Digital Nomading by Slowmad
The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
If you were to design a system of slavery, what would it look like?
Well first.. you’d want the slaves to believe they’re free.
After all, slaves who don’t know they're slaves are much more productive; They’ll work hard thinking they're working for themselves... while you sit back and get rich from their labour!
“But!” you ask...
“How does this work? And why won’t they realize they’re slaves?”
Great question!
This is where the magic happens… so listen carefully: You give them tokens in exchange for their labour! This way, they think they’re getting "paid” for their work.
What they don’t realize is that you can create an unlimited number of tokens at your discretion.
And here's the fun part: Convince the slaves that the more tokens they earn, the higher their social status. This way, they’ll work harder and even fight amongst themselves for "prestige" within the slave hierarchy!
As long as the slaves believe your tokens are valuable, they’ll bend over backwards to earn them. They’ll give up their views, values and freedom for those tokens!
To ensure you stay in power, control the media so everyone is brainwashed into supporting the establishment. Do this well, and your most loyal slaves will even police the behaviour of other slaves for you.
Eventually though, some of the smart ones will begin to catch on to your scheme. So what you do next is add layers of complexity to the system, so that it becomes harder to uncover the truth.
For example, you can create special certificates (to bought with tokens) that confer ownership of a business to the certificate holder! This way, your slaves get further distracted from the fact that they’re slaves, as they can now be “owners” of businesses run by other slaves!
They’ll be so content with this “achievement” that they won’t realize these certificates are ultimately priced in your tokens, and that you and your wealthy friends already own most of them!
In schools, teach young slaves how to be hard workers, but never about how the monetary system works. The result is they'll work hard for the tokens, but will not see the truth behind the scheme.
While your slaves strive to be ‘productive members of society’, work hard and save tokens, you continue diluting the value of these tokens by endlessly creating more.
And since these tokens are constantly being debased (i.e. losing real value), you'll want to first give them to your insider friends so they can quickly buy productive assets before prices go up from token debasement!
In the end, you and your group of rich pals will own most of the productive assets in the system while the slaves have to work harder and harder just to stay in the same place.
This will go on for a while until eventually, the whole system falls apart because fraudulent tokens cannot hold up against reality forever.
Thankfully, this will take a long time (about 80 years) to play out. Meanwhile, you and generations of your offspring will remain masters of the system, benefiting greatly from the labour of your slaves.
In the final stages of system collapse, most slaves will continue to be clueless about how the system works; So all you need to do is convince them of a big ‘Reset’, and they will follow you into a new system built upon a new token that you can once again conjure out of thin air!
You can then start a new cycle and keep growing your wealth and get even richer as you continue accumulating productive assets. This is why the richest families in the world come from old money; They’ve overseen generations of slaves across numerous system resets.
With this playbook, you can now do the same for you and your family. Congratulations! 
This story is, unfortunately, not too far from the truth of the modern world.
Whether you realize it or not, you were born into a system governed by a small group of elites that you are, effectively, a slave for.
You see, slavery was never about owning a person but about owning the fruits of their labour. Slave owners don't actually care about the slaves' physical freedom as long as the slaves keep working for free (or technically, for tokens created from nothing).
No man should work for what another man can print.
Jack Mallers
Now the thing is... even if you understood the whole system was a scam, it makes no difference if you can’t leave it; You’d still have to play by the rules set by the elites.
As long as you can’t leave the system, you are its slave that has to play by rigged rules.
Every system is made up of a social contract that says: If you follow our rules and work hard, you'll be rewarded with tokens and social status.
"Just trust the system and don’t ask so many questions. We'll take care of troublesome things such as thinking for yourself. All you have to do is listen and obey. We know what's best for you."
This is, put simply, bullshit.
The elites who run the system don’t want what’s best for you; They want what’s best for them.
When there’s a conflict of interest - and there are many - they’ll choose what benefits them at your expense, one hundred percent of the time.
Remind me… how many of the elites that caused the 2008 financial crisis got punished? They got rich inflating the housing bubble, and when it burst, who ended up paying the bill?
And why have recent economic policies caused financial assets - the majority of which are owned by elites - to skyrocket, while the average joe loses his job and struggles from rising costs?
If you believe this is all just a mysterious coincidence, I have a bridge to sell you.
The system does not exist to serve the people. It's designed to serve the elites.
This dynamic becomes increasingly clear as the system approaches the final stages of collapse. The slaves get pushed harder than ever before as the elites try to milk the system as much as possible before it implodes.
"Success" in life
Every country has its own system that makes promises to its population.
In Singapore (where I was born), the promise is as follows.
If you:
- Study hard and get good grades
- Serve the army as an obedient soldier
- Get into a good university and graduate with distinctions
- Never protest against the government
- Get a good corporate job
- Get married around 28 years old
- Buy government housing for ~$400k and get into debt
- Have 2.1 kids
- Climb the corporate ladder to a senior position and increase your salary
- Upgrade to a private condominium for $1.6m and get into more debt
- Keep working until 63 and pay off your mortgage before you retire
Then you are considered "respectable" and are promised "a good life”.
If you follow the rules of the system you'll be publicly celebrated, your parents will be proud, everyone will want to be your friend, and you’ll have no lack of potential mates to choose from.
If you don’t follow the system, you’ll be stuck with a low paying job, disproportionately high living costs, your parents will worry about your future, your friends will grow distant, and no women will date you.
Mild exaggeration aside, this is how most systems work today. If you fit into the system template, you are rewarded with tokens and social status. Otherwise, you are left to tumble down the social/financial pyramid until you effectively become an outcast.
Now if you find yourself asking, “How can I be successful in the system?”... then you’ve already lost. The key point to understand is that what makes you "successful" within a system depends entirely on how the elites want you to behave (which will be, of course, to their benefit).
Being “successful” then only means that one has been especially obedient and rewarded for one's compliance. The most conventionally successful people are those that have best fulfilled the wishes of the elite.
This has been the case for most of human history. As long as one’s fate is tethered to a single system, one cannot be considered “successful” without the blessing of the elites that own it.
"Ignorance is bliss"
In The Matrix (1999), one of the characters, Cypher, regrets being set free from the digital prison that is the Matrix.
He makes a deal with the computer overlords to betray this team of freedom fighters in exchange for being put back into the Matrix and having his memory wiped.
This is the secret to understanding the pervasiveness of the system; Many people would prefer to stay slaves, provided they are "taken care" of.
Like Cypher, they'd sacrifice their independence in exchange for relative comfort and blissful ignorance; They'd rather place their fate in the hands of an authority than be responsible for the direction of their own lives.
This tendency is perhaps best demonstrated in the high suicide rates among recently released prisoners:
Convicts grow so dependent on the prison system that they end up struggling to live without it.
This is the final state of slavehood, where the slave begs to be kept in prison because he cannot imagine any other way to live.
Such is the brilliance of the system; Many prisoners are actually not interested in freedom at all.
As Morpheus tells Neo, “You have to understand. Most people are not ready to be unplugged.”
Part Two: Monkey Trap