Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Randy White The Sharing economy is quickly becoming a diluted term, just like ‘sustainable” and ‘all natural”. If “sharing” means “make some side cash”, let’s call it what it really is. It is a way to raise cash using owned assets (a room, a car, a wheelbarrow, etc.) that boomerang back to the rightful owner at some point.
Think you know what big business looks like? Think again. According to Charles Gould, Director-General of the International Cooperative Alliance, cooperatives are poised to be the fastest growing business model by 2020.
I like to think of utopia as the space where idealism meets reality. Over the years, I have found few radical social change projects that met reality without failure or conflict, especially within a capitalist economy. Transformative projects often fail to take off and end up disillusioning their founders and volunteers. The Bike Kitchen model is one of those unique exceptions that we can try to learn from.
The desire to realise democracy is not futile. Rather, the problem is that real democracy, that is, that mode of governance which is characterised by the unmediated participation of all community members in the process of formulating problems and negotiating decisions, is unattainable once a group is split into a fraction that decides and commands and another that obeys. Such structures make a travesty of the notion of democracy. It is from this vantage point that we must gauge how democratic peer production communities are.
Americans live in a country in which bigger is often supposed to be better. Perhaps this is why our homes, like our food portions, waistlines, and debt, continue to expand…But the rise of the McMansion–and its attendant conspicuous consumption–has also helped to create the burgeoning tiny house movement, which extols the virtues of living smaller. Like Henry David Thoreau, who built his own 150 square-foot cabin on Walden Pond in the 1840s, most tiny house aficionados cite the sheer satisfaction of paring down to the basics, choosing, as he put it, “to front only the essential facts of life.”
The word “carpooling” usually conjures images from the 1970s: service stations warning “No Gas”, lines at the pump, and bell-bottom pants. For many people, carpooling brings to mind quaint notions of penny-pinching habits that went out of style along with turning the thermostat down.
But the history of carpooling goes back almost as far as the invention of the automobile itself, and has endured well-beyond its heyday in the late 70s, according to a publication by MIT’s Rideshare Research.
In this interview, Joe Moore argues that democracy today is in a state of crisis, and that participatory budgeting is an antidote to the cynicism and disengagement that people increasingly feel towards the government. Moreover, he claims that participatory budgeting is a significant source of community engagement and civic learning, and one step toward the democratization of public institutions and the restoration of public trust in the democratic system.
A day of hard rain and wind could not dampen the spirits of activists representing the 99% as they gathered at Justin Herman Plaza (dubbed Bradley Manning Plaza by locals) in San Francisco on Friday, January 20th, 2012, to mark the dark anniversary of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision with a day of action. Organized by a coalition of over 55 Bay Area organizations and dozens of OccupySF affinity groups, protestors disrupted business as usual with demands that banks end predatory evictions and foreclosures and that corporations lose the rights of personhood.
What do coffee growers in Ethiopia, hardware store owners in America, and Basque entrepreneurs have in common? For one thing, many of them belong to cooperatives. By pooling their money and resources, and voting democratically on how those resources will be used, they can compete in business and reinvest the benefits in their communities.
Joel Salatin doesn’t mind being called a communist. Though the self-described “Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic farmer” has a penchant for stockpiling adjectives, Salatin actually defies labels left and right…He’s also a veritable celebrity–having been catapulted into the national spotlight thanks to Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and dubbed the “High Priest of the Pasture” by the New York Times–but he betrays no bravado as he chats with me over the phone from his home in Swoope, Virginia.
As the recession and Occupy movement encourage people to reimagine work and how they get their needs met in the new economy, Timebanks are catching fire. They are a clever tool to circumvent the scarcity and misdirection of conventional money. Timebanks are at heart a simple concept – you work for an hour, earn an hour credit, and spend an hour with anyone in your Timebank community. Timebanks don’t pay taxes or get penalized in benefit reductions because they are more like charitable volunteering circles of mutual aid or relationship-based gift economies than market-based national currencies.
After being acclaimed as America’s best city for biking, what can you possibly do for an encore? Well, in the case of Minneapolis, you do even more bicycling–and more walking too.
