Category: deep adaptation

Was this the most expensive degree in the history of Universities?

jembendell2 Comments

Ten years ago today, the first payment of public university fees in Bitcoin was processed – and live on stage at a festival in Paris. Bitcoin is currently around 60,000 dollars each. Back then, on May 7th 2014, it was around 430 dollars each. Would that make it the highest fee ever paid for a degree? Is the Bitcoin worth 400 or 60000? That’s a philosophical argument one could debate forever – or at least in a PhD thesis.

The payment of 1 BTC (as an instalment for the full course fee) was made live during a panel on the future of currency. The PhD student was Leander Bindewald (on the right in the picture above) and he went on to complete his thesis on the discourse of money (see below for a close up of the payment screen).

I was Leander’s supervisor, and had arranged for the University of Cumbria to be the first public University in the world to accept cryptocurrency for payment. One can only wonder what might have been if the University had decided to retain the Bitcoin rather than convert it immediately into pounds. At least I’d have met my income target (finally). At 6 BTC for a graduate certificate (see below), that would be 360,000 dollars at current market rates. Wow… although studying with me might have been priceless 😉 Today I am happy to keep teaching a similar course after leaving academia (quick plug: ‘Leading Through Collapse’ happens online in September and in person in California in October).

At the same Ouishare Festival 2014, I explained the risk of new ‘sharing economy’ platforms and digital currencies becoming huge market players that would abuse their power to surveille and exploit. I argued for developing codes of practice and countervailing forces. A well known champion of the sharing economy, Ariane Conrad, quoted from my speech, where I called for a “public interest charter for private enterprise in the collaborative economy, mandating data portability (each individual owns and has the right to all information collected about him/her), based on open source and interoperable software with a commitment to counter surveillance, and facilities for the suppliers of shared services to organise and jointly represent their views to the firm, perhaps even via cooperative governance systems.” 

At other events that year I upset organisers by warning of a new corporate totalitarianism that would emerge because network effects would enable monolithic bigtech corporations to own an entire market. I was ‘off message’ as many people were imagining that tech could magically solve all problems of the world. In the decade since then both monopolistic and speculative practices have dented naive hopes in the power of tech to ‘magic away’ all problems of the world. Yanis Varoufakis has even given a name to this new era – technofeudalism. What I didn’t realise in 2014 was that the monopolistic power of some bigtech corporations would enable them to team up with deep state organisations and corporate partners to destroy democracy by manipulating public awareness of the opinions of both experts and peers on current affairs (e.g. disease, war, and climate). The fact they believe they are the good guys protecting us from ourselves makes them even more dangerous. It is something I explain in Chapters 8 and 13 of Breaking Together. 

Perhaps Ouishare became popular, and attracted major corporate sponsorship precisely because it didn’t tackle the issues of ownership and governance head on. Ten years ago, greedy capitalist enterprises seeking to dominate the taxi and accommodation markets were ‘redwashing’ themselves with the story of being socially progressive and greenwashing themselves with the story of enabling the more efficient use of limited resources. Under that cover Uber even deliberately misled regulators by targeting their phones and laptops to hide the amount of ride-sharing that was happening. We can only wonder what other kinds of manipulation of the online experience of regulators and politicians has been happening since then… might that be partly why our top bureaucrats and politicians appear to live in a totally different world to us? A world where genocide, potential nuclear war, excess deaths, banker bonuses, and an environment so toxic we can’t enjoy the sea air, don’t seem to matter to them?

To convey the way monopoly capitalism by digital platforms ends up ‘doing over’ customers, suppliers and staff, author Cory Doctorow recently coined the term “enshittification”. “It’s a three stage process,” he writes. “First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.” Witnessing the ongoing dominance of Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Airbnb, and others, he sounds rather hopeful about the ultimate destination of people abandoning monopoly platforms as stinky poo. As sources of hope, Cory points to initiatives trying to address monopolistic abuse: “The EU’s DMA will force tech companies to open up their walled gardens for interoperation. You’ll be able to use Whatsapp to message people on iMessage, or quit Facebook and move to Mastodon, but still send messages to the people left behind.” The hope, therefore, is some competition might be restored and therefore reduce abuses of monopolistic power. It is no wonder, then, that US BigTech firms are pleased with how US foreign policies have been weakening Europe over the last 21 years – a kind of weakening from unnecessary wars, fuel hikes, and divisions over refugees that is so insidious and unexplained that few citizens have realised either the true culprits or beneficiaries. Shrinking the influence of an EU superpower pushing back against global monopolistic strategies is a far bigger win than a local ban on a competitor like TikTok.

The dangers of monopoly power were already clear 10 years ago. Therefore, many groups were promoting cooperatively-owned sharing platforms and alternative currencies. I was trying to help them grow, by advising projects, publishing papers and presenting the need for them to be better supported. But I discovered that philanthropic foundations and governments were not interested, while venture capitalists were focused on benefiting from speculative bubbles and monopoly profits. You could read Peter Theil’s ideas for an illustration of that kind of infinite greed being cloaked in stories of efficiency through heroic entrepreneurs (like him, of course). That is a reminder that corporate abuse of stakeholders is often aided by the state and philanthropic power, rather than resisted or ameliorated. They act as an alliance for an expansionist and extractive Imperial Modernity, as I described in Breaking Together.

If you watch videos of the 2014 Ouishare conference, you will see a lot of hope expressed about how much we humans can enjoy collaboration. The lesson from the corporate hijack of that public-spiritedness is unless we guard against personal greed and the extreme profit motive of venture capitalists and publicly-traded corporations, then our efforts will become counterproductive. The founder of the Body Shop said the same thing twenty years earlier, when she discovered how floating her company on the stock market meant it couldn’t operate in the same mission-driven way. Anita Roddick later labelled that system ‘financial fascism’. That insight is essential as we enter an era of disruption, where companies will be offering their particular solution – from modular reactors to geoengineering. That is why I am a supporter of MEER, which focuses on open source and community-based ways of coping with the extreme heat that will beset urban centres in the years ahead. It’s bottom-up approach explains why it has struggled to obtain funding and why some elitist experts have been antagonistic toward it. 

I have chosen to return to these issues in this blog post because there was huge interest amongst the Deep Adaptation community in Budapest in the topic of alternative currencies, thanks to my colleague Matthew Slater at the recent World Adaptation Forum. Likewise some parts of the alternative currency and sharing economy fields are now recognizing how a breakdown of modern industrial society makes their initiatives even more valuable and urgent – so long as they are community-owned. Writing in shareable, a world leader in community and crypto currency, Stephen DeMeulenaere said “it was moving to see Dr. Bendell reiterate his support for reclaiming our monetary power as part of a freedom-loving environmentalism. This call… comes in a chapter on what he calls the “new doomster” way of life. He provides examples of how people have been transformed either by their experience of societal disruption or by their anticipation of collapse, to live life with more courage, compassion and creativity.”

Therefore, if you are wanting to help soften the crash and the crazy, please look into how to get involved in initiatives to re-localize trade that use systems which aren’t dependent on ‘don’t-be-evil’ global corporations (whether old ones or new crypto ones). A way to keep in touch with developments is to follow Matthew’s blog. 

Was it the most expensive degree of all time? Unfortunately not. Because of the neoliberalization of Universities, 60,000 dollars is nowhere near the most expensive degree today. The fact that University bureaucrats (including former academics) have participated in a process of moving Universities away from enabling the emancipation and actualization of the next generation, toward oppressing them through huge debt and a narrow training, is disgraceful. It is no wonder that many top University bureaucrats reacted so callously towards students during Covid and again during outrage at support for genocide. I hope University students all postpone their entrance to the most draconian Universities later this year and cause a financial crunch for them. 

If that is your situation, then remember there is always great work to be done around the world during a gap year. In the meantime you could read Leander’s PhD on the nature of money, or study a free online course on that topic which I developed with Matthew Slater. (I was so obsessed with developing the course that I forgot to buy Ethereum on pre-sale… argh!)

Below I share some videos that provide background to a more solidarity-based and freedom-loving approach to both the sharing economy and alternative currency systems. 

Imagine if paying the whole fee of 8 BTC that day! 8×60 = 480,000.

My appearance on BBC Breakfast in 2014, talking about cryptocurrency, was removed from youtube. If you find it, please add it in the comments.

Check out the vidz! 

Me talking in 2011 in Rome about why things like Bitcoin are emerging

Chatting to the freedom-fighter Tim Jenkin about monetary liberation, in 2015
Matthew explaining how credit and money need to change
Me explaining in 2011 why economic crises are features of our tyrannical money systems
You gotta watch Matthew here…
Here Matthew and I were explaining the ways to design projects that would avoid dependence on corporate monopolies.
We were cheap at the time. 6×600 = 360,000 for a Grad Cert. But Cumbria didn’t keep the BTC.

Donate to keep Jem writing / Read his book Breaking Together / Ask JemBot a question / Read Jem’s key ideas on collapse / Subscribe to this blog / Study with Jem / Browse his latest posts / Read the Scholars’ Warning / Visit the Deep Adaptation Forum / Receive Jem’s Biannual Bulletin / Receive the Deep Adaptation Review / Watch some of Jem’s talks / Find Emotional Support / Jem’s actual views on Covid

Sacred Pessimism – a talk to mark 5 years of a new movement

jembendell1 Comment

In March 2019, we launched the Deep Adaptation Forum (DAF) as a mechanism for people to collaborate with each other as their best selves in the face of societal collapse. It was my main response to the explosion of interest in the ‘deep adaptation’ paper. The aim of the new Forum was not only to connect people, but also to catalyse and promote initiatives around the world. We served that goal with a small grant and a team of part time freelancers, with the understanding that ‘deep adaptation’ would be shaped by its participants and take myriad forms around the world. Consistent with that bottom-up ethos, I left the Forum in October 2020 and observed from afar as it evolved – and continues to evolve. Last year I was contacted by one of the many national groups that make this movement real-in-place and we discussed the idea of marking the 5th anniversary of the start of this movement. The group is in Hungary, which had emerged as the largest and most active group in the world.

That is why in April this year I visited Budapest to celebrate the dynamism of ‘Deep Adaptation Hungary’ and launch the Hungarian translation of Breaking Together. The draft text of my talk to open the World Adaptation Forum, which they organised, follows below. I focused on the fact that people are making hugely significant and positive changes in their lives due to their acceptance of societal collapse. That doesn’t mean things won’t be tough, or there aren’t many more things that could be done… rather, it’s time to recognise that many people are becoming their best selves because they are not lying to themselves anymore. It is thanks to Balazs Stumpf-Biro and Krisztina Csapó, since 2019, that Hungarians have been finding each other to explore that.  

Continue reading “Sacred Pessimism – a talk to mark 5 years of a new movement” →

How do I sustain myself in these times?

jembendell

In recent Q&As, I have been asked how I sustain myself in these times. To understand my reply, you would need to understand my outlook on the future. I think a process of the collapse of modern societies has begun, and that catastrophic loss of life will occur on all populated continents in the years to come. If I live another twenty years, I would be witnessing that disaster unfolding. That is the context for my choices over the past five years.

I think I can’t plan to realistically avoid societal collapse myself but can try to avoid some of the early pain. That involves choices about where and how to live (moving to Indonesia). I also want to help soften the crash in the area I intend to live (through an organic farm school and other projects). I no longer believe I can contribute much to systemic changes that would reduce harm at scale (which was the motivation of my previous career). But I don’t want to give up on that entirely, due both to my sense of responsibility, as well as my relevant skills, experience, professional status, and network (so I wrote a book, and still blog and teach). Aside from these matters of personal security and contribution to society, I have felt a strong desire to live more lovingly and creatively than I did in the past, which has led to me becoming a musician and meditation retreat leader.

Continue reading “How do I sustain myself in these times?” →

Make Earth Day Useful – support Bekandze Farm School

jembendell

Earth Day is coming soon and is an important day for us at Bekandze Farm, as it marks the end of our crowdfund to support Balienze small holders to switch to organic methodz. Already, we are helping them to do that as a basis for re-localising and regenerating the rural economy. But to establish ourselves as a viable training centre, with a lasting impact locally, and to communicate that globally, we would greatly benefit from your help. 

You can learn more about the daily activities at Bekandze Farm by visiting our Instagram account. That is where we are posting pictures of trees planted as thanks to our supporters. We also produced a couple of short videos to tell you more about the project. The first one below is a summary of why and what we are doing.

Learn about Bekandze Farm School
Continue reading “Make Earth Day Useful – support Bekandze Farm School” →

Keeping your job at the end of the world (as we know it)

jembendell

In an era of constant disruption and even collapse, are there any ways back to feeling at peace, or even happy, about one’s current employment? Many people I meet express unease, because their job feels like a distraction from an environment and society that is beginning to break around us. For some, their employer is even making matters worse. Although it is painful to pay attention to a world in crisis and collapse, the pain is clearly made worse by living out-of-step with that awareness. For many people, conforming to the preoccupations and performances of their profession now means living a lie. But feeling out of integrity with who we are and what we know to be unfolding would not be our fault – it’s the result of being trapped in a system and culture that is dying. Stuck in such a way, people are losing crucial time to discover how they might live in greater integrity with their values in this new era. Meanwhile, others are quitting their old work to ‘go wild’ with entirely new ways of using their time on this glorious Earth (as I’ve described before). But many people, perhaps like you, will have responsibilities they want to maintain, at least for now, which requires keeping their current income.

Do you think it reasonable to find a way of earning a living without lying to yourself and others? I do. Because it should not be too much to ask that we can meet each other with greater honesty in our professional lives. In this essay I want to tell you about the variety of ways I have learned that people are integrating their collapse-awareness into their lives while continuing with their existing employment. I hope it might help you to make, or affirm, your own decisions.

I’ve met enough people discussing ‘deep adaptation’ over the last five years to know that the truth can set us free from the pain of pretending. There are options if we need to keep working in the same job or sector for now. In a previous post, I described the new openness in some organisations to begin discussing how to better prepare staff, stakeholders, and the organisation for a new era of polycrisis due to a process of collapse. To support such discussions, I offered an eight-step approach to deep adaptation in organisations. But most people don’t have roles in organisational development, and won’t be working in an organisation that has an enlightened leadership or possibilities for significant change. With that in mind, I reflected on the other ways I know collapse-aware people have been responding when not quitting their job or career altogether. What follows is a summary of what I’ve learned.

Subscribe / Support / Study / Essays

Keep serving (reveal and recommit in post)

Continue reading “Keeping your job at the end of the world (as we know it)” →

What’s to blame for collapse?

jembendell

Although I’ve been immersed for years in the news and scholarship on the unsustainability of modern societies, it is difficult to keep all of that information at the forefront of my mind. Not only is it a ‘heavy’ topic, it uses a specific part of my mind, and perhaps my body and soul, to critique, synthesise and communicate on such issues. So after doing a dozen podcasts and talks since my book came out, I paused to make more time to develop my organic farm school and play music. I’ve also been enjoying teaching again, both online (join me?!) and in person (including the Bay Area in October). Looking back at the various interviews, I think the first one I did to mark the launch of Breaking Together is the one to watch. Dave Derby of Lowimpact invited a focus on what is most at fault for driving the collapse, as a starting point for discussing what we can do to soften the crash – for ourselves and others. That meant we explored the role of an expansionist monetary system, and alternatives to ‘green’ authoritarian panic as the science darkens and societies are disrupted. You can watch us discuss that here. But as many people prefer to read, I’ve checked the transcripts and compiled them into one document in this blog post.

Continue reading “What’s to blame for collapse?” →

The Doom Vindication Blues

jembendell

Although there are many potential benefits from accepting societal collapse, there is nothing inherently beneficial about being right about one’s expectations of catastrophic change. Having held more accurate assessments than the majority doesn’t reduce the pain about what’s happening or what’s to come. It doesn’t compensate for the alienation experienced with those who would not see, or even condemned our clarity. It doesn’t compensate for the pain of witnessing the lost opportunities for people to process this reality for themselves. If there is any benefit in being right, it comes from how we acted with our awareness until now. Has it influenced us to do more of what we consider wholesome, and less of what we consider unwholesome? Has it meant we have tried to develop our capabilities for coping better as life becomes more difficult? Perhaps, also, to help others develop their own capabilities? You know the basics – mindfulness, letting go of old habits and expectations, and having a way to make sense of life in an era of collapse. For some of us, we can experience a liberation from past compromises and the permission to ‘go wild’. Without evolving ourselves in such ways, then feeling we were right could generate a further alienation, through a pointless sense of superiority. And what we definitely don’t want is to be isolated in our pain as things unfold, in the same way many of us have been isolated in our anticipation. So, when our outlook is confirmed by current observation, it is a time to assess whether we have made good use of our knowledge. Then, if not sure, to commit to try again.

Continue reading “The Doom Vindication Blues” →

In case you missed some key news and opinion on #deepadaptation

jembendell

Every 4 months the Deep Adaptation Review provides a free round up of significant news and opinion on the topic of collapse risk, readiness and response. If you aren’t subscribed then I recommend you have a look at that ’round up’ section from last month’s review, below. If you would like an email with that kind of info a few times a year, then sign up. You can read the rest of the DA review, including my editorial, where I discuss how more professionals are inching towards discussing collapse, here.

[Winner, 2023 Wildlife Photographer of the Year People’s Choice Award. Ice Bed/Credit: Nima Sarikhani, Wildlife Photographer of the Year. Source.]

Excerpt from DA Review #15, February 2024.

Continue reading “In case you missed some key news and opinion on #deepadaptation” →

The Professional Implications of Collapse: Deep Adaptation in Organizations

jembendell1 Comment

As modern societies experience further disruption and decline, how can our work in organizations help more of us ‘break together’ not apart?

Once people reach the conclusion that societies are not just being continually disrupted but that we are in a situation of actual breakdown, not everyone can quit their job and do something new. After doubt transitions into shock, grief, and anger, not everyone can ‘go wild’ like many ‘doomsters’ do. Nor would we want everyone to! How to integrate an acceptance of societal collapse into one’s professional job in a large organisation is therefore a huge issue. However, until now I did not find anyone in the field of organisational development who could try that. This intransigence even existed amongst experts on ‘sustainability’ and so moved me to write an article last year that summarised the ways they were maintaining their denial. However, five years after the Deep Adaptation (DA) movement took off, it appears that the situation is opening up a bit, as I noted in the latest DA Review. The recent engagement with both DA and my new book ‘Breaking Together’ by world-leading sustainability advisors and trainers R3-0.org, is another indicator of change. Some management consultants may prefer to speak of a polycrisis of ongoing disruption, rather than the unfolding collapse of industrial consumer societies – but an opening has appeared, nevertheless. Therefore, in this essay I will offer some initial ideas for how to work on societal collapse risk, readiness, and response, within organisations.

Continue reading “The Professional Implications of Collapse: Deep Adaptation in Organizations” →

It’s a big world out there (beyond the limits of English media)

jembendell1 Comment

The fact that so much of the world now speaks English has made it convenient for me, as a British man, to interact with people around the globe. Last week, for instance, I was with over 100 climate professionals and activists from across Asia, and the whole retreat (here in Bali) was in my native tongue. The prevalence of the English language means that I can learn about the experiences of people from different parts of the world. In addition, they can more easily learn from each other. But as we enter an era of societal disruption and collapse, the prevalence of English reflects a dominance of systems and cultures which is unhelpful. In Breaking Together, I describe this as Imperial Modernity: “the interlocking set of political, economic, and cultural systems that shape our everyday lives to favour the accumulation of power by elites.” It is why I am interested in learning more about responses to environmental change from outside English-speaking countries, and the ‘West’ more generally. Although living in Indonesia helps, my desire to engage beyond my usual circles is one reason why I am travelling on a book tour this year. 

I lived the majority of my adult life outside the UK, where I was born. Over the years I have noticed that people from English-speaking countries are more likely than people from elsewhere to assume that their framings of philosophies, politics, problems, and suchlike, are both ‘common sense’ and universal. They are also more likely to express an opinion on what is right or wrong in other countries. However, my view is that just because the world speaks English does not mean the English-speaking world contains or defines everything that matters in the world. 

Continue reading “It’s a big world out there (beyond the limits of English media)” →