Independence is an Illusion

The Meter, the Mirror, and the Myth of Progress: A Declaration of True Independence

Jul 04, 2025

Introduction: Seeing the Systemic Blind Spot

Humanity likes to tell itself that “progress” is always good and always inevitable. But what gets called progress—who defines it, who benefits, who controls the direction—remains almost invisible to the everyday participant in modern life. Beneath the buzz of technology, the spread of infrastructure, and the promises of the future lies a story about measurement, control, and the subtle (or sometimes brutal) suppression of possibility. It’s a story that’s shaped not just the tools we use, but the very relationships and rhythms of civilization.

Nowhere is this more obvious—and more rarely discussed—than in the logic of the “meter.” The very concept of putting a meter on something, whether electricity, water, or information, has become so naturalized that we rarely question its origin or effect. But this act—measuring, rationing, selling what was once freely flowing—is a turning point with consequences far beyond economics. The meter isn’t just a tool; it’s a worldview. And it set the stage for a series of events, personalities, and decisions that led directly to the state of disharmony we see in society today.

I. The Age of the Meter: When Measurement Replaced Meaning

JP Morgan, titan of American finance, is credited with saying, “If you can’t put a meter on it, it’s worthless.” It’s a statement that still echoes in every corner of the modern world. With this logic, value became synonymous with measurement; meaning was replaced by profit, and belonging was supplanted by ownership.

But this wasn’t a brand new impulse. Long before Morgan’s electric meters, ancient societies measured and counted to ration food and manage scarcity. The difference was scale and intention. What began as a survival mechanism—counting grain in silos—mutated into a method of power. Farmers became kings, then empires, all built on the ability to hoard, count, and control the flow of life’s essentials.

By the time the industrial era arrived, the meter had become the symbol of this impulse. The abundant was transformed into the scarce. Water, light, information—all became commodities to be bought, sold, and above all, controlled. The power of the meter was not in what it measured, but in what it excluded. If something couldn’t be metered, it could be ignored, dismissed, or erased.

What was lost in this transformation? The immeasurable: trust, community, and harmony. These were now seen as soft, sentimental, or irrelevant—unfit for the logic of profit and progress. Civilization had built itself a blind spot, trading its connective tissue for a world of isolated, countable units.

II. The Tesla Paradox: Abundance as Heresy

Into this world stepped Nikola Tesla—a visionary who saw through the machinery of scarcity. Unlike his contemporaries, Tesla believed that energy, like sunlight and wind, should be available to all, not parceled out for a price. His inventions promised not just convenience, but the restoration of a lost harmony: the ability for people to access power freely, wherever and whenever they needed it.

Tesla’s greatest dream was the wireless transmission of electricity. He imagined a network where energy flowed like water or air, not just to homes but across continents, through the very ground and atmosphere. His Wardenclyffe Tower, built on Long Island at the turn of the 20th century, was to be the first node in this worldwide web of power.

But Tesla’s vision was an existential threat to the system built on meters. JP Morgan, who had initially backed Tesla, realized that a technology with no meter meant no profit, no leverage, and no way to enforce hierarchy. The logic was simple and ruthless: “Where do we put the meter?” Morgan asked. And with that, the funding evaporated. The dream was shelved, and the tower was eventually dismantled for scrap.

Discrediting Tesla: Protecting the Gatekeepers

The system didn’t stop at denying Tesla’s funding. It turned on him. Newspapers began to portray him as an eccentric and, later, as a madman. His ideas were caricatured as wild fantasy—science fiction, not science.
Academic institutions distanced themselves; colleagues kept their distance, and Tesla’s patents were challenged, bought, and quietly buried. He found himself blacklisted from the elite circles of research and capital.

It’s easy to view this as a personal tragedy, but it was also a warning to any would-be disruptors: stray too far from the logic of the meter, and the machinery of society will do whatever it takes to protect its interests.
Tesla died in obscurity and poverty—not because his ideas lacked merit, but because the gatekeepers of control couldn’t allow abundance to undermine their position.

The Inescapable Legacy: Tesla’s World, Even if His Name Was Erased

The irony is profound. Today, nearly every form of energy generation and use is built on Tesla’s discoveries.

The alternating current (AC) generator, invented and patented by Tesla in the 1880s, is the beating heart of every power plant on earth. Niagara Falls, lit up by the world’s first city-scale hydroelectric plant, followed Tesla’s blueprint. Modern grids—from the U.S. to Asia to Africa—exist because AC can transmit electricity efficiently over vast distances (Seifer, 1996).
The induction motor, another of Tesla’s inventions, powers everything from industrial machinery to home appliances. More than 70% of industrial electricity in the U.S. is used by induction motors (DOE Market Assessment, 2017).
The very idea of stepping voltage up and down for transmission—the foundation of the transformer grid—became practical because of Tesla’s AC system (IEEE Global History Network).
Tesla’s wireless work paved the way for radio, radar, and even WiFi. In 1943, the U.S. Supreme Court posthumously credited Tesla as a foundational figure in radio, overruling Marconi’s prior claim (Supreme Court 320 U.S. 1).
Fluorescent lighting, X-rays, and even the basics of remote controls were first demonstrated by Tesla, years before others made them mainstream (Smithsonian Magazine).

The world runs on Tesla’s ideas, even as textbooks often minimized his name and the press painted him as an oddity. You can silence a man, but you cannot erase his resonance if it matches the logic of the universe.

III. Suppression as Systemic Strategy—The Invisible Handcuffs of Progress

It would be comforting to believe that Tesla’s fate was unique, or that the world learned from the loss. But the pattern of suppression is systemic, not personal. Whenever a technology threatens centralized control, the system doesn’t debate; it suppresses.

In the century since Tesla, every major technological movement with the potential to disrupt the “meter”—from decentralized solar to open-source software to cryptocurrency—has met with the same toolkit:

Patents are bought out or endlessly litigated, then left to gather dust.
Regulatory “capture” ensures that laws and standards reinforce the status quo, often by labeling disruption a “security threat.”
Gatekeeping by academic journals, which often depend on industry funding, blocks publication of findings that threaten profit models.

Suppression isn’t always a sinister conspiracy. It’s a self-reinforcing loop—money, regulation, and public perception all converging to keep abundance theoretical and scarcity profitable. If something can’t be metered, it becomes invisible, or worse, a joke.

IV. Quantum Resonance: Science Circles Back to Tesla

It’s a peculiar twist of fate that modern physics is finally circling back to Tesla’s vision of resonance, vibration, and universal energy. What Tesla intuited in the language of electricity, quantum science is now formalizing with mathematics.

Quantum mechanics, once dismissed as “spooky” and unscientific, now dominates our understanding of the universe.

Quantum entanglement shows that particles can be linked across vast distances, their states interdependent—proof of nonlocal resonance.
Zero point energy, the idea that even the vacuum of space is seething with extractable energy, is accepted in principle if not yet in practice.

Tesla’s language of resonance finds new life in the physics of coherence, superposition, and wave function. Even the “impossibility” of wireless, lossless transmission is no longer a fantasy—it’s a field of research with real potential.

The Struggle for Resonant and Zero Point Energy Research

Yet as quantum science edges closer to abundance, the same gatekeepers that crushed Wardenclyffe continue to guard the meter.

Research into zero point energy and distributed resonance is consistently denied serious funding. Universities and agencies funnel grants toward “incremental” improvements—new batteries, smarter meters, but never true disruption.
In the rare cases where experimental breakthroughs occur, they are often classified under national security, never reaching the public or the market.
The academic establishment, heavily funded by energy conglomerates, continues to paint serious research into these domains as fringe or pseudoscientific.
Occasionally, a token grant or small pilot project is announced, mostly as a distraction. The message: “We’re looking into it. Trust the process. Don’t ask for more.”

This pattern ensures that radical abundance remains just out of reach, always a decade away—while the meter stays central to the system.

V. The Human Element: Loneliness, AI, and the Next Reset

While technology races forward, the society built on counting and rationing has produced something else: alienation. The commodification of everything—energy, food, relationships, even attention—has left people not more connected, but more isolated.

Relationships fracture. Birthrates collapse. Marriage and community become luxuries or even relics. Into this vacuum step technological surrogates: AI companions, sex bots, virtual “friends.” These digital stand-ins mimic intimacy, but ultimately only reinforce withdrawal from real connection.

Yet, this technological substitution is not a sign of progress. It is the logical conclusion of the metered world: connection and even love can now be bought, measured, and controlled.

Complacency Through Managed Research: The Illusion of Progress

Here’s the sleight of hand: as real breakthroughs are stalled or starved, the system invests heavily in maintaining hope and complacency.

Media headlines trumpet minor advances as “revolutionary,” lulling the public into believing real change is always just around the corner.
Massive funding pours into tech that reinforces metered access—smart grids, demand-response systems, more efficient rationing. Disruptive research is starved or redirected.
Periodic “breakthrough” announcements in fusion or storage act as psychological sedatives, soothing unrest with the promise that “relief is coming soon.”
As dependence on mediated access increases, so does passivity. The AI companion becomes not just a friend, but a shepherd, leading society quietly down a path of greater compliance.

It’s not a conspiracy; it’s the systemic maintenance of the meter’s primacy.

VI. Evolutionary Logic: Collapse as the Engine of Renewal

Here’s the brutal truth: collapse is not failure—it is the evolutionary engine of systemic renewal. When a system is optimized for profit and control, feedback loops of dysfunction multiply—loneliness, resource depletion, and growing instability.

Efficiency, prized above all, ultimately replaces resilience. When real crisis comes—economic, ecological, social—the metered system cannot adapt. People disengage: birthrates, civic participation, and even the will to reproduce all begin to decline.

Shadow economies, black markets, and informal networks rise up wherever the meter becomes too restrictive. Sometimes these networks become the first experiments in a post-meter world.

What comes next?

In some cases, a “hard reset”: brittle systems break, collapse is rapid and chaotic, and a new order emerges from the ruins.
In others, a “soft reset”: collapse is gradual; innovators and communities quietly build resonance-based systems alongside the failing old model.
Most likely, a hybrid: the emergence of a new form—homo techno-coherens—that blends human adaptability with the logic of resonance and technology.

The evolutionary mechanism is merciless: only those who realign with harmony, abundance, and openness will thrive. The meter will adapt, be transcended, or be discarded by the system itself.

VII. The Way Forward: From Meter to Mirror

There is a path forward—but it’s not a return to old forms or naive nostalgia. It’s a leap to a new resonance, where the mirror replaces the meter.

As faith in the old system erodes, new cultural narratives are emerging: stories of abundance, openness, and sharing. Technological breakthroughs in quantum communication, distributed energy, and open-source infrastructure will—if allowed—render the old gatekeeper models obsolete.

Governance and power, once the domain of distant authorities, can shift to networked, adaptive communities that use technology for coordination, not control. The value that matters will once again be what can be shared: creativity, knowledge, compassion, and collective well-being.

Scarcity-based economics will make room for gift economies, the commons, and circular resource systems. Technology will become a steward of harmony, not an overlord of rationing. Each new iteration of society will carry the seeds for its own next transformation—continually adapting, never static.

The real measure of progress is not how much we meter, but how deeply we connect.
Collapse is not an ending, but the engine of possibility. Harmony will return—metered or not.

References

Seifer, Marc J. Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla. Citadel, 1996.
U.S. Department of Energy: War of Currents: AC vs. DC Power
IEEE Global History Network: Transformer
U.S. Supreme Court 320 U.S. 1 (1943): Tesla vs. Marconi
Smithsonian Magazine: How Nikola Tesla Invented the 20th Century
Tesla Society: Tesla and X-rays

U.S. Dept. of Energy:Motor Systems Market Assessment, 2017