spanish, English, French and Portuguese conquest of the Americas could never have happened without what their history euphemistically called Indian allies, alliances of nations who vastly outnumbered the Europeans in every case and overthrew the existing empires or rival nations with the help of a few Europeans and their guns.

The indigenous women history deplores as sex slaves who had no autonomy or initiative were sometimes powerful to the point that it would be more accurate to call the Europeans their concubines, or even more accurate to call it a partnership. Hernán Cortés and his little band of 1300 men[cite] would not have survived, much less conquered the Aztec alliance, without the connections and actions of La Malinche[cite] throughout their campaign and her ability to negotiate alliances with all of the indigenous nations which provided the hundreds of thousands of warriors who overthrew the Aztecs[cite]. The Incas failed to retake Cuzco during the siege of 1536, not because of the 190 Spanish soldiers[cite] present but because of the army of tens of thousands1 sent by the Inca kuraka, Contarhucho[cite] in response to a message from her daughter, the Inca princess, Quispe Sisa who was living with the Spanish ‘conquistador’ Francisco Pizarro. The combination of European bragging and photoshopping of all indigenous and female people out of history has given a very unrealistic view of the conquest of every nation on earth by the trade economy. It was not a few European men who conquered the world, it was an idea.

While no indigenous people, including those of Europe, chose the genocide and social ills that befell them after the trade empires moved in, and few chose oppressive foreign governance, the structure of the trade empire was both chosen and continued in use by enough of the population that it was impossible to overcome. Many first age tribes still resist, and within each tribe there were always individuals who never stopped resisting, but the appeal of the trade economy to certain members of each society is universal. Would all areas of earth have developed into third age dissociated empires without Europe? It is impossible to tell, but all areas on earth had trade empires and fully dissociated societies where everything is for sale are a logical conclusion of trade empires. It is not necessarily true that these trade empires would have emerged as the dominant second age form of society in all places, but once the third age merchant ponzi scheme was established it was an unstoppable vortex, destined to spread as ponzi schemes do until they collapse, upheld by the desperate and the greedy worldwide.

While the first age tribal nations were all contained under the domain of the current states, many still exist today living very much as they have for thousands of years, completely autonomously and without even any contact with those outside their nations. Of the second age trade empires, none survived. Within a few centuries, every region on earth was under the domain of one system of states under a supranational empire and the second age of nations no longer existed anywhere. Once the process of dissociation and acceptance of a trade economy began, the supranational empire won, in every case and against empires far more evolved and beneficial to the people. Without understanding how the supranational empire won, we can never evolve past it.


Transcript from talk about Getgee


The short version of this talk is that we don’t need to rewrite any of the existing social media applications that are out  there like Twitter, or Facebook, or Google or any of the rest of them. The reason I’d like you all to remember that one thing is because it seems like every week for the last many years, I receive an invitation to the beta site of the next social media platform that is going to replace the existing big platforms, or a new search engine. So much money and time and code. And I know a lot of you probably use alternative social media, but none of these alternatives have come within hailing distance of Twitter or Facebook or any of the existing platforms. And they are never going to. And the reason they are never going to is because none of them address the reasons why all of the big platforms are in service to the highest bidder instead of us, why they were tempted to become evil and what gave them the ability to become evil.

So what I’d like to do today is go over what I feel are the main problems preventing us from having productive collaborative tools on the Internet and reliable knowledge repositories and then I’d like to suggest how we can resolve those problems once and for all.

The biggest problems I can see to collaboration on the Internet can all come under one of three headings which are noise, thought bubbles and truth dictatorships. So noise …


This is not the most illustrative slide I could have used, I chose this of course so I can show you all that for all the years Klout had this Top Influencers feature, I was either the second or third influencer to the man who is currently the Prime Minister of Canada. Right behind Justin Beiber. I can guarantee you if I had any real influence over this man, many of his policies would be very different. And I’m pretty sure Justin Beiber doesn’t have much influence over him either.

But on social media as it is today, this picture, this perception of influence, can translate into real influence. To the point that the former Prime Minister of Canada actually had a very hyped photo op with Justin Beiber because the perception is that Justin Beiber’s influence is so great that he can amplify the Prime Minister of Canada.


The reason these ponzi schemes are preventing us from having useful collaboration is because not only is celebrity not real influence, the two are mutually exclusive.

What celebrity means is you are riding the peak of the wave of socially acceptable opinion. You already appeal to the widest audience. It means you have no thoughts in opposition to acceptable mainstream opinion, celebrities reflect the opinions we all already know and agree with. You are not a voice that is seldom heard, by definition, and you definitely don’t speak at a level of elite expertise that is difficult for all but a few to understand. Celebrity is Donald Trump. Someone who speaks at a grade 3 level. The more easily understood and the less challenging your message, the wider your appeal will be. Celebrities are the status quo so amplifying celebrities is just creating more noise for the status quo, and making it harder to find anything innovative or understand anything challenging.

So it is counter intuitive to think celebrities can influence us to move in a new direction. If we want to hear the voices that are seldom heard, that expand our Overton windows and give us some fresh perspective, or require some elite level of knowledge to explain some breakthrough of the kind we require to solve the problems in front of us today, amplifying celebrities is the exact opposite of what we ought to be doing.

The other noise the Internet has brought us is astroturfing.


A few years ago if you said something was astroturfing, people would look at you like you needed a tinfoil hat, but now this has become so mainstream most states brag about their cyber warfare and their cyber armies. This is all that is. It is propaganda designed to drown out all information the states and corporations who pay for it don’t want you to see. For those of you who don’t spend a lot of time on social media, this is what it looks like. Every time this man was in the news, for years, the Internet would be hit on all forums, on article comments and on social media by these bot armies. These ones have avatars of horses and dogs, sometimes they have eggs or the canadian flag, but they all do the same thing which is fill all the forums with aggressive and unintelligible comments that just serve to tie this person to certain keywords, in this case terrorism.

Astroturfing is really annoying. It can be intimidating or frightening, some of it is really aggressive. It contributes a great deal to all the noise we have to wade through looking for signal. It is frustrating, you never know if you are talking to a real person or wasting your time with a bot, and it is very chilling to online conversation. It has made Twitter especially almost unusable for rational conversation.

The next problem is probably the most disappointing to those of us who were around when the Internet became a thing.

Thought bubbles

The most exciting thing for most of us I think in the early days of the Internet or even bbs’s, the most exciting thing was being able to connect with people who you never dreamed you would ever be able to connect to. And I don’t just mean people across the world, we have google translate so now we can understand them, but people with perspectives that you would never dream you would be able to have a conversation with, much less find empathy and common ground, but if you talked to them long enough you began to find that you do have common ground and you begin to understand their viewpoint a little more even if you don’t agree with it. You can begin to make some accommodations and sometimes we even change each others opinions online.

But it turns out this only happens until a forum reaches a certain size. Once a forum has reached a certain size and the people there have spent enough years with each other and discussed enough topics and reached some consensus around many topics, what happens is they start to create their own culture and develop their own ideas of what are acceptable viewpoints, and their own ideas that it is taboo to hold just like all cultures do. And then what happens when an opposing viewpoint comes into these forums is they are pushed out and shunned till they go off and create their own little thought bubbles of people who agree with them. And just as they weren’t allowed to participate in the main forums, they push out everyone who disagrees with them. And they bring all the supporting documentation that supports only their ideas. Then Facebook and Google see what they are interested in and feed them even more information in support of their views. So they begin to see only one viewpoint ever and they live in this little purified thought bubble where only their thoughts exist, just like the main larger forum is also now living in a purified thought bubble, but this thought bubble is created in opposition to the thought in the main bubble. So it is like a little cancer there. It is like an auto-immune disease that the wider society is usually not even aware it has or it doesn’t take them seriously until you get someone like an Elliot Rodger who comes out and kills a bunch of people they have been taught to hate.

Then when that does happen, the wider society does not typically come out and say, Oh, we have alienated all of these people, how did that happen and what can we do to re-establish communication and reach some common ground? What usually happens is the smaller group is vilified even more and shunned even harder so they become even more alienated and it creates an even deeper divide.

We have always had sectarianism, of course, sectarianism has been with the world for a very long time, but it used to be something that happened more between you and people ‘over there’, people you never saw or communicated with. Now thanks to the Internet we can never communicate with people we live right next door to and the sectarianism is more and more within our own societies. And yes, a lot of it was always there as classism, sexism, racism and other bigotry that was just painted over and the thought bubbles are useful to be able to be heard and explore things you can’t in wider society, but there reaches a point where the divergent viewpoints need to come together and seek resolution and that is where we are failing.

Also this is not all happening organically, definitely it is also something that is being helped along by the same type of people who brought us astroturfing, there are people on the internet who are there to promote division, and profiting from it. But whether it is organic or manufactured it is a problem we need to address.

This next slide I always feel should be Wikipedia’s landing page.

One truth

These are what I call truth dictatorships. This is where you have group of people and they all have to come to consensus, they all have to agree, and what they are looking for is the truth. So they all have to fight about which is the truthiest truth, and once they have lined up all their truthy truths they have to rank them all in order of importance. These truth dictatorships are of course great at promoting the status quo, and celebrity ponzi schemes, they create thought bubbles, but they have a special added feature I call photoshopping. Photoshopping is where you take every story and you just erase everything that doesn’t suit your world view by saying it’s not the most relevant part of the story. Wikipedia is great at this, you can spend weeks clicking through that site and never find anyone that is not a caucasian man. I used to say women didn’t need anonymity, we all come with built in proxy routing, everything we say is routed through the nearest man. But actually there are many parts of society that could say that.

But here is an unusual example.


Here is a person who is running for president of the United States, for the second time. But there is nothing on her Google blurb to indicate that. That wouldn’t be at all unusual if she was from anywhere else in the world, but if there is one group of people at the pinnacle of the celebrity ponzi scheme it is the US. Their never ending spectacle of an election is impossible to escape on any media but especially on Google.


Here is what Google shows for every candidate from the two main parties, and this is his first run and he did not even get the nomination of his party. But there is a huge amount of information on all of his policies on every topic, it is really obvious that he is running for the presidency. This is what you get for the candidates from either of the two main parties but not any third party candidates.

But Google is just a search engine. It is obvious they got their blurb from Wikipedia, they probably got the policy information from another third party site, so this isn’t really fair. Google can’t help what it finds on the Internet. So let’s just ask them.

Google, who is running for president of the United States?


And they flat out lie. We can’t blame this on anyone else, this is Google’s answer and they flat out lie. We didn’t ask who are the candidates from the two main parties, we asked who is running, end of, and they photoshopped out everyone else.

And if you like we can click that article below from the New York Times with the same heading to see how mainstream media does


And we get the same thing. Photoshopped again.

So this is where social media would really shine. When you can’t trust the big corporations like Google and NYT, we can rely on each other to keep ourselves informed, that’s why social media was so exciting.

So let’s look at this same candidate on Twitter.


Those of you who don’t follow a lot of people from the US on Twitter probably don’t see what’s strange about this, but Twitter has this thing called blue checks. What Twitter says a blue check means is it means that you are really important. It means you are a real person, and you are an extremely important person. What it actually means is you are from the US and you are probably a caucasian man. For years, no African heads of state had blue checks and most don’t even now. Outside of the US it is very difficult to get a blue check. But within the US, the most tenuous connection to politics, to tech, to journalism, to Twitter’s frat boy parties … the most random people have blue checks.

So you can see how this would be really confusing if you lived in the US and you wanted to know who you can vote for in your federal election. This person says she’s a third party candidate, but she can’t be a very serious candidate because she doesn’t even have a blue check and even the neighbour boy down the street has one.

And that’s what photoshopping is. If she doesn’t exist, you can’t vote for her.

So, noise, thought bubbles and truth dictatorships.

The problem here is not with the software, it is the way the web was designed. Just like crypto-currency did not change the algorithm that creates ponzi schemes of wealth and social media did not change the algorithm that brought us ponzi schemes of celebrity, the web did not change the ponzi schemes of information and it was not designed to. The web was created to mirror academia. Isolated pages of information citing other isolated pages of information. It was never designed for mass collaboration. We hear so much about walled gardens, but the Internet is a series of sealed wells. Even if we have access to everything on the surface, we do not have access to the information in the wells that is feeding all the life on the surface. And to add insult to injury, we created everything in those wells.


Look at these logos for a minute. And think about the amount of money each of these logos represents. The last I checked, alibaba was worth 65 billion. Uber is worth 60 billion. Airbnb is over 25 billion. And what do these corporations do? In every case, these corporations are a page that seals a well of user created information. The only service they provide is web hosting. Yes, I know they have written a lot of front end software and many of them have released a lot of great software to the open source community and that’s great, but that is not where the value is. If it was we wouldn’t be getting it for free. The value is in what the users created, our data.

And think about the control these corporations exercises over all of our data, which is our work, our networks. From monitoring our shopping habits to Facebook deciding to what mood we are in or whether we vote.

There is no point in creating another Twitter, another Facebook, another Google, another thought bubble with its own sealed well that doesn’t address any of these problems.

This control of user information is what created the fertile ground for corruption in the first place. Control corrupts. Absolute control corrupts absolutely.

We have free software. We are working on free networks. We need free databases.

So if we were to release all these 100s or 1000s of billions of dollars worth of value and put it back into the global commons and return control to the people who created this data, how would we do that? How would we create a universal global commons database that we were all free to use in any way we like?


So given that we want to deal with a database, here is a little 2 button app that does everything we ever do with databases. We can search, or we can log in and create, update and delete. And there are five entity types that I think will allow us to do everything we do in any of those applications. 

What these entities are is stripped down atomic objects that we can use to create larger meaning from. If you look at me as an object, any attributes you were to identify are very subjectively important. I used to say my official documentation decided the most important things about me were my name, date of birth and gender and they could just as easily have used my eye colour but now my official documentation does not require gender and it does require an iris scan so I guess someone agreed with me. But almost anything you can say is very subjectively important and changeable, so these are extremely stripped down entities. A person node is only an optional start and end date, usually correlating to date of birth and date of death, and a name. And we can all agree on just a name as a base data node we can all link to, right?

Of course not. 


How many of you remember what happened on Wikipedia when Chelsea changed her name from Bradley Manning to Chelsea Manning? If you missed this you really should look it up. It is the most perfect illustration of why we can’t have nice things in truth dictatorships. It was amazing, days of war waged over, who is the official authority for Chelsea’s name? Does she get to decide what her name is, or is her government the authority we should listen to? Or maybe we should rely on the journalists who write about her to decide. Was she more relevant when she was called Chelsea or when she was called Bradley, and should we use that to decide what her name should be? This is why we can’t have nice things in co-operative dictatorships.

The answer is really easy, Wikipedia.


These are two temporal realities of the same object. This is a hypernode. She was Bradley, now she’s Chelsea. It doesn’t matter which you choose, no one is going to argue with you, and your work will still appear associated with this same object.

These are temporal realities, she was Bradley, now she’s Chelsea, but there are also other kinds of realities.


Here is a perceptive reality. Las Malvinas, The Falklands, or if you are the UN and you just don’t want to get into it, they are still the same islands and whichever you choose, your work will still appear. Or if you like, you can call them The Penguin Rocks. Go for it, create a new reality, call them The Penguin Rocks, nobody cares, you don’t have to ask permission and no one is going to stop you, they will still be linked to the same rocks in the middle of the ocean.

But this brings us to a problem. How are people to know that The Penguin Rocks are not a name that serious people call these islands? There are couple of ways we can get around that. First, we can let them say they are joking, put a little fiction toggle on that reality and anyone can choose to filter it out. And the second is we use trust networks. We don’t have likes, we don’t have stars, or hearts or friends or followers, we have trust networks. A trust network is exactly like it sounds, people whose judgement we rely on. If you filter your search results within 2 or 3 degrees of your trust network and these Penguin Rocks don’t show up, it’s a good chance they are spam or astroturfing or trolls. So as long as you keep your trust network clean we are back to a place where we can actually work with the Internet again and we can filter out all those people who have made collaborating on the Internet impossible for all these years.

So we have three reality types, we have temporal, perceptive, and linguistic which is just like it sounds. And we have 5 entity types. And the reason we have these different reality and entity types by the way is because they have slightly different attributes so we can do things like attach geotags to events and organizations and map them or string temporal realities along in a timeline. So that’s nice. But it’s still not terribly useful or meaningful. There’s still not much we can do with this as an application. We have a global commons of data, we can all pull from it, that’s nice but in order to actually pull any meaning from it, if you look at me again as an object, there is very little you can say about me without relating me to another data object. I did this for this organization, I was this to this person, I did that at that event.

Usually these types of relationships are part of a schema that is part of the application developed by programmers. If this is ebay there is a programmer somewhere saying this is a buyer, this is a seller, this is a product and so on. But these things do not have to be coded by programmers and in fact they shouldn’t be. Programmers don’t know how users are going to use their data. People are always going off and doing peculiar things with the data and then programmers have to change the schema and it is usually difficult. So we can just allow users to create category trees like this to map all possible categories for each of the 5 entity types and every relationship between them.


This is beyond the ability or the interest of the average user, to create a schema for all these relationships, but it is not beyond the ability of a data analyst with knowledge of the sector. This is like blog themes, a blog platform gives you the ability to create blogs but if nice people create themes for it they provide more versatility and usability for a greater number of use cases. So if data analysts create category trees, users can pull them in to use in their own work.

If you remember the little 2 button app I showed you earlier, there were three places you could create. One was the Universe which had all the data nodes in the global commons, but there were also constellations and galaxies. A constellation is your own autonomous space where you can work by yourself or add editors or open it up to however many degrees of your trust network. In a constellation, you can take data nodes out of the data commons, use a category tree that some nice person has made and map all your data.

Here is a database most of you are probably familiar with. It’s called and it’s great.


This is really nice, someone has written a little d3 front end and they let you embed this graph in your work or share it on social media or export the data. But it’s still a sealed well. If you want to add any data to it, or add any front end functionality, you have to go through littlesis. Or export the data to your own sealed well and not collaborate with them at all. If this was on G, that little 2 button app we saw earlier, anyone could use the exact same category schema and create data in the exact same format as this. If you tapped on one of these nodes you would see everyone else’s work associated with it, even if they used entirely different category trees or had completely different ideas of what was important. Imagine if this was the Panama Papers data. ICIJ could have just created a constellation and added them all as editors and just mapped the data as they found it for us all to see. Then we could create our same constellations around the same data nodes so they could see oh, that person was also involved in this corporation, we should run a search on everyone else in that corporation as well. And even if they still hoarded all of the data, we could share information from the beginning and it would have been so much faster and more productive. And we would have the data in a usable format. They actually did use linkurious to map it all, we could have had all that in a global commons for us all to build from instead of these unusable wall of text articles everywhere.

And you could add any front end functionality you want.


Usually in an app you just have the programmers and the users. But once we decouple the database and the trust networks we’ve got the core programmers for the database, the data analysts who create the category trees, the researchers and journalists who map everything in constellations, and then the users can take those constellations and add their own meaning and functionality. Suppose you were a taxi driver. You could create a constellation of all your local taxi drivers, and then someone else could gather all the constellations of all the taxi drivers and have a global database of taxi drivers. Novel new idea. We just took 60 billion dollars worth of value from Uber. Or you could filter that database down to just your region and within one degree of trust and you can download that galaxy onto your phone and add a little bit of front end software that adds functionality for you like paying your taxi driver.

Or if you are a politician, suppose you are a pirate politician and you have a blog, but you also belong to the pirate party of Germany and an international galaxy someone has created of all the environmental groups from all the pirate constellations. Now you can add blogs at every level, or loomio decision making software, or schedules or whatever you like.

Because now that we have split out the databases and trust networks, all those unicorn corporations we saw earlier are reduced to their real value which is bits of front end software that provide some collaborative tool or whatever it is they do.

And now users have their choice back. If any of that software starts antagonizing its users, they can just get rid of it and use something else and they will not lose all the work and the networks they have spent years building up. And they can choose the functionality they want. They don’t have to go through facebook for everything whether they are logged in or not, they can have a little stripped down read only app on their phone and a giant application on their laptop because it is not one product now it is an ecosystem, anything can be replaced without destroying the whole. And it doesn’t matter what application you use, you can still collaborate with everyone else because that happens at the data level.

So we have a way to filter out astroturfing and spam. We don’t have celebrity ponzi schemes now because it is all about the people doing the work. We can isolate ourselves but we can’t create community thought bubbles, everyone has control of their own information. We have diversity of opinion and we allow for different realities. And we can let our own trust networks decide what we want to be shown and not leave it up to Facebook and Google.

Right now I’m rewriting this in React and using IPFS. If anyone wants to help, money is welcome, pull requests are welcome.

More information:

How we came to be ruled by Death Eaters












Sex, both social and anti-social






















– – –

See also:

Free will and seductive coercion

Witches and how they were silenced

An economy for all

Society vs dissociation

Sociopaths, Psychopaths and Death Eaters


This article has been stigmergicly translated into French.