<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div><span></span></div><div><p dir="ltr">What an inspiring vision, with a nod to John Holloway's Cracks in Capitalism. Its the creativity that comes when we manage to lift our heads from the everyday drudge of what appears to be 'normal'.</p><p dir="ltr">I live in a small town and have been part of a project for the past 4 years which arose out of a Transition Town 'Health and Well Being' group, which has long since disappeared. Every Friday we cook soup and provide a community space for people to come together. Local shops generously provide the ingredients. It has taken different forms over the years, volunteers have come and gone, some have had ambitions to become a 'constituted' group, apply for funding, expand to more days. Others have wanted to be more health conscious, or more organised, with a coordinator. When the place we used was flooded out just after Xmas, we were taken in by the Methodist church. Our volunteers generally agree that though there is not a huge need- we don't have queues of homeless and hungry - we really enjoy working together. And while it in no way challenges the system, probably helps prop it up, maybe we are prefiguring the breakdown of existing structures.</p><p dir="ltr">Anna</p>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Jun 17, 2016 3:39 PM, "Eric Hunting" < <a href="mailto:erichunting@gmail.com">@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br type="attribution"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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<p>When I was a child I was particularly fascinated with books like
Stuart Little, The Borrowers, classic fairy tales, The Secret of
NIMH, The Rescuers, and the like. Stories of little creatures that
had created secret, hidden, civilizations within the overlooked
and forgotten interstitial spaces of our built habitat,
repurposing the detritus of our own civilization. In cartoons mice
are always repurposing our misplaced stuff into some model of
casual suburban living on their scale. Thimbles become sinks and
ottomans. Thread spools become various kinds of furniture. Xmas
lights become track lighting. Vast communities carrying on their
daily routine unseen in the spaces behind walls, under floors, in
the forgotten sealed-up space created as we built up our own
infrastructures. Often they would have their own independent
infrastructures. They would create miniature railways from toys,
use pigeons as an airline, scavenge wiring and electronics parts
from our cast-off consumer junk and create their own telegraph,
telephone, and radio networks, all operating independently and in
parallel to our own.</p>
<p>Then, as I got older, I moved on to SciFi but found similar
themes. There was Arthur C. Clarke's Rama; a vast, ancient, alien
spacecraft housing a rotating space colony. Its creators, purpose,
and destination unknown, its complex enigmatic systems and robots
running on their own, Rama became the host of multiple species who
simply boarded and setup shop within its vast space when it passed
through their solar systems. They could live well by simply not
drawing the attention of the Raman systems, exploiting the spaces
the robots seemed to ignore, learning and exploiting their routine
patterns of activity and behavior. Then there was Larry Niven's
Ringworld. Another vast alien construction whose creator's
original civilization collapsed, leaving it running on its own
automated systems as they reverted to more primitive, fractured,
societies and came to think of the ring as some natural or divine
phenomenon. <br>
</p>
<p>As I began to study Post-Industrial futurism I encountered Ken
Isaacs' and the Urban Nomads of the late '60s and '70s. This brief
movement was based on the expectation of a new youth movement
emerging amidst the slow collapse of the Industrial Age to
repurpose the urban and industrial detritus to facilitate a mobile
lifestyle. It's from this we got the 'upcycling' craze, Lofting,
Cargotecture, and the High-Tech design movement based on the
repurposing of industrial goods, hardware, and cast-offs in a
domestic context. Back in that middle third of the century
futurists seemed quite convinced of an imminent and dramatic
collapse of corporate capitalism, its economics, and institutions
as suggested by the civil unrest erupting at the time, though this
prediction would prove premature. The dinosaurs had a few last
tricks up their sleeves and the oft-predicted era of Total
Automation was still a ways off. Later, I encountered Alex
Steffan's and Cory Doctorow's notion of Outquisition. They
imagined a near future where the growth of intentional communities
in the late 20th century had come to shelter, like cloisters, a
counter-cultural civilization in the midst of the mainstream
culture and that this had become quite self-sufficient in its
cultivation of sustainable technologies ignored or suppressed by
the dominant culture. And as that dominant culture began to
incrementally fail from its inherent unsustainability, abandoning
one community after another to states of crisis, evangelistic
missionaries, of a sort, would emerge from these cloistered
communities to intervene, introducing the locals to the suppressed
technologies that could rescue them. <br>
</p>
<p>And so I've come to regard the emergent Post-Industrial culture
as a kind of insurgent civilization emerging amidst the declining
Industrial Age, filling the gaps in its progressively crumbling
edifice with new systems and structures of its own, recycling and
repurposing its detritus. New life emerging in the decaying hulk
of a fallen tree. The objective of the Industrial Age was the
creation of a kind of Santa Claus machine intended to provide all
our needs in its particular fashion. The market. But it has become
akin to some AI master computer that has succumbed to dementia as
its circuitry has corroded and been repeatedly hacked. It has
become pathological in behavior. A jealous god that seeks our
total dependence upon it, eliminating alternatives to itself by
the systematic division and enclosure of the commons, oblivious to
its failing, unsustainable, self-destructive, logic. But there is,
in fact a lot that it has overlooked or discarded because it
didn't suit its limited paradigms and models. A lot of blind
spots. A lot of interstitial spaces. A lot of 'sodai gomi'. And as
it fails in expanding ways in its progressing decrepitude it
produces even more to exploit. And it's in that where we might
find the initial resources for the creation of a new commons and
infrastructures deriving from it. <br>
</p>
<p>So I see the task of contemporary Commons development as the
cultivation and engineering of an alternative, parallel,
infrastructure building on these overlooked resources. Adaptive
reuse as a way of life. We are like settlers in the ruins of a
prior, alien, civilization whose sometimes still dangerous
machinery carries on blindly, stupidly, pursuing programmed
imperatives that no longer make sense or matter to us. We lack the
power at present to tear it all down and rebuild. Historically,
that approach is a bit rare anyway. But we can still exploit it.
Settle in its forgotten spaces. Exploit its behaviors. Repurpose
its structures. Scavenge its failing hardware. Defuse its hazards.
Build on its decay and thus transform it into something new. Now
that the frontiers are all gone here on Earth, now that the old
machine has encircled everything, adaptive reuse is all we can do.
<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite">
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<div style="display:inline">Subject:
</div>
[P2P-F] New article from Michel Bauwens</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<div style="display:inline">From:
</div>
Orsan <a href="mailto:orsan1234@gmail.com" target="_blank"><orsan1234@gmail.com></a></td>
</tr>
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<td>
<div style="display:inline">Date:
</div>
6/13/16, 10:01 AM</td>
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</blockquote>
<br>
<br>
<pre cols="72">--
Eric Hunting
<a href="mailto:erichunting@gmail.com" target="_blank">erichunting@gmail.com</a></pre>
</div>
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