23 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2023
    1. Sustainable consumption scholars offer several explanations forwhy earth-friendly, justice-supporting consumers falter when itcomes to translating their values into meaningful impact.
      • Paraphrase
      • Claim
        • earth-friendly, justice-supporting consumers cannot translate their values into meaningful impact.
      • Evidence
      • “the shading and distancing of commerce” Princen (1997) is an effect of information assymetry.
        • producers up and down a supply chain can hide the negative social and environmental impacts of their operations, putting conscientious consumers at a disadvantage. //
      • this is a result of the evolution of alienation accelerated by the industrial revolution that created the dualistic abstractions of producers and consumers.
      • Before that, producers and consumers lived often one and the same in small village settings
      • After the Industrial Revolution, producers became manufacturers with imposing factories that were cutoff from the general population
      • This set the conditions for opaqueness that have plagued us ever since. //

      • time constraints, competing values, and everyday routines together thwart the rational intentions of well-meaning consumers (Røpke 1999)

      • assigning primary responsibility for system change to individual consumers is anathema to transformative change (Maniates 2001, 2019)
      • This can be broken down into three broad categories of reasons:

        • Rebound effects
          • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=jevon%27s+paradox
          • increases in consumption consistently thwart effciency-driven resource savings across a wide variety of sectors (Stern 2020). -sustainability scholars increasingly critique “effciency” both as:
            • a concept (Shove 2018)
            • as a form of“weak sustainable consumption governance” (Fuchs and Lorek 2005).
          • Many argue that, to be successful, effciency measures must be accompanied by initiatives that limit overall levels of consumption, that is, “strong sustainable consumption governance.
        • Attitude-behavior gap

        • Behavior-impact gap

    2. The resulting focus on saving the world as a consumer, onegreen-lifestyle action at a time, blocks inspirational avenues to work-ing collectively as citizens toward the good life.

      // key observation

    3. People cannot reason and weigh every consumer decision every timethey act. Most of the hundreds of small decisions we make are basedon daily routines. We simply would not be able to function otherwise.And our routines, in turn, are strongly infuenced by their social andmaterial contexts. Time, societal norms of comfort and appropriatebehavior, and fnancial structures, all play a role here. Breaking rou-tines and practices requires far more than the provision of informationabout products and product use. It requires a change in the institu-tions and structures supporting them.

      // argument against consumer sovereignty

    4. Another is strate-gic coordination: a great many consumers must make the same productchoices at the same time, with persistence. But this requires a level ofdiligence, focus, conviction, and resistance to greenwashing that doesnot emerge spontaneously. It comes from collective action, most oftenpromoted and organized by civil society organizations.

      // - indeed - coordinated collective action is what is missing here

    5. The starkest danger of the “consumer in charge” narrative is that itdepoliticizes the challenges before us, at a time when a citizen politicsis most called for. With consumers in charge, only the softest and mostbenevolent policy interventions are required from governments, likeproviding consumers with information on the environmental and so-cial characteristics of products, and information on how to use theseproducts in a better (especially more effcient) way. For these reasons,the consumer sovereignty narrative is attractive to politicians, as itshifts responsibility away from producers, retailers, and those taskedwith regulating commercial activity

      // - this, however, can be transformed through coordination. After all, it's the same principle of having enough people in consensus - one is in the economic arena, the other is in the political (voting). We can and should do both

    6. The advent of a consumer sovereignty/individual control narrativeparallels the re-emergence, in the early 1980s, of neo-liberalism, a po-litical and social philosophy that emphasizes individual responsibilityfor larger social conditions.

      // - consumer sovereignty, neoliberalism and democracy have elements in common of the individual having some form of power to determine collective decision

  2. Jun 2022
    1. The goal is to gain “digital sovereignty.”

      the age of borderless data is ending. What we're seeing is a move to digital sovereignty

  3. Mar 2022
    1. For centuries, Kyiv was looking westwards and was a part of a union with Lithuania and Poland until it was eventually conquered and absorbed by the Russian Empire, by the czarist empire. But even after that, Ukrainians remained a separate people to a large extent, and it's important to know that because this is really what is at stake in this war.

      Putin's twisted logic rests on the assumption that Russia's conquering of Ukraine by war for a brief part of history justifies his (false) assertion that Ukraine was always a part of Russia.

  4. Oct 2021
    1. As Shaw so wittily shows us, Ruskin’s political perspective boils down to the basically Bolshevik belief that the people are the property of the regime. There is no such thing as a citizen—only a subject. The idea that the people can rule the government is just a fraud—like QAnon—but older. The government has no choice but to rule the people. This is the purely absolutist Renaissance or Machiavellian theory of sovereignty.

      Thank you.

  5. Jun 2021
    1. Personal Property Has Not and Should Not Depend On TTPs For most of human history the dominant form of property has been personal property. The functionality of personal property has not under normal conditions ever depended on trusted third parties. Security properties of simple goods could be verified at sale or first use, and there was no need for continued interaction with the manufacturer or other third parties (other than on occasion repair personel after exceptional use and on a voluntary and temporary basis). Property rights for many kinds of chattel (portable property) were only minimally dependent on third parties – the only problem where TTPs were neededwas to defend against the depredations of other third parties. The main security property of personal chattel was often not other TTPs as protectors but rather its portability and intimacy. Here are some examples of the ubiquity of personal property in which there was a reality or at least a strong desire on the part of owners to be free of dependence on TTPs for functionality or security: Jewelry (far more often used for money in traditional cultures than coins, e.g. Northern Europe up to 1000 AD, and worn on the body for better property protection as well as decoration) Automobiles operated by and house doors opened by personal keys. Personal computers – in the original visions of many personal computing pioneers (e.g. many members of the Homebrew Computer Club), the PC was intended as personal property – the owner would have total control (and understanding) of the software running on the PC, including the ability to copy bits on the PC at will. Software complexity, Internet connectivity, and unresolved incentive mismatches between software publishers and users (PC owners) have substantially eroded the reality of the personal computer as personal property. This desire is instinctive and remains today. It manifests in consumer resistance when they discover unexpected dependence on and vulnerability to third parties in the devices they use. Suggestions that the functionality of personal property be dependent on third parties, even agreed to ones under strict conditions such as creditors until a chattel loan is paid off (a smart lien) are met with strong resistance. Making personal property functionality dependent on trusted third parties (i.e. trusted rather than forced by the protocol to keep to the agreement governing the security protocol and property) is in most cases quite unacceptable.

      Personal property did not depend on trusted third parties

      For most of human history personal property did not depend on Trusted Third Parties (TTP). To the extent that TTPs were needed, was to defend property from depredataions of other third parties.

      Jewelry, automobile keys, house keys — these all show that humans had a preference for having sovereign access to their property, without relying on third parties.

      This preference remains with us today and you can see it manifest itself in people's anger when they discover that part of their product is not owned by them.

  6. May 2021
    1. Before generating an institutional order, sovereignty was then conceived as a claim, a kind of rebellion, or a protest against an established political order dominated by the Empire and the Church.
  7. Aug 2020
    1. More information about copyright concepts

      Additional Resource: I would like to recommend adding:

      Is it possible to decolonize the Commons? An interview with Jane Anderson of Local Contexts

      https://creativecommons.org/2019/01/30/jane-anderson/

      This interview expands on TK (traditional knowledge) labels and Cultural Heritage. The interview came about after a panel the CC Global Summit, where the panelists discussed "the need for practical strategies for Indigenous communities to reclaim their rights and assert sovereignty over their own intellectual property.".

  8. Jul 2020
  9. May 2020
  10. Feb 2020
    1. But Washington’s extreme dysfunction forces decision-making onto cities and states. To make matters worse, extremists on both the far left and the far right—who make up the majority of voters in low-turnout local primary elections—now hold most of the power. When that happens, balanced decision-making goes right out the window. So instead of weighing the pros and cons of each public policy, reaching a compromise, and then giving everyone certainty and resolution, tech regulation today is a battle zone.
  11. Oct 2019
  12. Jul 2019
  13. Sep 2017
    1. oreign policy analyst Stephen Krasner has argued that “conventional rules of sovereignty would be abandoned overnight.” Confidence in both the national security institutions of the country attacked and international institutions such as the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations, which had so manifestly
  14. Aug 2015
  15. Oct 2013
    1. sovereignty of the United States of America

      I hadn't heard the meme before of sovereignty being violated by immigration. Is this a common focus of conservative objections?