But.
I think things are beginning to change.
In a nutshell; it’s revenge of the internet.
Decentralization serves a body blow to the machine.
The people were in control, even if for just a moment in time.
And the powers at be did not like it.
But before we get there… disclaimer.
I am not an expert. As I learn, I convey.
There is a very small gap between discovery and dissemination. What you see, is what you get.
Most outlets like to gather intel, make lofty analyses, check with bosses, amend and curate for the general population, and then share widely.
I don’t have time for that. Or resources. Or bosses.
So
No middlemen.
I simply give you what I perceive is true. And so, you must know, I am very pro human. Not here to trick people, or to push a hidden agenda.
Only to spread Love.
But, to get there, we need to get to Truth.
A friend of mine told me that our collaboration toward finding what’s real, is akin to our walking about a dark room, shouting out the shapes of things we bump into, relaying the sounds we hear.
A metaphor in some ways, for social media.
A tool — albeit an imperfect one, which we can use to find what is real.
Only, it has been hijacked for some time now.
Pun intended.
(Hi jack.)
Point is, I cannot figure this out alone.
But that’s the beauty of it.
Today, specialization has become the norm.
No longer do we rely on ourselves, or each other. Not really. Everything has been compressed into elite domains of expertise.
Forget human intelligence.
“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”
Albert Einstein
Artificial ones have become the rage.
Though before we breakdown the wild happenings of this past week of market madness, and pull apart what’s really going on —
We need to first understand what money even is.
Because I fear we have been lied to, and tested on. Like lab rats.
(It’s no wonder they call it a rat race.)
We are not the consumer; we are the product. Ask Meta Mark.
We have been programmed, and what we think is real, is not.
But you already knew that.
From what I can gather, we’re stuck in an old paradigm rooted in competition, and fear. Life tends to proceed in cycles of growth and decay, our egos are largely to blame.
As the saying goes…
And right now, we are on the verge of a cycle shift.
The underbelly of our collective unconsciousness is beginning to rear its head.
Unlike social engineers who over intellectualize predicaments and seek to bring about utopia via incomplete and untested mental models, I believe…
Markets are inherently biological.
So, despite our overlords best attempts, the dub is truly inevitable.
The people will win.
“Markets behave much more like biological ecosystems rather than physical devices”.
Andrew W Lo. MIT
As it turns out, people best organize in systems that allow for free flow of information, capital, and resources; unconstrained by decisions made by a group of board members in Silicon Valley.
Or a few bankers in Washington D.C.
The key idea here, is that of a true free market, one where people organize themselves. No need for experts, central agencies, or fiscal babysitters.
In this system, authorities are relegated to side judges, and sovereign individuals get decide how and where their money flows.
The projects which help facilitate this reality will grow, the ones which oppose it will become obsolete.
(This is why DeFi is SO exciting)
Because really, capitalism is just democracy — with dollars. Every dime is a vote. So, whatever we spend on, is what we value.
A form of collaboration; really a process of value discovery. By bidding on various items and goods, we get closer to what is real. (Ideally.)
But what happens when people are not privy to real information, real capital, or real resources?
Or worse, if these people are actively fed bad information meant to mislead?
Fake news didn’t start with Donny, he was simply able to bring it to the forefront of American consciousness.
A phenomenon that is not only dangerous, but deadly.
The goal of being human, is to be together. To love, in earnest.
But, these echo chambers are leading us away from one another.
Not only that, but most platforms are capitally incentivized. Meaning, they are paid dollars to feed us with insecurity, pump us up with distrust, and leave us feeling hopelessly alone.
When we no longer agree on what is real, we splinter off into factions that effectively keep us locked in intellectual limbo.
It’s politically expedient, for now.
But truth still exists.
This is why stocks like GameStop are all the rage.
The people were finally able to cut through the noise of financialization and sense a glimmer of what was real. A peak into how a dollar is made, and a truth which threatens to undermine everything we think we know.
There’s a glitch in the system.
All it took were a few nodes in the human network to converge on a website called Reddit, where they’d execute a plan to burn a few hedge funds.
Genius, really.
I’m sure you’ve already heard the story.
Though, forget what you’ve heard about short squeezes and asset managers.
All of that is good to understand, true. But at the core of this phenomena lies a single idea…
Money is not real.
It’s all a game.
In fact, the entire money supply today has become little more than glorified monopoly notes. Remember, currency only has value, because WE say it does.
The network determines the cost.
So, Keith Gill, or RoaringKitty (Or, Reddit username; DeepF*ckingValue) quickly became a synonymous with the everyman.
A blue-collar working class citizen able to get one over on Wall Street.
But — he could also be a market boogieman — manipulating public sentiment to create perceived value out of thin air, potentially leaving others to hold the bag while doing so.
Fact is, he succeeded in manipulating a stock price to levels unheard of, leaving many vulnerable to greater market forces in the process.
A single node, spurred on by an idea and $50,000; was able to circumvent reality in such a way that a few insiders were able to create wealth from nothing, and those late to the party ended up disappointed.
Understand, Keith Gill is currently being investigated by the SEC, for whatever that’s worth.
He also has a background in financials, so this is not some rookie trading for fun on Robinhood.
What did he know that we didn’t?
From below $20, to nearly $400.
Within a matter of days.
And now, we find ourselves in a precarious position.
A majority of those who bought in on good faith that they could have a fair fight against wall street… are currently locked out, some down 90%+.
Holding the bag of market exuberance.
Are they to blame? Is Keith to blame? Are hedge funds to blame?
What about the SEC? Or big banks? Or Robinhood?
Who is to blame, when the market makers also make the rules?
When people begin to realize that this game has been rigged for the 1% and incentives to play along fall drastically?
That is, unless the jig is truly up.
(Anarcho-capitalists will love this one.)
Because if everybody can manipulate markets, then… well.
That is, a free market.
Nodes in a network, acting in unison.
But this dance is not one which is choreographed by big wigs, this particular dance emerges organically.
What folks are waking up to, is the fact we have been willingly trading our valuable time for paper notes of decreasing value, while a separate class effectively gamified the entire economy for their 3rd yacht.
A lot of brain power in the United States is dedicated to making money, make money. Not to creating value, or to building things. But to accelerating greed.
Using financial instruments and leverage insights to manipulate money. To extract numbers on a screen from one computer server to another.
Maybe, it’s been a game all along.
Yet we continue to go along with it.
Which is odd, since U.S. dollars are backed nothing but hopium and broken promises (see: The Constitution).
At this point, it’s like playing with the controller unplugged.
The gold standard was abandoned during Bretton-Woods in 1944, and since then, it has been the wild west of fiduciary responsibility.
The only losers are the ones who don’t know it yet.
Indentured servants.
Slaves, really.
Though, only because America has a monopoly on the money supply.
Enter Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of Bitcoin.
The goal of cryptocurrencies (in general) are to form an end around old institutions that clog up the system with market inefficiencies.
To start a new game. One that’s fairer.
(Or at least, more decentralized.)
Though to be fair… Bitcoin has a few flaws of its own.
Let’s be clear, I’m not here to sell you anything. There are enough grifters around these ready and waiting to shill your favorite dog coin.
Even Mr Musk has managed to join in on the fun.
Personally… I’m good on it.
Again, this is like a personal stream of consciousness.
My goal, is to help you think.
To add my limited measure of perspective, and let you come to your own conclusions. But I do have opinions, and I’m not afraid to share them.
One being..
“Real money” is an oxymoron.
Because, all of it depends on YOU.
You create the value; the object just sits there.
(That’s the joke.)
There is nothing of inherent value in magical internet money, just as there is nothing of inherent value in green paper with dead faces on it.
Yet, we act as if it’s the only thing that matters.
C.R.E.A.M. …right?
Like if I issued some Toso Tokens for me and the homies, sure it could work… but, the second you all decide it’s worthless, it becomes so.
The value decreases (or increases) in direct proportion to the size of my network (or perceived network.)
If you exit the chat, you render my currency value-less.
This is what we need to, but with our current conception of money.
We cannot blame society, because we are society.
Today, power is no longer a function of coercion, but of cooperation.
(We need to use money, not people.)
Because people are valuable. Increasingly so, I might add.
And, they are not widgets.
They are human.
In a world where we’ve managed to make money a meme for pumping lies (or for likes on social media) GDP doesn’t really tell me much about a nations economy.
Sure, it’s a facet of the full picture, but we in the west especially often take it as gospel. Reality is, it’s time for a more holistic approach.
What really matters now (and what I believe what has always mattered) cannot be quantified in full by reductionist, materialist, rationalist dogma.
We need more Love.
We need more Truth.
We need things like…
Human ingenuity.
Inspiration. Innovation.
Collaboration. Creativity.
Faith.
(Things you cannot put into a bank account, I’m afraid.)
Money has long served as a proxy for material value.
We figured; if I want ____, I need to get some ____ (usually cash, or gold).
But what if, instead of spending time on money so that you can spend money on time… why not just directly spend time on what matters?
In that, whatever financial by-products come of our focused and passionate lives can then be deposited into the collective bank of humanity.
Understand that the future is watching us.
Believe that people want to be good.
They simply do not want to be tricked into doing so.
True love can only be had when preconditions are erased.
No expectations of reciprocity need be, only a willing heart.
If you can’t tell by now, this is more a manifesto on life than on money.
But, back to the topic.
The web has in many ways levelled the playing field for free markets, and it’s only getting better — with dApps for Web 3.0 in development as I write this.
Free information means free enterprise, which means organic solutions driven by the communities effected.
Economically viable battery storage, for example.
(Or self-landing rockets, if that’s your thing.)
We can send William Shatner to space, yet nearly half of the planet still has limited access to water. Half of our brother and sisters remain in a state of induced survival mode.
This is a problem.
But it is also an opportunity.
Imagine what the next decade could bring, if we could see clearly what needed to be done as a collective, and would do those things with conviction.
If we began to see money not as a thing to hoard, but as a thing to use.
For good.
Because;
We live in the most abundant moment in human history.
Despite headlines to the contrary, it would behoove one to take a good look around, and marvel at how beautiful this existence is.
Then, proceed to make it more so.
We’ve got vertical farms, dreams of becoming interplanetary, and plant based meats becoming main stream. Like. Cool. Great.
But — what if, as a stretch goal — we also aim to ensure that sure every single human being on the planet is treated as such?
A decade to solve world hunger, and homelessness.
I think we have the resources; I think we have the money.
But, do we have the will?
Not the economic imperative… but the will.
When I say that money is fake, I do not mean that money is useless.
I mean that its value is entirely dependent on a network of users, and in its own strength, it represents nothing more than a promissory note.
The greater the number of network adherents, the greater the value of the issued currency.
Capitalism brought us to a point where we can communicate to each other via video streams on super computers in our pockets…
But what good is technology if there are still human beings sleeping outside?
Both literally, and figuratively.
If I am rich, and my neighbor is poor — am I really rich?
If our dollars are like votes, then the distribution of what we value has been skewed to reflect the ideals of the 1%, and not of the majority.
Classic rigged election.
(Oops, did I say that out loud?)
A few families at the top have much of the collective wealth, and because of this, we run the risk of adopting false valuations determined by people who don’t care about people.
The America Dream is a Ponzi scheme.
And those who buy in last will end up sorely disappointed.
Our history has shown that money has long been the most effective way to help us organize, store, transact, and discern value.
Specifically, of food and goods.
But what happens when we become the food, and the goods?
Is money still worth what we are paying for it?
Or, as the enigmatic street poet of our generation once said…
“How much a dollar really cost?”
Kendrick Lamar
It’s a question to consider.
Some form of currency is necessary, I concede.
But will it still be money as we know it today?
And what is currency anyway, but what is current.
What we value, now.
Not yesterday, not tomorrow.
Right here, right now.
It is a function of our shared understanding, in what constitutes value now can be ever changing, which makes pinning down reality such a bitch.
The thing about now, is that it always changes.
The only thing that cannot change, is what is real.
Love, for example.
Therefore, it is in our best interest that we become grounded in something solid, or risk a reality not dissimilar from a house of cards.
*Or Jenga Blocks for the new school.
Dollars are the currency we use today.
A form of value we transact with the people we choose to spend life with.
If I know you will take my dollar for some eggs, I don’t need to raise a chicken.
I just need to raise, a dollar.
This is good for new exploration and enterprise. Even better for specialization. Humanity requires innovation to leap forward.
To serve the greater good.
Problems arise though, when businesses fail to truly create value, and instead opt to extract it, using the currency most think is valuable. (For now.)
Remember our mini Toso economy?
Imagine — if you could just create coins from thin air? Or stake value by being a net positive to the community? Or, be rich… in TosoTokens?
Could be that the community decides it’s via engagement, or acts of service, or great ideas that value is disseminated.
Really, whatever actions are deemed ‘tokenable’ assets, become so.
Because the value is rooted in the needs of the community.
If I know you have my back no matter what, I no longer need to raise capital.
I just need to cultivate love.
Value creation is done then, not by the organizing unit — but by the people who participate in the organizing.
The employees do 90% of the work, for 10% of the profit.
It has always been that way.
But it doesn’t have to be.
The people could become self-sufficient, and to be completely honest, 99% of humanity would be better off for it. If we could only work together…
I believe we could eliminate poverty within a generation.
Easily.
Except, the very point of a business today, is to put up the least amount of capital, for the greatest potential return.
Or in some wild cases, to ensure poverty persists.
In many industries, no actual work is being done. Only money being wasted.
Get this —
Starbucks is more a bank than it is a coffee shop. Why?
Creation without input.
No labor completed; no value created.
So, who is actually making this money?
You are.
Problem here, you don’t own it
That’s the bankers job.
The Fed gets to print trillions of dollars, and you get to slave away at a dead-end job that has itself become a sort of market bubble.
The money handlers are happy to let you continue doing so. They will continue to feign ignorance, as long as you keep running on the hamster wheel.
14 Trillion bucks printed in 2020.
That’s over a quarter of the ENTIRE supply of US dollars…
Created out of thin air.
And who gets all those newly minted greenbacks?
Not me.
Probably not you.
So, what have we been doing this whole time?
Going to school, finding careers, buying cars, chasing ‘the dream’, etc…
All while our slave masters have been smuggling our money off shore.
Widening wealth gaps, cheating at a game they created, and watching us lowly serfs struggle to survive from their lofty penthouses.
Remember. Money isn’t real.
It’s all a lie.
Truth is, slaves built this country.
And they continue to do so.
(Unfortunately — today, slavery IS a choice.)
The servants of society have always done the work, the “elites” took what they pleased. It has been that way for some time.
Truth is, money doesn’t care.
Therefore, they don’t care.
They just want their 4th yacht.
As long as we keep chasing what’s fake, we play into their hands of their deception. Those who think they’re on the inside, usually aren’t.
Personally, I think we’ve been tricked into playing along, long enough.
You may think you’re earning a living.
Really, you’re just earning your death.
Labour, attention, time. All that effort spent over the course of 80 years. For what? Vaporware, posing as value? It’s the hedonic treadmill.
And we’re all on it to varying degrees.
As soon as you make $100K, you realize you’re poor again.
Money is a manmade thing, what really matters is you.
That is, until last week*
GME and AMC were publicly throttled by hedge fund managers trying to get out from under highly leveraged short trades, and people are beginning to realize that this has all been a game all along.
We still believe that, C.R.E.A.M. since most of us have already invested so heavily in the paradigm. Though, I haven’t managed to quite yet.
Never been rich, because the cost benefit analysis hasn’t added up quite yet.
Though, I could go for a good tendie.
Either way, its fake value reliant on collective approval.
Our cooperation keeps it afloat.
Once we stop, the game… stops.
(I’m so sorry. Please finish reading. No more puns, I promise)
Ideally.
We can be like a collective sell order.
From main street, to wall street.
A bunch of hedge fund guys will say “hey… you can’t do that!”
But what if you can?
What happens when the prisoners realize that they run the prison?
It’s the classic falling tree scenario.
(Yes. Falling trees make noise.)
So, let’s go.
What the global banking cartel was able to do, is both incredible, and insidious. Money historically has been tied to something physically bound by some basic rules of reality. Essentially, there was a limited supply.
And for good reason.
It’s effective as what we call a store of value.
Also, I probably should have said this earlier, but…
I am not a financial advisor, nor am I a market expert.
Plus, I bought Dogecoin. You probably shouldn’t listen to me.
Though, to be fair — what the hell is an expert anyway?
It’s almost like information is kept quarantined behind closed doors at fancy dinner parties so that the few can get rich at the expense of the many.
“Expertise” only means you have access to better, more specific information, not that you necessarily understand any more than anyone else does.
This is where things like insider trading come from.
Only, nobody tells you that all trading is technically insider trading.
Some people are just closer to the middle.
(Remember: America the Ponzi scheme.)
The reason why doctors go to school for decades, is the same reason laws are filled with esoteric language nobody can comprehend but the select few.
Industry secrets let everyone get a little bit richer.
But they also pile up, accreting like cancer cells.
These secrets can be in the form of public ignorance, or planned obsolescence, or both. Or more. Whatever necessary to keep the money flowing in.
The basic notion underpinning all of this is…
“What they don’t know won’t hurt them.”
That is, until what they don’t know becomes so painfully obvious that everything blows up at once. And of course… the culprits escape, scot-free, laughing in the distance.
Like they did in 1929.
Or in 2008.
It’s called a correction for a reason.
But some of the bad guys never get correcting.
Bubbles form from our indifference.
Those overleveraged get wiped out.
Usually the banks, politicians, and media heads can stay a few steps in front of the public, keeping us “informed” of what fears to pay attention to, all while they shuffle money backstage to the relevant hands of import.
It is how they keep getting richer after all.
But in 2021, the internet caught up, again.
Still far from perfect, but occasionally, you’ll get bundles of autists who band together and connect dots once unrelated, exploiting market inefficiencies for themselves in the interim.
We praise bankers and fund managers as if they’re genius individuals.
Really, their wizardry and accounting came down to nothing more than some golf trips, algorithms, and a few private dinners.
They are not more intelligent than you, they have simply been playing the game longer.
In fact, they have been playing this game for so long (one that’s effectively been rigged since 1970) that they may be worse off than you are for this brave new world.
Sure, they have mastered this game.
But they’re stuck in it now.
To have adapted to a false reality does not make one intelligent.
Narcissism may give some an edge in this temporary game of money making, (one which they know is fake, but also don’t mind letting you believe is real.)
I am simply here to tell you, it’s not.
You are.
Which is why Jesus said something like “the love of money, is the root of evil.”
Not money itself.
But the love of it.
Because money is a tool.
Love is to be reserved for human beings, but we fumbled that bag.
We have instead chosen to love things that leech off our soul, making us into things in the process. Things that we are not.
We’d rather have the superiority complex, than the real relationship.
That ego.
That lower self.
It’s literally holding us down.
Rather than be open to what is real, and risk getting hurt, we decide to stack paper along an indifferent timeline of corporatism and greed. Waiting to be venerated, so that we can finally tell the world…
“I’m the best!”
And therein lies the problem.
If we are waiting for external validation (aka money), then we have effectively outsourced our value, to paper.
(Or more specifically, to the institution who owns that paper.)
I believe value should not depend on how much fake money one is worth to the American government, or to China, or even to Satoshi Nakamoto.
Value should depend on Truth.
Yet, most don’t know who they are anymore.
They’ve outsourced their identity to Facebook.. or Meta.. or whatever.
All has been reduced to code (and metadata).
Transactions dictate reality.
Even sex has been rendered meaningless.
Sex.
The best feeling in the world.
Is now meaningless.
If that aint a red flag, I don’t know what is.
We film it and disseminate it in the most degrading forms possible. So weirdos who can’t speak to women in real life can scratch their itch as well.
Why?
Money.
The perfect tool God gave us to literally make love, we’ve reduced to another lever of institutional control, where algos and ads manipulate the (m)asses.
This is no good.
There’s a deep beauty that hides beneath our human exteriors, though, the lines have become blurred as of late. 01110111 01110100 01100110.
Code programmed into machines have begun to program us; and so, we buy into a world of false material goods, forsaking what’s truly important.
Stop listening to experts. You know the answer.
In fact.
Everybody does.
The ideas we need are all there, what is now needed are the right nodes to form a thesis that bring it all together.
In theoretical physics, they would call this a “Theory of Everything.”
Something that ties the conceptual framework of space, time and matter into a neat bow. Lossless data compression.
In the form of an equation. (or an algorithm)
Seems impossible.
Closed ecosystems degenerate, right?
Well, I suppose that’s what makes us human.
We are creators.
We formulate thoughts, and manifest realities.
Ideas in that way are like physical things, and once acted upon they become projected into the real world.
In my humble opinion, I think everyone on the planet is a genius.
Some of us just don’t know it yet.
The best possible long-term game is to facilitate the unlocking of our collective latent potential.
Forget money. That’s temporary.
We are speaking on scales of eternity.
What makes certain somethings more valuable today I suppose, is that folks manage to create moats around whatever knowledge they acquire.
We don’t see what’s really happening, and if ever presented with evidence, we often assume, “Well, it can’t be that bad.”
But what if it is…
What if, I told you, that today, money is no longer an indicator of truth acquired, but of lies embedded?
A denominator of an overzealous banking system free of all perceived repercussions, and not of our joint hard work and sacrifice?
What if I told you that corporations are not here to offer you services, but to control your perspectives?
What if I told you the entire game is rigged?
Well…
I guess you’d have to make your own then.
Follow me online @Timetogrowdude
