Forget Running Up That Hill. Kate Bush’s song about Ken Livingstone is clearly her best.
KEN is the
man that we all need
KEN is the
leader of the GLC
Usual stuff – eco-socialism, nature and complex systems, solidarity economy, commons. That kind of thing.
Sunday
+ [[Energy storage]] and [[grid balancing]].
+ [[Associational socialism]]
+ The [[Iceberg Model]]
+ The [[water cycle]] is a complex system.
Monday
+ [[Stokes Croft Land Trust]]
+ [[Community land trusts]]
Tuesday
+ [[An Essay on Liberation]]
Thursday
+ Read: [[What Does An Ecological Civilization Look Like?]]
Friday
+ Listened: [[Cuba’s Life Task]]
+ [[Conversations with Gamechangers]] is pretty awesome lineup.
Saturday
+ Did the [[parkrun]].
+ Read: [[David Bollier, P2P Models interview on digital commons]]
+ Read: [[A Syrian democratic social economy in the making]]
+ [[Cooperatives in Rojava]]. [[Aborîya Jin]].
tl;dr: A bit of action around [[systems thinking]], primarily as it relates to the [[environment]] and [[climate crisis]]. [[Systems literacy]].
Sunday
+ Listening: [[Aaron Benanav on Associational Socialism and Democratic Planning]]
+ The [[biosphere]] is just one part of the Earth’s [[climate system]].
+ I’ve not had so much time for the stream of late. Most stuff is going in the garden. Of course, changes to the garden are a stream of themselves. I just mean I haven’t been posting much to the social media streams, where others can more easily discover and interact with it.
+ Bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.
+ [[A Wizard of Earthsea]].
+ Yesterday we watched:
+ [[Minions: The Rise of Gru]] at the cinema.
+ [[Minority Report]] on TV.
Monday
+ [[ProtonMail Android app takes a long time to load messages]]
+ Started [[Nature matters: systems thinking and experts]]
* Tuesday
+ Read: [[Humans need to value nature as well as profits to survive, UN report finds]]
+ [[Ipbes]]
Wednesday
+ Lots of good stuff in [[A Systems Literacy Manifesto]]
+ [[systems literacy]]
Thursday
+ What actually is a [[system]]?
+ [[Thinking in Systems]].
+ [[Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance]]. [[System change]]
> If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves. . . . There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
+ via [[Thinking in Systems]]
+ [[The Limits to Growth]]
Friday
MIA
Saturday
+ [[Sand battery]]
+ [[energy storage]]
Just a summary. Click the links to find out more on each one.
tl;dr: more eco-socialism. Watching things and trying to get more out of them by thinking about them critically. Some emacs faffing. Much more happened of course, but I don’t tend to write much about work or my private life here in my digital garden.
Sunday
+ [[Open Referral]] has been adopted as a UK standard.
+ https://openreferral.org/uk-government-endorses-open-referral-uk/
+ [[Open Green Map]]
+ Watched: [[Cloud Atlas]].
+ I thought it was really good. Entertainingly done and plenty of thoughts about human nature to cogg on.
+ Oh yeah, a couple of days back we watched [[Wonder Woman]].
+ [[Political theory and film]].
+ I did my first [[parkrun]] in about 2.5 years yesterday. I got a new personal worst, but still pleased to be doing it again…
+ We visited [[Walney Island]].
Monday
+ I appear to be missing in action this day.
Tuesday
+ We’ve watched [[The Good Place]], WandaVision, [[Loki]], [[The Falcon and the Winter Soldier]], and [[Hawkeye]] over the last few months. Also watching [[Ms. Marvel]] as the episodes come out. All Marvel ones, apart from The Good Place. All pretty decent and worth a watch. Some of the Marvel ones even have a bit of social commentary in them.
+ Reading: [[Technology of the Oppressed]]
+ [[the structural violence of the information age]]
Wednesday
+ So cool that [[KeePassXC]] comes with a CLI! Makes sense but I hadn’t realised. That is very handy for me.
+ Listened: [[The Uber files: the unicorn]]
+ Generally been avoiding a lot of the [[Uber Files]] stuff so far. Not quite sure why… it’s just kind of depressing I guess. And kind of confirming what was already known or suspected – that a firm built on aggression, growth and toxic masculinity is corrupt and rotten on the inside as well as the outside.
+ [[Growth]].
> What the system has done, as a mechanism to continue with growth at all costs, is actually to burn the future. And the future is the least renewable resource. There is no way that we can reuse the time we had when we started this conversation. And by building up a system which is more debt-driven—where we keep consumption going, but by creating more and more debt—what we’re actually doing is burning or stealing the time of people in the future. Because their time will be devoted to repaying the debt
— https://www.wired.com/story/the-infamous-1972-report-that-warned-of-civilizations-collapse (h/t Doug Belshaw)
Thursday
+ I need to find a way to share my spacemacs config in both my personal and my work logins, but have some customisations in both spaces.
+ [[spacemacs profile-specific configuration]]
Friday
+ Listened: [[Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese on Half Earth Socialism]]
Saturday
+ Reading: [[A Wizard of Earthsea]]
+ Can definitely see the climate change / don’t interfere with nature subtext.
+ As a piece of writing, not enjoying it quite so much as [[The Dispossessed]] or [[The Left Hand of Darkness]], but still good.
+ The [[Half-Earth Socialism]] authors really don’t like [[geoengineering]], particularly [[solar radiation management]].
+ Did the [[parkrun]] again. A bit faster than last week; stopped less times.
Seem to have mostly consumed things about socialism and ecology.
Plus Boris Johnson resigned – now wondering who will be least worse for the environment (as well as everything else) from the leadership contenders.
Sunday
+ [[Technics]]
+ Listened: [[Turning the Earth into Money w/ John Bellamy Foster]]
+ [[carbon footprint]] is bunk
+ Environmentalism is presently primarily the preserve of the [[professional-managerial class]]. It needs to be inherently valuable to the [[working class]].
+ [[Matt Huber, “Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet”]]
+ Decarbonise electricity, then electrify everything.
+ [[Climate sadism]]
Monday
+ [[Free association of producers]] is a goal of socialism/communism.
+ [[Net zero policies would reduce the cost of living]]. That’s an incredibly important line of enquiry to pursue. Talk of [[degrowth]] isn’t appealing if you’re already on the breadline.
+ ‘The cost of living’ is a wretched phrase.
+ Reading: [[Marx’s Vision of Sustainable Human Development]]
Tuesday
+ Watched: [[Armageddon]]. Pretty terrible. [[Don’t Look Up]] is better…
Wednesday
+ I need to renew my passport. This is massively over subscribed and delayed in the UK right now. So I’m following a Twitter bot some guy made that tweets whenever new appointments are available. World beating service from the UK gov once again!
Thursday
+ [[Boris Johnson]] is going. This is good. ([[Boris Johnson is a liar]] etc).
+ [[Steve Baker]] is in the news. This is not good.
+ Listened: [[Adrienne Buller, “The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism”]]
Friday
+ Looking at different [[options for publishing an org-roam-based digital garden]] because mine is currently horrendously slow. Nothing ticking all the boxes yet though.
Sunday
+ Started skim reading (ironically?) [[How To Take Smart Notes]].
+ I’ve encountered most of the ideas before via the numerous articles and posts written about it.
+ I need to spend more time turning literature notes / quotes from books in to my own understanding.
+ [[Social media is important because everything is social]].
+ Joined the [[Bonfire]] playground but haven’t got time to do much on there at the mo. But I really love the mission they have around social media so following with great interest.
+ Reading a bit on [[Antonio Gramsci]] apropos [[site of struggle]].
+ [[Patrice Lumumba]]
+ Read: [[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-61838781][Patrice Lumumba: Why Belgium is returning a Congolese hero’s golden tooth]]
+ [[There is no such thing as an ungoverned space]].
Monday
+ [[Calculating effort estimates and scheduled times in org-mode]]
+ [[Emacs note taking systems]]
Tuesday
+ Watching: [[Don’t Look Up]]
+ I like Iain M. Banks and I’m currently re-reading [[Look to Windward]] because in [[Red Plenty]] it was described it as an example of a 20th century [[Marxian idyll]]. It’s good and all but I’m reading the [[Culture]] now as kind of all premised on [[Prometheanism]] / [[fully automated luxury communism]]. I’m gonna reread [[A Wizard of Earthsea]] (last read as a young teen!) by [[Ursula K. Le Guin]] next as in [[Half-Earth Socialism]] they describe that as [[Jennerite ecological scepticism]] and that is more my bag lately.
+ I feel happy discovering more and more as I get older that sci-fi books I took off my Mum’s bookshelf as a kid are in fact often allegorical for some kind of radical politics that I had no idea of at the time.
+ [[Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World]]
Friday
+ Listened: [[Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky, “Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power”]]
+ Listened: [[Richard Seymour, “The Disenchanted Earth: Reflections on Ecosocialism and Barbarism”]]
+ [[Adding more storage space to YunoHost / NextCloud on Hetzner]]
Saturday
+ Read: [[For a Red Zoopolis]]
+ Very good. On [[eco-socialism]]. I like the description of a what [[abundance]] could actually mean.
+ Also introduced me to the idea of a [[Zoopolis]]…
+ I have oscillatory waves of activity on my garden.
+ Sometimes I have blocks of focus on the mechanics of how the garden works.
+ All the PKM, zettelkasten, smart notes, kind of stuff.
+ Then periods of time spent on the actual content.
– Reading, taking notes, writing about politics, technology, the environment, etc.
+ Occasionally there is a moment of harmony between the waves where the two almost intersect.
+ e.g. critical theory of social media, how digital gardens, the Agora, fit in to that, etc.
+ Chat with Flancian
– FlanciaCam
– Flancian tour of America
– Portland
– homelessness
– ‘illegal’ encampment
– 30,000 in San Francisco
– Housing First
– is homelessness a complicated or complex system
– if there are X people without homes, can we just give X homes to solve the problem?
– [[David Peter Stroh, “Systems Thinking For Social Change”]]
– [[Adam Day, States of Disorder, Ecosystems of Governance]]
– similar to [[Seeing Like a State]]
– too top down?
– c.f. [[universal basic income]]
– perhaps a simplistic approach, yet in present society money gives agency
– walking and meditation
– otter.ai
– what about libre alternatives?
– [[counterantidisintermediation]]
+ Listened: [[Matt Huber, “Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet”]]
+ More [[eco-socialism]].
+ I listened while doing household chores so have less notes. But it’s a good podcast.
+ Marxist approach – emphasis on class struggle, movement building, trade unionism.
I feel happy discovering more and more as I get older that sci-fi books I took off my Mum’s bookshelf as a youngun are in fact often allegorical for some kind of radical politics that I had no idea of at the time.
I like Iain M. Banks and I’m currently re-reading Look to Windward because in Red Plenty it was described it as an example of a 20th century Marxian idyll.
It’s good and all but I’m reading the Culture now as kind of all premised on Prometheanism / fully automated luxury communism.
I’m gonna reread A Wizard of Earthsea (last read as a young teen!) by Ursula K. Le Guin next as in Half-Earth Socialism they describe that as Jennerite, anti-humanisation of nature and that is more my bag lately.
This is a very interesting discussion. The book critiques the UN’s traditional approach of ‘state-building’, i.e. treating what it deems ‘failed states’ as simple machines where you can simply remove the bad part and replace it with a good part and all will be well. The author proposes treating them as complex systems, and ultimately as sites of self-governance, not world-building exercises from the outside.
"There is no such thing as an ungoverned space"
https://newbooksnetwork.com/states-of-disorder-ecosystems-of-governance
Equally fascinating is OSM Landuse Landcover.
Dead interesting to compare urban areas, agriculture and wilderness.
No surprise that near me there is a ton of pasture grazing and crop farming, a bit of urban sprawl, and a depressingly small amount of woodland and forest.