Shared by Richard Struppi Pohl

Shared by Curt McNamara with the Trimtab Book Club

Yes! We could actually rehabilitate the concept of a corporation as a living body if compensation for public good was the foundation for economic currency.

Yesterday, I met Gil Agnew, who has been focusing on the Angel of Wholeness.

A builders collective?

We have realized that we want more in our lives than to be the unwitting pawns in a game of global domination, genocide, slavery, and oppression called capitalism.

Mark Smith asked me if I was familiar with the term ouroboros. I replied, “No.” So he sent me this link.

This symbolizes the cyclic Nature of the Universe: creation out of destruction, Life out of Death.

I am just realizing that I was not listening to The New York Times about the strikes spreading across the United States of America. Of course, the editors would not want to be causing this mass panic or a labour movement.

I was learning about this from Democracy Now!

Perhaps people have finally had a chance to read Debt by David Graeber or Temp by Louis Hyman or Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas.

This is the great disillusionment in capitalism that Forbes will not talk about. What have we been building this whole time? Colonization, slavery, and genocide on steroids enabled by big tech and big business? Maybe people just want their self-respect back.

I received an email from Emma Shimmens at Designlab referring to the Great Resignation.

Then I began to look up what this term meant. I had been listening to The Daily podcast from The New York Times about the strikes at John Deere and Kaiser Permanente. But I hadn’t realized that this movement had a name: Striketober.

Mark Smith: Stephen, are you familiar with “ouroboros”?

Yesterday, I was at a thrift store with my wife, Jayne, and as I usually do, I went straight to the books section. I happened upon a couple books. One was entitled Elephant Reflections and included high praise from Jane Goodall. Another was The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers.

While in the store, I was checking my email and noticed there was something from the Design Science Studio.

Tomorrow’s visiting Visionary, Catherine Connors will be speaking on New Narratives: Storytelling ARTchitecture!

As I was flipping through the book in the checkout line, I noticed the preface to the second edition:

“I’m not trying to copy Nature. I’m trying to find the principles she’s using”

— R. Buckminster Fuller

A book goes out like a wave rolling over the surface of the sea. Ideas radiate from the author’s mind and collide with other minds, triggering new waves that return to the author. These generate further thoughts and emanations, and so it goes. The concepts described in The Writer’s Journey have radiated and are now echoing back interesting challenges and criticisms as well as sympathetic vibrations. This is my report on the waves that have washed back over me from publication of the book, and on the new waves I send back in response.

On the back of the book, the description includes the following introduction.

Christopher Vogler explores the powerful relationship between mythology and storytelling in his clear, concise style that's made i this book required reading for movie executives, screenwriters, playwrights, fiction and non-fiction writers, scholars, and fans of pop culture all over the world.

Yesterday, I was at a thrift store with my wife, and as I usually do, I went straight to the books section. I happened upon a couple books. One was entitled Elephant Reflections and included high praise from Jane Goodall. Another was The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers.

“Because physicists started out with the imaginary, unstable cube as their model instead of the real-world stable tetrahedron, they got into all these imaginary numbers and other complicated and completely unnecessary mathematics. It would be so much simpler if they started out with the tetrahedron, which is nature’s best structure, the simplest structural system in Universe.

(Just as an aside, to remember later when you’re studying physics in school, I want to point out that the tetrahedron is also equivalent to the quantum unit of physics, and to the electron.)”

A Theory of Change and Systems Thinking

Take this job and shove it.

But Buckminster Fuller does not believe that the cube is the model of reality. The tetrahedron is the smallest unit of volume in spacetime, which Struppi and I have been attempting to name. We are leaning toward a quant.

I had no idea that this idea was as ubiquitous as this. I would love to know how this phrase was inspired by NPR, COPE, and Karen McGrane.

A Moving Performance

Perfectly expresses my orientation and my love of XTC.

All I needed to know about COP26. It is actually the living embodiment of a racist, fascist, capitalist police state.

— Stephen Bau

From the question arises the need to coin a new term, aphanipoiesis. The question is the definition.

People are trying to change something that they cannot perceive. Therefore, the only changes that are apparent are incremental changes to the existing system. It is a catch-22.

In our Design Science Studio session today, Niki Selken suggested that we purchase Tezos to experiment with NFTs.

Niki Selken, Gray Area, shared Kukai with the Design Science Studio today as an easy way to get some crypto, using a single sign on with Google.

How does this correspond with the social, economic, and political as it relates to the qualities of love and the unified quantum field of consciousness: connection, energy, and power?

What terms can we use that are not comparisons or relationships to the dominant frame?

How do we intentionally and proactively work to avoid the problem with Jon Stewart by addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the writers’ room?

A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency by Seth Klein

We did it for the Second World War. We can do it again.

Hmmm. I have been thinking about Earth having a fever in response to a pathogen. Foreign bodies, viruses, known as corporations have infected the minds of their host organisms, using legal systems to reprogram their syntropic nature as living organisms with a compulsion to replace themselves with entropy machines. By assuming personhood, corporations are consuming and monopolizing the time, energy, and resources of their hosts so that they have achieved a level of control and domination over nature such that they can change the climate and reversing the process of biological and cultural evolution.

“I think I can feel the future.”

https://world.builderscollective.org/awake/

The inability to think holistically is the problem.

It is difficult to know what to believe when human cognition can easily misrepresent reality.

Beginning, Middle, End

Micah White wrote of the end: The End of Protest.

Micah White is the award-winning activist who co-created Occupy Wall Street, a global social movement, while an editor of Adbusters magazine.

Occupy Wall Street was a constructive failure but not a total failure. Occupy demonstrated the efficacy of using social memes to quickly spread a movement, shifted the political debate on the fair distribution of wealth, trained a new generation of activists who went on to be the base for movements ranging from campus fossil fuel divestment to Black Lives Matter protests. Occupy launched many local projects that will have lasting small-scale impact. Occupy buoyed many institutional activist organizations that were able to materially profit from the renewed interest in protest. All of these are signs that our movement was culturally influential. It may be comforting to believe that Occupy splintered into a thousand shards of light. However, an honest assessment reveals that Occupy Wall Street failed to live up to its revolutionary potential: we did not bring an end to the influence of money on democracy, overthrow the corporatocracy of the 1 percent or solve income inequality. If our movement did achieve successes, they were not the ones we’d intended. When victory eluded Occupy, a world of activist certainties fell apart.

I call Occupy Wall Street a constructive failure because the movement revealed underlying flaws in dominant, and still prevalent, theories of how to achieve social change through collective action. Occupy set out to “get money out of politics,” and we succeeded in catalyzing a global social movement that tested all of our hypotheses. The failure of our efforts reveals a truth that will hasten the next successful revolution: the assumptions underlying contemporary protest are false. Change won’t happen through the old models of activism. Western democracies will not be swayed by public spectacles and mast frenzy. Protests have become an accepted, and therefore ignored, by-product of politics-as-usual. Western governments are not susceptible to international pressure to heed the protests of their citizens. Occupy’s failure was constructive because it demonstrated the limitations of contemporary ideas of Protest. I capitalize p to emphasize that the limitation was not in a particular tactic but ratter in our concept of Protest, or our theory of social change, which determined the overall script. Occupy revealed that activists need to revolutionize their approach to revolution.

Failure can be liberating. Defeat detaches us from a theory of revolution that is no longer effective, reopening the possibility of true change. “For a revolutionary,” writes Régis Debray, professor of philosophy and associate of Che Guevara, “failure is a springboard. As a course of theory it is richer than victory: it accumulates experience and knowledge.”

(Pages 26-27)

A Theory of Change

How did we get here?

Yesterday (October 26, 2021), I picked up David Graeber’s book, The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity, written with David Wengrow, at Coles in Abbotsford.

It is interesting to note that David Graeber was interested in the origins, the beginnings.

Renowned for his biting and incisive writing about bureaucracy, politics and capitalism, Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement and professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE) at the time of his death.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/03/david-graeber-anthropologist-and-author-of-bullshit-jobs-dies-aged-59

Reimagining our social architecture might begin with rethinking our past and origins as a species.

This may account for the problem with signups on one Ghost site showing up in the Stripe account of another.

Recommended by Mark Wagnon

A new way of ‘World Building (Manifesting through Quantum Social Science)

This is the integration that I am using to connect my daily writing practice with the process of publishing. iA Writer and Ghost have enabled me to share my ideas and project intentions into the world in such a way that they have become indispensable tools for community building.

Public relations for a colonial, corporate governance system dependent on the theft of land and resources and the disempowerment of the population through the mechanism of money.

Shared by Russ Diabo on Twitter.

Self-Hosting on DigitalOcean means setting up Let’s Encrypt to configure SSL.

ghost setup ssl

This fixed MySQL issues when installing Ghost on Ubuntu 20.04 on DigitalOcean.

This article refers to the site I created to document the design process for the builders collective: time, energy, and matter, which redirects to timeenergyresources.com.

Marilyn Waring

Time: The New Currency

Women tend to be excluded from the national economy because their work is not paid and therefore not value or factored into the Gross Domestic Product of a nation. Money, then, is a mechanism for disempowerment.

The Sunday Thing

The love of money is the root of all evil

This week, Michael Gungor asked us to discuss money in our breakout groups.

Money is power

We outsource our power and authority to those who claim to have greater access to capital, because we underestimate and undervalue our own social influence, economic capacity, and political agency. The entreprecariat is designed for learned helplessness (social: individualism), trained incapacities (economic: specialization), and bureaucratic intransigence (political: authoritarianism). https://hypothes.is/a/667dOC0bEeyV6Itx3ySxmw

Indigenous cultures in Canada were disempowered by outlawing the cultural practice of generosity (potlatch) and replacing the practice with centralized power over the medium of exchange: money. Money is a mechanism of disempowerment.

Money is a shared story we tell ourselves about what has value. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/795246685

We translated “ekklesia” as church. It is the deliberative body of the experiment in democracy in Athens, Greece. The people who are figuring out how to live together in the commons. The work of the people. The Liturgists.

The Story of Money

In this hour, On the Media looks at the story of money, from its uncertain origins to its digital reinvention in the form of cryptocurrency.

On the Media: Full Faith & Credit

Squid Game

People were also discussing Squid Game.

Squid Game was on my mind today before the call. “The reality of the history of Canada’s mining industry makes #SquidGame look like child’s play.” https://twitter.com/bauhouse/status/1449726452098682881?s=20

The truth is that all of the gold that was mined out of the Klondike was under Indigenous land. There was no treaty with any of Indigenous peoples in the Yukon.

Commons: Mining

On the Media

The Story of Money

Full Faith & Credit

In this hour, On the Media looks at the story of money, from its uncertain origins to its digital reinvention in the form of cryptocurrency.

The Story of Money

Ten autumns ago came two watershed moments in the history of money. In September 2008, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers triggered a financial meltdown from which the world has yet to fully recover. The following month, someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto introduced BitCoin, the first cryptocurrency. Before our eyes, the very architecture of money was evolving — potentially changing the world in the process. In this hour, On the Media looks at the story of money, from its uncertain origins to its digital reinvention in the form of cryptocurrency.

A command line interface for Ghost

In this guide, we will show you three different ways of getting Node.js installed on an Ubuntu 20.04 server…

DigitalOcean Monitoring

DigitalOcean Monitoring is a free, opt-in service that gathers metrics about Droplet-level resource utilization. It provides additional Droplet graphs and supports configurable metrics alert policies with integrated email Slack notifications to help you track the operational health of your infrastructure.

I use this app every day.

This feature makes this app even more valuable. Awesome!

Lost in Translation

In the film, Lost in Translation, Bob and Charlotte begin their conversation learning what each of them is doing in Tokyo.

Bob: What do you do?

Charlotte: I’m not sure yet, actually. I just graduated last spring.”

Bob: What did you study?

Charlotte: Philosophy.

Bob: Yeah, there’s a good buck in that racket.

Charlotte: (Laughs.) Yeah. Well, so far it’s pro bono.

(33:45)

Edge Effects

In ecology, edge effects are changes in population or community structures that occur at the boundary of two or more habitats. Areas with small habitat fragments exhibit especially pronounced edge effects that may extend throughout the range. As the edge effects increase, the boundary habitat allows for greater biodiversity.

Wikipedia: Edge effects

The reality of the history of Canada’s mining industry makes #SquidGame look like child’s play.

“The truth is that all of the gold that was mined out of the Klondike was under Indigenous land. There was no treaty with any of the Indigenous peoples in the Yukon.”

“That land was stolen by the Canadian state and that gold was whisked away by private interests. The Federal Government only signed land claims with Indigenous peoples in the Yukon in the 1990s, but by that point, almost all the gold had been mined out of the ground.”

“The Klondike gold rush was a rolling disaster that captured tens of thousands of people. When the first European explorers came to the Americas, they came here looking for gold. In the 1890s, that lust for precious metals eventually led men to the farthest reaches of this continent.”

“Today, instead of 100,000 people descending on a small patch of land, you have large corporations digging treasures out of the ground. But the legacies these mining operations leave behind are just like what happened in the Klondike: workers with broken bodies, environmental destruction, the dispossession of Indigenous land, sexual violence. The gold rushes never stopped. They just morphed into something different.”

“The truth is that all of the gold that was mined out of the Klondike was under Indigenous land. There was no treaty with any of the Indigenous peoples in the Yukon.”

“That land was stolen by the Canadian state and that gold was whisked away by private interests. The Federal Government only signed land claims with Indigenous peoples in the Yukon in the 1990s, but by that point, almost all the gold had been mined out of the ground.”

“The Klondike gold rush was a rolling disaster that captured tens of thousands of people. When the first European explorers came to the Americas, they came here looking for gold. In the 1890s, that lust for precious metals eventually led men to the farthest reaches of this continent.”

“Today, instead of 100,000 people descending on a small patch of land, you have large corporations digging treasures out of the ground. But the legacies these mining operations leave behind are just like what happened in the Klondike: workers with broken bodies, environmental destruction, the dispossession of Indigenous land, sexual violence. The gold rushes never stopped. They just morphed into something different.”

Canada is Fake

“Canada is not an accident or a work in progress or a thought experiment. I mean that Canada is a scam — a pyramid scheme, a ruse, a heist. Canada is a front. And it’s a front for a massive network of resource extraction companies, oil barons, and mining magnates.”

Canada is Fake

Canada is not an accident or a work in progress or a thought experiment. I mean that Canada is a scam — a pyramid scheme, a ruse, a heist. Canada is a front. And it’s a front for a massive network of resource extraction companies, oil barons, and mining magnates.

Extraction Empire

Canada is fake

“Canada is not an accident or a work in progress or a thought experiment. I mean that Canada is a scam — a pyramid scheme, a ruse, a heist. Canada is a front. And it’s a front for a massive network of resource extraction companies, oil barons, and mining magnates.”

https://twitter.com/bauhouse/status/1449737672407150595

“Eventually they spread their land grab all the way to the Pacific Ocean and the northern coastlines in pursuit of gold, silver, iron, copper, nickel, and diamond reserves.… ‘Canada’ came about in the late 1800s for nakedly economic reasons…”

Design for Resilience

Podcast

What came up for me in exploring the parallels between writing and mathematics.

We are meeting Siobhan Roberts in our Trimtab Book Club today.

See my Coding Challenges.

Andrew Wilshere was working on content at Designlab when he asked me to write an article about the Bauhaus.

I ended up writing something that never got published with Designlab. Instead, it was shared by the Bauhaus Movement to their Facebook followers.

The fusion of art, technology, and spirituality has been the foundation of my thinking as a designer as I have explored design practice, design education, and design philosophy.

We mistakenly focused on physical artifacts without fully realizing—and questioning—the values that were being embodied in architecture, built to reinforce our habits and behaviours into social, economic, and political systems. Technology has enabled us to scale, accelerate, and amplify these systems to envelope the globe.

We have been engaged in social architecture, a form of metaphysical design. It has been a form of colonization that has been built on individualism, specialization, and authoritarianism.

Originally published on Medium on August 29, 2019.

Bauhaus

The Tower of Babel

When I first read this manifesto, I had immediate associations with the Tower of Babel. The cathedral project of global neoliberal capitalism began as a socialist utopian project in the Weimar Republic as Germany’s first experiment in democracy. The democratic experiment failed when the Nazis shut down the Bauhaus in 1933.

The experiment continued in the United States of America as the Bauhaus diaspora spread the ideas of modernism to the art, design and architecture academies around the world.

The World Trade Center in New York City embodied the vision of modern architecture that Walter Gropius had been exploring at the Bauhaus, defining the trinity of building materials of the modern world: steel, glass, and concrete.

When the twin towers collapsed on 9/11, the modernism movement came to an abrupt end. Ever since, we have been living in a distinctly postmodern world.

I wrote about the Bauhaus for Designlab, but they did not publish my article, so I connected with the Bauhaus Movement, shared the article with their followers on Facebook, and continued my exploration of Cultural Evolution, Social Physics, and Metaphysical Design.

I wrote this article as a survey of articles about the Bauhaus.

This is a paper I wrote for ART 126 at Trinity Western University while I was studying Communications and Fine Arts in the early 90s.