And off the treadmill

The societies of the world will be faced with the task of rebuilding systems of fruitful activity, i.e., real economies based on productive behavior rather than the smoke-and-mirrors of Frankenstein-finance con games.
– James Howard Kunstler

Of course, getting out of the prison is only the first step. The escapee may in the beginning continue to work for the prison bosses voluntarily, going back and forth. This will give them time to consider what’s next.

Those who don’t see it as enough can look for bosses who are not fully wedged in the prison themselves… companies that, one way or another, understand the “no asshole rule” and the need for reconnection among the employees. There are a few out there. Work-sharing in another means to gradually disconnect from the “boss economy” while helping out another person still in need of a job. Laying down a local infrastructure that enables the family and the community to be more resilient when it comes to food, shelter, warmth, and other basics is another early step many are taking these days. And reconnecting eaters with farmers immediately provides fresh, high quality food to one party and a good living to the other.

Reconnected and disruptor-free, why don’t we start our own enterprises? Why don’t we run things among us so that they benefit those who have left the prison? We band together, creating co-ops, partnerships, worked owned businesses, farm CSAs and other types of rural communities, companies run with attention to the triple bottom line, and the like. We work for one another, not for the bosses anymore. Another move, now promoted by the Transition Town people, is to start “our” utility companies that serve a town with wind, sun or water energy gathered in greenish ways. But small enterprises enabling people to capture energy at the household or small neighborhood level while reducing each household’s energy needs may be by far the greenest option available.

The Amish model deserves to be emulated and modified for wider use. They have cradle-to-grave security, and a mix of private enterprise modulated by their tight community framework and mutual aid. Some people will opt for the “new tribalism” social pattern; they will gather together into clans that provide basic cradle-to-grave security in exchange for the freely-given contribution of all able adults to open source projects that benefit the entire community, the entire commonwealth. And experimentation with gift economies is already ongoing. Others will come up with solutions as yet unconceived today.

My favorite radical choice is the “new tribalism.” The term was invented by Daniel Quinn, who began to feel for another model of livelihood containing tribal elements. He did not get very far; his examples of a circus, a theater troupe and a newspaper are more on the order of cooperative enterprises. A tribal living cannot be sold. It is rooted in some form of commons cared for in perpetuity. I see a “new tribalist” community as one that provides all the basics for free to all its members. Basic food, shelter, warmth, education, and medical care. Safety, belonging and meaningful participation in one’s social and natural world. It’s not really hard to do. This is how humans had lived since time immemorial. This is how other creatures live, and manage it easily. The result being that all the other creative things can be done on a lark. Because a person wishes. Because a person is inspired. And since they don’t have to worry about survival they can explore anything they want. Any practical results, of course, belong to the commons, serving as open source for explorers coming after, freely modifying and experimenting with the ideas and inventions of others. And those who think that the “basics” are not enough are free to use their talents to figure out how to have better food or better shelter – as long as their solutions are not privatized and enrich the entire community. (This is, in part, how early science worked, and it worked admirably well.) Is this vision of a society that is both easy on the land, and full of creative ferment, enjoyment and exploration practically doable? That remains to be seen. Such “new tribalism” communities can be among the laboratories of new socio-economic patterns, evolved from the grassroots and debugged before wider implementation. But there is no need to consider them as “the one right way” and turn their development into an ideological quagmire. Those who think such a vision hopelessly commusomething are welcome to experiment elsewhere.

As these new enterprises spread, more and more people will emulate the most successful ones. Other groups will be working on local, non-predatory systems of credit (not money so much, which can be crushed at will by central bankers); yet others will find new ways to hold land, perhaps by implementing Georgist land-value fees, or by taking it out of the market by turning it into a land-trust in perpetuity. Let us not fall into the trap of thinking that some alternative economist out there has the right system all worked out. That is residual totalitarian thinking. Diversity is key and many schools of thought are needed, along with many practical interpretations. And it makes sense that many econ teachers and many learners thrive in our communities; we must no longer leave “economics” to the experts many of whom have been shown up as mere paid-for babblers. I am about to dive into two books that come well recommended. Debt: The First 5,000 Years (money is a late development, forced top-down, claims the anthropologist author), and Debt Virus: A Compelling Solution to the World’s Debt Problems, a controversial work by a physician turned rebel after sitting on board of a bank.

I am not an economist by inclination, and all I see is this fuzzy outline. But I think the following incipient formative sequence is sound. Wherever we go, whatever we do, let’s:

• shrink the distance between us
• adopt the “no asshole rule”
• find ways to work for one another, more and more…

How about starting an Underground Railroad that helps human beings leave the prison and begin to learn the skills to leave the workhouse treadmill as well? There are huge numbers of the unemployed in every country. Many of them are young, high energy people ready to pitch in. Let’s find room for them in “our economy.” There has never been lack of useful work needing doing. There certainly isn’t such lack today.

As Kevin Carson weighs in with the OWSers:

Our general aim should be to promote a relocalized, high-tech [and smart low tech, I add], low-overhead economy that’s less dependent on centralized infrastructure, in which production costs are lower, in which waste labor and waste from planned obsolescence are eliminated, and in which it takes an average of 20 hours or less a week to produce the equivalent of the value we consume.

Encourage a shift of as much production as possible to commons-oriented peer production, and self-provisioning in the informal, neighorhood, and household economies. Encourage primary social units like urban communes, neighborhood cohousing projects and cooperative associations, intentional communities, and extended family compounds, and a revival of the kinds of mutuals and friendly societies [that once flourished in America] as means for pooling income and risk.

Instead of “creating jobs,” we should be breaking the 200-year-old link between work and jobs, and enabling people to meet their needs with their own skills and labor in cooperation with other people, without depending on some corporate hierarchy to give them permission in the form of a “job” to translate their labor into subsistence.

One stream of our energy after another is removed from the prison economy. Eventually, the Leviathan may fight back. Our best hope is that it does not realize the need until the mycelium of the new culture permeates enough of the undergrowth to form a critical mass. Let’s do all this as non-confrontationally and “under the radar” as possible, while at the same time be ready to defend the culture we are building — if it comes to that. When a whole new culture has been grown within the grassroots first, the good fight is merely in the defense of a revolution that has already come.

We need a very rough vision of what the next economy can be, one that inspires wide support. Here is one possibility: whatever our ideological differences, the economy that makes across-the-board sense is a “low-overhead economy.” Bypassing all the countless trolls hunkered down in their toll booths, skimming off productive work of other people, will free up plenty of room for financial sanity and economic well being everywhere.

 

Group intelligence emergent

First you act, then you know. – Coert Visser

We make the path by walking. Not so much by talking about it. And herein lies one of the major pitfalls of human decision making: we gather into groups of talking heads and hash out ideas. Then we vote or use some other abstraction-based process to narrow the choices, and hope that this will lead us in the right direction. But it is often a real struggle to get anywhere, and the results? Lackluster.

Social insects do it differently. They use a process called quorum sensing. What happens when ants need to move their home after a crack in the ground, or bees need to choose their new hive after swarming? Scouts go out looking for likely sites, laying down pheromone trails in areas that seem promising. Then they go back and communicate their excitement to their nest sibs. But not just any old way: excited ants are quicker to communicate and excited bees dance longer directional dances. Then other scouts go out, lay down more pheromones (thus highlighting the more popular trails), return and communicate. More and more scouts come to the most the promising sites and report back. At some point, the community senses a quorum, and the ants or bees move en masse. Much of the time (90% or so!), they pick out the best possible site through following this simple pattern that does not require either leaders or top-down oversight; freely undertaken, non-managed choices of unsophisticated agents add up to a very intelligent decision. But it’s not just insects… fish do it, wildebeest do it, and so do dolphins.

This day in French Polynesia, a group of about 25 spinner dolphins is sleeping behind the barrier reef protecting Moorea’s lagoon from the open sea. Like all dolphins, they remain conscious during sleep, resting only the hearing parts of their brains while relying on their sight to identify predators. In this state, they move as stealthily as ghosts, surfacing quietly, breathing low. But by the late afternoon the school begins to awaken and the dolphins pick up speed, with individuals bursting through the surface to perform the dramatic aerial leaps and spins for which the species is named.

Then almost as quickly as they awoke, the dolphins slow down again. The spinners have entered the phase of their day Norris and colleagues dubbed “zigzag swimming,” with the group oscillating between sleep and wakefulness, as some individuals wish to awaken and others wish to lounge abed in the lagoon a while longer. [Impending is the group’s choice to go feed in the open sea.] It’s no easy decision. At stake are their lives. By leaving the lagoon the spinners face real danger. To catch fish they must venture offshore and dive alone or in mother-calf pairs to depths of 1,000 feet or more in the nighttime sea. They will be hunting alongside many larger predators, including sharks hunting them.

Underwater, the split in intentions is … obvious. When the group is persuaded to sleep, the dolphins fall silent. When the group is urged to awaken, the sea explodes with the whistles, clicks, quacks, moos, baahs, barks, and squawks of their varied calls. In short order, these sounds are accompanied by an artillery barrage of dull booms and hissing bubble trains: the percussion of belly flops and back flops at the surface. Like howling wolves and cawing crows the spinners are consolidating their intentions, using zigzag swimming to cast and recast their votes until consensus is reached [or, more likely, until a quorum is sensed].

Quorum sensing has fascinating applications in computing and in medicine. For example, it is pointing a way out of the impasse created by antibiotics. The “massacre them all” approach only breeds nastier, more resistant superbacteria. Disruption of bacterial quorum sensing simply slows down the foe and gives the body’s immune system more time to use normal defense mechanisms to deal with the invader.

What exactly are the key components of ant and bee quorum sensing? I have gathered as many as I could find.

• individual initiative in going out and evaluating (freedom, randomness)
• a considerable variety of possible solutions is examined
• each individual is aware of a variety of criteria for evaluating the sites (which may differ from individual to individual somewhat)
• individual actions lay down pheromone markers upon which the next-comers build; pheromone trails grow stronger as more ants come to investigate
• each individual signals to others (direction, qualities of the site, enthusiasm)
• each scouts communicates their information and enthusiasm in full, then “shuts up” and new scouts coming in continue the process; individual ants build onto what others had done before them
• a threshold or quorum is recognized by all (some means for assessing the numbers involved is needed)
• when quorum is reached, a commonly-understood response follows
• there is no leader in this process (it’s self-organized and decentralized)
• the critters do not aim for clarity in what they communicate; if they are confused or unenthusiastic, they convey that… the clarity will emerge in time from their combined efforts

Rules of thumb: take action, explore; do what you understand as best; leave a marker or sign; communicate your enthusiasm; know a quorum when you see one. Diversity of options and free competition among them lead to a superior solution.

Quorum sensing is one pattern of swarm intelligence. There are others yet simpler; for example, sometimes communicating with others is not even necessary. Interacting with the environment and leaving signals for others to act upon is enough (think Wikipedia). I am but nicking the surface, hoping to leave some scratch marks for others to follow.

Useful search terms:
Swarm intelligence
Swarm theory
Smart mob
Collective intelligence
Stigmergy [sign + work]
Group genius
Emergent swarm
Signaling [or signalling]
Wisdom of the crowd
Co-swarming

Readings (the most glowing reviews on Amazon are for Seeley’s book):
Thomas Seeley: Honeybee Democracy
James Surowiecki: Wisdom of Crowds
Peter Miller: The Smart Swarm
Alex Pentland: Honest Signals

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Well then. How may all this apply to human groups? I don’t know yet, but I have a bee in my bonnet. A swarm of insights has descended upon me that I am abuzz to share. So please bear with me as I dole out the honey. (Help… where is that anti-venom?)

Truth to tell, I was struck speechless by the realization that these ants are freer than us humans. (Ants?! Ouch.) They are free to go out and act as they see fit, free to explore any option they find interesting, and to tell about it to the group. And they are free to wait until a deep sense of rightness emerges that propels the entire nest to action. Unlike humans, they are never faced with a contrived decision to obey.

I do not like being forced to go along with group decisions that go counter to my own deep sense anymore than I like green eggs and ham. Sitting in meetings imposing decisions on each other, with people expected to fall into line once the decision is hammered out… is that really what we want, or is it something we have put up with for way too long? Instead of an OODA loop, we have the hum-drum reality of OODO: observe-orient-decide-obey. Given the underlying expectation of having to toe the line, no wonder humans find group decision making unpleasant, anxiety-producing, manipulative, and full of miserable compromises.

I want what the ants have! (Did I actually say that?) I want to be able to listen with care what others have to say and to observe their actions. Then I want to be able to act within freedom, in my own turn. Isn’t that where true dignity lies? I have a new personal manifesto: the loyalty that I owe to the group does not consist of obeying its rules. It consists of opening up to the information flowing my way, allowing it to change me, then acting in freedom as I best see fit.

Then, get this: the ants actually do stuff! Wha? They do not sit around debating things in the abstract?! Their eventual smart choices emerge out of iterative cycles of doings. They throw themselves into an exuberant exploration of possibilities. Just think about it. Don’t we only find out about real decisions by doing in the human world as well? People talk and think and imagine – but making final decisions out of this material makes little sense. Only when the decision is embodied and acted out, it becomes the sort of decision you can hang your hat on. The rest are just dreams, wishes and other ephemera. True-blue resolve must be embodied rather than just thunk.

When I stayed at Earthaven, there was in place a sturdy consensus, hammered out in meetings and supported by the eco-village culture, regarding care for the land. But when several young people clear-cut a whole section of the forest, leaving not a tree or bush standing, and what’s worse, leaving the banks of the adjacent creek bare and vulnerable to run-off, that consensus proved false in the face of the contingencies of debt and the need to get the most yield out of the area (intended for a pasture flanked by fruit trees). And this in the face of a state law specifying creek bank protection! The community looked the other way while the young men mowed down those woods. Theoretical agreements carry very little weight when the chips are flying.

It is not enough to discuss ideas and then choose one of them. If the doings of each individual are the material from which an intelligent decision of the group emerges, then people must be free to do. Theoretical agreement does NOT tell us what people will want to do once the chips are down, and actions are required. It does NOT tell us what people will do when they have to apply their ideas in the real world, and real world feedback kicks in. It does NOT tell us what people will do once they get out of that armchair, and their cherished ideas turn difficult in practice, or have unforeseen consequences, or just plain feel disagreeable when realized. It does NOT tell us what we will pick when all our faculties are engaged, not only the rational. There is a great variety of things that are agreeable to think… but not agreeable to do.

Emergent decision making has a number of advantages listed in the literature as robustness, flexibility, low-energy, decentralization and self-organization. But it occurs to me that there are others: emergent decision making is honest; a group or company can create phony “paper decisions” that sound good but merely mask the actual reality within, but people aware of emergent decisions will look beyond such facades. Second, emergent choice does not lend itself to be sabotaged by top-down leadership because it “happens on its own” and any tinkering turns it into something else. And the freedom of each agent to act as they see fit subverts tendencies to groupthink. “Crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions. A group won’t be smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to tell them what to do.”

Emergent decision making leads to novel, creative, unpredictable results. There is no trauma so often attendant contrived decisions, which makes it possible to revisit the issues as often as necessary. And finally, emergent, embodied choices are highly persuasive where mere ideas are not: research has shown that people are more apt to imitate behaviors they have seen several other people do already. There is quorum sensing somewhere in there…

Have you heard of the Estonian country-wide clean up party? The elements are all there: autonomous signaling, visible mapping of the signals, and finally the emergent quorum that brought 50,000 people out to clean up all the illegal garbage dumps and piles that had accumulated throughout the countryside. In one day. Nearly 4% of the entire population showed up. Bloody amazing.

 

Emergent versus imposed design

We make the path by walking. – Spanish proverb

Some decades back, the communist planners in a central European town built several of their cheap high-rise apartment warrens. As usual, the landscaping was slow in coming. The grounds between the buildings grew muddy, people complained. Someone threw grass seed down and made it all a little more bearable.

By the time when, two or three years later, the aparatchiks finally sent a crew out, the men discovered that the pattern of sidewalks had already been patiently laid down by the pitter-patter of feet large and small, perfectly suited to the needs of the inhabitants. These workers had the good sense to adapt their blueprints to the impromptu human design etched in the grounds between the buildings.

Imagine – instead of people having to follow some engineer’s preferences, the sidewalks followed the preferences of those who lived and walked there! What a revolutionary concept. I’ve been reflecting on how much of our surrounding human world is built upon the herky-jerky imposition of distant planners, architects, and technocrats, us locals stuck with it like Cinderella’s sisters with the ill-fitting slipper. Is it such a preposterous idea that people who live and walk in an area have vital knowledge regarding how sidewalks ought to be laid out? In fact, isn’t their knowledge so vital that no amount of abstract knowledge and accumulated experience from elsewhere can make up for it?

A happy exception, this friendly walkway. To juxtapose, there is a story about a particularly nasty bit of “design by imposition” in Richard Douthwaite’s free book Short Circuit. A small island community off the coast of Ireland requested a modest grant to rebuild an old and very serviceable pier. Instead, the distant authorities approved a huge amount of money for a brand new pier. Let Richard tell it:

The New Pier built with high hopes and at great expense is rather a damp squib. Disturbance of the sea bed during construction has caused large areas of the harbour to dry out during low tide and the ferries cannot get into the pier for parts of the day. Dredging is now necessary… Even when the tide is sufficiently high, boats cannot lie easy at the new pier in bad weather due to its open construction and the old pier, long the island workhorse, is still required. It is estimated by the local boatmen that a great deal of money will be needed to create the necessary shelter on a pier which may never be free of problems. Designed in Dublin by engineers who probably never visited the island, it has been a disaster from the beginning.

Ouch. Grandiose, expensive, high-maintenance, and utterly incompetent! Quite an achievement, innit? As long as we keep beginning with fantasies of changing people, a harbor, a town, a region or continent from on high, from “knowing better than thou,” we’ll end up in disastrous cul-de-sacs.

Mother Nature does not start with master plans and goals. She evolves its creatures from tiny beginnings via nimble adaptations. It is a humble process that rises out of the needs of currently existing living beings, where novelty and improvements emerge via trial and error and feedback loops along the way; there is no ultimate goal. Humans, on the other hand, tend to start with designing the finished end-product, and then march from goal post to goal post to reach it. If reached, it is celebrated as an achievement regardless, as with the pier, of the actual impact of the finished scheme. Such a process is admirably suited to the replication of well-understood, proven tools and other artifacts. To reach something novel and beneficial, or to grow a living entity like a community, however, emergence and evolvement is needed.

I have collected in the following table some of the “thinking switches” that have been helping me focus on what emergent design (or emergent decision making, for that matter) may mean. This is — naturally — an emergent project. Additions, modifications and open source use are welcome!

Imposed design	Emergent design
God’s eye view (view from the mountaintop)	Many partial and specific local views
Rationalistic, abstract	Experiential, relational
Assuming knowledge of the whole, “having all the answers”	Assuming limitedness of human knowing; seeking useful questions
Forced clarity	Creative ambiguity
Omnipotent, vague “we”	Humble, specific “I”
Insistence on certainty	Acceptance of uncertainty
Decree	Evolution, unfoldment
Rules	Norms and feedback loops
From the center, from authority	From the grassroots
From the outside in, top down	From the inside out, bottom up
Beginning with the future	Beginning where we are, where I am
Goals	Possibilities
Focus on the destination	Focus on the journey
Where are we going?	What are we hoping for?
Experts decide, and override lay people/locals	Lay people/locals are assisted by experts
Master planning to launch project	Inspiring manifestos to launch project
Trying to shape the future, bending it to our will and control	Future emerges from today’s actions, serendipitous opportunities, flexible adaptations

Emergent design is evolutionary. It holds both emergence (the bubbling up of new phenomena from the random interaction of individuals) and design (the crafting of a desired future state) in a dynamic embrace that transcends the apparent duality. It seeks to reduce the friction points that inhibit free flow of information and to encourage rootedness in the very particular present. Allowing for experimentation toward an envisioned future, the process of realizing that desired state becomes more like the leaves of trees reaching for sunlight than planning.

And all this hints at the main reason why, IMHO, so many dictatorships are collapsing. In the unpredictable, weird world we have entered, regimes that constrain people from choosing as best they know how in response to problems experienced first hand, that depend on preventing emergent solutions to difficult problems, are exposed as lumberingly, unsustainably stupid. They are being weeded out as we speak.

 

And so…

So, a new year, a new decade. And for me, a new lease on life, having survived yet another drawn out medical cave-in. I am determined that this is the last time I will let the medical whale swallow me whole and keep me in its belly for months on end. Like Jonah, I emerge from the whale into a ‘Niniveh world’ bent on self destruction. What now?

I feel moved to find a way to live not through planning, not through “doing from above or outside in” but rather being here now and moving via the energies and potentials of what is here. Not pushing and commandeering my future, but rather flowing toward where my life takes me. I am already doing one bit: reconnecting with my ‘inner commonwealth.’ Hey… if we want a truly power-sharing political & socio-economic commonwealth, doesn’t it make sense to begin inside?

Outerly, I am exploring the damage the high-modern planning mindset has done and continues to do to our world, to our personal lives, and to our psyches. I want to speak against it, but speaking against it is not enough. I feel nudged to discover another path, another mindset and practice that unfolds from its own inner seedlets rather than being rationally imposed. And curiously, this too seems to be a part of solving the puzzle of power and domination which is a recurring theme in this blog.

How does one live without relying on plans? I am intrigued by the following statement:

The Chinese approach is not to be goal-oriented but rather to be tuned in to take advantage of whatever “potential” of whatever situation presents itself. Rather than set up a model to serve as a norm for his actions, a Chinese sage is inclined to concentrate his attention on the course of things in which he finds himself involved in order to detect their coherence and profit from the way that they evolve. From this difference that we have discovered, we could deduce an alternative way of behaving. Instead of constructing an ideal Form that we then project on to things, we could try to detect the factors whose configuration is favorable to the task at hand; instead of setting up a goal for our actions, we could allow ourselves to be carried along by the propensity of things. In short, instead of imposing our plan upon the world, we could rely on the potential inherent in the situation.

I want to write from the inside out as well. Too much of my writing has become agenda-bound. And following that agenda, I miss out on the acute pleasure of letting my fingers type as my inner being speaks.

This blog started with several intentions. Primarily, to document my journey out of Babylon. And since my heart whispers that getting out of Babylon involves finding one’s true community, I have written about some of the patterns that true communities naturally embed or are enfolded in. So far, I have collected 10. (I think.) These are not meant as building blocks but rather as materials and energies that need to be understood when the communitarian goes about gathering community. As a house builder needs to understand foundation, bricks & mortar, orientation toward sun and wind, her own spatial needs, etc., those of us hoping to draw and be drawn to community must pay attention to those patterns that enable a community to emerge and thrive.

Here they are, so far, and I will eventually create a tab to list them directly:

• Start with relationships
• Put main energies into people, not property, institutions or procedures
• DIY with others
• Band as basic human unit
• Community emerges from specific acts of caring
• By their fruits ye shall know your true kin (awareness – resilience – trustworthiness)
• Embodied action
• Common outlook yes, ideology and believism no
• Pro-social cooperation (feeding energy to pro-social people and withdrawing it from anti-socials)
• Power-sharing

Soon to be added:

• Circles
• Groovin’ together
• Hiving off
• Visioning

While I attempted to group these by the use of “pattern language” tags, now that I’ve gone through each post, I see that the tags are not of much help. I may end up discontinuing this category. It seems most of the posts have to do with community and what works, one way or another. Can you think of other “patterns of community” that ought to be remarked upon?

To improve the blog, I have put up an Archives tab, making it easy to find older posts. Blogs should have an automatic “table of contents” widget, ain’t so? This will have to do in the meantime. I have also further elaborated the Ludda vision. (Click on the Ludda tab, top right of this page, and step through the gateway.)

I will continue to write civ and/or doomer critiques as appropriate, though these topics are being creatively covered in many venues nowadays. I want to track here my efforts to embody what’s in my heart and mind, get closer to Ludda, and come up with a whole other way to do politics. I have a sense of it; the knack of putting it into words and deeds is yet to come. And the project of luring kindred spirits into my orbit is ongoing, so don’t say I didn’t warn ya… I am also collecting yummy non-beef-stock soup recipes, so please don’t keep them all for yourselves, folks, mm, sharing power and sharing belly-warming soups go together. Perchance we’ll some day be blessed to share in person…

 

Sharer village

I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self-evident, “that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.”
– Thomas Jefferson

I am not much of a fan of science fiction, but there is one book I can recommend wholeheartedly: A Door into Ocean, by an American biologist and writer Joan Slonczewski. It imagines in great detail a planet all covered by ocean, where the humanoid inhabitants live on clusters of living rafts within a social system of radical equality. They are called Sharers, both by themselves and their planetary neighbors. As one reader comments:

The [main] planet is a largely traditional human society; capitalist, patriarchal to a large extent, traditional forms of government, and physics based technology. The inhabitants of the aqueous moon are females who reproduce via parthenogenesis, have a very egalitarian society, and rely on sophisticated biotechnology. The book is about the clash of these two cultures.

The author bravely tackles the attempt of the nearby planet of humans much like us to colonize and dominate the Sharers. The usurpers are unsuccessful in the end. Sharing proves to be not only a good way to live in a challenging environment, but also powerful enough to deflect would-be conquerors.

I have been thinking quite a bit lately about the need to not only share power but also to share the Earth, if we are to have a saner, durable future. I used to prefer communities where individual financial independence was stressed because I felt that there are too many complications in sharing socio-economic systems. But more and more, I am tending in the direction of another way of doing money and economics altogether. Apparently, I am not alone. In one of the recent discussions on Orion Magazine, Susan Meeker-Lowry commented:

Unless people are willing to actually come together (in the words of John Lennon), to be willing to experiment with sharing not only ideas but land, houses, “stuff”, gardens, responsibilities, and money (yes, even that!) we won’t get far because we’ll still be stuck on our own, in our own little enclave wanting to come together but afraid of the changes involved. Don’t know if this is a “woman” thing or not, but that’s what I have to say about it right now.

Indeed. Watching the global financial system self-destruct under the weight of fraud and bogus theories, the times are ripe for daring experiments. One such bold step into the unknown is the uniquely visionary Freeconomy Bristol Village. For several years, some folks in England have been tinkering with minimizing their use of money, reducing their needs and scavenging for discarded food and other necessities. The Moneyless Man book describes one year in the life of Mark Boyle, an Irishman living near Bristol, who decides to live without money altogether. Mark also created a web site that connects people who are interested in what he calls freeconomy, and who offer their skills and used items to others, entirely free.

Mark seems especially good at garnering publicity for his projects. His book is selling well and is being published in several languages. He has dedicated all profits to a trust fund that will purchase rural land within 50 km of Bristol where the village will be located. It is an ambitious undertaking, perhaps not so much on the level of financing, but because of the various rather difficult challenges the initial villagers pose themselves, not the least of which is to supply most of their basic needs (including clothes!) from the land. Nevertheless, if not now, when? Mark has gathered around him a group of people who know how to make things happen.

The villagers intend to phase out all use of money within a short time following their land purchase. They plan to outfit themselves mostly from local and waste materials, and if Mark’s example from his year without money leads the way, they will rely on foraging and growing their own food supplemented by scavenging out-of-date foods in surrounding communities, and keep their living conditions and comforts simple, spartan, almost primitivist. The community will attempt to use permaculture design for all its aspects, nearly eliminate waste, and resort to recycled and natural building materials in constructing shelters for the permanent inhabitants and visitors. But let the founder describe it himself:

…a parcel of land where humanity evolves beyond the need for money and lives again like it did for 95% of its time on earth, just with more understanding. This first moneyless village will become an experimental society, a model we will constantly refine and which I believe will not only show a truly ecological way of living but one which will liberate humanity from the chains of economic and cultural slavery. This model can then be replicated by anyone in the world who wants to go down the moneyless path, tweaking it for climate, culture and the value systems and needs of those who want to live in it.

A particularly agreeable feature of the community is its emphasis on sharing skills freely, not just among the villagers, but also with and among all the visitors coming to experience and learn. One of my personal pet peeves has been the yuppification of permaculture with its typically expensive courses offered to dreamers rather than focusing on making the learning accessible to all, especially to young people and farmers whose incomes may be limited but who are ready to apply what they learn. No such problem will attend the Freeconomy Village. All workshops and skill sharing will be free to everyone who shows up. A gift economy at its fullest; any sense of obligation on the part of visitors can be discharged by applying the “pay it forward” principle which, as Mark sees it, spreads the circles of sharing wider and wider.

Myself, I tend to think that money can be a useful tool, provided its role is confined to being a medium of exchange, while deleting its current use as a store of value. Designing the money to “rust” (lose small amounts of value over time) also helps to keep it circulating. But I am fascinated by the moneyless experiment because such steps can illuminate for the rest of us what can and cannot work to provide alternatives to the present crashworthy system. So far, the various local money schemes have not been very successful and it may well turn out that the Freeconomy Villagers have something that will be. At least within the confines of the village itself, they may succeed in creating a deeply communitarian economic system. In any case, my hunch leads me to say that the Freeconomy Bristol Village bears watching.

 

Getting down to getting along

To me – and I accept that this is an unusual and unpopular viewpoint – the real issue is that we are behaving like a bunch of undignified, narrow-minded twats.

A powerful and growing agreement exists among people hacking away at the current impasse that we must begin with building circles of increasingly powerful community. Yet, tension keeps recurring between those who call for education toward growing awareness and for sharing those awakenings with others a la women’s consciousness raising groups of yore, and those who bank on relocalizer groups working to bring about small practical changes into their lives, villages and towns. And then there are those who argue that such small changes can lead to political quietism on the one hand and on the other, that practical localization achievements can be swept away by the Powers that Be in an instant if they so choose, and therefore localization and personal changes are not enough. What if all are right? It’s not either/or. I want to weave these three points of view together and take a good look at the emergent pattern.

The red pill club
Vast are the multitudes these days who have seen past the curtain. Just this morning, sitting at the local java joint, the conversation turned to the state of the country. So I looked toward the guy doing most of the talking, and popped the question. Why is it that America is unable to go after all those criminal banksters and fraud-peddling financiers, full well knowing we wuz robbed? He got it on the first try: “Because those people who caused the problems and those who are supposed to fix them are in bed together.” “So,” I say, “it’s kinda like the mob used to do it? At first he looks startled, then responds, “Exactly; you put key people on your payroll, one way or another.”

Like a diamond, awareness has many facets, but it is clear to the core: the colorful ever-shifting overlay of spectacle designed to distract us has lost its coherence, and the increasingly ugly reality is visible to any who pause to look. To switch metaphors, we’ve awakened finding ourselves wading in bullshit and humanure up to our knees. Within the deeper layers – and there are always deeper layers – there is of course far more than that: understanding that the crises of our age are intimately bound with the underlying structure of our civilization, for example. Or that the touted “efficiency” of the industrial machine is a lie, that this machine is grossly inefficient and destructive – but the measuring sticks used are meant to obscure that inconvenient reality. Or, closer to the vest, the realization that our touted “food security” is practically non-existent, embedded as it is in an agricultural system rooted in ridiculously wasteful practices and propped up by artifice (subsidies and legislated favoritism).

My most recent awakenings have to do with a deeply perceived need to segue to a more “whole,” unfragmented, undomesticated form of thinking and indeed inhabiting my world, and tinkering with what it means to embody what I care about. The other day, I heard a click when someone pointed out that after America’s Founders crafted the rather inspired Constitution, having worked a bit too hard to make sure that the new American government was tilted toward the elites, their successors contrived successfully to convince the increasingly educated and aware “middling sorts” that this is Freedom. No need for Jefferson’s “revolution every 50 years,” folks! Just think positive thoughts, recite the Pledge and the heroic industrialists, CEOs and other bigwigs will take care of everything in this best of all possible worlds! Now even this bamboozle is unraveling in the very heart of conservative America. These days on the internet, every week seems to bring another small piece of the large puzzle.

How well have we done with the job of ‘awareness’? While incremental gains have been made over the last 200 years and more, I would say that the last 10 years have made a huge difference. Significant levels of awareness are no longer the province of a few intellectuals or rebels. The ‘tuning in’ of the 60s, pushed underground, joining with other streams, has morphed into something much deeper and far more pervasive. In particular, the last two years have seen a mass awakening. People now know. Not intellectually, I mean. We know in our bones. Millions and millions of us, right, left and center. In part, we know because of the internet. We finally have a way to talk with one another, help each other find useful information, reinforce our best sense of what is going on, and cross-check with others firsthand. And in part we know because of the ongoing visible decay of the old ways of living and growing impotence of the old ways of thinking. We also have the elites to thank: the economic unraveling and their increasingly brazen and obvious plunder is doing wonders to shake people from their slumber all around the world. And in the U.S., the end of unemployment checks for millions this November will force yet another layer of reckoning.

When my book club recently read Orwell’s Animal Farm, I worried that these mostly older and not at all radical ladies would have a hard time relating. Yet the discussion was the liveliest we’ve had in a while, and it didn’t take long for bubbles of anger at what is happening in America to percolate to the surface. Our oldest and most conservative member actually went into an angry riff sharply informed by Orwell’s insights! I went away that day thinking that the underpinnings of ‘American reality’ have finally shifted; it is the lack of social permission to speak up that holds people back. In our group, Orwell’s book provided a temporary safe space to talk about such “unmentionables.” With each bump on the stairway of the long descent, more people will find their voice. So I’ll go out on a limb and say, when it comes to ‘awareness,’ well done, boyz and grrlz! Well done. Call me a crazy prophet: I say from here on out, awareness will gather into a wave as all exponential processes do.

Path of resilience
I have called it a contagion, because the people who are bit by this bug are altered by it and get in gear to make changes that are far more than skin deep. But I hope it is more of a path than a fortunate kind of popular craze. Everybody understands resilience. Now I am not saying that the majority is willing, as yet, to get off the dependent couch. But my impression is that for those with their native “species’ intelligence” intact, resilience makes a ton of sense. It does not matter one bit if we have huge disasters ahead or not, nor whether all resilience pioneers become dubious about the project of modernity. All folks are pilgrims on the path of resilience who recognize that human life is precarious, and always has been, and that living as pathetic domesticated sheeple who just keep consuming, get fleeced and amused, and have their wastes taken to a pretend-place called “away” is neither a worthy human existence nor one that bodes well in a downturn. And there are always downturns on this planet. Resilience appeals to sensible people of all persuasions and worldviews. It is an idea – and praxis — whose time has come. The last 100 years have been a blip of an exemption for many of us, a dubious opportunity not to have to deal with the nitty-gritty of life and each other. Here is our chance to apply what we have learned from this strange experiment and move on to something saner.

As one commenter responding to a Jensen article recently said about the resilience vanguard: They grow gardens, share the bounty with each other, learn to compost, save and share seeds, share information about the evils of industrial food and offer strategies to counteract that. As they learn about sustainable food production, their interests spread toward other related things. Canning and preserving. Reusing and recycling unwanted items from the home. Buying sustainable products of all kinds. Learning to sew. Making their own music. Raising chickens. Installing solar power. Riding bikes and walking more. Jensen poo-poohs this stuff but it’s the seeds from which the future will grow. Every time I attend the annual seed exchange or visit the local food exchange I feel optimistic. Every time I eat home grown produce, plant seeds my friends saved, and otherwise avoid voting for industrial culture with my wallet, I hope I am making a little bit of a difference. I’d go blow up a dam but then I’d be forced to eat industrial food and wash with industrial soap in prison.

How are we doing on the side of resilience? It appears to me that the needed knowledge is largely in place. All those people who began to build alternative houses from local materials, making their on-site energy, rediscovering subsistence agriculture or foraging or herbal medicines or home birthing or greywater systems, creating pockets of independence from the totality, have done well. Some of the extensive mainstream know-how and gadgets can be adapted to resilient ways of living with relative ease. There is much alternative, appropriate technology out there that can be brought in as needed, and John Michael Greer is apparently sparking a revival and intensification of this work. Appropriate tech even appeals to folks of a cornucopian persuasion who nevertheless recognize the follies of what passes today for “smart” technology and science. It’s a damn shame that so many ingenious inventions of the past that were simple to understand and easy to make, and required little energy to run, have been swept away by the relentless march of modernity. Some can be recovered, and this is a worthy task. Some can be bettered by those among us with the sort of understandings that apply modern magic to a very unmodern task: the day to day practical living of the sort that brings humble creaturely joy, makes deep personal sense, and helps communities (both human and ‘natural’) thrive.

So. We have a large knowledge base to draw on, and great many people in all walks of life are making it their business to reskill and retool. All you appropriate and convivial tool inventors and recreators, all you new agrarians and off-gridders, all you folks daring to leave clueless urbanity behind and jump into a whole new-old way of living, you have done us proud. Working with so little, in your back yards, garages and fields, dedicated to relearn ancestral ways when most of the culture pushed you hard in the opposite direction, you kept going. You kept going through the years when hope flickered small and these very practical tasks seemed like the only thing that a person could do to keep the flame alive! The coming generations are catching the bug anew now, learning food from the ground up, turning suburban backyards into oases of fruit trees and vegetable gardens, and getting reacquainted with the underlying natural patterns of waste, water, living soil webs, sun and wind, and how we humans can flow with the planet, rather than push against. Creating robust and stable local economies is a task that awaits the next wave of daring trailblazers. What a profound sense of relief: resilience is back. Blessings for all on this ancient path!

In each other we trust?
Facing a disturbing and heartbreakingly difficult future, it seems obvious that people of goodwill must come to pull for one another in ways unprecedented since the last ice age. Everything we hope for, everything the future could be, depends on our capacity to recreate the conditions needed for interpersonal trust. Yet so far, this work has remained in the shadow. Efforts of note include experiments with public deliberation, creation of open spaces, compassionate communication, sociocratic governance and open source collaboration. We’ve but scratched the surface. For example, while amazon and ebay have their trust metrics, this craft has not informed our lives yet. Instead, the culture of hate thrives in the words of doomers, leftwingers and rightwingers, scientists and layfolk, the religious and the atheistic; it has infested all public spaces. Just say something unpopular in an impassioned forum and all the rude trolls will come out of the woodwork while most of the participants aid and abet the abuse by doing nothing. A lot of otherwise aware, educated and with-it folks have no idea how to get along with people who disagree with them. Go into a forum like that, and it’s war. The hate culture crosses all boundaries. James Howard Kunstler gets regularly abused by anti-semitic emailers, but he himself lashes out brutally against southerners, rednecks, the tatooed, teabaggers and others who in his view are beyond the pale. How can lefties, who are unable to talk about their rightwing neighbors without spewing fury and contempt, press in good faith for ending American wars abroad? How about ending the wars fought on our front porches first?!

People who do not trust one another end up hiding from each other within lies, hypocrisy and isolation. They will have few inner resources for the radical collaboration at the center of humanity’s livable future, and keep on running away from community despite their deep needs and earnest convictions. I say it’s time to get serious about setting aside the fear and suspicion that have driven us to the anonymity of cities and impersonal institutions. Can we summon the strength to turn away from the absurd political spectacle and toward each other, and grow a culture of trust from the grassroots? From this trust, a new kind of politics can finally emerge.

Once we get excellent at working together, only then can we set our sights on the huge, formidable challenges of whole regions cooperating to reshape large-scale economic and power patterns, and to begin the work of planetary healing. You are urging us all to sweep away the current malignant order of things? My first question would be, when was the last time you called your opponent a douchebag of a fucktard? When was the last time you smothered him or her under 16 tons of condescension? Yesterday? Back to the starting point, I’m afraid. How the heck could we accomplish what we dream about without being able to — in our sleep! — listen with empathy, give and receive honest feedback, gather into groups without posturing and terminal boredom, internalize effective accountability without someone cracking the whip of authority, stop deferring to power-hogs, and make collaborative work so enjoyable people will flock to it rather than run in the opposite direction?! What will it take to learn to listen to people across ideological divides, diffuse long-standing animosities, and begin to work with them on projects of crucial import to us all? We need everyday visionaries in all walks of life pioneering the same sort of alchemy and “green wizardry” that Greer is promoting, but in the fields of trust that have lain fallow too long. Everything else hinges upon this. Intractable human problems become in principle approachable if we get down to getting along.

 

Be the change

There is no way to peace; peace is the way.

Isn’t there a big — humongous, crucial — difference between doing and embodying? Doing means some activity that pays heed to my concerns and cares. Embodying means ‘giving birth’ to a human being who lives those concerns and cares as naturally as fish swim. If I become a person who embodies empathy, then whatever I do comes to be infused with empathy. If I turn into someone who embodies profound ideological tolerance, then my discussions and interactions will be deeply informed by it. If I dream of tolerance but remain an intolerant person in my everyday outlook and habits, then what I actually do in the world will be far more likely marked by intolerance as well.

The process of changing one’s behavior surely includes stories and ways of speaking, as in, for example, “sisterhood is powerful.” New words and images can inspire and provoke. But if one’s inner being and the behavior arising from it isn’t altered, in turn producing changed outer reality, isn’t it then all for naught? “Sisterhood” fades into yet another broken dream.

A person can talk about cooking from scratch all the time, or read cook books, or organize on behalf of slow food, or write manifestos, but will it really amount to anything unless that person opens up to something new within, which in turn produces actual cooking behavior resulting in tasty home-made meals?

In a well known essay Forget Shorter Showers, and elsewhere, Derrick Jensen has criticized the sentiment behind the quote often attributed to Gandhi: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” He says, “I want to be clear. I’m not saying we shouldn’t live simply. I live reasonably simply myself, but I don’t pretend that not buying much (or not driving much, or not having kids) is a powerful political act, or that it’s deeply revolutionary. It’s not. Personal change doesn’t equal social change.”

Jensen is right; personal change does not equal social change. If I become a person who embodies respect for water, and live this respect in the outer world only by changing some habits and undertaking household modifications, I will not save the Ogallala aquifer upon which I depend. For that, I must do more than embodying my water-respect in small personal ways. The Ogallala aquifer will be sustained and replenished when a critical mass of people – householders, business people, farmers and all — who draw from it come to embody water-respect in their individual and collaborative actions, both public and private, which will then add up to a profound shift in how things are done at all levels.

The point that Derrick seems to have missed is that activity without embodiment cannot produce the profound, fundamental shift he is calling for. “Be the change” is necessary though not sufficient. One online commenter astutely remarked: “Jensen is right in the sense that if you only effect personal change, that doesn’t do much at all. But he’s wrong in the sense that you only focus on outside change. If you do that, you get a reproductive rights organization like Planned Parenthood where so many of their own low-income staff have unplanned pregnancies, or a rights organization like Acorn that union-busts its own employees. We must be the change, and we must effect change from that place.”

I want to distinguish no action (hypocrisy), vs. earnest outward action (conventional activism), vs. lifestylism (“personal = political” green quietism) vs. embodied action (“personal to political” activism). What I am trying to get at is this: the path of embodiment, of incarnating my values and desires in my flesh-and-blood being, leads then organically into action which is infused by those values and desires.

Perhaps the best way to get at the inner kernel of embodiment is via stories…

There was a time when I got involved with the Greens, in the late 80s. Eventually, I had to leave town for three years. At the time of my leaving, the group was fairly large, energy was high, mini-conferences were organized and projects started. When I came back, I found a handful of stalwarts hunkered down working out in excruciating detail how not to be bogged down in minutiae, finessing a variety of rules and directives the national organization had passed on down and which were meant to put an end to this pattern once and for all. The group faithfully toiled on the document’s behalf. After sitting in the stupefyingly boring meeting for some time, I said, “Here’s an idea. Remember that Muste peace quote [above]? Let me paraphrase it. There is no way to not doing organizational minutiae. Not doing organizational minutiae is the way.” They looked at me with instant recognition and shock. A few long seconds passed. Then they said, oh, but we have invested too much energy in this already. We have to go on and see it through. And that was that.

Once upon a time there gathered a group of people who were onto interesting projects. They organized well attended and lively events. Over time, however, they became troubled. Though living in a diverse city, the attendees were invariably lily-white middle-class people. So the group got together to look for solutions. Many concerned discussions were held about the need to pay attention to inclusivity and to change the group to appeal to the others. Various ideas were written up as a result. Funding was sought, and eventually received. A Diversity Coordinator was hired. Outreach PR activities were undertaken, educational workshops were planned to draw a greater variety of newbies in, and obligatory contacts with non-white, non-middleclass organizations were proposed and initiated. Several years later, more or less the same situation prevails, and the same calls for more inclusiveness are heard at the gatherings.

Another group in the same situation, located in a remote and eccentric kingdom, faced this problem another way. The participants decided to embody the solution, opening up to becoming the sort of people who have diverse friends and acquaintances. They each began to seek out neighbors, friends of friends, fellow students and colleagues who did not fit the white middle-class profile. What they learned from these encounters they brought to the group to chew on, and eventually, some began to bring along their new friends to the group’s events.

A boy went to a Zen master to learn about jade. At the first lesson the Zen master put a piece of jade into the boy’s hand and proceeded to talk about the wind. The boy played with the pebble while he focused on the conversation. After a while the master announced that the lesson was over. The boy gave back the jade and left. This continued for some weeks. The master gave the boy a piece of jade to hold and proceeded to talk about the things of nature. One day the boy’s parents asked him what he was learning about jade. The boy felt that though he had learned much from the master, he had learned nothing about jade. He went to his next lesson determined to remind the master of his reason for attending the lessons. When he arrived, the master put a small stone into his hand. The boy jumped up and cried, ”This is not jade!”

 

Birds of a feather

How do we find the right kind of people with whom to form a band? The first question looming large in my mind is “who.” Who is it that I am searching for? Who is my true kin? I recently realized that I was suffering from believism: the viral meme that insists that beliefs and ideas are what really matters, and “by their beliefs ye shall know them.” When I reflected on where to turn to find my kind of people, I kept coming up with various worldview groups. The desire to be with others of like belief is a powerful thing. How often have we exclaimed in relief – finally I have found people who think like me! What joy. (Until we find they really don’t.)

After another such encounter – hoping to be altered by a face-to-face meeting with someone who was an excellent belief match, and did not pan out in real life – and after seeing how people of like beliefs end up fighting with one another over magnified molehills, I figured it was time to scrap this whole template of searching via beliefs and start over.

It seems to me that people flock together basically in the following ways:

• because they like the company (e.g. I always get along with cousin Emma, we have good chemistry between us)
• because they share passions, interests or projects (e.g. beekeepers)
• because they share beliefs, worldviews (e.g. Catholics)
• because they share a lifeway, a local culture (e.g. the Highland Scots)
• because they share value-laden preferences (e.g. participatory, peer-based communication)
• because they share an inspiring vision (e.g. peace)

Any and all of these reasons are compelling. They do work to bring about mutual enjoyment and a bond. They all provide motivation to spend time in the other person’s company, and explore further. What I am about to argue is that they are not enough. They are not enough to form long-term tight relationships, the kind of bonds that are needed to forge together a viable tribal group that has both cohesiveness and durability.

Any of them alone will likely lead to disappointment in the search for a good band-mate. What is missing? The missing part has to do with integrity. It has to do with the ability to work through conflict. It has to do with a whole slew of phenomena that perhaps can all be lumped into ‘trustworthiness.’ If another person knows how to navigate the perils of a heated discussion without getting nasty, I can trust them. If they know how to give me critical feedback without biting my head off when I screw up, I can trust them. If they are able to offer empathy in response to my grief or anger, I can trust them. If they do their damnedest to be honest and straightforward, I can trust them.

All too often, we offer solidarity on the basis of ideas, and forget to reserve our loyalty based on that other piece of the puzzle: character. On who this person really is in the world. What sort of story are they enacting among their own? How do they behave, how do they treat living beings? For example, if a person shares my beliefs to a tee, yet they are a habitual blamer, take their frustrations out on other people, and are driven by the need to be always right, all the good ideas, shared interests and other similarities are not going to prevent ongoing damage or save the relationship in the long run.

True community must be based on both trust and common outlook. If the trust isn’t there, no shared-belief magic will fill the hole. I am willing to extend this further and claim that when it comes to forging alliances with people, trustworthiness must take precedence over ideas. If the person or group is trustworthy and treats you right, even if some of their ideas are weird or unpalatable, it makes sense to favor them over people whose ideas are right on but who cannot be trusted. Ideally, we want both in a small band community; but when choosing wider allies, I say choose trust over like-mindedness.

Besides, think of a geek with poor social skills who does not know how to treat people well. What is easier for this person to change: behavior, or beliefs? Bingo. People readily learn to adapt their belief systems. But ego trippers or chronic quarrelers usually remain so across worldviews. As Diana Leafe Christian writes in Creating a Life Together, many an intentional community has come to grief over the ill-considered acceptance of the untrustworthy.

Trust is the unifying force we have been looking for. It goes past the games people play with ideas and language. Trust is the ageless glue that used to hold communities together in former days. Ideals and passions unite today and often fragment tomorrow. Shared trust unites us for the long, winding road ahead.

 

Uncivilization: base camp

The Dark Mountain Project just convened their first festival in Wales. Dubbed as the base camp of the uncivilization expedition, it has had a mixed reception. A variety of feedback can be found, some of it at the Uncivilization Ning site, some of it at various blogs; see for example Dire Mountain, Imagining things differently, and A church full of underminers.

I have followed this project with considerable interest, partly because I adore their Manifesto, partly because I have been wondering for some time if they actually have what it takes to live their ideas. So far, I would say that in some important respects, they do not. Whenever people criticize them for that, they get defensive, and point out that theirs is a cultural project. They are about imaginings, writings, art, they say.

But isn’t it essential to live what you preach? I am not pointing down the path of activism, I am pointing to embodying our values in whatever we do. The organizers are well aware of issues like seeking out women for key roles, the desirability for not turning attendees into mere spectators, inclusion, and opening up creative space where spontaneity can flourish. Yet the reality of the event played out old scenarios… few women presenters, open mic time for those who could afford a generous donation, workshops of lecturers speaking to an audience and leaving little time for interaction at the end, presentations falling short of the promises made, helpers being excluded from key events for not having paid the full entrance fee.

The Dark Mountain’s Eight Principles say: “We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.” Yes, but how about the myth of the necessity of elite control? Do we really need yet more events where people are divided into Presenters and Audience? The organizers set the agenda, choose the rest of the Presenters, and hold onto the reins. The Audience come to consume the offerings. Gadz, I am so sick of this model…

What I want is events that simply Open the Space and invite all of us to set the agenda, convene around those whose ideas we want to hear and add to, and speak with one another. In such a setting, the whole damn tired plaint of “how come there aren’t more women presenters” will vanish like last year’s snow, because the women who come will speak as much as anyone… or in any case, it will be up to them to make sure women do play a full role. By all taking part in crafting the festival, we practice handling our own affairs, together, as we move along!

Invite a bunch of interesting people, throw the gates open to all comers, and let the people who come create the festival that is meant to happen. This simple idea and subtle practice is called Open Space Technology. Silly name, I know. Just call it Open Space. Unconference is another take on it. Doesn’t it make sense? Shouldn’t the first order of uncivilization events be to unconference themselves?! After all, this is the way ye olde fairs were shaped. A convenient space was provided, some people took it upon themselves to ensure safety and basic comforts, and people came to play, trade and connect. Those that showed up were the right people. What happened was what was meant to happen.

I am aching for us unciv folk to say… ok, so let’s plan a gathering of other would-be mountaineers. We dream of a world where the people run our own affairs. So let’s come up with a way to do our gatherings that embodies this longing. Let us do our gatherings in such a way that as we all live through the event, we live what we preach: we share power, the teaching/learning flows back and forth, and we co-create the festival together.

Un-meeting, un-organizing, un-managing… let’s open up the spaces of our lives so that we the people finally look after our own affairs. Instead of marching to fulfill organizers’ goals, we can let the living essence of an event emerge through its own logic, its own serendipity.

We uncivvers dream of a world where we the people share power and design our world together, but still live a world where organizers hog power, control the design of an event, and bring in Presenters to entertain and educate Audience. So once more, the people who show up with high hopes are again constrained within the same old paradigm. Shades of Orwell: the clever pigs decide who will speak, what ought to be spoken about, where and when, and even who will be allowed into the various presentations. The rest of the animals obediently go through the motions, grateful to be allowed to ask a few questions at the end. And they pay to get in to be treated so!!! Bizarre, no?

But the intrepid Dark Mountain climbers did not entirely miss the opportunity of coming to live, for a few days, in a world where people work and play together and co-create, for a blessed moment, our own world. It turns out that Space actually did Open at the fringes of the festival, where people struck up impromptu happenings as they were inspired. The base camp came into being after all, out of the way of the old baggage the organizers brought with them. Hail Mountaineers!

 

DIYWO!

Been reading up on and reflecting on the Transition Town movement, a worthy cause garnering a good amount of publicity. And my unease has grown, particularly after perusing the upcoming offerings of the TT conference in Devon. Now why would I be uneasy about something so obviously “right-on-the-money” as transitioning to a saner way of living? Actually, that part of Transition Towns suits me just fine. I am behind anything and everything practical a small town can do to become more resilient. That ol’ uneasy feeling is provoked by the “movement” part of the Transition movement.

Let’s take a quick peek at the model itself. Wikipedia defines a social movement as “as a series of contentious performances, displays and campaigns by which ordinary people make collective claims on others, consisting of:

• Campaigns: a sustained, organized public effort making collective claims of target authorities;
• Repertoire: employment of combinations from among the following forms of political action: creation of special-purpose associations and coalitions, public meetings, solemn processions, vigils, rallies, demonstrations, petition drives, statements to and in public media, and pamphleteering; and
• WUNC displays: participants’ concerted public representation of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitments on the part of themselves and/or their constituencies.”

So here we have it in a nutshell. A movement focuses on and feeds energy to “them” – the same people and institutions that are the problem. Like Sisyphus, it rolls a boulder uphill, trying to fight or influence the system monolith. It wastes energy on symbolic displays. It pleads like a powerless child with the parent state. And quite inauspiciously, it tells the authorities who and where the opposition is, making it convenient for them to send out their cadres of anti-movement saboteurs.

As though this were not bad enough, there is also the problem of inner cooptation. Consider the following flow chart (thanks to Wikimedia Commons):

Of the five possible outcomes, only one is good. The odds of failure, cooptation, mainstreaming, or repression loom large. But the zinger is what happens before that: bureaucratization. The movementniks take over and begin to build fiefdoms and careers via volunteer and paid services to the movement, grantsmanship and institutional alliances. Once that happens, surely cooptation or mainstreaming isn’t too far off for those movements which “succeed.”

Eventually, enjoyable mutual aid groups succumb to being managed by movement planners who set the goals and point out the path for others to follow and then look for ways to “mobilize” and “agitprop” the rest of us to march to their tune. And there is the lure of grand schemes, overarching conceptualizations and endlessly complex studies. In the Transition Town movement, for example, some have taken to creating GIS-guided “foodshed maps” of a an area while working out local food resilience. They are pretty, but is such an effort well spent? Or is it just another attempt at feeding off a movement trough?

For those who want to transition in small towns, why not just convene Open Space and get going? Do it yourself with others. DIYWO.

To paraphrase the immortal Blazing Saddles, we don’t need no stinkin’ movements. We need 10,000 DIYWO conspiracies!