Michael Lucas Monterey: Archiving reality, etc.

Coming soon ~

I considered changing the title to Elites vs. Humanity, but leaving it as is seems to highlight the root of The Problem. Consider the following paragraph from today’s Gaurdian article Why We Stopped Trusting Elites, by William Davies:

>> The biggest scandal of 2012 was a different beast altogether, involving unknown men manipulating a number that very few people had even heard of. The number in question, the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, is meant to represent the rate (of interest) at which banks are willing to loan to each other. What was surreal, in an age of complex derivatives and high-frequency trading algorithms, was that this number was calculated on the basis of estimates declared by each bank on a daily basis, and accepted purely on trust. The revelation that a handful of brokers had conspired to alter Libor for private gain (with possible costs to around 250,000 UK mortgage-holders, among others) may have been difficult to fully comprehend, but it gave the not unreasonable impression of an industry enriching itself in a criminal fashion at the public’s expense. Bob Diamond, the CEO of Barclays, the bank at the centre of the conspiracy, resigned in July 2012 (as a result). <<

I italicized portions of Davies’ text and my parenthetical addenda to highlight what the author acknowledges as being surreally mystifying to him and a vast majority of us. First, the mention of unknown men means men and women who know how to manipulate the world’s totally irrational financialist bubble economy without being prosecuted or punished. The trick hidden in plain sight is the assumption that the top executives and shareholders really meant to represent the notional rate of interest at which banks have a desire to loan money of unknowable current value to each other, as if banks are rational human decision-makers. That is surreal mainly because the daily estimates declared are simply estimates based on unpredictably fluctuating arbitrary values of all currencies and assets determined by speculators (gamblers) and major manipulators. Accepting all that is not a result of trust, but of ignorance, denial and normalized bamboozlement. That a handful of brokers could and would conspire against everyone else is hard to fully comprehend proves my previous statement.

Verily, verily I say to you, quoting the late Carl Sagan, “one of our worst problems is that a majority of us are too easily bamboozled; and, the longer and worse we’re bamboozled, the less we want to know about it.”

The very worst mass-bamboozlement, that fuels and funds all the others, is the subversion and perversion of the meaning of ethics, goodness, honesty, virtue, value, credit, money, wealth and success. Until we restore the ethical essence of our cultural paradigm, modern civilization will keep declining into worse kleptocracy and ecocidal mania. Results have causes, and causes always create outcomes, inevitably. After all, trust depends on belief based on knowledge of good and evil, what has life-enhancing value and what may decrease our quality of life. Being confused about value and ethics prevents wise decisions.

A call to action: This is a link to a great video on money as an  ecocidal psychosocial illness, which I’ve been saying since 1990, online since 2008. > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMbeYJgH_6g&feature=youtu.be&t=1650

The following is a slightly revised copy of a recent email message to the HotFutures group @ Google+ ~ M

Paul et al, in recent dialogs we discussed options for expediting community empowerment, restoration and cultural evolution, globally. I was referred to MACs, the Credit Commons, Localpay, etc. and, after reviewing them, I am encouraged yet inspired to offer the following:

At the Commons P2P Foundation wiki, following quotes of Tom Greco’s wonderful content, Jamie Brown-Hansen offers this, “Community credit, however, is currently a global landscape of local credit facilities. This is not yet a global credit facility. It is easy to offer community credit within a local network of trust. It is much harder to offer community credit for something you’d like to order from China. So the interconnection of these facilities is the next piece in the puzzle that can make this a viable alternative to bank credit as a global medium of exchange, and that’s what we’re focused on today.”

Now, as much as I appreciate Greco and his analysis and the efforts of the folks who pioneered and sustain the existing exchanges, the main reason that the Credit Commons remains unlaunched and existing exchanges are not serving the majority of daily transactions of humanity and commerce is that they did not go far enough or deep enough.

By that I mean that revealing and restoring the actual meaning of credit and its relation to the reality of money is insufficient. The meaning, principle and valid use of credit depend on the principle and understanding of value. Without explicit articulation and acknowledgement of the actual principle and realities of value, a generally useful, popularly implemented alternative to plutonomy is impossible. The history of banking, money, crypto-currency  and corruption prove that fact.

“Designed to be a universal blockchain platform for diverse industries adaptation, HetaChain is a DPoS + BFT hybrid network focused on addressing the blockchain scalability problem, so as to enable cross-industry scale transactions. The project strives to provide solutions to help tech services break down the adoption wall between them and the public:

• Bridge Protocol – through this protocol, data is still securely enclosed while the Private chain communicates with Main chain to update abstracted transaction details to the public ledger.
• Dapp Store – plug-and-play Dapps, software, smart contracts, etc. pre-built by the community and third parties for the ecosystem.
• Offchain Database – designed for large data storage, HetaChain’s Main chain connects with third-party data centers to provide enterprises with big data analysis for efficient project development.
• Auto generating Dapp – the platform allows anyone with little programming knowledge to create simple smart contracts by just dragging, dropping, and adjusting.

“HetaChain uses blockchain’s decentralized and encrypted properties as a way to store, save, and optimize resources. It acts as hub for connecting companies with modern data technologies and in-depth insights that helps to significantly shorten decision-making time.”

Notice that nowhere does that promo mention a biocentric definition of wealth or success or economics or anything about value, ethics, corruption, manipulation of markets, global sea level rise caused by increasing use of blockchain and conventional crypto-coins. Thus, we can critique the above promo to deconstruct and understand the true nature & scope of the problem.
1) The “scalability” and “adoption wall” problems exist because blockchain and the crypto-currencies do not resolve the underlying, anti-ethical Piracy Paradigm problem.
2) The so-called “bridge protocol” does nothing to eliminate the intrinsic lack of trust seeming to require infinitely more time+energy intensive storage & computing processes.
3) The envisioned DAPP store & PnP DAPPS for smart contracts, etc., support no alternative to status quo socioeconomic norms, habits & patterns of consumption, production & waste.
4) Due to issues listed in 1 to 3 above, the proposed “off chain database” and HetaChain’s main chain connection with conventional big data mining complexes promises only more efficient plutonomy, not cyber-utopia.
5)  The notion that the HetaChain “platform allows anyone with little programming knowledge to create simple smart contracts” easily ignores the fact that that developers with little or no ethics and little or no programming expertise caused all the glitches, insecurity and inefficiencies of the global network infrastucture plaguing us now. It also ignores the current availability of AI-assisted system development and coding expertise that far exceeds the abilities of any human team lacking a leading-edge AI support system.
6) Assuming that a conventional blockchain/crypto-currency & exchange system without ethical AI-enhanced system management will help to “shorten decision making time” requires ignoring the fact that most decisions involving cultural interaction or exchange require much more consideration of qualitative, ethical & esthetic issues than merely quantitative factors.

Hence, the purpose, mission and prime directive of the Global Community Development Alliance (GCDA) integrates the functionalities necessary for dealing with the whole-system issues and challenges. That makes it uniquely suited to fostering and supporting adoption and regular use of all existing currencies and exchanges. The GCDA also enables fulfilment of all the requisites of global cooperation and cultural interaction acknowledged by Greco, and much more.

Again, without creating a system based on a valid, biocentric standard of value, that supports ongoing realization of the nature of value and the reality of cultural credit, there can be no sustainable alternative to plutonomy, no real solution worth sustaining.

FYI: See my new draft of Winners Take All? or Class-war vs. Humanity at my new blog page: Axiology: MetaMoney & Ethics

Best of Fortune, etc. ~ M

NOTE: The video reminders linked below miss the fundamental importance of cultural wisdom, value, ethics, direct agency and decentralized issuance of cultural credit (not monetary cyber-currency) as the simple basics of cultural commonwealth and sustainable affluence: > Social credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHG92nQesbE&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR1BJoKQcogq9uLEh-An4d7rCiClYXgZLlXDRlB113uvgqZKRTnMuNFSdWA > The website:  http://www.socred.org/