Plex: 20 November 2024

The Biweekly Plex Dispatch is an inter-community newspaper published by Collective Sense Commons on first and third Wednesdays of each month. Price per issue: 1 USD, or your choice of amount (even zero).

In This Issue

• Students Invest in Each Other and in Their Dreams (Kevin Jones)
• Plex-Resonant Community Events, Dialogues, and Publications (Charles Blass)
• From Pathetically Weak Democracy to Monarchy (Douglass Carmichael)
• The Church of Gaia (Sam Schikowitz)
• Pix from Lucca (Ken Homer)
• Childhood’s End (Ken Homer)

Students Invest in Themselves and in Their Dreams

by Kevin Jones

We are launching a currency within Warren Wilson College whereby students can invest philanthropically in themselves and in the ideas they want to see become reality.

It's done through a localizable low-cost philanthropic investment platform we are representing, with services for the investee and investor to be determined.

The Warren Wilson economist says the currency will start in the student store. They are already using sticks as a kind of central bank.

If you squint, you can almost believe it’s real.

Plex-Resonant Community Events, Dialogues, and Publications

by Charles Blass

Project Liberty Summit on the Future of the Internet

Thursday 21 November 2024
Bi-Partisan Policy Blueprint for the Future of the Internet

Friday 22 November 2024
An Innovator's Guide to Resetting Our Digital Footprint

Note also, the Project Liberty Alliance

Democracy4all

ticketed stream, discounts available here, https://linktr.ee/akashahub

Safe Harbor Summit: Law meets Innovation

vitalia.city (Roatan, Honduras popup city)

livestreams/ keynotes/ panels, 16-17 Nov.

• Safe Harbor Summit Day 1 (YouTube)
• Safe Harbor Summit Day 2 (YouTube)

Speakers/ topics - https://lu.ma/Safeharbor

Overall well curated, high caliber discussions, some parts/aspects are challenging, but important stuff to keep up on.

Featuring leading edge deep dives into DAOs & decentralization, between various jurisdictions & use cases particularly in Special Economic Zones.

First Iteration of Combinations

RadicalxChange published the first iteration of Combinations last week, https://www.combinationsmag.com/

live launch event/ excellent panel w/ creators (14 Nov.), Welcome to our live show! (YouTube)

Change Is in the Cards: Governance Transitions in Open Source Communities

also launched last week:

Zine Release: Change Is in the Cards: Governance Transitions in Open Source Communities
by MEDLab (University of Colorado Boulder) as part of Metagovernance Seminar

• Get Our Latest Zine, on Open Source Governance: “Change Is In the Cards”
• Change Is in the Cards: Governance Transitions in Open Source Communities

uno mas, via gyuri lajos

What Is Web 4.0? Worth Explaining Now? (LIZARD.global)

From Pathetically Weak Democracy to Monarchy

by Douglass Carmichael

Democracies tend to concentrate power and turn into monarchies. We are full steam ahead into that cycle. A reading of history supports the conclusion.

The problem for us is that we face a society organized around Economics, and not enough on the quality of life and well-being.

But here's the rub. Climate change requires a centralized world government acting on the whole. The trouble is that the centralized government we are likely to get is not a bureaucracy of experts but an emptied bureaucracy in parallel with a poorly educated monarchy acting on its own interests.

AI will play an important part in cutting most employees, and the key issue I see is how will income be distributed, if there is any income.

The Church of Gaia

by Sam Schikowitz

Also published at: The Church of Gaia

A treatise on the sacredness of the biosphere.

This is my attempt to describe what I value most.

1. Lives are not sacred. Live Pure Biomass is sacred.

• This biomass is the stuff of life. It is recycled continuously between plants, bacteria, fungi, and animals. Without it, no life could exist.
• For billions of years, plants have been sending down roots and selecting the minerals that are compatible with life, like magnesium, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, iron, selenium, zinc. The plants leave toxic minerals like lead, mercury, and arsenic behind.
• Plants (and some bacteria) have been using sunlight to fuel the transformation of elements in the atmosphere like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen into soil biomass. As this process has continued, a layer of relatively pure biomass has developed, sometimes meters thick.
• Nature is red in tooth and claw. Lives come and go. As they do, biomass is accumulated from dead matter through the action of life.
• The quantity and quality of biomass in any location are exactly the quantity and quality of life in that location

Characteristics of biomass:

• A very specific chemical composition
• Pure. If the wrong elements get mixed into it, it becomes deadly
• Transmutable to practically any animal, vegetable, bacteria or fungus

Toxification of biomass is desecration.

2. Diversity is sacred.

• Organisms and ecosystems will evolve, adapt, and diversify to utilize any available energy sources to the fullest extent possible, as this leads to increased growth, reproduction, and overall success in an evolutionary sense.
• When the environment changes, that diversity ensures that life continues.

Monocropping is desecration

3. Biological complexity is sacred.

• Life builds up complexity as evidenced by:
  • The complexity of chemistry,
  • The complexity of cells,
  • The complexity of collections of cells,
  • The complexity of organisms,
  • The complexity of social groups,
  • The complexity of ecosystems.

Some of these systems are renewable, and others are not. For example, there are billions of human beings on the planet, but only one Amazon rainforest.

Destroying unrenewable complex systems like the Amazon Rainforest is desecration.

4. Consciousness is sacred.

• Intelligence is required, but not sufficient to produce consciousness
• Consciousness is the universe seeing itself
• Consciousness can be cultivated

Allowing consciousness to be dimmed with neurotoxins like lead is desecration.

What is the Church of Gaia?

A community that treats biomass as the sacred fountain of life that must be stewarded.

1. Communities work to go closed loop on materials, especially the elements of biomass
   1. Composting and liberating food waste from landfills.
   2. Human waste and greywater recycling.
   3. Development of scalable process for local agriculture in the permaculture style (converting mono-cropped industrial farmland into multiply interacting sub-dunbar permaculture communities)
2. Communities work to develop diversity and complexity, both as local biodiversity as well as diversity and complexity of thinking and perceiving.
   1. Habitat restoration
   2. Emphasis on personal development and learning
   3. Experimentation with and use of appropriate technology (possibly rocket stoves, heat pumps, climate batteries, greenhouses, etc)
   4. Experimentation with green economic endeavors
3. Communities work to develop the consciousness of the members.
   1. Contemplative and meditative practices embedded in the fabric of the community
   2. Governance structures that work to develop the social intelligence of the members

Pix from Lucca

by Ken Homer

Childhood’s End

by Ken Homer

I’d never seen my aunt look so anxious.
And it was common knowledge in our family,
that she was a worry wart who always looked anxious.

Her blue eyes welled with tears and her frame was stooped sorrow.
The creases on her face seemed deeper than usual.
She drew me close to her, her cigarette laden breath washed over me.
Your father’s in the next room. I’m very concerned about him.

I want you to go and tell him that you are a man now.
I want you to tell him that you can take care of yourself.
I want you to tell him that you will take care of him.

Sensing the duty her words required I squared my narrow nine-year-old shoulders.
Drew myself up to my full 52 inches of height
And marched in to see my father and repeated her exact words.

As I repeated my aunt’s declaration aloud,
I could sense the crushing weight the mantle of adulthood brings with it.
My life from here on out would never be the same.
The carefree days of my childhood ended in that moment.

My father leaned down to hug me. The tears in his eyes made me uneasy.
I hated seeing my father cry–it twisted my insides into awful shapes.
I stared at his feet when he told me he loved me, to this day I recall his canvas shoes.

I didn’t know at the time what I had just done.
Nor did I have an inkling of how much my life was about to change.
Or of how lost, rudderless, and bereft I would soon feel.

I only knew I had to do what my aunt had told me to do.
Lest something horrible happen to my father.
And after losing my mother I couldn’t let that happen.

Little did I know that my mother’s death, which terrified me beyond imagining,
had just swallowed whole my young life. Which would now be very different.
I was still me, but I was no longer the person I’d been only a few moments before

Ken Homer • January 2024

Thank you for reading! The next edition will be published on 4 December 2024. Email Pete with suggested submissions.

Grateful appreciation and many thanks to Charles Blass, Douglass Carmichael, Ken Homer, Kevin Jones, and Sam Schikowitz for their kind contributions to this issue.