Abundant Systems

Over time, plenitude is a process in which more and more goods and services are provided to more and more people, as technologies advance and costs come down to grant new free ‘indulgences’ every year.

Competition is an outdated concept. Instead of trying to ensure you win, try to help everyone win. There's plenty to go around. Refusing to share is just holding you back.

The new economy isn't zero-sum. It's time to realize that and start approaching things differently.

Kindness isn’t always easy or obvious, because the urgent race to the bottom, to easily measured metrics and to scarcity, can distract us. But bending the arc toward justice, toward dignity and toward connection is our best way forward.

If a commons is being managed successfully, individuals feel like they're getting back more than they're putting in, that the thing is more than the sum of its parts, that running it together means we have something more powerful than any of us could on our own.

H]uman beings need all the relatives they can get–as possible donors or receivers not necessarily of love, but of common decency.

. . .

When we were children in Indianapolis, Indiana, it appeared that we would always have an extended family of genuine relatives there. Our parents and grandparents, after all, had grown up there with shoals of siblings

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“The best way to be superhuman is to do things that you love with other people who love them, too.” - Cory Doctorow, Walkaway

When a Collective joins a Fiscal Host, they get a clear service: we'll hold your money, you don't have to go get a bank account and form your own legal entity, we're going to take care of some really annoying paperwork stuff for you, and we'll give you this nice online tool that lets you share your budget transparently and pay your expenses. On the... See more

But you can’t optimize systems in a context that’s changing, especially if it’s changing in unpredictable ways. Removing inefficiencies when circumstances are as anticipated means that there isn’t much slack in the system to respond when the unanticipated happens. Optimization is intrinsically brittle , because it’s about closely matching the outpu

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And more than anything, it feels particularly, uncomfortably, acutely uncertain.