This is part of a series on How to Escape a Cult that's Taken Over the World:

• Part 1 - The Cult
• Part 2 - Know Your Comrades
• Part 3 - Let The Music Lift You
• Part 4 - Establish Your Goals
• Part 5 - Fear of Cashless Society

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There's a reason we hate politics so much. Politics is the "art of governance". In other words, politics is about the distribution of power, how this distribution is determined and what that power is used to regulate, prevent, restrict, enable, enforce, you get the point. That power is supposed to be for the benefit of society, but today's politics don't work that way. It's no wonder in a failing democracy why we all hate politics when it makes us feel so powerless.

I hated politics too. That was until I became involved in a different world of politics. That world was unregulated, untouched by our conventional governing/political system. In fact it was designed so that it can't be. That world opened my mind to alternative political structures where I found I did have power. This is the story of how that happened.

Apparently YouTube doesn't like videos more than 15 minutes unless I give them my booty call line (that's a joke guys) so here's the second half of the same video.

To my Steem Veteran friends: If I've made any mistakes in the video above about how Hive removed the corruption from the network in breaking away from Steem, please correct me and I'll be happy to edit this post for accuracy.

As you might have gathered from my story, the politics of Blockchain communities is certainly not without its ups and downs. I left the Steem network with a very heavy heart, believing we had failed and I couldn't watch it all collapse after I'd invested so much time and love into it.

Due to the nature of this blockchain, on which power is based on your measure of stake in the platform, we have an analogy for stakeholders from big to small. The network is the ocean and we're the sea creatures. What type of sea creature you are depends on your size. Nowadays, we're broken up into 5 categories: red fish, minnows, dolphins, orcas and whales. But for simplicity, I'll stick to explaining the original concept of minnows, dolphins and whales.

As you'd expect, the smallest stakeholders were considered minnows (small fish) and the largest were considered whales. Whoever was in between made up the dolphins. Basing your voting power on the amount of stake you have has its problems in most contexts, but for the purpose of an attention economy (which is what social media networks are), it's a pretty good game that can work (with the right rules to keep all players engaged), and at the very least serves as a really educational experiment.

The idea of this analogy was that for a large stakeholder (a whale) their one vote alone is enough to make a big wave, or large impact. Dolphins are much smaller than whales, but when they come together as a pod, their impact could be even greater than a whales. This meant that they could counter the vote of a whale to protect the integrity of the rewards pool. And this was something I witnessed on a regular basis!

Minnows, as the smallest stakeholders would see their vote as fairly ineffective when voting alone, but working together as a school of fish, or what we call "guilds" of curators, they were able to have a pretty decent impact on what posts got rewarded.

Dolphins and whales also have a lot more to lose than minnows do, because their stake is locked up. So if the platform is failing to attract investment, their stake is losing value and could cause a domino effect of power downs which is like a race to the bottom. Everybody loses in that scenario (which has also happened). So there is an incentive to maintain the integrity of the chain and keep the minnows happy. That means rewarding them for their content and engagement. Afterall, they are the majority and therefore the main consumers of the attention economy which is where social networks get their value.

I could write a trilogy on the story of the Steem blockchain. I'm not a gaming person, but it was one of the most fascinating political games I've ever participated in and I managed to make a living from it for almost two years. I went from being a minnow, to a dolphin and then having a large enough stake delegated to me by a whale to have the influence of an orca whale (without owning the stake myself). With that I was able to fund content creators in Venezuela when their currency was going into hyper inflation. A few of my Venezuelan friends used their rewards from the platform to flee to Peru. I also had a huge network of support from Indonesia, the Philipines and several other countries I never dreamed I would have friends in.

With that delegation I was getting rewarded for voting and I had "guilds" which were groups of curators who would find great content for me to vote on. I was getting paid for my vote and paid for my opinions. I had power and while I had to keep myself from abusing it, it felt great. It was when I started hosting my podcast which became a weekly discussion of the "steem politics", that I realised it wasn't politics that I hated. It was our existing political system, where I have never felt that I had impact, influence or power. I had that realisation before I received any power delegation. That was when I was just a minnow!

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