Best explanation here.

An excellent read about possible alternative futures, and the psychological control methods of capitalism. This article is so good it has earned a place alongside Voltaire in my signature.

Excerpts:
"One aspect of every phase’s dominant affect is that it is a public secret, something that everyone knows, but nobody admits, or talks about. As long as the dominant affect is a public secret, it remains effective, and strategies against it will not emerge.
Public secrets are typically personalised. The problem is only visible at an individual, psychological level; the social causes of the problem are concealed. Each phase blames the system’s victims for the suffering that the system causes.
And it portrays a fundamental part of its functional logic as a contingent and localised problem."
--
"When misery stopped working as a control strategy, capitalism switched to boredom. In the mid twentieth century, the dominant public narrative was that the standard of living – which widened access to consumption, healthcare and education – was rising. Everyone in the rich countries was happy, and the poor countries were on their way to development. The public secret was that everyone was bored. This was an effect of the Fordist system which was prevalent until the 1980s – a system based on full-time jobs for life, guaranteed welfare, mass consumerism, mass culture, and the co-optation of the labour movement which had been built to fight misery. Job security and welfare provision reduced anxiety and misery, but jobs were boring, made up of simple, repetitive tasks."

“We do not want a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation is bought by accepting the risk of dying of boredom”
-The Situationists

"The mid-century reorientation from misery to boredom was crucial to the emergence of a new wave of revolt. We are the tail end of this wave. Just as the tactics of the first wave still work when fighting misery, so the tactics of the second wave still work when fighting boredom. The difficulty is that we are less often facing boredom as the main enemy. This is why militant resistance is caught in its current impasse."

---

Consumption culture has largely solved the problem of boredom by replacing it with near-constant distraction. Look down at your smartphone, dear American worker. Check your facebook. Engage your digital fantasy world, don't think about your real life.

Another excerpt will serve to elaborate:
"New products, such as video-games and social media, involve heightened levels of active individual involvement and desocialised stimulation. Workplace experiences are diversified by means of micro-differentials and performance management, as well as the multiplication of casual and semi-self-employed work situations on the margins of capitalism. (...) Capitalism has encouraged the growth of mediatised secondary identities – the self portrayed through social media, visible consumption, and lifelong learning – which have to be obsessively maintained. "

Capitalism is an extremely adaptive virus. It lives inside your brain, and the brains of everyone you know. There it thrives on your ignorance, your inability to honestly face your own suffering and trace it back to its roots. And it is malignant as fuck, destroying you from the inside out.

In contemporary capitalism, the dominant reactive affect is anxiety.
"Today’s public secret is that everyone is anxious. Anxiety has spread from its previous localised locations (such as sexuality) to the whole of the social field. All forms of intensity, self-expression, emotional connection, immediacy, and enjoyment are now laced with anxiety. It has become the linchpin of subordination. One major part of the social underpinning of anxiety is the multi-faceted omnipresent web of surveillance. The NSA, CCTV, performance management reviews, the Job Centre, the privileges system in the prisons, the constant examination and classification of the youngest schoolchildren. But this obvious web is only the outer carapace."

"We need to think about how people’s deliberate and ostensibly voluntary self-exposure, through social media, visible consumption and choice of positions within the field of opinions, also assumes a performance in the field of the perpetual gaze of virtual others (back to social media). We need to think about the ways in which this gaze inflects how we find, measure and know one another, as co-actors in an infinitely watched perpetual performance. Our success in this performance in turn affects everything from our ability to access human warmth to our ability to access means of subsistence, not just in the form of the wage but also in the form of credit. Outsides to the field of mediatised surveillance are increasingly closed off, as public space is bureaucratised and privatised, and a widening range of human activity is criminalised on the grounds of risk, security, nuisance, quality of life, or anti-social behaviour."

Think for a moment of the suffering experienced when you lose a job - you not only lose a vital source of income (=survival), you often also have long-standing social relationships mercilessly severed. To say nothing of the stigmatization and shame one feels in relation to one's peers!"

"Since everyone is disposable, the system holds the threat of forcibly delinking anyone at any time, in a context where alternatives are foreclosed in advance, so that forcible delinking entails desocialisation – leading to an absurd non-choice between desocialised inclusion and desocialised exclusion. This threat is manifested in small ways in today’s disciplinary practices – from “time-outs” and Internet bans, to firings and benefit sanctions – culminating in the draconian forms of solitary confinement found in prisons."

"The present dominant affect of anxiety is also known as precarity. Precarity is a type of insecurity which treats people as disposable so as to impose control. Precarity differs from misery in that the necessities of life are not simply absent. They are available, but withheld conditionally."

I hold that no human being is disposable. The wealthiest money-producers and the least able to produce any quantifiable value for society - are and must be equally precious, equally priceless, in a society that values life over money.

"Precarity leads to generalised hopelessness; a constant bodily excitation without release. Growing proportions of young people are living at home. Substantial portions of the population – over 10% in the UK – are taking antidepressants. The birth rate is declining, as insecurity makes people reluctant to start families. In Japan, millions of young people never leave their homes (the hikikomori), while others literally work themselves to death on an epidemic scale. Surveys reveal half the population of the UK are experiencing income insecurity. Economically, aspects of the system of anxiety include “lean” production, financialisation and resultant debt slavery, rapid communication and financial outflows, and the globalisation of production."

If you find yourself in NYC, and you ever want to horrify yourself, pay a visit to any of NYC's HRA Foodstamp application centers. Take a gander at the hours-long lines and compare them in your mind to the food lines of the Great Depression:



"Many more discourses of scapegoating and criminalisation treat precarity as a matter of personal deviance, irresponsibility, or pathological self-exclusion. Many of these discourses seek to maintain the superstructure of Fordism (nationalism, social integration) without its infrastructure (a national economy, welfare, jobs for all). Doctrines of individual responsibility are central to this backlash, reinforcing vulnerability and disposability. Then there’s the self-esteem industry, the massive outpouring of media telling people how to achieve success through positive thinking – as if the sources of anxiety and frustration are simply illusory.  These are indicative of the tendency to privatise problems, both those relating to work, and those relating to psychology."

Related: Bruce Levine - The Rebel Yell

Current tactics and theories aren’t working.  We need new tactics and theories to combat anxiety.
"If the first wave provided a machine for fighting misery, and the second wave a machine for fighting boredom, what we now need is a machine for fighting anxiety – and this is something we do not yet have." <<< Enter Bitcoin and its offering of potential financial liberty

"Current militant resistance does not and cannot combat anxiety. It often involves deliberate exposure to high-anxiety situations. Insurrectionists overcome anxiety by turning negative affects into anger, and acting on this anger through a projectile affect of attack. In many ways, this provides an alternative to anxiety. However, it is difficult for people to pass from anxiety to anger, and it is easy for people to be pushed back the other way, due to trauma. We’ve noticed a certain tendency for insurrectionists to refuse to take seriously the existence of psychological barriers to militant action. Their response tends to be, “Just do it!” But anxiety is a real, material force – not simply a spook."

You're shocked because you forgot that Beliathon is a persona, not a real person. Beliathon is an internet Lion, it's fun to step into that mask and roar truth and righteous indignation at you, scream the terrifying truth until I'm blue in the face.

But the reality of my life is best characterized by long suffering interrupted by brief moments of peace and sanity. I am plagued by lifelong anxiety and depression secondary to PTSD. Maybe one day the posts will stop suddenly, and I'll finally have peace.
One thing I can tell you about suffering, it's fertile soil for growing the clarity of mind necessary to discern truth from illusion/myth. "Our lives run different ways, through the pain we see things as they are..."

I did, once. The most I had at one time was 74 BTC, but times have been tough for me this past year, and I've had to fall back on savings to support myself. It didn't help that my mother lost her house to foreclosure about 18 months ago...

The saddest part is that the house now sits empty and useless is falling into disrepair, because the bank can't sell it. Very few people can afford to buy a New England house in her former neighborhood in this economy.

Fixed that for you.

The gains are locked in the moment the Bitcoin enters an address for which you are the sole holder of the private keys. They are locked in by the inevitability of the way this game plays out.

The human eye evolved in an aquatic environment. As such, it is full of fluid and therefore FAR from ideal in non-aquatic environments, such as ours. Evolution is the only explanation that sensibly explains the human eye.

Unless there is a god, but (s)he's retarded. Scary thought.

Getting back on topic, regarding American Education. Here is a great book:

Wise words; sound advice.

Me. I have 8 BTC and feel confident that I'm going to be doing extremely well within 3-5 years, if I can just find a way to maintain my current income. Tough in this economy, many of my friends' companies are doing layoffs and I'm looking for work.

That is a myth, and is wholly untrue. Hobbes was an idiot who totally misunderstood human nature. Read Sex at Dawn.

I'm sure the noble families of the feudal age thought the same thing, oblivious to the endless suffering of their peasants. If you're an American or European white person (especially male), you're living in a bubble of privilege. You're clueless to the reality of the lives of most people on Earth.
Life is not so great for the folks who make your clothes in Bangladesh, or the kids who assemble your electronics in Guangzhou, or the wage-slaves who harvest your coffee beans, or the undocumented migrant workers in your own nation. Ask them what they think of capitalism.

Oh wait, you don't care. Far easier to remain blissfully ignorant, apathetic, and tacitly complicit in their suffering, while in utter denial about your own.

Not even close, no. Being poor does not exempt you from the power relations inherent in violence-backed capitalism. Quite the opposite.

I know it's hard to fathom in your brainwashed myopia, but for a looooooong time (about 500,000 years, actually), Homo Sapiens supported each other without the need for money. Love and reciprocity were all that were necessary.

Capitalism has existed on this planet for an unbelievably tiny length of time when viewed on an evolutionary timescale.

Read this:



And this:

Fixed that for you.

Computer chips were once vacuum tubes. Do you think these people could have imagined the modern microchip?



I doubt it. The past always seems incomprehensible to the people of the future, I see no reason why THAT rule would not apply in 2020.

I'll let Rust Cohle answer that for me, few have ever said it better.

"If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, than brother that person is a piece of shit, and I'd like to get as many of them out in the open as possible."
"What's it say about life? You've gotta get together and tell yourselves stories that violate every law of the universe, just to get through the goddamn day? What's that say about your reality?"
"People are so goddamn frail they'd rather put a coin in a wishing well than buy dinner."
"Certain linguistic anthropologists think that religion is a language virus that rewrites pathways in the brain; dulls critical thinking."

-----

The parallels between nation-state indoctrination into fiat and debt-slavery and religious indoctrination into godfear slavery are clear as crystal for those of us who have survived the painful process of auto-deprogramming the lies and myths of our sick mother culture.
In the end all forms of controlling human beings comes down to making them afraid. Fear. Fear of god's wrath, fear of prison, fear of poverty, fear of homelessness, fear of state-violence, fear of loneliness, shame, guilt, stigmatization, and social rejection.

All suffering is rooted in fear, all fear is rooted in violence and survival insecurity. Systematic violence is aided by superstition as superstition inhibits reason, and fear inhibits compassion.

Reason and compassion are the cures to all the ills of human society. Utopia waits just outside the dark tunnel of a world governed by violence and fear.
If we want our species to live in a world governed by reason instead of violence - ruled by compassion instead of fear, there is only way to move forward.

We must make decent food, shelter, healthcare, and education [And I don't mean nation-state indoctrination-schooling] available to all human beings as a birthright.

The plain fact is, humanity can do better than capitalism.

Yours in solidarity and compassion,

World Citizen Beliathon

Who gives a fuck about what most Americans think? Most Americans believe in angels. Most Americans are clueless slaves who think they're free. Most Americans still believe in fucking capitalism for fuck's sake!
Most 'Muricans still believe in the American Dream - a system that through them overboard thirty fucking years ago, they can't see what's right in front of their goddamn faces.

Bitcoin is the sovereign global currency of Earth. The indoctrinated obedient masses of China, USA, Russia, Iceland, and all the other nations will follow the herd when it is stampeding out of the burning forests of fiat into the cooling oasis of crypto.
Human beings are social creatures, they always follow the herd. The only question, dear reader, is where in that herd do you want to find yourself? At the front of the pack, or trailing at the end, closest to the flames?

There's only so much water in that Oasis.

"If you can't beat em, join em!"

PayPal knows they're beaten, they didn't get rich by being naive.

Credits cards will far harder to come by when the next Dollar-debt-bubble bursts.

I've already had my credit card rights rescinded by Bank of Evil America, it was a Platinum Plus and I've been with that bank for 15 years, since they bought Fleet. Banks just don't give a fuck anymore, I'm apparently too risky to do business with now because I have student loan debt.

Crypto is going to fuck their whole evil system up, and that's why I love it.

He's set for life with 350 BTC.

You'll be set for life with 50 BTC. If you can hold onto it long enough, you'll be set for life with 5 BTC.

It will be the invention of a true general artificial intelligence that will one day render Moore's theory irrelevant. That or nanotechnology chips.

Correct.

That is not an accurate statement at all.

"The Internet's takeover of the global communication landscape was almost instant in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, already 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated info by 2007"

14 years from 1% to 97%

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_internet

Perhaps both tragically and amusingly, this pattern will continue repeating itself over and over for at least the next few years.

"oohh, $600, that's way too expensive for me" [even though you can very easily buy $6 worth of bitcoin today].

"ohh, $2500?! That's WAYYY too much money for me." [even though you will still be able to buy $50 or $500 worth of bitcoin a year from now].

"ohh, $10,000 per coin? Bitcoin was never this expensive before, I'll wait for it to come back down." [even though it will only ever keep going up year after year].

P.S.
I went all-in via several buys when BTC was between 80 and 140. I told most of my friends and family to do the same. None of them did. I held.
I implored them to buy in when it reached 300, still none of them did. Now I've stopped bothering. I'll be rich enough for all of us anyway, soon.