Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
I lament my own immersion in an economy that grinds what is beautiful and unique into dollars, converts gifts to commodities in a currency that enables us to purchase things we don't really need whole destroying what we do
Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry
Money seems to be the enemy of every worthy social and political reform, as
Charles Eisenstein • Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
Capitalism is not simply a system of market exchange - it is a system that measures and reduces the value of Life including human labour, living ecosystems, relationships and life-force.
Stephen Reid • Post Capitalism and the Five Elements Mandala
It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
Mark Fisher • Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?
People in industrialized nations used to be called “citizens.” Now we are “consumers”—which means (according to the dictionary definition of “consume”) people who “use up,” “waste,” “destroy,” and “squander.”
Vicki Robin, Joe Dominguez, Monique Tilford • Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Fully Revised and Updated for 2018
than be slaves to market forces (Du Bois 1933b).
Jessica Gordon Nembhard • Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice
Like oil and land, data are a common that is commodified by private actors for profits. The commons being commodified is our essence as humans: our interactions with society at large.