“Utopia is All Around Us”

I think we now need utopian thinking more than ever. The mistake people often make with utopia is to see it as a destination, a fixed end point. Instead, utopia is the process of first imagining, and then believing that we can organise the world differently, which empowers us to take steps towards it

A Measured Response to Surveillance Capitalism

A flood of recent analysis discusses the abuse of personal information by internet giants such as Facebook and Google. Some of these articles zero in on the basic business models of Facebook, and occasionally Google, as inherently deceptive and unethical. But I have yet to see a proposal for any type of regulation that seems proportional to the social problem created by these new enterprises.

Dissecting the Madness of Economic Reason

In these tumultuous times, after all, the left urgently needs its brightest and most creative minds to focus on the intractable puzzle that now confronts it: the question of how to break up the vicious cycle of endless compound growth and bring an end to the institutionalized madness of economic reason before it lays waste to all human civilization.

In The Rush Toward A Cashless Society, The Poorest Are At Risk Of Further Exclusion

An estimated 7 percent of American households don’t have access to bank accounts, according to the most recent survey from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. And a government study at the end of last year found that the U.S. homeless population had risen for the first time since 2010. Given rising inequality, what happens to those on the margins of the economy when cash is no longer king?

Could Community Activism Replace Charity in our Society?

Giving money can often be a way of avoiding our feelings of guilt, whereas increasingly people are using these negative emotions as motivator for positive change. Community voluntary action is taking the place of charitable donation as people increasingly allow themselves to respond emotionally to social inequality when they see it around them.

Slow Growth, Rapid Ruin – the “Seneca Collapse” of our Society

According to Bardi, small causes can lead to big effects in complex systems. The problem is that modern industrial society, as soon as it goes into a crisis, usually tries to solve the problems it faces by expanding its governance structures – in other words, it is doing a fatal “more of the same” instead to initiate a change.

The Environmental Consequences of Monetary Dysfunction

Dysfunction of the money-system underpins the problems of the world’s multiple converging crises. Discuss. Might that assertion be taking an ideological position, encouraged by the echo chambers of like-minded twitterati? This piece is an attempt to tease out the nature of the underlying connection, and in doing so describe some of the attack surfaces that are available to those bent on change.