Ran Prieur om hur ett anarkistiskt samhälle skulle kunna fungera
"With the wrong structure, even small cities are too big. Anthropologists have calculated, and anecdotal evidence has confirmed, that when a group of humans gets bigger than about 150, it undergoes a phase change where people can no longer work things out socially, but only with the help of rules and central control. This doesn't mean we can't have big systems. The Iroquois ran a huge region with a system where small groups would gather and talk until they reached consensus, and then each group would send a representative to a higher-level group that reached consensus, and so on. This was the inspiration for our American "democracy" in which a hundred million people watch propaganda and then impose the tyranny of the majority on each other.
A healthy big system needs to be composed, as far as possible, of sub-150 semi-autonomous cells, the same way our bodies are made up of cells. The danger is that some of these cells will fall into a pattern of runaway increase and drag the rest with them. In the body this is called "cancer," and in the culture of Empire it's called "success."" (Ran Prieur i denna essä)
A healthy big system needs to be composed, as far as possible, of sub-150 semi-autonomous cells, the same way our bodies are made up of cells. The danger is that some of these cells will fall into a pattern of runaway increase and drag the rest with them. In the body this is called "cancer," and in the culture of Empire it's called "success."" (Ran Prieur i denna essä)
Ran Prieur om den eviga tillväxten
"No engineer would design a plane that can only increase its speed and altitude, but we do it everywhere: When has a government reduced the number of laws? When has a new computer operating system been leaner than the old one? How often does a food store move into a smaller space and carry fewer products? Have we ever torn down a housing development and planted a forest? When did cars ever get easier to fix?" (Ran Prieur i denna essä)
"Before Peak Oil, we had Peak Topsoil and Peak Wood -- all three are stored carbon, and extraction of energy from topsoil and forests went into decline a long time ago. The so-called "green revolution" in the last century was mostly about increasing yields on dead soil by eating oil. Now oil production is set to decline, and we're supposed to hope for some new source of even more abundant energy. That would be the worst thing that could possibly happen. The deeper problem is that we are on an airplane designed by madmen to only work if it keeps going higher and faster, and the higher and faster we go, the harder we will eventually crash.(Ran Prieur i samma essä)
