Posts

(dis)Information is Power

In 1990 Alvin Toffler (best known for his book Future Shock) wrote a book called “Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century” (Goodreads). In that book, Toffler described three types of power:

  • Force (physical power)
  • Wealth (economic power)
  • Knowledge (the power of information)

Or, as it is better described on his chapter 2: Muscle, Money and Mind.

After the first decade of 21st Century, I would add one more type: Deception.

Since several years back the access to information has become massively fast and easy. One person can access to old and new information in a matter of minutes (or seconds) with one hand. The growth of Internet, information services and social media engineered to connect everyone with everyone helped to share what is happening in one remote part of the World with everyone around the glove in just a few minutes. This is so big that nowadays news agencies and newspapers are way behind of spreading breaking news as they cannot keep up with the pace of how news are shared through Internet. And the true is that today, every person with a mobile or computer with Internet access is a real “news agency”.

In my opinion this is great. Never in history we had such a big megaphone for the people and the opportunity to (a) spread any news which is happening in real time and (b) access to most of human knowledge everywhere.

But as always, every great advance has its drawback. The nature of Internet is to be open and democratic; and although some countries try to block and control it, they will be putting doors to the field. This will give an advantage for some people to spread false information intentionally and hide it with half trues; doing it in a smart way and continuously so false news will easily become true news where even the most prestigious newspapers will print their front page with them.

Fake news are now a fact when a couple of years back no one believed this can be happening. Today a normal person can have a big audience of several thousand people who can read/watch/listen what this person says (think in an average youtuber or blogger who easily can reach these numbers of followers). This is power and as all kind of power can be used wisely or foolishly.

Here is where deception comes out strong. The era of information we are living on is sometimes used to spread hoaxes and frame an illusion to the wide audience that is built to generate some kind of benefit to the ones orchestrating it. We have recent examples with the new populism used with some politicians and successfully achieved their goals: Trump campaign, Brexit and recent VOX campaign in Spain are good examples of it.

This is a very interesting and complex topic: why people are blindly following ideas that, when they are deeply analysed are smoke bombs? What I think about this is that people do not well understand some topics, they build an opinion under their own logic, share this opinion to a wide audience and there are other people who believe them. This make a perfect primordial soup for guiding and manipulate thoughts if someone knows how to build a masterplan for this.

Sometimes can be difficult to scape from these trends. However I believe there are ways not to fall on this; one simple way is to contrast the news with different sources, find the original source and most important COMMON SENSE; even if its definition is changing… But this is a different story for another post.

/by
,

Financial Domination

Money is necessary in any today’s society; no matter if you live in the first, second or third world. The concept of money appeared thousands of years ago as an evolution from the ancient exchange goods: they were unsustainable.

In reality, money give us wellness (or it should). All and all money, more than an object, it is a medium or an asset.

The people, including myself, we have an important dissociation with the money: we love it on one side, and hate it on the other. Anyway money itself it is not bad neither good, however it has some big cancers which I will try to explain three of them:

1 – CREDIT

One of the biggest “cancers” today. Financial institutions create this artificial “money” which is totally inflationist. Any bank in the world could create money from nothing, like magic. And they can do it because there is a legal framework that allows them to create that magic.

Here are two examples how this works:

  • In the USA for each real dollar, banks can credit 10 dollars (1×10). If someone put $100 in the account, the bank could give $1,000 as credit ($900 created from nothing and sell as real money).
  • In Europe, for each real euro, banks can credit 100 euros (1×100). If someone put 100€ in the account, the bank could give 10,000€ as credit (9,900€ created from nothing and sell as real money).

As you can see this leads to big problems; big expenses where easily can happen global crisis like in 2007 (the two frameworks above can influence globally in some way or another).

2 – HOSTILITY OF THE ENVIRONMENT

We live in a hostile environment to access money. Someone has created the environment in a way that it is difficult, complicated to access to this valuable good. We have been locked down in this environment to slave us and make us believe to agree to be enslave and to other things that in other circumstances we would not agree to. If you need a lot of money, or you debt it, most likely you became docile like a rush; a very flexible person capable to accept things unacceptable.

This is the spectrum if you enter in the world of work as an employee. But the environment becomes even more hostile if you decide to create your own business. In this case, your government is the one who will punch you with a bunch of bureaucratic barriers so you could not create your company easily.

In any case, governments and financial institutions will constantly record how you exactly use your money (what I call the CCMoney) like a Big Brother. In multiple cases also, governments have limited the movements of money creating laws against this (i.e. not able to pay more than 1,000€ in cash in some European countries). And there are of course the sway of taxes that are created without clear reasons.

3 – HAVE MONEY = LOSE MONEY

Money is the most fickle thing in the world. A lot of entities and bodies operating around the money will try to take it from you. I will explain with an example:

Imagine you have an amount of money.

  • If you decide not to move the money, your bank will charge you for keeping it (maintenance fees).
  • If you decide to widthraw some money, you bank will charge you for it (if you do it from ATM of different bank or similar).
  • If you decide to spend your money, the government will take part of it (as taxes). But also, if this spend is to buy a house or a car, the government will ask you to pay more taxes (yes, you have to pay taxes after you pay taxes).
  • When you get your monthly salary, the government will take part of it (again taxes).
  • If you decide to donate your money, also you need to pay taxes.
  • When you inherit money, you need to pay taxes for that.
  • If you have a company which generates benefits, part of it will go to the government.
  • If you win a price like lotto, you need to give a big chunk to the government.

I understand that taxes are needed to maintain a country and a social wellness. My point is to show the unjustified abuse of what we need to pay to governments and bank gangs. Don’t get fooled; we are living in a system that is not perfect (no matter what we have been told) and it is not sustainable as we saw in 2007. Too much to change for individuals, but at least if we question the system and to ourselves, there is chance to find the path for a better place.

/0 Comments/by