Intentional Communities

I had an interesting conversation with my brother this evening about the continually progressing totalitarian impulse to drive “undesirables” out of “polite society.” We were talking about it in the context of digital currency, and how a federal version of bitcoin would allow the government to freeze your assets or prevent you from receiving payments if you have the wrong identity or ideas.

If that sounds far-fetched to you, you haven’t been paying attention. I mentioned the Joe Rogan thing before, but people far less famous than him have had their entire lives ruined for the crime of being conservative in the public eye. The director of operations for an important digital currency company was fired over this tweet he posted five years ago:

Homosexual acts are evil. Transgenderism doesn’t exist. Abortion is murder. Contraception is a perversion. So is masturbation and porn.

Now, you may or may not agree with those ideas or the way in which they were expressed, but they essentially represent Catholic dogma, at least up until very recently. Are all Catholics to be removed from their jobs?

Lest you think this is a new phenomenon, back in 2014, Brandon Eich - the co-founder of Mozilla, which developed Firefox - was forced to resign because he had donated $1,000 toward California Proposition 8, which called for the banning of same-sex marriage in California. That proposition passed with over 52% of the vote in California (although it was quickly overruled by the courts). Are 52% of Californians unfit for employment?

It’s not just jobs that are under attack. GoFundMe closed an appeal for the defense of Kyle Rittenhouse, who was ultimately found not guilty. GoFundMe not only stopped accepting donations for the Canada trucker protest, they refused to disburse the money as intended and threatened to donate it instead to other causes they approve of.

So when the metaverse comes, and most of your interactions are virtual using an avatar tied to your real identity, do you think that people whose views diverge from those of the ruling elite will be allowed to participate? Will they be allowed to buy and sell? To work and get paid? To talk or write in public view?

If you correctly deduce that they will not, and if you happen to be among those divergent types, what will you do? Where will you find a community of like-minded people with whom to associate freely? Where will you be allowed to do so?

It would be a good idea to start now to develop intentional communities and the infrastructure to support them, so that you are not dependent upon the whims of a censorious mob whose only metric of success is how many they can excommunicate.