This past February I co-presented at the International Conference on Community and Complementary Currencies in Lyon, France. This was through my involvement in the Time For the World project (TimeFTW.org). Here is the video of our presentation. It introduces the project and presents one aspect of the theoretical lens through which I’m examining currency systems and economic development.
Video: Presentation at complementary currency conference
Filed under Hierarchies, Networks, Time For the World
The Post-It Manifesto
I’ve been working on too many projects lately, but advancing the process of stitching them together. One of the projects I’m working on is found at OpenCapitol.us. It is an effort to draw attention and address barriers to civic engagement. I recently penned a communique for it, otherwise known as the Post-It Manifesto. We are in the process of analyzing the action, its successes and limitations, in the context of the sets of theory that we developed it from so that we and you can run more experiments in grassroots empowerment and signal creation.
Filed under Hierarchies, Networks, Uncategorized
NSF Fellowship Proposal: personal statement
NSF fellowship proposal part 3 of 3. The story of me…
This is a time of intense difficulty. Over the past five years we have witnessed increasing retrenchment of economic modes and institutions. The economic gains of the late 20th century appear for the moment to have been predicated on a shared illusion of limitless growth. There are, however, always limits. The greatest limit appears to be of human understanding. The recent shock and continuing shudders throughout the system were not unpredictable. Even so, many economists, business people, and politicians were trapped in the expanding bubble, unable to react for risk of lost opportunity. This crisis was just not part of their models and narratives of the world. For this reason, neither will be the solutions to it. Continue reading
Filed under Uncategorized
NSF Fellowship Proposal: research experience statement
NSF Fellowship proposal part 2 of 3. More things released into the underverse:
I have spent the past three years contemplating collapse. In particular I have been grappling with how we understand continuous versus discrete system change. Continuous change can be understood as regular system developmental processes. It is gradual. Discrete change is something different. It considers the emergence of new, unpredicted, and potentially unpredictable system structures. These types of change appear as events. Continue reading
Filed under Uncategorized
NSF Fellowship Proposal: project statement
Part of my goals for this site is to have a place where works that would otherwise remain hidden and, consequently, unproductive can get a degree of exposure. Much of the work we all do exists in closed boxes. If things are in the open they can become usable for others if they deem the work worthwhile. From that perspective, I have decided to publish the series of essays I recently wrote for a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. They are relatively short (compared to other things I’m writing), but offer a fairly refined portrayal of my background and the types of questions that interest me. This first one is the proposal for the PhD project I intend to pursue.
Trophic economies and community regeneration: examining bottom-up processes of value creation
Key words: Time Banking; Resilience; Socio-Ecological Systems; Community Currency; Microeconomics Continue reading
Filed under Uncategorized
Event as resonance cascade, circa spring 2009
The following is an essay I wrote over a year and a half ago for a political geography seminar. At the time it was the culmination of my thinking on the concept of the event. Since then my thoughts have developed further out and been refined. I’ve modified diagrams and adapted my thought of them, for instance, but I think it’s useful maintaining a document to that allows someone to trace the modification and development of thought.
The Event has subsequently become focal to the work that I do and this essay, in a modified and expanded form, has become one of the three primary chapters in my thesis. That version is not yet ready and benefits from what precedes and follows it. At some point soon I hope to have it posted here along with the rest of my thesis. Ideally, I will begin publishing it in segments in the next couple weeks. I just want to get the first chapter polished as much as possible so it appropriately sets up what follows it.
Filed under Post-structuralism, Uncategorized
On the question of ‘development’
I am affiliated with a time banking dissemination project called Time For the World. We are working on a paper for a complementary currency conference in February. There was a question about out use of the term ‘development’ in the title. I wrote a post addressing our thought about using the term and inviting discussion on the project blog. Feel free to take a look. Comments are best addressed over there.
Filed under Uncategorized
Abstract to Resilience2011 Conference: Shear and feedback loss in central structures
Here is an abstract Preston and I submitted for the Resilience2011 conference this next spring.
Title:
Title:
Shear and feedback loss in central structures
Abstract:
Calving derived social structures:
Upper level or centralized structures like bankers and banks, teachers and schools, or authors and publishers emerge to alleviate strain, effectively empowering lower levels – savers, the student body, audience. They are derived and serve. Lower level edge structures, however, become equally derived from the upper levels once they emerge. It is efficient shorthand to isolate a derived level as the primary operative level: the one that matters. The material and conceptual significance of derived structure is sufficient to allow the aggregate to become an independent useful context. Through this process shear emerges and upper level consideration elides lower level detail. No longer directly considered, lower level strain cannot contribute predictive signals to governance of derived structures’ behavior. Instead lower levels cope with strain until limits are reached where their services collapse.
Filed under Hierarchies
Emergence as stress relief: some thoughts on power distribution and transformation
My friend Preston (twitter handle: @gl33p) and I are working on a series of projects all the time. One of the big conceptual ones focuses on theory of system behavior and development. We’re developing a framework that looks at how upper-level or more central institutions or structures emerge to solve problems in shear or stress of lower levels. In turn these upper levels functionally redefine, elide, and reduce the higher degrees of potency of the lower levels. Upper levels define things down. This increases their degree of power, but imposes a degree of limitation. Extrapolation of this offers, I think, an avenue to bridge between contrasting models of power: that of Weber’s site-specific power (power as held by institutions) and Foucault’s notion of power as emergent network effect. I’m working to pin this down at the moment.
To digress a bit, though, here is something I wrote and posted last weekend to an enclosed forum that lays out part of what we are thinking; I want to make it more visible. It’s related to yesterday’s post. It’s in a somewhat rough form, but I’m fine with that. Honing comes with time. Comments are always welcome.
Filed under Uncategorized
Trophic incoherence in business strategy, preliminary thoughts.
Umair Haque recently wrote a column on business strategy that, in his style, seeks to disrupt conventional models of business activity in order to create a more meaningful economy. I highly recommend it.
http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2010/11/strategy_can_do_better.html
Below is the comment I posted to the column. Some people seem to like it.
Filed under Uncategorized
