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Craig's guest tonight (8:30 EST) is Brian Swimme, close colleague and collaborator with Jane's Friend Father Thomas Berry

If we can harness our empathic sensibility to establish a new global ethic that recognizes and acts to harmonize the many relationships that make up the life-sustaining forces of the planet, we will have moved beyond the detached, self-interested and utilitarian philosophical assumptions that accompanied national markets and nation state governance and into a new era of biosphere consciousness. We leave the old world of geopolitics behind and enter into a new world of biosphere politics, with new forms of governance emerging to accompany our new biosphere awareness.

The book describes the evolution of the Italian hacktivism and net culture from the 1980s till today and it is a reconstruction of the history of artistic networking in Italy and of the Italian hacker community.

This page should be covering Spanish-language resources on P2P, participatory, open, and commons-related movements.

Whether we assume that “it all starts with the individual” or “the individual is shaped by their social systems and circumstances”, we miss the extent to which individuals influence collective awareness, functionality and evolution AND collective systems influence individual consciousness, evolution and functioning. Individual and collective capacities and dynamics constitute a feedback cycle which doesn’t START anywhere. Or perhaps I should more usefully say that this feedback cycle starts everywhere. (This is similar to it being more useful to talk about leaderful groups rather than leaderless groups. Both are true, but the framing invites different consciousness and behavior.) This realization about the feedback and synergy between the individual and collective opens our consciousness to strategies which maximize the evolution of BOTH.

The term "Hyperlocal" generally refers to community-oriented news content typically not found in mainstream media outlets and covering a geographic region too small for a print or broadcast market to address profitably. The information is often produced or aggregated by online, non-traditional (amateur) sources.

A republication of January 2006, on my own concept of netarchical capitalism. Some of the references are dated, but I think the main concept is still valid.

The Opera browser, since June 2009, comes with an important extension: Opera Unite can turn any computer running the browser into a server that will share designated data with peers on the net, directly, without the need to upload. After the alpha version of June, last November saw the release of the beta Version 10.10 of Opera which includes Unite as a standard feature. It runs on Unix/Linux, Windows and Mac operating systems.

Social transformation is not a job to be left to the whims of billionaires. Perhaps if we supported the energy and creativity of millions of ordinary people, we could create a foundation for lasting progress that will never come through top-down planning by a new global elite, however well intentioned. When this principle is accepted and philanthropy is recon?gured to be less technocratic and more supportive of people’s own self-development efforts, then change will come — larger than we can control, quicker than we can imagine, and deeper than we could ever hope for by reducing everything to market forces.

As this article goes to publication, the University of California is erupting as a site of political conflict over the recent budget cuts, tuition increases and furloughs. A UC wide strike and walkout of faculty, staff and students has been called for on August 24th, 2009, the first day of instruction. It seems that the UC’s disregard for the health and wellbeing of their employees, as well as for the quality of education, has reached an intolerable point for many. Many academics have taken this opportunity to turn their research back to the university itself, which is exemplified by UC Berkeley’s colloquium event entitled “The University in Crisis: The Dismantling and Destruction of the University of California.

"Social innovation is a process of change where new ideas emerge from a variety of actors directly involved in the problem to be solved: final users, grass roots technicians and entrepreneurs, local institutions and civil society organizations. The main way in which it differs from traditional “garage” innovation is that here the “inventors” are groups of people (the “creative communities”) and the results are forms of organization (the “collaborative services”).

What is happening is that profit risk is less manageable and the tendency of consumption (a consumption function) is approaching a price of zero because people can get replacement items for free (the core of P2P theory). The result of these two trends is businesses like Twitter and outcomes like co-ops.

We received a message from folks organizing a new conference tentatively titled the "First International Conference on Accessible Digital Manufacturing Technology and Design" to be held in Campinas, Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2010. While the conference's title is not yet written in stone, their objectives are:

This retreat week with Barbara Marx-Hubbard is a blossoming of ideas, visions, insights, states of consciousness. We gave ourselves enough time to cover many topics. This video is a short excerpt of our conversation on free currencies.

At the root of this idea is overwhelming recent evidence for horizontal gene transfer - in which organisms acquire genetic material "horizontally" from other organisms around them, rather than vertically from their parents or ancestors. The donor organisms may not even be the same species. This mechanism is already known to play a huge role in the evolution of microbial genomes, but its consequences have hardly been explored. According to Woese and Goldenfeld, they are profound, and horizontal gene transfer alters the evolutionary process itself.

Anyone considered what these mega structures would do to the local climate?

SOLAR TOWER  —www.enviromission.com.au/
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tWlP0knKQU

Note that this mega-design could be made on a smaller scale with mirrors pointing to the top of the ...

Hey Dan, I think you would get a kick out of Steve Pavlina's blog   www.stevepavlina.com/
I just bought his book...excellent groundwork for accessing agency and getting out of your own way.

KW literally has bleed to the bone.

Yea Nassim sees infinities both ways...the guys are jiving on how phi spirals towards the singularity for infinity...that is a big weed eureka   There are no Plancks in this universe, it is spirals all the way down.

OM...is the sound of the sun. Nas...

A republication from February 2006: Riane Eisler’s Hierarchy of Actualisation

The excerpt is from Russ Volckman’s excellent Integral Leadership newsletter. See below an insert about the importance of Eisler’s previous book about the origins of hierarchy.

“Q: Would you characterize the partnership model?

A: Well, let’s look at the Nordic Nations. First of all, rather than having hierarchies of domination–these rigid rankings–they do have hierarchies. They have more of what I call hierarchies of actualization. I’ll get back to that because it’s key to my model for business and economics. But the first thing that you see is that they have much greater political and economic democracy. They don’t have these huge gaps betweens haves and have-nots. They have a generally high standard of living for everyone. Second, rather than ranking of the male half of humanity over the female half, they have much more equal partnership between women and men. With this–and this is critical–you find that as the status of women rises, so does the status of those traits and activities stereotypically considered feminine: caring, care-giving, non-violence. So what do you see? You see that the Nordic nations were pioneers in what my friend from Finland, Hilkka Pietila, calls a caring society. We call it a welfare state, but it’s very different from the U.S. welfare system. They have universal health care, childcare allowances, elder care and paid parental leave. In other words, in cultures that orient to the partnership model, the care giving that is stereotypically associated with women can become a fiscal priority of the nation. This is very, very good for the economic health of the nation. Finland, for example, in both 2003 and 2004 ranked ahead of the much wealthier, much more powerful United States in the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness ratings. And of course, these nations are always on the top in the U.N. Human Development Reports. These nations also pioneered the first peace studies courses. They pioneered laws against physical punishment of children in families. They pioneered a strong men’s movement to disentangle male identity from violence. They also pioneered what we today call industrial democracy, teamwork in factories, rather than turning human beings into mere cogs in the industrial machine. Ecologically sound manufacturing, such as the Natural Step, was also pioneered by them. Now, none of this is random or coincidental. It’s part of the cultural configuration characteristic of the partnership rather than domination model. It is a configuration that factors both what happens to the female half of humanity and also what happens in people’s day-to-day lives…

2. The Caring Economy model

Q: Ultimately, I want to get to the question of leadership, but I think there is still more foundation to be laid. For example, you brought up the subject of economics. In a new book that’s coming out called Enlightened Power yours is the first chapter: The Economics of the Enlightened Use of Power. Can you lay out for us a little bit of the economic argument in support of a partnership approach?

A: It is something I’m very deeply involved in. I am actually working on a new book on partnership economics: a caring economy. We’ve been told for a long time, for example in terms of organizational structure, that hierarchies of domination are needed for success. In these hierarchies of rigid top down rankings, accountability, respect, and benefit flow mostly from the bottom up. Enron, for example, certainly didn’t have much accountability or respect from the top down. Most of the benefits accrued to the people on top. That’s the classic domination model. And Enron shows that in the long term it’s hardly successful. I don’t mean to pick on Enron. But these hierarchies of domination, where there is so little accountability or respect by those on top, are rife with horrible corruption and cause great suffering and loss. These companies eventually went bankrupt or changed their names. These were disasters for many people: stockholders, employees and their pension plans. What we’re discovering today–and it’s all over the management literature–is that hierarchies of actualization are much more efficient, much more effective. Now what is a hierarchy of actualization? Well, if we look at the way power is conceptualized, it isn’t conceptualized so much as power over, power to dominate or to destroy, but power to empower oneself and others to be the best we can be. It is also power with. So a term like teamwork is really part of the shift to partnership where there’s a different way of looking at power. In a hierarchy of actualization, you have respect, benefit and accountability flowing both ways. But you also have something else that is very important: you have much better information flow. This is very important for companies to make effective business decisions. In partnership structures, not only do you have teamwork where people can really have input and use their brains and their creativity, but you also have the possibility for much more creativity. When people are in a hierarchy of domination, they know very well that they better conform. It’s very dangerous to disobey orders or to question. Particularly in a post-industrial economy where we are told we need a flexible workforce, a creative workforce, a workforce that can solve problems, the hierarchy of domination just does not work. The structure inhibits creativity and flexibility. There is something else really basic that takes us back to what I was talking about when I spoke of the Nordic Nations. There are many studies now showing that when people feel cared for–which is part of the hierarchy of actualization–people perform much better. There are empirical studies showing this. So all in all, what we’re finding out is that the partnership model is not only more conducive to higher stages of human development, but it actually is much move conducive to economic well-being.”

3. The historical origins of hierarchy

In the book that launched Riane Eisler’s fame, The Chalice and the Blade, where she outlines the difference in dominator and partnership societies, she formulates the following hypothesis, based largely on the research of M. Gimbutas. The story goes more or less like this: for more than 100,000 hears of human history, humans lived in egalitarian bands. But it is a mistake to think that the rise of agriculture and domestication is itself responsible for hierarchical warrior societies. That agriculture gave rise to warfaring empires is the result of an ‘exogenous’ import: that of the masculine-dominated, warrior societies of pastoral nomads, born in the Eurasian steppes, who in fact took over the agricultural kingdoms, and developed a hybrid civilization. Before these invasions the evidence points to feminine-dominated societies, not geared to war. She dates these developments to about 4400 BC.

Riane’s website is at www.partnershipway.org.