Sham Elections, Fake Tans & Bogus Blockchain Solutions
There seems to be a concerted effort to amplify the “election shenanigans” (that have always occurred, by the way)—this time, by using more contentious and overt methods to discredit the entire process (especially in the past few elections). Could this be a coordinated attempt to “undermine” the general public’s belief in the “legitimacy of the election process”—hmm? I think elections (in general) have always been a sham. However, the recent, and seemingly manufactured, chaos surrounding the current U.S. elections could be a precursor to introduce blockchain voting and then slowly usher in digital governance, which would rise from the primordial “liquid democracy” waters—accompanied by buzzwords like “transparency” and “open source” software. In the following essay, I shall attempt to string those thoughts together; in addition, I’ll explain why I think Elon Musk, Twitter, and USPS may be significant in this thought exercise. Bonus: some words on holons and complex systems.
The midterm elections just took place in the United States and I know the title of this piece indicates I’ll be writing about the elections, but I don’t actually have many direct comments on the subject matter (specifically). From the peripheral observations I’ve made, it seems like there is a deliberate effort to delegitimize the election process (in general)—and I’m not saying this because I think the process was even “legitimate” in the first place. In my opinion, there has probably never been a “fair” and “transparent” election in the United States (or in any other country for that matter).
My question is this: why does it seem like many people just suddenly began caring about the integrity of the elections? Especially at this scale—it’s odd, no? Of course there are people who have always legitimately cared about this issue and those folks have been reporting on it for many years; so, this is no shade to them. My question is to the average person who is all of a sudden flabbergasted that “the election was stolen from Donald J. Trump”—why do you care? By the way, I had the same question for the “pussy hat posse” back in 2016 when they were shrieking about Hillary Clinton losing the election—so, my frustration is not only directed at the Trumpites. Seriously though, imagine playing defense for someone like Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump and then being confused when you get a bad reaction—comical.
Anyway, from my understanding, elections are conducted locally and handled differently in each district—and districts are basically artificially drawn (and constantly redrawn) parameters within each state. Most of the districts are represented by some undeserving, corrupt chump who shouldn’t be holding the position. To circle back to my point about the deliberate effort to delegitimize the elections, I mean this in terms of perception management and not necessarily the particulars of what has or hasn’t been going on for decades now. I am not an elections expert, but I do have common sense.
From what I’ve seen (again, as a passive observer) the news in the mainstream and alternative has been consistent on one message: “the election process has been fishy and we need more transparency in order to secure the integrity of the elections.” And I’m not saying that’s not true, but when I hear that, my mind wanders to one place: blockchain or distributed ledger technology—because this might be the perfect opportunity for our dear overlords to introduce blockchain voting and institute some form of liquid democracy and eventually migrate toward full scale digital governance. I did a video on that topic here—in the presentation, I discuss liquid democracy, generative economics, biomimicry, Dell & Beijing Blockchain 3.0 papers, stigmergy, directed acyclic graphs (DAG), and much more.
Side note: generative economics is related to thermoeconomics—a medium article titled History of Hypergraphs: Where the Digital & Physical Universe Convene discusses the topic in detail. According to the article, generative economics enables “a continually evolving economy to develop in a way that doesn’t require value (aka energy) to be extracted out of it” — this is in line with some of the ideas in the Green New Deal (a report published by the UK’s New Economics Foundation in 2008). It’s also reminiscent of the thermodynamically open and organizationally closed autopoietic systems that I spoke about in this video. The author also included the graphic below (in his article here) and the image demonstrates how a DAG (directed acyclic graph) evolves (in real time) as new data enters the network—the data comes alive. Spooky. Technically, a blockchain can be understood as the most simple configuration of a DAG because a DAG is a linear structure made of nodes, blocks, and edges, which are directional, but contain no cyclic relationships.
Elon, Twitter, Liquid Democracy & Deep Sea Cloud Empires
Quick thought exercise: since Elon Musk just offered everyone on Twitter an opportunity to be verified for $8/month; perhaps, Twitter will soon (openly) merge with government services (maybe the Post Office) and verified accounts could eventually vote through their Twitter accounts. Wouldn't that be grand…(I’m being sarcastic). To take it a step further, the liquid democracy component would allow voters to delegate their votes to others (on the issues with which they may not be familiar). Below is a screenshot from the presentation I mentioned earlier (here)—the image on the left is from a Google paper about their liquid democracy experiment. The system was called Google Votes and it was an experiment “in applying liquid democracy to decision-making in the corporate environment.” The paper also highlights “a liquid democracy system can be built on top of an existing social network”—the experiment was on Google’s corporate Google+ social network. I wonder if Elon Musk is planning on implementing this type of model on Twitter?
The legal entity or oligarch errand boy, Elon Musk, is one of America’s biggest corporate-welfare queens. He is deeply entrenched in both the private business sector, as well as the institutional or government end (they operate as one at this point). Having said that, it would seem logical for the man who receives boatloads in government subsidies (Elon’s 2021 NASA/SpaceX deal alone was worth $2.89 billion) to merge Twitter with a legacy institution (maybe USPS) and implement mandatory ID verification to the terms of service. Of course, people don’t have to sign up for any of that and it would still be a choice—most people will probably participate because of the convenience. Also, speaking of SpaceX, I made a video about the link between the ocean below and the stars above on my Doom’s Dungeon channel on the YouTubes (here).
To summarize, Elon will probably implement policies to completely eliminate any sense of anonymity some people still think they have on Twitter—emphasis on think because there is no such thing as privacy on the internet. Which goes back to perception management because it’s never about what has been happening and how many ways one can prove it—our beloved “overlords” are probably more concerned about how the information is released and around what narrative (rather than what information is released). And of course they love sending their obedient little minions to collect sentiment analysis, so they can adjust the narrative (and the approved counter-narrative) as needed—you know, the usual. To tie that back into Elon, I think his role is to be a (fake) contrarian or disrupter of sorts (like Trump) and trick gullible people into thinking he is fighting back against the establishment and triggering the liberals—while covertly acting as the bridge that connects big business, machine learning, AI, and government bureaucracy with one of the largest social media platforms (Twitter).
In my opinion, the privacy argument is a red herring because even when you do a mild keyword search on what is referred to as the “internet backbone”—you quickly realize only a few companies (one of them Google) own most of the subsea cable networks that connect everyone to the internet all over the world. They own the hardware and they own the backdoors (hopefully most people realize this by now). This article here (from Wired) discusses Facebook and Google’s lion shares in the cloud industrial complex (aka deep sea fiber-optic cable empires).
It’s interesting that the ‘cloud infrastructure’ exists underwater (subsea cables) — perhaps, one must dive down below in order to to fly up above (plus, up and down are based on perspective or frame of reference, anyway). This would give credence to the toroidal universe theory (presentation about that here). In the video, I discuss the torus governance network, toroidal universe theory, a Belgian cyberneticist (Francis Heylighen) and his theory about Web3 as the Global Brain, complexity theory, Paul Otlet & knowledge mapping, smart legal contract law, and much more.
To loop back:
I first came across the concept of liquid democracy while reading the Ethereum white paper (it was mentioned in the section about Decentralized Autonomous Organizations or DAOs). I wrote an essay (here) about Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum founder), futarchy (a theoretical government controlled by speculative markets), the Extropians, Wikileaks, UNICEF, and futures markets in terrorism—I also had a conversation about this over the summer with Alison and Jason (here).
Liquid democracy was initially pioneered by Lewis Carroll (the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) in a pamphlet he wrote in 1884 titled, The Principles of Parliamentary Representation—side note: his name was actually Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll was a pen name). Anyway, liquid democracy is supposed to be a synthesis of both direct democracy and representative democracy—liquid democracy allows voters to transfer or delegate their votes to others.
In my opinion, the voting would eventually be delegated to your digital twin (more details on digital twins here). The digital twin would most likely be created by AI based on your data or the digital dust you leave online (search history and what not). I think it would be sold as “don’t trouble yourself with decisions about boring government bureaucracy, we know who you are; so, we’ll take care of it for you”—basically, decisions can be made for you using the information/data (in 1’s and 0’s) that the AI has accumulated on you (your mind file). Query: how is this any different from the current structure where the politicians claim to represent their districts (or states) and then pretend to “vote on their constituents behalf” in Congress? That’s the thing, it’s not different.
In theory, liquid democracy is a solution marketed as being able to fix the “lack of participation and engagement” in direct democracy (as well as fix the problems with “transparency and accountability” in representative democracy); however, when you take a closer look, liquid democracy is just another tool used to quell the symptoms of a problem (rather than dealing with the root cause).
Blockchain Voting “Solutions” & USPS
A Dell Technologies paper titled Powerchain—Based on Blockchain 3.0 (published in 2020) notes that digital voting can “leverage blockchain technology for storing votes that have been cast [to] create a tamper-free voting process thus increasing trust in elections.”
The Dell paper was published around the same time that the U.S. Postal Services announced it was seeking a patent for decentralized ledger technology (DLT) or blockchain technology to enable voting by phone. The voters would register to vote on an app and cast their ballots via a QR code sent in the mail (that’s only one of the possible scenarios). According to Forbes, blockchain technology could maintain voter rolls and ensure no one votes twice—this reminds me of Trump’s (bogus) outrage over people voting more than once (aka the mail-in voting fiasco of 2020). Unsurprisingly, that’s how the USPS announcement about their “blockchain voting” patent application was framed:
As news of Trump trying to shut down the United States Postal Service (USPS) and stall mail-in voting captures the headlines, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today made public a patent application from the USPS titled Secure Voting System that describes using blockchain technology to secure mail-in voting.
Give me a break! First of all, Donald Trump’s quest to “secure the elections” is about as real as his fake (orange) tan. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t be surprised if they did “rig” the election for Joseph Biden, but what is “rigging” in an election where one has to choose between two illegitimate candidates? Frankly, I just don’t give a flying fuck if they did or didn’t rig it because I don’t see Trump or Biden as anything other than two actors playing their assigned roles.
It usually transpires like this: first comes the (manufactured or legitimate) problem, then the reaction and the subsequent confusion to said problem — followed by the ritualistic offering of a (faux) solution that our overlords always wanted to implement anyway. Basically this is done by manipulating unsuspecting individuals into begging for the very thing that may contribute to their enslavement. Perhaps I’m being dramatic and, honestly, this is nothing new. Furthermore, I am of the belief that only you can enslave your mind, no one else. So, it’s better to take responsibility for your actions, own your mistakes, and then accept that even if you have been a victim of a heinous act, only you can help yourself heal from your trauma, no one else. Sure, people can keep you company and comfort you, but they cannot heal you.
War on Discernment
I mention this because I hear people worry about “mind control” and the tricks played on the public through propaganda (or even frequencies)—but honestly, I call bullshit. I fundamentally disagree with the framing of that narrative because no one can actually “control your mind” or physically insert thoughts into your head—those are things you usually allow to happen. I’m not saying “blame the victim” (believe me, my empathy knows no bounds) but I am saying that the most important defense mechanism to combat any type of external manipulation attempts is possessing sharp and polished discernment skills. The copious facts, figures, and information one can learn and regurgitate becomes worthless if the understanding or perception of that information is inaccurate. In my opinion, we have never been in an information war, it is and has always been a war on discernment.
I guess one of the reasons I’m writing this piece is because I have a problem with blockchain voting being marketed as some new and revolutionary tool to “fight corruption” and restore “integrity” in the elections (when that’s simply not the case). There are no miraculous technological advancements or structural adjustments that can eliminate unethical human beings from engaging in corruption. Unless the “solution” is to socially engineer people into “behaving well”—which involves manipulation and dishonesty in itself (and if that’s the solution then that’s engaging in the very thing that was articulated to be the problem in the first place). Lastly, how is it that many people are against “digital ID’s” and vaccine passports, yet insist on ID verification for voting? Some of these same people also claim to want “small” government (whatever that even means) yet they want the government to issue the ID that allows them to vote on “the government” they say they don’t want. Whatever.
Back to USPS:
The Postal Services patent application lists a consultant from Deloitte (one of the Big Four accounting firms) as one of the investors. Furthermore, the patent application describes the consensus mechanism as “Proof of Authority” — meaning, a group of pre-selected officials are the only ones who have the authority to verify the information and confirm the data on the blockchain. How convenient.
Again, I ask, how is this different from the murky process already in place? And who determines the “authority” here? I’m going to guess that it’ll be the same “authority” people didn’t trust in the first place (just rebranded as something else). I’m not an election expert, by any means, but even to my novice eyes, this looks just as suspect as the current procedures in place. Interestingly, in 2016, the Office of the Inspector General (in collaboration with Swiss Economics) released a report where they stress “USPS could benefit from developing its own bitcoin-like digital currency, which it [could refer] to as Postcoin [and] Postcoin could enable the Postal Service to expand its financial offerings into other areas, like becoming a global payment service serving unbanked customers.” Below is an info-graph about how Postcoin would work (it’s from the joint report by the Inspector General and the firm, Swiss Economics).
Last thing on USPS before I sign off, in 2013, during an interview with Esquire, Mohammad Adra (who was Assistant Inspector General from 2009-2020) explained that from his perspective:
The point of the post office was never paper, or even simply mail…It was [about] binding the nation together—connecting people. So what he and his twenty-person team do in their cubicles and workrooms…is study how the postal service might best fulfill that goal in the digital world.
Given what I understand about some of the corporate or big business motivations behind the desire to “connect people” or “bank the unbanked”—USPS seems uniquely and perfectly positioned to be the local facilitator of many of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” policies—ranging from financial services, supply chain management, and identity services to blockchain voting (and that’s just on the surface level).
Some Words on Holons and Complex Systems
I would conjecture that USPS could play a role in tracking the material holons (made up of individual people, neighborhood, cities, and counties)—perhaps, with a focus on mapping the physical relationships and entanglements. The notion of a holon comes from the observation that everything in nature is both a whole and a part (differentiation and integration). I have a video about holons here.
The holon concept is central to complex systems because, ideally, if you can learn how to recognize certain patterns, then you can learn to predict certain aspects (or parts) of a complex system (but never the whole thing). I don’t necessarily agree with the premise that you can predict behavior based on observing repeated patterns because as long as there’s a possibility that anyone can awaken to the fact that they are capable of making different choices (than the ones they’ve always made); then there is always a chance anyone can decide to breakout of their behavioral patterns or conditioning. Basically, everyone has the capacity to change (if need be)—no matter what they’ve done or how badly they’ve hurt others. In my opinion, that capacity for change is innate in all humans, animals, or “complex systems” (if you want to call them that). Also, when I say “complex systems” in this context, I am working off of a definition that includes humans, animals, organizations, society, and plants (all defined as complex systems). According to Francis Heylighen, the nonlinear aspect of complex systems makes them challenging to use for prediction, but at the same time, it opens new opportunities for what Heylighen calls: emergence.
I do have more to say, but I’ll end it here before I get lost on another tangent. I’ve always had a problem staying on topic—I am terrible at discussing one subject matter at a time because my mind just simply doesn’t work that way (I guess you could call it “ADHD”—but I don’t have a problem concentrating on things I actually find interesting). What if most of the kids being (mis)diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) are just victims of super boring instructors? Hmm. Anyway, that’s all for now.
Peace and blessings.
-S
