THE INTERNATIONAL FORECASTER Decentralize Everything: How To Avoid the Technocratic Nightmare
by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
January 15, 2017
The metaphorical ink was hardly dry on last week’s “2017: Year of Technocracy” editorial when a flood of stories twittered their way across the newswire to confirm my predictions in spades:
Sigh.
It may seem like a hopeless situation. Caught between the rock of our increasingly technological lives and the hard place of total tracking, surveillance and control, it’s easy to simply throw in the towel and resign ourselves to the boot stamping on the human face forever.
But as bleak as things seem in the short term, I’m equally convinced that in the long term we are going to see a world of uncontrollable, uncensorable, irrepressible technological innovation, a world where decentralized, peer-to-peer communities of interest are the norm and the idea of centralized surveillance control grids are a thing of the past.
Believe it or not, there are already people working on the forerunners to this world of decentralized, peer-to-peer freedom solutions. The technocrats would obviously prefer you not know about them. So today let’s examine a few of these technologies and what they’re helping to achieve.
The Liberator
If you’re an American of the constitutionalist ilk, you may think that the ability to keep and bear arms is a sacred right enshrined in the Second Amendment. Those who fear human liberty, on the other hand, will argue that you’re trapped in an antiquated, 18th-century mindset. And you know what? They’re right. In the 21st century, the real legal battlefield in the war over gun rights will not be the Second Amendment, but the First Amendment.
You see, in the coming years our very concept of what actually constitutes an object will change radically. What matters now is not physical objects, but physibles. Yes, you read that right: physibles.
A physible is the digital blueprint for creating a physical object through technology like a 3D printer. It’s not the finished product, but the recipe for that product. And just like a recipe for the perfect chocolate cake is more dangerous for your waistline than the cake itself (because it allows you to make thousands more of them), so, too, could the “recipe” for a physical object like a gun be more “dangerous” to would-be gun controllers than the gun itself, because with those instructions and the right piece of technology, anyone, anywhere can manufacture as many guns as they like.
 Case in point: Defense Distributed, Inc. Founded in 2012 by Ben Denio and Cody Wilson in order to “defend the human and civil right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the United States Constitution,” Defense Distributed released the plans for a physible, 3D-printed single shot handgun called “The Liberator” on the internet in 2013.
To the surprise of absolutely no one, the State Department’s Office of Defense Trade Controls stepped in just two days later and sent a letter demanding that the plans be taken down. Their justification? The State Department’s interest in protecting national security–specifically, preventing foreign nationals from learning how to produce weapons and weapons parts–actually outweighs American citizens’ right to free speech.
That’s right, the possibility that someone in a nation hostile to the US might learn how to 3D print a one-time use pistol is apparently why the State Department is allowed to revoke the First Amendment and stop people from publishing information on the internet.
So this is how gun control has officially become a First Amendment issue.
As a result, Defense Distributed was forced to take down the Liberator plans. But Cody Wilson and the company he helped create have not given up their fight against the injunction. They have filed a lawsuit against the State Department challenging the take-down order and plan to fight it all the way up to the Supreme Court if need be.
It’s going to be an uphill battle. Just this past September the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals denied a request to stay the injunction against posting the plans while the case is being fought. Once again, the court ruled that the vaguely defined catch-all of “national security” trumps Americans’ right to free speech:
“The fact that national security might be permanently harmed while Plaintiffs-Appellants’ constitutional rights might be temporarily harmed strongly supports our conclusion that the district court did not abuse its discretion in weighing the balance in favor of national defense and national security.”
So the good news is that the era of physible guns is already here, and it has made the Second Amendment debate effectively moot. The bad news is that the era of physible guns is here, and it has made gun control into a First Amendment debate. And once again, the courts are not likely to be on the side of freedom.
But guess what? In those two days that the plans were up on Defense Distributed’s website they were downloaded 100,000 times. The plans are already out there, and no court decision can undo that. And it’s only a matter of time until someone else comes along to make their own, better 3D-printed gun, and no court decision is going to prevent that from happening.
What a world.
The SAFE Network
The average internet user has no idea how the internet operates. They are generally happy to pay Internet Service Providers like Comcast to collect their personal information, log that info with their IP address and hand it over to the government whenever requested. Even those who are concerned enough to seek out a free speech-protecting, privacy-advocating ISP (should one exist) generally don’t encrypt all of their traffic and/or run it through VPNs, meaning that Uncle Sam already has access to their data anyway (via the back doors the major telecoms have happily provided them).
The problem, as always, is the centralization of what was created to be a decentralized network. Rather than a decentralized, peer-to-peer, mesh network of computers around the world sharing data directly, the internet relies on a series of ISP nodes that give most of the users their “on-ramp” to the information superhighway. And those nodes, as students of the kakistocracy are all too aware, are easily controlled, disrupted, surveilled and co-opted.
As always, however, the problem may be easy to identify but the solution is difficult to construct. Although a server-based internet goes against the logic on which the internet itself was built, transitioning from a server-based internet to a decentralized peer-to-peer internet is an engineering problem of massive proportions.
So along comes MaidSafe with the SAFE network, aka “Secure Access for Everyone.” SAFE describes itself as a “crowd sourced internet.”
Rather than using data centers and servers common within today’s internet, which are prone to data theft and surveillance, the SAFE Network uses advanced P2P technology, that joins together the spare computing capacity of all SAFE users, creating a global network. You can think of SAFE as a crowd sourced internet. It is on this network that everyone’s data and applications reside.
 Essentially, SAFE is a P2P program that encrypts data and then chops the encrypted data into pieces, distributing copies of those pieces throughout the network for storage and access. Users decide if, when and how that data is shared and accessed, or whether it is shared at all. In the future, the SAFE network will also contain programs and applications, meaning that users will be able to use the network for decentralized messaging, emailing, data storage, video conferencing, apps and whatever else people use the controlled and surveilled ISP-centralized internet for.
To access the network, users will create an account username (no personal details required) and allocate a section of their hard drive to the network. They are then rewarded in cryptocurrency for their part in helping to operate the network.
If this sounds like a massive project, it is. MaidSafe had been working on the technology for a full decade before they released their alpha version of the SAFE network (targeted at “very early adopters” and with limited functionality) to the general public last year.
As usual with projects like this, the alpha version is very much a work in progress. It’s no surprise, then, that this is not yet a project for the casual user. But those who are inclined to dabble in it may be interested in any of the numerous guides to getting started that have been created by the technology’s advocates.
BitChute
Long-time Corbett Reporteers will remember my 2015 video “The Revolution Will Not Be YouTubed” where I discussed Google and YouTube’s de-monetization of AntiWar.com and WeAreChange and a slew of others in the independent media. Apparently justified by arbitrarily-decided “infractions” of vaguely-defined Terms of Service (like AntiWar’s willingness to publish some of the pictures from Abu Ghraib documenting what the US military was actually doing in Iraq), YouTube and Google have steadily been depriving independent journalists of the ad revenue that so many of them were relying on to do their work.
The story picked up again last year when this crackdown impacted some larger channels, and it continues apace. Just this week YouTube took down the Legal Insurrection YouTube channel, described as an “influential conservative politics and law website.” The charge? Posting a video of a proceeding of the Modern Languages Association. As part of a larger report on the MLA’s resolution to boycott Israeli universities (the resolution was rejected), the video clearly falls under “fair use” provisions in the copyright law. Still, the lords of GooTube decided (outside of a court of law) that the video was a copyright infringement and, without warning or complaint, all eight years of videos on the Legal Insurrection channel were removed.
This is the fundamental problem with all of the major social media platforms today. When you sign up for an account at one of the big sites (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram; they are all essentially the same) you are requesting an account on their platform. And that access is only granted if you agree to abide by their vaguely-defined Terms of Service, invariably written in densely-packed small type legalese and read by exactly no one. So when they decide that a certain type of content is too controversial, too uncomfortable or too dangerous to the alphabet soupers and their pals in Silicon Valley, they can revoke your access to the servers as they see fit.
A number of “YouTube alternatives” have sprung up over the past decade, promising a free speech haven (Veracity Videos, anyone?). But invariably they have followed the YouTube format: Host everything on centralized servers and farm out all the videos from there. However sincere the creators of these websites are in their quest to provide a censorship-free video-sharing platform, they are immediately hit by the problem of scalability. If they get any attention at all, their bandwidth costs start soaring. Soon they’re holding fundraisers and slapping advertising over everything in order to make ends meet, and users abandon the platform when the servers can’t handle the traffic.
There’s a reason why YouTube has such a stranglehold over the video sharing market: It’s extremely expensive to maintain. Only a giant like Google could afford to run such a site.
Enter BitChute.com. It’s a simple idea that at once conquers the problem of centralized servers and scalability. Relying on WebTorrent technology, the site works on the same principle as bittorrent or other torrent clients, meaning it is peer-to-peer and decentralized, with users automatically sharing the videos they are watching with other users on the network. It requires no data centers to operate and in fact inverts the scalability problem; the more active users there are, the better the site will function.
But unlike torrent applications that require installation and set-up, WebTorrent allows BitChute to function right in the browser with no set-up or installation necessary.
As the BitChute FAQ explains:
“Here we believe people should be able to express their opinions and choose their topics. If existing services cannot allow that, then let’s make some that will. The question is, how to disrupt a platform as well established as YouTube? It cannot be on their terms; we think we might have an answer, decentralization by torrents and tailored matchups for monetization. *More on the monetization to come soon.
“Rather than needing massive data centers with humongous bandwidth costs, torrents depend on many people sharing videos from their home computers. While this has been possible for many years through bit torrent, bit torrent applications have steep learning curves; this site aims to make the torrent experience seamless by working entirely in the web browser.”
Just three weeks into the project, the site is still very much in its infancy and most of the functionality is yet to be realized. For the moment all of the torrents are being seeded by the site developer (@RayVahey), but soon others will be able to host torrents from their own site. That’s when the real fruits of the project and the potential for a truly decentralized YouTube alternative will be realized.
In the meantime, the proof of concept is up and running smoothly. Check it out for yourself.
Conclusion
Now don’t get me wrong: I am positively not endorsing or putting a seal of assurance on any of these particular technologies. As always, people will get hung up on the particularities of a given project and lose sight of the idea itself. Defense Distributed might lose its case against the State Department. MaidSafe might never get past its alpha release. People might lose interest in BitChute or it might never catch on in the first place.
But to point at the failure of this or that instance and dismiss the ideas themselves is to miss the point.
These technologies already exist. The information is out there. The ideas are in the ether, and they’re bulletproof.
Decentralization is the way of the future. This or that government might try to suppress these technologies by force. This or that court might rule basic freedoms illegal. This or that legislature might pass laws against thoughtcrime. This or that police force might place guards on every street corner to stop people from sharing the light of liberty. But the ideas already exist, and in the end there’s no putting the lid on this genie bottle.
The revolution is already here. The only question is: Do you want to be a part of it? |
Follow the dots. Even Steemit, where this article is posted, wants to confirm your real ID before you are allowed to post. Do you think they really care? No. The Deep State wants to know who you are when you speak up.
Eventually, on-line access without a physical ID will be illegal. Then you will have to choose: Become a data serf, with your every comment monitored, or stay free by becoming anonymous and, by that act alone, become an outlaw.
There’s a great book that explores this conundrum. Thieves Emporium by Max Hernandez. The Daily Bell thought it was soon good they ran it as a serial, which you can still get on-line for free if you look for it.
Or you can buy it from Amazon (where it averages 4.6 in over 115 reviews), Nook, Smashwords, or IBooks.
A must read if you want to know the next step in this cyber war for your freedom.
www(.)amazon(.)com/Thieves-Emporium-Max-Hernandez-ebook/dp/B00CWWWRK0
www(.)barnesandnoble(.)com/w/thieves-emporium-max-hernandez/1116498383
www(.)smashwords(.)com/books/view/346807
James: I have mentioned this book to you before. It’s right down your alley, I hope you will take a few minutes to investigate it by, if nothing else, looking at some of the Reader Comments on Amazon.
If you want, I can get you a Smashwords coupon code for an evaluation copy, without, of course, any obligation on your part other than to glance through the work.
I know you are busy, but this novel really is, as one reviewer said, the first serous political fiction of the new digital age.
Yeah, quite upsetting. I tried to make an account on Steemit, but I do not own a cellphone/smartphone, so I am unable to participate… and gladly so I presume. Don’t know why a smartphone is needed in order to validate your existence.
Ownership.
Government can’t own you unless they know who you are. So there is a concerted effort by TPTB and those they control to establish who you are at all times. You can’t, for instance, get a cell phone in most countries in the world without providing proof of ID. Which means tracking your account back to a phone connects your ID to your account.
I have had some luck with renting an SMS number. Those numbers can be obtained without providing traceable ID and allow you to get confirmation information through them. Free numbers seem not to work, though. Maybe because they have been used multiple times and so can be detected this way.
If you want to take a shot at that technique, I paid via Bitcoin for a private US SMS number with receive-sms.com for a one-month number for $6 and it worked well.
I guess it’s an “alternative” to having an e-mail. Not exactly the same, regarding privacy concerns, is it?
BOOKS
I once owned more than a million books.
Here is some information about the book industry. Some aspects might be outdated.
In 1996, a friend (who I had once partnered with in the apparel industry forming a huge wholesale operation) and I took $2,000 seed money, my cube truck and folding banquet tables to enter into the retail book industry. No more seed money was added. By the year 2000, we were doing more than 3.5 million dollars a year in book sales. In 2000 my partner and I parted ways. By 2001, I had a wholesale warehouse and online book ordering operation along with some large and small book stores.
These were new books, not used books. They were all priced at 75%-90% off the normal retail price. Yes, a normally priced $20 NEW book would cost $5 or less from me. In fact, there were many times I sold normally priced $50-$75 books for $5. High priced IT books were very popular at $5. Many days I would literally sell tons and tons.
Here are some things about the book industry during this era.
I could purchase these new books for 2 to 10 cents on the retail dollar. So, a $20 retail book might cost me 40 cents.
“Returns” are new books which places like Barnes and Noble would return to the publisher. When books don’t sell in the store, the store ships them back for credit. “Hurts” are new books which have a bruise or some minor flaw. “Overruns” are when the publisher prints too many of a book. “Overstock” is when the publisher has too many of a book in their warehouse. Often yearly I would go to the trade show in Chicago. Publishers and “Book brokers” would display their off-price samples and take orders. Essentially, they are trying to liquidate their left overs.
Example: “Mass Market Paperbacks” are those small paperbacks you often would see at the grocery store checkout lane. These might be your best sellers, like Stephen King or John Grisham. These books are destroyed so there is no “aftermarket”. At a book distributor, I personally have witnessed a crew of a dozen people opening brand new cartons of these books, tearing off the covers for credit, then throwing the book into the roll-off dumpster.
Small time publishers have the system rigged against them. I watched many go under. It is a tough business. I saw the same thing in the 80’s with the apparel business. At that time, there were thousands of American independent clothing manufacturers. No more.
I should explain how my book business evolved, because I am just a regular guy. In the beginning with the $2,000 seed money to buy some inventory from a local warehouse, I drove to a street corner vacant gas station, set up some banquet tables and sold books. Sales were weak, but I knew we had a winner. In the weeks and months following, I would line up temporary sales at old malls or at events or at the American Airlines Headquarters cafeteria. Lots of heavy lifting with literally tons of books loaded on dollies. (I well remember chatting with the CEO of American Airlines, Robert Crandall, about mowing the lawn and yard work.) Deep discounted new books was a very popular draw. Customers got extremely excited buying armloads of books. Eventually, I negotiated a very, very, very sweet lease at an old mall because I was a draw card for public traffic. Rents can be negotiated, even opting for month to month. There are a lot of things you learn along the way.
Integrity and Literacy
By 2000 with sales in my large stores over 3 million, about one million was from checks. My stores did not have the electronic check verification. We just wrote down the driver’s license number on the check. I had less than $300 out of a $1,000,000 each year in uncollected bad checks. If a check bounced, I had an office worker write a handwritten note to the person “Oops! The check bounced. These things happen. Please mail a money order in the return envelope.”
I used to joke: “Thieves don’t read.”
In early 2001, I contacted a broker to help me sell my business. I knew the internet was gaining momentum. Also, think about a person’s house and their bookshelf space: A person could fill a 6 foot tall bookshelf from my store for less than $200. Books are not consumables, like food or vitamins. I had customers telling me about the tall stacks of computer/ IT books in their garage that they had purchased from me. There is only so much space in a person’s home for books.
However, 9/11/2001 happened. The economy started to tank. There was a lay-off of 10,000 people in the local telecom industry (these people read books). Pretty soon, my huge stores were sitting by themselves in the vacant shopping centers after the grocery store, the Comp USA, the K-Mart and other anchors left. I got very creative and tried to wait it out, but by 2004 I had to go bankrupt. My many employees loved their job because I didn’t require the “conventional rules”. Sidenote: I knew bankruptcy law would not necessarily pay the small publishers who I owed money. So, I made it a point to pay these guys while not paying certain Federal taxes during the year prior to bankruptcy. Ha! The tax man would come into my office/warehouse looking for me every month or so, “but I would be gone”. Finally, I did the bankruptcy filing. I called the IRS, scheduled an audit, and then went down there with a large dolly of well-organized bookwork. It took me many years to pay off my IRS debt.
Ha! I like to read and I love to study a variety of different topics. During my working 7 days a week for years in the book business, I never read a complete book. I didn’t really have the time.
Thanks for the story, HRS, but please do try to limit comments to 500 words (or split them into two) in the future.
More of a new year project than a new years resolution but my aim is to draw up a birthday calendar of the many people who have been murdered in the info war.
It would be nice to remember them and celebrate their birthdays as a reminder that there there are still many good people in the world.
Some to start it off…
Michael Hastings (Jan 28, 1980)
Deborah Jeane Palfrey (March 18, 1956)
William Cooper (May 6, 1943)
David Kelly (15 May, 1944)
Mae Brussell (May 29, 1922)
Gary Webb (August 31, 1955)
Aaron Swartz (Nov 8, 1986)
Interesting. We’re just about to revisit the “Requiem For The Suicided” series on The Corbett Report Extras channel so a few of those names will be popping up here again in the coming weeks and months.
If I can add a couple:
Dorothy Kilgalen (Nov 8, 1965)
And in a slightly different category but worthy of note:
John O’Neil (Sept 11, 2001)
and although this does not fall into the category of murdered, I do appreciate the work of
John Judge (Apr 15, 2014)
Michael Hastings and the car crash.
2013 – Richard Clark talks about the remote control vehicles and Hastings.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/24/michael-hastings-car-hacked_n_3492339.html
DARPA – “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency” – circa 2013
(3 1/2 minutes) remote control
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zurrQiETDHA
Would a corrupt oil multi-millionaire murder another corrupt oil multi-millionaire to gain more wealth and to keep from going to prison?
Aubrey McClendon was an internationally famous, influential and very rich oil man in Oklahoma City.
2016- He was indicted by a Grand Jury for manipulating prices and land purchases, but less than 24 hours later he had “a fiery accident” in his modern computerized vehicle. LOOK at the car!
(3 minutes) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL7309tce8s
Official Police Announcement on FACEBOOK
https://www.facebook.com/okcpd/videos/vb.65444419168/10153987261814169/?type=2&theater
If you read the Facebook comments, you will notice that many of his close associates do not think this was a suicide.
Would someone else want Aubrey dead? (After all, dead men can’t “make a deal with the Prosecutor’s office”, dead men can’t talk.)
Who knows?…maybe this ex-partner, Tom Ward … (Anchor talks about him being a co-conspirator)
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oil-prices-rise-not-us-203908039.html#