Should Corporations Rule the World?
For most of human history, the idea that a corporation could become more powerful than a government would have sounded absurd. A corporation was supposed to be…
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The Community Memeplex
Much of my work is often described as community building, time co-ops, social capital, trust economies, mutual aid, mutual support, human capital, or social infrastructure. And those…
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Interesting Take on Dunbar’s Number
If you haven’t yet heard of Dunbar’s Number, here is a quick take from an article published in Cracked 18 years ago. Old but still relevant. David Wong’s…
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Community is the Foundation
Community is not a byproduct of society. It’s the foundation upon which society is built. And we seem to have gotten that backwards lately. It seems like…
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Banksy and Truman: “This is for you.”
Don’t you think there’s something different about art that’s given away? I do. And I’ve been working on this idea for years. It ended in a project…
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It’s More than Just “Capacity”
A lot of modern ideology assumes humans are infinitely interchangeable units with equal ability to navigate complexity independently. But lived reality says otherwise. People vary tremendously in…
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The Indie Web, The Boring Web, Web Rings
One thought that struck me while crafting this piece: the history of the internet mirrors a lot of the patterns that I write about in communities. The early…
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“The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow
At its core, this book is an argument that most of what modern people assume about human history is either oversimplified… or outright wrong. The standard story…
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Frameworks for a Better Theory of Change
The Problem Statement Modern systems optimized for production and consumption have systematically dismantled the social infrastructure (trust, reciprocity, belonging, mutual obligation) that once made communities strong. And…
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Money Is Not Value; a Position Paper
Reclaiming Human and Social Capital as the Foundation of Economic Life A Position Paper by River Stephens Executive Summary Modern society has become extraordinarily skilled at measuring…