Feb 25, 2022
How much are your digital thoughts or prayers worth?
What if…?
I’m going to explain the religion I made, why I made it, and what it’s designed to do. I apologize if this makes you uncomfortable — these are uncomfortable times. I’m rootin’ for ya.
What if we built a system designed to do something meaningful with the energy we put into our digital thoughts or prayers?
It could look something like this:
The above code repository is open-source, meaning anyone can copy it or modify it, and also none of the content is copyrighted so you can remix any of it however you’d like. It’s a minimum viable product, or MVP, which means it was a bit like a science experiment to build out the minimum of what it could be to operate effectively.
What if we had an economic system that wasn’t designed primarily to treat us like replaceable parts in service to corporations?
It could do something like this:
That’s a white paper that can explain how to use the above technology platform to create a democratic cryptocurrency-based economic system which could run in parallel to the dominant economic system in order to serve a market that is currently being underserved.
What if the only way to improve things is to figure out how to actually bring everyone together in a way that we can all agree on collaboratively?
That’s what religion is for. That’s how we’ve always used religion. That doesn’t mean we haven’t it fucked up horribly sometimes. A religion is not its faith. A religion is a system built around faith the way science is a system built around math. We often use pseudo-religions born of capitalism to do this and call ourselves secular.
Capitalism may not make us religious but it inspires a tremendous quantity of faith-like behaviour from us.
There needs to be more effective means of collaboration.
The whole thing is as democratic as I can make it. Honestly it’s probably more democratic than what you have in your government:
I am so tired of watching the horrible predictions of those better informed than I am about the state of the world as they come to pass. It’s all terrible bullshit. The world keeps smashing its problems into our faces and it’s hard not to get overwhelmed by them. I’ve driven myself crazy several times now thinking about how to solve the worlds problems. (This is becoming increasingly common and I recommend this long, detailed podcast as a good protection against the harmful thoughts that can arise from existential dread and related challenging experiences.) There is a global mental health crisis. Anyway, I can’t believe things keep getting more ridiculous. I was sure they were at their most ridiculous years and years ago but here we are. The continued deterioration of the quality of a number of critical systems and supports is evidence of a potential continued deterioration.
It feels like I’m standing where things are headed with what would have been required to prevent it — not what will be needed to stop it.
I need to try to have fun as a wizard because otherwise I go crazy — so it’s easy to forget that I’m being a silly person and also trying really hard to change a bunch of stuff it’s impossible for me to change. I don’t have a well considered solution for how Ukraine is right now. (Yes I know that sounds vain, but I think I have a great solution to the problem of US corporations and also I’m the unofficial Wizard of Canada). Mostly my solution to everything is the same thing. It’s usually the social media platform for the religion I made or some combination of the elements of the project, or something inspired by the project. The Church of Earth is a tool that I made to solve problems like this because I can’t solve problems like this… but I can build technology to support the people who can.
The solution I came up with to solve as many problems as I can possibly attempt to solve doesn’t apply to every problem. It can’t. Everything is too complicated. My solution also requires a high level of privilege to use because it’s based around a technology platform. It doesn’t work well in regions with limited or degrading technological infrastructure.
I made it to help everyone but that’s impossible.
The Church of Earth is a collaborative problem solving and project management platform. The code is open source. It’s not hosted anywhere because I hosted it for years and no one ever really signed up… but I’m really stubborn. So I just kept at it and kept going crazy until I eventually went bankrupt developing and hosting it, which is definitely the obvious potential outcome of that experience.
A less obvious potential outcome was that I would create a kickass problem solving and project management platform for use by individuals and groups in a way which prioritizes openness, consent, and helpfulness. And also make it open source and a Wordpress site so that basically any web developer anywhere can get it up and running.
It’s designed to help people in Ukraine
This is an article about what could be viewed as the Groups/Pages module of the Church of Earth Platform:
The module is a way for individuals to make decisions and collaborate on projects as a group. The Church of Earth is built differently than other social media platforms because I didn’t make it with a financial incentive structure in mind. It has different priorities. It doesn't bring people together in order to make sure they see ads, it brings them together in order to help them effectively do whatever brought them together.
This blog post explains the design features intended to mitigate online conflict and provide clearer intentionality in communication.
There are a bunch of different modules to the platform. It’s a web application. I built it based on how we solve problems and collaborate. I’m actually a pretty experienced web developer. Nobody is qualified to do this but I’m pretty qualified at some related stuff. 🤷♂️
It’s built to support activist organizations (I keep trying to put Greta Thunberg in charge of it.) It’s built to support and sustain Occupy Wall Street or the Arab Spring. That support is limited because there are always limitations. One of the limitations of this platform, from a certain perspective, is that everything is public. Almost everything in my version is designed to be public. (All of that can easily be changed though because it’s all open source and none of it is copyrighted.) I wouldn’t suggest people use it in Ukraine to organize an insurgency against Russia . Even if I could legally suggest using it this way — I believe the public nature of the platform would make it a terrible tool for the job of running an insurgency against a government (and I designed it to be bad at that)— but it can probably support people while they try to help each other stay alive as noncombatants during periods of urban warfare.
That is a project that people will need to manage as a community in order to achieve the best outcomes.
People don’t like the branding or the idea behind The Church of Earth? It can be changed. It’s absurd that people won’t engage with this technology platform because of the branding. I don’t mean the average person on the internet… we all exist in an information ecosystem designed to burn through our emotions to keep us hyperconnected and distracted. I’m talking about the many qualified academics and relevant professionals with suitable academic knowledge or professional insight required to understand and recognize what is being attempted here. I’m talking about all the people with millions or billions of dollars in silicon valley talking about “disrupting” the world. You are. Stop it. Your disruption is often selfish bullshit and you’re lying to yourselves about reality.
Just to be clear, this is the faith at the core of the project. It doesn’t compete with the others — it compliments them.
This is where it got me:
Thanks for reading. If you require something like this developed for yourself, or an organization you belong to, I may be willing to collaborate with you.
