I’ve been noticing that different people in similar situations have been having vastly differing experiences handling the self-quarantining asked of us during this pandemic. As a service worker, my income has been nearly completely annihilated by the temporary shutdown of non-essential businesses and I normally spend a lot of time in coffee shops — yet I’m still having somewhat of a great time now, with so much ability to think deeply about things and pursue goals I wouldn’t normally be able to pursue.

So since we’re all going to be inside a lot for the next weeks and months, I wrote this post on things I’ve done that have helped me cultivate good indoor habits — behaviors I’ve developed over the years which are now probably contributing to my ability to enjoy my social distancing. I’m sharing them so that others can potentially draw from these things to help them get by and even thrive as our society-wide response to the pandemic plays itself out. …

You can watch or listen to this blog post here:

Dealing with the stress and mental stain caused by social distancing and the immense uncertainty of the situation, the likelihood of a the healthcare snafu, and the urgency to facilitate emergency basic needs provisions due to Covid-19 are (relatively) short-term concerns, which are absolutely necessary to think about and work within. So I’m extremely glad that many people are taking this quite seriously and organizing around it.

But a few people need to be thinking about how to brace ourselves for the marathon struggle, the economic situation that our community is now in, together, in for the long term. …

This is a time when millions upon millions are realizing that the old systems are in a freefall, collapsing together and bringing us down with them. Inequality is on everyone’s mind, yet it continues to grow worse and worse. This is a time when privatization and commodification have begun to consume everything and the overarching force that drives it — neoliberal Capitalism — has begun to reach its logical conclusion: self-cannibalization.

This is a time when millions are coming into the awareness that allowing the old systems to continue will result in our annihilation.

And now, what might be the final straw is systemic shocks that will be caused by Covid-19, causing economies to slow down, rattling the already financially-fragile lives of millions and exposing the shaky foundations of the Panglossian narrative and economic dogmas which claim that neoliberal Capitalism leads to the best of all possible worlds. …

Today, the world is primarily transformed by human systems. That is to say that on a material level, natural systems maintain a level of relative stasis relative to the rapid rate of material change caused by human systems. When natural systems change rapidly (as with climate change) it’s now largely a result of the relatively rapid rate of material change caused human systems.

So to understand how the world is shaped, it is crucial to understand the key principles of how human systems operate and how they are shaped.

And it seems that all human systems are systems of flow. For instance, the food system is a system of caloric and energy flows, mostly leading back to flows of capturing and transforming solar energy. Other human systems include flows of thermal energy, electrical flows, information flows, mineral and material flows, chemical flows, water flows, flows of vehicles and groups of people — and of course all the flows of money that incentivize and disincentivize how people create, alter, and behave within these systems. …

At the community film screening of Invasion yesterday that some friends and I put on (about neo-colonial intrusions into indigenous territory to build multi-billion dollar fossil fuel infrastructure) I was struck by something that I hadn’t noticed in my first couple views of it. The white man with glasses offering the pathetic, poorly thought-out “offering” of bottled water and packaged cigarettes looked truly ashamed of what he was doing. The moment occurs 12 minutes in (see below). He looked humiliated. …

Emin Gün Sirer is a computer science professor at Cornell University and co-director of The Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3). Sirer created a P2P proof-of-work digital currency (Karma) that preceded Bitcoin by six years, has played a significant role in the development of core consensus protocols, and has previously alerted the cryptocurrency community of previously-undetected security flaws in various protocols.

I spoke with Sirer in his office about increasing blockchain adoption in the general public and how groups within the crypto-space have changed their ideas around the immutability of code as these systems continue to evolve to solve real social needs and issues. …

Emin Gün Sirer is a computer science professor at Cornell University and co-director of The Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3). Sirer created a P2P proof-of-work digital currency (Karma) that preceded Bitcoin by six years, has played a significant role in the development of core consensus protocols, and has previously alerted the cryptocurrency community of previously-undetected security flaws in various protocols.

I spoke with Sirer in his office about increasing blockchain adoption in the general public and how groups within the crypto-space have changed their ideas around the immutability of code as these systems continue to evolve to solve real social needs and issues. …

In June 1968, a group of eight American civil rights and land reform activists traveled to Israel with a plan that was ambitious, if not outright radical. They made the journey in order to study the legal foundations and management practices behind the Jewish National Fund’s leasehold system, and to use this knowledge to advance the civil rights movement and broad-based land reform.

One of these activists was Robert Swann, co-author of The Community Land Trust: A Guide to a New Model for Land Tenure in America. In the book he explained that, “Israel has been one of the few countries in the world to be successful in preventing the process of uprooting the poor tenant farmer from taking place. The leasehold system has brought security of land tenure to the small farmer and his family and has prevented the control of land by absentee landlords, speculation in land, and the exploitation of farmworkers by a landowning class.” …