So these days we had a TROM-Cast, like we usually do, but this time we discuss about our new trade-free.org project. It got the attention of some people, and new ones participated for the cast challenging the idea. To make it super-mega short, I “created” this path now for “social change” via “trade as the source of most problems”, and some think is not a good idea. I’ll keep it all extremely brief since I already wrote thousand of pages on the topic.

How I got here?

1. Since high-school I realized that money fucks things up. Pretty much all problems were due to money. No money for food, rent, science, exploration, whatever. My parents had lots of debt and I saw what influence money had over people. I was angry.

2. I saw Future by Design in 2006 – it was about an old man saying the same things: the monetary system creates these bad behaviors and we need to go beyond money, and build a different world. He called it The Venus Project. I agreed. I was intrigued. I forgot about it.

3. In the meantime I opened a personal blog where I was writing about today’s problems and how they are mostly created by money and that we can think of a different kind of society without money. I didn’t remember TVP much. I was writing. I liked it.

4. In 2009ish I saw Zeitgeist Addendum, a continuation of the first Zeitgeist that caught my attention years before. I saw this old man again and I loved it. It resonated with me a lot. Fuck yeah, there are people out there thinking the same as I do and want to change this world. I felt happy and motivated. In the documentary it was emphasized even more that money is the problem and a solution could be this Resource Based Economy envisioned by the old guy. But the old guy kinda made it clear that this is just his view of this kind of world, not like the world should look like that. He seemed very humble. The following 2 years I wrote more stuff, watched/read everything with and about TVP, and I realized that maybe it is possible to create a different kind of world beyond the monetary system. I was dreaming. I liked that.

5. In 2010 I decided to make a series of videos about all of this since I felt it was nothing of the sort out there. I spent 1 year watching and reading and listening to whatever it was online about TVP, TZM, and the like. So much that I remember (even now) some videos word by word. I was engaged.

6. In 2011 I released the 14 hours documentary I made. My idea was this: present the problem and then what solutions there are to this problem. The problem: the monetary system. The solutions? Multiple, although I focused a lot on TVP since it was the only coherent idea about how a future beyond money could look like.

Now I knew: the monetary system is the problem and TVP is a solution for it. Moreover, I understood that scarcity creates systems of barter/trade/money, and that the solution (generalized) is abundance. But I didn’t get a very clear picture of none of these from TVP/TZM. I refined further: scarcity and poor education created this monetary system, and the general solution seems to be abundance (a resource based economy as a model for it) and a scientific education. I became more knowledgeable. I felt like growing up mentally.

7. Next 2-3 years I orbited around such ideas and I started to dislike something: the notion of a Resource Based Economy. Why? For one, because the term implied too much emphasis on resources and this creates confusion (people associate it with “going back to the ol’ living”), and second because people misinterpreted what TVP was talking about (I would say). I always saw RBE as TVP. Same thing. Like, “Look, TVP’s idea of an RBE!”. But some people were saying that an RBE is not necessarily TVP, although not really showing any other RBE out there except interpretations of TVP’s RBE. TVP and RBE were splitting apart in people’s heads. I was also becoming skeptical about TVP’s ability to “build this world”, and actually I never thought that’s how it is going to happen. Even in TROM I said: if most people understand such ideas, this kind of society will emerge. I became doubtful and a bit confused. It was a war of words out there and interpretations.

8. From 2012 to late 2016 I had the ‘opportunity’ to work closely with TVP. I was excited! It was happening. I managed TVP’s magazine and helped them with a lot of stuff. I wrote a lot for the project. I wrote more and better sourced articles than on my blog.

But TVP and those following the project became so obsessed with taking TVP too literally that it made me sick. These people proclaim to have “the solution” for this monetary system, yet they lack any relevant details about it. You just have to trust them. This attitude sparked many to dream about this new world and a transition towards it. I felt like they forgot that TVP’s RBE was a reaction to the “monetary system” problem and it was A solution – at least that is what I got from Jacque… TVP people focused too much on this RBE that it got ridiculous to the point of hearing some proclaiming an X year transition plan. I didn’t even mention RBE in these years since I found it ridiculous to be taken as literally as “this is the world we will build”. These 4 years or so working with TVP made things more confusing for me. It was not anymore a problem needing a solution, like the monetary system needing to be changed into something else, but it was “follow TVP and RBE”. From “one of the solutions”, TVP became THE SOLUTION in many people’s heads. I didn’t like it. I started to doubt TVP’s intentions quite a lot. I always felt like TVP is a great inspirational project but didn’t think that they really proclaim to actually build this world themselves. That I did not see as feasible at all.

9. One book that changed everything for me: The Money Game and Beyond. I said, look….my initial thinking was that money is the source of most problems and we need to go beyond that somehow. TVP’s RBE is a great set of ideas, but not to be taken so literally since they had nothing to back up such a massive plan. They struggled to composed a few teams here and there for infinitely smaller task than building a city, and were all very inefficient from my experience….if TVP can’t even put together a team to make a good website, how in the world are they going to build the world? TVP blew 200.000 dollars (from donations) on a movie script…imagine that. 200.000 dollars gone, and no movie script. I found them to be very incompetent and yet they pretended to be capable to “build the world”. I honestly don’t want to be a jerk with them. I love TVP’s ideas, but they got too cocky about this “We, and only we, can build this new world” attitude. So then I said: I don’t know anymore what the fuck we are we doing….so let’s write a book about this monetary system “problem”. I want to understand what this is and if/how others tried to change it for the past 200 years, plus how TVP compares with that. And boi’ … I learned a lot! 1 year of intense work, and my views changed (read as in: improved). How?

a. Money is just one of the many trades out there. That I got since before writing the book, but I didn’t realize how confusing it has become over the years to focus on money and not on trade. People got so confused that they thought a solution to money is bitcoin or other forms of trade. The focus on money was thus very confusing. People around TVP didn’t even understand (at least some) why cryptocurrencies might be a bad idea for example. So, focusing on money was super confusing and very incorrect. Therefore I switched to “trade” from that moment on. The monetary system was not the problem anymore, the trade system was. I hoped that TVP would switch to that too, to cut from the confusion, but they never did. They focused on this “monetary system” entirely.

b. Scarcity leads to trades. That was the conclusion. When you have everything you need and want, you don’t need to trade anymore. I knew that before, but I solidified that idea into my head quite a lot and I explained it in length.

c. The solution is still abundance, like I presented in TROM Documentary, but I better defined it in the book. I can summarize it as: abundance means fulfilling most requests. TVP does a bad job, in my view, to detail what abundance may mean, so I felt it was necessary to explain it better. TVP never improved on this aspect as far as I know, even after this book that was written for TVP Magazine.

d. TVP is not such a unique set of ideas. Others like Technocracy, Communism, Socialism, Metabolism, or Bucky Fuller, had very similar ideas. Very similar!

e. Top-down change seems not possible. The world is too complex. Despite Jacque saying TVP is neither top-down or bottom-up, it seems to me that for the past years TVP is certainly a Top-Down approach. Again, they proclaim to have the blueprints for this new kind of world and they want to build (demo) it. Technocracy proclaimed the same. I became very skeptical about this approach. Maybe, maybe, I agreed that a test city can showcase the technology and some aspects of human behavior in action in such an environment, but I could not take TVP seriously anymore. It started to smell like any other organizations before it who imagined this “brave new world”.

f. Focusing on a problem is more important than any solution out there. This didn’t grow as much in my head back then, but it will in the next years, so much that it became the central point of my understanding of the world.

In all, this book made me realize that trade is the source of most problems (sure, scarcity drives trade), and that imagining the future is just that: imagining the future. Change does not come like that, by planning like TVP does. Others tried and failed and for good reasons since the society is too complex for a group of humans to try and re-organize it. The overall solution still seems to be abundance so that we make scarcity irrelevant. However, I started to also get that you can sell abundance in today’s world….and that was confusing…somehow there seems to be trade even when there is abundance…hm….ok…weird…maybe we need abundance everywhere so we don’t see this kind of an outcome. Anyways, I finished the book.

It was the book that made me 100% go from: Money as the problem and TVP-RBE as model for a solution, to Trade as the problem and Abundance + Education as a solution. And maybe that we could try and build some test cities to prove that this kind of world is possible, but I completely gave up to the ‘dream’ that TVP is capable of such a task (if I ever had any such “dream”). I pushed TVP away from my mind, mainly because I could not agree that TVP is anything more than an inspirational idea. To me TVP was/is an inspirational idea, a model of how a society that makes trade obsolete could look like, based on an educated guess. But that’s all.

Although I presented money (and slightly mentioned barter and such) as the problem since 2011 documentary, and abundance + scientific education as a solution, I had a very weak understanding of these notions up until I wrote this book. Therefore, this book made the situation a lot more clear to me. 370 pages of mental cleansing.

10. The biggest mental change. Breaking up from TVP allowed me to be more mentally free and express myself better and in my own rhythm. Something “lurked” inside me from the last book…..this thing about focusing on the problem not the solutions….trade not money…..and what about this scarcity and abundance thing…are these that important? People want an RBE…some want the money free party….some TVP’s RBE specifically….some a gift or open economy….some want a new currency….wtf…confusing. So, I said, let’s spend another year or more focusing more on the problem. Because if we don’t know the problem in great detail, then what the fuck are we doing?

I wrote The Origin of Most Problems (over 1 thousand pages long), and I learned a shit ton:

a. This “trade” thing is bloody important. Many people have no idea how many trades there are out there. The “Money Game” is irrelevant at this point. It is the Trade Game that we need to be aware of and fight against. Data trade, influence trade, social credits, cryptocurrencies, the world of trade is much bigger than I realized in the previous book. And in today’s world is crucial that we get this, else we will get tricked by this massive tsunami of currencies and trades that is inundating our society everywhere. I can’t stress enough how important “trade” is if you want to know what creates most problems in the world.

b. Trade is not solely a result of scarcity – trade can be seen in abundant systems like online platforms that are an abundant stream of content for the users, yet users are paying for that with their data. I give many examples in the book. I realized this: we already live in an abundant environment from clothes to software, food to services, and everything in between. It’s just that we distribute this abundance in a very very unequal manner. Mostly via trades. People need to trade to get this abundance. We rarely have scarcity in this world. So saying that scarcity creates the problems is confusing, despite you calling it “artificial scarcity”. Like there are so many cars yet I don’t have one ‘cause I can’t get it. Call that as “artificial scarcity”, but is confusing. You better define that situation as: there is an abundance of cars but I can only get one if I TRADE for it. If that car would be available as trade-free for me, then that would be a good situation. An abundant one for me in terms of cars. If all cars would be available as trade-free to everyone, then that would immediately mean an abundance for all. See? We don’t need to focus on scarcity. Focus on trades and it makes things much easier to define and more clear. Citizenship, social credits, and the like are also trades that are forced upon you. Hard to explain that with “scarcity”. People are forced to give away their freedom for accessing whatever (roads, water, etc.). It is a trade-off. It is a forced trade.

c. If scarcity is seen as the problem and we want to fix it, then abundance is a great solution to it, except it is unrealistic to do anything with that. Some people told me: look, youtube is an abundant stream of videos for people but the reason they still want trades (like data mining or attention grabbing) is because they LACK something. Google doesn’t have access to what it needs and wants, and so it engages into trades to be able to get that. It is true, however it is pointless. Google can and will always grow and want more, so in that sense they can never have access to what they need and want. It can grow indefinitely. So what do you propose? To give Google what they need and want in order to make them not want to engage into trades? The theory is nice, the practicality of doin’ something with it is null.

Probably TVP people might say that this is the reason we need to restructure our entire society so that entities like Google will not even exist in this abundant society. Again, nice theory and I agree, but that translates to me into: “Wait for the BIG change, one that TVP will bring on a global scale”. Sounds too unrealistic and leaves people in limbo. Understand that I agree with the theory, but there is no practicality to it unless you dream about this different kind of society that TVP envisions.

A second argument I’ve heard: Google wants people’s data because data is scarce. If data would be abundant, Google won’t want that. This is a bizarre argument that is again on the fantasizing realm. For one, data is either abundant or it will never be abundant. You pick whichever you want to believe. So one can say data is already abundant for so many – but google decides to use it to make profits (trade), because Google has the means to build these big bloody servers and AI systems to take advantage of this abundant data that anyone has access to (think of billions of websites, can you create a search engine out of them that is better than google?). On the other hand, data can never be abundant. If Google had access to all the data it wants, then tomorrow it needs more data because it is another day and more data is being produced by people. Of course Google cannot have access to ALL THE DATA it needs/wants. Ever. Like data means anything: heartbeats, people having sex, breathing, walking, sneezing, gadgets and all their sensors, whateverthefuck. These mental-theories are ridiculous.

Actually these mindsets pushed me away from TVP even more, since TVP people seem to like to give these “out of this world” examples and analogies that can never be true. “What if Google had all it needs and wants, will it trade? What if Google had access to all the data?” What if sharks had legs, would they participate to marathons? Ridiculous thoughts that have nothing to do with the real world.

d. Speaking of being unrealistic, I realized even more how unrealistic it is to want to change the society in this TVP-way of building a “model society” and having this BIG change. I looked at what changed society for the past thousands of years and it was never a big change. And please don’t argue that: “well the past is not the present, maybe now we can do it in this big way.” Because if that’s the only argument then it is meaningless. What changed society were problems. We had the X problem and it bothered us, until we came with a fix for it. That’s how it happens, and it happens in small steps. Lots of solutions. So, if say we focus on scarcity as the problem, then we might be able to eventually create abundant systems here and there, although people could still make a trade off of them, however this seems like a bloody hard task to do. How can you honestly do that? Unless you have a shit ton of power in this world I don’t see such systems emerging anywhere.

Here is a simple example:

Back to Youtube with their abundant system and trades.

Adam says: “Scarcity is the problem in this case! Of data, of what youtube wants and needs.”

Tio: “I agree Adam, but what can we do about it?”

I have no realistic answer for this. Do you? If so please tell me, Adam. Can we say: let’s create an abundant Youtube service? Well, it is already abundant for people. It leaves me without a solution.

Eve says: “Trade is the problem in this case! Of data, of attention, of currency.”

Tio: “I agree with you Eve, but what can we do about it?”

Eve: We have to create a trade-free video platform or stop the trades with Youtube. Oh, look, Archive.org. Peertube. Webtorrent and Bittorrent. Archive.org pushes no trades into people’s faces despite them lacking a lot in terms of resources or not even having an abundant content stream like youtube does. Compare Archive with Youtube and you’ll see how one is much better than the other. Youtube incentivize moronic content and competitiveness, Archive does not. Archive won’t push you to stay as much as possible on their platform because they need attention, or ban videos because it is inappropriate for their advertisers. That’s the difference!

So my point here is, that if you want realistic solutions then take trade away from goods and services as much as possible. A video platform that wants something from the users (like data, attention coins, whatever) is going to become like Youtube, regardless if they provide an abundant service. A video platform that does not engage into trades with the users, it is like the Internet Archive. And so it will happen to any domain in this society.

Less trades, better: science, entertainment, human values, products, etc.. Less trades, less: crime, waste, corruption, and the like.

The chicken and egg dilemma.

This is an interesting discussion but maybe it is pointless. Is it trade the source of most problems? Is it scarcity? Is it profit? Is it ownership? We can argue for years, but one thing you should give me is a path forward if we focus on any of these. Because at the moment what I know for sure is that focusing on trade will, for one, highlight a problem that creates a billion other problems (so the focus is on point), and second that it allows me, and you, and others to DO SOMETHING about it. I am creating trade-free services like TROM Tools, I can advertise my site as being trade-free because I want nothing from anyone, and if you give me 1 billion dollars I can do a billion things with that in this direction. Actually I will write an entire book about what would I do with a few billion dollars if I had them.

I think is a lot more unrealistic to think that any organization out there can create a small-scale world to showcase how the future will be, and then that to spark a world-wide change. Sound intriguing, but not realistic at all in my view, and I think my view is supported by history.

Ok. Enough.

It took me many years to realize these things and I best explain them in the materials I created over the years, especially in The Origin of Most Problems book. If anyone disagrees I ask to please first read that book because that is my argument. Else is like I would decide to not listen to 90% of what you, whoever you are, say.

A brief message to TVP-folks:

Look guys and girls, I don’t disagree on fundamentals with Fresco at all. I was a TVP watchdog for many years and Jacque and Roxanne themselves told me several times that I understand TVP so well in their view. Jacque was perhaps the only human that had a big impact on my way of thinking and I fuckin’ miss the old dude. I wish he would have lived for 600 years. But I feel like TVP today is not what I understood form Jacque. To me Jacque was a sharp minded, well-educated and humble person, who wanted to show us, the mortals, what is the problem in our society and what society we could build. This is why he focused so much on the behavior aspect to showcase that this fucked up monetary system makes us despicable, and we need to change that environment in order to change these behaviors. His TVP-RBE vision was an educated vision about the future but even he said that’s not how it should be built. If the concept/fundamentals behind his vision were abundance and an intelligent management of Earth’s resources as a solution for our current system, and TVP currently pushes the same concepts, then TVP is doing a good job. But I feel like TVP is taking Fresco’s ideas too literally, and regardless, as I explained, I don’t see this path forward with abundance leading anywhere realistically. In theory it sounds great and I agree with the concepts 100%. In practice I doubt it sounds like anything.

BUT regardless:

1. I honestly cannot see anyone able to create a model of society and that to be relevant in any way….I just can’t because I know about medical studies, and Bittorrent, and GMO debates, and Vimeo, and traditions, corruption, sports or whatever other trillion things that make up a society, and I feel like you cannot model anything that would be relevant, even if you build a “test” city. On top of that I don’t think there is any piece of unique  technology or implementation out there that TVP can demo. Modular designs, self driving cars, automation, are all demoed in today’s world in abundance. Thus, I think that you cannot “model” – showcase – how a society could look like, or that this is relevant really.

2. Any organization that gets billions in funding, because you need a lot of money for such a project, is subject to trades. I find it hard to believe that anyone would give a lot of money to any such project and not want anything else in return. So I fear that such a massive project, even if funded, will have many strings attached to many organizations and rich individuals. I even heard Roxanne talking about these model cities being like a theme park and selling tickets for those who want to visit. I think that’s a very slippery slope.

3. I observed how TVP is incapable of many things in terms of doing something. They could not create a movie script with 200.000 dollars. I cannot trust that they can create a model of a society with a few millions dollars. I am sorry, but I simply can’t.

I don’t want to spend time debating over these topics, unless people also listen. I listened to TVP for at least 13 years now. Maybe others should to listen to TROM a bit too. Then discuss. But be open minded and ready to upgrade your “operating system”.

In the end, if our method with “trade” succeeds in making the world a bit better, then amazing. If TVP’s method works for the same purposes, amazing. But I am not waiting for TVP and RBE, I am doing something now, that will both educate and help people, and also project this big plan underneath the skin of this approach (of this massive change to a Trade-Free society – eventually), because removing trades from this complex world-wide society seems way more realistic to me than trying to rebuild it from scratch. What we do is volunteering combined with a protesting mind about this fucked up society. Addressing the (or if you want to say “a major”) root cause of today’s problems is not patchwork.

If TVP builds the world, then I’ll still pay attention to trades within their system 😉 – ’cause where there are trades, there are problems. Cheers!

HEY! Mind you, this is posted in “rants”. I allow myself to let my brain vomit when it comes to rants. So take it as that :). This is my personal place where I am allowed to say whatever I want :P. This is why such posts are not going to be shared on TROM networks except TROM Curated News ;). Anyways….

I had enough with The Venus Project. They are a company that does not care about so called “changing the world”. They only care about TVP and they have become properly cultish.

Since I left TVP in 2016 I didn’t care much about them. I focused on TROM and we grew an amazing project. So many people are involved now with TROM and all of them are so friendly and hard-working. I didn’t have time to even think about TVP. But I said I will add their newsletter RSS feed to TROM Curated News and their Youtube channel to TROM Curated Videos so that we try to still inform people about them. But for the past months I lost my last marbles of respect for TVP. For the past months several Points of Contact for TVP got in contact with me and complained a lot about TVP. Similar stuff I’ve been through with TVP for many years. Volunteers’ work is ignored, they are treated badly (almost as if they are employed by TVP), and how cultish TVP is (they said). I had a relief-laughter knowing that now I have nothing to do with TVP, so fuck them with their backwards attitudes. I knew they are like that, so it was no surprise. But a series of events clicked inside my brain and I said “Fuck them completely” and I removed them from TROM Curated News and honestly I won’t even mention their website to anyone. Why? What events?

1. TVP volunteers continuing to complain about TVP – these are people that I know and are super nice and friendly and hard-working people and some helped/help TROM a lot and it hurts to see TVP shitting on their motivation and work.

2. I hear that TVP is more and more pushy with “asking” (cough’ – forcing) volunteers to sign all kinds of papers, like Non-Disclosure papers (something I was asked to sign several times); a recent one in particular is to sign that you won’t help any other RBE organization. Like, what? Are these people crazy?

3. I hear that TVP “high-rank-officials” ( 🙂 ) are asking those who also help TROM why are they donig that and not helping TVP more? Maybe because you don’t let them TVP?

4. I hear that in let’s say a particular interview/doco that I am about to appear TVP-close-friends are fussy if/about Roxanne should appear in that interview too because Tio is in’it. Such a sick way of thinking.

5. I posted this on FB which was an image that said the following:

It was from a TVP Mag that I wrote and Fresco and Roxanne approved. Of course it stirred the TVP fanatics’ hive and one of them in particular started to troll me saying I am irrelevant and attacking me personally. Unfortunately they deleted the comments, I am surprised to see now…So the TVP fanboys don’t even like when you post about them. How you dare?!

6. They don’t care about “creating a better world”. We started to make a series of videos called TROM Poems. Seb is doing it. Great series about short important topics like wars, poverty, corruption, etc.. He mentions at the end of each video TROM, TVP, and TZM. Seb is such a polite guy and he asked me if he should remove TZM and TVP since we are making these for TROM and I said it is up to him. He left them there. It was equally ok for me. I told him to also share these videos with TZM and TVP facebook pages since these videos are universally important. TZM shared a few, TVP said something like: these are great videos but we only share videos that are about TVP and with our footage so come work with us. They are so ego-centric that they refuse to share some “great” (in their views) videos, unless it is ONLY about them. Surprisingly the same guy who responded to this, was the guy who trolled our above TROM facebook post. Such “amazing” official TVP characters!

Aren’t we all, these organizations, trying to highlight the immense injustice in this world and point to solutions? How can you tell me TVP cares about such things when they refuse to share such videos? Actually look at their social networks and their website and you’ll see that they super rarely or never share anything unless it is from them or only about them. I know this too well since I worked with them for 4 years and I realized this very quickly.

Oh, I apologize, TVP shares other people’s work on their “recommended books” page. Well, you have to buy those books. And well, TVP makes money off of that through Amazon partnership. Actually pretty much every adblocker blocks that TVP page and years ago I made them aware of that and told them to put there a frickin’ message if they want for people to see these recommended books. It took a while but they put this message:

I see no “can you please disable”. Straight simple: “you can disable”. haha what a great attitude. But why TVP? Why is adblocker blocking these? Do they track me? Am I trading more than my money to buy these books? Of course, I am trading my data to Amazon through TVP’s website.

7. TVP is just a marketing machine. Speaking of selling stuff. The next thing that almost made my frustration with TVP explode was when I’ve read their latest newsletter and I realized that pretty much all of it is advertising their on-sale videos and products. I then looked at all of their newsletters over the past year and more than 60% are dedicated to advertise their on-sale products. Marketing! There you go:

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Not only that but they are charlatans about them. They offer “free” ‘lectures’. But there is a catch (see, no trade-free?): you have to give them your data, and a lot of that:

An here’s their “privacy policy” – is TVP Apple? Who reads this?:

And in their “terms and conditions“, besides the carnival-mess of a lawyer-istic language we find:

Their excuse that “we are forced to comply with the law” that I heard from Roxanne many times is, in my view, non-compliant (to use their language) with the values that TVP tries to project through their documentaries and lectures. They could at least mention that they have to put these on their site to comply with the law. I would even apologize for putting this charlatan mess on the website.

…..but TVP uses lawyers a lot. Again, maybe they are forced to, but damn this is so un-jacque.

If you look throughout their website you’ll see that they employ charlatan marketing tactics to sell stuff, like the .99-type of price. Here, and here:

And when they started the online store it was full of .99 price schemes. I insisted for them to give up on that. And finally they did the change for some products. But took them a while. And they still have such prices on their site.

8. The straw that broke the camel’s back. I saw that TVP only accepts volunteers that go through their training process now. Something akin to Scientology if you ask me. You have to go here and follow the many steps, videos, pages to read and quizzes. The “test” starts with:

TVP and its obsession with “levels of education”. Jacque talked about the nonsense of these things, but apparently TVP is crazy with these and pushes them onto everyone who wants to volunteer for TVP. Anyways, they have some 7 “levels” and their quiz is designed to not let you move to the next “round” until you complete the first, then second, and so forth. You are given a code that you have to add to the next quiz, and so forth. Man, these people are not joking! :)). The quiz questions range from very dumb to cultish.

Examples:

And my favorite:

Apparently no one but TVP aims to “prepare people for changes that lie ahead”. Just, wow.

An now happily sign the Non-Disclosure Agreement!!

You know what happens after that? From my 4+ years experience and lots of other people who were or still are volunteering for TVP: they will put you into a team or more; add you to lists; skype groups; you’ll talk and have to ask for permission; the stuff you do must be reviewed several times and will never be published; probably you’ll have to pass more quizzes and some “mentor” course to prove you are on par with TVP’s excellence. I even heard people saying that TVP told them to buy a $400 “package” from them with books and videos in order to become a volunteer.

Here’s a joke: how is TVP changing a light-bulb?

They send a newsletter asking for volunteers to help with it and for donations for a new light-bulb. Volunteers must go through a 5 step quiz, and several TVP website pages before submitting their request to become a volunteer. Once accepted, they sign a Non-Disclosure Document and are put into a skype group. They will debate what to name the light-bulb changing team and what logo to make for it. They won’t agree on the colors, but at one point they’ll have to submit the idea to a TVP supervisor. They wait a few months and after being dragged into several other skype and Facebook groups, they wonder how would Jacque change the light-bulb. Months later and the room is still dark, and those volunteers are dragged back into their normal life. One day Roxanne enters the room and observes there is no light-bulb. She asks if there are any volunteers helping with it. They decide to send a newsletter to ask for volunteers and for donations for a new light bulb. Volunteers must go through a 5 step quiz, and several TVP website pages before submitting their request to become a volunteer. Once accepted, they sign a Non-Disclosure Document and are put into…..

🙂 Admit it, it was funny! 🙂 And honestly it was true. That”s what I experienced with TVP.

I can rant about TVP enendlessly, but I need to stop. I’ll only mention one more random thing:

TVP used to say their phase 2 is a Major Motion Picture, but now they include “documentaries” to perhaps say that they are in phase 2 since the Major Motion Picture is nowhere in sight. TVP raised a shit load of money for the script of the movie, since I think 2009 or so, and basically fucked all of the money on different script writers and have no finished script many years later. Also, nearly zero transparency with the process.

What’s next? Phase 3 goes from “Experimental Research City” to “Digital Books and Experimental Research City”?

SO, all of this made me finally say: TVP, the organization, is just a company. That’s all.

They want to make money, they are all about TVP and nothing else, and they have become a cult with Jacque transformed into their cult leader. It smelled like that since 2012 when I first got to work with them, but I hoped that I have problems with my nose. Then others started to complain about the same smell. And now I am sure, the smell is real. I accept it and move away from it.

I will still talk about the idea of TVP and Jacque’s ideas, but bloody hell I don’t want to hear about anything else when it comes to TVP. This organization is worse, in many aspects, than Apple or Facebook. It is deceiving, non-transparent, aggressive at times, has many fanboys (the nice word for cult members), sells the “truth about the world” like any conspiracy-prone and money-grabbing and Facebook-liking organization that you see the Internet being full of. I am not sorry for saying all of this because it is true and I had enough. Why “be nice” with this organization? They are not nice with their volunteers or the rest of other organizations that are trying to help out.

Now that I kicked TVP in the butt, I accept kicks back because this is the rant section. So, go for it 🙂 – In a way rants are good. Let it out. But also, let it in.

So today I learned something that really bothered me and I am sure many people think it is stupid to get annoyed by this. But I think it says a lot about our culture. So I am using Riot, a great open source and decentralized messaging tool. It is awesome for teams so we use it for TROM. Send files, talk, chats (one on one) or rooms (multiple users), it even has video and audio calls as options. Awesome! Today I was making an account for someone and added that someone to one of our rooms in Riot and I realized that on her instance you could see whoever sees a message when you post it. I was like “WTF I never see that on my instance!”. Then I realized that for the past 2+ years since using Riot I had no clue that others can see when you see their messages. Apparently I disabled that from my Riot 2 years ago, but that option only hide this “feature” on my instance like I will not see who sees what, but others can see if I see a message. This is the Riot option:

In my mind that option, being disabled, should have hide my “watch activity” from others too. What’s the point to hide it from myself? It is nonsense.It is like choosing to be “invisible” but that’s only invisible for me and not for others…what!?

So, again, what Riot does is when someone is posting a message and you see it, it adds your avatar besides the message to showcase that “this guy saw the message”. In my view this is a useless feature and I am going to rant about it because it is something the internet users nowadays are so used to.

For one, this Riot opt-in opt-out thing felt very un-intuitive to me as I explained, but second I feel betrayed and embarrassed for not realizing this. I have this weird habit of “getting rid of notifications” on my laptop. So, when I receive any email I quickly open it in a new tab in Thunderbird to read and respond later (hours or days). I simply hate to see “unread” stuff on my computer. I do the same with Riot whenever someone posts a message I click the notification that opens Riot and then minimize Riot – I have a mouse with 20 buttons so I do such things lightning fast since I have customized those buttons for such actions. If someone posts on Riot I click it to stop the notification and at times quickly peek to see if there’s something worth my immediate attention, then minimize Riot. This behavior made me look a bit crazy perhaps to the others when every message was quickly “seen” by me and then I got back to them (replied) in a few days time when I had time to deal with that message. For me it was a quick way to get rid of notifications and to also see if there’s something that needs my immediate attention. At times I was talking to someone and I was like “Ok I am out now, it is late, bye!” and then I realized “Shit, I have this awesome idea about tromsite.com” and I spent 2 more hours doing that and the same person may send me a message in that time and I do my “open Riot and minimize” thing to get rid of it until tomorrow or later on when I can answer, and that person may have seen (I now realize) that I did not go to sleep or whatever haha which is very funny to me now when I think about it. It is like you are lying or it gives the wrong impression. It s like if anyone asks me if I ever use FB I say no, but if you would see my entire browser activity  you’ll see that at times I visited or will visit FB for reasons other than the vast majority – like for TROM page, or to check something with a project that I find, etc.  – however if you would only see how many times I visited FB for the past month you’ll say “Aha, well you at times visit FB” because you see a simple output that has no meaning if you don’t know my intentions, and the same is for this shitty “message seen by” – you have no clue what that really means. Probably I didn’t even read that message, maybe I had Riot opened and I was sleeping. Whatever.

Why does this matter to me though? Isn’t this nonsense? It is but that’s not what bothers me, what bothers me is that I feel like I lived in a room that had glass walls and only now I realized it. I trusted Riot not to be the fuckin’ Facebook with its “live lives” kind of concepts. I do not want a “mark as seen” for my emails, my messages, my online presence, simply because I don’t fuckin’ want that kind of online life.

I remember the early 2000s. I was spending lots of time in IRC chats, if anyone remembers. They looked like this:

The good ol’ days when your username was @Hacker_Penguin or @M1trix67. You chose your name on the fly and hoped no one in the IRC has that name, else you could not choose it. You could talk whatever you wanted and create your own channel. At times admins would ban you but you had to be a filthy mouth for that to happen. And you could get back with another username in seconds – ahahah. No one could see if you watch the chat (read it), no one knew your “real” name, see your profile, or anything of the sort. It provided you with a comfy anonymity that is hard to explain nowadays. You would talk for hours with strangers about all kinds of things. I spent hours on IRC and I had my own channels where me and my online friends would meet from 18:00 to like 19:00 because the Internet was limited to a few hours a day. I felt like exploring a new world without anyone seeing that I am a 12 year old in my living room. It was a brain to brain experience. Simple and no engagements 🙂

I also remember those days exploring the “web” by typing in the URL bar all kinds of websites at random to see what I find: chair.com, whale.com, what.com, earth.com, everything dot come. No search engine was popular or known by me at that time. Then I would save those websites (I learned how to do that) and explore them more offline when I had no internet connection. It was my own world and I LOVED it. No one would bother me. My computer, my world! With or without the Internet it always felt like my world. At worse, the internet was a window to another world, but a tinned window that I could close and open whenever I wanted and no one could get inside my house. Like a tinned window from a 5th floor apartment that I looked through.

Today the internet and computers could not be more different. My Android phone feels like it is rented, where apps and settings are added and changed at the will of the company who sold the phone. Many apps I cannot uninstall, for some I cannot turn off the notifications. So I gave up on that. I use my phone as a phone to keep in touch with my parents. The rest I give no shit – maybe except when I use it for GPS navigation. So my laptop is my window to the internet and my laptop listens to me. I have a customized Manjaro Linux installed (TROM-Jaro) and I can control pretty much every aspect of it. It is my best friend! The apps I have installed are of the same nature. They don’t do things I don’t want them to do.

So back to Riot and the “see me” internet culture: maybe I am “old fashioned” but I want the ol’ internet back where you used it not for relationships, but to explore the world, learn, scratch your curiosity, and also collaborate on projects and build stuff. Relationships were offline. I want to be anonymous online. If I can choose any identity why in the fuckin’ world would I choose my “real” one? Let me exert the powers I have in this digital realm! And let this internet world be something I control on my own computer, not the other way around! When I write and post a message to a chat, I do that voluntary and I can control that. BUT when I read a message on a chat that’s not something I have any choice in the sense that if I open the chat and the chat recognized that action then will display that I have read the message, so for fuck’sakes I have no saying in that. Maybe I opened the chat and I wanted to do something else (use the menu, or I opened it by mistake) so don’t forcefully say that I have read a message just because I put a window into focus.

I honestly hate ping-pong discussions, and live discussions on video, audio, or chat are always like that. Yeah I still like TROM-Cast because it may not be like that since we discuss subjects that are not “small talks” and subjects that I know a good deal about – but still I prefer writing or email.  If someone sends me an email I have hours or days to think what to reply. In some cases some email clients can check if the other one has opened the email, which is horrifying for me for the same reasons. Like, give me a fuckin’ break and don’t broadcast that I opened the bloody email. Give me some basic privacy. It is almost like FB saying “Hey, Maya is on the toilet and she saw your live video with a grumpy face” kind of thing. Do we want that? Well, is not far off! Like, give people some fuckin’ privacy in their own homes on their own devices. What if we could see on any website, and any FB profile and youtube video who is watching it. Imagine you watch a youtube video and that would be publicly broadcasted to everyone who is watching that video (maybe that’s even a thing – it is for sure on FB). I understand that in some cases people might enjoy this kind of live interactions when it comes to ping-pong discussions where they chit-chat, but this should not be the default, this should be an optional thing you have to enable!

Maybe I am bitching about it because I don’t really chit-chat online – I engage in discussions that require you to think about your responses so I am bothered if a message is marked as “seen by me” because it pushes me into a ping-pong discussion like “Hey, Tio saw your message, you know…” – I feel like it forces me to reply quicker and I hate that!

The slope is very slippery and big companies are responsible for the irresponsible attitude towards privacy from users’ perspective. Yes, it may not matter to you normal FB chit-chatty always-live and feeling-lucky creature, but for one your attitude is simply a burp from the crap you have eaten from companies like FB that want your attention and want your engagement NOW and NOW, and second because you accept these then companies in all domains will feel ok with implementing more and more privacy invader features and now even an app like Riot follows suite and wants to be “cool-man” and implements these FB like nonsensicalities. To me privacy is not a way to become safer from the “dark sides of the inter-web”, since I don’t think anyone can harm me just because they can see some details about my real life, but to me privacy is a way to be comfortable with exploring the internet without ever feeling like someone is watching behind your back and you are broadcasting every move you make. If you know that your friends and family are seeing what you post on FB, then that will strangle your creativity and curiosity and you will self-filter yourself because you are a “public persona” now, one that has a real identity that can face consequences if you post/say something that’s taboo.

The main reasons I was able to make my own blog and write whatever the fuck I wanted and be 100% sincere, then TROM, was because no one was looking over my shoulder and I was not concerned about anyone knowing the “real” me so I could express myself exactly like I wanted to without hearing “my friends” barking reactions at me for what I was posting online, or feel under-pressure to not say some things. Anonymity online is the essence of sincerity and creativity for sincere and creative people, and a breathing ground of trolling for trolls. I care more about those sincere and creative people.

My point here with this rant is that today’s internet forces you to broadcast yourself to the world and I personally think this is crippling people’s ability to be sincere, creative, and unleash their curiosity. It creates ping-pong discussions at the expense of thoughts. No one needs thoughts in the internet era – they need views, engagement, clicks! “Don’t think about this message or post, we want you to REACT! NOW! PLEASE! DO IT!” That makes them profits! So please don’t create an internet where you force my hand to tell the world that I’ve “seen a message”, where I am, what I do, with whom, what I watch, who I am, what I eat. Let me have my private life if I choose so, and only offer those as options (opt-in). Ok Riot? 🙂 I trust and love you because you are open source and great, but please don’t try to be FB!

Because of all this Riot made me not want to “peek” and see if anyone needs my attention for TROM, because I simply feel uncomfortable. I simply DO NOT WANT to force me to show the world when I read a fuckin’ message! Let me disable that! So I’ll ignore more Riot notifications from now on and only read them at once when I use Riot more actively. I want to be 12 and do not feel like I am leaving a fingerprint when I explore the internet. I don’t want to feel like I am 12 in my living room, and 40 people are watching over my shoulder what I do. I don’t want that.

I contacted Riot and submitted this issue and I am happy to know now that they are aware of this and are trying to fix it. Thank you! Let’s see this fixed asap. Until then I am blocking ads and scripts with Firefox, I only use trade-free apps, and a clean trade-free operating system. I feel filthy using the internet nowadays so I need these vaccines and pills to keep me sane and healthy, and this is why I am creating TROM-Jaro and tromjaro.com to help others do the same.

I have to admit, I hate so much this FB and Insta kind of world of today with their “always present” presence online, and lack there of in the offline realm. A trade that, to me, is creating lonely, sad, simple minded, and narcissistic people. Plus, no one thinks anymore, everyone reacts!