The word Borgerlyst is a Danish portmanteau of Nadja’s invention. It consists of the two words Borger (meaning citizen) and Lyst (roughly meaning lust, urge, delight, inclination). In short, a sort of civic urge. It is meant as a sort of play on the phrase ‘civic duty’. Whereas civic duty is all the obligations, rules and expectations society forces upon you, civic urge is something like the opposite.

It is the feeling that you get when you feel a positive connection to the society around you. It can both be a sense of privilige for being able to take part and act in democratic processes, but more often it comes across as a sense of positive indignation. Every time you experience something in your life that also affects others in the same way, and you think “this could be a whole lot better”, you’re feeling that positive indignation, a civic urge to improve the world around you for the benefit of all. And when you succeed in realising such improvements, you will feel a civic delight.

Borgerlyst as a project focuses on building greater awareness around such civic urges, and make it easier for us as citizens to connect with others who share our civic urges and initiate projects to realise our civic urges. We hope that by building a positive framing around such civic engagement and participation, people will be more likely to take positive action together, rather than resorting to skeptical complaining or cynical blame games whenever they come across something in need of improvement.

A fundamental idea behind Borgerlyst is the notion that neither democracy nor society will ever be perfected, but is in a state of continuous development. It is in beta. That is to say: We have certain structures and procedures that generally work but there is still plenty of room for improvement. It is an acceptable error state that depends on our being present and engaged. And the drive that keeps us engaged in this way is our civic urge.

Today, we launched our Facebook page and in the coming month, we’ll launch our website at borgerlyst.dk as well. The whole project is focused on Denmark and will be in Danish, but we’d be most happy if the project can be an inspiration for similar initiatives elsewhere. If you’re curious to learn more, let me know.

The people behind the project argue that we already have the technological foundations needed to ensure a sustainable and pleasant standard of living, and that with some effort, these technology can be made available at the cost of “scrap metal + labor”. They’re currently experimenting with easy-to-make prototypes of what they consider to be the technology necessary to bootstrap such a village. The goal is to make a “Global Village Construction Set” with open sourced blueprints, documentation, permaculture designs and descriptions that will enable a small determined group anywhere in the world to build such sustainable communities of their own.

As an example of what such a future of resilient communities might look like, they point to a piece of speculative fiction called The Unplugged. In this future, the unplugged are a group of people who voluntarily leave society and the main economy behind. They build on the idea that if we save up enough money, we can all live off that wealth for the rest of our lives (This is the classic capitalist dream of “getting off at the top”, cashing out and living like you want to for the rest of your life).

Unplugging inverts this notion to some extent by offering the opportunity “buy out at the bottom” and build an independent life-support infrastructure and financial architecture – a society within society at the cost of just three months of wages to get started. Of course, then you’ll have to learn how to live such an unplugged life, and work everyday to ensure your own survival – but you’ll be living sustainably and independently.

I find the whole notion of Open Source Ecology to be fascinating, but it seems to me that the people involved in the projects are more interested in the technical and agricultural aspects of building a sustainable village than in the social aspects. In their presentation, they appear to be aware of this themselves as they’ve sketched out a sort ofsocial contract for their experimental village. Though its rough and unfinished nature is apparent in statements such as “can people simply get along?”

I expect they’ll discover that the hard part about building a replicable sustainable village won’t be the technology part but the getting along part.

One of the most interesting aspects of this is what Jarvis calls the “the end of the myth of perfection.” His point being that we need to get used to thinking products in a web-minded manner: Always in beta, releasing early to learn and collaborate and improve:

This is of course very similar to the open source mindset I’ve studied in my fieldwork, but I find Jarvis says it well. And not only that, he only also makes it clear that this is not just relevant for software developers, but for almost every walk of life. We have to let go of the notion that we’ll ever achieve perfection, and instead focus on how to provide the best circumstances for continual improvement. The new world order is a permanent state of acceptable errors and continuous improvement.

Juris’ main argument is simple enough: That the practices of the anti-corporate globalization movements involve a growing a confluence of forms (organisational structures), norms (political models and ideals), and technologies (the computer infrastructure – typically mailing lists – through which the movement interacts).

Juris points out that these networks are not inherently democratic (they are basically structured in the same distributed manner as Al Qaeda). Rather, the activists continually seek to build networks that promote their core values of participatory democracy, self-organisation and fierce egalitarianism.

Juris concludes his chapter on these participatory democratic practices by quoting one of his informants on his motivations for being involved beyond replacing “the current system of representative democracy”:

One of the things that motivates me these days is trying to figure out how we should organize democracy at the beginning of the twenty-first century, given the technological infrastructure at our disposal and new forms of economic integration. How do we deepen our local democratic practices – at work and in our neighbourhoods – and transfer that spirit to the global level?

Throughout the book, Juris circles around this question of democratic practices and involvement, and he uses his book to explore a wide range of aspects of the practices of the anti-corporate globalization movement, including the direct action tactics, the participatory democratic coordination within affinity groups, shifting alliances between various groupings within the movement, the World Social Forums, and the use of digital platforms like Indymedia.

Juris does a decent job of presenting these experimental democratic practices, but I found myself growing ever more annoyed at Juris’ stance – for two reasons:

One: Every chapter ends up concluding that the democratic experiment presented is a confluence of norms-forms-technologies, but Juris doesn’t ever get into what that really means. Because there are so many different practices to describe and explain, Juris ends up spending the entire book focusing on ethnographic descriptions and anecdotes, leaving little room for analyzing and discussing the implications of these practices.

And so, every chapter ends up posing more interesting questions than the ones it sought to answer: What about those deepening local democratic practices? It’s too early to tell, apparently.

Two: Because of the focus on ethnographic description, Juris carefully seeks to position himself as an ethnographer. But even so, he is deeply sympathetic to the cause and committed to providing the movement with helpful research (and, he promises, not just in furthering his academic career).

That means he is caught up in a weird-role as a double agent: Both working for academia in understanding the anti-corporate globalization movement, as well as working for the anti-corporate globalization movement to help them understand themselves better – a position he calls militant ethnography:

For the militant ethnographer the issue is not so much the kind of knowledge produced, which is always practically engaged and collaborative, but rather, how is it presented, for which audience, and where is it distributed?

In “Networking Futures”, Juris talks very much to the academic audience, apologetically describing every element of his political involvement, reflecting on his role as a scientist in a field of subjective opinions, many of which he happens to agree with.

The result is a sort of tightly self-moderated eye-witness ethnography which describes the historical events of the anti-corporate globalisation movement in minute detail but dismisses the grander opportunity to explore where that movement are heading since those heady days of protests and social forums.

Considering this, I find that my main gripe with this book is that it isn’t what I wanted it to be. I had hoped for a book written by an activist full of passion and vision for a better, more democratic and positively human future – like David Graeber’s excellent Possibilities. Instead, I got a somewhat anemic, academic work that does a decent job at explaining the past but offers little forward thinking.

I hope that Juris does have visions for a brighter future as well, and that he’ll share them with us all at some point.

I believe 2009 will be the year when the question of how society should be arranged will cease to be an idle, abstract topic, dwelt upon by ivory-tower-intellectuals after a few glasses of wine, and will instead enter the workday mainstream with a vengeance.

These discussions, de Botton predicts, will lead to the rediscovery of thinkers such as Karl Marx and John Ruskin. Most have heard of Marx, but I knew little of Ruskin. So, inspired by de Botton’s article, I read Ruskin’s essay Unto this last.

Written in 1860, “Unto this last” reads as the foundation of many of the tenets of the welfare state we know today: minimum wage, public health care and schools, unemployment benefits, and so on. The title is a reference to Christ’s parable of the vineyard, which Ruskin uses to support his argument that all workmen should receive equal pay, as they all have the same needs, even if they haven’t worked equally hard.

And that touches upon a central part of Ruskin’s argument: That merchants, manufacturers, capitalists have a social obligation above that of merely making a profit for themselves. Soldiers, teachers, doctors, and lawyers all have an honour code integral to their profession that are easily recognized as central to the well-being of their society:

The Soldier’s profession is to defend it.
The Pastor’s to teach it.
The Physician’s to keep it in health.
The Lawyer’s to enforce justice in it.
The Merchant’s to provide for it.
And the duty of all these men is, on due occasion, to die for it.
“On due occasion,” namely: -
The Soldier, rather than leave his post in battle.
The Physician, rather than leave his post in plague.
The Pastor, rather than teach Falsehood.
The Lawyer, rather than countenance Injustice.

Similarly, the merchant is obliged to ensure both the quality of the products he provides, as well as his word in his engagements with his customers and employees.

Basically, what Ruskin is advocating is a sort of primordial Corporate Social Responsibility: That corporate entities are obliged to focus on the needs of the people it interacts with above mere profit maximisation. Acquiring material wealth in its own right is of little value, it is only the life you lead, as he concludes, forcefully: “There is no wealth but life.”

I found a great introduction to Ruskin’s work in this documentary, which also explains in greater detail how he meant the above statement to be interpreted. It is also some of the best and most compelling art history I’ve ever seen:

Ruskin, a very conservative man in many regards, saw society like an organism or a natural habitat or an eco-system: all its parts completely interdependent, constantly striving to maintain equilibrium. Wealth, then, is our ability to help those around us, as well as being helped when we need it. But whenever this mutual aid ceases and parts of the system care only for their own self-interest, that is what Ruskin calls corruption.

Ruskin saw capitalist industrialization as such corruption – a disruption of interdependent equilibrium of old, where artisans infused their work with their individual creative soul, combining home life and work life in one harmonious whole (Ruskin had some fairly romantic ideas of what medieval life was like).

What I find so compelling is Ruskin’s insistence that mutual aid ought to be a matter of honour above petty personal concerns and ambitions. All professions should mind the well-being of society as a whole as well as their individual self-interest, for we are all dependent on one another. Doctors, teachers (well, pastors at Ruskin’s time), soldiers and lawyers all have clear honour codes, ritually established through oaths, pledges and creeds defining their professional obligations to society.

But merchants, manufacturers, bankers, and the like lack such an honour code. And in the past 40 years (or more), they have embraced the neo-liberal notion that the market – and individuals’ rational economic self-interest – would provide the necessary means to maintain society.

But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

And now more than ever, merchants and others providing goods and services to a society should be expected to be as honourable as every other professions. Especially in a globalised world where the consequences of one’s actions – both socially, economically and environmentally – might not be immediately evident.

What might such an honour code look like? Well, Ruskin offers a rough idea:

In all buying, consider,
first, what condition of existence you cause in the producers of what you buy;
secondly, whether the sum you have paid is just to the producer, and in due proportion, lodged in his hands;
thirdly, to how much clear use, for food, knowledge, or joy, this that you have bought can be put;
and fourthly, to whom and in what way it can be most speedily and serviceably distributed;
in all dealings whatsoever insisting on entire openness and stern fulfilment; and in all doings, on perfection and loveliness of accomplishment; especially on fineness and purity of all marketable commodity: watching at the same time for all ways of gaining, or teaching, powers of simple pleasure, and of showing in simple things which even the poor enjoy — the sum of enjoyment depending not on the quantity of things tasted, but on the vivacity and patience of taste.

Today, there several attempts at making such merchant honour codes. There is the UN Global Compact, the Fair Trade certification, even the International Co-operative Alliance’s statement of co-operative identity.

But I find that there are two problems with all of these:

One: There are very limited options for sanctions against any member who breaks the rules. They are not legally binding in any way. For such an honour code to work, it needs to have clear cultural, social and legal implications – similar to the pledges of other professions. Ideally, it would be something like a GPL license for ethical business conduct.

Two: They focus on companies, businesses or products, and not for individuals. Taking social responsibility is not something that an incorporated entity can do on behalf of its employees and shareholders. It is an ethical commitment that each individual must make and believe in. In a way, it is a return to the more spiritual meaning of Christ’s parable: Unto this last will be expected the same ethical commitment.

One way of doing this may be to return the ideas of the co-operative movement: Where each stakeholder – employee, customer, supplier – has an equal say as well as ethical commitment and responsibility for the conduct of the business as a whole. I find that the co-operative movement, anchored locally and centered around a shared code of conduct may well have a renaissance with the emergence of new digital social tools. But I’ll have to ponder this some more.

Input is welcome.

Suppose I see a beautiful sunset and I want to describe it to a loved one on the other side of the world. Today’s communication technology makes this possible. In the process, however, the technology in question puts constraints on message communicated. For example, if I pick up my cellphone, my description of the sunset will be limited to words and sounds that can be transmitted by phone. If I happen to have a camera phone and the ability to send a picture message, I will be able to communicate a very different type of description. If I’m limited to 150 characters in an SMS message, my message will be constrained differently again.

The point of the example is this: the technology I use to communicate puts limits and constraints on my communication. Technology defines what I can say, how I can say it, when I can say it, and even who I can say it to.

This is neither good nor bad. It is simply the nature of technology. But it means that those who control our technology control us, to some degree. As information technology becomes increasingly central to our lives, the way we experience, understand, and act in the world is increasingly controlled by technology and, by extension, by those who control technology.

I believe that the single most important struggle for freedom in the twenty first century is over the question of who will set these terms. Who will control the technology that controls our lives?

Free software can be understood as an answer to this question: An answer in the form of an unambiguous statement that technology must be under the control of its users. When free software triumphs, we will live in a world where users control their technological destiny. We simply cannot afford to fail.

Far too many of us fail to acknowledge the importance of controlling the technology we use. We don’t realise how much we depend on these tools and services, and how many unconscious comprises we make everyday in using non-free software. Sure, you and I may not be able to appreciate the openness of free software that allows hackers to develop and extend the software according to their needs. But I would much rather depend on people who I know and trust rather than corporations whose leadership might change from one day to the next.

So to show my support of Free software, I’ve joined the Free Software Foundation. Richard Stallman may be an uncompromising zealot – but when it comes to keeping technology free, that’s actually kind of reassuring.

Arendt’s experience at the Eichmann trial bolstered the belief that defines her political philosophy: that there must be a rigorous separation between love, which we can experience only privately, and respect, which we earn in and require for our public lives. (…) A dignified individual existence, she believes, requires distance from others (…) Compassion is dangerous, in her view, because “not unlike love,” it “abolishes the distance, the in-between which always exists in human intercourse.” What preserves that distance, on the other hand, is pride—the pride of equals that she finds exemplified in the political realm, the “public space.”

This view of politics may help explain why, in “The Human Condition” and “On Revolution,” Arendt exalts it as the highest of human activities. Politics, in her work, is not really an empirical concept—an affair of elections and legislation, still less of tax policy or Social Security reform. Everything having to do with economics, in fact, Arendt prefers to exclude from her definition of politics, relegating it to the nebulous category of “the social.” Real politics is found, rather, in the deliberations of the Founders in Philadelphia, or the debates of the Athenians in their assembly. It is an affair of exceptionally talented individuals—people not unlike Hannah Arendt—arguing with one another under conditions of equality and mutual respect.

Still more revealing than Arendt’s definition of politics is her explanation of why people are drawn to it in the first place. We do not enter the political world to pursue justice or to create a better world. No, human beings love politics because they love to excel, and a political career is the best way to win the world’s respect. In ancient Greece, she writes, “the polis was permeated by a fiercely agonal spirit, where everybody had constantly to distinguish himself from all others, to show through unique deeds or achievements that he was the best of all. The public realm, in other words, was reserved for individuality; it was the only place where men could show who they really and inexchangeably were.” Arendt recognizes that most of the people of Athens, including all women and slaves, were shut out from this arena, but she accepts that her kind of politics is necessarily an aristocratic pursuit. In yet another instance of her favorite metaphor, she defends “the bitter need of the few to protect themselves against the many, or rather to protect the island of freedom they have come to inhabit against the surrounding sea of necessity.”

Nothing could be more characteristic of Arendt than the longing for respect and recognition that shines through these seemingly abstract arguments. All her experiences as a woman and as a Jew (…) goes into her yearning for the masculine, aristocratic freedom of the Greek polis (…) At times, Arendt’s love of the public and the political, and her fear of the private and the psychological, becomes almost neurotically intense. As she wrote to McCarthy, “the inner turmoil of the self, its shapelessness,” must be kept under strict quarantine: “It is no less indecent, unfit to appear, than our digestive apparatus, or else our inner organs, which also are hidden from visibility by the skin.”

Too much of life and too many kinds of people are excluded from Arendt’s sympathy, which she could freely give only to those as strong as she was. If, as she wrote, “it is the desire to excel which makes men love the world,” then our love for the world actually makes it harder for us to love the people who inhabit it. This is the dilemma that runs through all Arendt’s writing, demonstrating that what she observed about Marx is true of her as well: “Such fundamental and flagrant contradictions rarely occur in second-rate writers; in the work of the great authors they lead into the very center of their work.”

I find this tension between public and private, between the desire to excel and the love for close relations fascinating. How can one balance the desire to be respected by many with the desire (need, even) to be loved by few? I suspect that this is the dilemma that lies at the root of much stress and depression which affect so many people today: When we cannot combine these two domains, the tension between them tears us apart.

The presentation, given by one Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. Based on his research into moral psychology, he claims to have found evidence of 5 moral foundations, which conservatives and liberals value differently:

He concludes that we need both: The sense of realism and stability of the right wing, as well as the compassion and open-mindedness of the left wing. Apparently, it’s a bit like Yin and Yang. I must admit that I like his ideas, even though I find his research bordering the unscientific.

Back then, much of our discussion was informed by a video I had seen on Google Videos on how today’s money no longer represents actual wealth, but rather future debt. Even though it is a bit too keen on claiming that grand conspiracies are at work in the beginning and at the end of the film, it’s still well worth a view, as it also provides a good explanation of how money and debt works (and, at times, fails) in today’s market economy:

One of the reasons for dumpster diving is to raise awareness about the surplus of food in our society. To do that, Hannibal and his friends have put up a web site offering tips on how to gather your own food for free. Similar information is available in English, as well.

Though these Danes don’t draw much ideology into their actions, they do sympathize with American dumpster divers who have termed their lifestyle as “Freegan.” As one anonymous freegan puts it in the freegan manifesto Why Freegan, “when you “vote with your dollars”, consumerism always wins, capitalism always wins”, so the best way to make a stand against consumerism and capitalism is to stop consuming. And if that means eating the garbage, so be it.