In the ancient Roman Republic, the Plebians were members of the general citizenry in ancient Rome as opposed to the privileged patrician class.
Throughout the period known as The Conflict of Orders, between 500 BC and 287 BC, plebians had organized and progressively pushed for reforms that gave them some of the same rights as the patricians.
Eventually, hundreds of years later, Rome went into full blown empire and crashed.
Well, 2,000 years later, and 230 years after the founding of “The Land of the Free,” we still have a political class that considers the rest of us their underlings.
And, in the last 20 years, a whole new class has arisen to power. The “surveillance capitalists” are all of the people and companies that use our information, or information about us as part of their business model. They share, sell, leak, or otherwise mishandle our information, leading to an escalating loss of privacy all across the developed world.
We called our association Plebstor because we aim to disrupt the status quo in much the same way as the Plebs did in Ancient Rome, but instead of using political action, we are using computers and our freedom to associate and communicate in order to opt out of abusive corporations and other institutions and to reclaim our privacy.
By providing a way that individuals can participate in a peer-to-peer computing resources network, we provide ways to consume computing services which do not require payment in legal tender. When you use Plebstor, you pay for the services you use by providing a node that provides services to others on the network in exchange for the services you use.
By coming together as individuals, and not as a corporation, we effectively create a full scale, private, independent barter network for computing services, and we provide a way of opting out of contracts with corporations that use and abuse our data as part of their business models.
When millions of us do this, we send a message to Big Data that we don’t consent. And we stop sending them our money.
And, about the money: For now, let’s just say that we’re living in a monopoly money society where banks and governments create money to put people into debt. Being in debt is a form of slavery. As modern day abolitionists, we at Plebstor do not consent to this either.
If you want to continue paying for these services with your favorite national or government currency, go ahead. But you will have to do that somewhere else.
We’ll still be here, though, in case you see the value in Plebstor.
Plebstor is your data stored, for free, and forever.
If you want it.