Have I destroyed all chances I may ever have had at normal employment and climbing the corporate ladder with my honest expression over the last few months? I am not sure, possibly. Nothing about my capabilities or my interpersonal skills has changed, but I have expressed grievances which our current society may not be capable of redressing. I couldn't sit in a position of privilege while the opportunity to speak out struck me. Perhaps my actions were in part a subconscious expression of solidarity.
I am going to directly copy the Bio I completed for the first crowdfunding campaign that I initiated:
Former IT professional specializing in computer networking. Taking a break from wage labor for skill building and creative expression.At the time I quit my last job, I could vividly see my workplace as a microcosm of the greater disease which afflicted the world. I have so far found no better explanation of what I am talking about than the following documentary:
I would like to quickly tell you a bit about myself and how I have built up to this. I am a fairly quiet person and was subjected to constant stress throughout my life. I did poorly in school because I learn by experimentation instead of memorization and repetition. My only challenge was to pass classes through high test scores. People thought that I was smart, but I seemed to do very poorly in this environment. To this day, a few fluff English and elective type courses remain between myself and my HS/College diplomas. It wasn't until my late 20's that I realized my entire education was nothing but make-work credentialing.
Experience is the real teacher, and this was actually a blessing in disguise. Through my late teen and early adulthood, my Father worked abroad and so I was able to visit over 20 countries in my life. We always stayed clear of resort areas, and really endeavored to see what life was like for the locals. This gave me a great appreciation for what I had, even though I didn't really know the truth of this privilege. By 25, I had been finally finding relief from the symptoms of chronic stress (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) through a very physical warehouse job and supplements like l-glutamine. I was in great shape, the brain fog was lifting, I was getting my energy back, and I met my future wife!
I went back to college (didn't finish again) and got an amazing job (anyhow) at the I.T. helpdesk of a major financial institution. While I quickly became one of the most valued workers on my team, much time was available for me to continue earlier research on disaster preparedness. This began a maddening quest to find the ever bigger picture and the meaning of all of this. By 2012 I was heavily researching manipulation of the precious metals markets, by 2013 I was heavily researching the manipulation of all markets and the broader institutions of our society.
At age 30, the year 2014 was the most profound of my life. It was the culmination of everything that I had experienced, and completely transformed my life. I had realized the sheer complexity of the worlds problems and decided to stop reading and start doing. By this time I was convinced that Bitcoin was part of the logical response to everything I had discovered. If blockchain technology could replace the need for a third party, such a a central bank, what else can it do? Three of my articles were published in the Cryptobiz magazine, each with a successively broader and more profound scope.
I had been very active in the strategy and marketing of an “alt-coin” called Crypto Bullion, with a furious amount of time and effort spent well into the summer of 2014. The stress was getting to me again, and I found myself again at the peak of unhealthy patterns of behavior. I had really started picking up Buddhism since February, and was reading a book by OSHO while on summer vacation. All of my experience converged in those days, and something had deeply changed inside me, but I didn't yet know what.
I can not really explain the next few months but it was both exciting and frightening. I came to realize that I had broken free of the fear-based patterns of ego which, for me, manifested as a quest for truth in a mad world. I was finally free of the expectations, the aversions and desires, the worrying, the over-thinking, and the general self-importance of life.
With this experience, many wonderful gifts began to materialize for me. I realized unconditional love, the meaning of compassion, and, a serene sense of equanimity. I also came to realize that we are all equal; that there is no such thing as good or evil, but rather that we are all shaped to be who we are by our experience, and it is not our fault. This insight is absolutely critical for my work because it gives me the ability to see the difference between the old regime of division, and the gems of unity which are the product of an emerging planetary consciousness.
This quickly explains why Native Americans referred to competition and exploitation as a disease. We are so far along the path that alternatives are almost inconceivable and we believe our societal structures to be optimal. Management is not interested in critical analysis and proposals for efficiency gains through information sharing and responsibility, if its not your job. My years of experience allowed me to see clearly the bottlenecks of operation, but suggestions may simply be taken as threats to authority. Why don't I just increase my *own* efficiency? huh?
And why should I be working towards foreign profits? Why can't my efforts directly benefit my community and build strength of local networks? We are all heavily invested into the way things are, and these questions may sounds really stupid. They strike at the heart of exploitation. It is actually possible to work together to encourage local sustainable abundance while making communities more independent. Why does it seem like there is no motivation for this to happen at all in society? We like to have the bounty of our labor swept away to far off pockets? Is this a stupid point?
“Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor or they will never be industrious,” Arthur Young 1771.Three Aspects of Poverty
However, the lack of money is more a symptom of poverty rather than its cause. In most cases the poor are not without an income, what they lack is the ability to accumulate assets, which is a key ingredient to the creation of wealth and breaking the cycle of poverty.Looking at this exploration of poverty, its easy to conclude that most of us are in it. Who is able to save money? When I left my job, one reason was that I was going further and further into debt. I either try to make something happen now, or some time down the road it all collapses anyhow. With society in such desperate need of critical analysis, I felt that privilege can wait, and that I might actually find support for my work.
Besides their low earnings, the prime reason for their inability to accumulate assets and thus increase their security of income is that their profits or potential savings are often appropriated by moneylenders who charge usurious interest rates, by formal and informal regulatory and enforcement agents/organizations who demand bribes or extort protection money, and by middlemen or other stronger business partners who exploit the poor because the poor lack market information or the ability to use that market information to increase their own incomes.
What was once the carrot of all kinds of crap I can consume if only I work hard for it, has now become the stick of debt and bills which subtly threaten to remove my access to life. What little I had saved is long gone, and there is nothing left but to submit myself again to directed labor. The system works! But this is stupid right? Why even bother talking about it, don't we all have to do this?
A Five Hundred Year Moment?
To be dependent on working for wages, or to have to keep up regular payments in order to have somewhere to call home—at the close of the Middle Ages, either of these things was a sign of destitution, misery and impotence.
[...] For a long time, the primary form of resistance to wage-labour was simply a persistent unwillingness to give up the varied activities and irregular rhythms of the day, the week and the year. In England, where full-on industrialisation came earliest, the historian E.P. Thompson catalogues the complaints of the authorities and (would-be) employers against the ordinary people:Some of you may be aware of a concept called technological unemployment. It basically means that automation driven by profit motivated efficiency seeking, is drastically reducing the cost of labor (and wages) leading to underemployment and unemployment. We have reached a point where we can clearly see that if current trends continue, there will be very few jobs left, and no one will be able to afford the products and services being automatically provided. Here is a quick video which seems to hit on a few good points:
“If you offer them work, they will tell you that they must go to look up their sheep, cut furzes, get their cow out of the pound, or, perhaps, say they must take their horse to be shod, that he may carry them to a horse-race or a cricket match.”
(Arbuthnot, 1773)
“When a labourer becomes possessed of more land than he and his family can cultivate in the evenings… the farmer can no longer depend on him for constant work…”
(Commercial & Agricultural Magazine, 1800)
These difficulties were resolved by the process of enclosure, a series of laws by which the ‘commons’—land held in traditional forms of collective ownership, to which local people had a web of overlapping rights of access, grazing and foraging—were privatised. Carried out in the name of ‘agricultural improvement’, enclosure was essential to the creation of a large class with no alternative to renting out their bodies at a daily or a weekly rate.
While rural life in England had been shaped by the customary rights of the commons, the skilled trades were also governed by longstanding customary agreements. These formed the basis of a way of living in which artisans worked largely on their own terms, combining the practice of their trade with other activities and shaping the rhythms of their work as they wished. By the early 19th century, this arrangement was under attack from new legislation and new industrial practices. When their petitions to parliament went unheard, the weavers of Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire were ready to fight rather than be reduced to the status of wage labourers in other men’s factories. This was the origin of the Luddite movement: attacking mills by night, smashing the machinery and sometimes burning the owners’ houses, it ran through the manufacturing districts of the three counties between 1811 and 1813.
The tendency of grown men to smash up the machines contributed to the preference of manufacturers for employing women and young children. To create a modern workforce, fully accustomed to the submission of their time and energy to their employer’s command, it was necessary to start young—and so the story of how wage-labour went from a stigma to a human right forms the shadow side of the history of education. The process is described quite openly by William Temple, writing in 1770, as he makes the case for sending the children of the poor to workhouses from the age of four:
“There is considerable use in their being, somehow or other, constantly employed at least twelve hours a day, whether they earn their living or not; for by these means, we hope that the rising generation will be so habituated to constant employment that it would at length prove agreeable and entertaining to them.”The origins of mass education are double-edged: on the one hand, the extension of schooling was often pushed forward by those sincerely dedicated to rescuing children from the horrors of the industrial workplace in its earlier forms; on the other, it served as the means to produce an obedient industrial workforce, accustomed to the discipline of completing tasks, often meaningless to them, under the direction of an authority figure and with strict rules concerning time-keeping.
So if we are going to accept profit at the best motive for society that we can come up with, we will watch as the false pretext of caring for human needs is swept aside in the name of competition. We are going to have to realize that most of our history saw a stewardship of our common heritage and cooperation as the dominant force for meeting human needs. Competition will need to be identified as the disease which continually appropriates all excess wealth towards the few and denies us the ability to build strong interdependence within our communities. Sounding like a load of crap again? Don't worry, it's the conditioning. We have so much psychologically invested in this way of life. We have all worked so hard to feed it. What if the illusion collapses? We can do this the easy way (red pill), or the hard way (blue pill).
Post-Capitalism: Rise of the Collaborative Commons | The Revolution will not be Centralized
As capitalist markets and wage labor becomes less relevant, an economy built upon new principles and social values will progressively emerge: decentralized networks will take the place of markets; access to an abundance of shareable goods and services will reduce the significance of ownership and private property; open-source innovation, transparency and collaborative co-creation will replace the pursuit of competitive self-interest and autonomy; a commitment to sustainable development and a reintegration with the Earth’s biosphere will redress rampant materialism and overconsumption; and the re-discovery of our empathic nature will drive our pursuit for community engagement and social belonging in a rising Collaborative Commons.
[...] If there is an underlying theme to the emerging paradigm, it is the decentralization of everything.Cooperatives whose profit has been constitutionally redirected towards expansion and co-creation of commons is one example of a new type of organization which directly encourages abundance and the meeting of human needs. What exactly are commons? Its a great subject for another post, but essentially it is neither public, nor private, but common. This is maintained by collective stewardship in the common interest. Working together we would quickly see the bounty of cooperation massively outstrips anything that competition could ever produce, especially with the coordination possible with emerging technologies.
There are many new ideas being thrown around such as the guaranteed basic income, but it must all be looked at with a critical approach. If we are unaware of the possibility to invest in local sustainable abundance (permaculture), the money will be wasted just as so much capital is squandered in the purchase of items designed for obsolescence, not independence. Corporations have the money to spend thinking about how they can remove their dependence on human labor. If we are not thinking of ways to remove our dependence on corporations, we will become obsolete, and discarded just as we discard our coffee cups.
Bonus Documentaries (very excellent):
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