Multiverse Minutiae

Most social workers and Americans, generally, are hard-pressed to remember Mary Parker Follett either as a social worker or as one of the nation’s most astute commentators on democracy. Follett saw democracy in holistic terms, terms that moved beyond the indirect measures and practices of representative government to the direct practice of democracy. Direct democracy for Follett involved a citizen’s willingness, responsibility, and capacity to self-organize, act, and creatively solve complex problems. Direct democracy expands the power and capacity of citizens and society as a whole for self-regulation through individual and collective acts that regenerate society itself. What Mary Parker Follett puts forward is that democracy is a method, a scientific technique of evolving the will of the people. But with the fact in mind that the individual is the basis of self-governance, although the individual exists within infinite social relations. The pluralists have proposed diversity but have...

How can we envision the merger of energy democracy, direct technocracy, cybernetics, and crypto?   We start with an analysis of Allende’s Chile and Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn. Stafford Beer’s perspective of cybernetics was instead of the abstract dichotomy of centralization versus decentralization, he asked: What is the maximum degree of decentralization that still permits the system to flourish?  Paul Cockshott who has written extensively on the possibility of post-capitalist planning aided by contemporary processing power, is a big admirer of Cybersyn: “The big advance with Stafford Beer’s experiments with Cybersyn was that it was designed to be a real-time system.” Allende pushed Beer further to expand Cybersyn’s “decentralizing, worker-participative, and anti-bureaucratic” possibilities.  Public sector operations that were near to each other work together are “cordónes industriales” - literally “industrial belts” - in order to coordinate the flow of raw material...