WANTED: 100,000 strangers to kickstart the paradigm shift to True Abundance
A petition on change.org is addressed to everyone featured in Social movements powering the future of money, available for free downloads on Amazon from April 24–28, 2019 (Pacific time).
Please sign the petition here but it runs as follows:
“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?” David Foster Wallace
Ben Hunt calls the water we swim in a Zeitgeist but isn’t that the Age of Nonsense we co-create to survive/get ahead, just doing our job/startup/fill-in-the-blank?
Although it is the 21st century, why are so many people still at the base of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? Is that because we all need money to survive, money is scarce and the prevailing paradigm signals that self-preservation and getting ahead is centered on winning at all costs?
Meanwhile, top corporations continued to accrue revenues far in excess of most governments in 2017. According to Global Justice Now, of the top 100 economic entities, 69 are corporations while of the top 200, 157 are corporations. ‘Artificial persons’ like Walmart, Apple and Shell all also accrued more wealth than Russia, Belgium and Sweden.
Jeff Desjardins illustrates how in 2018, the Big Five tech giants had generated over $800 billion (in terms of GDP, that’s equivalent to that of our 20 largest countries), even surpassing Saudi Arabia’s entire economy ($684 billion GDP). They also generated a net $139 billion windfall for their shareholders.
The water we swim in as of February 2, 2019 market capitalization, per Google Finance :
Our world’s 10 largest transnationals (Five in tech, two in finance, two in consumer services and one in energy) all have their roots in the US but they enjoy global dominance and marketplace.
According to Yasha Levine, author of Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet:
“Since the dot com boom, Silicon Valley has been selling itself to the world as a new breed of global corporation — neutral platforms that sit on top of the world, unconcerned with and totally removed from American geopolitical and national security interests. The public believed it. Even Silicon Valley people believed it. It was the dawn of a new depoliticized corporate internationalism. It was all about a utopian technological revolution that would connect and empower people, regardless of their nationality or language. Indeed, Silicon Valley was supposed to make “the nation” obsolete. Of course, this was always a transparent sham.”
As money scarcity addicts you to self-preservation, you could be like a fish in the water — just doing your job — unaware the Business-as-usual paradigm has been controlling us with money serving these key functions:
· Transfer of value (buy and sell goods and services and pay debts/taxes),
· Store of value (accumulate to transact goods and services later) and
· The most critical, psychologically as a numeric unit of account (common measure for goods and services to be exchanged) so whoever has the most money and power can very easily control and manipulate you — e.g. rewarding (giving money) or punishing (taking away).
With 97% or more of money in circulation digital and seemingly distributed and decentralized, you may even miss the systemic context. Including how all our individual data is being aggregated and turned into Big Data — the future of money — for absolute control.
Instead of Big Business paying most of us a decent salary to buy the goods and services we produce, this digital trend revolves around us creating the value and buying their services and products while all the key benefits (wealth) end up in the pockets of the Big Business and their owners.
As technocrats of all shapes, sizes and hues race to replace old structures with new and transform every product into a service with them as the middlemen, this may even portend the top-down shift of Control from money to Big data.
Focused on self-preservation, you may not even realize you have exchanged your real value for money, surrendered to business entities with no higher god than growth/funders, or how an abundance of money also loses its value (e.g. booms and busts). As money scarcity sows fear, discord and distrust (to control our behaviors), can the water you swim in blind you to how fighting one another, all of us co-power a global rent-seeking model?
Our shared future based on more of the same?
“It is the very success of capitalism (greater efficiency, raised productivity etc) which produces unemployment, rendering more and more workers useless: what should be a blessing — less hard labour needed — becomes a curse. Or, to put it differently, the chance to be exploited in a long-term job is now experienced as a privilege.” Slavoj Žižek
Automation, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) have (gradually, initially) been replacing humans. When John Chambers, Silicon Valley’s longest-serving CEO, retired as Cisco’s chairman in 2015, he even predicted that 40% of companies would be dead in 10 years.
Meanwhile, surveillance is increasingly being outsourced to Silicon Valley while China aspires to be the world’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) powerhouse. Along with rolling out the Social Credit system and the Belt Road Initiative, China has also incubated nine of the world’s 20 biggest tech companies.
This global shift is happening in plain sight but apart from the technologies being new, the Business-as-usual paradigm of extracting our value to maximize profits for Big Business has not changed one iota. Based on the same direction/paradigm, wouldn’t the use of new digital tools simply accelerate the insatiable extraction of the rest of our value — from cradle to grave?
“Data is to Technocracy as blood is to your body.” Patrick Wood
‘Artificial persons’ have no higher god than growth and the global rent-seeking model is built on debt. So, when people lose their jobs to automation, robotics and AI, how will they pay back their debts? How will you survive?
“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence — it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” Peter Drucker
By continuing to think and do what you have always done, the latest transition may take us from the world’s dumbest idea to the world’s most dangerous idea. To explore why we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking used to create them, Social movements powering the future of money is available for free downloads from April 24–28, 2019 (Pacific time).
Self-organized to drown out what’s happening in plain sight?
In 1963, way before tech giants made us their product to build their data-mining empires (21st century’s Towers of Babel), an article titled Chaos in the brickyard shared how scientists were generating too many facts, too busy churning out bricks without any regard to how they went together. Once the land became flooded with brickmaking:
“It became difficult to find the proper bricks for a task because one had to hunt among so many … It became difficult to complete a useful edifice because, as soon as the foundations were discernible, they were buried under an avalanche of random bricks. And, saddest of all, sometimes no effort was made even to maintain the distinction between a pile of bricks and a true edifice.” Bernard K Forsher, the Mayo Clinic
Isn’t that an example of ‘I win, you lose’ behavior in the water we swim in? To survive/get ahead for ourselves, don’t we unwittingly keep funneling money and power to the corporatocracy?
For True Abundance to emerge, all of us we have a mindset chasm to cross, unlearning Nonsense to relearn Common Sense, walking your talk. Essentially, to go from “For me” preservation to “For us” maximization. That requires a shift in direction — from control to empowering each other — so strangers anywhere can build trust with one and all.
To try to cut through the noise generated by 1 minute of internet time, PLEASE help generate awareness of this upcoming experiment. Very broadly, the proposed Business-NOT-as-usual pitch:
· Strangers anywhere co-create this pilot
· Strangers co-write a book on how they build trust doing that
· Strangers share the net proceeds generated
Everything is emergent as that will depend on whether you are ready to participate and what you will do. In a world of almost 8 billion, I hope enough people will want to walk their talk for True Abundance instead of throwing siloed bricks at each other on social media platforms.
Other things being equal, the first 10 to post a review of the book on Amazon will be given preference for net profit sharing should we succeed in piloting this experiment. To allow time to observe behaviors towards our shared future, broad guidelines for the pilot will be posted once this petition is signed by 100,000 people.
As strangers try to catalyze the shift to sanity, please also share this link with your family, friends and networks. Together, let’s see if enough strangers anywhere can kickstart True Abundance even if you have bills to pay and family members to feed in a global rent-seeking model that thrives on artificial Scarcity!!!
Most of all, don’t forget to ask yourself what future you are creating for everyone, including yourself and your present and future generations!
