everydayrobots

I still can't believe and the whole team feels more than humbled.

Ai Weiwei OK'ed to auction an ARTBOARD of his! It will be signed by him! I really don´t know what to write at the moment but to ask you for your help to spread this great news as far as possible, so that we can get as many bidders as possible crazy about this extraordinary piece.

This is really a huge opportunity for us to make the planned skatepark and the school in rural India a reality really soon. As promised: all money only and directly goes into the realization of this project. No overheads, no costs of big organisations, just direct impact.

As most of my readers will know I support a project aiming to build a school in rural India. Jointly with my dear we_magazine colleagues Ulrike and Bea we've launched our latest project for we_school: ARTBOARDS/ SKATEBOARDS.

Artists, many of them friends of us, have offered their services free of charge to design skateboards which will be auctioned to help build a skatepark in an area of rural India. The auction is open to everybody and begins on 20 March.

The general idea of the skatepark is to give kids in rural India, who don´t know what a skateboard is and who are lacking in self-confidence, the chance to bring some fun into their lives and learn new skills by playing. This will give them trust and confidence as they learn to develop new social skills and learn what it takes to commit themselves to a set goal.

The invitation to turn a SKATEBOARD into an ARTBOARD has been taken up not just by “hotshot” artists but also by the local kids in Jodhpur, the village where the skatepark will be built. The galaxy of stars supporting the project extends from artists whose names are household words like the Indian pioneer Raghava KK, the internet trendsetter Joi Ito and the young star photographer Vicky Roy from New Delhi to internationally famous artists like Austria’s Ernst Handl, New York’s Egon Zippel, Germany’s artist couple and Golden Nica winners Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss and the Berlin photographer Axel Pfennigschmidt. What’s more, Dagmar Woyde-Koehler, widow of the German artist OUBEY, has given the work of her late husband a new lease of life in this exceptional format that deliberately shuns the conventions of the established art world. Two Romanian artists are also on board – the Berlin entrepreneur and painter Béa Beste and Elisabeth Ochsenfeld with a host of international shows to her credit. On the national/local level we’re pleased to have gained the support of Indian and German artists. Bea Gschwend, the creative mind behind all we_activities, Bernd Herweh from Heidelberg (the hometown of the project’s initiator Ulrike Reinhard) and the art studio MAATI in New Delhi that supports and trains artistically gifted people from rural areas of India. We’re also joined by two “local heroes” from Jodhpur, Rajasthan and Khajuraho, Madhya Pradesh – a children’s group and the “best living artist” from the city of the Kamasutra temples, Ashok whose temple paintings enjoy an international reputation. In short, we’ve assembled a richly diversified group of people who all wish to see social change and support it – for a wide variety of reasons in a wide variety of forms. So please go to our project website to read more about the artists and the skateboards they’ve painted for the special auction. The link to the auction "YOUR BID" will be activated on 20 March. The auction runs from 20 to 26 March. It’s open to everyone. Bidding for each ARTBOARD / SKATEBOARD starts at 300 Euro.

This describes pretty much my problem with Social Entrepreneurship. In most cases I´m aware of it does not really change the underlying systemic violence against the poor.

While some might say it´s still better than doing nothing, I more often than not come to the conclusion that it actually might make things worse on the long term. It further cements the current economic system based on debt and growth and expands its market logic to the poorest people putting additional financial pressure and competition on them in many cases.

Our way of life, our industrial civilization is the reason for the hardship of the many, not the cure. The January 2014 report Working for the Few by Oxfam claims that the 85 wealthiest individuals in the world have a combined wealth equal to that of the bottom 50% of the world's population, or about 3.5 billion people.

In this very same direction Peter Buffett, the son of Warren Buffett, was argumenting in his New York Times opinion piece The Charitable-Industrial Complex some months ago:

"As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” [...].

But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place. The rich sleep better at night, while others get just enough to keep the pot from boiling over [...].

And with more business-minded folks getting into the act, business principles are trumpeted as an important element to add to the philanthropic sector. I now hear people ask, “what’s the R.O.I.?” when it comes to alleviating human suffering, as if return on investment were the only measure of success. Microlending and financial literacy (now I’m going to upset people who are wonderful folks and a few dear friends) — what is this really about? People will certainly learn how to integrate into our system of debt and repayment with interest. People will rise above making $2 a day to enter our world of goods and services so they can buy more. But doesn’t all this just feed the beast?

I’m really not calling for an end to capitalism; I’m calling for humanism."

Yesterday I came across two pieces that finally made me angry. Two pieces that not just let me find myself going back to daily work in disbelief like dozens of articles on the topic of surveillance before during the last weeks. No, now I´m really angry and I want you to search for that feeling inside you too and then let loose, express it. Fight. 

The 1st article is by Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, describing how the British Secret Service forced journalists of the Guardian to destroy MacBooks and hard drives in the Guardian´s basement. Supposedly destroying information of the ongoing journalistic research on the secret spying on whole societies, information showing that our governments and mega corps are snooping around in our personal communication and collecting basically all data from phone calls over chat, email and VOIP to mail. 

The 2nd piece is by Pamela Jones explaining in a very emotional last post why exactly this overall surveillance is making her closing down her (excellent) website Groklaw. Of course I will and can not judge this individual decision but her intense writing explaining her reasons to do so were the final trigger to me: 

We must not give in and leave the web. Time has come to enter the battlefield, to choose our weapons. We must fight back with better ideas, bigger visions and lots of courage and here´s why.

Imagine just a year ago a friend of you would have told you that there are multiple "Western" governments with a secret service that stores and analyzes most of all global communication, that forces the plane of the head of state of a sovereign country to land against the expressed will of this president and searches through the plane, a secret service that claims possession of SSL master keys of companies and basically makes all private online communications impossible by doing so, and that can switch its citizens´ laptop camera and mic on without them even knowing. A country whose politicians and police detain the founder of a web platform that enables investigative journalism and witness protection in an embassy in the heart of its capital, that imprisons a soldier for years and take him to court for speaking out against war crimes and crimes against humanity. What would you´ve told this friend last year? And what should you do together with him now that you know?

A year ago I probably would have told him that something like this can never happen in any European democracy because our politicians and courts would nip this in the bud. Today I have to understand that exactly those political and judiciary representatives just don´t care. They simply don´t give a fuck while our basic civil rights are shred to pieces, not because they don´t know or don´t understand but because they don´t want to. 

While we see those enormous powers and their backstage plan unfold there´s not much hope left in me but this: It increasingly feels like we are in the beginning of something like the "great disillusionment" of my generation. We start to understand what it really means that "freedom does not come for free", after we grew up naively in an environment that seemed to guarantee all comfort automatically and for all times to come. We start to understand that the stories and examples of surveillance we came to know these last weeks do not happen by chance or are the product of some agency gone mad. No, they are tips of the iceberg and follow a plan for years already. We witness nothing less than the intentional, proceeding reconstruction of Western Democracies towards Surveillance States. 

A part of what I feel it takes now is my generation finally to grow up. We admire the courage of people like Snowden, Greenwald and Miranda, the courage to stand up against something that is so obviously wrong it hurts. Something that breaks the fundamental rules we were educated to believe the world is run by, something that goes against our "inner knowledge" of what is right and what is wrong.

But we have to understand that it´s us who have to leave our by-stander position watching the complete erasing of our liberty and freedom, now it´s us who need to become more like those people we admire. Sharing THEIR actions on Twitter and Facebook won´t be enough, we all have to bring in our skills and become "activists" to save the free web, because the free web is just one of many possible forms of expression of the most precious thing we have, our individual freedom. 

If you didn´t see the short film "OVERVIEW" by the amazing Planetary Collective already I recommend it warmly to you.

The overview effect is a cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts and cosmonauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from orbit or from the lunar surface. Friends of mine are working on bringing this to as many people as possible in a very different (and maybe just a little crazy) approach to tackle the climate crisis humankind is currently building up.

In many countries around the world people risk and lose lives in their struggle for freedom and democracy, oppressed by regimes violating the civil or even basic humans rights of their citizens. 

After my latest post "Digital Self-Defense" a few people asked me if I know about ways how to communicate online while staying absolutely anonymous. Here´s what I´ve learned:

First of all: There is NO way of absolute anonymity online. Accept this and grow a healthy dose of paranoia. Do no shortcuts, not a single one, in your efforts to stay anonymous, not because you´re tired, not because you´re stressed or pressured by others.

Very basically you have to think about four areas where you have to cover up:

Hardware (f.e. mac adress)

Software (f.e. operating system, browser)

Access point to the web

Payment and Login info for the software you´ll use to encrypt and hide your web traffic

At best have a machine that you only use for your political work. You have never logged in to facebook, there´s no history of downloads, no mail clients, no activation of Windows or OSX. Simply nothing that is in anyway associated with your identity.

If you don´t have a new machine you can erase your harddrive´s data with tools like "Darik´s Boot and Nuke". 

What is true for your hardware is even more true for your software. Don´t use an operating system associated with your identity. There are basically two ways to do this: Either you use another machine, f.e. in a public internet cafe, or you use live CDs. A live CD (or USB partition) is basically booting a Linux operating system from CD and does not store anything on your hard drive. In case you want to save specific settings or data on your disk some live CDs come with tools like "Truecrypt". Truecrypt allows to create an encrypted partition on your harddrive to store to. In case of emergency when you might not have enough time to erase your data, it will be encryted at least.

Currently I´d recommend "The Amnesic Incognito Live System (Tails)" not just because of its name but for its range of functions. 

"Tails" comes with "Tor", a distibuted network of relays run by volunteers all around the world that bounce your communications to prevent the allocation of data traffic to individuals. Tor is really easy to use and comes with an adapted version of the Firefox browser called "Tor Browser" with the add-on"HTTPS Everywhere" preinstalled. "HTTPS Everywhere" enforces encryption of your web traffic to websites automatically. Now again: Don´t do anything else with this browser! No Facebook login, no installation of add-ons, just leave it as it is. 

To add an extra level of anonymity you can think of running the TOR/ webtraffic through the server network of a "Virtual Private Network (VPN)" service. If choose your VPN provider check for the following:

No logs policy: no logs, not only of the websites you visit, but also of your connection times aso. This means you´ll have to avoid providers in the EU and US.

The VPN provider should have access servers close to your location to not slow down the whole security apparatus even more (as it will be pretty slow anyway). 

And maybe most important for our topic of anonymity: Do they offer options for anonymous payments? After the FED shut down "Liberty Reserve" there are the following options: Find a VPN provider that

accepts prepaid cards like "PaySafeCard", "WebMoney" or a similar service that works in your country.

that accepts the online currency "Bitcoin". If you run it through "Tor", use new "Bitcoin" adresses for each transaction and pay the VPN provider in bulk this is pretty secure.

Search for how to set up an anonymous "Paypal" account as I won´t run you through that here. 

Do NOT provide any of the above with your real name or similar information again! If you need a mail adress use free mailers with funny personal details or a temporary mail address service like "GuerrillaMail".

Now if you finally want to go online don´t do it from home or any access associated with your identity. Go to a public wifi or use prepaid cards for mobile that allow for data traffic. If you connect your machine through your mobile´s prepaid data plan via tethering that´s also might work. Change cards from time to time.

Disclaimer Curse: If you use the above for illegal stuff just for your own egocentric benefits go burn in hell!

Please feel free to add hints or questions in the comments.

[UPDATE: I´ve posted a 2nd article on the subject. It´s focussing on political activism and anonymity online. 

On another note I also skipped Skype for Jitsi, an open source and encrypted alternative that just works and does not required any personal data at registration.]

Pretty scary headlines blink on everbody´s screens these days: Edward Snowden lifted the curtain to the international power games and their tools of mass surveillance online (and offline: in 2012 160 billion pieces of paper mail have been photographed in the US). Now that the conspiracy theories I used to laugh about became a reality, now that we reached a point that would make the "Stasi" (= shortcut for "Ministerium für Staatssicherheit" what roughly translates to "National Security Agency") go green with envy, I see two ways of dealing with this:

Going offline.

"Be the friction": Shoshana Zuboff calls on us to break the arrogance of Silicon Valley: This friction "...is our insistence on a new commercial model that refuses to externalize our well being, our freedom, our privacy, and our rights to live our lives and manage our data as we choose. It is a demand for companies to take responsibility and accept accountability to end users as the ultimate source of value and wealth. Finally, friction is you and me. It is our willingness to exercise judgement, to say what is right and what is wrong even when we are at odds with power and opinion."

I decided to go with the latter for the moment and these are my ingredients, you might want to pick yours:

VPN/ TOR The most fundamental change for me was starting to use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) provider and its server network to access the web and yes, this does not come for free. I knew roughly about VPNs before but had no idea about good quality services so I asked for some advice on Facebook. Oh the irony.

After some research to understand the tech and protocols behind I found "Perfect Privacy" to be the perfect service for me. Until I figured it´s run by neo nazis, why I won´t link there too. Watch out! So my personal finalists I give a try are BtGuard (thanks to @zeigor ) and VpnArea. They come at 7.95€ and 9.99€/ month, have a no-log policy (no logs at all, also no connection times), both are not US nor EU companies but based in Canada and Switzerland and offer the OpenVPN protocol instead of the industry´s quasi standard PPTP by Microsoft.

I also started using Tor more regularly, a distributed, anonymous network of virtual tunnels and it´s version of Firefox. It´s easy by now and done in 2 minutes with out any coding. If you just want to make one thing to improve your privacy online make it Tor.

DIASPORA OVER FACEBOOK I´ll give Diaspora another try as my primary social network and from there push links to Facebook. No more interaction there and almost all my info is deleted. Diaspora is a community powered ads free Facebook alternative that obviously becomes better with more friends joining in. It has quite some disadvantages for sure but I just have enough. Mark, I´m not your product. Sorry.

Twitter shows that it can work differently too: In a recent announcement they stated that if "'Do Not Track' is enabled in your browser (check your browser´s settings page), Twitter will not collect information in order to show targeted ads on Twitter" and it allows to completely opt out of targeted ads via the settings page.

SEARCH I skipped Google Search for DuckDuckGo. There are extensions and plugins for all your favorite browsers and it just works. No tracking, no logs.

EMAIL The nasty part clearly is email: Encrypting emails is quite some hassle because you have to juggle with private and public keys. Although I probably will rarely use it I wanted to understand how it works and the easiest way I came across to be used with Gmail is Mailvelope build on the OpenPGP encryption standard. With the Firefox Addon or its Chrome Extension it allows for powerful encryption right in the web frontend of Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Outlook.com and similar web mailer. 

BROWSER On the browser side I use Chrome "hardened" by the following: 

HTTPS Everywhere: It automatically switches thousands of sites from insecure "http" to secure "https".

Ghostery: Helps you to track and block the invisible trackers on websites.

AdBlock: well…

Disconnect: Manage and disable tracking and depersonalize search.

MOBILE My Android routes its Firefox traffic now through Tor too with "Orbot" and the mobile Twitter app connects via "proxy ("localhost", "8118"). If this sounds cryptic to you just have a look here: it´s easy and done in no time.

BLOGGING I´m about to switch back from this Tumblr to a self hosted Wordpress blog. Although this means more work (backups, plugins) it´s open source and I own my data. Stay tuned on this one.

MISC I also stopped "quantified self" services ´cause it increasingly felt like "spying on myself" and cleaned out services I joined because of my "1st mover index finger" but actually never could find a real benefit for me. I quit using foursquare, runtastic, instagram and path among others. For more background on this I found the article by BigThink´s David Berreby pretty much aligned with my thinking: "Self-monitoring, it seems to me, fosters acceptance of extreme surveillance as a part of life." 

ORGANIZE To me it makes more sense then ever to support organisations that directly take legal action and try to inform the public and preserve our civil rights therefore I joined the "Electronic Frontier Foundation" (EFF). I also donated to the Guardian to say "Thank You" for being one of the rare sources really doing the job of critical journalism these days.

I know that all of the above is not "the solution", neither technically, because it won´t have much impact on the identification via "browser fingerprint" f.e. (If you don´t know what that is just go here and run the little anonymous test. It´s an eye opener.)

Nor politically. Because ultimately this is a political challenge. This is what we elect gouvernements for: To listen to the collective will of its people and serve it by representing it internationally and enacting laws to make infringements punishable. Theoretically.

Sad to say but practically I don´t see any German gouvernement to do this anytime soon because of two very simple reasons:

German secret services benefit from the data and are heavily involved in the surveillance themselves.

We simply don´t have leaders able (or even willing) to really pick up this fight internally and with the US.

No doubt it would be better to have secret services not out of any democratic control, but reality looks different today. Therefore I think we have the duty to do what we can to defend our freedom of expression in the virtual space if we don´t want to loose the enormous potential this global web infrastructure offers to us. Don´t wait for politics or legal entities, it´s time for digital self-defense. 

All in all for me it comes down to finding a new balance between security and usability and this is my try. Let´s see how it will work out... 

On a final note: just imagine for a second how the next wave of Silicon Valley´s tech obsessions like Google's Glass will take surveillance to a whole new level: Then it will not only be the users "spying" on themselves but on each other although.

Automated "Glass-tracking paintball drones" anyone?

And if you think that #prism or #tempora are big you might want to read this to understand we are only aware of the tip of the iceberg:

In April, as part of its 2014 budget request, the Pentagon asked Congress for $4.7 billion for increased “cyberspace operations,” nearly $1 billion more than the 2013 allocation. 

The US Cyber Command. Keith Alexander, newly promoted to four-star general, was put in charge of it. The forces under his command were now truly formidable—his untold thousands of NSA spies, as well as 14,000 incoming Cyber Command personnel, including Navy, Army, and Air Force troops.

Indeed, dominance has long been their watchword. Alexander’s Navy calls itself the Information Dominance Corps. And Alexander’s Army warned, “It is in cyberspace that we must use our strategic vision to dominate the information environment.” The Army is reportedly treating digital weapons as another form of offensive capability, providing frontline troops with the option of requesting “cyber fire support” from Cyber Command in the same way they request air and artillery support.

UPDATE: The first books left the house! If you are interested in reading one of the rest of the books just let me know. 

Inspired by my colleague and friend Daniel I´d like to offer some books I´ve read in 2011/12. In case you are interested in lending or swapping just let me know and we´ll figure a way.

ENGLISH

"Depp Green Resistance" (Aric McBay, Lierre Keith, Derrick Jensen)

"Design Anarchy" (Kalle Lasn, Adbusters)

"Walden Two" (B.F. Skinner)

"The World We Have" (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"The Miracle of Mindfulness" (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"Against the Wall - The Art of Resistance in Palestine" (William Parry)

"Earth Democracy" (Vandana Shiva)

"A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing" (Paul Sloane)

GERMAN 

"Haben oder Sein" (Erich Fromm)

"Auf der Suche nach einer besseren Welt" (Karl R. Popper)

"Befreiung vom Überfluss - Auf dem Weg in die Postwachstumsökonomie" (Niko Paech)

"Ein Planet wird geplündert - Die Schreckensbilanz unserer Politik" (Herbert Gruhl) 

"Die Lifestyle-Falle - Der Klimawandel als Cahnce für ein neues Lebensgefühl" (Sepp Fiedler, Andreas Eickelkamp)

"Prinzessinnengärten - Anders gärtnern in der Stadt" (Nomadisch Grün)

"Alles Öko - 1 Jahr im Selbstversuch" (Colin Beavan)

Last Thursday we were invited to present Open State at the Open Strategies – Summit of New Thinking in Berlin. 

In the tracks "Open Innovation", "Open Business", "Open Data", "Open Reality" and a 5th open track that ran in parallel about 100 speakers gave 30 mins talks, presentation and workshops. In a really "open" setting, all sessions took place in one huge hangar at Station Berlin, around 500 participants listened, took part and mingled in 2 days full of open and participatory projects and concepts. 

To me it was really great to see how the "open-source-everything" – movement is slowly taking shape. We hope to contribute especially on the communications part to bring it into mainstream. It´s time for an alternative lifestyle.

Here are the slides of our talk, probably not self-explaining without the audio but you´ll get an impression for sure. The video of our talk will be published in about 2 weeks.

UPDATE: For all of you interested in a more deepening look into the logic and systematic of the current global monetary system I recommend "The need of reforming our monetary System" by Mark Joób.

ORIGINAL POST: I recently got more and more interested into the omnipresent "euro-crisis" and the overall logic of our global financial system so I collected some numbers you might find useful.

For nice info graphics like the one above (see the tiny truck in the lower left corner?) visualizing the indebtedness of countries and the world take a look at this.

GERMAN DEBTS

2 Trillion € = 2.000.000.000.000 €

~25.000€/ inhabitant

80 Millions € additional debts/ day

Although Germany is one of the most powerful economies every German Government after WWII went into debts. A good portion of the growth of the last 50 years was financed through enormous debts, year by year. Let´s take a look on the increasing indebtedness of Germany:

1950 = 20% GDP

2012 = 80% GDP

If you calculate in also spendings that´ll come for sure like pensions aso this makes unbelievable 5 Trillion € = ~200% GDP (!)

More or less the same development took place in the US and on global scale:

U.S. DEBTS = 15 Trillion $ = +100% GDP 0.5 Billion € additional debts/ day

GLOBAL DEBTS = 40 Trillion $

To sum it up: we´re facing an incredibly high indebtedness on all levels and it´s absolutely impossible to "pay it back".

My next questions were: "Who do all theses countries and their millions of tax payers owe all this money?" What´s this "financial market" everybody is talking about? The answer is pretty easy:

The investment banking market, the global trade of derivatives, is controlled by six to eight huge, international banks. Every year each of them generates more turnover than most countries.

This financial economy became more or less independent from the real economy. It does no longer what it was suppose to do, lending money to corporations to enable them to grow and generated real revenue in real markets. Money is no longer a tool to make business, it became the subject of doing business itself. Making more money with money by investing it in speculative financial products. This becomes obvious in the following numbers.

Back in 1990 ... ... the total value of the global economy = 15 Trillion € ... the total value of the global speculative financial market = 1.5 Trillion € (~10%)

Now in 2012 ... ... the total value of the global economy = 50 Trillion € ... the total value of the global speculative financial market = 500 Trillion € (~1000%)

This means that the speculative financial market grew 300 times in only 22 years!

Over the last 2 decades the financial industry basically put in place a full-automated "money making machine": transactions, decision-making and therefore the global market prices are mainly calculated by algorithms. Trading all kinds of financial assets within nanoseconds around the globe, while everybody playing a role in this trading market obviously has a interest in fluctuations of market prices to earn even more with subscription warrants and financial derivatives, betting on rising or falling (stock) prices.

Why is no one doing something to regulate the market practices again? Because a lot of politicians are part of the game. This is not even a "secret" but publicly communicated: "Financial experts" taking over political positions to "solve the financial crisis". Goldman Sachs did this pretty successfully:

Henry M. Paulson became the finance minister of Bush´s U.S. government in 2006. Since 1974 he worked for Goldman Sachs and was managing director between 1999 and 2006. His income in 2005 was estimated ~35 Millions $, his total wealth ~700 Millions $.

Mario Draghi, since 1st of November is president of the EZB in Frankfurt and therefore one of the most important decision-makers in the finance world. From 2002 to 2005 he was vice-president from Goldman Sachs London.

Mario Monti heads the Italian government since mid November 2011. Before that he was vice-president of the EZB and Goldman Sachs consultant.

Lucas Papademos was prime minister of the Greek interim government from 10.11.2011 to 16.04.2012 and chairman of the Greek central bank from 1994 to 2002. In this position he potentially was involved in the false accounting of Greece that was covered up by Goldman Sachs.

Otmar Issing is an international consultant from Goldman Sachs. Until 2006 he was part of the board of directors of EZB and before that part of the board of directors of the German Bundesbank. In addition to his job at Goldman Sachs he is also consulting the German government since 2008.

Of course this "money-making machine" I was talking about before is not really "making" new money but is redistributing the existing money at global scale and with unbelievable speed. Basically “the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer."

In 2011 the total value of private assets in Germany equals 12.5 Billion € and 1% of the population possesses 50% of all those private assets while every 5th child in Germany is raised in poverty. Germany currently has the lowest maximum tax rate ever and no wealth tax.

Beginning 2012 I teamed up with Daniel from NEST and Kari, Max and Simon from 10hoch16. In the last months we sketched out Open State and what started as one of those "what someone should do one day - ideas" over some coffees/ beers grew into something I´m really passionate about. More and more free-time was devoted to the core question that was buzzing in our minds for years now: How can we move away from consumerism and growth as organizing principles of our society? – Why? Because if we keep going like we did the last 50 years we will have destroyed the biosphere within our lifetime.

Therefore the aim of Open State is: Developing and bringing to life the smallest cell of a sustainable, post-growth society.

The concept embedded below is work in progress. Several people already pointed out, that we might focus to much on the tool (camp, open source blueprints aso) and to little on the goal, the impact we´re aiming for. We agree and there will be updated slides soon. Never the less I wanted to start to share our thoughts around Open State with you and invite you to read our paper. Feedback about our approach, people to talk to and similar projects out there is warmly welcome! We´ll also start an open working doc soon for a more direct collaboration with everybody interested. I´ll keep you posted.

I´m (re-)reading two books in parallel these days: "Architecture & Design versus Consumerism – how design activism confronts growth" by Ann Thorpe and "Design Futuring – Sustainability, Ethics and new Practice" by Tony Fry. Two books I strongly recommend to everybody interested in the systematics of "changing things to the better" in anyway. Drop me a line if you want to lend them out.

Also I might oversimplify their messages at this point, what strongly resonates with me so far is the idea of demanding additional design principles, things a designer/ inventor/ developer of the 21st century simply has to keep in mind while creating.

Based on the realization that everything is interdependent and connected in our ecosystems and biosphere, all our actions will have an effect somewhere. Furthermore there´s rarely one cause with one effect, but very often the effects emerge in "chaotic" patterns, tipping points where things "suddenly" start to unfold. Nature is not linear, but very often our thinking about the world and ourselves is, because we have to reduce complexity by conscious and subconscious filtering and sorting in order to survive. We can´t overlook the whole complexity of the planet´s systems that keep us alive (f.e. climate) nor do we fully understand, not to mention control, the systems we created ourselves (just think financial products, fully automated global trading).

The moment we start to understand this and take a look around us in the current situation of transition and change the implication for every designer, basically everyone who creates things, becomes obvious: 

Design for the future, not for profits, fame or fortune.

It must become a fundamental guideline of our work, be it as freelancer, employee or founder of the next big thing: It´s our obligation as human beings shouldering the responsibility to design a better tomorrow by our actions today. To take care of what we got from our ancestors and what we´ll pass on to our children one day.

So how about the design principle "health" next to durability, marketability, look, functionality aso? Our individual health, health of our environment, the community and ecosystem we live by. Abandon work that does more harm than good. We need to put "health" in its broadest sense back into a design, that really aims to make life better, not just amass money.

"Back", because the basis of all the above is not new at all but old wisdom almost forgotten, what makes it even more powerful. It´s time for return.

In all of your deliberations in the Confederate Council, in your efforts at law making, in all your official acts, self interest shall be cast into oblivion. Cast not over your shoulder behind you the warnings of the nephews and nieces should they chide you for any error or wrong you may do, but return to the way of the Great Law which is just and right. Look and listen for the welfare of the whole people and have always in view not only the present but also the coming generations, even those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground – the unborn of the future Nation. (The Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy)

What embracing the design principle of "health" could practically mean f.e. in the realm of architecture is shown impressively by the "Garbage Warrior", visionary and radical architect Michael Reynolds. He develops and builds "earthships", sustainable, passive solar homes made from natural and recycled materials.

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. [...] We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off. (Fight Club) 

Are you? I mean is any of you really pissed off by the fact that "we are working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don´t need"?

What does the average "creative job" of today in Berlin look like? Either you´re working for one of the agencies: advertising, branding, communications, strategy, or you freelance for them or you´re working for a start-up. It all ends up sitting in front of a screen day by day, working long hours from deadline to deadline, mainly for messages, projects and costumers that are shitty to ok, but rarely great. Creatives of all sorts as many tiny gearwheels of the global consumption machine, in the end refurbishing this very machine and helping to make people buy things. Mainly meaningless stuff they´ll forget about soon, things that brake because they were build that way: "Built-in obsolescence" to make people buy again soon.

Now don´t get me wrong: there´s nothing wrong with startups or agencies and there are some really awesome out there. But there´s something seriously wrong with creatives, by definition people able to think flexibly, not questioning what they are working on and what kind of future they are building by doing so. And from my experience this is still the vast majority at the moment.

I assume most know better. Deep inside we have that idea what we were actually made for. But we find a thousand reasons why today won´t be the day to do it. But tomorrow, next year or when we retire. Sure than we´ll do it. Not.

In my opinion creatives, people with the potential to push the status quo, became spectators of their own lives just like everybody else. Caged in a total consumer lifestyle, on a permanent hunt for the irrelevant they clinch to the hope that it will all stay the same, that it will not be that bad, that someone will work out climate change, acidification of the oceans, melting of polar ice, loss of biodiversity aso. Actually they don´t even want to hear about all this anymore, people talking about that "eco stuff" are starting to bug us.

We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear.  (Fight Club. Again.)

Just picture for a second what would happen, if all those skilled, unique, beautiful people would start to focus on what they really want inside what is exactly the same the world needs from them ...

No one said it´s going to be easy and I fail in walking my own talk over and over again but we are running out of time and what awaits us after this will be no fun at all.

What are the rubber bands holding you back from radically doing the "right" things? You don´t believe the numbers? Monthly bills? ... What would help you to leave relatively senseless work and start to do stuff that really matters? Community? Basic income? ...

Over the course of the last two weeks I was part of a very interesting process that took place at the beginning of a three step corporate culture project we execute at the moment. The goal of this first stage was to irritate and shake up the about 500 employees of a quiet successful German company.

With our initial action a dream I had since childhood came true: I always wished to be locked in in a supermarket for one night to do what ever I want with all the stuff there. Well it wasn´t a supermarket this time but four office floors and I wasn´t there exactly to do what I want but we built all kinds of physical irritations out of 0.75 tons of cardboard. Although I don´t want to write about the project itself but the regulations of the system we were confronted with here two impressions:

   Confronted with the "unusual" situation we had created the first emotion we got back from the company´s employees was not curiosity or maybe skepticism but fear. We instantly got overrun by all kinds of restrictions, regulations, laws and their advocates.

Our cardboard could burn the whole place down (spontaneous ignition), we built stuff in the escape routes people would have to use in case of mass panic aso. Therefor the system´s strongest reflex that we felt instantly was to try to get rid of the unusual situation built out of 3mm cardboard as fast as possible with the arguments of various regulation texts.

When systems grow we build more and more complex and detailed rulesets to regulate what we do and what we don´t do in these systems. What was put in place to make it easy to live in these systems or to make them more effective, turns against the "good intentions" at some point. This is exactly the point that stroke me the most and what is probably transferable to most systems we built and are living in: 

Over time a regulation becomes a hurdle itself and a lot of people switch off their brains. They simply rely on the rules made by someone else one day. They stop arguing for or against something, they simply repeat the rules, think they are "right". They stop to think critically, to shape the world around them, they stop being active. Step by step following the rules becomes the norm, people follow the rules even in situations the rules were not designed for and in the very end even lightweight cardboard is received as a serious thread.

We all know the situation when we stand in front of a red light in the middle of the night. Only us, no cars, no bikes, no pedestrians. The rule of not crossing the street when the lights are red makes perfect sense when there is traffic. But it´s absolutely useless when there is none. The same is true for systems designed for effectiveness, the distribution of power, decisions and responsibilities (society, political parties, companies...).

There´s a pretty stunning documentary online by the German television station ARD. 45 minutes full of numbers I´ve extracted some for all non German speakers, the rest should go here to watch the full movie, it´s absolutely worth the time. We all know there´s something going terribly wrong in the financial system so here are the numbers if you need some arguments or just to give you some orientation about its dimensions:

Let´s start with Germany anways, the country most think is doing quite well all through the crisis so far: Not one German government since 1950 did not contract debts. While the debt was roughly 20% of the German GDP back in 1950 it is now at 2.5 trillion € (80% GDP). If you also calculate in coming costs like pension payments that will come for sure you land at 200% indebtedness for Germany, the alleged prig.

The USA currently is at 100% GDP national debt and by the end of this year Democrats and Republicans will negotiate again about rising the upper limit of the national debt limit. At the moment the USA adds 0.5 billion $ to its existing 15 trillion $ National Debt. Each day. With those numbers in mind I think Prof. Kenneth Rogoff (Harvard University) is not exaggerating when he says we´re witnessing the beginning of the 2nd Great Depression.

But as we know the money is not "gone". It´s just somewhere else: the number of millionairs increased by +15% in the US and even+ 65% in China in 2010. While ~20% of Americans are living under the poverty line today.

This super rich elite of the world has a big interest in crisis and changing, instable stock prices because this is the time when a lot of money can be made simply by investing the money you already have, via option contracts and derivatives trading, bets on the development of certain rates.

That the financial markets stopped "serving" the real economy a long time ago also becomes obvious by the following numbers:

In 1990 the global economy generated around 15 trillion € globally while the speculative fiancial market did 1.5 trillion €. In 2011 these numbers are turned upside down completely: While the whole global economy tribled in these 21 years, the speculative market volume grew 300 times up to 500 trillion € now. And almost the whole investment banking business is done by six global players.

Last year all employees worldwide generated 42 trillion € in total and the volume of all stocks traded globally was 45 trillion €. These numbers are facing the unimaginable sum of 1500 trillion € (as far as anyone can tell) in option contracts, derivatives trading and other bets.

Either we find a way to redistribute at least some of this money down to the bottom really soon or there will be a lot of people knocking at the doors of the luxury villas around the globe. If they only knock ...

We did it again, for the 7th time already, what makes me feel a little bit proud to be honest. This time we took on the arts and especially the art by OUBEY because we feel that his extraordinary artwork is a great fit and strengthens our idea of the greater WE.

Besides the PDF embeded below we created 2 web formats:

A more visual one which you can check out at arts.we-magazine.net

And the more “traditional” form in the blog at we-magazine: here