I live in a VW Transporter that is the evolution of the OG Kombi van. I got the van in November 2013 after waiting 8 months. It has personalised “BUKINI” plates and is a customised Orange long wheel base T5. Sunny has the 2 L twin turbo BiTDI 132 kw 400 N inline 4 cylinder (16 valve) engine, differential lock, reinforced suspension, 7 speed DSG gearbox and 4motion transmission. I have become quite intimate with Sunny, so I decided to trace back to its origins in the Nazi German General Labour Front in 1937.
As I did this I noticed a very curious coincidence with a recent conversation between Elon Musk and Alice Weidel (current Leader of the German Far Right) where they referred to Hitler as a Socialist.
However if you go back to the formation of the Nazi German General Labour Front in 1933 you can see that Hitler took over the various independent trade unions in Germany by occupying their offices, seizing their assets and brutally beating and arresting all of the leaders before sending them off to concentration camps (even those leaders who agreed to cooperate with them). This is how Hitler enslaved the German workforce to the fascist business class. Following were the key mandates of the General Labour Front.
“to restore absolute leadership to the natural leader of a factory—that is, the employer… Only the employer can decide.”[6]
“to create a true social and productive community of all Germans” and “to see that every single individual should be able to perform the maximum of work.”[8]
The workers had no rights, each worker had to carry a special book with their employment history and status and they could only leave a position if they were released by their employer. This is the kind of socialism front that Weidel and Musk were referring to, a kind of fascism that tries to hide behind ethno-national populism, that they both seem hell bent on returning to. This same fascist ideology is also reflected in the ethos of Tesla and Musk’s various X companies.
The first Volkswagen (people wagon in English) factory was financed by promising each worker a car and the workers paid for the factory out of their wages. The workers never received their car as the factory was repurposed for the Nazi war machine in 1939. The Volkswagen T design platform series is the oldest automotive design platform – that is still operating – dating back to a variation on the original VW Beetle design that was produced in post war Germany. The first vans were produced on the platform in 1949.
Fast forward to 2005 when Angela Merkel came to power in Germany and invited Jeremy Rifkin to advise her on facilitating the transition of the European economy through the third industrial revolution. Transitioning from combustion engines to electric vehicles; fossil fuels to renewable energy; and from centralised systems created for an analogue world to fully distributed digital systems.
Eight years later in 2013 Rifkin went to China to meet with premier Li Qian and advise him on doing the same thing for China. In 2015 Li Qian’s administration launched the Made in China 2025 strategy which was clearly aimed at making China the global leader of the Third Industrial Revolution by 2025.
In 2024 as China was completing its 2025 objectives a year early, France’s finance minister Bruno Le Maire admitted Europe had lost the race and said,“When we decided to shift from thermic engines to EVs, we were late vis-à-vis China — I would say between five and seven years late,” At the same time BYD a Chinese auto company became the biggest maker of electric vehicles in the world, overtaking Tesla, which coincided with Volkswagen announcing it is closing 3 of its factories in Germany. This is the end of the line for the T platform as future iterations of the iconic VW van will now be made using the Ford custom transit van design platform at a Ford factory in Turkey.
The T5 the 5th generation of the series was launched in 2003 as a significant upgrade with the new Turbo Diesel Injected (TDI) engines and the DSG gear box coming in 2009. In 2016 VW became the largest car seller in the world overtaking Toyota, off the back of its “clean” TDI diesel performance engines that had innovative turbo fuel injection technology, that delivered very high levels of efficient performance. However they went a little too far in marketing their “clean” TDI technology by designing software to reduce emissions of Nitrous Oxide in the engine, that was only utilised during the emissions testing of the car. So the real NOx emissions were actually higher and they got caught in 2015. Sunny was one of the vehicles that had this technology as he was manufactured in 2013. The consequences were quite severe for VW and the whole affair came to be known as “Dieselgate”.
While this was happening Tesla was lobbying the Chinese government to adopt California style clean air policy to accelerate the demand for electric cars. In 2017 China adopted the Policy and the 1st Tesla electric car was produced in Shanghai in 2020.
According to Jem Bendell’s research as documented in his book “Breaking together” the zenith of so called “human progress” coincided with Trump being first elected in 2016 as President of the USA. Bendell documents quite clearly how across the board indices of human wellbeing, financial security, education, standard of living, healthcare etc as documented not only by the United Nations but also by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), were all increasing by 1 to 2 points per year up until 2015. Then after 2016 all these indices started to decrease by 3 to 4 points per year clearly marking the beginning of the breakdown of modern civilisation as we know it. Capitalism is now eating itself in a feast of Fascist populist propaganda. The wealth gap between the top 1% and the rest of the population especially the bottom 50% has become so obscenely extreme.
China’s Loess Plateau having suffered hundreds of years of over farming and grazing became the worst mass example of human induced environmental degradation in the 20th century. In 1995 the Chinese govt worked with the world bank to plan and implement the largest environmental restoration project ever. Now in 2025 the millions of people that live there are starting to harvest the benefits with their standard of living increasing as the landscape and forest is restored. Their land use based livelihoods now consist of sustainable practices that consider their long term effects on the environment.
This along with the huge pollution problems have led China to take the climate crisis seriously and to take big steps to transition their economy to a renewable economy. Meanwhile America grasping as its accelerating collapse gathers momentum, is going back to investing heavily in fossil fuel infrastructure and wantonly pillaging its own natural resources. China’s economy is already vastly more efficient in real terms than America.
Comparison on key macro-economic metrics 2024:
Looking at the above metrics you can see how far China is ahead of the US in transitioning to a clean, efficient green economy. China has 76% of the global EV market and more than 80% of the global Solar Photovoltaic manufacturing capability.
China’s influence can be seen in the Aboriginal Sovereignty movement in Naarm. Doctor Aunty Alma Thorpe, Aboriginal Elder, Activist and Matriarch of the modern Movement went to China during the Cultural Revolution. There she received an intensive training in basic healthcare services along with 1.5 million Chinese farmers who all went back to their local communities as healthcare leaders and barefoot doctors. Aunty Alma is the mother of Uncle Robbie Thorpe and the Grandmother of Senator Lydia Thorpe.
It seems America’s current strategy is to try and bully its way back into the driver’s seat and thinks it has the strongest hand because it has the largest market and is the worlds biggest producer of fossil fuels. However this is hubris because that position is based on the accumulation of debt and is not sustainable. America seems to be aligning heavily with the other key petro-states of Russia and Saudi Arabia, in the hope of prolonging the worlds addiction to fossil fuels. I think it is clear from the above metrics how America has already completely lost the race and is just speeding up their own demise. They will become isolated, weak and poor and Musk’s technology will be rejected by the rest of the world. As witnessed in the recent global sell off of US treasury bonds and the EU migration away from starlink to the French Eutelsat satélite service. Global alliances are shifting now moving away from the US and towards China, first with trade and then the rest of society will follow.
It is clear that the 21st Century will see the rise of China to be the dominant global culture just like America was in the 20th Century. The other thing that seems to be clear is that digital networks and their communities are beginning to replace nation states as the thing that reflects and defines one’s identity, values and culture. China is much further ahead in the digital revolution especially with regards mainstream adoption of digital financial technology. Although China has taken a very centralised approach to digital financial technology, I think as decentralised digital financial technology develops it will provide viable alternatives to the more authoritarian centralised networks and these networks will be interoperable visa v stable coins.
Digital neighbourhoods are starting to emerge like the #Blacksky community on ATprotocol which can be accessed using the Bluesky app view. As these communities become empowered with secure blockchain integrations that allow for the easeful creation and sharing of digital assets, the framework is laid for secure decentralised governance. With secure Decentralised Identity (DID) standards at the heart of how these digital networks work, reputation and trust become key features of how these communities are governed with sophisticated decentralised voting protocols, such as Neural Quorum Governance. This then provides the basis for decentralised data sovereignty where each actor has decentralised control of their identity, data and digital assets visa v their DID and has various options for how they can store, manage and share their data.
My goal for 2025 is to research and develop the DID integrations with the stellar blockchain and the ATprotocol community. I intend to have my own personal data server running from mum’s house primarily on solar power. My goal is to be able to host other people’s accounts on my personal data server and to have a smooth onboarding process in place.
Tuesday 16th December 2025 (Waratah bay)
We are coming to the end of 2025 and I haven’t achieved the above goal that I had set earlier in the year. I have since stopped using social media altogether and done a complete purge of my devices so that doom scrolling is no longer possible. This has been both liberating and also thrown up quite a bit of grief.
As more dying takes place within me, the grief releasing itself in the emotional expression of crying somehow signals the letting go, the unravelling. Not having the distraction of social media and doom scrolling there is so much more time and space. In becoming accustomed to having all of this additional time and space there is a grieving for the loss of all of those things that I had used to fill all of that time and space in the past.
A Radical Shared Economy 
Leave a comment