pangaia.sf.net

[Charles N Wyble]

Marcos,

Can you tell us more about the project in your e-mail signature?

pangaia.sf.net

Looks really neat.

[Marcos]

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 1:30 PM, Charles N Wyble <cha...@knownelement.com> wrote:

Marcos,

Can you tell us more about the project in your e-mail signature?

Sure.  My delays at talking about it are only because I'm having to slowly build the belief that its ideals are achievable (and actually are all ready within the "collective consciousness") and the physical-global context *in which* to achieve them.  That in itself may be difficult to believe.  This has not been an easy prospect given the weight of history, abuses of power, cynicism, ignorance and the like.

But the project is aimed to organize all the content of the world's knowledge and (non-local) social interactions at their most abstract -- that is, absent of any arbitrarily-imposed constraints or "personality" -- kind of like sunlight to earth's life, it imposes nothing and serves as a currency that gets absorbed and transformed all around earth's ecosystem. 

In other words, I'm claiming that there is a Unified "Theory of Order", but that it couldn't be *real*ized until a social dynamic was created with it.  The Internet creates the first possiblity for that dynamic to work out in *real time* and in a fun way that serves the human spirit.  Which is to say: in a way that is realistic and won't break down as it has in other contexts like capitalism and communism.  See the articles "diagram" and "structure" on the pangaia wiki.

The social dynamic is necessary because there "cannot" be an externally/universally taxomony imposed to create that new order.  The social component solves many problems that would otherwise create an Orwellian capitalistic scenario.  Likewise, the Internet provides the modicum of neutrality that can implement the universal rules in order to avoid the tendency towards a communist dictatorship.

As might be gleaned from the diagrams mentioned, Pangaia implements both, both the social dynamic as well as the principles of order.  (It should be said that American democracy was also an attempt to create just that, but it did not have the means to achieve it after the rise of global media (and in the absence of the internet).  This topic is also discussed on the wiki.)


Darn, real time is calling and my colleague and I need to grap a bite to eat.  Will try to resume later this afternoon..

Thanks for the question though :)

Marcos

[Marcos]

Ok.  Sorry if that last message had too much hyperbole -- many here have already thought and constructed much of these ideas in some similar fashion.  It's hard not to get excited and until the message lands on the right ears, I will probably continue to spout such claims.  In any case, that is also part of the point I'm trying to make -- is that this project has been conceived within the collective desires within Mankind, a culmination of our desire to create a free and worthwhile society.  To this extent, it belongs to everyone, is Free and Open Source, and why there is no way for this to be strictly a for-profit enterprise. 

But those of us here at the low-end of the economy get first claims, since it has largely been the effort of those at the bottom than those at the top. 

Now one important point for this project to be successful (and that you'll note in those diagrams) is that this project can not purely be an "Internet project": a self-contained virtual system that lives on the net -- that would just create another caste system, much like our physical realm where there is an apparently unstoppable tendency towards hegemony.  There has to be a bridge between the physical world and the virtual.  For the pangaia project, this will be something like nodilus.org and such -- a site, online, that links virtual-world activity to the physical world (community gardens, housing cooperatives, open source manufacturing, and such).  Additionally, a physical space dedicated where people can come together to *fix* (i.e. fixate) these ideals in space and time is also required, to share physical contact with each other, record accomplishments, swap garden produce, and other subtle messages that pass when people are in actual contact with each other.   This "trifecta" (to borrow a term from Robert Steele) is nicely illuminated towards the end of the cotw video on Open Source Culture (http://coalitionofthewilling.org.uk).

Anyway...  Pangaia integrates two important value chains -- the personal and the impersonal.  It does so by extending the already-successful wiki philosophy with per-item and per-user voting.  This solves the data-overload problem and user-credibility problems.  The details of this, of course, are what is sought, since a hundred sites have attempted to integrate this very thing.

More to come...

marcos
pangaia.sf.net

P.S.  Please pardon the lag from last message,  much of this is done asynchronously....

[omdesign]

Well, it is definitely Do able and well overdue. The mistake is that we are the only ones talking about or trying to bring it into existence.

The ideas have been a round a long time (Bucky Fuller etc.) and many people who have put considerable thought into these ideas just don't have tech access (indigenous on every continent) or have been intimidated out of the conversation at large (same groups), not to mention the emerging "We Were Right" movement of revolutionaries who are just waking up from their long stupor to remember that this is the onlyplanet we've got and all the assholes in history who ran shtuff have not got a good track record at all.

[Mark Roest]

Hello Marcos, Charles and All,

A link to the diagrams and earlier discussions would be helpful. I'm starting to put some coalition pieces together for an initiative designed to benefit lower-income groups, especially indigenous and other minority communities. I'm also now in a battery technology start-up company, and I plan to cross-sell with both renewable energy technology offerings, other appropriate technologies and services, and health and communication resources. Put it all together and you get a bootstrap approach for (especially) rural communities, which can scale.

Communication can be affordably extended across large areas where it is currently not offered, if we combine low cost long hops like the WiFi interference reducing technology from UC Berkeley and Intel, with medium-scale economic interventions as above. Pangaia could be part of a GIS-based user interface for the information systems.

Start inexpensively and empower communities with information & communication technologies, health and nutrition interventions, and understanding of crop market dynamics, crop storage (silos, root cellars, etc.), real market prices for foods, and how to bypass middlemen who take huge markups while leaving farmers with nothing. Then use increased village revenues to support financing equipment and services to start some processing, manufacturing, service or other businesses in each village cooperative, along with whatever is needed for village clinics and schools (which may serve geographic clusters of villages). This brings prosperity, and communities can then purchase (judiciously chosen) consumer goods. Of course, at every stage, all electricity needs are met with high efficiency equipment & building design, renewable sources of energy, and electricity & heat (or 'coolth') storage.

Doing this on a regional scale, replicating and aggregating it across continents, offers opportunities to address appropriately-scaled, hyper-efficient infrastructure, starting where there is nothing, and then working up the economic ladder, thus flattening income distribution. It can be bootstrapped from a core of renewable energy and energy storage businesses, because they offer extraordinary economic leverage to both the 1.5 billion people without electricity, and the industrial world. Why the latter? Because when you install the equipment, it amortizes itself in one to ten years, and electricity is almost free from then on (assuming durability is a design priority).

This also means that we can complete the switch from fossil fuels to renewable-source electricity to power transportation, with the same economic argument.

It reflects the ideals in the second half of the CotW video.

Is anyone interested in helping develop these ideas into realities?

Regards,

Mark Roest

[Fabio Barone]

Is anyone interested in helping develop these ideas into realities?

Do you have the plan fleshed out or is it at this rather high-level view of things?

And what kind of battery technology are you talking about?

I am excited about compressed air technology as of lately...:)

Thanks for sharing

[Mark Janssen]

> The ideas have been a round a long time (Bucky Fuller etc.) and many people
> who have put considerable thought into these ideas just don't have tech
> access (indigenous on every continent)

Wow, amazing that you found an email from two years ago (that must
have been my alter-ego).

As for the indigenous people, these issues are compensated for within
the pangaia codes. The mistake is to think that we already have an
economic system and just need to find new ways to grow it. No. The
truth is that the current paradigm is something like a mental patient
running around with guns unaware that he is insane.

As my colleague at the Santa Fe Complex showed me, we do not have an
economic system, we have a chrematistical one. The world economics
comes from two Greek root "ecos" and "nomia"; together, which mean
something like "keeper of a household. Chrematistics, OTOH, means
"makes as much money as fast as you can". This is what has caused
growth (cancerous) out of balance with the planet and created a deep
disease both within capitailism and the Judeo-Christian soul.

The problems of the indigenous population is actually not that far
from the problems of the dominant population: complete disconnection
from the powers that are running the planet. The Internet offers a
more-or-less benign medium that can be used to bridge two major
value-systems: that of nature and that of society/civilization.

I have been deliberately steering the project to combine it with the
efforts of Open Source Agriculture (look under [[Tree of Life]])..
Besides that, Pangaia project will create a true economic system,
running in parallel to the current one, until balance is achieved. It
has a powerful and sophisticated set of rules to create an emergent
order without the overhead of institutional hierarchies.

> or have been intimidated out of the
> conversation at large (same groups), not to mention the emerging "We Were
> Right" movement of revolutionaries who are just waking up from their long
> stupor to remember that this is the onlyplanet we've got and all the
> assholes in history who ran shtuff have not got a good track record at all.

Yeah, I've been majorly disappointed that there have been so few in
academia actually fighting for virtue and for their own democracy -- a
failing that will have to be explained at some point. They are the
Doctors of Philosophy, after all.

Any way, some key take-aways as I mentioned in that message two years
ago, is that the focus cannot be only technical, it has to be
integrative, towards creating a post-industrial society as well as a
more balanced current one.
--
MarkJ
Tacoma, Washington

[Mark Janssen]

> A link to the diagrams and earlier discussions would be helpful. I'm
> starting to put some coalition pieces together for an initiative designed to
> benefit lower-income groups, especially indigenous and other minority
> communities.

I would be very interested in seeing what you've been putting together.

> I'm also now in a battery technology start-up company, and I
> plan to cross-sell with both renewable energy technology offerings, other
> appropriate technologies and services, and health and communication
> resources. Put it all together and you get a bootstrap approach for
> (especially) rural communities, which can scale.

These are interesting development. Have you seen the "tiny house
movement" as well? They get around building restrictions and put
houses on trailers which can be parked temporarily in many places
without problems. The key thing though is to reign back in the
virtues of democracy. There really is no excuse for this nation to be
out of control. The People have the power: it doesn't matter what
any naysayers say. The problem is that there have been battles of
power that were won based on an INCORRECT assumption. It gets
complex, but it's been worked out. Ask me if you have questions about
it, but I'll forewarn you: "it gets biblical".

> Communication can be affordably extended across large areas where it is
> currently not offered, if we combine low cost long hops like the WiFi
> interference reducing technology from UC Berkeley and Intel, with
> medium-scale economic interventions as above.

You're probably already aware of MIT's One Laptop Per Child project,
but I'll mention it since it was a pretty major innovation platform
and initiative. My feeling, however, is that such initiatives, while
seeming like a huge issue, pale in comparison to the disconnection
problem today *within our own culture*.

> Pangaia could be part of a
> GIS-based user interface for the information systems.

I've been thinking of marrying the Pangaia project with Ingress, a
vast online game that uses GIS position to take control of territories
and such. Such software could be used to take back underutilized land
and buildings towards a new urban landscape.

> Start inexpensively and empower communities with information & communication
> technologies, health and nutrition interventions, and understanding of crop
> market dynamics, crop storage (silos, root cellars, etc.), real market
> prices for foods, and how to bypass middlemen who take huge markups while
> leaving farmers with nothing. Then use increased village revenues to support
> financing equipment and services to start some processing, manufacturing,
> service or other businesses in each village cooperative, along with whatever
> is needed for village clinics and schools (which may serve geographic
> clusters of villages). This brings prosperity, and communities can then
> purchase (judiciously chosen) consumer goods. Of course, at every stage, all
> electricity needs are met with high efficiency equipment & building design,

> renewable sources of energy and electricity & heat (or 'coolth') storage.
> [[More bunches of great ideas]]

> This also means that we can complete the switch from fossil fuels to
> renewable-source electricity to power transportation, with the same economic
> argument.
>
> It reflects the ideals in the second half of the CotW video.

These are great initiatives. I would suggest combining forces with
GOOD magazine and worldchanging.com -- those are two powerful groups,
one connecting people, and one connecting ideas. The GOOD site has a
nice social network for such initiatives, perhaps you'll be able to it
get to "catch fire" because it's a very well-designed site with a
physical presence in the world, just waiting for the crowd.

MarkJ
pangaia.sf.net

[om.design.is]

There is an interest here to explore the ideas that you have proposed though.

GOOD and worldchanging are both pretty diluted. Nice ideas but so decentralized as to render them marginally effective for decision making.

Another important fact is that the coming explosion of data-capable humans is already upon us. SMS represents a networking technology that spans the globe and is functioning now.

I've been a digital humanitarian volunteer for years now and have seen repeatedly that even in the disaster industry you will find huge resistance to enabling the rank and file.

The tool is here and the people have it.

What are we going to do next?

om
omdes...@gmail.com

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[Mark Roest]

Hello om,

SMS is not sufficient for planning; it is designed for short-term coordination with minimal complexity.

I have seen what you refer to. A guy who had organized a code camp for Haiti was absolutely arrogant when an extremely knowledgeable friend and I got in his face to get traction. I intend to empower people in communities, and dissolve rank (rows) and file (columns) -- a military drill term. Check out the success stories in OLPC, for instance in Peru, and consider what would happen if children in their language acquisition years had daily use of a Millennium (Newton) microscope to study the organisms in the soil in the organic gardens in their schools, using the educational materials of the Soil Food Web lady. By the time they were 10 they'd know as much as a graduate student in microbiology. They'd be unstoppable farmers as teenagers.

The problem with relying on something like SMS is that it works well as social glue for people who share a common culture (especially consumer culture), but we need to consciously and deliberately change the paradigm, and we need to be able to discern the very best approaches from the merely adequate ones in every single field -- even every single product and service. That is going to take very well-designed knowledgebases.

Regards,

Mark

[om.design.is]

Mark,

I appreciate how you might be used to SMS, but it is a vastly different mechanism than we know it as in this country.

When connected to even a modicum of smarts on the back-end, it becomes a wonderful means to share rich information in realtime. Using coded icon based menus, the system can be hijacked to effectively communicate contextual and relevant information.

Agreed that for any useful analytics or display, a web based graphical interface will be more useful, but in terms of an existing ubiquitous technology that can be utilized to throw meaningful packets around - I think we miss an important opportunity by thinking of it as a one to one, short term coordination tool.

om
omdes...@gmail.com

[OpenPrivacy]

Mark - I enjoyed looking at pangaia.sf.net and your references to Society of Mind (I also played at MIT AI/ArcMac). My long-dormant project - growing out of the first personal newspaper (my thesis: NewsPeek) is OpenPrivacy, that I describe briefly on this list here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/building-a-distributed-decentralized-internet/0VkN7ETmuIc/pGukb-fXPggJ

Reputation is where it's at, and building systems that allow each to create their own (opinions) based (if desired) upon those of others is key.

Wishing you the best, and perhaps we may collaborate one day.

=Fen

On Thursday, December 12, 2013 4:00:45 AM UTC-5, Mark Roest wrote:

 I intend to empower people in communities 

That is going to take very well-designed knowledgebases.

[Mark Janssen]

> GOOD and worldchanging are both pretty diluted. Nice ideas but so decentralized as to render them marginally effective for decision making.

Well, if you're looking for decision-making right NOW, you're probably
best off in the traditional structures of governance. Otherwise, I'm
trying to create adhoc structures of governance where individuals can
make a difference.

markj

[Mark Janssen]

> Mark - I enjoyed looking at pangaia.sf.net and your references to Society of
> Mind (I also played at MIT AI/ArcMac). My long-dormant project - growing out
> of the first personal newspaper (my thesis: NewsPeek) is OpenPrivacy, that I
> describe briefly on this list here:
> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/building-a-distributed-decentralized-internet/0VkN7ETmuIc/pGukb-fXPggJ

Neat!

> Reputation is where it's at, and building systems that allow each to create
> their own (opinions) based (if desired) upon those of others is key.

Definitely, the problem I found is that there is no *scalable* way to
combine reputation with per-item voting on standard (~2.3d) HTML, it
takes another dimension to keep things separable. Hence, my focus on
a 3-dimensional Internet navigation platform. The other part of the
challenge is maximizing abstraction so that the system doesn't impose
any particular "personality" and allows any kind of relationship to be
represented. We all know how a 100 sites with their own login system
is a large barrier to massive participation, because no one knows in
advance which of the 100 sites is worth the time.

> Wishing you the best, and perhaps we may collaborate one day.

Sounds great. Cheers,

markj

[Mark Roest]

Hello Mark J, Charles and All,

I've inserted further comments below. I'm sorry for the delay in sending this.

Regards,

Mark R

On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 1:40 PM, Mark Janssen <dreamin...@gmail.com> wrote:

> A link to the diagrams and earlier discussions would be helpful. I'm
> starting to put some coalition pieces together for an initiative designed to
> benefit lower-income groups, especially indigenous and other minority
> communities.

I would be very interested in seeing what you've been putting together.

I'm starting to build relationship with Cultural Survival, based on wanting to use the battery business to support culturally appropriate sustainable development in low-income (including indigenous) communities, and an offer by a friend who developed a translation engine to make it available to groups who want to document language pairs.

I'm also friends with:
1. The digital textbook manager for SugarLabs, which provides software for One Laptop Per Child

2. A leader in World VistA, which provides the Veterans Administration Hospitals' VistA EHR hospital information management system open source and free, using the MUMPS programming language

3. The founder of the International Symposium for Digital Earth, which is about GIS and digital earth imaging

4. A couple who are writing a world standard for sensors (the Internet of Things)

5. The founders of ReWilding Earth (humanity uses only 18 of the 80,000 edible plants for 18% of our calories -- not very resilient!)

6. The founders of YWorlds

7. The programmer who is taking Compendium to the next level, as a global discussion tool for all topics

[OpenPrivacy]

Hi Mark,

On Thursday, December 26, 2013 7:37:31 PM UTC-5, Mark Janssen wrote:

> Reputation is where it's at, and building systems that allow each to create
> their own (opinions) based (if desired) upon those of others is key.

Definitely,  the problem I found is that there is no *scalable* way to

combine reputation with per-item voting...

Promoting reputes (signed "reputation" triples of {Reference, Identity, Value}) to first class object status (allowing reputes to have reputes attached to them) enables a distributed reputation calculation engine (RCE) network. This enables well-known entities (e.g. Google or your local bike club) to have well-regarded "centralized" RCEs, while still supporting you to "color" or add your own bias to the results with your personal "mountain biking in my region" RCE. Since your RCE can be made public and gain reputation without disclosing your Real Name, it can safely become another resource for others interested in similar types of biking. And if it becomes seriously valuable (reputation is currency and vice versa) you can at any time make a zero-knowledge proof that an anonymous (e.g.) bitcoin account (or yours) is connected to the RCE so people could fund further development.

Just some quick musings to illustrate that OpenPrivacy's complete decentralization enables infinite scaling.

=Fen

[Mark Janssen]

>> Definitely, the problem I found is that there is no *scalable* way to
>> combine reputation with per-item voting...
>
> Promoting reputes (signed "reputation" triples of {Reference, Identity,

> Value}) to first class object [...]

> Just some quick musings to illustrate that OpenPrivacy's complete
> decentralization enables infinite scaling.

Sure, but the issue besides technological scaling is useability
scalling: how do I find the best items within millions of users of
similar ranking?

MarkJ
gothenburg, nebr

[Mark Roest]

By remembering, and acting on, the fact that we live in highly distinguishable places on this planet. Yes, the human infrastructure cancer has covered a lot of places over, but a viable return to relationship with place and the historical ecosystem is still possible if done with knowledge and understanding. The best way to put this idea in lots of people's minds, with immediate access to information about the character of each specific place, is with a combination of Geographic Information Systems and Digital Earth Imaging.

That Niagara Falls of data you are rightly concerned about becomes manageable with steps like these:

1. Divide it by the roughly 867 terrestrial eco-regions (see the World Wildlife Fund page on Terrestrial Eco-regions)

2. Divide it again by the number of ecosystems in each eco-region

Find yours, and you have found your Place in Nature

3. Define the nature of the problem you are trying to solve, and only include data which supports it and supports sustainability in your place.

(This entails determining the kinds of eco-regions and ecosystems for which any potential solution to problems is appropriate, when it is entered into the knowledgebase.)

4. Further reduce the data returned by only accepting that which is appropriate to the cultures which occupy the place, especially those which co-evolved with it over thousands of years (that would be the original indigenous people of that land).

Number 4 entails cultures having access to the data gathered so far which is appropriate to the place and problem, and choosing which is appropriate in their world view. There are still about 7,000 languages in use today, down from about 9,000 when the Europeans set out to conquer the world. By the time you are done with these steps, you have narrowed it down to a garden hose of useful data, around which communities can align and make their choices. Bucky Fuller and Doug Engelbart will do the spirit dance in joyous celebration.

Regards,

Mark

[Mark Janssen]

> By remembering, and acting on, the fact that we live in highly
> distinguishable places on this planet. Yes, the human infrastructure cancer
> has covered a lot of places over, but a viable return to relationship with
> place and the historical ecosystem is still possible if done with knowledge
> and understanding. The best way to put this idea in lots of people's minds,
> with immediate access to information about the character of each specific
> place, is with a combination of Geographic Information Systems and Digital
> Earth Imaging.

I had though of doing a place-oriented system (and in fact was
re-writing the pangaia-world-game to do just that), but decided in
favor or a project-based in order to foster a post-industrial economy
or "homebrew industrialism". My intention is to use such a system in
hackerspaces which will make contact with new living modes and include
community supported agriculture, bike co-ops, etc.

Perhaps of interest is that the current IP/DNS system of the Internet
compares favorably to the infrastructure to do what you're describing:
the top-level domain names create something similiar to "eco-regions"
(currently things like educational, commercial, non-profit, etc),
while the IP address anchors one to a geographic region. Not quite
used like you're describing, but doable.

mark

[Om G]

Hi Mark,

I agree that location is of primary importance.
Project based systems don't exclude location but are actually enhanced by
it IMO.

The systems I'd like to build use projects based upon location, allowing
neighboring communities to contribute resources and request them.

I felt that such an interaction would be especially useful to build
resiliency post conflict or disaster.

This would also create a paradigm where citizens become the drivers of
policy through aggregated expression of needs.

In places where this might be most useful, I see a location aware system
that uses icon based menu's on "dumb" feature phones to transmit complex
information through coded sms message.


On December 29, 2013 11:25:24 AM Mark Janssen <dreamin...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Mark Janssen]

> Project based systems don't exclude location but are actually enhanced by it
> IMO.

True, yet the value of knowledge (which is what the Internet excels
at) is amplified more with location abstracted away, more than by
physical notions of location. But it is not exclude physical location
and there remain many valuable uses for it.

> The systems I'd like to build use projects based upon location, allowing
> neighboring communities to contribute resources and request them.

Yes, I hope to do this though with physical spaces (hackerspaces),
which combine "art, science, and community" (to borrow a bit from
sfcomplex.org) and farmer's markets.

> I felt that such an interaction would be especially useful to build
> resiliency post conflict or disaster.

The best way to do this is to avoid disasters in the first place via
living in balance with nature.

> This would also create a paradigm where citizens become the drivers of
> policy through aggregated expression of needs.

The Internet *should* be doing this already. That it isn't speaks to
a failure somewhere.

> In places where this might be most useful, I see a location aware system
> that uses icon based menu's on "dumb" feature phones to transmit complex
> information through coded sms message.

I would like to see this for a "space reclaimation" program: people
could tag geo-locations with tags about where remediation is desired,
ultimately with the hope of making inter-connected green spaces.

mark

[Om G]

Perhaps repurpose Ingress?!

[Fabio Cecin]

On Sun, Dec 29, 2013 at 4:05 PM, Mark Janssen <dreamin...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> This would also create a paradigm where citizens become the drivers of
>> policy through aggregated expression of needs.
>
> The Internet *should* be doing this already. That it isn't speaks to
> a failure somewhere.

It is a wide-spread failure of personal insight and of our "collective
stories" (Charles Eisenstein). A "crisis of perception." We take the
problem with us wherever we go and whatever we do, and we can't see
it, can't conceive of it. We can't conceive of how far into the old
stories each of us personally is.

We have the Internet but we sort of don't know what to do with it. But
whatever we manage to do, even if it is sort of "poisoned" with the
old perceptions, helps to change things for the better, both
externally and internally. They poke the perception bubbles. E.g. no
matter how you feel about "Bitcoin" being a thing that is going to do
any practical good or not, it already did its job of mutating the
conversations.

Fabio

[Mark Janssen]

>> I would like to see this for a "space reclaimation" program: people
>> could tag geo-locations with tags about where remediation is desired,
>> ultimately with the hope of making inter-connected green spaces.
>

> Perhaps repurpose Ingress?!

That's EXACTLY what I was thinking! Seriously that platform would be
perfect. Ideally would be integrated with hackerspaces, where Quests
could be made to made seed bombs, and such to start building a
self-sustaining agriculture.

Mark

[Mark Janssen]

>>> This would also create a paradigm where citizens become the drivers of
>>> policy through aggregated expression of needs.
>>
>> The Internet *should* be doing this already. That it isn't speaks to
>> a failure somewhere.
>
> It is a wide-spread failure of personal insight and of our "collective
> stories" (Charles Eisenstein).

That's part of it Fabio. But there's also a more serious part -- no
one's been willing to put their life on the line for a virtuous nation
and correct the imbalances of the G8 pseudo-economy. The U.S.
Constitution coupled with Jefferson's Declaration of Independence give
an individual profound power in which to argue from and correct the
imbalances of current politics. I was hoping Occupy would make some
decisive and public victories (assaulted for standing up for a
constitutionally-protected right? WTF?), but it seems it was all just
a fairly tale.

When I was arrested (before Occupy), I was fighting alone. I had a
rock-solid case to defend my liberty which would be insurmountable
within the US. My "Ace up the sleeve" was that Native American
history hadn't been properly redressed, and that no court would be
able to make a principled stance for my own right to live. (I was
arrested sleeping on unoccupied "property"). So I've been spinning my
wheels wondering WTF?

This is more than about perception, this is about good and evil,
ignorance and gnosis, about action and tilling old paradigms to make
way for new.

> A "crisis of perception." We take the
> problem with us wherever we go and whatever we do, and we can't see
> it, can't conceive of it. We can't conceive of how far into the old
> stories each of us personally is.

All very true. I have a bit of an advantage after leaving
civilization. I could see all the forces at work from the outside
looking inward: Biblical, secular, the fears that drive everyone.
It's quite complex, but it's managed -- my problem isn't the
complexity of it all, it's how I'm suicidally depressed because no one
came to help...

markj

[Om G]

Could even do it now as a meme within the existing game!

[Om G]

But we're all still here in a million conversations just like this one

[Fabio Cecin]

On Sun, Dec 29, 2013 at 5:40 PM, Om G <omdes...@gmail.com> wrote:
> But we're all still here in a million conversations just like this one

I had a mega-email-exchange with Tom Atlee recently that was triggered
more or less by this same sentiment. (Tom Atlee is the guy that knows
what is a conversation that goes somewhere.)

As a side-effect of the conversation it made me realize, or remember,
how much I have changed through these conversations that "go nowhere,"
even though it seemed they were useless. The internal stuff -- the
"inside." It exists objectively and it is a thing, a place. Being a
different person is akin to moving, "going somewhere else." My
response to things has changed.

The conversation itself was, among other things, about opening up when
you talk with other people, trying to understand others and trying to
make them feel understood so that they will want to understand you in
turn.

A conversation is an exchange of psychological stuff. You can archive
what you "learn" as information (analogous to e.g. downloading more
intellectual porn into your library of static knowledge, e.g. "now I
understand how that other people think") or you can open up and modify
your software -- you give some of it inner execution permission ("I
will think like that from now on and see what happens"). It changes
what you say or how you think or filter things in a following
conversation, or it changes other physical actions, what you "do" or
even how you "live."

Fabio

[Mark Roest]

Hello Mark,

I did something along the lines of leaving civilization in the winter of 1973-74. I came back after I realized that I could not do the work of changing society from that place -- and that people would keep moving in and 'developing' all around where I lived, and soon it would be part of rural suburbia anyway.

I felt challenged by the prospect of holding my way of thinking together, back in the city. I realized that if I was working to build an economic base in renewable energy or other sustainable economy practices, I could eventually use that as a platform for the other values I wanted to express.

That realization was sufficient for me to confidently return, and within a few weeks I was helping to put on a conference on social, environmental and economic sustainability at my college. I have managed to continue through both good times and bad since then -- and now I see the many needed pieces coming together to allow a transformation of society. Not to make it happen, but to allow us all to make it happen. I am now in a company working on battery technology, to help unleash the economic power of renewable energy sources.

Depression is a combination of physical and mental factors. I encourage you to find care (perhaps from someone who does shamanic work and / or regressions to look at events in your past), and to try doing a yoga practice, walking in beautiful places every day or at least every other day for at least half an hour, finding people who share your recreation and / or organizing preferences, eating a naturally healthy diet, working in a garden (and / or building a home from cob or straw bale), and looking into Mahayana Buddhism as psychological technology for creating happiness.

Some combination of these approaches is likely to help you build a foundation of peace and strength, which you can than use to do your mission in life most effectively, and in collaboration with others in what Paul Hawkens calls the Blessed Unrest, in his book of that name. The index of groups committed to social and environmental work which was based on the categories that make up the last third of his book is now www.WiserEarth.org, and I recommend browsing them, as well as searching for potential allies and partners there. It may put a smile on your face to realize it's not just you and a few other people trying to turn the tide! We actually have enough to form an effective trim tab, to use Bucky's metaphor. We just have to design the most powerful tool for their use, and for the use of all the people on this planet.

It is because the tool has to be for the use of all the people on this planet that I emphasize ecosystems and eco-regions so strongly. About half of the population of the planet does not live in cities; they live in relationship with nature, and their communities grow most of their own food. Their economies are almost all more or less broken because of systems that take the products at virtually no profit to the producers, and I have some ideas about how to fix that. Once it is fixed, many people can return from the cities to their ancestral homes, and work to restore their ecosystems and cultures.

Namaste',

Mark

[OpenPrivacy]

On Friday, December 27, 2013 10:45:04 PM UTC-5, Mark Janssen wrote:

> Just some quick musings to illustrate that OpenPrivacy's complete
> decentralization enables infinite scaling.

Sure, but the issue besides technological scaling is useability
scalling:  how do I find the best items within millions of users of
similar ranking?

Google with its PageRank will provide an excellent first cut on "reputable" responses to queries. Just as people have done mashups of Google, so, too, will mashups that take bias from personal RCEs adding flavor to the system.

But a key point was missed here: reputation is personal, and small, trusted groups or communities can create reputations I trust. If all the software for OpenPrivacy existed today, it would fail in its goals immediately if e.g. Google bought it and installed it in its servers, as can you really *trust* Google the same way you trust your best friends and confidants? (Not to mention, would you trust them with providing security for your most personal infobits?) The way OpenPrivacy - and indeed, any reputation system must be built - is from the grass roots. You're not going to trust Google with who should babysit your kids -- you're going to trust your personal community. As you begin to need more security for certain sets of interactions, the collective communities that you trust will enable the required capabilities.

One handy side effect of all this is the system does not need to interact with any existing financial or identity system upon release - it can be a standalone, replicable system that supports the creation and management of nyms, reputes and RCEs. This will enable communities like advogato.org to spawn and develop reputation-based trust metrics. (Contrasting virgule with OpenPrivacy is a topic for another post - or paper - but in short: virgule enables peer-reviewed global trust metrics while OpenPrivacy enables the pseudonymous application of reputation on a scale ranging from personal to global.

Hope this helps,

=Fen

[Mark Roest]

Hello Fen,

The 'ideal' frame for designing a sustainable economy -- or shadow economy -- is the eco-region, which is defined by a pattern of ecosystems. The 800-plus I mentioned above were defined by about 1200 scientists, mostly ecologists, funded by the World Wildlife Fund and National Geographic after the turn of the millennium. There has been, and will be, some drift due to global warming, but a lot of the eco-regions are anchored by soil types and terrain.

Your system is intrinsically regional or local in nature, along with interest groups who cut across the boundaries, and may be global. I see no problem with overlaying your system (or comparable ones by others) on a GIS / digital earth imaging based knowledgebase as the environment in which people do much of their communicating, planning and coordinating -- in other words, as part of the GUI. Another part would be the direct accessing, combining, manipulating and display of data. The affordance would be elegant ways of combining the two, where the user is in control of what is combined, when, and how, and how it appears, if they choose, and there are default settings which are designed to support various modes of learning, and of interacting with the environment, to make people with different styles equally comfortable.

If this is done well enough to inspire global adoption, or even universal adoption among the Blessed Unrest and all the others who want to find a new path, it can also be used to develop models of local (and aggregated) economic transformation, and to plan and execute their implementation.

Regards,

Mark R.

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