Fixing Capitalism with Shared Visions and Aesthetics
The founder of The Elysian discusses publishing, humanism, and the Via Pulchritudinis
Welcome to the latest issue of Decent Tuesdays, an experimental edition of The Main Street Journal that covers and connects the many aspects of decentralization.
Elle Griffin is the visionary writer and editor behind The Elysian, a blog and imprint that publishes essays by her and a collective of other writers working to imagine better futures in practical, actionable terms. Griffin is also writing a book, We Should Own the Economy, that was inspired by her visiting and reporting on the cooperatively run Spanish conglomerate Mondragon.
We Should Own the Economy is funded, appropriately, on Wefunder with profit-sharing for investors, and The Elysian’s shorter printed works are sold via Metalabel, the creative marketplace created by Kickstarter founder Yancey Strickler. Griffin is also currently beta-testing Strickler’s Dark Forest OS (DFOS), a new, decentralized platform for private creative collaboration.
I’ve been wanting to do interviews for Decent Tuesdays for a while, and I’m excited to be publishing Griffin’s here as the first.
PS: What’s the origin story for We Should Own the Economy, the moment that you realized you wanted to and could write that book, and that it began taking shape in your mind?
EG: I was researching how to fix capitalism and had a long list of case studies I wanted to learn from. I had already written a few pieces in that vein:
But my research list kept getting longer, and it started feeling more like a book, with a cohesive vision. If I were interested in traditional publishing, I would have queried the idea to literary agents at that point. But that seemed a poor way to see if there was a market for it. Instead, I put my outline up on Wefunder to see if it was something my readers would be interested in.
PS: I like that you publish pamphlets and books as physical, printed objects. How does that decision fit in with your overall vision for The Elysian? Since printed books show what people are reading, have you ever heard of a conversation starting over someone reading an Elysian publication in a public space?
EG: At the same time that I’ve been studying a better society, I’ve also been experimenting with better media. I do not value the Twitter-ification of the media: Short-form, endless feeds, algorithms deciding what we read. At various points in my career, I’ve gotten online and tried to “play the game” by either trying to have a social media presence or be more aggressive with my work, but I’ve hated it every time. So I’ve progressively focused my work on email, slow journalism, and print pamphlets.
I’ve never seen an Elysian publication read in a public space, but my friends send me pictures of themselves reading my books around the world, which is fun. And I recently met someone who already had one of my publications on his bookshelf when he met me, which was quite the coincidence!
PS: Maybe this is too personal, but how do your own beliefs about God and religion intersect (or don’t) with how we can collectively imagine and create a better future? I recall that Communism was called a “great Christian heresy” for promising that paradise is possible through human effort alone— do you favor a “separation of church and state” for The Elysian that focuses on tangible, non-spiritual solutions?
EG: I was a Catholic in my 20s and 30s, and completed my graduate studies in Mariology, the study of the Virgin Mary. For my final project, I re-created eight iconic images of the Virgin Mary using modern photography. After my program, I became a Humanist and an agnostic. I love Humanism because it only has one creed: Meliorism, the belief that the world can be made better through human effort and that it is our moral imperative to do so. This creed can (and has been) accepted by the religious and secular alike, and I think that’s important.
Regardless of whether we believe in God, we can all believe that we should be helpful to one another, and this is something I advocate for a lot in my work. One of my favorite parables follows the same idea: When you pray, move your feet.
(More on all of the above:
PS: You’ve written about design, and I like the clean, literary look of your work. It seems to me that others with similar ideals use very different aesthetics, for example, Kalle Lasn’s Adbusters and related publications have an in-your-face punk aesthetic, while Helena Norberg-Hodge’s Local Futures content has a green, eco look. Do you think this design disparity conveying similar views is healthy, gets in the way, or doesn’t matter?
I’m inspired to ask this in part by a J.G. Ballard quote that Lasn included in his Manifesto for World Revolution: “Many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are aesthetic.”
EG: One of the pathways into the Catholic Church is called Via Pulchritudinis (The Way of Beauty). The idea is that people become Catholic because of the cathedrals and art and incense and words whispered over water to make it holy. This is absolutely true for writing— we will always be drawn more to a book that is beautiful than one that isn’t. It’s also true for the future. When people think about a future they want to be part of, the first thing they think about is what it looks like. Lots of plants and flowers, lots of waterfalls, a solarpunk city meandering through a wood, technology so advanced it’s invisible in this paradise. Erik Hoel once called the aesthetic “high tech pastoral.“
Almost before anything else, we have to define the aesthetic of the future before we decide how to create it, and this has always been where novelists thrive. And for that matter, where Disney World thrives, where the most popular restaurants thrive, where the most popular coffee shops thrive, what makes an Airbnb or a hotel or a house more expensive? Whatever is the most beautiful is what we will flock to. It’s also been one thing technologists often get wrong. There’s a reason VR didn’t take off the way people thought it would.
PS: I’m probably older than most of The Elysian’s audience, as are some other Main Street Journal readers, many of whom have created institutions, structures, and resources that younger activists and visionaries might not know about, but could find helpful.
How can an aging idealist like me best support the younger people who are now more at the center of change, impart institutional knowledge (while trusting the younger view of what’s now irrelevant), and help develop exciting, young, telegenic leaders who can move the work forward?
EG: I think age is irrelevant in our quest for a better world. Adam Smith was 53 when he wrote Wealth of Nations, Thomas Paine was in his late 30s when he wrote “Common Sense,” Alexander Hamilton was in his early 30s when he co-wrote The Federalist Papers, and Charles Darwin was 50 when he wrote On the Origin of Species. Rachel Carson was 55 when she published Silent Spring.
I say all of this because words change history, and some people can write some bold, brash ideas when they are young, and some people develop them over the course of their life until they have a working masterpiece that will inspire generations. But the words themselves remain ageless, reaching someone at 20, someone else when they are 80, and someone else 300 years from now.
When I am looking for ideas about what the future should look like, I am reaching from hundreds of thinkers across hundreds of years who have refined ideas, polished them, and I can now polish even more. We can’t know what will reach whom when. We can just keep having ideas and thinking them through together.
NEWS
SOLIDARITY
Thrift Store. Clinic. Roller Rink. Center Becomes ‘Radical’ Lifeline Amid Homelessness, Drug Crises, KFF Health News (January 9)
An abandoned, graffiti-covered retail building in a poor New Orleans neighborhood serves as a community thrift store, pharmacy, and free clinic, and also attracts visitors and broad support by operating as a punk music venue and roller rink. Its combination of volunteer dedication, community support, cultural cool, and fun factor keeps all the services afloat without government or foundation funding.
These Refugees Are Developing a First-of-Its-Kind Community Land Trust in San Diego, Next City (January 5)
In San Diego, the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans (PANA), founded by Somali immigrant Ramla Sahid, is raising funds to develop 2.2 acres that it owns into Global Village, a community-advised city-within-a-city dedicated to settling and supporting refugees and other recent immigrants. The site will be owned and operated by a community land trust focused on and stewarded by immigrants.
FINANCE
Financing the Future of Perpetual Purpose Trusts, ImpactAlpha (December 23)
To stay true to their mission and avoid takeover, companies can be owned by perpetual purpose trusts rather than by private owners or public shareholders. The trust is governed by non-owner trustees— for example, the company’s employees. Transferring ownership to a trust often requires money to buy out the previous owners, but impact financiers like RSF issue loans to enable such transitions. More people should know about this possibility.
FOOD
How Urban Gardens Can Bolster American Democracy, Civil Eats (January 7)
The upcoming book Tiny Gardens Everywhere shows how resourceful, non-wealthy people have grown crops in cities’ unused spaces and edges for centuries and improved public health despite urban snobbery. For example, near Washington D.C. in the early 20th century, a Black community bought lots and homesteaded, and more recently, suburban gardeners near Chicago faced neighbor opposition but passed a state Right to Garden law.
ENERGY
Creative Ways to Use Heat From Data Centers, Corporate Knights (January 5)
Big data centers demand energy to both run servers and cool them down. Dutch company Leafcloud builds data infrastructure with smaller server installations at apartments, pools, and other places that put their generated heat to good use. In Copenhagen and Denmark, larger data centers co-located with municipal heating plants help provide neighborhood hot water and steam, but recovered heat alone isn’t hot enough to produce steam.
TECH
Decentralization vs. Democracy in Crypto, Hackernoon (January 5)
With cryptocurrencies, don’t equate decentralization with democracy. Distributed decision-making can still be undemocratic. The Obyte platform and wallet app integrate voting into the chain that underlies their GBYTE currency. Votes for system settings are weighted by users’ GBYTE ownership.
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Really compeling take on how aesthetics preceed policy change. The Via Pulchritudinis framing is spot-on because I've watched cooperatives in my city struggle with messaging until they got the visual branding right. People need to see what a differnet economic model looks like before they'll take the leap, and that's exactly what makes places like Mondragon feel tangible rather than theoretical.