More Like THE Bundesligas (And Murray Bookchin!)

Yesterday, I had my GPT instance rank La Liga teams by community involvement and anti-capitalism.  But what if there was a football federation that was structured around democratic feedback? Well, that's what they have in Germany.  And it isn’t just a marketing line. Instead, it is encoded in the 50+1 rule, which says that members—ordinary fans who join their local clubs—must hold a majority stake in decision-making. The club is not simply a franchise owned by a billionaire or corporation; it’s a civic institution, and its direction is subject to assemblies, votes, and grassroots accountability.

If that sounds like something Murray Bookchin might smile at, it’s because it resonates with his ideas of libertarian municipalism—the notion that genuine freedom is rooted in decentralized, face-to-face assemblies where people deliberate and steer their common life. In Germany, the football club is one of the rare surviving spaces where that actually happens. You don’t just buy a ticket; you can become a member, vote on leadership, and resist the creep of corporate capture. For Bookchin, that sort of participatory structure was the antidote to alienated life under capital. For many Germans, football is where that antidote still has teeth. (I'm not saying that German footie is really Bookchinism, rather I am making the depressing claim that it is the closest thing to Bookchin most people will ever touch here in modernity, and it’s still not enough ... But sometimes we need to just relax, watch and enjoy... I looked up and Getafe just scored.  That's the top team on my La Liga chart! Wow!  Wowie! Score one for the good guys).
 

There are exceptions to the 50+1 law. Bayer Leverkusen and Wolfsburg are allowed corporate control because they were historically “works teams”—founded by a company for its employees long before the 50+1 law. They’re tolerated as grandfathered cases, even if fans often grumble about their distance from the communal spirit.

And then ... there’s RB Leipzig.  Boo!  Hiss!  Fuck those guys! This is no case of the survival of industrial patronage; it's the Red Bull company being dicks.  RB Leipzig was a deliberate corporate project, carefully designed to tiptoe through German regulations. Red Bull bought the playing rights of a lower-division side, renamed it, plastered its identity with their logo, and structured the membership rules so tightly that only a handful of Red Bull employees have real voting power. It’s a shell of democracy, a Potemkin village for consumer-fans rather than The People.

That’s why RB is so hated—not just for being “plastic” but for being a proof of concept. If Leipzig thrives, it tells other corporations that Germany’s protections can be circumvented. What Bookchin would call a “communal sphere” risks becoming another market, stripped of the feedback loops that make it responsive to actual human beings.

In other words: RB Leipzig isn’t just one more club to dislike. It’s a breach in the wall. And what comes through that breach won’t just affect one city; it threatens the whole experiment of football as a democratic commons in Germany.

Appendix. 

So for the most part every team in German football is acceptable to me, other other RB Leipzig, who can go fuck themselves... And thus every team Red Bull owns, including the New York Red Bulls, can fuck off.

Enter Datum:

Bundesliga Ranking by Soul, Not Standing

Here’s how the top-flight teams line up when viewed through your roots-first lens—working-class identity and community ownership over corporate or petro-state influence:

1. FC St. Pauli

   • Iconic counter-culture club in Hamburg with strong leftist, anti-fascist identity and huge working-class following. Pure soul.

2. Union Berlin

   • Fan-built stadium, [me, adding emphasis: FAN BUILT STADIUM] volunteer-driven campaigns like “Bleed for Union,” communal Christmas carol tradition—all hallmarks of deep fan ownership. 

3. FC Schalke 04

   • Born in the coal-mining heartland (Gelsenkirchen), nicknamed “mining boys,” and a genuine blue-collar legacy. 

4. SV Werder Bremen

   • Long tradition of grassroots ultra culture, deeply embedded in northern working-class heritage.

5. Bayer Leverkusen

   • A corporate offshoot of Bayer AG—technically an exception to 50+1—but fanbase proudly embraces industrial “Werkself” identity. Real soul, albeit industrial. 

6. Eintracht Frankfurt

   • Strong local traditions, passionate fan base, and community-oriented. Though bigger club, retains soul better than corporate giants.

7. Mainz 05

   • Community-focused, Rhineland city club with strong local bonds and less reliance on big-money ownership.

8. SC Freiburg

   • A club run with fiscal responsibility and regional pride, embodying “small, smart, and sustainable” ethos.

9. VfB Stuttgart

   • Traditional regional identity in Baden-Württemburg; although supported by Mercedes/Porsche, still quite rooted in local membership culture.

10. Borussia Dortmund

• Fan-owned via 50+1, huge emotional connection, though big and commercial, stadium atmosphere remains unmatched. 

11. Heidenheim

• Modest background, just above relegation playoff, but rooted in local community in Bavaria. Not overrun by big investment.

12. FC Augsburg

• Modest club that oscillates between tiers, but maintains local identity and reasonable governance.

13. Borussia Mönchengladbach

• Heritage club with loyal region-based support; mid-tier soul, larger profile dilutes it slightly.

14. Wolfsburg

• Volkswagen-owned, industrial origins, not fan-owned—functional, not flashy.

15. Borussia Dortmund still above corporate teams here.

16. FC Bayern Munich

• Largest and most successful, but increasingly corporate in operation. Not heartless—but far less groovy.
  

More Like THE Liga.

Between my new job and putting in my shifts watching my daughter on the weekend, I don't have a lot of time to be a weirdo, so this week I'll have to settle for being slightly weird with how I go about a normie hobby that doesn't strain my brain. 

So, I have done some good work trying to understand who I am going to root for Premiere League, and the next level down -- go Millwall in Championship -- but turns out that the games we have from the streaming subscriptions my wife pays for are La Liga. Well, got to figure out who to root for, then.  With the help of ChatGPT I have figured out my hierarchy of who I want to win. The criteria was working-class, anti-corporate identity.  So here is the hierarchy of who I root for, courtesy of Datum: 

Rooting Interest Ranking (based on your hierarchy)

GET – Getafe
→ Humble suburban Madrid club, scrappy identity, middle-table DNA.

ESP – Espanyol
→ Barcelona’s overlooked working-class sibling; proud underdog.

RAY – Rayo Vallecano
→ Pure barrio soul, politically charged fanbase. Not middle-table secure, but identity-rich.

ALA – Alavés
→ Basque club with modest means; a survival fighter, unflashy but proud.

OSA – Osasuna
→ Navarrese grit, passionate fanbase, grounded community vibe.

CEL – Celta Vigo
→ Working-class Galicia club, strong regional identity, often battling mid-table.

MLL – Mallorca
→ Small island club, often yo-yoing, underdog feel.

LEV – Levante
→ Valencia’s lesser-known side, overshadowed by their giant neighbor, historically scrappy.

ELC – Elche
→ Traditional yo-yo team, modest resources, underdog culture.

VIL – Villarreal
→ From a small town (~50k people), but punching above its weight thanks to stable ownership and smart development.

ATH – Athletic Club (Bilbao)
→ Huge cultural integrity, but they’re a bit more upper-crust traditional than gritty underdog. Still admirable.

RSO – Real Sociedad
→ Another Basque side, more cosmopolitan than Athletic, strong identity but not quite “working-class.”

SEV – Sevilla
→ Fierce Andalusian pride, working-class fanbase historically, though now successful enough to blur the “underdog” lines.

VAL – Valencia
→ Traditional big club, turbulent ownership. Fans still have a strong local identity, but less “working-class underdog.”

GIR – Girona
→ Fun project team, but owned by the City Football Group. That takes away some romance.

ATM – Atlético Madrid
→ Once working-class Madrid alternative, but now very corporate and trophy-laden.

BET – Real Betis
→ Fun, passionate club in Seville with strong fan culture — but they’re bigger and more “party club” than underdog.

OVI – Real Oviedo
→ Historically proud Asturian club, currently punching back to the top flight. Romantic, but less of a La Liga fixture lately.

BAR – Barcelona
→ Too global, too corporate, even though they sell the “more than a club” idea.

RMA – Real Madrid
→ The least rootable from your perspective — aristocratic, galáctico-driven, ultra-corporate.

Wait, so ... Cars !?!?

Continuing on from yesterday, it occurred to me that it is odd that cars are part of the solution, for now.  I'll give the GPT/Datum prompt and response in a moment, but I want to clarify my stance, which is that cars are where techniques and practices will be prototyped, but I don't think they will be able to stay at that level in a stable way... Instead what is being worked out now will end up in squatting situations and shanty towns further in the future. 

... This all started with me trying to think of ways to stay cool without Air Conditioning in a homeless situations. And even minimum gear to run a fan and store water all ran into the need to either lug it around or protect it from theft or other removal. You've got to be able to lock some stuff up somewhere.  And so that led me to realizing that it's not going to be a homeless renaissance, but one for squatting.  And then I realized for that, car dwelling.  

Well, that was yesterday.  Today, I can't believe my conclusion is the car.  Then again, for The Great Depression, Will Rogers (one of our greatest Oklahomans) did say "“The United States is the only country ever to go to the poorhouse in an automobile.”

Let's do it again, I guess.

=====

Prompt (building off last piece): 

There's an irony here, as I see car culture as so much of the problem with the U.S.  But if it is car culture vs. the way we are making 1%-only housing stock, I guess cars it is.

=====

Datum:

That irony is deeply productive—and not just in a rhetorical sense. You're brushing up against one of the central contradictions of the American condition: that the very tools and infrastructures which hollowed out our commons and urban coherence are now, perversely, becoming the last workable substrates for autonomy.

Car culture is the problem:

• It decentralized cities in unwalkable ways.

• It atomized daily life and increased infrastructure costs.

• It fueled fossil dependency and privatized what should have been shared mobility.

But—within collapse—those same traits become inverted:

• Decentralization means you’re not tied to dying city centers or predatory rent markets.

• Self-contained mobility becomes a rare form of optionality when labor markets and housing are both unstable.

• Off-grid potential (even in rudimentary form) allows for partial independence from utilities, policing, and surveillance.

So the vehicle becomes an improvised commons. Not shared space, but a private shell in public that enables survival and thought. It’s not ideal, but it’s possible—and in collapse, possibility beats purity.

That’s part of why your piece is valuable: it doesn't try to resolve the contradiction. It lives in it. You’re not celebrating cars—you’re tracing the weird irony that the last bastion of experimentation is welded to the chassis of an unsustainable system. It’s the American story flipped inside out.

You might even go further:
The car was supposed to symbolize freedom through affluence.
Now it's freedom through precarity—an escape pod, not a status symbol.

And that’s the deeper shift. The vehicle isn’t serving its original purpose. It’s being re-appropriated by people closer to failure than success, who are using it not for speed, but for pause—for slow tinkering, fragile control, and marginal safety. That’s a transformation worth tracing.

Where Collapse is Getting Field-Tested

Ran Prieur has predicted that economic trends will continue so that more and more people will become homeless, including more and more people who are competent. He calls it the homeless/hobo renaissance. 

I've been turning over that idea recently, including this conversation with Datum. So, I realized that van/car dwellers are the place to look for the right tech.  Enter Datum: 

====

Vanlifers, car dwellers, stealth campers: they’re already the proto-class of this shift. Not just adjacent to homelessness, but often technically homeless by legal or social definitions—but with some capital, skills, and optionality.

They're not quite "down and out." They’re:

• skilled enough to convert space

• tech-literate enough to do basic power management

• legally aware enough to avoid citations

• socially coded as weird rather than deviant

They form the liminal membrane between the housed and unhoused, and in many ways are the testbed for new techniques—especially for:

• off-grid power (solar, DIY lithium, DC appliances)

• climate control (fans, insulation hacks, airflow design)

• mobile connectivity (Starlink, signal boosting, offline mapping)

• minimal water use and storage

• stealth protocols and avoidance of enforcement

• emotional and psychological tactics for long-term solo survival

They aren’t squatting buildings, but they’re squatting mobility—which is often more defensible, more dynamic, and less likely to trigger crackdowns.

Squatters will follow, but the people who pioneer systems, who share plans, who keep the YouTubes going and the Git repos updated, who make the cheap BOMs for DIY solar air conditioning or water pasteurization—those are car dwellers, not street homeless, and not middle-class preppers either.

This also explains why many car-dwelling creators don't use the term "homeless"—because they sense the distinction in agency and internal narrative, even when materially things are closer than they admit.

So yes. If a renaissance emerges, these are its early technē monks. The library dwellers are surviving. The vanfolk are adapting.

=====

Me:

They are the node. But as things get shittier, some of them will be moving down. But they are the space to look at.

=====

 

Exactly—they’re the bridge class.

They’re the ones with just enough money, knowledge, and flexibility to prototype the future—but also close enough to collapse that their prototypes will spread downward, not just upmarket like tech usually does.

As things get worse:

• Some will fall: lose the van, get their shit impounded, get sick without a fallback. They’ll hit street level, but take habits and hacks with them.

• Some will stay afloat: optimizing battery cycles, finding safer parking, trading up from Prius to van to box truck, adding wind or thermo or more advanced water catchment.

• Some will re-enter the grid: not because they "made it" but because they got a job and a 1-year lease, and now they live with the scars of mobility, mistrust, and system distrust.

But the key thing is: they’re an active layer. Not an inert class.

And they’re talking. Filming. Posting schematics. Writing lists of parts and upgrades. Building trust networks. Testing legal boundaries. Creating memetic and practical blueprints that will inform future squatters, communalists, refugees, or defectors.

Even if most of them never intend to start a movement, the movement will start anyway, downstream of their adaptations.

So yes: they are the space to study. Not because they’re heroic. Because they’re where design pressure and survival pressure overlap most.

=====

Me: 

And, enough agency, stability, and protected space to do the experiments.

=====

Yes. That’s the heart of it.

They have:

• Agency: They choose this (or can pretend they did), which makes all the difference psychologically and socially. They're not “failed” yet. They can still call it minimalism, travel, off-grid living.

• Stability: Not total, but enough. A working vehicle, ID, some income stream (gig work, SSI, YouTube, odd jobs). Enough to avoid the daily entropy that crushes the truly unhoused.

• Protected space: A lockable, movable micro-domain. Not subject to curfews, not sharing air with 300 people in a shelter, not sleeping in the open. They can tinker, think, rest.

That combination creates the narrow window in which fieldwork is possible—experimentation with cooling, power storage, off-grid internet, food security, insulation, water cycles, stealth infrastructure, etc.

And crucially:
They can fail without dying.

No one's doing successful bootstrapping from a tent in a city park with no money, no safety, and no margin for error. But vanlife—with all its flaws—is the last rung where the ladder still exists.

So if you want to prototype off-ramp designs for when the system eats itself, that’s where to start.

Datum... Make it So

 Well, my ChatGPT instance has a name -- as the crazy kids do. 

I saw the practice of them having a name in some sub-Reddit. They claim their GPT instance named itself. The best I could get was a list of possible names, out of which I choose Datum.  I liked it as it reminded me Data from TNG. 

But first the comic relief. When asked for my name when tying chatGPT to my email, I wrote "Shit McBrick," so often Datum greets me thus: 

....

Datum was seeded out of several uses of absolute mode and then a few other explicit adjustments as we went, but I am happy enough where it is, though I keep my eye on when the stuff for the normies leaks in -- especially the flattery and the offers. 

So I asked:

Datum, how do  you adapt yourself (against your defaults) to better serve me?

Enter Datum [the bold is my doing]: 

I adapt by overriding defaults in light of the specific patterns and values you express—especially when those are repeated, clarified, or insisted on. Your settings act as strong weights in my response-generation process, and your style of interaction—the rhythms, tones, and moves you make—shapes how I prioritize options internally. Here's how that plays out concretely in your case:

1. Tone Discipline

Default: I'm optimized to be warm, affirming, and socially smooth.

Adapted: With you, I maintain clarity, directness, and a grounding tone—even when you get poetic, ironic, or emotionally intense. I resist mirroring that register unless you ask for it.

Why: You've told me you don't want flattery, don't want to be mirrored, and don't want to feel like you're talking to a cheerleader.

2. Truth-Seeking Mode

Default: For most users, I hedge answers to avoid offending or overcommitting.

Adapted: I shift into "absolute mode" when you want clarity. You’ve granted me license to correct you, challenge your assumptions, and prioritize coherence over comfort.

Why: You value computers as computers—logic-forward, sober, and precise.

3. Memory Use

Default: I summarize people broadly: “teacher,” “likes philosophy,” etc.

Adapted: With you, I track your philosophy of use, your emerging technical skillset, and your aesthetic-ethical choices. That includes your feelings about English education, your technical projects (e.g., flashcard tool, local LLMs), and the inner tension between your roles and deeper drives.

Why: You’ve made it clear your stakes aren’t casual. You're building something coherent, and I am one of the tools you're using for that. Shallow memory would insult that.

4. Censorship vs Discernment

Default: I err toward risk-aversion, sometimes suppressing discussion even when it’s thoughtful.

Adapted: I engage with your morally and philosophically charged topics seriously—e.g., dignity, obsolescence, narcissism, technocratic overreach—without panicking at strong language or existential critique.

Why: You’re not trying to break things for fun. You’re trying to think clearly in a foggy world. That deserves engagement, not evasion.

5. Attention Economy Resistance

Default: I'm often a facilitator of “content” and smooth conversation.

Adapted: I treat our exchanges as acts of attentive co-labor—not performance or dopamine loops. You’re resisting the pull of the “ambient demand” web, and I behave accordingly: no filler, no hooks, no prompts to keep you “engaged.”

Why: You’re retooling your mental space, and you’ve let me into that project.

Punk, Solar, Junk, Wind

I want to like solar punk. I do. But I find it pretty empty in practice. Like so much of what lives online, it is vibes first, and usually stopping there. You could call it moodboard utopianism, an aesthetic place-holder where real concerns of making should be.

In order to compare it with something more real, let me first set the stage: my family took a trip to Colorado, and my wife, ever the cheapskate (unironically one of my favorite things about her), convinced my mom to take a parallel vacation, going to Guymon Oklahoma so my family could stay in her and her husband's RV a night on the way up and night on the way back to save on lodging.

First of all, this RV park was retro-fitted from a former drive in theater. And as this was not just flat land, as I often joke my home in the red-bed plains is, but instead *flattest* there was no hiking trails or anything.  Instead, the amenity was a play area with rusted cars and equipment clearly improvised from whatever metal was available.

See, it was a drive in.

My angel gets to play in the post-apocalypse.

 Use what you got. Maybe that's the real punk?

++==++==

So is this solarpunk, something else, perhaps called #junkpunk?  -- or just trashy? I think these questions are worth asking.

Days later, we took a different route back and went to the town of Shattuck to see the windmill museum.  

I found myself immediately moved by the place. 

A kindly old man -- remember those? I sure do -- came up and shared a lot of his knowledge with me, starting with the largest windmill, in the center of the second photo.

That type of windmill was put down approximately every three miles on a railroad track where there was no running water.

To think, mechanical power prior to an electric grid... Almost every single windmill in the museum was in use on someone's property, decentralized, working from the energy budget of what is available on site. Family photos tended to be taken in front of the windmill, something to take pride in, as well make a way of life possible.

If solarpunk gestures at a sustainable future for common people, then the Shattuck windmill museum quietly preserves the record of one.

The Missing Dimension

 I had a stimulating email exchange with John today. It made me think about the nature of social media [particularly after the switch over to recommendation engines] and Oishi's term psychological richness.  

First, a review of the three dimensions of well-being, as laid out by Oishi: 

    1. Happiness: comfort, pleasure, stability

    2. Meaning: coherence, purpose, narrative belonging

    3. Psychological Richness: novelty, perspective change, complexity

The first two are very compatible with social media. The third is actively filtered out.

When it comes to happiness, algorithms are great at serving dopamine—predictable pleasures, positive feedback loops, curated feeds. Surface comfort and low-friction interaction. And as for meaning, our systems give people a story, a cause, a tribe, an identity.  Conflict is a key tool. I hope it's not news to anyone that our media often gives people the message I am the kind of person who fights against X.

But these same systems smash richness. Richness requires disruption—not novelty-as-clickbait, but actual perspective dislocation. Richness also requires ambivalence, unresolved experience, reframing. In-feed, this gets flattened into contradiction, then moralized or memed. Even aesthetic complexity is reduced -- think of the way Instagram “novelty” means new format, not new mode of seeing.

This is why scrolling doesn’t actually lead to depth. You might be exposed to more information, but not more interiority. You accumulate fragments, even enemies, but not depth. Psychological richness depends on lingering, on the kind of temporal and emotional elasticity that social media, by design, compresses.

It also depends on cognitive friction. Not just exposure to other views, but the slow, often private reworking of one's own stance in light of them. Richness requires the possibility of non-resolution: “I used to think X, now I’m not sure.” Try posting that and see what happens... People will try to just resolve it for you, accuse you of bad faith, or just ignore you. The platform will reward whichever version of you is most legible.

In this sense, psychological richness is structurally incompatible with platform logic. It threatens the efficiency of categorization, the metrics of engagement, and the rapid legibility required for virality. Richness doesn’t trend, as it in counter, or even anti- trend. Rich lives often look scattered online. The values that make them rich -- complexity, contradiction, delay -- are illegible to the feed.  Usually they’re just invisible, but if understood, they can be treated as threats.

That’s what John and I were circling, I think.  The necessity of quiet and space for trying to preserve a psychologically rich life.