WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

[Krishna]

Posted by Ilie Pandia (here)
When I had first discovered Linux in college I made a bet with a collage that it will never be able to compete with giants such as Microsoft, that it will always be the "ugly kid" around the block.
So how was that possible?! With all the resources that Microsoft had access too, somehow the Linux community was able to do better... Where did they get their energy from? Any insights?

This has to do with economics, creativity, and the importance of commons.

if you price something too high competitors will see profits and undercut you, or your customers will build their own.

The most sophisticated companies on earth, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, or any other big companies in the Silicon Valley uses Linux not Microsoft. Why? Linux is cheap and can be customized. And since it is not your core business you give it away. Students learn Linux is order to gain skills, just like everybody learns English.

Bill Gates was smart about sharing windows saying "They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect” This is the real reason why Microsoft has staying power. If there was no sharing windows illegally then Microsoft would have been wiped out long ago. I used to ask that people not send word documents and to use Libre Office for this reason.

That is one way to think about it.

Staying on the economics front.

Eric von Hippel wrote a book Democratizing Innovation In summary users know what problems they face, and have brains. So if they are given the tools to fix issues they will, this is how a lot of innovation actually comes about. Wade writes about how Dennis first Lamco heat pump customer was an engineer, it is these tinkerer customer types that make the product better while the company makes the money. They don’t even mind because they get a better product.

So Linux gets better very fast because users are fixing their own pain points. Without waiting for the central authority called Microsoft to come around. Witness Wikipedia who would have predicted the death of Encyclopedia Britannica? Stallman wanted a free encyclopedia in Dec 2000 and knew it could be done and set a set of principles it should follow. Needless to say it had an influence on Wikipedia

In short the combined brain power of users fixing their own problems and working together overwhelms any corporations ability to compete. This is one of the most important reasons to switch to free software/free culture/free knowledge. Yochai Bencher wrote books on these phenomenon The Wealth of Networks, The Penguin and the Leviathan: The Science and practice of Human Cooperation.

All this is nothing new the enclosure of the commons in England has strong parallels with copyright, trademark, trade secret and patents.
THE WEALTH OF THE COMMONS A WORLD BEYOND MARKET & STATE is a collection of essays on the various ways in which the commons is useful and important. James Boyle wrote a book The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind Siva Vaidyanathan has written Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity


Finally on the creativity front To be human is to be creative. Eben Moglen in an article says

"Moglen’s corollary to Faraday’s Law says, wrap the Internet around every brain on the planet; spin the planet. Software flows in the network. It is wrong to ask, “What is the incentive for people to create?” It’s an emergent property of connected human minds that they do create. The forms in which they create, like the evolution of spoken and written language, like the disposition of memes, cultural forms, patterns of pottery, shapes of musical endeavor, and so on, are structural characteristics of the human mind. We are a social species, and we create together; that’s our nature. The question to ask is, “What is the resistance of the network?” Moglen’s Corollary to Ohlm’s Law states that the resistance of the network is directly proportional to the field strength of the intellectual property system. The conclusion is: Resist the resistance."

Other good resources on Public Domain are
Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine. They have a blog. David Bollier books and books he likes, Lawrence Lessig, Eben Moglen

Roberto Verzola is a good resource he is a Filipino, his book Towards a Political Economy of Information is a good one. Vandana Shiva of India (she was featured in Thrive movie) is also a good resource wikipedia link .

One of the most important differences between the commons and intellectual commons, is that the commons needs to be properly managed and has the potential for tragedy. While intellectual commons becomes more valuable the more intensively it is used. This is because intellectual commons is non-rival, I can you my cake and eat it too.

Leaving with the lyrics of Nina Paley's "Copying is not theft"

Copying is not theft. Stealing a thing leaves one less left Copying it makes one thing more; that's what copying's for. Copying is not theft. If I copy yours you have it too One for me and one for you That's what copies can do If I steal your bicycle you have to take the bus, but if I just copy it there's one for each of us! Making more of a thing, that is what we call "copying" Sharing ideas with everyone That's why copying is FUN!

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Ulli:

Yes, that's the guy!

You bring up a few topics that have been on my list to write about, and I have written about most of this here and there, but this will be a little more focused. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, it was part of Hitler's plan, fashioned after what the English and Americans did to the American Indian, to wipe out all the Slavs of Eastern Europe, to make way for German "settlers." The Jews and Gypsies of Eastern Europe were targeted for immediate extermination (only after attempts to expel the Jews failed - no other nation wanted them, and Hitler largely learned his anti-Semitism from Henry Ford, and Hitler's Volkswagen was patterned after Ford's Model-T, as a "people's" car), but the Slavs were to be used as a slave labor force to build the infrastructure that the German "settlers" would use. In order to reduce the Poles to pliant slaves, the Nazis specifically targeted all of the Polish intelligentsia for extermination. It was a way to decapitate the society and eliminate their collective intelligence, so that they could easily be turned into slaves (the word "slave" comes from Slav in the first place, so their journey has been a hard one for a long time), and Hitler's plan was to work them to death, just as Jews were worked to death in the labor camps. The Nazis literally called it something like "extermination through work."

When the USA invaded Iraq, they ("we") had a plan similar to Hitler's program for Poland, and death squads roamed Iraq, killing off Iraq's intelligentsia. The USA turned the most progressive Arabic state into the disaster it is today. Iraq was also the most secular Arab state, and today you have the rise of ISIS. The USA took a page from Hitler's playbook, just like he took a page from the USA's. The USA has long had programs like that. When it invaded Vietnam, it murdered tens of thousands of people under the Phoenix Program, to eliminate any resistance to American rule. When it helped overthrow the Indonesian government, the CIA literally provided the kill lists for Suharto's murderers, and they murdered more than a million people, to wipe out any political competition. The USA did the same thing in Central America in the 1980s, with the death squads that were trained in torture in the USA roaming nations such as El Salvador and Guatemala, murdering anybody who stood in the way.

The evil-minded people in the MIC did not just do that to foreign nations, but they murdered a disobedient sitting president in broad daylight in front of hundreds of witnesses and covered it all up, and every president since then has been a puppet, and they know it. The job pays well, however. In the 1960s, after JFK's murder, the FBI really got active and began targeting any political resistance with COINTELPRO, and murdering activists was not unusual. Ralph McGehee was afraid to leave his house, as the FBI hounded him so badly, even after he took down his CIABASE and tried to quietly live out his remaining years.

If you read that little tale on Mark Comings's adventures, the author called the wiping out of FE inventors COINTELPRO for scientists and inventors. What happened to Dennis in Seattle and Ventura is just part of that program, although numerous interests were involved, at the local, state, national, and global levels. The rackets don't play fair. But the sheeple are in complete denial of that herd management, and even so-called "progressive" organizations such as the rad left make no bones that they have an ideological aversion to the idea of such activities happening. It is the adult equivalent of pulling the sheets over your head so that the monsters under your bed can't get you. It is an article of religious faith among "progressives" that those activities don't happen, or you have them seriously misrepresented by people such as David Corn (what a hack!), and Richard Stallman is among those in naïve denial, which is typical among American intellectuals. If Stallman had been pursuing FE rather than Free Software, he would have lost his naïveté by now, if he would have survived the experience. I lost mine the hard way, as did all of my fellow travelers, which brings me to Brian.

It is typical to be in denial of activities like that, especially if you are among the potential targets. What I call Level 6 is the initial point that many FE inventors begin with, thinking that corporate America, the American government, and the like will welcome energy innovation with open arms. It is a potentially deadly delusion, and Sparky Sweet epitomized that naiveté, mailing working FE prototypes to the big energy institutions, thinking that he was going to get a tickertape parade, much like Dennis thought that he would get one when he brought his heat pump back to his home state of Washington. The USA is evil, from top to bottom, founded in genocidal crimes that continue to this day. Its legal system is among the most evil on Earth, with the world's largest prison population, by far. Many are innocent, and most are not behind bars for what any rational person would call a crime. We are about the only industrialized nation that executes people, and until recently we executed juveniles, which put us in august company.

When FE inventors wake up a little, the more naïve among them finally realize that there indeed is organized suppression, but they think that they can sneak past it (which I call Level 7). That may be deadlier and more foolish than those in denial that it exists.

When I met Brian, he had recently spent the weekend with Tom Bearden, and got plenty of "conspiracy theory" from Tom on FE suppression, and Brian did not know what to make of it. His orthodox path did not prepare him for the reality, and he naively hosted a UFO conference the next year, the military arrived, and Brian nearly did not survive the experience. Brian began waking up fast, after that. The spooks are good at what they do, and when they murder their targets, they do it very differently from how the Mob does. When the Mob murders people, everybody knows it was the Mob, and the Mob likes it that way, to send a "message." But the spooks play a very different game. They take great pains to make the murders look like something else. They know that if FE inventors die off like flies in what are obvious murders, they are going to spook the herd and their activities are going to be exposed. For any one hit attempt, it is more important to make it look like something other than premeditated murder, so if the target survives the initial attempt, they will not "double-tap" them like the Mob would do, but will regroup and try another day. That is how people like Adam Trombly can survive multiple hit attempts over the years. Also, the attempt can cripple the target, taking him (usually a man) out of commission, which was the intent, anyway, so it can still be "mission accomplished," even if the initial goal is not achieved. Chomsky similarly said that Vietnam was a "success," even though not all of the American goals were met. So, there is a long trail of bodies of FE inventors, who died in untimely fashion from "heart attacks," "suicides," "cancer," "accidents," "random" crimes, etc. They have it down to a science. Dennis survived many murder attempts in his life, some from the Mob, but when the legal system tried it, they used the "death by inmate" tactic, but Dennis survived the experience, barely.

Of course, potential targets are going to be in denial about that. Who wants to believe that? Not long before he died, Brian said that he knew about 25 dead inventor stories, and he, like me, did not want to catalog them. Some have tracked suddenly dead scientists, and if somebody did it with FE inventors and scientists, the list would be pretty horrific. But those are relatively rare. The Golden Handcuffs is far more common, with thousands being bought out and silenced, and other suppression tactics come into play. If you follow UFO suppression, similar tactics are used to silence witnesses, with the initial team trying to convince the witness that it was an illusion. If that does not work, the threats come (and the MIBs are in that milieu), and if all else fails, they get violent.

Eugene Mallove's murder and John Mack's death bookended our 2004 NEM conference, and spurred Brian's move to South America. Brian disappeared to South America after Mallove's murder, and two of us had to stage the conference without any guidance from Brian. It was not easy.

The problem with all of those untimely deaths is that sometimes an untimely death is just an untimely death. For instance, I have seen the numbers that Democratic Party politicians are several times more likely to die in private plane crashes than Republicans. What an anomaly! The "skeptics" are notorious for attributing stuff like that to "coincidence," and they often engage in criminal lying, as I discovered firsthand. Organized skepticism is a criminal enterprise, as far as I am concerned, and the leading space debunkers (mostly to debunk UFOs), for instance, all had NSA/CIA connections, and even boasted of them as they tried to intimidate activists.

So, was Eugene Mallove's murder a "coincidence," with his body being discovered just as Brian was emailing me that something was up? Was John Mack's "accidental" death, the day after our conference, another "coincidence?" Maybe, but I did not blame Brian at all for moving to South America. I don’t know all that Brian knew, but it would not surprise me at all if Mack was taken out by the same interests who tried to kill Brian.

I have been invited to leave the USA and live abroad several times, but I have no plans to move (there is no place to run and hide, for starters), but I am also not going to waltz right into Godzilla's jaws. The "Let's have a conference" mentality is suicidal in this milieu, and you won't see me hosting or attending one. The CIA, Godzilla's minions, groupies, gullible newbies, opportunistic predators, and the like swarm such venues. Bill the BPA Hit Man came running, the first time that Dennis was allowed to leave the county to speak publicly, and Bill is a hit man today for the medical racket, literally on a Fortune 500 payroll, living in the heart of darkness in California. Been there, done that. I never saw anything truly productive come from those conferences, and it is really unnecessary in these days of cyberspace, Skype, and the like.

What also happens, very counterproductively, is when the naïve go paranoid. They stay in denial of organized suppression, and then when it hits them over the head, they lash out at everybody around them, even wiping out their allies. I have seen it happen, and I have borne the brunt of it, very painfully, I might add. It is not pretty. Walking the fine line between denial and paranoia is not something that many can do. It has to do with the heart, not the head.

Organized suppression is a critical yet minor reason for why we do not enjoy the benefits of FE today. Conspiracists usually attribute the entire problem to organized suppression, but that is where they miss the boat. They are delusional, but not as much as people in denial, like "progressives" are. What they both have in common is thinking like victims. The masses are their own worst enemies, doing almost all of Godzilla's work for him, in their low integrity and blind pursuit of their self-interest. For the herd's size, it has been exceedingly easy to manage.

Time for chores, and I will reply to Freeknowledge's posts in the coming days. There is some good stuff there.

Best,

Wade

[Ilie Pandia]

HI Freeknowledge,

Thank you for the reply. There are some interesting things in there that I did not know about and some ideas that I need to look into further.

"Copying is not stealing". It's a good argument the one with the bike, but not sure how it applies in software. I don't think anyone would even mind if you would make a copy of their bike, because you are not cutting into their "income". Also, the duplication process for a bike, may be comparable in energy resources with the process of creating the bike in the first place? But with software, or digital products in general, duplication is effortless, and it in some cases does cut into the "income" of the person who created it.

Of course, if energy was not an issue for anyone, then who owns what, copying vs theft would become meaningless debates. Creation would be a natural process, and if someone what's to copy that... they they would be wlecome to do so.

But I definetly need to study more the ideas, philosophy, resources and energy models behind free software (or perhaps I should say open source software?). Thanks!

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Before I get back to Dennis and Brian, address Freeknowledge's posts, and get back to vaccinations ( ), I want to briefly discuss an article I saw today, which discusses the deaths inflicted by the West on the Islamic world in recent decades, with the USA leading the way, as usual. It was written by an American college professor, so he gets some points, and it was no surprise that it comes from the "radical" state of Vermont. It in turn refers to this article, which supports everything I have been writing about on the subject since 1990. Whether "only" six million have died as a result of our activities, or a nice round ten million, does not matter to my fellow Americans, to whom turban = terrorist, and who probably wish was a billion. Nice to see Polya get some cyber-ink.

To kind of allude to what Freeknowledge is writing about, those unfortunates in those nations have not only had their demographic transitions prevented, in Iraq, the West has successfully rolled it backwards, as infant mortality skyrocketed, women are being placed back in burkas, and medieval ideologies have come to prominence again. The USA did the same thing to Iran long ago, and when you get down to it, the Middle Eastern peoples have had the Western boot laid across their necks ever since the British Navy converted from coal to oil more than a century ago.

I would like to briefly introduce a concept in my essay, which is of "pristine" development. There were only four pristine civilizations in world history, and arguably only two: the Fertile Crescent and Mesoamerica. There was only one pristine industrialization and demographic transition, which began in England in the 1700s. All other civilizations and demographic transitions were influenced by the first ones, so they have different characters from the pristine ones. The transition to the Fifth Epochal Event is only going to happen once, and it will be a global phenomenon, but the different "starting points" will make them differ in their characters. As long as we don’t stupidly use FE for wars or strip-mining Earth, it will all be good, and FE means the end of warfare and environmental damage anyway, unless humanity is the stupidest "sentient" species in the galaxy. I have a higher opinion of humanity than that, and if bonobos could do it, we sure can.

That college professor is a Peak Oiler, and I almost wanted to contact him, but after watching a little of his talk and perusing his efforts, it was clear that he is blood brothers with people like Heinberg, and they regard FE as the enemy, incredibly. All they can see is war and strip-mining, but I think it is really an addiction to scarcity, at its root.

Best,

Wade

[Krishna]

Posted by Ilie Pandia (here)
free software (or perhaps I should say open source software?). Thanks!

I can’t resist My handle on this forum is freeknowledge because I care about free software, free culture, free knowledge. A famous idiom, when thinking about 'Free Software' think Free Speech, Free Markets, Free People not Free Beer. Free as in Freedom.

Why Open Source misses the point of free software in Romanian. What is free software? The Free Software Definition or Definiția software-ului liber in Romanian.

You might also want to read the annotated notes of Eben Moglen’s speech

Wade says Stallman is legalistic, which is only partly true. If you look at his history he came from a culture where software was freely shared and copyright was not even recognized on software, but things started to change that culture of sharing was vanishing and copyright was starting to be recognized in software, before that nobody was sure if software was copyrightable (this was late 70’s or early 80’s). Stallman is a deep and methodical thinker he set out a set of principles and carefully defined them to explain himself. Lets say that like Wade he blows too many fuses, and if Stallman did not take extraordinary care in communication people like him will be vilified. He is legalistic because he invented Copyleft the best way to invert copyright using the power of copyright. Copyright is the enclosure of the mind, copyleft is using copyright to make sure that the commons can never be enclosed. Stallman was forced to become legalistic by his experiences.

Posted by Ilie Pandia (here)
"Copying is not stealing". It's a good argument the one with the bike, but not sure how it applies in software. I don't think anyone would even mind if you would make a copy of their bike, because you are not cutting into their "income". Also, the duplication process for a bike, may be comparable in energy resources with the process of creating the bike in the first place? But with software, or digital products in general, duplication is effortless, and it in some cases does cut into the "income" of the person who created it.

Lets start with physical property
"If I steal your bicycle you have to take the bus” meaning you can’t enjoy physical property unless you possess it. "You can’t have your cake and eat it too” is along the same lines, once eaten its gone. Physical property in other words is rivalrous. Another facet of property is that the owner protects property by paying costs to keep it from being stolen, this could be local property taxes, hiring security or keeping it on the person, whatever it may be, it takes energy to keep it from being stolen.

Copying an idea or bicycles or software is very different, the author can still enjoy the original. You can enjoy Nina Paley’s poem and so can I Each of us can do so as many times as we like. Duplication of digital bitstreams, books, technology involves use of resources/energy of the person who wants to duplicate, on what basis should this right of people to do as they please with their own private resources be restricted? Copy monopoly unlike physical property on the other hand imposes public costs (of energy).

Yes, it impacts income the authors might be able to make in the market both positively and negatively. So does education of other people, so does competition.

We don’t create in vacuum we create by building on what came before All Creative Work Is Derivative by Nina Paley Linux/Wikipedia as you know is built on the work of many contributors.

Apart from that I gave an answer in my first post on what I could accept for copy monopoly Restrict monopoly to limited time say 10 years, and limit by geography. Question Copyright has a proposal The Declared Value System: Managing Monopolies for the Public Good

If people don’t find enough incentive to create digital products, they can switch to other work that they find worthwhile.
Wade gets no income from his website and from his forum/thread and does it in his ‘spare time’. If humanity had enough collective sentience we would pay him because of the social utility of his efforts. But since we don’t pay him, he does whatever is necessary for him to earn a living. Finding himself reading long diatribes from me in his ‘spare’ time.

Posted by Ilie Pandia (here)
Of course, if energy was not an issue for anyone, then who owns what, copying vs theft would become meaningless debates. Creation would be a natural process, and if someone what's to copy that... they they would be wlecome to do so.!

This is getting cause and effect reversed. Our childhood is long as compared other animals because we need a long time to learn and become human as adults. The cultural transmission of knowledge is what makes us human, even animals have culture. We are human because we learn and use ideas from others by copying their ideas, behaviors, innovations. And stopping the flow of ideas and culture is an old of game of beating down competition from the time of agriculture to the modern day.

Regarding owning an idea, ideas can be private (personally or among small groups) and thus owned by somebody, or they can be public in which case I don’t see how it is owned anymore, we in society might choose to restrict copying of ideas if we think that it will incentivize creation of art, culture, ideas etc by giving up our fundamental right to copy for a limited time. Please read Misinterpreting Copyright—A Series of Errors


Wade writes
"The rise of humans was dependent on numerous factors, but the most important may have been the ability to increase humanity’s collective knowledge. If each invention during human history had to be continually reinvented from scratch, there would not be people today. The cultural transmission of innovations was critical for growing humanity’s collective technology, skills, and intelligence.”

I fully agree.




=======Added Later ============
From Intellectual Property and Computer Software, A Battle of Competing Use and Access Visions for Countries of the South by Alan Story

"3.1 Copyright Protection and Restriction
...
Traditionally, utilitarian works (that is, functional works that do something or cause another part or piece to do something) such as computer programs have been protected by either trade secret or patent law;
....
was amended in the 1980s to explicitly put computer software under the copyright umbrella as a literary work. Acting on the recommendations contained in the 1978 report of the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU), a 1980 amendment to the US Copyright Act, Section 117, expressly recognised the copyrightability of computer programs."


The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation

Fashion does not have copyright

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Anybody notice how this thread wanders all over the place? That is part of the beauty of it, and making my own forum has been key to making my public writings a little better organized. Before I write about Dennis, to briefly address Freeknowledge's latest…

Believe me, I get all about why Stallman went legalistic. I sacrificed my life to get Dennis a lawyer and a sliver of hope in Kangaroo Court, and it worked. Dennis has been in legal battles for the past 30 years, nearly continually, as the Establishment attacked his efforts. He ended up doing most of his own legal work, and that would be a very long conversation. After he got railroaded the first time, 40 years ago, he began waking up to our legal system's evils.

What happens, however, is that efforts like Dennis's or Stallman's, in an effort to survive, play the legal game, and it distorts their efforts. Those legal games are artifacts of survival in a world of scarcity, and will mean nothing in the Fifth Epoch. The so-called legal system in the Fifth Epoch I expect to work like Walsch's "God" said it works in HEB societies: there are only a handful of laws, they are simple, and everybody knows them. It will probably resemble Fulghum's list.

Only in a society of relative abundance could something like the Free Software Movement exist. People willingly working for free for the good of society is rare in the human journey (not enough surplus energy for it). In the Fifth Epoch everything will be free, as almost no human effort will produce any of it, and the "work" that people do will be to fulfil their souls, not to survive in a world of scarcity.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

OK, on to Dennis. He is by far the greatest human being that I ever knew or heard of, whose life's journey is simply unbelievable, but I lived through its darkest chapters with him, so I know that they happened. The lessons that I learned during my journey with Dennis were the most important of my life, and without them, I would likely have nothing worth saying. I have seen people around me think that all I "know" I got from books, and that is ignorance talking. Experience may be the only teacher. About the only books that I use in my work are scientific and scholarly, and are the results of trying to figure out what happened and how/why, as a way to help steer our ship today. Those are worthy pursuits, and I mine them for all they are worth, but in my radicalized state.

I met Dennis through one of those many preposterous, larger-than-life events that attended my journey and that even I have a hard time believing happened, and it happened inside my head. I had already been mentored by a world-class scientific and inventive genius, which began my energy dreams, and with Dennis, I began to live them. I can't regret what happened, but I would not wish it on anybody else. It was one hell of a way to learn, and I suppose that my public writings are to help people learn in easier fashion, so they are not risking their lives. If everybody had to learn those lessons like Dennis and I did, there would be almost no survivors of the "curriculum," and my choir idea would never have a prayer of even forming, much less making a dent.

The lessons that I learned from my journey with Dennis are lessons that almost nobody on Earth really wants to learn, which is why I know that I seek needles in haystacks. Even people who seem like enthusiastic seekers end up going down the rabbit holes and into blind alleys, learning all the wrong lessons, if they really learned them at all. That is one reason why I say that a person has to have already been awakened somehow for any of this to make sense, as otherwise, they drag the baggage of their conditioning with them, and they can't comprehend my material or an Epoch of Abundance while they drag the baggage of scarcity along with them.

IMO, what is most important about Dennis's journey are these facts/ideas/issues:

• The dent that one man can make in our world, if he tries hard enough;
• The inability of that one man to manifest the biggest event in the human journey, not matter how hard he tries;
• The particulars of the energy technologies that Dennis sold, his heat pump most importantly;
• How to take disruptive technologies from tinkerer stage to the marketplace at industrial levels of production;
• How to market such technologies (putting it for free on people's homes is the most brilliant thing that I saw Dennis do, and a harbinger of the Fifth Epoch, like the Free Software Movement is);
• How the world system really works, including the American legal system, dominated by black hats and white hats, and we encountered both factions on numerous occasions, and that includes the organized suppression of exotic technologies, with FE chief among them;
• How the low integrity amongst the masses, as they are focused on their immediate self-interest to the exclusion of all else, is the biggest reason for our predicament, not what ultra-elites do.

What is really not important about Dennis's journey, IMO, is his Christian faith (if he had been born in the Middle East, he would be a fanatical devotee of Mohammed and Allah, not Jesus and "God"), his attempts to marry heat pumps and heat engines, his NWO and "patriot" rhetoric, his business-oriented efforts to make FE happen, his PT Barnum ways, and other highly visible aspects of his journey that can be distractions from learning the important lessons. I see people get mesmerized by them all the time, and get caught up in the distractions, as they fail to understand what is important.

There are some pretty simple and undeniable facts of Dennis's journey, which people ignore, deride, lie about, and the like, and they include:

• Dennis grew up in a migrant farmworker household and was forced to leave home at age 13, which was not unusual in that culture; and he was kicked out of high school when he was discovered sleeping on its premises, which he had done for years;
• He then enlisted in the military, which was a common "career path" for his culture, and he was a paratrooping medic who saw combat in Southeast Asia as the USA raped the region;
• After his military days, Dennis woke up to the lie of his nationalistic indoctrination, and it was his first and greatest awakening moment, in an event more spectacular than when I first heard that voice;
• After he helped the FBI sting the Alaskan Mob and survived a couple of murder attempts, he fled to New Jersey, where he continued his college education;
• He lived amongst the Eastern Oligarchy and was at the top of his class, studying Utopian societies, and woke up to the true nature of the profession that he would soon join, became disgusted, and dropped out of college on the brink of graduation;
• After dropping out of college (and being fired from the last job he ever had as an employee because he outsold his entire department, making everybody look bad), he began an idealistic homebuilding business, which was soon wiped out in the mayhem of the USA's first energy crisis, which ended the most prosperous period in the human journey;
• Dennis then produced a business plan from a days-long bout of what would probably be called automatic writing, and it was a way to unite the consumer and give them a voice in the marketplace, which was dominated by corporate manipulations of the consumer;
• During those years of trying to make a go of those very idealistic businesses, he met his current wife, became a Christian, survived more Mob hit attempts, survived numerous attempts to steal his business, and became partners with one of the world's most prominent televangelists, but in the end, his businesses failed;
• After those business failures, he got involved in the energy industry, in energy conservation; his first venture was low-flow shower heads, and he soon graduated to home insulation;
• Dennis is a marketing and sales genius of the likes I never saw before or since, and his energy companies were always wildly successful, which attracted the attention of the Mob and other opportunists, and he was constantly fending off attempts to steal his companies, and the theft attempts were often successful;
• Immediately after mobsters stole his insulation company, Dennis became paralyzed from the neck-down and nearly died three times from the negligence of the Veteran's Administration hospital where he was treated, and their negligence permanently crippled him;
• As he recovered from his paralysis, he became involved with a unique heat pump, and soon dominated the fledgling industry, once again, as he tried to industrialize it;
• He soon unveiled his shared savings program for his heat pump, building on his earlier programs, and he soon reached meteoric sales rates, which once again inspired mobsters and his business associates to try stealing his businesses, and they were successful more than once, and Dennis survived more murder attempts;
• After one of the successful thefts of his business, when that time he and his wife had almost nothing to their names but the clothes on their backs and three small children to feed, he visited his family in his home town, his youngest child died of crib death, and Dennis discovered that his home state, which had long had the cheapest electricity on Earth, suddenly was in a crisis due to nuclear plant boondoggles, and he realized that there was a unique market opportunity for his heat pump;
• After wasting two years in his home town, working with a local robber baron, Dennis had enough and drove over the Cascade Mountains and set up his business in Seattle, where he soon made the greatest run at bringing alternative energy to the marketplace in world history, it was a spectacular snuff job, inflicted by the electric interests, with everybody from the Attorney General to the media to the federal courts being involved;
• When a hit man from the federal agency that ran the local electric industry was responsible for the death of one of Dennis's employees, Dennis had the first of many radicalizing moments in his energy journey (what had happened on the East Coast was only a warm-up);
• In the midst of all of that, a voice in my head led me straight into Dennis's company, as it was in its death throes;
• After working for free for months to reconstruct the company’s financial records, Dennis's company was stolen by Mormon grifters, and my boss helped engineer the theft from the inside, mere weeks after Dennis's finance company was stolen as a way to steal Dennis's company;
• Dennis was run out of his home state by the electric interests, and tried to rebuild his business in Boston; I had been hit by the lightning and could not let go of my teenage dreams, and chased Dennis out to Boston, where I soon improbably became his partner, and we began to pursue FE the day after I arrived in Boston;
• I got my first professional mentor involved, who eventually proposed marrying his engine to the panels from Dennis's heat pump, to produce FE, and in Boston we received an overture from what I now know was the people who run the world, and they offered us $10 million for the exclusive rights to our bright idea (before Mr. Mentor made his technical proposal), and the local electric industry was keenly aware of our efforts, and Dennis and Mr. Engineer soon had a red carpet audience with the most powerful electric executive in New England, as we stumbled into another nuclear power controversy;
• The local officials in New England, as in our home state of Washington, were sharpening their axes to attack, on behalf of the local energy interests, but we moved away to the town where I was raised, in Ventura, California, and that is where the fireworks really began;
• There is far too much to tell about our days in Ventura in this post, and a billion dollar offer delivered by the CIA on behalf of "European interests," to make us go away, was only part of the terrain, but three years after we hit Ventura, my life was ruined and I was radicalized, and I cover the highlights on my site;
• Dennis was eventually kangarooed into prison, where the prison officials kept trying to get him murdered by the inmates, but Dennis survived those murder attempts, too, and "only" had some fingers broken and teeth knocked out;
• When Dennis got out of prison, he went right back at it harder than ever, and you really had to see it to believe it, and within two years, he was barnstorming the country with a free energy and exotic technology tour, and we met with Al Gore at the White House immediately after hosting the largest FE gathering in world history;
• After several years of trying, Dennis coaxed me back into working for him, and I nearly went to prison myself for my troubles, and ever since, I have refused his entreaties to work with him again, even an invitation to the White House;
• Between my stints with Dennis, I hit the books, became one of Brian's biggest fans, and we all came to learn that FE technology is likely older than I am, and it sits in Godzilla's Golden Hoard, and one of my close pals got a peek back in the 1990s;

To put it mildly, that is quite and story, and even I get overwhelmed by it at times. Virtually all of it is well-documented, and I lived through a great deal of it, but really, I think that Dennis did his most interesting work before I met him. What he did in Seattle has never been done before or since, and what was really important about those days is what we learned about how the world really works, not the technology so much, although it is important to understand how it worked, and it is really pretty easy to understand if somebody puts their mind to it. The brilliant aspects of Mr. Mentor's engine are also pretty easy to understand, again if somebody puts their mind to it. Classical physics says that marrying heat engines to heat pumps cannot make FE, and maybe that is right, although I encountered scientists who thought otherwise. IMO, it is not really that important whether FE could be made thermodynamically, and Dennis's attempts and pitching in that realm should be taken with a grain of salt, especially Dennis's explanations. ZPE is vastly more important, and I believe that the greatest threat that we presented to the global power structure was not what we were building at our facility, but that our efforts could inspire people such as Sparky Sweet to join up with us, and then it would have quickly been Game Over for the global elites, and they knew it. That was why we received the attention that we did, not what we were working on at our facility so much. Dennis kept trying, through business collapses, picking up the pieces once again, etc. But in his last attempt, that time with high-MPG carburetors (which took me back to my days before I met Dennis), he was finally run out of the USA, The Land of the Free, like Brian was also run out of his cherished homeland, to die in exile.

Those are the facts as I know them, and most are exceedingly well documented, for those who do their homework, but all that the media, authorities, "skeptics," and even Dennis's "allies" in the FE milieu can do is tell Big Lies about Dennis, and what was more dismaying than their blatant lies was how easily they gulled people who parrot the disinformation to this day, and I mean public figures whom I regularly see lionized. I saw the same people embrace the liars and their lies as they turned around and attacked Dennis and Brian, which is one reason why I do not want to have anything to do with the FE field today. Almost nobody in it has the right stuff, and the field has been in a state of arrested development for longer than I have been alive.

It was only after many years of the life-risking and life-wrecking trial and error, carrying Dennis's and Brian's spears, that I came up with my choir idea, and Dennis and Brian instantly knew that I was doing something different, and Brian was planning on promoting my approach soon before he died.

Time for chores, and I plan to write a summary post on Dennis's, Brian's, and my efforts, and might get to it today, but we will see.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Briefly, I see no end of articles like this, banging the drums of doom, as if there is no way out other than a 90% depopulation of Earth. Yes, humanity is on the edge of the abyss and almost nobody knows or cares. Yes indeed, but I have yet to see even one doomsayer, especially of the environmental persuasion, give FE the time of day, other than labeling it the enemy, in classic Level 5 fashion, even though it can quickly make every single one of their causes of worry evaporate almost overnight.

Neat the end of his life, Brian was nearly beside himself with how FE was either treated like the enemy or completely off the radar of "progressives," as he futilely banged on the "progressive" doors that were closed, but they rolled out the red carpet for people such as Heinberg.

Best,

Wade

[Krishna]

Posted by Wade Frazier (here)
Only in a society of relative abundance could something like the Free Software Movement exist. People willingly working for free for the good of society is rare in the human journey (not enough surplus energy for it).

Very few in the free software movement or related movements work for free for the common good, as few as any other charitable cause in society. That will change in the next epoch.

The success of Free/Open Source Software or Wikipedia is because

• It is very cheap and very useful
• It is cheap to contribute to in energy terms, you find a problem you can fix it
• Network effects are enormous.
• The network is the Internet.

While Free Culture is non-rival, Free Software, Free Knowledge are non-rival and anti-rival .


Eben Moglen says it better than I can

"there are two classes of goods with zero marginal cost in the twenty-first century. One class of goods is functional; it performs either better or worse than another class of goods at the same job. Executable computer software is a good, central, but not the only, example of such functional information. Maps, genome information and other examples could be equally invoked. My proposition, as I have already put it before you, is that for functional goods with zero marginal cost, production without property relations produces superior goods. And this is true the more that collaboration is necessary in order to produce. Hence, free software and soon-as a result of the work that I and hundreds of other people are doing around the world--free genetic information and machines, represent the demonstration that this form of production, without exclusion from the right to understand and produce oneself, produces better goods. So everybody who wants to be a producer is, and produces at the margin of the ever-expanding compact mass of existing production, because nothing requires reinvention. What you have is a system of Lamarckian evolution of functional goods, in which the acquired characteristics of any one good can be inherited by all the others. The result, as Lamarck and Darwin and other nineteenth century evolutionary theorists noted, is the rapidest and most positive kind of evolutionary change.

But there is no such thing with respect to non-functional goods. One cannot say that anarchist music is inherently superior to proprietary music. What one can say is that in the world of zero-marginal cost, anarchist distribution--that is, distribution without exclusion from the act of distributing--produces inherently superior distribution. This is even easier to perceive than the first proposition. When the right to distribute goods with zero marginal cost has to be bought and sold, there are inefficiencies introduced in the social network of distribution. When no such buying and selling, no such exclusion from the power of distribution exists, distribution occurs at the native speed of the social network itself."


This finishes my homework on Free Software. Next I will write about Radical Left and lessons I learned. That will end my homework

[Wade Frazier]

Thanks Freeknowledge:

If the free software movement is full of as many greedy people as work at Microsoft, no wonder they are not interested in helping make FE happen! I was wasting my time, thinking that I might have a chance with Stallman, whose motives are primarily self-interest.

The issue of self-interest, altruism, and the like is an old one, and I discovered the hard way that self-interested people were effortlessly defeated by organized suppression, at least in the FE milieu. There has been a battle over the terminology of free software, open-source, etc.

The fact is that if everybody was a peasant, sacrificing their bodies from sunup until sundown to eat, nobody would be spending their "free" time contributing to Wikipedia. The Internet is the apex of high technology, which is only really possible in affluent societies, with plenty of free time from the surplus energy. It was developed with a great deal of government money, and the first Internet boom was completely fueled by VC and IPO money. Almost none of it came from customers. I have only been able to do my writing because I sacrificed my life and live in an affluent society.

I can almost get with the idea that the free software people are simply following their mutual self-interest, but it was only a high energy, affluent economy (history's richest and most powerful) that made the "good" possible. In a way, I am advocating something similar, in that everybody will benefit by living in an FE-based economy (except that Godzilla will lose his power over humanity, and both elites and poor will vanish), but selfish people are not going to help us get there, and those in the FE milieu who advocate open-sourcing and giving it away largely are acting from altruistic motives. I am getting ahead of myself here, but making and giving away the most lucrative technology in world history, by far, is going to implode capitalism from the inside (like Luke and the Death Star). For-profit enterprises will not survive in that environment.

One thing is for sure; my motives and those of my fellow travelers are very different from the anti-rival motives of the free software people. Making FE happen will not be easy, and cannot be based on some mutual self-interest approach. I found that it will not work, and that the path of love is the only the only one that will work, and to understand that, I think that people need some kind of mystical awakening. It may not be required, but the people worth anything in the FE milieu were that way, and were overgrown Boy and Girl Scouts. The self-interested fell by the wayside almost immediately and helped wipe out the efforts from the inside. Looking for needles…

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

OK, I am going to finish off that series of posts that began with this one. Dennis and Brian were overachievers in a big way, more than me, and Dennis and I had the firstborn's disease of initiative and achievement. Dennis went far beyond his station in life, being born into a family of migrant farmworkers, when white people still did that in the USA. Brian became an astronaut, Ivy League professor, and advisor to presidential candidates, raised by parents who did not attend college. I was raised by a father whose IQ was in the 160-170 range, was mentored by world-class inventive genius long before I met Dennis, and was groomed for a life of achievement almost from the cradle. I had far more "excuse" for my journey than Dennis and Brian did.

We were all geniuses, raised during the most prosperous era in the human journey, as members of history's most privileged demographic group - white, educated American men - who grew up during the post-war boom. Arrogance is one of the USA's chief exports, and being as gifted and privileged as we were, we all had to work at humility, but Dennis least of all, coming from roots as humble as his. Brian openly admitted how his ego was challenged back in his astronaut and "bright lights" days, and I wrestled with delusions of grandeur when I was an FE newbie and Dennis's partner. We all got beaten down pretty thoroughly, with Dennis getting body cavity searches in prison and Brian being cast from the Citadel, and he struggled economically ever since, until his death in exile, which included going bankrupt. Dennis survived numerous murder attempts, while Brian "only" survived one that I know of, and I have not had to try surviving one so far, and I am happy that I did not. I had my life ruined during my adventures, and am still picking up the pieces of my shattered life. I had enough of that and do not seek martyrdom, as Dennis and Brian seemed to be motivated at times, which comes with the hero's role all-too-often.

We all got involved in the energy issue because of the USA's first energy crisis, and the American standard of living has been declining ever since, similar to Rome's decline, as it slowly ran out of energy. But, as I discovered during my journey, what made us rare in the FE community and in the USA in general was our Boy Scout natures. That set us apart from nearly all the rest, and all fellow travelers that I had much respect for had the same motivation. We were not being guided by self-interest, but had a higher calling. Anybody can say that, especially politicians ( ), but Dennis has lived it at levels that are hard to believe, and Brian was similarly motived by his conscience, not self-interest, and that is what attracted me to them in the first place. The self-interested project their motivation onto others and cannot comprehend the motivation of the Dennises and Brians. It takes one to know one. They passed the integrity test with flying colors, as did Mr. Professor. However, passing the test at those levels of the game usually means a wrecked and prematurely-ended life, which happened to Mr. Professor and Brian, and those close to Dennis are amazed that he is still alive, much less going at it as hard as ever at nearly 70 years old. I passed up more than a million dollars on five separate occasions on my journey, and Dennis and Brian also passed up immense sums to follow their consciences. Not many like that walk Earth today, and Brian sought rich "altruists" during his NEM days and in his life's last years. He didn’t find any, primarily because they don’t exist. Billionaires swarmed Dennis when he was riding high, and not one of them parted with a dollar that I know of, but they all tried to see how they could co-opt what Dennis was doing. They are more harm than good, if any good at all.

Unlike the Free Software Movement as presented by Freeknowledge, there is no immediate, if indirect, payoff for making FE happen. Economic gratification may well be delayed past the end of our lifetimes, for those in the choir. Making FE happen will be an industrial process, not the province of tinkerers in their garages. The tinkerer approach will not work for the most transformative technology in the human journey, although those without technology development experience often think so. A self-interested approach will not work for making FE happen, as I discovered the hard way during my journey. The Boy Scouts are also guilty of projecting their motivation. When I became Dennis's partner, Dennis thought that people really cared. It was a delusion, if a noble one. A decade later, Dennis admitted to me that almost nobody really cared, but he was sifting through humanity's mine tailings, looking for stray nuggets. He rarely found any. Ralph nobly thought that if people had access to the information that he did, that they would wake up to the evils done in their name. Ralph was wrong. Brian sought those rich altruists that don’t exist. We all had to go through those moments of disillusionment and awakening, and I learned my lessons the hard way on that score, and it was the most important lesson of my journey.

So, I know that I seek needles in haystacks: people who actually care for something other than their immediate self-interest or their in-group's welfare. Only by seeing all of humanity, indeed all life on Earth, as our in-group, will my effort succeed. That was also the message of the spiritual masters, and I have studied their message at length (only after a mystical awakening do their words really make sense, in my experience), and it is the only approach with a prayer, as far as I can see. Love is the only answer that I know of.

But I do not seek heroes. Men are groomed to play the hero and women are trained to be cheerleaders and groupies for such heroes, and that dynamic has marred the New Age movement, for instance, and FE inventors announce that they are the Messiah, etc. The men have I seek have to put away their heroic notions, and the women need to step up from their roles of cheerleaders and groupies, for my approach to work.

Best,

Wade

[Krishna]

Wade,
First a request can you add a time column to the epoch table basically approximate dates of when each epoch started.


Looks like I will never move past Free Software topic

There are two communities Free Software community and Open Source software community that confusingly call the same thing (software) two different names Free Software, Open Source Software respectively even more confusingly they work together on creating software together. All of them have the same skills (software engineer) and therefore can make money doing high tech work. So their lifestyles are similar.

Also lots of people get their introduction to Free/Open Source Software as students, they make contributions in their youth, eventually they graduate, get a family/real job and slowly their contributions taper. Are these students altruistic or not?

What about hobbyists, that enjoy their hobby and contribute as a side effect of their hobby? Are they altruistic?

Even more confusingly corporations have very good business/capitalistic/self interested reasons to contribute to Free/Open Source Software (same thing different names). The general public thinks that 'open source' means somebody with a good heart is giving their jewels away. Nothing can be farther than the truth in this case. They use Free/Open Source Software for the same reason that you do. Software is a cost and they are picking the cheapest software that they is good enough. If there are bugs or improvements that they need to make, they will make them and release the improvements. Multiple companies doing the same means that the cost of development goes down for any given individual company.

The Open Source community is apolitical and are only mildly altruistic. The Free Software people understand politics, put sharing first and are much more altruistic, they are more likely to have woken up. Thus my request to you to write the open letter to the free software movement. I await version 2.0

Among Free Software people if they are very committed to the principles, even they can find work at high tech companies working only on free/open source software, others like me don't insist on such work. Still there are others who work only on free/open source software at non-profits/charities only.

Stallman is a saint by any measure. His stance is an ethical stance first. In your parlance he is an overgrown boy scout, he was happily sharing his software without seriously thinking about politics/ethics. He was woken up by changes in the communities around him.

See how he defined free software.

“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price.
….
We campaign for these freedoms because everyone deserves them.

If we go back to evolution you can say that he is merely extending our innate biological drive of cultural transmission to the digital realm.
If you compare that with the agricultural epoch or the current industrial epoch he is saying that elites have no right to stop self education and use of knowledge for individual or community purposes. In India it was forbidden for the lower castes to study, as was the case with African Americans in the USA, and I am sure this is the case elsewhere as we saw with the Easterlin paper

Education is the lever on which the transitions between epochs happen. Be it the transition from chimpanzees to Fire/cooking which according to you was invented only once. Or the transition to Super Predator epoch, the further transition to the agricultural epoch and finally the current industrial epoch. Cut education out or restrict education and the transitions won’t happen, and Stallman is opposing those restrictions on education.

He wrote about these issues The Right to Read and The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource which had an influence on Wikipedia see History of Wikipedia

You are right to lament about his "materialism, scientism, and rationalism”, but not about his altruism, he is one of the "rare people willingly working for free for the good of society".

Free Software, Free Society is required reading to understand Stallman. It is a book available online under a free license for no cost or you could decide to buy a dead tree version.


The free software people (altruists) are unhappy when people talk about ethics and say open source because it has no ethical connotation to open source see definition of open source vs definition of free software When you say that you want to open source something. I read it as Wade wants to free it, liberate it, put no restrictions on it, because of ideas about what is ethical. Like Stallman when you are near the finish line you will find people who will join you they too will open source, free it, liberate it, put no restrictions on it but wont be driven primarily by other serving nature.

You seek Free Software people now, but the Open Source people will also be one of your greatest allies later, because they understand abundance and anti-rival nature of what you are trying to do.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Hi Freeknowledge. OK, I'll accept that Stallman may be a Boy Scout, but I already took a run at him, a good one, and I know that he is openly hostile to the idea of FE. I did not name him until I heard that from one of your Free Software pals who tried to interest him in FE in a public venue. I won't waste my time with him again. He is a Level 3, and they are the most entrenched of all.

I am looking for anybody, from any persuasion, who has a love of the truth, a desire to heal humanity and the planet, and if they are like that, they will not have let their ideological indoctrination, whatever it was, have a death grip on their psyche. They have got to let go of that stuff if they are going to comprehend this vision, not only in its fullness, but also understand that they can help it happen by "merely" raising their awareness to the stage where they can digest my big essay and learn to sing the abundance song. That is all that I am currently looking for.

My experience has been that almost nobody is willing or able to do that, for various reasons, which are almost all self-serving. That is the problem, not how "smart" people are. Scientists rave about my big essay, but I have seen laypeople get enough out of it so that they were hitting some notes, even Nine. If Nine can do it, almost anybody who really puts their mind to it can get at least some of it, particularly the gist of it.

On dates on the Epochal Table, let me think about it. Maybe the pristine instance of each one could be helpful, but there is a pretty wide range of dates today on the first one. Stone tools have now been found that go back about 3.5 million years, and as you saw in that recent paper, scientists are arguing for "only" 800K years ago for cooking, and some even put it in very recent times, as if protohumans controlled fire for hundreds of thousands of years before they figured out how to cook with it. I don't buy that, but there is a great deal of controversy over that one, but what they can all agree on is that some energy game had to be played to grow and power the human brain.

On Open Letter 2.0, I have some homework for you. Make an outline of what you think I should cover, and I will think about it.

Best,

Wade

[Krishna]

Wade,
I am not asking you to contact anybody, you gave me homework to explain Free Software. That is what I am doing. And clearing up misconceptions since this area is notoriously difficult to understand. I blew fuses at one of the best Indian charities, and these are very thoughtful people. I had no success after spending 2 years intensively trying to help them understand. I don't do that anymore.

With apologies to SL and Ilie. It is not enough to say that I am an anarchist and therefore don't believe in copyrights. One has to be able to explain the energy flows of software/wikipedia or free art as it exists today and explain their success or failure. Likewise we should be above falling into the trap of thinking that software/digital goods are the same as physical property we need to analyze them based based on their public good, non-rival and anti-rival properties. Finally we need to be able to identify and understand the various human motivations involved in creating digital goods.

I hope I succeeded in my efforts.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

You are doing fine, Freeknowledge. Yes, Free Software and Open Source and their distinctions are a fine thing to discuss here, largely because you thought, long ago, that FE and FS could be natural allies, and it seemed that way, and now you want me to write Open Letter 2.0. Writing 2.0 cannot be about anything other than reaching out to your FS brethren, and I am willing to do it if I can reel in a few more. I worked for software companies for nearly 15 years, do systems design myself, live across the street from Microsoft, and the area is teeming with those high caste refugees from India. I know the game from the capitalist side pretty well, and the "free" model of Google was Bill Gates's biggest nightmare. Crushing Netscape using the "free" model (and monopoly price everything else) did not work out quite like he anticipated. The entire Internet culture is something very new and unusual, but the enemies of freedom are moving to lock it all back down, as is evident. I am trying to take advantage of this opportunity while I can.

In the FE milieu, activists want to Open Source FE technology for the same reason that Free Software people do their thing, it seems. The economic arguments for Free Software (non-rival, etc.) are less compelling than the "freedom" ones, although both are obviously intimately related, and politics has always ridden on the back of economics. But Open Sourcing and giving away FE will be a very different task from coding. Working prototypes in the FE milieu have not meant much, as they are quickly sequestered by a variety of means, as Godzilla's playbook is thick and older than I am. Open Sourcing and giving it away may be the only way that it can work. Develop the most lucrative technology in world history and give it away. Similar to Sauron never suspecting that the Fellowship would choose to destroy the One Ring rather than use it, Godzilla can scarcely imaging somebody really having FE and giving it away to the world. It would be his greatest nightmare, but he can awaken from his dark dream, too.

Best,

Wade

[Krishna]

Wade,
Very very quickly. My brain dump, please excuse the lack of coherence.



I just re-read your fifth epoch. I am not sure if the effort of writing open letter 2.0 will pay off. The way I am thinking could involve a lot of research (I know what is important, but since its your voice you have to spend time reading them, I spent a lot of time reading in this area it could eat a lot of your time, the good news (if any) is that I have documented all the reading material in this thread.)

Here are my thoughts.

You could start by explaining how, to be human is to copy and improve on what came before. All the epoch changes came from small populations inventing and then spreading it via education/copying etc..

the hunter gatherer epoch was also a great waste of brains, of course energy dictates that outcome.
The agricultural epoch was characterized by not sharing knowledge by the elites and therefore wasting brains, because of lack of enough energy surplus. The industrial epoch is different, we now have energy surplus but we choose to spend it on oppression and still continue to waste brain power. Our lives are better with more individuals who are educated, yes there is competition but also innovation and copying which is far more important for quality of life. FOSS communities/wikipedia are always asking why are underrepresented communities not contributing, how can we help them contribute etc… They realize that an educated world is a better world.


You could go into non-rival, anti-rival goods and explain how free software/wikipedia works and what can be. Eben Moglen is looked upto because of how inspiring his speeches can be.
This will accomplish 2 things it will give you reputation as somebody who needs to be heard, just like the scientists who like your big essay.
Secondly people who are afraid of FE will see that they don’t need to be afraid. They have been taught all their lives that copyright/patents etc.. are good for them (reminds me of cigarets are good for you), and you can show a new world where there are no copyrights and they can see for themselves the abundance of digital goods.

You could show how copyright is a racket just like numerous other rackets.

Sure one could read The Wealth of Networks, Free Software Free Society, Democratizing innovation etc… etc…but your comprehensive and unique voice could put it all together in ways not seen before.

Very few open source people and only a subset of free software people really understand how things work w.r.t. software /wikipedia production
helping them understand might help you find choir members. Likewise people outside the FOSS movements have no idea about its importance (that Indian charity) but there are people who could be helped along the path of thinking about abundance by demonstrating how intellectual commons works. Wikipedia/FOSS can be explained as a showcase of how abundance can work in the FE era and also make them less fearful of FE.



Eben Moglen is a fantastic advocate for education, sharing software and understanding the implication of intellectual commons etc…https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Free_...ectual_Commons

“How many of the Einsteins who ever existed were permitted to learn physics?”. And people think “Well, maybe one, maybe two – maybe Isaac Newton was another Einstein…” but of course the answer is “Almost none”; so few, in fact, that we know the names of them.
[Laughter]
Which, had we educated all the Einsteins in the world, in physics, since the beginning, we couldn’t do, because there would be so many of them. And what we think of as the extraordinary characteristics of genius are primarily merely the selection function applied to human diversity, through radical injustice in access to the ability to learn. Which means, of course, that we know that – smart guys as we all are – we are really only thefraction of the smart guys in the world who’ve been allowed to learn anything, in a world where there are six billion people, most of whom will never be able to go to school. And their brains will starve to death.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Freeknowledge:

I see what you are driving at, to try to couch the Epochal Events in language that your FS comrades understand, and using concepts familiar to them. I can try something along those lines, but that can be a delicate dance, as energy can be at risk of being seen as ancillary to freedom, when energy is the means to freedom. And yes, it means some study, and not sure when I will find the time. I can put it into my stack of things to do.

Some find the Third Epochal Event the most important and interesting one, as that is when civilization appeared. Elites, professions, metals, cities, farms, and so on. Pretty big stuff for the human journey. If you study the rise of complex life, from a geochemical and geophysical perspective, eukaryotic life was not "necessary," as prokaryotic life was doing fine, although plants caused more erosion, which provided more nutrients to the ocean. Eukaryotic life is more of a frill than necessary for Earth's life, and one day, it will be back to unicellular life before Earth loses its life as the Sun grows into a red giant.

Similarly, elites were never necessary for civilization, but they were opportunists who commandeered the energy surplus for their lifestyles, and they exploited the masses to do so. They appeared when civilization did, and they will disappear with the Fifth Epochal Event, and that is why Godzilla has suppressed FE like he has: he sees it as survival. But he is willing to kill a planet to keep his ill-gotten position, although cooler heads may prevail.

Just like Dennis and Brian had the Eye of Sauron focused on them at times, and the orcs were set on Dennis more than once, the Black Hats and White Hats are watching my efforts. The people who gave my pal a show were cheering him on, and if an effort of mine actually builds a functioning choir, it will encourage those technologies to come in from the shadows. That is just one side-effect that the choir can catalyze. I know that what I am doing does not seem like much to the uninitiated. When I think back to driving across the USA, chasing Dennis, after the flaming disaster in Seattle, if you had told me what was in store for us in the next few years, I would not have believed it. Within a few months, we were being offered $10 to go away, and the next year, they raised the "offer" to a billion. That is how important this issue is to the global elite, and I know how that snowball can form. I rolled one once.

I no longer have Dennis in my camp, but I know that what I am doing can make a dent, if I can find enough people with the right stuff and train them. On the scale of these events and its potential impact on the human journey, what I ask of my readers is trifling.

Time for bed.

Best,

Wade

[Krishna]

Wade,
You write "The rise of the human species was dependent on exploiting new energy sources by using intelligence and manipulative ability.”
As can be seen from my thoughts on education, I see education as the mere spread of intelligence, and the spread of intelligence determines our living standards subordinated to availability of energy. Anything stopping the spread of intelligence stops the improvements of our living standards, after all the education of Japan, Korea, China, India has only been a positive for Europeans and the World. As opposed to narrow assessments of competition see following quote

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/op...-homework.html

"When I was growing up, my parents told me, 'Finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving.' I tell my daughters, 'Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving for your job.’” Thomas Friedman

I am not necessarily asking you to target FS people. Beyond FOSS, there are Free Culture people (Nina Paley for e.g.) and people who want kids in the developing world to be educated, all of them would be thrilled to read an essay on why sharing of knowledge is useful for society of course this is second to the energy issue, but it helps to rope them into thinking about FE. You also mentioned that in the FE era at least a third of the people would work (if they choose to work) on creative endeavors and sharing and building on each others work (since there won’t be copyright and hoarding, which is precisely what FS/FC/FK is about) the technologies, art, knowledge that we would enjoy would be astounding, and the FS/FC/FK movements show us a glimpse of the future.
The Roads future is 300 years in the future. Maybe you could blend the existing and imagine something in the near future that is more easily imaginable, for those of us who can’t imagine Roads futures (positive ones).


Also I forgot to say, in the past US did not recognize foreign patents/copyrights. So Charles Dickens works were public domain in US. He still made more money in US because he sold gave the first copy to the US publisher who paid the highest amount. The publisher would then saturate the market by releasing the book all over the US simultaneously. After that cheap copies would show up, but both the author and publisher made money. Likewise at that time you could patent even very well known ideas from world in US as long as nobody in the US knew that idea, this was a way to encourage immigration of talent to US.

So while the rhetoric of US is about stealing today, US was built on copying from the rest of the world and they had every moral right to do so.

[Krishna]

Robert Verzola a Filipino is a good resource on the intellectual commons issues, I particularly like
The piracy of intellectuals

"Pirating a computer program is quite different from pirating a doctor. When the U.S. pirates our doctors, it doesn’t take a copy and leave the original behind. Instead, it takes the original and leaves nothing behind."

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Freeknowledge:

My website is nothing but an educational tool, made during seven of the most economically productive years of my life, as I worked for free (and all of my "spare" time for a quarter-century), so I get the value of education. On visionary futures, my big essay is really several hundred pages of education so that this chapter is understood as well as possible. As far as visionary goes, I been told by people who should know that there is nothing like that chapter on Earth, and people do not need to read Roads to understand, but digesting the big essay before that chapter will be very helpful for making that chapter comprehensible.

I scientist pal began this PowerPoint presentation that I finished off. I have a presence at Avalon and Scott's forum, for readers to interact with me. Some of my essays have even been translated into Spanish (and my translator may be foolhardy enough to translate my big essay into Spanish ). For the readers I seek, I am meeting them way more than halfway. Those who need it spoon-fed to them more than that are not going to be in my target audience. I am not trying to reach the masses. The people I seek will encounter my work, dive in, and not come up for air for months or years. People who don't do that are not going to have what I am looking for, in order for my choir idea to work. People looking for quick and easy answers are not in my target audience. The people that I seek can be as few as one-in-a-million for my plan to work. I am not going to water down my work for the masses. I played the mass movement game several times already, carrying the spears of the best of the best. Never again. I eventually learn.

Again, FE newbies always try to interest their social circles, and if they are not ostracized (careers can end from FE proselytizing), they will find that nobody is interested, or they have their circuits fried in minutes. I have witnessed it many times. My work is not for the masses, and really never was. They have way too many delusions to shed, delusions that feed them, and they will only begin to wake up when FE is delivered into their lives. It was this way for every Epochal Event, and I don’t expect it to be any different this time. That kind of inertia and denial, especially among scientists, academics, and "progressives," is what led Brian to wonder if humanity is a sentient species, but it does no good to judge humanity in its semi-sentient and egocentric blindness. It is just what it is. I seek very rare people, and I know it.

Best,

Wade