• for: democracy - by device, quote, quote - Barry Chudakov, quote - democracy by device
• quote
  • We are in the midst of a remarkable social and civic experiment, democracy by device
• author: Barry Chudakov

• for: quote, quote - Robert Epstein, quote - search engine bias,quote - future of democracy, quote - tilting elections, quote - progress trap, progress trap, cultural evolution, technology - futures, futures - technology, progress trap, indyweb - support, future - education
• quote
  • The big tech companies, left to their own devices , have already had a net negative effect on societies worldwide.
  • At the moment, the three big threats these companies pose
    • aggressive surveillance,
    • arbitrary suppression of content,
      • the censorship problem, and
    • the subtle manipulation of
      • thoughts,
      • behaviors,
      • votes,
      • purchases,
      • attitudes and
      • beliefs
    • are unchecked worldwide
• author: Robert Epstein
  • senior research psychologist at American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology
• paraphrase
  • Epstein's organization is building two technologies that assist in combating these problems:
    • passively monitor what big tech companies are showing people online,
    • smart algorithms that will ultimately be able to identify online manipulations in realtime:
      • biased search results,
      • biased search suggestions,
      • biased newsfeeds,
      • platform-generated targeted messages,
      • platform-engineered virality,
      • shadow-banning,
      • email suppression, etc.
  • Tech evolves too quickly to be managed by laws and regulations,
    • but monitoring systems are tech, and they can and will be used to curtail the destructive and dangerous powers of companies like Google and Facebook on an ongoing basis.
• reference
  • seminar paper on monitoring systems, ‘Taming Big Tech -: https://is.gd/K4caTW.

• for: progress traps, progress, unintended consequences, technology - unintended consequences, unintended consequences - technology, unintended consequences - digital technology, progress trap - quotations, quote, quote - progress trap
• title: Experts Predict More Digital Innovation by 2030 Aimed at Enhancing Democracy
• authors: emily A Vogels, Lee Rainie, Janna Anderson
• year: June 30, 2020
• description: a good source of quotations on progress traps / unintended consequences of digital technology from this Pew Research 2020 report on the future of the digital technology and democracy.
  • the Pew Research Center interviewed a lot of experts in the field
  • in particular, section 5 of the report entitled
    • "Tech causes more problems than it can solve" is quite salient for the topic of progress traps
  • The Indyweb actually addresses many of these problems:
    • https://opencollective.com/open-learning-commons/projects/indy-learning-commons

• for: quote, quote - Barry Chudakov, quote - progress trap, progress trap, cultural evolution, technology - futures, futures - technology, progress trap, indyweb - support, future - education
• quote
• paraphrase
  • Technology’s greatest contribution to social and civic innovation in the next decade
  • will be to provide
    • accurate, user-friendly context and
    • honest assessment of
      • issues,
      • problems and
      • potential solutions / comment - indyweb /
  • We are facing greater accelerations of
    • climate change,
    • social mobility,
    • pollution,
    • immigration and
    • resource issues.
  • Our problems have gone from complicated to wicked.
  • We need
    • clear answers and
    • discussions that are
      • cogent,
      • relevant and
      • true to facts.
  • Technology must guard against becoming a platform to enable targeted chaos,
  • that is, using technology as a means to
    • obfuscate and
    • manipulate.
  • We are all now living in Sim City:
  • The digital world is showing us a sim,
    • or digital mirror,
  • of each aspect of reality.
  • The most successful social and civic innovation I expect to see by 2030
  • is a massive restructuring of our educational systems based on new and emerging mirror digital worlds. / comment: This bodes well for Indyweb for education/
  • We will then need to expand our information presentations to include
    • verifiable factfulness that ensures any digital presentation faithfully and
    • accurately matches the physical realities.
  • Just as medicine went from
    • bloodletting and leeches and lobotomies to
    • open-heart surgery and artificial limbs,
  • technology will begin to modernize information flows around core issues: urgent need, future implications, accurate assessment.
  • Technology can play a crucial role to move humanity
    • from blame fantasies
    • to focused attention and working solutions.”

• for: corporate power, technology - capitalism, capitalism - exploitation, Danah Boyd, progress trap
• paraphrase
• quote
  • technology in the U.S. is caught up in American late-stage (or financialized) capitalism
    • where profitability isn’t the goal;
    • perpetual return on investment is.
  • Given this, the tools that we’re seeing developed by corporations
  • reinforce capitalist agendas.
  • Innovation will require pushing past this capitalist infrastructure to achieve the social benefits and civic innovation that will work in the United States.
  • China is a whole other ball of wax.
  • If you want to go there, follow up with me. But pay attention to Taobao centers.
  • We haven’t hit peak awful yet.
  • I have every confidence that social and civic innovation can be beneficial in the long run
    • with a caveat that I think that climate change dynamics might ruin all of that
  • but no matter what, I don’t think we’re going to see significant positive change by 2030.
  • I think things are going to get much worse before they start to get better.
  • I should also note that I don’t think that many players have taken responsibility for what’s unfolding. -Yes, tech companies are starting to see that things might be a problem,
    • but that’s only on the surface. -News media does not at all acknowledge its role in amplifying discord,
    • or its financialized dynamics.
  • The major financiers of this economy don’t take any responsibility for what’s unfolding. Etc.
• author: Dana Boyd
  • principal researcher, Microsoft Research
  • founder, Data & Society

• for: progress trap, unintended consequence, unintended consequence - digital technology, quote, quote - progress trap, quote - Doc Searls
• quote
  • What won’t change is people’s tendency toward gossip,
    • tribalism driven by gossip and the ability of anybody to inform anybody else about anything,
      • including wrongly.
  • The only places where news won’t skew fake will be localities in the natural world.
  • That’s where the digital and the physical connect best.
  • Also expect the internet to break into pieces, with
    • the U.S.,
    • Europe and
    • China
  • becoming increasingly isolated by different value systems and governance approaches toward
    • networks and
    • what runs on them.

• for: progress trap, unintended consequence, unintended consequence - digital technology, quote, quote - progress trap, quote - David Weinberger
• quote: I see no reason to think that the current situation will change:
  • Tech will cause problems that require innovative solutions and
  • tech will be part of those solutions.
  • Machine learning (ML) is right now an example of this
• author: David Weinberger
  • senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society

• for: progress trap, unintended consequence, unintended consequence - digital technology, quote, quote - progress trap, quote - Jonathan Grudin
• quote: Can our fundamental human need for close community be restored or
  • will we become more isolated, anxious and susceptible to manipulation?
• author: Jonathan Grudin
  • principal researcher, Microsoft

• for: quote, quote - Esther Dyson, quote - progress trap, quote - progress traps, progress trap,
• quote: "If tech doesn’t contribute to solving some of the problems it creates, we are doomed"
• author: Esther Dyson
  • internet pioneer
  • journalist
  • entrepreneur
  • executive founder of Way to Wellville

• for: quote, quote - Ethan Zuckerman, quote - fragmentation and polarization, Indyweb - support, MIT Center for Civic Media, Global Voices
• quote
  • We need mass innovation in design of social tools that help us
    • bridge fragmentation and polarization,
    • bring diversity into our media landscapes and
    • help find common ground between disparate groups.
  • With these as conscious design goals,
    • technology could be a powerful positive force for civic change.
  • If we don’t take this challenge seriously and assume that we’re stuck with mass-market tools,
    • we won’t see positive civic outcomes from technological tools.”
• author
  • Ethan Zuckerman
    • director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media and
    • co-founder of Global Voices

• for: titling elections, voting - social media, voting - search engine bias, SEME, search engine manipulation effect, Robert Epstein
• summary
  • research that shows how search engines can actually bias towards a political candidate in an election and tilt the election in favor of a particular party.

• for: search engine manipulation effect, SEME, voting, voting - bias, voting - manipulation, voting - search engine bias, democracy - search engine bias, quote, quote - Robert Epstein, quote - search engine bias, stats, stats - tilting elections
• paraphrase
• quote
  • In our early experiments, reported by The Washington Post in March 2013,
    • http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/could-google-tilt-a-close-election/2013/03/29/c8d7f4e6-9587-11e2-b6f0-a5150a247b6a_story.html?ref=hackernoon.com
  • we discovered that Google’s search engine had the power to shift the percentage of undecided voters supporting a political candidate by a substantial margin without anyone knowing.
  • 2015 PNAS research on SEME
    • http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512.full.pdf?with-ds=yes&ref=hackernoon.com
    • stats begin
    • search results favoring one candidate
    • could easily shift the opinions and voting preferences of real voters in real elections by up to 80 percent in some demographic groups
    • with virtually no one knowing they had been manipulated.
    • stats end
    • Worse still, the few people who had noticed that we were showing them biased search results
    • generally shifted even farther in the direction of the bias,
    • so being able to spot favoritism in search results is no protection against it.
    • stats begin
    • Google’s search engine 
      • with or without any deliberate planning by Google employees 
    • was currently determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the world’s national elections.
    • This is because Google’s search engine lacks an equal-time rule,
      • so it virtually always favors one candidate over another, and that in turn shifts the preferences of undecided voters.
    • Because many elections are very close, shifting the preferences of undecided voters can easily tip the outcome.
    • stats end

• for: big tech - bias, big tech - manipulation, big tech - mind control, big tech - influence
• paraphrase
  • Early in 2013, Ronald Robertson,
    • now a doctoral candidate at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University in Boston,
  • and I discovered that Google isn’t just spying on us;
    • it also has the power to exert an enormous impact on our opinions, purchases and votes.

• for: Hiliary Clinton could have won, voting, democracy, voting - social media, democracy - social media, election - social media, facebook - election, 2016 US elections, 2016 Trump election, 2016 US election, 2016 US election - different results, 2016 election - social media
• interesting fact
  • If Facebook had sent a "Go out and vote" message on election day of 2016 election, Clinton may have had a boost of 450,000 additional votes
    • and the outcome of the election might have been different

• for: search engine bias, google privacy, orwellian, privacy protection, mind control, google bias
• title: Taming Big Tech: The Case for Monitoring
• date: May 14th 2018

• author: Robert Epstein

• quote

• paraphrase:
  • types of search engine bias
    • the Search Suggestion Effect (SSE),
    • the Answer Bot Effect (ABE),
    • the Targeted Messaging Effect (TME), and
    • the Opinion Matching Effect (OME), among others. -
  • Effects like these might now be impacting the
    • opinions,
    • beliefs,
    • attitudes,
    • decisions,
    • purchases and
    • voting preferences
  • of more than two billion people every day.

• for: progress trap, unintended consequences, Indyweb - justifiication
• description
  • a great source of quotations by thought leaders on the unintended consequences of technology,
    • in other words, progress traps
• comment
  • also a lot of rich material to justify the Indyweb's design ethos

• for: progress, progress trap, exponential growth - knowledge, exponential growth - technology, technology - exponential growth, US patents, patents, intellectual property -description: GIF graph of US patents from the start in 1825 to 2021

• for: transition, transition - energy, progress, progress traps
• title: The Energy Transition Is a Technological Revolution — with a Deadline
• subtitle: What historical transitions — from water wheels to semiconductors — can teach us about today’s energy transition.
• authors
  • Yuki Numata
  • Laurens Speelman
• date: Aug 10, 2023
• source: https://rmi.org/the-energy-transition-is-a-technological-revolution-with-a-deadline/

• for: superorganism, biomolecular archeology,

• for: biomolecular archeology, tuberculosis
• paraphrase
  • biomolecular archeology can assist in solving the puzzle of tuberculosis

• for: stats, stats - microbiome, human microbiome, stats - human microbiome
• stats
• paraphrase
  • One hundred trillion cells is the approximate number of microorganisms in your body,
  • that's ten times greater than the number of your own cells.
  • The micrbiome is about 2% of our body weight
  • That's about one and a half kilograms

• for: progress trap, cumulative cultural evolution, gene-culture co-evolution, speed of cultural evolution, human genome project
• paraphrase
  • the human genome project took 10 years and cost 3 billion dollars
  • with NGS technology, 10 years later, the same job takes 1 day and costs $15,000 dollars

• for: umwelt, symbiocene, perspectival knowing
• comment
  • the experience of reality of other living beings

• for: inequality, Anthropocene, climate justice
• title: Why this viral photo of the world’s largest cruise ship is polarizing opinion
• source
  • https://edition.cnn.com/travel/viral-icon-of-the-seas-cruise-ship-photo/index.html
• comment
  • economic AND carbon inequality on display

• for: life expectancy - ancestors - example
• example
• paraphrase
  • The "Old Man of La Chapelle", is the name given to the remains of a Neanderthal who lived 56,000 years ago,
    • found buried in the limestone bedrock of a small cave near La Chapelle-aux-Saints, in France in 1908.
  • He was found to have had arthritis, bone regrowth along the gums where he lost several teeth.

• for: human life expectancy, life expectancy, life expectancy myth, life expectancy at birth, life expectancy - ancestors
• title: The life expectancy myth, and why many ancient humans lived long healthy lives
• comment
• new insight
  • life expectancy at birth skews our understanding of how the health and longevity of adults. -There is a false claim and belief that due to modern technologies, modern humans have lived far longer than our ancestors in the distant past.
  • In fact, child mortality rates play a major role in calculating life expectancy and this is what differs modernity from our ancestors.
  • Our distant ancestors did live to their 70s and 80s

• for: life expectancy, human life expectancy, life expectancy - myth, life expectancy - ancestors
• paraphrase
  • It is not uncommon to hear talk about how lucky we are to live in this age of scientific and medical advancement
    • where antibiotics and vaccinations keep us living longer, while our poor ancient ancestors were lucky to live past the age of 35.
  • This is not quite true:
    • at best, it oversimplifies a complex issue, and
    • at worst it is a blatant misrepresentation of statistics.
• key question
  • What happened?
    • Did ancient humans really just drop dead as they were entering their prime, or
    • Did some live long enough to see a wrinkle on their face?

• for: life expectancy, human life expectancy, life expectancy - myth, life expectancy at birth, life expectancy - ancestors
• paraphrase
• definition
  • What is commonly known as ‘average life expectancy’ is technically ‘life expectancy at birth’.
  • In other words, it is the average number of years that a newborn baby can expect to live in a given society at a given time.
  • But life expectancy at birth is an unhelpful statistic if the goal is to compare the health and longevity of adults.
  • That is because a major determinant of life expectancy at birth is the child mortality rate
    • which, in our ancient past, was extremely high, and this skews the life expectancy rate dramatically downward.

• for: life expectancy - ancestors
• key insight
• paraphrase
  • in our early ancestors, the early years from infancy through to about 15 was perilous,
    • due to risks posed by disease, injuries, and accidents.
  • But those who survived this hazardous period of life could well make it into old age.

• for: intentional communities, intentional communities - failure, cults
• comment
  • This article does not seem to be aware of the controversy at Damanhur:
    • https://rightsforrainbows.medium.com/a-call-for-a-new-spiritual-paradigm-in-the-face-of-spiritual-abuse-and-authority-490b912584d8

• for: intentional communities - funding
• comment
  • the fact that many intentional communities court wealthy benefactors means that they are not really autonomous or resilient but instead, parasitic on the very society they are trying to escape
  • and depending on 60% of your funding coming from workshops or spiritual tourism implies it isn't that resilient if eco-disaster were to strike.

• for: intentional communities, intentional communities - failures
• comment
  • modern, industrialized society is still a massively interdependent system
  • what many who start intentional communities don't realize is this refined interdependency give us a lot of time savings
  • we find that out when we live in an intentional community and have to make everything ourselves

• for: intentional communities - case study - New Harmony
• paraphrase
  • New Harmony
  • Year: 1825
  • Location: Indiana
  • Size: 20,000 acres
  • Members: 800 in first 6 weeks
  • ideals
    • environment
    • education
    • abolish private property
  • problems
    • low percentage of hard skills
      • 140 of 800 had skills contributing to local industry,
      • 36 were skilled farmers
    • indiscriminate and allowed too many without skills to join
    • intentional communities are often the most attractive for a dangerous constellation of actors
      • dreamers,
      • drifters,
      • seekers in need of belonging,
      • the needy and wounded,
      • the egomaniacal and power-thirsty
      • free riders, lazy and without skills
    • founder was absent a large percentage of the time

• for: intentional communities, intentional communities - failure
• paraphrase
  • reasons for failure:sound more like the challenges afflicting any organisation today:
    • capital constraints,
    • burn-out,
    • conflict over private property
    • conflict over resource management,
    • poor systems of conflict mediation,
    • factionalism,
    • founder problems,
    • reputation management,
    • skills shortage,
    • failure to attract new talent
    • failure to entice subsequent generations.

• for: intentional communities,
• irony
• paraphrase
  • the irony is that many of the administrative and managerial forces that individuals are running away from within mainstream society
    • are exactly the organisational tools that would make intentional communities more resilient

• for: stats, intentional community, intentional communities, - stats - intentional communities
  • intentional communities fail at a rate slightly higher than most startups
  • startup failure rate is around 90%
  • longevity of Fortune 500 companies listed in 1955 to 2017
    • failure rate of 88%
  • S&P companies average lifespan: 15 years

• for: stats, intentional community, intentional communities, stats - intentional communities
  • intentional communities fail at a rate slightly higher than most startups

• for: intentional community, intentional communities, eco-community, ecocommunity
• title
  • Utopia Inc Most utopian communities are, like most start-ups, short-lived. What makes the difference between failure and success?

• for: ecocommunity, eco-community, intentional community, Dieter Duhm, Tamera, psychoanalyst -noteworthy
  • Tamera ecocommunity was founded by psychoanalyst Dieter Duhm

• for: energy storage, battery storage, pumped hydro, PSH
• description
  • Recent studies indicate that pumped hydro can play a significant role in energy storage for a 100% renewable energy system

• for: pumped hydro storage capacity, pumped hydro, PSH
• paraphrase
  • According to the International Hydropower Association, or IHA,
    • a facility with:
      • two reservoirs roughly the size of two Olympic swimming pools,
      • a 500-metre height difference between them,
    • would have
      • an energy capacity of about three and a half megawatt hours and
      • they last for decades,

• for: pumped storage hydro, pumped hydro, pumped storage, PSH, ANU study, ANU PSH
• stats
  • 23 million gigawatt-hours of global PSH
  • sites in the study were
    • geographically and topographically feasible
    • non-urban areas
    • environmentally protected areas
  • this is 100x more than is needed for a global 100% renewable energy storage system
  • so even if only 1% of sites were useful, that is enough to provide all we need for global 100% renewable energy storage

• for: storage requirements per million, grid storage
• stats
  • storage requirements for one hundred percent renewables is about
    • one gigawatt for every million people
    • twenty hours of energy storage per person
    • 20 gigawatts including buffer for every million people
    • 500 gigawatts for Australia, with storage potential 300x that figure

• for: NREL, PSH, grid storage, grid storage - alternative, grid storage - pumped hydro, pumped hydro, renewable energy - storage, pumped storage hydro,
• the new NREL study shows the potential for pumped storage to provide for all the grid storage needs

• for: climate change - evolutionary causes, cultural evolution - unsustainability, unsustainability
• definition: Anthroecological theory (AET)
  • This theory proposes that the ultimate cause of anthropogenic environmental change is multi-level selection for niche construction and ecosystem engineering

• for: social organization - evolutionary purpose,
• paraphrase
  • human social organization exists to maximize
    • the extraction of energy from the environment to the group and individual (X), and
    • the efficiency of the conversion of extracted energy into offspring (E). -This is identical to the claim that
    • social organization exists to maximize the fitness of the group (Wilson and Sober 1994) and/or the individuals which compose the group (Nowak et al. 2010),
  • given an energetic definition of fitness.

• for: energy offspring, natural selection energy
• paraphrase
  • Pianka (1970) argued that, “…natural selection will usually act to maximize the amounts of matter and energy gathered per unit time.”
  • Brown et al. (1993) likewise offered an energetic definition in which fitness is “reproductive power, or the rate of conversion of energy into offspring.”
  • This reproductive power was taken to be a function of both
    • the rate of assimilation of energy from the environment and
    • the rate of conversion of energy to offspring (but see (Kozlowski 1996)).

• for: for: ecological collapse, overshoot, progress trap, progress trap - cultural evolution, ultra-sociality, Lotka's maximum power, gene culture coevolution
• key finding
  • paraphrase
    • In AET,
      • multi-level selection acting on the genome and
      • occurring in concert with selective and non-selective mechanisms acting on culture and technology
    • results in a species that is prone to
      • niche construction and
      • ecosystem engineering,
    • and the scale of these processes continues to increase as the population rises.
    • This increasing scale
      • coupled with human propensity for niche construction
    • leads to human unsustainability

• definition
  • extra-somatic energy
    • energy that is used by humans but not used in direct human metabolism

• for: Malthus - energy extraction, overshoot,
• paraphrase
  • increasing energy extraction via cultural evolution of new energy saving and extraction technologies allows a population to continue growing exponentially instead of crashing due to limits of energy extraction growth.

• for: ecological collapse, overshoot, progress trap, progress trap - cultural evolution, ultra-sociality, Lotka's maximum power
• paraphrase
  • to Gowdy and Krall, the ultra-social nature of human groups allowed for a shift in the primary level of selection
    • from the individual level
    • to the group level.
  • Thus, “With the transition to agriculture the group as an adaptive unit comes to constitute a wholly different gestalt
    • driven by the imperative to produce surplus

• for: AET, Anthroecological theory, anthropocene - causes, ecological crisis - roots, overshoot
• paraphrase
  • Anthroecological theory (AET) hypothesizes that
    • human social and cultural evolution is the ultimate cause of the ecological crises currently damaging earth systems

• for: gene culture coevolution, carrying capacity, unsustainability, overshoot, cultural evolution, progress trap

• Title: The genetic and cultural evolution of unsustainability

• Author: Brian F. Snyder

• Abstract

• Summary
• Paraphrase
  • Anthropogenic changes are accelerating and threaten the future of life on earth.
  • While the proximate mechanisms of these anthropogenic changes are well studied
    • climate change,
    • biodiversity loss,
    • population growth
  • the evolutionary causality of these anthropogenic changes have been largely ignored.
  • Anthroecological theory (AET) proposes that the ultimate cause of anthropogenic environmental change is
    • multi-level selection for niche construction and ecosystem engineering.
  • Here, we integrate this theory with
    • Lotka’s Maximum Power Principle
  • and propose a model linking
    • energy extraction from the environment with
    • genetic, technological and cultural evolution
  • to increase human ecosystem carrying capacity.
  • Carrying capacity is partially determined by energetic factors such as
    • the net energy a population can acquire from its environment and
    • the efficiency of conversion from energy input to offspring output.
  • These factors are under Darwinian genetic selection
  • in all species,
  • but in humans, they are also determined by
    • technology and
    • culture.
  • If there is genetic or non-genetic heritable variation in
    • the ability of an individual or social group
  • to increase its carrying capacity,
  • then we hypothesize that - selection or cultural evolution will act - to increase carrying capacity.
  • Furthermore, if this evolution of carrying capacity occurs - faster than the biotic components of the ecological system can respond via their own evolution,
    • then we hypothesize that unsustainable ecological changes will result.

• for: unsustainability
  • humans have spent much of the remainder of our post-paleolithic history in a state of unsustainability

• for: history - hyperlink, history - Vannevar Bush, history - Ted Nelson, history - Doug Engelbart

• for: Ted Nelson, Xanadu, knowledge federation

• for: memex, Vannevar Bush, Indyweb, Ted Nelson

• for: zoning, city council, re-zoning, low carbon city, walkable city

• for: project drawdown - walkable city, walkable city

• for: beautiful cities - qualities, comparison - American vs European cities
• paraphrase
  • qualities of a beautiful city
    • orderly, but not homogenous
    • they have visible life
    • they are compact, not sprawling
    • have both orientation and mystery
    • appealing scale with ideal height of 5 stories

• for: adjacency - urban decay, suburbs, history- suburbs, history - car culture, urban decay - economics

• paraphrase

  • as the suburbs expanded they need more and more roads highways Bridges infrastructure to stay afloat
  • but because the nature of the suburb is spread out single-family housing as opposed to the densely packed City Apartment dwelling the suburbs have too few people to be able to fund this infrastructure
  • subsequently, they so they have to keep expanding in order to fund themselves and even then they still can't fund themselves
  • so they often rely on tax dollars from City dwellers to subsidize their Suburban excesses
  • who lives in the cities because of white flight ?... people of color

  • when it comes to housing, people of color have been screwed over in literally every way in imaginable

  • so we have this self-perpetuating cycle

    • the growth of suburbs leads to more suburban sprawl
    • this increases the need for cars
    • this leads to the building of more highways and Roads
    • this leads to not enough income to pay for the suburbs
    • this leads to black and brown communities being forced to subsidize Suburban Lifestyles at the expense of the beautification of their own communities leading to the degradation of inner city neighborhoods

• for: history - suburbs, history - car culture
• etymology
  • jaywalking
    • invented by the auto industry to discourage waling in the suburbs. A "Jay" was a derogatory term in the 1800s that meant "worthless"

• for: history - suburbs, history - car culture
• paraphrase
  • With so many people living in the suburbs, there was a new transportation problem as these people had to travel to the city centers to work.
  • High speed rail and mass transit lost out over big oil and the auto industry lobby, and this loss resulted in an auto-centric design that shaped not only the American landscape, but the entire world
  • The 1956 federal aid highway act created a national highway system, but also provided positive feedback to increase suburban development
  • highway construction disproportionately affected minority communities

• for: history - suburbs, GI Bill, racial discrimination, structural racism, institutional racism, racial discrimination
• paraphrase
  • The GI Bill institutionally and structurally discriminated against people of color and played a major role in how suburbs expansion was racially discriminatory against people of color

• for: town planning, zoning, uglification, history - car culture, big oil - lobby, history - suburbs

• for: polycrisis, Trumpism, Chaos, distraction, climate crisis, climate communication, complexity, adjacency climate change fossil fuel industry, adjacency climate change big oil, adjacency climate change politics big oil, quote adjacency climate change fossil fuel industry, quote adjacency climate change big oil
• key insight
  • claim
    • One big reason that big oil is funding GOP to keep the chaotic Trump story as the main headline is to foster distraction from climate change impacts
    • big news story in the US is Donald Trump and the election, climate change impacts of extreme weather is minimized
    • the distraction of politics from a chaotic GOP is perfect distraction for the masses to ignore climate change and for big oil to continue BAU
• paraphrase
• quote
  • when you take a step back and look at that part of the distraction and the chaos that Trump and these GOP trolls deliver
  • it's it's a wonderful Boon for the oil and gas industry and the Koch brothers and the guys that fund these campaigns and the federal Federalist Society that's owning the Supreme Court
  • they want to keep doing business as usual and the easiest way to do that is
    • to have this big chaotic GOP that ignores climate change and
    • to play into what they want
      • the mainstream media not focusing more on climate change let alone making those two connections
    • a lot of mainstream media is scared to make that connection because oil companies are paying the bills of CNN and every other network
• author
  • Noel Casler

• for: rapid whole system change, TPF

• for: cosmolocal, quote, quote - cosmolocal
• paraphrase
  • acting locally with knowledge is how we bring about systemic change

• for: open source, indyweb, open learning commons, radical collaboration, individual / collective entanglement
• paraphrase
• quote
  • to live for the common good is a very good purpose but
  • purpose is a gift and the purpose of our life here on Earth is to change the environment which we met for something better because there is always an opportunity for something better
• author
  • Obiora Ike
• quote
  • I would urge us all to be in a learning mode and
  • we when we know things to be in a teaching mode also
  • that is propagating what we know
  • sharing it with others and
  • making this knowledge open source for the world and
  • especially to help train a young generation of new leaders who are going to be the ones that grapple with these problems
• author
  • Jeffrey Sachs

• for: extinction, hope, futures, radical collaboration, indyweb, TPF, SRG
• quote
  • people from all different aspects
    • all different kinds of business people
    • in governments
    • not just the finance people
    • but the environmental section and so on
  • they need to get together and discuss
    • calmly and
    • productively
  • what we can do to creating a new mindset
  • and we can only work out a future economy if people come in from these different sectors and
  • talk together
    • not in a controversial way but
    • in a way of we must find a solution
  • because humanity is not exempt from extinction
• author
  • Jane Goodall

• for: individual / collective entanglement, ubuntu M2W, human interbeing, quote, quote - John Mbiti, quote - human interbeing
• paraphrase
  • professor John Mbiti will always say "I am because we are since we are therefore I am:
• so my being is not just my being alone and being the richest in the world and owning everybody
  • my property has no meaning my wealth has no meaning
    • if it's not of service to the community
  • so if you come to my Village and many other villages in the African continent and someone says is a wealthy person but is not bringing his wealth to
    • Advanced education
    • Advanced roads and infrastructure
    • train people
    • support agriculture
  • people don't care he's not respected
  • but once you bring your wealth and no matter how poor you are that you are contributing to the society
  • you are considered great so these are the values we think we can start discussing in the International Community

• for: W2W, TPF, stats, inequality, wealth redistribution, wealth tax, quote, quote - wealth tax, quote - inequality, stats, stats - inequality, stats - wealth tax
• quote
• stats
  • An annual wealth tax of just 5% on multi-millionaires and billionaires
  • could raise US $1.7 trillion a year
  • enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty
• author Institute for Policy (2023)
• comment
  • that breaks down to approximately $US 1,000 per person for 2 billion people from the 1% elites
  • this is pretty reasonable
  • W2W can begin with this simple VOLUNTARY ASK
  • if the multi-millionaires and billionaires do just this consistently, then it is so little from their coffers and they could avoid a wealth tax by simply stepping up voluntarily
  • Could W2W motivate them to?

• for: indyweb, silos, emptiness - example, entanglement - example, progress trap
• paraphrase
• quote
  • all the problems I've mentioned are being tackled by groups of people
  • sad thing is those people are often operating in silos just concerned to solve their particular problem
    • not realizing that if they don't have the whole picture they may solve their problem
    • and cause problems in other places
• author
  • Jane Goodall
• comment
  • the Indyweb and SRG strategy is designed specifically to mitigate progress traps through radical collaboration built into the communication and information system itself.

• for: TPF, cosmolocal, community as building block, city as building block, W2W, quote, quote - Brian Wong, citizen assemblies, bottom-up strategy
• paraphrase
• quote
  • the victims that suffer under over consumption over depletion and environmental degradation don't really have a say
  • so we want a fair World
  • At Large we need to start with Fair countries
    • and with Fair countries the prerequisite is
    • fair cities
  • what's needed here too is direct mechanisms by which
    • the people can have their voices heard
    • can hold Elites accountable and
    • fundamentally have an opportunity to partake in the designing of
      • the rules of the institutions and
      • of the outlying sort of overarching structures of their cities and therefore
    • we move from cities to countries and
    • from countries to the World At Large

• for: extinction, climate departure, Jane Goodall, quote, tapestry, thread,
• quote
  • we humans depend on the natural world
  • but what we depend on is healthy ecosystems that are made up of a complex mix of plants and animal species
  • each one has a role to play and I see it as like a beautiful living tapestry and as an animal or plant species disappears from that ecosystem it's like pulling out a thread
  • and if enough threads are pulled then the tapestry will hang in tatters and the ecosystem will disappear
• author
  • Jane Goodall

• for: quote, quote - W2W, quote - inequality, quote - jane goodall
• quote
  • there's the unsustainable lifestyle of so many of us
  • and I include myself
  • I have far more than I need and
  • some people take this to excess and they have way way way more than they could ever possibly need and
  • this is something that somehow we have to change
• comment
  • this supports the need for the W2W program

• for: inequality, poverty, W2W, Jane Goodall, socio-ecological system, climate justice, emptiness - example, entanglement - inequality and climate crisis
• key insight
  • if you're very poor and you're living in some kind of Wilderness Area
    • you're going to destroy the environment in order to survive
    • example: Gumby Street National Park
      • in 1960 it was part of the Great Forest
      • but by the late 1980s was a tiny Islander forest and all the hills around were bare
      • more people living there than the land could support
      • too poor to buy food elsewhere
        • struggling to survive
        • cutting down the trees to make money from charcoal or Timber
        • or to make more land grow more food and
      • that's when it hit me
        • if we don't help these people these local communities find ways of living without destroying the environment
        • we can't save chimpanzees forests or anything else so we need to alleviate poverty
• comment
  • This is why the inequality crisis is entangled with the climate crisis

• for: science-based societal transformation, whole system change, overnight change, 50 year project, radical change
• paraphrase
  • this is not an overnight project
  • radical change would be dangerous
• comment
  • the word "radical" is subjective here
  • how does John view the latest earth system science about the need to reach zero emissions in less than a decade and likely 6 years in order to stay within 1.5 Deg C carbon budget?
    • is that considered radical change or not?

• for: evolutionary design, organisms - problem solving
• key insight
  • organisms as evolution's way of solving a specific problem
  • hence, organisms are by their very nature, solvers of specific evolutionary problems of how to best adapt to an environment, and that includes our own human species

• for: polycrisis, adapt or die, evolutionary pressure, maladaptive
• paraphrase
  • the fact that we could be in the early stages of extinction is evidence that there is something deeply dysfunctional about the systems we have designed
• comment
  • from evolutionary biology perspective, also could argue that
    • we have become maladaptive due to the huge mismatch between
      • rate of genetic biological evolution and
      • rate of human cultural evolution
    • in other words,
      • human (cultural) progress,
      • cumulative cultural evolution,
      • gene-culture coevolution
      • has resulted in progress traps
    • Progress traps leading to our progress traps may be evolutions milestone / marker / indicator to us that
    • we must now evolve to our next stage if we are to even survive
    • in other words, the polycrisis itself may be contextualized as an evolutionary pressure to adapt or die

• for: early adopters, social tipping points, wide bridges
• question
• paraphrase
  • who are the envisioned early adopters?
    • there are numerous experiments going on everywhere
    • new digital currencies
    • new types of democratic systems
    • new kinds of economic system proposals
    • existing communities may have a few thousand members, but can be exponentially grown to hundreds of millions
    • lots of small prototypes being built right now, we find the optimal ones and scale those

• for: contributors, contributors - science-driven societal transformation
• comment
  • almost every field of science plus many fields in the humanities and arts as well as other fields would contribute

• for: population decline, economic growth vs population decline
• comment
  • John makes a good point
  • how will humans negotiate a growth economy when population is shrinking?
  • it may be that AI automation may lessen the need for human capacity, but the future is unknown how these forces will balance out

• for: future climate impacts, futures, climate impacts, preparedness, climate change - human migration, climate refuge, climate departure, Camilo Mora

• comment

  • There will be massive human migration
  • Europe is already unable to cope with the migration of a million climate refugees from Syria
  • The US is polarized due to mass migration of a few people escaping climate crisis and violence in central and South America
  • Developed countries will be overwhelmed with climate refugees number in the millions or tens of millions
  • In addition to human migration, the migration of species seeking cooler temperatures will fundamentally reshape our economies
  • climate departure is the date when local climate goes outside normal historical bounds and locally adapted species do not recognize it anymore and will be forced to migrate to survive
  • climate departure is a huge issue that is going to happen, regardless of which decarbonoization path we take. This means all species on the globe will be undergoing dramatic environmental shifts, making mass extinction more likely.

• reference

  • Dr. Camilo Mora et al. seminal 2013 paper on climate departure: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbafybeihfoajtasczfz4s6u6j4mmyzlbn7zt4f7hpynjdvd6vpp32zmx5la.ipfs.dweb.link%2FTheprojectedtimingofclimatedeparture2013.pdf&group=vnpq69nW

• for: voting, power - money, money - voting, inequality, voting - money, equity, voting power - rich
• paraphrase
• question
  • if we think of money as a voting tool
    • why does a billionaire have a billion times more power to decide what society should be like than i do?

• for: doughnut economics, climate change - societal impacts, whole system change - motivation
• question: why transform?
  • answer
    • The word transformation is carefully chosen by John and here he explains why.
    • We face an extreme and growing polycrisis that threatens to overpower our capacity to cope with it unless we act now for whole system transformation.
    • Voices across all of society are becoming more vocal of the need to transform the existing system.
    • This transformation program does not need everyone to participate, just a sufficient but small percentage of the population who are aligned to these ideas.
    • Not everyone believes such transformation is necessary but the R+D project only needs to onboard a small percentage of the population who does believe to change the entire system for the benefit of even the non-believers.
• comment
  • John is implying social tipping points as well as social engineering

• for: definition, definition - second order science, first order science, second order science, entanglement, complexity
• definition
  • second order science
    • "Second Order" science contrasts with first order science.
    • In first order science, the scientist is an observer standing apart from that which is observed.
    • Second order science is science in which the scientist is part of the observed phenomena and experiment itself.
    • Second order science is value driven, in contrast to first order science.
• paraphrase
  • first order science is what we humans have participated in most of our history
  • but second order science is really what's applicable now
  • second order science is reflective and involves both science world and stakeholders
    • a group of stakeholders want something to happen and science is engaged in building towards that aspiration, so it's a bit like engineering
      • this makes it value driven
  • second order science still requires first order science in many cases but it needs a level of transparency that states the desired goal of the science

• for: societal design, designing societies, societal architecture, transforming society, whole system change, SSO, social superorganism, John Boik

The seven main ideas for societal design: 1. societal transformation - is necessary to avoid catastrophe 2. the specific type of transformation is science-based transformation based on entirely new systems - de novo design - 3. A practical way to implement the transformation in the real world - it must be economical, and doable within the short time window for system change before us. - Considering a time period of 50 years for total change, with some types of change at a much higher priority than others. - The change would be exponential so starting out slower, and accelerating - Those communities that are the first to participate would make the most rapid improvements. 4. Promoting a worldview of society as a social superorganism, a cognitive organism, and its societal systems as a cognitive architecture. 5. Knowing the intrinsic purpose of a society - each subsystem must be explained in terms of the overall intrinsic purpose. 6. The reason for transformation - Transformation that improves cognition reduces the uncertainty that our society's intrinsic purpose is fulfilled. 7. Forming a partnership between the global science community and all the local communities of the world.

• for: whole system approach, system approach, systems thinking, systems thinking - societal design, societal design, John Boik, societal design - evolutionary approach, designing societies - evolutionary approach -paraphrase
  • currently, all societal systems function as silos
  • how does the total system change and achieve new stable states?
  • advocating for designing societal systems so that the cognitive architectures of the different component systems can all serve the same purpose
  • design a fitness evaluation score Rather than tackling problems in individual silos, John is promoting an integrated approach.

This is wholly consistent with the underpinnings of SRG Deep Humanity praxis that stresses the same need for multi-disciplinary study and synthesis of all the various parts of the SSO.into one unified Gestalt to mitigate progress traps. https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthetyee.ca%2FAnalysis%2F2019%2F09%2F20%2FRonald-Wright-Can-We-Dodge-Progress-Trap%2F&group=world https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthetyee.ca%2FCulture%2F2018%2F10%2F12%2FHumanity-Progress-Trap%2F&group=world

• for: Social Superorganism, SSO, reform vs transformation
• comment
  • John distinguishes between
    • reform and
    • transformation.
  • In the simplest terms,
    • reform deals with changes to an existing paradigm whilst
    • transformation deals with fundamental structural changes of an existing paradigm - a paradigm shift.
  • John views societal systems as
    • a social superorganism (SSO) and the major cognitive architectures as SSO systems such as
      • legal,
      • economic,
      • social,
      • governance,
      • education, etc
  • as cognitive architectures of the SSO. -The theoretical question being asked is:
    • There is an optimization problem. Of all possible variations, which one has the best fitness to the function of a society that operates within earth system boundaries?

• for: earth system boundaries, cosmolocal, local movement, transition town, circular cities, TPF
• comment
  • integrating science with local communities
  • this statement is key, to bring extra capacity to communities that are handicapped and don't have scientific, technological and engineering capacity -paraphrase
• This project is a collaboration between the global scientific community and local communities to improve societal systems. It's not a one-size-fits-all process, but many different experiments.
• TPF and SRG strategy is well aligned with Science-driven societal transformation ethos:
  • second order science combined with local communities as the building block of civilization
  • AND cosmolocal networking (https://clreader.net)
    • via Indyweb interpersonal computing.
    • https://opencollective.com/open-learning-commons/projects/indy-learning-commons

• for: precarity, inequality, United States - poverty, no savings, financial crisis
• quote
• stats
  • 6 out of every 10 American interviewed said they did not have $500 savings in the bank
• source
  • Bankrate 6 survey

• for: overgeneralization, overgeneralization - gender, assumptions - gender
• paraphrase
  • Subsequent studies revealed that
    • men’s social preferences centred more on these masculine attributes
    • than on sexual orientation specifically.
    • When presented with more direct evidence of warfare-relevant traits, such as physical strength, we found that
    • men cared less about one another’s sexual orientation per se.
    • Men actually preferred
      • a gay man who was strong, courageous, etc.,
      • over a straight man who was weak or fearful.

• for: evolution, evolution - war, descendants - war
• paraphrase
  • Genetic analyses of human Y chromosomes (which are passed directly from fathers to sons) reveal that
    • groups of men who succeeded on the battlefield replaced the losing groups of men in the gene pool.
  • In other words, the coalitions of men who were successful in warfare not only survived
    • but reproduced with local women and passed on their genes.
  • Success on the battlefield was thus highly consequential.
  • Humans today are the descendants of those men who managed to dominate their opponents in war. -comment
  • wow!

• for: stats, quote, stats - homophobia - war, quote - homophobia - war, evolution - homophobia, homophobia - war
• quote
• stats
  • estimates indicate that nearly 20-30% of our male ancestors died in intergroup conflicts
• comment
  • wow!

• for: evolution - homophobia - war
• title
  • Ancient Warriors and Modern Footballers: An Evolutionary Explanation for Homophobia
• source
  • https://areomagazine.com/2023/05/19/ancient-warriors-and-modern-footballers-an-evolutionary-explanation-for-homophobia/

• for: intentional communities - failure
• comment
  • moral highground and not actually having a collective scaling strategy are the reasons why this typically fails

• for: model human
• comment
  • a misunderstanding of emptiness, especially the entanglement of the individual and collective allows the typical imbalance of focusing only on the individual and ignoring the collective
  • there are actually many religious intentional communities that have existed for long periods of time, but this is for lifelong practitioners of a religion, such as Buddhist or other monasteries. It's not for the faint of heart!.

• for: never say never, scaling organic production
• comment
  • claims true at one time in history, may not be true for a later time as progress develops new solutions that make yesterday's impossible, today's possible.

• for: intentional community, intentional communities, intentional communities - failure
• claim
  • intentional communities have a fatal flaw, an intrinsic Achilles Heel

• for: intentional community, intentional communities, intentional communities - failure, stats, stats - intentional communities
• stats
  • of 478 intentional communities since the 1820s,
  • 112 exist worldwide in the last 30 years (1988 - 2018

• for: intentional community, intentional communities, intentional communities - failure, stats, stats - intentional communities
• stats
  • of 478 intentional communities since the 1820s,
  • 112 exist worldwide in the last 30 years (1988 - 2018

• for: definition, definition - decentralized city, decentralized city, network city, definition - network city, question, question - decentralized city, question - network city
• definition
  • decentralized city
  • network city
    • a virtual city united by rules of governance for its members via the internet but with physical buildings and infrastructure all over the planet. Each physical location is considered a neighborhood of the decentralized or network city
• questions
  • does this mean that each networked city is really only defined by its membership and virtual governance framework?
  • these physical settlements would still have to abide by the bylaws of the actual physical location (ie. ward or district of a city) they are located in

• for: city DAO, decentralized city, intentional community, intentional communities, Jonathan Willis, Cabin DAO

• for: regenerative cities, sustainable cities, doughnut cities, earth system boundaries, urban planetary boundaries, circular cities
• comment
  • if they are envisioning a lot of cities, they need to carefully think about earth system boundaries for each city, otherwise, they will simply be adding to the problem of cascading tipping points.
  • They also have to be designed to be climate resilient as extreme weather will make any human settlement of the future very challenging

• for: intentional community, intentional communities, DAO community, decentralized cities, Jonathan Hillis, Nora Bateson, intentional communities - failure
• comment
  • this is a critical question
  • unfortunately, many people have tried living in intentional communities over many decades and the success rate is not high
  • listen to what Nora Bateson has to say about her experience of living in idealistic intentional communities and why they fail
    • https://hyp.is/ISC75i5JEe6lgW93D0Ye_A/docdrop.org/video/GE39xfNRRyw/

and

https://hyp.is/ISC75i5JEe6lgW93D0Ye_A/docdrop.org/video/GE39xfNRRyw/

• for: decentralized cities, DAO city, intentional community, intentional communities
• Description
  • Jonathan Hillis is interviewed about his decentralized cities project

• for: intentional community, intentional communities,

• for: ecological civilization
  • Nora Bateson
    • Nora shares about the many diverse intentional communities she has lived in and found them all dysfunctional.
    • The problem is that they have a mission statement, a purpose.
    • The perspectival knowing is different for each person.
    • How do you nurture unintentional community?
    • support unintentional possibility
    • top-down instructional is an unecological process
    • The question "who can you be when you are with me?" is preferred over "what should you be?"

• for: decolonization, decolinization - museums
• title
  • Museums and Chill, The Role of Museums in Deconlinisation
• source
  • https://icom.museum/en/news/museums-and-chill-the-role-of-museums-in-decolonisation/
• descrption
  • a dialogue betewen guests
    • Gerty Dambury
      • Caribbean author, was born in Pointe-à-Pitre (Guadeloupe).
      • She has published poetry as well as plays.
      • She has studied African-American literature and theatre:
      • her essay on the history of the first theatre opened by blacks in New York in 1821, William Alexander Brown’s Dream, won the 2015 Carbet Prize for Literature and the Tout-Monde.
    • Hotense Belhote
      • Actress, author and art historian
      • She is the creator of Merci de ne pas Toucher,
        • an Arte web series directed by Cécilia de Arce, which deciphers the masterpieces of classical European art.
  • on
    • reclaiming narratives
    • redefining curation
    • museum as forum

• for: climate departure
• compare: climate departure

• for: communication, TPF
• comment
  • radio can be an accessible and democratic form of communication to reach local communities

• for: communications, TPF, STP
  • community radio
    • KDNA
    • WGXC

for: quote, art, quote - art, Adam Philips - quote - if the art legitimates cruelty, I think the art is not worth having. - author - Adam Philips

• for: futures, decarbonizing - cultural sector, climate futures - cultural sector, climate futures - cultural industry
• paraphrase
  • more local performances
  • more local purchases
  • leverage point for regional transition
  • reduce capacity
  • slowdown
  • reconceive / eco-conceive the arts so that it may endure
  • educate and change public policy

• for cancel culture
• comment
  • by cancel culture, what I mean here is that in cases of real emergency, culture has been canceled, as during the Covid crisis
  • If elites cannot voluntarily control their extremely high emissions, then it will be done by policy as their inability to do so can threaten the survival of organized human life itself as research on millionaire's emissions have demonstrated:
    • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedirect.com%2Fscience%2Farticle%2Fpii%2FS2666791622000252&group=world

• for: W2W, carbon inequality, carbon footprint - 1%, carbon emissions - 1%, luxury advertising, luxury advertising contracts, carbon emissions - luxury goods
• key insight
  • the elites are often the main popularizers, influencers and propagandists of the fantasy of overconsumption
  • culture of overconsumption
  • such elites have a close tie to the luxury industry via large advertising contracts
  • Media posts critical of the carbon air travel emissions of famous DJ named DJ Snake offers a prime example of a common attitude of privilege and self-righteousness found amongst a number of elites

• for carbon inequality, carbon emissions - air travel, carbon emissions - concerts, stats - air travel - concerts
• paraphrase
• stats
  • The Shift Project has estimated that
    • if only 3% of festival-goers attending the Vieilles Charrues Festival come by plane, they account for more than 60% of carbon emissions linked to public transport!
  • Tomorrowland concert - close to 25,000 festival-goers fly in via "party flights"
  • North America Burning Man - 20% of festival goers fly in
  • In general, the largest footprint for famous cultural events is air travel

• for: music industry - touring economics, concert booking arms race, unsustainable booking
  • the intensity of bookings ( number of artists scheduled to perform per year or per season) is increasing
  • the average booking is becoming more geographically widespread ( more kilometers travelled per artist) with fewer performance dates per region
  • increase in artistic fees and technical requirements force organizers to attract more audiences who come from further away, creating a concert booking arms race

• for: carbon emissions of the 1%, carbon inequality, carbon emissions - artists, high carbon lifestyle
• comment
  • top tier entertainers are conditioned to a high carbon lifestyle. This is a challenge to overcome.
  • example given
    • DJ who flew to perform in four different EU cities in the same evening!

• for: carbon footprint - music industry, carbon footprint - concerts, carbon footprint - touring
• paraphrase
  • Most renowned artists and the trades and professions around them
    • producers,
    • broadcasters,
    • booking agents,
    • distributors, internet platforms
    • studios
    • equipment and service providers
  • are today dependent on hyper-intensive energy-consuming models.
  • Music or showbusiness artists, for example, depend more and more on touring and festivals.
  • Namely because with a remuneration of 0,0034 dollars per listened music track,
    • only 1% of music artists receive a minimum wage through streaming and
    • because, in the meantime, sales in the physical media market (CD, vinyl) have collapsed,
      • and streaming has not made up for loss of value.
  • Unsurprisingly, the artists who are most successful at making a living receive the quasi-totality of their revenue from the tours they do via concerts or festivals
    • (which incur high travel carbon footprint)
  • And those have a tendency to increase at an unchecked rate.
  • To attract the largest crowd possible, these artists demand
    • more and more top billings
    • with equally
      • increasing fees and
      • technical requirements.
  • example
    • Coldplay travels with no less than 2 kits of 32 articulated lorries on the road (for their “ecological” tour),
    • Rammstein accounts for
      • almost 100 articulated lorries
      • 7 cargo planes for their tours and
      • burns no less than 1000 litres of heating oil for their pyrotechnical effects at each concert (something the group proudly displays on social media).
• noteworthy
  • due to loss of product sales, touring and concerts is the only way musicians can make money, and that comes at high carbon emission cost

• for: carbon emissions - culture, carbon emissions - cultural sector, carbon footprint - culture,

• paraphrase

• stats
  • for France
  • culture and leisure are the third reason for travel after work and shopping
  • watching movies at movie theatre alone is responsible for nearly one million tons of CO2 emissions
  • culture takes up 60% of all downloads on the internet, 80% if porn is included
  • tens of thousands of buildings such as auditoriums are depending on fossil fuels to operate
  • cultural events drive high carbon tourist industry:
    • account for 60% of revenue of hotels and restaurants at the Avignon Festival
    • Louvre's carbon footprint of 3.4 million tons of CO2 emissions are in large part due to air travel of tourists from around the globe

• for: emissions reduction, bend the curve, TPF, W2W, emissions reduction - cultural sector, bend the curve - cultural sector, TPF - cultural sector, W2W - cultural sector, carbon emissions - cultural sector, carbon inequality

• comment

  • well written article on the carbon emissions challenges of the cultural sector
  • this is related to the carbon emissions of the luxury industry as well
• question
  • same question as asked about luxury, since there is overlap with culture industry and luxury
  • Given that the 1% have the same carbon emissions as the bottom half of humanity, does the sustainability impacts of the decarbonization efforts of the luxury aspects of the culture industry measure up to stay under earth system boundaries in time?
• reference
  • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=carbon+inequality

• for: carbon emissions - DJ, carbon footprint - DJ, carbon emissions - music industry, carbon emission - cultural sector, research study - carbon emissions - DJ
• noteworthy
  • some DJ's fly to perform in four European cities in a single evening!

• for: carbon inequality, decarbonizing luxury, decarbonizing luxury goods, carbon emissions - luxury goods, W2W, TPF,

• question

  • Given that the 1% have the same carbon emissions as the bottom half of humanity, does the sustainability impacts of the decarbonization efforts of the luxury industry measure up to stay under earth system boundaries in time?
• reference
  • carbon inequality
  • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=carbon+inequality

• for: cape town, cape town - climate plan

• for: sustainable transport, Cape Town, Cape Town - sustainable transport, Heinrich Boiller
• Description
  • Heinrich Boiller study on sustainable transportation for the city of Cape Town

• for: cape town transportation, minibus industry South Africa , Cape Town, sustainable transportation, informal transport
• title
  • Views 0 CrossRef citations to date 32 Altmetric Research Article The spatial and social logic of the Minibus Taxi network: how access may support social inclusion in Cape Town, South Africa
• date
  • May 24, 2021
• author
  • Ruth Joan Nelson
• source
  • Applied Mobilities
  • https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23800127.2021.1926054

• for: the lack project, sense of lack, the reality project, sense of self, sense of self and lack, poverty mentality, sense of time, living in the future, living in the present, human DOing, human BEing
• key insight
  • we construct different types of experiences of time, depending on the degree of sense of lack we experience
  • it means the difference between
    • living in the present
    • living in the future
• paraphrase
  • it's the nature of lack projects insofar as we become preoccupied with them
  • that they tend to be future oriented naturally
  • I mean the whole idea of a lack project or a reality project is right here right now is not good enough
    • because I feel this sense of inadequacy this sense of lack
    • but in the future when I have what I think I need
      • when I'm rich enough or
      • when I'm famous enough or
      • my body is perfect enough or whatever
    • when I have all this then everything will be okay
    • and what of course that does is that future orientation traps Us in linear time in a way that tends to devalue the way we experience the world and ourselves in the world right here and now
    • it treats the now as a means to some better ends
    • Now isn't good enough
      • but when I have what I think I need everything is going to be just great
  • So many of the spiritual Traditions taught
  • especially the mystics and the Zen Masters
  • they end up talking about what is sometimes called
    • the Eternal now
    • or the Eternal present - a different way of experiencing the now
  • As long as the present is a means to some better end
    • this future when I'm gonna be okay
  • then the present is experienced as
    • a series of Nows that fall away
    • as we reach for that future
  • but if we're not actually needing to get somewhere that's better in the future
  • it's possible to experience the here and now
    • as lacking nothing and myself in the here and now
    • as lacking nothing
• it's possible to experience the present as something that doesn't arise and doesn't fall away

• for: the lack project, the reality project, sense of lack, sense of self, poverty mentality, polylcrisis, polycrisis - root
• paraphrase
  • the irony is that
    • if this desire
    • if this craving for money
    • if this lack project and
    • we could also call it reality project
      • because another way to talk about all this is to say that we don't feel real enough and we're looking for that which somehow will make us feel more real more complete more whole
  • because whatever the lack project may be it is looking for out something outside
    • that's going to secure this sense of self-inside
  • the tragedy of the whole process is that it doesn't matter how much money you earn
    • it's never going to be enough
    • because what we're dealing with is just a symptom and not the core problem
• key insight
  • the lack project is at the root of our polycrisis

• for: progress trap, sense of lack, the lack project, collective lack project, individual lack project
• key insight
  • progress, and the shadow side, the progress trap
  • is the collective lack project, that corresponds to the individual's lack project

• for: sense of lack, sense of self, sense of self and sense of lack, human condition, poverty mentality, alienation, separation, emptiness, emptiness of emptiness, W2W, inequality
• key insight
  • sense of self is equivalent to
    • sense of lack
    • duality
    • disconnection
    • alienation
    • separation
    • solidification - the opposite of emptiness
• comment
  • this sense of lack that is intrinsically associated with the sense of self is perhaps the deepest root of our unhappiness
  • this is a key insight for sharing for both those who have too much (the 1%) as well as those who are so materially impoverished and deprived that they are forced to adopt survivalist strategies to stay alive, and if successful, take on a hard edge to survivalism, over-appreciating materialism
  • the same mistake is committed on both end of the disparity spectrum, both groups are still under the illusion that that sense of lack can be filled

• for: self, constructing reality, constructed self, constructed reality, constructing the sense of self, self and other, nonduality, duality, insecurable, comment, question

• paraphrase

  • sense of self is a construct
  • a psychological and social construct
  • it's not something that infants are born with
    • it's actually something that develops as we grow up
  • our caregivers look into our eyes
    • give us a name that we learned to identify with and
    • also basically we learn to see ourselves as they see us
      • we internalize that which is why we are so preoccupied with what other people think about
    • we learned to use language in certain ways
      • mine
      • you
      • yours
      • his
      • hers and so forth
    • that's all very essential to it
  • so we could say that the sense of self is being a construct
  • it's composed of mostly habitual ways of
    • thinking
    • feeling
    • acting
    • reacting
    • remembering
    • planning and
    • tending
  • it's the way that these mostly habitual processes work together re-enforce each other
  • but does that give us insight into what the fundamental problem is?
• I think it does and here's what it is as I understand it
  • because the sense of self is a construct
    • because it doesn't refer it
    • doesn't depend on it
    • doesn't point back to a real self that has any self-reality or or self-identity

• this sense of self by virtue of its lack of essence is inherently uncomfortable

  • we can say it's basically inherently insecure
  • in fact it's not only insecure but it's insecurable

• comment

• question
  • I agree with David's analysis but also have a question for him:
    • what about the biological, evolutionary definition of the self of a living organism. Is there a contradiction here?
    • reference
      • Major Evolutionary Transitions occur when a group of individuated living organisms achieve greater fitness by mutualism and begin to reproduce together as a new unit
        • How do we harmonize the claim of a psychologically constructed self with this evolutionary formation of new biological SELF units through MET?

• for: TPF, youth climate activism

• for: polycrisis, collapse, tweedledums, tweedledees, wicked problem, social mess, stuck, stuckness, complexity
• title
  • Is This How Political Collapse Will Unfold?
• author
  • Dave Pollard
• date
  • Aug 3, 2023
• comment
  • thought provoking
  • honest, diverse, open thinking
  • a good piece of writing to submit to SRG / Deep Humanity analysis for surfacing insights
  • adjacency
    • complexity
    • emptiness
    • stuckness
      • this word "stuckness" stuck out in me (no pun intended) today - so many intractable, stuck problems, at all levels of society, because we oversimplify complexity to the point of harmful abstraction.

• definition

  • Tweedledums

    • This is a Reactionary Caste that believes that salvation lies in a return to a non-existent nostalgic past, characterized by respect for
      • authority,
      • order,
      • hierarchy,
      • individual initiative, and
      • ‘traditional’ ways of doing things,
    • governed by a
      • strict,
      • lean,
      • paternalistic elite
    • that leaves as much as possible up to individual families guided by
      • established ‘family values’ and
      • by their interpretation of the will of their god.

  • Tweedledees

    • This is a PM (Professional-Managerial) Caste that believes that salvation lies in striving for an impossibly idealistic future characterized by
      • mutual care,
      • affluence
      • relative equality for all,
    • governed by a
      • kind,
      • thoughtful,
      • educated,
      • informed and
      • representative
    • elite that appreciates the role of public institutions and regulations, and is guided by principles of
      • humanism and
      • ‘fairness’.
  • references
  • Aurélien
    • https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/reality-would-like-a-word
  • source
  • led here by reading Dave Pollard's other article
    • https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2021/09/13/something-better-than-democracy/
    • which was the result of a Google search on "better than democracy"

• for: polycrisis, polycrisis - response, incrementalism, greenwashing,
• paraphrase
  • our preoccupation with
    • one-upping the Tweedledums, and with
      • social justice’ platitudes,
      • incrementalism,
      • technotopian thinking,
      • niceties of speech, and
      • mistaking
        • virtue signalling,
        • policy platforms, and
        • wishful out-loud thinking
      • for actual progress toward real goals,
      • constitute a
        • grossly negligent and
        • staggeringly ignorant response
      • to the existential crises of the day.

• for: definition, definition - Tweedledums, Tweedledees
• definition
  • Tweedledums
    • This is a Reactionary Caste that believes that salvation lies in a return to a non-existent nostalgic past, characterized by respect for
      • authority,
      • order,
      • hierarchy,
      • individual initiative, and
      • ‘traditional’ ways of doing things,
    • governed by a
      • strict,
      • lean,
      • paternalistic elite
    • that leaves as much as possible up to individual families guided by
      • established ‘family values’ and
      • by their interpretation of the will of their god.

• for: definition, definition - tweedledees, tweedledees
• definition
  • Tweedledees
    • This is a PM (Professional-Managerial) Caste that believes that salvation lies in striving for an impossibly idealistic future characterized by
      • mutual care,
      • affluence
      • relative equality for all,
    • governed by a
      • kind,
      • thoughtful,
      • educated,
      • informed and
      • representative
    • elite that appreciates the role of public institutions and regulations, and is guided by principles of
      • humanism and
      • ‘fairness’.

• for: collapse, polycrisis, political collapse
• signs of collapse
  • misinformation
  • disinformation,
  • propaganda
  • censorship,
  • scapegoating,
  • disenfranchisement,
  • suppression of dissent,
  • widespread surveillance,
  • overt and large-scale corruption,
  • emergence and use of paramilitaries,
  • widespread
    • arrests,
    • incarcerations and
    • ‘disappearances’,
  • election interference and fraud,
  • election cancellations and
  • the dismantling of democratic institutions. Over the past decade, most of these have been employed in many countries, and their use is becoming widely normalized in much of the world.

• for: further inquiry, unpack, self-other entanglement, dual, nondual
• paraphrase
  • Our real challenge, perhaps, is in relearning what the “collective interest” actually means,
  • and why it is so important,
  • and how we got to this perverse situation
    • where we have such monstrous distrust of each other,
    • and of collectives in general,
    • that we have assumed that, somehow, 7.8B people acting in their
      • isolated
      • individual,
      • personal, and often
      • trauma-influenced
    • self-interest,
    • will somehow be synonymous with an optimal collective interest.
• comment
  • it points once again to a deeper understanding of the relationship between
    • self and
    • other
    • and their entanglement

• for further inquiry, unpack

• for: further inquiry, unpack

• for: collective interest,
• paraphrase
  • When the tribe is not a cohesive group but an assemblage of thousands or millions whose only commonality is the place they call home,
    • what exactly does the “collective interest” even mean?
  • By contrast, the interests of individuals and groups within the larger goup, such as
    • unlicensed gun owners,
    • protesters of various stripes, or
    • hate-mongers on social media
  • are pretty easy to delineate.
  • No surprise then that the dysfunctional courts often choose
    • personal interests over
    • an amorphous and undefinable “collective interest”.
• insight
  • reason why the judicial system often sides with a definitive, but often harmful group, over a vague but beneficial group
• quote
  • modernity has hollowed out the word "collective interest
• author
  • James Gien Wong
  • Stop Reset Go

• for: citizen's assembly

• for: community, loss of community, alienation, separation, anonymous neighborhoods, representative democracy, unrepresentative democracy, together alone
• adjacency
  • community
  • representative democracy
  • anonymous neighborhoods
• comment
  • makes me think of this article:
    • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Finthesetimes.com%2Farticle%2Findustrial-agricultural-revolution-planet-earth-david-korten&group=world
  • I've long felt that modernity has hollowed out the original meaning of "community"
• quote
  • modernity has hollowed out the word community
• author
  • James Gien Wong
  • Stop Reset Go

• for: broken system, voting, low turnout, low voter turnout, together alone
• adjacency
  • low turnout
  • low voter turnout
  • alienation
  • anonymous neighbourhoods
  • anonymous community

• for: complexity, collapse, polycrisis, vulnerabilities - civilization
• comment
  • the threat of sudden collapse is that our highly interdependent world crashes
  • and we are all specialized cogs in the wheel
  • If sudden collapse happens and complex infrastructure becomes unusable, it takes a tremendous amount of global coordination of specialists to bring the infrastructure back up again
  • global society is not easy to replicate with small groups, as the specialized skills are so fragmented that no small group would likely have the collective knowhow to reconstruct the complexity

• for: animal decision-making
• adjacency
  • animal herding behavior and
  • direct democracy
• claim
  • herds and flocks of many other animals (other than human) use a form of direct democracy in making decisions
  • Alphas do not alone make decisions, as leadership often rotates
  • The law of "two feet (or four" tests the group's readiness for consensus and the "first follower" principle
  • dissenters and unpersuaded group members are free to go off and look for another group
    • except at critical times such as
      • breeding season
      • under threat

• for: governance - story, story - choice, story, Inuit
• story
  • Three Inuit tribe members who get stranded in a blizzard during a hunt
    • They discuss their situation.
    • The two elders say their experience and instincts tell them to stay put and wait for rescue.
    • The younger hunter accepts the argument
      • but states his belief that it would be best for the group if one of them were to attempt to make it to safety and tell the rest of their community about their predicament.
    • Finally the younger hunter heads off.
    • In the end, the elders are rescued and the younger man dies.
    • There is
      • no blame,
      • no repercussions,
      • no second guessing the decisions.
    • The choices were the only ones the trio could have made in the circumstances.
    • They were respected, the young man’s death was mourned, and life went on.

• for: democracy, governance, alternative governance
• title
  • Something Better Than Democracy
• author
  • Dave Pollard
• date Sept 13, 2023
• source
  • https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2021/09/13/something-better-than-democracy/