Going Underground: Building a Caring Alternative Parallel Society

As the poet, dissident, and member of the Czech underground resistance movement during the communist regime, Ivan Martin Jirous wrote, perhaps in “Parallel Polis: An Inquiry”:

“If it proves impossible legally to compel the ruling power to change the ways it governs us, and if for various reasons those who reject this power cannot or do not wish to overthrow it by force, then the creation of an independent or alternative or parallel [society] is the only dignified solution ...”

With the shadow of totalitarian or techno-feudalist regime change looming over us and already detrimentally impacting our lives, and the dismal prospect of a further descent into superficiality, falsehood, blatant corruption, vulgarity, and barbarism, not only in the Disunited States but also elsewhere in Europe, the UK, and around the globe, we need to be making preparations right now, and developing alternative infrastructure – and keeping a faithful record of our history – while we are still at liberty to do so.

A Little Something for Your Ark, Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt

In these increasingly dire times we have plenty of warners, but what we desperately need right now are more arks.

As Michael Ventura wrote: “[A]ll of this passing things on, in all its forms, may not cure the world now—curing the world now may not be a human possibility—but it keeps the great things alive. And we have to do this because, as Laing said, who are we to decide that it is hopeless? And I said to my son, if you wanted to volunteer for fascinating, dangerous, necessary work, this would be a great job to volunteer for—trying to be a wide-awake human during a Dark Age and keeping alive what you think is beautiful and important.”

~ James Hillman and Michael Ventura, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse.

So, with that in mind, here's a little something to stow away safely in your ark, as we make preparations for the dark times ahead of us.

“Some want to turn the clock back, harkening back to some golden age of nostalgia, when women, children, the lower class, parishioners, and people of other races and creeds knew their place; not back to the 1950s, but further back: to Dickensian times and to (corporate) feudal fiefdom. They want to wind the clock back to a time before the hard-won battles for civil rights, social reforms, and worker representation. A time long, long before the ‘woke virus’, ‘illegal immigrants’, and gender identity, when life was more conservative and white lives mattered; though with a new, fundamentalist, Christian nationalist (or Islamist, or ultra-Zionist, or even atheist) and isolationist twist. And some will go to any lengths – and I do mean any desperate, violent, draconian lengths – to bring this vile and unholy vision about.”

~ Preface to Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt, a story of resistance.

AEON, Step 1: Hello World!

Welcome to AEON!

Home of the Ad-hoc Emergency Online Network.

Inspired by Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt, a story of resistance by H.M. Forester.

The AEON Network

AEON is a decentralised, trust-based, non-hierarchical, democratic, browser-based, online network (with no vulnerable central server or database). It uses gossip to propagate individual users' digitally-signed registry entries (using a private key) containing details such as hostname, IP address, nickname, X509 security certificate, and personal biography or blurb on any site and community resources they choose to host in the network.

A would-be member can contact any other registered member, via the latter's built-in server (a http web server running on port 8008), and become a registered member of the AEON network.

Any registered member can moderate users' behaviour, and it is up to individual members which (if any) moderators they trust, and hence whether or not to act on their trusted moderators' actions. Though we can't block individuals from a decentralised network like AEON, we can limit their audience reach by applying trusted moderator overrides. This will limit the propagation of the individual's registry entry and updates, and hence reduce their social reputation and reach in the network.

Bloggers: A pox on Googlebot

Technical stuff

For a while now, GoogleBot, via the Google Search Console, has been crawling and indexing sites "mobile first": that is, they crawl a web page as if they were a smartphone user. Only much later, if at all, do they come back and carry out a "desktop" crawl.

The issue for users of Blogger / Blogspot is that these sites detect the simulated mobile device and redirect GoogleBot, adding "?m=1" onto the end of the URL (web address).

The ishraqi institute Facebook group

The ishrāqī institute is an independent, multicultural and multidisciplinary, virtual, non-profit think-do-and-be tank. Administered, supported and contributed to by unpaid volunteers, its central aim is one of benign human service. You can find the ishrāqī institute at Facebook.

According to Steingass’s dictionary, in Persian ishrāq means “Rising (of the sun); sun-rise, morning; splendour, lustre, and beauty” and ishrāqī means “Of or pertaining to sun-rise; eastern, oriental; having the splendour of the East.” It also has links to the philosopher Suhrawardī, who founded the Persian school of Illuminationism which is a school of philosophy (and way of being) that flowered in Islam and draws upon Zoroastrian and Platonic ideas. Here, “Oriental” refers not to the geographical East but (according to Henry Corbin), to the mystical, Celestial Orient, the heavenly Pole.

It is our task to explore the many difficulties and crises that we face as individuals and as members of society and the human race; to suggest or offer coping mechanisms and solutions to these issues; to educate the wider public; to help or signpost people to groups, organizations, education and training that will help better prepare them for the changes and difficulties that we are experiencing; and to help, in our own, little way, to usher in a bright new dawn.

As Ursula K. LeGuin wrote in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction: “Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? ... If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”

By multidisciplinary, we include not only the obvious arts and sciences, but a wide range of orientations, vocations and callings, including (but not limited to): mythology; creativity; art and poetry; crafts; alternative and appropriate technology and environmentalism; education; traditional and modern psychology and sociology; minority interests and the “off-beat”; cross-cultural study and traditional wisdom; equality and humanitarianism; spirituality and non-dogmatic religion; philosophy; cultural creatives; polymathy; altruism and love; and not least humour – because you never know where a conversation may lead, nor where, from what direction, or from whom, a particular insight or solution may arise.

The Internet ain't what it used to be

The first time I “went online” was in the 80s using a BBC microcomputer borrowed from work. I dialed a long distance number to connect via a very slow modem to GreenNet to access a bulletin board about environmental issues, for a magazine I was running. Being an expensive call, I set all content to spool to a text file as I was “browsing” the text (there were no images), and got offline again as soon as possible, reading the content later, and then incorporating it into the magazine.

Then around 1999 I discovered the free dial-up service FreeServe. Well, the service was free but it might take up to six attempts before I managed to fully connect, and I was charged for those attempts to connect. Whether this was due to issues with the new technology or a deliberate policy to swell their coffers, I do not know.

Wild West

I created my very first web site around that time, and found the usenet newsgroup alt.sufi, meeting people from around the globe who were actually interested in the Way, which opened up a whole new world. This was before the first big groups like Yahoo! groups came along and began to kill off usenet.

The internet was far more open then, and there was a lot more searching around and exploring. In those days, someone might come along to the web site and stay there for ages, slowly browsing through most of the pages on the site, or (being in a web ring of like-minded sites for a time) they might browse my site having just come from the previous site in the ring, and then wander on to the next site in the ring. Again, in those days, search engines would crawl and index the whole of the site and especially at AltaVista and Yahoo! you could find my site on the first page of many results, even though it was just a chicken shack operation.

[Technical] An off-the-grid networking project

Alternate Net is a project that I've been working on for some time. It will allow people to create a network of web sites independent of the ICANN regulatory body that is responsible, amongst other things, for managing the Internet's domain name system (DNS). While ICANN works with regular domains like ".com", Alternate Net will bypass the regular network of DNS name servers and use the custom top level domain ".altnet".

This has been done before, of course, and it's popularly called “The Dark Net” since the web sites and other resources in such private networks do not show up and cannot be accessed from web browsers and other devices that are tied to the official DNS servers. If someone types in a domain like "some-site.altnet" into their web browser, regular DNS servers will send back an NXDOMAIN response (domain not found). Unfortunately, the Dark Net has acquired a very poor reputation, since it hosts all manner of unsavoury, illicit and illegal content and activities – and that is the last thing we want.

The Caravanserai, Facebook discussion group

The Caravanserai

A caravanserai is an inn in some eastern countries with a large courtyard that provides accommodation for caravans, and hospitality for travellers.

The Caravanserai is a new open and informal group at Facebook for people interested in a broad range of fields such as spirituality, mysticism and similar traditions; psychology; cultural research; education; learning; human rights and humanitarian concerns; the environment, and creativity ... or whatever material, news or internet links you feel would interest other members here.

Feel free to take part in formal discussion; to share your experience, or to simply engage in relaxed chat.

You can find The Caravansarai discussion group at Facebook.

The frame story behind the name "caravansarai" can be found in the writer, thinker and Sufi mystical teacher Idries Shah's works:

What would Idries Shah think of social media?

Someone across at Idries Shah's Facebook page recently asked what the late writer and thinker would have made of social media like Facebook.

I'm sure Shah would have had many things to say about on-line social networking: some rather positive about the way the internet can bring people together from far-flung places and help disseminate information (as well as misinformation and disinformation), and doubtless he'd also make some rather astute and less complimentary observations.

I wouldn't like to second guess the man, however, but there are some things in our own fields of expertise that we are perfectly capable of working out for ourselves. We don't need to be advanced Sufi mystics to ask ourselves why, for example, over 900,000 people at Facebook would fall for a scam like the R.I.P. Morgan Freeman Facebook page and not bother to check reliable sources elsewhere to find that the actor is in reality still very much alive; or – better still – why we might have fallen for such a patent falsehood. Or why, in their wisdom, Facebook has still not deleted the page, in spite of thousands of Facebook users reporting it as a distasteful scam. Perhaps because the inalienable constitutional right to free speech outweighs harm done or outweighs the simple common sense that we were once born with?

Anyhow, shortly after that question was posted, someone followed me across at Twitter, and rather than simply click to follow them back, I had a look at their public profile.

Fragmentation of attention in the internet age

In general terms, I’m tempted to think that in this second phase of the internet age, we’re now being overwhelmed with both choice and volume in information.

When I first ran a web site around 1999, many folk would browse the whole of the web site at a leisurely pace and even download all of the free pdf documents before moving on. More recently, I’ve seen that most visit for a specific purpose and often leave having read or flipped through one or two pages, sometimes within just a few mere seconds.

Over time I’ve also seen the old usenet newsgroups die a death, then yahoo! forums, with lengthy discussion threads giving way to one-liners or simple “likes” and more and more fragmentation of venues, of information, and of the participators' or audience's attention. Having said that, certain niche communities, such as pagans and conspiracy theorists, continue to buck such trends.

Tips for writers #3: Social networking

+ Twitter will help you keep in touch with established, loyal readers and may help you gain some more. However, chances are that a tweet will give you no more than a few seconds of fame before it is swamped by a deluge of competing posts, unless it leads to worthwhile content that other kind folk are willing to read and to retweet.

+ Don't go overboard with pure marketing on twitter, facebook or blogs, unless you can offer "added value" through previews of your work, special offers or decent freebies, so that your readers don't go away empty handed or feel short changed. Consider using a second twitter account to handle most of your marketing, using hashtags, to free your main account for more real and genuine interaction.

+ Tweetfests -- sending one tweet after another -- may annoy your readers and they may decide that enough is enough and unfollow or block you.

+ Running your own blog with worthwhile content is a great way of connecting with, sharing with and building readers. You can, of course, link to your blog from twitter and facebook. Intersperse your marketing with worthwhile content that you feel your readers will enjoy, appreciate and benefit from. Don't take yourself too seriously, and let your readers see that you are a sentient human being just like them.

+ Allow blog comments and pay attention to feedback you receive from readers. Express your gratitude. You may have to moderate comments and allow only registered users to comment, in order to keep out the inevitable spam and occasional hate.

+ Having your own blog will also get you into the search engine indexes so that others can find you.

+ Share the care and help other authors, especially new and independent authors who are struggling to establish themselves.

+ However, be wary of using "black hat" or "grey hat" marketing tactics to game the system in order to artificially get more links to your site, more followers, more likes or more friends, and to give a false impression of popularity. For example, reciprocal link exchanges may help you build up your readers, but search engines may impose a penalty on your page rank for what they consider to be "black hat search engine optimization (SEO)".

+ Above all, enjoy writing and interacting with like-minded folk. Good luck in your own endeavours!

• By Etienne de L'Amour ~ Google+