The Apocalypse Guild Field Guide

Abstract wealth is the ability to meet one’s needs/desires by paying people for goods and services.

Real wealth is being able to meet one’s needs/desires directly or through community.

If the economy collapsed, the latter would persist. — micah daigle

What we are experiencing is not only an apocalypse (the revealing of truth), but it is actually the much-fabled Apocalypse (with a capital A). This is *The Apocalypse*, it’s here and it’s also right around the corner. It’s a cascading wave of unfolding which hits us all at different times and speeds, gaining momentum as it goes along. Experience is very much critical to the quality of your own personal apocalypse, whether or not it could be described as a lifting of the veil, a revelation of insight, or merely a really bad time of stress and suffering, wishing for things to go back to normal.

A large part of the apocalypse is understanding how much we have lost over time, how our deep connection and relationship with the world around us has been systematically whittled away, leaving behind not much more than a mere dead husk. I am talking about spiritual death, something which can never be known until one becomes spiritually alive (reborn, etc) and gains something to compare the past life to, and to know what has been lost.

Near the end of the last writing piece, I jumped right into the American revolution of 1776, with the Declaration of Independence, using this as a great example of a collective struggle for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Back then, they were fighting against tyranny of a foreign government, collecting taxes in a relationship of subjugation. This is the classic pattern of slavery that we see throughout our history and right up until this point in time. Through this piece we will be exploring the mechanics of spectacle, tyranny of the masses, and the alienated commodification of all life which amounts to modern-day slavery.

An estimated 40 million people, well over the entire population of Canada, is said to be outright enslaved through out the world today, but how do we define slavery? ‘None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.’ — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. I don’t have to sit here arguing semantics. The fact is that most people living on this planet have no option to stop working without dying. The pandemic will continue to show this to us, as it drags on it will become more and more of an apparent problem. Life on earth was not always this frantic, with no option to stop and smell the flowers, no option to take a break and enjoy being alive. Chasing dollars and desires, we all know the tropes. I’m going to show you what these people have been trying to tell you.

Most of us today are subject to varying intensities of what can be called modern day slavery. It is the ongoing process of alienated commodification which has led us to this point. Part of the apocalypse is certainly becoming aware of this gaping void, this hidden death trap which has been set, not by any one person, but allowed through convenience and carelessness. Part of waking up to our collective situation is to gain a vision of what it would take to become responsible for the world around us, what it would take to take care of our needs and of those around us. The apocalypse is a vision of what it’s like to be more fully alive.

In order to gain this vision, I’m giving you a pseudo-history of our people, your people. A story of what happened to your ancestors that lead to this point, and what of it can be seen reflected in your own life. It doesn’t have to be exact, just plausible enough so that you can click some pieces of the puzzle together. We are focusing again on the axial age and the transition from oral tradition, because the move towards written language holds the master key to unlocking all of what happens afterwards with regard to the commodification of all life.

If you have a feeling that something is wrong with society in the way that people are so concerned with appearances, and very shallow surface understandings of the world around them, then you’ll appreciate the origin story for this behavior. In fact it’s one and the same as that first great failure which practically created a new species out of us.

This surface-level navigation of reality is really the end result of this long road, this long process of commodification of life. It’s this surface level through which we break when we gain deep insights about our self and the world around us. I’m trying to help us orient ourselves in a history which accounts for this surface level navigation which one normally does not realize they are bound to. This accumulation of appearances is sometimes called the simulated reality, the Matrix, the Spectacle, etc.

These are matters of the gravest depth and concern, and encountering them can be very dangerous, extremely dangerous (though I would argue that not encountering them is moreso). It’s possible for these types of engagements to shake one’s reality to the core, leaving one disoriented and grasping for something solid to hold onto. In fact, one of the responses that I received from my last piece was exactly along these lines, that feelings of revelation and insight were coming with regards to the apocalypse, and it had a very disorienting and emotionally disturbing effect. We could go on about the ethics of talking about this stuff but it is truly the case that an informed consent is absolutely impossible (you can’t know this stuff without changing yourself through the process of discovery).

This work has a necessary component of inner participation, in which the reader must be looking into the phenomena of their own experience of perception. When doing so, deep insights can be triggered, and once you see some of these things they cannot be unseen. Nevertheless, I am adamant that in fact the world needs to know about this stuff, needs to go through this, or we will never have the capacity to approach the various problems that I outlined in the previous writing.

What I’m talking about is learning this skill of relationship with the world around us (and indeed even with ourselves), it can go very deep, or it can merely be imitated. We could even just call this the skill of skillfulness. To be even more clear I’m not expecting some kind of mass awakening event, however, we are certainly approaching some major thresholds. I have heard it said that a mere 10% of the population is often enough to trigger systemic change in the rest. We’re not quite there yet, but we seem to have entered a very widespread networking phase which is an immediate precursor. By the end of this writing piece we should have a pretty good understanding of the dumpster fire that is our modern world, and what new sparks of life are emerging together out of the ashes.

If you feel like you’re not in a very mentally stable place right now, or not ready to make changes in your life, then I would recommend not reading this series as this type of writing could trigger an involuntary cascade of insight which, without proper grounding exercises, often becomes a traumatic hindrance to further progress. With that being said, I would also like to offer as much of my time and attention as possible to answering any questions or concerns that you have regarding your own experiences. We have to also look to each other, to create our own support networks. There is no education that could ever prepare anyone, and needless to say I’m not a doctor or psychologist.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is in fact, the Apocalypse. We are going to establish that, first by exploring the mechanics behind the critical mistake humanity made when transitioning from oral to written culture (we lost our natural immunity to memetic cancer), second by a pseudo-history of the commodification of all life that ensued from that point, and finally by describing the current perilous conditions of our society that have resulted from our cumulative neglect. As what could be called mathematical certainties come to fruition regarding things like our monetary system, and our ecological systems (more on this in the next piece), the simplistic surface level views of the world that we hold will be forcefully ripped away from us revealing the raw consequences of our actions, and this is what we will call the Apocalypse. A judgement day, in which we do not answer to each other, but to the unchanging creator of this world (I will rationally explain this language later, don’t get your stuff in a bunch).

The vast majority of people have no clue how their own perception of the world around them works. What I’m going to describe here is something that everyone has access to, and yet most of us have been systematically prevented from realizing. You may have some feeling deep down that you were born to do something so much more amazing and wonderful than what’s been put on your plate in this life. You may feel like you’re not a robot, not a machine, not such a simple equation in a corporate database. What invisible trap has been set for humanity?

If you understand these feelings, then you intuitively know exactly what I’m talking about. You have a perceptive intuition about things that I am going to explicitly describe in an academic approach. People have since time immemorial had these intuitions, and until the dawn of the Axial Age, an academic explanation was never really available. The axial age birthed many of the modern religions, and this was done in direct opposition to the forces which could be seen acting in the world that caused this gradual commodification of life (in fact the religions all but completely succumbed to it). We knew long ago that we were about to go down this long road.

At the same time that we learned how to write down and teach each other what should never be lost or forgotten, the very lack of responsibility described caused us to lose and forgot all of that. These ancient teachings were held in some of the most popular texts the world has ever known including the bible and many other scripts, but over time, mediation away from the Tree of Life paid its cost in entropy (decay of all society). The Hail Mary of these ancient teachings are now ridiculed according to surface level appearances and not their True Message, which was a Relationship with Life itself. So long have we forgotten the substance behind appearance, that every facet of civilized life now bears the marks of alienated commodification and decay (entropy).

There are so many histories, so many people, so many places, so many stories, that there can never be a true objective account. There isn’t a single history or perspective upon which to orient the entire world with its past. This is why I mentioned the pseudo-history before. I am more concerned with conveying the mechanics of change over time of our collective reality, the change in the types of immanent experiences we have had over the past many thousands of years. Through this approach, we can uncover the hidden dynamics that were certainly at play in the past, by witnessing their effects in our own present experience.

Now, before we get into literally the secret teachings of all the ages, a quick note on delivery. With abstract and systems thinking, context is everything. It is absolutely necessary that a map or a picture be painted so that you can get oriented before we start to proceed with some deeper mechanics. Without enough context, one’s biases and assumptions fill in too many blanks to understand whats communicated here. I am trying to give your imagination as much fuel as possible here to sustain blastoff.

This is one of the most critical points in human history which we are now entering. I am making a case that this is the Apocalypse, to many people who don’t even realize that anything out of the ordinary is even happening.

We need to figure out a way to help everyone everywhere to become more alert and sensitive to the world around them, and to give more care to think about what kind of world we live in and what kind of responsibilities that means that we have. There seems to be a lot of big changes happening right now and it’s important to be able to figure out which causes are worth pursuing, how best to do certain activities, etc. Mass pain and suffering in the world is causing our collective imagination to explode in search of answers. If we can bootstrap the Guild before the general dissolution of our alienated commodity stacks, we might prevent an even greater, and ultimate suffering (a biblical “flood”).

In order to embody this change we have to be literally spending time paying attention to and interacting with our local networks. I have spoken with many people who intuitively feel this as a direction and what it means is to become more responsible for ourselves and those around us, the world around us. If the launch of the Internet is a major mark of a shifting culture, its faultline runs between a one way broadcast and a two way communication. To relate as peers is the foundation of networks, but once again we see the alienated commodity has mediated our services (servers). The fact that we are now seeing officially sanctioned narratives on our social media, and the censorship of officially wrong thoughts should be troubling.

If you have any intuition that something is wrong with the world and would like to find the deepest roots to the problem together so that we can properly orient ourselves, then keep reading on. We are currently walking through a gradual unfolding of the apocalypse itself within your experience. This is no small feat to accomplish, both on your end and on mine. You may already be on your apocalyptic journey, but we can journey together. Let’s begin with a meditation.

Allow yourself to come to rest at the end of this sentence. Stop. Breathe. Look away from the screen and be aware of your surroundings — you are in two places at once — sitting at your computer or with your phone, reading my words, and then in this shared space that we have created between us, neither here where I sit typing these words, nor there where you are reading them. You can feel the connection of those two different realities, and you can become aware of your awareness of them. Through this kind of awareness you know much more than you think. This is cyberspace.

Now.

If you’re wondering what that strange swirling distortion of light is that’s been forming within the periphery of your senses, we call it a Portal. Portals are entry points from one’s current “reality” into adjacent, tangential, or parallel realities. I stepped through a big one six years ago, and only relatively recently have learned how to recognize and intentionally use them. The reason that they seem so indescribable and sometimes hardly noticeable until pointed out is that they bend our lens of perception itself and the fabric of reality appears to shift and become unstable. Once you’ve spotted a portal it’s almost certain that you’re going to be drawn into it, but it’s nothing to be afraid of (look up grounding practices). So if reality is like a lens constructed by your mind that you look through to understand the incoming data from your senses, then a portal makes contact with this lens and augments or bends it, or sometimes causes entire portions of it to collapse (seen for pure illusion).

This particular portal is an Isomorphic Portal, that is, it’s a portal-portal, a Portal that is self-referential in nature, revealing an entryway into one’s own self, through one’s own body. It’s a point of departure from normal activities in which we are kept constantly occupied with “the world out there” or “objective material”, these mind games played in the virtual machine of a floating head that doesn’t realize its direct connection to everything around it through the body.

We call it the Sorcery of the Spectacle, all of these inbound signals, advertising and official messages, news and propaganda events and architecture which interact in very discrete and computationally exact ways with our perception of reality. Vast swaths of the population can be triggered by specially crafted signals to have precise responses. With our simplistic apprehensions of the world around us, these surface level understandings, one who wishes to control our behavior, need only create certain appearances. This level of mass control is only possible if our overall apprehension of reality is limited to appearance without any will or even skill to dive deeper into the possible meanings of any particular signal.

In order to understand the Apocalypse you have to understand the Reality War, in order to understand the reality war you have to witness it first hand on the battlefield of your mind. Watch as narratives are projected into your mind and the minds of millions at the same time. Notice the effects of warmongering, advertising, editorializing, fear and desire, aversion and attachment. When there is an official narrative projected through broadcast media, if we rely on it exclusively to form our worldview (our universe) it means that what could be called our reality tunnel is entirely mediated, and its navigation commodified. Narrative projection used in terms of public relations and manufacture of consent is a completely pervasive dark sorcery which happens surreptitiously.

If I walk through this portal will you follow me there? Will what I have to say reflect itself upon your inner world, will you take it as an invitation to experiment with your own perception of reality? Will you get lost and upset and reject the exercise entirely? Will you keep trying even if nothing special seems to have happened? Will you keep paying attention? Those who would take the blue pill have already left.This is the part where we take the red pill, strap ourselves in, and touch the mirror. What happens next?

When we were born, babies, did we know what reality is? No, but through contact with the world around us, we slowly started to learn about “things”, about what stuff is, how it works, how to get our needs met, driven by simple pleasure and pain responses. Our mother didn’t read the dictionary to us so that we knew what types of objects could be expected to compose reality. For every single thing, every type of object that exists within our reality, there is a number of actual memories of experiences in which they appear, giving you material to work with when forming a vision (imagination) of what’s possible in reality.

We all do this, it happened to all of us. We weren’t raised by dictionaries. Each noun type has appeared so many times in each of our experiences giving us a refined understanding of the possible. Each verb type, describing actions between these noun types, came from experience of the actual unfolding between types which has been categorized. What we take for real, for reality, is an ongoing process and product of direct step by step construction of narratives over time since birth. Therefore, although we have each accustomed our neural networks to largely similar training environments, giving us a sense that we’re sharing the same reality (and there is actual convergence here), our experience of meaning for each facet that we encounter is entirely unique to each of us.

The effect of reading the previous paragraphs might be an uncomfortable unpeeling of certainty that we normally find very comfortable and unconcerning. This veneer of certainty that we feel about how the world around us works is a product of natural selection. Neural networks tend to find these metastatic comfort points in the absence of pain and in the presence of pleasure (or even just neutrality), but they can conceal great dangers of an ever-changing underlying situation. It’s been said that the only constant is change itself, and this is one way to articulate the problem of clinging to an unchanging simulated reality generated by the mind. It’s only a matter of time before the disconnect with “reality” becomes so wide that disaster strikes. That’s the point we’re at with this apocalypse right now on a societal scale.

While getting into the mechanics behind all of this, a phenomenologically verifiable model will be used. In order to phenomenologically verify a model, one would have to consciously apply it as a model to their current experiences of perception and notice the results. In this case much of what we’re doing could just be called watching thoughts and noticing if their structure, their composition, seems to match up with the map provided (the Model). We can’t get into everything all at once but hopefully enough materials will be provided along the way to cross that bridge. Phenomenology is looking inward at the experience of perception, while noticing the codependent arising of phenomena which cause the experience of categorical thought (ontology), and the real-time modification thereof (epistemology), literally the ongoing projection and modification of reality.

SPECTACLE MECHANICS

The majority of people are so insensitive to the world around them that they likely cannot be counted upon to be a part of the necessary change that’s occurring, until the last moments, when finally things have gotten so bad that there is no choice but to have one’s eyes ripped, not even peeled open, and one is forced to experience the disconnect between ones simplistic version of reality, and the apparent chaos unfolding before their eyes. What is happening on a mass scale right now, is what I am describing to you right now on the micro scale, the scale of the individual. I am describing the worst mistake in human history, and I’m not trying to claim that it was avoidable. We have a chance right now to pick up the pieces, to take up the call of the sages, the call of those who awakened to their great responsibility in times before our time. I have years ago joined this growing chorus of those who are begging the world, begging those around us, to please pay attention and exercise your responsibility as a living organism to be sensitive to the world around you and learn how to navigate the world beyond the surface level spectacle.

Spectacle is a normal component of perception. It’s not to be avoided, it’s impossible to avoid. You see a chair and it’s a chair. Much of our experience of reality can take on this solid quality without detriment, however there is much harm that comes from relying on spectacle when we are interacting with each other. We carelessly navigate our interactions with others based on appearance, based on skin color, on religion, on ideology, and even identity, we box each other in and this has resulted in disaster. No relationship can be possible between two people who exclusively play these mind games against one another. There will never be the possibility of reconciliation, of nuanced discussion, of ever seeing each other past the extremes of the labels we put on everything.

We are opening a portal right now to the inside of your own experience. My team and I are making adjustments to your crystal implant as we speak which will bring the portal into focus and cause a shift into an abnormal reality anchored in self-reference. You may get a feeling like you’ve awoken into some strange new space and you’re just looking around through new eyes, or this maybe already happened to you long ago and you continue reading with a knowing grin on your face.

As we grow out of our childhood, the realities that we have constructed for ourselves from our own experiences seem to become solidified. We start to take things for granted, assuming that what we think something is, it is in fact that, and nothing more. This is the reason why time seems to fly by faster and faster as we age, because much of our experience is being categorized and navigated in an automatic reactionary sort of manner. The neural network reaches metastatic equilibria with the world “out there” with which it interacts (auto-pilot). We begin to feel like learning something new is painful and to be avoided, we have difficulty seeing from the perspective of others, our world becomes a crusty husk and the life spark is slowly drained from us.

To be clear, again, this is a normal naturally selected property of neural networks, to find some balance and then just sit there, but as we will explore, this is really the primary danger in which the world has become trapped and exploited. We don’t have to go on exploring the deep nature of a door, or a light switch or a chair every time we encounter one of these, but there are other areas where this behavior absolutely contributes to a tyranny of the mind over its environment, including ourselves and others. What we are talking about here is the reality in your head that’s constructed and overlaid or projected onto the world around you including onto yourself and others.

This is a major cause of alienation, that feeling that we are very separate from each other, and seem to talk past each other, and can’t seem to find the common ground of shared experience, of seeing the self in the other and the other in the self. Look at yourself. Who are you? Are you a label of first name and last name? Are you a label of what profession you are? Are you a label of what political affiliations you have made? Do these labels come anywhere close to describing who and what you are inside?

The problem of meaning is at the core of the mechanics of perception which enable Sorcery of the Spectacle. When one’s reality does not include a self-aware aspect of how its own reality and meaning is constructed in real-time, it remains vulnerable to constant hijacking via appearances. When surface level labels of reality are confused for reality itself, when this web of meaning that we’ve created for ourselves since birth to make sense of the world, is mistaken for the world itself, then we are entertained by a simulated reality, unaware of abuses and exploits going on at deeper layers.

Breaking out beyond this is a normal birth right which was certainly encouraged and practiced in oral tradition cultures. A common right of passage is to be given a knife and sent out into the wild away from the reality of the village. This is an experience of the total collapse of all safety nets and all things considered normal, a shredding of the simulation and a reignition of the imagination. It’s one of those experiences that rips your eyes open and gives your neural network an experience so shocking that it is given no choice but to come into the awareness of uncertainty, that change is around every corner and we have to stay aware, awake, alive, to those changes so that we can adapt as life adapts.

But we can hardly compare ourselves to the experiences of these cultures of the past. Where in those cultures one may be prepared for that final push into the unknown, into adulthood, into responsibility of navigation of the world, in modern day culture it’s quite the opposite. For every plateau of commodification that we will be walking though, there is a corresponding plateau within the experience of an individual in their lifetime that reflects this commodification process. Such so that we are not being prepared for an experience of liberation and responsibility, but for an experience of final collapse of all that is possible into the smoothly curated reality tunnel where we ourselves have become the commodity inputs to a cold dead machine.

COMMODITY MECHANICS

You may not have realized it but we’ve actually now been wading pretty deep in the waters of that first and greatest mistake that our civilization has ever made, the mistake that cemented our fate for the next many thousands of years up until this point, the mistake that firmly entrenched the Reality War which rages on until this day, having now become a hot war (high-order cybernetics, the bomb, the satellite, the internet), out in the open for anyone to see. In the past I have called this the Great Axial War. I have also called this point the Great Schism (between mind and body). It’s very important to locate the beginning, even though it seems like ancient history and therefore useless, anyone trying to make sense of the absolute shit show of modern times has to come back to this first great mistake, because it’s the same one we keep making to this day. The root of the problem hasn’t changed.

Nothing is so cut and dry, of course we have been making these kinds of mistakes even before the alphabet was standardized and the trees and rocks started talking back to us (it’s very hard to change their minds). The effect that the written word had on us was to give the symbolic representation, to give appearance itself, a feeling of solidity, of reality. Instead of having the living guides of oral tradition available to us to help snap us out of the spell of reality, a static unchanging teacher written into the world for all time now authoritatively barks truth and command at us. And we are instructed by those who don’t understand why these things were written in the first place.

The map is not the territory. This is one of the analogies given to illuminate the problem of meaning. It means that the appearance of a sign within your perception, does not have a single static meaning that you can then project overtop of the environment in which you perceived it. We should be familiar with this pitfall in modern society as we are being pressed so painfully into the limits of this shallow and simplistic navigation of reality. Having a nice car doesn’t mean one is wealthy (credit anyone?), having a nice green lawn does not mean the house is in good order (domestic abuse anyone?), having a filter-perfect face, or beefed arms doesn’t mean one is healthy (toxic vanity anyone?). All life is supposed to be like this now and it was all allowed to happen by forgetting our proper relationship with the world around us.

Whenever an object is sensed within our experience of perception, there is a codependent arising of both the concrete senses of the collection of symbols into artifacts, that is, the impression that they make to us, as well as an abstract arising of the “type of thing” that it “is”. This is the mind meeting the body as an unfolding meme. But just because we recognize something as a type of thing, which is a necessary precursor to even perceiving it, does not mean that whatever we just sensed, just made contact with, is equivalent to the map in our minds through which it was recognized. What I’m describing here has been intuitively known for the ages, that we make this mistake commonly, and that it’s a common factor of conflict and destruction (decay, entropy).

If we limit ourselves, who we are, to some identity constructed by the mind, it will amount to an abuse. How did that identity even get there? Do you remember deciding what your identity is? What your roles are? Did these things come from within or were you shaped from the outside? When we write someone off, even ourselves, as a certain ideological identity, a certain race, a certain role, a certain shameful label, we are enacting a tyranny of the mind onto the environment (the body). We are precluding a sensitive relationship between our inner world and the outer world around us including our own body. These labels are thought stopping clichés in a sense, we unconsciously choose to slap a label on someone or something (including ourselves) and leave it at that.

An example: Consider receiving a mass media broadcast from your “authorities” regarding a necessary war. Perhaps you are told that your way of life is threatened by some people on the other side of the world (who really are hardly different than you in their daily lives). They are given labels like terrorist or communists (note there may be valid concerns regarding tyranny here). You are told that patriots support the war. You identify yourself as a patriot. You identify the other as an enemy. The calculation is simple. It can’t be anymore simple. You are a patriot. You are (your country is) being threatened. The enemy must be defeated. Simple.

Navigation of reality by spectacle is to navigate a very simplistic version of reality and to mistake that simplistic version of reality for the actual “world out there”. Without a natural remedy, a cognitive medicine which was necessarily available in cultures of oral tradition, this way of thinking accumulates like a cancer creating entire worldviews and complexes, including the self identity (often bound up in guilt and shame). When one encounters natural memetic medicine, such as represented by this writing, the whole thing is threatened to collapse, and this can be an incredibly scary proposition. What would be even more scary though, is if we continue to pretend that our social and economic systems, and our just-in-time existence is not just another one of these over-simplistic projections, subject to the same apocalypse.

How could I possibly be talking about anything more uncomfortable than encountering the complete void of substance waiting below the surface, the fine veneer of appearance which seems to give our lives some kind of meaning. This thin veneer of appearance which we can absolutely see for ourselves by looking inward, can also be seen in the world around us which emerges from our collective projections. All of the vain appearances that we cling to and value so much, all of these desires to look one way or the other, to be labelled one way or the other, amount to shallow grasping for something solid in this world. Especially if we have suffered from this, felt the pain of it, then we can see that there is something horribly wrong with the world around us (the world within us).

It should come as no surprise whatsoever when it turns out that a product we purchased quickly falls apart. Sure, it looked like it met all of the requirements. Sure, it looked like what you were purchasing was in fact, the thing that you needed. Of course, when you went to use it, it worked just fine. But now, a few days later, that thin veneer, that flawless appearance has vanished, leaving a hole in your pocket and an unmet need to again deal with. This is the archetype of the alienated commodity. You have nothing to do with the person who made it for you and they couldn’t give any less of a care if it works, after you have already paid the price.

You may be thinking that you’re a smart consumer, that you know how to see the reality beyond the appearance. I will say good for you, you’re probably right, you probably do this, it’s a part of being alive, navigating the muddy waters of the world we live in. The younger we are, the more we do this, the more we question everything, but we always seem to get crustier as we get older, and there are many things that remain a sacred dungeon, never to be touched or unlocked or questioned, and this is where our sense of identity lies, where our idea of how politics works, how the world works, what our place in the world is in the big picture. These things remain untouched and unquestioned as a matter of “survival”.

Uncertainty is the most fundamental of the primordial archetypes, it constrains all the others. There is nothing that is beyond its reach, and so, when we are navigating by surface spectacle, using labels and appearances as if they are the rock solid foundation itself, we are only deceiving ourselves, and we are only facilitating the tyranny of the mind over our body and the world around us. When we do this we are becoming tools, manipulated with calculating exactness by those who know how to harness the sorcery of the spectacle against us, we become the direct cause of the many wicked problems that we are all facing right now.

THE COMMODIFICATION OF ALL LIFE

It is our responsibility to maintain a relationship between ourselves and the world around us. Whenever we are encountering these labels, especially when they are being projected overtop of another human being, or whenever they are being projected upon a commodity as part of our economy, we have to take care not to mistake the biases of our neural network, shaped up to this point through our own experiences, for the “actual reality” of the person or object that we are encountering through the senses. Again, to reiterate, this relationship should especially be present between our own mind and our own body, for this is the starting point without which the relationship will never extend out to the world (to others, to the environment). Without healing the Great Schism within your own self, you will be unconsciously objectifying everything you encounter without realizing it, you will be what is called spiritually dead, and you will remain a tool for the objectives of others (sorcery of the spectacle).

I use the term spectacle in two primary ways. One way is as “the Spectacle” which is the cancerous (unchecked) accumulation of appearances and their ties into your own mind which altogether form the workings of a lifeless social machine that recuperates and commodifies all attempts at bypassing it (such as this writing). The Spectacle exploits the other primary way in which I use the term spectacle, which is simply an aspect of perception, that all things have concrete appearances (spectacle), that nothing that we experience is without appearance. That experience of appearance is importantly different from the substance of those things which conditioned that appearance.

Im already hearing the usual detractors saying “this is nothing new, this is already said before, we already have this, we already have that”. The purpose for me going over this stuff again is because I want to give everyone who is following along a solid chance at actually understanding what it is that im working towards with this writing series. Furthermore, if we’ve already solved all of this stuff then why is the world still solidly in the death grips of what I am describing? Where are the institutions to deal with these problems? In fact I will be addressing all of this as I go along into the very many facets and implications of this work.

Remember. I am laying the foundation for two major documents which I called the Declaration of Responsibility, and the Constitution of the Guild. Without painting this picture of the context in which they exist, these things would be meaningless and incomprehensible. I am also using this exploration to prove beyond a doubt that this is in fact the Apocalypse, the Big One, while providing direct materials to facilitate it (being that its unavoidable) in the most healthy way possible. Part of that will be to describe entire social systems, and entire social platforms which doesn’t even really exist yet because its part of what we *don’t see* when we experience the void of culture that these and upcoming shocks to our very core are pointing us to.

We will not be settling the question of whether or not this is the apocalypse in this piece as there is quite a bit to go to establish that, however, we will be able to complete some thoughts regarding the commodification of life and that great gaping void of culture that it left behind. This is one of the things that the Apocalypse reveals to us as unsustainable illusions crumble. So rather than just giving a sense of the void itself I will try to wrap this current piece up with a vision of the emergent collective intelligence (the System of Guilds) that is set to fill it. This will hopefully help us to orient to our history and current situation, as well as give some hints for going forward.

We almost have enough background (context) to describe the beginnings of this Declaration of Responsibility document. We have established that a grave mistake was made when moving from oral to written tradition. This mistake can be described as allowing a neglect of responsibility towards maintaining a relationship between map and terrain, that is, the map in our minds of what reality “is”, and the actual “world out there” which the map is used to navigate. The higher the quality of the map, the more coherent will be the navigation of the terrain. With oral tradition we always had an explicit guide to give us feedback when this mapmaking process is not developing or becomes broken.

To get a sense of just how vast, how many possible facets, this terrain covers, were going to try to as quickly as possible walk through the plateaus of commodification. This will necessarily allow us to orient ourselves to a pseudo-history that adequately explains the extreme degree of specialization which we find ourselves in, and what kind of actions we may take to mitigate the worst problems that it causes. Of course, we do live in a society, and it’s normal to divide the labor among the network, but we will also be exploring some parts that could (should) be considered fundamental and a necessarily shared responsibility. Even when we “outsource” our needs to others through this commodification process, there is a responsibility as a good “consumer” to know how to demand Isomorphic products, that is, products which are harmonious and healthy not only for the consumer, but for the environment, for those laboring to create it, etc, and this responsibility is unique to each commodity.

So lets jump out of the tribe and into the city-state with the commodification of land. You have farms, you have roads, you have a state military to defend the borders. One piece of land is as good as another (it’s called a farm, and a farm is a farm.) One no longer has to be so immediately concerned with the environment by staying within the known and designated territories. This plateau offers a major power base: the storage of grain, the ability to conquer and expand. This is like a very basic cell, with a semi-permeable membrane, providing shelter to what’s inside and allowing it to develop towards the next plateau.

The next plateau is the commodification of the organism, that is, the economic sustenance of its constituents. Conventions emerge as to what types of products and services become recognized and demanded and markets form to facilitate their exchange. Certain crops become dominant, certain tools become dominant, certain services and the way they are performed become dominant, state currency is issued as a medium of exchange. This standardization of the economy enables many city-states to efficiently trade, enabling the rise of empires. Just as land was commodified to serve the city-state, entire cities are now repurposed for industry in service of a larger empire, potentially specializing and becoming dependent on trade.

The next plateau to emerge from the now existing structure of empire is the commodification of maintenance, which is a function performed by neural networks in adapting one’s map to the ever shifting terrain, as discussed above regarding the sorcery of the spectacle. Roles themselves are commodified, no longer passed down as family tradition and know-how, but through schooling, certification, and licensing, where only certain approved ways of doing things (and thinking) are accepted. Empire is usurped by the corporation, including the nation-state which is a type of corporation. Management and political structures extend down from concentration points to ensure that the entire structure is being maintained according to the corporate map. Roles become bound to identity.

The final plateau is the commodification of community, which is how we relate to each other, how we govern ourselves and each other (with implications for the quality of the world that we leave to the future). Here, the commodities of all previous plateaus are wrangled together in service of overarching visions (hyperstition) of the future of our societies. The myth of progress, for example, has been championing science and technology as facilitators of an endless stream of improvements into the bright future. This is also where we have more concrete notions like the “law of the land”, official languages, weights and measurements, what kind of government we have, etc. Through commodification of community, one’s very own capacity to navigate this shape of the future and past of the “whole story of the world”, through our legacy of interactions with others, becomes reduced to choice between a selection of provided shapes of our visions of the future society we live in. This is the imagination colonized (commodified), and it has an effect of commodifying all facets of life which are not explicitly commodified by a dysmorphic Social Operating System.

As we have “progressed” down the long road of commodification of life, we passed through many plateaus, which provided launching points for new and more complex socioeconomic systems. From the very beginning we were regarded as pieces of meat: human slavery, trafficking, objectfication. Men were killed, women and children enslaved to the city states which expanded in power, those inside were subject to the military and largely had no need or ability for self-defense, their labor put in service of the commodity. The economy emerged, trade emerged, every action was in service or production to some commodity, extreme specialization, empire sprawled. The bureaucracy emerged, management enforced the standardized ways of doing every role, schooled, certified, authorized. And finally, the very purpose of our existence, our reality itself and our visions of the future world become prepackaged, captured and offered to us as a narrow selection of the possible uses for this entire great commodity stack, “the commodification of all life”. This is your pseudo-history.

THE GUILD SOCIAL OPERATING SYSTEM

We are now ready to set the stage of a more Isomorphic Social Operating System, one which involves responsibility for much of what has been commodified and mediated away from our awareness. I am not trying to dive deep into technical mechanics here but to paint a picture of some of the most core elements, without going too far into any one of them. I would like to convey just enough, within the constraints of time and attention, to convince you that this is in fact the appropriate response to the challenges of our times. Please do not feel overwhelmed. The emergence in so many ways of this collective intelligence is already well under way and gaining incredible momentum.

If we take stock of our current behaviors, how we are taking care of our own personal economies (needs) and our interaction with the world, we may find some of our behaviors are already under significant maintenance and improvement. We may already see high convergence (cooperation) with others via shared spaces and media. It is very unlikely, however, that we will be taking special care to map the underlying protocols (and guild network) into shared database media (such as index cards, or softwares). Normally this would just be memorized and navigated haphazardly within one’s own head, but of course written symbolic language is used all the time to augment our thoughts, and a coherent network demands it.

When one or more of us are cooperating together towards some shared goal, we can call this a context, and we can also call it a Proximity Guild. This is a shared context in which one or more people have made, and are acting upon commitments. This is the most concrete aspect of the System of Guilds. Our interactions are happening through the mediation of abstractions. This abstract aspect is referred to as Natural Guilds. Natural Guilds and Proximity Guilds go hand in hand, just as the phenomena of concrete objects and their types arise codependently in our experience of perception. Finally the proper interaction between the Proximity and Natural Guilds is what’s described and embodied in the Fundamental Guilds (The Constitution of the Guild). “The Guild” emerges in the presence of these three (holonic) main types of guild to varying degrees of coherence.

I spent a lot of time talking about the maps that we use to navigate the terrain of “reality”. These maps go without saying, they are a part of us, a part of the mechanics of perception, they compose what’s called the Abstract Phase Space, which is the abstract counterpart to the concrete of Spectacle (both arising codependently in the experience of perception). Many techniques have been developed, most haphazardly, to augment these maps with expressed representations. For example, one might use a calendar, and mark commitments into certain time slots. This is a simple form of mind mapping. When we are working with others in the context of a Proximity Guild, it is necessary to map the mind out to the environment, either through speech or through written language, or some other form. This ability to collect materials relevant to the workings of a group of people is a critical function of the Social Operating System.

No matter what form the mind mapping takes, the ultimate result of it is that future behaviors may be modified when the map is later encountered, such as a to do list, or a reminder about specific processes. The least reliable way of doing this is through pure memorization, and unwritten agreement. It’s possible to do many things this way, but if we want to learn from our actions and share these lessons out to the greater network it’s critical to be able to make good maps and that our experiences be intentionally fed back into them, thus increasing the quality and potential use as learning materials for others. People seem to be wondering what the emergence of our collective intelligence (the Guild) will look like, and I hope to convey that it will look like the quality of the maps that we share with each other.

No matter what shape or functionality is built into our maps (a dayplanner, a todo list, an instruction manual, a note to self), they are either implicitly or explicitly bound up in protocols. For example a todo list is something that can be iterated through and enacted while crossing off completed items. Protocols are heuristic in nature, setting up events to watch for, conditions to match(perhaps the event itself), and actions to take (potentially leading to other significant events). Whether or not we realize it, our behaviors are already set up to navigate the complexities of the world through heuristics like these. The ability to share these protocols with others, for example in the form of a policy document, is what enables us to consistently share behaviors with each other, and behaviors are how we describe all the facets of functioning in the context of society.

It seems necessary at this point to put some concerns to rest about how much effort people actually want to put into the mechanisms of collective intelligence. It is a given that most people will not be interested in capturing and cataloging protocols. This is a very pragmatic type of exercise which would attract more abstract thinkers, people who think in systems. The vast majority of people will be more interested in the ability to share and accumulate stories of success and failures, stories of the problems that we are facing together (our common struggles), in the ability to have a vision of the network around us, and these things too are part of the map. Even further still from the interests of most is the academic rigour required to describe the dynamics behind the emergence of such systems of collective intelligence; these things of the Declaration of Responsibility and of the Constitution of the Guild, and yet we see it also is happening.

And don’t be fooled into thinking that having a couple of documents is the same as having the processes they describe currently in practice. Afterall, look at how beautiful our current documents are (government constitutions and declarations) and then look at the sorry state of the world (let’s be honest). This is why the unfolding of such things appears through relationships, in contexts such as education, which is the most fundamental of all Natural Guilds. What we are doing here is learning how to communicate with each other about what are the most important and core behaviors that hold together a life-affirming society.

If we were to attempt to capture and contain within a vastly distributed database, all of the major functioning, or forms of behavior, that collectively describe an entire society, we could use the four plateaus of commodification explored earlier as guides to iterate through them. The scope of this is practically unimaginable to any one person, but this exercise in imagination should help to give us some ideas of what our Social Operating System is currently missing. Whatever becomes recorded into such a database, into our notes, our guidelines, our policies, must always be taken as provisional when being interpreted and enacted. What this means is that we cannot blindly follow what is recorded, but must at least be aware of the feedback and improvement process inherent to all such materials.

Instructions (protocols, policies) have the same problem of meaning that we find in other areas overwhelmingly dominated by categorical navigation, such as identity politics, ideology, and virtue signalling. This simplistic navigation of reality is what has allowed all of life to become mediated by the alienated commodity in the dawn of civilization. We have been fooled into taking appearances as primary, as mistaking the signifier for the signified, the map for the terrain. This is an absolute disaster which if left to run its course can only result in not only apocalypse, and certainly not a happy apocalypse, but an Apocalyptic Armageddon: the dissolution of the entire alienated commodity stack, period.

It is our responsibility to start paying attention to how the world around us works, to all the ways in which our life has been mediated out of sight, and to start by reversing the most dangerous and threatening of these learned helplessnesses. One of the most obvious of these is how we get our food and what we call food security. Thanks to this pandemic, it’s no longer unimaginable that store shelves could be empty. We have to take this as a serious threat (thus activating the imagination) or we may find ourselves under the Flood of lizard-brained panic (again). We can start simple, start with what we think we can do to change. It is a long process but we can help each other. It’s our responsibility to change our relationship with the commodity, and start looking beyond its surface layer of appearances.

A consumer of a commodity, whether it be a good or service, has certain responsibilities to themselves and others. At the very low of ignorance one simply knows the name of the product and maybe has an idea of what it looks like but nothing past the surface. Every product or service is not the same as the other, because different companies have different manufacturing processes or service processes which may affect the quality of the final product. Or perhaps some commodities like many foods may have gone bad or may contain harmful chemicals (which may be more difficult to know about), or may be harvested in an unsustainable and destructive manner. It’s up to the consumer to be as informed as possible about the products and services they are choosing to purchase.

There is also a major distinction between purchasing a product or service on the market and being able to produce or carry out that service through your own facilities and efforts. Since mediated and alienated “customer service” most often comes with a monetary cost, disintermediation and development of skills to take care of oneself is an obvious economic objective for many. Through advertising we are also conditioned to believe that we need (desire) certain things, certain lifestyles, certain appearances, which can often be dropped without the need for replacement. In many cases like with food, the cut of the middlemen can often be dropped by going directly to the farm.

APOCALYPSE MECHANICS

Now that we’ve got an idea of the potential responsibility of paying attention and care to ones household economy, we can expand this thought out to the entire social operating system, looking inward at all that has become mediated by alien commodity. Apocalypse often seems to be perceived with fear, which is why I wanted to spend so much time outlining the Social Operating System. Its important to consider all of the possibilities, especially the positive ones, when trying to imagine what it would be like for all of society to lead and drag each other through a total systemic apocalypse.

Wiki says: Eschatology is a part of theology concerned with the final events of history, or the ultimate destiny of humanity. This concept is commonly referred to as the “end of the world” or “end times”. In holarchic models we often see fractals, repeating self images, at different scales, such as that we could have both a personal apocalypse, or perhaps spiritual rebirth, and also a social one. If this is the big one, the “good” version of apocalypse, then there is an indefinable spiritual emergence behind it, and focusing on the Guild is how we deal with it together, through real community.

As I mentioned earlier, to understand the Apocalypse we have to understand the Reality War. Through time our entire stack of responsibility has been mediated by alien commodity, which means that we have almost completely no idea how our existence is protected, sustained, and maintained. On top of that we have commodified the emergent community within our shared spaces and realities. The narratives we tell ourselves to explain the world and the experiences that we have, are being provided to us as an alienated service. In other words, when some confusing news comes along, a “spin” is projected to assist the integration of the confounding narrative into the reality stream.

Operations to propagandize the population via “news” have been known for many decades, but only became legal a few years ago. It is clear at this point just by looking at the absolute divide of the country into left vs right, each with their own mass media broadcast channels, that vast swaths of the population are living in incompatible universes. The reality itself is different; signals and facts have completely different meanings and interpretations depending on the projection stream. Needless to say this is a hindrance to communication.

Commodification of the reality tunnel is the capstone of the colonized imagination. The environment has become a very smooth terrain, none of the signals coming in are cause for existential alarm. With the stack of alien commodity in place, there is next to nothing left to actually do for the mind, and so the imagination goes out of use and out of practice, it becomes a painful thing to bother. This is towards the state of death perfected, that sense of wonder gone, submission of service to the machine, with only this perfectly smooth (and defective) reality tunnel in return.

Communication with others who are still very much entertained by this perfectly normal and routine reality, is very difficult, because when everything is fine, why is any action at all necessary? Whenre the neural network has slipped deeply into metastasis it becomes very painful to encounter real uncertainty of any kind, which becomes a trigger for aversion. Uncertainty that troubles the mind is what activates the imagination. Some troubling things will remain unresolved in the background, some others will accumulate, until the signals from the body become too great to ignore, and action must be taken, or perhaps an existential worldview (universe) has to be reworked.

Apocalypse is the cracks in the tunnel with a drip drip drip leading to a dam break. Finally trust is lost in the authority behind the mass media broadcasts when confounding narratives cannot be recuperated and the accumulations of dissonant narratives passes a threshold of pain. When it finally happens and trust is lost, the normal instinct is to look for another authority, another reality projection stream. Most are not prepared for the responsibility of interpreting and projecting complex social and geopolitical narratives, let alone the bigger questions of life. Cognitive dissonance holds many captive because the alternative is this massive perceptual void of what was once smoothly mediated for us.

Apocalypse is when the narratives can no longer make sense and become peeled back exposing raw experience of reality. Just like with so many of the other professions, we are going to have to start seeing ourselves as journalists, piecing together the puzzle from fragments of narrative, chasing the scoop, finding the real stories. Sure we can still listen to broadcasts, especially from each other, but the battlefield has been lit up by imagination, booming and blasting away. It is our job, in the journalist’s guild, to teach each other how to do this, and to share our researches and angles as a collaborative sensemaking effort. This is just one example of the responsibility awaiting us if we choose it.

The world we build together is really a projection of our own imagination. When we allow this highest purpose and function of our being to be mediated almost entirely by alien commodity, the results on our world can not be human. We project what is projected onto us, and if we are not aware of computational propaganda, this trigger manipulation (by appearances, the sorcery of the spectacle) seen with identity politics, virtue signalling, narrative spinning, etc, we will unknowingly project these alien landscapes onto each other. This is the tyranny of the masses, for which there is no simple fix, but a deep relationship with the world around us (and especially with ourselves).

The contours of reality are made of narrative; the stories we tell ourselves and others to make sense of the events of the world around us. At any moment, without realizing it, all of these little bits of story are coming together into worldviews, into overarching biases that color every particular narrative (and hypernarrative). The art of Journalism is not simply a task of assembling facts and weaving spin in service of a particular metanarrative, but to be continually open and listening to the stories and secrets told by the world around us. To cling to certainty here, is to again cling to death, inviting yet more cycles of decay (entropy) and apocalypse.

As we navigate the current event, It’s important that we focus on disintermediation of the natural commodity stack of society. The Guild was, and always will be, just waiting to explode from behind the scenes wherever the cancer of alien commodity has taken hold (decay). This is the network behavior we now see popping up (emergent) all around to take care of our Natural Concerns. If the alien commodity stack begins to collapse (security of person/property, supply chain disruption, general mismanagement, faith in media and government lost, etc) before enough of us are able to effectively answer the Call of the Guild, we may have what we call the bad apocalypse (results may vary).

Until recently, it seemed like the reality we were all accepting was the maximally mediated and atomized vision of globalism, with unlimited growth and unlimited externalization of costs, but perhaps many people are realizing its fragility and are returning towards the local and the responsibly disintermediated. Perhaps small business has been obliterated in favor of the big boxes and the online warehouses. Whatever our situation is, if it’s as bad as they say, then it’s going to be a massive collision because all of the pieces of a real critical response are now coming together.

Before so many projects and initiatives can really get a proper footing in the ground of a more connected and meaningful world, there has to be some core behaviors that we share in common (such as being engaged and sensitive), but also so many more specific things that simply coarise emergently, to build up and rebuild the world of the public. The Constitution of the Guild (Guild Dynamics) provides the means to organize coherently in this way as a Social Operating System, which we call “The Guild”. When the map is good (the Model), the quality of the social systems (terrain) can be good. The final ingredient is your careful love and attention.

The government (and other corporations — govcorp) was never intended to take over and alienate us from all responsibility. In fact there is very little that the government even can do relative to the collective power and sensitivity of the people. The current event has reactivated our collective imagination, now let’s focus it onto the terrain of our local proximities. And let’s also focus our imagination on making govcorp better, and more responsive to feedback, wherever possible.

There is not an inherent competition between hierarchical and network organization models. We should be encouraged to exercise our rights and duties as citizens to interact collaboratively and cooperatively with our governments and our other corporations, to give feedback and allow the system to adapt. Just because our responsibility stack is largely mediated by alien commodity, does not mean that we should become oppositional or hostile. These products and services and organizations are here for a reason, being provided in the way that they are for a reason, therefore the change has to happen on the demand side. Say it with me: “I am responsible for the mediation of my own commodity stack.”

BOOTSTRAPPING THE GUILD

We have now established the absolutely vast scope of potential that would be available to us if we more intentionally managed our collective intelligence. To try to articulate and develop protocols for every facet of our collective realities would be no small feat, surely the largest collective human effort ever undertaken. We don’t have to keep learning everything the hard way, over and over again, and suffering so hard for our ignorance. Many collectively emergent projects are just waiting for the glue that holds everything together, and this is it.

Lets boot up the network. We are into overtime as they say, and only the people can do anything about it. People will need to make sense of what’s going on around them and a “universal pseudo-history of your alienated commodity stack”, coupled with the apocalypse guild field guide, might just do the trick. Commodity mechanics and all that. We (my network) have been working on the basics for years now and I bet that people can understand what we’re up to and bring their own pieces of the puzzle.

We’ve also been working on what we call the Document Artifacts for years now, I will link them, however they tend to appeal to academic perceptions. These documents describe a Model for interfacing with the Guild, presented to appeal to the perception biases of four different temperaments: Academic (The Standard Model of Memetics), Pragmatic (Guild Dynamics), Devotional (Chronology of Spectacular Systems), and Perceptive (Perception Mechanics). These are works in progress.

Work on the database and the core of the Social Operating System has been going on for years in my network (and emergent elsewhere). We started with index cards and protocols, networked into clusters (proximity guilds) across the Telegram chat software. This development went in two ways. One via the Autonomous Organization software was a more pragmatic trial and error, ongoing experiment to organize a local hackerspace community according to the systems and processes outlined here. The other way this development went was on an academic model of these systems (the Document Artifacts), and then to represent the articulated model in software. Both approaches have already born amazing fruit.

AO is short for Autonomous Organization. It’s not a DAO because it uses a traditional client-server architecture — it is not Distributed. The AO is a tool for self-replicating, autonomous hackerspaces. Communities can use the AO to manage membership and member fees, control doors and local gadgets like a soda machine or art installation, use community points to reward taking care of the community space, and trade cards privately over tor in a trading card game. Cards can contain anything (soon including memes) and help to carry an idea all the way from inspiration to execution across multiple disparate communities.

The Academic route also has developed into software, which were just calling the Dashboard for now. This is intended as an interface to the System of Guilds, allowing us to work together, and teach each other, the shared responsibility, of mediating the commodity stack, which shelters, sustains, and maintains, our self and our community. Through software, we can easily navigate all of our proximity guilds, related protocols, the stories and the people that hold them together. There is much more to it but suffice it to say that software development is ongoing and we could use help.

There are so many people and projects out there working on the same set of problems right now, without being fully aware of how their piece fits into the whole puzzle, or aware of who else is working on similar pieces to them. This awareness of each other is critical to accelerating our collective efforts to a pace that might match and adequately meet this unfolding apocalypse, with a world-saving response. We all have a role to play in meshing our collective works together, and perhaps we could call this the effort of the Ambassador’s Guild. To this end I am going to introduce some people and projects that I am aware of and have made contact with.

Space Cadet Cory Caplan is a friend of mine who has been part of my online network for years, working on adjacent projects. I see a lot of myself reflected in his own epic story, including the messianic callings and desperate attempts to reach out and tell the world what is happening before it’s too late. Cory is currently orbiting the planet Earth in a starship, gathering together a team of leaders with these same ancient visions described in this writing. What will history write of us? Will we make it to a new Council of Nicea, to a new Constitutional Convention? We are not throwing away our shot!

Ceptr is designed to provide the building blocks of the kind of expressive capacity which embodies nature’s architectures of intelligence and enables an explosion of new patterns of collective intelligence on every scale. Holochain enables a distributed web with user autonomy built directly into its architecture and protocols. With digital integration under user control, Holochain liberates our online lives from corporate control over our choices and information.

One Nation Party (USA). It kinda feels auspicious that this group came into my awareness at the same time that I was listening to the alexander hamilton sound track and learning about the federalist papers and all that. I met some of them on facebook and vid chat and they seem to be spot on with their momentum and direction. They were also talking about a related project called Civilization Redesign. Im assuming y’all’er after the real deal so lets make this some epic 1–7–7–6 style upgrade.

Together Life Systems. Bret and I, our work has intersected a couple times over the years. I was always impressed, not only with the cognitive tech itself, but the software implementation, the absolute scope of purpose, and the relentless accountability to the work. Look at what this is now. I am seeing so many angles on the Social Operating System represented here. An incredible amount of articulation, and best yet, practice and feedback over the years. From what I’ve seen, the software they developed seems like a functional (and aesthetically pleasing) proximity guild navigator.

Decentralized Dance Party. I have known Gary online through this project for many years. This work is one consistent piece of the puzzle that always reminds me that its worth it, worth all the effort. I am just in total awe of what amazing feeling of community comes from decentralized dance parties, it just seems to totally embody the spirit of connection and good vibes. I will prove it to you at the end of this writing piece by sharing one of my favorite videos, by a mutual friend/acquaintance Peter, with his organization The Liberators International.

The Venus Project proposes a system in which automation and technology would be intelligently integrated into an overall holistic socio-economic design where the primary function would be to maximize the quality of life rather than profits. This project also introduces a set of workable and practical values. This is also in perfect accord with the spiritual aspects and ideals found in most religions throughout the world. What sets The Venus Project apart, however, is that it proposes to translate these ideals into a working reality.

The Transition is comprised of vibrant BUD Teams, Intentional Communities, Co-op Businesses and grassroots community initiatives and events that seek to build community resilience in the face of the challenging times we are now experiencing (Degradation of the biosphere, Malaise of the Economic System, Decline in Human Health, Growth in Global Poverty and often Subsequent Inequality) These issues are real problems we now face. We seek to mitigate these converging global crises by engaging our communities on the local level, with citizen-led education, action, and multi-stakeholder planning to increase local self reliance and resilience that creates global impact.

The two paragraphs above were from material taken directly from the project websites. I have contacts within each project who have helped me to understand these projects better. TVP seems to come from a more cyber-technological perspective, and the Transition seems to be more about engaging local groups and efforts together. At this point I’m just wondering are these orgs familiar with the Guild or not? If their philosophy and structure already is compatible then we have a lot to learn from each other I believe. Who has the actual vision? I’m not interested in science idolatry, or old people having meetings, or this waiting for collapse (when people suddenly become interested in the organization) as a plan.

I’m mentioning these projects because I think they have great ideals and I wanna see the praxis. I wanna see the things raised in this document organizationally addressed. Im willing to help, actually, I would be happy to consult on organizational matters of any scale. More than this I’m offering this service free of charge to anyone in my direct network down to the individual level 1on1, I need to be working better together with those around me, and so do you. There are so many pieces to the puzzle, and we each have something to contribute to this unfolding. Share this please.

In the next writing piece we will get into much finer detail of the unfolding of the current event. The Reality War is hot, out in the open, visible for all to see. The battlefield is torn and riddled. The enemy is entrenched and entwined. What does it look like to take back reality? What should we do about the controlled demolition of our economy and society?

How can we have a happy apocalypse?