"Racines est une initiative collective, portée depuis 2021 par un groupe de fondations, d’associations et d’acteurs académiques réunis autour d’une même ambition : faire évoluer leurs pratiques et leurs postures à travers une approche systémique de la philanthropie."
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"As I mentioned on Twitter, I just finished reading the second volume of Aragon’s Histoire de l’URSS (published by Edition 10/18 in 1962). It is purely by accident that last week, when I was in my apartment in Belgrade which is stuffed with hundreds of books bought by my father and myself when I was young, that I stumbled upon Aragon’s three volume opus. I chose the second volume, running from 1923 to the end of the Second World War. The picture on the cover was appropriately that of Stalin.
The book is strangely part of a UNESCO project done in the early 1960s, imagined and directed by a UNESCO official, Carlos de Azavedo. UNESCO commissioned André Maurois, a French writer and biographer, to write a history of the United States, and Aragon, the history of the Soviet Union. Aragon who was a poet, not a historian, but a dedicated Communist party member spent two-and-a-half years collecting and readings reams of documents. Because of Aragon’s Communist links he got access to some Soviet archives that were, at that time, closed to all researchers. Despite a very sympathetic treatment that Aragon gives to the Soviet Union, the book was never published there. By the 1990s it probably became obsolete as much new evidence was unearthed.
However, it would be wrong to dismiss the book. It is ideologically very Khrushchevian, and gives us an insight into what the accepted (Khrushchev’s CPSU) version of Soviet history was: dismiss Trotsky because of innumerable political vacillations, downplay the importance of Zinoviev and Kamenev, accept that Bukharin was (in Lenin’s words), the “darling of the Party”, and attack Stalin for the cult of the personality and the Great Terror, but otherwise accept that he accomplished great things. Aragon elides the human costs of collectivization, laying the blame on kulaks’ intransigence on the one hand (and never questioning who the famed “kulaks” were), and abuses of the individual party members and secret police on the other. Things become more alive with the Great Terror of 1936-38 when Stalin is unambiguously portrayed as a tyrant. Foreign policy of the USSR is throughout, but especially after the mid-1930s, presented in an undiluted favorable light, and all the blame on the lack of cooperation between France, Great Britain and the USSR against Nazi Germany is placed on the former two countries. While an informed reader is sometimes startled by Aragon’s statements (e.g. the unmitigated enthusiasm of the working masses in the Baltic countries and Bessarabia when being annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940), there are nonetheless the facts that Aragon brings up and that are in today’s historiography forgotten or ignored. In that sense Aragon’s book is a useful antidote to today’s versions of history: it pushes the reader to look for the discussion of the events that he or she was not even aware happened."
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"Alors que le capitalisme concurrentiel désigne la capacité des humains à créer des objets et à s’enrichir par leur échange (vu comme un jeu à somme positive), celui de la finitude se concentre sur la rivalité insurmontable autour des ressources naturelles que sont les océans (espaces du commerce maritime et ressources halieutiques et minérales), les terres (cultivables et abris de ressources minières) et le travail humain. Il vise l’appropriation – essentiellement par la force et finalement sanctionnée par le droit – de ces ressources par des acteurs suffisamment puissants pour y procéder : entreprises géantes ou Etats, souvent les deux ensemble."
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"In the end, all factions accept that Multipolarity is a threat, that NATO is indispensable, that mobilization is necessary, that technocratic governance is legitimate. So, we need to understand that coordination in some areas is real (we can empirically document it), but it is not conspirational because it is structural, network-based and imperfect. Further, elites have agency, they can choose what they say and do. But they do so under the constraints of the structures they live in (material conditions, institutional embeddedness, network dependencies, etc.). Essentially, just like we all do, we act within the constraints of structures bigger than ourselves.
During the Cold War, NATO coordinated defense policy, ideological messaging (Congress for Cultural Freedom), and economic integration (Marshall Plan) across the West. Nobody calls this a conspiracy. We know it is documented history. This what I call the Bunker State operates similarly through coordination through institutional mechanisms (NATO Planning), ideological production (think tanks), and material incentives (defense contracts, EU funds).
Right now, we are embedded within similar processes, trapped in them. We cannot step outside the geographical space that is the world while travelling into the future to look back at a historical time. But we can still do our best to gather and observe. The difference between then and now, is that we’re observing it in real time, before it’s safely in history books."
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"I'm a PhD candidate in Human Centred Computing at University of Oxford's Department of Computer Science, supervised by Prof. Max Van Kleek. I was also a researcher in the Summer of Protocols.
Research: As a Social Computing researcher, my long-term interest is Cyborg Sociology—the study of societies transformed by human augmentation through Crypto, XR, AI, and other technologies. During my PhD, I focus on Decentralized AI (DeAI)—specifically DeAI governance through Trustworthy Agentic Web and DeAI applications through AI for Commoning. My research applies Protocol Studies, Artificial Life, Collective Intelligence, Trust Systems, Human-AI Symbiosis thinking. I've proposed a Trust Experience Design (TXD) manifesto for distributed autonomous futures. See more here: https://tx.design."
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"Nilenso, is the first tech worker cooperative in India. Founded in 2012 by eight colleagues, they wanted to avoid the fate of many small tech consultancies in India—becoming “zombie companies.” According to Steven, zombie companies are businesses that persist after founders leave, lacking clear ownership or strategic direction, leaving employees to manage them in a stagnant, leaderless state.
Steven was among the eight people who started Nilenso. The team envisioned a startup with a flat organizational structure. However, they did not have an idea what type of legal entity they would register. After some discussions, they landed on the idea of a tech worker cooperative. But they found few existing models around the world. To make matters more challenging, Indian law does not provide a legal structure for worker cooperatives.
The founding team consulted with several lawyers to explore the legal pathways for establishing Nilenso.
“The lawyers kept using this word: institution. The thing you want to build is an institution. It’s not about any individual person—it’s about the organization standing on its own two feet.” Steven Deobald
Due to the legislative framework, the founders registered Nilenso as a Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) in India, not as a formal cooperative. There are several reasons that Steven shares as to why they chose an LLP, rather than a cooperative legal entity:
India’s cooperative laws are outdated and restrictive, primarily designed for agricultural and dairy cooperatives. There was no legal framework for a technology cooperative.
After consulting lawyers and accountants, the founders were advised that using the housing cooperative (one of the initial proposals) structure would look “really weird” and create tax complications.
The LLP structure offered legal simplicity and liability protection, similar to how law firms operate. Nilenso adapted this by making every member a partner, ensuring equal ownership and governance internally.
Steven explained:
“India has an odd set of cooperative laws… Our lawyers said you can just structure this like a law firm—use an LLP. Instead of having ‘partner’ as the end goal, everyone’s a partner. We open-sourced our LLP partnership agreement on GitHub.”
This approach allowed Nilenso to function as a de facto worker cooperative while complying with Indian law.
Therefore, the idea of an institution shaped Nilenso’s structure as a de facto worker cooperative, ensuring that ownership and control remain with those actively working in the company. Unlike traditional startups, Nilenso was designed to survive leadership changes and resist acquisition pressures from tech giants."
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"Bioregionalisme is een filosofie en beweging die pleit voor het organiseren van menselijke samenlevingen (politiek, economisch, cultureel) rond natuurlijke, geografische grenzen (bioregio’s), zoals stroomgebieden of ecosystemen, in plaats van kunstmatige politieke grenzen, om duurzaamheid, lokale veerkracht en een diepe verbinding met het landschap te bevorderen."
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" the Geotribe Learning Commons — as a space for shared listening and sense-making during this transition. It’s not a program or a solution, just a container for thinking together without rushing to ideology, certainty, or false answers. I’ll share more as it takes clearer shape."
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"Discover why the "Execution Line" isn't an accident—it's a deliberate system designed to harvest your labor through "Economic Rent.""
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