What’s your name?
Brandon Mason.
Where are you from?
I live in the western part of Colorado in the USA.
What aspects of the transition to Stakeholder Capitalism are most personally relevant for you?
As a software engineer, most of the jobs I see posted are essentially involved in building a control and surveillance grid. Some examples of places my personal contacts are employed:
- Working for the DOD building AI vision recognition systems for automated monitoring of the forests… and on their road map are use cases for cities.
- Working for Salesforce, whose founder Mark Beniof regularly attends the WEF, and promotes the indoctrination within the company.
- Working for Disney, where the ESGs are running strong.
- Working for a cosmetic pharmaceutical company.
The job applications now have standard ESG language baked into them. Once it’s adopted by the software companies that provide the platforms, it’s de-facto adopted by all of their client companies. I don’t think that most people in the tech world understand what they are participating in. The indoctrination in Silicon Valley runs really deep.
Living out in the country now, I filmed a public hearing for Land Use Codes where the citizenry was pushing back after the authorities operated behind the scenes to implement sweeping changes. I don’t know if this is directly tied to WEF agendas, but it is certainly a forfeiture of property rights, and is a part of the UN Agenda 21 plan to centralize control under the guise of climate justice.
These are just two examples. Really, I see these agendas playing out in every aspect of life. Where I live I would say it’s about 50/50: the number of people around me who are connecting the dots. But I think there are many areas of the country (and world) where a person connecting the dots would be in a very small minority.
What would you want to see in a movement for an alternative?
Principles without action are dead. Yes, it’s important to come to a correct understanding of reality. But we need to implement our understanding in our lives. I’ve been waiting to meet people of common interest and values for a long time. I have many ideas for things that we could do, particularly in the software space.
It’s not necessary that we build platforms that fundamentally compromise privacy and subject people to the whims of censorship and deplatforming. We could be creating decentralized systems that would honor core principles:
- I declare my identity, and I need no intermediary
- No one can silence my voice (but I can’t force anyone to listen to me)
- I have the ability to enter into relationships and contracts of mutual agreement
- I own my data, it lives with me, and I decide who uses it and how (we don’t need to store data in central platforms and give up our control)
We could rebuild the foundations of our software in a way that honors humanity and takes inspiration from the study of living systems. I believe this would fundamentally change human relationships, guiding people towards kinder, more compassionate ways of relating, while simultaneously refocusing us on productive and wholesome pursuits. Ultimately we could build software that assists in self discovery and the maximizing of human potential. I can only imagine what beautiful wonders will unfold when people have the proper resources and encouragement to achieve their dreams.
What skills, talents, backgrounds would you like people to know you have?
I’ve been building software for startup companies for 15 years. I run a consultancy, Torchlight Software. We built the event management software behind Mastermind.com, among other things. If you have projects of mutual interest and alignment, please let me know. If you’re an investor and open to a pitch, please let me know.
What books, movies, blogs, or other information sources helped you to come to your current perspective?
I love resources that talk about solutions, not just the problems. Often times people are capable of describing the problems in great detail and yet have no solutions to offer. Here are some resources containing solutions that have inspired me:
- Reinventing Organizations: by Frederick Laloux
- Who do we choose to be? Margaraet J Wheatley
- What then must we do? by Gar Alperovitz
- Unstoppable: by Ralph Nader
- Maverick: by Ricardo Semler
- Turn the Ship Around: by L. David Marquet
- Critical Path: by Buckminster Fuller
- Gamestorming: by Gray, Brown, Racanufo: This is a playbook for democratic decision making.
- The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: by Richard Feynman: a cozy and heart warming talk encouraging inquiry and exploration of life.
- The Systems View of Life: by Capra, Luisi: watch out for this one, it’s dense scientific material.
- Credo Economics: a tour of how the economic theories you were taught are bullshit, and what we know about economic systems that actually work for the benefit of society at large.
(you can find all these on Amazon, but I’ve endeavored to send you anywhere else…)
Some resources for understanding the problems we face:
- Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power: if you want to understand authority, hierarchy, control, and indoctrination…
- Superimperialism: by Michael Hudson (the petro dollar and IMF strategy that was implemented by the USA was inspired by this book)
- Century of The Self: A BBC series documenting how propaganda was developed by using Freudian psychology to manipulate people based on their childhood insecurities.
- The Social Dilemma: Propaganda in the era of social media. I feel it is even more powerful viewed in the light of Century of Self, because it’s so impressive the level of manipulation that was achieved in the era of TV and radio… The power now is even more immense.
- Yuri Bezminov on Demoralization - a bombshell lecture that makes a lot of what’s going on in the world make a lot more sense.
- Catherine Austin Fitts and her site Solari.com. Catherine while working at the Housing and Urban Development Department in the USA uncovered trillions of dollars of missing money. In her work now as an independent news source she continues to “follow the money” and has a unique perspective on world events.
- Whitney Webb and her site Unlimited Hangout. Whitney’s debut One Nation Under Blackmail uncovers the organize crime and intelligence collaboration surrounding Jeffrey Epstein. Also notable is her work identifying Moderna’s pre-covid history, and the harms they knew were inherent in their product.
- James Corbett, corbettreport.com. James has been covering for decades the activities of the WEF, the Trilateral Commission, the Fabian Society and other shall we say ambitious transgovernmental entities. Check out Who is Bill Gates? and Meet Caroll Quigley for starts.
- Children’s Health Defense: I could sum up the core focus of this organization in one term: Regulatory Capture. If you understand that the regulatory agencies are compromised and can no longer be trusted to do their jobs, you are a lot closer to understanding the responsibilities you must now take up for your own safety and health.
- Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt: Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco: an illustrated and narrated tear jerker covering the “sacrifice zones” of America that will dispel the myth of American superiority and call attention to solving our problems at home.
Is there anything you’d like to share about your personal journey?
I believe that the highest calling is to be in service to the spirit of life. The study of living forms is the greatest inspiration that we could have for building the systems that underlie our society, economy, and industry. I believe that organizations should be constructed as living systems. That they are in fact, living systems, and that by embracing this viewpoint we can design systems that operate in harmony with human beings and the world around us.
Our present economic view, where anything not monetary is relegated to “externalities”, is the cause of much damage. So in a sense, I agree with the WEF that we need to include “stakeholders” in the decision making process. But I don’t think we need any top down authority to do that for us. What we need is to do that from the ground up, forming worker owned cooperatives and other forms of shared decision making. That is a workers movement, and a choice of individuals, not a system of governance. Consider that if the factories of Detroit had been worker owned cooperatives, it is unlikely that they would have voted to destroy their own livelihoods and derelict their own city in order to improve “shareholder profits”.
Where the WEF’s agendas are particularly dangerous and insidious is that they get individuals and smaller companies and municipalities to adopt standard systems that they control. So they are using a genuine impulse towards human compassion and greater sensitivity to our impacts to justify a forfeiture of sovereignty. I believe the right step forward is to apply compassion and awareness, without one inch of forfeiting sovereignty.
