In this episode we explore and parse apart three distinct elements of atonement: telling the truth, acknowledging and apologizing for harms, and taking direct action to repair.  As this conversation underscores, atonement represents just one element of a more complex set of reforms necessary to address systemic oppression. Absent a broader effort, the very harms reparations seeks to address would perpetuate.

Denise, Sam, and Zaheer's personal reflections make this conversation especially powerful. Denise expresses the labor involved in bringing this topic to light, Sam shares his experience atoning and paying restitution for the crime that had him spend 24 years in prison, and Zaheer highlights the ways in which our mindsets of individuality inhibit our ability to take responsibility for each other.

Discussion summary:

• Framing the topic and this moment for social justice [1:00]
• The story of Bruce's Beach in Los Angeles; "what is an apology without an action behind it?" [4:36]
• Missing elements from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and recent activity in the U.S. Congress [7:47]
• Reparations as part of the broader racial problems and history of the U.S. [9:22]
• "Do we believe ourselves to be one body?" Addressing and repairing a wound in the body that we all share [11:48]
• Accounting for atrocities that happened generations ago [17:26]
• Moving beyond the narrative of the self-made person [22:32]
• "all men are created equal" and truthtelling [23:27]
• Cycles of poverty [24:41]
• Myth of the meritocracy [29:15]
• Justice and restitution in museum culture [30:33]
• Assessing the current moment [43:08]
• What is enough and what is sufficient? [46:39]

Resources

• Why We Need Reparations for Black Americans Brookings, April 2020

Current events

• California Panel Sizes Up Reparations for Black Citizens New York Times, December 1, 2022
• H.Con.Res.19 - Urging the establishment of a United States Commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation proposed in February 2021; referred to subcommittee in April 2021
• H.R.40 - Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act introduced January 2021

Historic references

• The Radical Republicans movement (1850s)
• Forty Acres and a Mule & General Sherman's Special Field Orders No. 15 from the Civil War.
• Bruce's Beach, a black-owned resort that was taken by eminent domain in 1924
• The Rosewood massacre (1923) and the pursuit of reparations in Florida
• Germany's restitution to Holocaust victims (1945-2018)
• Civil Liberties Act of 1988 reparations to Japanese Americans for internment during WWII
• Truth and Reconciliation Commission 1996-2003 in South Africa

Books cited

• Caste: the Origins of our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
• When Affirmative Action Was White by Ira Katznelson
• Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing by Joy DeGruy
• From Here to Equality, Second Edition: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century by William A. Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen

‍

‍

To stay connected to all things Denizen, you can sign up for our newsletter at www.becomingdenizen.com.  There we share our latest content alongside community events, educational opportunities, and announcements from our many partner organizations.

Partnerism is both a social and economic system. Based on the principles of equitable partnership, it reaches across the spectrum of society — gender studies, family systems, organizations, cultures, and political systems — as a movement towards a more just and caring society. Overall, it shifts paradigms from hierarchies of domination to hierarchies of actualization.

This has been the life's work of our guest for this episode, Riane Eisler. She is a social scientist, cultural historian, attorney, and Holocaust survivor whose transciplinary exploration is making a lasting impact in the social sciences and society-at-large.

This episode also features the contributions of three Denizens who are building on Riane's work in distinct ways - movement-building, storytelling, and economic change.

In this episode, our deep dive on partnerism includes:
 

• Introducing Riane and her story [2:39]
• Introducing partnerism [4:29]
• The domination-partnership scale [10:32]
• Four cornerstones of transitioning from domination to partnership cultures [16:55]
• Quantifying the economic value of care [22:51]
• Shifting narratives from domination to partnership [27:10, 39:28]
• Introducing The Chalice and the Blade [28:21]
• Nations modeling the shift to partnerism [29:31]
• Introducing Rosie von Lila [32:36]
• Introducing Catherine Connors [39:28]
• Introducing Donnie Maclurcan [49:25]

To stay connected to all things Denizen, you can sign up for our newsletter at www.becomingdenizen.com.  There we share our latest content alongside community events, educational opportunities, and announcements from our many partner organizations.

We all know about all the things that are wrong with social media as we know it. It's a model where everything is centralized and the market dynamics foster very few competitors who just get bigger and have more power. Who builds? Who governs? Who owns? Where are the servers? Where do the applications sit? Where does the data live? It's largely in just a few companies that in many cases have walled gardens of content. This dominant model yields a tremendous centralization of power for tech executives who are incentivized by market dynamics, to grow and to extract and to capture more and more of our attention. So, how do we get ourselves out of this mess?  Does the answer lie in decentralized social media?

Our guest for this episode is Evan Henshaw-Plath, veteran Silicon Valley engineer and CEO of Planetary, a decentralized social network.

In this episode we cover all things decentralized social media, including:

• The story of Twitter's "original sin" where it abandoned a federated model for a centralized one [4:14]
• A framework to think about decentralization across the Internet and social media [12:22]
• Distinctions between web3 and the dWeb (decentralized web) [15:18]
• What a protocol is, why it’s a core element of decentralized social media, and the current landscape of protocols [15:33, 23:37]
• Architecture and design considerations at protocol vs. app levels [28:39]
• Big debates in the decentralized social media space [31:31]
• Issues with blockchain based solutions [36:28]
• Evan’s vision for decent social media and what he’s up to with his startup, Planetary [38:56]

Resources:

• Denizen's writeup on decentralized social media
• Planetary's homepage
• Evan's homepage
• What obligation do social media platforms have to the greater good: A TED Talk by Eli Pariser
• ‍My first impressions of web3: by Moxie Marlinspike, who founded Signal
• The Battle for the Soul of the Web, The Atlantic Oct 2022
• dWeb principles‍
• ‍Web3 is Self-Certifying: by Jay Graber, the CEO of Twitter's spinout Bluesky

To stay connected to all things Denizen, you can sign up for our newsletter at www.becomingdenizen.com.  There we share our latest content alongside community events, educational opportunities, and announcements from our many partner organizations.

Charles is the author of several books, including The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible and Sacred Economics. His work spans multiple pillars of the Denizen Inquiry, including economics, culture, and consciousness.

In this episode, Charles and Jenny discuss gift economics, a very different model of exchange than capitalism. In a gift economy, goods and services are given away as gifts without an explicit agreement on giving anything in return. This does not mean there is no financial exchange -- in many cases, the consumer opts into paying an amount that is determined at their discretion after the good or service has been received.

Gift economies are moderated by social norms and were the dominant form of exchange in many indigenous cultures.  Critically, gift economies are circular and relational as opposed to a transactional, and thus present a compelling example of a non-extractive economic model that is more aligned with natural law.

This episode covers:

• Why gift models more aligned with human nature [4:40]
• How gift economies induce gratitude and reciprocity [7:21]
• The essential cultural component of gift economies [12:06]
• Why the gift is a natural model for digital goods[13:24]
• How gift economies engender circularity vs. hoarding [15:38]
• Intellectual property and the collective inheritance of humanity [22:00]
• Charles' experience stepping into a gift model in his own work [26:20]
• Implementing a gift model [29:53]
• The circular, relational vs. transactional nature of gift economies [32:00]
• How the circularity of gift economies mimic nature [32:47]
• Navigating boundaries between gift and market economies [34:18]
• Synchronicity and the gift [36:50]

Resources

• The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, Charles Eisenstein
• Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein
• The Gift, Lewis Hyde

To stay connected to all things Denizen, you can sign up for our newsletter at www.becomingdenizen.com.  There we share our latest content alongside community events, educational opportunities, and announcements from our many partner organizations.

Universal basic income has gotten a lot of attention in the past five years. What is universal basic income, and why might it be a compelling component of a just society? How did the pandemic accelerate the possibility to adopting cash assistance in various forms?

Our guests for this episode are Natalie Foster and Dorian Warren, co-founders of the Economic Security Project which has spearheaded some tremendously impactful work around guaranteed income in the United States over the past few years.

In this episode, we do a deep dive on universal basic income and guaranteed income, including:

• What universal basic income (UBI) is [2:15]
• Its funding sources and costs [3:42, 34:31]
• Four arguments for it from a political theory perspective [3:44]
• Practical arguments from the macro and microeconomic points of view [8:24]
• Distinguishing "guaranteed income" from UBI [11:14]
• Historical influences and the movement of poverty abolitionism [16:03]
• Valuing the care economy [19:24]
• Complementary views from Buckminster Fuller, Milton Friedman, and Charles Eisenstein [20:42]
• Incorporating solidarity economics [21:39]
• Policy experiments, especially in Stockton, California [23:24]
• How recipients spent the money and were affected [26:00]
• Mayors for Guaranteed Income and pilots currently underway around the United States [32:17]
• Going behind the scenes of social change work [35:42]
• The narrative, cultural and political elements of power [39:00]
• Similarities to social security [41:13]
• Sources of excitement and hope [46:06]

Resources

• Economic Security Project
• UBI overview (Stanford Basic Income Lab)
• Political Theory for Universal Basic Income, by Juliana Uhuru Bidadanure (highly recommended)
• Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?: Martin Luther King Jr.'s final manuscript with a vision to abolish poverty
• Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter, by Manuel Pastor and Chris Benner
• The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, by Heather McGhee

To stay connected to all things Denizen, you can sign up for our newsletter at www.becomingdenizen.com.  There we share our latest content alongside community events, educational opportunities, and announcements from our many partner organizations.