Plex: 7 May 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

A compact issue this week!

• Joyride with Jack and Pete (Peter Kaminski)
• Commons Stewardship by Communities Project (Peter Kaminski)
• A Compact Language (Peter Kaminski)
• Pix from Valencia (Ken Homer)
• Reading • Stories • Words • Worlds (Ken Homer)

Joyride with Jack and Pete

by Peter Kaminski

Jack Park and Peter Kaminski took to the skies over sunny San Diego last month on a 30-minute helicopter tour. Jack had been gifted the tour and had a spare seat, which he graciously offered to Pete.

Jack’s been a pilot for many years, Pete is an aircraft buff, and we both had a wonderful time.

Commons Stewardship by Communities Project

by Peter Kaminski

I created a draft primer on Commons Stewardship by Communities, exploring how communities collectively manage things that are “commons” (shared resources), ranging from natural environments to digital assets. The bibliographic-heavy document covers theoretical foundations, governance principles, case study summaries (including open-source conflicts), community currencies, and key thinkers in the movement.

I posted the draft to the OGM mailing list, asking for help with proofreading and taking editorial responsibility for the content, and a number of wonderful folks chimed in as ready to help. I think I’ll set it up for publishing from a Git repo in Codeberg, mirrored to GitHub, and get the ball rolling on prepping it for publication.

If you’d like to know more or get involved, send me an email: kaminski@istori.com.

A Compact Language

by Peter Kaminski

I’ve been fascinated by human language since I was a teenager. One of my interests has been “constructed languages,” languages created by one or a few people, rather than evolved over centuries or millennia.

Today I’d like to tell you a little about Toki Pona, a minimalist language created by linguist Sonja Lang in 2001, and why I find it interesting. (A quick note: names are usually capitalized in English, which is why I capitalize “Toki Pona,” but within the language itself, it would not be capitalized: “toki pona”.)

Toki Pona has a total of around 120-140 words, and a simplified orthography (spelling) and phonology (sounds) that make it accessible to many people around the world, not just English or European-language speakers.

The most common way to write Toki Pona is with a reduced set (14) of Latin letters, but there are a few other writing systems, including a set of simple drawn characters, one per word, by Lang herself; or a more visually rich, artistic writing system that looks sort of like Mayan hieroglyphics created by Jonathan Gabel.

Americans who go overseas often wonder why people don’t speak English; English speakers often assume other languages are more or less like English just with different words.

But often, using different languages requires adjusting your conceptualization process; you have to think differently to really use the language properly.

And so, the compact structure of the language, the playful, artistic writing systems, and finding ways to express your thoughts with the building blocks of the language invite those who use Toki Pona to conceptualize differently than English in a way that sounds interesting to me. I’m going to explore more.

Here are some starting points (or ask your LLM to tell you about Toki Pona):

• Toki Pona (official site)
• Toki Pona (Wikipedia)
• Toki Pona in 18 Minutes (YouTube)
• The world's smallest language (YouTube) (it's not, actually 🙂)
• which misconceptions about toki pona are the most annoying? (r/tokipona)
• Do toki pona speakers, in practice, permit compounding more than three words? (Constructed Languages Stack Exchange)

Pix from Valencia

by Ken Homer

Reading • Stories • Words • Worlds

by Ken Homer

A few years ago, I catalogued all the books in my house that I had read. I put the titles in a spreadsheet with a link to a goodreads review along with the decade I read the book. It was an instructive exercise. Especially illuminating was when I sorted the sheet on decade read. Immediately an anomaly showed up. The total number of books I had read for each decade going back to the 1960s was roughly equal. But in the 2010s that number plummeted. What happened?

Thinking it over I realized that coincided with a shift in my reading habits. The 2010s marked the time when I began to read more articles and posts online and fewer physical books. Not only did the number of books I read plummet to a new low, but this reading pattern also fractured my attention span. Reading on my computer feeds my ADD. Alerts pop up and I stop reading a post and go off to read a text or an email. Often, I will open a linked post to read it. Sometimes I don’t get back to what I was reading. I open more tabs than I can possibly read in a day. I’ve come to realize I have unconsciously cultivated a less-than-optimal habit. It shows up big time when I sit down and attempt to read a physical book. I almost have to tie myself to the chair in order to concentrate.

The other big realization that came from cataloging the books I’ve read was noticing that about 95% of what I have read in my life is authored by men. And the vast majority of are men steeped in and writing out of the Euro-centric tradition which almost unfailingly places human beings in a privileged position sometimes referred as human exceptionalism or anthropocentrism. I look around at what that worldview has wrought, and I am horrified by what I see. Surely, there must be better paradigms to operate with that can help us learn how to heal the incredible wounds we have inflicted on ourselves and our planet?

“All Law-breaking comes from that first evil thought, that original sin or placing yourself above the land or above other people.”
~ Tyson Yunkaporta – Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World

Among the few books I had read by non-white, non-male, non-Eurocentric authors were Carlos Castenada’s stories of Don Juan––which made a big impression on my adolescent mind back in the 1970s. I was disappointed to learn much later that they were almost certainly works of fiction. Back in the early 1990s I read Malidoma Patrice Somé’s autobiographical, Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman. I recall that there were stories in that book which challenged many of the assumptions of my modernity-colonized mind and I considered much of it to be a work of fiction. I now see that I should have been much more skeptical of Castenada and much more open to Somé!

Given the near monopoly that authors from the Western Canon have had on my reading until this late stage in my life, I decided it was important for me to seek out works by women, by Indigenous authors, and by people whose backgrounds are at a far remove from my own. I’ve been at this for about three years now and it’s been quite fulfilling to open my mind to some very old as well as some very new ways of thinking.

I am 98% convinced that the social operating system that has sprung up since the dawn of modernity and become the dominant organizing element in human relationships bears the brunt of the responsibility for the multiplicity of wicked messes that confronts humanity.

Vanessa Andreotti’s excellent, Hospicing Modernity, is one of the most profoundly wise books I have read in the past few years. Modernity, as Vanessa uses it, is a set of expired stories, stories that can’t move things in generative ways because vitality of those stories is spent. Among other things, modernity is a single story that attempts to explain the role of humans in the world, something Vanessa refers to as “wording the world.” The roots of modernity are entangled and contested. Some trace it back to ancient Greek philosophy, while others center it in the Renaissance or the European Enlightenment. As Vanessa notes:

“One widespread story presents modernity as a general project of civilization that seeks to engineer society through humanism, reason, science, progress, and technology. There are stories that present it as a particularly Western project of civilization that has achieved nearly universal reach because of its merits. Other stories describe modernity as a local European design that has been imposed globally through explicit and subtle violence…

…It is also important to note that most stories written about modernity defend modernity as the greatest achievement of humanity and the best of all possible worlds.

Other stories see it as an expression of humanity’s capacity to simultaneously manifest extraordinary and terrible things, arguing that other worlds are possible. In these stories, many who benefit from modernity would be prepared to fight to secure its continuity.

Many of those who are exploited by modernity would prefer to benefit from it, regardless of the costs. Many would like to see modernity replaced by a different system. Some of those believe modernity is stuck in self-infantilizing behavior; some see it recklessly crossing several tipping points leading to its decline; others see it as approaching or already past its expiration date.

Some believe a genuinely new system is only possible if we are able to learn the lessons that modernity has to offer in its decline.” (emphasis added)

The Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures website notes the following:

“Our decolonial perspective is informed and inspired by Indigenous analyses and practices that affirm that our current global problems are not related to a lack of knowledge, but to an inherently violent modern-colonial habit of being.

Four denials structure this habit of being:

- the denial of systemic violence and complicity in harm (the fact that our comforts, securities and enjoyments are subsidized by expropriation and exploitation somewhere else),

- the denial of the limits of the planet (the fact that the planet cannot sustain exponential growth and consumption),

- the denial of entanglement (our insistence in seeing ourselves as separate from each other and the land, rather than “entangled” within a living wider metabolism that is bio-intelligent), and

- denial of the depth and magnitude of the problems that we face:  the tendencies 1) to search for “hope” in simplistic solutions that make us feel and look good; 2) to turn away from difficult and painful work (e.g. to focus on a “better future” as a way to escape a reality that is perceived as unbearable).

We have created a social cartography that maps these four primary denials onto four levels of denial. Download it in PDF here.” (Well worth a gander.)

[To give respect where it’s due, I want to emphasize that the material in quotes above is from either from Vanessa or the GTDF website and not work of this aging white guy.]

Realizing that my mind has been colonized by modernity and how that colonization has delegitimized large bodies of valuable knowledge has been highly confronting to my sensibilities. That’s one reason why Vanessa spends a good deal of time in the early part of her book urging you not to read it. This book is not for the faint of heart or the closed of mind.

What if the knowledge of Indigenous Peoples and ancient traditions that modernity so blithely dismisses in favor of AI* holds the crucial insights required to cope with the anthropogenic intertwingled-wicked-mega-messes which now confront all of us?

IMO, it's high time for those who wish to be effective in preserving as much of the world as possible to stop granting modernity the power to delegitimize and marginalize traditional bodies of knowledge––which are often stored in racialized bodies. It’s time listen anew to what those bodies and those stories have to offer that can teach the rest of us about how working on behalf of all life can help all us-humans to cope with the present and put us in a better position to secure a more positive future. One of the most profound suggestions for developing the relational intelligences required to do the work of hospicing modernity is co-sensing with radical tenderness.

*Nate Hagens shared a quote from a friend of his that “AI is the child of white parents that could be the prodigal child, but that it needs to be raised by Indigenous parents.” Which I interpret to mean that AI is the child of modernity, and for it to be the savior that people think it could be, it will need to be schooled in Indigenous ways that decenter humans as the pinnacle of evolution and place us in proper context for effective collective action.

Ken Homer • May 2025

Thank you for reading! The next edition will be published on 14 May 2025. Email Pete with suggested submissions.

Grateful appreciation and many thanks to Charles Blass and Ken Homer for their kind contributions to this issue.