by Aaron Rene Carvajal | May 31, 2014 | Education, Freedom, The Future
This question may seem mean. But I recently overheard someone say this about their grown unemployed child. I happen to know the “useless” person in question – a college grad who never quite bought into the whole job thing – but a far cry from “useless”. What makes a parent discard the worth and talent of their own children? It seems that the video gaming basement dwellers are not the only ones who are put into this basket these days. I Googled it and was surprised at what I found . . .
If you search online you will find many articles proclaiming Generation X and Y useless – as opposed to the “Greatest Generation” who endured the Great Depression and WWI and II. There are many proposed solutions that range from starting World War III so the useless can have something to do – to penalizing the poor and unemployed to a slow death by disenfranchisement. What gives? What has happened that now makes people the enemy and places our current paradigm beyond reproach?
Some say it is the media, some say it is human nature, but most seem to believe that people are fundamentally lazy and bad. Where did they learn this perspective? Looking online I find people are crazy clever, engaged, and brave. Many are dumping the current perspective of the “real world” – and have decided to create their own reality and blaze a path rather than be a peg in the machine that accounts them no value. There is a growing counter culture that finds fertile ground in the countless pages of internet art and commentary.
It is easy to miss what is happening with the influx of big established media anxiously devising new ways to feed us our latest perspective. Yes, I believe our opinions are not our own. Surely we are more compassionate than the headlines would make it seem. I don’t know anyone who says they would turn away a fellow human in desperate need of care. Yet this is what we do everyday. It is done indirectly by our daily participation and propping up of activities that collectively creates our society.
This is a society where a child is diagnosed with cancer every 3 minutes, someone dies of starvation every 4 seconds or so, and the physical earth is nearly dead. Is our human spirit dying with it? We build this world by abandoning our families and communities everyday to go out and “work” or get “educated” so we can grow up and be “successful”. I’ve heard this most accurately described as “organized irresponsibility”.
Our world claims to be progressing towards a society that is working towards human freedom above all else – yet does not allot any human beings their most basic birthright. Our birthright is the freedom to build a home on a piece of land, grow our own food, and live in cooperation with our community. Very little seems to have changed from the times of lords and serfs except we call them “banks” and home “owners” now. We are delegated to concrete jungles where we slave to live in a box , buy chemical ridden food, and teach our children that success is how deeply they can get tied to a lifetime of debt, competition and glorified greed.
We are entering a world with rapidly growing inequality not seen since the era of the “Greatest Generation”. There is nothing you can do about it though … right? Most feel their only recourse is to buy a gun, blame someone else, and elect yet another new leader to captain the same sinking ship. Will we stand up with the courage to suggest something different – something better that we can leave our children? What will it take to get folks to act in a way that gives credence to life and liberty instead of the numbers on Wall Street and the masters that tell us they are the only real thing?
“I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.” Harriet Tubman
by Aaron Rene Carvajal | Apr 24, 2014 | Dome Homes, Education, Freedom, Geodesic Domes, The Future, Uncategorized
Everyone loves the expression, “Cut out the middle man. ” It means having enough insight to get the most beneficial outcome. The internet has brought this sentiment to new levels. The instant abundance of information, reviews, and how-to sharing have made our world very different in just a few short years. What does this mean for our future? Does it simply mean online group deals, cool video games, and sharing photos. Is it becoming something bigger that could be game changer?
We set out to use the power of the internet to find the best tools to demonstrate a different kind of freedom- one that is not intimately tied to the fickle economic system. Many human atrocities continue everyday due to the staunch belief that we have the best system in history. This view is accepted by nearly everyone through long held institutions that mold our perspective and control many aspects of our lives. As social creatures that inately depend on one another – it is no wonder that we hold to the current model as immovable and indisputable. We call it the real world.
What we have now is nature and survival of the fittest at work – and it has always been like this. We are at the height of progress. Forget about the many humans, animals and ecosystems struggling for survival. Everything is awesome. The market is up and economies are growing. This is the middle man’s spiel that keeps the wheels turning. Ultimately our families and communities are separated, cubified, and thus easily controlled.
We aim to break out of the box and go round instead. This means flipping our approach and working together like we know we should. We are starting by working with community gardens and by building a completely self sustaining dome home this year. It will feature solar power, water capture, heat capture, aquaponic food domes and more. By pulling our resources together, as a group of family and friends unified – we will accomplish in one year what is supposed to take thirty years. There are no bank lords in our alternate future. In the coming months we will be documenting how it all comes together. Please stay tuned!
So who is this boogie man we call the middle man? It is what gets in the middle of what we feel instinctually in our gut, heart, and soul. This is the same beacon that shows the bees how to make a honeycomb or navigates the flocks to precise points. What gets in the middle is certainly different for each of us. Much of our current “reality” has trained us to mute what we know for what we have been taught to believe. Some write stories, or paint, or compose as ways to create rifts in our ethos. We decided to build new ways with our hands and demonstrate a different way. We feel the unifying effects of the internet should be leveraged to our highest possibilities. FutureoftheFree.com is our particular lab and we invite you to visit regularly.
by Aaron Rene Carvajal | Mar 26, 2014 | Agriculture, Aquaponics, Design & Innovation, Dome Homes, Education, Freedom, Gardening, Geodesic Domes, Sustainability, The Future
What if you could provide food, shelter, and security for your family without enslaving yourself to a lifetime of debt and stress? We believe it is not only possibel, but very easy, cheap, and fun all in one.
Future of the Free is a new venture from the Santa Cruz Mountains of Silicon Valley building community bio-dome’s using aquaponics and nature’s design to create an alternate future. This project introduces a bio-dome kit that anyone can build with parts that are recycled, free, or very common and low cost. The goal was to create an alternate path to provide the necessities that many on earth seem struggling to secure.
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We like to call this an open source project for humans since the goal is to create the most with the least – for the benefit of all. We used barrels, containers, and parts found everywhere for free or cheap. We used 3-D Printing technology to design, teach, and test construction. We hope to raise enough funds with our Kickstarter.com campaign so we can produce the kits quickly with a ShopBot next time.
We love to inspire the imagination towards the possibilities and power of working in harmony with nature and each other. Our focus is to accomplish our goals through community movements that demonstrate real live examples of how cooperating with nature and each other reap rewards never to be seen in the current system of competition and profit above all else. We are already working with non-profit farms to build the first community domes in Northern California. You’ll see dome raisings from Garden to Table of San Jose, Team Tierra in San Martin, and Garden of Hope in Redding.
Organic Food & Home independence is not only possible – but is now necessary considering recent droughts and revelations regarding GMO’s, pesticide use, and bees dying in mass. Aquaponic systems yields more produce using only 10% of the water as commercial growing. Super strong weather resistant solar powered domes provide the easiest to build and strongest structure known to man using only a third of the materials – per the American Institute of Architecture.
The idea started when planning the first year of home-schooling for our young sons, ages 5 and 7. The boys had lots of questions about how our world works. We had to explain money, energy, war, poverty, jobs, taxes and so on – in a way that made sense and wouldn’t be scary to them. Answers to seemingly basic questions always required a string of explanations that showed that every aspect of our lives and relationships are governed by money – but has little to do with human needs – or logic.
We asked the most basic questions to get the simplest solutions. We decided it all starts with depending on our local communities that have our same interests at heart – instead of organizations that represent the blind corporate pursuit of profits.
For the last seven years our group has focused on projects that create better alternatives for our future. We’ve developed several sustainable products like the hemp surfboard, art canvas, jeans and more through U.S. Hemp Co and Museum. We’ve spent lots of time promoting change at events and online. We’ve shifted our focus further down the road now with the successful shift of public perception towards acceptance and legalization of Industrial Cannabis (Hemp) and Medical Marijuana.
This year we’ve joined our commitment to a better future with our love of innovation and technology to create our latest and greatest development – Future of the Free. Please join us.
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by Aaron Rene Carvajal | Dec 30, 2013 | Education, Freedom, The Future
An open source project is typically used to refer to the software development community that emerged in the early 1980’s. Open sharing has now reached far beyond the techie networks. This sub-culture has grown beyond software into every arena imaginable. Online sharing has reached epic proportions with constant creation of new content and connections. Indeed, we consider our core research and development team to be all the folks who post on YouTube and on online forums.
What can this mean for us?
Imagine what this could mean for our future. What if everyone cooperated in the same spirit of open source sharing to solve our most pressing problems. It seems this is already happening to a degree. It could mean much more if it can take hold and get absorbed by everyone. Imagine what would happen if we stopped fiercly competing for Monopoly money and focus our collective energy on creating real solutions by utilizing the power of the worlwide web community.
We believe it is possible and have put forth our contribution here.
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Future of the Free by Aaron Rene Carvajal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at futureofthefree.com.
by futureofthefree | Dec 21, 2013 | Freedom, Sustainability, The Future
Once upon a time the password to all my computer accounts was “freedom”. This was a long time ago, before I knew better then to use such a simple password. It meant learning, living, and loving – and not getting tied down and trapped in a meaningless job like all the adults around. As I approached 30 I re-defined this notion based on “reality”. Everyone certainly could not be wrong about what being a responsible and valuable member of society meant. I’d never be “successful” or have my own family if I kept being a “dreamer”. So, I began pursuing my own business ventures to make the almighty dollar.
I began spending nearly all my waking hours in hot pursuit of more money. This is what I did and did and did … and so on for about 7 years. Life passed me by, my oldest son grew up seemingly unnoticed. I had everything I needed, but certainly did not feel rich. It seemed I had nothing of real value to pass on to my kids even though I had money, This was not good. It seemed I was anchored to assets – whose future value seemed speculative at best. I was a far cry from the freedom I initially set out to find. Yet, everyone around me told me I was on the right track.
It occurred to me that all along there was an operating system at work that had been programmed into my brain from birth. It had nothing to do with my true nature, my real inate knowledge, nor any sort of coherence or connection to the natural world. It separated happiness from the hearts reality. It took 7 years living in the coastal redwoods of Santa Cruz, California next to a river, to even begin to unravel the neural web of premises and fear programmed into my subconscious brain. It took another 7 years of abandonment of the script to clean out my cache and begin to understand a different reality.
For those non egghead types: A cache is the temporary memory in a computer that is akin to our short term memory. It seems memorization is a fixation on equating intelligence with the ability to retain “facts”. Our meritocracy is based on this, and made real by the economy god. The foundation of our “civilization” depends on this program. Interestingly, a computer will eventually crash if you don’t clear the cache. Perhaps this is why we have so many anti-anxiety and depression drugs being prescribed, and so many people snapping and committing atrocious crimes. What more evidence do we need that we are on the wrong path? Read the daily world headlines for a month and you’ll see what trajectory we are on.
This is the short version of what brought about the birth of the Future of the Free project. The point is that we believe it is time to abandon the square world we have created and get off the grid and off the current script. We believe that a completely new way of seeing the world and each other is crucially needed at this time.
The institutions that have molded our beliefs and thus our world, are being revealed as not just economic failures, but more importantly, detrimental to our home – Earth. Our greatest asset and wealth is not a number on a computer screen governed by a very tiny group with questionable motives and horrific historical tack records.
We cannot leave our children and future to the care of this system. We do not intend any sort of conflict or revolution, for this is the way of the current consciousness that we are leaving. Our true power is in our collective cooperation based on love and true intention, unhindered by the fading system of scarcity, competition, and fear. Buckminster Fuller said it best:
“You never change things by fighting the
existing reality.
To change something, build a
new model that makes
the existing model
obsolete.”
R. Buckminster Fuller
by futureofthefree | Dec 11, 2013 | Education, Freedom, Sustainability, The Future
The amount of books that have been written is astounding. This bygone era of paper books is nearly past, being replaced with an online web of constant chatter and lots of daily content. We believe this thriving dialogue could instigate some real changes in what we call “the script”.
What is everyone writing and talking about? It seems most everyone is repeating the same topics, phrases, responses, and reactions. It is work, sports, movies, politics, news – or more accurately bad news. Is someone writing this script? Is it simply our collective consciousness at work?
Either way it seems that we are the actors.
Our current collective script is destroying the planet and causing lots of strife for the majority of people. So why do we keep acting it out – even to the detriment of health, home, and family. Even if you are in the top 1% -does it make sense to maintain the status quo? Quantum physics has recently revealed the real physical/spiritual connections we all share. There is no hiding in a gated community.
But this is not a philisophical discussion. This is simply a proposition for a new script. One that does not make excuses or justifications for injustices. A script that does not pit us against one another in constant competition, then play the blame game until we are all damned. Simply speaking, a script that focuses on our least common denominator that binds us together; cooperating to supply our families with food, water, shelter and most importantly solid family and community foundations. This is true security that doesn’t rely on a politician, legislation, and a police state for order. This means recognizing that the enemy and bad guys are the result of an absence of basic societal structures. No NSA needed.
Living from a new script is possible. It seems to be a choice we make every moment of every day. This is how I believe the future will define freedom – the flexibility to really make your own life choices every day – without the hinderence of a script that says we need to digress to the economy script. Here is one way to live in harmony with nature and each other -right now. Make a Choice.
Some may say that this is impossible and say, ” Look at history, survival of the fittest, greed is good, that is naive, it’s not economically viable, there is not enough evidence, need new legislation, the economy is headed in the right direction…” etc etc etc.
There is that darn script again! It’s time for a new one for sure.
