This is a book that I discovered in my twenties, and it impressed me so much that I ended up making my way to Tanzania in 1991, and staying for a couple of months on two ujamaa villages. Ujamaa means ‘familyhood’, a concept that Nyerere wanted to extend to encompass the whole of humanity, Read more

This is ‘the History of Oil’ by comedian Rob Newman. You might have seen it already, but if not, have a look – it’s very funny, as well as spot-on. He mentions the Radio 4 news item – that there was ‘an American plan to bring democracy to the Middle East’, and marvels at the… Continue reading What do you think about about this video by Rob Newman, and what does that say about you? Read more

An experimental day looking at aspects of game theory in parallel with discussions around the replacement of the Trident nuclear deterrent. Read more

In the 1990s I visited the headquarters of the Yamagishi Association in Mie-ken in Japan. It’s a federation of intentional communities that is still going strong – but even then it comprised 3000 people in 30 villages all over Japan Read more

I’m guessing that most people’s answer to this question is a resounding ‘yes’. There are no countries, surely, whose citizens are more important than the citizens of any other country? Read more

Jack Daniel’s is a classic example of this. You must have seen their ads – on posters, in magazines, on TV? The ones where they try to disguise a massive corporate behemoth as a folksy, friendly, small, local business? Old men in dungarees play cards on upturned barrels Read more

This report is really something that everyone in the world should understand, because it spells out precisely what the corporate sector intends to do.  Read more

The Tyranny of Structurelessness is a seminal essay by Joreen Freeman (above), written in 1970. I read it for the first time recently, but I’ve known about it for many years, and in fact, I lived in an intentional community where it was regularly mentioned, and at least some of us lived by its main… Continue reading ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’: some thoughts Read more

Bloomberg recently covered a Credit Suisse report on the concerns of international investors in the US, in Europe and in Asia. What they found was very interesting – that their concerns were entirely economic. They just couldn’t care less about politics – and especially who gets elected in which country. Read more

You must know by now about Class War‘s ‘attack’ on hipster cereal cafe ‘Cereal Killer‘. It wasn’t much of an attack, to be honest – no-one was hurt and they were open again the next day. But were they right to target Cereal Killer in their anger about the gentrification of Shoreditch? Read more

First, to reiterate something that has been pointed out on this site many times – the corporate empire is global and governments are national, and that fact alone means that national governments are in no position to challenge the corporate sector. Read more

Here’s a rash statement, but I believe it to be true. Most people these days know, either rationally or intuitively, that humanity is heading in the wrong direction. If you ask people whether we’ve seen the back of ecological calamaties, financial collapses, corruption, poverty or war Read more

Graeber was a leading light in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the book begins with a fascinating insider’s view of the goings-on in and around Zucotti Park in 2011. The most important point in the book for me though was the reminder that people always want a blueprint for a new society Read more

It’s so ironic that the biggest lesson in how to destroy democracy is being delivered to the world in the birthplace of democracy. Read more

I’m going to the Breaking the Frame gathering on Thursday, representing Lowimpact.org. The event has been organised by Corporate Watch, Scientists for Global Responsibility, Rising Tide and Luddites200. Dave King of Luddites200 contacted a couple of years ago and I’ve been going along to his ‘politics of technology’ reading group one evening a month since. Read more

“Where is everybody?” Enrico Fermi is supposed to have asked in 1950 of his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Working from first principles, Fermi calculated that extraterrestrials should have visited the Earth long ago, and many times over Read more

There is an argument [see the Guardian, for example] currently going on about whether Westminster MPs deserve the 10% pay rise that they’ve been awarded, bringing a back-bencher’s salary up to £74,000. Read more

It’s the next readers’ question in Philosophy Now magazine (much recommended, by the way), and when I saw it yesterday, I had a very strong reaction to it that has big implications for Lowimpact’s position on sustainability and democracy Read more

The exponential function is a very surprising (and potentially dangerous) thing. An exponential growth curve looks like this: Read more

NB: Dave from Lowimpact.org will be giving a talk about the Ujamaa2 idea on the Saturday afternoon, and the whole event will bring together people from various parts of the ‘alternative technology’ field Read more