Michel Bauwens

updates on p2p and commons developments; peer, commoner, husband, father, son; see our click 'notification' re shadowbanning.

[Michel Bauwens @mbauwens]

Please share in your networks if you can:

* A fundraising to maintain the existence of the P2P Foundation wiki

WE NEED YOUR HELP: DO NOT LET THE P2P FOUNDATION WIKI (https://t.co/69SUseC2op) DISAPPEAR AGAIN. !!!!

Dear friends,

Some of you may have noticed our wiki was not available for three weeks. I believe this wiki is an extremely important public resource, a unique record of the present transition towards a new form of human civilization. 

* We have collated, organized and synthesized more than 40,000 projects and concepts that are using decentralized, peer to peer, and commons-centric forms of social life. A lot of this material is not easily available on the open internet.

* We reached one billion views a decade ago and the wiki is not just widely used ‘directly’ anymore, but two million chatbots visit us every week:  the p2p/commons perspective is now integrated in the responses of the major AI research chatbots such as ChatGPT and Deepseek (just ask to add the ‘p2p wiki’ perspective to any of your searches).

* We bring a vital new perspective on social change, based on the real experiences of millions of people who are effectively changing their ways of life.

If you want to know how to organize productive communities, how to relate to non-human life and resources , and how to create a resilient and thriving life in harmony with the planet’s long term existence, this wiki could be of vital assistance.

We have been able to maintain this wiki since 2005, spending several hours a day of unpaid work. Since 2018, we have not received any support from NGO’s and philanthropic sources. So now, we need direct support from our users and the public.

Last month, we disappeared from the intern
et for three full weeks. We are back with the help of Jeff Emmett of the Crypto Commons Alliance.
With your financial help, I want to generate a basic income to protect my capacity to continue updating and maintaining the wiki in terms of content; and to compensate Jeff for his hosting and maintenance work.

In the immediate future, we aim for $6k to bridge a difficult period. Please assist us with this fundraising.

This is an urgent request for assistance.

How to donate:

This is a donation wallet for Ethereum: 0xAEE413a9E640Ce817E4aE024176fE8a4550104fD

This is a donation wallet for Bitcoin: bc1qxndzlxxssd2xjn8znq0p9000hpvmus49y6937s

This is a bank account in Thailand:
Kasikorn bank 279-2-82087-8SWIFT KASITHBK194 Chotana rd, Changphuk t, Muang a, ChiangmaiThailand 50300(Thai banks have no IBAN).

[Michel Bauwens @mbauwens]

* Seven years of work on holistic and true accounting, in France, by the COOP DES COMMUNS collective:

"Compter ce qui compte vraiment. Capitalisation de 7 ans de travaux de La Coop des Communs sur le modèle C.A.R.E.

RDV le 14 octobre prochain - Caisse des Dépôts, salle Grenelle, 15 quai Anatole France -75007 PARIS

https://t.co/i4MVnxRij0

Alors qu’elle est généralement considérée comme une technique neutre, la comptabilité est porteuse d’une certaine vision du monde dans laquelle, actuellement, les humains et la nature n’ont pas la place qui leur revient. Dans un environnement peu préparé à cette (r)évolution, le modèle de comptabilité socio-environnementale C.A.R.E. cherche à élaborer et mettre en œuvre un cadre de gestion et d’évaluation des résultats qui soit cohérent avec l’objet social et les missions de l’organisation.

Les tensions constatées par les membres de La Coop des Communs pour rendre compte de la richesse de leurs productions, créées par des communautés qui travaillent dans des logiques non marchandes ou à lucrativité limitée, montrer les nécessaires coûts qu'engendrent le respect de règles éthiques en matière sociale et environnementale, établir les comptes pluriannuels nécessaires à la redirection écologique et sociale qui ne soient pas centrés sur le seul maintien du capital financier au détriment de la préservation des capitaux humains et environnementaux – les ont conduits à s’engager fin 2018 dans une démarche d’appropriation du modèle C.A.R.E.

Actions de sensibilisation, accompagnement d’expérimentations centrées sur les capitaux humains, capitalisation des enseignements, conceptuels et pratiques : le bilan de nos travaux initie un commun de connaissances que La Coop des Communs souhaite faire vivre, avec d'autres commoners, d'autres expérimentateurs de C.A.R.E et des professionnels de la comptabilité.

Ces travaux ont été rendus possibles par la mobilisation de nombreux membres bénévoles de La Coop des Communs, au sein du groupe animé par Daniel Le Guillou, et grâce à l'appui de La Fondation de France."

[Michel Bauwens @mbauwens]

I find this so characteristic of the politics of our time. If you are on the left, migration and crime have to be invisible, 'move on nothing to see, these are fake issues'; and on the right, there is no climate change and no trillionaire techbros monopolizing public wealth, and doing anything about it is very bad and misguided. So either side is willfully blind to part of reality, and refuses integrative thinking.

Even more interesting, if the other side moves to finally seeing what they denied before, then obviously this is not a good thing, and they will be attacked for it, at least for the other side:

[Edwy Plenel @edwyplenel]

Canicule : sur Mediapart, inventaire exhaustif (et accablant) des décennies de déni climatique du RN. Le climatoscepticisme est une caractéristique de l’extrême droite. Autrement le déni de la réalité.
https://t.co/n876tALwrn

[Izabella Kaminska @izakaminska]

Not being funny @MarioNawfal but the below is exactly my @Telegraph column from June 17 replicated. But without any attribution. I wouldn't mind if I was riffing off someone myself, but this was quite a contrarian take at the time and I got a lot of grief for taking a different position. Comments like:

"The author is a journalist. Let us not forget that fact. Numerous energy experts, many of which have decades of experience in energy markets, differ with this journalist's perspective - and their explanations why should not be ignored"

https://t.co/kWbLdB3kkm

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is genuinely shocking, and says so much about our approach to China.

I decided to check for independent reviews of the English version Xi Jinping's latest book, published a year ago, to see what people had to say about it since I hadn't read it myself.

To my surprise, I couldn't find any: not a single thoughtful review about the book out there! Even on Amazon, check it for yourself (https://t.co/1LVlhACA53): the book has only 3 ratings, that's it.

No matter where you stand on China, you’ve got to admit that’s pretty crazy: the sitting president of the world's rising superpower publishes a 700-page book explaining exactly what he's doing and why, and we don’t even care to look.

If there ever was a fact that illustrates just how willfully ignorant we are about China, this is it.

All the more because we then go spew the usual clichés around how secretive and impenetrable the Chinese system is: the book is on Amazon for $21 for crying out loud!

Anyhow, this felt so wrong that I figured I'd fix it. I bought the book, read it attentively and wrote what I hope you'll agree is a thoughtful review of it.

The book contains genuinely surprising passages, such as Xi writing that oversight of the Communist Party by "the judiciary, the public, and the media" was not just something the Party must “readily accept,” but something that he framed as historically decisive - an essential component to "escaping the historical cycle of rise and fall" that has doomed every dynasty in China's history.

Other passage that I'm sure would surprise many: a common narrative out there is that China blames the West for the century of humiliation and is driven by revenge. Well, Xi explains that's not true at all: the century of humiliation was China's own mistake, originated in the Ming Dynasty's disastrous "policy of national seclusion" that "resulted in China missing out on the opportunities presented by the Industrial Revolution" and "led to China’s decline."

All in all, the book is remarkably self-reflective and thoughtful. For instance Xi recognizes that his drive for “full and rigorous internal governance” - including to rid the Party of corruption - risked "instill[ing] fear and apprehension, or intimidate members into inaction.” He emphasizes the need for pragmatism in this regard, codified in a framework called the “Three Distinctions” that separates honest mistakes - made while experimenting, reforming, or operating without precedent - from deliberate violations committed for personal gain.

And many other surprises still. I found it a genuinely fascinating read for anyone interested in how the Chinese system works and how Xi thinks - or anyone interested in governance, period, as so much of what he writes is pretty universally applicable.

This is the link to my review of the book, an article I titled "The Book the West Refuses to Read": https://t.co/DYowWEESOd

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

The largest foreign owner of US government debt is now a seller, and not by choice.

Japan is burning through its reserves to rescue a collapsing yen, and almost all of those reserves are American Treasuries. Saving its currency means selling ours.

The yen just touched its weakest in nearly 40 years, around 162 to the dollar. Defending it cost Japan a record 11.7 trillion yen, about 73 billion dollars, in a single month. That money came straight out of its foreign reserves, which fell 75.6 billion dollars, the steepest drop ever recorded, and US custody data shows foreign official holdings of Treasuries falling right alongside it. The dots connect themselves.

The cruel part is the loop underneath. The yen is weak mainly because US interest rates tower over Japan's. But selling Treasuries pushes US rates higher. So every dollar Tokyo spends defending the yen lifts the very American yields that are sinking the yen to begin with. The medicine is the poison.

Washington is watching closely. Japan holds 1.24 trillion dollars in US debt, more than any nation on earth, and the Treasury Secretary has already told Tokyo that turmoil in Japan's bond market could bleed into America's. A draft Japanese strategy this week put it bluntly: making real use of these reserves would mean selling US Treasuries.

For 40 years the arrangement was unspoken and reliable. Japan buys American debt and holds it, the patient creditor who never sells. That just broke. The buyer who was always supposed to be there has been forced to the other side of the trade, and it cannot stop without watching its own currency come apart.

Most folks are reading this as a yen story. It is a US bond story. The safest debt on earth just lost one of the steadiest buyers it ever had.

[Michel Bauwens @mbauwens]

More new items in the P2P Foundation wiki this week,

via https://t.co/6ZktrNiHTZ?

* Articles

Benjamin Life on What the Postmodern Moment Was For

Bernard Stiegler's Foreword to "Sauver le Monde" - (English Translation)

Daniel Schmachtenberger on the Three Civilizational Attractors and the Metacrisis

Global Theory of Intellectual Change

Henk Vandaele on the Work of Gustav Landauer and Michel Bauwens Compared

Mapping an Ecology of Integrative Approaches to Addressing the Metacrisis

Metatheory for the Twenty-First Century

Network Strategy for a Integrative Worldview

Time Currency, Reduced Work Time and Participatory Democracy

Toward a Unified Science of Spiritual Experience

[Michel Bauwens @mbauwens]

New in the P2P Foundation wiki this week,

via https://t.co/6ZktrNiHTZ?

* Topics

AI Public Option

China as a Training State

Civic Intelligence Infrastructure

Degrowth (Typology of)

Distributed and Localized Manufacturing for Territorial Resilience

Earth-Centered Governance

Integral Facticity / Integrative Metatheory /
Integrative Worldview

Monetary Architectures (Overview of)

Non-Violent Communication (critique of)

P2P Data Visualization Tools

Single Focus Fallacy

Software Obsolescence

Soul Studies

Visionary Realism

* Projects

Eudaimonia Institute

Metapattern Institute

Worldview Network Protocol

[Michel Bauwens @mbauwens]

@jvantill Ergens in Frankrijk. Ik kan je via email met de organisator verbinden!

[Michel Bauwens @mbauwens]

* Point Zéro lance le New Civilization Festival

https://t.co/TIGWvdzZVE?

"un événement inédit qui réunira citoyens, artistes, chercheurs, entrepreneurs, accompagnants et bâtisseurs de nouveaux futurs.

Notre conviction est simple : les sept prochaines années seront déterminantes pour la trajectoire de notre civilisation. Elles peuvent mener à une catastrophe comme à une véritable transfiguration collective.

Le New Civilization Festival a été imaginé comme un espace de convergence destiné à accélérer cette seconde option, en se concentrant sur la façon de faire émerger des récits qui ne soient plus bloqués dans une polarité de conscience (masculin/féminin, individuel/collectif, nature/technologie, rationalité/émotion, etc.) mais les intègrent toutes."

[Balthazar Grimm @BalthazarGrimm]

@mehdirhasan You set the precedent 🤷🏻‍♂️

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

I never wanna hear a word about free speech from the GOP ever again.

[Michel Bauwens @mbauwens]

A meditation on the work of Peter Koening on Soulful Organizations and Individuals, ie. those that are connected to their 'Source' (Principles):

https://t.co/2zwIJ2SlR0

[Michel Bauwens @mbauwens]

* Elementary Eras Throughout History, inspired by the Chinese system of elements, applied to historical cycles:

https://t.co/wgWNouCYiM?

[Michel Bauwens @mbauwens]

According to this blog, we have entered the "Air Era", and it will last 200 years. It requires a new type of adaptive human being, and this is the how-to guide:

https://t.co/385YiFL91Q

"Navigating the Air Era is not a sprint; it is a marathon lasting two centuries. The Air Matrix is neither utopia nor dystopia: it is a playing field with new rules. Those who thrive will be those who have understood that:"

[Michel Bauwens @mbauwens]

* On the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the start of Canada's infamous unmarked graves social panic.

https://t.co/7xDHHYTYTF

"As many of you will know, that was the lengthy hysteria that followed false reports that the bodies of two hundred and fifteen Indigenous children had supposedly been found on the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia.

It's taken years for Canadian media outlets such as the CBC and Globe and Mail to finally admit that many journalists got taken in by a fake story, and in the interim, much of the country more or less fell to pieces."

[Michel Bauwens @mbauwens]

* The State of Cosmo-Local Mindful Food Markets in Asia

https://t.co/2CXYZuvK4l

Dev Lewis writes:

"This is where Michel Bauwens' framing of cosmo-localism felt applicable for what I was sensing in the room. The principle is simple: what is light should be global, and what is heavy should be local, as much as possible. The code, the culture, the shared knowledge — these become a global commons, designed and improved together. The food itself stays local, grown and eaten in its own place and context. Connect the islands this way and you get an archipelago: a translocal network where experiments, ideas, and trust-models can travel, carried on community-owned, open-source infrastructure rather than the extractive, "enshittification" logic of today's digital platforms.

Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS) and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) are forms of this, institution like relationship-based models of trust and cooperation, born in one place, now shared and adapted by food communities around the world, with no need for government or corporate gatekeepers. In Chiang Mai I recently joined a CSA run by the social enterprise Farm to Truck and got to experience this myself.The work that the World Farmers Markets Coalition and Mindful Markets are doing is the federation layer: helping local markets share what works across borders.

Cosmo-Localism in its truest form is an alternative civilisation order, beyond the binary of market (capitalism) and state. With new types of institutions that are called “Magisteria of the Commons”

“Inter-locking sets of translocal institutions that can protect human and “human-nature” institutions and that have major democratic input from the involved citizens.”

Cosmo-Local is also inspired by Karl Polyani’s thinking but this is not the place to dig too deep there. While there is much theoretical promise, Cosmo-localism is hard, and there is a reason why translation from theory to practise so far has been limited.

Food-producing communities are intrinsically local. They work with the land, in their own language and customs, and often lack the resources or technical or linguistic fluency to engage at the global level. As one participant quietly admitted to me, these spaces can also be socially conservative, holding tight to traditional norms, not always open to borderless, fluid thinking. And the gap cuts both ways: the cosmo-fluent digital world is just as lost in the local as the local is in the global.

So cosmo-local Bazaar of markets will need translators — people genuinely capable of being local and global at once, able to bridge these two worlds without betraying either. That, I think, is the path Light Forest World is pointing toward. As Richard put it at the forum, the alliance that finally tips the scales might be an unlikely one: between the urban middle class and the farmers who feed them. Perhaps that will also come in the form of the less rooted, globally fluid and the grounded food producers.

As I end this note, to bring it back to the practical here and now I asked several of the speakers for one recommendation for anyone to get reconnected to food, and the most common thread was: cook. Cooking can be the start of the journey and I can attest that it has been the case for me too."

[Michel Bauwens @mbauwens]

The status of regenerative food markets in Asia:

https://t.co/2CXYZuvK4l

Dev Lewis writes;

"In Asia, South Korea and Japan appear to the beacon for the regenerative food and organic movement, lead by Hansalim as a cooperative with a million members and Japan’s Seikatsu Club, a federation of 32 cooperatives with 350,000 members. We heard some promising stories from communities in South India and Myanmar, as well as learned about efforts from the Nonthaburi Food Council, a cross-sector collaboration to promote access to healthy food, which was also co-created by the organisers and funders of Mindful Markets. There is also a Food Spirit Project, with funding from Thai government, towards more spiritual reconnection with food, and I got to meet some artists and creatives exploring reconnection through music and dance."

[Michel Bauwens @mbauwens]

From @devlewis18 :

* A Republic of Mindful Markets and Cosmo-Local Bazaars

https://t.co/lQILSTYBsW

Notes and reflections from the Mindful Markets Bangkok Forum for local food system organisers from Asia

[Michel Bauwens @mbauwens]

An excerpt on relational markets:

https://t.co/2CXYZuvK4l

Dev Lewis writes:

The market as catalyst (conscious, regenerative, relational space).

Markets can also serve as this crucible, a connective tissue, a watering hole, that enlivens and brings us into relationship with food and farmers. Far more than just a place for transactions.

When we are in relationship with our food producers, a bi-directional flow of learning and feedback loops become possible.

We learn more about the food (the conditions it takes to grow, ways to cook and eat it, etc.). We can start to ask questions, especially about local varieties that might be specific where we live. Trust starts to form not via certificates but a living relationship. Achala Samaradivakara (Co-founder of Good Market in Sri Lanka) called this an example of a conscious food system.

Farmers learn more about us, our preferences, our habits. They grow for us. More of the money we spent on food also goes directly to them rather than captured by the intermediaries. They live happier and more sustainable lives doing the work we need them to do for our sustenance. Our parents and grandparents knew it and so did all our ancestors. We just need to remember.

There is also a human element that is important but missed out in our modern calculations: the human core.

Farming is lonely work and the full value of their work is never visible. Seeing the buyer’s joy and experience, it becomes a form of sustenance that keeps them going through the unpredictability and difficulty of farming. When they know the people buying their food, it becomes fuel that may inspire them to go the extra mile to produce more nourishing food.

I believe all of this together becomes a part of the idea of reciprocity that indigenous worldviews point to. Where food is viewed not as commodity but a gift, as Robin Wall Kimmerer writes.

It also reminds me of a Buddhist monk who once told me how it was important for her to know who cooks and grows the food she eats. Because when we eat food, we also consume their emotions and energy.

These are all the invisible ingredients that get invisibilised by the modern economic system that values output, low cost, high yield. They don’t make it into labels or health data trackers.

In a market of relationships it is less easy to hide the true cost."

[Michel Bauwens @mbauwens]

A cogent critique of 'non-violent communication', in French:

https://t.co/6lyzZPoCuX