decentralization – Mark E. Jeftovic is The Bombthrower https://bombthrower.com Blowing up the Clown World. Sat, 24 Feb 2024 19:36:44 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1 https://bombthrower.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/favicon.jpg decentralization – Mark E. Jeftovic is The Bombthrower https://bombthrower.com 32 32 Are You Ready For Neo-Collectivism? https://bombthrower.com/are-you-ready-for-neo-collectivism/ https://bombthrower.com/are-you-ready-for-neo-collectivism/#comments Sat, 24 Feb 2024 18:14:54 +0000 https://bombthrower.com/?p=9395

“Two-thirds of young people would like to live under an explicitly socialist economic system”

Even worse: They have no idea what socialism is.

Not long ago we looked at The Future Laboratory’s report on travel that predicted carbon passports and limits on personal CO2 emissions as a way to mitigate climate change.

The back of the napkin math from our look at that report, was that living standards in G-20 nations would have to drop by 75% in order  to bring personal carbon footprints in line with “expert” recommendations (the typical North American pleb emits somewhere between 12 and 13 tonnes of CO2 per year – to meet those netzero objectives, set by unelected, globalist technocrats, we need to ratchet that down to 2.3 tonnes per year).

In the course of breaking that down I came across another report,  also authored by Future Labs (whom I described then, as coming across as a WEF-wannabe). That was on the coming “macrotrend” of Neo-Collectivism. At the time I plunked down £265.00 to buy the report, promising to write it up in an upcoming piece.

Here it is:

There are five core themes running through 40-page, high-gloss PDF:

  1. Climate disaster is imminent.
  2. Democracy and capitalism in their current state aren’t working.
  3. Individualism is on the way out.
  4. “Web3” is a driving force of decentralization, (but it is being co-opted by capitalism).
  5. Young people increasingly see collectivism, if not outright socialism as the solution.

Like everything The Future Laboratory emits, there’s a lot of word salad:

“a new model has the potential to reroute power from organisations: Web3. In this digital laboratory, decentralisation reigns: citizens become squads, profits are dispersed and community is king.

 

It represents a fresh start, an Alternet Economy that allows us to imagine how systems rooted in consensus, equity and care can be reproduced in offline societies too. How, for example, could cities, wealth and even entire organisations be shaped by solidarity?”

The report promises that, “These practical strategies will guide your brand through the shift from individualism to collectivism“

However, when you peel back the veneer of equity, social justice and “deeper meaning” that are supposed to supplant the crass, destructive impulses like capitalism and free exchange, the trends highlighted as “re-imaginings” of work, organization and ownership, turn out to be… somewhat capitalist and free enterprise-y.

And that’s a problem.

Any kind of co-operative enterprise that is entered into consensually and produces excess time, services or goods (profit) which is then divided among the participants is basically a free enterprise venture. It’s nothing new.

“This means that brands, which are nothing without their communities, will make the radical move from being sellers to coordinators. To genuinely place collectivism at the heart of their products, campaigns and workforces, brands should prepare for a future in which they invite customers to run their businesses, design infrastructure as a service, and blur the boundaries between a company, a community and a collective.”

One could argue that customers already run businesses. Or at least they would, if left to themselves: “The customer is always right” and “Necessity is the Mother of Invention” are what drive a pure market economy.

What customers value, what they need, is what gets produced. All other factors are distortions.

You can ruminate on how profits tend to coagulate toward the few, how monopolies emerge and hierarchies ossify into oligarchs and elites – but closer inspection on why – for anybody who cares to go down that rabbit hole, usually reveals a broken monetary system, Cantillon Effects and a political class hell bent on perpetuating the grift.

These realities tend to cast a pall over “collectivist opportunities”:

Decentralisation is one of the driving forces behind Web3.  This re-imagined internet is intended to be governed by its users, and its collectives are flourishing in gaming platforms like Roblox and decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) like Friends with Benefits.

 

But this sense of ‘freedom’ that Web3 promises is already being disputed. Ed Zitron, CEO of media relations company EZPR, argues that Web3’s veneer of equity is being rubbed away to resemble the hierarchies of Silicon Valley – an idea exemplified by Facebook’s acceleration into the metaverse. ‘These systems are not ‘free’ or ‘owned by the people’, but owned by the people who created the systems,’ he writes.

You mean platforms and infrastructure are owned by the very people who risk their own capital and time in order to invent and build them? The horror!

Even Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) find it necessary to implement policy and consensus through the ownership of governance tokens, and those tokens are usually bought and sold like commodities. They have to be, or else nobody would ascribe value to a governance token – that may be what the project participants are initially paid in.

The sub-text of all collectivist or socialist aspirations, spoken or not, is “equality of outcome” – something which is categorically impossible so long as there are any vestiges of free will. 

The sub-text of all collectivist or socialist aspirations, spoken or not, is 'equality of outcome' - something which is categorically impossible so long as there are any vestiges of free will.
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No matter how much you try to democratize and make any given venture equitable – at some level people have to decide whether to allocate their time, energy, resources to it, or to something else – and the only way to do that is to make doing so involve an economic trade-off. It’s the same reason why Proof-of-Work (mining) is so integral to the success of Bitcoin.

Choice ensues, as does subjective value, then ownership. And wherever you get ownership, you get concentration of ownership. It’s the Pareto Principle 101 (the 80/20 Rule, which we find everywhere, is like a naturally occurring constant of the universe, like the Golden Mean).

The only way to obviate concentration and “unfair” ownership distribution, isn’t through  halfway-communist euphemisms like “Neo-Collectivism”, communitarianism or “socialism” – you have to go full-throttle: 100% central planning and abolition of individual rights on everything.

No “skin in the game”, no subjective value, no individual choice – just the fulfillment of a collectively decided central plan, against which there are no alternative actions or considerations (sounds a lot like #netzero and #degrowth, tbh).

In case you think I’m exaggerating the end-point of socialism, the report points (rather blithely, I might add) toward a Brave New World of “Post-Family kinship”:

“something ME O’Brien, a trans communist writer, is calling for: ‘In place of the coercive system of atomised family units, the abolition of the family would generalise what we now call care.’”

Noting that the “generalization of care” would only accomplish commoditizing it –  we get a sense of where collectivism inexorably leads: abolition of basic human rights.

The primary mechanisms through which individual choice and action occur (along with the choice of vocation), include the selection of a spouse, the raising of one’s family and relations with kin.

Theoretical depiction of a post-kinship collective living the proletarian dream.

Confusing “Decentralization” With “Collectivism” Considered Harmful

“Neo-collectivism is not only motivating consumers to create their own systems of commerce, care and community, but leading brands and organisations to reconfigure their own anatomies too.

New initiatives are applying this sense of localism to the retail market, using communal sharing models in order to decouple consumption from capitalism.

Where citizens once relied on Silicon Valley powerhouses to spearhead better technologies, they are now taking control, forming human networks that rely on groups of people working in tandem.”

These are all just rhetorical repackagings of free enterprise , entrepreneurship and dare I say it, competition.

You can call an employee owned co-operative with a relatively flat org chart neo-collectivist and socialist: but it isn’t. It’s a capitalist, free enterprise business and more power to those who can make it work, especially by giving everyone on the team skin in the game (ownership, “equity”, shares).

But the danger here is packaging all these ideas around decentralization and new ways to do business as some kind of vindication of collectivism, or socialism. The report introduction cites the Institute of Economic Affairs, that

“Two-thirds (67%) of young people in Britain would like to live under an explicitly socialist economic system”

Yet very little in this report, that purports to describe the coming “macrotrend” of neo-Collectivism, is actually socialist or even really collectivist (except maybe the idea of abolishing the family).

What the Future Labs report is really talking about is decentralization. It talks about localism – which is another megatrend, closely related, and coincidentally something I’ve been recently talking about with Charles Hugh Smith, regarding one his books, Self-Reliance in the 21st Century:

Here’s the Future Lab word salad version:

“The pandemic helped people recognise the personal limitations of aligning career with purpose, motivating people to find life satisfaction closer to home, and within more localised communities and collectivist opportunities.”

 

“New initiatives are applying this sense of localism to the retail market, using communal sharing models in order to decouple consumption from capitalism.”

And here’s what Charles wrote:

“the entire premise of self-reliance is to relocalize one’s own economy as much as possible by earning and spending money in one’s own community, outside the control of corporations / globalization.”

and how he describes his book:

“self-reliance in the 21st century means reducing our dependency on fragile supply chains and becoming producers as well as consumers.

 

“[it] is often confused with self-sufficiency–the equivalent of Thoreau s a cabin on Walden Pond. But self-reliance in the 21st century isn t about piling up money or a cabin in the woods; it s about humanity’s most successful innovation: cooperating with trustworthy others in productive networks.”

The Future Laboratory and Charles Hugh Smith are talking about the same thing. But when you filter out the “WEF-speak” and glorification of collectivism – what we’re really looking at is driven by self-reliance (individualism) – which occurs within a community or what Charles calls a “productive network” (a free market).

I’ve heard people whom I thought would know better, such as ‘Exponential Organizations’ author Salim Ismail, trying to make  the case (on Robert Breedlove’s ‘What Is Money’ show) that “privately run socialism” would work better than state run, because it’s the central planning of The State that is inefficient.

This is really just a variation of “True Communism has never been tried”, where techno-utopians like Ismail inadvertently drift toward the “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”  ideations of Aaron Bastani (publisher of Jacobin Magazine). We’ll have to to break that out into another post. The short version is that all versions of “FALC” assume a near-zero marginal cost of energy – which, at least for now, is not the case. 

Ismail cited  Uber as an example of  a socialist app, proving that even brainy people are prone to conflating  sharing (or even cooperation) with socialism.

When you think about it, sharing is impossible without ownership and without capitalism, specifically. Private property is what makes sharing even possible. Without it, in a truly socialist system (no private property), there is no sharing – there is only taking turns using things – and who’s turn it is gets decided by somebody else.

So too, is cooperation decidedly individualistic – one must decide to enter into a mutual agreement with another – and at least two individuals have to decide it to have any cooperation at all. Socialism, or collectivism is not cooperative – it is conformity and compliance – enforced by other people.

What Future Labs is articulating in this report, and techno-utopians like Ismail are hinting at, are really the myriad permutations that can and will arise on the crest of the decentralization revolution. Some may be hyper-individualistic, other decidedly communal, let a thousand flowers bloom.

But let’s not fool ourselves – or worse – mistakenly vote ourselves into socialism or embracing collectivism because we think they’re the same thing as decentralization.

The late great Ross Elver (my long-time lawyer and mentor) was fond of saying “You can’t suck and blow at the same time”.  The coming megatrend is decentralization, and you can’t have decentralization and collectivism at the same time.

Who gets to decide what you do? You or somebody else?

Decentralization is about the core, fundamental human right: choice – and choice is all about individualism.

Collectivism, under whatever name you want to call it abolishes choice.

The easiest way to tell the difference is to ask yourself “Who gets to decide what you do (or don’t do)? You? Or somebody else?”

Decide what? Your travel allowance, your meat consumption, your energy usage… everything.

If it’s somebody else, then it’s socialism / collectivism. 

I won’t post the Future Labs report here because it’s their paid content and, I assume, their copyright. Perhaps someday, after the abolition of private property, they won’t mind.

My next e-book The CBDC Survival Guide: Navigating Monetary Apartheid will be out soon (honest), sign up for The Bombthrower mailing list and I’ll let you know when it drops – and get a copy of the The Crypto Capitalist Manifesto in the meantime. 

Follow me on Twitter or Nostr. npub1elwpzsul8d9k4tgxqdjuzxp0wa94ysr4zu9xeudrcxe2h3sazqkq5mehan

Also See:

]]> https://bombthrower.com/are-you-ready-for-neo-collectivism/feed/ 12 It’s 2022 and the Pandemic is Over. https://bombthrower.com/its-2022-and-the-pandemic-is-over/ https://bombthrower.com/its-2022-and-the-pandemic-is-over/#comments Sat, 01 Jan 2022 21:18:24 +0000 https://bombthrower.com/?p=3064
A Procession of Flagellants – Francisco De Goya 1819

Only the most brainwashed True Believers will cling to the failed narrative.

For a few months now I’ve been writing that my thinking around Covid tyranny and these elite aspirations toward a Great Reset under their purview had shifted. For nearly two years I had feared that we were headed into a new dark age of totalitarianism and repression, that Western leaders would aspire to implement China-style social credit systems and completely takeover the economy and day to day lives of its subjects.

Make no mistake, many establishment elites do want that. It’s just for awhile there it looked to me like they would succeed. But then my thinking started to shift around that. I realized that the entire transformational shift in the very nature of communications (Internet), power (networks) and then money (Bitcoin) meant the very architecture of society had changed so profoundly that this type of top-down, centralized authoritarianism I had feared so much was now untenable.

It was trying to retrofit digital versions of industrial era authority onto a new terrain of decentralized networks and individual sovereignty (at least for those individuals who successfully position themselves for it. Everybody else will be neo-Feudal serfs, and many of them will actually prefer that).

I began to suspect that rather than entering this new Dark Age of Davos inspired technocracy, we were instead experiencing a crescendo, a culmination of over a century of creeping Marxism.

Covid, rather than bringing about a monoculture of globalism, which those who respected human rights feared, it forced the hand of these impulses. It became a matter of Too Much, Too Soon.

Further, my readings of history made me expect that when the entire false Zeitgeist around COVID, collectivism (including climate) came unglued, it would happen very rapidly. A la the fall of the 800-year old Czarist line in under 72 hours, or the collapse of the Soviet Empire within 18 to 24 months.

These last couple days felt like something has palpably shifted

When omicron came out and the media went hysterical, I wrote that Omicron changed nothing. The early indications were that it was less dangerous than Delta, which was only 1/10th as bad as Alpha (that’s why the casedemic became so absurd under Delta as the fatalities never rose with the case counts).

But I was wrong about Omciron, in that it changed everything. It became very apparent very quickly that Omicron, with data showing 1/2 to 1/3 the lethality of Delta, was a nothing-burger.  Its super-contagiousness meant that COVID would be endemic, but benign.

Over the past few days the CDC moderated its stance on quarantine times, acknowledging the new reality. Here in Ontario the medical board announced no more PCR tests for the non-symptomatic – in other words, there will be no more histrionics over case counts. Schools will remain open, much to the chagrin of teachers’ unions and those conditioned by two-years of Pavlovian fear-mongering.

Now into this highly sensitive state of  self-organized criticality comes the Joe Rogan interview with mRNA inventor Robert Malone. Three hours long to a widespread audience, Youtube took the video down within hours of the interview being covered on Zerohedge.

This was no surprise, so I had already downloaded it before Youtube took it down and I’ve uploaded the video to Rumble here.

What I didn’t expect to happen so fast was the sudden narrative and policy shifts in the face of the undeniable reality that Omicron has ended the pandemic. Super-contagious yet mild in effects, with ultra low hospitalizations and near-zero fatalities, Omicron is nature’s detente with humanity. An all natural herd immunity (except for the part where it was probably, originally cooked up in a lab).

Ironically, the fact that the dominant strain is now a head-cold version of COVID should be good news. However, for many this had become a religion.

There will be those who try to cling onto COVID tyranny for as long as possible and in doing so, they will perpetuate a state of hyper-normalization that will be self-defeating.

Hyper-normalization is a phrase coined by the UK documentarist Adam Curtis, and it describes a state where the prevailing establishment narrative is so absurd and demonstrably false that only the most brainwashed True Believers can cling to it. Only the most corrupt and self-seeking policy makers will attempt to perpetuate it. Those who do espouse it are typically the greatest beneficiaries of the dysfunctional zeitgeist.

Whether it’s Justin Trudeau accusing the vaccine hesitant of being racist misogynists

…or Big Tech attempting to deplatform Robert Malone. Every further incident, every attempt at censorship and gaslighting just makes it all the more clear and undeniable: the only people pushing to continue this state of affairs are insular elites who are detached from reality and who benefit from a system that has lost all legitimacy.

Today’s post contained excerpts from  The Crypto Capitalist Letter, which covers macro tensions between the globalists and sovereign-individuals. We also  have a tactical focus on publicly traded crypto stocks. Get the overall investment / macro thesis free when you subscribe to the Bombthrower mailing list, or try the premium service for a month with our  fully refundable New Years’ trial offer.

]]> https://bombthrower.com/its-2022-and-the-pandemic-is-over/feed/ 23 Never mind The Great Reset. Here comes The Great Reject. https://bombthrower.com/the-jackpot-chronicles-scenario-4-atlas-shrugged/ https://bombthrower.com/the-jackpot-chronicles-scenario-4-atlas-shrugged/#comments Thu, 06 May 2021 14:59:31 +0000 https://bombthrower.com/?p=2223

The Jackpot Chronicles Scenario #4: Atlas Shrugged

It occurred to me that I never did finish the final instalment of last summer’s Jackpot Chronicles, wherein I posited four possible post-Covid scenarios.

For a quick refresher, The Jackpot is concept I cribbed from William Gibson. It’s a term he uses across a few of his near-future cyberpunk novels that describes a series of rolling global catastrophes that set in sometime around 2016 (his stories span multiverses, and timelines, but the common theme is that somewhere around 2016, some kind of irrevocable glitch in the matrix occurred that put a permanent end to normalcy as it has been understood up until that point).

If there was a Jackpot, whatever it was, it could arguably have happened at many points throughout the 20th century, or if we wanted to confine our speculation to the 21st century then, 9/11 or the GFC would do. Everything after that being symptomatic as opposed to causal.

And then… 2020 and COVID hit. That’s when the fabric of time cleaves us into the before times and The Jackpot.


The other post-pandemic scenarios from the rest of my Jackpot series were:

  1. Force Majeure: The wheels come off completely and the system comes unglued. Mad Max.
  2. Tin Foil Hat: It really is one Big Conspiracy and we’re into a New World Order.
  3. The Great Bifurcation: The middle class gets wiped out and we get a two-tier society

I had thought the fourth scenario would be the one themed Deglobalization, and to a certain extent it still is. In the original outline I described that Deglobalization:

“Is where multi-national corporations, so shaken from this Near Death Experience, realizing their error of betting the farm on just-in-time supply chains, labour cost arbitrage and having zero buffers, begin pulling manufacturing back home.

The smart ones start building cushions and shock absorbers into their business logic, and they begin to eschew leverage after being on the wrong side of a series of cascading liquidity implosions. In other words, businesses begin to transition themselves into what I called “Transition Companies” as posited in the inaugural posting for [this blog]”.

I also went on to say that I considered this one most desirable yet least likely. My view on this scenario has changed somewhat, and I also think that the staggering government ineptitude and duplicity at all levels in all jurisdictions (with few notable exceptions) has made our regeared “4th scenario” more likely given that it’s in progress. Mass demonstrations, mass exoduses, crypto-currencies are symptoms of a Great Reject, or as I’ve renamed this scenario “Atlas Shrugged“.

The TL,DR of the novel, Atlas Shrugged is that once the institutional sclerosis of the ruling class was understood to be both incorrigible and irreversible, the only other option was a global opt-out. There was no Great Reset in Atlas Shrugged. They got The Great Reject instead.

Under the Atlas Shrugged scenario, deglobalization is just one of numerous motivating factors, but it’s mainly an outcome of a larger dynamic where all non-ruling factions in society lose faith in the prevailing structure of Neoliberal Globalism (a.k.a “Mr. Global”). With Mr. Global’s viability in question, people begin to look for the exits.

This begins to occur on two fronts. What Vilfredo Pareto called “the non-governing elites” begin to realize that the system which used to accommodate them, even rely on their tacit support, is now becoming hostile toward them. At the very least, the ruling elites are undermining their interests. This is part of the dynamic of Peter Turchin’s “elite overpopulation” that we looked at recently.

The other front is the comparatively powerless underclass, which, in pace with Pareto’s Theory of Elite Cycles, lose their moorings and standing within the system they are expected to adhere to. The social contract no longer seems to be a matter of middle-class protections and living standards but instead becomes starkly authoritarian and one-sided. What is clear is that the existing institutions are now functioning to defend the position of the overclass, not to uphold the rights and liberties of the underclass.

The culmination of multiple super-cycles (Pareto’s Elite Cycles, Turchin’s long term dynamics of sociopolitical instability, debt, a Fourth Turning, and a Maunder Minimum for good measure) combined with an accelerated onslaught of technological innovation: Internet, crypto-currencies …biotech? Nanotech? Micro nuke? Fusion? Quantum computing? We have all the necessary components for a complete breakdown of existing institutions and the total loss of legitimacy of the current governing elite class.

So it goes in our Atlas Shrugged scenario. Various interests of many forms and myriad factions, from dissident states (like Florida), to decentralized and virtual companies, emergent DAO’s, all the way to individuals and cultural tribes all begin to experience these moments of clarity in their own way. From there they will act in their own rational self-interests and cooperate with others doing the same in order to navigate the breakdown of Mr. Global.

In spite of this, Mr. Global’s prevailing policymakers and governance structures will frantically maneuver and spin narratives of fear and fantasy in order to keep the existing system on the rails.

They walked back the second one, but not the first one.

That is what The Great Reset really is: it’s an attempt at a zeitgeist-level rationalization that doubles-down on institutional failure on the part of the entire governance structure of Mr. Global, and gives them a new lease on life to remain in charge. Reimagined by the Davos crew, amplified by the mainstream media, lubricated by Big Tech.

The antidote to all of this are crypto-currencies, smart contracts and decentralization.

That antidote also brings significant upside regardless of which one of our four possible scenarios plays out.

When I listen to people who are complete denial about crypto, I realize that there is a common thread in their objections (what made me think about all this today was listening to Michael Pento’s criticisms of Bitcoin on George Gammon’s Rebel Capitalist. Pento’s 2012 book on the inevitable bursting of the bond bubble is a must read. That book helped be form the basis on what I think is the funds flow that is actually putting a floor under crypto. I don’t begrudge Pento for not seeing it, because as I’ll explain, he’s looking at it through the wrong lens)

We could go on for hours about how most of these people haven’t really delved into the technology or what it means, how their criticisms at the defects around Bitcoin apply even more accurately to US dollars (“backed by nothing”, “infinite supply”, “uses too much energy”, et al). But what they all have in common is that they all posit that whether Bitcoin and cryptos succeed or fail is premised on whether the existing establishment will permit it.

What will the Fed do? What if the government bans it? Won’t the World Bank just create their own CBDC?

This is completely inverted. They have it backwards. It’s not up to the existing system, because the existing system is over. That’s the part they don’t get.

Nation state establishments within the twilight of a declining system should be thinking deeply about their place in the new reality of network states, not pontificating how they will lord over this new landscape. The coming system will be multipolar in not just the geopolitical dimension, but across cyberspace and the network dimensions as well.

Instead, the incumbent system is busy banning menthol cigarettes, gearing up for negative interest rates and undergoing mass conversion to a peculiar new religion called Wokeness.

It won’t work, and it brings to mind a particularly vivid example I once heard about a balloon disaster that still makes me cringe when I think of it:

A group of people were embarking on a balloon ride and as they were just a foot or two off the ground, the burner erupted into flames. The balloon pilot realized the situation immediately and he leapt from the gondola which was still only a few feet off the ground.

 

One or two of the passengers were quick witted enough to realize what this meant and followed him. This set off a feedback loop: as the fire expanded, its hot air forcing the balloon higher, combined with the weight reductions as the first few people bailed out, the situation very quickly escalated past a point of no return.

 

The balloon had accelerated very rapidly to heights from which it was no longer possible to leap safely. The unfortunates who had hesitated and were trapped in a gondola being propelled higher by a fireball, to their inevitable doom.

That’s what our entire situation feels like today. The balloon is still hanging a foot or so above the ground, the canopy is on fire, and the people who have figured out what this means are bailing out while they can and in doing so they are accelerating the ultimate burn-then-crash of the entire system.


In Rand’s book they went to a hidden valley called “Galt’s Gulch” and used their skills and their resources to restore new communities while the old systems imploded. If this scenario plays out we’d be looking for people creating a decentralized, network of gulches. Seeking each other out who are pursuing this same goals, creating open protocols to to rebuild civil societies and autonomous communities built on the ageless principles of free markets, liberty and prosperity.

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