Imagine for a moment that there was this group of people in the world, screaming that the ice is melting and the sea levels are rising. They scream and scream how coastlines will be under water in 100 years time. "We need to stop the ice melting!" their slogans say. "We need more political will to stop the melting!" they are screaming.

But then some weirdo comes and tells them...."You know that the ice melting and its impacts, are because of climate change...". He is quickly dismissed. The Ice Melting Cult marches forward, too blind to see that ice melting is just a symptom of a greater problem.

Well, this is what we are confronting nowadays via projects like TROM. The world is screaming "climate change", others say "the soil is being destroyed", some say "corruption is the problem". Plastic, waste, slavery, inequality. A LOT. But what they fail to see is that all of these are symptoms. Symptoms of trade.

Take climate change. The reason humans pollute so much and can't seem to change and move to renewables, is that...well...they have to trade. The fossil fuel industry is so huge in this trade game, that they can influence politics. Politics is a bunch of people who get a lot of money from being in those places. The other humans are too busy trading their life away to get access even to their basic needs, so what can they do. Everyone is in a race to trade, and in the process they are either destroyers of the environment (think big corporations), or numb zombies who can't even grasp these issues or do anything about them (think most workers).



So we are impotent to fix climate change simply because this trade based society does not allow it. It incentivizes humans to profit more, be mindless, consumers, etc.. Even if we switched to renewable energies tomorrow, these incentives will make humans create more and more waste, pollution, suffering, destroy the environment, and so forth. Pointless.

And so, to all of those who do not see this trade based society as the originators of most of today's problems, I am calling you out because you are in the Ice Melting Cult. And you have to wake up. Else we are all fucked. Thank you!

#tromlive

Many people believe a fat myth of today's world, that capitalism (this trade-based system) is creating diversity. Look at how many chocolates there are, cars, gadgets, software, etc.. But this is a myth. The diversity is in the package/wrapper and not the product itself. Most phones are the same, nothing new for "new releases". Cars brought almost no advantage to transportation overall for the past decades. Products in the supermarket taste quite the same between brands, and clothes are recycled fashion trends. Movies and books are remakes or copy cats of whatever sells best. And so on.

Anyway, here is a search engine we made to showcase how 175 companies own pretty much everything in this world https://www.tromsite.com/tbf/

But I want to focus on 1 particular domain: software.

Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, VK, and maybe 3-4 more, are the ones that are the most used in the world. They do not communicate with each other and are very limited in terms of functionality. It means you choose one or another, or a bunch of them and manage them separately. They are trade-based platforms (you trade your data, currency, attention to them). Full of ads, full of censorship, full of crap overall.

On the other hand the Fediverse is a network of such platforms: Friendica, Mastodon, Peertube, Pixelfed, Funkwhale, and so forth. Look at the diversity here https://fediverse.party/en/miscellaneous/ - these are made by different organizations and enabled by different people. A ton of diversity in terms of options.



These are video platforms, blog platforms, photo sharing platforms, platforms for musicians, live streaming, events, you name it. And all communicate with each other. If some organization has an account with Peertube (video platform) I can follow and interact with them from my social platform Friendica. How amazing! If I have a Peertube account and a Friendica one, I can easily setup so that when I post on Peertube a video, it goes on my Friendica too, as a post. The options are very diverse.

This "fediverse" is created not to be traded but to be shared. You will not find ads on these platforms (at least not on the vast majority of them), or data collection or any of that crap.

The MacOS and Windows vs Linux is yet another example of how diversity is actually achieved when humans do not sell their stuff and themselves, when you have a community of people who share their work and ideas. Linux comes in so many flavors for so many needs and wants. Look at this:



So if you look at software overall, the "capitalism" world, which is the trade-based world in which people make software to trade it (for data, attention, currency, etc.) is like a handful of options. But when the software is created for the sake of creating it and is shared and anyone can copy these, modify, redistribute, as trade-free, then real diversity is created and a better environment emerges overall.

We should take the software example and try to provide other goods/services in the same manner. But to do that we have to decouple humans from the trade-based society. At least when it comes to their basic needs. Else no one can have the time to engage in such things. Software is easy to create and maintain from the comfort of your home and in your space time, but is difficult when it comes to food or other goods and services. In any case there is still and abundance of such trade-free goods/services out there as we showcase here https://www.directory.trade-free.org/. But this is not enough.

So. If we want to create a wonderful society, we first have to decouple humans from this trade-based society by at least providing them with their basic needs as trade-free. That creates a good soil for the emergence of lots of trade-free goods/services, in a positive feedback loop. Imagine how much good we can create in this world. Imagine how much real diversity. Imagine how wonderful this could be.

#tromlive

We have the tools to save the planet from climate change. Politics is getting in the way, new IPCC report says https://link.trom.tf/nA_xADrt



Yeah well....climate change, a problem created by? Trade of course. The fact that humans are forced and incentivized to trade at all costs. Else they can die in this system. This awful incentive creates huge consumption needs. Thus making humans create new phones every week, same ones, but different styles. Millions of cars each year - same cars, different colors. All kinds of useless shit for the sake of trading this for that.

Now to make all of this shit humans need to use energy. And a cheap way is to grab the dead biological matter from the earth's crust, and burn it. And they are pretty good at that. And that puts lots of unwanted gasses (molecules) into the atmosphere. Not to mention the forests that are cut, the biodiversity loss, the waste that is created for the sake of making more shit to be able to trade it.

Of course humans now have the means to use renewable energies instead of dead animals and plants, so they won't put those bad molecules into the air. But for one big companies (clusters of humans) depend on trading the dead biomass and they are quite powerful. You can't simply push them aside. Same is for the jobs that are created because of this industry and so forth. Second, even if we are to do it right now, there will be a huge issue in terms of other sorts of pollution (hello batteries!) that come as a cost for our insane consuming society, due to its trade nature.

Now...this is never going to be solved even if it is solved. The immense plastic pollution, nukes and the possibility of a WW3, the biodiversity loss, the threat of an asteroid hitting Earth and humans not being even remotely prepared for that; the forever chemicals and so much pollution and waste....these are growing issues that will dwarf the climate change problem in the future.

Wake up humans! You need to realize that it is the structure of your society that's at fault. The fact that you, humans, still think that everyone on your planet has to trade even for being allowed to live on this planet. You have transformed your own kind into reckless and mindless monsters that all they want is to trade this for that.

And no renewable energies will change the nature of this game. To think that renewable energies are going to fix these massive and global issues, is like asking a rapist to use condoms next time he rapes someone. #tromlive

By Tio.

Yesterday my family got 2.200 Euros withdrew from their bank account. By some "name". Search online, go to the bank, and find out it is the government. Or at least a gov institution. The bank sends you home because they can't tell you why that is. You are home, confused. What to do? Ask around....or ask a lawyer. Ok, fine, ask a lawyer. They charge you. They say the money was withdrew because of a fine that likely you didn't pay in time.

What?!

Go to another gov institution where the lawyer sends you. They say: "Yeah, you got 2 speed tickets last year and you did not pay in time!". But my family did not receive any notification....

Go to the police, dig deeper by yourself. Find out that when we bought our car, years ago, they failed to add an address to the car. By "they" I mean the authorities in charge of that. So when the police caught us "breaking" the law, via automated radars a year ago, they looked for the plate number then they found out the name of the owner of the car (my father), and associated that name with the address my father had on its Spanish identity card (he is a resident here in Spain). Documents that were made 15 years ago. So they sent the notifications to that old address....We live in a tourist town where it is almost impossible to rent a place, so we had to move 4 or so times for all sorts of reasons. For the past 10 years we have the same address tho. Same address that we had when we bought the car...

Also, taxes and all that for the car, come to our current address. But not the fine it seems....Weird and infuriating.

So yeah, the system failed to let us known that we need to pay a fine, and since we "delayed" a year with the payment, they decided to directly charge my father's bank account. With over 2.200 Euros. On top of the fines, they fined him for not having an address associated with the car....that was the reason why we did not get any notification about the fine in the first place, and is something that the institution doing the papers when we bought the car was responsible for.

In all, us as human beings, were fined 2.200 Euros, more than we could save in months and months, for the simple fact that the system made an error and could not notify us of a fine we got a year ago.

And that's representative of this society we live in. The fault is always on the individuals. Put the blame on them! And this way the system seems like it is working, because every system's failure, is in fact seen as the individual's failure.



And to do justice for yourself.... how can you do it? Well...hire another human called a "lawyer". And good luck if you are poor because you won't be able to hire anyone. "Justice" comes at a price in this trade system. A human life comes at a cost. Everything has a price, but no value.

Alien: But why did they punish (fine) you in the first place?
Human: Probably because they want to make me drive more carefully....keep the roads safer!?
Alien: So they hope that punishing you will stop you from speeding up?
Human: Probably...although I am sure I will forget about this in the future + when I am stressed and not paying attention....I do not think this can work in the long run....
Alien: Hold on! If they want to make transportation safer why not create a safe public transport system? Allowing everyone to have and drive a car, and buy more and more every year, to pollute, to consume, to drive for hours and hours, to waste....this is insanity squared.

.....

And it is....it is insane. We will never ever change anything in this society if we do not see where the problems come from. To beat and punish people for the "bad" behaviors that they exhibit, when these behaviors come from the environment, is as pointless as trying to stop the clouds from raining. The success is almost nonexistent.

If we want less problems, we need to fix the society. Not to punish anyone. To the contrary, we have to help people. Take the above situation, none of us wanted to do anything bad. And yet we are slapped very hard by the society. What is the outcome of that? If you take 2k Euros form my bank account, especially when it was not my fault for such a sum of money, then you make me poor and prone to steal and cheat. Can't you see that!?

I struggle to push saner thoughts via TROM, but the society is at war with me. And with anyone else that refuses to, or cannot trade. Because trade is the blood of this society keeping it alive and insane.

If you want to support TROM and the tens of projects that we have, and help me keep a voice in this madness, please see https://www.tromsite.com/donate/

I need to remind myself quite often that this trade based society is the enemy. Trade is the enemy. Not people. I am at war with this society, not by choice, but by not having one. #tromlive