Ruby Irene Pratka: Call it “An Inconvenient Truth” for the market economy. In “The Third Industrial Revolution,” American economic and social theorist, business school professor, and policy adviser Jeremy Rifkin lays out a bleak vision of a near-future world devastated by climate change, mass extinctions, slow economic growth, and rising levels of extremism and inequality. “This is no longer imminent; it’s at the door and in the house,” Rifkin says, giving a lecture to an audience of several dozen people at an undisclosed location in Brooklyn, New York, before launching into a Q&A session. “If it were fully explained, our human family would be terrified.”

Over the course of the filmed lecture, Rifkin charts a course out of the quagmire. For Rifkin, creating a more sustainable world within the next two generations is necessary for humankind’s continued survival. This sustainable world, he says, will depend on increasing interconnectedness between people, places, and objects. Youth engagement, the Internet of things, renewable energy, and the sharing economy will play pivotal roles. Together, they will create a network of data hubs in buildings and vehicles, powered by renewable energy, generating data that can be mined by app developers to create useful, shared tools. The end result, Rifkin says, will be a “distributed nervous system that will allow everyone on the planet at low cost to engage directly with each other.”

This model “works best when it’s collaborative and open, and more and more people join the network and contribute our talent,” he says, referring to already-existing examples of open-source knowledge-sharing networks, such as Wikipedia and Massive Open Online Courses. Widening the network would open the door for a “vast, vast expansion of social entrepreneurialism,” he says. “You already spend part of your day in the market economy, and part of it in the sharing economy with car sharing and Wikipedia.” The sharing economy, he says, “as murky as it is now, is the first real new economic system since capitalism and socialism… I don’t think capitalism will disappear, but it will find value by developing a relationship with the sharing economy.”

He posits that the shift in perspective created by the sharing economy — from a focus on owning property to a focus on accessing goods, services, and experiences — will lead to a renewed awareness of the interconnectedness of everything on Earth, and a more sustained response to the troubles the planet is facing.

“We have one generation to lay down biosphere consciousness,” Rifkin says. “No other generation has had this weight, one generation called upon to save the species. We need to join together in the virtual and physical world to make this happen.”

Fittingly, the feature-length documentary itself, distributed by Vice Media, has been made available for free on YouTube. Watch it here.

Header image is a screenshot from the film

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Ruby Irene Pratka: According to the World Health Organization, more than 420 million people around the world — including over 29 million Americans — have diabetes. People with diabetes are unable to naturally produce sufficient insulin, a hormone that regulates blood sugar in the body. Over 90 years ago, Canadian scientists discovered a way to extract the hormone from pigs and cattle and purify it for human use. Then, in the 1970s, scientists used a new “recombitant DNA rechnology” using human genes and bacteria to make insulin.

Problem solved, right? Wrong, say increasing number of doctors in the U.S. Insulin is one of fewer and fewer drugs for which no generic version is available. According to an NPR report from 2015, as these more expensive, new drugs became available, the older ones left the market. The bill for uninsured patients can be several hundred dollars per month — as a result, one Baltimore doctor told NPR that some of his patients had stopped taking the drug altogether, putting their health at risk.

Anthony DiFranco and his team at Oakland’s Counter Culture Labs are hoping to change that. DiFranco is a medical researcher, self-described bio-hacker, and cofounder of the Open Insulin Project. He has Type 1 diabetes himself. DiFranco and his team are working on a protocol to extract insulin from genetically engineered yeast cells and produce a generic drug at a cost of around $10 for a month’s supply. He says users could even eventually produce the drug in their homes. The project has created a definite buzz, raising nearly $17,000 in a crowdfunding campaign on the science-oriented crowdfunding platform Experiment.

Shareable caught up with DiFranco to learn more about the Open Insulin Project and the team’s mission to make diabetes management affordable.

Ruby Irene Pratka: How long have you been involved with the biohacking movement?

Anthony Di Franco: I got involved first in about 2011, with the founding of Counter Culture Labs. A year before that, I had worked on the founding of our sister hacker space, which deals with computer technology, and I wanted to explore ideas related to diabetes. A friend of mine had been doing research on the security of insulin pumps, and I originally wanted to [build] a DIY secure pump, but then people started thinking about founding a biohacking space, and I started rethinking my original idea.

Why insulin?

At the time, I had already had diabetes for five years. I had seen that progress was essentially non-existent — now it’s been 12 years and that hasn’t really changed. One major vendor did release a more secure [insulin] pump, but that was because hackers had pulled ahead and were putting pressure on them. If you want anything done you have to do it yourself. While I was looking into that, I saw a blog post on do-it-yourself thyroid hormones and met with a researcher who was able to get me up to speed on the chemical aspects of making [hormones] manually and potentially automating the process further down the road. We had a successful crowdfunding campaign and started actual lab work in January 2016.

Considering that close to 30 million people in the US alone live with this disease, you would think someone would have tried this before now. Why haven’t they?

I can only speculate on the reason, but it’s undoubtedly a lot of work. Many people seem to be afraid of having to deal with regulatory requirements that cost big companies millions. Insulin is one of the last holdouts where there is no generic version of the drug after more than 90 years. There are low-cost producers in other countries, but Western producers are very good at holding onto the [domestic] market. In some cases, drug companies have paid generic manufacturers not to produce drugs. The big producers are determined to keep their oligopoly.

Chemically, what is insulin? What are you building in the lab?

It’s a very small protein. In the lab, you need to introduce a gene into some organism so it creates the protein, and then find some way to extract it. We started with a protocol to make it in E. coli bacteria, but bacteria lack the sophistication to modify or secrete proteins, so the protein we extract is proinsulin, which still needs to be modified into the active form in the lab. We were looking at just making the proinsulin and making small changes to it that would allow us to complete the other steps in vitro… Now that we have some people on board with expertise in yeast engineering, we’re thinking about moving [the production] to yeast. With yeast cells, you can engineer them to secrete insulin, instead of having to extract proinsulin from dead cell debris [as with the bacteria cells]. Then you can purify [the insulin] from yeast, which is a relatively simple task. That’s what we’re focusing on. We’re still just making proinsulin as a first step and working on engineering the yeast to do everything for us. Our final product will be a strain of yeast cells that secretes insulin. Once we succeed, we will share what we come up with and build something that works for the long term.

Why is it so expensive? 

Markets are the main reason. It’s not that expensive to produce. For me, a month’s supply would cost about $10 to produce, but I’m paying about $1,000 before insurance and still $75 after insurance. If people were paying $15 for a drug that cost $10 to produce, that would still be a very healthy profit margin.

Tell us a bit about the work that has gone into this.

Most of it was just persistence. Some weeks there was very little to do in the lab and some weeks there was much more. Right now the yeast experts are the ones that are always in the lab, and I’m doing the organizing. It has been a lot of work, and we have had quite a few people coming and going, but it’s important enough to enough people that we always have enough people to keep moving it forward. A lot of our volunteers have just finished school and have the perfect science background, and they see it as doing something cool for a good cause.

What remains to be done to get the yeast-produced insulin into circulation?

We need to compete the yeast engineering, figure out a technique for purifying it and then look at the next step — how to set up a low-cost manufacturing operation and get over all the regulatory hurdles. That would require more money and more organizational sophistication than we have now, but hopefully by then our case will speak for itself and we will be able to prove we have the technology and it is usable. It will not be a for-profit undertaking.

How do you plan to test this? 

First we’ll have to verify that we have created insulin, then we’ll use standard techniques to purify it. From a regulatory point of view, if you’re making an existing drug, you just have to demonstrate that you made the right drug, you don’t have to demonstrate its efficacy all over again. We would just have to show that we made the right [chemical] sequence. We may have to do a receptor-binding study but we’re not going to worry about that right now — we will just focus on making a form of insulin that has been in common use.

A lot of the media coverage of your efforts has referred to “home-brewed insulin”— is that accurate? Are people going to be able to cook this up in their homes?

I don’t know if it will be economical to produce it in your home, but it’s not out of the question. At some point, someone will develop a protein-purifying machine which can be distributed to pharmacists or taken out into the developing world. The technology exists but the engineering work still has to be done.

What is your timeline? When do you hope to be able to distribute generic insulin?

Three or four years from now is a realistic timeline, but I hope we can do it a year or two sooner. I’m hoping we’ll have the yeast strain that does all the work soon, and then we’ll raise money to actually produce the product.

How do you react to the wave of support that you’ve gotten via the crowdfunding initiative?

It has been really encouraging. Although some people have dismissed the whole thing as impractical, a lot of other people have seen the value in it.

What motivates you about this experience?

It has confirmed what I know as a person with diabetes. The establishment views and treats diabetes and diabetes patients as a means of making money, and not as a group of people who need to be cured of an ailment. People are desperate for something they can afford. A significant number of the people who supported us have been people with diabetes who couldn’t afford their own insulin. They gave us 25 bucks to see if we could come up an alternative to these oligopolies. You realize how many people are desperate even in the Western world. By making the market competitive for insulin and eliminating these absurd profit margins, we want to contribute to the realignment of incentives in health care. We’re watching people slowly degenerate due to this condition [and] I’m skeptical about whether the economic landscape incentivizes a cure in the short term. If projects like ours give people access to drugs, in the long term they collapse the market and [incentivize] getting a cure out there.

Header photo courtesy of Anthony Di Franco.

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Ruby Irene Pratka: An intriguing blueprint for a post-capitalist world is gradually being built in a converted spa in Barcelona, Spain. Founded by the Catalan dissenter Enric Duran, who made headlines in 2008 after “borrowing” thousands of Euros from Spanish banks and donating it to social causes, the Catalan Integral Cooperative is a wide-ranging operation which encompasses diverse services: a financial co-op, a food pantry, a legal-aid desk, an open-source tool workshop, and a bed-and-breakfast for tourists in a medieval watchtower. It has developed its own local exchange currency — the eco — and launched a cooperative credit mechanism for funding social projects. A readable and eye-opening new report commissioned by the P2P Foundation and the Robin Hood Coop for Commons Transition summarizes the co-op’s numerous projects and wide-ranging ambitions.

The goal of the Catalan Integral Cooperative (“Integral” is a Spanish word best translated as “holistic”) is to build an anti-capitalist cooperative structure not just for the benefit of its own fee-paying members, but for the Commons as a whole. “The main objective of the CIC is nothing less than to build an alternative economy in Catalonia capable of satisfying the needs of the local community more effectively than the existing system, thereby creating the conditions for the transition to a post-capitalist mode of organization of social and economic life. … It is the conviction of the CIC that the goods required for satisfying the basic needs of society should be freely accessible social goods, rather than commodities,” the author George Dafermos writes.

Like many co-ops, the CIC resists hierarchical organization; about a dozen committees manage its day-to-day activities. The co-op itself has more than 2,000 members, whose levels of involvement vary from paid committee members to freelancers (auto-ocupados), to the many subscribers to the CIC’s local product exchange networks. The product exchanges provide local farmers and other producers with a market and allow the cooperative to fund its operations with a small percentage from each sale.

The cooperative was formed seven years ago and since then has enjoyed rapid growth. Dafermos spent two months in 2016 studying the CIC, its projects and its aspirations. “It’s an amazing and crazy thing, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before,” he says. “On paper, it doesn’t really exist, but at the same time, it creates legal entities which allow people, mostly young professionals, to do their own thing. It’s a highly ideological co-op meeting practical needs.” In other words, the CIC thinks globally and acts locally.

The nerve center of the CIC is AureaSocial, a converted spa in downtown Barcelona which serves as a co-working and workshop space and houses a CIC-run library and food pantry in addition to headquarters. Its daughter projects, including the bed-and-breakfast (called SOM Pujarnol), a tool lab (maCUS), and a self-managed cooperative community, are spread across Catalonia, attracting the interest of increasing numbers of potential members at a key time in history. The report describes it as a “network of projects” that has a long-term aim of creating a fairer world.

“Young people are seeing less hope now than in the past…if you do get a job in the corporate structure, it’s not appealing,” Dafermos says. “People want to experiment, and that’s why we’re seeing the re-emergence of co-ops in general, and of this one in particular.”

To learn more about the CIC’s activities, read the report here.

Photo by Don Meliton

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“In Quebec cities, the church is the landmark,” historian Paul Mackey says. “In Europe you have castles — here, we’ve built churches.”

From the arrival of the first French settlers in the 1600s to the last half of the 20th century, the Catholic Church and the rest of society in Quebec were tightly intertwined in a way difficult to imagine in the rest of North America. Hospitals and schools were church-run, and priests played a key role in political and family life in the province.

“Since many people finished school in grade nine, the priests, who were more educated, became social and political leaders,” Mackey says.

St.Gabriel’s Church of Scotland in Old Montreal 1889. Photo by Philippe Du Berger via Flickr

A wave of nationalization and secularization in the 1960s, known as the Quiet Revolution, upended that dynamic almost overnight. “This was also the time of the birth control pill and the Second Vatican Council which called for the church to be more open to the world,” Mackey says. “At the same time there was a political transition in Quebec, which put hospitals and schools in the hands of the state, and made higher education available to more people.”

As a result, church attendance plummeted, from more than 80 percent in the mid-1960s to nine percent in 2012, according to a study by University of Ottawa researcher Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme. Data from the Quebec Religious Heritage Council shows that between 2003 and 2016, one in six Quebec churches closed its doors. By the late 20th century, many of the buildings had fallen into abandon and disrepair.

“Two hundred and thirty-three churches still belong to us, but since 1980 we’ve had to sell 42,” says Rémy Gagnon, head of the department of buildings and religious heritage at the Quebec City regional diocese, the second largest in the province. “You can see the rhythm that we’re talking about.”

But now, with the support of municipal governments, residents, and religious leaders, some of these centuries-old churches are in the process of being transformed into community hubs and cultural centers. And it’s not just Catholic churches. Anglican and other Protestant churches are also changing, Mackey says, pointing to St. Michael’s Anglican Church, now a library, and the former Lévis Anglican Church, now a concert hall appropriately baptized L’Anglicane. Mackey has observed several innovative church conversions, often to libraries or concert halls.

“I know of one church in Shawinigan [between Montreal and Quebec City] that was turned into a bar called The Confessional,” he recalls. “Unfortunately, it didn’t last very long.”

Of Quebec City’s four “giant” churches, two — Saint-Jean-Baptiste and Saint-Charles — have closed in the past ten years. A third, the Quebec Basilica, remains open, but a nearby Augustinian convent has become a health resort. The fourth, Saint-Roch, still holds regular masses. However, it has rented out spaces which once held reliquaries, to local fashion designers and to a nonprofit that operates a communal food fridge. Another vast church, Saint-Esprit, which closed in 2000, now houses the Quebec School of Circus Arts.

Citizens Take Charge on Transforming Church Buildings

Conserving the church as a gathering place is a top priority for Edouard Blanchet, coordinator of Espaces d’Initiatives, a citizens’ group working on the transformation of Saint-Charles. That building, in the heart of the working-class neighborhood of Limoilou, has sat empty since its closure in 2012.

Blanchet, 29, talks with overflowing enthusiasm of plans to turn the church into a coworking space with a café, a neighborhood history exhibit, a daycare, and a small public garden with a play area.

“There is a lot of concrete in this neighborhood; it traps heat,” Blanchet says. “The garden will be amazing in the summer.”

Sunset in Limoilou. Photo by Caroline Gagné via Flickr. 

In summer 2016, Blanchet and his colleagues organized a series of concerts and set up a sidewalk café and a small edible herb garden in front of the church, as a precursor to their plans for the interior. Their plans already have the support of the parish priest, who holds the keys.

“We want to make the place profitable, but keep it open for everyone,” he says. “This building was maintained for decades by the nickels and dimes of people’s offerings, and it has to continue to belong to them.”

Blanchet estimates that in two years, the building inspection, the technical plan, and the business plan needed to get the center running will be complete. He hopes the multi-purpose center will be a unifying force for his neighborhood, which is torn between its working-class roots and a wave of recent gentrification.

“We want it to be intercultural, intergenerational, and inter-class,” Blanchet says.

Through his multifaceted business, he wants to maintain the church and create opportunities for neighbors to meet. Blanchet is hoping to receive city funding and crowdfund more extensively once his business plan is complete.

“These buildings have lost their initial purpose, but we can’t lose them,” Blanchet says, adding, “Just doing this is an act of faith — but you’ve got to believe.”

Preserving the space also matters to the Monastère des Augustines in Old Quebec, which was founded in 1639 and housed more than 200 nuns at its peak. As recently as 1958, a new wing wasbuilt onto the vast structure adjacent to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, the oldest operational hospital in North America. Now, only 11 nuns and a postulant live on the site. Excluding the postulant, only one nun is under 40 and most are over 80. As the world of skilled professions opened up to women, becoming a cloistered nun, once the only way to work as a nurse or teacher, lost its appeal, explains museum guide Amélie Nadeau. “As early as the 1970s, the nuns were contemplating what to do with all this space,” says Nadeau.

The remaining nuns live in one wing of the monastery; the rest was ceded to a trust and now houses two museums, a historic chapel, meeting and concert spaces, a restaurant with an emphasis on local food, and a health retreat. Nuns’ cells have become small but cozy hotel rooms. It opened in 2015 after an investment of $41 million, a combined investment by the Canadian government, Quebec’s provincial government, Quebec City and the Augustine order.

An inside view of Monastère des Augustines. Photo by Museomix Quebec via Flickr. 

“The sisters wanted the monastery to be a public place, to mark their legacy of serving the public, and to have a mission to sustain people’s health, because they were nursing sisters,” says project manager Denis Robitaille.

Guests stay for 3 to 14 days, wandering the vast, serene halls, attending daily yoga sessions, feasting on healthy, local fare, and going to the occasional concerts, which are open to the public.

“For the past 20 or 30 years in Canada, people have been dealing with stress, anxiety, overwork, and over-connection,” says Nadeau. “People come here to learn how to breathe, how to meditate, how to feed themselves. Although we’re not a religious retreat, the chapel is open for people to pray or sit in silence. We want people to slow down, and everyone does that differently.”

From Church to School of Circus Arts

Slowing down, however, is not part of the plan for the Église St-Esprit, now the Quebec School of Circus Arts. The church closed in 2000 and reopened as a circus school in 2003. Several hundred students, from kindergarteners attending after-school programs to professionals in their 20s, learn the finer points of clowning, juggling, dance and trapeze artistry. Half of the older students come from outside Canada. Dozens of schoolchildren attend after-school programs that mix tutoring in school subjects with circus arts. The school’s annual “circus days” festival draws thousands.

Église St-Esprit, which now houses the Quebec School of Circus Arts. Photo by Ruby Irene Pratka/Shareable

“We needed a new building, and the bishop wanted to let this church go,” explains the school’s director, Yves Neveu, whose office is in the former baptistery. “I took a look inside and said, ‘You can’t close this beautiful place.'”

Where the organ once sat, aspiring acrobats stretch on padded mats. A juggling class is underway in the old wedding chapel and trapeze artists fly above the altar. Anyone can come and watch the students practice. “Every now and then, someone will poke their head into the wedding chapel and say, ‘I got married here.'” says Neveu.

Gagnon, the diocese representative, says he’s “very proud” to see the century-old church converted into a school.

“We hired an architect, and worked with the church to remove all the relics and things like that; we installed the supports for the trapezes, but a lot of things have been conserved,” says Neveu, pointing out several frescoes of saints along the walls. “We needed depth in a building, and this gives us that. The walls inspire us, and the fact that it has some history makes the students treat the place with more respect.”

Dominique Drolet wants to use that history to breathe new life into St-Jean-Baptiste Church. The vast grey stone church at the center of the Faubourg-St-Jean-Baptiste neighborhood, to which it gave its name, closed in 2015. Drolet and her neighbors are working on plans to transform the church into a genealogy center.

“Traditionally, the church was the keeper of the archives,” she says. “We won’t have the paper archives here, but we will have the virtual archives. There will be permanent exhibitions and school trips, and a training center for traditional arts as well.”

“The city financed a feasibility study and told us it would be very positive for tourists, not to mention locals,” says Drolet, who gave tours of the church when it was open. “Families from around Quebec and the United States would come here year after year to see the church where their great-grandparents were baptized. They were very disappointed to see it closed.”

Profitability is a major challenge for all of these ventures, especially considering their vast, aging buildings. At its closure, St-Jean-Baptiste was expected to need over $10 million in repairs.

“The church is in good shape now, but we can’t expect it to remain that way for 15 years,” says Drolet. She and her fellow volunteers are raising money through a crowdfunding program and a partnership with a local brewery, which gives the project a percentage of sales.

“Whether you’re a believer or not, the church is still a meeting place,” Drolet says. “It’s the heart of the neighborhood, and we’re going to give it back that role.”

Header image of Église St-Esprit, which now is home to the Quebec School of Circus Arts, by Ruby Irene Pratka/Shareable

Cross-posted from Shareable.

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