“We are at the end of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during which human society grew in scale while it abandoned the early indigenous wisdom councils and communal decision-making. Power was centralised in the hands of increasingly specialised ‘elites’ and ‘experts’ who not only failed to achieve all they promised but used secrecy and the control of information to deceive the public into allowing them to retain power over community resources that they ultimately looted.”
“Over the course of the last centuries, the commons was fenced, and everything from agriculture to water was commoditised without regard to the true cost in non-renewable resources. Human beings, who had spent centuries evolving away from slavery, were re-commoditised by the Industrial Era.”
“Sharing, not secrecy, is the means by which we realise such a lofty destiny as well as create infinite wealth. The wealth of networks, the wealth of knowledge, revolutionary wealth – all can create a nonzero win-win Earth that works for one hundred percent of humanity. This is the ‘utopia’ that Buckminster Fuller foresaw, now within our reach.”
Sounds like the words of a revolutionary? Yes they are, but from a source you’d probably not expect. These are the words of Robert David Steele, former Marine, CIA case officer, and US co-founder of the US Marine Corps intelligence activity. He’s also the author of a book every entrepreneur should read: “The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth and Trust”
Despite opposition from the CIA, he obtained permission from the Marine Corps to organise an international conference on open source intelligence – the paradigm of deriving information to support policy decisions not through secret activities, but from open public sources available to all. The conference brought in over 620 attendees from the intelligence world, which worried the CIA so much that they prevented him from running a second conference. This prompted Steele to resign from his position as second-ranking civilian in Marine Corps intelligence, and pursue the open source paradigm elsewhere. He went on to found and head up the Open Source Solutions Network Inc. and later the non-profit Earth Intelligence Network which runs the Public Intelligence Blog.
If you’ve ever followed any of my work, you’ll know that I am a big advocate of “open source”, especially in relation to the software I promote in my guide “The Technophobes Guide to Internet Marketing Success”. Software like WordPress, which is enabling you to read this post.
In fact, it was back in 2008 when I first starting standing up and offering my opinions on the internet, especially in the way that it relates to entrepreneurial endeavours, that I described Facebook as a huge monolithic blue-walled city that rose up out of the (open source) wildereness of the internet, into which most of the web’s modern consumers were born. People who readily and happily handed over all their private details to a corporation in order to follow their daughters’ progress (antics) at University when they left home.
As an intentional marketer, it has been very difficult to avoid places like Facebook, because this is where everyone is at. It’s where all the traffic is. The same with Google. Little were we to know, in 2008, that Google was also trangressing all our rights to privacy by selling it’s data to the likes of the NSA. Information we only know due to the bravery of people like Edward Snowden. It’s why we’ve seen the rise of new search engines like DudkDuckGo, which promise never to share our data and the surge and success of leaderless groups like Anonymous, Fight for the Future and Battle for the Net.
As entrepreneurs, it’s essential that we are at least aware of what’s going on here, because to implement the new paradigm is going to take action beyond the words of the thought-leaders like Steele. It’s us that are going to do the heavy lifting, implementing new ways of working, new ways of monetising our endeavours, news ways of collaberating.
Recently, a good friend of mine Ben Hunt released a book called “How to be Rich Today”. He gave it away online asking for donations for his work after people had read it. He was dismayed at the response to his request and in a Facebook post expressed how he thinks people are just not ready for this kind of business model yet.
I thinks he’s right. Most people expect everything to be free, even cutting edge information. Personally, I’m not one of them. I will happily hand over thousands of pounds to learn the best information I can get my hands on. It’s called investing in yourself, and pays dividends for the rest of your life.
Part of the problem has been that online, we think that services like Google and Facebook are free. They’re not. We’ve been handing over our data to these frankly dodgpot organisations for years. That is a very real and very high cost. To me, they are like the child snatcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – handing over their sweets to entice us into their net. And we blindly and happily do it, such is our addiction to the information and communication they offer us.
We all suffer from some sort of cognitive dissonance
, which is probably why we allow these corporations to trample all over our personal privacy so much so that I have met people in the UK who actually think it’s a good idea that our children’s biometric data is handed over and used as a means of identification that allows them to get lunch or borrow a book from the library, or that it’s a good idea that everyone hands over their DNA information to the police “in case” they commit a crime. One deluded woman actually said to me “Well, if they’ve got nothing to hide, what’s the problem?”
But there is a revolution coming. In fact it’s already happening. The hierarchical structure is being dismantled in millions of places concurrently. Spiritually, it’s referred to as “The Shift” a raising of our consciousness to a higher level of vibration. An inevitable, and unstoppable process that’s manifesting with the bankruptcy of the Federal Reserve, the end of the petrodollar, the end of the reign of our evil handlers.
In 3D holographic reality terms (ie. where you and me live), what does this all mean? What does it mean to be an entrepreneur post-2015? We are still in a monetary system, whether we like it or not. The advent of non-corruptable currencies like Bitcoin give us some hope for a bottom-up style organisation of society, but at the moment how can we collaberate more, share our ideas with the world yet still make enough money to continue to do so. After all, we all gotta eat ain’t we?
One interesting video from the excellent Thrive movement, explains some of the business modelas we should all be thinking about adopting:
In fact, I recommend anyone with an open mind watches the Thrive film. I paid to watch it when it first came online, but they soon realised it needed to get to a wider audience so they put it on Youtube for free. If you like the film, please donate to them. It’s important work:
Much of Thrive’s solution to world problems relies on free energy. This is something I remember discussing in the school playground in the 70s. We all seemed to know as a fact back then that the guy who invented the car that ran on water was killed by the oil companies. Nowadays, saying that brings derision and the nonsensical label conspiracy theorist (something thrown at critical thinkers by hypnotised Matrix-dwellers).
Our true hope comes not from Google, but from companies like Tesla Motors, named after the king of the conspiracies, Nikola Tesla. A man strangely left out of the history lessons in our corporate-controlled education system despite the fact that he was a greater genius and greater contributor to our society than Einstein.
In case you don’t know, the “theory” is that Tesla, funded by one of the architects of of the 1% society that is currently crumbling, JP Morgan, discovered a way of pulling electricity from thin air. Once Morgan realised there was no way to profit from this, he burned down Tesla’s lab, dismantled his work and discredited him as the archetypal “mad scientist”. If you think this photo of Tesla’s lab looks like a scene from “The Bride of Frankenstein” you would not be mistaken, such is Hollywood’s role in manipulating our perception of reality.
But in the wake of a BBC documentary last week that exposed the mighty Apple Inc as a company that is abusing the people that make it’s products in shocking ways, the likes of Tesla Motors shine a light on our potential future.
On June 12th, Elon Musk – the founder and CEO, released the patents on all their technology “in the spirit of the open source movement”. You can read his full statement here
Entrepreneurs and inventors like Tesla and Musk, and critical thinkers like Steele, offer the real light of hope and truth for us as a race, and as entrepreneurs we should all engage and understand the potential paradigm we can be living and working in.
It is a paradigm of hope and could usher in a new golden age of collaboration.
