January 2014 - P2P-Foundation - lists.ourproject.org

Fwd: [Newsletter] New film: In the Red
by Michel Bauwens 27 Jan '14

27 Jan '14

hi kevin, when you have time, thanks for presenting this to the blog, Michel ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Oliver Ressler <oliver(a)ressler.at> Date: Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 10:50 AM Subject: [Newsletter] New film: In the Red To: newsletter(a)ressler.at (for German please scroll down) * In the Red* A film by Ana Pečar & Oliver Ressler 20 min., 2014 *In the Red* is a film about the Strike Debt group, an offshoot organization of Occupy Wall Street in New York City. The group organizes around debts, an instrument of control and maintenance of economic power. Strike Debt initiates several activities to expose hidden mechanisms of financial capitalism. Similar to Occupy, the movement organizes along affinity groups: The theory group issues a handbook—the *Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual*—for those attempting to renounce their debt. The action group organizes protests, provides free medical care and information about their activities. The Rolling Jubilee group buys, for very little money, the huge amounts of personal debt the banks have already written off; they then “abolish” the debts and therefore free the debtors from their bills. By this grandiose act, Strike Debt spreads information about how the secondary debt market is working. Few people in the U.S. know that when individuals consistently fail to pay bills from credit cards, loans, or medical insurance, their bank or lender usually sells that debt to a third party. These sales occur for a fraction of the debt’s true value—typically for five cents on the dollar—and debt-buying companies then attempt to recoup the debt from the individual debtor and thus make a profit. *In the Red* follows a group of Strike Debt activists over several weeks, engages in intimate conversations with the group revealing the collective decision-making processes. The film explores horizontalism, a social way of organizing that brings out richness and democratic inclusion unavailable in predominately hierarchical structures. Directors, producers and editors: Ana Pečar& Oliver Ressler Camera: Ana Pečar Additional camera: Thomas Parb Sound design, mix and color correction: Rudolf Gottsberger Participants: Alex, Ann, Jacques, Laura, Nicky, Ohyoon, Sandy, Sean, Winter Music: David Backer, Carlos Mandelbaum Special thanks to Strike Debt – strikedebt.org, Stacy Lanyon, Mike Watson The project was funded partly through support of The Gallery Apart, Rome and Ministry of Culture Slovenia. Further information and film excerpt: http://www.ressler.at/in_the_red/ *Exhibitions:* “Subterfuge”, The Gallery Apart <http://www.thegalleryapart.it/>, Rome (I), until 15.03.2014 “Democracies possibilities and impossibilities”, Kala-Bhavan, Santiniketan (IN), 14. – 20.02.2014 Art Konsult, Delhi (IN), 06. – 21.03.2014 *In the Red* Ein Film von Ana Pečar & Oliver Ressler 20 min, 2014 „In the Red“ ist ein Film über die Gruppe „Strike Debt“, ein Ableger von Occupy Wall Street in New York. Die Gruppe betrachtet Schulden als ein Instrument zur Kontrolle und zur Erhaltung wirtschaftlicher Macht. Strike Debt ruft verschiedene Aktionen ins Leben, die verborgene Mechanismen des Finanzkapitalismus offenlegen. Wie auch bei Occupy gibt es innerhalb der Bewegung verschiedene Bezugsgruppen: Die Theoriegruppe gibt das Handbuch „Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual“ heraus, das Menschen helfen soll, sich von ihren Schulden loszusagen. Die Aktionsgruppe organisiert Proteste, bietet kostenlose medizinische Versorgung an und informiert über ihre Aktivitäten. Die Gruppe „Rolling Jubilee“ kauft die von den Banken bereits abgeschriebenen Schulden von Menschen um wenig Geld auf, um diese dann „abzuschaffen“ und die SchuldnerInnen von ihren Schulden zu befreien. Im gleichen Zug klärt Strike Debt darüber auf, wie der Sekundärmarkt für Schuldtitel funktioniert. Nur wenige in den USA wissen, dass Banken oder Geldgeber Schulden aus Kreditkarten, Darlehen oder Arztrechnungen, die von den SchuldnerInnen dauerhaft nicht zurückgezahlt werden können, oft an Dritte verkaufen. Das passiert zu einem Bruchteil der wahren Höhe der Schulden – oft im Verhältnis von fünf Cent je Dollar. Die erwerbenden Unternehmen versuchen dann, die Schulden von den einzelnen SchuldnerInnen einzutreiben und darüber Profite zu machen. „In the Red“ begleitet AktivistInnen von Strike Debt über einige Wochen und bietet Einblicke in intime Gespräche innerhalb der Gruppe, die die gemeinsamen Entscheidungsfindungsprozesse sichtbar machen. Der Film erforscht Horizontalismus, eine soziale Organisierungsform, die Vielfalt und demokratische Einbeziehung ermöglicht, die in den vorherrschenden hierarchischen Strukturen nicht denkbar sind. Regie, Produktion und Schnitt: Ana Pečar & Oliver Ressler Kamera: Ana Pečar Zusatzkamera: Thomas Parb Sound-Design, Mischung und Farbkorrektur: Rudolf Gottsberger TeilnehmerInnen: Alex, Ann, Jacques, Laura, Nicky, Ohyoon, Sandy, Sean, Winter Musik: David Backer, Carlos Mandelbaum Besonderer Dank geht an Strike Debt – strikedebt.org, Stacy Lanyon, Mike Watson Das Projekt wurde teilweise von The Gallery Apart, Rom, und dem Kulturministerium Sloweniens finanziert. Weitere Information und Filmausschnitt: http://www.ressler.at/de/in_the_red/ *Ausstellungen:* “Subterfuge”, The Gallery Apart <http://www.thegalleryapart.it/>, Rom (I), bis 15.03.2014 “Democracies possibilities and impossibilities”, Kala-Bhavan, Santiniketan (IN), 14. – 20.02.2014 Art Konsult, Delhi (IN), 06. – 21.03.2014 _______________________________________________ Ressler_newsletter mailing list newsletter(a)ressler.at http://mailman.mediainvent.at/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ressler_newsletter -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

1 0

Fwd: New website of NetwOrg is online and running!
by Michel Bauwens 26 Jan '14

26 Jan '14

thanks Orsan, Michel ---------- Forwarthanksed message ---------- From: Chapullers OrsanS <orsan1234(a)gmail.com> Date: Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 2:40 PM Subject: New website of NetwOrg is online and running! To: "Pantland, Walton" <Walton.Pantland(a)unitetheunion.org>, Jim Larkin < Andrew.Brady(a)unitetheunion.org>, Stephen Mahood <mv(a)cyberunions.org>, Dave Spooner <dave.spooner(a)global-labour.net>, Peter Hall-Jones < phj(a)newunionism.net>, Michel Bauwens <michel(a)p2pfoundation.net> Dear comrades, NetwOrg website is online and running (http://networg.nl) It is still a work in progress moving with slower steps. Yet it is eager to learn from others and improve, so wide open to any kind of collaboration and global solidarity. Best, Orsan -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

1 0

Fwd: A Powerful New Theory of Social Change
by Michel Bauwens 26 Jan '14

26 Jan '14

very rich essay which includes a cririque of marxism as a reductionist way of seeing the world, with explorations of the importance of mutual recognition ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Rabbi Michael Lerner <rabbilerner.tikkun(a)gmail.com> Date: Thu, May 30, 2013 at 5:37 PM Subject: A Powerful New Theory of Social Change To: Michelsub2004(a)gmail.com [image: Tikkun Banner] [image: Tikkun Team] Editor's Note: Peter Gabel's article below, a powerful critique of Marxism and other theories of social change, will completely change your idea of what "spiritual" means and show you how relevant it is to developing a strategy to change the political, economic and social realities of the world. This is not the "first get your inner life together and later worry about changing the world" kind of spirituality--it is an example of how spiritual consciousness can directly contribute to social transformation. Peter Gabel is one of the most brilliant thinkers in the progressive world, and his article (below) captures some of what makes him so creative, as well as restates the spiritual progressive worldview he helped develop in a powerful new way. If you didn't read it yet in the print edition of *Tikkun*, you can read it here. If you are neither a Tikkun subscriber nor a member of the NSP Network of Spiritual Progressives, reading this will show you why you really ought to be joining (members of the NSP get a free print subscription and your membership helps keep our spiritual progressive movement and our amazing magazine going). Please join by clicking here<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=HpQ5o3%2B5XFqoesqUjViyAb5jThmd…>. Or at least Subscribe by clicking here<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=QyuJ%2BFnJQfY%2FyEcddIuV8b5jTh…>. And if you join, you can become active with us in our campaign to GET MONEY OUT OF POLITICS AND ELECTIONS<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=9H%2FQLhM0%2F32mLZ7fS0%2B6AL5j…>(through our ESRA--Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution), our campaign for a GLOBAL MARSHALL PLAN<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=16fvsJeY4VtkFPwLFneU%2B75jThmd…>based on the supposition that it is generosity, not military domination, that will provide us with lasting security, and our campaign for an open-hearted reconciliation between Israel and Palestine and an end to the Occupation of the West Bank<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=DqnJ3mi1pdvqUtlF6ljTVr5jThmd28…>. NO--YOU CANT GET TIKKUN AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR NEWSSTAND because unless you've insisted that they carry it, they don't any more (but you do insist, tell them to order it through Ingram Distributors). And NO IT's NOT ON LINE. The articles in the print magazine are only accessible on line by people who subscribe or are members of the Network of Spiritual Progessives. So we are sending you this one so you get an idea of the quality of discourse you are missing--and because Peter Gabel's piece gives you an idea of the kind of thinking that you rarely hear in the Left in the Western world! IF you ARE a subscriber or NSP member how about buying gift subscriptions for all your friends--even your most cynical friends will be shocked at the sophistication of articles in Tikkun, with writers like Bill McKibben, Harriet Fraad, Aryeh Cohen, Amy Lefy-Lyons, Gar Alperovitz, Eli Zaretsky, Gary Dorrien, Henry Giroux, Robert Bellah, Elizabeth Schussle Fiorenza, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Brian McLaren, Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi, Daniel Boyarin, Stephen Zunes, Svi Shapirot, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Noam Chomsky, lWalter Brueggemann, Riane Eisler, David Korten, Hans Kung, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Marge Pericy, Duglas Rushkoff, C.K. Williams, Jonathan Granoff, Donna Schaper, Georgia Kelly and many many more. *A Spiritual Way of Seeing **by Peter Gabel* Most of the theories and narratives we use to understand social reality assume that the material world is the main shaping influence over that reality—economics with its emphasis on goods; evolution with its emphasis on physical survival; or think even of the recent presidential campaign with its emphasis on jobs as the defining issue in determining how people will vote. I don’t deny the obvious importance of the material dimension of existence, but I find that theories such as these are often blind to the spiritual dimension of social life: by focusing wholly on humans’ desire for things, they fail to perceive the power of humans’ desire for love, community, solidarity, and connection with others, or as I will explain shortly, for “mutual recognition” of our common humanity as authentic Presence. Where we place our emphasis in interpreting the world is critical to being able to act together to influence historical events in a positive way and help to create a better world—a world more capable of realizing the yearnings of the human soul. Or in other words, our “social theory” is central to our capacity for effective and meaningful social action, in the sense that social theory is really nothing more than a way of seeing, and in order to do the right thing, to devote our energies in the time that we are here to worthwhile projects that are most likely to improve our collective lives and the world that we collectively inhabit, we must learn to see what is going on in front of us in a way that allows us to interpret its social meaning as accurately as possible. *Freud and Melancholia* The stakes involved in choosing between different social theories and narratives can be illustrated by a discussion of Lars von Trier’s *Melancholia*—a movie that has received a great deal of attention from critics and moviegoers. In this remarkable film, a woman named Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst, gets married in a wedding ceremony that is both extraordinarily opulent (vast sums of money are spent by her brother-in-law to assure that this is the happiest day of her life) and yet profoundly alienating in the sense that virtually all the characters, including Justine’s parents and other family members, are represented as unhappy, selfish, and preoccupied with the details of the wedding ritual over the substance of any profound human bond. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to most of the guests but somewhat mystically understood by Justine and less mystically and more scientifically so by her brother-in-law, a planet that has been hidden behind the sun has somehow shifted in its alignment and is rapidly heading toward earth. Although Justine is obviously deeply disturbed and disengaged while enduring the experience of her own wedding, she becomes more centered and present in the days following the wedding as the danger of collision with the errant planet—named Melancholia—becomes more likely. In the final scene, as Justine sits holding hands with her frightened sister and innocent young nephew in a hastily constructed “magic cave” that Justine has told the boy will protect them all, it is Justine who seems spiritually prepared for the apocalyptic end that awaits them and all of the world. While during the early part of the film, Justine appeared to be the one doomed to disorientation and debilitating melancholia, at the end it is she who becomes at one with the profound and sudden ending of both the collective life and the collective history and culture of the human experience, of human existence itself. The theory that has informed most of the reviews of *Melancholia* has been quite explicitly Freudian, perhaps because Freud wrote a very famous book called *Mourning and Melancholia *that addressed the way that loss—in particular unmourned loss—can create a pathological attachment to the lost object that leads one to become in-dwelling and withdrawn, to lose all interest in life, and to become quite literally vitiated of human vitality. This meaning of the word “melancholia,” drawn from Freud’s good work on the subject, has then been projected into the movie, so that Justine is identified as deeply “depressed” by the disturbed nature of her conditioned upbringing, which reaches a kind of apotheosis in the dysfunctional and dysphoric wedding ceremony. This depression is interpreted as a manifestation of her melancholia, her loss of vitality and interest in life. In Freud’s analysis, the failure to work through the experience of loss through the process of mourning both expresses and reinforces an infantile belief on the part of the sufferer that he or she is responsible for the loss of the loved object, and this guilt not only becomes a primary cause of the sufferer’s unrelenting attachment to the lost object, but also engenders an unconscious need for punishment to partially expiate the guilt, or better, to satisfy the guilt fixation. For the critics who adapt the Freudian way of seeing to the movie, Justine improves at the movie’s climactic ending because that long-deserved punishment has finally arrived in the form of the planetary collision. While the brother-in-law commits suicide and the sister cries, Justine is fully present emotionally and awaits the end with equanimity and perhaps even joy. While not all critics adopt all of the components of the Freudian theory in analyzing the film, there is a consensus that the film is “depressing,” that the characters are dreadful human beings, that Justine is a deeply disturbed woman, and that it portends one eccentric but talented director’s vision of the end of the world. While the Freudian interpretation is true to the facts of the movie in the sense that the existing facts can be “seen” in a way that makes them consistent with the theory, the interpretation is in my opinion completely wrong. To my way of seeing, Justine’s reactions to the alienation and dehumanization of her social environment are understandable and even courageous, although because she is presented to us as socially absorbed into this world—as a kind of passively willing participant in her dreadful wedding ceremony—she is far more isolated and far crazier as a result than she would have been had she instead, say, joined the women’s movement or Occupy Wall Street. But considering the pathological social place in which she found herself as a thoroughly isolated woman, it was obvious to me that she was throwing all of herself into her resistance to what was being made of her from the outside. Her recovery during the course of the movie as a result of the approach of the planet, to my eyes, manifested her emergence into mental health, because the arrival of the errant planet would liberate both her and also all of humanity from the social alienation, brutality, and inauthenticity into which our world had fallen. In a beautiful final scene, it is Justine who can reassure her little nephew of his security in the magic cave they construct out of sticks, because this magic cave, in which Justine, her nephew, and her sister hold hands as the end approaches, is a new little world of authenticity and love and spiritual recovery of their simple common humanity. I left the theater with a full heart and a smile that I could not get off of my face, and I felt that my true self—the authentic longings of my soul—had been recognized and confirmed by Justine’s final beauty and presence in the face of death and of the limits of existence itself. We really are here together if only we will embrace one another. Now, as I say, there is nothing wrong with the Freudian theory, or the related “the movie-is-depressing” theory, on its use of the facts. Exactly the problem of all mistaken but well-articulated theories about the meaning of social events is that they express a way of seeing that *fits the facts.*What is wrong with these theories is not that they cannot explain things, but rather that they *can* explain them and that they do so incorrectly. The error in these incorrect or faulty or too-limited ways of seeing is that rather than illuminate the meaning of social events as they actually are, they impose upon these events an order that renders this true meaning invisible. *Marxism as a Way of Seeing* For example, Marxism does a brilliant job of presenting historical events through a theory, a way of seeing, that fits the facts of these events. In Marx’s own works and the many works that have followed in his tradition, we see the myths of various historical periods penetrated by a critical way of seeing that shows the shaping power of underlying economic factors, the hidden organization of society adapted in each epoch to the production and distribution of material goods under conditions of material scarcity. As soon as this organization produces a surplus, it is appropriated by the class of people that has gained power within a particular means of production, generating a struggle for survival between classes that is obscured by universal myths and rationalizations—ideologies—that legitimize the status quo and cover up what’s really going on. In the Marxist framework, its way of seeing, everything is accounted for: economics, law, religion, culture, gender roles, racism, conquest and domination of other cultures, everything. But Marxism is nevertheless wrong, not because it cannot explain events, but because the superimposition of this way of seeing on historical events is not true to what we might call the social being of the events as they really are, in their being. Yes, there is a formation of classes, there is a competitive division of labor, there is appropriation of the economic surplus in unjust ways, there are masking ideologies that rationalize unjust social relations and transform might into right… but this turns out not to be taking place because of the material struggle for survival but because of a Fear of the Other that has been injected into history and reproduced across generations in ways not reducible to material factors alone, or even primarily. Yet if you come to believe in the Marxist way of seeing, if you are understandably seduced by how brilliantly it fits the facts while appealing to your instinctive sense that the world, as it is, is profoundly unjust, then you will be led in wrong directions by it—for example, you may think that an economic revolution that reorganizes productive relations is the key element to overcoming injustice and fulfilling human possibilities. Since coercion may be involved in such a process, that mistaken way of seeing—adopted with the best of intentions—may lead to tragic and even terrible consequences. Nothing that I say should be understood to minimize the human suffering manifested in the history of class society—the suffering from poverty, material inequality, exploitation of economic resources and human labor, and the illegitimate hierarchies through which rulers in each historical period have dominated the ruled. Nor do I mean to minimize the human need for food, shelter, and other elements of basic material survival which continue to cause suffering for much of the world’s population—for example, the 2.5 billion people who cannot obtain enough food to receive adequate nutrition each day, according to United Nations estimates. Rather what I am saying is that these forms of material suffering and injustice are manifestations of our historical legacy of our alienation from one another—that the “cause” is to be found in the social-spiritual separation expressive of an underlying failure of mutual recognition that expresses itself existentially as Fear of the Other. *The Worldview of Liberal Democracy* Or consider Marxism’s main historical competitor in the last two hundred years and its at least temporary conqueror on the historical stage, liberal individualism and its political corollary, liberal democracy. In liberalism, we are given a way of seeing in which the social world in front of us is perceived as a vast collection of individuals, each pursuing his or her own chosen destiny, each free and equal to all the others, who combine to form collective life through private agreements and through one great public agreement, the social contract that is formed and realized through the act of voting in public elections. Within the liberal worldview, it’s acknowledged that we are each born into families and must be nurtured properly through contact with others in order to achieve our individuation, our unique and sane and mature stature as individual participants in the liberal social order; but the outcome of good-enough child-rearing is self-evidently the production of the separate and free actor, who can believe whatever he or she wishes and do whatever he or she wants, as long as this free action does not involve improper interference with others through improper deception or duress or other forms of coercion. Material inequalities are explained by variations in ability or the luck of the draw, but the main point here is that whatever aspects of social life might be considered unfulfilling or unjust in liberal society can eventually be solved by the system itself: because it is the free choice of the collection of individuals themselves that will determine the existence of this lack of fulfillment or injustice, if they want to they will eventually—actually as soon as possible considering the commonsense challenges that confront human life with limited knowledge—do something about it. If we destroy the planet through nuclear war or environmental destruction, this would not invalidate the liberal worldview—it would simply reveal, with pathos, that human individuals are too burdened with inherent limitations, understood as expressions of evil or ignorance or simply biological or psychological frailties, to make a success of our own destiny as individual beings. The result of the liberal calculus would be simply that we tried and failed, but not that we had the wrong theory, that we were blinded by an incorrect way of seeing what has been going on. Like Marxism, liberalism fits the facts perfectly; it can account for the feeling of personhood, social formations, economic life, the existence of law and government, the justifications for collective actions of all kinds, including war and environmental destruction, criminal conduct, personal unhappiness, and so on ad infinitum. The problem with liberalism is not that it doesn’t fit the facts, but rather that it does fit the facts, and by doing just this obscures the true reality of the totality of phenomena that it projects itself onto. We are not actually each individuals thrown amidst a vast collection of other individuals that as a mere collection comprise the social world, the world of social existence, but are rather mutually constituting social beings perpetually knitting each other together through the inter-experience of mutual recognition into a fabric of interrelatedness that is social through and through. The reason that we feel so much like individualized entities is that we have inherited from prior generations a Fear of the Other, a fear of one another, that envelops us in the illusion of separation at a distance. While we can be grateful to liberalism and those who helped to build a world based on it for helping us to overcome the limitations of other earlier ways of seeing that caused often terrible human suffering and social injustice—ways of seeing such as the Divine Right of Kings, the natural superiority of the aristocracy, the superiority of the white race, the superiority of men over women, or of straights over gays—it is important to see that its very completeness as a social theory functions to render invisible the cause of our isolation and despair, our pathological destruction of the natural world, our infliction of starvation on the 25,000 people (many of them children) who die on the planet from lack of food every day, our imminent danger of obliterating each other with nuclear weapons that persists each day, all as if these were inevitable consequences of the way things are and have to be. *A Social-Spiritual Way of Seeing* In this article, as well as in my new book, *Another Way of Seeing: Essays on Transforming Law, Politics, and Culture (Quid Pro Books)*, from which this piece is adapted, I am offering one expression of a worldwide effort now taking place to bring another theory, another way of seeing, to the forefront of human life. The central aspect of this new postliberal, post-Marxist way of seeing is to begin from the interior of our awareness to grasp the “within” of the intersubjective life-world into which we have been thrown and into which we are, in the words of philosopher Martin Heidegger, always already in-mixed. What we find by this interior-to-interior method—from beginning inside ourselves and from that interior self-transparency going forward by intuition and understanding to the inside of the world we are trying to see—is that human beings actually exist in a psycho-spiritual world in which they seek not primarily food, shelter, or the satisfaction of material needs, but rather the love and recognition of other human beings, and the sense of elevated meaning and purpose that comes from bringing that world of intersubjective connection into being. Of course the satisfaction of material needs is indispensable to our physical survival, but please see that our survival is different from our *existence*—our survival is the background, the indispensable precondition of our existence, and if it is threatened we can be driven to whatever extreme is necessary to preserve this existence. But our existence itself is a manifestation of our social being that a) is fully present to itself and others, and b) exists only by virtue of our relation to the presence of others as the source of our completion. When I say that we are social beings, therefore, I mean that we do not really exist as individuals except to the extent that our individuality is one pole of our existence in relation to others, and the central longing of our life, immanent within our very existence as social beings, is to be fully recognized by the other in an embrace of love and to recognize that other with the same grace. Insofar as we must maintain the preconditions of our existence, we are motivated by the material need for survival, but our existence itself is animated by the desire to realize ourselves as social beings through connection with others, through the grace of love and mutual recognition. Taken to the level of an overall social theory, this way of seeing—a way of seeing that bridges the interior of the social person to the interior of that person’s surrounding (or historical) group—produces some core insights about social life that shape the perspective in the essays in *Another Way of Seeing *on law, politics, public policy, and culture. Let me summarize the first two of these insights here. First, we are all animated by the desire for mutual recognition, for a transparent connection to others in which we become fully present to each other, anchored in each other’s gaze in much the way that the German theologian Martin Buber described in his book *I and Thou.* I aspire to see you and to exist in relation to you not as a mere “you over there,” as a mere passing or glancing presence going by, but as a full presence both there and here, the very completion of myself insofar as we emerge into a We that is neither fleeting nor in danger of dissolving back into reciprocal solitudes corroded by mistrust and fear. The We is not a fusion or erasure of the individual person, but a realization or completion of the social person in authentic reciprocity. Second, the world that we have been born into and have inherited is primarily characterized by the denial of this desire for mutual recognition, in the sense that we are primarily in flight from each other and experience each other as a threat. But the threat that we experience is not of “destruction” in the Darwinian or even Marxist sense of a struggle for material resources, but rather the threat of nonrecognition or ontological humiliation. When we pass each other with blank gazes on the street, punctuated by furtive steals of a passing look, our entire existential state as social beings is revealed to us—namely, that we are each, or both, encapsulated in solitude because we are pulled outward and toward each other by the desire for mutual recognition (the furtive glances *toward* each other that we each experience as compulsory), and at the same time feel compelled to deny this desire and look away, “keep our distance,” because of the immanent anxiety that the other will not reciprocate this desire for mutual recognition. This denial of our core need and desire as social beings for essential authentic reciprocity, for love in its deepest sense of essential affirmation and sight, is actually what creates the massive material injustice that Marxism and its allied ways of seeing correctly name and analyze—it is our social alienation taken as a collective totality that creates and reproduces the worldwide socioeconomic system. Were the populations of the world not infected with this legacy of fear of nonrecognition and humiliation by the Other, we would really without great difficulty solve the material problems that generate so much unnecessary suffering and pain. In other words, the world is the way it is not because people want power or wealth or control over material things, but because they cannot experience their deeper longing for love, for authentic vulnerability and recognition, and for the coming-into-presence that would be the healing of this legacy and the transcendence of it. It is our alienation that causes material injustice rather than the converse, and it is in giving birth to a new politics that overcomes our alienation that we will overcome material inequality and injustice. But such a new form of politics can emerge only from a new way of seeing that makes our social-spiritual alienation visible in perception, thought, and reflection. *The Divided Self* Take a moment to consider the roles and masks that we feel compelled first to don and then to permanently inhabit—think of the newscaster, the weatherman, the president of the United States, this man dressed in one uniform or that woman dressed in another, the father, the therapist, the lawyer, and so forth. Although of course we can embody these roles in a way that is infused with our authentic presence, insofar as we are alienated from each other, or in a kind of flight from each other’s recognition, these roles become artificial holograms of being, pseudo-manifestations of our sociality in which we seek to master and deflect the other’s presence by “playing the role” from a conditioned outside that we are continually monitoring from within with an anxiety signal when we veer from it. In this mode of what the psychiatrist R.D. Laing called the “divided self,” we deny our own desire for authentic intersubjective connection by throwing up the role or mask that we have been over a lifetime coerced into identifying with on pain of loss of what social connection there is, while threatening the other with a comparable erasure should he or she seek to become present as a Thou. Why do we constantly threaten each other so? Because any other course of action requires a vulnerability to the other that risks the ontological humiliation of not being recognized, of not being loved and accepted and affirmed in our existence when we are utterly laid bare as longing for that recognition and love and affirmation before the other’s power to grant it or withhold it. This leads me to five additional core insights produced by the spiritual way of seeing that I am proposing: 1) The denial of the desire for mutual recognition is not merely something that is transmitted between two persons—between you and me as we pass each other on the street—but is rather a vast, rotating social field, in which every furtive glance and blank gaze and nonpresent (elusive) role-performance is taken as what’s real by each of us as we experience it. Or to put this slightly differently, every such act of flight from each other, every false way of being designed to conceal our true longing, is coupled with an implicit meta-statement that “this is who I really am” and “this is who you must recognize me as and who you really should and must be yourself.” Pre-reflectively and more or less instantly, we are each perpetually internalizing the social reality and necessity of what the other is transmitting to us, and we then—in what I am calling a “rotating” fashion—re-externalize toward others as real what we have internalized from the others passing us or surrounding us emerging in and out of our social field, from infancy forward, because the social field of the whole of existence, of the life-world in which we coexist, forms a mutually influencing circle that is our conditioning. I call this aspect of our social reality the “circle of collective denial” that keeps us spiritually imprisoned in our separation, a circle that each of us co-creates because as social beings actually constituted by each other, we cannot but externalize what we have internalized even as we long to and struggle to transcend it. 2) Seen in this light, all of social life as we have inherited it thus far is a legacy of social alienation that separates us, rotating through the circle of collective denial and manifested in an infinite number of historical forms, but that we are constantly simultaneously seeking to transcend in the fullness of mutual recognition, in the simple completion of love that every newborn child anticipates at birth and manifests in the pure joyful, anticipatory presence in his or her eyes. History is, therefore, not a straight developmental process, but rather a spiral of social being, in which up to this time the desire for mutual recognition has occasionally broken through the constraints of denial of that desire that seek to contain it, erupting into social movements that ricochet across the globe often very rapidly in a great spirit of hope and optimism. At these moments the spiral whirls upward and forward and a true revolution of our social existence becomes possible, the word “revolve” referring in reality to the turning outward of our withdrawn state toward finally grounding each other in the fullness of our reciprocal presence. And at every moment, in every interaction and social encounter, this breakthrough subtends the moment as a potentiality. But the weight of the past, and its claim on our loyalty to past patterns of safer and more impoverished forms of recognition, also at every moment work to keep us sealed in what I elsewhere have called “The Pact of the Withdrawn Selves.” We have formed vast hierarchies of disciplinary control of our social presence that we call the class system, or the legal system, or family values, or an infinity of other macro and micro examples from the schools to corporations, whose limiting, unconscious spiritual aim is to contain the impulse toward the social fulfillment of mutual recognition and the vulnerability and threat of humiliation attendant to it. 3) Insofar as we each experience this internal conflict between the desire for mutual recognition and the need to deny this very desire, for fear of nonrecognition by the other and the vulnerability attendant to it, we collectively conspire to form imaginary group identities that simultaneously provide us with a sense of substitute connection or community and serve to reinforce our collective denial—or better, to seal off our longing for the authentic mutuality of I and Thou in community by an allegiance to an imaginary community that both substitutes for and encloses/represses that authentic longing. Here I am speaking of the “inflated balloon” variety of patriotism, nationalism, ethnic purity, sexual or gender identity, profession-ism—really any form of imaginary group cohesion that conceals—or more accurately, *reveals by concealing*—an inner absence of presence, a hole at the center of the imaginary group’s collective being. In my book *The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning*, in the essay entitled “The Meaning of the Holocaust: Social Alienation and the Infliction of Human Suffering,” I show the way this type of imaginary identity emerged within Nazi Germany as an inflation of an illusory imago of community concealing an inner terror of humiliation, the goal of which was precisely to conceal the vulnerability to that anticipated threat that existed *inside *the puffed-up, grandiose Nazi imago of unity and connection. And I show in historical context how each person given over to the illusory bond of the imago makes allegiance to this false unity compulsory on all others, in the service of sealing off the deeper longing for and fear of true recognition—in such a manner that no one is allowed to see the bond’s illusory nature because it is manifested as “real.” Even more, when the collective imago is inflated to this extent, it is also manifested as “perfect” to prevent any challenge to it—not to maintain the validity of the imago as such, but to seal off the vulnerability to the longing that underlies it. While the Nazi situation was the extreme and perhaps limiting example of what I am describing, this impoverishment of social being is manifested also in the way, say, boys in my childhood behaved in the locker room in aspiring to their male identities, or the way the corporate lawyer carries his briefcase and speaks too loud at the meeting (“We lawyers” speak as if we’re in charge)—in other words, in all forms of false social unity in which we as social persons co-construct a carapace or shell of ungrounded or artificial social connection that both covers over and seals off the true being that underlies and also unconsciously observes and monitors it. 4) Accompanying the giving over of our social being, in alienation, to the false group is always what is commonly called the demonization of the Other, in which the always-experienced threat of dissolution of the false group, which is at every moment unstable because it is in fact illusory and sustained by the requirement of compulsory allegiance only, is channeled into a projection out on to some Other that supposedly is the true source of the threat to the group’s artificial unity. Whether it is the Jews, the gays, the blacks, the women, the students, the unions, or, to use the Dr. Seuss example that I use in one of the essays in my book, the people who butter their toast on the bottom instead of the top, these Others are sacrificed not because they are actual human beings who are rejected and expelled for their true nature, but because they are turned into carriers of the threat that inhabits and corrodes the false group itself, the threat of its own unmasking. The false group, an illusory unity of communion, always defends itself against exposure by pretending that some projected Other is a threat to its solidity and infinite continuation, when the true threat is exposure of the underlying vulnerability to a longing too painful to acknowledge. The choice of the particular carrier of this threat is always shaped by historical conditions—like the legacy of anti-Semitism in Germany in the case of the Nazis—but the underlying dynamic is a characteristic of social alienation itself: an imaginary group cannot sustain itself without a demonized Other because it must by its very nature as imaginary, as illusory, as false, have a projected outlet to enable it to continually master and conceal its own artificiality. 5) Finally, and this is of central importance to the optimism and moral direction—let me call it the moral optimism—that I hope comes through in what I write here, this entire description of the process of social alienation that accounts for so much human suffering is at every moment countered by the desire to transcend it, by the inherent goodness of every human being that codetermines and transcends the way each of us manifests our presence in every moment of our existence. Here again please recall the presence of every newborn child during the first years of life, the full presence of the child’s radiance and life-force as it is manifested in the child’s whole way of being, in the full eyes, in the spontaneity of its gestures and reaching out, in the search for the other’s loving gaze and embrace and its willingness to make whatever meaningful sounds we make (“language”) to be *with* us. This new-born being we always remain, underneath the legacy of our alienated conditioning. What my friend Michael Lerner and I (and now many others) call “spiritual activism” is collective activism for social change that seeks through practical, present-day actions to make manifest our deep longing for spiritual connection and to partially realize that connection through a new form of spiritual politics. For example, the Network of Spiritual Progressives that I am a part of aspires to and presses for universal health care not simply because we need doctors to care for our bodies, but because universal health care is a necessary manifestation of our universal longing to recognize and care for each other’s well-being and that of each other’s families and loved ones, as well as to be similarly cared for ourselves: health care means *caring about each other’s health*. Social Security is important not simply because older people need financial help as they age, but as a manifestation of intergenerational love and solidarity that elevates the communal self-presence of the entire society. In these senses, as I say in the early essays on law in *Another Way of Seeing*, I embrace Martin Luther King’s definition of justice as “love correcting that which revolts against love.” As I hope the last two brief examples demonstrate, the theory of social being and social existence that I am summarizing here is therefore not a theory that is “merely psychological” and divorced from the real world’s problems and struggles. It is as fully engaged with the socio-economic and political struggles of the world as, say, Marxism itself. What is different about it is that it is based on a way of seeing human reality—in every social interaction between two people and in the unfolding and development of human groups as a whole—that places the spiritual dimension of social existence at the center of our understanding of social phenomena and at the center of our effort to transcend the problems that continue to limit and constrain us. While these problems certainly also have a material and economic dimension to them—the reality of children dying of starvation around the world, the lack of adequate food and housing for so many in the United States and around the world, and the vulnerability of the large majority of the world’s population to having to face such material and economic difficulties mean that it is obvious that the material dimension of existence and the risk of scarcity impinges immensely on human life—this material, economic dimension is a context of the body rather than an essence of the consciousness-in-action that is social-being-in-the-world. Social existence is constituted out of the spirituality of social consciousness-in-the world, within the intersubjective flow of recognition, of love and the denial of love; and as much as the survival and well-being of the physical body is central to the context of the unfolding of this social inter-experience, across history and in the present moment, any theory or way of seeing that focuses primarily on this material element as the central descriptive or explanatory factor is missing the essence of social being itself as a manifestation of the human spirit and its struggle to fully realize itself, always in social form. *Real-Life Applications of Spiritual-Political Theory* In my upcoming book, which will be published this May, I expand on how the theories I have just laid out can be applied to particular circumstances: law and justice; politics as the human co-creation of the world through elections and other forms of group formation; public policy in the context of how to think about war and peace, gay rights and sexual identity, the labor movement and social change, and the spiritual foundations of science; and finally the meaning of cultural phenomena, from the work of one great philosopher influential to me (Jean-Paul Sartre), to baseball, to photography, to living with illness as a cultural reality. The essays, in other words, are applications of the theory to a wide variety of real-life examples rather than explications of the theory itself. It is in the nature of the intersubjective, spiritual-political theory that I am proposing that its truth-value to you depends upon whether you can recognize it as true rather than any analytical proof or capacity to explain diverse facts that is the measure of the truth of more scientific ways of seeing and thinking. All phenomenological or descriptive theory depends not upon a theory’s ability to explain facts from premises or theoretical postulates, but rather upon its self-evidence, upon its capacity to produce an experience of recognition in the reader. Since the theory itself begins with a social-spiritual understanding of the very thing that the theory is addressing and talking about, the only claim to validity that it can make upon the reader is the extent to which the reader can recognize it as adequate to fully *reveal* what is being described. While a descriptive theory can be true even if nobody understands it or recognizes it as true, it can become a valid form of social knowledge only through its capacity to generate an experience of recognition in a reader who him- or herself shares the very being of the “object of the investigation,” of the thing being talked about. That is why, in both *The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning *and *Another Way of Seeing: Essays on Transforming Law, Politics, and Culture*, I have written essays about very practical matters like (in the former) a bank teller caught in a corporate hierarchy, the relationship between imaginary forms of community and the holocaust, the limitations of Darwin’s theory of evolution, the relationship of the 60s to the rise of Ronald Reagan, the meaning of a Maalox commercial—and in *Spiritual Activism*, the constitution and the legal system, John Kerry’s and Barack Obama’s “presence” (or the lack of it), the war in Iraq, sexual fear and gay marriage, opening day at a Giants-Dodgers game. Each essay is meant to illuminate a world that I “see” through the lens of the theory—the way of perceiving and then thinking and describing—that I have presented in summary form above. In the two books taken together, I am seeking to trace the historical development of the vicissitudes of mutual recognition—its social flow and blockage in the context of a quite volatile, ongoing, historically specific struggle of hope against fear—as this struggle has unfolded from the 1950s through the present moment in 2012, from JFK through Barack Obama as embodied expressions of precisely these spiritual-political flows-in-tension as they have been manifested through political leaders, and in the area of public policy from, for example, the rise of creationism as part of the New Right to the emergence of other more emancipatory spiritual approaches to science some twenty years later and the relationship of both (as reaction-formation in the case of creationism, as continuation of the liberatory impulse in the case of the sacred biologists) to the breakthrough of recognition that actually was the 1960s. In my lifetime, it has been primarily the movements of the 1960s that have generated the upward spiral of hope and authentic mutual recognition in the historical process, just as the 1930s did so for the generation that preceded mine. During the period from roughly 1965-1974, a parallel awareness emerged in the United States and ricocheted across the world very rapidly, a propulsion of spiritual presence that provided people like me with a new ground to stand our lives on. For precisely this reason, because of the threat posed to traditional and more alienated forms of connection that nevertheless were also conditions of social membership and spiritual safety, the 1960s and the parallel ontological universe it gave birth to also have generated a powerful defensive social reaction—in Freudian terms, the reaction that the superego, in defense of the ego, always has to the transcendent longings of the id. Within the social-spiritual way of seeing the world, the upward movement of history is carried forward by such breakthroughs, or to recall the Doors, by breaking on through to the other side of the system of blocked connection. And these breakthroughs are never fully forgotten in historical consciousness, even as they are resisted through coerced deference to artificial conditioning, disciplinary observation, cooptation, flight into irony, and direct violence, among other expressions of the legacy of our alienation from our true loving selves. My work is an effort to help preserve the spiritual insight afforded to my generation by an upsurge of the human spirit more powerful than the force, existing not in Them but within each of us, that is trying to contain it. One expression of that spiritual upsurge, that outbreak of social connection, is the way of seeing social being and historical social life that I try to give voice to here. Like Marxism and liberalism, I believe that the descriptions in my work fit the facts of the realities they describe, but in a way that I hope is truer to the social reality that they describe because of the inclusion of the spiritual-political dimension that the 1960s made visible in my lifetime and that may prefigure the kind of seeing and thinking that will provide a basis for the next movement upward to change the world. ### Peter Gabel is editor at large of *Tikkun* and the author of *The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning **and* *Spiritual Activism: Essays on Transforming Law, Politics, and Culture *(available at quidprobooks.com<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=U2LTdC1QUkQRqg7DlfaNZ75jThmd28…>and tikkun.org/store) Click here to unsubscribe<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=5fp8VFBqpCgi9su2y6YXxb5jThmd28…> Contents Copyright 2012 Tikkun Magazine 2342 Shattuck Ave. #1200, Berkeley , CA 94704 Phone: (510)-644-1200 Fax: (510)-644-1255 Email: magazine(a)tikkun.org Web: www.tikkun.org [image: empowered by Salsa] <http://www.salsalabs.com/?email> -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/ ver

1 0

Fwd: What If We All Lived in Paris or Houston?
by Michel Bauwens 25 Jan '14

25 Jan '14

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: John Robb (Resilient Communities) <admin(a)resilientcommunities.com> Date: Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 8:02 AM Subject: What If We All Lived in Paris or Houston? To: michelsub2004(a)gmail.com Having problems viewing this email? View this post on our website<https://cs962.infusionsoft.com/app/linkClick/5811/489c0db804d67f69/2462792/…> . [image: printlogo-1329425488189.jpeg] What If We All Lived in Paris or Houston? By John Robb What if we all lived in one single megalopolis? Would resilience be possible? First, here’s a graphic that shows how big that city would be. [image: One City]<https://cs962.infusionsoft.com/app/linkClick/9742/6a110ebe7d65803a/2462792/…> As you can see, the density of the city matters quite a bit. If we lived in a city like Paris, we would all likely be in apartment buildings, with central squares, like this (satellite pic of downtown Paris). [image: Paris]<https://cs962.infusionsoft.com/app/linkClick/9744/f4abd7a6148ff07a/2462792/…> If we all lived in Houston, we’d mostly have suburban lots like these (satellite pic of downtown Houston): [image: Houston]<https://cs962.infusionsoft.com/app/linkClick/9746/89a33e31b636a005/2462792/…> *Production in Dense Urban* In the case of dense locations like Paris, the only personal access to the sun needed to grow food and generate solar energy would be through a window/balcony. That’s not much. The only other form of potential production is biogas generation from kitchen waste. This biogas could be used for cooking/heating (with the waste used for fertilizer). The remainder of the productive capacity would be on common areas from the central squares to the rooftops, from rainwater harvesting to solar power generation to makerspaces/public greenhouses/and much more. The capacity of these areas to generate meaningful levels of production would be limited by the ability of the community to cooperate. If yes, quite a bit. If not…. *Production in Suburban Sprawl* In an endless sprawl like Houston, most families would have access to a small fractional acreage (2/10′s of an acre or so). That’s enough unused and underutilized space to produce a significant amount of food as well as all of the energy/water a family would need. Community production and facilitation would be gravy. *However, we are becoming more capable….* There is one twist. Some good news. With each passing day, it’s becoming easier, better, and less expensive to produce *everything* at home or in your community. But, in order to leverage this wave of innovation and the prosperity it provides, both you and your community need to actively access the sun, rain, land, and community spaces you currently have available. Transform them from barren spaces that merely box life… into productive, living spaces that actively and meaningfully support it. Stay Focused, JOHN ROBB [image: JR Small]<https://cs962.infusionsoft.com/app/linkClick/9748/f3904c8d5c5fa481/2462792/…> For your convenience, John Robb will deliver his articles straight to your inbox each time a post is made! I look forward to the ongoing conversation and you're always welcome to post your comments at www.resilientcommunities.com<https://cs962.infusionsoft.com/app/linkClick/5813/031e0b62f30ad32c/2462792/…>. If you no longer wish to receive our emails, click the link below: Unsubscribe<https://cs962.infusionsoft.com/app/optOut/8/50f35d64da011d70/2462792/01b149…> Resilient Community, LLC 14405 W Colfax Ave #309 Lakewood, Colorado 80401 United States <https://crm.infusionsoft.com/go/infs/jschneider/html> -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

1 0

Fwd: Daniel Pinchbeck & MindShift
by Michel Bauwens 25 Jan '14

25 Jan '14

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Mangu.tv <shannon(a)mangu.tv> Date: Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 1:22 PM Subject: Daniel Pinchbeck & MindShift To: Michel <michelsub2004(a)gmail.com> Use this area to offer a short preview of your email's content. View this email in your browser<http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=a334d1f66e4c5c1e639663a9e&id=7836755a3e…> [image: Facebook]<http://mangu.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a334d1f66e4c5c1e639663a9e&id…> Facebook<http://mangu.us4.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=a334d1f66e4c5c1e639663a9e&i…> [image: Twitter]<http://mangu.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a334d1f66e4c5c1e639663a9e&id…> Twitter<http://mangu.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a334d1f66e4c5c1e639663a9e&id…> [image: Website]<http://mangu.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a334d1f66e4c5c1e639663a9e&id…> Website<http://mangu.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a334d1f66e4c5c1e639663a9e&id…> [image: Email] <info(a)mangu.tv> Email <info(a)mangu.tv> [image: Tumblr]<http://mangu.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a334d1f66e4c5c1e639663a9e&id…> Tumblr<http://mangu.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a334d1f66e4c5c1e639663a9e&id…> <http://mangu.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a334d1f66e4c5c1e639663a9e&id…> Dear friends, Daniel <http://mangu.us4.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=a334d1f66e4c5c1e639663a9e&i…> Pinchbeck<http://mangu.us4.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=a334d1f66e4c5c1e639663a9e&i…>'s first book *Breaking Open the Head <http://mangu.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a334d1f66e4c5c1e639663a9e&id…>*, the documentary we did together on personal and global sustainability (*2012: Time for Change*<http://mangu.us4.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=a334d1f66e4c5c1e639663a9e&i…>) and his constant friendship and mentoring really helped me to push through the culturally-imposed values I was subconsciously obeying. He gave me the courage to start questioning everything. He planted in my head this idea of consciousness expansion - where you can develop an harmonious relationship with yourself and with your environment. I am extremely grateful to him for having started my own "mind shift." Please check out his new show, he is on a mission to Shift more Minds! Much gratitude, Giancarlo <http://mangu.us4.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=a334d1f66e4c5c1e639663a9e&i…> MIND SHIFT<http://mangu.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a334d1f66e4c5c1e639663a9e&id…>is a new kind of talk show for a new era. Host Daniel Pinchbeck<http://mangu.us4.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=a334d1f66e4c5c1e639663a9e&i…>focuses on the deepest issues impacting our world today. Featuring top intellectual heavyweights and cultural superstars, Pinchbeck and his guests explore topics like the future of civilization, technology, spirituality and an emerging new paradigm for humanity. <http://mangu.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a334d1f66e4c5c1e639663a9e&id…> We are facing a unique crisis as our renewed vigor for attaining enlightenment clashes with our materialist based economy and fear-based politics. Is there a way we can reconcile our current systems with the new spiritual paradigms? If not, how can we reform them? Daniel Pinchbeck<http://mangu.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a334d1f66e4c5c1e639663a9e&id…>explores the cultural benefits of enlightenment with comedian Russell Brand<http://mangu.us4.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=a334d1f66e4c5c1e639663a9e&i…>and playwright Eve Ensler<http://mangu.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a334d1f66e4c5c1e639663a9e&id…> . Russell Brand offers his insightful perspectives on spirituality, economics and politics without abandoning his unique zeal and sense of humor. It is an entertaining and informative account on the profound benefits of individual enlightenment. The conversation continues with Eve Ensler as they offer further insights on reforming our fear and consumerism based cultures. Individually and collectively, we can stop being passive and become the transformers of our own lives. BUY TICKETS at www.NeuronsToNirvana.com *Copyright © 2013, Mangusta Productions, LLC, All rights reserved.* *Our mailing address is:* 221 E. Matilija Street, Suite C, Ojai, CA 93023 unsubscribe from this list<http://mangu.us4.list-manage1.com/unsubscribe?u=a334d1f66e4c5c1e639663a9e&i…> update subscription preferences<http://mangu.us4.list-manage.com/profile?u=a334d1f66e4c5c1e639663a9e&id=faf…> -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

1 0

Fwd: Bank Run Fears Continue as Banks Restricts Large Cash Withdrawals
by Michel Bauwens 25 Jan '14

25 Jan '14

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Michel Bauwens <michel(a)p2pfoundation.net> Date: Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 4:16 PM Subject: Re: Bank Run Fears Continue as Banks Restricts Large Cash Withdrawals To: Daryl Taylor <taylor.daryl.r(a)gmail.com> thanks! On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 4:04 PM, Daryl Taylor <taylor.daryl.r(a)gmail.com>wrote: > > http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-01-24/bank-run-fears-continue-hsbc-restr… > > *First come the restrictions, then the confiscations. * > > "This is how it begins, with restricted access to bank balances and banks > requiring justifications for withdrawals. See Cyprus in 2013, or worse, > Argentina in 2001. The system does not regard your bank balance as your > money. It is a liability the bank owes to you, which it may or may not be > able to meet. Reserve requirements have been whittled away to virtually > nothing, meaning that the bank could not satisfy even 1% of its deposit > account liabilities if everyone decided to cash out at once. They restrict > access in order to slow down the outward movement of money, but in doing so > they generate fear that makes bank runs more likely. Once the psychology > shifts, and it can do so on a dime, they're damned if they do and damned if > they don't." *Nicole Foss* > > -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/ -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

1 0

Fwd: Florence (ISIA) students are redesigning their education
by Michel Bauwens 25 Jan '14

25 Jan '14

first video version of our p2p intervention in Florence ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Salvatore Iaconesi <salvatore.iaconesi(a)artisopensource.net> Date: Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 4:35 AM Subject: Re: skype connection with my co-speaker To: Paul Bouchard <paulbou32(a)gmail.com> Cc: Michel Bauwens <michel(a)p2pfoundation.net> Hi there! first of all, thanks a lot for joining in the other day: it has been very important for the students. We will keep you updated on what's happening, as it is turning out really nicely. For your reference, the video is now online here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xQlfnWctrc&feature=youtu.be It is now in "unlisted" mode, so that you can view it, but it doesn't appear on search results. This is because the students are preparing an edited version, editing out all empty spaces and mixing in the slides and the audience better. This better version is the one we will use for communication. For example it will be the one that gets published on the Sole24Ore. But in the meantime you might want to use this raw one for your own purposes. I will let you know when the edited one is ready. Thanks again! And see you soon salvatore On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 3:03 PM, Salvatore Iaconesi < salvatore.iaconesi(a)artisopensource.net> wrote: > are you there? we're ready when you are > > > > On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 3:00 PM, Salvatore Iaconesi < > salvatore.iaconesi(a)artisopensource.net> wrote: > >> hi! >> we're about to start in 5 minutes >> >> >> On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 2:42 PM, Salvatore Iaconesi < >> salvatore.iaconesi(a)artisopensource.net> wrote: >> >>> hi! >>> >>> so the room is starting to flll up. We expect everyone to be here in >>> about 20mins >>> >>> I will notify you 5 mins before everything starts >>> >>> I have all your materials on this computer, as well as a connection, >>> should you want to show something online >>> >>> Paul: I've sent you a contact request on skype. If you accept it I will >>> be able to add you to the conversation. (unless you'll be speaking from the >>> same account: are you together? We have skype premium, so that we can >>> connect to multiple accounts at the same time) >>> >>> talk to you in a bit! >>> Salvatore >>> >>> >>> >>> On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 9:21 AM, Paul Bouchard <paulbou32(a)gmail.com>wrote: >>> >>>> fine Salvatore, talk to you soon. >>>> >>>> Paul Bouchard >>>> >>>> >>>> On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 3:19 AM, Salvatore Iaconesi < >>>> salvatore.iaconesi(a)artisopensource.net> wrote: >>>> >>>>> hello there! >>>>> >>>>> love to be connecting to you both later on today! The students (and >>>>> us) really appreciate your support and contribution >>>>> >>>>> I have received your slides, and will have them available for showing >>>>> during the talk, you just point them out and I will have them show. >>>>> >>>>> Also, there will be full recording, and we will alert you as soon as >>>>> the recordings are out, so that you can use them >>>>> >>>>> Everything is fine over here, and we're set for 3pm Italy time (-6 in >>>>> Ecuador --> 9am) >>>>> >>>>> I will ping you on email and skype 20 mins before, and a few moments >>>>> before we start >>>>> >>>>> If you need anything, just let me know! >>>>> Salvatore >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 8:16 PM, Paul Bouchard <paulbou32(a)gmail.com>wrote: >>>>> >>>>>> My Skype address is >>>>>> >>>>>> paulbou32 >>>>>> >>>>>> Cheers, >>>>>> >>>>>> paul Bouchard >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 2:00 PM, Michel Bauwens < >>>>>> michel(a)p2pfoundation.net> wrote: >>>>>> >>>>>>> Salvatore, thanks for skype-connecting with Paul, who will >>>>>>> participate >>>>>>> >>>>>>> -- >>>>>>> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - >>>>>>> http://blog.p2pfoundation.net >>>>>>> >>>>>>> <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: >>>>>>> http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens >>>>>>> >>>>>>> #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/ >>>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> -- >>>>> *Salvatore Iaconesi* >>>>> >>>>> salvatore.iaconesi(a)artisopensource.net >>>>> skype: xdxdVSxdxd >>>>> >>>>> *Art is Open Source*: http://www.artisopensource.net >>>>> *TED Fellow 2012*: http://fellows.ted.com/profiles/salvatore-iaconesi >>>>> *Eisenhower Fellow 2013*: http://www.efworld.org/ >>>>> >>>>> Contract Professor of Digital Design at La Sapienza University of Rome >>>>> >>>>> Professor of Digital Design at ISIA Design Florence >>>>> >>>>> Professor of Interaction Design at IED Istituto Europeo di Design >>>>> >>>> >>>> >>> >>> >>> -- >>> *Salvatore Iaconesi* >>> >>> salvatore.iaconesi(a)artisopensource.net >>> skype: xdxdVSxdxd >>> >>> *Art is Open Source*: http://www.artisopensource.net >>> *TED Fellow 2012*: http://fellows.ted.com/profiles/salvatore-iaconesi >>> *Eisenhower Fellow 2013*: http://www.efworld.org/ >>> >>> Contract Professor of Digital Design at La Sapienza University of Rome >>> >>> Professor of Digital Design at ISIA Design Florence >>> >>> Professor of Interaction Design at IED Istituto Europeo di Design >>> >> >> >> >> -- >> *Salvatore Iaconesi* >> >> salvatore.iaconesi(a)artisopensource.net >> skype: xdxdVSxdxd >> >> *Art is Open Source*: http://www.artisopensource.net >> *TED Fellow 2012*: http://fellows.ted.com/profiles/salvatore-iaconesi >> *Eisenhower Fellow 2013*: http://www.efworld.org/ >> >> Contract Professor of Digital Design at La Sapienza University of Rome >> >> Professor of Digital Design at ISIA Design Florence >> >> Professor of Interaction Design at IED Istituto Europeo di Design >> > > > > -- > *Salvatore Iaconesi* > > salvatore.iaconesi(a)artisopensource.net > skype: xdxdVSxdxd > > *Art is Open Source*: http://www.artisopensource.net > *TED Fellow 2012*: http://fellows.ted.com/profiles/salvatore-iaconesi > *Eisenhower Fellow 2013*: http://www.efworld.org/ > > Contract Professor of Digital Design at La Sapienza University of Rome > > Professor of Digital Design at ISIA Design Florence > > Professor of Interaction Design at IED Istituto Europeo di Design > -- *Salvatore Iaconesi* salvatore.iaconesi(a)artisopensource.net skype: xdxdVSxdxd *Art is Open Source*: http://www.artisopensource.net *TED Fellow 2012*: http://fellows.ted.com/profiles/salvatore-iaconesi *Eisenhower Fellow 2013*: http://www.efworld.org/ Contract Professor of Digital Design at La Sapienza University of Rome Professor of Digital Design at ISIA Design Florence Professor of Interaction Design at IED Istituto Europeo di Design -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

1 0

Fwd: Exploring Wholeness in more detail - to support our highest aspirations
by Michel Bauwens 24 Jan '14

24 Jan '14

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Tom Atlee <cii(a)igc.org> Date: Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 1:01 PM Subject: Exploring Wholeness in more detail - to support our highest aspirations To: Michel Bauwens <michel(a)p2pfoundation.net> Tom Atlee's Co-Intelligence Journal . The Co-Intelligence Symbol . What this message is about: Wholeness is the foundation of the co-intelligence w Like<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586068-7c588a5261320c45a4959703c8de4d3…> Tweet<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586068-34468f1b0a244aeefc7e70652282c7a…> Pin<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586068-4111fb276766e53771e89aa0e6f85b4…> +1<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586068-b20f321bc3a6f2f186ef0e1c336f537…> [image: Wholeness chart fragment] Tom Atlee's Co-Intelligence Journal [image: Cii-logo-smaller]<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586068-b44e47d0813eea186e51aeabab109dd…> . The Co-Intelligence Symbol . *What this message is about: Wholeness is the foundation of the co-intelligence worldview. It is a big subject - embracing many varieties, dimensions, and manifestations of wholeness, as well as many factors that contribute to or detract from it. Here you'll find materials that open up that rich and complex realm and attempt to provide some order and context for it. I believe that most of our personal and social aspirations - such as health, justice, sustainability, joy, wisdom, community, peace, a sense of the sacred - are all grounded one way or another in wholeness. The more we understand it, the better we'll be able to pursue and realize those goals.* ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ *IF YOU CAN AFFORD IT, PLEASE SUPPORT US IN THESE LAST FEW DAYS* ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Dec 2013-Jan 2014 Co-Intelligence Institute fundraiser progress report: *Funds raised so far: $4681* Our target: $20,000 // Percentage of needed funds raised so far: 23.4% People on our list: 1684 // Days remaining in this fundraiser: 8 Thank you so much to the 46 people who have responded! *If you value our work*, please participate with a donation. See the end of this mailing for how to contribute *As you can see, we could really use your support.* ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Exploring Wholeness in more detail - to support our highest aspirations<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586068-a2e341c26dacb43c6e9ba97e6359aff…> [image: 220px-Yin and Yang.svg] . . . . Whole and Part . . . . Dear friends, Since the beginnings of the 1990s I've known that my inquiry into "co-intelligence" was fundamentally about how to apply wholeness to promote wholeness. So for more than two decades I've been exploring wholeness to understand it better. Many of my models and essays on this subject are available on the Co-Intelligence Institute's webpage on wholeness<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586068-50f9d7f21ac0f9f555c64fd64d2fbb5…>. Other articles, models and notes are tucked away in files. I find that most people - if they think of wholeness at all - think of it as one thing. For example: Something is whole if it isn't broken. Or wholeness has to do with health, or wholesomeness, or integrity. Or wholeness describes Spirit or the non-dual nature of reality that includes and/or transcends all the diverse phenomenon of existence. My own fascination with wholeness comes from the fact that so much of what we want in our lives and in our visions of a "good society" - health, justice, sustainability, joy, wisdom, community, peace, a sense of the sacred - are grounded one way or another in wholeness. It seems to me that if we understood wholeness better we would more easily and wisely be able to co-create the good lives and good societies we dream of. But the topic as a whole (so to speak) is elusive: there are so many varieties, dimensions, and manifestations of wholeness - and so many factors that contribute to or detract from wholeness - that embracing them all in any explicit and coherent way seems nearly impossible. I've depended primarily on my evolving intuition to sense the presence and nature of wholeness in situations, dynamics, approaches, ideas, proposals, and more. However, it is hard to communicate that intuitive sense to others. Given how fundamental it is to the co-intelligence work and so much else, I decided two years ago to attempt a book or website devoted solely to exploring and articulating the full dimensions of wholeness. I don't know if that book or website will ever be realized, but I've decided at this point to share highlights of my explorations for those interested. As an introduction, you'll find below the preamble to the Co-Intelligence Institute's webpage on Wholeness<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586068-8e0bfb7f3e609c09c4821a586cbc759…>. (That page also links to a half dozen articles on wholeness that are not included in this message.) Following that intro, you'll find a list of wholeness-related factors that constituted an outline for the book I was planning to write. Finally, if you'd like to explore a framework within which most of those factors fit together more or less coherently, I invite you to visit my "Dimensions of Wholeness" model<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586068-58520d8aa6531530f6c53655de7a182…>. This features a graphic and an accompanying descriptive text. I am only including the link here, since the graphic is large for email and the model is complex enough that it may only interest a few readers. (A portion of the model graphic is shown at the top of this email.) I hope the material provided here will prove thought-provoking, inspiring, and useful in your own life and work. Blessings on our Journey through wholeness into greater wholeness. Coheartedly, Tom = = = = = = = *WHOLENESS <https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586068-2e4126a57ae22c97165e75ee0fae06b…>* In normal usage, the word "whole" means simply complete, entire, undivided, not ill or injured. Holistic science and philosophy and the study of systems have added new dimensions to our understandings of wholeness, understandings which are still developing. In co-intelligence work, *"wholeness" refers to the inclusive, ever-evolving coherence of life and its various parts and of the relationship dynamics between those parts.*This coherence underlies familiar concepts like health, integrity, wholesomeness, holiness, and other holistic concepts. Wholeness, itself, has many dimensions and dynamics which we are exploring in our co-intelligence work. That said, the fact is that wholeness is both central and not precisely defined. It is something to "get the feel of." When we talk about "wholeness" on this site, we are often embracing many overlapping phenonena, among them these: 1. Attending to the whole means attending to "the big picture" instead of engaging in narrow-minded glorification of limited information. 2. In a common definition of co-intelligence -- "Accessing the wisdom of the whole on behalf of the whole" -- the whole can include the whole group, community, or nation; all the parts of a system or all the adversaries in a conflict, in generative conversation with each other; and/or the larger wholeness or Spirit of Life as a source of wisdom. 3. Wholeness includes long term perspectives and realities. Although immediate problems, realities and outcomes may be important, they are not the whole story, 4. Taking wholeness seriously means looking beyond narrow self-interest to "the common good" -- and even pursuing self-interest through pursuit of the common good. 5. Concern for wholeness requires moving beyond shallow appearances and symptoms. It requires moving into fuller meanings, deeper causes, greater complexity, subtlety and ambiguity. 6. The wholeness of things of course includes their parts. But when we're considering living beings and living systems we must also address their overall health, responsiveness, development, special gifts, etc. -- their unique aliveness -- and also their context and history. We must especially transcend our focus on their utility to us. 7. Wholeness almost always involves the healthy mutuality (synergy) of relationships, a dimension of life that can be neglected by an exclusive focus on the entities involved in those relationships. Whole-system dynamics and structures are often the dynamics and structures of relationships that characterize the whole. 8. To attempt to understand the whole means to humbly recognize the fact that "there's always more to it; to appreciate the limits and evolution of knowledge and certainty. 9. Wholeness often refers to the unity of spirit -- and commonality of story -- that underlie the details of life. Unity and commonality are often overlooked when we focus too much on differences and separateness (although these, too, are part of wholeness!). "Wholeness" is the concept that best embraces "new paradigm" efforts to create a more just, sustainable and wise society. As the essays on this webpage make abundantly clear, wholeness is far more than unity. Co-intelligence is intelligence that arises out of wholeness and takes wholeness seriously. Co-intelligence can be considered the cognitive and responsive dimension of wholeness. = = = = = = *A CATALOGUE OF WHOLENESS-RELATED FACTORS AND PHENOMENA <https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586068-8975519850d7ab643be62f4d5d274d3…>* *IDENTITY* Diversity Differentiation Discernment Individuality / Uniqueness Form Name Soverignty / Rights Self-realization *INCLUSION* Openness Both / And Stakeholders Welcoming / Embracing / Invitation / Tolerance / Acceptance Curiosity / Sensing-into Listening/ hearing Presence (1) (showing up; being included) Respect / Valuing Trust Belonging / membership Include and transcend *INTERCONNECTEDNESS* Relationship / Kinship Stardust (the common source of all material reality) Intercentricity Networks Pattern Bioregionalism Understanding Organization Value Ethics / Morallity Fairness / Equity / Peerness Interdisciplinary Communication *INTERACTIVITY* Mutuality / Reciprocity Interdependence Cycles Power Feedback / Cybernetics Dissonance Complexity / Chaos / Multiple causation Interbeing / Co-incarnation / Yin-yang Cooperation / Power-with / Teamwork / Collaborative intelligence Co-creativity Community Co-evolution / Dialectic Conversation / Dialogue Resonance Exchange Economics Ecology *PARTICIPATION* Engagement Fit / Harmony Intelligence Action / Agency / Leadership Role / Function Purpose / Intention Choice Democracy Creativity Power Surrender / Prayer / Letting Go Needs Responsibility *CONTEXT* Environment / Climate Habitat Field (Morphogenic, Story) Commons / Common ground Reality / Conditions Freedom History Relevance / Relevation (quantum term meaning to elevate from the implicate order into explicate "reality" because of relevance to what is already going on) Challenge Nurturance Generativity Culture Assumptions Governanance *INTEGRATION* System Coherence Consensus / Confluence / Voice of the Whole Grace Completion Whole-person Self-organization Meaning Healing / Reconciliation Subsidiarity (functions carried out by the most local competent authority) Character *STATES OF WHOLENESS* Beauty Holiness Health / Resilience Vitality / Aliveness / Exuberance Balance Elegance (right simplicity) Sustainability Implicit Wholeness (things are whole exactly as they are; everything fits) Explicit Wholeness (achieved through fixing, healing, engagement, transcendence, etc.) Actualization Integrity / Truth Flow Nature / the Tao *EVOLUTION* Emergence / Manifestation Process Iteration Co-intelligence (History) Deep time (from the Big Bang into the distant future) Possibility / Vision Change Birth Growth Development Death Transformation Transcendence (Include and transcend)(a dynamic of a healthy developmental process) *INTERIORITY* Spirit Emptiness Consciousness Intersubjectivity (the "reality"-generating dynamic of many interacting "separate" consciousnesses) Presence (2) (aura; strength of personality) / Centeredness Viewpoint Psychology Power-from-within Calling *ONENESS* Unity Non-locality / Synchronicity Eternal now Non-duallity Communion / Love Supreme Being Quantum reality Mysticism / "the Perennial Philosophy" (Aldous Huxley's name for the mystical traditions of all major religions) *WHOLE-IN-PART* Fractals (patterns reappear at different levels of observation, such as branches of branches) Holonics (every part is a whole; every whole is a part) Holographics (each part contains the whole, or a part that contains the qualities or patterns of the whole) Holergy (a part is greater than its role in any whole) Membergy (the power possessed by a part due to its membership in a particular whole) (Yin-Yang) Microcosm / Sample *HOLISTIC KNOWING* (Knowledge based on any of the preceding items) Uncertainty / Ambiguity / Mystery Paradox Humility / More-to-it-than-that Intuition Comprehension / Depth / Insight Myth / Symbol Story Vision Imagination Integral models Wisdom / Perspective / Big Picture Multiple Intelligences Collective Intelligence Universal Intelligence Map / Model / Chart Holistic Design / Permaculture / Pattern languages Biomimicry Spectra / Bell Curves Nuance Humor Compassion Silence / Spaciousness / Meditation = = = = = = *DIMENSIONS OF WHOLENESS MODEL <https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586068-86501528c711934d1703131dd436fe4…>* This model linked here - a portion of which is represented by the graphic at the top of this mailing - includes many of the factors in the catalogue above in a coherent whole. If this topic interests you, I would encourage you to explore it and comment on it on the blog page<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586069-98876523c5f2d3282b77c5cce9ee3b6…> . [image: ***] *To support the Co-Intelligence Institute & Tom Atlee's work...* Please send a tax deductible donation of any amount -- $10, $25, $50, $100, $500 or more -- to The Co-Intelligence Institute, PO Box 493, Eugene, OR 97440 or use your Visa or MasterCard - or Paypal - to make an online donation<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586069-698dfd85a2499824cc69db6c1a209c4…>or tell some friends you know about our work, and invite them to support it. Do let me know when you've mailed a donation, so I can add it to our tally right away. Including your email address on your check will help me keep track of your gift. You can also arrange a monthly donation<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586069-8d2691841cca3b29270ac793fe4f9aa…> . ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ site: http://www.co-intelligence.org<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586069-13d2392992a1962aff46c27f5f101f5…>/ blog: http://tomatleeblog.com<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586069-dac022068dc421b155de0975ff05917…> Read Empowering Public Wisdom<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586069-f89667773134378256e0159450f03b9…>, The Tao of Democracy<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586069-ccdcb7623abd803cfe24072e0b6f42b…>and Reflections on Evolutionary Activism<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586069-a913a8bb4c353d22f0dca5f28378cb5…> Please support our work. Your donations<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586069-b1b3d25e2fdd39970175e0c4b4b28d8…>are fully tax-deductible in the U.S. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Prefer plain text? This format is what I am now using for all my messages. *If you wish to receive my messages in plain text format* send me an email at cii(a)igc.orgwith "Revert to plain text format" in the Subject line. [image: ***] [image: 1px] ©2014 Co-Intelligence Institute | PO Box 493, Eugene, OR 97440 Web Version<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586069-2338d8d0ae1a9d4b9b7c174247795c4…> Forward<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586069-899b3701fb01cb27cfea34295d5ac04…> Unsubscribe<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586069-ec84c55ae44444b959d745133e7cdcd…> Powered by *Mad Mimi* ® <https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1390586069-dd898ab09251af4fdc79930dbc9ebd5…> -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

1 0

Fwd: Pixelache Helsinki festival dedicated to commons theme
by Michel Bauwens 24 Jan '14

24 Jan '14

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Pixelache Helsinki <newsletter(a)pixelache.ac> Date: Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 5:42 AM Subject: Pixelache Helsinki January Newsletter To: michelsub2004(a)gmail.com *PIXELACHE HELSINKI NEWSLETTER 1 / 2014* View<http://us4.campaign-archive1.com/?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f1&id=9fa5fb766b…> newsletter in your browser. Camp Pixelache 2014: Vartiosaari, 6-8. June <http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…> Pixelache Helsinki Festival 2014 will be an international 2-day trans-disciplinary event focusing on the theme of “The Commons”, including bio-, urban culture and knowledge commons topics. Adding a new island to its logbook after Suomenlinna<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70…>(2011) and Naissaar<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…>(2013), Camp Pixelache will take up residence in Vartiosaari<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…>, a nature island surrounded by eastern suburbs of Helsinki, during 6-8th June 2014. Based on previous Camp Pixelache experiments, the event is designed around two main unconference days. Except for keynote lectures planned in advance, typically at unconferences the agenda will be shaped and confirmed by the attendees at the beginning of the event. Anyone who wants to initiate a discussion on a commons-related topic can claim a time and a space. The event is free of charge. Several events will be organized around the main Camp Pixelache days, including a programme of participatory workshops. According to Michel Bauwens<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…>, “the Commons consist of any common resource that is available to all, and as such there are many type of Commons but basically two: physical resources or man-made. The Commons is also a series of specific institutional formats used to manage such common resources.” On the local Commons.fi<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…>web-presence, the following examples of Commons are also given: Shared natural resources, free software, open data, p2p networks, co-operatives, co-cultures, talkoots, street art, as well as many other commonly-known past, present and future manifestations.” Pixelache already has a long history of engaging with collaborative digital media and particularly with knowledge-sharing and Free/Libre Open Source culture. Early in Pixelache Helsinki's development, a social science paper by Katri Halonen<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…>, correctly identified the strong co-relations between open-source ideology, and the influencing thematic and organizational structure of the festival. Pixelache Festival 2014 engages further in Commons issues, specifically from the angle of educational and cultural production strategies and sustainability. As a trans-disciplinary cultural festival, we believe in the necessity to develop trans-disciplinary capacities to tackle together issues of the Commons, such as environmental protection and sustainable nature-resource utilization/management, as well as resisting privatizing forces on all aspects of life. Camp Pixelache's main venue Vartiosaari<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…>demonstrates many aspects of the Commons as an undeveloped nature and recreation island in the middle of suburban city sprawl, which hosts numerous social and association-run wooden summer-villa retreats and special features. The island is currently under-threat of full-scale residential development <http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…>by Helsinki City Planning Department<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…>, and there is a grassroots campaign<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…>to protect it's particular qualities, in which artists & cultural practitioners are involved. We are hoping that the occasion of Camp Pixelache can also provide a discussion forum around Helsinki-Commons issues. If you would like to get involved, please contact office [-at-] pixelache.ac Learn more..<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…> FACEBOOK<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70…> TWITTER<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70…> UPCOMING *January* *24-31.1*: Evelyn Müüsepp's <http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…> Micro-residency *28.1*: Foodycle<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70…>Open Planning Meeting *February* *04.2: *Trashlab at Kaupunkiverstas <http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…> *12.2*: PhotoTaggingAmok<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70…> *13.2: *Start of Hanna Harris' residency *March* *04.3*: Trashlab at Kaupunkiverstas <http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…> *04-11.3*: Salah Maloulih's Micro-residency *Pixelversity 2014 Programme * In 2014, Pixelversity<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70…>outreach & education programme continues consolidating previous themes, and introducing a few new ones: *InfoWork, Trashlab, AV-Culture, Ruins*, and other things not yet become. Special attention will be given to the *'InfoWork'* that is done in the organisation, including documention and archiving. There will be ongoing Amok events (Photo-tagging & Data-entry) on our photo-archive<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…>, several media streaming workshops focused on open source software/hardware solutions, aswell as interview and research initiatives related to, for example, Maaland<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…>initiative. With our 'Narratives' project, we will endeavour use some time and resources later in the year to record the narratives of those involved in Pixelache. These activities are supported by a grant from the Ministry of Culture for cultural knowledge-sharing in digital forms<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70…>. The InfoWork theme also gives experience for revealing the social-organisational processes events involved in open-plan event production, via our EU Grundtvig-supported Open Learning Steps and Open-sourcing Festivals (OLSOF) network project, which will be announced publically in February. Read More..<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…> *New Micro-Residencies' season!* Since the year 2012, Pixelache has offered 3-4 micro-residencies<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…>positions per year, concentrated on 3 to 7 days periods. They are based on invitation for professionals of Pixelache’s extended network. They are not oriented towards new productions as such but rather function as spaces for informal knowledge exchange and inspiration, between the resident and the host organisation, and to some extent between the resident & the local scene. Micro-residencies set out to be micro-laboratories where different tools, approaches, ideas can be tested, to re-invent cultural production models in general, and consequently, our organisations themselves. Most of them include a public event where our guests present their practice and projects. We have the pleasure to welcome our first 2014 resident during 24-31 January. Evelyn Müürsepp-Grzinich<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70…>is a visual artist and cultural coordinator, based in South-east Estonia. We also like to invite people very near us to be micro-residents at Pixelache office, and we are thus delighted to host Helsinki-based curator, producer and researcher Hanna Harris<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…>around mid-February. Our last micro-resident this winter is Moroccan cultural producer Salah Malouli<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…>, visiting during 4-11 March. *Join The Next Photo Tagging Amok!* As the continuation of an archiving process that started a couple of years ago, and as an exploration of peer-production tools, Pixelache is organizing a series of open sessions focusing on how to archive Pixelache's ~30,000 photos from the past 12 years. These sessions are called Photo Tagging Amoks and are led by Pixelache's all time photographer Antti Ahonen. Have a look at our progress so far<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…> . Next month's Photo Tagging Amok event, featuring a pot of Antti's soup, will take place on *Wednesday 12.2* at Pixelache office<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70…>. The two first Amoks have focused on 2013 pictures, and the series on each occasion endeavours to go further back in time. For example, the November event will focus on the tagging of 2012 photo material. Read More<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…> *Open-Sourcing Festivals* How does an organisation open-source their cultural festival? Can we share the process for organising a festival, so that other groups can use it themselves? How do organisations support activities and events throughout the year? Can we share the process for sustaining ongoing programs, so that other groups can do this too? These are the questions that five experimental art, design and technology organisations from the Pixelache Network<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…>are asking themselves and others, and exploring, through a mobile circuit of workshops and seminars organized across Europe during 2013-2015. In the process, Piksel<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…> (NO), Pikslaverk<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…> (IS), Mal au Pixel<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…> (FR) and Pixelache<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70…> (FI) will gradually be working towards 'open-sourcing' their festival skills and tools to provide them to their UK partner Access Space Network<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70…>, who will test and utilise them in organising their first major digital culture festival, the closing event of this process. Read more<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70…> *Trashlab at Kaupunkiverstas (1st Tuesday eve each month in 2014)* Trashlab<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70…>(formerly known as Trashlab Repair Cafe) events are social occasions to gather and try to fix the things you have that are broken, and meet others who care about tinkering, fixing, hacking, and the problem of waste and obsolescence in society. For each event we have at least two expert-hosts, who will try to identify the problems or diagnose the broken item. We encourage people also to share their skills, learn from peer to peer and develop their own methods. While Trashlab cannot guarantee that all items are fixed (some might get diagnosed, some even more broken) - we can guarantee that participants will get more information on how to proceed with their broken item. Trashlab provides basic tools and materials for fixing, but if you have very specific items, you´d like to fix, please notify us in advance: paivi.raivio [-at-] gmail.com Kaupunkiverstas<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…>is the city library´s makerspace which has been opened in Lasipalatsi (former Kohtaamispaikka). The makerspace is open for all and is equipped with: 3D-printers, 3D-milling machine, Vinyl cut labels and for packages, dedicated cartoon work-station where you can make your own comics, workshop spaces... Participation to Trashlab is free but we happily accept small donations, which will go towards the tools and materials. Read More..<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70…> *Come & Develop Ideas with us for Foodycle 2014!* Foodycle<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…>, a trans-disciplinary food festival was organised for the first time in Helsinki during 12-13.9, as a collaboration between Ruoan Tulevaisuus<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…>and Pixelache<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…>. Foodycle Festival #2 is planned to take place in September again this year. We hope that many of last year's participants as well as newcomers take part in developing ideas for the 2014 edition of the festival, and help Foodycle become more of a community of people eager to improve our food system! You are mostly welcome to join our open Foodycle '14 open planning meeting next Tuesday 28.1 from 18-20 at Pixelache office<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70…>in Suvilahti (Building 7, A-entrance, on the Kalasatama side). We have a special guest attending, Evelyn Müürsepp <http://pixelache.us4.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70…>from MoKS<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70…>(Southeast Estonia), who is the founder the Mooste Food Club, and currently our micro-resident<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…>at Pixelache. We hope that many of the participants will continue contributing and help Foodycle to become a community of people with different backgrounds sharing ideas & tools for improving our food system. - See more at: http://www.pixelache.ac/blog/2013/foodycle-report-on-a-transdisciplinary-ex… Foodycle Festival #2 will take place in September again this year. You are mostly welcome to join our open Foodycle 14′ open planning meeting next Tuesday 28.1 from 6 to 8 pm at Pixelache office in Suvilahti (Building 7, A-entrance, on the kalasatama side). We have a special guest from Moks in Estonia attending the meeting, who is currently a micro-resident at Pixelache. Her name is Evelyn Müürsepp and she is the founder the Mooste Food Club - See more at: http://www.pixelache.ac/blog/2014/foodycle-14-open-planning-meeting-28-1-kl… Pixelache in Facebook<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…>| Forward to a friend<http://us4.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f1&id=9fa…> Pixelache Helsinki, www.pixelache.ac office(a)pixelache.ac *Our mailing address is:* Kaasutehtaankatu 1, Rakennus/Building 7 00540 Helsinki [image: Email Marketing Powered by MailChimp]<http://www.mailchimp.com/monkey-rewards/?utm_source=freemium_newsletter&utm…> unsubscribe from this list<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f…>| update subscription preferences<http://pixelache.us4.list-manage.com/profile?u=d008242ccaa382fc8689a70f1&id…> -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

1 0

Fwd: Inequality for All: TASC Film Premiere and Panel Discussion at JDIFF
by Michel Bauwens 23 Jan '14

23 Jan '14

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: TASC <contact(a)tascnet.ie> Date: Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 10:52 AM Subject: Inequality for All: TASC Film Premiere and Panel Discussion at JDIFF To: michelsub2004(a)gmail.com *January 2014* Dear Michel, TASC is starting 2014 with a big event! In partnership with the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival (JDIFF), TASC will present a unique opportunity to see the award-winning documentary, *Inequality for All*, starring Professor Robert Reich of University of California at Berkley, who was Secretary of Labour in the Clinton administration. When: *6pm, Monday 17th February 2014* Where: *Cineworld*, Parnell Street, Dublin 1 How to buy tickets: *Book now (only **via the JDIFF website)*<http://www.Swiftpage8.com/SpeClicks.aspx?X=300XKZIIIDL03NES00YSWU> TASC took this initiative to promote public awareness and discussion of this fundamanetal issue, which is at the heart of TASC's work programme. The film will be followed by a *lively panel discussion *with audience participation (the event will end at c.8.30pm). The panel will be moderated by *Seán Whelan *(RTÉ's Economics Correspondent) and the confirmed panellists are *Margaret E Ward *(financial journalist, CEO of Clear Ink); *Marie Sherlock *(economist at SIPTU), *Colm O'Regan* (comedian, best-selling author and broadcaster) and *Nat O'Connor *(TASC). *Inequality for All *demonstrates how the widening income gap has a devastating impact on the American economy. With valuable lessons for all advanced economies, Prof. Reich explains how the massive consolidation of wealth by a precious few threatens the viability of the American workforce and the foundation of democracy itself. In this 'Inconvenient Truth' for the economy, Reich uses humour and imaginative graphics to explain how the issue of economic inequality affects each and every one of us. You can see a two-minute trailer for the film on YouTube<http://www.Swiftpage8.com/SpeClicks.aspx?X=300XKZIIIDL03NES01YSWU>and learn more about the film and Reich's analysis on inequalityforall.com<http://www.Swiftpage8.com/SpeClicks.aspx?X=300XKZIIIDL03NES02YSWU> . This screening will be a *one-night-only premiere for Ireland and the UK*, and it may be the only opportunity to see the film, as there is not yet ageneral European release. All ticket sales are being handled by JDIFF (not TASC!), so please *book via the JDIFF website*<http://www.Swiftpage8.com/SpeClicks.aspx?X=300XKZIIIDL03NES03YSWU>or by phoning (01) 6877974, or at the Box Office in Filmbase, Temple Bar. Tickets are €11. Early booking is essential, especially if you wish to bring a group. Come and join us for this uniquely enlightening and entertaining night. Kind regards, Nat *Nat O'ConnorDirector, TASC* <http://www.Swiftpage8.com/SpeClicks.aspx?X=300XKZIIIDL03NES04YSWU> ------------------------------ <http://www.Swiftpage8.com/SpeClicks.aspx?X=300XKZIIIDL03NES05YSWU> "A really astonishingly good movie that takes some big economic ideas and how these relate to the quality of everyday life as lived by most ordinary people." *The Observer* "In short, this is a motion picture designed to put people in motion." *The Washington Post* Covering a broad swath of liberal economic theory in brisk, simply stated fashion, "Inequality for All" aims to do for income disparity what "An Inconvenient Truth" did for climate change." *Variety* ------------------------------ *Support Our Work* Fundraising appeal. Your contribution will allow TASC to continue to be an independent voice for equality. To support our appeal please follow the link for ways to donate: click here<http://www.Swiftpage8.com/SpeClicks.aspx?X=300XKZIIIDL03NES06YSWU> Sent to:*[email protected] <michelsub2004(a)gmail.com>* If you prefer not to receive future e-mails of this type, click here<http://www.Swiftpage8.com/SpeSupIt.aspx?X=300XKZIIIDL03NES00YSWU&Addr=miche…> Sent By: *TASC* Second Floor, Castleriver House 14-15 Parliament Street Dublin 2 Ireland <http://www.Swiftpage8.com/PowrdBy1.htm> To view as a web page click here<https://www.Swiftpage8.com/speasapage.aspx?X=300XKZIIIDL03NES00YSWU> . <http://www.Swiftpage8.com/SpeForward.aspx?X=300XKZIIIDL03NES00YSWU> -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

1 0