Author Archives: wrenchinthegears

Twice in the late winter and early spring of 2018, I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor of the Fisher Fine Arts Library, a Venetian-Gothic jewel box designed by Frank Furness as the main library of the University of Pennsylvania’s West Philadelphia campus in 1890. It had been years since I’d been inside the […]

For years I’d hoped someone with an artistic inclination would come along to translate themes of cybernetic control, empire, and global finance into a format that was more accessible to the general public than my long-form essays and presentations. Yesterday that dream came true. I met Eve at an info-picket outside the Philadelphia School District […]

I became somewhat of a hermit over the winter. Once it got cold in late December our Subaru intermittently wouldn’t start. It took several visits for Raphael, our mechanic, to find the loose grounding wire, and by then I had made it a habit of spending my days making maps and planning presentations at my […]

I’ve been meaning to share this jewel of insight from my friend Cliff for a month, but I needed to get past the summer doldrums and re-engage with my blog. I’m taking a week off to refresh my thinking in the Shenandoah, but when I get back I’ll be ready to jump back into Berggruen […]

This presentation is a follow up to the one Jason, Lynn, and I did deconstructing the Joe Rogan / Marc Andreessen interview last month. You can watch that here. Laura Arrillaga, Marc’s wife, established policy infrastructure around data-driven philanthropy and social innovation in the Bay Area starting in the late 1990s through her ties to […]

*Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexican Mountain Range Our lives are made for communication, our bodies bathed in information. Some information is vague, like a handmade sign in a sagebrush field “Coming Later.” Sometimes amusing, “Wisdom Way, Dead End.” Sometimes it is unexpectedly delightful, a poem composed on a […]

Yesterday I was feeling frustrated with the digital world and picked up a book that had just come in the mail:  Alexandra Rutherford’s “Beyond the Box: B.F. Skinner’s Technology of Behavior from Laboratory to Life, 1950s-1970s.” As I got to the chapter on token economies at Anna State Mental Hospital in Illinois, it all became […]

Featured Image: Piazza Ovale, Casina Pio IV, 1560 This is the fourth post referencing refugee labor, charter cities, faith communities, cooperatives and tokenization. You can read it in full here or access a PDF here. A year after taking office president of France Nicholas Sarkozy, who happens to be Catholic, tapped Joseph Stiglitz to head […]

This is the third post referencing refugee labor, charter cities, faith communities, cooperatives and tokenization. You can read it in full here or access a PDF here. Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank and Columbia University professor, paid visits to Mondragon in 2005 and 2018. He was looking at worker-owned cooperatives as […]

Featured Image: Pope John Paul II with Chiara Lubich, Founder of Focolare Ecumenical Movement This is the second post referencing refugee labor, charter cities, faith communities, cooperatives and tokenization. You can read it in full here or access a PDF here. We’ll delve deeper in the next section when we discuss the model global cooperative […]