Of course cultural appropriation of spiritual indigenous narratives from westerners is something that has been happening for decades. And I totally see the point of your analysis.

In a way, what I was trying to say is that even tho this kinds of appropriations need to be fought so they don’t take over the political discourse about ecology, by itself this doesn’t seem enough imo. In order to fight the power imbalance that colonisers have created throughout the centuries, I believe there is also a need to consciously take into consideration, as well as incorporate the suggestions and approaches of indigenous people in the relevant discourses in western politics, ecology, and their intersections. Certainly, without the element of appropriation, but as as equals.

I tend to agree with this article, but it is also a very slippery slope.

We must be careful not to erase once more indigenous/local narratives because we don’t like the vocabulary used. We risk to contribute into reproducing the colonisers’ power imbalance by disregarding local knowledge, just because it is presented in non-western way (i.e. cultural burnings).

I only know that it is both casually used as a park and that they are also regularly doing stuff there.

Hmm I’m not totally sure that it is something you exactly find first and deploy after. Of course there are a tone of things to read, discuss etc but I have the impression that you find some parameters and then it’s a trial and error process. Maybe.

Sometimes there are already people doing stuff like that near you. In a squat or a non-hierarchical collective nearby? Sometimes these collectives do not exist in our area, so maybe try to find other people with similar interests close to where you live and start something all together? As it says in the article:

It doesn’t matter how small you start, just start and see how it grows.

I dunno. From my experience in doing similar stuff for the first time I learned something else. Long story short, the things I imagined or feared etc, had nothing to do with what happened in reality. And doing the project felt great also because it opened the door to new kinds of interactions with other people.

I’m not trying to be lovey-dovey or something. With time, challenges emerged, some tough, some easy and badly handled, you name it! But what you describe reminded me of some of my “fears” before starting a project for the first time, this is why I thought of mentioning the above.

Thank you so much. Doing this immediately!

Maybe I should have specified that where I live it’s summer now, so windows are always open and will be so for many more weeks. Meaning, releasing it outside would not prevent it from coming back in.

Of course, that’s exactly what I’m saying.

As long as it is implemented within capitalism, it will never be neutral. Capitalism is destructive because it exhausts all natural resources and disregards all living creatures and ecosystems, for the sake of monetary profit and infinite economic growth. All these, on a finite planet. Clearly, eternal growth is a cancerous way of development, and it has nothing to do with sustainability.

I see things differently than the way they are analysed in this text.

AI by itself is nothing. What it is depends on the context, and the context here is capitalism. This is very obvious because most, if not all, the problems atributed to AI in this text, actually derive from how capitalism works. Maybe I should I say how AI works under capitalism.

So the problem for me is not the tool itself, it’s who is holding it. Meaning, going after AI, doesn’t change how capitalism operates. It’s by unstiching capitalism that the broader social and economic relations get the chance to reconfigure.

If I understand you correctly in the part you talk about labor, robotics and AI, it reminds me of what was said by capitalists when automations started being employed in factories, meaning many, many decades ago.

At the time the capitalist narrative was saying to workers stuff like “we know you work hard, but thanks to the technological advancements in automations your children will work less and have a better life”. We very well know this never happened, only the rich got richer, to the detriment of everybody else and the planet as a whole.

So, allow me to say, this approach is not new.

I was wondering if anyone here has read it as well. And what your take is.

Personally, I will not read it because:

Meet the authors

James Arbib is a technology investor and the founder of Tellus Mater, an independent philanthropic foundation dedicated to exploring the impacts of disruptive technology and its potential for solving some of the world’s most challenging problems.

Tony Seba is a world-renowned thought leader, author, speaker, educator, investor and Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

In relation to the content of the book, I wouldn’t be too surprised if these two capitalists suggest misleading technological “solutions” to a problem that is not technological in nature, but systemic. Meaning, the problem is the eternal growth of the capitalist system on a finite planet, and there is no techno-fix for that. Also, I’m pretty sure they are making baseless claims about humans and human societies to back their proposals.

Anyways, now that I said all that, may I suggest another reading? Totally free and priceless :)

What is Solarpunk?

I just realised that we should also keep in mind that the time-frame of this study is several decades, so we are talking about about an average through the decades.

What you said reminded me of an argument that I recently heard and found quite interesting, as well as accurate.

It was saying that the developing countries are actually the colonising ones because they got prosperous from ferociously extracting the resources from the places they colonised. In the so-called “post colonial era”, theses western countries kept their development through economic exploitation of the same areas and people.

Edit: So the developed countries, should actually be called developing instead. And what we call now developing countries should be called exploited, abused or something similar.

Ok so it looks like they try to shift to the sociocracy model.

Coincidentally, I have a friend who worked for some years in a company that was trying to shift from a typical hierarchical structure to a co-op with a horizontal decision-making processes, using sociocracy. For them, and to my understanding, it was not going great. They actually kinda kept replicating the typically centralised structure for too long but this time using the “circles” deriving from sociocracy. That said, maybe by now they have managed to move on from this transitional phase, but I don’t know since my friend doesn’t work there anymore. That said, from the conversations we had, I got the understanding that there has been successful approaches in other coops, in the sense that they had achieved consent-based decision-making processes.

This could be a promising project. If anyone knows what is the decision-making processes within this community, could you share a link?

My knowledge is very limited in coding and since this is the first time I hear the term vibecoding, I don’t think I can answer your question just by reading the wiki you linked. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great you did link it!

So I thought of sharing one myself. Perhaps it could help you make up your mind on how to answer your question? I dunno, I suppose at least, it could be a good starting point, and I hope you totally enjoy reading it!

A Solarpunk Manifesto

You can find some relevant book titles in this audiobook community and download them from Anna’s Archive

I loved Braiding Sweetgrass and now can’t wait to check out the Moss one.

I don’t agree with this article, but I really appreciate the work of one historian mentioned at the end in the Reference section.

Fernand Braudel decided to take a look at history from a different point of view, especially in relation to time. Instead of talking about specific dates of big events and big names, he decided to look at the conditions of everyday life of common people (food, shelter, human interactions, work etc) who lived around the time that these big events happened, and draw conclusions taking these factors into consideration.

For example one of his takes on why capitalism was created in Europe and not Asia or the Americas, is related to dietary habits, cultivation and transportation methods of wheat, rice and corn respectively.

I’m not too sure of the english title of the book I’m talking about, cause I read it in french and the title was very different to the ones I find in english (La dynamique du capitalism).

How do you treat PTSD - Post Traumatic Stress Disorder- when there is no “post”. When you’re in a place like Palestine, where the trauma is ongoing and inter-generational.