Pleasure First Pt.! in Series: What Blockchain and Crytpo can do in an enlightened society
Not a damned thing! or the same damned thing it can do in a common society.
I mean, really?
We really need to work on that getting enlightened part.
If you're not interested in a mix of sardonic post urban critique, academic conjecture and metaphysics. Go the fuck away. We go deep.
Three things prompted the writing of this entry:
- Reading this! Jeremy Currier and Seth Stephens should be the cybersecurity workers of tomorrow. Instead, they're at the center of a possible criminal investigation
- The woman I'm presently romantically involved with, said, "I find it interesting that you don't post to Steemit." My reply, Well, I took a look at my audience and elected to put publishing on hold.
- I awakened to a beautiful layer of "Tracking Snow" on the ground. Then I thought about it.
It's my time!
Early and deep snows have this power to mute the broadcast transmission of emotional energies, especially the shit that's un-tuned, de-tuned and improperly modulated. Snow is an obstacle for most land bound prey. Empathy and sympathy have olfactory components that track like footprints in snow. So does technology.
I felt my inner predator leave the bed and building, minutes before my body this morning. I put on my sarong, bunnyhug, boots, got a cup of coffee and followed my seasonal "Spirit Animal" (It's kind of like hundreds of years ago some dumb ass British collector's pet Honey Badgers got loose in Walkerville, fucked some Wolverines, had a one night stand lovechild with a witch, who made babies with a few early computing devices, and well, here I am. Conditioned by violence to appear all socially, polite, appeasing, awkward, cute and cuddly, and deceptively well designed for this environment.) Like the "Spoon bender" youth of this generation.
The trick is. if you know your stomping grounds, you don't need to know where prey wants to go.
Prey has a tendency to look backwards a lot.
In Northern climates, a lone predator's gotta be oblique, and sometimes appear obtuse in order to isolate prey. Smart prey learns from omnivorous carrion types to understand the benefits of symbiotic partnerships with predators. The olfactory elements of empathy and sympathy play an important role in the lives of prey that cannot change color or hibernate the whole season. They must mask their scent, distract predators or learn to be of benefit to those that would eat their young or them.
In the same way, systems seek to isolate and control the creative mind that seeks to understand the workings of things. Especially things that the people in charge of systems they don't understand.
And here we are on the edge of the proliferation of an economic exchange system that is going to displace representative capital and credit, its predecessor which has been in effect for our purposes, since the late Bronze age, about 600 years ago.
The people in power are only going to do one of two things. Fight back with all they have or find ways of controlling it. Jeremy Currier and Seth Stephens are examples of their fear.
Now, were I seeking to be in the disruptive set. I'd hire these kids and ship them off to a country where the ban on their internet activity would be encouraged instead of highly oppressed, if they don't go work for their enemy. Which I ain't. I've got my own bag of fish to fry and since I am the Western world's original GMO anomaly gotten loose in the infrastructure, I really ain't concerned with the politics of ya'll shit.
The one thing that has not change is, fast food still fights back.
Too often when we project a desired experience onto others, the passion that forms the images that bring those machinations to consensus reality are driven by the present state of pain that we are experiencing, without thinking these pains are results of past actions, and the resulting expression is the amplified projection of more pain, discomfort and dis-ease.
I want you to challenge yourself to alter those projections to embody a different result. I want to challenge you to generate in your self, for yourself, images of an elevated and sustained desire for a shared bliss, joy, happiness and peace.
If you learn that this is not your talent. I want you to imagine the search for someone for you to inspire, nurture and encourage to imagine and produce those things.
To think of others is the most selfish.
I’d like to address this topic being inclusive of all life, but I’m going to focus on being self-centered, self-serving and selfish. Because with that mind, pleasure and happiness can become a tool that can produce a surplus that might be monetized. Without this at the front of any economic system design, the most we can hope for is a power shift in the commodities, securities and capital credit exchanges. It will not change the exploitation of human labor, the abuses to our ecosystem that threatens the planet or hault the migration away from relationships based in appreciation for producers of goods and services toward automated transactions devoid of human interaction.
To imagine a producer of a thing or experience as an End User equal to the consumer of that producer’s product is the first step. What (Not How) do I want the person making my shoes to feel regarding me in their lives? Am I a simple transaction? “Ooh! I want that, here’s my money, gimmie my shit. I’m out.” or “They said because I made them feel special and important, they took extra care and spent some time with me they made me a great cup of tea while explaining their passion. Now I love these shoes even more.”
It seems to be one of the greatest challenges in life to change one’s own speculative projection’s imagery towards a joy filled now. Partly because we have been conditioned to express desire for things that already exist. We are discouraged from imagining things that don’t exist in our collective reality. We are indoctrinated to covet things that have already been made available and in certain circumstances, comdatized, replicated in volumes that can only be sustained via slavery or automation, tested down to a very narrow list of options, stripped of every beneficial magical power except bedazzlement and priced at an almost unattainable, but most desirable point. And the true surplus of products often destroyed on worse, sent to landfill dumps around the globe.
Far too often people credit deities and representatives with that which people have provided them. In the past, we’d been wholeheartedly complicit in helping to facilitate the eradication of the human creative faculties from elements of intimate social dynamics of community. We’ve denied our capacity to generate the awe inspiring, by denying our capacity to do “evil” at grand scales. We’ve exiled the producers of handicraft and with it key portions of our cultural heritage.
Now one of the major factors in this is our perception of time, we lack tend to lack the facilities to enjoy extended immersive experiences. It’s slightly different from demanding immediate gratification, but has similar effects.
We project a lot of hate, and because of that, we fear what we are capable of manifesting with our present set of passionate emotional states. And, we abhor the “timeline” from expression of desire to the receipt of the manifest result.
The pursuit of Pleasure and happiness becomes the acceptance of objectified products (e.g., trying to find a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris) and joy has become a totally abstract concept, like a plan for what one will do with their Lotto winnings before playing the Lotto.
Our natural instincts and biological imperatives have been weaponized, not just at people of color, but all life on the planet. Even words like pleasure, passion, joy, the senses have been demonized by churches and governments. Oddly, even the words discipline, uniformity, servitude and standardization outside of the militaristic / voyeuristic entertainment and distraction industry have been demonized and at best relegated to being sexual fetishes.
Now the great thing is that there is a growing pool of people of means that believe Melanated people have solutions to present conditions and the world needs to encourage and support, or at least allow us access to our own hordes of wealth. Without citing the array of reasons, theorems and conjectures for our present condition.
Without considering the plans and actions of corporations and governments, I’ve elected to imagine and express holistically pleasurable states of community.
- Social constructs in which technological innovation and the minds that generate them are held dear to and within a community.
- Where curiosity and talent are guided and balanced with wisdom, love and caution.
- Where the purpose of formal education is to prepare those who would work in service to community.
- Where custody of the young lives in a community is the responsibility of all the members of a community.
- Where every young person is prepared to enter the rest of the world with a skill trade and a full set of living skills.
- Where no individual is treated as a chattel asset.
- Where pleasure is learned at an early age.
- And with every technological advance that displaces an occupation a new, equally satisfying career is created.
When we accept that all life consumes and therefore participates in the “Trade ecosystem” but only a few species actively, willfully participate in the processes of creative production, (which differs from creative expression) We open the door to ponder how we individually can use affect to effect the creation, refinement, sustained and sustainable production of goods and services that bring us pleasure.
Imagine the feeling, the emotional state that we want an artist to be in when they paint your portrait. There’s an emotional (spiritual / magical) aspect of self that we want embedded in the canvas and perceived by the most casual observer.)
We can begin to imagine magic embedded in the most mundane tools and actions.
We can begin to imagine, simple tasks elevated to holy ritual status.
And we can begin to imagine sharing this magical knowledge with select others.
But when we reduce these arts and sciences down to elements of transactions, we encourage others to quantize, comadatize and monetize our creative expression for our convenience and their gain.
Steve Jobs once said that “you have to start with the customer experience and work backwards towards the technology”.
My goal is to make Apple the new Magnavox, makers of the Odyssey very first video game console.