Plex: 4 December 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

• Delta Queen (Jack Park)
• Can We Create a Resilience Corps on the Swannanoa? (Kevin Jones)
• Translating Surprise into Symbiotic Mutualism (Michael Lennon)
• Vanishing Culture / Preserving Cookbooks (Charles Blass)
• Pix from Italy (Ken Homer)
• Insomnia (Ken Homer)

Delta Queen

by Jack Park

Can We Create a Resilience Corps on the Swannanoa?

by Kevin Jones

Originally published at: Can we create a Resilience Corps on the Swannanoa?

A Vision for Community-Driven Disaster Response

In the wake of increasingly frequent climate disasters, a promising initiative is taking root in Swannanoa, North Carolina. Drawing inspiration from successful post-Katrina recovery efforts in New Orleans, we’re helping those working to establish a professional Resilience Corps that builds upon the extraordinary efficiency of existing mutual aid networks.

The Foundation

At the heart of this initiative is Saket Soni, a veteran of disaster recovery with 19 years of experience in post-hurricane restoration. His work creating Resilience Force in New Orleans demonstrated that disaster response can simultaneously create career pathways for marginalized communities and build lasting resilience. Through Soni’s work, undocumented workers gained professional skills in disaster home renovation, while a Resilience Corps emerged to coordinate rapid response efforts.

Now, we’re hoping to bring this model to our farm at 15 Riparian Way – a historic property that carries both the weight of difficult history and the promise of healing. This land which launched Buncombe County’s first massacre, is also home to an undefiled Native village site that witnessed 5,000 years of indigenous presence; the archaeology was done across the river on the part of the village that was on the land of Warren Wilson college . Today, three double weave basket weavers from the Eastern Band will be tending the river cane, marking the beginning of what could become a multicultural educational initiative that will also heal the river post Helene.

The Vision

Our approach is two-pronged:

1. A Professional Development Path: Creating an internship program that transforms often-undocumented individuals into professional disaster home renovation experts, building on Saket’s successful New Orleans model.
2. A Resilience Corps: Professionalizing the remarkable pro bono work currently being done by mutual aid networks. These network weavers bring professional-quality expertise that deserves to become a sustainable livelihood.

The goal is to build geographically distributed enterprise workforces capable of responding swiftly to disasters. Soni’s existing network includes thousands of renovators, but the success of a local Resilience Corps will depend on the dedication of our current network weavers.

The Broader Impact

This initiative represents more than disaster response – it’s a replicable model for coordinated collective bioregional climate response that could significantly reduce costs after future hurricanes. We’re already engaging with regional funders, including a cohort of flexible community development finance institutions, (CDFI’s) and we plan to showcase this work at the Neighborhood Economics conference in Asheville this April, followed by our national conference in Chicago next September, where the MacArthur Foundation will serve as anchor sponsor.

A Personal Note

As I watch this initiative unfold on the farm where I once imagined growing old, I see something even more valuable taking shape. Beyond the practical aspects of disaster response and professional development, we’re creating a space for healing and bioremediation. This work represents my commitment to supporting younger generations who are building something meaningful – something that might one day draw my grandsons back to Swannanoa after college.

After more than two decades of working to accelerate the flow of capital toward positive change, this initiative stands out as particularly promising. With Soni’s proven track record and our community’s extraordinary mutual aid networks, we have the potential to create something truly transformative. As we move forward, we’re guided by a simple truth: interdependence is the path to our collective and individual survival.

The real power of this initiative lies not just in its practical benefits, but in its potential to heal, unite, and build resilience across communities. It’s a testament to what’s possible when we combine professional expertise with community wisdom, creating pathways for both individual advancement and collective strength.

Translating Surprise into Symbiotic Mutualism

by Michael Lennon

Michael's session from the 4th Applied Active Inference Symposium

Me2We2All: Translating Surprise into Symbiotic Mutualism

A conversation about Re-vitalizing Organizational Symbiosis and Re-negotiating flourishing within, between and beyond familiar boundaries

Session on YouTube: Co-inferencing Organizational Symbiosis (1h 59m 35s)

Here’s my prepared outline, which I expect will continue to evolve—possibly growing into a full chapter or even a short book. Your questions, comments, and feedback are welcome.

• PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS IS MISUNDERSTOOD: Human happiness is influenced more reliably by SOCIAL and Environmental factors than by INDIVIDUAL traits.
  • Similarly with flourishing of human collectives, external relational dynamics influence more heavily than dynamics within the collective alone.
  • Just as the intuition that the sun circles the earth was incorrect, the belief in the reliability of Individualism is over-applied.
• New understanding of systemic disease as collective (relational) dysfunction
  • Cancer as cellular trauma: Traumatized cells over-consume and reproduce excessively to the point of strangling their host.
  • New treatment for healing cancer: instead of punitive killing of traumatized cells, new informational interventions “call parasitic cancer cells back into symbiotic relation” with neighbor cells.
• Healing Organizational (Economic) Cancer: The mal-adapted corporation (or the disease of “Mono-Capitalism”)
  • Corporations (& liberal capitalism) started in the 1600's as self-assembling symbiotic groups joining to achieve together what individuals alone could not.
  • Many once symbiotic corporations have become disconnected with their originating local communities, prioritizing by law relations with and for stockholders. The “mono-focus” upon financial returns over other forms of living capital has driven corporations to become “relationally inbred” towards the rest of their living capitals. And as cancer does to the body, disconnected corporations are over-consuming environmental, civic, social and collective commons at the expense of the overall system—the planet.
• Informational solution for Organizations: Calling organizations back into more skillful and diversified Relation (Amplifying mutualism from “mono-capitalism” (“extraction”) back to multi-capitalism (“symbiosis”))
  • Building new organizational forms and inter-organizational forms symbiotic with Peers, Place and Life
  • Recovery / regenerate relational capacity throughout organizations and inter-organizations (e.g. marketplaces) to practice and harmonize around multi-capitalism / relational capitalism instead of mono-capitalism
• Active Inference (AIF) is a biology-derived pattern language for continuously adaptive distributed learning and synchronization. AIF can help existing and emerging groups to co-sense, co-predict and co-adapt much dynamically and holistically than traditional hierarchy
  • AIF offers existing or emerging organizations new ways to learn collectively
    • From Correcting Error to Co-Learning from Surprise more skillfully
    • New and “informationally leaner” ways to monitor, co-predict and co-adapt
    • Informationally more efficient ways to collectively monitor and learn from the emergent or unknown (e.g. inter-relationships, perspectival diversity, scope of attentional perspective, flows, pattern monitoring..)
• Fair Sharing Commons is a similarly biology-informed form of Organizational Mutualism
  • A pattern-based approach to practicing symbiosis within, between and beyond organizations
  • Similar to LINUX, build both commons for all, as well as, support the
  • FSC (EvoluteSix, Me2we2all, and allies) – A relational, self-governing business model and platform
• Invitation: Prototyping AIF-oriented Fair Sharing Commons (FSC) for symbiotic innovation, sense-making and venturing within, between and beyond the familiar AIF patterns
  • Constitute Fair-Sharing Commons (FSC) for Active Inference-related prosocial ventures, supporting the growth of the AIF commons, as well as, ventures prototyping and development Self-Assembling Mutualism, prototyping a commons for AIF-inspired ventures
  • Proto-type agent for accelerating access to and engagement with funding (BFF)
  • Proto-type Agent for connecting to competence & complementary capabilities and cultivating Personal, Inter-personal, inter-organizational and inter-ecosystemic symbiotic competence

Vanishing Culture / Preserving Cookbooks

via Charles Blass

Download & read the Vanishing Culture report now:

Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record

In today’s digital landscape, corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history.

The rise of streaming platforms and temporary licensing agreements means that sound recordings, books, films, and other cultural artifacts that used to be owned in physical form, are now at risk—in digital form—of disappearing from public view without ever being archived.

Cyber attacks, like those against the Internet Archive, British Library, Seattle Public Library, Toronto Public Library and Calgary Public Library, are a new threat to digital culture, disrupting the infrastructure that secures our digital heritage and impeding access to information at community scale.

When digital materials are vulnerable to sudden removal—whether by design or by attack—our collective memory is compromised, and the public’s ability to access its own history is at risk. 

Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record aims to raise awareness of these growing issues. The report details recent instances of cultural loss, highlights the underlying causes, and emphasizes the critical role that public-serving libraries and archives must play in preserving these materials for future generations. By empowering libraries and archives legally, culturally, and financially, we can safeguard the public’s ability to maintain access to our cultural history and our digital future.

Read Katie Livingston’s essay from the Vanishing Culture series, “Preserving Cookbooks”:

Vanishing Culture: Preserving Cookbooks | Internet Archive Blogs

<p>On January 1, 2025, creative works from 1929 and sound recordings from 1924 will enter the public domain in the US. Celebrate with us on January 22nd! REGISTER NOW</p>\n

Internet Archive Blogsvanishingculture

Pix from Italy

by Ken Homer

Insomnia

by Ken Homer

I wake night after night
Cold sweat soaking the hair on my chest
The creases of my elbows and the back of my neck
I’m shivering in the dampness of the sheets

I go into the bathroom
Towel myself dry
Empty my bladder
Return to bed
Turn the pillow over to the dry side
Try to find slumber once more

Gripped by a nausea I’ve felt since the election
My stomach knots with a fear I struggle to keep at bay
The shouting of my ancestors roils my thoughts:
Is this shit really going to happen again?!
The doleful eyes of the unborn appear before me:
What will be left for us when it’s our time to live?

Sleep is nowhere to be found
My mind’s engulfed by a dark foreboding
I stare into the abyss of fascism’s future/history
Hell is empty and all the devils are here–again
My country, O my country
Whither goest thou?

Ken Homer • November 2024

Thank you for reading! The next edition will be published on 18 December 2024. Email Pete with suggested submissions.

Grateful appreciation and many thanks to Charles Blass, Ken Homer, Kevin Jones, Michael Lennon, and Jack Park for their kind contributions to this issue.