The problem with most alternatives to the corpostate’s rather censorius infotariate is that they simply try to be like the thing they are an alternative for.
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UPDATE: THIS JUST IN, THE FOUNDER OF THE INTERNET HAS A NEW PLAN FOR A DECENTRALIZED WEB 3.0 THAT WILL WRECK BIG TECH!
The Guy Who Built The World Wide Web Is Building A ‘New Internet’, Where You Control Your Data
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Let’s break down corpostate and infotariate for those new to The Freedomist.
“Corpostate” is just our way of lumping in the corporate and government controlled industrial, commercial, and political complex. This is all the real shot callers in our country. This is that core of, say, 10,000 ruling class members who may revolve as satellites around another core of 1200 or fewer big bosses, who in turn seem to follow, albeit informally, maybe a few dozen big bosses.
This is not a conspiracy. Yes, conferences like Davos may be networking opportunities for the ruling class, but they aren’t a hierarchy or a monolith. Indeed, some are decent people who do good, some are scoundrels, but most have massive egos and don’t share their power with anyone who can’t benefit them directly.
It’s hard to define this corpostate as a single entity with a single ideology, it has factions and tribes within. But what is essential is that the corpostate ruling class definitely tend to agree that they, and they alone, should have the power. They crave a monopoly over our lives and to them we are just like cattle. It is possible they don’t even view us as equally human. The exceptions prove the rule.
The infotariate is shorthand for all the institutions and entities that collectively impart information of any kind, from news, marketing, and entertainment to academia, communications systems, and internet platforms. They all, collectively, impart information and thereby socialize people and acculturate them, they assimilate people into the borg-like monoculture the corpostate ruling class need people to fit within to control them.
But this is not planned: it happens more because even different ruling class members will tend to use similar means because they have similar ends in mind. The “culture” they all tend to foster tends to make most people atomized individuals, disconnected from things like lifelong monogamy or tight-knit extended families, who all depend on centralized systems, including food and energy production through a few major providers, to sustain themselves.
In typical Western fashion you may have just read these explanations quickly. But let’s use iteration and a more Eastern method to ensure you truly “get” this.
The corpostate are the real puppet masters. Their numbers are getting smaller as power and wealth are being concentrated in fewer hands. The dance between the ruling class in government, whether as elected officials or career bureaucrats, and in corporate entities, whether as formal owners or investors, prevents us from clearly seeing whether government is using corporations as its tool or the corporate ruling class are using government. It is likely both things are happening.
Indeed, some have their hand in both spheres, some go back and forth in a game of musical chairs.
The infotariate are the people and the means by which the ruling class seek to impose a monoculture that best assimilates you and I into a borg-like compliance with their wishes. The Borg are a fictional race in Star Trek in which all members are part of a centralized collective consciousness and lack individuality. Some infotariate ruling class are part of the corpostate ruling class, some are merely puppets, even if they have been richly rewarded for this.
It is important to understand these two terms, corpostate and infotariate, in order to address how one might build an alternative big tech, or, more broadly, infotariate. It is our vision, in part, to ultimately erect among ourselves an entirely independent infotariate. This will take time and won’t be easy and we will have to use a dialectical approach.
We now need another pause to explain another core term: dialectical. Few people on the freedomist side of things seem to master this term or its skillful application.
What it means can best be described if you envision a crowded room. The shortest distance between you and the door may be a path blocked by people or furniture. If you just tried to plow through, pushing aside people and furniture, you would either be very slow or you might not succeed at all.
But the easiest path is to meander around, sometimes seeming to walk in the opposite direction, away from the exit, finding gaps and openings, and keep moving along, until you get to the exit.
We want to exit the “room” controlled by the corpostate through its infotariate. But it’s not going to be a direct and easy path. In fact, we may USE their platforms or similar tech, even if eventually we aim to discard them. Like, for instance, this site uses WordPress but eventually will be on a new platform called “Upadaria”, one not run by or connected to the big tech structures or their tools.
We should think in terms of a dialectical approach: finding whatever gaps and openings exist to move foward.
What is “moving forward?”
Moving forward for us is gathering more supporters who pay to subscribe so we can produce good content and fund our effort to build a new Christian-based freedom movement, from the neighborhood level to the whole country. By becoming a paid subscriber you enable us to fund writers and pay for technology and to support a core team of full-time Freedomists, people with a passion for freedom and special skills to advance the cause.
Our alternative big tech won’t simply be another version of some other platform, and it won’t be just one thing. We are building an entire infotariate of multiple products, web properties, and the like which all have the same Freedomist agenda and yet are not all part of a centralized system. Taking out our infotariate won’t be simple because it is diverse and decentralized and because it can be reproduced quickly in different places.
For obvious reasons we can’t explain how we do this. But as we gain support and partnerships with others who have the same agenda, we will grow and grow a distributed network of freedom properties, platforms, and resources.
The main hub will eventually be a new platform with a very new take. Its theme is to model a Christian-based globally distributed “Commonwealth” set in the next century. (You don’t have to be a Christian to participate in and use this new platform.)
Users assume new roles and a new identity within this fictive space, but their interactions are real. They really buy and sell and communicate, albeit “in character”, and as their ideal selves.
Freedomists will have space there through a partnership between us and this platform, as our content moves over to “Upadaria” our subscribers will have the same access for the same price, albeit they can sign up for upgrades within the new platform and participate as an eResident or eCitizen of this “Commonwealth.”
Another new approach will be hardware and software. We aim to be part of an effort to help people build a globally distributed private network, with mesh nets in each locale connected via satellite or airships to all other local mesh nets around the world, through this virtual Commonwealth. This intranet will not be connected to the infotariate at all and will have its own software and/or devices.
For trade and commerce we may either use the Upo, a unit of trade based on some form of blockchain on the Upadaria Platform, or our own Upo-based trade script, The Freedomist Crown (provisional name). Either way, no financial or credit processing companies will be involved.
For banking, we will promote Freedomist and other local credit unions and digital banking through your handheld device. The Upadaria Platform will host such digital banking services for different communities, including its own international Christian NGO and its Branch Societies.
Looking at things like education through local homeschool cooperatives and digital learning as well as participatory learning or crowdsourced knowledge libraries, it is the same thing. We will opt for decentralized approaches that create autonomous local networks connected globally through the virtual Commonwealth.
In our dialectical approach, we will seek ways to avoid censorship or interference while we are weak. We won’t be building “free speech platforms” and we will moderate for content to avoid negative bad press, though this may not totally protect us, hence using multiple channels and properties and distributed networks.
For now, our Freedomist product is more or less you getting content we produce, albeit as we grow we will create better feedback loops and give you more opportunities to participate in news gathering and reporting. We won’t have the problems of users posting things that run afoul of decency or legal standards.
This isn’t our final destination and we cannot exactly lay out where we intend to be, lest our opponents, the corpostate ruling class, get good intel against us.
We do know their plans. In some cases, we will expose that and in most we will use our intel to bob and weave and find our gaps until we can exit the room. That intel will enable us to avoid their traps and blocks, but exposing it might make us weaker.
The lack of sophistication and the direct, non-dialectical approach by many has rendered them vulnerable and easy prey. We will not take that approach. We understand who our opponents are and we understand the dialectic.
Our aim is to exit the room, but our path is not straight or simple. It winds around through the openings and gaps. As we get stronger, we can remove obstacles and not just go around them, and when we are weaker, all we can do is go around. We never lose sight of our goal.
This is what we are asking our supporters to get behind. Not only our fresh, original, and inspiring content, but our dialectical goal to get out of the “space” of the corpostate’s infotariate.
What you may see as a “blog” you pay to gain premium access to, is a small part and starting point of a whole new alternative infotariate that will not be controlled by the corpostate and that isn’t vulnerable to its aggression.
When you become a subscriber, you aren’t just getting content, you are supportering a dialectical and long-term effort to build a space that is totally free and independent of the corpostate and exists outside the corpostate’s censorious infotariate.
Reprinted from The Freedomist