. .. and you don’t get that with youtube, maybe twitch, maybe some other platforms but how many other blockchain powered projects can you really say that about apart from steem, here are a few thoughts I’ve had recently after now nearly two years now on the platform.
I am 28 moons, I have been here since November 2016 and in the last six months alone because of steemhunt have hit the 70 rep which I always set for myself even if it doesn’t always mean that much these days, it’s good to have goals (also I recommend you start the embedded youtube video below for aural happiness while reading this raw brain datadump
This kinda all started to come together for me as a post I wanted to write last night while listening to my favourite show on mspwaves, the retro wave show that @crimsonclad does so regularly week in, week out — it’s always full of cool information, great debate, reality of running a witness and a real melting pot of ideas, it’s like going to your favourite bar and sitting with friends and shooting the shit. ..
. ..it brings up great dialog and thoughts and allows you to frame your only feelings about being a node within this network of other nodes wanting to live their own lives in different ways away from the centralised notion of the system above ground.
when reality bytes, bite back.
It would be incredibly easy to just stop, to give up, to stop engaging and writing, to stop being part of the network, to just fade away and fall away to the wayside of mediocre life and just stand accept the programming we are bombarded with everyday in life again — the commutes would become boring and static again, looking for happiness in dead faces on the tube and train and living in hope that other people existed out there like you and things would get better.
I spent a lot of time in my twenties after my raving days trying to reprogram my brain to be back into society but everywhere I turned I just saw blank walls, mental health and dysfunction (I admit, self inflicted) is often met with processes that are out of sync with our potential and spirit — it was like I was running in treacle and the destination was always getting away from me, I had to just accept the pace that the universe was giving me.
I hated it, city life was consuming me and making me just another patron of it’s succubus life ways, sucking the very financial life force out of me painting inside of an illusion of progress — my first experience of that was the way that the tug ships feed resources to the island of Manhattan keeping the tourist drone army fed and watered, it’s a machine, a very calculated organised machine.
You only have to walk across any of the engineering marvels in New York at 3am to realise what strength and the long play looks and feel like, this solid, defiant machine that took a hundred years to produce and stretch across a chasm of land mass so that it could FEED this other land mass, to define the districts and to mark turf — at that time in the morning, drunk on life exit, wind howling through my hair entering the city, with echos of ‘escape from New York’ sound track blasting through my mind you really start to connect the dots of where our ‘part’ of the puzzle begins.
combined with the classic ‘warriors’ interleaved with hip hop and spray painting on the side of trains it was obvious to me way before crypto arrived and the early hackers started blowing 2600hz tones into phones that we would always have the HAVES and the HAVE NOTS, each with it’s own able to be manipulated, and those flaws would always be influenced by money and who controlled it, we would always have a WIZARD of OZ that would lie and control behind the curtain on our lives.
I accept my damage, I accept my positively negative mindset, jaded, broken and battered but with a seemingly intent ethic hanging by a string, I always pushed through like a weed between the gaps in society where others may have moved on passed, I was happy to pick up the chaff, always balancing the tightrope between the two worlds.
The universe threw me a bone in 2011 with my selling of me.dm to Evan Williams of twitter fame, I rebooted my life and bought a new computer, a van to live in, pay of debts — I truly believe it was because I never gave up, never gave in, accepted my two years of solid self introverted introspection to define what it was that had bought me to that point years previous, the way I had played the game like others were playing it, it was a game that nobody ever truly wins. You will always have to contend with the battle in your own brain of self definition.
I spent three years then wandering around a city, building up a studio like a throw back twisted version of studio54 (nyc) with a digital media edge as cellar54, it was apt that it was below street level and put together on a shoelace budget (props to cj for that definition) — we were the anarchists version of low low budget, the fire starters for people not wanting to move position, stagnating in just accept the ‘company line’ — we became the discussion mediators in the city, constantly questioning where the creative quarter money was being drained off too.
I saw millions get stolen and squandered, every week the figure would change, a board made up solely of powerful invested positioned men, I was offered investment in my ideas as long as I would allow control of them to others and eventually at the end I was asked to make a ‘DEAL’ when it came to my digital and social opinions — I left the city, I had no desire to play that male egotism game of power and control, I wanted to feel again.
crypto is my want to self govern.
i truly believe that passed all the money, the markets, the manipulation, the push back, the very fight at the very fringes of society, the undersea conduits getting spied on and eaten by sharks that we are at a very crucial defining moment in the human condition.
our planet will twist and turn without us being here, we have an opportunity to connect on a much higher frequency than ever before if we choose to jettison our collective baggage of what has gone before and accept what we have in our hands right now.
I stay here, I put in, I take out, I do it with no audience or no feedback, I truly believe that intention and the universe will bring together the people that are meant to be together and to craft bigger things, I follow people here avidly because who they are, what they believe in, because of the light they carry for change, for the way you so eloquently carry yourself through the world and adapt when needed.
If we don’t have other humans we consider peers to empower us and to inspire us then we might as well just accept the AI future to come and just lay down and allow ourselves to falter at the hand of the cancers of the world, it’s growing louder disfunction or we can learn to self govern and adapt and to share what we have learned and how we turned things around.
node 101 never truly died
I was part of the first wave of video bloggers way back in 2005, a rag tag hundred strong group of people that just discovered what it meant to be citizen journalists for the first time, there was no true home for conversations and connection — we had media workers, homesteaders, creatives that just lived on the edges of society looking in — we were nodes dotted around the world, all edge cases, reporting in, self reliant, self defining, carrying parts of the node with us wherever we went, seeking out liked minded people to build projects together with.
The intention never changed but the faces did, the people came and went, the technology changes, the access to that technology became a torrent, a flood, the crack for society to get hooked on, we sold our privacy for choice and choice came with poor rush deployment, we couldn’t get out of it if we tried, we all got sold on some back room manipulation, I hope you adapted wisely.
you each bring something as a node
Just being here, even just surfing through page after page of text, photos and opinions, shuffling the digital papers to find your story of today, as a visual reminder that your still flesh and bone and a body bag of water, that’s taking part, that’s adding to the brain of the ledger, the ledger needs your presence, the activity is it’s currency as it cares not for money. ..
in it’s way, the witnesses give the ledge it’s purpose, being here, keeps it alive, buying steem and saving it is like supporting your local farmers market because you believe in local — the steem blockchain is your local, the connection to every single local you might never get to see.
moving passed the feelings of the red
We are not a market place of green and red markets, we are not the sum of those numbers, we are the outer conduits of empathy and caring connectors who have managed to navigate our own path through the storm up to this point, we are the Jason AND the argonauts and our masthead is the blockchain, we commune with her (I have to make it a her, because she cares in a multi facetted way without judgement) on a daily basis with our comments and upvotes and intention.
The value of life is in the stories, the moments and the interactions, the memories that you get to replay in the final moments, those are your own personal ledger that you carry, you’ll play that back like a hardfork when your life here is done, that life ledger will cascade through the universe like a nexus ribbon of energy well after the charade of this life is done.
let us not be defined by a market place that we were never gonna have control over anyway, let’s not assign value to a computation that can be manipulated, it does not define the routes and roots that we have built between each other.
the blockchain will always be channel 19.
I know right now, you could probably tell me about the lives of ten people off the top of your head, you know what they believe in, what they want from their lives, where they are maybe in the world, how to contact them, connect to them, how to effect and influence and be influenced by them — that’s a hugely powerful thing to have access to, it’s the ultimate cb radio channel.
It’s always started with hello, 19-a-roger, over but never out.
the comfort of strangers is real
Today and every time that bitcoin or any crypto has faltered for whatever reason I see the empaths come to the front, I’m seeing it across the steem blockchain and even on twitter, people reaching out when they don’t have to do say it’s ok, buckle in, better times to come — I know it can seem like it’s the same old same old, over and over, but ask yourself, if you don’t believe in change, change in ourselves, change in the future then why do we try, it’s gonna take is all, collectively, working as independent nodes or together, changing the algorithms that have shaped our world already.
We can’t send John Conner back yet so while we are here we better just get our own shit together and get ready to work alongside the machines, at least for now, we need to optimise everything, including ourselves, our value, our money, our dreams and our futures, time to buy chewing gum, we got a lotta work to do ;)
__humble
pinterest epic wins pinboard → brand advocate for nokia, 1000heads, verisign → won vloggie for node666 (san fran 2006) → television for time team history hunters 1999 (burton on trent) → sold me.dm to evan williams in april 2011 → went to phil campbell, alabama to help raise money after tornado ripped up the town (was on sky news, bbc news)→ CNN for sxsw 2013 about austin south by southwest event → video chat with robert scoble from rackspace → music video can you spot me? → won the digital derry contest for 5k euros → crowdfunded digital signage concept called pi street → now living life through digital blockchains.
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