Tuesday, December 30, 2008

a celebration of victory

the ideological platform (gasp!):

1. market hijack media attention - be creative!

2. promote the debtor's union - crash the stock market

3. circulate local currency - legalize hemp

4. practice sacred groundskeeping - subsidize natural building

5. provide logistical support - soup kitchens, music festivals, permaculture schools,
                                             and interfaith worship ceremonies

6. grow food, not lawns

7. celebrate the victory with a Jubilee year

8. endorse the Witch Doctor's guild

9. everybody hyphae-Haj

10. take deep breaths! its a wild ride... no, really.  take some deep breaths.  Go ahead, meditate.


The dictatorship of the Bodhisattva is the end of History...

Monday, December 29, 2008

Dictatorship of the Bodhisattva

The world's most assertive buddhists gathered in a small mythological space. They were sick of the mess the world was in, and they were going to do something about it.

The dictatorship of the proletariat wasn't enough. These buddhists weren't placated with simple communism.  They were anarchists, working for the overthrow of Empire. They were committed to realizing the dictatorship of the Bodhisattva, where compassion rules against all logic. This is the essence of the Asylum Project.

How? This was the strategic question, the crux of the campaign. How could a small group of committed dharma anarchists take over the world? In this age, a good campaign strategy needed to read like a solid business plan.

This is what they set out to do:

1.) hijack media attention. Audio clips, video clips, blogs, emails, text messages, graffiti, underground social networks. get everybody looking in the same direction at once.

2.) spread the message: Rome falls. Empire rots from the inside out, and we, the barbarians howling at the gates, are the new guides.

3.) reframe nonviolent direct action: Does anyone remember how to celebrate? transformation as a practice, not a theory

4.)build consensus: inter-generational, multi-cultural, casteless

5.) market sacred groundskeeping as a sustainable business and viable future

They smiled amongst themselves. Warriors become salesmen, who'd have thought?
Truly, they were writing the new book on the Art of War...

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

attention harvesting

Ultimately, it seems that a successful permaculture movement will evolve online into a successful ecotourism movement. Attention is once again  in vogue as a currency, and any successful permaculture movement will get paid a lot of attention.  While that attention may start off as virtual attention, its a virtual guarantee that sooner or later someone curious will want to drop by physically. The attention will focus on global ecologies, traveling to them, living in them, sharing with them, learning from them.   Ecotourism will support permaculture, and replace ecologically degrading tourism with ecologically healing permaculture.  Another way of looking at it is that the tourists of the future won't just visit an exotic place:  they'll live locally while there, growing their own food, helping with livestock, learning about climate and soil and wild things, finding their own natural selves.

...and it will start from a website.  Permaculture fosters sustainability, and sustainability means more than merely growing one's own food. Sustainable culture is not self-reliant but interdependent, not merely ecological but also economical, spiritual, transpersonal, conceptual, and viral. That is, sustainability is a positive feedback loop: by optimizing any aspect of an organism, more energy is freed up to benefit all other aspects of the organism.

a successful permaculture movement will have a competitive advantage over industrial capitalism, in that it will be sustainable. Thus, in the competitive marketplace, it will thrive where industrial capitalism fails. Consequently, it will attract positive attention. It will breed. It will harvest attention, in a sustainable and profitable way. The attention that it harvests will be used to breed better permaculture, in a positive feedback loop that grows exponentially.

Energy flows where attention goes. When attention goes to sustainable culture in this age of industrial capitalist collapse, we witness evolution in action. That which works, survives, and the Art of Love always gets attention...