Endesha - Where Leaders Meet

Today – 6 May 2009 – was an important day for the online community in the European Union. An revamped telecom legislation passed through the European Parliament containing a ‘three-strikes-and-you’re-out’ measure to permanently deny Internet access to copyright offenders in the EU members states.

An  amendment was accepted by the parliament that undid this part of the broader telecom legislation, putting a new vote on how to deal with copyright offenders in the EU off for at least a couple of months.  I was personally relieved when the news broke today, but what caught my attention was a press release issued by IFPI chief Frances Moore.

It said (edit and emphasis mine):

Many of the recommendations in this [legislation] stress the need to protect intellectual property as a driver of growth in the creative sector.

This is an example of Business 1.o: growth is measured in terms national currency (USD, EURO, Yen, …). Growth is the accumulation of more wealth. Wealth however only has to be measured in national currency if you want to measure value in national currency. Wealth could also be measured in terms of personal development, learning, building new relationships or improving existing ones, … . Wealth can be measured in all kinds of ways which makes that this measurement is inherently personal.

Only Business 1.0 measures growth and wealth in an impersonal way: through the accumulation of more impersonal national currency. Today’s vote – for now – protects the EU’s online community from being bullied by the entertainment industry (without any means of defense). But is also – clearly – draws a line in the sand. This line will become the battle front for many future conflicts and separates those who measure  wealth in terms of converting creative works into impersonal national currency from those that measure wealth from a personal point of view.

Regarding today’s vote, the fractions in the European parliament obviously want to avoid upsetting voters with European elections just one month away (June 2009). But six months or one year from now this proposal will be presented again, and what will be outcome then be? The RIAA has announced it will stop suing individual users for copyright infringements. It is obvious what their alternative strategy is: bully the online community through national and international legislation. The current proposal circumvents national judicial systems, hence does not even attempt to guarantee due process. Instead, the entertainment industry will prosecute individuals and forces ISP’s to collaborate. Obviously this creates a process that is open for abuse and where collateral damage is unavoidable. And obviously the entertainment industry has no more use for prosecuting citizens through national judicial systems. Something has to give.

I’m convinced that this kind of legislation will pass one way or the other and this is bad news not for the online community but for nation-states. The debate over what is growth and what is wealth will not be settled through legislation. If anything, bad legislation will only start that debate.

The battle over how copyright and intellectual property should be protected online is now a decade old and it’s exactly in this domain that the personal definition of wealth differs the most from the national and/or international definition. It is my conviction that the debate on what is growth and what is wealth in the domain of intellectual property is one that is not going to end well for nation-states. By pushing this issues through the European legislative process the entertainment industry is paving the way for massive ‘creative destruction’ that will spread to domains other than the entertainment sector.

For one, more and more people are starting to realize that the way copyright is enforced in the domain of entertainment is very similar to the way patents are enforced in the pharmaceutical industry. It’s ironic that Girl Talk – the archetypical remixer – used to be a bio-engineer in his day job. In part 11 of RIP: the Remix Manifesto he comments on how similar the copyright issues are in the entertainment and pharmaceutical industries, and how innovation in the pharmaceutical industry is crippled by patents.

The debate on what is wealth, and which kind society needs in order to grow is one that will be unavoidably pushed to it’s logical conclusion by the entertainment lobby, and when that happens the fallout will cause tremendous havoc. There are no obvious reasons why nation-states and national economies cannot fall victim to creative destruction.

There can be only one – prelimary – conclusion to future events that are going to unfold between the online community and the national bureaucracies that try to control that community over the freedom of culture: impersonal society will pass the point of no return where its proponents will have to go into the defensive (regardless or because of their aggressiveness). The discussion on how (or whether) culture has to be controlled by national bureaucracies will once and for all put nation-states on the wrong side of the debate, in direct opposition of 99% of its citizens. Through their desire to let the past control the future of our cultures the entertainment lobby will lure national bureaucracies into a trap, one they will only be able to escape from if they dissolve themselves – and thus the nation-states they represent – to a large degree by abandoning attempts to control culture.

Compared to just a decade ago western nation-states find themselves in a situation where the majority of their citizens are now producers of content and culture (digital cameras and mobile phones are to a large extend responsible for this). Virtually none of these citizens however expect to get compensated in national currency by consumers of their content and culture. Very few of these citizens will accept legislation that restricts their personal freedom as creators and consumers of culture (for no obvious reason apart from greed). Although these citizens may not articulate their demands in this way, they won’t allow the past to control the future.

During the 1980’s and 1990’s nation-states have always considered that their job was to control their national economies and national currencies. Now – it seems – their üntergang  will be caused by the question: who controls culture? To which extends can anybody expect to regulate and control the usage of culture they own? To which extend can culture be owned? It will be fascinating to see how national bureaucracies will collaborate in the creation of their own demise.

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Now that Joel Spolsky has dropped the A-word to describe the motivation behind the design of this incredibly successful social website StackOverflow.com this is probably a good time to review what exactly anthropology is.

Disclaimer: I’m not an anthropologist by education or profession just like Joel Spolsky. I’m not even a social scientist according to these criteria. I specialize in building communities, mostly online and this obviously involves building social websites. I have a background in software development and since about a year ago I took and active and intense interest in anthropology in relation to social networks.

People who are considered to be professional anthropologist will not necessarily be able to explain what anthropology is about. Actually, they will be to explain what they think anthropology is. They’ll probably say that anthropology is actually ethnography. You’ll get this answer because all trained anthropologists today have been trained to do ethnography. In fact, if you want to get your PhD. in anthropology you’ll be required to do ethnographic fieldwork as part of the curriculum.

Ethnography is a discipline of anthropology but anthropology is not ethnography. The fact that almost all active anthropologists mainly focus on ethnography doesn’t make this any less confusing. What Joel Spolsky refers to as anthropology is not ethnography either although he does use that word. There is an emerging field called digital ethnography (which is not the same as ethnography) but that’s not what Joel is referring to either (although it would be interesting to see an ethnographic study of StackOverflow.com as has been done by Micheal Wesch for YouTube).

What Joel means by anthropology is the way he designed StackOverflow.com to allow individuals to scale themselves up and scale the world down. Another word for that is community. Ultimately, the historic goal of anthropology has always been to bring about a world society that is more democratic and more equal than ever before. I think Joel has succeeded brilliantly in bringing democracy and equality about in the StackOverflow.com community through the design of the website and I congratulate him for his design principles. These will set a new standard for how social sites ought to be developed.

It’s also very encouraging to see that a public figure like Joel Spolsky has been brave enough to couple anthropology to social websites and social networks in general. Anthropology is not so much a study of how people live together, but is much more concerned with helping people to live better lives through community. This makes it a brilliant platform to build any community on, and again Joel has done this brilliantly.

If you want to know more about how you can use the ideas behind anthropology in social networks and websites I encourage you to listen closely to Keith Hart. He’s a retired professor of anthropology and prolific twitterer. In particular, check out this lecture. I believe it will give you a much better understand why anthropology is so relevant for social networks and websites.

Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

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Every time I launch my Windows Live Writer application in a moment of excitement I know I’m in trouble.

Want to change the world? Then first try to understand how it got to be as it is.

It’s a lesson I’m privileged to be learning right now. Somehow conditions have been made exactly right for me to learn that lesson.

What made me launch my Windows Live Writer application was this piece of reactionary writing on the damage schools do to society. It thought me that the people that are currently part of the problem should not be blamed, and that the institutions that are so ferociously resisting all change are not be blamed either.

What I’ve discovered – and this is early days – is the field of Comparative Change Studies: well-written, peer-reviewed essays that try to explain why certain institutions in society are the way they are. The wonderful benefit of this field is that once we understand where certain institutions come from and what they have gone through three things suddenly become possible:

1. We get a much better idea what the future might be like.
2. We get a chance of incorporating current institutional members in new movements.
3. We’re making it a little bit harder for those people who stubbornly keep committing to the status quo.

I’m currently working with a number of other people on an essay on where the educational system is coming from and what it has been through. Our motivations are clear: disrupt the current education systems so much that they break. But in order to do that properly we have to do Comparative Change Studies: which changes have happened in the past – to education – and how do they compare (how are they similar or different)?

If you sit down and do this for education you come to some wonderful conclusions that I at least would never have been able to come up without a careful comparative study of historical changes that have occurred. I hope we can publish our paper shortly. Until then I’ll be careful not to spill ideas that so far are still under review.

If this essay would prove to be appreciated in educational circles it will certainly encourage me to do Comparative Change Studies in other areas current controlled by big, inflexible institutions. It’s just an intuition so far but my guess is that Comparative Change Studies is one component that is missing to let the world change itself.

I’m certainly seeing a lot of difficulties to apply Comparative Change Studies to for example government of military. But in many cases Comparative Change Studies might be what is needed to move people’s attention from the rules as they are to how the rules came into existence in the first place. Institutions are so stubborn because people believe that the existing rules are the best possible way to govern current society. This is the typical mistake institutional organizations make: they look at the world through the lenses of their own rules.

I hope Comparative Change Studies can make a difference, especially for people currently in the institutions. And if not I hope we at least can find a way to fail productively.

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Nassim Nicolas Taleb provides 10 rules that if followed will reduce or even completely eliminate the risk of Black Swans in the economy. Check out the full detail of these rules in his article. Here’s the list of rules he proposes:

1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small.
2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains.
3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus.
4. Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks.
5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity.
6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning.
7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence”.
8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains.
9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible “expert” advice for their retirement.
10. Make an omelette with the broken eggs.

His is an interesting list because it makes you think: could these rules be further simplified? I believe they can. Taleb makes the assumption so many other make: we need institutions. There’s no justification for this desire other than habit: we’re so used to having institutions that we can’t even imagine a world where institutional forms of organization are much less dominant.

By letting go of the need to have institutions I can rewrite Taleb’s 10 rules as 5 rules:

1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Don’t use institutions.
2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains.
3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus.
4. Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks.
5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity.
6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning.
7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence”.
8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains.
9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible “expert” advice for their retirement.
10. Make an omelette with the broken eggs.

Taleb’s rules 1, 2, 3, 4, 8 and 9 are a direct result of the institutional model. Institutions are great devises to let a few conspire against many. In other words: institutions depend on opacity from the outside to function. In collaborative models every participant is part of the working system and while abuse by a few is still possible it becomes much easier to detect and adapt the system based on lessons learned.

Institutions in the form of collaboration are given their charter by the state. This is no accident since the state itself is an institution. The state enforces the institutional model in its laws upon those that want to run their own business. This is a fatal flaw in our society and one that cannot disappear unless our current model of society disappears.

For this reason Taleb’s 10 rules or my 5 rules will never be adopted in our current model of society. The state is uniquely concerned with self-preservation. Our culture is uniquely concerned with control. Without a collapse nothing will change and everything that’s bad today will become worse tomorrow. The good news is that the current state of erosion appears to be so advanced that collapse is imminent.

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The big advantage of the past is that we have a pretty good idea on how it treated us. The big disadvantage of the future is that we can’t know how it will treat us. Humanity doesn’t have any long-term goals. Does is matter if our species survives or evolves into new species? Do we care? I don’t. Many don’t.

When we do set ourselves goals they become part of culture. Culture is what creates the tension in the present between the past and the future. We want to do better than we have done in the past yet we don’t want to make changes that would give us a worse deal in the future than we expect. Culture is uniquely concerned with control.

Our ability to think about, reason about and even predict the future is what creates culture. Without understanding that A leads to B there can be no culture. Our ability to recollect the past, compare outcomes and engage in what-if thinking functions as an input for thinking about the future. Storytelling lets us learn about the outcomes of decisions without actually making those decisions ourselves. Law enforcement is uniquely concerned with storytelling.

The more culture gets fragmented in today’s long tail of worldwide interactions the more we loose control. By engaging in cultural practices in small groups instead of as masses massive control of people becomes harder and harder and eventually it will become impossible. As I told yesterday we need to be worried about how we will make money to be controllable by states. Yet more and more people are being paid to engage in free interactions with people they seek to influence. Once that influence is actually working and the communication channels are in place these individuals won’t have to worry about making money anymore because that influence can be monetized regardless of who pays.

Trust is a true currency in the sense that people who have earned it don’t have to worry about how to make money: they just make money by what they do and thus become much less controllable. This money isn’t being made through per-transaction revenue but through daily interactions regulated by trust. When the interactions violate the trust the earned privileges disappear and so do the monetization opportunities.

As the relationship between earned trust and making money become a phenomenon that regulates ever larger portions of the economy the groups in which trust is exchanged become more and more fragmented. The fragmented context in which wealth is created is such that exerting control – especially by a state – becomes next to impossible. Culture which is uniquely concerned with control changes drastically too. The part of culture that is used by the state to organize society shrinks to the advantage of the many fragmented interactions citizens engage in.

In other words citizens get much more chances to control than before and the state gets much less.  This shift in control can be directly attributed to the long tail: the state is much better in influencing the very common interactions – like participating in traffic – than it is at influencing fringe interactions (those in the tail). When there didn’t used to be a long tail the state was all powerful. Now that there is  long tail the state is practically forced to say away from the fringes.

Unfortunately much of the interactions in the financial industry used to be in the fringes where states didn’t exert control. Now that that fringe activity has blown up the economy and has put the financing of future society under grave threat the state has shot itself in the foot. By insisting for the past decades to keep their national currencies impersonal they’ve allowed people in the fringes who were explicitly not controlled to screw everybody. As it becomes clear that impersonal currencies are no longer viable states are and will continue to fight for the lives.

By counting on the answers from the past to regain control states will make the situation much worse. They can’t know this and even if they did know there’s nothing they can do about it. States are uniquely concerned with self-preservation. They have no choice but to mend national society until total collapse has arrived. Because total collapse is unavoidable under the regime of the answers from the past.

Since the answers from the past won’t do all we have left are the answers about the future. We’re not good at taking these serious yet our existing political and economical culture is completely obsolete. This is what Clay Shirky talks about when he says the old structures collapse faster than they can’t be replaced. We have a gigantic decision problem before us where the old processes of reaching decisions are useless.

We have seen this happening all around us since many decades. The legal system – laws and courts – is eroding. National policy is eroding. Democratic principles are eroding. The financial and economic systems are eroding. Health care is eroding. Agriculture is eroding. After erosion comes collapse. In all practical terms erosion is a slow-motion train wreck.

We have always believed that more control would solve our problems and we’re being proven wrong in a very dramatic way. The peace time carnage going on in the world today is larger than it has ever been before and the collapse of national societies is upon us.

The usefulness of any domain can be easily revealed by the clarity of the question that are being asked. When it comes to society, which are the questions that govern our decisions? That is not clear. There is no clarity what our society is for or about. As we reconstruct a brand new culture we’ll have to start asking the right questions. There is one question that was once asked during the 18th century by the first anthropologists like Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacque Rousseau that is making a comeback: How to construct a world society that is more democratic than ever before?

(i) inspired by Keith Hart, Kris Hoet

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In order to understand money we have to start from a point where there is no money. Money has been invented many times over by many different cultures seemingly independently. Before the rise of global empires money was local in the form of local currencies.

The purpose of money is supposed to be making trade easier in all kinds of ways. That’s the story you’ll hear in an economics 101 course. The true purpose of money however is this: convert wealth into money. Everything we value in our lives is wealth. When we have a lot of things we value we own a lot of wealth and are wealthy. The purpose of money is to convert wealth – food, water, shelter, music, health care – into money.

Once wealth is converted into money it opens the doors for all kinds of new ideas and behaviors. First of all, the economy can be measured in terms of money instead of in terms of harvest produce or doctor visits. Secondly, money can be invested in order to earn future gains which creates a form of capitalism. Thirdly, the purpose of every major organized industry that require vast amounts of capital shifts from its nominal purpose to making money. Fourthly, the state can collect taxes in the currency it recognizes making that currency the default currency. Fifthly, money can be lend for profit without much hassle (usury). Sixthly, excess amounts  of money can be brought to banks for protection and to earn a profit from lending your money to banks (usury). Seventhly, the state can sanction and control the creation of new currency. And eighthly and lastly, the government can collect future taxes in advance by issuing bonds (usury).

The simple existence of money allows wealth to be round up and concentrated with a few people in a way that could never be achieved without money while at the same time enslaving most people. Money regulates the acquisition of wealth. The state relies on the fact that none of its citizens are able to collect all the wealth they need and want without money. To acquire this wealth citizens need to generate an income – that is create and sell wealth other people want – and pay taxes on that income. Money is an ingenious system that connects everybody to everybody.

But money is also dangerous. The biggest problem with our currencies is that they are impersonal: a bank note or even a gold nugget can’t tell who were its previous owners or in which transactions they have participated. Because of this we don’t know or even care anymore how the wealth we acquire got created. This on a massive global scale leads to all kinds of excesses because virtually all transactions we engage in are by design impersonal. People want to earn money and want to acquire wealth. Since most transactions eliminate personal connections we don’t have a clue anymore what our footprint on this world might be or what kind of trail we leave behind.

Our societies were never supposed to remain as they are today. Today is just a snapshot on the road to a different kind of society. There’s no reason why our societies have changed constantly for 12,000 years and now suddenly should stop changing. Whether our societies will improve or get worse will depend to a larger extend on what kind of currencies we’ll be using. At the same time the design of our currencies reflect the needs we have in society.

We define the purpose of money. What we want to achieve has to be expressed in the design of our currencies. Otherwise we’ll never achieve anything in society. Because states play a vital role on how our currencies work they have an important interest in not letting society change too much. Through money the state controls its citizens and the state needs to keep that control in order to remain a state. The institution the state protects itself through the design of our currencies out of self-preservation.

The question that is never asked is: would we be better off with a different kind of state, possibly a world society? The question that gets asked a lot instead is: how do I make money? The state actually encourages us to have impersonal connections when making money which leads to selfish intentions. By ensuring we remain impersonal in our doings the state ensures we never ask ourselves the question it doesn’t want us to ask.

The obvious threats to the continued existence of the state are free and personal relationships that create wealth. These relationships are made possible through online communities where wealth is exchanged most of the time for free and where the relationships through which this wealth is exchanged are most of the time personal. The state has no response this these kind of interactions and slowly but surely we’re starting to ask the question: are the societies we live in the best for us, or can we do better? Whenever this question is asked it is the direct result of engaging in personal relationships that do not involve our current impersonal currencies. People that mainly engage in impersonal relationships in order to obtain wealth are too busy and worried to ask this kind of questions.

This is a dangerous time for states. The ponzi scheme of endless debt is being exposed for what it is and states are taking draconic measures to keep the illusion alive. In the meanwhile more and more people are finding their ways into online communities where wealth is exchanged for free and transactions are personal. Whenever and wherever our impersonal currencies are no longer used to exchange wealth the state loses control. And as it loses more and more control its existence comes under threat.

The purpose of our current currencies is to keep the nation-states we have alive but that is not the purpose of money. We the people define the purpose of money and someday soon we will. We just have to find the right reasons to do so.

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I write down here the account of my gloomiest prediction in the hope that this will be my low point, and that in writing it down I can move on to happier thoughts. Anyway, if this prediction comes to pass we’ll all hit rock bottom together.

The simplest way I can describe the crisis is this:

The economy is measured in money transactions. The entire volume of these transactions makes up the GDP, and so on. In order for the economy to grow each year more wealth has to be converted to money than the year before.

In that sense farming and water distribution is about making money. It doesn’t really matter what the food or the water is like as long as people pay for it. This is why communism doesn’t work and why some people believe that only truly free capitalism can work (I do not believe this). We do not have truly free capitalism, far from it.

For the same reasons – converting wealth into money – property rights are as important as they are for governments: it’s a powerful way to convert wealth – land, houses, machines, ideas – into money and hence grow the economy. This is also the reason why the RIAA is given a free pass: if they can maximize the conversion of wealth – listening to music – into money – make every listener pay – the economy benefits.

If the economy would be measured in a different way – for example in terms of the health or happiness of the people – we’d see a completely different type of collaboration. But the economy is measured not just in terms of money but in terms of national currency.

In order for this economy to grow ad infinitum the conversion of wealth into money has to continue forever. This can obviously not work and the thing that has hurt the national economies most is free. Free software, free music, free information, free everything. When wealth is offered for free instead of converted into  money the economy does not grow.

What is worse: each time wealth is taken for free the financial system cannot do its voodoo magic because there are no money transactions. And because the economy is measured in terms of national currency all the money that is made due to the voodoo magic of the financial system on top of the regular money transactions is part of economy. When there are fewer money transactions, and the amounts of those money transactions decreases this hurts the economy more than expected because of the lack of financial voodoo magic.

As this crisis continues, and as more and more people are trying to benefit as much as they can from what is free the economy gets worse. Ultimately the US government – after creating even more debt than it already has – will be forced into default. Taking on more debt combined with a frugal population cannot work in the long run.

To make matters worse people have radically changed their assumptions and habits so that the classic institutions of the 19th and 20th century are rapidly collapsing (newspapers, banks, music industry, car manufacturers). The models that will replace them will be either much cheaper or free resulting in even less money transactions. It’s becoming harder and harder to convert wealth into money.

While the US government is trying to save the banks by spending crazy amounts of money it’s really digging itself into a deeper hole. The world – the financiers of US government debt – will ultimate realize this and cut off credit to some extend leading to a default. The same dynamics are happening in every other country complicating things even further.

This is were my gloomiest picture comes in: not if but when the US government collapses other governments around the world will already have collapsed. But these nation-states along with their bankers won’t give up control so easily: with the economy collapsed they’ll continue their control of people by creating an outbreak of some disease leading to millions of citizens being round up in prison camps where they will die. This is the ultimate form of taking control.

We cannot sustain ourselves in terms of food and fresh water. Without a working national economy and national government we cannot survive. We are destroying our institutions more quickly than they can be replaced. This is unavoidable and I don’t regret it. Human beings will suffer tremendously but humanity will come out of this much, much stronger.

(i) inspired by The Ascent of Humanity.

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Things are spinning out of control. Obama can’t get control on the government-owned banks and AIG. The US government is sending trillions of future taxpayer’s money down the drain. Bad money.

In Europe things are looking equally grim. Spanish banks have yet to take the beating for their dubious credit exposure in Latin-America and the meltdown in Eastern Europe really hasn’t started yet. The Western European banks have already been punished on the stock markets for their Eastern exposure but the real beating still lays in the future.

Add to that the multi-trillion bond underwriting of 2009 still has to occur. The US and UK are underwriting so many bonds that they will push and price all other countries out of the market. In the meanwhile the export revenue for the 2009 US wheat and corn harvests are likely going to decrease by as much as 10% due to falling demand elsewhere in the world.

The global economy is shutting down. In the meanwhile the US and UK governments and playing smoke and mirrors. The issues are going  to get so complicated that nobody is going to be able anymore to have an honest discussion. Things will decay into flame wars where no side can  get the upper hand.

Public policy will fail to restore any kind of confidence resulting into more economic slowdown. This will continue until the mist has cleared. By then entire countries will have failed. The US and UK are high on the list of failing states.

Welcome to the unreal where the governments that are supposed to protect you are going to try very hard to sell the lives and work of you and your children for their own benefit. This is our frustration, and this is what will bring us together before this year is over.

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You may have heard of Quantitative Easing, or you may not. Regardless, it’s a very dangerous moves that is being contemplated by the biggest central banks on earth, and to which China has responded by increasing its military budget for 2009 with 15%.

Quantitative Easing is jargon for printing money by the state, out of nowhere. It’s an attempt to create hyper-inflation as is seen as the measure of last resort to counter debt deflation. When people don’t take out credit – because of bad credit ratings, being buried in debt or out of work, or just out of sensibility – our global debt-based economy starts shrinking dangerously. In general deflation means that there is less money in circulation, meaning it becomes much harder for anybody to get hold of money. This means prices and wages go down, and that investment opportunities all but cease to exist. But the big problem with deflation is that while wages go down monthly payments for outstanding debt go unchanged. In other words, deflation hurts everybody.

Deflation is bad enough as it is. But nation-states are bound to make things much worse. They know deflation is upon us, and that things will move very quickly really soon. Their response is to preparing themselves and us mentally for Quantitative Easing. The problem is that nobody knows what the results will be for our economies, not even the central banks themselves. The only thing they know is that it might work, and that doing nothing will certainly not work.

Central banks have no issue at all with wiping out the savings of everybody in an attempt to save their own nation-states. But if our money is going to be wiped out anyway, what’s the point of having nation-states at all? Nation-states are supposed to protect their citizens, not banks. There is defensible argument that putting banks before citizens is the better choice. Yet central banks go ahead nonetheless.

This is a good point to start thinking about what central banks do. First of all, they’re not called central citizens, so that tells you who they’re rooting for. Secondly, neither the Federal Reserve, nor the European Central Bank, nor the Bank of England, nor the Bank of Japan are controlled by the people. They are part of the state but they are not controlled by the democracy. That means they can do as they please knowing nobody will stop them.

Well, the only ones that can stop them is us. Quantitative Easing will wipe out all our savings, and will benefit those that are in debt over those that save and invest. Quantitative Easing will also mean that there will be another round of putting people in debt all over again so that we’ll all be enslaved for another few decades. Why save nation-states? Quantitative Easing favors those that made all the mistakes in the past, and punishes those that worked and/or took risks to earn their money.

The time for action is now. We cannot let nation-states continue in their path of destruction simply to save themselves. No institution or system is more important than us people. The system should be the slave of the people, not the other way around. The 20th century has been the century of the central banks and the nation-states. Let’s end the 20th century thinking once and for all.

Expect to hear more from me on this soon. In the meanwhile, speak up. Reading is a wonderful past-time, I do a lot of it myself. But if you want to change anything you will have to act because nobody will act for you. Writing is a good first action. Comments are open below.

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