It might not be terminal but it seems to me that the conjuncture of Greece, JP Morgan and the London Whale and the over-hyped Facebook IPO could set off the “perfect storm” of financial collapse and if not… well it seems there’s always another Greece, London Whale and Facebook waiting in the wings.

Also, the first comment, by CoCreatr, also raises the point that we don’t necessarily want to throw out the old concepts, because there may be useful points within them that we want to keep, but within a new framework.

Yes, no, Yes, no, on this: “…terms like “competitive positioning” or “marketing strategy” or “venture capital” or “return on investment” because these terms are meaningless to cooperative enterprises that have no need to compete, or market, or raise funds.”

If you want to be in business at all, serving society or your market in a noncompetitive way, you need to connect to your markets. Having a strategy for that helps a lot, and it would embrace the non-competitive positioning.

You may not need venture capital, but you invest your energy, or seeds, your time or your fellow’s, and you need a return on that investment a bit larger than what you put in to survive, and a moderate abundance to thrive. Which would warrant to explore the spectrum of business nonsense, business sense, and giddy greed.

Agree, “the best way to convey the nature, value and potential of a Natural Economy (…) is to build a small-scale model of one that works.” Why are the two examples you share worth exploring, supporting, joining? If you spread word about these Intentional Communities, are you, ahem, “marketing”?

I like this term, “non-old-paradigm language”, it feels recursively self-explanatory. Yes, we knew what we didn’t want when we saw it. The need for clear wording to describe where we aim to go – unknown territory with new experience awaiting – calls for co-creation of fresh words or stripping language of some of its baggage allowance. Lots of good questions you put there.

Let’s collectively improve on the bankrupt definition of “economy” and raise the vision of where we wish to go. WIth the framing you provide, I propose a slight changeto Jeff’s alternative definition: politics is the process of understanding and appreciating each other to make decisions that further our collective interest, and economics is the process of taking care of each other and the planet to enhance our collective well-being. I took liberty to replace “best” with “further” and replace “optimize” with “improve” because the superlatives “best” and “optimize” presuppose anyone or the collective knows what that is. I presuppose we don’t know it until we see it, hence the need to let go of some worldview ballast and experiment. And even then what’s best and optimal for some isn’t so for others, opening a spectrum for continual collective learning.

We might even change from “ruling by law-making” to “collaborating by crowd-coding our principles”. Are we untangling our own words? Attempting right here and now.

Yet again, interesting reading – thanks!

I came across this a few days back: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175538/tomgram%3A_ernest_callenbach%2C_last_words_to_an_america_in_decline/#more
(Scroll down to “Epistle to the Ecotopians “)

When I read it, I thought of you and couldn’t help but share.

Enjoy the day.

This statement, to the quoted paragraph that preceded it, makes things so very obviously clear. For me it summarizes well the last ten+ years of individual outpourings on the Web (ranging from idiotic comments through business models that rely on advertising through to highly-refined analyses and commentaries from truly fine minds). All the information and knowledge is available to us in order to shine bright lights on ALL the issues identified in the quoted paragraph, as are processes of evoking, refining and making actionable visions happen.

But of course that information and knowledge is used by all involved .. not only to clarify and inform, but also to distort, misinform and manipulate.

And so on we go … we remain asleep and more-or-less immobile in the face of a cumulative-and-growing clusterfuck which keeps us anxious and uncertain whilst employing powerful mechanisms to keep us asleep.

Unfortunately, the disintegration of human society related to the unhappy and unsustainable paradigm in which we are enchanted is most likely to continue apace. We keep hitting the snooze button on the alarm and then roll over and go back to sleep.