Vocabulary of a World in Transition: Difference between revisions

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The last word I'll pick is "emergence". Emergence occurs in a group conversation when there is the right balance between openness and coherence."
The last word I'll pick is "emergence". Emergence occurs in a group conversation when there is the right balance between openness and coherence."
* The Spell of Capital , https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Reversing_the_Spell_of_Capital
Eric Bordeleau:
"The spell of Capital works as a collective trance that’s below and around us, lifting us above ground, abstracting us — extracting us — from our shared living conditions. The famous diagnosis according to which it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism tells us something essential in this regard: whatever we call capitalism holds a deep, intimate grip on us that goes well beyond the ideas we entertain about ourselves as being rational economic agents.
'''Capitalism, or the economy as we know it, must be regarded as an economy of unpaid costs, insofar as a substantial portion of the actual costs of production remain unaccounted for.''' This is what economists call externalities. We have been so successful in drawing the line between what matters economically and what doesn’t that we are now on the verge of civilizational collapse.
'''This crisis can be summarized in three divides that disconnect us from each primary source of life: ecological, social, and spiritual.''' The ecological divide manifests in symptoms like environmental destruction. The social divide manifests in increasing rates of poverty, inequity, fragmentation and polarization. And the spiritual divide shows up in increased rates of burnout and depression, and in an increasing disconnect between GDP and people’s actual wellbeing.
'''Our challenge is to reverse engineer this destructive process.''' We need to resist the economic reductionism led by for-profit corporate entities and start building a world beyond it. How can we internalize in commons what has been systematically externalized by the current economic system? We first need to foster a new ecological wisdom — a new ecosophy — that integrates the three dimensions of life aforementioned: the ecological, the social and the spiritual. And: we also need to make it economically viable and operational."
(https://medium.com/economic-spacing/zero-degree-project-for-cooling-off-capital-part-1-initial-ecosystem-offering-ieo-1e39545f8eeb)




Revision as of 05:24, 20 January 2025

Concepts you should know about:

A

= "legal entities that have no human controllers".


B

  • Bro-Politics

"“Broscience” is slang for knowledge claims originating from the bodybuilding community, sharing practical advice not based on scientific consensus. It is usually looked down upon, but the positive framing is that it represents a goal-oriented empiricism grounded in trust networks. A political equivalent has now emerged: bropolitics.

This is where the masculine logic of getting things done predominates over stuffy academic pretentiousness. Signaling that one is a good or smart person is irrelevant; instead, flexing what one can achieve with efficiency is prioritized. The pinnacle of bropolitics, to date, is exemplified by Elon Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)."

https://lessfoolish.substack.com/p/they-call-it-bro-revolution?


C

"We need the ability to tolerate disturbance and abide in an unsettled state. Complexity, uncertainty, mystery, paradox, conflict, crisis and diversity can all generate such unsettledness — yet all can also bring wisdom because they open us to fuller reality. So learn to co-exist comfortably or at least patiently with them so they can give their gifts in due time."


"The 'Circulation of the Common' = Analytical concept proposed by Nick Dyer-Witheford in a landmark essay of the same title.. It refers to the social reproduction mechanism of Peer Production, in a process analogous with the Circulation of Capital described by Marx."


= "the glue of a healthy civil society is the material benefits of cooperation".

Daniel Wortel-London explains:

"Civil society organizations can’t perform the political work we need unless they perform economic work for its members. And this means more than organizing for the sake of demanding reforms from the state or exactions from the private sector. It means creating durable institutions where we can materially provide for one another along solidaristic lines."


Marie Cornu, Thomas Perroud et al. :

"What should we understand by this term?

In an initial approach — one that will, of course, be developed further in the following lines—the term refers to the idea that certain things or goods are marked by a communal dimension. This means they could not only be opened to shared or common use under various modalities but also be protected and preserved for the present and the future, in the interest of all, or of a broader community (national, European, or global), or a more specific community (inhabitants of a town or neighborhood, a creative community, a community of users, etc.).

In the context of this research, we considered that the "communality" of a thing is evaluated based on the degree of openness to the power to decide on its uses; the power to benefit from its utilities; and the power to control these uses and utilities. The less it is legally possible to exclude individuals from exercising these three powers, the more a thing can be said to be communalized. The notion of communality thus refers not only to the idea of a common interest but also to the concept of inclusivity (see below).

From this foundation, the notion of a "scale of communality" has been developed, indicating a gradation in the legal forms and scope of this communal destination. This tool has proven to be interesting because it allows for an understanding of the degree of communality in the legal arrangements of various interests surrounding goods and resources (private interests and common interest(s)) and how the law delineates these boundaries: with what legal frameworks, what guarantees, and also what weaknesses."

Source: the French Report, L'échelle de communalité - Propositions de réformes pour intégrer les biens communs en droit.

D

Peter Limberg explains:

"The “g factor,” or general intelligence factor, is a psychometric construct representing one’s general intelligence—the cognitive ability believed to affect intellectual performance across a range of mental tasks. IQ tests aim to measure this general intelligence factor. But what about measuring one’s “dark factor”?

The “D-Factor,” or dark factor, is colloquially expressed as a score representing how sociopathic an individual might be. Knowing someone’s score could be quite useful. In the “Terrible Communities” series, I wrote about the “sociopath question”:

How do we deal with people with innate power literacy, who are bent toward self-serving motives and are extremely skilled at manipulating social fields?

It only takes one terrible person to terrorize a community."


  • Decomputing,

https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Decomputing

= "Decomputing is the bottom-up recovery of alternatives that have been long buried under techno-fantasies and decades of neoliberalism - people-powered visions of convivial technologies, cooperative socialities and a reassertion of the commons.".

Dan McQuillan explains:

"Decomputing starts with the refusal of more datacentres for AI, on the basis they are environmentally damaging and because they run software that's socially harmful. Hyperscale datacentres are the platform for AI's assaults on workers' rights, through precaritisation and fake automation, but also for the wider social degradations of everything from preemptive welfare cuts to non-consensual deepfake porn.

Decomputing opposes AI because it's built on layers of exploitative labour, much of which is outsourced to the Global South, and because its reductive predictions are foreclosing life chances wherever they're applied to assess our future "value".

What's needed to salve pain and suffering isn't the enclosure of resources to power the judgements of GPUs but acts of care, the prioritisation of relationships that acknowledge our vulnerabilities and interdependencies.

Decomputing is a direct opposition to the material, financial, institutional and conceptual infrastructures of AI not only because they promote an already-failed solutionism but because they massively scale alienation. By injecting even more distancing, abstraction and opacity into our lives, AI is helping to fuel our contemporary crisis, furthering the bitter resentments that feed the far right and the disenchantments that separates us from the more-than-human lifeworld.

What we urgently need, instead of a political leadership in thrall to AI's aura of total power, is a reassertion of context and agency by returning control to more local and directly democratic structures. Decomputing argues that, wherever AI is proposed as "the answer", there is a gap for the self-organisation of people who already know better what needs to be done, whether it's teachers and students resisting generative AI in the classroom or healthcare workers and patients challenging the algorithmic optimisation of workloads that eliminates even minimal chances to relate as human beings.

Decomputing claims that the act of opposing AI's intensification of social and environmental harms is at the same time the assertion that other worlds are possible. It parallels contemporary calls for degrowth, which also opposes runaway extractivism by focusing on the alternative structures that could replace it.

As much as contemporary AI is a convergence of off-the-scale technology and emergent totalitarianism, decomputing offers a counter-convergence of social movements that brings together issues of workers' rights, feminism, ecology, anti-fascism and international solidarity.

Where AI is another iteration in the infrastructuring of Empire, decomputing recognises the urgency of starting to develop alternative infrastructures in the here-and-now, from renewable energy co-ops to structures of social care based on mutual aid."

(https://computerweekly.com/opinion/Labours-AI-Action-Plan-a-gift-to-the-far-right)


Freddie deBoer:

"What do I mean by “deference politics”?

When I talk about deference politics, I’m referring to the tendency of left-leaning people to substitute interpersonal obsequiousness towards “marginalized groups” for the actual material change those groups demand.

If you’ve lived in any left-aligned spaces in the past decade, you’ve encountered deference politics many times. A white person in a humanities seminar, an organizing meeting, an industry convention, a workplace gathering, etc., who makes the conscious decision to avoid engaging or to engage from a position of proactive apology towards various identity groups is engaged in deference politics. Someone who insists that members of “dominant groups” should censor themselves or speak softly or avoid speaking too much or defer to or otherwise “make space” for members of minority identities is advocating for deference politics; someone from a dominant group who tells others in that group that they should defer is practicing (self-aggrandizing) deference politics. “Maybe men should just shut up for awhile,” voiced by a man, is quintessential deference politics. “I sat my white ass down and listened” is deference politics. “Teach me how not to oppress you,” spoken at an academic conference by a straight person to LGBTQ people on a panel, is deference politics. Avoiding sharing a challenging opinion on an issue of controversy for fear of running afoul of the wrong kind of identity accusation is deference politics."

(https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-basics-deference-politics)


= concept proposed by Vitalik Buterin, the founder of the Ethereum project

"Do not try to enforce stasis. Instead, embrace the chaos of markets and other fast-paced human activity. At the same time, however, tweak rules in such a way that the upsides get funneled into supporting public goods (including quality of the governance itself), and the downsides get capped or even outright removed for the people who are not able to handle it."

- Vitalik Buterin

"A political ideology that openly embraces chaos, but tweaks key rules and incentives to create a background pressure where the consequences of chaos are aligned with the common good."

(https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/04/01/dc.html)


"Cory Doctorow describes enshittification, the degradation of online platforms and services as value is reallocated from captive users to shareholders, as a “seemingly inevitable consequence” of the way technology is positioned - a two-sided market in which users are valued primarily for the resources that can be extracted from them. But what if it didn’t have to be this way at all?

Deshittifying technology means treating human experiences as valuable in themselves, not as a means to an end. Deshittifiers view users as subjects rather than objects. They see technology as a creative medium and challenge assumptions about how it can and should be designed. They build systems that resist capture, extraction and manipulation. They treat centralization as a liability. Above all, they aim to provide value that they couldn’t claw back even if they wanted to."

via the Deshittifcation Residency in Chiang Mai


Louise Borreani and Pat Rawson:

"Digiphysical (alternatively: “Phygital”) goods typically refer to “goods that exist in physical form, and maintain a cryptographic link to its digital (on-chain) record via NFC [near-field communication] technology.” In contrast to digital collectibles, the virtual half of a cryptonative digiphysical is bound one-to-one with an associated material asset; in effect, digiphysicals, when tightly coupled, are two simultaneous halves of a digital-physical whole.

Their key value proposition resides in their unique enjoinment of virtual and physical attributes, where when tightly coupled the NFT representing the physical asset cannot be transferred without the physical asset in question also being transferred. Looser couplings are also possible, such as Plastiks’ endangered wildlife NFTs, which enter the charitable donor into a lottery for an autographed FC Barcelona T-shirt—an opportunity to redeem the NFT against the good in question (but not the good itself).[33] Other loose couplings include burn-and-redeem, redeem-and-replace, or access functionalities, where an NFT is destroyed, exchanged, or presented in return for a physical good."

(https://mirror.xyz/ecofrontiers.eth/zkh2LoADInAgr7GLbXnsuUOEcwJKFE4GuUSYuYU22io)


= "A digital nomad is a “globally travelling” digital worker".

Angtyasti Jiwasiddi et al. explain:

"Digital nomadism is an emerging lifestyle, a way of working and living that combines digital work with nomadic globetrotting. It has seen substantial growth in recent years, with a significant rise in individuals, especially in favoured locations such as Chiang Mai,1 as well as in businesses and facilities catering specifically to this mobile lifestyle (Descalsota, 2022; Schlagwein, 2018a). From the perspective of local communities visited, digital nomads present a novel type of visitor and, thus, part of their visitor economies—the focus of this special issue and our study.

A digital nomad is a “globally travelling” digital worker. Hence, prior studies in the information systems (IS) literature research on digital nomadism are within the wider context of “digital work” and “future of work” (Ahuja et al., 2023; Schlagwein, 2018b; Wang et al., 2020). Prior IS literature on digital work discusses how various forms of information technology (IT) enable the work of teleworkers, remote workers and mobile workers (O'Leary et al., 2014; Tarafdar & Saunders, 2022; Waizenegger et al., 2020). The central themes of prior research on digital work are organisational implications (Carillo et al., 2021; van der Meulen et al., 2019) and worker productivity (Chen, 2018; Tams et al., 2020). The nomadic travel lifestyle aspect, however, sets digital nomadism apart from other types of digital work. Further (readers and reviewers found this a striking point), digital nomadism as studied here provides an opportunity the reflect on the current, exclusive focus of this literature on digital workers and organisations only (Atasoy et al., 2021; Wang et al., 2020): we show that digital work also impacts third-parties, such as the local communities worldwide now hosting digital nomads (i.e., this is to suggest the current focus might be too narrow).

A digital nomad is also a “digitally-working” global traveller. As with other travellers, their impact is felt within local communities worldwide, including regions such as Asia and Latin America, with digital nomads integrating into their chosen destinations' visitor economies (Schlagwein, 2018a; 2018b). Given the existing classifications in the tourism and visitor economy literature, digital nomads can be seen as a subtype of “non-institutionalised” (independent) traveller (Cohen, 1972; Cohen, 1973; Plog, 1974). However, digital nomads' unique behaviours and interactions set them apart from other visitor types. Digital nomads uniquely leverage the digitalisation of work to enable their travels (Hong, 2021) and use unique facilities such as coliving spaces and coworking spaces (Jiwasiddi et al., 2022). Therefore, digital nomads may be best understood and regulated as a digitally-enabled novel part of the visitor economy of digital nomad destinations, as reflected in the growing trend of countries introducing “digital nomad visas” in 2022/23."

(https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/isj.12496?af=R)


Suzy Weiss explains:

  • "First, they’re doomers. They believe that we’re at “the end of industrial modernity,” said Fitzgerald, or “the end of the end of history,” or they think that liberalism is over, or that we’re living within “a collapsing global empire”—a million different ways of saying that, in short, we’re screwed.
  • Second, they’re optimists. Collapse could be a long process, Fitzgerald assured me. “And maybe it’s not even collapse, maybe it’s just a transformation.” And everyone in this cohort, she said, is trying to live a good life, to forge ahead, despite their doomerism—“trying to find meaning in an alienated world.”

For the various people here, that meaning might come from starting new publishing houses or living off the grid, finding God, or fighting their HOA to allow for backyard chickens, “real decent-sized ones.”

“Whoever hasn’t thrown themselves into some kind of sad nihilism is trying to build something heaven-like,” as McNiel put it, addressing the retreat at the outset. “And that’s what we’re here for.”

E

Daniel Christian Wahl explains:

"Evolutionary activism is socio-ecological innovation that drives transformative culture change. In kairos, this time of transformation that Joanna Macy calls the “Great Turning”, the personal, the collective and the planetary are intertwined more than ever. She speaks of our dual role, of needing to be both hospice workers of the old “Industrial Growth Society” (with its habits, structures and stories that no longer serve) and midwives of the new, the emerging “life-sustaining society”."

Macy identifies three dimensions of involvement with this process of cultural transformation. The world over, we, the people are engaging in:

i) “actions to slow the damage to Earth and its beings”,

ii) “analysis of structural causes and creation of structural alternatives”, and

iii) “a fundamental shift in worldview and values” (Macy & Young Brown, 1998: 17)."

(https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/we-are-coming-back-to-life-and-this-changes-everything-3a5ba8c97044)


Richard Bartlett:

"To name this tension between street movements and institutional power, in Madrid they coined the term extitution: “If institutions are organizational systems based on an inside-outside framework, extitutions are designed as areas where a multitude of agents can spontaneously assemble.” (The same author has named Cooperation Jackson as a U.S. example of the same phenomenon.)

All of this extremely promising organisational innovation is enmeshed with technological innovation. I’m immensely encouraged by the deep collaboration between political scientists and computer scientists that I’ve seen in Spain, which holds a rigorous critique of proprietary “sharing economy” and “smart cities” software, while also prototyping tools for direct democracy." (https://c4ss.org/content/50824)


= processes to assemble diverse forms of capital and resources, based on the collective self-empowerment created by citizens, rather than on expert submissions to institutions

"The other, the extitutional procedure, is based on the collective self-empowerment created by citizens. While the institutional process is based on its hard materiality, the extitutional process is a soft surface that operates thanks to the logic of the network; from the inside-outside duality that governs the institution and its hierarchies, extitutional surfaces can be understood as able to eventually assemble a multitude of different agents. As a concept in construction , we understand the extitutional process as a logic or a mode, instead of a positive reality. Extitutional is not the contrary of institutional."


= "Extitutional theory builds upon assemblage theory to conceptualise the ordering logic and dynamics of social phenomena."

URL = https://extitutions.org

F

Daniel Tutt explains:

"the psychoanalyst Wilfred R. Bion points out in his studies on groups, political communities form to allow members to flee this sense of persecution. In his Experiences in Groups, Bion describes a similar logic of group belonging, in what he calls the “fight–flight group.” Here, group members identify with a leader by forming a dependency structure that is violent and exclusive. The emergent fight–flight group affirms the zero-sum logic of the capitalist market interior to the group, but it does so on terms that are perceived as fairer and more satisfying than mainstream groups, such as the school, the church, or the army.

In the fight–flight group, the leader plays the role of forming an artificial environment in which the competition of the wider society is reenacted within the group, but on terms that are more transparent. Like the Nietzschean community which affirms the winner-loser myth by active separation and division from those deemed weak or inferior, the fight–flight group does the same thing, but they rely on a leader to enact this separation from the wider society. The fight–flight group thus sustains the winner-loser mythology by rejecting the dominant liberal version and fortifying the community as a perfect alternative to it. Problems inevitably arise within the fight–flight group because the leader, as a savior figure takes it upon himself to perform victoriously against a hostile world. The fight of the group thus becomes the reserve of the leader alone and they leave little to no room for group members to enact their power. This results in the inability of the fight-flight group to satisfy the independence of each member, and they become what Bion refers to as a “dependent group.” A dependent group is formed around a leader whose authority is taken to be benevolent but who remains the only actor within the group that can confront the hostile outside world."


Travis Kling:

– "the idea that cost of living is strangling most Americans; that upward mobility opportunity is out of reach for increasingly more people; that the American Dream is mostly a thing of the past; and that median home prices divided by median income is at a completely untenable level."


G

Louise Borreani and Pat Rawson:

"A green asset, in comparison to a typical financial asset, is understood as a transferable financial object that generates a positive impact for the environment while providing economic benefit to its holder. Per our stack metaphor, the green crypto-assets explored in this chapter are ultimately issued by crypto-institutions who, hoping to improve the ecological state of the underlying material reality, administer protocols that control the governance surface, supply dynamics, and distribution of these assets through technical smart contracts, legal-institutional negotiation, and socioeconomic intervention. Once existent on a public blockchain, these crypto-assets are exchanged in the open market layer situated above.

This chapter begins by overviewing existing efforts and taxonomies for classifying green assets."

(https://mirror.xyz/ecofrontiers.eth/zkh2LoADInAgr7GLbXnsuUOEcwJKFE4GuUSYuYU22io)


H

  • the Hopf vibration:

"A fair shares commons, viewed through the lens of a Hopf vibration, would be like a beautifully intertwined tapestry of individual and collective energies. Imagine a sphere where each point represents an individual contribution, spiraling together in harmony to create a unified whole. This collective vibrancy flows, with each contribution enriching the commons and being enriched in return. The dynamic motion of the Hopf vibration reflects the ever-evolving nature of the commons, where sharing and reciprocity create an enduring cycle of abundance and connection. It's a living system, where each participant's frequency resonates with the whole, fostering a space where all can flourish and share in the prosperity of the commons."

ChatGPT riffing on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopf_fibration


  • Horological Politics

= how keeping and enforcing time is linked to political power

Saffron Huang explains:

"The visible imposition of time has very often been a deliberate means of exerting control over lives. Sometimes, this display of control is meant to achieve a sense of security through projecting order in chaotic times. The world’s oldest known surviving mechanical clock was installed in medieval Chioggia, soon after a war between Genoa and Venice that left the main piazza blood-stained and the economy devastated. The city council invested what little money it had in a clock tower, as a sign of order for their citizens.

In general,

- public clock towers have always been used to project political power.

By instilling temporal order, public clock towers also aim to instill a sense of civic order.

This civic order can generate a sense of comfort—or not, depending on which people are controlling time for which people’s attention.

Within days of invading, colonists in Africa’s Cape of Good Hope instilled a militarized time signal: the firing of a hilltop cannon everyday at noon. Phenomenologically, a cannon is experienced very differently from a clock tower: associated with war and death, the boom of a cannon carries for miles. Symbolically, it conveys a different message from a local timepiece for a city’s citizens; it asserts control in hopes of unsettling people, rather than reassuring. Every day, the British cannon reverberated clearly in the ears of rival imperial settlers and the indigenous African people and continues to make Cape Town visitors anxious to this day.

Something very similar played out after the bloodshed of India’s First War of Independence, when the British Raj embarked on a construction project that included tall and very loud bell-rung clock towers.

It has been said,

- if the clock was an avatar of Western time, the bell was its amplifier.

The bell-rung clock tower administers a reminder of order, and who can enforce it, to eyes and ears far and wide. The British’s horological supremacy at the height of the empire—London was the center of the clock industry—helped them both to justify (via a sense of technological superiority) and to assert their colonial dominance. More than one hundred clock towers were built in India during the colonial period.

The British imposition of time was oppressive to the people it was imposed on. We have the example of the Australian Indigenous people who had their own timekeeping systems and who resisted and ignored colonial clock faces for a long time, imperially imposed time protocols did finally constrain the unwilling participants with no liberation—telling them to follow protocol and obey their rulers."

(https://summerofprotocols.com/control-and-consciousness-of-time-web)

I

"An Idea Machine is a self-sustaining organism that contains all the parts needed to turn ideas into outcomes:

- It starts with a distinct ideology, which becomes a memetic engine that drives the formation of a community

- The community’s members start generating ideas amongst themselves

- Eventually, they form an agenda, which articulates how the ideology will be brought into the world. (Communities need agendas to become idea machines; otherwise, they’re just a group of likeminded people, without a directed purpose.)

- The agenda is capitalized by one or several major funders, whose presence ensures that the community’s ideas can move from theory to practice – both in terms of financing, as well as lending operational skills to the effort. (Without funding, an idea machine is just that: an inert system that needs fuel to turn the crank and get it moving.)

- As community members move from ideas to action, they might become scene builders, who help sustain the community, develop the agenda, and attract new members; or operators, who drive the operating initiatives that lead to outcomes – the ultimate purpose of the entire machine. Both types might also lend a hand to create support organizations, whose purpose is to strengthen the values and best practices of the idea machine."


I

"Psychological and game-theory experiments demonstrate the existence of “inequity aversion” among both human and nonhuman primates and the specifically human tendency to punish those who behave inequitably even if administering the punishment incurs a cost to the punisher. For example, Sergey Gavrilets (2012) has used agent-based modeling to show that each individual benefits if within-group competition is reduced and that strong coalitionary action against bullies could have reduced within-group competition in prehistoric hunter-gatherer bands to the extent that conditions would have favored selection for a psychological disposition called the “egalitarian syndrome,” ."including empathy, altruism, and egalitarian morals. Recent studies in neuroscience show that economic inequity is evaluated in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. Te pre- frontal cortex controls executive functions of the brain, which suggests that inequity aversion is related to a phylogenetically recent reorganization of frontal cortical circuitry in the human lineage."


J

Nathan Schneider explains:

"The ancient Hebrew jubilee was a periodic Sabbath year in which debts would be cleared away, slaves would be freed, and lands lost in the course of commerce would be returned. Jesus declared a jubilee as he began preaching the forgiveness of sins. But the forgiveness he preached began with repentance. Likewise, any jubilee must begin with the recognition that there are wrongs to be righted. Clearing away debts does not make sense if we consider debt an immovable reality, an amoral fact of life. To celebrate a jubilee, we need to recognize the usury in our midst.

In centuries past, Judaism, Christianity and Islam all shared an anxious opposition to usury. Sometimes “usury” meant any kind of interest-charging on loans, sometimes just lending under especially unjust terms. But in any case, these traditions regarded finance as an activity of supreme moral concern, one rife with opportunities for the abuse of power and unjust accumulations of wealth. Imagine bishops worrying about adjustable-rate mortgages the way they worry about abortion. That is the kind of concern we’re talking about.

Jacques le Goff’s pithy book Your Money or Your Life reconstructs the tenor of medieval attitudes. “Usurious profit from money,” Pope Leo I (d. 461) held, “is the death of the soul.” The French theologian Jacques de Vitry warned lenders that “the amount of money they receive from usury corresponds to the amount of wood sent to hell to burn them.” In some cases the vitriol was a form of anti-Judaism, since Jews often held a monopoly on lending to Christians. But Jews themselves denounced usury just as strenuously in dealings with one another.

St. Thomas Aquinas, representing the scholarly consensus of the 13th century, argued on the one hand that usury “leads to inequality which is contrary to justice.” Charging interest on money, further, is contrary to nature; “This is to sell what does not exist.” Interest-charging severs the economy from actual production or people’s actual needs.

Centuries of clerical coziness with financiers made such denunciations less and less convenient. As the modern period progressed, concern about usury faded, then all but disappeared. Some tried to justify interest theologically, but mainly the shift was a matter of omission. The influential economist Msgr. John Ryan began his pamphlet The Church and Interest-Taking (1910) by stressing, “The Church has never admitted the justice of interest whether on money or on capital, but has merely tolerated the institution.” (http://americamagazine.org/issue/resetting-interest-usury?)

L

  • (Our) Little Corner of the Internet

"In the conversation, @PaulVanderKlay is referenced in relation to "this little corner of the internet," a phrase used to describe a loosely connected online community of thinkers, theologians, and intellectuals who explore topics like faith, philosophy, and meaning. VanderKlay plays a central role in this community, bringing together diverse voices who engage with deep questions about life, spirituality, and culture. The discussion highlights how this space fosters thoughtful dialogue and connections among people seeking to understand complex ideas, with VanderKlay as a key facilitator in these conversations."


  • “longevity escape velocity.”

https://popularmechanics.com/science/a62990579/humans-backwards-in-time/

"It sounds super sci-fi, but it’s basically the idea that as our life extension technology gets better, our life expectancy could increase by more than we age over a set period of time. For example, as medical innovations continue to move forward, we would still age a year over the span of a year. But our life expectancy would go up by, say, a year and two months, meaning we would functionally get two months of life back.

In March of this year, Ray Kurzweil—former Google engineer and prominent AI-centric futurist—told multiple outlets that he believed humanity would achieve longevity escape velocity by 2029."

N

Defined by Marcin Jakubowski:

"Neosubsistence: The combination of advanced material and information technologies introduces a new economic option that we call neosubsistence. This is modern day means to livelihood where wise use of advanced technology and ready access to information allows one to spend a small amount of time in self-sufficiency production. This leads to a high quality of life where higher skill provides more resources in-house, reduces the need to 'work to make a living,' and opens up time for other pursuits. It is a route to promoting a bioregional economy, which relies more on its own resources rather than uncontrollable global market forces. This promotes accountability and reduces the necessity of war."


Tiberius Brastaviceanu explains:

"What I see here, in terms of tools, is the creation of an NIP (Network Intangible Planning) as a parallel system to an NRP (Network Resource Planning), or an extension of the NRP in the intangible dimension. Thus, the layer of intangibles can be better coupled to the layer of tangibles, which means coupling happiness to the real economy, connecting processes that make people happy to processes that make people innovative and productive.

Technically, I see a path towards that. First inspiration is Verna Allee's treatment of intangibles for corporations (the real economy), through the concept of value networks. Note that Verna wrote her papers long time ago, some of the may be outdated, but the lesson here is that the wealth of corporation is largely driven by intangibles, which the management layer doesn't even know they exist and don't monitor. These intangibles are not affected by organizational boundaries, they flow through human to human relations from one firm to another, which is what she calls value network. Verna calls on CEOs and managers to become conscious about intangibles and their flows, and put in place policy that captures and converts these intangibles into tangibles. Now that's a BIG lesson.

Another piece to this puzzle is Arthur Brock from Holochain with his Metacurrency Project. Using his concept of current-see, Art describes symbolic systems that have the ability to influence and even organize or structure flows in society, and these current-sees can be applied to tangibles as well as to intangibles. Therefore, one can apply Art's concept of current-see to Verna's flows of intangibles, to create symbolic systems that shape the flows of intangibles.

One can use Blockchain and use tokens of non-monetary nature to do just that, experiment and see what happens. This is precisely what wee do in Sensorica, with OVN, using various Benefit Redistribution Algorithms to incentivize collaboration. No one knows what scheme works best in context, one needs to try and good patterns will emerge."

(via email, December 2024)


O

"John Boyd’s OODA loops are more than just an esoteric strategic concept; they’ve earned a huge following online and around the world. In this article, I highlight key points about OODA loops along with a glimpse into the life of John Boyd, their creator. OODA loops are quite intricate once you get into the details, it’s easy to miss some of their subtleties, and they’re often misunderstood (partly because they use the word “loop” when they’re not really loops).

Here’s a short overview."


P

  • (Individualist) Panarchy

a system of multiple extraterritorial governments

T. Collins Logan comments:

"Panarchy as a model for governance — conceived in the mid-1800s — where each individual can choose the form of governance they prefer, without having to physically relocate.

My response to this is that, although my own left-anarchist leanings resonate with the intent of increased autonomy and self-determination, the reality is that panarchy suffers from the same flaw that all individualist anarchist proposals do: it doesn’t appreciate a) the actual mechanisms of liberty as a collectively agreed-upon construct and praxis, rather than an individual choice; and b) the interdependence and complexity (which has been exponentially increasing) of all systems, processes, rules, infrastructures and institutions within any political economy, conditions which preclude the maverick “go it alone” mentality from bearing constructive fruit in any society. Essentially, this flavor of “panarchy” has the flaw of being overly simplistic and atomistic, but nevertheless may be alluring as part of what we might call “appeals to freedom” persuasion for the average person."

(https://quora.com/What-are-your-thoughts-on-Panarchy/answer/T-Collins-Logan? )

"The idea of panarchy has been studied for a long time, however only recent technological advances have made it feasible to implement it as an organisational structure. What is required for the emergence of such a structure is direct communication amongst widely distributed participants. ...

Panarchies are scale-independent, which means they are directly applicable to single individuals for the purpose of personal organisation, or personal mastery,[10] but also apply at the level of large-scale industrial and governmental structures. At each distinct scale we will find repeating patterns that arise as a result of dynamic self-organisation.

We believe that the most effective and attainable solution to the current global problems is for the people to unite into a global self-governing panarchy. The global panarchy would be formed from many global-scale panarchies operating together like the departments of a large organisation. These "departments" would represent the great mechanisms of society such as spirituality/religion, education, politics, sanctions, industry, administration and the financial system. These great mechanisms operating as panarchies are defined by, and work in the service of the people from the bottom up, but yet form a framework of order and economy of scale, these being the benefits of the hierarchical approach. The mechanisms are fluidly adaptable so that they can deal with the changing requirements of the people and the inescapable momentum of change." (http://organicdesign.co.nz/Manifesto)


Daniel Tutt explains:

"In the absence of civil society and political associations, micro-communities form online around public figures, and this takes on a “parasocial” quality. Parasocial communities are in many ways more intense than purely social communities because they are forged in the liminal comfort of online spaces. While relationships formed online are typically noncommittal and passive, political micro-communities on the left—precisely because the left tends to be composed of people who have themselves been radicalized and who experience alienation from this system—tend to forge more passionate connections. The power of these parasocial communities should not be underestimated; it is more likely that a young person will change their minds about political theory, power and social reality from exposure to a podcaster and their micro-community than through experiences at college with professors. Micro-communities are more than mere education hubs—the leaders can take on the role of a spiritual coach as much as an intellectual. They provide sense-making, allowing for the development of an ideological lens by which to make coherent the politics of our world."


Jonathan Zawada:

"The concept of Planetarity describes a new condition in which humans recognize not only that we are not above and apart from “nature,” but that we are only beginning to understand the complexities of our interdependencies with planetary systems.

“If Copernicus’s heliocentrism represented the First Great Decentering, displacing the Earth from the center of the heavens, and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection the Second Great Decentering, then the emergence of the concept of the Planetary represents the Third Great Decentering, and the one that hits closest to home, supplanting the figure of the human as the measure and master of all things,” Blake and Gilman write.

As further argued by the authors in a forthcoming Berggruen Press volume, “the Planetary as a scientific concept focuses on the Earth as an intricate web of ecosystems, with myriad layers of integration between various biogeochemical systems and living beings — both human and non-human. Drawing on earth system science and systems biology, this holistic understanding is being enabled by new planetary-scale technologies of perception – a rapidly maturing technosphere of sensors, networks, and supercomputers that collectively are rendering the planetary system increasingly visible, comprehensible and foreseeable. This recently-evolved smart exoskeleton — in essence a distributed sensory organ and cognitive layer — is fostering an unprecedented form of planetary sapience.”

(Noema, April 2024)


Paul Dylan-Ennis explains:

"Ethereum culture can be split into three categories: cypherpunk, solarpunk and lunarpunk. I say "can" because some argue the -punk distinctions could happily be folded into one."


  • Popularism

Explained as the strategy of the Democrats in the last election:

Jon Stewart Dem Autopsy Takes https://youtube.com/BA5687kROLk?si=bMXBIp69Zk2brDd4 via @YouTube


@MichaNarberhaus explains, in this paradoxical defense of the new administration in the U.S.:

"bringing manufacturing jobs and agricultural production closer to home, as the Trump administration plans to do, makes good environmental sense. The accelerating pace of globalisation in recent decades has always been criticised by serious environmentalists. Apart from the huge environmental impact of transporting goods around the world, the idea of managing and improving environmental and social standards globally through complex bureaucratic systems, rather than making the world more sustainable and humane, has made multinational corporations more powerful at the expense of small producers who cannot keep up with the bureaucratic requirements. JD Vance's idea of strengthening families, local communities and local economies seems to me to be a more important step towards a sustainable future than trying desperately to implement a global system of sustainability.

Another positive aspect of the new administration could be Bobby Kennedy's commitment to regenerative agriculture. As part of his mandate to make America healthy again, he may be able to provide some positive impetus in this direction."


"In this 1927 study Sorokin makes the point that "no social process ever continues endlessly in one direction". The large survey embraced in this article points out that any single movement of a social process has rigid limits. For instance a phenomenon like a death-rate or a divorce-rate cannot continuously increase or decrease. In this article Sorokin even implies that the limits of movement in one direction apply also to most known physical, chemical and other phenomena, due in part to changes of substance and to changes of meaning. When uranium changes greatly, to illustrate Sorokin's meaning, it becomes no longer uranium, but lead.

When Sorokin later develops this idea further, (see Dynamics One, [1 Volume Ed.], Ch. 39), he draws it still tighter as basic to understanding the inherent cyclical tendencies always immanent in the processes of cultural and historical change. In other words, the idea of limits is more restrictive, or allows less range for variation, in the more complicated and composite cultural phenomena than in single elements within the total phenomena."


"The purpose of this brief is to provide an introduction to an increasingly popular way of communicating outputs of research: the Publish-Review-Curate (PRC) model. This model came into practice in the early 2000s, and it is now beginning to grow more rapidly. Here, we explain the model for the benefit of researchers, research funders, research institutions, and others in the scholarly communication ecosystem, and we provide data on uptake of the model to date."


Luo P/Acc explains:

"Based on the political economy analysis of data labor earlier discussed, when digital nomads — super-individuals oriented towards decentralized platform cooperation or anti-capitalist tech politics — conceive a form of punk accelerationism (P-Acc) in the following way:

Creators with a tech-political consciousness use web3/AI technology to control their data labor outcomes, preventing monopolization by tech giants. They form entrepreneurial communities with diverse skills, liberating creativity, driving projects through a platform cooperative model. They simultaneously establish democratic and autonomous digital nomad community networks worldwide, expanding individual data sovereignty to societal data sovereignty, promoting universal basic income, and fostering social justice.

Similar to punks, they release aggressive, escapist, and negating energy, disrupting existing technology-capital reproductive structures, improvising and creating possibilities for alternative technology routes on a daily basis, transforming corporate workers into digital nomads:

In the AI field, creating more technical interfaces to help ordinary creators; in the web3 field, developing more products that promote data sovereignty and assist community autonomy, instead of engaging in coin speculation financial games. Lowering the barriers to entry for workers to use these tools, making them as easily accessible as smartphones. Empowering more workers to reclaim their data production means.

Spreading tech-political awareness, establishing platforms for platform cooperation, public sociology, socialist feminism, ecological anthropology, and other sustainable theories.

Through the emancipated creators discussed above, breaking down disciplinary barriers, fostering open collaboration, encouraging cross-disciplinary integration, creating new forms of cooperation, and social relationship networks. Exploring entrepreneurial models that are less focused on capitalization, adopting a platform cooperative model, developing alternative technological infrastructure, and strengthening the positive feedback loop in the aforementioned steps.

Simultaneously, establishing democratic and autonomous digital nomad community networks worldwide. This is a complex, challenging, and controversial entrepreneurial process, involving post-colonial criticisms and self-critique, returns on family-social labor divisions, integration of local ethnic communities, and managing existing power dynamics. In daily practice, designing communal communities and public life artistry that accommodates both human and non-human residents."

(https://medium.com/@quer1968/ai-technology-politics-accelerationism-super-individuals-and-liberated-machines-8d2d08f6cbc2)

R

"What is the role of aesthetics, then, today? I said that beauty cannot be subsumed; yet we live in a time when financial mechanisms subsume everything there is. Capitalism has moved from “formal subsumption” to “real subsumption.” These terms, originally coined in passing by Marx, have been taken up and elaborated by thinkers in the Italian Autonomist tradition, most notably Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. For Marx, it is labor that is “subsumed” under capital. In formal subsumption, capital appropriates, and extracts a surplus from, labor processes that precede capitalism, or that at the very least are not organized by capitalism. In real subsumption, there is no longer any such autonomy; labor itself is directly organized in capitalist terms (think of the factory and the assembly line).4

In Hardt and Negri’s expanded redefinition of “subsumption,” it isn’t just labor that is subsumed by capital, but all aspects of personal and social life. This means that everything in life must now be seen as a kind of labor: we are still working, even when we consume, and even when we are asleep. Affects and feelings, linguistic abilities, modes of cooperation, forms of know-how and of explicit knowledge, expressions of desire: all these are appropriated and turned into sources of surplus value. We have moved from a situation of extrinsic exploitation, in which capital subordinated labor and subjectivity to its purposes, to a situation of intrinsic exploitation, in which capital directly incorporates labor and subjectivity within its own processes.

This means that labor, subjectivity, and social life are no longer “outside” capital and antagonistic to it. Rather, they are immediately produced as parts of it. They cannot resist the depredations of capital, because they are themselves already functions of capital. This is what leads us to speak of such things as “social capital,” “cultural capital,” and “human capital”: as if our knowledge, our abilities, our beliefs, and our desires had only instrumental value, and needed to be invested. Everything we live and do, everything we experience, is quickly reduced to the status of “dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Under a regime of real subsumption, every living person is transformed into a capital stock that must not lie fallow, but has to be profitably invested. The individual is assumed—and indeed compelled—to be, as Foucault puts it, “an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself … being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings.”


  • Reality Privilege (lack of):

https://independent.ie/entertainment/books/book-reviews/how-four-billionaires-are-trying-to-persuade-us-real-life-isnt-worth-saving/a690887865.html

"In an interview in 2021, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen discussed an impending cultural divide. “The vast majority of humanity,” he said, “lacks Reality Privilege — their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.” He promised to build digital products for precisely this kind of consumer, “no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in”.​"


  • Re-Enchantment

as in: the return of the supernatural in a high tech world (here below in its christian incarnation)

Rod Dreher: Covid fueled the Christian re-enchantment

https://youtube.com/Gg5exn6J3Lk?si=6Qa3yCJ1b8QcT0vU via @YouTube

S

Akasha:

"So, what is a "shared field"? In scientific terms, it refers to a domain where certain interactions permeate, predicated on our coexistence and varying by time and space. Simply put, it's the mutual interaction in a given time and space where we coexist. Or from another perspective, it's the world influenced by our collective consciousness.

Back to our reality, this shared field is the world created when I chat with a friend on the sofa, or when I open WeChat and see our conversation from five minutes ago. It's also the world built within Web3 communities on platforms like Discord, where people discuss NFTs.

This "shared field" isn't mine or yours but ours—a slice of space in a particular timeframe. The difference between the shared field and my personal field is that we often mistakenly believe we are always in our personal fields. But the influence of the shared field on our perceived world is much greater than we think."

(https://akasha.buzz/what-is-the-shared-field)


"are Olympian spiritual athletes, the Navy SEALs of prayer, who are not only praying for the salvation of their own souls but for all of ours."


Chris Leong:

"In the sensemaking web, coherence is produced by a shared belief that each party possesses at least a partial truth and that the purpose of conversation is to create greater mutual understanding, rather than to fight each other like soldiers. Participants tend heavily towards the synthesis of various beliefs and even if people synthesise them in different ways, they still have something in common - namely that their beliefs are syntheses.

In addition, there are also a number of common high-level beliefs such as: the world facing some kind of crisis, skepticism towards cancel culture, meditation/mindfulness and other spiritual practises providing insight necessary for navigating this crisis, and of the importance of shifting away from centralised authorities towards decentralised intelligence. Beyond this, there are a large number of shared references - the heavily involved figures would be generally familiar with the core beliefs of the main memetic tribes - which is kind of the price of entry to having a meta-aware discussion.

The last word I'll pick is "emergence". Emergence occurs in a group conversation when there is the right balance between openness and coherence."


Eric Bordeleau:

"The spell of Capital works as a collective trance that’s below and around us, lifting us above ground, abstracting us — extracting us — from our shared living conditions. The famous diagnosis according to which it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism tells us something essential in this regard: whatever we call capitalism holds a deep, intimate grip on us that goes well beyond the ideas we entertain about ourselves as being rational economic agents.

Capitalism, or the economy as we know it, must be regarded as an economy of unpaid costs, insofar as a substantial portion of the actual costs of production remain unaccounted for. This is what economists call externalities. We have been so successful in drawing the line between what matters economically and what doesn’t that we are now on the verge of civilizational collapse.

This crisis can be summarized in three divides that disconnect us from each primary source of life: ecological, social, and spiritual. The ecological divide manifests in symptoms like environmental destruction. The social divide manifests in increasing rates of poverty, inequity, fragmentation and polarization. And the spiritual divide shows up in increased rates of burnout and depression, and in an increasing disconnect between GDP and people’s actual wellbeing.

Our challenge is to reverse engineer this destructive process. We need to resist the economic reductionism led by for-profit corporate entities and start building a world beyond it. How can we internalize in commons what has been systematically externalized by the current economic system? We first need to foster a new ecological wisdom — a new ecosophy — that integrates the three dimensions of life aforementioned: the ecological, the social and the spiritual. And: we also need to make it economically viable and operational."

(https://medium.com/economic-spacing/zero-degree-project-for-cooling-off-capital-part-1-initial-ecosystem-offering-ieo-1e39545f8eeb)


A market for stake: The key to distributed value

Dick Bryan explains:

"The stake market ... must encode more than ‘price’ if it is to deliver critical signalling to the network. Stake offered to the market must encode information about the social priorities which will be expressed in the performances and outputs it funds. Stake must carry a value proposition (a verifiable claim that performance outputs create social benefits), not presume a profit proposition. Buying and selling stake is thereby a social debate about value propositions. As staking momentums shift over time, so too does the network’s overall view on ‘what creates value’ change over time. The granularity of information required for this process must be revealed and preserved. In an era of Big Data, it is possible to preserve this information in a way Hayek could not have imagined.

For staking to play this pivotal role of simultaneously funding investment and debating value-creation proposals, it cannot be driven by private wealth accumulation. In this network, staking cannot be funded from accumulated wealth. Staking must be a reciprocal relation between each agent and the network of ‘other’ agents.

The following protocol is therefore critical: to acquire stake in another agent, each agent must relinquish stake in itself. The more an agent wants to acquire ownership of other agents, the more they must relinquish their own stake. It should be clear now why it is critical to avoid confusion with a capitalist stock market.

Further, for staking to be a transparent, network-wide articulation of ‘voting’ on value priorities, reciprocal staking cannot be a barter relationship (a one-to-one relationship); it must be a one-to-many relationship (each agent with the network) through an impersonal, distributed stake market with automated matching, netting, and clearing. William’s review does not feature our specific proposals about an automated staking market, though the general issue arises later, in compatible ways, in the context of his valuable discussion of ‘federated learning’ and data sharing."

https://cambridge.org/core/journals/finance-and-society/article/designing-postcapitalist-finance-in-protocols-for-postcapitalist-expression/D6F7F7D6CC48200F4C7F6990F9F67B31


"The term “stochastic terrorism” is used to describe real-life political action or violence inspired by (usually online) public rhetoric. Its theorists argue that this dynamic operates when hostile rhetoric against an outgroup, originating with some leader or charismatic figure, is amplified by supporters in a way that dehumanises the target and — ultimately — legitimises spontaneous-seeming real-life violence against it.

Such rhetoric in turn relies on claims that may be of dubious factual truth, but which feel emotionally or perhaps allegorically true. This quality of “truthiness” was satirised back in 2005 by the commentator Stephen Colbert, who characterised it as a preference for statements that feel as though they ought to be true, over things that verifiably are. “Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914?” he asked. “If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart.”

Amid today’s digital competition for eyeballs and clicks, the aggregate result is a competitive discursive war of weaponised emotional logic, whose downstream consequences can sometimes include real-life attacks on reviled individuals or outgroups: so-called stochastic terrorism.


Joshua Goldstein explains:

"Structure refers to the deeper forces of social change and conjuncture to the actual course of history. One can look at long-term change (structure), medium-term change (conjuncture), or very rapid change, "the shortest being the easiest to detect" (Braudel 1984:17).

Wallerstein's (1979:673) view of long cycles resonates with "structural history." He sees cyclical patterns as a "central part" of "long-term, large-scale social reality." "To seize this reality, we need data over wider space and longer time, and we have to search first of all for the continuities."

"This "[[Structural History," pioneered by Braudel, emphasizes the systemic level of analysis, especially the level of the world as a whole, and examines the traces of long-term forces of change in society.

Those who study history, Braudel argues, help society to develop and refine its collective self-temporalization — how we see our society in time. "World time" is Braudel's (1984:17) term for time "experienced on a world scale," which governs certain realities and excludes others. For Braudel, structural history means not only a new time scale but a change in focus, from the political to the economic/social/cultural aspects of history. His interpretations tend toward "geohistory" in which politics is "secondary to other historical ensembles of action" and the emphasis is on "a space ecologically articulated rather than on a nation politically expressed" (Kinser 1981:103). While shifting the focus away from the state and "politics," Braudel (1984:19) also steers clear of the approach in which economics drives all other aspects of society (economism): It would be a mistake to imagine that the order of the world-economy governed the whole of society. . . . An economy never exists in isolation. Its territory and expanse are also occupied by other spheres of activity—culture, society, politics — which are constantly reacting with the economy. Reality is a totality, the "set of sets," in which each set (economics, politics, culture, society) "extends beyond its own area" (Braudel 1984:45)."

(http://joshuagoldstein.com/jgcyc13.pdf)


  • Symbolic Capitalists

Kenan Malik explains:

"The key to understanding wokeness, Al-Gharbi insists, is the struggles of “symbolic capitalists” – “professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction”. In other words, writers and academics, artists and lawyers, museum curators and tech professionals. It is a social stratum that attempts to entrench itself within the elite, elbowing out others already there, by using the language of social justice to gain status and accrue “cultural capital”. Theirs is a struggle within the elite presented as a struggle against the elite on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed.

This is not simply cynicism or hypocrisy, Al-Gharbi argues. Symbolic capitalists have constructed myths about their social roles that allow them genuinely to believe in fairness and equity while entrenching inequality and injustice, myths that have been accepted by many social institutions and power-brokers. The consequence is that the language of social justice has helped “legitimize and obscure inequalities”, allowing sections of the elite to “reinforce their elite status… often at the expense of those who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized and disadvantaged”.

Many aspects of this argument have been expressed before, for instance by the cultural theorist Catherine Liu and the philosopher Olúfémi Táíwò. Liu argues that the professional-managerial class “hoards virtue” to enhance self-worth and justify “its unshakable sense of superiority to ordinary working-class people”. In Elite Capture, Táíwò also maintains, though from a different perspective, that the elite have appropriated the politics of radicalism to serve their own ends.

These works are important in helping make sense of the absurdities of contemporary politics."

https://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/10/cosplaying-social-justice-is-the-new-elitist-way-of-elbowing-out-the-working-class?


Flavia Macedo:

" Sintropians are people who agree to be forces of syntropy inside the humanity spectrum. Syntropy (Sintropia) is the coordination force of creation, it's life's energetic principle of order and internal organization that attracts together ever-increasing complex forms to create something new. While entropy breaks things down, syntropy guides them together. It could be translated as life force or the energy behind the phenomena in which life creates conditions conducive to life, as it is mostly diffused through regenerative agriculture practices. The Sintropians I'm calling forth work inspired by life's coordinating principles to guarantee that we, as life forms, also create conditions conducive to life by building GCI as a life-centric tool.

...

The Sintropians who feel as an emergent property of their being the calling to build GCI in pursuit of these goals must initially look to the current state of the world, where we are drowning in wars, polarization, social inequalities, fake news, environmental destruction, corruption, and all the others symptoms of a failed world to realize all we need to let go of.

Most of our current habits of interaction and organization, which are rooted in fragmentation and destructive competition, are not suited for the development of a wholeness-based GCI. The basic cognitive processes needed for any kind of intelligence—collective or otherwise, like decision-making, problem-solving, sensemaking, remembering, and learning, are heavily impaired by the conflicting interests embedded in our geopolitical-economic arrangements. The first step to developing such cognitive processes globally is eradicating the perverse incentives guiding people toward individualistic actions by presenting them with an alternative coordinating language written through wholeness principles."

(https://sintropiadao.org/the-solution-sintropiadaos-life-centric-global-coordination-tool-a-3-dimensional-support-system-that-weaves-self-relationships-and-planetary-impact/)

T

Mark Rediker:

" This is a common bias in our thought, something I have called «terracentrism», the often unconscious belief that only the landed surfaces of the earth are real, and that the sea is an abstract, unreal, ahistorical void. We need to think about the sea as a real place – of work, accumulation, conflict, and history-making. We need to recover and honor the struggle for the oceanic commons."

(https://counterpunch.org/2021/10/11/hydrarchy-maritime-resistance-and-the-production-of-race-an-interview-with-marcus-rediker/)


  • What is a 'Theoros' (ancient Greek)

https://theorosproject.substack.com/p/the-theoros-project

"The Theōros: An Ancient Figure for the 21st Century

In seeking a model for this new type of scholar, we find inspiration in an ancient Greek figure: the theōros—a contemplative, a representative, and a traveler. The word means “seer,” “observer,” or “spectator.” As a group, the theōroi were practitioners in the art of theōria (contemplation), from which our word “theory” also derives. A theōros could be a figure of civic, philosophical, or religious importance. At times, the theōros would move among all three of these spheres. In this sense, theōroi were not just contemplatives but also delegates and civic representatives, travelers who would move from city to city to bear witness to events of special significance.

Indeed, one could find the theōroi traveling to Olympia, to Delphi, and to other Greek city-states during moments of importance. The theōroi would come to observe and then return home to give an account of the event to their community. In their contemplative modes, theōroi were also committed to that higher seeing we associate with religious pilgrimage to sanctuaries and sacred places. Travel for a theōros can thus mean physical travel but also theoric travel—a different kind of journey and return seen in the movements between history and timelessness, sacred and secular, and immanence and transcendence.

The concept of traditional theōria in ancient Greek culture, then, encompassed a range of meanings, from sacred observation to civic participation. Originally referring to delegates at religious festivals or spectators at public events, it evolved to include travelers and explorers of many kinds. At its core, theōria involved a journey or pilgrimage, often to witness these sacred events or spectacles. This practice included three key elements: the journey from home, focused contemplation, and a return journey, with the act of seeing a sacred event or place at its center."


Key Kreutler explains:

"Scientific literature documents the concept of threshold forgetting. It describes the curious effect in which individuals are much more likely to forget their intention upon crossing a threshold like a door. Most people can relate to instances of standing in the kitchen and struggling to recall their original purpose for entering. This concept can also be applied to digital spaces. Have you ever opened your phone with the intention of checking a message from a friend, only to find yourself navigating through five apps, three websites, and who knows how many advertisements, struggling to remember your original purpose? Monetized digital environments seem to intentionally prompt threshold forgetting, guiding users through a labyrinth of addictive applications—only to be lost forever, having taken the wrong route toward infinite scrolling."


  • Timekeeping Protocols (the evolution of )

"Timekeeping protocols, and the devices they are intertwined with, have shaped consciousness and been a primary site of control and power throughout history. Ancient Romans resisted sundials that regimented their days; British imperialists used loud clock towers to assert dominance in colonized lands. Attitudes toward timekeeping acquired moral dimensions, as temperance and self-discipline became linked to obeying clocks. The materiality of timekeeping devices also influenced how humans experienced time, from rhythmic ticking to continuous burning incense. Over centuries, Western clock time diverged from natural cycles, prioritizing mathematical regularity over ecological responsiveness. Today’s pervasive minute-by-minute timekeeping supports industrial civilization but strains against human biology, enabling complex collective endeavors while also exerting control over individual lives, and ironically giving up control over nature. I hypothesize that “good” protocols constrain in order to liberate, but assessing a protocol’s net benefit is complex, subjective and ever-shifting. Timekeeping protocols may need to evolve and become more diverse, to enable rather than overly control modern lives, but the deep entanglement of timekeeping with consciousness and power throughout history suggests any changes will reshape society in ways hard to foresee."

https://summerofprotocols.com/research/control-and-consciousness-of-time


Reilly Smethurst et al. :

"We ... claim that DeFi’s governance is timocratic. This reflects the fact that DeFi’s elites are not simply wealthy; they are sometimes “shadowy” and unidentified as well.

Timocracy is a type of stakeholder governance that dates back to the Solonian Constitution from the sixth century BC. It involves both producers (developers) and property owners (token-holders) that pursue a mixture of particular interests and common interests. Timocracy’s main risk is effectively the same as the risk identified by Warwick: if a timocracy degenerates, then it becomes an oligarchy (or a plutocracy).

As discussed in Plato’s Republic [545a–550c], a timocracy is a conflicted mix of community-oriented virtues and private wealth accumulation. Timocracy’s emblematic rulers hide their wealth in “treasuries and strongrooms”, which implies that timocratic power is crypto- (‘concealed or secret’). “Victory and honour”, in a timocratic regime, are obtained via calculated risks and courageous conquests, not via harmonious rationality or dialectical reason. Timocratic rulers accumulate wealth in subtle ways that are odds with the commons, and they “run away from the law like children running away from their father”. Socrates’ contemporary Sparta is an example of a timocratic regime, and it enjoys an eponymous relationship with Synthetix’s Spartan Council. Incidentally, Lycurgus of Sparta first implemented a separated powers model, which Synthetix and Yearn Finance later adopted.

A timocracy degenerates into an oligarchy when its constitution is rewritten to explicitly reserve power for the wealthy, and when contracts are created to purposefully exacerbate the division between a wealthy class and a poor class. Although our nine DeFi cases are tacitly governed by wealthy, above-average token-holders (whales), average and below-average token-holders (minnows) are allowed to participate in the governance procedures. The minnows’ participation is not as effective as the whales’ participation; but it is not strictly precluded. Furthermore, developments like Synthetix’s quadratic voting are intended to stop the inequality gap from widening.

To reiterate, DeFi’s governance is timocratic. DeFi’s timocratic rulers – the unregistered, above-average token-holders – accumulate more power over time by purchasing even more tokens. The concentration of power is gradual, subtle, and putatively neutral, because crypto-asset marketplaces are open to all. DeFi’s timocratic governance could degenerate and become oligarchic if above-average token-holders vote for so-called improvement proposals that significantly diminish the power of average and below-average token-holders, or if they vote for changes that make it more difficult for newcomers to acquire and exercise voting rights [42; 550d–551b]. Such actions would further strengthen the “old guard”."

(https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160791X23000568?via%3Dihub)


""As one with something of a taste for the bizarre and eccentric, I might find the PC circus to be little more than a philistine but amusing bit of outrageous entertainment, akin to professional wrestling or the old freak shows of carnivals past, if it weren’t for the fact that these folks are hell-bent on imposing their “ideals” on the rest of us by force of the state. Totalitarian Humanism is a war on sovereignty. It is a war on the sovereignty of individuals against arbitrary and coercive authority, the sovereignty of non-state institutions against political authority, the sovereignty of organic communities against a centralized leviathan, the sovereignty of nations against global entities, the sovereignty of history, tradition, and culture against prescriptive and prohibitive ideology. Totalitarian humanism is an effort to reduce all of us to the level of dependent serfs on a plantation ruled by an army of overly zealous concerned mommies and busy-body social workers backed up by the S.W.A.T. team and paramilitary police. Give me beautyism or give me death."

- Keith Preston

V

"Tech extremism emerges from the power grab of right-wing venture capitalists in the tech industry. Having grown exceedingly rich in the first two internet bubbles, this element now seeks to compromise the US government with campaign donations, to assume a new level of power and wealth, and attain forms of legal, economic and regulatory sovereignty, where they can operate outside of any other nation-state power."


Niall Ferguson:

"In a clever Substack post in February, Santiago Pliego tried to sum up the change that had occurred from the epoch of woke—which began with the cancellation of James Damore by Google in 2017—to the unfiltered era of Elon Musk’s X.

“Fundamentally,” Pliego wrote, “the Vibe Shift is a return to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition.”

To be precise:

The Vibe Shift is spurning the fake and therapeutic and reclaiming the authentic and concrete.

The Vibe Shift is a healthy suspicion of credentialism and a return to human judgment.

The Vibe Shift is living not by lies, and instead speaking the truth—whatever the cost.

The Vibe Shift is directly facing our tumultuous times, refusing to blackpill, and choosing to build instead.

The vibe shift hit American politics on the night of November 5. What no one foresaw was that it would almost immediately go global, too."

(https://thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-the-vibe-shift-goes-global-assad-putin-trump)


4

"The “B” in 4B translates to “no” (“bi” in Korean) — the “bis” being:

no sex with men

no giving birth

no dating men

no marriage with men"

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