Featured artist Dylan Cole
It's no question to many of us that everything evolves. This is something that happens to biological creatures over millions of years, but also happens to societies and even general aspects of societies. Social organisms change shape and divide just like cells divide. Whenever a healthy subgroup becomes ready to express new value sets it can separate from the previous social organism and become its own unique entity. "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to dissolve one's ties" for example. There is also something to be said about time cycles and waves of awareness as mentioned in the previous post on time cycles. New social structures can more easily arise when at the peak of a wave during a cycle of time, such as when the United States was formed due the separation from the colonies of the monarchy of England. This in some sense was a very unique form of activism as this group had access to an entirely new and unregulated land and country. As activism evolved from the late 1700s into the late 1800s we saw that the activist community was now trying to separate not from the English monarchy but from the regulations imposed by the new democratic government. Then, as time went on, the activism was less focused on financial freedom as indicated in the Haymarket massacre or WWI, and more towards an ecological awareness and protection of natural resources for future generations. As we can see, we are currently still evolving and moving towards a more integrated approach to activism that does not blame and is solution-focused to meet the needs of all people at all levels of development. This new activism in some sense has a new tool much like the so-called sounding fathers had with the massive tract of land we now call the United States of America. This new tool is called the blockchain or a more broadly distributed ledger technology or even more broadly still, decentralization.
Looking back we can now see how we evolved through stages. First there were the ancient tribal communities of Native Americans, Druids, tribes of Africa, Southeast Asia, and so on. Next we have the individuals who branched off from the tribes and claimed dominion over land as independent warlords. Then we have the warlord who became king and established dominion over all the other warlords and tribes under a common rule. After the kingdoms were established, eventually the people revolted to establish a democratic rule. And finally the ‘green’ activism of the West that has arisen with values pertaining to equality, egalitarianism, and ecological sustainability. Now we are beginning to see what will come next.
Without dwelling too much on our ancient history which looks less like activism and more like general conflict between tribes, between warlords, or between monarchical kingdoms, we can focus more on these latter three forms of evolution through social rebellion.
Let's call them free-market activism, equal rights activism, and decentralized activism... (and perhaps what comes after that is immutable activism).
With the Haymarket massacre in Chicago we have a famous historical event available to illustrate this level of social development and ‘free-market activism’. We later see the development of the IWW and workers unions all fighting for the individual rights, to have the right to work and earn money and regulated and enforced by the government to protect workers from layoffs and shortened work days. Woody Guthrie didn’t sing much about ecological issues or equal rights, but more about rights as an individual and rights to earn a living, workers' rights, and the right to have access to property.
Roughly 80 years later, we see the hippie movement of the '60s again arise with values of egalitarianism, rights of groups such as blacks and women, and even rights of nature and the protection of our ecosystem, as can be read in the famous book Silent Spring. Just as in the time of the arrival of the hippie revolution, the activism of the previous cycle had already become mainstream and enforced by government in all areas. Now at our current era the activism of the hippie generation is now becoming mainstream when we can find so-called organic foods at Walmart, regulation demanding smog check on cars, garbage containers all over the world labeled "recycling", and countless corporate advertisements assuring that companies are "eco-friendly". This green revolution was still a dream in the 1980s, but through the '90s, and the beginning of the internet age, it arose as an obvious part of collective culture in the West. This evolutionary level of activism is ubiquitous in social media today. So what will come next?
There have always been amazing forward-thinking visionaries; Marcus Aurelius, Giordano Bruno, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Jane Austen, Harriet Tubman, Madame Blavatsky, and Virginia Woolf, to name a few. Sometimes these characters and personalities arise in a timely way and their message is heard by their current contemporary generation. Other times they die in obscurity only to be rediscovered later. There have been people in the past who might have been supportive of this current arising activist paradigm, perhaps even many who many are well-known such as Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, William Burroughs, Robert Anton Wilson, Gregory Bateson, Joanna Macy, Barbara Marks Hubbard, Joan Halifax, Jean Houston and others. However, they did not have a large enough community to create a Global movement, nor did they have the tools that we have today. The internet was the first big step into the world of decentralization. This new tool gave all of the previous types of activism a new medium to reach the global community at large. As Marshal McLuhan suggested, “The medium is the message.” This is not to say that all people understood the nature of decentralization. In the beginning of the internet age it seemed on the surface level that sharing information at no cost was the primary advantage to this new digital tool. To some of its architects it seemed far more profound. Now we have many decentralized platforms such as blockchain, IPFS, mesh networks, and algorythmic patterns like Holochain. In 2008, from economic collapse during a recession, Bitcoin was born. And from Bitcoin, thousands of other decentralized projects that reinvent the concept of value and how we exchange value have come into being. In the early days Bitcoin attracted the decentralists, attracted this new form of activist that we have called ‘decentralized’. The decentralized activists, who sometimes called themselves cyberpunks or cipherpunks, were on the edge of reinventing capitalism. The concept of anarcho-capitalism suddenly became actualized and practical, where in the past it had seemed little more than a philosophical paradox to most. In the past activism very rarely ever saw adequate funding for pushing forward their visions of social justice. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin not only became a source of funding for other solution-focused projects through speculation but it also evolved into various types of governing organizations and funding platforms such as DAO, ICO, DeFi loans, etc. People eventually realized that these decentralized platforms could be used not only for value exchange, and also for what is now called "smart contracts". The smart contract concept was popularized by Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum. This concept added or expanded the use case for decentralized tools into governance. We now have a decentralized form of value exchange that's not controlled by anyone, and something subsequently a smart contract created a decentralized form of governance that is not controlled by anyone. essentially the list of operations and tasks performed by any office in any country or government can be programmed on to a smart contract and executed automatically in an immutable system that cannot be tampered with or hacked. This would put an end to voter fraud and embezzlement and corruption of so many different kinds.
Essentially decentralized software architectures now provide the means through which we are able to replace the centralized nation state that has been in effect since monarchy began 300 years ago. It's a transition into democracies. What will a decentralized direct democracy look like? A new arising governing system, decentralized and self-organizing, that can be both private and transparent, borderless and therefore global (if not galactic), currently unhackable and therefore presently immutable, with no central point of control or failure. These are its magical new attributes that make it valuable. No other medium for the transfer or exchange of value has these qualities. For some people, that's what is so exciting about it. The price speculation is being televised.... But the revolution itself is not.
The decentralized activism has more depth than merely technology, but the technology has provided new tools that can be used and the decentralized activists are more apt to understand them by their nature rather than just by their usefulness. Let's look at some of the other aspects of this new decentralized activism. First of all it has a perspective of perspectives. That is to say, in the past, activism generally had its own perspective and one adversarial perspective. Decentralized activism can step out of its own shoes to notice multiple different perspectives. It's own perspective is "how do I meet all needs of all perspectives?" In this arising decentralized activism problems can be identified and then, rather than dwelling upon them, can be eliminated by the creation of solution-focused alternatives. Marcus Aurelius, nearly 2,000 years ahead of his time, summed up this concept as, “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” Another attribute of the decentralized activist is that he or she has the ability not only to always question the narrative of others but also the ability to question our own narrative. All stories are merely stories. When we can see all perspectives from that view and not as we merely perceive them to be, then we can distill reality to its fundamental truths. The decentralized activism transcends all previous kinds of activism without eliminating any of their values. This arising activism includes the values of each while meeting the needs of each.
What is true, is true. The more we are able to learn the way things actually are, whether through our evolution as a species or through other technological mediums, the more we will begin to understand Immutable Activism. Understanding the universe as an expression of mind requires that we better understand mind itself. The greater understanding we have of Mind, again, as individuals or collectively, the more we will understand Immutability and Immutable truths relative to any particular era in which we are living. It is Immutable that “change is the only constant”. Even Plank and Einstein knew that. It is immutable that from mental judgment, emotions arise. It is immutable that through non-judgment suffering subsides or ceases to exist. It is immutable that all things arise from emptiness, or some kind of quantum vacuum. As we evolve, and more of our activist visionaries understand the nature of immutability as a concept, the sooner we will become a sort of Homo Immutabilus, a species free from imposing unnecessary suffering upon ourselves though imposing it on others or our natural environment. The Immutables will realize that to meet our own needs, we will need to meet at least the basic needs of all humanity and the planet. E Pluribus Unim.
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