1 Like
None of this is going to be possible without a clear recognition of the role of the human body both in our response, adaptive or maladaptive, to the polycrisis, and its role in our interconnectedness with each other and the earth. The body and not just the brain is what will provide the practical answers we seek. That is if we are willing to relinquish our control as experts and truly join hands in addressing the human condition.
As a somatic social theorist this is my focus. We now have the ability to think beyond all the old mental and objectifying categories but I don’t see evidence of this in your report. What is within our bodies is of course very cutting edge systems theory and requires both a basic knowledge of anatomy and an existential exploration of our interoceptive sensory motor system. But it is not beyond the capacity of anyone here to do this.
I would love to contribute some of these essential elements of the system within as I have understood them.
[email protected]
1 Like
Having spent the past several days consulting with a wide spectrum of non-profits, co-ops, and community action groups, I find myself wondering today about the role of “sustainability” for social action modeling. First, the phenomenological background …
- Rents and housing costs are up for everyone.
- Inflation in general is a problem.
- Social services budget cuts are affecting everyone.
- Steady jobs are getting harder and harder to find.
- Help from the US federal level is at least two years away, if even then.
- State and local governmental budgets are under pressure.
- Family firms tend to shut down when the owners reach end of working life.
- A “silver tsunami” of the Baby Boomer demographic bulge hitting retirement is pushing demand for all senior-related services.
- The default setting for everything appears to be putting people into box-like institutions and the provisioning of services through for-profit franchise operations.
I would like to say what people are looking for is “sustainability”. By that I understand things like steady job, steady income, reliable groceries, housing they will not be priced out of, available health care, a community that stays diverse and vibrant over time with many distinctive local businesses able to flourish. A couple years ago I started down this journey through the lens of “bioregionalism”, but the awareness grew ever more clearly that any notion of environmental regeneration or sustainability in my location would demand attention to human factors in the first instance. People whose main concern is food, jobs, housing, etc. are not going have much bandwidth for the fish or the forest.
And yet … in many theoretical discussions, the word “sustainability” has fallen under bad odor. It’s not radical enough. It’s too cosy with capitalism. It’s too much about adapting current systems and not enough above forming something radically new. OK, so what word works better for what I have in mind? How should this problem space best be framed?
My perception is that people wish to inhabit stable systems. They want material circumstances that will not dissolve around them. Of course, thanks to entropy, no system is long-term stable without material inputs periodically to refresh and rejuvenate. Owning a home is more stable than renting, for example, but without an income flow to maintain that home, the roof, the pipes, and everything else is sure to rot away! So the stability I have in mind is a dynamic, wide-boundary sort of stability, which makes the ultimate stability barrier no less then the metacrisis itself. So please do not confuse my local action focus with lack of global vision! It’s just that worshiping Gaia pays nobody’s rent. Can we have a global vision and also get things done for people on the ground that will stabilize current humans under pressure?
I would like to say my aim is systemic sustainability, in a whole systems framing, from a fully globalized view, but focused on local, embodied application. I do not wish to receive arrows in the back, however, from those who see their thinking as somehow more comprehensive than what I have in mind. If “sustainability” is the wrong target to aim for, then what word works better to summarize the things that people really need?
Precisely what the brilliant Zygmunt Bauman (and hinted by many others before him) defined as the problem of “liquid modernity”.
Society claiming structure, determinism and coherence but ultimately most of it being hollow.
Some people (legitimately) question whether structures were really truly “solid”. However, our belief in their solidity and structures (systems) is the important difference.
Society was able to persist the belief that it was substantively “solid”. Now when incoherence has reached such levels - it’s pretty obvious that even keeping the pretence of it is a waste of time. Sustainability seems like we’re still saying that what we’re trying to sustain has some validity. We need a total civilisational rebuilding.
I’m not saying that sustainability is not important, I’m just questioning where it sits in the stack of problems and challenges.
Suppose all this is correct and so-called social “structures” involving food supply, housing, employment, health care and such are in fact liquefying. What becomes of the people caught in the meltdown? Being priced out of housing because of the need for a civilizational redesign speaks to the cause, but not to the action target or the action mechanism. To me, refactoring civilization sounds like a good project for a century or more. In the meanwhile, entire generations will be born, age, and die while the structures of the old world melt down around them. Maybe it’s a fool’s errand to aim at building structures now aimed to last for eternity. But, for example, putting people into housing priced to last at least an adult life span or so seems like a desirable target.
Well, the pain is given - it just depends whether you want to invest your effort into the race to the bottom. The choice is entirely yours. footnote: Trump managed to “refactor civilisation” in a few years.
A very alive example of regressing civilisation and liquification of the structures - my parents arrived from outside of the EU to Italy yesterday. They need to register with the local police (just like any other tourists) within 24 hours. They’ve been doing the same thing for more than 10 years now, every summer.
So they went into the police station today and were told that there’s no record of them entering the EU. Recently introduced “digital borders” means that there are no passport stamps - so if the system has no record of you, then you crossed ilegally. They were asking for “some proof”, like credit card receipt that they really travelled on the day and crossed the border.
No apologies, no interest in what actually happened, no questioning the incompetence… and it’s gonna get much worse. Optimise that! Send a strongly worded letter to your MP. Put a message in a bottle and make a wish.
Not sure what investing in a race to the bottom would like, but I trust it’s not an attractive option!
I like to approach these matters as situated as possible. From the POV I understand best, the personal, we have owned a home for over a decade now. To keep that home “solid” requires periodic upgrades to various subsystems - roof, plumbing, chimney, etc. Lacking requisite skills and materials for such jobs, it’s all purchased on markets. That funding, not to mention the funding required for the initial home purchase, flowed from salary. That in turn flowed from skills, training, education, job performance, and some lucky landing on feet after a couple of layoffs along the way. The most “solid” thing in that process was the value proposition of education → valuable skills → salary - housing access.
For current students, unfortunately, that value proposition is coming undone in serious ways. The most recent degree recipients (in computer science) remain seriously under-employed. Several of them are seeking minimum wage jobs in health care. Those sorts of jobs barely cover rent. The idea of future home purchase seems like a complete fantasy. Meanwhile, nothing on the either the corporate or the government services fronts looks like it’s going to bail anyone out anytime soon.
My initial response to this is to maintain a personally “solid” situation, because the social services picture for seniors is not great either. The only way to get a Scandinavian style social services package in the US is to basically self-fund it. So I get to live in a tiny little patch of Denmark. Other parts of town look and feel more like the global south. The challenge I am working on is how to extend reliable services to a wider circle. Ultimately, something that would encompass large political units. But a more selective local network will have to do for start.
One key to the situation, IMO, is to switch from an exclusive focus on financial capital to poly-capital. The idea is to transform cash into solid assets, but also very importantly, into durable relationships. For example, my parents received elder care (to some extent) from me, because the extended family still sort of functioned then. My generation can’t count on that sort of thing at all. But purchasing things like in-home nursing care on “liquid” markets is not a very reliable model with respect to quality of care, availability of care, personal security and trust. So I’m working to support development of some local worker co-ops for in-home nursing services ideally years before I become a client for such services. The worker co-op model improves salary and benefits for the workers, does not increase customer costs, and improves quality of service. Because the services I would like to have available for me (someday) do not exist under the current system, I’d working with suitable partners to make such services exist. Being self-funded in my personal Scandinavia, affords me the luxury of time and effort to expand the boarders of that happy place to whatever extent may be possible. I’m hoping it turns out to be a large extent!
Yes. Good thing US Customs was not involved!
I have no plans for international travel anytime soon, but my recommendation for anyone considering such a journey is to assume systems failure will occur at multiple points, have redundant documents, sources of funds, communications channels, etc. available. Take nothing for granted. Allow slack in the schedule, follow breaking news, and change plans in prudent manners if needed.
update: my kids who arrived on a plane from the UK last night are also not in the system! Agree, it could be worse…
Good example. I think that some of us think that while the house might be considered solid and something we can control, the ground underneath is increasingly unstable. As for the recent graduates in computing - their skills are all of a sudden not relevant and that can’t be easily mitigated… I can’t think of any limited / easy fixes to the complex set of problems that we already have a name for - polycrisis.
My recommendation to current students is something like a “Bildung” approach. Not so much out of idealism as out of pragmatic anti-fragility. Markets promise to be generally chaotic for the next generation or so. Flexible opportunists will have the best chances keeping their heads above water.
One change I would make to the classic capitalist self-reliance package is for students to learn to get by with a little help from their friends. Network, network, network! All of the entities I am engaged with (school, non-profits, co-ops, etc.) have this social capital dimension. When I say “Bildung”, I don’t mean to recommend personally majoring in the everything! A very key dimension of the Bildung model is that it is community-based. Each person should major in something, but also become conversant with the rest, and most importantly, have active, mutually supportive, social connections with people who bring knowledge, skills, and attitudes different from one’s own. A lot of the community groups I hang out with are specifically to engage with people who are NOT like me! Good thing, too. The metamodern philosophical activist community is not terribly thick on the ground in my immediate neighborhood!
Interesting observations Robert.
I think you are taping in the dark against the unknown barriers we bumbp against when trying to do finally something.
It is not simple to speak about these things because we are so deeply entangled in these systems.
One of the barriers or problems we often bumbed against in web3 sense making session is the problem of tax:
I remember a session in berlin where someone with a legal background said: you all know that you are here basically tlaking about tax evasion?
So this leads to the problem: can you give a community the autonomy to self sustain or experiment, but it menas the community is essentially diverting from the state.
- we against the state, in the sense we as a seperate community
- we as the state so lets fix it
Obvisously there are also other problems with money and property but this is a start.
Having worked a lot lately on business details with variety of organizations, I can safely say tax evasion is not on our agenda! Local political leaders are collaborating with us, so this not an anti-state initiative. I would characterize the general model as a regional network for co-op and non-profits providing services to each other as well as to the public at large.
In many ways, these co-ops and non-profits work like conventional businesses. So what is different? The main difference is, there is no “owner” to sell the organization to a larger corporate entity and then take the profit in cash. That means we are not setting out to create billionaires. It also means that because the businesses stay local and can’t be sold for cash, there is no incentive to “enshittify” the services to extract higher profit margins. I would say our model is not opposed to the state. If it is opposed to anything, it is the massive concentration of wealth and the enshittification of everything!
1 Like
Yes co-ops can be part of the transition model. But at a certain point in time frictions with the monetary system and the state will manifest , are already showing. I’m thinking about ways how to appropriately discuss this. : what is relevant for you, what eamples can I give, where I do see problems and where people did find already potential solutions.
The pattern of - enshittification - I think deservers greater attention. Do you have a meta thread on that? For me its quite a hard and yet simple problem to solve: the human condition of how to find balancE - HOW much is enough. How much growth does an individual need. this is of course tied to the world view of a person , and the techno capitalist is rather search for more growth in space than to think about balance but yes there it is . How much is engouh?
That status is not immutable. If you have a members’ approval - I think you can do pretty much anything. I’m aware of a “working men club” that tried to do exactly that. The old members were dying and they stopped admitting new ones until there were only about 15 members, all aligned along the wish to sell the assets of the club and cash out. They were successful!
You can’t rely on a system to provide you a solution that would allow you to escape it.
The same goes for people hoping that the courts would be on their side in the system that’s turning dictatorial.
No. But start one if you wish!
Yes. In my area, in the mid-20th century, there were several worker-owned co-ops for plywood milling. They all eventually sold out due to changing business conditions.
Part of my thesis, though, is for metacrisis reasons, the capitalist “growth” model is going to hit the rocks due to planetary boundaries and geopolitical and general social instability. The classic Reagan-Thatcher era leveraged buyout will not work anymore. That model required lots of available Wall Street finance that could be spread around to suck up businesses and then flip them for quick profit (usually gutting and enshittifying the acquisition target in the process). The current AI bubble is completely based on this model. My thesis is that rising interest rates will pop this bubble and the era of cheap money for buyouts will headed for the history books. My co-op model is built for resiliency in the aftermath - a world that may look quite a bit like the Great Depression.