Decentralising Your Life [pt1]

more than ever I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a decentralised human being. That is, one that is not attached to just one place, one country, one regime — what does it actually mean to be a level of free where you take complete ownership of your life and how you function within that life during our time here on planet earth.

oOooooo Abstract huh? ahem. Not really.

But seriously, outside of the usual boundaries that we either impose on ourselves or feel suppressed by within our relationships, jobs and government what does it mean to try and live out a life as a decentralised human, putting in and managing our own analog life portfolio of value.

where we put in our value unhindered by distraction economy and by digital portfolios that allow us to invest in other peoples dreams and ideas in the process without the creative tap being taxed at every available chokepoint.

The more I’ve used crypto currency, passed just the ability to earn financial rewards from writing and engagement the ability to use my intelligence to carve out a new way, a new view to the way my life is constructed and to consider the roadblocks that are in place because of centralised processes and systems.

if not stated some of my photos are from unsplash a free site for images, also you can grab some cool images from nomad.pictures a site i run with @dayleeo to get pictures out of the camera roll and onto the web — Photo by Andre Francois on Unsplash

Is it even possible to complete uncouple from these suckling pig centralised systems if we don’t already have in place the things that they were put in place to make us have more efficient and enjoyable lives, after all if we don’t pay taxes, then local authorities can’t maintain the very roads that were built that we drive our cars on, just consider all the paths your life needs on a daily basis and you can see it’s not a clear concept.

sure you could escape out of the system, buy some land, vanish out of sight but that doesn’t make you decentralised, you would have to change many factors of how you interact with the centralised world to not garner attention to you wanting to live out your life in a different format (people don’t like change, they want often sheep culture) at some point you need to get resources from the existing centralised methods.

I heartily believe that while we might not be able to completely uncouple ourselves from the connivence stores, the brands that don’t care if they make the earth completely unfuckable, the services and resources that have packaged for us to provide us a ‘lifestyle’ life I do believe that we can save ourselves some mental anxiety and stress if we decentralise ourselves from the expectations of those systems.

FINANCES AND BANKING

obviously the biggest one here for me is money. How many times in your life have you complained about this bank, that bank, sat on phone calls, had emails, letters, hacks, pin problems, replacement plastic cards, frustration with the place that’s supposed to be better than putting physical money under the bed — you haven’t? Well awesome, congrats, your a special human, I however have had nothing but problems with money in my life and my relationship with it, how to use it, how to make it work for me.

Decentralisation, or aka the blockchain way of looking at finance and money was something I was was never really interested in, I was not into trading, markets, anything like that. I’m still not compared to the many who trade and love it daily BUT It has made me look closely at VALUE, how I make money, how much TIME of my life I take away from LOVING the time in my life to how much I exchange that for the NUMBERS of money and what I then do with it when I have it.

I’ve made wallets, I’ve secured them, I’ve encrypted my logins, I’ve moved funds around, with minimum charges, often instantly, with no fuss, no phone calls or ‘specials from the manager’ wanting me to take time out to come into a bank to ‘have a chat’ — I’ve become my now bank on a public ledger that anyone in the world can see and it’s just the start — once the world can attach my VALUE with the amount of VALUE I’m taking out of the system we can start to truly see who the real brand advocates of LIFE their really is.

I will have a lot wrong, apathy moments, things where I could have been a better HUMAN, I’m hoping that AI will help me make those adjustments, that sentiment and flipping my VALUE into a moment that is calculated by an algorithm to be better for me to engage in for my health, well being and mental health instead of that VALUE sitting there.

waiting for it to be utilised, that I can be an active, integral, useful member of society based on decisions I’m given that I can DECIDE to react on, data that I’m in control off, a recommendation engine for life, no matter where I am, the colour of my skin or sexual gender choices. Just a human, wanting to be useful.

Crypto currency for me is not just an alternative payment method, it’s not just moving my value away from the big concrete buildings of banking sector, it’s just that it doesn’t suit the person I am in this digital life - I’ve outgrown the pacing and speed that analog ideas provides and you’ve shown me and many others on planet earth that your motives and ethics are completely in the wrong place.

a different place from the ones I personally want to live. You on many occasions broke trust, used terminology to confuse me, trap me, belittle me and ultimately spend time on an area of my life that should be a joy to EARN financial rewards where as TAX should be a celebration of paying towards a better society.

FOOD WE MAKE NOT WE BUY

This is always on my mind the most just recently. As I watch news (too much) and read this and that, the highs and lows, the earth and the climate falling apart, water shortages, fear, fear, fear all over the place my EARTH sign parts of me jump to the survival rescue and want to do more — they come to the front and say, ok, how do we get food, how do we store it, what do we get, from where, what if we can’t get it from the CENTRALISED places when BREXIT comes, what if they can’t get import it or get it across from borders.

Then I think about the apathy of the fact that I don’t grow my own or have the skills that I need to do so, the patience, the ability to tend to those things like my grandad did, the joy he had for curating and talking to his plants that turned into FOOD that he could serve to the family — the way he would sit me on the fridge freezer as he would walk me through the making of POTATO FRITTERS in only the special way that my grandad did and how now that’s just a MEMORY of a time that seemed just easier.

Maybe I was just less informed, less awake, less WOKE, maybe I was just young and innocent and that the world that my grandad frequented came natural to him because that was his ROLE on planet earth, as part of a previous generation that went on what they could SEE and TOUCH rather than what information they could LEARN and PROCESS, my granddad was a union man at Rolls Royce, I thought very highly on him and how he discussed food — my grandma was the same, taking me around seven shops to find the best price for a can of beans, pre internet, pre google search for the best price — you had to put in the WORK to get the THINGS.

But if that work has now been done and that stops working, it’s gonna be the game about how we adapt to not having the THINGS and I think that’s just as dangerous territory as not having the SKILLS to adapt to the varying changes in life, so that’s why I’m constantly on the HUNT for balance in this crazy world — the last thing on planet earth for me would be to experience the inability for myself and my loved ones to be able to eat and die from hunger, we all die, sure, but how we do so SHOULD be a choice we have some input on! :)

CLOTHES WE WEAR NOT THEM WEAR YOU

When I was seventeen years of age I was addicted to FIRETRAP, I had to have firetrap everything. I was as brands baby. I had to have proper cornflakes, brand names that I believed were better quality without no proper research into the brand, I had no idea who ran it, where it came from and if it was made in a sweat shop across the other side of the world — that’s because even today OUT OF SIGHT is still very much OUT OF MIND.

And let’s be straight here, this world is OUT OF IT”S MIND what with the ability with the technology, process and minds we have on planet earth, we do have the resources to progress the human condition if we just GOT THE FUCK OUT OF OUR OWN WAY to resolve some of the most fixable things here on planet earth, we are aliens to this spinning space rock.

Having worked in warehouses full of clothes, return of clothes in the new year and the wanted destruction of clothes to avoid taxes to send to other countries as ‘test’ items (I have no idea) I have see first hand what happens when you just allow the machines to keep making, the fool hardy idea of a spread sheet on free play as the products keep coming, the trash stacking up in the parking lot out back now that china no longer is the garbage skip of the world, you see the rules are changing all over.

I’m a pretty basics kinda guy now, warmth, still with my addiction to t-shirts from startups but mainly I’ve got maybe two sets of everything I need, apart from socks, I have no idea where they go but they get replaced as and when I’m terribly inefficient with my laundry and clothing cycle, I wear clothes because it’s not sociably suited for me to sit daily blogging ;)

TRANSPORTATION

I own a smart car

It’s very tiny, it’s got two seats and not much else, it’s cheap to run and not to insure, it runs on petrol unfortunately not electric which I wish it did, if it did that would be my perfect car, although I admit it’s a bit of a faff when it’s me, dayle and Bella — I’d like to upgrade a van but not at the expense of some gas guzzling beastie.

Recently we just hit the next generation of electric cars and vans meaning that other electric vehicles with still perfectly good electric batteries and charging have come down massively in price making them kinda realistic for the next transportation upgrade.

I admit that range is a problem on those, but would be great right now because it’s relatively new in the local town to charge them, meaning I get a few hours of charge for free meaning I can get out and go charge for free and take in some shopping for cheap food stuffs or a change of scenery in a different coffee space (saving us from cold turkey)

To be fully decentralised in my transport I really need some kind of foldable electric scooter that’s made super light, chargeable quickly from a source in said coffee shops and is accepted on other transports without problems, we are not there yet, we have a way to go, many versions exist that are the R&D of those ideas, we don’t have decentralised transportation yet but the existing bus networks are trying their best to get their offerings there to stay transportation relevant in this modern, on the go age.

YHA AND GUEST HOUSES

In the uk here we have a number of places that you can stay at if you have membership, one of those is called YHA Youth Hostels & Camping and they have hundreds of places spread out across the country, it’s certainly something that I’ve always wanted to do and feels very ‘decentralised’ to go between boon docking and staying at a nice place where I can have a proper bed and breakfast between exploring.

Of course the ultimate would be to have an electric car, mapping to where the next charge it, showers and laundrette drive in’s like they have in portugal (well at least the laundrette stuffs) and the occasional YHA to stay at, from a media makers perspective of exploring the country and documenting the journey as you go it would be a great crossover.

If money was no object then I’d do that tomorrow but in a tesla for the range until the Tesla semi is here in the uk and then I would train to drive one of those and setup a little europe haulage company driving five hundred mile chunks at a time delivery shipping containers across the country to steem powered nodes — I think that would make a hell of a great daily stream and dtube lifestyle channel! :)

Anyway, back to the point, accommodation, guest houses, places to crash and boon dock, people are already doing this as part of their RV life and even people who are back packers are living this lifestyle, travelling between airports, coffee shops and places to rest their heads, keeping it moving, decentralised in many ways in nature.

I believe the age of being centralised has been over for a long time and those that are tied to a place, space or area will be feeling the pain of making that choice as the systems that were designed to support those regions start to be effected by poor financial management and the blood letting of crucial infrastructure by those in positions of power.

everyone is on the move these days, keeping it moving is going to be crucial in a system where the value is always moving, the economies of places are in flux more so than ever before, people are on the move in mass migration numbers, resources are shipped on the global sea highways or flown at the expense of the environment impact, it makes no sense to give on one hand and feel like it’s taking away on the other — I guess that’s the nonsense of being human.

FUNDING CLOUD SERVICES WITH OUR CRYPTO INVESTMENTS

The final area I wanted to talk about is the things is the resources currently use, that we have to find financial compensation from to afford the luxuries of using the cloud to store our messy human lives. Those have a cost, a bit like investing in these different crypto currencies — everything has a bill, electricity, human power to make those things run smooth.

Currently the trap for someone wanting to live a decentralised life is the financial methods in which we pay for those services. We are partly trapped by location and the need for our current banking and financial overlords to have us tied to a place, decentralisation does not ask for that requirement.

For me to have a presence on the web I have to pay for hosting, for me to access the internet I have to have a cellular connection, for me to even write I need to charge the batteries for my wireless keyboard, once you start adding it up you realise how tied to centralised services we actually are.

Sure you can buy VPN upgrades, stickers and teeshirts, even sell bees honey using a decentralised store using modern day software but we are not anywhere near the level you would need to be able to live a fully decentralised life, we can chip away at it however but it’s going to take time.

WRAPPING UP

In my next post I’ll focus on an area at a time and look at ways and means and considerations and maybe some achievable resolutions to try and decentralise some of these topics mentioned above and how certain crypto powered blockchains might feed into that.

Cheers!
Love ya!
T E A M H U M B L E x

pinterest epic wins pinboard → brand advocate for nokia, 1000heads, verisign → won vloggie for node666 (san fran 2006) → television for time team history hunters 1999 (burton on trent) → sold me.dm to evan williams in april 2011 → went to phil campbell, alabama to help raise money after tornado ripped up the town (was on sky news, bbc news)→ CNN for sxsw 2013 about austin south by southwest event → video chat with robert scoble from rackspace → music video can you spot me? → won the digital derry contest for 5k euros → crowdfunded digital signage concept called pi street → now living life through digital blockchains.