Opensource Society and Neighbourhood-Networking

The Earth is undergoing the largest mass extinction since the Late Cretaceous period some 65 million years ago. Every ecosystem is being stressed beyond its capacity, at the same time every area of human society is undergoing chronic systematic decay and disintegration, collapsing under its own inelegance and hubris.

To many this strikes fear and deep anxiety into the very core of their being. Much of peoples' identity is tightly interwoven within the existing social fiction. As it coughs and splutters many cannot help but cling dearly to their crumbling ideologies, for when one's reality is shattered one is presented once more with emptiness. Yet all things come from the void of emptiness and within emptiness is a fullness which renews one's self and one's World. It is the fear of emptiness that has created so much suffering as people have fled from themselves outwardly into the World neglecting the inner World. As Carl Jung said, people will do anything, no matter how absurd to keep from facing their soul. The outer World is the only World that many know, but it cannot be saved, it can only be let go of and once it is let go of one becomes the World.

The issues humans face are not contained within politics, economics, science or religion, but within the level of awareness which society has cultivated. A level of awareness which has separated people from each other and from Earth. Only when the basic psychological fault is addressed may there be any progress within an ecological framework. With this comes a shift away from the external sphere to an internal focus, a movement from having to being.

From this time of chaos comes tremendous opportunity to reinvent oneself and one's World. If one can only see the World as a trainwreck then that represents one's own self-becoming as the shadow projected onto the World, if one see's only opportunity then one has become blinded to the suffering of others. It is easy to polarize between being a pessimist or optimist, but more than anything people need to be fearless, proactive and pragmatic by taking responsibility for their thoughts and actions.

The establishment can only exist so long as people give their power away to an external authority. A free man or free woman cannot be controlled because they are not afraid. That is why the establishment being a reflection of the individual ego always seeks to covertly terrorize citizens into wilful submission by inciting fear and violence to justify its own existence. The media has become awash with information and disinformation both of which distract people with the time consuming filtering required to discern what is actually happening. The principle method of social engineering is through pre-loading a given outcome into peoples minds, perception management. Language is a very powerful tool for manipulating people, but if one can harness the power of language to expose lies as lies then a more egalitarian memeplex may result. Ideologies are powerhouses of control, for every ideology there should be an opposite to balance the equation.

What is the wildcard, what is the pandoran technology that undermines the existing power structures? You are using it now, it is The Internet. This technology is not only joining people together virtually, but also psychically as self-similar ideas find their way into social hubs online. The Internet is an alternative lifestyle and it facilitates a pluralism that conventional society cannot accommodate. The human species is fundamentally different from the days before mainstream Internet uptake. The Internet has recalibrated peoples' minds, created a new economy and layer of social organization. It has connected people in new ways yet alienated them from the immediacy of the World around them. It has created a new level of information transparency, social awareness and activism.

Can this chaotic technology be put back in the box, can it be unplugged? The Internet appears to be the emerging cybernetic brain of a superorganism which humanity is collectively constructing. Is a two-tiered Internet really feasible? How can the social domain and corporate domain really be pulled apart when they have coalesced as one? Could the Internet be shutdown indefinetly using a killswitch or would that not just cause issues to boil to the surface of the social fabric? The establishment have openly expressed their concern for national security from cyberthreats and coordinated actions against them. The establishment has everything to lose, the people have everything to gain. Perhaps a powerful electromagnetic pulse could take the Internet down, but in doing so it would take all electronic technology down.

If indeed the Internet is an emerging superorganism, then just like a fertilized egg it must merge and divide to build upon itself. At this stage Internet usage should become more holonic by focusing on distributed local nodes of network activity in order to support a more tribal organization and mobilize people to take action locally in an opensource society.

The ideas about to be presented are controversial and haven't been fully ratified. Instead of social-networking there could be neighbourhood-networking using GPS technology. For example any resident within a street could have access to information about their neighbours, not just trivial data that people pour into Facebook, but statistics which can be used for policy making and event planning by the community. The idea being that it encourages people to get to know their neighbours and come to agreements amongst themselves without necessarily requiring an outside authority.

If for example someone was abusing the waste management policy then they could incur some penalty agreed upon by the group. Persistent offenders would be moved to a community which reflected more their personal ethos. Ofcourse there would need to be some outside authority to deal with disputes and coordinate the goals of proximal communities, but it shouldn't need to be given significant power. The idea is that if people are organized within small neighbourhoods then problems remain manageable. If such an autonomous, opensource and self-policing intranet were developed then it would alter peoples' social organization to co-adapt with it. It would empower the core economy through relocalization and data transparency allowing people to build trust and develop social capital.

The currency of the future is one of interconnectedness, of service to others. Those who are buying guns and ammo and taking off to the woods are going to die. People cannot survive without someone else, what if the person falls ill and needs medical assistance for example? When all the civil unrest and chaos ensues from the collapsing of the existing infrastructure it will be communities that stand strong in the face of adversity.