Canadian Sustainability, Jordan Peterson, and an Anti-Woke “GameB?”

Feature image from Jordan Peterson video clip “There are some games you don’t get to play unless you’re all in,” 2017.

This is just a short post to provide some context around a clip I recently posted to my Youtube channel of an interview Jordan Peterson did a number of years ago. The clip is just the beginning of the interview where Peterson provides his credentials, including working with former Blackberry (Research In Motion, RIM) co-CEO John Balsillie on a 2013 United Nations document “Resilient People, Resilient Planet.” In the clip Peterson said he removed the “ideological claptrap.” This information is also included on Jordan Peterson’s website.

Stephen Harper appointed Jim Balsillie head of Sustainable Development Technology Canada in 2013. Balsillie had served as the sole Canadian and representative of the private sector on the United Nations Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability in 2010. In 2001, Balsillie funded the creation of a non-profit Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), whose goals are aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. 

In 2011 CIGI entered into a partnership with INET (Institute for New Economic Thinking), a project of George Soros to transform global economic relations – what we now see as the cybernetic circular (or doughnut) economics. INET has a huge number of affiliates, including James Heckman who created the equation for human capital finance speculation. Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and economist who worked for Thiel Capital, is also a member. 

I wrote an extensive piece on INET back in the summer of 2018. It discusses plans to leverage creative finance to profit from the poverty of the billions on the bottom of the economic pyramid. I remember really scratching my head when I found out Open Society was funding economic research at Milton Friedman’s University of Chicago. At that point I didn’t understand that the power structure is evenly distributed across political ideology. The cybernetic agenda is neither one side nor the other.

Balsillie’s partner at RIM was Mike Lazaridis, now with Quantum Valley Ventures, whose philanthropic efforts included establishing the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics to the tune of $100 million in 1999 and a quantum computing center at the University of Waterloo. Looking back now on the attention given to Blackberry in media, how all the important politicos were wedded to their devices, and knowing that Canada as a digital nation is be positioned as the vanguard of social impact sustainable tech, it seems pretty clear that the company’s product was about normalizing and uplifting what would become the surveillance tracking infrastructure of the future. I’ve included a map I made in 2019 linking UN SDG 4, education, to fintech impact data collection.

Canada’s involvement with sustainability goes back to the 1970s led by oilman Maurice Strong, who made a fortune in Alberta and later in hydro-power management. Strong then founded a multi-faith contemplative community with his wife Hanna in Crestone, Colorado in 1988. The area has long been considered sacred land by the original peoples and sits atop a vital aquifer. Strong headed the Canadian International Development agency in the early 1970s, working for Trudeau senior, when he was tapped by UN Secretary General U Thant to spearhead a conference on humans and the environment. That was Habitat-1 held in Vancouver in 1976. Strong’s involvement in the development aid space was initiated by Prime Minster Lester Pearson. Pearson’s name was given to a commission he chaired in 1968 that prepared the global development aid / finance regime for the techno-social entrepreneurship that would blossom in the twenty-first century. If you want a deeper dive you can check out this dissertation on the Pearson Commission on International Development here.

Strong’s close collaborator was Barbara Ward Jackson, a British born networker who built up the field of sustainability within the context of global humanitarian aid. This brings us to where we are today with data-driven impact finance structuring natural life on earth in the name of social justice and conscious capitalism. A hat tip to Raul Diego for bringing Barbara Ward Jackson to my attention. She, Strong, and those who followed down the path they cleared in the 1970s, like Balsillie and Peterson, should have our attention as the world pivots towards cybernetic governance.

Below are two maps showing Barbara Ward Jackson’s diplomatic ties around sustainability, global aid, and the financial sector.

These are clips from Crestone, Colorado.

This is an analysis I did of an interview with Barbara Ward Jackson that also touches on the Silicon Icarus article, “Building the Impact Finance Regime.”

Peterson recently announced on Joe Rogan’s show his creation of a new global organization to develop alternative futures, in London of all places. I’m going to suggest that we consider this development within the context of complexity theory and “Game B” developed by Jim Rutt in partnership with members of the Intellectual Dark Web, including Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist whose firing from Evergreen State College led his brother Eric to coin the term the “Intellectual Dark Web.” “GameB” revolves around creating a global economy of abundance through voluntarism and cooperative economics. It is imagined as a civilizational level social operating system. Based on the individuals involved it seems like this model will likely feature biohacking, performance optimization, meta–psychotechnology, extasis; oh, and maybe some ethical cults.

What is not obvious to most people is that such a system will be built on distributed ledger technology and governed through token engineering; a practice that will extend not only to financial transacting, but also to “democratic” voting systems on blockchain. All of this will be framed as radical participation and populist, but it is ultimately governed by systems of technocracy. The anti-woke crowd of traditional values can replace ESG governance with encoded “moral economies,” which will be fine by the artificial intelligence infrastructure. It likes all flavors of human life. Resistance is acceptable, welcome even, as long as the various sectors can be tagged and monitored and used for machine learning.

See my “GameB” map below. It’s still a work in progress.

I didn’t post that clip to make Jordan Peterson wrong. I posted it to provide context that might open up the possibility of exploring a broader narrative than the polarizing ones we are continuously being offered. Many of the critiques I’ve seen online are rabidly anti-leftist, framing Soros as a tool of Marxists looking to take over their country. Well, as best I can tell, executives of high-tech computing companies producing the instruments that will be required to track, trace, and optimize us towards some evolutionary next step don’t fall into that category. Machine learning systems operate through pattern recognition; but the real world is so complex, it needs to start collapsing human variety into more manageable chunks. That is why we are all expected to inhabit an easily discernible category. And once we inhabit them, we are supposed to see those inhabiting the other boxes as our enemies. 

The following is an excerpt from my latest installment of my series “God’s Eye View.”

“The next statement is key – the importance of the non-equilibrium state to generate the energy needed to run the system. Social media, all media, serves this function. It serves to create polarity, trigger words, tribalism, heightening emotion to keep us all in a state where we feed our life force into these circuits. I’m not here to point fingers. After all, I’m writing this on a blog, aren’t I? But I hope you’ll notice I am working on the way I hold this information and the way I share it, so that I do not unnecessarily feed into the disequilibrium state.

Fear Porn = Disequilibrium

I am convinced of the overall goodness of the human heart. People are generally well-intentioned, but they live inside stories. Those stories shape what they think the world is, and how it works. Those stories are highly-managed. Top-down control of reality increased exponentially as we slid down the slippery slope of bits and bytes, ones and zeros. The things I am talking about here – the ant computer – no one is supposed to know. If we knew, I believe most would stand against it. The most powerful neutralizer for this program is to take away their energy. Stop allowing weaponized narratives and labels (both sides) to feed the vitriol you are supposed to feel about your fellow humans. We are their energy source, our hearts.

‘Energetic issues are critical to embodied computational systems, which must be maintained in a non-equilibrium state either for a definite duration or indefinitely. Therefore the formalism needs to be able to describe and define the flow of matter and energy through the system. Active elements have to be powered in some way, either continuously during operation or by being arranged initially in a non-equilibrium state.We anticipate that embodied computational systems will be fueled in a variety of ways and powered by a variety of energy sources (electrical, chemical, optical, thermal, mechanical, etc.). Therefore the formalism needs to be able to define the dynamical and spatial relations among energy sources and other elements.” Source'”

This system is driving us forward through the strategic use of disequilibrium. I’m taking time to post this, because the identity politics (both sides, woke / anti-woke) and the polarity that results from that tension is central to understanding how complex systems are being coded for some sort of post-human eugenic emergence. So how is that working out for us? Is it getting us any closer to understanding the true nature of the machine? I would say it hasn’t. Instead, it leaves us emotionally ragged, depleted, and constantly scouting the horizon for the next threat. We are not using our intelligence, which John Trudell said is our most important tool in dispelling tech-no-logic. 

That is what I’m writing about in my latest series, which examines betting culture, prediction, intuition, bio-computation, and bottom-up architecting. We are caught in a vortex. We don’t understand the water we’re swimming in. If you haven’t read my series, I’d love it if you could spend some time with it, and share your thoughts and feedback. I’m particularly excited to talk with people about Part 3 – Civic Tech, The Wisdom of Crowds, and Offshore Sandboxes.

Someone left a snarky comment on my posting of the clip implying that I have skeletons in my closet, alluding to my activism on the left. I hide nothing. I still hold the same values, but I was finally able to see the box that was created for me to inhabit. I’ve outgrown that box. Maybe you can outgrow yours, too, and then people can stop putting targets on one other’s backs. Instead we can ponder over the fact that for many, many decades, centuries even, some unseen force has gradually brought us to this place where we teeter on the edge of natural oblivion.

Stop letting them use your identity to steer you. If we can put the hammers down and step out and look, just look, we might be able to see a way through that doesn’t involve tokens or robots or sensors or algorithms. How about it? 

I wrote this post about the United Nations Sustainable Development goals and social impact finance and big data the week before the pandemic was announced. It’s sort of a time capsule of where I was then. I’ve grown a lot over the past three years. My core values remain the same, but I see the tactics and narrative tropes that have been used to manage us into not looking at the bigger picture. I continue to deepen my awareness of the true nature of this emergent anti-life program.