Plex: 2 April 2025

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

• Call for Progressive Political Activism Resources (Peter Kaminski)
• SafariPark from helium balloon (Jack & Linda Park)
• LBW Technosophical Conversation about AI (Peter Kaminski)
• 2025-03-27 OGM Call (Peter Kaminski)
• Springtime in Marin (Ken Homer)
• Media and Mood Management (Ken Homer)

Call for Progressive Political Activism Resources

by Peter Kaminski

Do you have pointers to any progressive political activism resources, such as Indivisible.org or Heather Cox Richardson's Substack, Letters from an American?

Send one or many pointers to me at kaminski@istori.com.

Please no bare links to resources; write a paragraph or two about why this resource, what it means to you in your life, other ideas you have or actions you're taking, etc.

Let's change the world,
–Pete

SafariPark from Helium Balloon

by Jack & Linda Park

LBW Technosophical Conversation about AI

by Peter Kaminski

On March 19th, Gil and Ken hosted me on their Living Between Worlds call, with part one of a technosophical conversation about AI. The recording is here:

Part one was mostly presentation, and part two will be mostly discussion. Part two is coming up on April 16th, register here:

Living Between Worlds, with Grace, Dignity, and Power (Zoom, free registration)

I'm also posting daily “homework” exercises five days a week until the next call. I try to provide some interesting ways to learn more about LLMs by doing. We're halfway through, but feel free to skim the past days, and subscribe for the rest:

Pete's AI Homework (Substack, free to read and subscribe)

2025-03-27 OGM Call

by Peter Kaminski, with ChatGPT 4o and Claude 3.7 Sonnet

Last week's OGM Thursday call was very good, and I recommend watching the playback, if you like watching meeting playbacks:

Here's the call in Jerry's Brain: 2025-03-27 OGM Call (xlnt).

As a bit of an experiment, I ran a transcript of the meeting through summarization with both ChatGPT and Claude, and offer the following merged description. I aimed to give a taste of the meeting, but not a full summarization that might seem complete but wouldn't be. The LLMs created this meeting description based on my direction, and I take responsibility for its content.

The meeting focused on the relationship between micro and macro actions in creating change (“the micro makes the macro”). Discussion began with an upcoming Neighborhood Economics Conference and work with economically disadvantaged communities, including post-disaster economic rebuilding efforts.

The central theme explored how small individual actions collectively create larger systemic changes, suggesting targeted leverage points rather than addressing overwhelming large-scale problems directly. The conversation referenced the World Happiness Report showing Finland's high ranking, examining how contentment relates to expectations, social systems, and personal habits like sharing meals.

Additional topics included educational reform, AI's impact on learning, community-building through local organizations, collaborative knowledge systems like NeoBooks, and developing interconnected mental models. The discussion also touched on recent advancements in AI image generation as part of broader trends in digital creativity and learning tools.

Springtime in Marin

by Ken Homer

Media and Mood Management

by Ken Homer

Regular readers of The Plex know that both Gil Friend and I have written about moods in past issues. Mood, as used in this context, is an emotional feeling tone of sustained duration that influences how you feel about and orient yourself to future possibilities. 

Moods are complex. It’s possible to experience several moods simultaneously or in succession. Take moving to a new place. You might experience curiosity, excitement, wonder and a poignant sense of loss, either one after the other or all at the same time.

You might love your job and have a wonderful boss. This usually leads to uplifting moods where you see multiple possibilities and have both the desire and the sense of agency to act on them. OTOH, your relationships at home with your family might be under stress and duress which tends to narrow the possibilities you see on your horizon and can lead you to feeling trapped resulting in moods of resentment and resignation.

In addition to being personal, moods unfold in social dimensions. A lot of OGMers are Baby Boomers. The social dimension of the dominant mood of the industrialized world when we came into it was one of nearly infinite possibility, coupled with an optimism that the world was getting inexorably better. Compare that to Gen Z, whose members have known levels of social, economic and ecological strain and insanity that casts a very different light on what they see as possible. [For a fascinating take on the cultural moods of the current Seven Generations see chapter 7 of Burnout From Humans.]

“Consumer confidence” may be the best-known example of a social mood. When consumer confidence is up, bull markets rule. When it’s down, bear markets take over. 

In this moment of history, us-humans are living through a crisis of unimaginable proportions. Some terms you may have heard applied to our situation include:

• the poly-crisis (poly = many)
• the perma-crisis (perma = permanent)
• the meta-crisis (meta = beyond)
• wicked messes (wicked = highly resistant to intervention and mess = an ill structured problem where those looking at it can’t agree on the symptoms let alone potential solutions)
• wicked mega-messes (multiple gargantuan entangled or intertwingled messes) 

Whatever you choose to call the multiplicity of crises us-humans are confronting today, their impact on moods both personal and collective is undeniable. It’s even more distressing when you consider that these crises require us-humans to collaborate at scales and levels never attempted before. Yet, many people are resigned – “Good luck with that” and/or “That will never happen.” Worse, the leadership for stewarding such changes appears to be almost entirely lacking in both corporate and elected positions where the mindset of business as usual continues to apply engineering and technology approaches to living systems, completely ignoring that Earth’s regenerative capacities have been pushed past the boundaries of sustainability and are now in varying stages of collapse. This does not bode well for those of us trying to be good ancestors!

Mainstream media’s coverage of these messes is abysmal and the well-funded campaign to deny that a changing climate is now our reality is both wildly profitable and hugely successful. It’s enough to drive you mad – which is exactly what is happening to large segments of the population. If you are exposed to the news these days, your personal mood as well as that of the tribe you identify as belonging to is being impacted, often unconsciously and to a degree most people are not aware of.

I’ve written in the past about the benefits of a media fast. A lot of people that I know went on one voluntarily after the election – at least as far a political news goes. We’re all familiar with the tagline of “If it bleeds, it leads”, and how most major media outlets run stories each day that prominently feature disasters and disasters in the making, often told from a perspective that lays blame and creates victims. Media outlets know featuring bad news is a surefire recipe for creating captive audiences and it sells advertising, so they keep it up even while it harms those who produce it.

When I was assigned a six-month media fast as part of my professional coaching course 25 years ago, I quickly learned that my daily ingestion of news was contributing to a mood of anger and powerlessness. It was revelatory to me to realize that my lifelong habit of being informed about goings on in the world was actually making me (and by extension, some of the people closest to me) miserable.

Unless and until there is some major unforeseen shift in the winds of fate, us-humans are in for a rough ride in the coming years. Events beyond our control can evoke deleterious moods. Personally, I can’t sustain a mood of anger, outrage, indignation, and powerless for long without dire consequences for my wellbeing. So, taking a lesson from my media fast experience of a quarter of a century ago, I am carefully curating my news feed today and taking media-free days regularly. I want to remain informed but not so much that it throws me out of my center. IMO, it’s important not to be in denial about how bad things are, while setting good boundaries and holding toxic news at bay as a critical part of selfcare. I hope you can find your balance.

Today, it’s not only impossible to keep up with the daily deluge of dismay due to the dismantling of democracy, it’s also disheartening and deleterious to do so. So, I’ve cut down my reading about politics to a fraction of what it used to be. I scan the headlines, but I only click on stories about climate, art, human interest, science, etc.

Here are a few sources I get news from:

Letters from An American – Heather Cox Richardson
Heather is a professor of history at Boston College. She places current events in historical context and while her content is often dismaying (because how could it not be?) she tends to present things in as positive a light as possible. Daily updates.

Civil Discourse – Joyce Vance
Joyce served for nine years as the US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. She knows the law inside and out and has many friends at the DOJ (or friends who were formerly at the DOJ). She places events in an easy-to-understand legal context and focuses on where the courts are holding the line and what can be done. Daily updates.

Meditations in an Emergency – Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca may be best known for her books, A Paradise Built in Hell, Men Explain Things to Me, and Hope in the Dark. She’s a longtime activist and brilliant writer and I love her ability to reframe dire circumstances as openings for action. Her column is a bright light in a dark time. Weekly updates.

The Contrarian – Numerous authors
With the motto: Not Owned By Anyone, The Contrarian is many things, among them it’s the new home of former WaPo columnist Jennifer Rubin, Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonist Ann Telnaes, and lawyer Norm Eisen, It’s a place with live interactive videos, a daily round up of news from the resistance. There’s also “Undaunted” a weekly profile of an inspiring leader who refuses to bend the knee. Honestly, this site has more content than I can keep up with so, I take small sips.  Daily updates

Other sources for staying sane

Explorations and Explanations – Dave Gray (yes, THAT Dave Gray!)
An irregularly published newsletter from XPLANE Founder and possibilitarian Dave Gray – who’s a regular participant on our weekly OGM calls. I don’t recall Dave mentioning politics much in any of his newsletters, but they a delight to read and I always learn something interesting whenever this shows up in my inbox. Thanks Dave!

My list of shows and movies – for when you need a break from the news.
Back in the ‘90s my wife began to keep a list of movies and live events that we went to. I took over the project from her in the early 2000s and it has grown into a spreadsheet with over 1,500 entries that encompass everything from the beautiful animation of Studio Ghibli to political and nature documentaries to kids movies to British detective shows to juvenile humor (Clerks or Bridesmaids anyone?) to serious science shows. 

Final thought. Here is the text of the Fifth of the Five Wonderful Precepts as articulated by Thich Nhat Hahn:

Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful consumption, I vow to cultivate good health, both physical and mental, for myself, my family, and my society by practicing mindful eating, drinking and consuming. I vow to ingest only items that preserve peace, well-being and joy in my body, in my consciousness, and in the collective body and consciousness of my family and society. I am determined not to use alcohol or any other intoxicant or to ingest foods or other items that contain toxins, such as certain TV programs, magazines, books, films and conversations. I am aware that to damage my body or my consciousness with these poisons is to betray my ancestors, my parents, my society and future generations. I will work to transform violence, fear, anger and confusion in myself and in society by practicing a diet for myself and for society. I understand that a proper diet is crucial for self-transformation and for the transformation of society.

As Joyce Vance says at the close of all her newsletters: 

We’re in this together.

Thank you for reading! The next edition will be published on 16 April 2025. Email Pete with suggested submissions.

Grateful appreciation and many thanks to Charles Blass, Ken Homer, and Jack & Linda Park for their kind contributions to this issue.