I’m excited to be writing on a new platform here, with the renewed optimism that we – the collective conscious of humanity – might well be finding our way out of the tech and communications quagmire that has been the past 40 years of electronic ‘innovation’.
I first sat down with a computer in the mid 1980s, a surprise blessing at the time, before a screen and keyboard were officially introduced to our Scottish island education systems. The population of the village and, by association, the school, were so low that we were all in one classroom at that point, and having had various (possibly too many) changes of teachers over previous years, we had developed a certain oppositional stance to our learning guardians. We had become, all ten of us, rather unruly. So the husband of our head-teacher (and sole educator) was called in, to try and convince us to be reasonable.
He was most charismatic, and for myself as one of the older pupils, isolated at the heady heights of the primary school hierarchy – amongst two or three other children – I personally was desperate for some actual new information. I’d exhausted the curriculum in my 6th year (out of 7), my self-education stamina was petering out, and I was most keen to have more mental enrichment. The teacher’s husband was a treasure-trove of the new, and a fabulous world of data, programming, intelligent games and autonomy opened up for me. It blasted open the probabilities for my future, in contrast to the typical options that had been illustrated to that date for me, in our village with a couple of shops, a barely-functioning pub, and a maximum of 6 weeks of summer busy-ness.
Three decades later, having missed out on even the newly-introduced computers at the high school through lack of capable teachers to instruct us on them, and having lived relatively barefoot and hand-to-mouth in various countries and cultures…. The internet began to encroach on my attention, and it seemed time, around 2007, when some minor inheritance, plus the fact of living in a city for the first time since art school, converged into the possibility of my being exposed to others who had websites, emails, and used computers to do stuff.
I was already **very bored** with the very concept of working in the conventional sense, and was somehow (I will never truly comprehend how I did so) managing to subsist through a bizarre juggling of pittance, art prizes, governmental subsidy, living in sunnier climes and working in fields, plus the very occasional sale of a painting. Two months doing a ‘proper job’ in a national art gallery in England, and a year or so running night classes for elderly drawing students, and I’d had it. This didn’t stop me working my arse off for the next two decades, attempting to craft my own business, branding and even autonomous existence – a farcical blend of, albeit edgy, mainstream social media coupled with endless reinventions of colourful, experimental pop-up events, social entrepreneurship, and at least *some* growing notoriety for my radical authenticity.
The internet, almost as soon as I ‘entered’ it, was something of a double-edged sword and a false friend. The attention and the perceived ‘power’ that it brought me and my art, were short-lived, and did not appear to be putting down roots. This did not deter me, because of course I’d been convinced by cult-ure that art-ists were *supposed* to struggle…. until they ‘made it’: that tantalisingly alluring fairy tale of material success for all.
Several bouts of burn-out later, having poured my vital force into the final-straw visionary project for transforming community-landscape-collective-wealth, AND THEN having had my meagre income decimated by the lockdown and social exclusion of the plandemic period; my stoicism had me reach out beyond the edge, to more alternative and eventually, logically, to more truly-decentralised projects.
In early 2019 I joined the Steemit blockchain, which forked into the Hive.blog – and I’ve enjoyed almost 7 years earning sufficient amounts of crypto to invest in a pot of gold (bitcoin, that is) that spills over here and there, allowing me to do (much!) more than barely-getting-by. More importantly, the weight on my shoulders of deep disconnect from the collective conscious, friends and family, society, and a Living Ecosystem of technology and communications, was somewhat eased off.
A steep recent learning-curve with Nostr however, liberates my senses: it instills in my consciousness the optimism that we are collectively capable of reinventing that which has been created with nefarious intentions, to demean and de-evolve the expansion of our direction as a whole. The Correction of the Internet is a lofty goal, and one that I am behind for sure, as recent years I had begun to imagine a life without it altogether, it’s usefulness increasingly moving down the spectrum from efficient, empowering, enlightening tool to liberate people – to chocolate teapot status.
Absurd search engine results to simple requests, laughable propaganda at every turn, incessant publicity even from those who claim to be the solution, bots and trolls, mind-numbing GIFs and forwarded private messages: detritus, detritus, detritus.
Finding my twinflame and moving to the wild(er) countryside of Molise, Italy, our cocreative intolerance of ‘the system’ came full-circle, and we opted out of the last of paperwork, lowered our use of bank accounts to emergency-back-up-only, and disconnected from mains water and electricity - beginning our healing, BTC-empowered journey back to Living On The Land. Two minds, brought together in symbiosis, can achieve freedom so much more quickly than one alone can: our weaknesses which held us back, alone, have been stretched out into new energetic muscles. We are protected and nourished multiple-fold, in relation to how we could take care of ourselves before. Our pooled riches and resources – if meagre when we were solo – are not accumulatedly many times more abundant. And our decisions about direction in life, our confidence and courage in making big decisions, are profoundly more potent.
Our relationship with tech and communications similarly shifted. We found Nostr, started researching its potential, and then very recently joined up, having a rejuvenated sense of the probability that we might even find a proper community online to grow and learn with: to actually climb collectively out of this deep, dark hole that was dug for us all.
It is exciting indeed to find such a brave band of Real Folk, striving to resolve such an epic problem as we have been entangled with: the sad human migration away from Real Life, from Natural Law, and from the state of divine harmony and co-creative surthrival that we were conceived into – that we have Natural Sovereign Reign of. It has not been easy to carve out initially, a safe place to live, to have real success and respect and visibility in, and a place to even speak the Truth. Here’s to another rising Cosmic Wave of human effort that will succeed in lifting us out of the darkness and confusion and into the light, towards the sun. It is a great joy to be presented with the collective efforts of bright minds and enthusiastic hands, who similarly to us, know their worth and their Rights. Let’s see where we can go from here.
Looking forward very much to knowing more of the workings of Nostr, and of the people interwoven through it.
With Love,
Clare.
www.claregaiasophia.com
www.claregaiasophia.com
