Defining Trumpism, defeating Trump | Links

Shared by dan maertens, like and 1 save total

Why Solar Power Is Booming Under Trump | OilPrice.com

Shared by dan maertens, like and 1 save total

Relational Intelligence: The Next Human Threshold

"Relational Intelligence: The Next Human Threshold
Artificial intelligence may shape our tools. Relational intelligence will determine the future we create together.
RUDY DE WAELE
JUN 07, 2026

A personal reflection on AI, relationships, belonging, and why gathering together matters.

As we prepare for The Invitation Brussels, I have been reflecting on the thread that has connected many chapters of my life: bringing people together around questions, experiences, and possibilities that matter.

In an age of accelerating technology and profound transition, our greatest challenge is not simply learning how to work with artificial intelligence, but remembering how to deepen our humanity through relationship, presence, and collective wisdom.

“The quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives.” - Esther Perel

For someone who has spent decades exploring technology, innovation, and the future, the thread running through my life has surprisingly little to do with technology itself.

It has always been about people.

Long before artificial intelligence entered the conversation, I found myself bringing people together around music, culture, ideas, technologies, experiences, and shared visions. What fascinated me was never the tool itself, but the energy, creativity, and possibility that emerged when people truly connected and came alive in each other's presence."

Shared by Michel Bauwens, like and 1 save total

At the Edge of Viability - Indy Johar

"5. Systemic Corruption as a Defensive Operating Regime

Systemic corruption is the defensive operating regime that emerges when a degenerative field constricts meaningful optionality and places identity under existential viability stress. It is the normalization of actions that preserve identity while degrading the field in which meaningful identity is possible.

This is the central definition: systemic corruption begins when actors preserve identity by means that further degrade the field that sustains them. The institution protects its reputation by damaging truth. The state protects authority by damaging legitimacy. The corporation protects profit by damaging the conditions of future value. The person protects identity by denying realities that would require transformation.

The actor may not experience this as corruption. From within the degenerative field, it may feel like necessity. Concealment feels like continuity. Extraction feels like energy. Control feels like stability. Coercion feels like order. Epistemic closure feels like protection from destabilizing knowledge. These behaviours become natural because the field has made openness, reciprocity, and truth feel existentially unsafe.

This is why systemic corruption is more dangerous than everyday corruption. Everyday corruption violates a system’s order. Systemic corruption becomes part of the system’s order. It is not merely a breach in operation; it becomes the operating logic itself.

6. The Defensive Operations of Systemic Corruption

The main defensive operations of systemic corruption are extraction, control, coercion, concealment, and epistemic closure. These are not separate from systemic corruption. They are the ways systemic corruption acts.

Extraction occurs when actors take from the field because they can no longer regenerate through the field. Instead of renewing the sources of value, trust, labour, ecology, care, or legitimacy, the actor consumes them for immediate continuity. Extraction is survival by depletion.

Control occurs when actors reduce uncertainty by narrowing participation and centralizing authority. When the field feels too volatile, distributed agency begins to appear dangerous. Dissent becomes threat. Plurality becomes disorder. Feedback becomes disloyalty. At political scale, this control can become authoritarian.

Coercion occurs when trust, consent, or voluntary coordination no longer hold. The actor can no longer rely on legitimacy, so it forces compliance. Coercion may produce order in the immediate term, but it usually damages the very legitimacy that would make coercion unnecessary.

Concealment occurs when the actor cannot survive admitting the contradiction between its stated purpose and its actual survival logic. The institution hides failure. The state hides illegitimacy. The corporation hides extraction. The person hides from the truth of what has become necessary. Concealment protects identity by breaking contact with reality.

Epistemic closure is the deepest form of concealment. It is not only hiding what is known. It is restricting what can be known. The actor reorganizes perception so that destabilizing truth cannot safely appear. Feedback is filtered. Criticism is pathologized. Reality is managed in order to protect identity.

Together, these operations form the grammar of systemic corruption. The actor extracts what it cannot regenerate, controls what it cannot trust, coerces what it cannot legitimate, conceals what it cannot admit, and refuses to know what it cannot survive knowing.

7. The Recursive Degeneration

The tragedy of systemic corruption is that its defensive operations often work in the short term. Extraction can produce resources. Control can produce stability. Coercion can produce compliance. Concealment can delay collapse. Epistemic closure can protect identity from destabilizing truth. These operations give the actor temporary continuity.

But they deepen the condition that made them necessary. Extraction further depletes the field. Control further reduces adaptive intelligence. Coercion further damages legitimacy. Concealment further destroys trust. Epistemic closure further separates the actor from reality. The actor survives by weakening the field that makes survival meaningful.

This creates the recursive loop: degenerative field, constricted meaningful optionality, existential viability stress, defensive operations of systemic corruption, deeper field degeneration. The loop repeats because each defensive act worsens the conditions that produced it. The more the actor defends itself corruptively, the more hostile the field becomes. The more hostile the field becomes, the more necessary corruptive defence appears.

At this point, systemic corruption becomes an attractor. It pulls behaviour toward itself. Even actors who understand the damage may find themselves reproducing the same logic because the field continues to reward defensive operation and punish regenerative action. New actors enter old structures and inherit the same pressures. The corruption survives beyond the individual corrupt actor because it is embedded in the conditions of action."

Shared by Michel Bauwens, like and 1 save total

The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange

"Table Of Contents
Back to Top
Translator's Note vii

Author's Preface to the English Translation ix

Preface xiii

Introduction. On Modes of Exchange 1

Part I. Mini World Systems 29

1. The Sedentary Revolution 35

2. The Gift and Magic 50

Part II. World-Empire 57

3. The State 63

4. World Money 81

5. World Empires 104

6. Universal Religions 127

Part III. The Modern World System 157

7. The Modern State 165

8. Industrial Capital 182

9. Nation 209

10. Associationism 228

Part IV. The Present and the Future 265

11. The Stages of Global Capitalism and Repetition 267

12. Toward a World Republic 285

Acknowledgments 309

Notes 311

Bibliography 339
"

Shared by Michel Bauwens, like and 2 saves total

Reciprocity vs. Empire: The Long View Series - Ayni Institute

"The Reciprocity vs. Empire: The Long View Series mini course provides an introduction to the ancestral concept of Reciprocity and how this stands in contradiction to two of the most important historical processes of the last 5,000 years, domination through empire and accumulation through capitalism. 

This mini course introduces Reciprocity and its different modalities and scales (individually, communally, between communities, etc.) and provides an orientation to the Long View of history, a methodological perspective that allows one to view the roots of our social problems through historical processes over 5,000 years ago and thus grasp the complexity of our social relations today. Through this introduction to the Long View, viewers get a macro and systematic perspective of the origins of some of our biggest societal issues and how to understand them so that we may begin to transcend them and bring about a more reciprocal world.  

This is a living mini course that will continue to evolve. Included in the mini course are interactive videos and exercises, quizzes, timelines, and in the future we plan to host events, include more supplemental material, and build more activities for you to deepen your learning and experiences in relation to the history expanded on here."

Shared by Michel Bauwens, like and 1 save total

Modes of Exchange Framework - Ayni Institute

"The Reciprocity vs. Empire: The Long View Series mini-course introduces the ancestral concept of Reciprocity and how this stands in contradiction to two of the most important historical processes of the last 5,000 years: domination through empire and accumulation through capitalism.


This mini-course introduces Reciprocity and its different modalities and scales (individually, communally, between communities, etc.) and provides an orientation to the Long View of history, a methodological perspective that allows one to view the roots of our social problems through historical processes over 5,000 years ago and thus grasp the complexity of our social relations today. Through this introduction to the Long View, viewers get a macro and systematic perspective of the origins of some of our most significant societal issues and how to understand them so that we may begin to transcend them and bring about a more reciprocal world.

The first two modules introduce the concept of Reciprocity and provide an introduction to the Long View of History before enrolling by clicking the link below."

Shared by Michel Bauwens, like and 1 save total

Onion Collective

"Onion Collective is a place-based social enterprise located in the small coastal town of Watchet in Somerset, from where we work to reconfigure economics from the perspective of our attachments to community, culture, nature and the future we hope for."

Shared by Michel Bauwens, like and 1 save total

Sovereign Money is not Debt: Why Central bank Accounting Must Change | Institute for New Economic Thinking

"Central bank money is still accounted for as debt, a legacy of an earlier monetary order. Treating sovereign money as equity would clarify central bank balance sheets, strengthen institutional transparency, and better prepare monetary systems for future digital-era design choices.

Modern monetary systems rest on a conceptual inconsistency that has gone largely unchallenged for too long. In most jurisdictions today, two legacy conventions still shape how central bank money is understood and reported. First, central bank money is commonly treated as a liability on the central bank’s balance sheet. Second, central bank laws typically authorize note issuance, lending, and open market operations, and yet they rarely state explicitly that the central bank has the sovereign power to create reserve money ex nihilo (Bateman and Allen, 2022).

These conventions are so familiar that they appear natural. In fact, both are historically contingent residues of an earlier monetary order. And both obscure the true nature of sovereign money in a fiat system. They cloud balance-sheet transparency, perpetuate legal and accounting confusion, and risk distorting public and policy understandings of what central banks actually do—especially now, as monetary systems enter the digital era.

Under the Accounting View of Money (AVM), the conventional treatment is conceptually wrong. Central bank money—whether in the form of banknotes, reserves, or central bank digital currency (CBDC)—is not debt. It is better understood, for the issuer, as a form of sovereign equity (Bossone and Costa (2021),[1] and for holders as a custodial asset safeguarded and administered by the central bank (Bossone and Costa, 2025). These are not semantic refinements but radical shifts that clarify the legal nature of money, strengthen institutional transparency, and offer a sounder basis for the design of digital monetary instruments."

Shared by Michel Bauwens, like and 1 save total

The European civilizational crisis - by Timothée Brès

"History suggests that renewal often begins in semi-marginal communities experimenting with new forms of life.

The central question is therefore not how to invent a civilization, but how civilizations have historically renewed themselves.

In Part 2, we will explore the seed forms of cultural renewal, the communities that carried meaning through periods of decline, why successful renewals emerged through recombination rather than restoration, and what monasteries, artistic movements, scientific societies, and new forms of community can teach us about the conditions from which future civilizations emerge.

The distinction may ultimately not be between old and new, progressive and conservative, secular and religious. It may be between forms of meaning that remain conceptual and forms of meaning that become lived, embodied, and transmissible."

Shared by Michel Bauwens, like and 1 save total