Profil

I found this book in "Het Fort van Sjako", a brilliant bookstore in Amsterdam (run by a collective, full of interesting political books) and finished reading it in a few days. Written by the author as a reaction to the death of his son, in order to continue the work of his son to change the world for better. It has a good overview of the worlds problems and what you can do as an individual. Most of it is not surprising, like eat less (or better: no) meat, consume less, emit less CO2, ... But it is a good summary and provides a common story line to tie all things together. While it shows that individual change can only do so much, it also shares hope that with collective actions and with grassroot movements even the big corporations can be pushed to be better. This book is planned to be the first in a series of three, looking forward to the next two which will cover corporate and law in the second book and grassroot movements in the third. The book is sometimes a little confuse, giving the feeling that the author could have organized the storyline a bit better, but it is also showing the authors passion on the topic. There are lots of references, so the author definitely did his research and knows what he is talking about. It never leaves the feeling that it was badly researched... Overall: recommendation to read, helps to get a bit of hope back.

Eden Medina describes the history of Cybersyn, a project in Allende's Chile to govern the economy by a systems thinking approach. Devised by Stafford Beer but developed by a lot of Chilean experts the idea was a computer based system following the viable systems model to allow for the government to shape the economical policies on real time to the dands of the economy, but not as a central control but a complex system allowing control from worker level to the government. The book describes well the challenges and the philosophy behind the system, sourcing from interviews and a lot of historical documents. The system never got to work, as Allende was killed before it was anywhere near to be finished, but it helped the Allende's government to handle a couple of crisis already in it's partial state. The ideas behind the system are worth to be revisited, and there are some elections for today found in this book for the application of technology to sociological and political problems.