Ideas become meaningful when they change how we work together.
Business After Capitalism did not emerge in isolation. It grew from years of conversation, experimentation, publishing,
and practical business development.
The projects shown here form a wider ecosystem around that work. Some explore new ideas. Some distribute knowledge.
Some test collaborative principles in the marketplace. Others provide the conversations and relationships that help those ideas continue to evolve.
Together, they demonstrate a simple premise: changing business is not only a matter of proposing different ideas. It requires us to practice different relationships in the real world.
THE FOUNDATIONAL MODEL
The BRIDGE
The BRIDGE is the foundational model of collaboration developed through Activate Us. It describes a practical transition from competitive dependence, through greater independence, toward mature interdependence.
It is not a single organization or prescribed system. It is a way of thinking about how individuals, businesses, and how communities can embrace their distinct identities while becoming more capable of supporting one another.
The projects in this ecosystem do different things, but they share this underlying direction: decentralized participation, practical experimentation, mutual benefit, and collaboration without central control.
Business After Capitalism is a resource to support the comprehension and application of this wider social transition. It fits within the Aikido Economics aspect of The BRIDGE.
IDEAS, MODELS, AND EXPERIMENTS
Activate Us
Activate Us is a small think tank co-founded by Ray Bretzloff and developed with two others. Rather than stopping at critique, the Activate Us core team explores how people can move beyond social systems built around dependence, competition, and concentrated control.
Activate Us develops models, workshops, publications, and practical experiments intended to help people build more collaborative alternatives. The BRIDGE, Sovereignty University, Monkey Wrenches, and several real-world business experiments have all emerged from this work.
Activate Us is also where many of the ideas explored in Business After Capitalism were tested, challenged, and developed over time.
BAC Concepts Used by Activate Us: “Dynamic Leadership”, “Manifestation Lists”, “ Private Member Associations”, “Metabolism”, “People-Centric”, “What Do I Want?”
LEARNING AND DISTRIBUTION
Sovereignty University
Sovereignty University is the learning and distribution initiative of Activate Us.
It brings together courses, books, workshops, and practical resources created by Activate Us and aligned contributors. Its purpose is not to centralize knowledge under one institution, but rather to help useful ideas travel through a wider network of independent educators, organizations, and communities.
Its curriculum includes The BRIDGE, collaborative community development, personal development, new-paradigm business and finance, and other resources concerned with practical social change.
BAC Concepts Used by SU: “Pay It Forward”, “Never Pay For Advertising”, “ What Am I Actually Offering”, “Leveraging Mutual Benefit”, “Intelligences”, “What is Money?”
A PUBLISHING EXPERIMENT
Monkey Wrenches
Quotes, Concepts, Statements, and Stories to Challenge Your Perspective of the World.
Written by Ray Bretzloff and published through Activate Us, Monkey Wrenches is a collection of short provocations intended to disrupt familiar assumptions and encourage readers to look at society from less conventional angles.
The book is also a practical publishing experiment: an example of Activate Us using its own ideas, creative resources, and distribution channels to bring this work directly into the world.
Some entries are reflective, some playful, and some intentionally uncomfortable. Together, they invite readers to reconsider what they accept as normal—and what other possibilities may be hiding behind it.
BAC Concepts explored in Monkey Wrenches: “Logical and Intuitive”, “Personal Development”, “Fire Holes”, “Double Slit Experiment”, “Manifestation”, “Are You Sophia?”
Don’t BUGMe I’m On Vacation
COLLABORATIVE BUSINESS IN PRACTICE
Don’t BUGMe I’m On Vacation is a functioning commercial business co-founded by Ray Bretzloff with Josh Melcher.
BUGMe helps travelers discover local, independent tourism experiences based on their interests and intentions—not paid rankings or predetermined packages. Travelers explore freely and book directly with participating operators.
The platform is a practical application of principles explored in The BRIDGE and Business After Capitalism:. Businesses retain their independence, customer relationships remain direct, participation is not determined by advertising budgets, and value is created across a network rather than extracted by a central gatekeeper.
BUGMe is not presented as a perfect finished model. It is an active experiment in building a viable commercial enterprise around direct relationships, shared benefit, and collaborative discovery.
BAC Concepts Used by BUGMe: “Upward Spiral of Benefit”, Balancing Team, Customers, and Stakeholders”, “Symbiosis”, “Industry Perspective”, “Business Plan Exercise”, Reverse Filtering”, “Never Pay For Advertising”, “AI (Artificial Intelligence)”.
CREATIVE EXPRESSION IN PRACTICE
GuideStickers
GuideStickers was founded by Ray Bretzloff and Josh Melcher, who later went on to co-found Don’t BUGMe I’m On Vacation. The project grew from the language, humour, experiences, and shared identity of people working in outdoor adventure.
GuideStickers has since been integrated into the Activate Us ecosystem, where it serves as a small but tangible example of turning lived experience into creative expression and direct enterprise.
Guide Stickers is intentionally modest in scale, but that is part of its relevance. It demonstrates how an idea can move directly from lived experience into a creative product—without requiring a large organization, elaborate infrastructure, or conventional publishing process.
Products are produced and fulfilled through an independent print-on-demand marketplace, allowing the project to experiment, evolve, and reach people without holding inventory. The storefront is hosted on Redbubble, while GuideStickers.com provides a simple, memorable doorway into the collection.
BAC Concepts Used in GuideStickers: “Systems and Efficiency”, “Job vs. Business”, “Automation”, “Fun & Easy”,
Independent work.
Shared Purpose.
Collaboration does not require every participant to belong to the same organization.
Some of the most valuable relationships are between independent initiatives that maintain their own work, identity, and direction while making space for honest conversation, encouragement, and mutual learning.
The Gatherings
In a time when many people feel isolated, overwhelmed, or divided, Gatherings offer something different: a facilitated space where every voice can be heard, where concerns and hopes are welcomed equally, and where new possibilities can emerge through genuine human connection.
The Gatherings is an independent, aligned organization with which members of Activate Us maintain an ongoing peer-support relationship.
That relationship is conversational rather than operational. Through regular video calls, they share perspectives, explore common questions, encourage one another’s work, and provide the kind of thoughtful peer connection that can be difficult to find while developing unconventional ideas.
We do not direct or participate in The Gatherings’ programs, and The Gatherings is not an Activate Us initiative. It is included here because relationships of this kind are themselves part of practicing a more collaborative way of working.
Life Force Nation
Life Force Nation is an independent community dedicated to personal sovereignty, conscious participation, and helping people become more intentional authors of their own lives.
Its work explores how identity, attention, beliefs, and awareness shape the realities people experience and the futures they help create. Through educational resources, conversations, podcasts, and a supportive member community, Life Force Nation encourages people to move beyond inherited patterns and take greater responsibility for their choices and direction.
Our relationship with Life Force Nation is grounded in mutual support and an overlapping interest in sovereignty, self-governance, and the creation of alternatives to systems that no longer serve people well. While our language, methods, and areas of emphasis are distinct, we value the opportunity to exchange ideas, encourage one another’s work, and learn across those differences.
Life Force Nation remains entirely independent of Activate Us and Business After Capitalism. It is included here because collaboration does not require uniformity. It grows when independent people and organizations recognize common ground while retaining their own identities, perspectives, and direction.
Let’s Continue the Conversation
These projects are different expressions of the same underlying inquiry:
How can we create businesses, learning systems, and working relationships that preserve individual agency while expanding our collective capacity?
We are interested in conversations with people who are exploring similar questions—or who would like to bring these ideas into a wider setting.
Ray is available for podcast conversations, speaking engagements, facilitated workshops, panel discussions, and other opportunities to explore business beyond extraction, domination, and endless growth.
Explore Business After Capitalism
Learn more about other Business After Capitalism resources, including workshops and bulk purchases
Invite Ray to a Conversation
Inquire about Ray personally attending an event, conference, podcast, or other in-person or online gathering.