OCCUPIED TUCSON CITIZEN
The Place of Statelessness
What is statelessness anyway? The US government took away NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden’s passport while he was in the Russian airport. In response, Snowden stated, “The Obama administration has now adopted the strategy of using citizenship as a weapon. Although I am convicted of nothing, it has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person.”
The United Nations reports that there are officially, 20 million stateless people, most of whom are refugees. Living at the margins of society many stateless people lack healthcare, mobility, education, and the ability to become shareholders in society. Their voices go unheard and their plight unseen. Their suffering is unable to penetrate into mass media that is owned and controlled by corporate America. There are even people who have citizenship, but who live without their basic human needs, such as healthcare and housing, being met. They live basically, as if they are stateless.
The nation-state system fails to provide for the needs of all the people of the world. It was founded on a falsehood that causes the human species massive suffering and endangers countless plant and animal species, too. It is built on an anti-human political world of artificial borders, physical walls, totalitarian surveillance systems, an enormous spy apparatus, and fuels endless imperialistic resource wars.
Statelessness is not only a place where millions of refugees and political whistleblowers like Snowden find themselves, but where the power-brokers like transnational corporations and national militaries reign supreme.
A stateless person resides in the noosphere, a word first used by Russian scientist Viadimir Vernadsky, to denote the thinking sphere, or mental layer ofthe Earth. The noosphere, emerged from human cognition. It has fundamentally transformed the biosphere. Our biosphere is dependent on the noosphere in order to access the higher powers of self-reflective planetary thought that is essential for us to save eukaryotic life on Earth.
The stateless noosphere is not like international space, or the space governed by the United Nations that is based on the division of national interests. It is composed of invisible ether, a cosmic plenum, or Akashic record where “the ground of all that is” creates a “holomovement,” a state or process of becoming. American theoretical physicist, David Bohm, defines holomovement as a“dynamic wholeness-in-motion in which everything moves together in an interconnected process.” This flowing universal movement is in the process of fitting together the diverse parts of humanity to create a new cultural formand a global infrastructure that is necessary for us to free the 21st Century.
Statelessness is where global transformation can occur. For example, the world witnessed the power of statelessness during the prelude to the war in Iraq. Millions of people throughout the world came out onto the streets to protest the possibility of an invasion of Iraq by the United States. Even though the protests were unsuccessful in stopping an unjust war, the people were right in their “no war” stance. It was later proven that the Iraqi War was started basedon the false evidence of an alleged weapons program that the United States presented to the United Nations Security Council in 2003. The global protests for peace rallied together a new superpower, the superpower of the people who could see beyond the immorality and lies of the nation-state system.
We understand that the basic building blocks of matter are atoms. Life arose from non-life during a quantum change that allowed replicating RNA molecules to evolve and undergo natural selection. In other words, the important step in the beginnings of life was the ability to copy the molecules that encode genetic information.
To protect the replicating molecules from the external environment, cell membrane was created. More change occurred when a cell or group of cells began to perform different functions during cell metabolism. As specialized functions formed symbiotic relationships within the cell, multicellular organisms were able to advance and eventually build patterns of neurons that make up the human brain. The brain and its networks of neurons gave us our own personal memory storehouse.
As our information grew beyond the level of a single human’s comprehension, programmed with a globalizing impulse, our memory capabilities expanded and our need for brain-extension technologies grew exponentially. The ability to artificially simulate consciousness makes it possible for us to put ideas or memes together to construct systems of thought and plan for the future, there by building our present (immature) civilization. These mind-extending capacities have morphed into a collective planetary consciousness, one interrelated super-organism that remembers everything that is entered into its databases.
The maturing noosphere has now united human memory with Internet memory in cyberspace making the simulation of consciousness complete. Our planet has grown a silicon central nervous system throughout the stateless place of Cyberspace. Human beings have become intimately connected with the electronic global society and can no longer live productively without it.
Due to the invention of the Internet, we see the law of complexity and consciousness in action. With the increase of greater integration and unification of computer networks higher awareness grows. Architect Paolo Soleri saw this movement in terms of architecture, what he called The Urban Effect. As the world’s population becomes more urbanized, high-density leads to more social interaction. With the exchange of greater information, it causes the need for more complexity and order toallow for more personal and collective freedom. The Urban Effect has mutated into the Cyber Effect that has swiftly moved consciousness into a virtual planet-metropolis. Currently, the planet-metropolis is joined together by an unsustainable infrastructure that is devouring the wilderness.
As one enters the cyber world through the Internet, it is there, where one can feel the global territory of statelessness. Information travels to all spaces of the Internet at near the speed of light. In his book, The Best That Money can’t Buy: Beyond Politics, Poverty & War, Jacque Fresco writes, “Information flows across the Net statelessly while ignoring customs, borders, and international agreements.” Even translation software has made language barriers a problem of the past.
Science fiction writers, such as H.G. Wells, foresaw such a linked-up computer network that he called the world brain, where world citizens utilize a “world encyclopedia”to make the best use of the universal information. Wells’ idea of a world encyclopedia has become a reality with powerful search engines like Yahoo!,Wikipedia, and Google as the nucleus of the Internet. In many ways, these search engines have become a more efficient and immediate research tool than local public libraries. Social networking sites such as Facebook and Reddit have made it possible to communicate with a world audience. Social media technologies were used during the Arab Spring uprisings to bring protestors together in order to overthrow tyrannical forms of government.
For those who have access to technology, disseminating information and knowledge has become as easy as clicking a mouse button, or talking into voice activation software. Victor Hugo once said, “There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.” With the development of the Internet, it appears that global citizenship is an almost impossible idea to stop.
There is a world-wide nationalistic-capitalistic surveillance force that is attempting to obstruct the flow of unifying information and knowledge necessary for us to achieve our next phase of human evolution. The social networking site, Facebook no longer allows for massive broadcasting to one’s own Facebook friends. It has encoded an algorithm that limits the number of friendships we can form, which limits the number of friends who can see our posts. If you want more of your friends to see your post, there is an option that you can pay a fee to “boost” or promote it. In order words, social networking and freedom of speech to the masses comes with a price. Those with money can pay for freedom of speech, while those without cannot.
Another example, of how global capitalism is an anti-human force in the cosmic plenum of the Internet, is the way that for-profit advertising is strangling the net. As we move around the Internet we leave digital trails that are tracked and (data)mined. Corporate giants, like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc., know our online habits and curiosities, while their motivations remain hidden from us. Knowing our personal data, they target and customize advertisements to our tastes and moods to sell us their products. They shape our worldview to their capitalist agenda by making us see the world through their trivial advertisements that distract us and waste our time. Corporations have brainwashed mainstream Netizens into believing content creation is dependent on Internet advertising revenues.
In reality, content is being created to fit into the framework of the advertisers .In most cases, critical, investigative, and analytical journalists find out that truth telling doesn’t pay.
Commercial surveillance systems piloted by private corporations are supported bygovernment security agencies. Both corporations and governments are the pushers of the idea that the purpose of the Internet is to foster business and that Internet surveillance is necessary in order for government security agencies to find those who might be planning terrorist attacks.
Netizens are seen as potential customers whose personal information in the digital age is the new gold. This private/public partnership is the monetization or domestic side of surveillance. The economic and political power of the commercial Internet giants has made untouchable data tracking systems and government regulations incapable of remediating corporate control of the Internet.
Capitalism is a materialistic ideology that puts profits before people. Corporations use public resources and put profits made from these resources into private bank accounts. They function in a myopic economic system that looks after it’s own interests, clan, or social class. It filters out the true healing power of globalizing consciousness that brings us into a global economy that takes care of all the human family.
Capitalists and their corrupt economic, industrial, and indoctrination system exploit and contaminate both natural and mental resources to the point that humanity sits at the edge of social chaos and environmental extinction. When people get in the way of the capitalistic ideology, armies of the world are instructed to commit genocide on those who resist the forces of greed and selfishness, and who speak out against the façade of nation-states and the corporate manipulators who control them.
In today’s Internet dependent world when an organization, or individuals, become too powerful and the global elite feel threatened, it’s easy for them to cut off the Internet as we saw happened in Cairo during the Egyptian revolution. Another oppressive action taken by the military/police state against the people of the world was when the global elite cut off users’ rights to donate to Wikileaks. Visa, Mastercard and Paypal froze Wikileaks’ accounts, so that the public could no longer make online donations to this cause for global justice. Julian Assange said it well, when he warned of an encroaching “privatized censorship regime,” which he has experienced first hand.
In a true democracy free speech and the communication technologies that make it possible should not equal money. In the 21st Century, shouldn’t access to communication technologies be a basic human right?
Ray Kurzweil says in the final stage in his outline of the epochs of memory, “it is time for global consciousness to wake up.” So, what will it take for our global consciousness to wake up? How do we move from unconscious cyberspace to a conscious cyberspace to solve the biospheric crisis of our time? What are the moral-ethical aspects of a global brain waking up? How do we use our vast memory databases to save ourselves? How do we employ this information and knowledge to reformulate the world by reprogramming the computer network, so that it works like a wise super-organism? Can we create a digital economic system that distributes our common wealth fairly without destroying our life support system, the planetary ecology?
Searching for answers to these questions, I looked to Anodea Judith’s book, Waking of the Global Heart: Humanity’s Riteof Passage from the Love of Power to the Power of Love. She writes that each one must see her or himself as the redeemer, not only as a brain cell, but as a heart cell of Gaia. In doing so, we become the collective heart beat of a new globalized civilization.
She writes, “We need only turn the focus of our technology towards redemption rather than consumption. We can use our colossal media to inform rather than distract. The global brain can organize its thoughts, and wake up from the nightmare, to dream a new dream.”
Using the global heart/mind connection as the new organizing principle provides us with a holistic perspective that shows us the way to the moral compass of peace. Buckminster Fuller articulated a new global ethic when he said that, our task is to “make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.” Fuller realized that nation-states were “blood clots”in the world’s global metabolism. Competition among warring nation-states causes vast military build-ups, trillion-dollar arms races, and leaves the people of the world with unsolved problems, such as, what to do with nuclear waste that will be radioactive for billions of years.
We wake up when we recognize that we already have transnational corporations that dominate the Earth in unethical ways. They control our banking system that is based on private wealth, personal avarice and wage slavery for the working class. To think about how we could make the global system work for everyone isn’t even considered a worthy goal for the power elite. They make the people of the world internalize their oppression by placing the blame for poverty on the individual, instead of on an unjust global economic system that disregards truth and scientific facts.
The plutocrats who control the warfare technologies of nation-states are building robots and drones programmed to kill human beings. Internet voices of opposition can be easily deleted from the databases and blocked from being able to participate. Drone technology can simply target dissenters and have them assassinated. A friend said, “Our democracy transmogrified into anassassinocracy.”
The globalization process within the individual is like the caterpillar that is becoming a butterfly. When the caterpillar begins the metamorphosis from caterpillar-to-chrysalis-to-
Internet hacktivists, truth tellers, and radical visionaries like Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Aaron Swartz, Barnett Brown, Jeremy Hammond, and Edward Snowden are working like imaginal cells of the Noosphere. These hackitvists have become butterflies—globalized individuals. The oppression they face by the nation-state system is like that of the immune system of the caterpillar that tries to destroy the new imaginal cells.
The role these hacktivists are playing is that they are moving out of a nation state, capitalistic mindset that our collective consciousness has outgrown, and into the stateless place of cybernation. In their chrysalises (or confinement, exile, imprisonment, and in the case of Swartz death) they have entered into birthing a new ordered world, where information is free and truth guides the global village into an era of world peace and environmental security. Such a metamorphosis is a quantum leap, jumping from one stage to the next: from the fragmentation of the nation-states system, where creativity has become stagnate, to a whole Earth perspective of infinite possibilities.
If Cyberspace is to be a place of liberation and not one of ruthlessness and fear, it must be governed by universal human rights, a global environmental ethics, tolerance for new forms of artistic expression, and a Happy Planet Index.
When the globalized individual perceives herself as a neuron and heart cell of consciousness within the Internet, consciousness can no longer accept the tyranny of the nation-state system. Personal identity shifts away from the deception of national identity to embrace a cosmic consciousness. With the introduction of the Internet into our lives, we have evolved from being citizens of a nation-state to becoming global citizens. Simultaneously, we have become Netizens of Cyberspace. The place of statelessness is where cosmic individuality and global problem solving can merge.
Such universal thought is necessary for us to become an Outer Space faring species that is programmed to do no harm to the new worlds we may encounter, which is our long-term destiny if our species is to survive.
Respect for the planet eliminates the need for national security and its totalitarian surveillance system. Trillion-dollar military budgets become obsolete. The protection of the whole Earth is perceived as the global/local priority. It gives us the liberty to develop a humane global governance system whose purpose is to defend our home planet from such threats as pollution, or a cosmic apocalypse—a huge asteroid on a collision course with Earth. It would be a giant step forward for humanity to turn our death-ray satellites and drone pilots, armed with hell-fire missiles, from targeting different ethnic, political, or religious groups as the enemy, and to use these technologies to defend Earth instead.
How vitally important it is that we move beyond nationalism, can be seen with the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident where three nuclear cores melted down, 300-milliontons of radioactive water continues to leak into the Pacific Ocean each day, and eleven thousand spent nuclear fuel-rods need to be removed from the damaged plant. An accident with the fuel-rods, contaminated with plutonium and uranium, has the potential of causing an atomic explosion unlike anything the world has ever seen before.
The Japanese have not been able to bring the crisis under control. The nuclear crisis is affecting the entire world and needs to be solved on a global level, but we don’t have a global governance system in place that transcends nationalism and moves us towards a model of global problem solving. Isn’t it time now, to build a global governance structure with the ability to call together the most experienced nuclear engineers?
Isn’t it time now, to broadcast on every channel of communication what they are doing to fix the problems on a daily basis, so that our collective intelligence is focused on solving the crisis?
The new bottom line—the Lovolutionary goal—is to restore the health of the biosphere, by using the principles of biomimicry and whole-systems design. Such “greenprints” create a new base where an evolutionary architecture, Paolo’s Soleri’s arcology, the fusion of architecture and ecology, can finally come forth as an ultimate new way to create a low-to-zero-carbon emitting civilization, designed so that the use of nuclear power can be abolished.
Isn’t it clear from this cyber feminista that public information, artistic and scientific knowledge are needed to save our species and should not be bought and sold? Isn’t such knowledge priceless and shouldn’t it be distributed as part of a universal education campaign to emancipate the Internet from hands of an undemocratic, idiotic corporatocracy? Isn’t withholding information and knowledge to make a profit a crime against humanity?
The intention behind the cyber feminista is not only to tear down the virtual or psychological walls produced by capitalist indoctrination, acculturation, and socialization, but also to provide a physical aim for the hacktivist group Anonymous.The cyber feminista is calling for the greatest hacktivists on Earth, the computer science geniuses, working both inside and outside the Establishment, to reprogram university computer laboratories and military data centers—like the Utah Data Center—with the purpose of building Bucky Fuller’s vision of a world accounting system or Earth Bank that works for 100% of humanity.
Our Lovolutionary task is to retool computers from plotting for war to plotting resources, trends, and making scenarios that are essential for our non-violent transformation. Using the world’s databases, our job is to convince our global audience that, by “melting down the metals from weaponry and putting it into livingry” we might have the resources needed to reorganize the world into a network of arcologies.
By reprogramming the supercomputer within a moral framework, we can make a comprehensive inventory of the world’s vital statistics. Such knowledge is invaluable for us to begin the process of taking care of everyone’s needs. In such an ethical system, the Earth’s resources—its natural capital—becomes our common heritage. Electrical sensors connected with the supercomputer give us instant feedback to verify if the decisions made actually create social harmony. If not, then decisions could be corrected until happiness is reach guided by the Happy Planet Index.
Once the supercomputer it is in the hands of the Lovolution all data mining for capitalistic reasons would be immediately halted. The privatization of knowledge would be no longer an option as computers are reprogrammed to use open source technologies to create a sharable, cooperative and free future.
Last year, it was reported that the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg “scored more than $2 Billion worth of stock and $503,000 in base pay last year.” With such great wealth and social control, Zuckerberg is a global dictator over the world’s largest social media platform. He makes the rules and sets the policies for its billions of users. Working as a private entity in Cyberspace, Facebook is not subjected to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution that guarantees the right of free speech. So, isn’t it high time to take the power away from the CEO’s of these private Internet giants and put the power into the hands of the people of the world?
The Lovolutionary objective is to declare that any social media technologies and search engines that have more than a million users immediately enters into the public domain of Cyberspace and becomes part of a democratically governed, opened-source, global commonwealth. The Lovolutionary reason behind the demand to make Facebook and the telecommunication infrastructure public domains is that they have become essential media technologies for the reconstruction the world.
Facebook, or other social media sites, can be used for a massive online collaborative effort to use the Internet to restructure the world as a rational and beautiful social organism. To bring out the best human characteristics in people, such as compassion, wisdom and love, without the worry about making money, will allow people to join a collaborative team. With the Lovolutionary goal in mind, the sole purpose of social media is to be a tool for us to self-organize into productive and creative teams, necessary for our social liberation.
To achieve the metamorphosis of Planet Earth, the cyber feminista calls for an Internet movement of two types of hackivists: the coders and the carriers of enlightenment. Coders (or hackers) have the technical know-how to reprogram machines, whereas carriers realize the seriousness of our collective situation and act out of a moral duty to be carriers, or distributers of bits of the Lovolution, that is, any idea that enlightens us about the need to build a global infrastructure by creating an electronic Earth Bank (that makes a basic guaranteed income possible for every human), automated industrial system, a planetary solar-powered energy grid, and transform urban sprawl into a network of arcologies.
The man-made world has been built from an unconscious urban growth that now resembles carcinogenic tumors on the surface of the Earth. Such development lead us to chaotic patterns of urban sprawl that has destroyed forests, rivers, streams, lakes, mountain tops, plains, deserts, savannas, and the ocean. All parts of the Earth have been by affected by human pollution to the point of changing the global climate. If we are to survive, our species can no longer live in a way that is damaging to the biosphere. A mass exodus from one civilization type to another is inevitable.
Arcologies, the miniaturization of the city, is a new pattern of development that uses resources in a more effective way. With production automated and resources shared within an arcology, time can be organized to allow everyone to live without poverty, war, or crime, by giving people freedom to do the creative work they were born to do in life. Arcologies would also give land back towilderness areas, so that endangered animals and plants have a chance to make a come back in their natural habitat.
Revolutions in the past have failed because they didn’t redesign social and physical structures to fit the needs of the revolutionary thought. They were unsuccessful in breaking out of repressive social traditions. Lovolution’s intention is not to repeat the mistakes of history, but to build a world that is arranged to bring out the goodness and creative drive of the people of the world.
Both these categories of hacktivists are working as Distributed Intelligent Agents—distributing power/knowledge. These agents or “cyber neurons” have tapped into the unique part they play in the liberation Planet Earth.
Hacktivists understand that the power of the Internet is not controlled by a hierarchal power structure, but as distributed bits of information. Hacktivsts acknowledge that power is everywhere and that each of us has a responsibility to embody wholeness necessary to heal our planetary mind-field. As more and more of us become cyber synapse charged with electrifying messages of Lovolution, we begin affecting each other and linking up in a coherent way. The cyber brain awakes into global consciousness with the ability to see a positive pathway to a Neutopian order that continually updates the supercomputer with the newest information.
To make our story into a story of an ever-evolving global democracy, made possible by the cyber nervous system, a new stateless party and cybernetic administration is necessary. Never before in the history of humanity has a global governance system supported by artificial intelligence been possible. I propose that the party initiating the creation of an open-source global governance structure be called the Wikileaks Global Truth Party. The party will not be electing personalities to office but, rather, voting on ballot initiatives by electing reasonable and beautiful proposals into power. To see if these proposals can be manifested, we will run them through the supercomputer to see if they are doable and desirable for our future as a whole. The Wikileaks Global Truth Party’s campaign slogan is “The Right to Know.”
However, global democracy needs the guidance of a global meritocracy, composed of artists and scientists who have exhibited excellence in embodying global consciousness for the administration of global democracy. Their job is to workout the essential questions and dialogues we need to ask the supercomputer in order to manifest the transformation of humanity in the quickest possible way.
Internet reputation sites that give credit for trustworthiness and integrity—the new social currency of the Lovolution—recognizes these people as beacons for Internet freedom using art and science. Reputation credits start at birth. A child is given a Wikipedia page as a birthright. Throughout one’s life one is able to update one’s profile and control the chronicles of her or his notable deeds, thoughts and loves. There is also a place for other people’s opinions of her or him so that the individual receives feedback from others.
Wikipedia, once under the control of its “monarch” Jimmy Wales, is another Internet giant that would be part of the Lovolution’s Internet commonwealth. Unlike under Wale’sreign, Wikipedia would allow everyone to be a notable person. Since theoretically, everyone in a global democracy has access to the supercomputer, no one is excluded from the means of self-knowledge and empowerment that are necessary to find a meaningful role within the global meritocracy.
To sum up the cyber feminista, typing the computer codes for building not only a global infrastructure, but for the construction of a network of arcologies provides us with a plan for rapid planetization. As Julian Assange stated, “The Internet hacking community has a moral imperative to act.” Anonymous, the Lovolution—a non-violent cyber revolution—is calling you and every other honest person to act. How else will our heroes be saved and our planet freed?