What do the struggles of capitalism and communism have in common?

For a long time, people have thought that capitalism and communism are opposites. Obviously both need the idea of the “capital” as part of their core identity.

But what is capital?

Capital is money and securities (foreign currencies, stocks, bonds, ETFs), real estate, etc., everything that is wealth that is money issued by a central bank already, can be reliably exchanged for money, or can be used as collateral for loans.

But what does money need to exist?

It needs tax filings. Money that isn’t handled according to the tax laws and all other international compliance laws is not legal money.

Obviously the system to be designed couldn’t really do anything about black markets, because those are currently based simply in stupid political decisions (e.g. keeping drugs illegal, school system that doesn’t teach body autonomy and emotions, etc.).

And what is necessary to make these tax filings happen?

It’s proper accounting (Buchhaltung) and legal advice.

Without that, you’re basically screwed, as long as you’re not an absolute tax nerd.

Now imagine that, and times a thousand.

Every single action you do is only real because it is represented in a physically filled out and stamped form (the permission, a kind of “certificate”, i.e. someone allowing someone else to do something).

One big part of the failure of the Soviets was their desire to centralize.

The intention by party leadership was not “well-being of the people”, but centralizing as much power as possible in a very small group of elites.

OGAS sounds like a cool forgotten cybernetic thing, but I believe it’s good that it never came to be.

What the Soviets wanted (and what the initiators of OGAS certainly supported) was the state controlling every aspect of human life.

With manual bureaucracy, at least people could make mistakes.

But when everything is centrally controlled by a computer system, according to some defined plan, eventually everything will run perfectly, eerily perfectly. Mistakes would not happen anymore, but also there would be the actual mistake much deeper: This would cement a two-class hierarchy, of people “in charge” and “the workers”.

As mentioned in my other post, I believe that the path to personal “liberation” is to try to live in ways where divisions of power are only based on circumstance, not based on ritual or tradition. Where you continuously actively evaluate what governs you, what you want to start governing you more, and what you want to start governing you less.

I give you an example of myself:

• Right now I am heavily governed by my job, which is basically home office “desk work”, which I want to reduce, but first I need to build this self-generating machine of bureaucracy automation, so just following that thought also heavily governs me, though it’s intention is to eliminate itself as a priority in my life, .

• Since Monday, I have been eating breakfast, lunch and dinner regularly. I know, it have been just 2.5 days so far, but it’s a big thing for me. My eating schedule had gotten totally out of hand in the last few months, and I had reduced physical activity basically to zero, except for short daily yoga sessions. So taking care of the cycles of my body regarding food, physical exercise and sleep is what I want to govern me more.

• Then there are some other things which I might tell you in person if I know you and trust you.

So I believe setting plans (i.e. intentions for yourself is the way to go).

You need to govern your own life. No one else should.

This isn’t just self-help bla-bla.

As mentioned many times on this blog before, it means a deep structural revolution of bureaucracy, because it means fully transferring personal data autonomy away from large institutions, and to the individual.

The problem in today’s society, a hundred years ago and pretty much ever since humans started writing, is that who can write, and who manage the records is centralized in a very specific group of people. It’s centralized in nation states and large companies, all those organizations with strict hierarchies. But in reality, nowadays, with all our advanced and very small computer systems, it wouldn’t need to. It would just need a more secure data exchange system, where individuals enjoy the same “eye-to-eye” security guarantees as large corporations already do anyway.

Typically, to initiate any larger endeavor, you need legal advice, you need tax advice, you need a notary.

Many humans and their livelihoods are dependent on us being able to handle documents (“Urkunden”) safely.

“Urkunde” is a very beautiful German word.

“Ur” is a prefix which means “very old”. For example you can also use it in “Uropa”, which means “great-grandfather”, while “Opa” is just “grandfather”. There’s also “Urwald”, the rainforest, which in German literally means “very old forest”. Or “Ursprache”, a hypothetical predecessor of every other language.

“Urkunde” is, in that way, peculiar.

Forests or grandpas have existed for a long time, and all of them are actually old, in terms of time.

But “Kunde” as in “Urkunde” is rather an initial expression of knowledge, information, or news (German: Kenntnis, Nachricht, Mitteilung, as “Kunde” does not only mean “customer” in modern German, but also a mix of news and information in old-timey German).

Some more examples of how “Kunde” in this old-fashioned meaning can be used:

• “Er gab Kunde von seiner Ankunft.” = “He gave word of his arrival.”

• “Sie brachte gute Kunde.” = “She brought good news.”

• “Ich habe Kunde von dem Unglück erhalten.” = “I have received word of the tragedy.”

In combination, Urkunde means in English:

• document → general, neutral term

• certificate → e.g. birth certificate, marriage certificate

• deed → legal document, property/title deed

• charter → founding or granting document (e.g. a charter of incorporation)

• record → official record / entry

Basically, every running nation state is based on the sanity and honesty of its notaries. If they would start certifying documents randomly, chaos would ensue.

If we want to make the levels of power between different people in society contrast less, it’s necessary to conceive bureaucracy as infrastructure.

Just because I create a new association or a new company doesn’t mean that I would need to pay a company for a piece of software which allows me to properly manage my members, employees, taxes, or whatever. It’s ridiculous that people are disincentivized from going their own ways, simply because the bureaucracy associated with basically everything is genuinely intimidating.

I think solving bureaucracy must be the main focus of pretty much everyone in the world for at least a few months or years, because it’ll make everything soooo much easier.

Why don’t more people make impact startups?

Because the people genuinely caring about our planet are not typically those who have grown up profiting a lot from capitalism, and are therefore often very intimidated by the “language of money” (i.e. bureaucracy).

One of my mid-term goals (i.e. the level I want to bring my startup to) will be fully democratizing the administration of a company.

That means automatically tracking all inflows, outflows, invoices, receipts, and of course also all other product-specific events.

I think it’s total insanity that even services like firma.de, while they allow you to found the company, then you also need to pay for all the tax advisory, which can easily be a few thousand euros per year, even for a simple “UG (haftungsbeschränkt)”, a German type of limited liability company where the minimum initial capital of the company can go as low as €1. So just the official starting capital is not the issue, but everything attached to it.

That makes our economic system extremely unfair: People who cannot afford tax advisory are basically completely prevented from becoming more independent, self-governed people.

So in both capitalism and communism, people oppress each other simply using excessive, inefficient paperwork, handled in infrastructure often prone to data leaks, programmed in inefficient ways where much business logic is duplicated across systems, leading to frequent inconsistencies and personal data scattered on the servers of many different parties.

There is only one solution: Data autonomy.

I want to be able to own my own data.

Of course if I want to, I also want to be able to “outsource” this “data custody” to a second party.

However, the primary focus of the hardware+software system to be developed will be those that self-host. That can of course happen in any form, e.g. someone renting a server from a hosting company, or even just having a Raspberry Pi standing at home, which would then be your personal data provider, meaning it can also always be turned off if you don’t want to hear from it for some time.

From what I have gathered, there are basically no downsides, and only upsides:

• risk of data exposure minimized

• trust in the system maximized, because every computation becomes tracable (and the previously black-box institutions become transparent)

• humans don’t need to work on desks anymore, and can instead be in nature, and do the activities humans are truly made for: deciding, building, being creative, loving and feeling

Life always needing to be hard is not an eternal fact of life. So far it has been for some, because obviously in the current systems there always needs to be someone who is the asshole, while some others are the “royalty”.

If you are in any way in the IT sector or know people in the IT sector, try to explain to them that, to get anywhere as humanity, we need to make an effort to minimize the use of digital technology, everywhere on the planet.

For me, people who are developers at TikTok or Facebook are basically on the level of people working directly in the global cocaine trade.

So it’s pretty obvious: clay tablet has turned into paper has turned into smartphone.

I personally completely reject all technology-centered futures.

Internet things, i.e. communicating easily globally, should obviously be a basic human right, but, more important is the question what is then transmitted. And, as described, it’s pretty obvious: Data is transmitted peer-to-peer, based on what happens. Knowledge is always shared only among the parties which truly need to know about it.

The battle between capitalism and Soviet-/Xi-style governments has always been in vain.

Both want to centralize, just in different ways: The ones towards a few different large companies, the others towards one ultra-powerful government.

We, the actual people, should not get fooled by either.

They both play the same game which monarchs have been playing for millennia: Keeping a few people on the top.

And how do they do that?

Interestingly, they don’t only do it through actual direct physical threats. Instead, they make it by making our lives boring.

They classify, grade and order, until everyone fits into a form.

Bureaucracy is dehumanization at its finest, because it constrains the limitlessly free identity of what a human can be to a set of form fields.

And finally, after having made bureaucracy overcomplicated for centuries, nowadays we need to pay legal, tax or financial advisors to escape from the trap of “permanent employment” (abhängige Beschäftigung). The German term for it literally contains “abhängig”, which means “addicted”.

It’s our system, collectively.

It’s not a system that should exclude anyone.

A state is a participatory system.

Not where some participate and others just execute and get left behind.

We need to resolve the silent split through our society: Some fill out forms according to their own will, while some just execute the instructions that follow from what others have filled into these forms.

Bureaucracy is not just one more problem we currently have.

Civilization is defined by what has been written down and stored in secure records.

If we continue like we do right now, thinking that each party would need to keep all “their” customers’ data instead of embracing true data sovereignty/autonomy, society will grind to a halt, to a complete standstill, because as the older generation retires, the burden of old computer systems will get larger and larger, while the Big 4 get greedier and greedier to do their infinite “digital transformation” projects, and it’ll all continue to be one big loop of enshittification and overregulation.

Currently people do not own their economic or legal existence. They rent it from bureaucratic gatekeepers. Both capitalism and communism rely on an extensive network of trust monopolies. Coordination is concentrated into command structures. The party that is generally trusted the least is the end customer.

There is a very fundamental next step for humanity: Finally getting our paperwork in order.

Paperwork is like telecommunication: It doesn’t make sense to have two different sets of phone number systems, and some artificial split through the world.

Everyone, no matter their background, no matter their experience level, will get access to high-quality bureaucracy for all management tasks, from handling personal accounting and tax filings to large-scale corporate controlling and compliance.

And resist centralization. Many people will tell you all kinds of reasons for why you should centralize with them (e.g. keep your data on their servers etc.). Except for very special cases for very special types of data processing, their existence is most often completely unjustified. It’ll take us a few years as humanity to collect and unify all the different functionality, and many people who had devoted their entire life to a job in software engineering will be very sad about losing that opportunity (at first, until they finally reconnect to nature), because the explicit intention of this entire project is to maximize reusability of software components on every level of the stack, so that in the future, constructing new data processing will become not much more than defining the events to be exchanged and developing the event processors.

At the same time, when software engineering isn’t a necessity anymore, but it upgraded to being a type of art, the beautiful forms of self-expression we might see with software engineers liberated from their desks will also be pretty awesome.

If a company or government just processes data on behalf of users, the same processing can also be made fully transparently, so that the end user always knows which parties have knowledge of their data and based on which agreements or legal basis each data exchange and data transformation happened.

The first step is creating this peer-to-peer communication channel itself. Details will follow once I have them.

Capitalism and communism both relocate the center of agency away from the person. We need a shift away from institutional data sovereignty, towards personal data sovereignty. From an organization-centered civilization to a person-centered civilization. Both capitalism and communism dehumanize, as they turn social life into an accounting problem.

And you’ll see: A better climate (both environmentally and socially) will follow logically. Some people suffer directly, but many are also completely unaware that what they do is not a product of their own dreams and imagination, but entirely based on instructions from others. No one should be forced (e.g. economically) into situation where they become just “dream realizers” for others.

For most people it’ll be a pretty crazy revelation that they will need to completely change their course of life, because their intended jobs (e.g. becoming a high-ranking employee in a bank, working at Meta) won’t exist anymore, because all those institutions that base their existence primarily on handling paperwork and administrative records based on deterministic rules won’t need to exist anymore.

Humanity will outgrow them, once people get the magic that lies within effective, transparent, self-sovereign data custody and processing systems.

The real struggle is not between capitalism and communism, but between centralized legitimacy and distributed legitimacy.

Civilization runs on ledgers. Whoever controls the ledgers controls the game.

So each individual should control their own.