Turning Techno Amish

People are always trying to figure out better ways to live. Many people in our consumer/technology/corporate society are pretty strongly opposed to the approach to life they were socialized into even as they keep going to work and turning the crank at the gloppita-gloppita factory.

The life of debt slavery and consumerism has very little appeal. False freedom. Lots of low level stress and constant avoidance of existential questions that sit in the corner and stare like a dog who knows its time for you to go outside.

There are books and youtube channels who delve into the nitty gritty details of alternative approaches to life that require no debt, and exist outside the consumer mainstream. It's striking how much their approaches to life resemble the pioneer lives I've read about in recent months and years. Growing and making food stuffs from scratch, or making clothes rather than buying them were necessities back in the 19th century, but are a means to avoid debt today.

If you wanted to live deliberately, and make deliberate choices about your life, it makes a lot of sense to pick and choose from all the historical examples of what worked and what didn't and basically go back in time with some modern technology rather than following the general flow of the contemporary culture.

Credit Systems and Markets

In the 19th century in the new states and territories of the United States money was scarce to the point people often used Spanish silver. Real goods, like lumber or grain, were valuable and relatively plentiful and in immediate demand. Consequently, people mostly used barter and issued credit agreements as an everyday thing. For example, if you were building a mill and needed some steel parts, you might strike a deal with a blacksmith to provide 100 bags of wheat or a portion of your production for 2 years to pay for a steel axle for the mill.

Banks weren't really necessary for farming on a small personal scale, but with the development of the transportation systems like the canals and railroads, banks could serve as an intermediary between more anonymous distant parties, and money/credit could facilitate trade between producers of unlike goods without the hassle of negotiating contracts for every transaction.

Railroads developed agricultural infrastructure, like grain silos, to facilitate the mass movement of commodities like corn or wheat to where they'd be actually consumed or processed. Money was a sort of token within the context of that entire system that started to represent a portion of the productivity of it as an entirety.

Large scale commerce and concentration of commerce in cities and ports also led to the ability to command large quantities of goods and manpower which led to the growth in industry and a parallel growth of the "financial system". As a side effect the banks which issued "credit" within those systems were able to leverage the productivity of all the commerce that was carried on within them even though the bankers didn't actually do anything.

By the Bubba Clinton presidency, the financial markets completely disassociated from the "real" economy of railroads and grain elevators. The real economy is hugely productive and massively undervalued, while the paper and electronic economy is parasitic, country clubbish, and hugely overvalued.

Barter "Finance" in the Old Northwest

It's an eye opener to read how people conducted business in the early 19th century. Money was not readily available since there was nothing like the banking system we have today that issues credits that are ubiquitous and widely accepted, so people struck barter-based deals all the time on all scales. The land company that bought the Western Reserve from Connecticut "bought" the land at about $0.30 an acre in a deal that was financed by bonds, which were really backed by the future land sales rather than any collateral put up by the company, for example. Similarly, within the settled territories, none of the people had money so they struck deals in barter terms. The credit they extended to each other was in terms of labor or goods and food.

A person who lived within such a system had to be fairly realistic and understanding of the limitations of the value of things like bushels of peas or bags of corn and the "volatility" of those things. There really wouldn't be any concept of "price" like we have now, which is mostly set by gamblers in futures market-casino games rather than between producers and consumers.

Another interesting aspect of the financial dealings of the 19th century people is the Indian population, at least within the context of the sources I've read, didn't participate in this type of credit system. Dealings between settlers and indians were either one-off purchases or were like deals conducted with a foreign nation done through treaties and deals with "chiefs" and governments.

The American's credit system tied them to the East Coast and its institutions, even though those institutions were totally feeble and remote from the settlers in the newly opened interior of the country. It's really not hard to imagine the Indians issuing credit in the same way the land companies or states did, but they actually just became peons and clients to these agreements the same way individual settlers did.

How Trump Got Elected

In retrospect, the people who got Trump into the White House were brilliant in their use of Social Media as a propaganda tool. My guess is they developed all that stuff and then recruited (or ordered?) Trump to serve as their front man.

A peculiar feature of Social Media is groups can self-select and segregate into ersatz tribes. (lots of posts on that) Two groups inhabiting cyber-space might not even know the other exists.  When they discover one another, it's simple enough to just screen the others out if their ideology is hostile. A perfect example of this phenomenon is the Trump coalition included both strident evangelical zionist and jewish zionist conservatives AND alt-right cosplay nazis.

Both of these Groups Voted for Trump

Subsequently, I believe other social media accounts were created (or formed spontaneously to fill an obvious void) to try to keep all these groups on task. In recent days, for example, as the United States and its allies appear to be agitating for a war or at least "regime change" in Iran, the alt-right "white nationalists" and "nazis" are cajoled by the idea that the Iranians are Aryans who deserve to be free from Mullahs and/or are Muslims that should be mass murdered anyway before they rape white women in London. Meanwhile on another vector, "White  Nationalism (muh white race!)" is equated with Kosher Nationalism. Identitarian ethno-DNA-state of Israel is held up with toxic levels of irony, as a model for White Nationalists.

It's become more obvious that tribal marketing techniques were very carefully planned and employed against the population via the Internet--social media and YouTube specifically and that Hillary Clinton (who's policies Trump now puts into practice) and her old style campaign had no chance against weird alt-media personalities like Alex Jones and Stefan Molyneux, which is pretty damn amazing.

Trump's people created a web of cross-promoting social media  accounts in various overlapping ideological categories from the hoodoo alt-media people who talked about bigfoot, aliens, and alt-history topics, to alt-finance, to libertarians, to pick-up-artist websites, to the weird rabid anti-semite performance artist Brother Nathanael.

All of these were a feeder system into the cloaca maxima of the Trump campaign. It started several years before the election and continues today.