Non-Geeky on flow

Fundamentalism

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve always been interested in fundamentalism and the pattern that lies beneath it. Here’s a great article on copyright as a fundamentalist religion, that adds a bit to that pattern.

facing the reality of collapse

Mon, 11 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A friend of mine recently asked me to read Carolyn Baker’s article When facing reality is not ’negative thinking’. This article has finally helped me nail down some thoughts I’ve been having about the way I’ve been often asked to look at the “collapse” of civilization and the idea that we need to “face reality.”

Jane Jacobs: The Nature of Economies

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I have just 10 minutes ago finished Jane Jacobs, The Nature of Economies, and I just have to write about it.
I am totally stunned, and deeply sad that I never was able to meet her. In this book she speaks directly to me from beyond the grave completely confirming the approach I have been following in rethinking what currency is and what it means to humanity.

Rethinking Economy

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I gave a presentation on rethinking money at UMass Amherst for a course Julie Graham is teaching called Rethinking Economy. Julie does some very interesting work on community economies.

Historical Comments

Riley — December 30, 2008 at 12:32 AM

Hi, Eric.

econophysics and community currency

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently been introduced to the field of econophysics and I’ve read an interesting the review paper on the field. My thoughts on this paper is that it’s very good news for the community currency movement, if understood properly.Â For a long time when talking about cc, I’ve been using the little thought experiment of asking people to imaging the Buddha, Jesus and Mother Theresa sitting down to play monopoly and to see if the game will have a different outcome. The answer is obviously no, not if they play by the rules. It doesn’t matter how good or evil you are, the rules of monopoly simply require that all the cash end up in one player’s hands, i.e 100% inequity.Â The econophysics work on the Statistical Mechanics modeling of money takes this intuitive analogy and “proves” quite definitively the fundamental inequity of our current system if you assume that the rules of the game are that money behaves like energy.Â The good news for community currency arises out of the basic flaw of the paper which is it seems to imply that money is natural system, rather than a created one. If money were an inevitable natural system, then the paper could be seen as an justification of that structural inequity. But since it is a created one, rather it’s an explanation of the the inequity, and thus can point us very clearly in directions of how the monetary system should instead be re-designed.Â What are those directions? Well, we see in the paper the very careful arguments to show how money is conserved. This is crucial to the model because in the model money is energy, and statistical mechanics is built on the law of the conservation of energy. But more importantly their model is about statistical equilibrium of energy states in closed systems. So this gives us a clear indication of where to go: change the monetary paradigm to one where the fundamental model is based on non-equilibrium state energy systemics. Well, we know what non-equilibrium state energy systems are, they are living systems. In living systems what matters fundamentally is not how much energy is accumulated but rather, whether energy can be made to flow in particular complex patterns that themselves are self-sustaining. Even more crucially, life is not about what happens if energy is allowed to dissipate to equilibrium. The name for that process is death! So I think we could even argue that that the modeling they have done is of the death of an economy! Life is not about accumulation of the energy itself, but instead it is about the accumulation of the complex patterns of energy flows. The word for a such patterns is “ecosystem”.Â In their model money is seen as energy, or the capacity to do work. This actually makes sense for an early stage in the evolution of money. When the main issue is the scarcity of the capacity to get work done, then finding ways to accumulate it is key, and building an economic structure to generate that accumulation makes sense. We now live in a world where our capacity to do work is not at all scarce, it’s over abundant. The big problem is the waste human capacity (think of the structural unemployment) and also the squandering of all that massive capacity in ways that are blatantly destructive (military expenditures) or systemically destructive (climate change). So our task is now to re-gear the fundamental system to not simply accumulate of the capacity to do work, but mostly to accumulate particular patterns of that capacity that are what we call “healthy”.Â So, how do we do that!? I use a completely different model for money that I think fits the bill, namely that money is a form of language, or more precisely a writing system that encodes information about wealth events. This model transcends and includes the model of money as energy, because in its simplest form, the rules of the writing system can be made to follow the rules of conservation of energy. What I have been calling for and working on with open money (as well as collaborting with Art Brock on his OS-Earth platform) is a meta-currency system that is precisely about making it easy to create these many different writing system (currencies) and their rule-sets, or another way to put that, that precisely enables a the creation of pattern sets for economic flows.

mexico

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’m in mexico, and it’s the start of the third day of theÂ open money intensive. Â This is an incredible experience of the expansion of the open money vision that’s been in gestation for so long and is now being Â birthed. Â More soon!

wealth literacy

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

why i am working on open money

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I’ve had opportunity to reflect on why I’m particularly dedicated to the open money path out of all the many different community currency paths.

I offer it here not in the spirit of saying open money is better than other approaches, but rather just to share my understanding and what motivates me to work where I know I am best suited to contribute.

More on language and wealth acknowledgment

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In a discussion today with Jean-FranÃ§ois about the content of my previous post, he described another very important way of thinking about the evolution of writing from pictographs to alphabets and ideograms. Namely that the step taken was from a system in which representations could be created, to a system in which information can be created. Likewise our current wealth acknowledgment systems actually represent wealth directly. A direct consequence of this is that money can be stolen. Writing, however creates information. Information intrinsically can’t be stolen (you have to set up complicated legal systems to shoe-horn information into being steal-able). Open money embodies the shift to a wealth acknowledgment system that allows us to move beyond representing wealth, into building information about wealth.

the cost of lies

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Today it occurs to me that one way of describing inflation is that it is a tax on falsehood. Most of the taxes we pay are explicitly levied in some way or another. Inflation is the implicit tax that we pay through the structure of the monetary system itself, because of the way money is issued. I don’t want to dwell on that too much as others have; see: wikipedia, Ron Paul on the right, and Tom Greco on the left.

Language, Money and Wealth Acknowledgment

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

David Abram, in his book The Spell of the Sensuous, describes the history of written language and its evolution from pictographic directly representational symbolic system to an abstract phonemic system. He describes the incredible intellectual leap taken by some scribe who realized that the symbol doesn’t actually need to have ANY visual resemblance to the thing it represents. Apparently this evolutionary step came as a joke, as a pun. To describe this, the example Abram imagines is putting the image of a bee together with that of a leaf, making the word bee-leaf = belief. There is simply no pictorial representation of the abstract notion of a belief, but the pun simultaneously allows this representation and brings us to the first step of writing words phonemically. There are historical example of this in pictographic writing systems, and even in the first truly phonemic script of the semitic scribes, letters are often visually reminiscent of the word that contains that letter. For example our letter “A” comes from the aleph, which is drawn like our letter “A” turned upside-down and which looks like the head of an ox. The semitic word for ox began with the sound that the letter represented.

the "elevator-pitch" for community currencies

Mon, 14 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a skype chat I’m on that discusses community currencies, that recently was trying to find “the ultimate elevator pitch” for community currencies. This is a very reasonable request as all of us working in this area are frequently asked to describe what we are up to succinctly. Here’s my post to that chat in response to this request:

The Economics of Innocent Fraud, John Kenneth Galbraith, 2004

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

You can read this short book in an hour, but you’ll be thinking about it for much longer. Galbraith, a man of impeccable credentials, points out some of the unspoken (by mainstream culture) truths of our times:

Recent Reading List

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

A while back I thought I would take on the discipline of posting a short essay on each book I read. I haven’t done that, but here is a list of my recent reading, with one or two sentences for each.

confucianism, standards, and culture

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In a previous post, I talked about how there are two different kinds of trust, and how important that is to understanding what needs to happen in the currency world. Here is a fantastic essay on confucianism technical standards and culture, which gets to the same essential pattern but in a different arena. The essay includes the following quote from Confucious’ Analects:

proof is in the pudding

Sun, 14 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The power behind the open source/creative commons movement lies in the value of letting go of ownership of your productive work and trusting that the value you could have charged for directly by not doing so, will instead be returned to you indirectly.

The end of Bush McCarthyism?

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Today I listened with awe to Keith Olbermann “Sacrifice” speech. I can only hope that this, appearing in a mainstream media outlet, will have the effect of ending our modern day McCarthyism: “the War on Terror.”

community currency and trust

Tue, 12 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

When ever I introduce people to the idea of community currencies, I have experienced that the question of trust comes up again and again. This is reasonable, but I’m quite convinced that the breadth and depth of what trust is, is very poorly understood. Trust seems to be a word that, in the case of money, is hiding at least two forms of something that are actually quite disparate. I think this is because experientially, these forms of trust feel the same, but they arise from entirely separate circumstances. Some examples to get at this:

Is the Creative Commons movement reall about the commons?

Tue, 12 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve been involved in the creative commons, open source, free software, or any of the many strands of thinking that are developing along these lines, then Copyright, Copy-Left, and the Creative Anti-Commons by Anna Nimus is a must read. She provides a very provocative understanding of the fundamental idea of copy-right, from it’s historical genesis, to how it relates to the Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons work. The paper is long, but it’s very well worth the read.

sousveillance and subvision

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

One of the many very nice concepts that I learned about first in Jean FranÃ§ois Noubel’s work on collective intelligence is sousveillance which is the inverse of surveillance. It was first coined by Steve Mann and then later picked up by Howard Rheingold.

What is it all coming to?

Mon, 16 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Well, Bruce Sterling, as usual, has an idea. It seems to me that we are walking a knife edge, nay, a ceramic blade edge of incredible sharpness, on one side of which is evolved conciousness, and the other, dismal slavery. That blade hurts my feet.

Yahoo gets into the community currency game

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

It looks like yahoo is getting into the community currency game with Yootles. A quick read of the their FAQ indicates a highly “economics” based approach. Also I don’t see an indication of the meta understanding that what’s necessary is to provide a playing field for people to create currencies, rather than just Yet Another Currency (YAC).

Currency "Equity" (Yet another community currency metaphor)

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

“Don’t worry, it’s a rental.” That’s what we say when we drive that Hertz car smack through a pot hole. The difference between how people keep up rented appartments and owned homes is a standard trope in our culture. We understand that people feel and behave differently about things that they own. The same must be true for currency. If we create our own currency, instead of rent it from a unknown source, we will treat it differently. In fact, we will probably do a lot of things differently, just because it’s ours and we own it. Probably most importantly, we can begin to thing about the “value” of the currency in a different way. We clearly understand that the value of a home is not encoded simply in the number of dollars we’ll get from it when we sell it. It’s true value is in the home’s utility to us, here and now. Oddly, the same is true of a currency. Selling a currency on an exchange market is like selling a house. It shows one kind of value that it has; it’s value to people who are comparing the overal value of two separate currencies (just like someone about to by a house may be comparing the overall “value” of two houses). But a currency, like a house, has the utility value of those who use it, which is of substantially different form than its exchange value. There are other things that might be different if we own our currency instead of rent it. Our relationship with debt might be different. For one thing, we would come to a deeper understanding of the connection between debt and money, and thereby be more healthy about it. The monetary experience is by its fundamental nature is the combination of debt and credit. The money I hold in my pocket is positive side of the ledger that elsewhere is written down as a negative number: a.k.a debt. It is not possible to have money without debt. If we owned our own money, the question of what kind and what amount of debt we want to have would become much more crucial to answer well and wisely.

Phronesis and the Internet: the Process Revolution

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I learned about the Aristotelean intellectual virtue of phronesis along with the related term episteme a few years back from Kathryn Montgomery in discussions about her book How Doctors Think. Episteme is the scientific rationality we are all quite familiar with. Phronesis is usually translated “practical wisdom” and is the kind of rational skill doctors and entrepreneurs have that is based on experiential knowledge and provides the ability to take the best action in particular circumstances. We are much less likely to have thought of this as a separate kind of rational capacity. These terms came up again recently for me in the context of a collective intelligence discussion, which really set my mind going and has led me to some propositions and a conjecture:

Viral Communications

Sat, 08 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just read Andrew Lippman and David Reed’s paper on Viral Communications. It’s quite insightful. Two things:

I’ve said it before, but “Intelligence at the Leaves” for currency is what the open money project is all about. Currency is the centralized communication tool that needs to undergo the same process that Lippman and Reed describe in the paper, for all the same reasons. “In the end, viral communications transforms communication from something you buy to something you do. Independence of operation allows communications services to be separated from traditional service providers.” Substitute currency for communication.
On a more speculative note: maybe the reason why SETI has not been successful so far, is that intelligent species move very quickly to low power Tim Shepard style scalable radio! So our current high power RF output is very naturally a short lived (i.e. 200 year) stage in technological development, that lasts only long enough for us to realize that we are better served with a very different pattern of radio usage, which is not detectable at interstellar distances. Assuming this is true, I’d gues that the probablity of catching another intelligence in the same 200 year window is not very high.

[tags]viral communication,viral,SETI,open money,currency,money,scalable radio,David Reed,Andrew Lippman,Eric Harris-Braun,p2p[/tags]

God Bless America

Tue, 04 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

On this July 4th, I’m thinking that God has already blessed America, many times over, with great natural resources, with a powerfully and deep intellectual, spiritual, and political heritage that is the product of the coming together of many strains of human history. We are a blessed melting of many metals that make an alloy of unusual qualities.

BALLE presentation on open money

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s the power-point version of the presentation on open money I gave at the local currency preconference to the BALLE gathering in Burlington last month. The presentation came after a full day of folks like Bernard Lietaer and Tom Greco excellently setting stage by explaining how our current monetary system is both unstable and the structural underlying cause of many of our economic woes. They explained clearly how changing the monetary system is a necessary step for fixing our economic system.

the case for local currencies: money as technology

Mon, 29 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Below is part of a talk I gave at the E. F. Schumacher Society seminar Tools for Change.

I’m assuming that at least one of the reasons why you are all here because you understand that the current economic order isn’t leading us down a healthy path. This is pretty easy to explain and to see as manufacturing jobs are outsourced, as land goes fallow and is developed into unsustainable strip malls, and as workers are more and more disempowered. These are very visible things that we hear about all the time in the independent media, and even in the main-stream media. But it’s much more difficult to see, let alone, explain, the role of our monetary system in all this. So my goal here is to give you the basic tools to explain why we need local currencies. That is the “The case for local currencies.”

thoughts on a retreat

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

In March I participated in a retreat that is somewhat hard for me to describe. It’s hard because I fear being judged. So, to my more materialist friends I want to describe it as an experiment in developing the practices of collective intelligence and collective wisdom and stick to the intellectual content. To my more spiritually oriented friends I want to describe it as a re-inventing of the practices of Quaker corporate worship in the context of the post-post-modern, quantum/relativist, networked, Wilberized, self-conscious and what-else-have-you, world. But this splitting into the mental and the spritual to appease my imagined world view of this or that friend, is a mistake. A huge mistake. So now I declare: go ahead and judge me! Here’s a better description: I participated in a retreat where a small group of people together worked on integrating all levels of their awareness: physical, emotional, mental, and “soul,” into a single group awareness. I put soul in quotes because there is common agreement that parts of our conciousness are separately devoted to physical, emotional, mental awareness, and we have decent language to talk about those three types of perception, but we don’t have good language or terms to talk about “soul” perception, or even agreement that such a form of perception is even “real” (what ever that means!) and has a similar status as the other three. [And now I’m noticing that that last sentence is yet another caveat to try and prevent judgement.] For those of you with a scientific/materialist bent I recommend reading Jean-FranÃ§ois Noubel’s paper on collective intelligence. This paper mentions only in passing at the very end the need for personal transformation. But it was that part that is what the retreat was all about. The practicing of that transformation to begin to make possible the potential for real collective intelligence. If you aren’t turned off by spiritual language, try the sacred circle web site. Some things I learned: I am generally very unaware of my body, and what it has to offer me. If I change the way I sit, I change the way I perceive. I can tell when people are speaking from a place of fear. If I take my glasses off, I can’t see detial, but detail is not all there is to see. The things that I am naturally good at, that come easily to me, are my gifts to the world. If I toss them out as if they don’t matter, I disempower myself and those gifts at the same time. One of the key structural benefits of the open source world is that it requires the formation of human relationships. Because it’s free, i.e. the value it generates has not been monitized, you can’t rely on money to get you what you want, instead you have to either rely on yourself, or, prefereably, rely on relationships with others. I am afraid of esoteric, new-agey, airy-fairy, “stuff” and I have a hard time just being with it when it shows up. Taking on and accepting as true things that people say is very different from being with them and actually listening to what they have to say. There are many levels of listening, at least four of which are: from the past (where we try and understand what we hear based on what we already know); with an open mind (where we try and learn new things that we don’t know); with an open heart (where we try and put ourselves empathically in the position of the speaker and really listen to where they are coming from); and with an open will (which is harder to describe, but it is deeper than the other three, and is similar to the experience of listening for the sense-of-the-meeting when clerking a Quaker meeting for worship with a concern for business, where not only are you listening from all the three other levels, but you’re basic will, i.e. your desires, are left open and subject to modification). Quakers already know a ton about collective intelligence and the practial stuff about what is needed to move foward in this realm, but they suck at integrating body and emotion into mental and “soul” practice. If you get into this work, it will have ramifications on your “personal” relationships. [tags]quakerism,collective intelligence,open source,FLOSS,Ken Wilber[/tags]

power and love

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

â€œPower properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites-polar opposites-so that love is identifiedwith the resignation of power, and power with the denial of love. Weâ€™ve got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anaemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time.â€? â€“MartinLuther King Jr. [tags]love,power,MLK,quotes[/tags]

open source spirituality

Sat, 25 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The open source movement is, I think, the tip of the iceberg of a fundamental sea change in human thought that is swirling all around us. I had been emailing with a friend about how Quakerism seemed to me to embody in a religion,the principles of open source software because (I wrote) “it handles the balance of the community and the individual in a precise way: 1) the individual is highly autonomous and assumed to have unique and direct access to the devine. I.e. everybody can write code. 2) because this is true of everyone, individual revelation must be checked with the group for further descernment, i.e. your code has to be checked in to the repository and actually work with the whole system! Thus there is no preacher/parishoner or consumer/producer relationship, we all minister to eachother (we are all prosumers).” My friend pointed me to various links on open source spirituality that are worth looking at. I was especially intruiged by yoism which at first seems like yet-another-newagey spirituality thingy, but on closer inspection is quite a bit more than that. [tags]spirit,FLOSS,yoism[/tags]

The City of Ember, by Jeanne Duprau (2003)

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The City of Ember is a young adult novel that is a fantastic allegory for spiritual awakening, though I have no idea if it was intended as such. The story is of a girl who lives in an underground and completely self-contained city created by the “Builders.” The population of the city knows of nothing outside the city, in fact, though they speak English many of the words in it like “sky” are not understood in any terms but metaphorically. The problem is that the city is falling apart, the lights are going out, the vast stores of supplies of light bulbs, canned food, and vitamins are running out. The reader is in on a worse calamity, namely, that a secret message in a timed lock box that was left by the Builders, which was meant to be handed down from mayor to mayor and that would open just in time to explain to the city dwellers how to get out of the city, was lost many generations back. Well, being a young adult novel it’s pretty predictable in that the box is in our hero’s closet, but a nice turn of events it is found by our hero’s baby sister who chews on it for a while before our hero gets her hands on it leaving the message is only partially legible. So the bulk of the story is the deciphering of the message, followed by the experience of trying to communicate its contents to the adults, who of course don’t accept the message (where else is there but here?) which is the equivalent of all prophets experiences of rejection by the status-quo. And finally, there is the adventure of eventual escape. This book reworks the universal theme of Plato’s cave, and of all mysticism. What we think of as the whole universe is but shadow, and further, that to enter that “kingdom of heaven” you must be like a child. The insight that this version of that universal story led me to is part of the answer to why childishness is a necessary component of the transformation. Children haven’t yet become someone. Which means who they are is not yet at stake. For some reason our culture has this question “what are you going to be when you grow up?” Think about the hidden structures and assumptions in that question. Who are you? Have you figured it out yet? Is what you do, who you are? Is what you believe who you are? Is who you associate with who you are? I write these questions myself in shadow not in the condition of childishness, and with all of this, as Quaker’s say, “a notion,” i.e. not something that I have experienced, but rather something I think. But this thing that is mostly a notion for me, that the distinction between notional and experiential living is key to awakening, I am begining in small ways to actually experience. [tags]awakening,experience,cave,Plato,mystics[/tags]

money & spirit

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

For that last 2 years I’ve begun a process of examining perhaps one of the most fundamental ways that I “participate in the consumer economy” and that is simply my use of money, specifically US dollars. Before this period money seemed primarily mundane. Money was just a practical thing about living life. It’s there, and I didn’t question it very much. In my mind, the connection between money and spiritual matters was mostly from biblical quotes, for example “the love of money is the root of all evil,” “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s,” “seek ye first the kingdom of the lord and his righteousness,” the kicking out of the money-changers from the temple, and perhaps the most influential for me is where Jesus says “look at how beautifully God as clothed the lilies of the field, not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed such as they, how much more will he care for you?” All of these quotes set up the primacy of ones spiritual life and faith in the divine provider over what ever promise of security we might find in money. In a sense, these are all more about the disconnection between money and those higher spiritual aims.

the role of conventional money

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Since mutual credit money is truly valueless, it cannot BE a unit of measure. It must USE a unit of measure. This means that there must be something with which to set the price of things. You could use chickens or bales of tobbacco or kilowats, or hours as your unit of measure in which the mutual credit money is denomitated, but you can’t really do this because the “value” of any of those things varys across and within communities. Instead, the proper unit of measure is a conventional money, which is determined by an arbitrage market. So in fact, I think what I’m claiming is that the true role of conventional money is to determine aggregate value of things, skills and time, to be a unit of measure. Once we have that (which we allready do), then we can do the bulk of our exchanging using mutual credit money. [tags]money,mutual credit,LETS,price,value[/tags]

what money is worth

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Michael & Eric are walking down the road talking about what people will do for money. Michael sees a steaming pile of dog poop and says: “Eric, I’ll give you 20 grand if you eat some of that.” Eric thinks, wow good deal, and does. Michael says “ok, I owe you 20k.” A little while further down, there’s another dog pile, and Eric says to Michael, “I’ll give you 20,000 big smacker if you eat some of that.” And Michael thinks, that’s an easy way to cancel my debt, so he does. They walk for a few more minutes and Eric says: “whoa, we both just ate dog shit and none of us is a penny richer!” Michael says, “yeah, but the Gross National Product just went up by 40K!” [tags]joke,money,GNP[/tags]

the "free software" of land ownership

Sat, 23 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

The FLOSS movement has questioned (or at least provided an alternative to) private ownership of software. One can, on very similar grounds, question private ownership of land (and historically the followers of Henry George have). Recently the E. F. Schumacher Society has published its work on forming community land trusts including actual legal documents that have been used to set up these organizations. Private ownership of land is burned much deeper into our psyche’s than private ownership of software. Thus even though many of the exact same issues are at stake, we are much less likely to see these two realms of ownership in the same light. The Schumacher Societie’s approach, however, bears close study because it steers so far clear of communistic and centralized approaches that we might rightly fear. [tags]community,land,FLOSS,CLT[/tags]

Of Wheat & Gold, by Christopher Houghton Budd (1988)

Sun, 06 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This little book is very interesting in that it is a sandwich of extremely cogent and clear understanding of the relationship of money and economics to spirituality and human values, with a filling of a very problematic practical solution. He gets right the fact that our current money system is one design out of many possible, and that it’s based on scarcity, and what that means for our world. And he has some very surprising and insightfull things to say about surplus, i.e. more than just the usual “our whole economy is based our ability to produce surpluses and then redistribute them”, but onto what surplus is spiritually, and who should own surplus. He questions if surplus comes from human effort, or is bestowed on us by nature. He examines when surpluses have, historically, been at all time highs, and claims that it is when individual conciousness is expanding most quickly (i.e. the renesaince, and right now).

heaven & hell

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

In hell you are sitting at a sumptuous banquet but your arms are broken and in a cast and though with your fork you can pick up food but you can’t bend your arms, so you can’t put it in your mouth! In heaven, everything is exactly the same, but you just feed the person next to you.

Bone, Complete one volume edition, by Jeff Smith (1991-2004)

Tue, 01 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I have a real soft spot for a good graphic novel now and again, and this one really hit the spot. The story is interesting, the characters are amazingly engaging, and the art is just fantastic. What’s most amazing about Bone, is that it doesn’t takes an unusual position of litterary self-awarenes. It doesn’t take itself completely seriously, like so many of them do, but it’s also not all silly. So while the monsters are at some points just clearly silly and out of character, i.e. discussing whether to eat their next victims raw or in the form of a quiche, or calling eachother fat, they are also downright monster scary. It’s tough to pull this off, but I, for one, was willing to suspend disbelief and really get into the story, not despite the silliness, but because of it.

Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, the Spirit of Evolution, Second Edtion, by Ken Wilber (2000)

Tue, 01 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This sprawling work requiresmuch more than a small description here, which I will do some time (probably as so many others have), but I’ve gotta gripe about it. I wish Mr. Wilber were a better writer, or he would let an editor fix his incredibly repetitious prose. Many people have told me that Wilber is dense and hard to get through, but it’s not really that dense. The book is indeed a brilliant synthesis of a whole bucket load of ideas, but the each section is so over belabored that it gets tiresome. Well that’s the gripe, the things I like best about it are: holons, a synthetic world view which includes a social and individual component of the interior as well as exterior (the four quadrants), ascenders vs. descenders, Plotinus, and the necessary interrelatedness of macrocosmic and microcosmic evolution.

blogging

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Back in 1995, when I was madly collecting web resources for the second edition of my book, The Internet Directory (by the way, don’t buy it unless you are an Internet historian), I kept coming across people’s personal jounals. I read all kinds of stuff that to me seemed incredibly inappropriate to be made public for the whole world to see. I just couldn’t imagine why people would want to divulge their private lives in such a fashion, and I assumed it was just a modern form of hubris. So I decided that these Web sites wouldn’t be included in the book, it just wasn’t interesting enough for my readers (I thought), and besides there were so many of them, they would just be taking up space.