Category Archives: New Utopia

Allure of fast riches; perils of misplaced ambition

Its not hard to understand. Three buddies struggling to keep their Wyoming construction business afloat get a call from a California lawyer who wants them to finish building her mansion.

They might be so eager to get away from roofing and drywalling jobs that theyd ignore questions such as: Why did the last contractor quit a lucrative gig? Why does the owner want the house finished in only four months?

Huge bonuses have a way of dispelling such concerns, as was the case when Gretchen Connors offered that sum to Teddy, Bart and Cole, co-owners of True Triangle Construction. Therein lies the setup of Godspeed, Nickolas Butlers intermittently effective but overwritten thriller that, at its best, is a bracing reminder riches often come at a steep cost.

Those riches would solve a lot of problems, though. Teddy, a married Mormon, could use that money to pay medical bills. Cole, soon to be divorced, fantasizes not only about fancy watches and a nice townhouse but also about whether childless, never-married Gretchen ever could fall for him.

Only Bart says the job doesnt feel right. At Coles insistence, they take the gig, but the pressure gets to Bart. As he did in his younger days, he turns to drugs to help him maintain the energy required for a backbreaking schedule.

Butler has thrown many other elements into this mix, including holdovers from the previous contractor who might be spying on the new crew, a pair of murders, a ruthless drug dealer and a health issue that might affect the outcome of the job.

Eventually, the book reaches nifty plot twists and fine character sketches. Butlers writing sharpens as the story turns grisly, and he excels at describing mysterious elements, such as the strange gleaming that comes from beyond the propertys hot springs.

Godspeed feels like a novel from a different era, with white, tough-guy protagonists driven by sex, money and power. Butler might not always know where to shine his spotlight, but he knows this much: A jog on a treadmill in pursuit of riches might produce fitness of a sort, but watch your step.

Michael Magras, Star Tribune

Beautifully accomplished ballet-themed thriller

Dara, the heroine of Megan Abbotts new thriller, The Turnout, has spent her life in her mothers shadow. Together with her sister, Marie, and husband, Charlie, who was once their mothers star pupil Dara runs the Durant School of Dance, the studio her mother founded.

As refined as Daras world is, it also is characterized by ruthless ambition and the intense competition the sisters foster between their students.

After a fire, as theyre ramping up for the annual production of The Nutcracker, the sisters hire a contractor to rebuild. Equal parts rube and fairy tale monster, Derek epitomizes everything Dara thought she had banished from their lives. To make matters worse, he starts sleeping with Marie. And the job seems to be taking a lot longer than he promised.

As it becomes apparent Derek has ulterior motives, his presence in the studio strains the relationship between the sisters, and Dara must face truths about her family she has hidden from herself for years.

Dara and Marie live with chronic pain, and dancing has all but crippled Charlie.

Even if we dont always like Dara, who has internalized the worst of her mothers ideas, we sympathize with her desire to discover the truth and free herself from her mothers legacy. Scandalized by Maries fling with Derek, Dara thinks of her sister as an animal. Sex turns Daras world on its ear. Nearly everywhere, with Derek in the studio, Dara sees or hears innuendo.

Because Dereks such a buffoon, its fun to watch the ease with which he gets the best of Dara. Brash, vulgar, leery, hes a comic villain until it seems he might not be the villain.

Similar to most domestic noir, The Turnout is a slow burn. After a long wait, when violence comes, it seems much more arresting. Were Abbott not so accomplished, we might tire of reading before the stakes become clear. But from the first page to the reveal at the end, a palpable sense of menace and the sympathy we feel for Dara as her world unravels make it impossible to look away.

Tom Andes, Star Tribune

Fascinating memoir of Utopian Indian city

The most surprising aspect of Akash Kapurs Better to Have Gone: Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville is the authors well-disposed view of the leaders, beliefs and practices of Auroville, a planned city founded in 1968 outside Pondicherry in southeast India. It was here Kapurs wife, Auralice, lost her mother to suicide and her adoptive father to a mysterious wasting condition.

Among those attracted to the place was Auralices mother, Diane Maes, and John Walker, who later became Dianes partner. The authors parents, too, had been drawn there. Akash and his future wife had been childhood playmates.

The early history of Auroville follows the pattern of other attempts to transform society and human nature. Aurovilles physical planning came from organizers in Pondicherry who envisioned a rigorously designed futuristic city of 50,000 with a complex infrastructure. The actual residents, however, tended more toward hippies, counterculturists and spiritual seekers, people who believed the place should develop organically.

In time this led to the organizers cutting off funding, and many of the residents hardened into ideological zealots who embarked on their own cultural revolution, complete with interrogations, purity tests, book burning and violence.

TAlthough this painful phase eventually passed, a benign view of nature and rejection of medical intervention persisted. Diane slipped off a tall building under construction and, though horribly injured, refused to be taken to a hospital. Ailments often were understood to be the symptoms of hoped-for cellular evolution. As John, too, shunned doctors, the cause of his long decline and death remains unclear; still, parasitic invasion seems a good guess if one can judge from the two 10-inch worms that emerged from his body at different times.

Despite this and other tragedies recorded here, the book provides a fascinating picture of an Ideal City brought into being by the ceaseless, grueling work of its first residents, idiot savants of endurance, as one man dubbed them. It is also a shrewd portrayal of some of the experiments key players and of the backgrounds and beliefs of Diane and John, two stubborn, driven, spiritual adventurers.

Katherine A. Powers, Star Tribune

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New on the bookshelf: July 31, 2021 - Kankakee Daily Journal

04/08/2021 - The Portuguese festival will showcase a strong selection of national films at its second summer edition

Jack's Ride by Susana Nobre

IndieLisboa is back for its 18th edition, spanning from 21 August-6 September and presenting 276 films across nine sections. The festival had already announced a retrospective of Sarah Maldorors work, as well the Silvestre, Indie Jnior, Directors Cut and Indie Music sections and the International Competition (which includes titles such as Norika Sefas Looking for Venera[+see also: filmreviewtrailerinterview: Norika Sefafilmprofile], Alice Diops We[+see also: filmreviewtrailerinterview: Alice Diopfilmprofile], and Alexandre Koberidzes What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?[+see also: filmreviewtrailerinterview: Alexandre Koberidzefilmprofile]). Now, the festival unveils most of its competitive and non-competitive sections.

The gathering will start off with Summer of Soul (...Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised), directed by Ahmir Questlove Thompson, and will close with the national premiere of Srgio Trfauts latest film, Paraso.

As the festival is dedicated to support and showcase Portuguese films, the National Competition is one of its highlights, comprising of four features and 19 short films (with a grand total of 14 world premieres) and focusing both on works from emerging directors as well as from prominent filmmakers. Susana Nobres Jacks Ride[+see also: filmreviewtrailerinterview: Susana Nobrefilmprofile] will have its national premiere as one of the four features included in this section. Gonalo Lamas debut feature film, Granary Square, will have its world premiere at the festival, alongside two other debut feature films, both national premieres: Rock Bottom Riser, directed by Fern Silva, and Simon Calls[+see also: filmreviewtrailerfilmprofile], directed by Marta Sousa Ribeiro. The short film selection includes Joo Pedro Rodrigues and Joo Rui Guerra da Matas homage to Jacques Demy, Um Quarto na Cidade, and three films that are also in the International (short film) Competition: Catarina de Sousa and Nick Tysons Tracing Utopia (US/Portugal), Laura Carreiras The Shift (UK/Portugal) and the world premiere of Helena Estrelas Transportation Procedures for Lovers (Brazil/Portugal/Spain).

Emerging Portuguese directors will showcase their works in the Brand New section. Fruto do Vosso Ventre, the winner of the Curtas Vila do Condes Take One Competition, directed by Fbio Silva, is included in this 13-film selection, as well as Miraflores, directed by Rodrigo Braz Teixeira and Rosa Vale Cardosos Se Tudo O Que Oio Silncio.

Part of the non-competitive sections, the special screenings programme presents several documentaries on key figures of the Portuguese artistic and political scene: from the architect Nuno Portas, in The City of Nuno Portas, directed by Teresa Prata and Humberto Kzure, to the artists Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and rpd Szenes, in Joo Mrio Grilos Vieirapad, and a film-performance starring Joacine Katar Moreira and Welket Bungu, Upheaval, directed by Bungu.

IndieLisboa will once again host the Lisbon Screenings, an industry event organised by Portugal Film - Agncia Internacional de Cinema Portugus that aims to support new in-development or finished Portuguese projects in finding their world or international premiere. A Tvola de Rocha, by Samuel Barbosa, which will have its world premiere in Locarnos Histoire(s) du Cinma, followed by a national premiere in IndieLisboas non-competitive section Directors Cut, is one of many films that were included in this industry event in the past. This year, the selection includes feature films by Ins Oliveira, Ana Sofia Fonseca and Jos Filipe Costa, as well as short films by Diogo Baldaia, gata de Pinho, Falco Nhaga, Jos Manuel Fernandes, and Pedro Neves Marques amongst others.

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IndieLisboa announces the programme for its 18th edition - Cineuropa

A Broadway recording of Come From Away will be streamed globally via Apple TV Plus.

The musical, which first premiered on Broadway in March 2017, follows the passengers of 38 flights grounded in the week of the September 11 attacks, when they are forced to land at the sleepy town of Gander in Newfoundland. The small town is faced with the task of housing and feeding 7000 stranded travellers.

Come From Away has book, music and lyrics by Irene Sankoff and David Hein, and is directed by Christopher Ashley, with musical staging by Kelly Devine, music supervision and arrangements by Ian Eisendrath, scenic design by Beowulf Boritt, costume design by Toni-Leslie James, lighting design by Howell Binkley, sound design by Gareth Owen and orchestrations by August Eriksmoen.

The WhatsOnStage Award-winning piece has been recorded at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre in New York, featuring cast members from the Broadway production (in total, 200 creatives will be involved either on-stage or behind-the-scenes).

It will be available from Friday 10 September, with RadicalMedia, who captured Hamilton and David Byrne's American Utopia, having overseen filming. Christopher Ashley directs the filmed piece.

The cast will composed of Petrina Bromley (original cast member) as Bonnie and others,Jenn Colella (original cast member and Tony Award nominee) as Beverley/Annette and others, De'lon Grant (Jersey Boys) as Bob and others, Joel Hatch (original cast member) as Claude and others, Tony Lepage (Rock of Ages) as Kevin T and others, Caesar Samayoa (original cast member) as Kevin J /Ali and others, Q Smith (original cast member) as Hannah and others, Astrid Van Wieren (original cast member) as Beulah and others, Emily Walton (Peter and the Starcatcher) as Janice and others, Jim Walton (Sunset Boulevard) as Nick/Doug and others, Sharon Wheatley (original cast member) as Diane and others and Paul Whitty (Once) as Oz and others.

Watch the new trailer below:

The show continues to run at the Phoenix Theatre in the West End, where it recently reopened.

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Come From Away Broadway recording to be streamed globally in September - WhatsOnStage.com

If the story of Walker and Maes cannot be separated from the longing and navet of the 1960s, as Kapur writes, it is even more tangled up in the politics of Auroville itself, which was thrown into an identity crisis after the death of the Mother in 1973. The ideological rifts went all the way up to the Indian Supreme Court: Did the teachings of Auroville constitute a religion, a sect or a spirituality? What are the differences between the three?

For a book that is so diligent about context, however, Kapurs lack of interest in the colonial legacy of Auroville is surprising, and his description of the land itself a fitting tabula rasa for the new world, this, in the teeming state of Tamil Nadu genuinely took me aback. (For a thorough treatment of the colonial roots of Auroville and indeed the idea of utopia itself see Jessica Namakkals Unsettling Utopia, published last month.)

A louder, more troubling omission is Maes herself. The contours of her faith, desires, personality are not easy to trace, and her contradictions impossible to reconcile she who let young Auralice be raised by neighbors but insisted on spoon-feeding the girl into her teens? She is a sphinx, reduced mostly to the extraordinary fact of her beauty. Walker, on the other hand, not only left a cache of correspondence but proved to be an uncommonly interesting writer. Some of the most vivacious prose in the book can be found in his letters (extended quotation comes with its perils). Kapur has his talents the story is suspensefully structured, and I consumed it with a febrile intensity but he has a deadly attraction to clich. Men contain all the requisite multitudes in this tale full of unfinished business and the wreckage of history, in which the wolf is perpetually at the door and seasons are spent in the belly of the beast (in this case, Harvard).

If there is a mystery to be solved in this book, it is not what happened on that day in October 1986, in the hut, where a man lay dying and a woman watching him wept. What happened was witnessed by many, it turns out; it was tragic and deeply unnecessary. The mystery lies in this books provenance and desire, the reason, I suspect, for that decorous reticence where Maes is concerned. This book has one real reader in mind: Auralice, who was raised with a kind of reverence and neglect not uncommon in Auroville in those days. She foraged for food, escaped to neighbors when the chaos of her home proved too much. Living with her, Kapur has come to know the quality of her silences there are places we dont go, thing we dont cant talk about, he writes. I suppose one of the reasons I wrote this book was to break down those walls.

He accomplishes far more. He brings this past into a kind of balance: He shows how to hold it, all together, in one eye a people and a place in all their promise and corruption. It is a complicated offering, this book, and the artifact of a great love.

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Revisiting a Utopian City With Fondness and Fury - The New York Times

Utopias are not, by definition, found on this side of paradise. Yet that truth hasnt stopped visionaries and seekersnot to mention knaves and foolsfrom trying to build communities on lofty principles and quixotic aspirations. One such wonderland is Auroville, a commune in Indias Tamil south whose heady origins can be traced to the incense-and-raga days of the 1960s. Akash Kapurs Better to Have Gone (Scribner, 344 pages, $27) is a haunting and elegant account of this attempt at utopia and of his familys deep connections to it.

Established in 1968 by a Frenchwoman with a God-complex, Auroville is a place committed to human unity and fostering evolution. Its first residents comprised a few hundred people from France, Germany and the U.S. and a sprinkling of other Europeansmost of them hippie-refugees from Western materialismas well as like-minded Indians. Today, 53 years later, its population stands at some 2,500. Few intentional communitiesnow, or everhave survived that long, writes Mr. Kapur. The world militates against . . . anywhere that tries to play by different rules.

The word Auroville was derived from auroreFrench for dawnwith a convenient echo, also, of the name of Sri Aurobindo, an Indian guru born in 1872. Mirra Alfassa, the Frenchwoman-founder, became Aurobindos acolyte in 1920 and his spiritual successor when he died in 1950. Alfassa came to be addressed by everyone as the Mother, and there was even an Indian postage stamp issued in her honor.

According to the Mothers founding charter, this City of Dawn belonged to nobody in particular but to humanity as a whole. To live in Auroville, one had to be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness, and each resident was vetted personally by the Mother. Although she is still revered in Indiawhere obeisance is accorded much too easily to anyone with spiritual pretensesits hard not to regard the Mother as a charlatan. Auroville, in her words, was a place where the embryo or seed of the future supramental world might be created. And it was no secret that she craved immortality.

Mr. Kapur and his wife, Auralicea name given to her by the Mother, who asserted the right to name all children born to her flockboth grew up in Auroville. Auralice was born in 1972, Mr. Kapur two years later. Auralices mother, Diane Maes, was a woman from rural Flanders whod arrived at Auroville as an 18-year-old. Headstrong and flirtatious, she soon separated from the biological father of her daughter and took up with another Auroville man named John Walker, in many ways the books most compelling (and infuriating) character.

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Better to Have Gone Review: Dawn of a New Humanity - The Wall Street Journal

What is the N.H. Freedom Caucus and how did they hold the Republican Legislature hostage?

Over time, Free Staters moved to New Hampshire, dressed as Republicans and gained enough seats to tie the hands of Gov. Chris Sununu until he conceded to limit his Emergency Power Orders and flip on divisive concepts. Sununu signed the first Freedom Caucus budget in N.H. history in the shameful hours of night, with no press. Sununu was played.

An April 8 press release titled, House Freedom Caucus Celebrates Budget Victory, the N.H. House Freedom Caucus website explains their motives, one term shouts out like a warning. They dont refer to government in common Republican phrasing limited government, they write, from under the heel of government a foreboding insight.

The Freedom Caucus, working from within government, strives for an anarchist utopia where citizens live as they please. Working from within, their goal is to bring down central and local governmental control starting with inciting racial resentment in local schools.

Nationally, the U.S. Congressional Freedom Caucus endorsed extremist Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) for Congress. The majority of N.H. Republicans chose Free Stater Jason Osborne as their majority leader. His extreme views are reflected in his deep involvement with the School Sucks Project, which aims to do away with all schools public and private. He is succeeding here in New Hampshire. The GOP passed the budget which provides more than $4,000 per child for anyone who already has or wants to pull their children from public school.

The Freedom Caucus vision for an anarchist utopia took a giant step forward thanks to the GOP dominated House and Senate and a tied up Gov. Sununu.

Will New Hampshire become the first Freedom Caucus anarchist utopia? Your votes will help determine the answer.

Originally posted here:

Annie Robbins: Will N.H. become the first Freedom Caucus anarchist utopia? - Conway Daily Sun

The Olympics opening ceremonies in Tokyo featured one of the worst pop songs of all time: Yes, Im speaking of John Lennons Imagine, sung by a large childrens choir and a bevy of celebrities.

As a fan of the Beatles and Lennon especially, it pains me to say this, but its true: While its melody and arrangement are indeed beautiful, the lyrics are an invitation to moral and political chaos.

Consider the opening verse: Imagine theres no heaven / Its easy if you try / No hell below us, above us only sky / Imagine all the people livin for today.

I frankly cant imagine anything worse. To say that there is no heaven or hell is to say that there is no absolute criterion of good and evil no way of meaningfully determining the difference between right and wrong, no standard outside of the subjectivities of each moral actor by which to say any one agent is better than any other.

If you doubt the convictions of a Roman Catholic bishop, take a good hard look at the tens of millions of corpses piled up in the last century by people who took very seriously the proposition that there is no hell below us; above us only sky.

What about livin for today? Wouldnt a world in which we all just live for today be a utopia? Yes, it would, but remember that utopia means, literally, not a place. We can dream about such a society, but we should have the common sense to understand that it will never come true, through our efforts, this side of heaven.

In fact, when we convince ourselves that we can produce heaven on Earth as so many revolutionaries and dreamers of the last 200 years have done then we actually produce something much more like hell on Earth.

Next: Imagine theres no countries / It isnt hard to do / Nothin to kill or die for / And no religion, too. I could only smile as the choir and celebrities sang these words just after the parade of nations attending the Olympics.

To dream of getting rid of separate nations is to dream of erasing human difference. There is nothing wrong with the existence of separate countries, and sometimes its necessary to fight and die for ones country, when its unjustly threatened. To defend this human reality isnt to succumb to mindless nationalism.

To dream of getting rid of religion is worse still. It has been a commonplace among secularists for at least three centuries that religion is at the root of most of our conflicts. But objective studies reveal that something in the neighborhood of 6 percent of all the wars for which we have documented evidence were caused principally by religion. Far more deadly have been nationalism, economic rivalry, tribal disputes, colonial conflicts and perhaps especially atheistic ideologies.

I confess that I couldnt suppress guffaws when I heard the celebrities sing the final verse: Imagine no possessions / I wonder if you can / No need for greed or hunger / A brotherhood of man.

The ones expressing these sentiments with such emotion were, without exception, multimillionaires with, I daresay, lots of possessions. Well, I think that the rest of us should give away our possessions the minute they give away theirs and I dont think we should hold our collective breath.

Once again, the problem isnt owning things per se; its lacking the moral vision to subordinate what one possesses to the common good.

As for the very last verse, about the brotherhood of man: That is, indeed, a beautiful thing to dream of. But we must attend to the simple, logical point that there can be no authentic brotherhood of humanity in the absence of a common Father. We cant be siblings unless we come forth together from the same divine Source.

Simply put, you cant have the brotherhood of man if there is no heaven, if there is no religion, if there is no God.

So go ahead and enjoy the tune of Imagine, but please dont abide by the lyrics.

Robert Barron is the auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles.

Twitter: @BishopBarron

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John Lennon's 'Imagine,' blared at the Olympics, is a totalitarian's anthem - New York Post

Grimes has debuted a number of new songs during a set for Australian virtual reality festival Splendour XR.

During the set at 3.30pm BST Sunday July 25 (12.30am AEST Monday July 26), dubbed the Grimes Metaverse (Super Beta) set, the artist played five unreleased tracks: Shinigami Eyes, Love Is A Drug From God with Chris Lake, 100 Percent Tragedy, Utopia and Player of Games. A number of the tracks had previously been teased by Grimes on social media.

The set was also streamed on her Discord server. Listen to the full set below:

On 100 Percent Tragedy, Grimes explained on Discord the track was about having to defeat Azealia Banks when she tried to destroy my life, referencing a 2018 incident when Banks allegedly spent days at Elon Musks house, making accusations against him on social media.

As Stereogum reports, Banks was quick to respond to the new song, saying Grimes def has some psychosexual obsession with me.

I think its bitterness cuz she doesnt have the musical capacity I have. Everything she does is out of pretentiousness and it comes out like that while everything I do is out of natural swag & geniusness lmaoo, she said in a now-deleted Instagram story.

Starting to notice all the weird undercover millennial racists hide out on Discord.

In earlier months, Grimes has described her follow-up to 2020s Miss Anthropocene as a space opera centred around a lesbian AI being.

Its a space opera about CLAIRE DE LUNE an artificial courtesan who was implanted in a simulation that is a memory of the AI creation story on earth from the brain of the engineer who invented AI because he wants to re live his life but see if his perfect dream girl could teach him to love and thereby he would preserve humanity this time rather than let them fade into obscurity overcome by the machines, Grimes said.

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Grimes says her new song is about having to defeat Azealia Banks when she tried to destroy my life - NME

In 2015, South Korean professor Jaeweon Cho hit upon a plan to revolutionise economics by commodifying human excreta. Powders derived from poop, he suggested, could act as fertilisers and biofuel, supplying food to microorganisms. This was the basis of his dream of fSM or Fecal Standard Money, which would create a modern society not based on traditional money.

Four years later, Chos seemingly esoteric idea inspired a virtual currency experiment 6,000 kilometers in Auroville, the 3,000-person international township of communal, spiritual living in Tamil Nadu.

Since late 2019, every Aurovillian who downloaded a mobile application has received 12 auras. Three auras of this allotment must be utilised in a select network of other Aurovillians. To discourage hoarding and keep the currency in circulation, auras depreciate by 9% every day.

Its very much in the Auroville spirit, said S Venkatakrishnan, who works as a Tamil translator and is one of the 400 users of the app. He uses the app to exchange his gardening and kitchen supplies. Others offer gardening lessons, a trip to the beach with friends or homemade food.

The new currency has been viewed with both enthusiasm and disappointment. In some way, residents say, the aura is emblematic of the rocky economics of Auroville itself, a work-in-progress marked by numerous attempts at renewal.

Auroville was founded in 1968 when 200 people from 20 countries settled in an arid stretch of land in Tamil Nadus Viluppuram district, ten kilometers north of Pondicherry. Following the vision of Mirra Alfassa, a French associate of the spiritual teacher Aurobindo who they call The Mother, they aimed to create a community without private property or exchange of money.

Their philosophy emphasised collective ownership of resources and sustainable living. They planned to support the settlement through a range of small-scale enterprises. Traditional market and management theories were put to the test.

Money, Alfassa had said in 1938, is not meant to make money. She explained: ... Like all forces and all powers, it is by movement and circulation that it grows and increases its power, not by accumulation and stagnation ... What we may call the reign of money is drawing to its close.

Still, it was not going to be easy, she warned. ...the transitional period between the arrangement that has existed in the world till now and the one to come (in a hundred years, for instance), that period is going to be very difficult, she wrote.

Since the inception of the settlement, Aurovillians have undertaken several experiments at achieving a money-less society. They piloted free distribution centres for necessities, a communal pot of money dispensed by a central administration and a basic income provided for those who work in the town. For many in the community, the schemes either enabled a weak economic foundation or shifted the town further away from its dream of a cashless society.

Eight decades after Auroville began, settlement member Hye Jeong Heo heard about Chos idea of Fecal Standard Money on a South Korean media programme. In 2018, Heo met with Cho and his team to explain the ideals of Auroville.

Even though there are different characters, I thought there are commonalities between the Auroville [idea] of money and fSM, said Cho, an environmental engineering professor and director of the Science Walden Center at South Koreas Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology.

At the heart of Chos plan was a toilet that converts human waste into fertilisers and biofuel. By loading powders into reactors that supply food for microorganisms, people would receive Fecal Standard Money that could be used in a market system, perhaps in parallel to existing trading systems.

Feces, like gold, is limited and precious, he wrote in Edge, an avant-garde technology publication. Nobody can make more than a certain limit, and it can be converted to energy.

Cho thought of this as a form of Circular Basic Income, an echo of the increasingly popular idea of Universal Basic Income: a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement, according to the Basic Income Earth Network.

It was Heos daughter, 27-year-old Dan Be Kim who decided to push the idea of Fecal Standard Money in Auroville. She had left the settlement at 17 in 2011 because of a medical condition, but returned in early 2019 to begin a feasibility study on the new currency.

However, a high tech toilet was where we lost a lot of people, she said over a video call from Berlin, where she now lives. There was interest and hesitation, she said, but it was clear that Auroville wasnt ready for a copy paste of fSM. Her team of four re-molded the idea of Fecal Standard Money into the digital aura.

Aura takes its traits from fSM, Cho told Scroll.in in an email. It is, he said, a distinct unit of account, a rusting/disappearing money that depreciates at 9% a day and involves sharing a portion of the allotment with peers in the system.

...Both are twins with different names and separate platforms, but with the same origin and philosophy, he said.

Still, there were bumps along the way. During the research phase, questions were raised in the Auroville community. Why not just do a pure barter? Why do we need any exchange at all? Why have money at all?

It took moving mountains, said Kim.

In a presentation of the idea at Aurovilles Future School in 2019, the teachers, whose classes Kim had sat in long before, were among the most reluctant they told her that the aura wasnt going to work, that plenty of experiments had already been tried.

There is this syndrome because of a repeating pattern of experiments in Auroville where each time they think they are reinventing the wheel, said Kim. Everyone has their niche projects going on, a lot of pioneer groups, they think thats the way to move forward, and then they burn out from the burden of the past.

Kim began to reframe the premise of her project using the language of Auroville. Instead of using the words buy and sell, participants would offer and receive. Instead of products, they focused on the untapped, human collective potential of Auroville space, skills, time.

Its not a tangible value that you can touch, said Kim. Its a spiritual, collective value. We finally got to a point where we could explain that.

With a major launch at the end of 2019, the aura app, created by a team of Aurovillians and nearby volunteers, was available for any registered resident of Auroville, regardless of what work they did or didnt do.

Because the pricing of items, tasks and actions are determined by the users themselves, there is not consistent value. It has to be something ethereal, said 80-year-old Bill Sullivan, who was one of the first Aurovillians five decades ago and worked closely with Kim on the aura. You could give your motor bike for 1 aura or a mango for 100 aura. We have to break those fixed values. Things dont have a value in and of itself its all in the mind. We dont want to reduplicate old economic models.

Kim added: Aura is an alternative currency that does not strictly depend on market-determined prices It is a thought/social experiment to see how people will go about valuing their offerings on the platform when given the freedom with unconditional endowments.

This, she said, is one of the most interesting aspects of research that can be done on user-generated data: Do people value specific goods and services in a specific range when there is the absence of price comparisons or references?

A brochure for the app reads: The aura creates a space for a circular economy where things considered waste, or things that are not being purposed, can first be identified and then upcycled and repurposed.

It states: For money to flow, money must be a means and not an end ... Money as a tool is not intended for accumulation, but rather circulation, it states, echoing Alfassas ideas.

But just as congratulatory comments began flowing in, the application began crashing.

Its been a tremendous problem, said Sullivan, who is known in Auroville as B. At first, it was just for a day or two at a time, but in February this year, the application went down for two weeks.

Weve had a challenge with our developers so we have to focus on getting the app to work well, said Sullivan. We are hoping for more funding from Korea and then we can convince the market and stores in Auroville to use it.

Funded by Chos centre in South Korea, the grant has not been adequate to cover a full-blown technology overhaul so the team is looking for external funding for maintenance costs, Kim said.

When Kim was conducting her research on Auroville, many people told her that Aurovilles economy was unequal, overly bureaucratic with too much talking and not acting, tending towards capitalism, and unsustainable. While this sparked the idea to create an alternative system, the fragile foundations of the communitys economy may be the ideas very undoing.

The issue with Aurovilles economy is its not self-sufficient, said Kim. Its reliant on external sources. Its a problem that has plagued the settlement from its inception.

In its quest to create a settlement free from money, Auroville is a human laboratory. Whether it is nearer or farther from its ideals depends on who you speak to.

Auroville has always been trying to get rid of money, said Manuel Thomas, a chartered accountant from Chennai who co-wrote an economic history of Auroville titled Economics of Earth and People: The Auroville Case 1968 to 2008 and continues to be a consultant for the community. They keep experimenting, but in all these years, there has not been a no-cash economy.

At its inception, Auroville received a periodic Prosperity bundle of clothing, toiletries and other basic needs from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry. After the Mother died in 1973, Aurovillians developed differences with the Sri Aurobindo Society. The Central government got involved, leading to a Parliamentary Act that handed over ownership rights to the Auroville Foundation.

The Auroville Foundation owns most of the land, buildings and assets, as Thomas book notes. The community has an international advisory council (similar to a board of directors), a governing board (a top management team appointed by the Indian government) and a residents assembly.

The introduction of the Maintenance system in 1983, which is still in place today, proved to be one of the most controversial moments in the communitys history, said Suryamayi Aswini who did her PhD thesis at Sussex University about the township.

Aurovillians who work in specific jobs receive a monthly stipend in their individual account. One third of Maintenances are received as cash credits that can be exchanged for rupees, while the rest acts as a local currency only usable for goods and services in Auroville. Some Aurovillians receive up to Rs 20,000 per month as a Maintenance, while half of Aurovillians dont receive any money because they determine themselves to be self-supporting.

The settlements major earnings come from micro and small enterprises (known as units) that are mainly involved in handicrafts, textiles, clothing and food. One of its largest employers and economic contributors is Maroma, a fragrance and body care products brand. Other major units include Sunlit Future, a solar grid system, and boutiques such as Kalki and Mira Boutique.

A Central fund (now called the City Services Budget) collects government grants and individual donations as well as earnings from Auroville units. Residents pay a standard monthly contribution, which started at Rs 200 in 1989 and grew to Rs 3,150 in 2018. Volunteers in Auroville have to contribute Rs 900 a month. An additional 20% of visitors accommodation fees is collected in the common budget.

Most of it is allocated to city expenses, the bulk of which goes to Maintenances and education. Aurovilles turnover in 2016-17 was Rs 337 crore. City services receipts for 2016 to 2017 amounted to Rs 19.5 crore, said Thomas, while Rs 51 crore was from grants and donations,.

The monthly City Services Budget, published in Aurovilles News and Notes Letter, stated that the town had a monthly loss of Rs 53 lakh in June 2021. Its internal contributions amounted to Rs 1.3 crore (the majority of which came from its commercial units and services) and its payments amounted to Rs 1.8 crore (of which Rs 34 lakh went to education).

In the early 1990s, those disappointed with the Maintenance system created Seed, a common account in which a small group of residents compiled their Maintenance and private funds to be disbursed back out by an administrator. This grew to other groups and became known as the Circles experiment. It started out full of people, idealism, enthusiasm, but failed to successfully take root, Aswini wrote.

In 2006, another experiment was attempted with Prosperity, a fund that acted more like insurance for times in need. But that fell apart as well.

In 1999, Thomas and a team set out to gather income and expenditure statements and balance sheets to be consolidated into a database, a task that was not only more arduous than assumed but also illuminated the dire state of Aurovilles affairs.

In 2002, the team released a White Paper showing that the contributions of Aurovilles commercial units per capita had dipped significantly in the previous decades. The paper encouraged the settlement to invest more into its commercial sectors to bolster income generation.

Manuel, who is currently updating his account of the settlements economic history, said that Aurovilles dependence on grants and donations seems to have reduced. Even though every experiment runs up against reality, he sees progress.

Basically, the aura is another experiment coming out of the Circles experiments a no cash philosophy, Maneul said. In the end, its still a medium of exchange and a form of informal money. But you are likely not to become an aura millionaire. Its the negative aspects of money that they are trying to avoid.

Henk Thomas, who lived in Auroville three decades ago and Manuels co-author, had a more sceptical take: Its high ideological content without solid thinking. In my view, its not very important or interesting because it covers such a small part of the economy. Henk said the aura is yet further evidence that the township never took heed of the advice contained in his book with Manuel.

There are endless experiments in Auroville and they all fail because in the end, there is a deficit, he said. The same questions come back again and again without new answers. I find it a tragedy that there is so much talent there, all kinds of people thinking from scratch and it dies out because there is no economic authority.

In 2017, Sullivan, who had helped Kim with the virtual currency programme, attempted an economic innovation of his own. He created physical notes out of waste paper with one note valued at Rs 100, exchangeable at Aurovilles Financial Service (which holds the individual financial accounts of Aurovillians and manages the Maintenances). He called one note an aura.

It was his attempt to revise the whole economy, but no one took it seriously, he said. ... Still, maybe [the first aura] broke through something that was a little bit stuck. Maybe those events helped prepare people for this aura.

Sullivan firmly believes that the critics will be proven wrong. In Auroville, you can find someone against everything, he said. This is a quantum leap to something totally different. Weve crossed a threshold and were committed. Weve tried all these other big things. The common pots, the circles. I was a part of them and they didnt really take off.

But the smartphone, he said, is the revolutionary leap that Auroville economics needed.

Manuel is among those keenly watching the aura experiment. He said: The thing with Auroville is it doesnt give up.

Karishma Mehrotra is an independent journalist. She is a Kalpalata Fellow for Technology Writings for 2021.

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In quest for utopia, Auroville hopes that it can create a society without money using an app - Scroll.in

The pandemic has affected our sex lives in many unusual ways, but perhaps none more unusual than this development: The coronavirus has highlighted the possible public-health benefits of glory holes. Sexual positions that make use of walls as physical barriers have long been considered niche. But when the New York City Department of Health recommended them last month as part of a push for safer sex, it tapped into a question that many of us have been asking: How do you seek sexual satisfaction during a global health crisis?

I havent had sex in more than a year, mostly because I took COVID-19 very seriously. I disconnected from the public sphere. No one visited my apartment. I disinfected my groceries and covered my apartments air vents with trash bags. As a queer person, I could barely register the idea of sex while living alongside a deadly virus that nobody really understood. One study published early in the pandemic showed that 43.5 percent of people reported a decrease in the quality of their sex life. Among study participants, they had fewer sexual encounters with other people, and even masturbated less often.

But queer and trans people have a rich history of pursuing pleasure, especially during dark times when that very pursuit is dangerous, even illegal. This drive stems from the fact that many queer and trans peopleespecially those of colorlive under a kind of sociocultural duress in which our livelihoods and human rights are constantly subject to negotiation and popular debate, to say nothing of our physical safety. In spite of this reality, queer and trans people have innovated not by waiting for the future to get better, but by prioritizing the urgency of feeling pleasure right here, right now. So I knew that some of us would create novel pathways around the pandemics roadblocks to sex. I also knew that as the world reopened and Grindr profiles got fired up again, queer innovators would bring the kinks learned during quarantine into their post-vaccine encounters with other people.

Read: The Pride flag has a representation problem

In a time when touch has been so limited, some people have been moving toward a future full of bold new pleasures. Alex Jenny, a therapist based in Chicago, told me she joined a nude-sharing group chat, started an OnlyFans page, and began having sex online. In Virginia, where I live, one friend sauntered over to a lovers doorstep one night wearing a mask and nitrile gloves, picked up a Speedo sealed in a ziplock bag, went home to do a photoshoot in the swimwear, and sent his beau the photos and videos. Many people are reimagining their own boundaries, thinking of this period of virtual intimacies, of distance and little physical contact, not as a lack but instead as a sort of edge play through sexual self-discovery.

For Julian Kevon Glover, an assistant professor of gender, sexuality, and womens studies at Virginia Commonwealth University whos writing a book about the nuances of nonmonogamy, that meant attending an online sex party with her primary partner. [My partner and I] played on camera with a group of like-minded folk and it was much hotter than I ever expected, she told me. Ive learned that queer people are and will always remain quite as horny, and we are inventive.

Though the pandemic necessitated screen-based intimacy for some, queer people have always used the internet as a place to navigate their sexuality. During the late 1990s and into the early aughts, I spent more time than I care to admit navigating chat rooms on gay.com and Manhunt, where I pointed and clicked my way to some of my first sexual experiences. But I wasnt looking only for sex. Growing up as a Black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, during the era of frosted blond tips, white-seashell necklaces, and Abercrombie & Fitch, I was hoping to connect with anyone who could help me not feel so alone. The researcher David F. Shaw talked about this form of online intimacy, or computer-mediated communication, as the uncharted territories of cyberspace where men sit alone at their keyboards producing and inscribing themselves within interactive texts of homosexual desire and need. Historically, gay online forums have been so widespread that a 1994 Wired top-10 list noted that of the most popular chat rooms created on AOL, three were for gay men, one was for lesbians, and one was for swingers.

Read: The coronavirus is testing queer culture

Part of the reason queer sex thrives online is because of the internets covert nature. Prior to the webs easy anonymity, queer people had to seek sly ways to court sex in front of other people without being detected. The hanky code of the 70s and 80s, an elaborate system of discreet communication wherein people put different colored hankerchiefs in their right or left pockets to indicate sexual interests, allowed queer people to speak about kink in plain sight without words. Craigslist, which most people know as a place to find an apartment or a piece of furniture, was for many queer people a vibrant place to find sex before the Fight Online Sex Trafficking and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Acts of 2018. The list of ways to hook up goes on: sultry personal ads in the back pages of gay publications such as XY and Ttu, dating sites such as Grindr, and now, the Zoom sex parties of the coronavirus era.

These arenas have facilitated cultural practices that the anthropologist Shaka McGlotten calls virtual intimacies, or feelings of connection mediated by communication technology. I was amazed by how swiftly queer nightlife and sex worlds moved to Zoom, but Aurora Higgs, a queer Ph.D. student, artist, and performer from Richmond, Virginia, says that the required shift to online events ended up feeling more liberating than in-person shows. In Virginia, liquor laws limit activity in mixed-beverage establishments, including how much skin dancers can show, which clothing items can be removed, and how dancers can remove them. But the brilliant thing about online burlesque, Higgs told me, was that there was no bar. We were able to do stuff we werent able to do before, things like nudity, she said. It was interesting to see how people were utilizing their own spaces at home to dip us further into the fantasy.

Higgs told me that she plans to start a website where she can do cam work and online kink photography. As a Black trans woman, I sometimes feel like everyone has access to my sexuality but me. Im expected to be passively content at the end of a violent gaze, with little opportunity to turn my gaze on to others or on myself, she said. With camming and virtual shows, the gaze that normally violates me is temporarily being used at my discretion.

Even though sex can now take place in real life again for some, many queer and trans peoplewho have long dealt with the reality of HIV/AIDSmust navigate transparency about sexual health with the added complication of COVID-19. Trust is the currency that will shape how queer and trans people approach hooking up in a post-vaccine summer, Ayo Dawkins, an artist from Virginia, told me. Not that I trusted everyone I was with pre-pandemic, they said. But I knew sex wouldnt kill you. You have condoms to protect you from STDs and STIs, and you have Truvada (PrEP) to protect you from HIV, but nothing could protect you from COVID aerosols. Today, with new questions to ask about sexual-health statuses, some queer people may favor a more curated approach to sex that relies heavily on closed sexual networks.

In many ways, the past year and a half of sexual distancing, online intimacy, and exploration of pleasures has been a rehearsal for a yet-to-be-imagined queer sexual ecosystem. One of my favorite passages from the book Cruising Utopia, by the theorist Jos Muoz, reads: Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present, which is to say that queerness might be the longing for a better world to come. I always say that creativity and innovation stem from the margins, from those who are resisting the kind of flattened human experience that comes from being denied access. If COVID-19 has taught us anything, its how to foreground the importance of feeling as a means of survival.

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The Surprising Innovations of Pandemic-Era Sex - The Atlantic