In this presentation, Dr.SHIVA Ayyadurai, MIT PhD, the Inventor of Email, Candidate for President of the United States, reveals why WE THE PEOPLE must take back, seize the SWARM’s means of production to ShatterTheSwarm.com. The SWARM – Elon Trump, Inc. – epitomizes theft of OUR public infrastructure. Full Blog Post: https://vashiva.com/dr-shiva-live-why-we-must-seize-the-means-of-production/
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So the topic I want to talk about is a term that some of you may have heard of, and you typically associate that with Marxism called “seize the means of production.” And I want to talk about that. And I want to go deep into that in the context of the Postal Service.
And then we’re going to sort of peel away to take some questions.
I did a tweet a couple of days ago, in fact two days ago, where someone had put out there on Twitter that, I think it was Tony Pierce, I don’t know if Tony’s here today, but Tony Pierce is one of our leaders in New Zealand, was having a conversation educating someone, and this other individual was saying, “Well, you know, there have been revolutions in the world,” and he was saying punk rock was a revolution.Okay. And he was talking about all these counterculture revolutions, and Tony said, “Well, that’s not the revolution I’m talking about. I’m talking about a bottoms-up movement by working people.”
Then this guy retorted to him and he said,
“Oh, workers’ movements don’t mean anything.
It is technology that has always changed things—
disruptive technologies.”
So I jumped in there and I said, look,
as a technologist, the reality is,
whenever technology has come—any kind of technology—
if you look at the history of humankind,
people initially think that
technology is somehow going
to make people freer,
that it’s going to give us more freedom.
It’s going to deliver better economics to more people, right?
This is called, a big word is called “devolution of power,”
D-E-V-O-L-U-T-I-O-N, devolution.
Devolution means that you’re
going to devolve power to more
people at the local level.
Anyway, there’s a bunch of technophiles who will argue,
“Oh, technology delivers more freedom to people,” for example,
and therefore, if we have more technology,
you don’t need people organizing and coming together to fight for their rights.
OK, that’s one theory.
Another theory says that, you know,
if we privatize everything and we decentralize everything,
somehow miraculously, it’ll just happen,
and then the world is going to be great.
We don’t have to really fight for any of that.
Another group of people, you call them “reformists,” R-E-F-O-R-M, reformists.
Reformists say that we can legislate change,
that if we just get the right people in governance,
somehow things change, okay?
These three philosophies—and their philosophies—have
always come as a way to avoid, you know,
going and doing the necessary surgery that society needs from time to time.
These are ideas which history shows actually
don’t really lead to anything except continued human suffering.
So the technology idea,
this guy in his post said,
“Oh, see, technology got rid of newspapers.
Technology got rid of…I think record labels, right?
And their technology is going to get rid of banks,
and therefore you don’t need to build a workers’ movement.”
Now, why is this guy saying this?
This is very similar to Bernie Sanders and the people on the quote unquote,
the left saying, “Don’t worry, Bernie will fight for your change.
You know, let Bernie go take care of fighting for workers’ rights.
He’s going to do it. You don’t have to build a movement.
Bernie Sanders is going to do it.”
Therefore, people just wait and wait and wait,
thinking technology is going to change something.
But let me just share with you a couple of things.
There’s a book I wrote in nineteen ninety three called Arts and the Internet.
This was at a time when many people thought that when the Internet came,
it was going to really free us.
When you really think about what actually happened,
you recognize that if you look at the world of actual distribution of records and films,
it’s all actually become even more consolidated.
Amazon, for example, and the big studios may have fallen,
but Amazon and Netflix actually control more moviemaking than ever before.
They vertically consolidated from funding the movies to having the studios and distribution.
Before, studios would make the movies, or record labels would make it,
and then they would have to go to someone else for distribution.
Now it’s all vertically consolidated.
You then look at publishing.
It’s a few major publishers own everything.
We were supposed to build our own Internet websites.
In nineteen ninety three, people were building their own Internet websites,
they were local Internet providers—some of you may remember—right?
Small Internet providers, and everyone would build their little website,
learn how to do HTML programming.
Then you had three behemoths show up: YouTube, Google, Facebook—
and Twitter to some extent.
These three behemoths…people started building,
they wouldn’t even build websites anymore.
They would just build their little Facebook presences.
Facebook made it point-and-click to do this,
but you outsourced your freedom of having your own website on your own server
in your own data center into the cloud,
into a particular property,
and those properties could throw you off.
Some of you who posted on Facebook get thrown off, right?
If you had your own website—done the old-fashioned way—you wouldn’t have that issue.
But most people got lazy and didn’t want to do that,
so essentially what happened is these major platforms—it’s almost like you go
into a big condominium, part of a massive apartment building,
so you have consolidation.
So when technology has come, it’s actually made it easier
to consolidate power as never before.
So the notion that technology is going to free us and give us even more liberation
is actually not true.
This is a very, very interesting larger question that people need to discuss:
How much technology, and who is actually owning these technologies,
and who is controlling these technologies?
Many of these technologies were built at the behest of public dollars—tax dollars—
people’s, many of these companies got subsidies, etc.
There’s a lot of tremendous infrastructure that has been built through your money,
my money, and working people’s money,
and somehow a lot of that public infrastructure tends
to get more and more privatized,
and then you outsource a lot of the rights to those private companies.
I’ve talked about this before, but I want to go into it in a little deeper way.
There has always been, long before Karl Marx existed—
for centuries and thousands of years—human beings had the concept of commons.
Certain things were “we the people’s” property, like air, right, like the trees.
Certain large-scale infrastructure.
The Postal Service was created as a technology infrastructure
in the vein that certain things are like air we breathe.
The founders, in seventeen eighty seven,
really felt movement of information and communication should be like air,
and so the Postal Service is a public infrastructure for open communications,
not just for delivering physical mail.
At the time it was founded in seventeen eighty seven,
what they knew about communications was letter writing,
but it was really designed for communications at the heart of it.
So again, I’ve shared this before,
but I want to put this in the larger context of the means of production.
The Postal Service is an infrastructure above which so many other things run.
It is a means of producing goods, traversing goods, making sure things happen.
It was never meant to be owned by individuals for maximization of profit.
The Postal Service has run extraordinarily well for many, many years.
It’s been the vehicle for political communication—uncensored political communication.
When email was created, email volume overtook postal mail volume in nineteen ninety seven.
I was very concerned about this. I told the Postal Service, I met with them,
I said, “You should create—expand your mission for open, free communications, and add email.
And in fact, add social media.”
They thought this was crazy.
But in my view, in the spirit of the founders,
that’s a public infrastructure which should support also public email service.
They could charge maybe five bucks a year,
and you could use a USPS postal service email system,
and even USPS could support servers.
What’s even more interesting is if you look at all these postal service locations,
there’s a technology that was coming out at the time called WiMAX,
where you put a little antenna, and so if you have enough antennas spread out,
you can create your own what’s called a mesh network,
which is precisely what Elon Musk has put into every one of his satellites.
So you basically have all these satellites in low Earth orbit,
and they all communicate among each other—they’re a mesh network,
which is what I’d proposed back in for the Postal Service to do,
but it would be our network, not owned by private companies.
Yes, if you want to use Verizon and AT&T, great,
but we, the people, would have our own mesh network.
We would have our own ability to communicate through email and social media,
servers brought to you by the people, for the people.
And guess what? If any of those communications were opened online or touched by anyone
in the government, you could sue the government for violation of your First Amendment rights.
Just think about what I’m saying. This is why certain things must be owned by the people
within the laws of “we the people,” because then we have rights.
Because if the government violates your rights, you actually have recourse.
So in many ways, a postal service was a vehicle for “we the people” owning our means of production—
very fundamental rights, directly linked to the Bill of Rights, in this case, the First Amendment.
What we’ve seen happen, step by step,
is as technology has come—and initially, a bunch of entrepreneurs get together, they build something,
they have twenty years of patent rights, okay, great, they make money—
but over time, the proliferation of what began as a market capitalism
has now consolidated to monopoly capitalism, and it is the nature of how things have evolved,
and then eventually imperialism. So you have three major furnace vendors,
three major telecommunications companies,
three major social media companies, probably one major Earth-orbiting satellite company
who is going to own all the communications,
one major platform which controls all political communications on social media—
that’s really Twitter. If you want to be a politician and you’re not on Twitter,
you’re out of luck—one major medium which controls sharing family stuff,
which is really Facebook.
So the level of consolidation of power technology has gone inexorably in a direction
that is not going to free us. It’s no longer disruptive.
Palantir can watch everything you do and know exactly how communications are going.
So technology is making it very powerful not to be disruptive technology or disruption for freedom,
but actually for control.
When you look at something like the Postal Service,
which was allowing us to have these amazing rights,
it’s being consolidated and it’s going to be outsourced.
I don’t know if you guys know, Postal Service workers cannot strike. Did you know this?
Think about this: if a postal service worker says,
“Look, my organization is protecting the First Amendment,
and I believe our organization is being attacked by private companies,
and I want to organize postal service workers to strike,”
they can’t do that.
And this has been argued, and I’ve started to do some research on this. It’s quite fascinating.
Here’s an organization for First Amendment rights,
which doesn’t even have its own First Amendment right to strike.
The Postal Service is the most important organization
for distribution of communications infrastructure,
and I believe this was done by Reagan or right before Reagan—maybe even under Carter.
Carter was one of the biggest neoliberal conservatives who played both sides.
He was a fascist, actually. Most of the real fascism took place under Jimmy Carter’s rule,
but then they try to reframe him as some humanitarian. It’s not true.
So we are seeing, right now, consolidation of technology as never before,
and outsourcing of infrastructure that you, I, and everyone created to private companies.
The entire AI infrastructure, by the way, is basically taking human knowledge of many, many years—
your knowledge in many, many industries—and putting it into private companies.
The algorithms are from the nineteen seventies and eighties. Everyone says, “Ooh, AI, AI.”
All that’s happened is they can put them on faster chips now, and they can consolidate it.
But the reality is all that human knowledge is our knowledge.
I’ll give you an example. In nineteen eighty four, there’s a very interesting field
called Tadoma—how deafblind people communicate.
How do deafblind people communicate? I don’t know if you’ve read the story of Helen Keller,
but there’s a technique called Tadoma, T-A-D-O-M-A.
Tadoma is where you take your hand and you place it on someone’s face.
Two fingers—one finger goes on the lower lip, the other finger on the upper lip,
one goes on the cheeks, and you can literally hear people’s vibrations and discern words.
So public funding came to MIT to figure out how this was being done.
All of that human knowledge was funded by public dollars.
It eventually went into AI systems, and God knows what’s happened with that.
My point is: human knowledge, human assets, society’s knowledge is being put on these chips
and going to be owned, and then eventually we outsource.
I would argue that’s public knowledge, wouldn’t you? Isn’t that our information?
Who is deciding that should be owned by a few companies?
Who is making these decisions?
It’s not that any of these technologies are bad. It is who is making these decisions to consolidate
these technologies and take publicly funded knowledge and give them to other people’s infrastructure,
and then they can charge us back.
If you look at telecommunications, if you actually look at what you pay for cable or TV today,
in the old days, we had UHF or VHF antennas. You still got entertainment; it was pennies.
Now you go on Prime, you’re paying fifty, a hundred, a hundred fifty bucks,
and you have to pay for ads. Prime is now charging you advertising on top of your monthly fees.
So you have an individual like Elon Musk representing what I’m talking about,
and it’s no different than China, the government and corporations have come together as one,
and it’s huge. It’s not even kings anymore. It’s a few monarchs—Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Zuckerberg.
The level of consolidation of power is occurring right before your very eyes: “Elon Trump, Inc.”
We need to get this very clear. What does this mean for innovation? Who gets to innovate?
What does this mean for the advancement of society?
It will become less and less people making decisions on what kinds of technologies
are going to be created and who will benefit. It’s a very dangerous time right now.
So we must put forward something bold, not pussyfoot around like the Democrats:
“Oh, we’re going to regulate this.” That’s what Elizabeth Warren says—“We’re going to regulate the banks.”
Whenever they do regulation, all that means is consolidate greater power.
We’re not talking about regulation. We’re talking about bottoms-up movements,
where we must say, “No, you know what, that is ours,” meaning we the people—it’s public commons.
A very different approach than top-down models.
We will talk more about this, but I want us to start thinking about this:
There are large-scale public commons. Who owns these commons?
The founders in seventeen eighty seven had already thought about it.
These were very, very smart people. They thought about this stuff.
If they were here today, they would be appalled at how much public infrastructure is now in private hands.
They would say we are way worse than pre-seventeen seventy six.
The king used to open up every mail—the Crown’s mail was opened up; everything was surveilled.
How are we any different right now? A bunch of oligarchs,
and you have Mark Zuckerberg telling you, “Oh, yeah, I had to censor you, poor me.”
More censorship has taken place under Elon Musk—fifty percent more—than under Jack Dorsey.
It’s happening right in front of your face. What are you going to do about it?
They are telling you, “We are doing this, and we will continue, and you have to deal with it.”
They’re not even apologizing anymore.
We must seize these means of production, the public commons which were created by us,
and we must have that attitude. We can’t run away from this. We have to start thinking differently.
This is why working people, like the postal service workers, should be striking.
They should say, “We’re going to go on strike on behalf of the working people of the United States
because you are seizing public property.” But the unions in the entire United States
have been taken over by charlatans who don’t really fight for anything
except short-term gains, raising certain people’s salary, and eliminating lots of jobs.
They’re fake unions.
So we’re living in a very important time, and our movement is the only force
that has this kind of conversation, to have this discourse.
Anyone out there who’s promoting that “technology is going to solve everything” is selling nonsense.
Anyone who’s not talking about the fact that we must take these means of production—
this is reality. This is where the rubber meets the road.
It’s very important to have this discussion.
I think this is the right time, and our movement is positioned to do that.
So all of you who are here, welcome.
I want to encourage you to participate in this conversation.
Nicholas, I know you were in the middle of introducing people.
Do you guys want to finish that up, or Matt?
Yeah, we can try to finish up.
I was just scoping the room.
Yes, if anyone’s new, please, as a part of the ethos here, raise your hand.
We’re a community here—don’t hide in the woodwork just listening because it’s really being a parasite.
We’d like people to contribute, in the sense, introduce yourself.
No one’s going to bite you. Say where you’re from, how you came to find us, and how you want to contribute.
We are a bottoms-up movement, all working people.
We want people to get off their butts, understand the dynamics of power—there’s a science to this.
There is a curriculum to this. You cannot learn this anywhere else but here.
We’re the only place you can understand this dynamic of power as an engineering science.
So if you made it this far, learn that. Start with watching Shatter the Swarm, come to the orientations,
join one of the local communities—they meet weekly, and monthly they meet face to face.
If you’re hanging out on the outskirts, after coming here, you have no excuse to say, “What do I do?”
There’s a lot of stuff to do. We have our movement, leadership training, solutions.
We have an entire solution for ensuring we have clean food, an entire solution for health education,
an entire solution for building new medicines bottoms-up, and we’re doing that.
We’re going after thirty-seven major diseases in the world by ourselves, using our own infrastructure.
Those of you who say, “I don’t have time,” that’s not true.
Take twenty minutes out of your day as a working person to go hand out cards, to participate.
That’s how things will change.
If you recently became part of the system or whichever country you’re in,
understand that you have to participate, and it’s going to be one-on-one educating people.
There is no shortcut. We have to do this one-on-one.
And everyone who raises their consciousness, they become an amazing beacon of knowledge to many others.
We’ve created that infrastructure. So if you’d like to introduce yourself, please be mindful.
Take one minute, say who you are, where you’re from, how you can contribute to us.
So we have Doug Sutton. Has he spoken before, Matt?
No, not yet.
Go ahead, Doug.
[Sound issues]Gerald, can you connect with Doug after this?
Yeah, I can do that.
OK, great.
All right, Matt, is there anyone else you see?
Looks like a lot of people aren’t raising their hands.
Oh, hi, Elizabeth. Go ahead.
Hi, I’m Elizabeth. I’m from Oregon in Willamette Valley.
I heard about you from Brighteon, and I don’t want to be a parasite. I don’t know if you know about…
[She mentions a blockchain project.]Yes, Elizabeth, are you new?
Yeah.
OK, cool.
Connect with Crystal and Nicholas because Nicholas is helping us run the Oregon meetings.
Elizabeth, to your point, you’re probably familiar with quantum computing, which is coming, right?
So blockchain is basically a linked list. You learn it in grade school computing now,
and quantum computing eventually breaks all this. So a lot of people have no idea.
The techno-geeks often miss the bigger picture.
I’m saying none of these technologies alone are going to free us. Freedom is going to come from
working people organizing. Technology is just technology—someone else can come up with
something else to break it. So that’s what this conversation is really about.
Welcome, it’s good to have you.
Let’s go to Amanda in New Jersey.
Good evening, everybody. I just want to introduce myself quickly. I am a new member,
Amanda from New Jersey. I’ve been part of alternative knowledge, media streams, and health for a while,
but I was really drawn to how you are syncing together all the philosophies
and the systems approach and contributing toward something more sustainable for humanity—
bottoms-up approach, circular economy, or things that are for the people,
trying to elevate people with knowledge. Recently, I’ve come across a lot of people that,
when you introduce contrary information or things that differ from the state-sponsored opinion,
there’s pushback. So I’m seeking means to educate myself and also deliver information
to get through to people, to help cause transformation in my own community.
Thank you so much for what you’ve done—it’s amazing stuff.
I’m still going through all the tutorials, but awesome.
What part of New Jersey are you in?
I’m in South Jersey, about thirty minutes away from Philadelphia.
Are you in touch with Eileen or Rose Sias?
I spoke to Rose about a week and a half ago, so I haven’t attended any local meetings yet with them,
but I hope to soon.
What do you do in New Jersey?
I’m a designer/developer for emerging technologies—augmented reality, virtual reality…
Very nice to have you.
All right, let’s wrap up with any questions we have on this discourse. We’ll take them now.
Ask your question, keep it thirty seconds to a minute. Let’s go.
[No immediate questions]OK, good. Barbara, question. Less than a minute, go ahead.
Yes, when I was collecting signatures at the post office, the postmaster general came out,
told me to leave, saying it was private property, I couldn’t be there soliciting.
I explained that I wasn’t soliciting. I left because I didn’t want trouble, but I came back the next day
with documents printed off from Supreme Court rulings. She wouldn’t look at them.
I asked, “Is this public or private property?” She looked at me blankly, asked her subordinate,
and he looked like he didn’t want to be involved. Was she right to do that?
If you’re on the sidewalk, that’s public property. If you’re on the property itself,
the Postal Service is a quasi-public/private organization. That’s part of the bigger question.
We’ll do a deeper video on this, but it’s not a simple quick answer.
Anyone else?
Rick:
Hi, Dr. Shiva, I met you this morning on my first open house. I heard you five years ago on Ernie Hancock,
lost track of you, wanted to hear more. I’m just wondering, worldwide, what’s the membership of this movement?
We’ve had about half a billion people see our videos. The bigger question is, why is there so much effort
to make us invisible? They spend a lot of energy telling people not to discuss us.
It’s good to have you, Rick.
Mary:
We had an interview last year on soil. I’ve been trying to set up three meetings with Monica and Prabhakar,
but not getting responses from them. I’d like a six-minute Zoom to partner on herbal results.
I’ve sent many emails, no reply. Also, I’d like to figure out what to do about a petition to maintain
the public infrastructure of the Post Office—how do we do that?
Nicholas or Crystal, please follow up with Mary to see what’s going on.
Sure, I’ll do that.
We have about six different court cases going on. Some states threw us off the ballot illegally,
but we’ve had significant victories without lawyers. People in this movement are learning how to do it.
We’re teaching them how to file. There’s a strategy. Petitions by themselves don’t do much
unless there’s a broader movement behind them. So we do it to educate people.
Nicholas, can you finish up with the anthem video and the features video?
Yes, will do.
Thank you. Keep an eye out for local meetings, typically Wednesdays, and monthly face-to-face.
Tomorrow we have a tutorial on our health education curriculum.
