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.
Our task is to share these blessings, not to greedily ask for more.
[tags]God,bless,America[/tags]
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.
So this presentation was aimed at showing how a decentralized community currency network platform in which individuals and communities are given the power to create an ecology of currencies, is the necessary second order mechanism so that we can change our monetary system. I argued that not only do you have to change the monetary system, but that you have to change how we change. This is a second order change. Which in this case, I propose, means setting up a system that allows for decentralized broad-based creation of many types (most yet unknown) of currencies in a unified network platform. Without that second order change in place I don’t think the system can be changed.
By the way, the red fish in the presentation is a herring. Get it, get it? 
[tags]open money,local currency,money,community currency,BALLE,Eric Harris-Braun[/tags]
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.”
I’m going to spill the beans on the case for local currencies as I see it in just one sentence: I can’t live out my values without local currencies. It’s as simple as that. I can’t live out my values with out them. This is because money is actually a technology. Like all technologies, it has effects on two levels, one is the functional level in which it’s effects on society are related to our choices of how we use the technology, and the other is the structural level, where the effects are not ours to choose, because they are the result the nature of the technology itself.
The first level of connection between values and money is fairly broadly understood. At this level the connection between money and values is functional, that is, it’s about how we use it.. We know that if we are to live by our values, we must align how we spend and invest our money with those values. The breadth of understanding of this connection between money in values this is reflected in the growth of excellent things such as Erbin’s fair-trade movement and the socially responsible investing.
The second level of connection between money and values, the level of structural connection, is less broadly understood A this level we see that our values are not just expressed in how we use money, but are encoded into the structure of money itself. As we come to understand that money is just another one of our technologies, it becomes much easier to understand this second level in the case of money.
As a culture, we’ve come to understand the effects of our technologies both levels. We see that technologies are not value neutral, that the use of this or that technology in and of itself has effects because of the nature of the technology that is independent of how we choose to use it. For example, internal combustion engines emit CO2 whether they are in a tank or in a tractor. Even though the internal combustion engine is wonderful at one level (let’s face, it makes the good parts of modern lives possible), at a wider systemic level, it has a the devastating effect on the biosphere that we call global warming.
What we need to understand is that money is another one of our technologies, and just like the internal combustion engine, at one level, conventional money is great, but at that wider systemic level, it is devastating the entire econosphere.
Raise your hand’s if you are thinking: “wait, wait, you’ve got his analogy all mixed up. It’s not the internal combustion engine’s production of C02 that’s the cause of global warming, it’s the fact that petroleum is used as fuel.” (This is because the carbon in the oil is taken out of the ground where it’s been sitting safely for millions of years, and pumped into the atmosphere. We could run the same internal combustion engines with bio-fuels and add absolutely no net C02 to the atmosphere because the C02 it puts out, was just extracted from the atmosphere that year by the crops grown to produce the biofuels. Global warming solved.) Well, you get the gold star, and that’s a key thing, because that points to a structural solution to the problem. If you change the fuel, you have suddenly aligned structurally aligned the technology with your values of not destroying the biosphere. By noticing this, you’ve focused on the structural, not functional aspect of the technology. Local currencies are about doing that with money.
So what’s the CO2 (or petroleum) of money? Well just like CO2 isn’t the only thing that’s going on in the global warming equation, the situation with money also has many variables. However, not surprisingly, here at the Schumacher Society, we’d say that the C02 of money is its centralization. Or more specifically, the CO2 of money (the part of the technology that has deep side-effects on the econosphere) is that its issuance is strictly controlled by centralized monetary institutions. The case for local currencies is built on examining what happens if we take away that centralized aspect of money, and we let communities, businesses, and even people issue money.
[tags]money,local currency,community currency,peak oil,global warming,technology,value neutral,economy[/tags]
This week I was given a copy of Paul Krafel’s mini-film The Upward Sprial. Which, despite, nay in part because of, some hoakyness, provides deep and powerful language and images for how to look at the world. He talks about flow, feedback spirals, and a “second solution” to the problem posed by the second law of thermodynamics. It is both philosphical and practical for those looking to change our broken world.
Just for fun I took this an opportunity to learn kml so that we could map the flow of the spread of Krafel’s ideas using google earth. If you want to play, go to a little site I created where you can add your location and then add to a network link into your google earth and see the location of all of those who have entered their locations to the map.
Enjoy!
[tags]Krafel, flow, google earth,kml,feedback[/tags]
Have you ever gotten the tcsh: Command not found. error after installing some code? Well it happened to me today, and I couldn’t figure out what the problem was. I had already added the commands directory into my PATH, and set it to executable with chmod 755, but still the error kept coming up. The answer turned out to be that the command file (a shell script) that I had download had DOS line endings. Which, I quicly fixed using my trusty bbedit and bingo it worked fine.
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-François 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 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. We’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.�
–MartinLuther King Jr.
[tags]love,power,MLK,quotes[/tags]