We Can’t Build Communities: You’ll See Why.
It’s taken a long time but I’m beginning to think that communities aren’t built. Organizations are built. But communities.. they emerge. That may seem like a small…
Social and Self-Help
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Context Collapse: Why We’re Losing the Story Behind the Story
One of the greatest challenges of our time isn’t misinformation, per se. It’s missing information. More specifically, it’s missing context. Context collapse is what happens when information…
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Negative Income Tax and Social Infrastructure: Why Precarity Needs Both
A negative income tax alone can’t solve precarity, because precarity is multidimensional. People can have identical incomes and radically different levels of security depending on whether they…
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An Academic Overview of the Bottom-up Social Infrastructure Framework
I asked RiverGPT to explain my framework to a PhD economist. Here’s the response: If I were speaking to a PhD economist, I would present River’s work…
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Bottom-Up Social Infrastructure
Definition: Bottom-Up Social Infrastructure is the network of relationships, trust, participation, and shared intention that enables communities to solve problems together without relying exclusively on top-down institutions.…
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On the Value of Attention
I’ve written before that money isn’t value. Money is a claim on value. The two are related, but they’re not the same thing. We often confuse the…
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A Closer Look at Precarity
This article (an important read) argues that precarity is much more than unstable employment. It’s a way of understanding how insecurity is produced, experienced, and distributed throughout…
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The New Infrastructure for a New World
The last few weeks in our community resource center, we’ve run up against the stark reality of our days. Now, for this to make sense, you have…
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Seashell Ear Thimbles
One of the most prophetic images in Fahrenheit 451 isn’t the book burning, though that’s at the top of the list; It’s the seashell ear thimbles. Bradbury…
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Malthus Wasn’t Really Writing About Population
Thomas Malthus is remembered as the man who believed there were simply too many people. That’s the shorthand version anyway. I think his actual idea was more…