The epoch of the nuclear Anthropocene

Each day, there seem to be so many epiphanies. That shift in awareness feels overwhelming. I’m not sure what to do with these realizations, as the next right thing is often uncertain and ambiguous. Charles Eisenstein is drawing me into an exploration of sacred economics.

On Saturday, October 9, after our World Weavers conversation on the topic Matter is Derivative of Consciousness, I was exploring Value Village, a thrift store in Chilliwack, with my wife, Jayne. I came across a book that fits with the theme for our World Weavers conversation on October 23: Shifting from an attention economy to an intention economy.

Sacred Economics

By Charles Eisenstein

Sacred money, then, will be a medium of giving, a means to imbue the global economy with the spirit of the gift that governed tribal and village cultures, and still does today wherever people do things for each other outside the money economy.

Sacred Economics describes this future and also maps out a practical way to get there. Long ago I grew tired of reading books that criticized some aspect of our society without offering a positive alternative. Then I grew tired of books that offered a positive alternative that seemed impossible to reach: “We must reduce carbon emissions by 90 percent.” Then I grew tired of books that offered a plausible means of reaching it but did not describe what I personally, could do to create it. Sacred Economics operates on all four levels: it offers a fundamental analysis of what has gone wrong with money; it describes a more beautiful world based on a different kind of money and economy; it explains the collective actions necessary to create that world and the means by which these actions come about; and it explores the personal dimensions of the world-transformation, the change in identity and being that I call “living in the gift.”

(Page XIX)

I am curious to read The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson as recommended by Raphaelle Moatti in the Design Science Studio coheART2.

"If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future."

— Ezra Klein

Quoted on the Amazon product page for the book, The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.

The book was recommended by Raphaelle Moatti in the Design Science Studio coheART2.

Recommended by Raphaelle Moatti in the Design Science Studio coheART2.

The Amazon product page for the book, Ministry for the Future, quotes Ezra Klein.

If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.

Canadaland: Commons

Introducing our new season… Mining

Stories about the dirty business of Canadian mining.

Mining is a dirty business, but it is what Canada does best. Three-quarters of the world’s mining companies are best right here in the Great White North.

In our new season, Commons: Mining, we’ll be digging deep into the practices and the history of the extractive industry. From the gold rushes that shaped the country to the cover-ups and the outright frauds at home and abroad.

Canada was built on extracting what lay under the land, no matter the damage it did or who it ended up hurting.

The first episode of Commons: Mining comes out on October 13th.

Canada is fake

Canada is not an accident or a work in progress or a thought experiment. I mean that Canada is a scam — a pyramid scheme, a ruse, a heist. Canada is a front. And it’s a front for a massive network of resource extraction companies, oil barons, and mining magnates.

Extraction Empire

Globally, more than 75% of prospecting and mining companies on the planet are based in Canada. Seemingly impossible to conceive, the scale of these statistics naturally extends the logic of Canada’s historical legacy as state, nation, and now, as global resource empire.

Canada’s Indian Reserve System served, officially, as a strategy of Indigenous apartheid (preceding South African apartheid) and unofficially, as a policy of Indigenous genocide (preceding the Nazi concentration camps of World War II).

Theft on a grand scale

It’s really been about theft on a grand scale. Look at how the United Kingdom became rich, or England and then Britain as it was, at the time. It was through bleeding India dry, we bled $45 trillion out of India. We taxed the subcontinent until there was virtually nothing left, then used a small amount of that tax money to buy its goods. So we were buying goods with their own money. And then we used the phenomenal profits — 100% profits — from that enterprise to finance the capture of other nations, and the colonization of those nations and the citizens, the railways and the other things we built in order to drain wealth out of them.

— George Monbiot

The Doctrine of Discovery

Since the Doctrine of Discovery was issued by a Papal Bull in 1493, Western Europeans have used this document as legal justification for the genocide, colonization, extraction, and profit from the theft of land and its resources in what they called the New World.

Extraction Empire

Globally, more than 75% of prospecting and mining companies on the planet are based in Canada. Seemingly impossible to conceive, the scale of these statistics naturally extends the logic of Canada’s historical legacy as state, nation, and now, as global resource empire.

Canada’s Indian Reserve System served, officially, as a strategy of Indigenous apartheid (preceding South African apartheid) and unofficially, as a policy of Indigenous genocide (preceding the Nazi concentration camps of World War II).

The Art of Noticing

This is a compilation of articles that I had written as a way to process the changes I was observing in the world and, consequently, in myself as a reaction to the events. I have come to think of this process as the art of noticing. This process is in contrast to the expectation that I should be a productive member of society, a target market, and a passive audience for charismatic leaders: celebrities, billionaires, and politicians.

• Social: fame
• Economic: wealth
• Political: power

An Agent of Change

To become an agent of change is to recognize that we are not separate, we are not individuals, we are not cogs in a machine. We are complex and diverse. We are designers. We are a creative, collective, self-organizing, learning community.

We are in a process of becoming—a being journey:

• Personal resilience
• Social influence
• Economic capacity
• Political agency
• Ecological harmony

This is how we shift from an attention economy to an intention economy. Rather than being oriented toward the failures of the past, the uncertainty of the present, or the worries of the future, in a constant state of anxiety, stress, and fear, we are shifting our consciousness to manifest our intention through perception (senses), cognition (mind), emotion (heart), and action (body). We are exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.

We are the builders collective.

We are one.

I use the metaphor of a compromised immune system to describe the effects of propaganda, the polluted information ecology in which we are swimming.

Ultimately, the cognitive distortions are the disease of modern life, where we can no longer understand ourselves or our world, because the disinformation campaigns have impaired our ability to think rationally when we are in a constant state of stress, anxiety, and fear. We become stuck in the lizard brain, the limbic system, where we make emotional decisions and subsequently justify our actions with rationalizations.

Theft on a Grand Scale

Theft on a grand scale

New European Bauhaus

Prize Categories

• Techniques, materials and processes for construction and design
• Buildings renovated in a spirit of circularity
• Solutions for the co-evolution of built environment and nature
• Regenerated urban and rural spaces
• Products and life style
• Preserved and transformed cultural heritage
• Reinvented places to meet and share
• Mobilisation of culture, arts and communities
• Modular, adaptable and mobile living solutions
• Interdisciplinary education models

If the Bauhaus existed today, what would it look like?

What would the Bauhaus do differently, learning from the mistakes of the past and how modernism was co-opted by neoliberal capitalism.

Shared by Mark Smith

Shared by Mark Wagnon

Matt Mullenweg’s criticism of Jamstack.

Going Jamstack with React, Serverless, and Airtable

Exploring the possibility of integrating Airtable into the Builders Collective, I started looking into the Airtable API and integration into a Jamstack workflow. A CSS-Tricks article came up in a search.

After the second meeting of the Stop Reset Go team, I created this publication and article on Medium to document our process.

The builders collective is documenting a community into existence.

Ferial Puren mentioned 528 Hz as the frequency of love.

Violeta Bulc, having formed a shadow government, was officially elected into the Slovenian government.

The Stop Reset Go team met with Violeta on Tuesday, and again in a call on Wednesday with the Crowdpol team.

Eichmann in Jerusalem

A report on the banality of evil

“The Bauhaus concept, as it was transplanted to the United States, was fundamentally different from the principles upon which the experimental school had been founded in Weimar in 1919. The guiding principle of the Bauhaus was to unify all aspects of art making—painting, sculpture, handicrafts—as elements of a new kind of art, erasing the division between “high” and decorative art. Explorations of materials, color, and form were important building blocks of the curriculum. The artists and designers of the Bauhaus believed that this new type of art and design would help to create a better society, and they sought commissions to design public buildings and other elements of public life (such as flags and currency). In America, however, the Bauhaus ideas lost their social and political thrust. The emigré teachers in Chicago, Cambridge, and North Carolina who had been committed to progressive architecture and design ideas in Germany were now lionized as upholders of a pure, reductivist style.”

(Stephanie Barron, page 25)

Edge Effects

It was in the Design Science Studio that I learned about edge effects.

Yesterday, I was thinking about how my life embodies the concept of edge effects. That same day, a book was delivered to our door, Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek.

Today, I was reading these words:

Design for the Real World

Design for Survival and Survival through Design: A Summation

Integrated, comprehensive, anticipatory design is the act of planning and shaping carried on across the various disciplines, an act continuously carried on at interfaces between them.

Victor Papanek goes on to say:

It is at the border of different techniques or disciplines that most new discoveries are made and most action is inaugurated. It is when two differing areas of knowledge are brought into contact with one another that… a new science may come into being.

(Page 323)

Exiles and Emigrés

The Bauhaus spread its ideas because it existed at the boundaries, the avant-garde, the edges of what was thought to be possible, especially as a socialist utopian idea found its way to a capitalist industrial-military complex, where the concept of modernism was co-opted and colonized by globalizing economic forces beyond the control of the individual. Design was the virus that propagated around the world through the vehicle of corporate globalization.

That same design ethic is infecting corporations with a conscience, with empathy, with a process that begins with listening to people. Design is the virus that can spread the values of unconditional love throughout the body of neoliberal capitalism.

This is mechanism for the Canadian genocide.

Marc Miller, Minister of Indigenous Services

Two years ago, the RCMP promised to modernize and reform its culture, to do better, and that Indigenous Peoples and their communities were entitled to the best there was of the RCMP. This is the minimum standard to be upheld. There is work to do.

A good white Canadian telling us how systemic racism works: through intransigent bureaucracy and the learned helplessness of its citizens as land theft and genocide on behalf of the Crown continues unabated.

Canada is racist.

The Indian Act is genocide.

You can tell by what they are not saying, “You are right. We stole this land. We had no right. We are giving it back and giving up our power, because we have neglected to fulfill our end of the treaties and promises. We have been getting rich off of your resources and we are paying back what we stole. That is the least that we can do.”

The mechanisms of our compliance with the dominant system are designed into the system:

• Social: learned helplessness (individuality)
• Economic: trained incapacities (specialization)
• Political: bureaucratic intransigence (authoritarianism)

Fascist Architecture

See Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt.

“It spells out so clearly that Nazi Germany’s worst atrocities and many atrocities the world over were not only the ideas of singular evil men. They were supported and enacted by systems, by groups of people who woke up in the morning and went to offices to work on it.”

— Avery Trufelman, Nice Try! Podcast

Call It Democracy

A culture of learned helplessness, trained incapacities, and bureaucratic intransigence are the social, economic, and political mechanisms of coercion that have worked so effectively over 153 years to design, build, and maintain a genocidal, apartheid state.

The Canadian genocide operates on the basis of exclusion, division, and disempowerment:

• Social: learned helplessness
• Economic: trained incapacities
• Political: bureaucratic intransigence

Watch the Canadian Prime Minister make the argument that institutions such as the Federal Government of the Dominion of Canada and the Catholic Church are set in their ways and inherently resistant to change. Change does not come from institutions, designed to maintain the status quo.

If the issue of changing the name of a building in Parliament is going to take more conversation and more time, clearly time is on the side of Canada, but not on the side of the Indigenous Peoples. Democracy, capitalism, and constitutional monarchy are weapons of the state.

The goal of white supremacy is to disempower through the ongoing threat of violence to legitimize the social, economic, and political architecture designed to manufacture the consent of the governed to the rule of law and the Crown.

A culture of learned helplessness, trained incapacities, and bureaucratic intransigence are the social, economic, and political mechanisms of coercion that have worked so effectively over 153 years to design, build, and maintain a genocidal, apartheid state.

It is not possible to make incremental changes to a killing machine to mitigate the harms. The Nazi regime had to be dismantled. The Canadian genocide ends with the dismantling of the Canadian regime. Declare the claims of the Crown to the land illegitimate. #LandBack

The solution is simple. But white supremacy is about power. Letting go is hard. Until the mind of the White Supremacist changes, the public relations spectacles will continue, and the violence of the RCMP and the bureaucratic apartheid state will escalate genocide and ecocide.

Individualism and the illusion of legislative representation disempower the solidarity of collective action, enabling the public consent and complicity in the Canadian genocide with impunity. Change would require agreement, coordination, and collaboration.

We have a model for change that we can borrow from corporations that have weaponized collective consciousness, action, and governance. The design process has been proven as a successful model for global domination, monopolizing human time, energy, and resources.

However, with greater disillusionment in the promises of our institutions, we are experiencing multiple systemic failures, leaving us with deep dissatisfaction in the existing reality with no sense of a desirable, feasible, or viable alternative.

We are all designers. We can reclaim our power from the authoritarians to which we have abdicated our collective power. We can reclaim our social influence, economic capacity, and political agency. Indigenous History: Learning from the past to create a future that works for all

We invite people to collaborate with us in the process of changing the world by first changing ourselves through the process of design.

We are exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.

We will begin by recreating our own realities by starting with an understanding of our relationships with each other and to all living beings and to the universe of shared experiences in which we find ourselves.

We will begin with an appreciation of the complexity, diversity, and unity of this Creation that binds us to each other as neighbours and kin.

We acknowledge that we are living on the unceded territories of those who have lived on these lands from time immemorial. We seek to share the good things of this earth, taking only what is given, living in reciprocity by giving back more than what we have been given.

Design Professionals of Canada

DesCan invites you to participate and be part of the change.

I tried to be part of that change by focusing on the process of decolonizing design. However, it seems that the community was not ready for this approach, and I was excluded.

I have learned that exclusion zones are the modus operandi of Canadian social, economic, and political systems.

Design for the Real World

You have to make up your mind either to make sense or to make money, if you want to be a designer.

— R. Buckminster Fuller

(Page 86)

Design for the Real World

Victor Papanek’s book includes an introduction written by R. Buckminster Fuller, Carbondale, Illinois. (Sadly, the Thames & Hudson 2019 Third Edition does not include this introduction. Monoskop has preserved the following text as a PDF file of images. I have transcribed a portion below.)

Buckminster Fuller on Design

In this book, Victor Papanek speaks about everything as design. I agree with that and will elaborate on it in my own way.

To me the word “design” can mean either a weightless, metaphysical conception or a physical pattern. I tend to differentiate between design as a subjective experience, i.e., designs which affect me and produce involuntary and often subconscious reactions, in contradistinction to the designs that I undertake objectively in response to stimuli. What I elect to do consciously is objective design. When we say there is a design, it indicates that an intellect has organized events into discrete and conceptual inter-patternings. Snowflakes are design, crystals are design, music is design, and the electromagnetic spectrum of which the rainbow colors are but one millionth of its range is design; planets, stars, galaxies, and their contained behaviours such as the periodical regularities of the chemical elements are all design-accomplishments. If a DNA-RNA genetic code programs the design of roses, elephants, and bees, we will have to ask what intellect designed the DNA-RNA code as well as the atoms and molecules which implement the coded programs.

The opposite of design is chaos. Design is intelligent or intelligible. Most of the design subjectively experienced by humans is a priori the design of sea waves, winds, birds, animals, grasses, flowers, rocks, mosquitoes, spiders, salmon, crabs, and flying fish. Humans are confronted with an a priori, comprehensive, designing intellect which for instance has designed the sustenance of life on the planet we call earth through the primary impoundment of Sun energy on Earth by the photosynthetic functioning of vegetation, during which process all the by-product gases given off by the vegetation are designed to be the specific chemical gases essential to sustaining all mammalian life on Earth, and when these gases are consumed by the mammals, they in turn are transformed again by chemical combining and disassociations, to product the by-product gases essential to the regeneration of the vegetation, thus completing a totally regenerative ecological design cycle.

If one realizes that the universe is sum-totally an evolutionary design integrity, then one may be prone to acknowledge that an a priori intellect of infinitely vast considerateness and competence is everywhere and everywhere overwhelmingly manifest.

In view of a number of discoveries such as the ecological regeneration manifest in the mammalian-vegetation interexchange of gases, we can comprehend why responsibly thinking humans have time and again throughout the ages come to acknowledge a supra-human omniscience and omnipotence.

The self-regenerative scenario universe is an a prior design integrity. The universe is everywhere, and continually, manifesting an intellectual integrity which inherently comprehends all macro-micro event patterning and how to employ that information objectively with omni-consideration of all inter-effects and reactions. The universe manifests an extraordinary aggregate of generalized principles, none of which contradict one another and all of which are inter-accommodative, with some of the inter-accommodations exhibiting high exponential levels of synergetic surprise. Some of them involve fourth-power geometrical levels of energy interactions.

Design for the Real World

by Victor Papanek

Papanek on the Bauhaus

Many of the “sane design” or “design reform” movements of the time, such as those engendered by the writings and teachings of William Morris in England and Elbert Hubbard in the United States, were rooted in a sort of Luddite antimachine philosophy. By contrast Frank Llloyd Wright said as early as 1894 that “the machine is here to stay” and that the designer should “use this normal tool of civilization to best advantage instead of prostituting it as he has hitherto done in reproducing with murderous ubiquity forms born of other times and other conditions which it can only serve to destroy.” Yet designers of the last century were either perpetrators of voluptuous Victorian-Baroque or members of an artsy-craftsy clique who were dismayed by machine technology. The work of the Kunstgewerbeschule in Austria and the German Werkbund anticipated things to come, but it was not until Walter Gropius founded the German Bauhaus in 1919 that an uneasy marriage between art and machine was achieved.

No design school in history had greater influence in shaping taste and design than the Bauhaus. It was the first school to consider design a vital part of the production process rather than “applied art” or “industrial arts.” It became the first international forum on design because it drew its faculty and students from all over the world, and its influence traveled as these people later founded design offices and schools in many countries. Almost every major design school in the United States today still uses the basic foundation course developed by the Bauhaus. It made good sense in 1919 to let a German 19-year-old experiment with drill press and circular saw, welding torch and lathe, so that he might “experience the interaction between tool and material.” Today the same method is an anachronism, for an American teenager has spent much of his life in a machine-dominated society (and cumulatively probably a great deal of time lying under various automobiles, souping them up). For a student whose American design school slavishly imitates teaching patterns developed by the Bauhaus, computer sciences and electronics and plastics technology and cybernetics and bionics simply do not exist. The courses the Bauhaus developed were excellent for their time and place (telesis), but American schools following this pattern in the eighties are perpetuating design infantilism.

The Bauhaus was in a sense a nonadaptive mutation in design, for the genes contributing to its convergence characteristics were badly chosen. In boldface type, it announced its manifesto: “Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all turn to the crafts.… Let us create a new guild of craftsmen!” The heavy emphasis on interaction between crafts, art, and design turned out to be a blind alley. The inherent nihilism of the pictorial arts of the post-World War I period had little to contribute that would be useful to the average, or even to the discriminating, consumer. The paintings of Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger, et al., on the other hand, had no connection whatsoever with the anemic elegance some designers imposed on products.

(Pages 30-31)

Victor Papanek’s book includes an introduction written by R. Buckminster Fuller, Carbondale, Illinois. (Sadly, the Thames & Hudson 2019 Third Edition does not include this introduction. Monoskop has preserved this text as a PDF file of images. I have transcribed a portion here.)

Tools for Changemakers

Shared by Ferial Puren

On September 8, 2021, I received an email from Orhan Cakir, Managing Director, Bauhaus Movement:

Dear Stephen…

I wanted to let you know that from November we will be publishing the Bauhaus Movement Magazine every 3 months. I would like to have an interview with you and your activities regarding the Bauhaus in Canada. The magazine is published in several languages and regions. Can you imagine a collaboration?

The same topic is covered by Anand Giridharadas in Winners Take All and by Amy Westervelt in her podcast Drilled exploring the history of public relations.

We had the privilege of interacting with Vandana Shiva in the Trimtab Space Camp course, focused on regenerative agriculture, offered by the Buckminster Fuller Institute.

Vandana Shiva, a world-renowned environmental thinker, activist, feminist, philosopher of science, writer, and science policy advocate, is the founder of Navdanya Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology in India and President of Navdanya International.

The recipient of many awards, including the Right Livelihood Award, (the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’) and the Sydney Peace Prize, she has been named among the top five “Most Important People in Asia” by AsiaWeek.

She is a prolific writer and author of numerous books and serves on the board of the International Forum on Globalization, and a member of the executive committee of the World Future Council.

This is the missing curriculum in design education.

Independent journalism for the win.

I am inspired by Amy Westervelt’s deep exploration of the history of public relations, advertising, and marketing to polish the reputations of billionaires and fossil fuel corporations in her podcast, Drilled.

I met Flávia Macêdo in a Trimtab Space Camp course. She invited me to participate in Holoptic – Global collective intelligence platform.

I suggested to the Stop Reset Go team that if we are focusing on connection, this might be a useful approach.

A GitHub repository for the Hypothesis project.

Shared by Ru Singh in an article, “A new microblogging strategy.”

Sallie McFague, in The Meaning of Life in the World Religions, writes an article entitled, “The World as God’s Body.”

Evolution is not only or solely biological; it is also historical and cultural. Once evolutionary history reaches the human, self-conscious stage, natural selection is not the only operative principle, for natural selection can be countered with the principle of solidarity.

(Page 297)

Sallie McFague

The World as God’s Body

I was watching a video in a Trimtab Space Camp on regenerative agriculture featuring Vandana Shiva. She said, “It all begins with food, because food is the currency of life.”

I connected this thought to Sallie McFague, who writes in The World as God’s Body about embodiment and incarnation.

Jesus’ eating stories and practices suggest that physical needs are basic and must be met — food is not a metaphor here but should be taken literally. All creatures deserve what is basic to bodily health. But food also serves as a metaphor of fulfillment at the deepest level of our longings and desires. The Church picked up and developed the second metaphorical emphasis, making eating imagery the ground of its vision of spiritual fulfillment, especially in the eucharist. But just as the tradition focused on the second birth (redemption), often neglecting the first (creation), so also it spiritualized hunger as the longing of the soul for God, conveniently forgetting the source of the metaphor in basic bodily needs. But the aspects of Jesus’ ministry on which we have focused — the parables, healings, and eating stories — do not forget this dimension; in fact, Jesus’ activities and message, according to this interpretation, are embarrassingly bodily. The parables focus on oppression that people feel due to their concrete, cultural setting, as servants rather than masters, poor rather than rich, Gentile rather than Jew; the healing stories are concerned with the bodily pain that some endure; the eating stories have to do with physical hunger and the humiliation of exclusion. None of these is primarily spiritual, though each assumes the psychosomatic unity of human nature and can serve as a symbol of eschatological fulfillment — the overcoming of all hierarchies, the health and harmony of the cosmos and all its creatures, the satiety of the deepest groaning and longings of creation.

(The Meaning of Life in the World Religions, page 296)

I recently found this book at Value Village while exploring the non-fiction books section. What caught my eye was the back cover’s reference to Sallie McFague. I learned about Sallie McFague from Tripp Fuller’s podcast, Homebrewed Christianity, when she died. He dedicated an episode to her influence. Her name also came up in conversation with Sophia at the Faith, Arts + Culture course at Bez Arts Hub.

When I read the title of the article, *The World as God’s Body,” I decided to purchase the book. I have been exploring this theme as it relates to the Gaia hypothesis in articles such as, A Prayer for the Earth.

We are a creative, collaborative, self-organizing learning community.

Life as a journey and a conversation where understanding is the destination.

Builders Collective

We are exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.

I agree, Jamstack is brilliant, but time consuming. I decided on using Ghost to take the friction out of writing and publishing.

MindGraph

Arts mentorship: dance, music, film.

The Hypothesis API integrates annotations into web services. Available to send HTTP requests and JSON responses, it aims to be useful for researchers, scientists, and educators.

What might it take to demo a Jamstack approach to connecting Airtable to Hypothesis with serverless functions in Netlify?

“Bring your attention back to the present moment, and make a deliberate choice to engage in the action that would reduce the gap separating your current life from your ideal life.”

“You have set the intention. Now it's time to act.”

Today, I noticed that Michal Korzonek has expanded on his concept of minimalist journaling.

Michal’s Medium page has this in the masthead: One square = one day of your life. What will you draw in yours? ✨ https://infinitysquares.carrd.co/

Gien Wong notes these three concept papers on Science-Driven Societal Transformation: Worldview, Motivation and Strategy, and Design.

It looks like they make their business model is based predominantly on hardware over software.