Cosmo-Local Credit

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Affordances of Digital and Blockchain-Based Community Currencies: The Case of Sarafu Network in Kenya | International Journal of Community Currency Research

"Community currencies (CCs) have been adopting innovative systems to overcome implementational hurdles from issuing paper currencies. Using a qualitative approach, this paper examined this digital transition of Sarafu Network in Kenya and its predecessor CCs as a case study. From the original vouchers launched in 2010, the foundation Grassroots Economics introduced a digital interface in 2016 that operates on a feature phone, and then integrated blockchain technology starting in 2018, undergoing several migrations before becoming settling on its current iteration called Community Asset Vouchers on the Celo blockchain since 2023. Using affordances from human-computer interaction, the research shows that digitalization and blockchain improved the facilitation of economic activities of the local communities, both their typical market transactions as well as traditional reciprocal labour exchanges, by offering more functionalities compared to the analog version of Sarafu. The unique contributions of blockchain include enabling automation of holding tax calculations and linking the vouchers to the mainstream monetary system via stablecoins facilitated by a series of smart contracts also known as the liquidity pool. The study also finds that there is an inherent trade-off between blockchain benefits and user interface complexity. Hence, balancing innovation and community needs remains a challenge."

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About Us | Grassroots Economics

"Our platform, protocol, and programs are grounded in community ownership and open infrastructure."

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CAPITALISM

"a grammar for recurring coordination functions that may help us describe and connect arrangements, not a universal score for how people must organize economic life.

A pool might be governed by an individual, a company, a cooperative, a community assembly, or a public institution. Its valuation could use negotiated prices, fixed references, or market data. A speculative CPP design might use auctions, changing prices, and variable fees.

Pools can charge fees, maintain reserves, and compensate people who provide liquidity. Those contributors might receive a negotiated share of fees or other rewards, depending on their agreements and the risks they accept. Other people might contribute resources as endowments without expecting financial returns.

Now imagine thousands of independently governed pools, with different rules but some overlapping commitments.

One registry might curate cooperative enterprises, another private financial institutions, and another agricultural producers. Governments could manage their own registries, recognizing particular pools for public procurement, agricultural support, or other authorized programs. Independent and government-managed registries could overlap.

A pool could participate in several networks without surrendering its own governance. Compatible commitments could potentially move between pools through routes that satisfy each pool’s valuations, limits, fees, inventory, and permissions.

There need not be one master registry or a single conductor directing the entire network.

The Cosmo-Local Credit documentation describes this wider architecture."

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(325) 3 heures pour penser le XXIe siècle avec Jean-Luc Mélenchon - YouTube

"ean-Luc Mélenchon est intervenu à l'occasion d'un grand entretien avec la maison d'édition Verso Books le 7 mars 2025, pour la sortie de son livre « Now the people! », traduction inédite et actualisée du livre « Faites mieux ! »."

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Questions and Objections — Decent Infrastructure in an Authoritarian World

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Our Collective Promise — Decent Infrastructure in an Authoritarian World

"Sovereignty at the level of the agent — not at the level of the nation or the corporation, where “sovereign AI” currently means your government or your employer controls the stack instead of a hyperscaler — but at the level of every entity that generates data and deploys intelligence. Each maintains its own AI operations, establishes its own data boundaries, and communicates through protocols that preserve autonomy rather than requiring its surrender.

Scale that and you enable ecosystems of sovereign AI agents — collective intelligence without centralised extraction. The wisdom of crowds without the crowd being farmed. Distributed cognition without a centre that captures it."

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(325) AI from Nowhere - “On Living and Computing”, Giuseppe Longo, Lindsay Lerman, Adam Nocek, 2026/03/30 - YouTube

"This panel (2026/03/30 ‪@rosaluxstiftung‬ ) brings together three leading theorists of computing, biology, and speculative philosophy to weigh in on the limits and possibilities of artificial intelligence and computing more broadly in the context of organismic complexity. Critical of deeply entrenched views (in science, engineering, and now philosophy) that reduce living and thinking systems to computational processes (even when computing is stretched to its mathematical limits), the panelists nevertheless reflect on what computing might be capable of expressing, if not the underlying functions of living systems. From design and somatic practices to theoretical biology and speculative engineering, Giuseppe Longo, Lindsay Lerman, and Adam Nocek draw on a range of discourses to investigate the real, albeit porous and politically negotiated, boundaries between what lives and what computes. "

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Community-based economics—A conversation with Dagan Cohen | Global Perspectives | University of California Press

"Dagan Cohen, founder and creative director of CHANGENCY, as well as leader of the Amsterdam Donut Coalition, discusses his work of integrating art and design into societal changes with Hagen Schulz-Forberg and James Quilligan. They also cover the efforts of the open network of the Amsterdam Donut Coalition, how to implement The Doughnut Economics Model by Kate Raworth into the Amsterdam municipality, all while emphasizing the importance of imagination and community in addressing ecological, economic and social challenges."

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The Lockstep: Civilization and the Command of Matter

"C. J. Thomsen introduced the three-age system (Stone, Bronze, Iron) in Ledetraad til Nordisk Oldkyndighed (Guideline to Scandinavian Antiquity), Copenhagen, 1836, as the organizing scheme for the Danish National Museum’s collections. It remains the foundational periodization of prehistoric archaeology.
The earliest known fired-clay objects are the ceramic figurines of Dolní Věstonice (Czech Republic), c. 26,000 BP; the earliest known pottery vessels are from Xianrendong Cave, China, c. 20,000–19,000 BP (Wu et al., Science, 2012). Firing converts clay minerals irreversibly into ceramic, a transformation of a material’s substance rather than its shape. Earlier, local transformations exist, birch-bark tar adhesives and heat-treated stone among them (Brown et al., Science, 2009), but fired clay is the first produced at scale and the first to carry civilization’s load.
The proto-cuneiform tablets of Uruk (Uruk IV period, c. 3300–3100 BC) are the earliest known writing, and their content is overwhelmingly administrative: rations, livestock, grain accounting.
Standard archaeometallurgy. Copper and tin ores rarely co-occur; Bronze Age tin traveled from sources including Cornwall and Central Asia to the Mediterranean. The Uluburun shipwreck (c. 1320 BC) carried roughly ten tons of copper and one ton of tin, the 10:1 bronze ratio, in transit.
Early bloomery iron was frequently softer and less reliable than good work-hardened tin bronze; iron’s decisive advantage was the ubiquity of its ore. Its adoption was gated by furnace practice and carburization (steeling). See, e.g., Wertime & Muhly, eds., The Coming of the Age of Iron (1980).
The claim in its strong medieval form (the heavy moldboard plow opening northern Europe’s clay soils) is Lynn White Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962). White’s causal weightings are debated among historians; the direction of the effect, cheap iron implements expanding cultivable land, is not.
Spectacles emerged in northern Italy c. 1286, most likely around Pisa; a 1306 sermon by Giordano da Pisa states the art was “not yet twenty years” old. See Vincent Ilardi, Renaissance Vision from Spectacles to Telescopes (2007).
The working-life argument, that spectacles roughly doubled the productive career of skilled craftsmen and scholars past age forty, is David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998), echoed by Macfarlane & Martin. It is a historian’s inference from demographics and guild records, not a measured statistic; phrased here accordingly.
Telescope: Hans Lipperhey’s patent application to the States General of the Netherlands, October 1608. Compound microscopes appear in the Netherlands and Italy within the following two decades. Torricelli’s mercury barometer: 1643.
Galileo, Sidereus Nuncius (1610); Hooke, Micrographia (1665); Leeuwenhoek’s letters to the Royal Society from 1673; Newton’s prism experiments 1666–72, published in Opticks (1704); Torricelli’s vacuum, 1643. The summary sentence is the author’s claim, offered as a challenge rather than a citation. Kepler’s laws, built on Tycho’s naked-eye observations, and Harvey’s circulation of the blood are the honest exceptions.
Alan Macfarlane & Gerry Martin, Glass: A World History (2002), argue that the divergent depth of glass traditions in Western Europe versus East Asia contributed to the location of the Scientific Revolution. The thesis is contested; it is presented here as attributed argument, not established fact.
Hero of Alexandria describes the aeolipile in his Pneumatica (1st century AD). Steam from a heated cauldron passes through hollow support tubes into a pivoted sphere and escapes through two tangential bent nozzles; the recoil spins the sphere, a reaction turbine, mechanically kin to a rotating lawn sprinkler. It performed no useful work: negligible torque, no pressure containment, no seals, no load path.
Thomas Newcomen’s atmospheric engine, first installed near Dudley Castle, 1712. It condensed steam inside the working cylinder: thermodynamically wasteful, but tolerant of the loose fits achievable with contemporary metalworking.
Watt’s separate-condenser insight is traditionally dated to his walk on Glasgow Green, May 1765; patent 1769. A condenser-equipped engine works the piston with steam pressure differentials that leak-prone cylinders could not hold.
Wilkinson’s 1774 patent covered boring cannon from solid castings; the cylinder-boring mill he built at Bersham in 1775 supported the boring bar at both ends and traversed the cutter along it through a fixed cylinder, producing unprecedented roundness and straightness in large bores. The shilling remark is from the 1776 letter of the patentees to John Smeaton, generally attributed to Watt and printed in Farey’s Treatise on the Steam Engine; quoted in the standard Watt biographies (e.g., H. W. Dickinson).
The first two commercial Boulton & Watt engines began work in 1776: one at Bloomfield Colliery, one blowing the bellows at Wilkinson’s own New Willey ironworks.
Henry Maudslay’s screw-cutting lathe, c. 1797–1800, combined a precision leadscrew, change gears, and a slide rest that removed the human hand from the toolpath. Joseph Whitworth (trained in Maudslay’s shop) proposed the first national standard screw threads in 1841. See Simon Winchester, The Perfectionists (2018), and Wayne R. Moore, Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy (1970).
The three-plate method for generating flat surfaces by mutual lapping is the classical origin of engineering flatness, practiced in Maudslay’s shop and systematized by Whitworth (surface plates, 1830s–40s). Two plates lapped together can mate while being complementary spherical sections; three, lapped pairwise in rotation, are jointly consistent only with a plane.
Uniform-pitch master screws were originally generated geometrically (an inclined blade against a rotating cylinder inscribes a constant-angle helix), then refined by measurement and mechanical error-correction; a nut engaging many threads elastically averages individual thread errors. Maudslay’s bench micrometer, “the Lord Chancellor,” resolved to roughly a ten-thousandth of an inch.
Gutenberg’s training as a goldsmith is documented through Strasbourg court records (1439) and Mainz sources. Printing type was cast in a lead-tin-antimony alloy in an adjustable hand mould from copper matrices struck with steel punches; the precise proportions of Gutenberg’s own alloy are inferred from later practice and metallurgical analysis, but the lead-tin-antimony system remained standard into the twentieth century.
Papermaking is traditionally credited to Cai Lun, 105 AD (per the Hou Hanshu); it reached the Islamic world via Samarkand in the eighth century and Europe via Spain and Italy, with the Fabriano mills operating by the late thirteenth century.
The figure of roughly 170 calfskins per vellum copy of the 42-line Bible is the standard estimate in Gutenberg scholarship.
Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).
The Peruvian guano boom (c. 1840s–1870s) and Chilean sodium-nitrate mining supplied Europe’s nitrogen in the late nineteenth century; both are finite mineral deposits, and their exhaustion horizon is precisely what motivated Crookes.
William Crookes, presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Bristol, 1898 (expanded as The Wheat Problem, 1899). The quoted phrase is from that address; his proposed remedy, fixation of atmospheric nitrogen, named chemistry as the responsible discipline.
Fritz Haber and Robert Le Rossignol demonstrated continuous laboratory synthesis of ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen on July 2, 1909, at Karlsruhe.
Carl Bosch’s Nobel lecture (1932) describes the failure mode, hydrogen at high temperature and pressure decarburizing and embrittling carbon steel, and the solution: a soft-iron liner (sacrificial to hydrogen) inside a pressure-bearing outer steel shell, with vent holes to bleed diffused hydrogen. The first commercial plant opened at Oppau in September 1913.
Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth (2001); Erisman et al., “How a century of ammonia synthesis changed the world,” Nature Geoscience 1 (2008), estimate that nitrogen from the Haber–Bosch process feeds roughly half the world’s population and constitutes roughly half the nitrogen in an average human body.
Aluminum is ~8% of the Earth’s crust by weight, the most abundant metal. In the early 1850s it traded above the price of gold; Deville’s chemical process then brought it down to roughly the price of silver, about $1 per ounce in 1884, when the Washington Monument was capped with a 100-ounce aluminum pyramid. The Napoleon III cutlery anecdote is widely repeated and likely embellished; it is flagged here as a story, not a source.
Charles Martin Hall (Ohio) and Paul Héroult (France) independently invented electrolytic aluminum smelting in 1886. Prices fell roughly two orders of magnitude over the following decades.
The 1903 Wright Flyer engine, built by Charles Taylor, used a cast aluminum-copper alloy crankcase to reach roughly 12 horsepower at about 180 pounds, a ratio the Wrights could not have reached in cast iron. The Manly-Balzer radial built the same year for Langley’s Aerodrome made about 52 horsepower at 125 pounds in steel; aluminum was the route open to a bicycle shop, not the only route.
Single-crystal superalloy turbine blades entered commercial service via Pratt & Whitney in the early 1980s; with internal cooling and thermal-barrier coatings, modern blades operate in gas streams hotter than the alloy’s melting point.
The point-contact transistor was demonstrated by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at Bell Labs in December 1947, using high-purity germanium developed out of wartime radar work; William Shockley’s junction transistor followed (theory 1948, working device 1951). Its two gold contacts, cut from foil wrapped over a plastic wedge, were roughly 50 micrometers apart.
Electronic-grade silicon is refined to roughly nine to eleven nines of purity (99.9999999%+) and grown as single crystals by the Czochralski process.
Robert Maurer, Donald Keck, and Peter Schultz at Corning produced the first optical fiber with attenuation below 20 dB/km in 1970, the threshold widely regarded as making fiber competitive with copper.
Usable bandwidth scales with carrier frequency, and channel capacity with bandwidth (Shannon); near-infrared light (~200 THz) sits four to five orders of magnitude above the practical top of copper’s range. Bell’s highest-capacity coaxial system (L5) required repeaters roughly every mile; modern fiber spans run 80–100 km between amplifiers. On Bell Labs and the copper-versus-fiber transition, see Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory (2012).
Charles K. Kao and George Hockham, “Dielectric-fibre surface waveguides for optical frequencies,” Proceedings of the IEE (1966), showed that the ~1,000 dB/km loss of contemporary optical glass was attributable to impurity ions rather than to silica itself, and set the <20 dB/km target. Kao received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009 for this work.
Contemporary observation: the binding constraints on the AI infrastructure buildout are widely reported to be advanced packaging capacity, high-bandwidth memory supply, and power delivery, all matter constraints, not algorithmic ones.
Dated intervals: aeolipile (1st c. AD) to Newcomen (1712), the idea waiting on matter for seventeen centuries; Watt’s insight (1765) to Wilkinson’s mill (1775) to commercial engines (1776); Haber’s demonstration (1909) to the Oppau plant (1913); Hall–Héroult (1886) to powered flight (1903); Kao’s purity argument (1966) to Corning’s fiber (1970)."

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