The Demos

In this episode, I deviate from dictating my blog posts and instead interview a friend of mine, Mark Wyner, to begin a series of episodes on free open source software (FOSS), specifically in this case, the FOSS that provides me a tolerable social media network called Mastodon, an instance of which Mark volunteers to moderate.In this episode, we introduce FOSS, go into some of the more nuanced thoughts we have about the distinctions between "free software" and "open source" software, explain things like the Fediverse, decentralised social networks, Mastodon in particular, and what it's like to be a moderator on an instance of Mastodon.Note: I have done more research about the history of the "open source" term in some contexts being used synonymously with "free" and want to be clear that I no longer think this was a politically smart move for those who made it. It now seems to me that it was not such a noble intention driving the use of the term, as I had imagined might well have been the case before.If you have any feedback or want to hear about certain topics more than others, please send me an email at [email protected] or reach out to me on Signal at resl.17.Mark Wyner's article on what it's like moderating a Mastodon instance can be found here.

This episode is the audio version of the blog entry by the same name on redthebean.net/blog.html. The purpose of this piece was to make the history of the Bretton Woods conference clear, re-iterate the structure of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank broadly, and review the general plan proposed by Keynes in 1944, though rejected then, so we can see the need to try it for the first time, now, internationally. I'm still learning how to do audio production things, so excuse the sound quality of these first episodes and... stay tuned in case I get better at this. Note: Future episodes will be more curated for podcast listeners, and will not always be the audio versions of my blog entries, but will also include newsletters on current events related to our collective work to build democracies and transform economics in the tech age. The collages used for episode covers are all licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 and were made by me using free software or paper, glue, and a scanner.If you're interested in talking with me on a future episode about the intersection between tech, politics, and the history of economics, please get in touch at [email protected].

This article is an attempt to talk about my impression that the ICU is actually not a totally wild idea, but is actually common sense among some very smart people. It goes over the two questions I've been wanting to ask Yanis Varoufakis and his answer to one of them. It mostly focuses on the optimistic sentiment that what I have been thinking we should all do is something we can and might actually do now. There are some audio blips -- sorry about that.You can find the text version of the article on redthebean.net/blog.html

In this piece, I try to describe the Internal Family Systems model of clinical trauma counseling, aka "IFS" - a model of the individual and process of healing that grants that every individual is a Self that has many parts, and no parts are bad. Even though the parts are all like individual persons, and it is important to focus on them one at a time, and, as the Self, try to get to know each part as an individual, the parts are not always eager to interact, because some of them have been chronically ignored or even shamed by the Self. Still, by practicing and remembering the point that no parts are bad, the Self can begin to help each part feel integrated into the whole system and begin to learn and grow without having to react in ways it might have learned in childhood. This is a helpful model for growing as individuals, but we can also use the model to think about the value in taking a compassionate approach to politics and to how we understand the different parts of our larger, global family system. This episode does not go into enough detail about IFS or the metaphor for my taste, so I am splitting it into parts, and will continue touching on the topic in future installments.

This is the first episode of the audiofeed for The Demos, a series about an anarchist's strategy for how to end finance capitalism, replace it with real democracies, from the bottom up and then from the top, down. In my thinking, all of the many goals binding activist groups everywhere depend ultimately on how the institutions and policies at the heart of international relations are structured to function. If we fix those, we can begin to address all of our individual concerns with hope for success. Those institutions and policies are comprised primarily of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, which were designed at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. The conference was held in the US, so that the Allied powers could decide on a new international monetary system to re-organize international power at the end of World War II. But because the US had the most money and power at that time, the monetary system that was chosen was one that served to write US dominance in stone, rather than to actually create a foundation for regulation and balance among global states. There was, however, a proposal at that conference, for an international currency union (ICU), which establishes equality within a common law, equally applied to all members, by all members, and that plan can still be tried today. However, it will take a global movement to insist that the IMF and World Bank transform in that way, and the only group of people big and wise enough to build that movement is us: the poor and working class people, by writing the petition, building the tools those institutions will need to transform, and then holding the line with labor strikes and economic boycotts to show our numbers if our petition and infrastructure are not quickly accepted and put to good use.