## Metadata - Author: [[John Clippinger and David Bollier]] - Full Title: From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond - Category: #books ## Highlights - The very absence of order (even if its potential is never activated and therefore goes unnoticed and unmeasured) plays the key role in a system’s long-term stability. This uncommitted potential enables a system to adapt to a changing environment and survive unexpected challenges. ([Location 1543](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00M7BMT04&location=1543)) - If we are to understand sustainability, we must recognize that the absence of order is even more significant than the first variable, order. A living system adapts in homeostatic fashion to buffer variability in performance by expending what Odum called “reserves.”[4] The reserve in this case is not some palpable storage such as a cache of some material resource. Rather, it is the capacity to show flexibility and adaptability to new circumstances – and it usually requires some loss of efficient performance.[ ([Location 1545](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00M7BMT04&location=1545)) - Efficiency is defined as the capacity of a complex flow system to process a given volume of whatever flows through it, per unit of time – e.g., grams of biomass per square meter per year for a natural ecosystem; GDP per capita in an economy; or billions of dollars per day in an electronic payment system. Resilience is the capacity of a complex flow network to survive an attack, a disease, or adapt to a change in its environment. ([Location 1550](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00M7BMT04&location=1550)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Not surprisingly, in all patriarchal societies a Yang bias is accepted as “normal.” In contrast, the poet John Keats coined the term “negative capability” for the often overlooked Yin trait of human personality and experience: the capacity to hold uncertainty without angst – the capacity to live with the unknown as an ally rather than something to be eliminated. It is more like a connection to an undifferentiated ground that resists form, which continually invokes questions and reflection and is potentially multidimensional, a space of “both-and” and neti-neti, the Hindu concept literally meaning “neither this, nor that.” ([Location 1594](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00M7BMT04&location=1594)) - A key insight from empirical studies of natural systems is that nature does not select for maximum efficiency, but for a balance between the two opposing poles of efficiency and resilience. Because both are indispensable for long-term sustainability and health, the healthiest flow systems are those that are closest to an optimal balance between these two opposing pulls. Conversely, an excess of either attribute leads to systemic instability. Too much efficiency (excess Yang) leads to brittleness and too much resilience (excess Yin) leads to stagnation. ([Location 1603](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00M7BMT04&location=1603)) - Our global network of monopolistic national moneys has evolved into an overly efficient and therefore dangerously brittle system. The system’s lack of resilience shows up not in the technical field of the computer networks (which all have backups), but in the financial realm. Such a crisis, particularly a combined monetary and banking crash, is – apart from war – the worst thing that can happen to a country. ([Location 1687](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00M7BMT04&location=1687)) - As noted earlier, the substance that circulates in our global economic network – money – is maintained as a monopoly of a single type of currency: bank-debt money, created with interest. Imagine a planetary ecosystem where only one single type of plant or animal is tolerated and artificially maintained, and where any manifestation of successful diversity is eradicated as an inappropriate “competitor” because it would reduce the efficiency of the whole. It would clearly be unsustainable. ([Location 1693](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00M7BMT04&location=1693)) - Conventional economists are correct when they claim that a diversity of media of exchange is less efficient than a monopoly. However, it has now been proven that complementary currencies facilitate transactions that otherwise wouldn’t occur, linking otherwise unused resources to unmet needs, and encouraging diversity and interconnections that otherwise wouldn’t exist. While this may result in a drop in efficiency, it is the necessary cost for increasing the resilience of the economic system. ([Location 1742](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00M7BMT04&location=1742)) - Humanity has become, involuntarily and reluctantly, the steward of this planet’s biosphere. Ultimately, we have no choice but to learn how to make our global civilization sustainable, or it will cease to exist. It may be useful to remember here that Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. ([Location 1759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00M7BMT04&location=1759)) - At its essence, money is a ledger, a system used by society to keep score of who and what and when and where. Money is our way of recording distributed memory. ([Location 1889](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00M7BMT04&location=1889)) - In the 1960s the writer Arthur Koestler postulated that many biological and social organizations simultaneously display part/whole relationships. In other words, every entity is self-contained while concurrently existing as an individual member of a larger collective. Koestler proposed the term holon to describe the elements of these systems. This term is a combination of the Greek word holos, meaning “whole,” with the suffix on meaning “part,” as in proton or neuron. The term is meant to reflect the tendencies of holons to act as autonomous entities that also cooperate to form nested hierarchies of subsystems. ([Location 2152](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00M7BMT04&location=2152))