also thinking.. on birthing a nother way.. for all of us..
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reading code/recode.. Nathan facilitated second interview..
here his article on them aug 2014:
Can Monasteries Be a Model for Reclaiming Tech Culture for Good?
http://www.thenation.com/article/can-monasteries-be-model-reclaiming-tech-culture-good/#
perhaps unMonasteries, sparing the dogma and self-flagellation, can keep alive the promise of a liberating Internet as companies like Google and Facebook tighten their grip.
The unMonastery’s gestation began in 2011, the year of Occupy and the Indignados, a time of so many ambitious undertakings with ambivalent outcomes. The Council of Europe’s ominous-sounding Social Cohesion Research and Early Warning Division sought, in the words of its chief, “to have a better idea of the extent of insecurity in society.” The international body sponsored the invention of Edgeryders, “an open and distributed think tank” of people working through an online social network and a series of conferences. They produced a report about the economic crisis—a “Guide to the Future.” Soon the council’s funding ended, but Edgeryders pressed on as an online network with more than 2,000 members and an incorporated entity. The group presents itself as a company in the business of “open consulting.”
At the end of its first conference in Strasbourg in June of 2012, a small circle of Edgeryders, with glasses of wine in their hands and under the shadow of a church, dreamed up the unMonastery. The idea was this: find a place with unmet needs and unused space to lend a building to a group of young hackers. Live together cheaply, building open-source infrastructure for the commons. Repeat until it becomes a network.
The unMonastery vision went viral in the Edgeryders community. It fit into a widely felt longing at the time, evident in many parts of Europe and North America where protest had broken out in 2011, to start figuring out practical alternatives to the failed order. Occupy activists were learning to set up worker co-ops, and their counterparts in Spain laid plans for Internet-driven political parties. This was the period, too, of Edward Snowden’s leaks, of Aaron Swartz’s suicide, of blockades against techie commuter buses in San Francisco. Google became one of the world’s leading lobbyists, and Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post. Tech could no longer claim to be a post-political insurgency; it had become the empire.
wow just copying it all so far
ben vickers.. insight – much to read here .. just go to link above
documentation can trump even failure; others can study the attempt, tweak it and try again.
[..]
Elf Pavlik, a 31-year-old web developer with pony-tailed hair, had been living for five years without touching money or government IDs.
[..]
Keeping track of the longer view was the job of Bembo Davies, a Canadian-turned-Norwegian widower and grandfather, a veteran of the circus and the stage who updated his WordPress chronicle in august prose.
[..]
or when they worried about whether they’d done any good for Matera whatsoever, they reminded each other, “Everything’s a prototype.”
[..]
Building a new society in the shell of the old can seem so impossibly hard. Capitalism, meanwhile, makes organizing ourselves look easy by paying us to pretend that’s what we’re doing. Maybe the longing for leaderless swarms in the protests of 2011 partly stemmed from the image of a team at a software conglomerate, or a noncommercial, open-source project nonetheless parasitic on its corporate sponsors. But the kind of democracy and community we glean from tech culture lacks a deep structure, a core; tech culture is particularly good at disguising the reality that its core has become investor returns and Wall Street IPOs. The CEO’s absolute authority dresses up like charisma. Rapt in admiration, we the people are being de-skilled out of actual self-organizing. A few months in, the unMonastery’s communications had become a jungle of platforms, many of them proprietary, with few clear lines between inward and outward: the public Edgeryders website, public Trello boards, a closed Google Group and public folders full of Google Docs.
[..]
Like just about everything, all of this has happened before.
[..]
“Making the democratic most of the Information Age,” Roszak wrote, “is a matter not only of technology but also of the social organization of that technology.” – 80s
rushkoff os law – we need to go deep/simple/open .. ps in the open – io dance ness
[..]
Offers of real estate for a new unMonastery have come from Greece, Spain and up near Venice.
[..]
Michel Bauwens, an elder statesman in Europe’s peer-to-peer movement, wrote an open letter to Pope Francis suggesting that underused churches and monasteries not be sold on the real-estate market but repurposed as sites of a new collaborative economy. He cited the unMonastery as a model.
[..]
These relationships can seem like compromises with the past, but what seems new and original almost never really is, except to the degree that we fail to remember.
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Of course the @washingtonpost thinks #OregonUnderAttack is about hating gov’t. But it’s also about the meaning of common land & resources.
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/nathanairplane/status/683784369610174464
?
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jan 2016 – are you ready counter apocalypse
http://americamagazine.org/issue/are-you-ready-counter-apocalypse
When I and several hundred thousand people demanding action on climate change marched through Midtown Manhattan on September 21, 2014, apocalypse was on our lips. We were marching to save the world—to change everything, as the propaganda beckoning us to participate had said. Wave after wave of marchers paraded through the city, carrying hand-painted banners and giant puppets, hopeful and joyful despite the likelihood of more political inaction to follow.
After a few hours in the streets, we could hear each other’s tired voices wondering what it might take for real change to happen.
[..]
There are many kinds of apocalypse stories. One can wait for the climate apocalypse to come, or one can see that it is happening already, especially in the pockets and places far from centers of power, where people live closest to the earth. These people are already on the brink. Things can get worse before they get better, but who says that they must
[..]
dispensationalism—a wildly popular, yet little-discussed, kind of Christian theology—that the idea of things getting worse before they can get better has been hidden in plain sight.
[..]
Those who long for crisis, and who imagine that it is necessary, betray their privilege.
[..]
Wherever we are, those facing apocalypse at the margins can be our guides, and our hope. … Grace Lee Boggs was heralding the kind of counter-apocalypse Catherine Keller writes about. Boggs and other Detroiters have been resisting the distant investors trying to take over their city, …“Instead of pursuing rapid economic development and hoping that it will eventually create community,” Boggs writes, “we need to do the opposite—begin with the needs of the community and create loving relationships with one another and with the earth.”
[..]
This is basic Sermon-on-the-Mount stuff. And it bears a simple and utterly non-dispensational revelation: Things will get better if we make things better for each other now, if we survive and love our neighbors where those who rule the present age want us out of the way. This is our calling, and it means no longer waiting for things to get worse. This is an apocalypse worth having.
yes. let’s. now. a nother way
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http://americamagazine.org/issue/resetting-interest-usury
The result is a financial system whose most serious risks are borne by the most vulnerable. Foreclosure, eviction and eventual homelessness are part of a tolerable business model. Through international debt, lenders dictate policy to debtor governments with little oversight from the people who will be expected to obey. And, as Aquinas warned, financiers lavish on themselves money from out of thin air. These are moral problems, but without a concept of usury it can be hard to see that. It is hard to imagine a jubilee.
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@nathanairplane
New from @excinit@KernelMag: Can we build a humane alternative to Uber? kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections…#platformcoop#IoO
@uscdcomm
VC $$ backed platforms like Uber slash customer prices to gain market share. Hard for coops, upstarts to compete. twitter.com/nathanairplane…
@nathanairplane
.@ucsdCOMM@excinit@KernelMag time to anti-trust the platform monopolies and cooperativize the pieces. #platformcoop#IoO
and/or cooperativize us.. making the pieces irrelevant (pieces from article, ie: money, policy, et al)
are we meaning share as in share things or as in monetary shares.. huge difference. i’m not sure we’re ever sure which one we mean.
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on Illich
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/missionary-go-home
schooling the world ness..
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platform coop as critique of open source
http://internetofownership.net/2016/05/21/platform-cooperativism-as-a-critique-of-open-source/
The result is products like Android, an operating system that employs Linux to carry out perhaps the most powerful engine of corporate surveillance ever invented.
[..]
Finally we are beginning to hack corporate ownership design with the same gusto and imagination with which the progenitors of FLOSS hacked intellectual property. We’re coming up with democratic financing, open companies, and diverse, multi-stakeholder co-ops. And we’re also rethinking the rules of the digital commons. The “copyfarleft” licenses of Dmytri Kleinerand the P2P Foundation, for instance, are designed to protect commons from exploitation by extractive companies while allowing their use by democratic and non-commercial enterprises. Some platform co-ops deem it necessary to use full copyright. There is disagreement about intellectual property in the platform co-op community, and I view this as a good thing; robust debate is needed to address the challenge of cultivating the commons while also doing business democratically.
Dmytri
p2p
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@nathanairplane
A similar creeping came over me during a very different kind of news cycle—the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath. ..the people who carried it out, finally, got a pass. …they knew they’d get away with it…….Where did the titans of finance learn to live so confidently by unwritten rules? At a formative age, we ship promising young people off to institutions where they’re supposed to develop the skills and relationships that will give them a start on adult life. Meanwhile, they’re expected to drink. For most of them, it’s illegal, of course; they start at 17 or 18, and the legal drinking age is 21. But they do it anyway, just as many of their parents did, just most of their new friends do, just as the literature and films of the American college experience indicate they must. On many campuses, there is a special police force, which helps ensure that dangerous situations can be dealt with while maintaining a parallel, privileged universe of tolerated illegality.
[..]
[..]
Those who don’t get to attend these special institutions, meanwhile, learn a very different lesson. When I lived in a rent-stabilized building in Brooklyn, I’d try to befriend my young neighbors—especially the young black men, many of whom had little hope of reaching a gentle enclosure of high-up higher ed. Befriending them could be difficult, though, not least because from time to time they’d disappear for months on end due to arrests and detentions. When they’d come back, I’d learn the crime was usually something along the lines of what I or people I knew had done regularly in college, with no thought that there would be any serious consequences; for us, there weren’t. For them, the lesson was their own expendability.
[..]
Alcohol and rape are part of a common continuum of toleration on campuses, constituting a curriculum of privilege that teaches students that they are and will be—so long as they remain in service of elite institutions—above the law and the ordinary moral order. This is how we train our leaders.
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july 2016 – scandinavian econs
https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-continuing-revelation-of-scandinavian-economies/2016/07/31
ust because their countries are at the top of the international charts for equality, that is no reason to be smug.
[..]
I know we are so much more.
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plan to save twitter: buy it
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/29/save-twitter-buy-platform-shared-ownership
obviously sharp thinking.. ie: green bay packers, twitter employees, crunching the numbers of shares .. et al
imagine if we go bolder.. and disengage from ownership.. from money ness.. why do we have to own it..? why play the game of measuring all this.. shares.. et al..
Even the US government could step in, recognizing Twitter as a public utility and helping to orchestrate the conversion – just as it has in financing rural electric co-ops since the 1930s, which have become vehicles forbroadband expansion today.
yes.. we need it all.. but why waste energy on counting shares.. on inspectors of inspectors.. disengage from money as os..
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@ntnsndr
“anarchism offers a stark alternative. It calls for a politics that doesn’t begin and end with politicians” americamagazine.org/content/all-th…
bulk of anarchist tradition has sought for people to be better org’d in everyday lives..from below/shared..not room for so much greatness
live as if already free.. anarch\ism
rev of everyday life
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via Nathan fb share:
A new bit of #platformcoop for Quartz (my first there), focusing on founders. They should have more options. Featuring insights from Paul Allen, a founder of Ancestry.com, as well as Jason Wiener.
https://qz.com/940876/sell-businesses-to-their-users-instead-of-investors/
before long, the founders discovered that their companies were no longer built around that original idea anymore, or even around the users it could serve. The whole point had become to extract short-term returns for shareholders—and to disguise that fact from users. The great idea, together with the community it attracted, became a mere commodity.
[..]
“When people ask what modern invention has led to the most inequality in modern civilization,” Allen told Quartz, “the answer I give is ‘the modern corporation.’”
[..]
Balancing the competing, diverging needs of investor-owners and users is a *cumbersome task. Given the choice, many companies may find they’d be **better off making their owners and users one and the same.
always/obsessing measuring transactions/exchanges is a *cumbersome task.. imagine how much **better off we all would be if we disengaged from that..
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fb share
Okay, so this is my moral argument against the philanthropy of the super-rich, new at America Magazine – The Jesuit Review.
The Case Against Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Philanthropy As We Know It
https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2017/06/12/case-against-bill-gates-mark-zuckerberg-and-philanthropy-we-know-it
What goes by the name of philanthropy—literally, the love of people—and what the tax code regards as giving can rival the cynicism of the feudal indulgence business.
When most of us donate from our small excess, we express a concern and entrust the money to those with expertise; when Gates donates, he sets the agenda.
He chose to do this through a limited liability company rather than a foundation, forgoing even the tax code’s spacious definition of philanthropy. The intended targets for this wealth, as for the Gates fortune, are health and public education, although, like the Gateses, they have limited direct experience in either field
If we are to go on tolerating the self-canonization and attempted do-gooding of wealthy donors, we should expect them to actually be engaged in donating—not in the buying of indulgences, not in a vast privatization scheme to replace what could be public decision-making. This is advocacy; advocacy is fine, but we should call it what it is.
If philanthropy means love of others, it must prove itself by entrusting the material of that love to the intended recipients.
To believe in the dignity of other human beings is to honor their capacity to choose.
Giving should mean really giving, or giving back.
Nothing is mine or yours, but it is ours because we are part of the same divine communism.
There is, of course, a very big but.
The catechism goes on, “However, the earth is divided up among men to assure the security of their lives, endangered by poverty and threatened by violence.” Our flawed and fallen nature makes God’s communism impracticable. Therefore “the appropriation of property is legitimate for guaranteeing the freedom and dignity of persons and for helping each of them to meet his basic needs and the needs of those in his charge.”
?
So, there is a pass for possessions. Property of some kind is needed and useful.
or not
property ness
Thomas Aquinas put the matter this way in the Summa Theologica: “Man ought to possess external things, not as his own, but as common, so that, to wit, he is ready to communicate them to others in their need.” We hold property, yes, but we should hold it as if it is not completely ours. We should dispense with it that way, too.
common ing ness
many such gifts are simply acts of either obligation, preference or reciprocity—like tithing at one’s church, or supporting organizations that promote one’s social opinions, or underwriting a public radio station to which one listens. That is a normal part of being a good community member, and it’s praiseworthy, but it is not really giving. It is more a matter of responsibility than philanthropy. Actual philanthropy, the love of people, the stewarding of Providence—these expect a fuller kind of gift.
In either case the gift, once given, is no longer one’s own. It never really was.
Pope Francis has made a point of challenging the common habit of mind in contemporary philanthropy that second-guesses the person in need, that presumes to know better.
an attempt to back away from the presumption that a philanthropist is typically entitled to: the presumption of knowing what other people need better than the people in need do.
Another framework for dispatching such presumptions is democracy. Democracy can be a tool, or a family of tools, for achieving the humility that wealth can otherwise lift beyond reach. We tend to think of democracy as the purview of government, but it can also be a means of real giving. It can be a vehicle of Providence.
Democracy often gets blamed for the bureaucratic outgrowths of government, so we forget its efficiencies;
spreading decision-making processes widely across a large and diverse society is, in principle, a far better way to meet people’s needs than trying to anticipate them through central planning.
redefine decision making via hlb
There has never been less reason for tolerating feudal, unaccountable pretenders to generosity.
One way or another, in order for a gift to be regarded as truly a gift, it should be given in a way that is accountable to its recipients, rather than as an imposition on them.
“Philanthropy is supposed to be private funding for the public good,” he has written, “but increasingly it’s become a playground for private interests.”
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a people owned internet – ie: next light
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/26/people-owned-internet-exists-net-neutrality
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@ntnsndr “A people who are hard to provoke are a people harder to rule.” Damn. All from here: https://t.co/pH3FF2feUS @ntnsndr
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/pattondodd/status/902651134317387776
Figure out what each of our peoples brings to all of us, that is
ie: hlb via 2 convos that io dance.. as the day..[aka: not part\ial.. for (blank)’s sake…].. a nother way
one can save that energy for focused, committed work
energy toward eudaimoniative surplus
A people who are hard to provoke are a people harder to rule.
unoffendable
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everything for everyone
This is the start of what is going to be a potentially obnoxious spree of book promotion in the coming months. I will do my best, in the process, to focus on promoting not primarily myself or even the book so much as the tradition it depicts, especially the remarkable people I’ve met who embody that tradition. This process can be awkward, but I view it as a duty and a service, and from there it can turn into a pleasure. Thank you, in advance, for understanding that this will be my job in 2018. Thank you, in advance, should you help amplify these remarkable people’s good works and my attempt to share them.
I hope this book will be a useful tool. I think it might be.
https://nathanschneider.info/books/everything-for-everyone/
suggested to library for purchase – thanks library
everything for everyone
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P2P Foundation (@P2P_Foundation) tweeted at 4:31 AM – 1 Aug 2018 :
Thoughts on OPEN 2018 https://t.co/7Q24IHrYYJ (http://twitter.com/P2P_Foundation/status/1024603549097963521?s=17)
Nathan Schneider had questions about the cooperative side of things. Are we using the language of commons, or the language of ownership? Are we escaping ownership, or doubling down on it?.. Nathan’s musing on whether this community is part of the traditional co-op movement or something new and different was interesting
hardt & negri property law
nathan and co op ness
let go
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Felipe (@cubaenergy) tweeted at 6:58 AM on Mon, Sep 17, 2018:
“Accompaniment is the only way we can learn what God is trying to tell us.” Thank you @ntnsndr. Great column: https://t.co/hRQQoBCYcM
(https://twitter.com/cubaenergy/status/1041672684780879874?s=03)
https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2018/08/21/dont-blame-sex-abuse-crisis-queer-catholics
at homosexuality, in general, which he reminds us the church regards as “intrinsically disordered” and that “cries out to heaven for vengeance” and possibly—the referent is not fully clear—is to be “hated with a perfect hatred.
Each time I read something like this, I think of how, over and over, the people who have saved my faith when it was on the brink happened to be queer folks. I suspect this is not an accident. I cannot be sure, but I expect it was their experience of marginalization and their humanness against it that helped me see where God is.
the universal church will not be any use if it is rooting out and driving underground all kinds of queer experience. We need to be present with that experience if we are to learn from it, together, to enlarge a bit our pitiful grasp of God..t
thurman interconnectedness law
In a sense, there is some truth that the problem of abuse has to do with a problem of queer sexuality. It is the problem of a repressed, denialist, immature queerness that discovered itself a little after Vatican II but was not able to go beyond that.
There is a revelation at hand here. It is not a liberal revelation or a conservative one. It is something else, something ancient. Blindness to it has caused so, so much pain. It has caused good people and good leaders to be their worst selves.
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RT @uniteddiversity: Everything for everyone: mbauwens interviews @ntnsndr in @Commons_Trans https://t.co/ud7c3ANMn6https://t.co/gm3o1nrbER
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/mbauwens/status/1042213331187245059
First, a book on arguments about God, then a close-up on Occupy Wall Street, and now co-ops. But it all makes sense in my head somehow. The overriding challenge for me has always been that of capturing how people bring their highest ambitions into the realities of the world. I’m drawn to people with both adventuresome imaginations and the audacity to put them into practice.
Pretty early on in this work, I started seeing opportunities for cooperatives in tech. I’ve long been a tinkerer with free software and open source, so I’d been used to thinking of technology as a kind of commons.
I regard cooperatives as a kind of commons, a mode of commoning that has made itself legible to the industrial-era state and market.
Cooperatives are a way of introducing people to a radical vision of the commons that also includes familiar stuff like Visa, Associated Press, and the credit union down the street. But I wouldn’t claim cooperatives are sufficient. They’re a starting point, a gateway to more diverse and widespread commoning.
The experience of FLOK, which was an effort to craft a country-sized commons transition, was very instructive for me. It was a chance to see commoning presented as a comprehensive social vision, not just as a series of isolated interventions.
has to be.. partial is killing us
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on team human w Douglas Rushkoff
douglas rushkoff (@rushkoff) tweeted at 9:26 AM on Wed, Sep 26, 2018:
The coops are already here and alive and well. Learn to see them. Nathan @ntnsndr Schneider on the new @teamhumanshow https://t.co/qKRXFK8tbs
(https://twitter.com/rushkoff/status/1044971424560173057?s=03)
10 min – d: you’ve been trying to spread the gospel of cooperation as a business strategy
12 min – going from seeing this stuff (co-op ness) as utopian/marginal to recognizing.. ie: you can see remnants/manifestations of co-op businesses..doing stuff in the background .. we rely on.. that are helping to prop up some of the best parts of this world.. and this is a part of the story of what goes under then name of capitalism.. that.. capitalism propaganda doesn’t want us to know that actually it’s not all a kind of investor crazy land of casino competition that is producing all the wonders.. to the extent that they are wonders.. that we live among.. there’s actually other logics that work as well..
capitalism ness
14 min – (coming out of occupy).. i saw a lot of those leading activists starting to figure out how to live in the econ that they hadn’t yet transformed.. and they turned to cooperative business.. where people can participate in democracy everyday.. where participants/workers are the owners and have some say on how it’s run
15 min – and then.. as i was continuing to be fascinated by this tradition and learn more about it.. i had the opp to move out here to colorado where my mother’s family was from.. to ask more questions about my family.. ie: my grandfather’s farm didn’t get electricity (1940s) until a co-op showed up.. to build utilities where an investor-owned utility company wouldn’t go
17 min – this is not something that the right/left owns.. (from my hard conservative grandfather to anarchists at occupy) .. that to me is an incredible sign of hope .. that this is something that’s so sensible.. that people who agree about virtually nothing else can actually get behind
22 min – d: your work is showing us that these businesses are everywhere
23 min – ie: ace hardware .. co-op of local hardware stores.. ace enables this individuals the opp to buy as if they’re a chain.. a model that does best when enabling diversity to happen.. and accountable downward than when upward to wall street
25 min – d: not a franchise like ie: mcdonalds..
lines can blur when co-op not vibrant.. can start looking like mcdonalds
26 min – 1\ voluntary and open membership – a non discrimination clause.. today esp important where co-ops being developed w people who are vulnerable in society.. ie: immigrants; disenfranchised
do we need membership anymore..?
27 min – d: i like this idea of voluntary.. reminds me of those open space.. unconferences.. not forced to contribute
2\ democratic member control – but not so straightforward ie: everyone voting on everything.. ie: when i was living in co-op house .. needed that weekly 2 hr meeting or the *bathroom wouldn’t get cleaned..
this is a red flag that we need to go deeper.. to the roots of healing.. and *help\ing
29 min – the diff is that the board is not made up of people accountable to investors.. but people accountable to the people/workers
rep\ing will still be a killer.. have to go deeper – only because now we can.. i don’t think we could go deeper in the past.. to get to the energy of 7bn alive people.. via tech as it could be (faciling 7bn daily curiosities).. thru 2 convers as infra
3\ member econ participation – that’s skin in the game.. this is not about a free handout.. this is about accepting and *building responsibility into the nature of the business..
we need a free handout (aka: no strings).. if we truly want to get to the energy of 7bn alive people
accountable ness is a killer (from 5+ years of non abstract findings)
wouldn’t have to *build anything if we didn’t squash innate ness (ie: curiosity, desire to help, et al)
often means.. co-ops were the original crowd funding.. when people wanted to do something in their community and no one had the resources to do it.. a co-op would serve that role
crowdfunding ness.. as panhandle\ing ness
30 min – ie: rei – one of our great consumer co-ops in the us – founded because a couple outdoors people in seattle wanted to get this really sweet ice ax from germany that they couldn’t buy on their own.. now you would start a kickstarter
4\ autonomy and independence – making sure that democracy is real.. goes back to anxieties of govt interference..
31 min – 5\ ed and training – people gotta know something about your business.. just like ie: have to know what a senator is.. make sure people know what they’re participating in.. making sure people can empower themselves..
34 min – d: if look at black panther movement.. a lot of ed ing in there
book – cooperative courage – talks about role of education.. in every co-op she studied.. make sure ed is always a part
yes .. education.. but not prescribed.. if we have to train.. i see that as a red flag.. we’re doing it wrong.. or rather.. we’re not doing it as it could be ie: as we have the means to do now.. (faciling 7bn daily curiosities)
35 min – d: the weird thing that happens to me when i try to promote co-op ness.. sometimes well meaning.. id politics friendly liberals will say.. isn’t that kind of elitist.. ? people in the projects wouldn’t be able to do this.. not educated enough.. as if these are elitist fabrications.. and i say.. no no.. the inner city people you are looking down on could teach you how to do co-op enterprise
again.. no one needs to teach/train/Ed anyone.. if we are first.. all truly free ie: meadows undisturbed ecosystem
36 min – yeah.. so many ie’s of that.. raising in times of most need.. but there too is that.. elitist ness.. ie: natural grocers.. whole foods.. in contrast go to italy.. the largest grocer retail in the country is a co-op.. sometimes look like whole foods.. sometimes like a target
37 min – on people asking for cheaper food..and getting shunned.. so some can’t afford.. co-op as an opp to manage our compromises
begs no money/measure man
39 min – not that you have to vote everyday.. ie: my credit union.. i don’t have to vote go everyday.. but still go to the annual meeting.. it comes down to accountability.. they have permission to not throw their customers under the bus
imagine.. (just for a second) .. not having to spend time/space on this ie: money/measure ness
40 min – 6\ cooperation among co-ops – d: hardest one..? competition for same members
41 min – this one can be hard.. like all of these rules..there are ways in which a little violation here and there doesn’t hurt things.. ie: credit unions competing w each other.. but you want to create structures where cooperation is happening because otherwise this ecosystem doesn’t work.. in same way can’t build co-op w people who are fighting w each other..
competition as disturbance (and/or symptoms) of disturbance to undisturbed ecosystem
42 min – the whole idea of co-op in itself – people recognizing their common interests..t
but see.. (again from 5+ years of non abstract findings).. if truly free.. those interests change.. or at least should be free to change.. everyday.. or the energy will die out..
begs.. a mech to listen to and facil daily curiosities.. sans money/measure
and similarly you can’t build individual businesses into a sector w/o those co-ops recognizing their common interests.. i think unfortunately that sense of culture has been lost in a lot of places in the us where co-ops have been kind of lurking under the radar.. pretending to be good ole capitalism for so long that they have kind of forgotten their co-op id.. so that kind of puts onus on new generation.. to revive that sense of id.. one way we’re doing that in colorado.. a co-op type branding.. colorado.co-opp.. create alignments so not relying on people to be saints all the time
43 min – another strategy is legal.. in italy.. co-ops required by law to contribute some portion of profit to help finance development of new co-ops.. if everybody does well .. everybody else benefits.. so .. building structure for that
44 min – d: but also about mindset
45 min – now into my crazy spiritual stuff.. co-ops are creatures of the fall.. .. these are not businesses designed w the expectation that we’re all perfect.. or that if we just do a little more internal cleansing and meditate an hr a day then we’ll be good/conscious.. no .. these are businesses for people who are kind of *broken and have goodness in them and have a little bit of that **art of the deal in them too..
*broken by money/measure ness.. so we keep on perpetuate\ing not-us
ie: grammatis broken law
**marsh exchange law
46 min – and the whole notion of forming .. co-op is an institutional innovation.. it’s a structure designed to make apparent to people.. that *ultimately we will benefit from working together
dang.. i think ultimately we benefit form trusting each other (at the point of whimsy et al).. perhaps we design from trust.. 100% trust
and from supporting each other’s success.. this is a structure that enables people to see that day to day and to do it w/o having to *trust each other to be perfect.. w/o **having to have worked out all their inner demons first.. before they can even come in
whoa.. *trust has nothing to do w others being perfect.. has nothing to do with earning it..
yeah **trust has no strings.. which begs.. we free people.. truly free them.. first
47 min – so to me it’s an invitation to a kind of institutional design that allows people to see/embody a better side of themselves..
yeah.. i don’t think that better side happens until we let go.. all the way.. inviting people to things is letting them get to eudaimonia – where the ultimate energy (we need more than anything) is
ie: invited vs invented ness et al
what the catholic workers/founders dorothy day and peter moran talked about.. a place where it’s easier to be good
wow..
that would be the place where we just assume good .. or rather.. assume we don’t have to be ‘good’.. (i mean who’s defining that..?)
what we need are spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove.. nothing
(again from 5+ years of non abstract findings)
not because you’re perfect but because the system helps you see the benefits of goodness more clearly
we can’t have a system defining goodness.. that’s how we got here in the first place..
‘benefits’ is sounding so poisonous.. ie: what we found.. is that.. if people are free to do their art (the thing they can’t not do) everyday.. and if it changes everyday so be it.. that.. that art/being-ness is the part of our one ness that we need..
we need 7bn alive people.. not 7bn ‘good’ people
could be semantics.. because i say assume good – but assuming good is more about not wasting energy judging.. benefits of goodness.. and place where it’s easier to be good .. seems to have an agenda.. to me..
again.. something i’ve been delving into for 10 yrs now.. with live people
d: we can embed certain values and stack the deck
yeah.. not that..
we can’t embed values and stack decks if we want to get to eudaimoniative surplus aka: meadows undisturbed ecosystem..
we have to create an infra for values to ongoingly emerge from within 7bn people.. everyday.. which we finally have the means to do today.. and we’re missing it.. team human et al
mufleh humanity law.. big time.. because what you describe sounds cleaner/kinder/gooder.. which means most people will go along with it..thinking it’s deep enough
d: all of these things are social constructions anyway.. so why not socially construct transactional platforms and commercial systems that engender the best qualities of humans..
dang – do we even know what that is..? ie: black science of people/whales
d: rather than designing them to bring out the worst
or the slightly better but still extremely compromising to the human spirit.. to human nature..
47 min – w/o illusions.. and you know obviously a lot of the young co-op entrepreneurs i run into do come w i think a certain set of illusions about
48 min – d: well they’re young and sweet in a certain way.. i mean they’re going to get disillusioned at some point.. but.. isn’t that part of youth.. your eyes are clearer..
wtf?
(laughing) well older one’s too
d: go in wonderful raves and now you’re going to make a co-op rave.. veggie.. vegan.. yogie.. enlightenment center
exactly.. exactly.. i generally tend to appreciate the people who come to this w a deeper business experience and then some co-op experience
of course.. dang..
and they come to it mainly as a business in the sense that they are trying to solve problems successfully..
which problems.. ? matters little if they’re the wrong problems..
i’ve ragging on you.. because we’re missing an incredible opp here
again.. i’d call it alive people
dang..
today.. we can do that
alive democracy (whatever that is) ?.. let’s go for alive people.. no..?
i see co-op ness (as you describe here – with money/measure) as unrelated problems..
be you. 