3 Mar 20 My dear fellow Steemians, as I explained to my dog in a post recently re Justin Sun and Steemit Inc, absolutely nothing odd is taking place. This is just another example of a fact of Human Nature, which Lord Acton explained to us with such succinct and memorable brevity: Power corrupts – and Absolute Power corrupts absolutely. This has been true forever, and therefore should be no surprise. But, there is a very pertinent corollary to this truth, which has been unstated, and therefore uninspected; and it has been misshaping the daily lives of humankind for the last 10,000 years – ever since the advent of Civilization with its God-Kings. That corollary is this: Top-down Power Structures create Criminal Leaders. Surprise, surprise! This failing of standard organizational methods is endemic in all large groups (including Steemit Inc) and tragically – in every Government in existence! This is why the pages of History and the pages of today's newspapers are overflowing with stories of high-level Corruption running red with wars, and rumors of wars. For all of History, Criminal Leaders have been busy plundering their neighbors and their own populations. Given the pervasive distortions of Civilization—as Man's universal de facto model for the last 10,000 years—wholesale Criminality during that period was to be expected. No one really needs to be particularly surprised about it. For our first 190,000 years, Homo sapiens lived happily in small Band Societies—where everybody knew everybody. Our default systems of Governance were Bottom-up Power Structures. Then 10,000 years ago, with the Agricultural Revolution, that all changed. We moved into cities jampacked with Strangers. Our default bottom-up systems of Governance no longer worked. By necessity, Governance changed radically from Bottom-up to Top-down Power Structures. And Criminal Leaders became the order of the day. There are those who point out that Mankind was adversely affected by the Agricultural Revolution – in that our diet was radically changed, and that physiologically our bodies are still trying to adapt. I would argue that the greatest disruption brought about by the Agricultural Revolution was psychological, not physiological. When Societies changed from traditional Bottom-up Power Structures to the new Top-down Power Structures, necessitated by living in Cities—as Lord Acton's maxim intimates—from then on, all of our Societies were criminalized, and our baser instincts rewarded. Given such abnormal and traumatic circumstances, the last 10,000 years of Corruption, Criminality, and Warfare is just an obvious, although perverted reflection of Human Nature. But happily, today's ubiquity of the undesired aspects of Man can be seen as an anomaly! And I say that it is an anomaly, because while the necessary logistics of Civilization require that Power be concentrated in only a few hands – Civilization itself has been with us for only 5% of our time on Earth. Here's a new saying for you: Don't judge the baby by the bathwater. Men and women are basically good. It is only the very smallest percentage of us who are Criminals. And as we exit Civilization, and enter the New Age, Criminality will cease to be a dominant influence in our daily lives. We will return to normal! Seen in this light, we can be confident that if the Structures of Governance that we create to organize ourselves in large groups do not continue to concentrate our Individual Power in the hands of only a few at the top of the structures, we will no longer create Criminal Leaders. This makes perfect, logical sense – doesn't it? Please let me help you with the answer. "Yes! This makes perfect, logical sense!" But here's the kicker – even though the logic of the above statement seems undeniably true – it also probably feels totally irrelevant. And this is because, through all those pages of History, there has never been any other way for large numbers of men and women to efficiently associate and organize themselves – other than by establishing various types of God-Kings. So, for all those thousands of years, we have maintained Criminal Leaders. We have flowed them our Individual Power – they have concentrated it, and then, all too often, they have turned that Power back on us to strip us of our wealth. And they have also turned our young men into Soldiers so that they might plunder the wealth of our neighbors. Logistically it has been impossible for us to escape that scenario. There has just been no other way! And I understand that it's hard for folks to think outside of a box in which they have been stuck for 10,000 years! Well, guess what, fellow Steemians – now there is a way! We now have the technology to solve all those problems of high-level Criminality with which Civilization has been struggling. It is now logistically possible for huge groups of people to solve their common problems without installing Criminal Leaders. And it should be no surprise, that after 10,000 years of continual Wars and Corruption, it is the Internet that will provide that new way. For about 15 years, I've been flogging my Matrix-8 Platform as a solution to fix the perennial ravages of Top-down Power Structures. I'll give you just the briefest of thumbnail descriptions here. The Matrix-8 Platform allows for Real-time Decentralized Governance. Using Democratic Processes, groups of any size can provide their Members with the Inclusive Participation, Anonymous Deliberation and Voting, which will allow them to speedily arrive at fully understood Actionable Accords. And it can all be done with only a Smartphone! (For a fuller exposition, please see my Introduction and White Paper, at https://steempeak.com/steemit/@matrix-8/a-newbie-s-combination-introduction-and-white-paper.) My Matrix-8 Platform can cure many of the ills of Civilization. Simply said, once it is adopted, Power will no longer be concentrated in the hands of a few Leaders. (Leaders who would thereafter be susceptible to the infection of Corruption.) With the Matrix-8 Platform, the Power inherent in any large organization—the Steem Community included—stays in the hands, and under the control of the individual Members themselves. You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. –Buckminster Fuller With the advent of the Matrix-8 Platform, Top-down Power Structures are obsolete. But without a Matrix-8 Platform a group of 500,000—such as ourselves—has no way to come to the constant critical Accords necessary to make its way efficiently into the future. The cacophony of Chatroom discussions won't make it. And if there is any community of individuals on this planet who should be able to see the simplicity of the Matrix-8 Platform – it is we Steemians. We need to organize ourselves in such a way that we can speak, and act as One. No Leaders – the only thing that leads us is the Common Cause that our group be truly free. The Steem Blockchain as given us the ability to enter into secure commerce with our STEEM Cryptocurrency; The Matrix-8 Platform will guarantee us our continued Freedom from any would-be Tyrants or clique of Elite. Getting the job done…. If we 500,000 Steemians were willing to pledge only $10 each to make this happen – we could quickly amass a war chest of Five Million Dollars! That sounds like enough to make a pretty good start…. We can pay ourselves in Crypto, and pay with cash for services we can't ourselves provide. When we're done, we'll have a truly decentralized Community that cannot be sold or corrupted by a few well-connected power brokers. When we're done, we'll have a state-of-the-art platform with a valuable bunch of unique bells and whistles – created and controlled from the bottom up, by Us. New Age DApps will then be able to Sell/License/Receive Royalties from other organizations that use subway platforms to access the Matrix-8 Platform for their own purposes. When money starts to roll in, we can then decide how any profits should be disbursed. So, let's stop crying over spilt milk! Let's pull ourselves together and create the platform we've all been dreaming about! The only real change will be that there won't be one or two entrepreneurs doing it – and thereafter pulling all the strings. We'll all do it! We pretty much know exactly what we want, and we have within our Members the technical knowledge to create it. So, what do you say? Let's get together and make New Age DApps a reality! I'll end off with another time-honored saying: If you want something done right – do it yourself! In this case, we'll do it ourselves. Together we can do this! John Huckel