Creator of Montessori Schools

Suspension of disbelief, sometimes called willing suspension of disbelief, is an intentional avoidance of critical thinking or logic in examining something surreal, such as a work of speculative fiction, in order to believe it for the sake of enjoyment.[1] Aristotle first explored the idea of such a concept as it relates to the principles of theater; the audience ignores the unreality of fiction in order to experience catharsis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief

Mmhmm turns your boring Zoom call into a Weekend Update-style TV show. (more)

Why Hollywood is really freaking out over Donald Trump: because this is the first cultural victory the right has scored since Reagan stumbled into one in the ’80s. (more)

Fiat money is a currency established as money, often by government regulation, but that has no intrinsic value. Fiat money does not have use value, and has value only because a government maintains its value, or because parties engaging in exchange agree on its value.[1] It was introduced as an alternative to commodity money and representative money. Representative money is similar to fiat money, but it represents a claim on a commodity (which can be redeemed to a greater or lesser extent).[2][3][a] Government issued banknotes were first used in 11th century China. Since then, they have been used by various countries, usually concurrently with commodity currencies. Fiat money started to predominate in the 20th century. Since the decoupling of the US dollar from the gold standard by Richard Nixon in 1971, a system of national fiat currencies has been used globally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money

Jerry Michalski's TheBrain space/instance https://www.jerrysbrain.com/

a person's internal Model of the universe (more)

Toby Shorin: The Desire for Full Automation. While relational agency is crucial to understand, as a species we obviously cannot just return to animism, because we no longer have the naïvety of our historical youth. We do not exist in an optionless world. Our job in the coming centuries is to reconcile this view with our scientism and humanism. (more)

Vitaly Dmitriyevich "Vitalik" Buterin (Russian: Виталий Дмитриевич Бутерин; born January 31, 1994) is a Russian-Canadian programmer and writer primarily known as a co-founder of Ethereum and as a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalik_Buterin

P2P Foundation on Fully Automated Green Communism. Aaron Bastani has written a fantastic, concise analysis of the current political economy vis a vis environmental realities. While I agree that we need attractive visions of the future (see our recent Commons Transition Primer for ours) and that, yes, States and unions are key components for any realist, short-term change, I found the article’s undertones to be too growth-oriented and vanguardist – the Commons or community-led change are sadly absent. Furthermore, populism assumes a dumbed down electorate, rather than an enabled, politicised one. (more)

Almost all markets in history have been based on rules for allocating scarce resources (e.g. food, land, energy). (more)

aka UBI, see Basic Income, Guaranteed Annual Income

It's tempting to think you can take the SmallWorld approach to Route Around BigWorld. But reality tends to intrude upon your TAZ. Peruchi was never arrested. He was never even charged. But his money was gone, under the absurd premise that property can be guilty of a crime, even if its owner isn't. The police department deposited Peruchi's money into its own operations budget, as it was permitted to do under Arkansas' drug forfeiture laws. Peruchi was told that if he tried to fight the county, his case would be turned over to the Drug Enforcement Administration. "Try fighting the feds," he was told. Even if Peruchi had won in court, his legal costs would likely have amounted to more than the $19,000 he was fighting for, and it's improbable that he would have been reimbursed for his legal fees. Peruchi is but one of many similarly outrageous stories told the new book Mugged By The State, by Randall Fitzgerald... Fitzgerald's ax grinds against power in general. It isn't partisan. His examples come from programs and policies embraced by both Republicans and Democrats. He documents outrageous abuses carried out in the name of the War On Drugs, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the EEOC, the EPA, and cases were city and state governments have seized land from ordinary people under Eminent Domain, only to hand it over to politically potent corporations and influential businessmen.

Genius (formerly Rap Genius) is an online knowledge base. The site allows users to provide annotations and interpretation of song lyrics, news stories, primary source documents, poetry, and other forms of text. Launching in 2009 with a focus on Rap Music, the site expanded in 2014 to cover other forms of media and a platform for embedding annotations into other websites, such as Pop, Literature and R&B. That same year, an iPhone app was released. To reflect these new goals, the site re-launched as simply Genius in July 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius_(website) (more)

Do We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism? What happens after artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics displace huge swathes of routine labor? According to Aaron Bastani, a London-based researcher, the answer would appear to be “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”. Strange as it may seem, Bastani believes that automation is driving capitalist societies headlong into a post-capitalist utopia: Think Star Trek or Ian Banks’ Culture Series. (more)

Give Us Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Imagine a life in which all your basic needs were met (more)

Artificial Intelligence, & Fully Automated Luxury Capitalism. People who airily dismiss fears about medium-term technological unemployment are committing the Reverse Luddite Fallacy. (more)

Brian Merchant on Fully automated luxury communism. Bastani and fellow luxury communists believe that this era of rapid change is an opportunity to realise a post-work society, where machines do the heavy lifting not for profit but for the people. (more)

Luke Coughlan: Could fully automated luxury communism ever work? Do we continue to allow technological innovation to be directed towards profit and social control? Or do we instead re-route towards emancipation? (more)

Taoism (/ˈtaʊ-/), or Daoism (/ˈdaʊɪzəm/, /ˈdaʊ-/), is a philosophical tradition of Chinese origin which emphasises living in harmony with the Tao (Chinese: 道; pinyin: Dào; lit.: 'the Way', also romanised as Dao). The Tao is a fundamental idea in most Chinese philosophical schools; in Taoism, however, it denotes the principle that is the source, pattern and substance of everything that exists.[2][3] Taoism differs from Confucianism by not emphasising rigid rituals and social order, but is similar in the sense that it is a teaching about the various disciplines for achieving "perfection" by becoming one with the unplanned rhythms of the universe called "the way" or "tao".[2][4] Taoist ethics vary depending on the particular school, but in general tend to emphasise wu wei (action without intention), "naturalness", simplicity, spontaneity, and the Three Treasures: 慈 "compassion", 儉 "frugality", and 不敢為天下先 "humility". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taoism