[FRIAM] Navalny - Berlin Diary - Klemperer - Daily News

Sun Jun 29 13:53:50 EDT 2025

Joaquin, your claim that “communism fails because no one owns anything, so
no one works” might oversimplify both human motivation and economic
organization. It assumes private property is the only incentive, ignoring
that people also work for meaning, contribution, and shared purpose — as
seen in teaching, caregiving, or open-source work. Attention and reputation
are important motivators — being forms of wealth beyond money and physical
assets

While state-run economies like the USSR suffered inefficiencies, these
often stemmed from centralized bureaucracy, not the absence of ownership.
Crucially, collective ownership — especially in distributed groups — does
not mean no ownership. It means shared stewardship, clear norms, and mutual
accountability. Co-ops and digital commons thrive on such principles,
sustaining motivation without relying on private profit.

More importantly, collective ownership can also yield collective profit —
and through self-governing rules, communities determine how that profit,
along with authority and responsibilities, are fairly distributed. These
rules are tailored to context: effort, contribution, equity, or consensus.
This kind of bottom-up governance creates sustainable motivation and avoids
both centralized control and extractive inequality.

Elinor Ostrom documented how communities across the world govern
common-pool resources — fisheries, forests, irrigation — through local
rules and cooperation, not markets or state command. One vivid example is
the Acequia system, with origins in Spain and the Middle East, and still
practiced in the American Southwest.

Acequias are community-managed irrigation networks where water is
collectively governed, not privately traded. Responsibilities are shared,
maintained through traditions like the annual cleaning and roles like the
mayordomo. They represent a third way — neither capitalist nor statist —
built on collective ownership, self-regulation, and distributed governance.

This model inspires our digital Acequia: a decentralized system for
stewarding shared data, computation, and sensing infrastructure. Built on
open protocols (WebDAV, WebRTC, local-first tools), it supports collective
perception and collective action, enabling collective intelligence to
emerge from distributed participation.

Just as physical Acequias channel water through mutual care, the digital
Acequia channels insight, shared value, and coordinated action — forming a
resilient, co-governed commons for the digital era.

- Stephen and Dan

____________________________________________
CEO Founder, Simtable.com
stephen.guerin at simtable.com

Harvard Visualization Research and Teaching Lab
stephenguerin at fas.harvard.edu

mobile: (505)577-5828

On Sun, Jun 29, 2025, 1:09 AM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:

> I was born in West Germany when the country was deeply divided in East and
> West. British, French and American forces had occupied the Western part,
> Russian/Soviet forces the Eastern part. My home town was part of the
> British zone. I remember British barracks, British forces on the streets,
> and British radio stations (British Forces Broadcasting Service, BFBS). At
> that time Putin was a small, insignificant KGB officer in Dresden in the
> Eastern part - the city where Victor Klemperer lived and suffered earlier.
>
> Americans were seen in the Western part as heroes. They were the ones who
> had defended England and freed France from the Nazis, rescued West-Berlin
> by the Berlin Airlift, and stopped the communists. In the cinemas Americans
> were the heroes too: first in American Western movies, like "The Tin Star"
> (Henry Fonda), "High Noon" (Gary Cooper), etc., later in action movies like
> Tom Cruise's Top Gun or Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones.
>
> After the Soviet Union collapsed everybody thought America and liberal
> democracy had won. Francis Fukuyama wrote "The End of History". As we see
> now maybe it is not that simple. Communism has drawbacks - mainly that
> nobody has an incentive to work because no one owns anything - but
> capitalism has a dark side too: it unleashes evil corporations and tends to
> destroy nature.
>
> There is evil on multiple scales and in multiple dimensions. Corporations
> and their CEOs can be evil, politicians and presidents too, churches can be
> evil (think of "Roman Inquisition") and political parties in totalitarian
> systems can be supremely evil. Even if we look at nature where animals eat
> each other alive we must wonder if Vasily Grossman was right in his book
> "Life and Fate", where he asks whether life itself is evil.
>
> Yes, we live in interesting times. We have more knowledge at our
> fingertips than all generations before us, and yet it does not seem to make
> us wiser or act better.
>
> -J.
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com>
> Date: 6/28/25 11:51 PM (GMT+01:00)
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: [FRIAM] Navalny - Berlin Diary - Klemperer - Daily News
>
> TD;DR (Too Downer Don't Read)
>
> I am reading Shirer's Berlin Diary
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Diary> as Mary reads Navalny's
> autobiography <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_(book)> (aloud to
> me) while our daily news rolls by this season (year? decade?) is pretty
> disturbing, but also comforting in a disturbing way.   We read (Mary out
> loud to me) Victor Klemperer's Journals
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Klemperer> (nod to Jochen's recent
> reference) a few years ago.
>
> <PriviedWhiteMaleSplaining>
>
> The *dis*comfiting part is really obvious I would say...  watching,
> through first person accounts of how an otherwise functioning, and in some
> cases vibrant culture can slip into a self-destructive spiral, usually with
> a strong opening game of abusing some *other* group of scapegoats
> (non-White, non-Christian, non-MAGA) on the way down.  Maybe invading your
> neighbors (Canada, Greenland, Panama?)
>
> Navalny's reports are most salient to some of the conversations here,
> notably glen's references to holding stocks as a strategy to keep tabs on
> our *evil corporate overlords* and even (potentally) attend stockholder
> meetings or demand extra documentation, etc.   It appears Navalny made this
> into a fine art in his early days of rising to attention and influence.
> *I* reduced all of my "blood stocks" to 1 share about the time of the
> election, some significantly before.  My dirtiest financial secret was
> riding Elno's coat-tails some ways up, but did begin to distance myself
> well before he went full-MAGA before the election.
>
> And best I can tell, as Chomsky indicated about "socially responsible
> investing", they are *all* blood stocks.   Some more than others.
> Palantir, Anduril, United Health, Purdue anyone?
>
> In Berlin Diary, I am just at the point where Paris has been occupied and
> the extreme contrasts THAT yielded.   The French government (as many may
> know) withdrew and declared Paris an "Open City" meaning they would not
> attempt to defend it as they had other cities and villages in the path of
> the Nazi Wermacht.   I was raised (anecdotes and history books) to believe
> that this represented some kind of moral failure of the entire French
> People (live to fight another day!).
>
> Shirer, an American, having lived/worked in Paris was very attached, and
> was "sent" into Paris (from Berlin) because all other foreign media had
> *fled* in the face of possible invasion (in spite of the Open City)
> status.  His reports of the police and fire remaining (mostly) intact
> (albeit disarmed) directing traffic (mostly Wermacht vehicles) while
> hundreds of thousands of evacuees were suffering (unto dying) on the roads
> leading away was stunning.  But the destruction of Paris itself (and the
> millions who did not flee) would not have served anything either?
>
> I also just spent 90 mins on a video chat with my Ukrainian colleagues
> (from Kiev) who have been unavailable since the invasion began.  We avoided
> direct discussion of their "troubles" in lieu of strictly technical
> discussions of their developments.   They did "let slip" that the bulk of
> their progress halted 4 years ago and they were just now trying to marshall
> those results into something marketable (e.g. triangular LED panels
> designed for constructing dome-sections at a scale from 9m to 90m
> (diameter)...   knowing that they are doing this under the constant threat
> of kinetic attacks from Russia and some of their (previous) descriptions of
> how hard they fought as young professionals (in their 30s) against the
> systemic corruption of (post) Soviet Ukraine gives me a little more
> perspective.
>
> As for the daily news: I recommend the apocryphal Twain quote: “I never
> read the newspapers until at least two weeks after they're published — that
> way I can be sure the lies have been corrected.”  and Tom Hanks' movie
> News of the World
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_of_the_World_%28film%29> for some
> perspective?
>
> Bottom line is "how good we have it" juxtaposed starkly with "this is how
> it all slides into oblivion", juxtaposed with "this too shall pass".
> Jochen (born in Cold-War E. Germany?) and Pieter (came of age through
> Apartheid), et al  can probably speak more personally to these contrasts?
>
> </PriviedWhiteMaleSplaining>
>
> Interesting times?
>
>
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