|
Easily Publish Gorgeous Magazines with Scoop.it.
Catch attention on what matters by curating content on your favorite topic. |
See How |
Our core narrative, the story into which every serious thinker is required to fit his or her thoughts, is the narrative of progress—the story that defines all of human existence as a single great upward trajectory from the caves to the stars, and insists that the present is better than the past and the future will inevitably be better still. The problem with that narrative, of course, is that for most people the present is significantly worse than the past—standards of living for most Americans, for example, have been declining for more than thirty years—and the future promises to be even worse than the present. The narrative of progress has no room for that perception; in public life, the only way in which it’s possible to bring it up at all is to suggest that someone or something is to blame for the temporary lack of progress, and then offer a plan to get the obstacle out of the way so that progress can get under way once more.
Via James Burns
|
ddrrnt shared this post on Tumblr. (January 16, 7:34 PM) |
|
|
ddrrnt shared this post on Twitter. (January 16, 7:34 PM) |
The Next Edge
In an email sent out in early May, Adbusters urges recipients to “occupy the future;” that is, “to describe, build and sustain the post-capitalist future we want to live in.”
Dayaneni concurs with that sentiment. “People ask me what they can do to support. I say, take more land. Occupy a library, a clinic, whatever, plan it right and [re-launch] it appropriately and at scale. We need to prove that we have the ability to self govern. This is the new moment of occupy, not tit for tat, not cat-and-mouse games with cops, but full-scale intervention. Occupy the Farm is one of the first to-scale interventions.” Our earliest descendants were hunter/gatherers who foraged for their food, were in tune with their surroundings, and ate with the seasons. After foraging was essentially replaced by agriculture, people became increasingly detached from where their food came from. Foraging offers people a way to reconnect with nature and shows that food is all around us.
@OzarkHerbs offers foraging workshops. Via Elle D'Coda 
... GDP is not the be all and end all of economic success. There are other ways to measure the progress of a society. One way to think about economies is as the aggregate of three sorts of capital: physical (infrastructure and the means of production), human (skills and education) and natural capital. While the first two are renewable (some argue inexhaustible), natural resources such as fossil fuels, soil, biodiversity, and even forests may be depleted, sometimes permanently.
The Inclusive Wealth Indicator, which is scheduled to launch later this year, captures economic growth as the aggregate of a country’s wealth including its natural resources. "Our goal is to provide national governments with a bi-annual report to assess transition to the so-called green economy, to create productive and sustainable economic bases for the future," says Anantha Duraiappah, executive director of UNU-IHDP in a release. Jugaad is a Hindi word meaning an innovation; an improvised solution born from ingenuity and resourcefulness when faced with scarce resources.
Frugal Innovation requires some hard questions to be answered. Is it affordable within the context of that economy? Or, is it accessible for everyone within everyday culture?
Frugal Innovation is the means by which everyday people find solutions to everyday problems, by using not much more than their ingenuity, and skills of observation. These entrepreneurs are also social innovators as they work for the collective good.
And the story that follows is very much about appreciative inquiry, A requirement for us to listen deeply and learn from all that which surrounds us. Even if it does not come from our normal sources of information and influence. For me this poses the question if we cannot afford business as usual where do we we need to look for inspiration and guidance? How do we minimize resources and maximize value? The answer is we need to look further afield.
via No Straight Lines 
I’m seeing a leveling up as we move beyond mapping “social graphs,” and move consciously towards mapping intentions, emotions, capacities, worldviews, desires, value creation, gratitude, and energy.
All of this has essentially been leading me to the same place:
There is an urge to redesign human culture, to construct life and work in a way that enables everyone to ‘follow their bliss’ and show up fully in their gifts and experience. We want to experience higher intelligence and capacities, and to choose what represents meaning and significance in life. We want to do it with style, grace, ease, beauty, and simplicity — as art.
While this is still a work in process, I’m defining culture tech as follows:
‘the systems, tools, processes and etiquettes designed to cultivate the full expression of the authentic self, liberate collective creativity and imagination, and foster the expansion of universal human capacity’ 
Integral Cities in different locations must adapt differing solutions to the same infrastructure problems. We need to evolve our internal environments and design our external environments in ways that honour the ecosphere that we are inextricably a part of . Only by doing so can both individual and collective human life optimize the amazing diversity our DNA has gifted us with and the deep resilience of the natural ecology Gaia supports us with. Via Anne Caspari 
The folks in charge don’t seem to be making much of a dent. Could the way women approach problems be better suited for the complicated and interconnected problems we face?
History and evidence shows us that in spite of the cult of heroic individualism and the lone-ranger innovator, all great innovation happens within groups. When it comes to wicked problems and implementing complex system shifts, you must bring collective intelligence to bear.
what make groups smarter and therefore better at innovation?
Three consistent factors:
The average social perceptiveness of the group members
The evenness of conversational participation
We’re trained to be productive. We have to put food on the table. Who can afford the time and money to be creative, especially with all that daydreaming involved, that pointless wandering around? We’re coming out of an Industrial Age that trained us to be factory workers, sensible professionals, linear thinkers. Creativity had little to do with any of this. It was banished to the sidelines otherwise known as Bohemia, not exactly known for a flourishing economy.
But now, as we enter this post-consumer era where we differentiate ourselves not through our factories, but our ideas, the question has flipped upside over. As we step into The Creative Age, who can afford not to be creative?
by @justinemusk thx @venessamiemis
One of the major opportunities lies in providing energy access for the more than 1.2 billion people who don't have electricity, most of whom, in business-as-usual scenarios, still won't have it in 2030. These are the poorest people on the planet. Ironically, the world's poorest can best afford the most sophisticated lighting — off-grid combinations of solar panels, power electronics, and LED lights. And this creates an opportunity for which the economics are compelling, the moral urgency profound, the development benefits enormous, and the potential leverage game changing.
The cost of coal and copper — the ingredients of conventional grid power — are soaring. Meanwhile, the cost of solar panels and LEDs, the ingredients of distributed renewable power, are racing down even faster.
If we want the poor to benefit from electricity we cannot wait for the grid, and we cannot rely on fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency, historically a grid-centric, establishment voice, admits that half of those without electricity today will never be wired. The government of India estimates that two-thirds of its non-electrified households need distributed power. 
... was it possible that the world’s first eco-superhero could still have a growing fan base 15 years after he went off the air? To find out, I asked Barbara Pyle, executive producer and co-creator of the award-winning TV series with Ted Turner.
“Anything is possible with the Planeteer Movement!” exclaims Pyle, with her signature burst of infectious enthusiasm.
Q: So what is this Planeteer Movement? I don’t recall that being part of the TV series.
A: Young adults who call themselves Planeteers for real have networked themselves together using social media. The brand and message of Captain Planet are very much alive and more relevant than ever for the millennial generation. Today, the Planeteer Movement’s Captain Planet Facebook page has well over half a million fans, with 60% in the 18-24 range, and another 30% in the 25-34. That kind of advocacy and brand loyalty is something you can’t buy.
ht @CaptainCalliope 
This is an inquiry I have been in for some time. More and more we are seeing the rise of a sharing culture in the world. Thanks to being globally connected now, and facing the same challenges all around the world, we are waking up to the potential of sharing information, resources, ideas, networks, and more. Open source everything is springing up all around the world, from open source software, to time banks, to skill-share to wikipedia to ride-share.
Yet, when it comes to money, we are still fearful, we are still hesitant. In most cases we’re willing to share our time, our ideas, our presence but not so much the money. There’s still such complex social and emotional baggage around it. It’s almost the pinnacle of our attachment to our separation, a kind of primitive survival fear and all the social construct – assumptions and beliefs – around money – If I have money, I am powerful. If I don’t have any, I am a failure.
By Filiz | Brave New World - stories from the new paradigm 
How could a newly established university be designed today in order to be elite? Which features must be included, and which features can be left out? |
As the sharing economy continues to gain momentum, the importance of security and trust between users is becoming increasingly apparent. Not only the Airbnb incident in June 2011 or the shutdown of the luxury carsharing company HiGear have shown that peer-to-peer (P2P) marketplaces involve higher risks than business-to-consumer e-commerce. The key advocates of the sharing economy Rachel Botsman and Lisa Gansky have also identified “trust between strangers” as a necessary foundation for the functioning of P2P asset-sharing marketplaces. While the existing reputation systems such as eBay’s rating system may have been sufficient for e-commerce, the newer P2P platforms, such as car or flat sharing, require more complex trust systems. Since acting anonymously is far easier on the Web than in real life, P2P transactions also call for some type of identity verification, that confirms that you are who you say you are. Having recognized these issues, several entrepreneurs in different countries have begun to build portable cross-platform trust and identity systems meant to facilitate the sharing of assets between individuals, such as TrustCloud, Briiefly, Legit and Peertrust.
By Francesca Pick Sharable Image by opensourceway on Flickr. ht @wwjimd 
With sky-high unemployment, Richmond, California, is not a place where traditional business models alone can dent poverty. The city has turned to co-ops in hopes that people who might be unemployable in the traditional economy gain access to both jobs and control over their own labor. 
As a species we are stumbling blindly due to a model of separation based on nationality with no coherent system of monitoring or design. We are engaged in economic and political power-play, a fight for unsustainable resources, a religious war rearing its head between Islam and Christianity and to top it all off have done more damage to the biosphere in the last 10 years than in the whole history of humanity. We are waging wars on the trivial and sometimes I wonder if it is a self protection mechanism to prevent us from seeing the truth that is staring us right in the face at this moment of human history.
The facts are clear, we as a species have created a situation where we have to stop, stop to think, stop to address the major issues that can and are potentially affecting us as a species. This is a very small planet indeed, we as individuals tent to look at it from our personal perspective that stretch about as far as we can see, and for the ones being a little more engaged as far as our national interest lies. This small perspective of a “large planet” can and might be the undoing of a sustainable abundant planet for our future generation.
by @stevenputter Indian elder, Oren Lyons, speaks of the path we are on and the upcoming point of no return we are collectively approaching. ***Copyright Disclaimer Under Sec... This presentation gives an approach in #Nemetics to model complex and 'wicked' problems so that greater understanding and sense-making develop. 
'The Economics of Happiness' - a documentary about the worldwide movement for economic localization. Via Anne Caspari 
a mind-expanding mental wormhole voyage to the future courtesy of another guest at our table, *JordanGreenhall, known to me only as the co-founder of DivX, Inc., the prestigious leader in software creation for video authoring and encoding.
$techgnotic: What do you think will be the “paradigm shift” in how new superheroes (or even our traditional iconic ones) will be conceived and how their stories will be told?
Could a new economic model be built around the commons? Think a minute. What are the commons? All the things that we inherit from past generations that we 'find' around us, which enable our livelihood. The natural, genetic, material, physical, social, cultural, intellectual, creative resources; the capital and assets that belong to no one or to humanity collectively, that enable us to become what we can become, live what we can live, access what we can access, accomplish what we can accomplish and evolve as part of an ecosystem. They are the pillars around which the social and economic couplings can be catalyzed, where the corporation can meet society’s needs and where economy can meet ecology.
by @HeleneFinidori 
by Thich Nhat Hanh
You manifested more than 4 and a half billion years ago and life began to manifest on you less that one billion years later. Since then, you have gradually become the beautiful living planet that you are today. Life evolved from deep within the oceans, multiplying and prospering on your body, slowly improving the atmosphere so that countless species could manifest. After one billion years, there was enough free oxygen in the atmosphere to create the ozone layer, which then prevented harmful radiation from reaching your surface, thus allowing life to develop on land. Via David McConville 
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” – Jack Kerouac
via @StevenPutter | Imagine Rural Development Initiative The BRICS summit has wrapped up in India. Creating an alternative global lender and stepping away from the dollar as a reserve currency were among their main objectives... |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |  |
11 |
|
Next |
