[–] 4 points 6 months ago

Yes. Every manager has responsibilities, because when shit goes south the meeting in the corner office wants to know who to blame, or even in less punitive cultures, where mistakes were made — where the opportunities to learn are. Corporations mask people from most personal criminal liability, but not all of it.

Allowing people to avoid responsibility by pinning it on a machine would be a big mistake.

Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction is still a solid read on this stuff.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago*

    If you think of solarpunk as a future utopia that could (or could have) existed, that sounds about right.

    If you think of it as attitudes/ways of life people can and do hold and act on, right now and whenever, whether we are pre-, post-, or during apocalypse, then its heft becomes clearer. For me the centers are the centering of and working cooperatively with life (including us human beans), the kind of social awareness and care that tends to go along with that, and appropriate tech (generally seeking/preferencing simplest thing that could work, most local, understandable & repairable. but not to the point of shooting ourselves in the foot).

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Hard to get a solid sense with a lot of projects, until you meet the actual people involved and get a clearer sense of where their focus and values are, and how well they've worked out the things they're talking about. Also, smart contracts ≠ cryptocurrency, though it's an understandably unsavory association. :-)

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    Right?

    Learning how to leave things alone, in our ecosystems as well as our built and social systems, is invaluable. Being able to just be with such things, observe, see how things develop on their own, how some wounds heal naturally and others do not. And, the results of that kind of learning in my experience include plenty of callings, ways we can and do participate actively to make life more wonderful.

    In general, so much human activity is so frenzied and disconnected, that "Just do less" seems like generally applicable advice but it's more like one-sided advice which is good on average given our current society, but obviously is not on point 100% of the time.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago*

    I'm with that the question of scale is very, very important. [edit: LOL, forgot I'd already mentioned it!] Graeber & Wengrow (Dawn of Everything) pulled together a bunch of research on there being plenty of past, larger societies which did not yield self-/other-destructive habits. But we certainly have a lot to learn about living together, especially in the large groups/networks/etc. we now have. Participedia is a good source for things in that direction. Mini-publics, citizen assemblies, sortition, a variety of good facilitation methods, online tools such as Pol.is, are all ideas/areas that explore how to do better at this. Healthy Democracy is one of the larger organizations working on related stuff in the USA, a smaller one I'm involved with is https://www.co-intelligence.institute/

    Their Wise Democracy deck: https://www.wd-pl.com/

    Deck about group patterns: https://groupworksdeck.org/

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    any large group we make is deadly

    This is basically our challenge, finding ways to organize large numbers of ourselves in ways that are far less exploitative of other humans, and other life, than the systems we have going now. Graeber & Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything suggests it's not quite as hopeless as many believe.

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    Prompted by a post from @krishnanrohit: "I'm once again registering my annoyance at the fact that EVERY SINGLE NATURE DOCUMENTARY talks about how humans suck. Literally every single one. I am so tired of explaining to my 7yo son that no humans are not destroying everything. That he can be optimistic. It's obscene."

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