Capitalism isn’t just an economic system, it deeply influences our psychology, how we design our communities, how we relate to each other, the kind of culture we create, and what’s possible for us to do together.
I’ve been engaged in a two prong approach of searching for a multi-stakeholder cooperative, an intentional community at the intersection of science, technology, engineering, arts, and math; one that seeks to be self-supporting by its own efforts.
Instead of waiting for that community to appear, I’ve been working to organize a small group to incorporate a start-up, an organization that’s devoted to providing housing, creative space, cyber-physical tools, including but not limited to, community relationship, intellectual property, and economic management, with a novel performing arts platform for communicating through demonstration our unique products and services.
A short biography…
My field of study began with aeronautical engineering/human factors, switching to environmental psych/design (understanding people in context) and in the 1990s, necessity forced me to accept an IT career to support my family.
I learned to drive on a circa 1950s John Deere without killing myself, labored in the Midwestern corn fields and on Southwestern Ohio assembly lines without losing any fingers, but I was born too late, so family farms were being bought out or killed off, and union factory jobs were barely hanging on the ropes by the time I joined the ‘job market’.
Anyway, over the years, I’ve found that whenever I speak of ‘culture as technology’, a common presumption is that I speaking figuratively, that it’s some woo-woo fantasy.
Far from it, I assert that the first tool was not a stone axe, flint knife, sinew or plant-based thread ― thorn or bone needle, but the ‘thought experiments’ and cooperation that preceded and guided the cultural development of those tangible objects.
Culture is the tap root, the primordial first tool. It is a fusion of art + science existing countless millennia before those words were invented, an infinitely adaptive, self-replicating, self-perpetuating, virtual Von Neumann Machine.
Culture is the repository that is integral to my set of tools for addressing fundamental human needs, the study of human psycho-social ecology that are my inspiration, guide my speculation, disciplined study and practice of critical self-reflection, inquiry, design, and development.