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Update: Industry is looking into this technology as was clear at the Dutch Blockchain Conference, held at the KPMG office.

Yesterday I visited the blockchain conference in Amsterdam. There is a string of these conferences around the world you can see the link here. The conference in the Crown Plaza business center in Hooftddorp could be called small. About 60 people, with a suprising number flying in from London. The proceedings consisted of an introductory talk about blockchains, presentations of startups and panel discussions.

Blockchain as a concept is associated with cryptocurrencies, mainly Bitcoin, now also Ehtereum, and many more. Usually virtual currency platforms are open source, because whoever gets involved wants to see that there’s no backdoors or bugs in the code that may threaten serious use of the currencies or the blockchain code. I will go through a number of aspects of blockchain technology, first the blockchain itself.

What is a blockchain?

To most a blockchain has no meaning, so to explain, a blockchain (because it is a more or less general design) is a system that stores transactions. It does so by grouping transactions into blocks, and then chain encrypting them. This means that all information on transactions of block one creates a code, called a hash, that is included in the information of block two. Block two also creates a hash, which will be included in block three.

The result of this mechanism is that it is very hard or impossible to change information in block one (or any previous block), because it would change the hash, both for block two and block three. The data of the blockchain is distributed over the people that want to use it to store transactions, and if you try to look up a block it is only blocks that can be verified to exist and have a certain hash (the one included in the following block) that you can use to check your transaction. This means the distributed system running the blockchain creates a single transaction history, which is immutable as long as you don’t change all subsequent blocks on a majority of existing datastorage devices.

Blockchains are not new, they are the principle way in which most document encryption works. If you take a large document and try to encrypt it, the encryption algorythm can’t just take the whole thing at once, it cuts it into blocks of a standard size and uses so called  padding to fill in the rest. Then it encrypts the first block, uses a hash of the first to encrypt the second block and so on. So all encrypted data is in blockchain format. When it is decrypted the process is reversed. The hash is not used because it is a one way process.

Trustless networks

Why Bitcoin and Ethereum and others are disruptive is that it uses the blockchain as described above to maintain a public ledger. Bitcoin was designed to exchange so called Bitcoins over a blockchian being run over many nodes. None of the nodes, peers or computers in the network would have authority over what did or did not get included in blocks, this would be a democratic process. Today the Bitcoin sphere is dominated by a handfull of large miners, but because bitcoins are used by many for transactions, it has a value like any currency, it can be traded without tax between other currencies at least in the EU.

A trustless network is like a game you play by the rules. The rules can only be changed democratically, nobody needs to trust anyone to follow the rules, they are baked into the cake.

At times there are alarm bells on Bitcoin because mining becomes increasingly unattractive (this is the process of creating new blocks of transactions and peer verifying them) as it is a energy intensive enterprise, It is not clear if Bitcoin will retain its value in the long run. It does prove a point that the creation and use of such a virtual currency in a network that is basically uncontrolled is possible. This is not surprising, gold coins worked for centuries and where also trustless. What is surprising is that this worked in the digital sphere, which always has a cost associated with it.

Bitcoin and Ethereum and other blockchain currencies do have a development community, and sometimes this community is divided. This community decides on parameters that affect the usefullness and value of a blockchain, and for most users who can not code this means they have to trust these developers to do the right thing.

Rewarding the work

A blockchain require work to exist. It requires peers to collect transactions and put them into  a block. It requires the verification of existing blocks by peers. This means a lot of calculations and these are energy intensive. Running a wallet (the name for a node in the network of blockchain peers) means you join in confirmation of hash calculations of blocks, sometimes from the first to the present of the blockchain in question. To compensate there is a mechanism that rewards this work, which is called mining. Mining is the term for ‘working’ to gain Bitcoin or Ether or some other cryptocurrency associated with a blockchain. It is not finding a prime number, it is basically guessing a number. One of the least attractive aspects of the current blockchain is that all mining participants are trying to gain currency by mining and to that end expend money on electricity. The idea is that the first one to ‘guess the number’ closes the latest block and gets a reward, and all participants are competing for this reward. On average the reward can be calculated and this provides the incentive to invest in hardware and electricity.

This guessing is otherwise completely useless. This is the worst aspect of Bitcoin and Ethereum. It causes immense CO2 pollution where this is not needed. The main reason is that the network is trustless, so it needs more protection against attacks, and one of the ways to do it is to distribute a burden which one ‘player’ could never carry. In a closed system this need not be the case. Ehtereum allows you to create currencies that use the general Ethereum blockchain and mining so many currencies can be created at the cost of one ‘guess the number’ process. This has also been implemented with bitcoin but was not inbuild.

A next generation public blockchain will have to have alternative ‘proof of work’, but the cryptocurrency associated with the blockchains is not the main advantage of them, especially not of Ethereum. The main advantage is to have a trustless data and code store that is hypertransparent and can be used for many purposes. More about that now..

Blockchain or Database

May organizations that wonder whether to use blockchain systems to store data do so because they understood that this data will be permanently stored and visible, like set in stone (as long as the blockchain exists). The IT industry does have a sector that is the current protector of data : The database community. Databases can be distributed as well, they are super proven technolology with billion dollar companies like Oracle providing solutions for most major companies. Websites usually use MySql (owned by Oracle but free for use), Microsoft has SQLServer products associated with their own server versions of the Windows OS.

The difference between a blockchain and a database is simple to explain. If you are dealing with a database you have two aspects : 1. Storage of data, done in files on the server. and 2. Mutations of this store. In the case of databases a mutation results in changes in the files on the server. If you look up data your database solution will have a file with a map of the other files, using it to find the right file, open that and look up your data.

A blockchain also has a store of data and it also allows you to mutate the data. But its store of data is distributed over all the transactions recorded on the chain. So if one wants to store data in the blockchain one could make a transaction with the table, field of choice, and leave the data in the chain. Then if someone wants to look up that data it has to find the transaction and reconstruct the data.  So the big difference between both storage media is that a database provides ready low work access (is optimized for that) and a blockchain requires more work. But in return a blockchain solution can be very low maintenance, in fact, you can download and run an Ethereum Wallet, store data, close the wallet and access the data years later with zero overhead. Even if you want to run your own blockchain nodes it is a process that can be done by non-IT personell on their desktops. 

Some applications

The best example of an application of blockchain technology was shown by Adi ben-Ari of Applied Blockhain. He uses the blockchain to store data on diamond properties and provenance. This is very important mainly to protect the major stakeholders in that market, also to protect against or exclude modern synthetic diamonds. It provides a means to control diamonds as a currency for illegal transactions. The applications are set to grow from diamonds to art to other valuable goods. Applied Blockchain uses a private network of nodes who can rely on it to keep a fair and impartial record of transactions.

Other applications where in fintech, possibly easing or elimination accounting load, and factoring, loan administration. Another application is triggering maintenance alerts.

Developer commitment

Blockchain code has to be developed and maintained. The main reasons for this are

• The structure and mechanism is under constant review
• The code contains bugs that need to be fixed
• The code may have security vulnerabilities that have to be fixed
• The code is not in it’s final state, features are being added

This process requires commitment by developers. this commitment is usually bought by initial release of the associated cryptocurrency, so Bitcoin developers who mined them easily in the biginning are now all multi miljonairs (sort of, cashing in is not a straightforward process). This also goes for Ethereum and the DAO a trustless organization that emitted it’s own currency to its stakeholders at the start.

The question is what happens once a blockchain has been launched. Once the initial work is done and a more or less stabile wallet (node) can be downloaded and transaction velocity is ok. Then who keeps track of the code, who prevents the initial builders to leave to sit on a tropical island or plant billions of trees in India. The code that is used to access and store new data in the chain may bifurcate and this obviously creates risks.

My view has been that there needs to be key stakholders to a certain blockchain, ones that require others to use it. So for instance all lawyers could require payment in legalcoin, so that anyone requiring legal assistance would need to buy those coins and thus support the existence and maintenance of the supporting blockchain. This is the only way any cryptocurrency is secure long term. All currencies we know are either physical or mandated as method to pay taxes, like the Euro.

If an industry or sector decides to adopt a blockchain mechanism for certain purposes it can do so privately, internally, and this creates an extra layer of trust in the interactions. Some private blockchains are encrypted, which does create risks because who holds the key? What if the key is lost. A major benefit of the current blockchain environment is that the code is open source, so whoever wants to experiment, can with a low treshold.

Introduction Obstacles

A panel discussion of the obstacles of introduction and adoption of blockchain tech was part of the congress. It had to suprising points 1. There are no applications and  2. The dutch culture prevents the dutch from developing lot of applications. Both where a bit weak. It seems the real reasons why there is little adoption (one other reason was offered by a spokesperson of Delloite, who said we won’t see adoption because we have not seen it yet, which is a great tribute to Neville Chamberlain). Of course there are other reasons. To guess a few:

1. The people that build trust networks are not beta, no developers, and like to keep their relationships human
2. Human trust networks are easier to move politically, so special interests and self interest can be more easily and less visibly served.
3. The current stake holders in the most important trust networks do not want to motivate people outside thier sphere to develop block chain applications.
4. Some financial applications like stock exchanges can not be implemented on a simple block chain because stocks traded often do not belong to the parties trading them (yet) or even exist. Market making would require large reserves of real stocks, which is uneconomical.

At least three speakers in the conference claimed there where no applications of blockchian technology yet where very bussy developing applications and speading information about it. Of course the common meetups (free) are a bit neurotic, so there was also someone that wanted to provide a solution to that (the good cop so to say). This all shows classic patterns of capture, protection and distraction around the blockchain community. Even in the community there where people driving a spectacle of adversarial opinions, which really don’t matter in an open source community (but do matter to people wanting to protect their hoard of inital cybercurrency).

Conclusion

Blockchain technology has real world applications, and can save a lot of money in some of them. They are no threat to some human trust networks that will never adopt them, even if they understand them, because they like and want the human in the loop. A DAO, or distributed autonomous organization with mechanistic application of rules will never fly from the developer community, and besides it is already here, it’s called capitalism or economism.

If you have questions or want to apply blockchain technology you can contact the author at frits@rincker.nl . We will offer generalized documentation certification and web content certification and are open to proposals.

 

 

 

 

We have written about how the economy as a system creates individuals that will try to realize goals that are damaging in the end, like trying to sell as much hardwood trees from Kalimantan, or as much Tuna from the Mediterranean Sea. These individuals apply economic rules that ignore anything that is not for sale. The economy is not about resources but turnover, because it was designed by banks who thrive on any trade. In our movie mythology terms a person that applies economic rules without considering or caring about its implication is a Borg or Systemic human.

The individual on the other end wonders what are the resources actually and reliably available to him or her. What skills does he/she posess so there is no need to trust or rely on others. The individual wants to see that there now and in the forseeable future there is food at least, or water, or shelter. The individual may be raising kids and ask the same questions in their place. In general if the economy is depleting a resource like hardwood or tuna, the individual doesn’t like it, the idea that once you had an option to get tuna, but because of the way others are treating the tuna that option will disappear triggers a sense of insecurity and social disapproval.

We are all individuals (except the one guy in the Meaning of life), and we all work in systems like a Borg. If we make breakfast for our kids it’s because we feel connected with them, we are family and operate with different drivers from our individual ones. There is nothing wrong with cooperating and not serving the direct individual needs, that is what heroism and sacrifice and pioneering is all about. But we are challenged today to think better about the systems we participate in. This challenge is that it is very easy to create systems that you feel you want to be part of as individual, but that in the end hurt you and your family.

Our sense of family and enterprise, one we have aquired as we lived as farmers in a harsh natural environment can be hijacked, has been hijacked for decades by others that where part of systemic organizations. Political parties, corporations, products like internal combustion cars or industry standards, all thos things represent systems where we have been asked to defer judgement and trust others in four ways 1. That they have our interest at heart 2. That they speak the truth 3. That they will actually do what they claim to do 4. That they consider the effect they have, avoiding negative effects. We can clearly say we have been disappionted.

One of the reasons why we have been disappointed lies in the template of most enterprises today : The loan based profit model. This can be seen as a suborganization any enterprise or organization must also be part of besides doing what it is doing. This template, a product of our banking system, is designed to serve the banking system, not cause the accumulation of wealth and security as we would like an economy to do. By adopting a business idea in the context of the wider economy we have been invited to also adopt this template organization, and this is what has created most problems.

There is nothing wrong with profits. Profits mean freedom to choose to support activities. It means freedom to apply our individual morality to society. But we have been conditioned to view as profit something that is not. Because if we make profit by selling coffee for instance, We find we have money in our hands. Money is a means of exchange. It is not a valuable thing by itself. So we gain access to products others make, but not to new resources. We may be gaining control over resources, but the total amount of resouces has not been increased. Profit is a mere buffer of security against the constant disapearing of money from society (by loan interes, financial losses, fossil fuel consumption). The economic template we have been applying has been a hologram, and nothing in it guarantees our future security or wealth.

If you are in a large organization then you will think in its interest, you will have ingested the system or you are trying very hard to. If what you find conflicts with your individual morality you will either quit or try to supress the thought, and this can in extreme cases create individuals with self loathing, no identity, drones for large organizations. If the organization expects this response then it will not help you cling on to your individuality, it will require you to dress and act as if you are one out of billions, not unique, replacable. It is a basic principle that this happens in any large organization, because large organizations fundamentally lack a reason to exist. They have to be populated with dreamy, distracted individuals. Ask the question : Which internationally operating organization do we really need? If you find a reason then wonder : Is the risk I think this organization protects me from created or always there? Also : Can this what this internationally operating organization achieves also be achieved by cooperating local organizations?

The key to being a ‘sound’ individual, meaning one that strives to survive and protect itself and whoever he/she cares about from harm, is to think through the purpose and effect of any system or organization one is part of, not only what it brings to the table for you. This is made hard by the same economic system, because it forces individuals to constantly look at money as a primary resource, while it isn’t, it is a promise to access to resources which explicitly lacks guarantees. The economy clearly tells us it focusses on trade in the market, not supply to it. As an individual one needs to think about real resources, like water, heathy soil, wood, fish etc. and wonder whether these resources are increased by the organization we work for, even as it sells them. There is a basic logic to that, of course if you sell a product you want to make more of it, but with Tuna, trees and other natural resources the economy doesn’t care, because one thing you will sell al the time : Fossil fuels.

If your organization does not generate resources and does not cooperate with an organization that offsets the damage it does (in real tangible terms), then you should withdraw cooperation in that organization. To make that easiest one should always strive for minimal debt and obligations, maximum ownership. Look for local smaller organizations that add to the reserves of food, soil, fish, fowl, trees, smart/skilled people, systems and organizations that look beyond money profit and those that support cooperation. Help others that want to do the same thing.

It is not Borg versus Neo, because we are made to cooperate and not be only individuals and only self interested. People that are like that use only part of their own resources, and sometimes it is the emptyness that results from that negligence that keeps them captured in their behaviour. We are Neo and Borg, and we can be so without destoying the planet. We just need to use our talent to analyse and our courage to move when we feel we contribute to our own destruction.

 

 

 

 

 

Available technologies

• Reverse osmosis
• Vacuum cooling desalination
• Vacuum evaporation
• Ionic desalination ( patent and study )
• Offshore rain catchment area

Driving force

• Wind Electric
• Wind Direct mechanic
• Wind hydraulic
• Wave
• Saline water (ionic desalination)

Interested parties

• Setataita Tavanabola, United Nations Development Programme
• Jerome Temengil, Pan Program Palau
• Save Waqainabete, Hydroscape Pacific Limited, Suva, Fiji
• Rex Thomas, Vanuatu
• Ethan Allen, Water for Life (w4l.prel.org)
• Carlos Calderson, Oxfam New Zealand
• Sele Tagivuni, Former National UN GEF Project Manager, Ministry of Environment, Suva, Fiji
• Vishwa Jeet, Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport, Fiji
• Basilio Kaokao, Mauke, Cook Islands
• Tita Kara, Ministry of Agriculture, Food, Forestry and Fisheries

If you like to contribute to or remark on our projects then let us know by emailing frits@rincker.nl

Potential for pacific islands

• Water harvesting
• Fish farming
• Seaweed farming
• Fresh water farming at sea
• Deep ocean nutrient utilization
• Solar autonomous ships

 

One thing one can say about our world is that usually, anything that can happen will happen. It is an insecure environment now that technologies are proliferating that we haven’t yet had the time to understand the implications of. This is apart from the delayed effect risks of what we may invent. A good example there is plastic, which is about to be in the bloodstream of most animals and humans for a long time as it is ground to dust on our beaches and landfills.

Information technology seems harmless. It has one big vulnerability, it is energy intensive. We have no clue what it will do to us once virtual reality reaches its maturity. Will it captivate a large portion of the affluent population? Will it drive men away from women as they can find virtual partners to coexist with? What will artificial intelligence add to VRs ability to drive our minds crazy. Dreams will come true, but they will remain dreams. This kinds of unknowns are now on the horizon.

In every field there are now new options that wheren’d there or simply wheren’t used before. 3d printing, genome sequencing, near autonomous and freely mobile sensing platforms. You can’t tell whether your phone is listening to your conversations (through speech recognition) or actual people, The biggest problem is control. We don’t have it. We are floated on a stream of positive projections of the future, marketing new technology as a benefit, just like in the 50’s.

One can wonder : Who is paying for all this, and why. The answer is simple. Its the fossil industry. Simple motives as well : 1. It distracts us 2. It drives fossil fuel consumption. Just like the 50s where a time where the demand for oil could not keep up with supply, and onstacles had to be removed to allow the explosion in fossil fuel use (and revenue), like the gold standard, now we need to drown out the call for renewables by offering a plethora of opportunities. To much is on offer, what should we choose, what should we worry about. and oh, yes. climate change.

The forces that are corrupting our governments, turning them into lakeys of industry, is also eroding our ability to control what comes into our world. It is not hard to make a virus or sequence DNA, create chemical compounts or a drone that can do harm. It is very easy. As one that has experimented with small computing platforms I know this is a watched space. Not everyone can get access to easy to work with microcontrollers (smal customizable processing units).

The question should be : How to make this mayham safe. The answer is simple : By making it independent and unrelated to fossil fuels. The reason is simple : The need to sell fossil fuels, and create fossil fuel cashflows is behind the push of this new techno-renaissance. Without it it would be organic. Now it is used as a tool to blind and confuse us.

Because we need to make this avelanche of technology safe, we have to, we create clear priorities. The source of productivity, development, mining, etc. has to be green. Solar, wind wave energy. The use of the technology should go towards greening our planet. This makes some of the technology usefull, other parts not. Even though large insurers are already creating a genome bank for EU citizens (for example) and all kinds of selective treatment are waiting to increase insurer profits, this is not the worst problem if we manage to remove the fossil fuel sales incentive.

The need to sell fossil fuels to create cashflow

distorts and directs the application of new technology

As soon the fossil fuel cashflow driver disappears a process or technology will be treated differently. For example, a motorcycle running on fossil fuel keeps a gas station owner happy, and a whole logistics chain all the way to the refineries and wells. A wind turbine with a electric charging station can exist autonomously, powering many electric motorcycles. But the owner doesn’t care about highways, about a whole army of other people that need to keep their jobs. He/she can care about the best service, about the sustainability of the operation. About local issues, and is not forced to present a dominant force.

Our current fleet of internal combustion cars requires a huge complex network of elements that get and supply the fuel. You get adds with oil motor monsters telling you you need to grease your engine with special oil, you have to burry the elderly that no longer can take the NOx and CO, VOC your inefficient noisy engine spews out. No innovation there, unless you go electric.  Then you can have independent solar farms that could (in theory) produce their panels locally from scratch. Solar plants whose assets can be 100% recycled given there’s enough electricity to do it. No global head office for charging stations. It may exist, but it is not necessary.

On the other hand, the elimination of fossil fuel as main driver for economic developemt also creates new opportunities to use the new technologies. Now the fossil logistics chain and economic utility of a region determines how it is developed. It is unlikely a buzzling Dubai style hub will emerge in Alice Springs Australia. It did arise in Dubai because of the fossil fuel wealth in the region, because the oil sheiks wanted their own Paris, because it makes no sense to be rich if you can have your own parties. It also arose because it made builders rich. It provided an opportunity to get rich building, even though the place has very little to offer. Now that the hausse is over, money has changed hands, the place is a cost center, consumming massive amounds of fossil fuels daily. Building with slaves is common, anyone with something to sell that boosts some ego can go there and sell. Is it sustainable? No. That’s the point of the entire thing.

With renewables one could start a dubai in Alice springs. First one would plant forrests around the place, irrigated with water brought there using solar electric logistics, at next to zero cost. The climate would change, the air would become more humid, buidling could commence with only solar and sand. The land would be able to feed people and all the things people needed could be furnished, all the while the area of new forrest would be expanded. No need for an airport or rampant building, the newest technology, robotics could be used to develop the place so it sustains its population and visitors. In the long run the whole of dry Australia could be turned green and almost no cost would be associated, because the solar energy, stored in wood and susequent fuels, plastics and solid structures, would be its own driver for expansion and security for the community. The people would always be in charge, and never be subject to a class of economically brainwashed lakeys of fossil expansion.

The techno optimist is right, but rather than driving him/herself into some technology frenzy, with things doubling and millions and billions etc. it is possible to view it like a new toolkit, that we have to find a user for that is not driven by profit or economic expansion or adressing the anxieties of the elites, but by creating sustainable communities, by restoring our ecosystems, by maximizing life. Those goals are in themselves sustainable, they will bring health, happyness, freedom and companionship for all. They will usher in the Roboeconomy 😉

Ray Kurzweil is an amazing guy. He is one of the proponent of the modern techno evangelicals. His talks are full of promise and optimism, full of new amazing possiblilities, new frontiers. He has done some incredible things like discover that Moore’s law has been true continuously even before the first computers. You may feel already that this introduction is preparing for a great reversal of praise..

This is not Ray Kurzweil

It is not really. The people that tell you Moore’s law of doubling of the number of transistors that fit on a chip or the amount of memory stored on a hard disk is true, are happy with progress. Aren’t we all. The question is : What does this progress mean. What can we read into it. How can you tell an audience that has been smothered in positive buzz about all kinds of technology to cool it a bit. To step back and see what real progress is achieved. If one looks at it that way, the answer may disappoint.

Moore’s law has come true for decades now, but what does it mean for our daily lives? We are more synchonized in our thinking and behaviour, but is that a good thing or just economically usefull?

We like to lose control, but only in a safe environment. Raveling in promising technology provides the mix, we can think ‘we don’t know what will happen’ and at the same time ‘but it must be good’ because it is ‘more’, almost literally. Moore’s law, we all want more, and it is more, because it means doubling! No clue what is said or implied or meant, no clue wether we have any control over the moral side of change, we are on a happy ride to the future.

The ideas about the brain he explains above where in 1990 textbooks. Otherwise he’s completely wrong about the way he interprets information on the brain. It is a series of annecdotes strung together in a serious confident voice. This is what his audience needs, it doesn’t like to distrust him for his boldness in presenting all these unkowns. Muck like a preacher teaching about the promised land. A sentence like “You will connect the modules in the Neocortex to the cloud” as kind of extention is such bullshit. “You will expand your neocortex without limit”. Please. Ray does not know that neocortical regions all inhibit each other, so once we have external corex additions, our mind will be effectively shut down.

A younger prodigy of Kurzweil is Salim Ismail. He can run down a number of new amazing technologies that turns our living world into a morphable feast. Fosforescent cats, tricoders, transformational technologies in the field of medical science. And “Solar energy is double in its price performance and has been every 2-5 years”. His talk below is really confusing in it’s mixing of quantities. Google car video material : “O my god, It’s driving itself! AAAAAArg”. Out of control but amazed. Exactly the same formula.

Really to disect these stories is easy for someone like me who was actually a neuroscientist and actually understands most technologies mentioned. Ismael says : That’s his amygdala freaking out. The maygdala mediates fear responses, like a flinch when something hits your eyes. “Every regulatory mechanism is now going to break down”. Switching to the digital media business showing a revenue drop. As if this has any bearing on any topic? What happened to digital media? They went digital! Next a new doubling mantra about 3d printing. Predictions where wrong, it was exponential. Next AirBnB has its turn. Its growth also shows an exponential curve. This is the message of Salim Ismail. Be aware that growth is not linear anymore, but probably exponential.

Wonder : What problem are we trying to fix here? Because confusion is a problem.

Salims talk is realy a whirlwind of facts and details about new technology. It’s mumbo jumbo to most of the audience, and so what can the audience pick up? the words double, millions, you don’t need, dissruption, disappearance. The mind holds on to the parts of what is said it can. “Three billion new minds will come online” omg. It is really impossible to keep up with his rapid fire of technology examples. Even the trained mind will be exhausted by such a useless summation. It’s actually a well know hypnotic technique, a confusion trategy. Here it is used to take a new view of the world, to sell the necessity to choose a new ‘business perspective’.

Growth and adoptation of technology has to do with many factors. One is cost. The above graph shows the growth of Paypal. I was looking for the growth of faxes, but this is pretty much the same thing. Why? Because one faxmachine is useless, one paypal account (that allows you to pay digitally between email type adresses) as well. Once a number of people have faxes they become more valuable and the pressure to have one grows. With Paypal the owner Elon Musk didn’t wait, but just paid people to open an account. Once the growth of Paypal caught on people thought they needed it and opened accounts for free.

Paypal’s growth curve was payed for, just like Ubers

Interesting enough Paypal grew in the era of sucky phones and a budding internet. Yet it grew quite like the Fax machine and some other inventions found later. The answer why is simple : They where technologies that where an improvement for everybody, so the growth had a lot to do with simply knowing about it.

An Uber can be spawned from Wallstreet every day

This is a function of human networks, and as those multiply knowledge by an exponential factor (5 people have 5 close friends who have 5 more friends) with cost friction and other losses along the way, you get an exponential curve. The lessen to be learned here is that people usually only adopt something if they see it in their enviroment, and maybe that if you want to strike this well of customers you need to make something small that most people find so usefull they will prioritize to buy it over what they would otherwise have bought.

Uber down $600 Million, about 1/3 an average Wallstreet bonus

Uber, also used as an example by Salem and Yuri van der Geest (in Holland) is no accident. They are not making profit, so how can it operate? Simple : Wall street money. Just like Starbucks, Mc Donalds etc. etc. If you can make huge losses you will always succeed in pushing out the competition. That is no miracle of exponential adaption, unless you ignore the cost, then you offer a better option where one wasn’t before, and you get exponential growth. Any product with marginal inprovement that has money backing it’s initial losses will show this pattern. Of course most people don’t know Wallstreet will never run out of cash, even though we all do know the US prints its own money at zero interest rates. The miracle is that we still accept it.

Yuri van der Geest is a dutch writer who create the book Exponential Organizations in which he combines books about innovation and opinions of famous opinionators like Bloomberg and Arianne Huffington. Ceo’s validated the methodology (whatever that means). This guy is not the first to take a lot of fantastic examples and claims and cross relationships (which may or may not exist) to dazzle the reader into disorientation. The final advice is to embrace technology. But we where already doing that.

Yuri’s final conclusion echo’s my view of the future that I call the Roboeconomy, that I have been blogging about for a while now. The question the Roboeconomy answers is how to make the adoption of technology benign. The key is to remove the pressure to grow an ‘economy’ by using only renewables. This makes ‘funding’ for change always local, always proportional. In the interview above Yuri is correctly called out about his interpretation of low tech growth like Ubers as an expression of high technology, it is not, it is a marketing exercise.

A good example of a multi million marketing exercise against solar is Solyndra. This solar company was run into the ground to serve as a negative example to discourage solar for the Republicans.

As someone that knows more about the arduous path of Tesla it is hard to accept Yuri’s nonchalant expectation that this approach can be adopted by others. The key to Tesla’s succes is that everything about it was terribly hard  (even though an initial investment of 60 million could be made by Elon Musk). Several times, even quite recently Tesla came close to bankruptcy, it did not have the luxury of running a $600 million deficit like Uber, because it was truely disruptive, and true disruption is fought tooth and nail by the market.

Yuri sounds like what I think he is, a techno evangalist, techno optimist, who triggers people to be amazed. He is an entertainer of sorts, who offers no leadership, nor does Salem, nor Kurzweil. The key to these ‘thinkers’ is simple : Economism. Of course there are limitless funds and accolades for anyone good at that.

 

We are autonaton, robots, biobased, wetware, bio-electronic systems is you wish. We protect ourselves, we protect behaviour that allows us to exist, and if those two factors are satisfied we hang around. This is to say, if we are able to express our natural behaviour.

In normal situations our systems have a soul, that soul is an effect that binds behaviours and properties and then stops. It accepts because the basic needs of the system are met, and because doing much more would use up our resources and this may become a risk in the future. It accepts also because we can’t be perfect, we ususally are not. Another reason why we have this mechanism to bind and accept is that we change, we grow.

If we grow up in a stabile environment we will learn what we need to do to also be accepted by others, and we will adapt to change by accepting it, as we grow older. Rarely will we have to assert our individual needs over that of others or at all. We would do that in puberty, and find a mate and then things would quiet down again.

Today our society doesn’t work like that. We are not left alone, We are not presented with a stabile environment and we are barely allowed to see our own children grow up. This is because we are dealing with two unnecessary factors : Scarcity and ownership. Ownership is not bad when you own what you need, but it is bad when someone else owns what you need. A house, a place to grow food, a place to work, these things are usually not yours. The bank owns your house and you pay for it. The farmer owns your food and you pay for it. But you work somewhere and you are payed for that.

In our society we are pushed out of our soulfull existence. If we don’t act we can barely enjoy freedom or express ourselves. Our freedom is taken by those that have put ownership of houses and lands out of reach by driving up the prices. These are not the people that use the land or live in the houses. These are the people that tell you you can have a house if you go into debt with them and work for 30 years to pay them. These are people just like you that want to sit on their asses and use your trust to put you in a place where your soul gets sidelined by your ego. Worse still, a position in which you will do that to others.

The ego is part of us that helps us survive, it knows what we can do, what resources it has and will make us aware if we need them. Normally we express it at no cost to anybody, we make decisions that not only help ourselves, but also others, or that are in line with the role or task the have in the community. Our egos operate within our soulfull selfs, and nobody will notice them. Maybe we see a solution to a problem, a shortcut to happiness, and then we will express our egos and other people may thank us. We normally don’t express our ego to the detriment of others.

Not so today. In modern society the ego is made king. This is done by threatening us, by seducing us with an easy pick, which then turns into a lead manacle. You can buy a house easy, but you can’t earn the mortgage easy. To earn the mortgage you are asked to express your ego, and make life harder on others so they express their ego. This system is led by the top ego expressers, the rich that show you their richness. Their possesions that shine with that intrinisic appeal. There certainly are soulfull rich and wealthy, and you will always see those are the ones least under threat. A rich London banker is not soulfull, but all ego, and he/she tells you that “Its a dog eat dog world, you need to fight to survive”. How poor is a person that needs to fight to survive?

If you cram to many people in a small room, they could stand there without much agitation, if they manage to share space just so they all have some room (some dark associations with people crammed in rooms sorry). If someone outside the room pokes into it with a stick, and people start to move, choking others, then all hell breaks loose. This is our society. The room is not real. It is not small, it is much bigger. The small room we are expected to believe we are in is defined by fossil-economic principles.

What are we fighting for when we express our ego, besides our existence in this ‘room’. We are fighting because 1. Our resources are scarce 2. Our fight means safety for some of us, the people that run this system. Our resources are scarce because our primary resource is not solar or wind or geothermal energy but fossil energy. Solar is not scarce, even though devices to harvest it still are. Solar energy can power the manufacturing of more solar energy devices, so at a certain tipping point we will be flooded with them at next to zero cost. Then our energy resources will not double, or tripple but multiply by more than 2000.

The system we have now is designed to deal with scarcity in a way that benefits some of us, which is the second reason we are fighthing : The safety of these few. One can talk about the elite, about the bankers and agitate towards them. That’s great. Then we express ego, and the ‘elite’ and the bankers see that one coming for miles. What is really going on is that there is a spectrum of personalities with on one side the dirty undeveloped analphabetical beggar and on the other hand the clean, organized, highly educated rich person. Two of the most important properties of the rich are 1. They like to be clean and do not like what is dirty (this defines a republican and is a scientific result) 2. They like to build protection (which is an extention of staying clean). This very basic property drives these people to express ego, usually more than the people around them, because they need to protect against that which they feel threatens them. And they are right, their behaviour is not evil or anything.

We are all born differently and raised in an unique way. This means we all have innate and learned sensitivity to our environment. We may trust easy because our trust was never challenged, or we may trust nobody because our trust was proven misplaced at a young age. We may be very cleanly or we may like to live rough. Certainly when courtship plays a role we can not prevent people from wanting to show they are fit, clean, healthy and powerfull. The economic system has taken this build-in property of the population and put it to work. Who wants to be clean and powerfull can be, by earning money, and putting others to work. This economic system is designed to make the world better for many, and it works, but it also has two major flaws : 1. It uses fossil fuels, 2. It has a banking system that depends on this type of energy to retain the cashflows they live off. As a result our society is super ego driven, and it is driven off an ecological cliff (or is already over it).

The true solution is surprising : We need royalty and noblemen. We need to allow the rich to be rich, and make it so they do not also need to serve an economic system to be themselves. We need to accept that some people like to live simple lives. We need to look at the people that manage cashflows and try to eliminate as much of them as possible (from their roles). We need to return ownership close to those live in or on the property and assign it by productivity of the land, not by the ability of one individual or another to generate cashflow (generate profit in the economy without producing goods or services). This way local, small scale systems will emerge, and our ego’s won’t be asked to act up all the times. We can make our local environment clean and green and beautifull, and  not even lose all the technology and luxury we enjoy today. We will create a better world that can still allow us to trade and travel, but also to live normal human lives with very little stress.

A meritocracy is in place when we look at our ‘old’ noblemen and royalty, their instinct to protect meant they protected ‘the realm’ and for their willingness to risk their lives they would enjoy part of what they protected. Modern technology makes it so that we don’t need to live in such a precarious situation, but we will still see people with stronger ambition and those with more average goals, hopes and dreams. The system or nobility makes room for that with minimal harm to those that are naturally more soulfull. The system is in fact still in place, because in Holland people that done things for which many are gratefull are still rewarded with different grades of nobility. They can come from any part of society.

To move towards a more soulfull society the defeat of the bankers and fossil industry is key. That is done by building more renewable energy sources, organizing with that goal, because solar by its nature gives power to the local community. You can observe how the soulless banker elite at the same time trieds to build an infrastructure that ensures you won’t be able to access energy, key to your survival, through them. They want you to keep feeling that greed and express that ego while it is not in your nature. If you want to feel happy and content then you need to make it so what you need is in your hands. Because of climate change there has never been a better time to start working on that than today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

These days walls have ears and eyes. You may have approved an app on your smartphone that takes pictures and listens to you when you don’t know about it. Anyway cell tower info can track your moves even if you have not approved it. Face recognition on street cams can identify you and public transport, Uber and airlines, keep track of you. There seems to be no way to move around unnoticed.

This moving around may or may not have attention of potential political adversaries. Our governments are not homegenous but consists of a group of loosely cooperating institutions all trying to abide by the laws. Companies and interest groups meanwhile are trying to change laws so that they can make more money or protect their members.  Many things go unnoticed simply because there’s nobody to detect them, for example the EPA was stripped under Bush so a lot of environmental crime went unnoticed. Many regulatory institutions are either owned by the industry or completely bought.

In this environment Journalists are under threat. Journalists are no longer independent researchers of the truth, in most cases they play a political role of exposing wrongdoings in a context where desperation is causing all sides to commit crimes. Smearing however is a powerfull tool to herd people to one direction or another, find a good opportunity to smear and you can win a war (and certainly start one). Free journalism is fought from Holland to Turkey, where in Holland you’re not supposed to talk to green, in Turkey you should not insult Erdogan. The issue of insulting Erdogan is used to distract us from more important news.

So on thee one hand your most intimate moments are now recorded and stored, and you have no idea how they can be used against you. For example, you can be invited to talk about new ways to organize society, an organization can be created around you which allows a certain interpretation of your moves and soon enough you can be convicted as a terrorist, if you in fact only had the desire to reduce suffering and create a society more free and just. you on the other hand are supposed to guard privacy and not make photos in public. If you organize to do so and create a counter surveillance organization you will be branded a terrorist sooner or later.

The mistake is that we consider journaism important. It can be, but only politically impacting journalism is, and then the question is how effective is it. First order of business of journaists should be to get a grip on surveillance of themselves and others. In reality a journalist has to write pieces for publication online or elsewhere and follow the current narrative, which is designed to seda and herd the public into a certain mentality. “Putin shows off new weapons” was the news yesterday, but Putin did not show off new weapons at all. What is the problem with Putin wanting to keep the resources he has to himself. What is the problem of the US it wants the EU to excalate a new arms race (which makes no sense at all).

Putin believes in a multipolar world and sadly one powered by fossil fuels, and this is correct and desirable as we transition to renewables (outside Russia). The US meanwhile wants to retina a monopolar system to enrich its banks and secure its own supply of fuels. The current fires in Canada are a major threat to US stability if they result in shutting down tar sands operations. Imagine that happens and at the same time oil from Venzuela and the Middle East stops flowing.

A group of reporters, writing pieces that will expose problems that can be fixed while suggesting a way forward with more renewables to solve tension inducing fossil fuel dependency, more examples of how things could work or news about initiatives of people getting over their desperate state inplementing solutions that server their physical needs, so they don’t sink into some ideological justification to deny others theirs. A state of journalism that is unlicenced, that is not gratefull to be allowed to be first class state propagandist in chief. A transparent view of information, from surveillance by video, wifi, cellphone, payemnt, public transport, and a shut down of it when it serves no public purpose.

We may be to late, our society may have reached a tipping point of inexperience due to the virtula nature of media, people may not be able to care enough in large numbers anymore to see they have an existential interest in keeping things simple, transparent and real. We are certainly driven to more desperation and lack of interest by right wing pro fossil fuels (no solution) politics. Maybe journalisms task is to inspire us towards choosing broadening our experience because it demonstrates to us that what we thought was true was in fact propaganda.

 

 

While and since Bitcoin got main stream an incredible number of cryptocurrencies have entered the scene. It is not a complex thing to start one, you need small applications that can be downloaded and run on a pc to create a network, then in that network you run your crypto block chain algorithm.

Crypto currencies have no central issuer, and hence there needs to be a mechanism to bring them into circulation. This is done through so called ‘proof of work’ which is a method of approximately equalizing all people wanting to own the currency. By investing electricity and hardware into making random guesses for a lottery number all people trying are equal and the ‘winner’ will rightfully own the new coins. It really works like that, Bitcoing mining is nothing more than guessing a long character string.

 

This ‘mining’ is a problem for the climate, it wastes enormous amounts of energy, but it is intrinsic in a truely decentralized ‘trust-less’ currency. Still the people with more calculating power can dominate what counts as a valid transaction, and cuts in the network (f.i. a cut between Europe and Africa) can cause a split in the block chain, in theory Bitcoins could be spend twice.

One of the more recent currencies is Ether. Ether seems to be designed right. It is not so much a community fiat currency, like Bitcoin, where users of all kind can use the coin or not. This type of unenforced use eventually runs into trouble. If you have to pay taxes but can’t in Bitcoin you have a problem, and if some new coin is launched that provides a better guarantee to be valuable Bitcoin will be sold off for that coin. The luck of Bitcoin is that it has been traded back and forth between USD and EU so often that people can use it as a proxy Dollar or Euro, which of course is not what any cryptocurrency is about.  Ether corrects this.

 

Today is May the 5th. In holland we commemorate our liberation from Nazi occupation by the allied forces. The US, UK, Canada pushed North from Belgium and all around the country people where celebrating, eating chocolate and killing traitors and collaborators. Desperation always creates opportunity for people with low moral standards, and the dutch wheren’t all saints, even though we like to remember the heros of the ‘England spiel’ (see the movie Soldier of Orange).

The story of the second world war is really how ignorance got a grip over an exhausted Europe, how the anger of one man who thought about it and decided to unite people by hate, caused the death of over 44 million. It is above all a story of industrial ambition, the hand of industry carried Hitler to his power, not the frustration of the germans, not their sense of superiority. The jews where an easy victim, it is typical for anyone that wants to rise in power, on any scale to show agression to the weakest, because it is that show of agression that makes others fall into line with them.

For me the lesson of the Holocaust is not that people are cruel, or that nazi’s are animals, but that large organizations can disable the ability to apply morality. The result can be that normal honest industrious people can become part of a terrifying killing machine.

Love is a double edged sword, because it does not only cause us to care, but also to hate. Love is not a positive or negative, it expresses itself in a contrast. The contrast between morality applied to what is loved and no morality applied to what is not loved can be witnessed in every action movie. The hero’s wife is killed, he loved her, he is enraged and commences to destroy countless lives. We hate with him, because his love imploded. The hate was always there, it is natural. The force of love increases the division between what we do and what we don’t care for, so we learn to protect our loved ones and defend against all else.

Why talk about the effect of love? It’s because it was used to make the perpetrators of the Holocaust as cruel as they where. Their self love was amplified by Hitler. They where ubermensch, they where superior. This meant they loved themselves and hated all the rest of the world. The jews where used to further build the contrast of them versus us. The doctors that performed euthenasia on twins, taken from the Roma, jews and disabled where vain, idle, ambitious and bought into the notion they where superior. Their self love translated into indifference to the lives of ‘not them’.

We need to seek a scale in society that makes the love we feel least dangerous

Hitler institutionalized the psychology that would insulate his germany from the rest of humanity and turn it into a killing machine. He used systematic propaganda and terror to force people to comply. He found help in the young, who have no developed morality (if it is not the instinct to love) and criminals to augment his amry of honest germans who ‘just did their job’. The organization he created was what drove people to destroy so many lives. On an individual level only the very vain and ambitious, or downright criminal people would otherwise have committed the attrocities.

Maybe you can say that the ease with which you can make someone threaten the life of another determines the dept of immorality you can exploit. A firing squad made up of jews that would be killed if they did not perform the job. They would be threated by someone who may never have killed anyone, but could in theory with impunity.

I read a letter once in the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem, it was of a proud german officer that explained how he increased the throughput of the gas chambers of his camp. It was written as if it was his challenge to produce as much model T Fords as possible.

The irony is that Hitler did take a look at the Ford factory. He got a lot of help from industry, not only to bring him to power but also in organizing his deportation scheme. What was later to become IBM delived punch card computers that made it possible to find and select people based on race. The logistics of the deportation of minorities to the camps would not have taken on the scale without this automation. It shows that industry has no morality, it can, but usually it does not because the directors in it care for themselves, not for who falls victim to their lust for profit. The insulation of superiority works very strongly for people that see themselves provide necessary products and services to thousands of ‘consumers’. In the First World War this drive from industrialists was perfectly evident, the war would have stopped much earlier if its emperor had not been pressured into continuing by them.

So to me the lesson if WO II is this set of rules :

• Don’t allow yourself to feel superior to others.
• Don’t allow any ideology to create a sense of superiority in its practitioners.
• Don’t allow industry to dictate what happens.
• Don’t allow money to dictate what happens.
• To disable industrial pressure downsize industry (horizon rule).
• To disable a unifying force in industry go renewables.
• To disable sensitivity to hate speach spead wealth equally.
• Always reduce the scale of power to its lowest level.
• Don’t allow decisions to be made at the aggegate level.

The horizon rule dictates that no company can serve clients or be owned by anyone beyond the horizon as seen from the company office. Alternatively it can mean the action radius of vehicles starting from the company HQ.

We came from a society like this, a small farm community society. It did have large trading centers, from Oslo during the Vikings, Persepolis during the Persian world hegemony, Venice etc. but power was fragmented. The world was a swamp of interests. The Chinese Ming dynasty or the Mongol empire where examples of organization combined with sudden death policies and they created large functioning economies. But those where still human scale. In the fossil era we have seen superhuman wars, super human production and super human organizations dominating our lives. We see a drive to turn people into AI controlled drones, as happy destructive end points for fossil fueld production chains. It seems like a good thing to consume Will.I.am music and wear the latest brands but the same system can be turned to drive hatred, the ignorant comfort it allows makes people indifferent to the destruction necessary to maintain it.

With renewables we can return to the ‘small farmer’ scale without losing our technological advances. We are wise to do so to disarm the large organizations that make us hate russians, muslims, Cruz, Trump. We are wise to do so because in the case of a fossil fuel supply calamity we will be safe. We are wise to do so to prevent genocides such as those of WOI ad WOII. We are also wise to do so because it is simply the better option for everybody except those living off fossil fuel cash streams.

Fossil cash flow has caused a lot of unnecessary waste and destruction as it does not matter what happens, as long as fossil fuels are used, cashflow can be skimmed and the money can be spend on luxury goods/lifestyles.

The engineers of the 1900s who suddenly saw a glut of coal and steel to realize dream projects where right to execute them, to push humanity ‘forward’. But along the way it created a class of people that did not depend on progress, social equality, but simply made money if more fossil fuels where used. They caught the once in a billion year opportunity of addicting our planet to fossil fuels, uniting it in a sense, making it a controllable thing with a top down political structure : fossi/banks/industry/society. The  proponents still work to consolidate this structure. But this structure includes weapons manufacturers, Haliburtons, large companies that don’t care who dies for their profit if it is not affecting them. It practices eugenics by advertising and selecting based on racial and economic factors. Homeland security, NSA, trillion dollar operations all happen because of this centralized approach, that exist to protect it.

This world economy, driving our ecological support system to zero is polulated by billions of people who don’t consider what they do immoral, just like the selecting camp doctor in Auschwitz thought he was ‘just doing his job’. The problem is the scale of things. The problem is the inability of people to exercise their morality over their own actions. They are either to desparate, to distracted, to misinformed but every time it is the scale of operations that makes this situation dangerous.

To protect against WOII psychology we need to return from a ‘global economy’ to a ‘multilateral economy’ and to do that we need to shed dependence on fossil fuels, because they create a centralized economic system due to their centralized production and distribution. The competition for these centrally distributed fossil fuels makes people desperate and ready to execute immoral acts.

It is lucky that to move towards such localized economy we are also solving a lot of poblems and preventing more harm to be done to our already precarious state. Wealth equality based on renewables, and alertness to systems that are sensitive to developing a war mentality will steer us to a world that cooperates, shares information and technology, lives off renewables and restores its ecology. Learning from the wars and with todays technology world peace is within reach.

 

 

 

We have written about the oceans for years. They are the key to surviving climate change. If we let them die we are lost, if we don’t we still have a lot of problems, but we have a chance. The reason is that oceans will becom toxic and will produce toxic gases that will choke life on land, plants and animals. Only life adapted to swamps may survive.

Today a newsblip announced that by 2030 we will already see oxygen stress in ocean animals. Of course today already large parts of the oceans are anoxic. Today the warm temperatures are making growing seaweed in shallow waters more difficult. We see Kelp forrest suffering. That’s half of all the oxygen we breath that is under threat. Doing something about it requires a new mindset.

Today if people talk about saving the fish and oceans they think about sanctuaries. They think about conservation and indeed it helps to have fish nurseries and leave those animals alone. Greenpeace is removing Fish Aggregation Devices because they cause a lot of bycatch, but they do not see how these devices are the future. Because conservation is not going to be enough. This judgement is not made out of some kind of idle desire for more action, it is simply true : The oceans will die no matter how big you make your sanctuaries. Creating ocean sanctuaries is like stopping with beating the victim up. We have to do more to save it from dying from its wounds.

Oceans can be saved because they can bring wealth, because they can sustain people’s lives. If we try and let them. The current fossil energy system does not want to invest fossil energy in large scale attempts to reduce the damage, even if it wanted to the banking system will sit on the mechanism to channel it into the right direction, by controlling the money flows.

Shell, Exxon etc. could of course direct energy to owned factories that make devices like offshore fish farm cages or wave drivenocean nutrient pumps, they have enormous (and immoral) control over an important resource, but whatever is done, fossil fuels will be a limiting factor, not a force large enough to return our atmosphere to normal concentrations (even with CCS).

We thought about the challenge and think we should use ocean grown biomass (bamboo) and plastics floating around to build the infrastructure to protect our oceans. This includes fish farms, seaweed farms, pipes and mechanisms to increase oceanic oxygen, To sustain people that have an interest in expanding the size of the living ocean. Perhaps even technology that reflects sunlight of the oceans, to replace the ice.