Reviews and Comments

"This is our Inconvenient Truth moment. Not only have infinite possibilities imploded into platform realism, but we also face the existentially confronting horizon of finitude. Not of TCP-IP or packet switching. Extinction Internet marks the end of an epoch of collective imagination that in many ways demonstrated how alternative vertical and horizontal technological arrangements were possible. Not one stack but many plateaux."

"The countries of the Global North must not continue to use enormous amounts of energy to foster even more economic growth. As we have seen, increasing economic growth past the current level is hardly guaranteed to improve the level of happiness and well-being of the people living in those countries.

But if the same resources and energy were used in the Global South instead, the happiness and well-being of the people there would increase exponentially. And if this is true, doesn't it follow that we should set aside a part of the worldwide “carbon budget” (the amount of carbon dioxide emissions the world can still safely allow) for them?"

"Any domain of nature may yield the virtual. By abstracting from nature, hacking produces the possibility of another nature, a second nature, (...) The nature of any and every domain may be hacked. It is in the nature of hacking to discover freely, to invent freely, to create and produce freely." #75

"To hack is to abstract. To abstract is to produce the plane upon which different things may enter into relation. (...) Differentiation of functioning components arranged on a plane with a shared goal is the hacker achievement, whether in the technical, cultural, political, sexual or scientific realm." #83

"We need to move from competitive ideation, trying to push our individual ideas, to collective ideation, collaborative ideation. It isn’t about having the number one best idea, but having ideas that come from, and work for, more people."

The Jevons Paradox:

"A television might use less energy than before, but the increase in demand from people purchasing more and larger televisions leads to an increase in the overall amount of electricity consumed by televisions anyway. (...) No matter how much apparent relative decoupling might occur due to the increased efficiency of new technologies, any such effect will end up being erased by the boomerang effect of increased consumption, rendering the whole effort meaningless."

”As Wallerstein saw it, capitalism relies on an opposition between “core” and “periphery.” Cheap labor is extracted from the periphery known as the Globa South, and the core raises its profits by driving down the price of the goods produced by that labor. This unequal exchange of labor power is what brings about the overdevelopment of developed countries and the underdevelopment of developing ones, according to Wallerstein."

“A momentous transformation in the Western philosophical tradition took place when ‘the good life’ was no longer viewed as the life of doing ‘just and noble deeds,’ as it was for Aristotle, or as the life of Christian virtue and devotion, as it was for St. Augustine, but rather, when the good life became defined as the life of individual satisfaction and consumption.” --- Seyla Benhabib

"Social movements right now are also fractal, practicing at a small scale what we most want to see at the universal level. No more growth or scaling up before actually learning through experience."

"organize with the perspective that there is wisdom and experience and amazing story in the communities we love, and instead of starting up new ideas/organizations all the time, we would want to listen, support, collaborate, merge, and grow through fusion, not competition."

"evil flows where it flows. Through gaps and loopholes and human beings. Indifferent to legislation and policies. Nothing halts it, except, sometimes, a sacrifice."

"Patriarchy is just like racism, a glutton for power it won’t share, for sharing power means loss of power to them, a form of weakness—if we give them space, where will we sit? What will we do? Who are we, then? Fear, the most poisonous animal that stands between them and enlightenment."

"Coöperism does not favor growth at all costs; it embraces a more holistic definition of growth that takes sustainability and the environment into account. There is room within coöperism for healthy debate on the question, though it leans toward location-specific analysis. Rather than focusing on GDP, it focuses on GPS. What might best fit one wealthy industrialized country may not be appropriate for another less privileged country..."

"We’re not only losing the power of our bodies, we’re losing the privacy our minds. What will be taken next for the sake of safety? This microchip protects our city, but it’s the husbands’, the city’s, the government’s tool to get inside us. My husband has the upper hand in our marriage, because I’m the one with a criminal body."

"A political theory of coöperism seeks, first, to extend existing forms of cooperation to other dimensions of our lives, but second, and perhaps more important, to concentrate cooperation. (...) Coöperism privileges and promotes those forms of cooperation that are most beneficial and combines them to create an integrated network of cooperation."

"Where the capitalist class sees education as a means to an end, the vectoralist class sees it as an end in itself. It sees opportunities to make education a profitable industry in its own right, based on securing of intellectual property as a form of private property. It seeks to privatize knowledge as a resource, just as it privatizes science and culture, in order to guarantee the scarcity and their value. To the vectoralists, education is more “content” for commodification as “communication.”" #066