After reading the Intro and first chapter a few comments. On p. 6 he discusses how monopolies intentionally thwart competition and innovation so as to maintain their stranglehold. But he claims entrepreneurs find a way around it and end up forcing competition with their better tech and price reductions. Yet he discusses on pp. 7-9 Larry Summers 2001 paper, wherein Summers acknowledges the emerging information economy was indeed moving to near marginal cost. Summers though didn't propose something like Rifkin but instead recommended "short-term natural monopolies" (8).

Recall Summers was Obama's pick for Director of the National Economic Council. His policy suggestions were well in line with the earlier promotion of "natural monopolies," and his resume attests. And we're seeing exactly this economic philosophy at play with the FCC Chairman Wheeler's proposed pay-to-play rules, where the ISP monopolies will destroy internet neutrality. Recall that Wheeler was another Obama pick, and was a former, and will return to being, a cable and wireless lobbyist. While Obama claims to back income equality and net neutrality he appoints the likes of Summers and Wheeler who make no bones about their support of monopolies. And without net neutrality good bye to Rifkin's entire plan, which requires it to succeed.

If you haven't yet, please take action to preserve it. Here's one place and you can find several others if you but look.

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This is interesting: Kickstarter for a New Civilization.

Solar is cheaper than the grid in 42 of the 50 largest US cities. This is so according to a new report by the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center, backed by the SunShot Initiative. This is in part due to a "rapid decline in the hardware costs for solar energy, which has made the technology much more accessible in all parts of the country," as well as "policies such as the federal Investment Tax Credit, state renewable portfolio standards, net metering and value-of-solar tariffs." It's amazing what we the people can accomplish when we set our minds  (i.e. ecological consciousness) to it.

God is also going solar: 

http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/02/10/apple-to-build-1300-acre-...

Smart cookie she is:)

Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation posted this link in his FB P2P group. The name of the article is "The new Greek government endorses Commons-based peer production solutions." The new Greek Deputy Prime Minister literally said so. Who knew that a leader in the emerging Commons on a national scale would be Greece? I guess this is what happens when a country is pushed so far into a capitalist paradigm that fucks over most of its citizens. When will the US get the message?

That's encouraging news. Putting it into Peter Pogany's (and Gebser's) frame, we could say that Greece experienced a deep enough crisis - coming to see on an experiential level the global capitalist model currently in operation is no longer working.  This is what it took for them to be open to different arrangements.  As Drakasakis is quoted in the article, "We live, then, not only in an historic era characterized by the crisis and the collapse of obsolete models, but we live a crisis that will eventually spawn new models and new social organization models, as was done in the past." 

And here's what Pogany wrote in 2013

"The current world order cannot deliver long-term sustainability on a planetary scale. By design, it is incapable of recognizing humanity’s thermodynamic reality. A new form of global self-organization is needed and it is probably waiting in the wings...    

What does all this have to do with Gebser? Wait, we’re getting there!

According to him, each consciousness structure coincided with distinctive socioeconomic conditions: The archaic, with primitive hunting, fishing, and gathering; the magical, with more advanced versions of the same activities within increasingly complex social schemes centering on the horde; the mythical, which was characterized by agriculture; the mental by industry coming to dominance.

The collision between our civilization and its ecological constraints, along with a likely historic crisis of epic proportions, may be regarded as the struggle of integral-arational consciousness (Gebser’s “fifth structure”) to deprive overblown rationality (the deficient phase of mental consciousness) from its current preeminence.

What will the parameters of the new global system be? Regardless of how correctly or incorrectly one may characterize it, any consistent attempt to find an answer must conclude that a radically new social, economic, and political organization will be needed. The precondition of saving the world from itself is a mutation of the average individual consciousness. It will favor cooperation over competition; acquiescence over indifference; responsible sociability over isolation; integrative open-mindedness over stubborn, perspectival dogmatism, altruism over extrasomatic hedonism."  

When will the US get the message? Hopefully sooner rather than later, but the evidence seems to suggest it won't happen until we experience a much deeper crisis. 

This could also be described as the beginning of Rifkin's "Empathic Civilization."  Have any of you read that book? I have it checked out from the library, but it's quite long, and I'm not going to have time to do more than skimming, and hopefully at least one chapter all the way through.

Yes, TEC was the first Rifkin book I read. I and Balder commented on it a number of times in the Rifkin thread, particularly the earlier pages.

David Bollier gave a great lecture summarizing his own history and making a good case for the Commons approach and "the unacknowledged power of cooperation."  To Make Hope Possible Rather than Despair Convincing Transcript here

http://bollier.org/blog/make-hope-possible-rather-despair-convincing

From Rifkin's FB page":

"The Third Industrial Revolution landed in the Amazon. The indigenous people don't need any oil. They need light at night. And thanks to the TIR LED lantern they can turn the morning sun into light at night. And soon they will be able to pay for it with their own work, through a Peruvian LETS (Local Exchange Trading System),t he Soledo, that will transfer the value of their local handcratf objects to the PV powered lamp. This is how the Zero Marginal cost economy is spreading around the world.
The human work and skills create social capital and welfare for the human community rather than financial capital for a few. Praise to the Digital Natives project in the Peruvian Amazon."

The Next System Project. See their about page here. Signatories include Gar Alperovitz, Robert Reich, Jeffrey Sachs, Bill McKibben, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader and many more. From the main link:

"The Next System Project is an ambitious multi-year initiative aimed at thinking boldly about what is required to deal with the systemic challenges the United States faces now and in coming decades. Responding to real hunger for a new way forward, and building on innovative thinking and practical experience with new economic institutions and approaches being developed in communities across the country and around the world, the goal is to put the central idea of system change, and that there can be a 'next system,' on the map.

"Working with a broad group of researchers, theorists and activists, we seek to launch a national debate on the nature of “the next system” using the best research, understanding and strategic thinking, on the one hand, and on-the-ground organizing and development experience, on the other, to refine and publicize comprehensive alternative political-economic system models that are different in fundamental ways from the failed systems of the past and capable of delivering superior social, economic and ecological outcomes.

"By defining issues systemically, we believe we can begin to move the political conversation beyond current limits with the aim of catalyzing a substantive debate about the need for a radically different system and how we might go about its construction. Despite the scale of the difficulties, a cautious and paradoxical optimism is warranted. There are real alternatives. Arising from the unforgiving logic of dead ends, the steadily building array of promising new proposals and alternative institutions and experiments, together with an explosion of ideas and new activism, offer a powerful basis for hope."

Yes, I've been reading articles about this over the last few days as well.  The co-chairs of this project, Gar Alperovitz and Gus Speth are respected names, though I haven't delved very far into their work. Alperovitz's book "What Then Shall We Do? Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution" has been on the radar, but I haven't read it.

Skimming through one of their initial reports, I am encouraged to see references to the original Limits to Growth report (proven to hold up after 40 years), Schumacher's Small is Beautiful, David Korten's Agenda for a New Economy, the de-growth movement, Richard Heinberg, Herman Daly, Tim Jackson, David Orr, etc. and the overall general emphasis on a systems model.

Here are some key areas in need of development from the report:

Worker Ownership and Self-Management; Localism; Reinvigorated Social Democracy; Participatory Economic Planning; “Beyond Growth” Ecological Economies; Socialism and Reclaimed Public Ownership; Bioregionalism; African American Cooperative and Related Strategies; Community-Based System-Changing Ownership Solutions.

From The Next System video: "We're compelled to search for alternatives, not just analytically, but in how we live, in what we do, how we organize our daily lives" (2:30).

3-D printed food.

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What paths lie ahead for religion and spirituality in the 21st Century? How might the insights of modernity and post-modernity impact and inform humanity's ancient wisdom traditions? How are we to enact, together, new spiritual visions – independently, or within our respective traditions – that can respond adequately to the challenges of our times?

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