Conspiracy vs System

A popular buzzword for opponents of The Zeitgeist Movement is the tendency to project a fear of conspiracies. A Resource Based Economy is simply a central nervous system of the planet's resources.  If we take a look at a functional definition of a system, it's easy to see why people would ignorantly associate it with a conspiracy.

Most systems share common characteristics, including:

• Systems have structure, defined by components and their composition;
• Systems have behavior, which involves inputs, processing and outputs of material, energy, information, or data;
• Systems have interconnectivity: the various parts of a system have functional as well as structural relationships between each other.
• Systems may have some functions or groups of functions

The difference between a conspiracy and a system is that a conspiracy is a hidden or often a secret system of arrangements and partners.  It is the unknown aspect that essentially separates it from any normal workflow system.  What appears to be happening is that lack of knowledge or information is causing what should be regarded simply as a system is being erroneously labelled as a conspiracy.  However the information is available, transparency is there, and the ignorance is not due to the lack of transparency or available information it is due to the lack of research effort.

One must be aware of what they label a conspiracy and what is merely just a system operating on environmental drivers such as profit, shareholder value, return on investment etc...  To all the NWO fanatics, just because YOU don't know how it works doesn't make it a conspiracy.  A lack of knowledge does not equate to a lack of available information.

"It's impossible to get the world to change"

This has been a very common objection since the release of Zeitgeit: Moving Forward. My responses to the comments have been as follows:

The only way it can happen is if it happens inside every one of us first.  When it does, it affects your actions on a day to day basis. People take notice and the information begins to spread. This is the very nature of social networking and the viral effect. 

Historically only 40%-60% public support has been needed for successful social movements to reach a tipping point. This is the point where some power holders begin to shift their resources to philanthropic endeavours. It is not necessary to convince the world, only a small portion of it.  Successful social movements also require a catalyst in two stages, one to ignite the core supporters into uniting, which has already happened with the 2nd movie and the formation of the movement, the second catalyst brings attention to the cause with which the movement uses to gather more support. This is the global economic crisis we have been seeing since the tech bubble crashed last decade.  A great study by Bill Moyer lead to the publication of an article entitled History is a Weapon - The Eight Stages of Successful Social Movements. If you study these eight stages you’ll see that we are in the middle of a global social movement that cannot be stopped. 

The more information people have the more they start aligning with each other in terms of values and motivation. The following video by Daniel Pink on Human Drive sheds an eye opening look into what really motivates humans.  Previously, information was limited to local, community, or regional broadcast methods so the information spread slower than needed in some cases to generate critical mass.  With the internet, information exchange around the globe has become literally instantaneous.  This is why the world new about the earthquake in Haiti as it was happening before the USGS could officially report it.  The world just got really small really fast.  National borders have all but disappeared in the world of online social networks. Global support for international inhumanities now has an ally in online social networks which is why Tunesia and Egypt are being discussed by a global conscience.  The technology is here, the need is as great as ever, and the catalyst is here.  Never before in the history of mankind have these elements lined up properly, especially the technology component.  A portion of the population has the ability to contemplate the potential of the movement as being able to achieve maslows hierarchy and are thus motivated to work towards this direction in order to simply satisfy these needs.  This is just a matter of information transfer. Over 2 million people have seen this message in just over a week. This rate of information exchange is unprecedented for such a controversial and fundamentally life altering concept.  We have everything to lose if we don’t change, and we have everything to gain if we do. The question everyone must ask themselves is simple, will you change?

We are in an emergent global symbiotic relationship with the planet. This fact will render any socio economic system that does not recognize this, irrelevant and destined for failure. We live in such a system today.  This monetary economic paradigm will go down in history as one of the shortest social experiments in our 150K years on this planet. Historians will look back on this time as a learning process for humanity, a bump in the road.  We are the only species on this planet who pays rent. We are the only species on this planet whose waste does not contribute to the ecosystem. These are unsustainable paradigms that must be changed or we will parish as a species.

Wants Vs Needs

I updated my FB status today with a theory i just came up with.  "People would want less if they could just find a way to get what they need."  I realized that this may require an explanation since some people haven't really given any thought to the difference between a want and a need.  Let's start with definitions. Want: something that is desired, craved, required, or needed.  Need: a requirement, necessary duty, or obligation.  The first thing you notice is that the definition of wanting includes desiring that which is needed. Whereas the definition of needed does not include desires or cravings.  If this were a mathematical equation it could be said that Wants = Needs + Cravings or Desires.  So my initial theory is sound, in that if a persons needs are met, their wants would only then consist of cravings or desires.

The second foundation for my statement lies in the proposition that, if ones needs are met, they then become more qualified to determine the relevance, sustainability, and legitimacy of their cravings or desires.  It reminds me of a quote from a movie i saw as a kid called Weird Science. Two young teenagers were reflecting after they had successfully manufactured the woman of their dreams through a magical science experiment. "She was everything i ever wanted in a girl before i knew what i wanted."  This familiar scenario suggests that knowledge affects desire.  The more you know about a situation the better you can determine the outcome of achieving your desires.

It has been said that happiness is the delta between what you have and what you want.  Logic would suggest that mankind can achieve increased happiness by first supplying that which is needed to the world.  Education is a need, not a want. it is crucial for survival.  If education were in abundance, cravings and desires would voluntarily be reduced to that which is sustainable and abundant instead of damaging and scarce.  The achievement of needs and the reduction of wants brings down the delta on two fronts.

We can then summarize by saying that supplying the worlds needs in abundance would have the positive side effect of reducing global demand for unsustainable resource extraction. This would satisfy key concerns for both environmental activists and social welfare organizations around the world since you have provided for the worlds needs in an environmentally sustainable system.

A Better Calendar Is Being Held Back

The following is a typical example of how the scientific method of problem solving would be able to provide us with a better, more consistent, and accurate calendar with which to synchronize the globe.

As our knowledge of the solar system and it's perennial occurrances increases with each generation of astronomers, physicists, and mathematicians, we have gained enough information to improve the accuracy, reliability and predeictability of our calendar system.  The current western calendar system, the Gregorian Calendar created in 325 A.D., was adopted based wholly on it's ability to track religious observances. Several proposals for new calendar systems have been submitted that eliminate many of the inefficiencies of the current calendar. Inefficiencies such as:

• It is not perpetual. Each year starts on a different day of the week and calendars expire every year.
• It is difficult to determine the weekday of any given day of the year or month.
• Months are not equal in length nor regularly distributed across the year, requiring mnemonics (e.g. “Thirty days hath September…”) or knuckle counting (ridges are 31, valleys are 30 except first valley [February] is 28 or 29 in a leap year) to remember which month is 28, 29, 30 or 31 days long.
• The year’s four quarters (of three full months each) are not equal (being of 90/91, 91, 92 and 92 days respectively). Business quarters that are equal would make accounting easier.
• Its epoch (origin) is not religiously neutral. The same applies to month and weekday names in many languages.
• Each month has no connection with the lunar phases.

The benefit of utilizing a calendar is to be able to schedule, track and document events with accuracy, consistency and reliability.  If there are ways to improve these three attributes they should be tested, analyzed, and the superior method should be utilized until a better system is available. This is the the scientific method.  Case and point, the World Calendar created in 1930 was proposed to the united nations and rejected by the U.S. on the sole basis of religious tradition requiring a 7 day week.  Another shining example of established institutions (namely religion) holding back civilization from emerging out of the dark ages based on newly discovered information.

History, Animals and Frontal Lobes... Oh My!

So I was having a conversation with a colleague about human nature vs human behaviour and the difference between humans and other animals, and as i started delving into the uniqueness and result of the evolution of the human frontal lobe, they kept inquiring, "what caused the first man to behave like a sociopath?".  I postulated that it was the scarcity of the basic needs of life, quality of life, and sound mind and social state. The list of which looks like this:

Basic Necessities of Life (Biological)
· Air
· Food
· Water
· Sleep
· Medical Care
Additional Necessities For A High Quality of Life (QoL)
· Shelter
· Clothing
· Education
· Energy
· Transportation
· Communication
Necessities for a Sound Mind and Social State
· Personal Purpose (Passion, Hobbies, Pursuits)
· Recreation
· Community (Family, Friends, Colleagues, etc.)

By definition, it is mankind's search for this "List", in an environment where these items are not in abundance,  that causes biological issues, low quality of life and unsound minds and social states.  So let's revisit the history of the first sociopath.  People tend to describe human history as "just the stuff that happened to us". This is true for all other animals, however, it is the way our frontal lobe developed that seperates us from all other animals. Ours is the only frontal lobe that can envision alternative outcomes thus allowing us to design a strategic path to the future we desire.  If humans are the only animal that can design and seek out a desired outcome it means human history was the result of our attempts to design our own future. The problem is, the information available is only as good as the science, data, and information technology at the time. So without sufficient information we are destined to seek the future we always wanted before we know what is good for us. Therefore, human history is merely the collective result of insufficient information being available at the time we made decisions on what we wanted our future to look like. As mentioned earlier, in order to design a future free from sociopathic behaviour we need to discover a way to achieve The List, in abundance, for all mankind.  The only truly reliable tool we have available is the scientific method of discovery and problem solving.  Therefore life must simply become a progressive set of social experiments whose hypotheses are continually tested and analyzed until a better hypothesis emerges with the end result being The List.  This all sounds great except that politics, religion, and money, even though they should be regarded as social experiments, were designed to be exempt from testing. All three require faith for their existence. Faith is defined as belief without evidence. Rejecting these established notions is a revolution of the mind we must first achieve.

Computing in a RBE

So, after yesterdays blog, exploring crowdsourcing as the method of problem solving in a RBE, the topic of interface arises.  By interface i mean the user interface that would be required in order to retrieve the latest problem that needed solving, the platform on which we would be able to work on that problem, and then eventually upload the solution back into the system.  At first glance this seems to be a problem in a RBE because nobody owns any property.  So what do we do about personal computers, your programs, your files, do they not belong to you anymore? In order to think about this problem we have to remove our notions that our computing ability lies in some form of property, when in fact, it is all software driven.

This brings me to my second web 2.0 term of the week, cloudcomputing.  Simply put, cloud computing uses 100% web app based operating systems (OS), web applications, and internet based processing power.  Cloudcomputing can be compared to todays energy grid.  You can plug in an appliance anywhere there is an outlet, and voila, it turns on!  Cloudcomputing is exactly the same.  You can log into your desktop from any machine with a browser and operate it as if it was your very own desktop sitting at home.  However, the OS, the applications, and the file storage is all virtual.  This, is in fact, how we live the majority of our lives today. You may not have realized it because it crept up on us without any warning.  Cheers to cloudcomputing, another important step towards a RBE.

Crowdsourcing: Problem Solving in a Resource Based Economy

Good afternoon readers.  Today's entry addresses a concern often voiced by people when first introduced to The Venus Project and a Resource Based Economy.  The objection goes something like this, "Well, if no one has a job in a RBE who will solve the world's problems?" The answer lies in a modestly simple web 2.0 term,  first coined by Jeff Howe in a 2006 Wired magazine article entitled "The Rise of Crowdsourcing".  I've highlighted the term's wikipedia article overview and it's relevant portions below:


"Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model. In the classic use of the term, problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. Users—also known as the crowd—typically form into online communities, and the crowd submits solutions. The crowd also sorts through the solutions, finding the best ones." "... the winning individuals in the crowd are sometimes rewarded...with recognition. In other cases, the only rewards may be kudos or intellectual satisfaction. Crowdsourcing may produce solutions from amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, or from experts ... which were unknown to the initiating organization."


In my humble opinion, this evolution toward a crowdsourced problem solving paradigm, is key evidence that an RBE is not only possible but inevitable. Proof of concept can be found in a joint venture between Sony and WWF at www.openplanetideas.com or at www.openarchitecturenetwork.org . The question is, can mankind recognize it before the final collapse of the monetary economic system?

Jeff Howe on Crowdsourcing