System Change with Gabriel

This is my inaugural interview of a series on How to Build a Commonwealth. I’ll be taking the framework of the caret economy, with which I ended How to Dismantle an Empire, and brainstorming ways to apply it to real world problems. The system change of communities rather than bankers issuing the mortgages can’t be done piecemeal, so the implementation is theoretical. However, until we know what we want to replace it, dismantling one empire would just make room for another.

When I considered an interview series, I immediately thought of Gabe from Libre Solutions Network and Micro-Dosing Failure. But when he posted that he was feeling overwhelmed, I decided not to ask. Then he had a tech snafu, meaning data apocalypse, and invited others who wanted to brainstorm their own projects to contact him—his own being on hold. I won’t say I was happy for his loss, but the sign to start this with him couldn’t be clearer.

Gabe approaches these topics with the thoughtfulness he’s known for. And brings in a deep knowledge of my book. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did!

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the dilemma of real life

Tereza Coraggio

This is Third Paradigm, and my inaugural interview of someone else: Gabriel of Libre Solutions Network. The reason I wanted Gabriel to be my very first guest is because we’ve been talking now for, what do you think, Two, three years?

Gabriel

Yeah, it’s been a couple since at least the thick of the COVID years for sure.

Tereza Coraggio

And I have always admired Gabriel’s clear thinking. I think of Gabriel as one of the most systematic thinkers that I know, someone who looks at the big picture, but who also sweats the details and looks at the pragmatic of ‘how do you do this? How do you make this happen?’

The series I want to do is looking at my caret system from How to Dismantle an Empire and going to the next level of How to Build a Commonwealth: what are the things we want to do and how could this system be used in order to make that happen? Gabriel has agreed to be my guinea pig and play with me.

So Gabriel, can you tell us a little bit about you?

Gabriel

Yeah, so I would say what really got the ball rolling is that during the depths of the COVID years, I was trying to talk to people about technology and technology freedom at local meetups and that kind of thing. And I realized, hey, if I’m talking to so many people, preparing presentations, why not write it down and share it? And that was a good experience. It was a way for me to kind of like raise my level productivity because to be frank, during the depths of those years, it was hard to function at all. And so I was really trying to reclaim some amount of personal autonomy while trying to push for digital autonomy was really the big picture idea behind that project.

And I’ll say it’s gone quite well. I’m very grateful for the opportunities I’ve had by taking that on. But lately, I’ve kind of shifted gears a bit because I have really spent a lot of time focusing on reclaiming my physical health, which was certainly a big part of the contradiction of those years where it’s like, oh, I was in health freedom spaces. Well, maybe I should prioritize health. And that’s been an interesting learning process that Tereza has been very kind in engaging with me on because I’ve been sharing all of them publicly and you’re one of the people there in the comments most of the time, so it is certainly appreciated. It’s been quite a hurdle that’s for sure and I’m not even done, I’ve certainly mitigated a lot of covid era damage but I have an integrated understanding of many of these different fights. As I said before the start of this, I am a lot less sure of things now than I ever was in the past. I was so lit up with fire, like, oh, we just need to do this. But now I’m realizing the details are certainly a lot more finicky than even I was willing to dive into at the start of all this.

Tereza Coraggio

Tell me more about that. Tell me more about what what brought you to that realization or what exactly that is.

Gabriel

Well, I would say in a really simple nutshell, I spent a lot of years of my life kind of avoiding real life, so to speak. pending a lot of time online is fun. It’s a great you can escape from many of the difficulties of things. And it gets really easy to be all in your head. It gets really easy to just play with the ideas and not put things into actual practice. And that kind of, I would say, contradiction is something I’m trying to resolve now by trying to take more action in real life and do actually accomplish things various things but I’ll admit, it is a difficult road and you realize once you start putting many things into practice, a lot of those pretty ideas and theories don’t actually land well with reality.

That’s really hard to experience because it gets really easy to just then go retreat back entirely into the abstract and be like—oh well the real world’s messy so i’ve just got to keep playing with these ideas. I’m realizing it’s like there is a lot of actual value in creating things rather than say barking out orders or coming up with plans. That’s really what I have been wrestling with. And it’s kind of hard to realize this reality is messy. Real people are messy and that can be terrifying. But it is what you have to do fundamentally. That’s very much been at the forefront of the many struggles I’ve been taking on lately.

Tereza Coraggio

That’s so interesting because I feel like some of our Substack friends, and I’m thinking particularly of Kathleen Devanney, have been writing about there being just a general shift in people moving away from online and more into the real world. And I’ve been feeling that.

I’ve been feeling that too, although I wouldn’t necessarily say that it is all in terms of relationships, an awful lot has been me moving away from online connections and more towards writing a second book called OMGdess.

But it seems like other people have been going more into nature, that they’ve been retreating from a lot of the back and forth and arguments that happen online. I don’t know whether you see that.

Gabriel

Well... I had a word for this. When I first noticed chat GPT and generative AI was really starting to pick up, when it first entered the scene, I wrote a piece called The Collapse of the Intangible.

I was trying to explain that I saw this bifurcation between the virtual world and the real world. And a very stark contrast of this would be somebody who’s like, you’ve got to get really good at AI or you’re going to get left behind.

So they’re playing in all these systems. They’re getting more consumed by whatever this is. And all they are ‘producing’ is in this immaterial world.

And this can be ideas. This can be research. This can be programs, whatever it is. Fundamentally, it’s all the same kind of game. But then there’s also, like you say, this real world that people are trying to reclaim and reconnect with.

My spicy take is that it’s not so much that people chose to forsake the real world. One of the reasons your book is helpful for people to understand the bigger picture is that—in many ways, younger generations were evicted from the real world. There were opportunities that used to exist, like mentorship, that became rare, became less abundant. And so I think there is a push and pull.

There’s a lot of social dynamics behind all this. I mean, I could talk about those things all day, but the point I’m really trying to get at here is what is making this current moment in time so hard, especially for our friends on Substack, is you have AI generating content and what’s the purpose?

Why are we doing this? Why are we you know just getting words out there? Is that really what we’ve been trying to accomplish all along? Did we just need the perfect Substack article that changes everybody’s lives? Or is there more behind all this that ultimately matters? And that’s a much harder question. Wrestling with that requires us to face things that are actually way more complicated than just, Oh, how do I write the next thing? It’s a very difficult game, but the good news is that’s where I’ve realized all the opportunity is. One of the drums I’ve been trying to beat this entire time is—once we kind of change how we think about this game, what we’re actually trying to accomplish, I actually think a lot of stuff is very much within reach.

For me, one of the many things i’ve been trying to do is work on my own actual skills. I’m realizing the bar for making a difference is way lower than one would think. If you’re in this hyper-reality online matrix you think nothing’s gonna work because everything’s corrupt anyways. But maybe we can just try a couple of things here and there. And maybe it doesn’t have to completely up-end everything. Maybe the small stuff can matter. And I think that’s probably one of the hardest places for people to kind of mentally rethink the bigger game right now.

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ai makes, doesn’t create

Tereza Coraggio

That’s so interesting, Gabe. I love the way that you turn around this idea of AI as making the churning out of material something that’s pointless.

I’ve said that the reason I write, the reason I put out episodes, is to teach myself something new. From the very beginning of doing YouTube videos, I couldn’t control whether people were actually listening to me. The only thing I could control was whether I taught myself something new.

And that’s the thing that AI doesn’t do. It goes through the motions and can be useful, I think, for some things. But what it can’t do is teach yourself something new. You’re not on that journey of creating. AI art is a contradiction in terms. AI decoration is a lovely, fun thing that has made that accessible. But it’s not art because it’s not creating anything new. By definition, It can’t do that. All it can do is synthesize and combine things that are already out there.

Gabriel

I think choosing to create is itself a form of rebellion in this entire big picture fight people are in right now. AI tools exist in their own kind of system. They can be used in certain ways but Wall street and governments are pushing this out. Patrick Wood said, “It’s empire, it’s just empire.” Obviously very relevant to your book. It’s trying to assimilate people structurally into this system where you don’t need to have any individual agency or talent.

It’s like you were just participating in the game. One of the hardest things to teach people nowadays is that you can play other games. It’s not like being the biggest personality on X is the only way to have an impact on the world. But I’ll admit, as somebody who’s been very sucked into the online world, that illusion is very, very strong. I think it’s easy for those of us who are trying to find something new to look down on those people as just rubes who are are tricked by the machine. But no, this illusion is very powerful.

Not a lot of people have seen how fake things are. And so it’s hard to appreciate the boundaries between those things. A perfect example is AI art because people intuitively understand the soul and the creation behind it. But when you talk about programmers, many of them are way more comfortable with using AI tools. It leads to this question of ‘Well, if it’s all immaterial anyways, what is the soul behind it?’ You generally don’t see the same kind of attitudes behind software development.

And I do think that field is worse off in this way you don’t see—the broader community aspect behind it. That’s a big part of the fight in those spaces right now. There’s questions about ‘are we going to have people?’ ‘are we going to have another great project?’ And the example they gave was Linux. A lot of people are talking about installing Linux on their computers now. But that was a solo project by one person who was just motivated to solve a problem.

In this age of AI where you can just generate things, whether they’re good or not, whether they accomplish the mission or not, the question is ‘are we really going to have someone who is so motivated to actually build something unique and game-changing in this world that we’re in moving forward?’

And that is the real danger, not that the AI doesn’t say what we want or it’s censored. No, the issue is that it allows us to assimilate ourselves into this system that is a bigger act of censorship than whatever it does or doesn’t say or create. Your book especially is very relevant because people want to blame the victims—the people using these tools are just fools. But if you don’t see the bigger game, you’re not going to appreciate why are people following into these traps. Why are these traps sucking in so many people? That’s a big animating force.

We need to show people that there are different paths but, at the same time, we can’t beat them over the head with ‘oh, you didn’t take that path. Therefore you deserve whatever happens to you.’ People deserve better. That should be the guiding principle behind this, we should want good for others, not just condemn them for going down a different path.

Tereza Coraggio

That’s such a nuanced view. It’s hard to untangle this because I started out working in the school system when my kids were young and trying to make a difference. And what I found is that locally, you as a parent cannot add a minute to the school day, you are boxed in by these systems. Then I gave up on making any difference locally to working on things that were global and saying, ‘okay, at least now I’m going to be with other people who aren’t saying, how does this affect me? It’s not going to affect us. It’s only going to be global.

I’ve backed off from that too. Now I don’t think you can be an activist until you know what you want. You have to be a strategist first and understand what’s really going on. In local engagement, you’re just spinning your wheels and they know that, we’re being manipulated against one another. My system steps away from all that and says, ‘let’s figure out a strategy for what we want to see happen.’ That’s really the first step.

Gabriel

And what do we want to have happen? One of the the traps I fell into in this whole activism space is that I used to think it was just fiat currency. It was just central banking. That was the totality of the control grid. So once we just get rid of central banking, everything is fixed. And that’s why you’ll see a lot of people saying we need gold and silver as currency. Once that’s back, it’s like the end of the movie where all the villain’s magic disappears and everything’s going away.

To be honest, I’ve been there. That was very much at the forefront of my mind. When I started reading your book, you did a great job of disabusing me of that notion because I didn’t realize how much these hard currencies could be manipulated and were. It’s something that’s happened. Even Tucker Carlson did a big interview lately about how everybody’s got to get back on the gold standard or whatever it is.

As I said at the start of this, I am a lot less sure of things than I used to be. When I started out going to these local activist groups, I would hear people talking about these different forms of MacGuffin thinking. But then I started to notice that there was some concrete business or empire reason behind it. Now, it’s never more clear than the whole AI push.

The tough part about it is that even local activist groups will have infiltrators and bad actors and people just trying to take advantage of other people. They don’t even have to be in cahoots with the big tyrants. They can be little tyrants just trying to run their own fiefdom, whatever it is.

So the challenge I see is that people are being brought into this kind of MacGuffin thinking of, we just need this one thing. And once we do this one thing, everything will be better. One of the background things I’ve learned in all this is there is a lot of bizarre financial engineering that is very complex that people just don’t really see. And that’s a very hard thing to disentangle if you think, for example, that fiat currency is itself the devil.

You’re not going to know all the complicated stuff of the derivative markets, how that involves insider trading. A lot of people are talking about Polymarket these days. There’s all this engineering that, if you’re not aware of it, you can be manipulated in ways that feeds into that system. You once used the phrase, ‘carrying water for things.’ People can be innocuously led into doing things that—on their surface—seem benevolent or harmless but actually have impacts. That’s led me to have way more questions than answers these days.

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the long long game

Tereza Coraggio

In How to Dismantle an Empire, I go back 3,500 years to the origins of money, but in OMGdess, I’m going back 5,000 years and further—looking at the origins of hierarchy and the ideology of obedience built into that. What I found is that civilization ended with the beginning of the bronze age.

These metals were all used for weapons. It isn’t the metals themselves that were valuable. They gave you killing power over other humans that let you dominate. But they would have just been tools if it hadn’t been for the ideology that that’s okay.

Circling back to my book, you have to separate out form and purpose. We think digital currencies are the enemy, but it’s because they’re being used for a purpose of centralization and control and domination. If you have the same digital currency and you’re using it for the purpose of local sovereignty, the form doesn’t matter. It’s really the purpose that does.

Gabriel

There is this idea that, if the bad guys have this, they will finally enslave us. But if you read How to Dismantle an Empire, how free are people really these days? I see a lot of these systems as completely interchangeable with all the censorship, with all the different mechanisms of control available these days. I don’t think there is one thing their empire is resting on.

You’ve got the anarchist saying statism, or at least the idea of authority itself is a foundational piece of this. But as somebody who isn’t very well versed in the history and the philosophy of a lot of this, the way I understand it nowadays is a game competition, a war of human domination throughout history that we’re born into.

One of the things I learned from you early on is nobody can actually do good because, if we actually understood how evil the system is and how participating in it perpetuates that evil, there are no good options.

Emotionally, I certainly didn’t resonate with it but logically I understand the point being made—these games are very complex, the long arc of history is beyond all the things that have happened and so what does unwinding tyranny and oppression that has gone on for centuries even look like? How do we even comprehend our individual role in these bigger games?

I don’t have answers to that. But it’s something I’ve been thinking about because a lot of people right now see the unfairness of all the systems around us, they see what is very incoherent and dysfunctional. They’re desperate for something new. They’re desperate for something that can work, that can introduce a sense of fairness, a sense of, hey, at least we’re building to something better now.

There are all these young lonely men who are bootlicking for the empire because it’s offering them something. There’s this division game going on and people are just desperate for a system that offers them something. I guess for most of human history, Empire has offered people quite a bit.

Tereza Coraggio

Tying those together, the reason I would say you as an individual can’t really do any good, don’t have any good decisions to make, is because to think otherwise is to think that somehow you were born better than everybody else who’s come before you for 5,000 years.

You would have to think, okay, if i I’m a moral person, if I make these moral decisions, this going to make a difference. Well, didn’t everybody else think that too? So that’s why I really focus on the system.

I think we’re looking at a form of anarchy that is mistaken. True anarchy can only happen as community anarchy. If you’re one person against the empire, you’re always going to be looking for ‘how do i get the best deal from this?’

If you’re a community, you have layers of protection. The purpose of your tiny community, even at the level of the neighborhood, is to protect the sovereignty of your household. And the next level, the village, say, is to protect the sovereignty of your neighborhood. So you have all these different layers where they’re interlocked and there’s no one they all report up to. You are always able to compare notes so if one tiny little hamlet is able to figure out a way to break free and do something different—something as simple as reporting the news correctly or telling the real history of something—then all the other ones are going to be made into fools because it only takes one good apple to cure the barrel.

Gabriel

That’s a great example where the bar for making a difference is a lot lower than people would think. Especially when it comes to this whole community aspect, that there are different layers.

I started to think strongly about the sense that, once the bad guys have this new technology, the game’s over. Well, we just don’t have to believe in game over. We can decide we’re going to fight whatever this is until the bitter end. I realized that it’s not that we have no community engagement. They got rid of the community social fabric to enslave people, that’s just the continuation of that process.

What’s very hard for people to recognize—having to do with the culture wars and ageism dimension—this agenda has gone on for multiple generations, and it’s had different impacts on different people.

For instance, if you’re on X right now, you’re seeing a lot of young, angry people saying, ‘the boomers took everything away from us, so we’re just going to go for their social security because that’s socialism for the the old.’

I can see both sides of it. You have young people very angry about opportunities that they feel have been withheld from them. They’re very angry about a social contract that hasn’t given them the ability to participate. But then you have people who live their entire lives not doing anything wrong now having all this stuff taken from them by a bunch of people made to be in that situation.

One of the things important to disentangle from this is that they are engineering some kind of precarity so that those people can be used to strike against other people so that those people then are in a new form of precarity that strikes against other people.

I see this going in vicious cycles. What makes that conversation so difficult is that if you want to be honest with people, somebody is going to have to eat the cost of the mistakes that have happened over however many decades.

And nobody wants to be the person to eat that cost. So it’s very convenient to say, we’re just going to pass the buck. What makes our current time so chaotic is you have younger people being given that offer by Empire: ‘Oh, you’re not going to have to pay that cost if you just let us take all the powers.’ Basically, the deal is the with the devil as I see it in this situation. And it’s very hard because rebuilding that community interaction, rebuilding those trusts is trying to play a defection game theory where these people are being incentivized to defect from each other—the destruction of the social bonds and communities and even families.

There was an article about estrangement ideology, therapists, brainwashing kids to never talk to their parents. I think we have to be very, very serious about what has happened as far as social family bonds. And some of that’s personal. It’s not all the bad, evil system destroying families. There’s stuff happening on the family level too. But on the other hand, there are these real structures tearing it apart and creating opportunities for this kind of thing to escalate further.

That was something targeted way before AI came into the space, way before Internet censorship became an issue, way before some of the more contemporary topics got all the attention.

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a politics of envy or reciprocity?

Tereza Coraggio

There’s someone who I study, Gottfried Feder from World War II, and his statement was that socialism is the politics of envy. That has really struck me, living especially in a college town, that there is such a resentment of ‘why should you own a home? It’s a privilege!’ You would never have thought that even one generation ago. You would have thought of it as a responsibility, because a home owns you, you don’t own it.

The same as having children, that’s not a privilege. That is adulting. That is a rite of passage. It’s learning how to take responsibility and pass that on. Instead of saying, ‘how can everybody have what I have?’ Instead, it’s other people saying, ‘I can only have that by taking it away from you.’

What my system goes back to is, ‘Who built the houses originally?’ And looking at that as a legacy that belongs to all of us within our communities. That’s the inheritance that should be distributed—not as houses, but by taking the mortgages and distributing those equally to all of the commoners, which is how I describe the native and long-term residents.

That gives us the necessity of passing on the gift by doing things that are ordinary, where you don’t have to make some crazy amount of money and invent some big global new thing, you don’t have to make a killing.

You can just make an ordinary living by doing an ordinary service. or making product you’re supplying to your neighbors and that’s going to be equal to the cost of housing in your community.

Gabriel

People understand planned obsolescence. We have consumer goods nowadays that do not last anywhere near as much as they could fundamentally. The broader economic position is, ‘We need quarterly profits, so we need people to constantly buy refrigerators, towels, every little thing.’

One of the ways I could imagine somebody attacking your system is saying houses are decrepit and basically a liability anyways, houses have no value because look at how horrible in shape many of them are. And I’m sure that’s a big problem in many jurisdictions. But the longer term view is that our economy is predicated on lose-lose interactions, where you’re paying for something that doesn’t have the quality. I don’t think it’s a secret on how we can build a fridge that lasts a long time. I don’t think that’s an engineering mystery or marvel these days. So there’s a lot of low hanging fruit about building quality again. If we can somehow create a virtuous cycle that makes that part of the equation, that can definitely pay off in a lot of these areas.

A lot of people point out that tyranny is actually ridiculously expensive and there is a lot of opportunity if we actually do figure out how to navigate in a different direction. Obviously the question is ‘how do we do that?’ That’s a fair question that I don’t have the ultimate answers for, but I think it is important for people to realize that we’re not just talking about playing the game as it exists now. We’re not talking about, ‘We’re just going to swap in Bitcoin or some other system for a new token that’s going to change everything.’ No, we’re talking about fundamentally playing different games when it comes to the economy, when it comes to our jobs, our lives, how we treat people. All of those things do matter on this equation we’re trying to change here.

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a different game

Tereza Coraggio

As you know, I’m about system change. But I think you’re totally right that it actually wouldn’t take that much. Most of us now know, when the banks put out that mortgage, all they’re doing is wiggling their phalanges over a keyboard and putting some number into an account and usurping ownership of the home. Usury is not interest. Usury is usurping ownership so we’re working for 30 or 60 years with dual incomes in order to give our labor to them because they’ve taken ownership of the houses.

That isn’t part of the constitution. It’s not a bill. It’s not a law. It’s a little technical term within the financial industry that banks are the only ones allowed to create money and hold it in their own account. So all we have to do is rescind that exception to the rules. The only people that would hurt would be the global bankers, the richest people on the planet, the Rothschilds. So that’s a change that wouldn’t technically take very much.

And once you take local ownership of the houses and the ability to create money and mortgages, then you can make all kinds of changes.

You’re absolutely right when you say that knowing how things work matters. If you were to say, ‘okay, now we’re just going to take this money and put it in everybody’s pocket and they can use it to pay their rent or mortgage’, all you’re doing is raising the level of those mortgages because they’re competitive.

So if everybody’s got $500 more a month in order to bid on the house, that just gets absorbed again. My system says that carets need to change hands at least once before they can be used for housing. Homes have gotten decrepit, of course, because we’re bidding based on how much money we can possibly spend every month for the next 30 years.

There’s nothing left for maintenance. You’re spending all your time earning that money and you’re spending all that money paying the mortgage for nothing—just to be extracted to them. One of the things that I have as part of my subsidies, which are the monthly distribution of carets, is home improvements.

That means that you, not just have the money to make improvements, but also create jobs by doing those trades. So it works both ways.

If there is purpose in in life, I feel like there was a purpose for me to be living in two places. I was born in Appalachia in a very impoverished town, and I still have my childhood home there as an Airbnb. And then here in Santa Cruz, which has the highest cost of housing in the country compared to the amount of income.

So I have two different extremes where I live. And that’s why you, as a community, need to be able to tailor your caret system to your needs because you can’t do the same thing in all places.

There, the houses are totally decrepit because nobody’s got money. There’s no money in circulation to fix them up. Here, the cost of housing is crazy exorbitant, crazy, crazy, crazy. So you’ve just got those two different extremes. In one place, you need to bring the amount of money in circulation up. In the other, you need to bring the cost of housing down.

Gabriel

That seems to be a big part of the political fights going on right now. I remember a big announcement by Trump about not letting the housing prices go down. And I hear a lot of ‘free market people’ saying, ‘we just need to get the government out of this whole debacle and then everything will be fine.’ I used to be very sympathetic to this mindset because I’m like, ‘the central banking MacGuffin is the thing that determines why all of this is wrong. And so, yeah, you just leave things alone.’

But the problem, and this is something that Catherine Austin Fitts is very vocal about, is if you say, ‘okay, we’re going to stop now and things are fair now,’ you entrench whatever manipulation has been going on. It’s really important for people to consider whatever system we want to change into or whatever we want to adopt either in piecemeal or in whole. There is this important question of what are we doing moving forward rather than just correcting mistake from the past.

There has been effectively a large game going on for many rounds. It’s not as simple as, oh, we just stop the game here and play a different game. There is a transition, there is things changing. And like you say, house maintenance is a very basic example of people are going to have to work those jobs. There are real pragmatic concerns for how we want to change the game or how we move from one game into another.

One of the things that holds people back is an idea that the current game we’re in, for better or worse, feels permanent. It feels like nothing can change. It feels like any attempt to do something different feels like a huge cost to bear.

One of the things your book talked about was this charity drive, where $300 was given to teach some class, and that was given to a charity in Palestine. By people creating an exchange, that’s kind of win-win. It’s like, I’m willing to do this for you. And you’re willing to do something a little different in that regard. It’s not like you’re doing anything that out of the ordinary.

I had this simple way of thinking that if we want something different than what the empire currency does to us, we have to value things that aren’t just the empire currency. That’s where this gets difficult because for many of us who are in some kind of situation of precarity, the empire currency still has value. We can’t just forget about it and pretend it’s gone. No, it still will exist in a real form and has real hold over people. When it comes to where do we individually want to intervene, I think that leads to some very interesting questions about those of us with some flexibility or those of us with some capacity. How do we want to be part of the transition away from how things are currently run to how things will be run and, hopefully, a better game one way or another?

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empires & eminent domain

Tereza Coraggio

Exactly. I don’t get rid of the imperial currencies because, if we were to trade those out at a one-to-one basis, all we’d be doing is making ourselves subject to the same discrepancy that’s already happened.

What I’m doing with the caret system is taking back the houses and having the houses back the carets so they definitely have value. As a designer for your Commonwealth, you decide what kind of exchange rate you want to give between the caret and the imperial currency.

Here in the extremely high priced place I’m living now, people come in from Silicon Valley and raise that cost of living. And of course, we have the hedge funds that are buying up all the sand and sun properties. So you have huge chunks of money coming in and driving things up.

Let’s say you’re from outside the area and try to come into Santa Cruz and buy a house. It’s going to be $2 for every caret and all houses, all mortgages are going to be priced in carets. If you’re a local, then you have a two to one advantage over someone coming in from the outside.

If they are extracting value, if they’re buying up and making them into rentals, every time that money leaves, you’re only giving 50 cents for every,caret. So you’re again cutting that in half so you don’t have that extraction going on.

Gabriel

Fitts describes how Wall Street has cheaper capital than most regular people. People ask themselves ‘where did all the entrepreneurs go?’ You have financial games that allow the big boys to run these operations. Private equity buys a hospital. They gut it inside and let it go bankrupt. Suddenly a community is down a hospital—this financial engineering has real stakes!

But a regular person asks, ‘Why can’t we get together and and do the same thing?’ And the answer, as Fitts describes it, is that it is more expensive for you who has to get it from a bank and have the collateral. Whereas Wall Street gets to loan each other the same $100 over and over and over again. It creates an extreme power imbalance that impacts regular people and all these different institutions.

Your system shows people there are ways to play that game in reverse, build up virtuous cycles to create liquidity into doing better things. For that to even work is understanding we are valuing different things than just the imperial currency. Sometimes it’s not even just the caret itself. Sometimes it’s this altruistic cause we care about. We care about, say, the youth in our society having skills and being able to do things. So maybe people are willing to teach for a discounted rate, whatever the the arrangement can be.

I see it as about changing what we value rather than just trying to design a new game and play it.

Tereza Coraggio

I would say yes and no. I don’t think it’s changing what we value.

I think it’s having a way because that way doesn’t exist so what’s the point?

To say we would change what we value would make it a moral decision. And I’m saying it’s not morality that we’re lacking. We know what we want. But there is no way to do it. As long as the banks own all the houses and create all the money, they own us. There’s no middle ground with that.

So my system change isn’t a gradual thing. It is night and day. Either the banks have the ability to create the money for the mortgages, or we do. And there’s no compromise between that. But once we do have that ability, then our labor is ours to organize. Money is a mean of means of organizing labor in the interest of whoever creates it.

With the banks creating the money, our labor is being used to make the rich richer. That is the only game in town. If we are creating that money, then we’re organizing our labor. And our only question is, how do we want to do that?

One of the things we can do, for that hospital, is use eminent domain. We can take anything that is extracting money from our communities, and use eminent domain to claim anything within our borders. And then we can create the loan in that imperial currency that pays them off for it. And it doesn’t matter how much of that imperial currency you create, because it’s all going down. So don’t worry about it because once you create that loan, it becomes a loan to yourself in your own currency, in carets.

For all the money coming in every month, you get to create that in advance and push it out. So the more that you have in loans for something like a hospital, the more that you can push out there and give everyone a monthly subsidy for healthcare. That way you have as much coming in and going to that hospital to pay off that loan as you have going out. Those two things have to match. But a loan is actually a good thing when it’s a loan to yourself.

Gabriel

I imagine the phrase eminent domain probably rings a lot of alarm bells in people’s heads because I have seen this kind of rhetoric in a bunch of different places where basically property rights are not an inherent attribute of humanity. They are in some ways a social contract. We decide whether or not BlackRock owns all the houses in an area. What we’re willing to do about that is a difficult question.

There are some very difficult questions about what games do we allow to continue unaltered and eminent domain is one solution for that kind of problem But a lot of people are afraid of going in these particular directions because it’s basically telling the government, it’s telling these corporations, it’s telling other institutions, we are challenging your sovereignty. You’re no longer playing this kind of hippy-dippy game with shells in somebody’s backyard. No, this is a real attack on their sovereignty, by trying to claim sovereignty for individuals.

Once people realize how much sovereignty has been taken from them, confrontation is inevitable at some point. When it comes to what people are willing to do and what people are willing to try out, it does lead to this awkward question of how willing are people really to directly contest sovereignty from either empire or these systems that do have a strong grip on people? I don’t think that’s a trivial question at all.

Back during the Freedom Convoy, there was this MOU going around talking about wanting to change the borders of Canada or change who is in office. And there was a whole RCMP report on it; there are things that make governments very nervous and very violent. How directly do you want to say, I think the system is illegitimate and I want something, not just a little different, but radically different? That’s a serious question, there are some real implications to that. We know Empire is not going to be gentle about these questions at all.

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innocence & the death star

Tereza Coraggio

In order for empire to not be gentle, they have to work through someone, right? They have to be working through your local military, your local police. If you’re the one who’s paying those police and those military, then how that’s going to happen?

One of the rules I would make for my Commonwealth is that I would not allow anyone who’s getting their money from military or defense contractors to exchange dollars for carets at a 1:1 basis, past the initial point. Once you’re presenting a different way for someone to make a living, then I don’t want to support US aggression by bringing that money back.

So I’m taking away what the money’s good for. Leave the money, take the assets, just like the godfather in ‘leave the gun, take the cannoli.’

Gabriel

I’ve seen bits of that in the free open source software communities right now where people are trying to add to their software licenses, ‘this can’t be used for either military or immigration enforcement’ nowadays. It’s like, if we want to build tools and do things that are good, how do we stop it from going in the wrong hands? And of course, people will push back against that. They’re saying the U.S. military is going to use whatever it’s available. Your cute little software license isn’t going to stop them, is basically the counter argument to that discussion.

If you are trying to create something, it is a reasonable and fair question to say, how can this be misused? When it comes to various software projects, if you’re building something that can be used by a military to liquidate people, maybe be a little careful about distributing that publicly.

This is where the imperial currency has its big asset—it lumps everybody together. It lumps in that grandmother trying to buy bread with the soldier coming to use his currency to buy your stuff. There’s this hilarious meme, and it it shouldn’t be as funny, but it is. I’m sure you’re familiar with Star Wars. There’s the Death Star and presumably there were engineers working on the Death Star to build the thing that blew up a planet and killed thousands of people. And the character has the sign speech bubble saying, ‘I’m on my way to my job as a morally neutral civilian.’

The sad fact of the matter is these kinds of activities blur those lines that make it very difficult. You may have sympathy for that random engineer who goes to his job to work on the Death Star whatever is. Are they really innocent?

The one red line I have for who I consider an ally or a friend is can they identify innocence? If you’re gonna say nobody’s innocent and that we should all do whatever, there’s problems here. But you can’t then use the innocent to whitewash any of the actual serious crimes that take place. And I think you’re right that these lines are way blurrier than people think.

That raises the complexity of how do we engage engage with this? How do you differentiate between many of these other things when it is the same currency, it is the same system. The way the system is going right now, I do think that bifurcation of society is already happening. I do think if you’re already working for the Death Star one way or another, you are effectively in a different situation now than most regular people are already. So I do think some of that divergence happens organically, but it’s definitely not complete. It’s definitely not a binary thing.

Tereza Coraggio

As you know from the back cover of my book, my core belief and only dogma is that all people are inherently good and, when they behave badly, systems and stories are to blame.

Right now, I would say we all work for the Death Star. The only difference is how many degrees you are removed. If you’re making a lot of money, you’re working directly for them. Or if you don’t make much, you’re serving the people who are serving the people who are serving the people who work for them. You keep getting more layers removed from that.

But that’s the only job there is. And so I don’t look at innocence or even ‘Right Livelihood,’ a phrase that was big for a while. I say, do what you need to do. If you’re not doing it, somebody else is going to be. And if you are enabling yourself to own your own mind, that’s the important thing. Until we have an alternative system available, I don’t blame anyone for what they do to care for themselves and theirs.

We are good people. There’s just not a good system. So after changing that system, going forward, I don’t want the houses to be the reward for behavior that is sociopathic against other people. Whatever you’re doing to someone else, if it would be wrong for them to do to you, it is wrong for you to do to them. It always has to be reversed to be an ethical statement.

However, I would definitely make it possible for people right now, when that system changes over, because they should have the ability to make a new choice.

Gabriel

I definitely think there’s a lot to that. One of the questions I would have is, how clean a choice can it be, once we start going into things like eminent domain and different strategies for creating that separation between old system, new system? Empire has its problems. There’s a lot of ways people are sucked into it and it’s the only job in town effectively. One of the things that scares honestly the bejeebies out of me is there are a lot of people who justifiably want to escape. They want to exit and build. They want to do something radically different without directly confronting the system for what it is. What I’ve seen over and over is a few pockets of places where somebody can carve out a little existence.

There was an atrocious AI written article by Mike Adams talking about the three technologies to live in sovereignty. He’s like, ‘we got solar, we got local AI.’ And I forget what the other thing was, but it was basically three vanity projects as far as I’m concerned. Yes, they’re interesting tools. Yes, they’re fancy ways of doing things. But this won’t even be sustainable in the society it’s trying to escape from.

There’s this limited capacity to exist ‘outside the system.’ And what I have kind of noticed, there are real instances where somebody tries to escape the system and there’s this pack of wolves waiting for them because they know they’re easy pickings. They don’t have that community sovereignty. They don’t have social networks of people to engage with. And so basically they’re easy pickings for all kind of like predatory behavior.

One of the reasons I take what you’re proposing here seriously is that people will give up on the idea of change within the system. And so they try to change things outside of the system. But then they get sucked into all these different parallel games that are arguably, I would say, more predatory and even more deranged because at least within the system, there is some pretense of accountability, whereas all those people who lost money on cryptocurrency were told a fool parts with their money—so there’s no protection in that.

There is a real reason to want to switch away from this big system but the challenge is, then you are directly saying ‘yes i am contesting the sovereignty of the system.’ As a Canadian, I think that’s very difficult thing to do because these systems are very clear with how much they’re willing to use violence. Many people don’t want to contend with how evil the system is and so it creates these traps where either you retreat from it so you can say, ‘I’m innocent, I’m blameless because I’m outside of the system.’ Meanwhile you’re sucked into this other crazy game or you’re saying, ‘Oh, well, the system can’t ever change. Therefore, I can rest easy no matter what I do inside it.’

I struggle with all of these different points of view because I feel like none of them are ultimately good answers for how do we want to live our lives? Do we want to just do our best within the system? Do we want to exit and exist in these weird predatory arrangements? A lot of these questions lead me to face the fact that what we do day-to-day really does make a difference, just not in the sense that Gabriel is unilaterally changing the system.

No, I don’t believe that’s what’s happening at all. But on the other side, building the social foundations that a system change is even possible in the first place is the winning move. Because right now when everybody’s so atomized, everybody’s just talking to six different AI girlfriends instead of human beings, what even can happen? That’s the trouble as I see it.

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a time to argue, a time to dance

Tereza Coraggio

I think you’re going back to that concept, though, between form and purpose. We’ve been tricked into believing that there is no purpose, that purpose, that meaning doesn’t exist.

Looking at spirituality and religions, either you have this concept of God the psychopath, which is what I call the God of really all religions, or you have no God, which means that we’re God, we’re creating everything that happens.

So we shut down the imagination of ‘what do we want to have happen?’ Because we say, if it would actually work, they’d never let us get away with it.

Gabriel

Right. You hear that all the time.

Tereza Coraggio

Exactly. So rather than engaging locally, my focus, to be honest, is to have as much fun as possible locally.

Gabriel

How dare you!

Tereza Coraggio

I have all my different dance crews and farmers market connections and I’ve got fun groups and I do not talk much seriously to them unless the opportunity presents. I don’t really try to change anyone’s mind because it’s important to me that when I show up at the dance class, there’s not someone I’ve made feel bad.

Gabriel

It is funny you say that because, I’m somebody who went from only participating online and really enjoying these kind of real conversations about what we actually believe and what we’re trying to understand, going to interacting in the real world where you’re not doing that at all. You’re not there to bug every single person you see with all this stuff. That was a real culture shock for me.

I’m thinking, this is an entirely different game. And it’s funny because on some level, it made me to realize I was right all along to retreat online because that’s where all the real conversations are happening.

Tereza Coraggio

And you’re right to love that about being online. I used to say that I would go to the ends of the earth for a real conversation. And now the ends of the earth come to me.

I don’t have superficial conversations. I have long comment threads that go deep, deep, deep with people who share that question. I wouldn’t even say share that passion or share that answer because, as you know, I’m famous for disagreeing. I’ve made it into an art form. So having those nuanced conversations that move the whole discussion forward, I have been looking for that all my life.

And now thanks to the whole COVIDcon, I have it. I have people who have found each other who are hungry for those real conversations. And so I don’t need to make that happen in my personal day-to-day life because I can wake up in the morning after I post something and it’s like Christmas. I get to open up my email or my substack and say, ‘oh, this person has a juicy answer that now I can build off of.’ That’s such a delight that has not happened in my life before and we should not be losing that.

Gabriel

That’s been a big motivator of mine when it comes to my Tech Freedom Passion project, because I do feel like there is a real desire by governments and corporations to ensure honest conversations can’t happen.

If there was one quote that drives me up the wall, it’s ‘you wouldn’t say that, or somebody would punch you in the mouth.’ It’s funny to me because everybody has this romanticized idea that real life social interactions are the bee’s knees. I’m like, well, we have a lot of problems that were never solved before the internet. So maybe the internet can solve some problems. I’m not going say it’s going to solve everything. I’m not like, we have the internet now, it’s utopia. But... I do think the ability to have honest conversations without face-to-face real-life status games is very important.

That’s why, when it comes to the consolidation of cyberspace, if everybody’s going to be locked behind an AI data center or a Starlink or whatever it is, I do think there are serious questions about those infrastructure level problems. I would be very motivated to ensure that your local networks can actually talk to each other. And I think an important question anybody can ask themselves is, Can I build a local internet of me and my neighbors, whatever the scenario is, I think that’s an important thing to try to accomplish.

Because it’s not an engineering impossibility. It’s not like this is a huge technical hurdle, I would say it’s more of a collective action problem. There are really simple engineering or tech answers to any of these serious problems we have.

But how do we get to get people interested in solving these problems and willing to spend whatever time or resources involved? That’s not easy. I had my own technical snafu over the last little bit. So I had to re-engineer my own stuff. But it’s worthwhile to think about.

Tereza Coraggio

Absolutely. So I’m going to use the trigger word again, eminent domain. I didn’t realize, but it was Andrea Dworkin who coined the phrase, ‘you can’t dismantle the master’s house by using the master’s tools.’

What the fuck are you going to use—your fingernails to pull out the nails? You’re going to leave the power tools to them? I say we need to understand what their tools are and why they’re so powerful so that we can take them back. Absolutely eminent domain has been used for the empire, for the corporations, for the dismantling of sovereignty But if you want to take back things like the Internet, you have to take back what is local, like your idea of having local area networks that then connect into wide area networks, that then connect beyond that. It gives you a protection, for one, against scams because you’ve actually got your technical people around.

I don’t think you should look at it as, this would be a lot for people to put in the technical time. They’re already putting in the technical time. They’re just using it for nonsense.

If we’re the ones who are generating the carets, and they’re backed by the houses, all the people who are living in your vicinity—especially if in you’re in a tech-heavy kind of place like I am—are going to want those jobs. Those are the jobs that are going to give them carets they can use on their housing. So building these things would actually be a joy.

Gabriel

Just to hammer home that point about, ‘you can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools,’ I do think it’s a really important warning. I don’t think we should figure out how to get Chat GPT to write, you know, the perfect thing. I understand there are structural controls behind these things. The more sophisticated our tools become, the more it raises the bar for how serious and diligent and responsible we have to be over these things.

For instance, nuclear power is quite powerful. I know people debate whether nukes are real, but clearly there is some damage that can be done by these things one way or another. And so we do need an aspect of care and finesse when it comes to how we use these things. People will just have this MacGuffin mindset of, ’I just need to use this thing because this thing is the victory,’ whatever it is. But no, it is part of a broader picture, a broader strategy, a broader understanding. And that’s where the game really changes.

Because you can’t just take the master’s spear and say, I’ve defeated all his guards now. There is a larger game being played in any situation. But that doesn’t mean that spear can’t be used for anything useful. There are some utility from these things. Walking that line does get very hard because, again, how much do you want to be sucked into those things? I do think it is hard, especially nowadays, to walk that line between using social media and social media using you.

Even for me personally, how I talk about my weight loss, something so... small and inconsequential as all this. If I post something to Facebook, just post a picture, people will leave likes. But on my own personal blog, people actually read it, people actually engage, the deeper questions get delved into. To me, it is so stark to see how you engage on these systems does have a real impact on these things. And so I do think it is important to ask, how are we using these tools that are part of the problem in one way. But I’m definitely not in favor of just throw it all out. Like you said, use our fingernails. There’s other things that can be done for sure.

Tereza Coraggio

When I talk about purpose, I’m not talking about some vague thing. I think you need measurables. The things you’re trying to prevent or or curb are monopoly ownership and extraction. And what you’re trying to incentivize is self-reliance at both the household and the neighborhood so that the more times a caret can change hands before it ends up cashed out and turned into dollars or whatever imperial currency is, the better your system is.

It would be great having a game, where we as Commonwealth designers could come up with ideas for: ‘Here’s what I would do for my system. Here’s my community. Here’s what it looks like. Here’s the problems that it has. Here’s what I would put in as my particular subsidies in order to make this happen.’ And then run it as an online game where you get extra points for kludging and stealing things from other people and they get points for that too. It encourages cooperation, but also has tangible measurements and it’s not just a feel good thing. It demonstrates that if we were to make this single change and take back the houses, we could do all this.

Gabriel

I do like the idea of running a simulation and really demonstrating it because people just need to see it work. That’s an obstacle in many different ways. I definitely think there would be a lot of people interested in playing the different parameters of, ‘oh, if I make the tax really high, what changes?’ For instance, Age of Empires is a big game in that space that people love to play around with.

So I do think there would be real value in putting something like that together, especially because you can see the broader discussion that evolves around it, where people have seen it play out so many times. And they’re like, ‘oh, if you do this, it always ends up this way. Is there another way you can go down that path?’

And there are definitely a lot of really interesting techniques you can do if you set it up in a way that says, this is a simulation we’re taking seriously. We want to get information out of those simulations and see where they go. It would be very revealing about how these kind of games can be played over time because there’s a lot of good that can come out of people choosing to play some win-win interactions. Again, I don’t think the bar is actually that high.

Tereza Coraggio

What I like about the idea too, is that there’s no one winner because everybody has a different Commonwealth with different issues and different things that are going on. So you essentially are just taking the best of what you find from other people and applying it to your own situation. But there’s no one system that really is going to work for everybody.

Gabriel

Yet surely we will eventually find the perfect system that everybody should run all the time. I’m skeptical of that.

Tereza Coraggio

There is a framework for the perfect system. Honestly, I will stand behind that my caret system is the perfect anarchist system. It puts the power of decision-making as low as possible, the power of choice while making things interactive. So, there is a perfect framework for a system, but how you apply it is as unique as the place you live.

Gabriel

I think that’s fair. Empire has been a framework that has been applied basically everywhere. So I don’t think there’s no value in looking at things in those terms. That’s for sure.

Tereza Coraggio

I’m going to end and by asking you to tell listeners where they can find both of your two excellent websites.

Gabriel

That’s a good question nowadays because I’ve had a bit of a tech oopsie that is requiring me to rebuild certain things from scratch. But the good news is that Substack is totally unaffected. So for those of you that are on Substack, I’m at LibraSolutionsNetwork.substack.com and MicrodosingFailure.substack.com. The second one being my weight loss journey, the first one being my tech freedom.

And everything that’s there was originally mirrored to my main websites, LibraSolutions.network and Gabe.Rocks. But a lot of things are in flux right now. Really, I am changing around a lot moving forward. Those links won’t change. That’s pretty much where things will be for a long period of time.

But I’m definitely in a process of change right now. So we’ll see how things look in a couple of months, which is basically the timeline I’m looking at.

Tereza Coraggio

Just for a dramatic effect, when you say, ‘my weight loss, that’s no big thing.’ Can you tell people what it actually has been over what period of time?

Gabriel

At the peak of my weight at the highest after the COVID period, I was 576 pounds. That was my highest recorded weight. And today I am just in the the low three hundred’s/ high 290’s. So I’ve lost over 270 pounds and it has been a heck of a journey. I’m still trying to inch forward as challenging as that is, but I do say it’s kind of no big deal in the sense that, people who listen to the updates will know, it’s a journey, but day to day, you don’t feel any different. That’s the weirdest part about it. So I guess I do downplay it. I do underappreciate it because I’m greedy and I want more change. It’s really the the gist of it.

Tereza Coraggio

I think of that as such a beautiful analogy for things that people think, ‘This is just the way things are. You just can’t change anything that major and that much a part of you.

And what I’ve loved about reading your microdosing failure and listening to your your videos, especially your walking ones where you’re talking about the philosophy of it, is that you have so much compassion for other people.

There is no ego that I’ve found in you—you really give other people that benefit of the doubt. And that comes through in all the different areas of what you do. That is what I’m so grateful for and why I wanted so much to talk with you as my first guest.

Gabriel

It means a lot. I mentioned a bunch of reasons why people need to think about different games. And I do think the caret system is a great model for people to even just learn, ‘hey, what’s wrong with the way things are run now?’ It’s a lot of detail really worth going into. And I think that’s kind of the big challenge. Where do you start? Looking closely at mortgages is a great example of saying, ‘How does this affect other areas? where can I see that kind of dynamic play out in other areas?’ There’s a lot of very interesting detail to go into. So thank you so much for this. It really has been a great deal. And I hope everyone listening has had an excellent one.

Tereza Coraggio

Thank you so much.

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Describes how to break the power of the bankers and enable distributed economic anarchy, which is self-governance, not chaos. The system change in my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, gives commonwealth banks the sole power to issue mortgages and the credit to repay them. I look at three rules that make it corruption-proof and eight questions for you to decide as czar of your fiefdom.