I learned a new term today A2D – alternatives to development. In the past – like 10 years ago – I used to think that everyone deserves their industrial revolution. This was without thinking about all the people that were subjugated by this, by the extraction, by the different lenses through which we can examine the effects of the industrial revolution beyond economics: familiar, ecological/environmental, cultural, etc. The way beyond is not the compensatory state that reinforces these networks, but something else that reframes the nodes on the network of extraction and provides alternative interfaces and perhaps funnels off from that structure. 

This is sort of a systems poetic interpretation. These are different systems through which we view contemporary industrial revolutions. 

There is also the idea that the industrial revolution is not localized. This is what I got from Planetary Mine. Rather than a sort of moving atomic monolith or something setting down in a country and causing “industrial revolution”, the industrial revolution is a process tightly coupled with capitalism and capital. It is like an octopus whose tentacles are moving to create new connections and networks – between sources of extraction and centers of commercial capitalism. 

How do we move beyond extraction which disrupts lives and lifeworlds (phenomenologically)?

We can have a plurality of parallel economies. I have been meditating on the oikos – the greek word for house. This is the original term for economics comes from this word- the House. The house is foundational in thought. The stars and planets have houses.  The house is the body to the soul – perhaps. There is Gaston Bachelard has a phenomenological analysis of the house – the inside, which I don’t really remember.  What is the inside to a nomad? To a wandering jew like myself? There is always an inside, an inner life or an inner sanctum, even if it is obscured for us… an occult house.  

We can use this and think about economies as the insides.  We can have inside economies and outside economies – right now we really have only outside economies. But these are not insides – these are not dwellings. The outside economies perhaps should be called something else – roads or streets. The economies used to take place in other insides – in the insides of markets like the agora or the NYSE.  But with network economies there are no more insides and outsides only skeletons. What is the inside of a skeleton – bone marrow? Blood is made on the inside of the skeleton – the house of the bone. The Blood is the transportation system of the body – the outside economy (if we call it an economy since it is an outside, but perhaps every outside is also an inside).  The blood is a transport, like the road. There is a door to houses, there is a path to the inner, that connects the outer world with the inner economy. 

Perhaps economies should be local parallel and plural. What we thought was the economy is actually something else, perhaps it is communication – like something fro Habermas. Perhaps there has been mass confusion?