thoughts i have

Lifestyles for a future Earth

updated 2024/11/16

A manifesto for cooperative living - Part One

Have you or a loved one suffered from the effects of media-induced helplessness? Ask your doctor if radical networks of care are right for you! This post contains my thoughts about how communal living could be transplanted into an urban setting, and why it absolutely should be.

Turn that frown around

The pessimism of our age thwarts our agency and offers nothing in return - a a short-term relief sought through the poisoned fruits of cynicism and despair can only condemn us to destruction. If there is a good future to be had we must begin creating it now and nurture its most vulnerable beginnings. There is no more time for inertia. The world that we have to aim for does not yet exist and will be bursting with surprises - realism be damned.
Picture an world in which climate change, ecological collapse, poverty and alienation have been put on the naughty step (and watched vigilantly). How was this achieved? What are the elements, remarkable to us now, that will be mundane and even boring to the citizens of this future Earth?
What are the lessons we can learn from the past and how can we invent what is to come?

Your ancestors were probably peasants

Most people who have ever lived did so in villages or groups of a similar scale. Only in the 21st century has the balance tipped towards the majority of people living in large urban areas - see Our World in Data .The stability of this arrangement is evidence that it is best suited to our social natures and likely the structures of our brains. But what are the core features of life in a pre-industrial village and how do they differ from the now dominant mode of urban living?
First of all, while reciprocity would be expected between neighbours, it would not come through transactions mediated by money or other arbitrary tokens of value. Maybe you help me build a stone wall, and I help you weed the vegetable patch. This rather simple one for one is only part of the picture, in practice everybody does what they can and takes what they need. This means child and elderly care, building structures, growing, harvesting, cooking creating works of art, educational support, cleaning and clearing our spaces, and everything else that we do for each other for the collective good in an act of trust. This trust can be maintained because the group is small enough to know each other personally, but still big enough to reap the rewards of cooperation.
The village is also a source of identity the blends places, foods, people and customs into an innate sense of self and purpose, the recent absence of which forming the double-edged sword of freedom and isolation. A child born into a hamlet in medieval England would look to their parents and neighbours to form their identity, drawing on a seemingly eternal tradition to build it. While this would provide certainty and comfort to many, there exists everywhere those who are not able to fulfil these roles laid out by accident of birth. But what if there was another village out there that needed somebody just like them?

How would they have lived in a big city?

The slightly editorialised picture of the historical village stands in direct contrast to the acquisition of goods and services in the 21st century, where the exchange of money preserves anonymity and prevents the formation of a relationship. -
"How much are these?" - "Is card okay?" - "Thanks, bye! Yes, you too!"
This is necessary in a society where procuring the means of living requires millions of interchangeable people to collaborate without ever meeting, but there is no reason that a small community built on trust cannot exist within a larger depersonalised network, and carve out a sphere of belonging without sacrificing the huge technological, cultural, and efficiency benefits of living together in large societies and cities.
But why focus on cities? While some may find refuge in the dream of a rural commune that works and lives together in harmony with the land, the reality is that this is not practical or even desirable for many. Cities provide the world with schools, universities, specialised hospitals, theatres and stadiums, fulfilling careers, and the potential for any kind of self-expression to flourish amidst the bustling diversity of people.
The potential for reduced environmental impact through urban living still remains largely untapped. Building taller and denser frees up huge tracts of land, not only from the buildings themselves but the roads, car parks, patios and unloved back gardens. the economies of scale make trains, trams and buses more viable, which in combination with pedestrian and cycle friendly zones result in a neighbourhood where almost everything important can easily be reached in 15 minutes without use of dangerous and wasteful personal motor vehicles (further reading linked here). What better place could there be to build or convert a co-housing property that hosts a miniature village within a city?
The need to establish and protect these social ties in the largest cities is apparent. The forces of capital are uniquely skilled at creating a mobile and individualistic workforce, who lack the experience of solidarity and turn in on themselves in a neurotic quest of self-optimisation instead. For many new arrivals into modern cities the participation in hobbies and shared interests is the main source of community, but it is an incomplete substitute that can vanish in the absence of good health and a stable income. Traditional working-class communities have a much stronger connection to people and place but are threatened by rising costs, particularly in housing, as these economic migrants from smaller towns and cities, like myself, come seeking a better life.

Won't money get in the way?

This is why the idea of housing as a financial investment is destructive. Housing should only be an investment insofar as a squirrel 'invests' an acorn into the ground. It should not be used as a vehicle for converting money into more money. If a cooperative's members have equity shares in the property, they will always have one eye towards the door, and if they were to cash out they would expect to receive the capital gains on their shares as the house and land value will likely have increased. This threatens to destabilise the whole project, and in reinforcing the link between land and capital, will have no long term power to provoke societal change.
Luckily this isn't the only viable way to raise the funds needed to establish a home. Once a group has agreed on terms, they can establish a member-owned corporation, with each member owning an equal nominal share of it i.e. £1. This corporation secures the loan, buys the property and funds construction or renovation. The resident members then pay rent towards it to pay off the loan and general upkeep. The efficiency of this offers not only much lower rents but also the absence of a profiteering landlord, while handing agency back to the people who live there. Once the mortgage is paid off the residents have the headroom to stockpile funds for expansion, acting from a position of strength to support similar ventures in a potential chain-reaction. This approach was almost entirely inspired by the Drive, a real example based in London who prove that this is all possible!

End of Part One - I will be sharing more thoughts before too long.

on the age of measurement

2024/10/04

If the Titanic disaster were to happen in 2024 one can imagine a contingent of passengers preoccupying themselves with tape measures spanning cracks, holes and fissures and dutifully recording the results. An enterprising few may even conspire to build an extra long measure in record time to asses the size of the open face once it splits down the middle. How reckless and irresponsible it would be to deploy the lifeboats before knowing the full scale of the situation!

If you feel personally targeted by this post, I'm sorry but data just isn't that into you.

on david graeber's bullshit jobs

2024/08/14

Disclaimer: this post is not an effective book review. If it makes you curious then read the book and see what you take away from it!

It's worth paying attention to the things that make you feel envious. When the Youtube algorithms decide I would enjoy a video of somebody creating incredible concept art or building a synthesiser from scratch I often want to copy them - I find it inspiring because I can imagine carving out some time from my evenings to give it a go, even though it usually ends up being far too challenging to replicate and joins my now burgeoning scrapheap of ambition. But I only really turn green when I stumble across a vlog of some ill prepared optimists renovating a dilapidated house, maybe restoring depleted countryside, or planting a thriving permaculture garden. The lifestyles shown are so distant and unattainable to me that they feel as fantastical as an episode of Game of Thrones. Having recenty read Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, I think I can better understand why I would feel that way.

A concept that stood out to me early on was that humans have a psychological need to be able to make something happen - really anything at all. As somebody who would absolutely press the electric shock button more than once if locked in a room with nothing else to do, this reallly resonated. The people in these videos are going out into the world and using their own two hands to tangibly improve their surroundings. There is nothing new about this, in fact I would guess that most people in human history have lived this way - so why am I jealous?

A little bit about my work: I am part of a small but scrappy environmental reporting start-up (please don't stalk my LinkedIn!). We take a pride in being thorough and accurate, and are all passionate about environmental causes. My role is essential to the team and there is no shortage of work to do, nor of bright young minds eager to pitch in. If I'm feeling any malaise around what we do, that must surely be a moral weakness to be kept to myself, lest it infect those around me! But although I am very motivated to convince myself of the work's value, I have been at this long enough to see the complete lack of meaningful action arise from our reports. The entire industry has no clothes seems to be a box-ticking exercise that enables our clients to continue as they are whilst feeling like they've done their part. It's quite transparent that if everybody involved on all sides would just stay home and maybe do some litter picking in the park it would do far more for the planet than our footnotes tucked away in an annual report ever could.