Stephen Downes posted a link to a Salon article on Community-based economy.
It strikes me that moving away from a market-driven economy (in whatever form that may take) would solve or at least alleviate many of the things that bug me about Modern Life. The omnipresent advertising. The insane bubble-and-burst stock market. TV being so dumbed down as to make the vast majority of it useless, or IQ-decreasing, or worse. The need to "monetize" everything. The resistance to making difficult yet necessary decisions (like, say, avoiding the Peak Oil crisis, for example).
How about a bottom-up, open-source-modelled community-based economy? It's sure piqued my interest... Now, how to move large portions of North America toward that model?