73 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. we don’t restrict bridge building because there aren’t enough metres, the availability of a currency should not restrict how much we trust and collaborate with each other

      Very good point. The denomination or quantification (e.g. measurement) of a somthing should not affect its exchangability-- except that is exactly how we practice the "currency game"

    2. true wealth is all life, including ourselves and wider nature, and the quality of our relations with each other and wider nature. Therefore, any currency should be a mechanism for us collectively enabling that wealth in its entirety, not restricting it or extracting it.

      Don't understand his logic. "If wealth is ALL2ALL relatedness, currency should not constrain it." But currency is reductive by definition. How exchange currency that is denominated in "all2all"?

    3. Innovations like Bitcoin, cap-and-trade, or microcredit, though often well-intentioned, have been co-opted to serve elite interests. Thus, he concludes that systemic change through top-down monetary innovation is unlikely to succeed.

      The Internet has been similarly coopted by institutions

    4. there has been a lack of leadership from either the banking system or the cryptocurrency world on matters of systemic damage from the sector they work in.

      Another externality?

    5. The dominance of Bitcoin in that space shows the valuations are about its fame for breaking the paradigm, rather than the latest technical excellence.

      Don't follow

    6. they continue to criticise bank loans to oil or mining companies, but rarely mention how money itself is created.

      Alternatively, using "language" as a similar meta-system to human interaction as currency is to economic activity. Critiquing the spelling of words does not get significant impact the in/effectiveness of communication any more than critiquing development loans impacts economic flows (or liquidity)

  2. Jun 2025
    1. marginalia

      Such a great word. And where we live when in hypothes.is. MARGINALIA Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster https://share.google/Zu83Br0kl9SeWEnym

    1. Among the most fundamental of these seemingly conflicting values is the freedom order

      The "freedom vs order" frame seems like a false binary not unlike hot/cold or winter/summer. If we frame the "freedom / order" dialectic as oscillations of systems where other systems (or other sides of a larger meta system), can be seen as unfolding according to their own trajectory--but not in "oppositional binary"--merely Resonating at different rates, frequencies and such, the limits of (and assumed responses arising from) binary framing are not as compelling.

      Perhaps the question of how to integrate the paradox of these opposites is more important than "choosing and imposing the correct perspective (freedom vs. Order).

    2. [Music] The level of fragmentation we are witnessing on planet Earth today is simply unprecedented. Never before was the human family so divided against itself and the need for healing greater. We have fractured into so many competing tribes pursuing mutually incompatible goals. The landscape of conflict has become simply too large to keep track of. One general observation we can make though is the fact that at their core each tribe is seeking to protect a set of values they deem to be essential against other tribes they perceive as threatening those. Among the most fundamental of these seemingly conflicting values is the freedom order dialectic. Both of these values are clearly equally essential to any healthy society. But in a state of fragmentation, these complimentary qualities become conflicting ones. Divided against ourselves, freedom becomes the freedom to attack, to sabotage and invade. And order becomes a vehicle for totalitarian control. In short, freedom becomes an attack on order, while order becomes an attack on freedom. Those siding with order seek to protect society from widespread chaos while those siding with freedom seek to protect society from totalitarian oppression. Both sides are right. Without the other balancing it, each one of those values becomes the basis for an equally undesirable pathology which we can summarize in this simple equation. Freedom time fragmentation equals chaos. While order times fragmentation equals oppression. The closer we come to chaos, the stronger the impulse for order becomes. The closer we move towards oppression, the stronger the impulse for freedom becomes. Any fragmented civilization will thus be trapped in an endless cycle of continually oscillating between these two pathological attractors. While deeply uncomfortable and the cause for so much needless suffering on this planet, one could argue that this is just how all of history has played out so far and will continue to forever. However, this perspective is missing a crucial aspect. The story of fragmentation is a story of warfare and the story of warfare is a story of technological arms races. While we indeed have been merely shifting back and forth between chaos and oppression over the millennia, our technology has steadily advanced in its capacity to amplify conflict. And since we use technology to improve technology, this amplification is actually happening on an exponential curve, one that is about to go vertical. which means we are running out of oscillations before an irreversible phase shift into either of the two failure modes is inevitable. This seems to leave us with a depressing decision between two highly undesirable timelines. A solution into complete chaos or devolution into absolute oppression. One might naively conclude the way forward ought to be a compromise between the two, a sort of middle path where we balance a bit of chaos with a bit of oppression and vice versa. The problem with this approach though is the fact that this naive compromise lies between two attractors and thus is highly unstable. In the context of exponential technology, walking this middle path can be likened to the impossible task of threading the eye of a needle in the midst of a hurricane. It thus offers no meaningful ground for hope. Clearly, if we seek to transcend this dynamic, we need to widen our perspective on the situational assessment.

      This binary framing does not seem so helpful. There are other ways to frame the exploration of oscillating conditions. The following graphic illustrates -->

    3. apex of this structure sits the spirit of fragmentation itself, which maximizes its leverage by manipulating its worshippers to manipulate others.

      Instead of "fragmentation" prefer the word "individualism" as a cultural meme or "separation" as a barrier to a quantum physics lens.

    4. We are thus so much more reliant on our worldview than most people realize.

      Bingo! For example, "individualism" is a fantasy that widely shaped relations in the West

    5. The only thing we can expect to observe is an increasing inability to come together on even the most basic of issues where we used to welcome diversity of perspectives leading to a complete erosion of the social fabric of our society from our institutions to communities all the way down towards the family unit

      Different "memetic clusters" (e.g. gender, family, tribe, marketplace, nation, etc....) have different arrangements for the co-regulation of meaning, trauma, etc. And not all of these "family-based" or "nation-based" agreements are compatible.

    6. Contrary to common belief, violence on this planet has not decreased in recent generations, but has shapeshifted into more subtle and sinister forms. Where the effects of traditional warfare were evident to the naked eye, the effects of this type of warfare are much harder to detect and hence much easier to deny.

      Excellent point about the "invisibilization of warfare" (better word than "warfare" needed -invisibilization of domination / extractive coercion, "othering", trauma, abuse, maladapted patterns, .....?)

    7. et's refer to these realms as the biosphere, the social sphere, and the nuosphere respectively. Together they form an integrated hole which cannot be meaningfully understood by analyzing any of its parts in isolation.

      "Noosphere" is a bigger concept than the "memetic" layer. Memetic is principally human minds, their footprints and emerging and derivative cognitive (?) Algorithms

    8. Beyond its physical manifestation, there's also the possibility for social as well as mimetic or narrative engineering.

      Great way to point to hidden frames

    9. All our creative attention should rather be focused on moving collectively towards the third attractor of wholeness.

      Agree EXCEPT that "Wholeness" is a mirage /limited mental model where two ideas are repeatedly conflated 1) a perspective "greater than my (our) own understanding " and 2) a presumed universal "whole" greater than my (our) current understanding (current or next)

      The assumption that "whole" maybe graspable by one, some, all is an aspiration / conceit rather than something which can be taken as given.

      So there is a question of how to optimize under incomplete, imperfect, fragmented and asymmetrical knowledge conditions rather than assume "becoming smarter / enlightened" resolves everything.

  3. Dec 2024
    1. The Everywheres are on the contrary nomadic elements that are willing to be of service to cosmo-local productive economic alliances, seeding various locales with the trans-local experience, both of other locales they may have visited, but also of the network itself.

      Seductive analogy. Reminds me of Daniel Schmatchtenberger's Game A (civilizational problems of competition) and Game B (beyond competition) that creates a simple US vs. THEM for convening the like-minded activists, but not sure it accurately describes the virtual landscape well-enough for implementers seeking to develop and deploy new type(s) of competence.

    2. capacity to globally coordinate human labor and fund it

      Proof of global design and proof of successful implementation globally have very different evidentiary basis for being asserted as true

    3. The idea here is a potential ‘entanglement’ between the local and the translocal level, which creates new levels of strength and capacity for the local.

      As noted earlier' this relationship is changing and it is not strictly a binary

    4. Cosmo-localism is compatible with functional city alliances that bypass nation-state levels of organization (for example, say a trans-local city league of FairBnB’s), but it is also compatible with a bioregional reorganization of the physical-productive world, in which bioregionalization is facilitated by the historical and political unifying tradition of the nation-state.

      Agree. **Deepening the city-planet eco&econ-links are probably the most promising / influential leverage point for cosmo-localism as a movement. **

    5. Traditional surviving kinship-based solidarity models are now supplemented by affinity-based neo-tribes that share a common social object in the commons they are mutually dependent on.

      Are the original solidarity models really “supplemented (suplanted?) by new forms of solidarity identified here? Evidence?

      Different forms of social solidarity models have been digitally disrupted; but inherited wealth and privilege (kin-based solidarity) continues to the primary basis maintenance and sustainment of economic power.

      Digital disruption of an industry is not the same as economic power disruption. the attentional (info)spaces which Journalism has traditionally shaped have been digitally captured and funded with a different revenue model and attention capture system (“social media”); Journalism’s business model has been supplanted; but the domination of social media through kin-based solidarity & domination ( economic owners) is as powerful as ever

    6. the creation of a new type of commons-based regulatory mechanism that can operate on a global level.

      Perhaps a more humble and scalable approach is to support intercommoning across jurisdictions and disciplines which can solve distributed learning challenges

    7. cosmo-local option and strategy is concerned with translocally strengthening alliances of locally-oriented regenerative production.

      Remember the cosmolocal frame presented here is oversimplified to impractical degree. Local could refer to local watershed (entire Amazon basin, a major tributary only, a secondary tributary etc; there are 12 levels of branching tracked representing different levels of “local”

    8. the creation of a new type of commons-based regulatory mechanism that can operate on a global level.

      More localized goal that may scale globally?

      Creation of transdisciplinary nested symbiotic learning within, between and beyond groups, jurisdictions, and disciplines

    9. we have provided a ‘global history of regulation’, which indicates the systemic characteristics that the new system must have.

      I found the history interesting. Thought some of these “must have conclusions “ were aspirational and theoretic rather than pragmatically evolved / emergent.

    10. In that context, it is important to acknowledge that the new economic institution is not just a corporation, or even a ‘cooperative’, but an ‘organized network with commons’. Like the example of the DAO, this is a ‘meta-container’ that can organize at a higher level of integration, non-market (permissionless contributions), market (commodity-based value), but also public players.

      An example would make this less notional / abstract

    11. extractive forms of ownership, to more generative forms of property,

      Suggestion: Replace “generative with symbiotic”?

    12. The entrepreneurs, or as we would like to call them, the ‘entredonneurs’. These are all those that add value to the open source common base, and create ‘value for the market’.

      Wonder if entredonneurs is in sufficiently attune to who benefits from its donations. And perhaps the idea of “donation” itself is a perversion or narcissism presuming the donor knows what is wanted needed by the consumers of her donations"?

    13. Web3 and crypto have created the capacity to fund shared infrastructures in open eco-systems, through processes such as public goods funding; other advances in funding make it possible to move towards bioregional regenerative funding ecosystems

      I hear this talked about more often, But I don’t see new players getting new money. Rather the same ole givers and receivers?

    14. What is heavy should be local, and what is light should be global and shared.

      Overly simple? Rather than a binary local - cosmo, some biological models of self-organization have nested levels of optimization based on the context

    15. One of them is the perception of parasitical or exploitative activity. A certain ‘rootlessness’ may be attached to this form of human identity.

      Indeed

    16. abetted by the more collective ‘cosmic’ knowledge of the appropriate ‘cosmic’ guilds.

      Rather than a binary cosmo-local architecture, intelligence models and biology suggest dynamically nested levels of “guilds of competence” (macro competence, mezo-competence, micro-competence, nano-competence, etc….) 'continuously optimizing between levels

    17. such as the ‘mycelium’ paradigm

      Very interesting and promising idea. The examples provide at the link seem more closely linked to related fields such as “living systems” generally than characteristic of mycelial sytems?

    18. sustainable

      Regenerative practice"

    19. A culture of translocal cooperation and mutual learning has been created, creating capacities for digital nomads for being the catalysts for translocal production alliances.

      Digital nomads is a term that best describes remote employees, and global thought leaders rather than a new type of localist. It is possible for locals to build critical mass a solidarity with web than was possible previously. But knowledge exchange and virtual contracting are very different.

      Funded or unfunded cooperation? Digital Models like DEVEX where infomediaries have funded activities and trans local economic roles seem to be rare

    20. this means that the switch in growth from towards exclusive efficiency, towards a balance between efficiency and resilience, can be accelerated. This is what we have called ‘True Accelerationism’.

      Don’t follow this logic entirely, believe a better argument is from uní-dimensional performance and efficiency to multi-dimensional continuously harmonizing distributed adaptability

      https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/8gu5vdffjai396ya41jzp/Simplified-Framework-for-Comparing-Socio-Econ-Environmental-Impacts-Targeted.png?rlkey=8lz8on9l98nie4d5lup8lo6gr&st=f4c7az63&dl=0

    21. True Accelerationism’.

      Not a fan of this label. Gandhi reminded us that there was more to life than increasing it speed. The Acceleration frame presupposed “faster is self-evidently better”. Suggest other labels for core shift such as Hagens “the Great Simplification “ or my own “ the great Amplification” (of “Connected Competence” or of “Aliveness”)

    22. open source knowledge, this means that any innovation anywhere in the common network, is instantly available to every node in the network

      Not true, and innovation can disrupt the established competences

    23. Production on demand can eliminate the huge impetus to create artificial needs and desires

      The on-demand model in fashion, and other rapid delivery industry Suggest otherwise.

    24. Relocalizing production saves a sizeable amount of matter and energy

      Restores the vitality and diversity of the local economy, possibly the self reliance as well.

    25. requires

      Relies?

    26. very long time periods

      This varies by industry. The IT industry does not behave entirely this way

    27. mass production,

      Mass consumption (rather than mass production)?

    28. Cosmo-localism is an approach that aims to combine resilient and regenerative forms of localized production

      Local economic permaculture?

    1. The one thing we just cannot be bothered to get off our bottoms to do, which is the only thing that works. Mobilisation

      A new approach to micro-mobilzation - "In your circles, co-dismantle the learned helplessness around big things."

      Www.theweek.ooo (climate change example)

    2. How else can we address the challenge of convincing those who do not share the same values as ourselves of our case?”. In other words, we are trying to make a case to people who just don’t care about the natural world. How do we convince them, when they don’t share those values, to change their minds

      Very good question

    3. £700 million. That’s the aesthetic value: in other words, what it looks like. We will value the increment in what it looks like at £700 million. It said that if grassland and sites of special scientific interest were better protected, their wildlife value would increase by £40 million. The value of their wildlife – like the chalk hill blues and the dog violets that live on protected grasslands – would be enhanced by £40 million.

      His argument is the valuation by the market is flawed. Agree. <br /> No valuation is without challenges. The examples Monbiot provides here are currency/market-based valuations of natural assets.

      A different valuation of nature in a recently widely-circulated Big Finance (UBS) paper assess the risk to financial capital from failure to assess natural resource degradation properly. It too has limitations, but risk avoidance is a much stronger motivator of Big Finance behavior than constructing notional natural asset valuations which constrain the privilege & power of financiers.

      https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/year-nature-finance-business-biodiversity-part-three-van-peborgh-chmyf?

    4. they devise a series of ideas and theories and mechanisms which are supposed to do what we’ve been unable to do by other means: to protect the world from the despoilation and degradation which have done it so much harm. I’m talking about the development of what could be called the Natural Capital Agenda: the pricing, valuation, monetisation, financialisation of nature in the name of saving it.

      Monbiot's both-sides critique of "1) failing to value nature properly is a market failure and 2) monetizing natural capital more effectively will lead to another pseudo-market success where quantitative extractivism is justified by reductionist quantitative-rationalism devoid of holistic or difficult to quantify systemic sensibilities.

  4. Nov 2024
    1. Our entire operating system needs to be regenerated and rebooted. That is exactly what happens when successful islands of coherence are prototyped, explored, and scaled to generate ecosystems of coherence

      Amen. This is the focus of Me2We2All- amplifying aliveness through more skillful connected learning and adaptation.

    2. Our learning systems must change from teaching for testing toward education for human flourishing in ways that activate our deep capacities for co-sensing and co-creating the emerging future (which is a multi-country initiative that we at the Presencing Institute are just launching with the OECD and their high pe

      Bingo a

    3. I have seen plenty of islands of coherence over the years that never translated into uplifting any of the larger systems.In order to generate change, islands of coherence need to be connected — with each other and with those that are not yet fully formed. Those connections can be made with the help of generative holding spaces that weave the islands into an ecosystem of coherence and that realign attention, intention, and agency at the scale of the whole.

      "Linking islands of coherence into connected competence"

    4. When a system is far from equilibrium small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to lift the entire system to a higher order.

      Opportunity for action/impact based on connecting and enactivating our own, feasible islands of coherence.

      "Connecting local coherence into competence greater than"

    5. What’s missing obviously is a viable third option that would disrupt and transform the status quo by leaning into and operating from an awareness of the emerging future

      Active inference is natural (and mathematical) way to describe and model the predicted landscape and adapt to the emergent surprise

    6. regulating the change we want to see — toward bottom-up: co-generating and embodying the change we want to see. Instead of government being the primary instigator of societal change, businesses, civil society, and leaders across institutions must learn how to work together, how to organize around shared awareness and intentions across many institution and sector boundaries. Obviously, the choice is not either-or. But the primary emphasis of change making may shift toward building collective capacity for bottom-up cross-sector innovation, for organizing around shared intention.

      Amen.

    7. two sources of legitimacy. One is the democractic process. That’s the one that Western thinking tends to focus on. But the other one is the quality of results.

      Love this! Too often the hunt for consensus gets in the ways of the other form of legitimacy - competence.

    8. What did many of these progressive movements end up doing? Creating new cultural norms and new government regulations. Many of them mark important accomplishments and progress. Some of them are perhaps a bit over the top. But what’s often missing? The perspective of the makers, the frontline professionals who must operate inside ever-growing straightjackets of regulation and bureaucracy

      Great critique. Enactivating change management through "corrective standards and regulation" distorts surprising moments from opportunities for distributed learnign into a compliance checklist for heirarchy

    9. also on the deeper conditions of social soil

      Presencing Institute's U-theory is one approach to co-sensing and co-cultivating the relational soil. Prosocial.world 's ACT matrix is a great tools for setting up for co-compassing forward. See here for demo --> https://www.sociocracyforall.org/activating-collective-resilience-and-intimacy-michael-lennon-kathleen-walsh-loubna-echabbi/

  5. Oct 2024
    1. Evolution therefore involves an increasing complexification of both the hardware (material-biological organisation) and software (cognitive capabilities) of life.

      The prediction of greater complexity arises from Free Energy Principle and Active Inferencen not Evolution.

    2. Evolutionary competition between species selects for living systems which can maximise the efficiency with which they harness and dissipate energy in harmony with environmental conditions. At every new stage of this process, life is navigating its relationship with earth in an evolutionary dance between its hardware and software.The X-curve at the

      I like his attempt to use evolution-related vocabulary to frame his narrative; he has a different intuition of Friston's free energy principle than myself. my understanding of friston does not depend of evolution-related memes for its dynamics

    3. Life can therefore be understood as an energy-dissipating system that contributes to increasing entropy in the universe by extracting ‘free energy’ in the environment and dissipating it as heat, all as efficiently as possible through paths of least energy.

      Perhaps another way to describe what is happening instead of "energy-dissipation" is "Life translates 'free (random) energy' into patterns which can persist and evolve into meta-patterns and so on"

      Or "Emergence arises from patterns able to form & self-sustain in the presence of continuous dynamics (energy) "

    4. Life can therefore be understood as an energy-dissipating system that contributes to increasing entropy in the universe by extracting ‘free energy’ in the environment and dissipating it as heat, all as efficiently as possible through paths of least energy. Through millions of years of evolution, this has driven living systems - from cells to the biosphere - to increase in complexity, resulting in higher forms of energy

      Surprised to see Karl Friston (who identified the Free Energy Principle) has yet to be mentioned anywhere so far.

    5. In The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life, theoretical physicist Paul Davies of Arizona State University argues that life can be defined as an astounding combination of ‘hardware’ and ‘software’. The ‘hardware’ is a configuration of matter which harnesses energy from its environment with surprising efficiency and dissipates it as waste back into the environment. The ‘software’ consists of the complex information structures – such as the genetic coding – by which that configuration of matter and energy is organised and instructed to self-reproduce.

      Beautifully summarized. I was introduced to this "biophysics of intelligence" lens by the podcast Machine Learning Street Talk's interview of Karl Friston. https://youtu.be/V_VXOdf1NMw? The first 10 minutes are particularly of interest to technologists interested in the future of AI beyond LLMs (e.g. chat gpt)

    6. planetary phase shift

      Conceptually interesting . Skeptical that the precision of understanding and mechanisms from physics and chemistry apply as precisely to planetary dynamics as he suggests, but this claim is a logical inference derived from the free energy principle as posited by Karl Friston

    1. An Active Inference Model of Collective Intelligence

      Short explanation of a Model for collective intelligence based upon the socio-cognitive traits of individual members Active Inference

  6. Sep 2024
    1. The increased organization of productive activity meant the increased experience of the transformative power of labor as well as a surplus of intellectual labor for reflecting upon the meaning, value, and use of work.

      Curious claim: monasteries were the first social institutions where synergies from coordinated labor and coordinated reflection (intellectual surplus) led to productivity and innovation benefits which benefited the culture in outsized manners.

    2. The social body was thus marked by a severe and tightly maintained division between a small fraction of a propertied class free from the need to labor and the rest, “free” or unfree, whose lives were consumed by laboring for another.

      Was the "enslavement of labor" more about the depriving those doing work from the right to receive (or negotiate to receive) shared surplus? Or was it about the labor? It seems the systemic problem arises less from labor and more from distorting (obstructing) the negotiation of compensation / distribution of surplus &/or the practice of more holistically-oriented mutualism across, within and beyond the with members and the natural place where they are.

    3. The task, then, is not to eliminate its religious consciousness, but to develop it from the true rationalization of labor according to its own ratio of perfection, i.e. to therein find its corresponding religious forms of thought that illuminate and reinvest in its capacities for the infinite and eternal."

      I wonder if the author has explored non-Christian Western perspectives e.g. Judaism perspective on the role of labor in among "the Chosen People"?

    4. Labor’s valorization thus emerged from recognition precisely in and through a religious form that implied labor was itself an intrinsic salvific act.

      This idea of "labor as salvation" (as practiced in northern Europe and its colonies) strikes me as a perfectly Protestant notion, rather as something emerging from the older monastic traditions of Christiandom

    5. This labor can be put at the service of human society, the life of the non-human, and if you are so inclined, in service to the very Ground of Being.

      What he is describing as "labor transformed", I call "creativity"

    6. the failure to think through and cultivate labor, as the material capacity for socially creating radical change, leaves the religious, as the cultural expression of real desires and intentions for radical change, to its most repressively alienating and distorting forms.

      ?! Instead of "redefining labor" perhaps "liberating (or amplifying) creativity" is closer to where the author is going?

    7. as formative in the creation of new forms of human consciousness

      Alt description? - memetic evolution of subjectivity?

    8. post-literate

      Rather than "post-literate" perhaps "insta-literate" (shorter attention) or "mem-iteracy" (or "memetic fluency") instead text-centric communicational fluency?