You wrote elsewhere, about becoming a corporation yourself:

“the true check against the excesses of that essentially publicly controlled corporation [the US government] is that private citizens can and do form other corporations other bodies other systems to continually modulate and correct the underlying mechanism of our society.”

Cynicism:

People already tried this. They were called Trade Unions and the powers what are decided to change the rules as soon as they were successful to limit their power. Similarly, the history of local currencies, as you know, is often the history of power banning their use.

So when you use the chess analogy - why should I get in trouble if they’re still getting their cut, if I am playing chess according to the rules - I think the correct question is: what do you do if you are playing chess against your older brother and HE keeps changing the rules on you every time you start winning, and threatens to hit you in the face when you complain?

Nomadism:

This is where that hoary old chestnut, the chess/go comparison comes in. In Go, there are ‘no’ rules (beyond the most basic allowing there to be a competition at all), just ever-shifting concatenations of power interacting with each other in unexpected ways. Hence Deleuze and Guattari’s whole schtick about go as the nomadic, un-statist option. If you rely on differentiated rules for differently identified pieces, you are at the mercy of the rule makers.

I think the missing element, which you are probably already manifesting but I don’t think have really made explicit yet, is that of Stealth. By all means make yourself a corporation, give away abundance for free, be totally open source in everything you do, but let the tentacly Overlords believe that you are just a shyster, putting one over on the marks for a quick buck. Which takes us all the way back to that dangerous shadowy side of the carnival/ bard/ travelling trickster angle.

Ironically, in being totally open, you may even end up making some money - people say, ‘but Tim, surely if it works bigger companies will just copy the formula and come in and take over your pitch’ - but if you have no formula, if they [if you allow them to] judge your actions by their own value system, they will fail to reproduce the fundamental creativity and flow at the heart of the enterprise (Burroughs: our one advantage over tham is that they do not understand magick). They will be Stuck, where you are smooth they must remain striated or else how can they maintain (hierarchical) form? ‘A cistern contains, a fountain overflows’, as Old Will Blake mumbled into his porridge one morning…

Am I on message or is this all just alphabetti spaghetti?

I was at a talk by Grant Morrison oooh, years ago, and he was talking about how he had just set up a corporation, GM Word, as a Magickal experiment, so it could then interact with other corporations and exploit their special privileges. No point doing that if the rules will change so that such entities no longer have special privileges, but then you can just move on to something else, right? A charity, a political party, a land trust. I don’t know wy the Trade unions didn’t just rebrand themselves as religions and get round anti-strike laws by having their oracles occasionally declare open-ended ‘religious holiday periods’, but there you go.

Of course, arguably I am violating my own principle of stealth by typing this all here. I wonder what my real agenda is? Everytime I get close to remembering my brain switches off, presumably to protect me from potential interrogators. At some point I might have to disable that firewall and find out…