Link Loving 02.12.12

• Gemma Bone reviews ‘Debt: The First 5000 Years’ by David Graebers and it sounds utterly fascinating. Read it.
• Three trending innovations in mobilisation from Greenpeace and its allies. Some great stories and campaigns. Michael Silbermann, Marianne Manilov and Bron York.
• Two Welsh tax-justice campaigners do an awesome action.
• Vicki Arroyo’s TED talk – Let’s prepare for our new climate. Pretty terrifying.
• Non-profits have a charter to be innovators. Seth Godin.

Awesome Jeremy Gilbert Quotes

On democracy

“Our contemporary polities are for the most part no longer ‘democracies’ in even the most attenuated sense, but ‘post-democracies’, wherein a set of consultative, representative and legislative institutions inherited from the moment of the mid-twentieth century persist with ever-decreasing efficacy: a Fordist institutional framework increasingly unable to gain any purchase on a post-Fordist world.”

On personal freedoms and market relations

“So the shift from the culture of mid-twentieth century capitalism to 21st century capitalism accompanies a move away from a highly regulated, conformist, collectivist, form of social life which, for all of its oppressively homogenising elements, was nonetheless relatively amenable to intervention by political institutions which were, comparatively speaking, relatively sensitive and accountable to the needs and desires of the governed. In its place emerges a system which tolerates far higher levels of diversity and personal freedom, so long as that freedom is expressed primarily through private consumption and as long as its expression does not take the form of substantial public claims. We move from a situation in which the price of democracy is the suppression of individual desires (or rather, the demand that desires themselves conform to a pre-determined norm), to one in which the price of personal freedom is the demand that all social life operate according to the logic of market relations, and in which any form of effective democracy seems impossible.”

Jeremy Gilbert

Science Girl Is Awesome

Performance Lecture: The Price of Everything

This is nice work in progress. Make sure to watch to the end.

Link Loving 30.11.12

• Dead matter has no goals of its own, yet life is constantly striving. That makes it a deep puzzle for physics. Vlatko Vedral.
• The Otesha Project UK is hiring a Green Jobs Director.
• The takeover of environmentalism by the neo-liberals is not a paradigm but a confidence trick. Paul Evans.

Link Loving 29.11.12

• Behavioural change or societal change? The aspiration is for the UK to be a low carbon society not 60 million low carbon individuals. Tim Chatterton.
• Thoughts on campaigning and where the dodo got it wrong. Jim Coe.
• How I learned to stop worrying and love discussing race. Jay Smooth.

How The Financial System Needs To Change – Part 1 – Tax Havens

The New Economics Foundation is fast becoming one of my favourite organisations. This new series of videos investigates different areas of the financial system – each one introducing a major challenge that needs urgent reform. The first one focuses on tax havens – enjoy!

Link Loving 28.11.12

• The end of violent, simplistic, macho masculinity. Thomas Page Mcbee.

Beyond The Small Life: A Letter To Young People

This just rocked my world. Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a professor at the Law School and I’m joining a small group of students to have dinner with him tomorrow. Check this out!

Link Loving 27.11.12

• It is wonderful to see former UK Youth Climate Coalition leaders go on to do super inspiring work. Gemma Bone is doing a PhD exploring how we can make the financial system work in service of people and planet. She’s now blogging about what she’s learning – well worth following.
• The new governor of the Bank of England will, despite his potentially exciting credentials, be more of the same. Ann Pettifor.
• Four questions worth answering. Seth Godin.
• Really inspiring stuff from Laura Billings and Lambeth Council.