Clay Shirky has the best overview I’ve seen/heard/read of PIPA and SOPA and the context from whence they emerged:

Bottom line: the legilsation’s about wanting us to be passive consumers, not producing and not sharing.

At “JOHO the Blog,” David Weinberger has a simple and very cool summary of the meaning of yesterday’s SOPA-induced blackout. “This is our Internet. We built it. We built it for us, not for you. We get to turn off the lights, not you.” Yes, indeed. It took a long time for the the Internet to smell like money to those folks who like that smell more than they like the smell of creativity, innovation, fellowship, commons, etc. Now it’s a platform for all media in digital formats that are easily replicated, therefore distribution is hard to control. Much of what flows across the Internet is freely shared by its creators, and there’s also channels for media that people pay for (like Netflix). A system that facilitates all that sharing, along with a high degree of interactivity, also makes it easy to do the natural sort of sharing that peopel will inherently do. Content providers could spend less time figuring out how to stop sharing, and more time figuring out how to build a business model that works in a social/sharing environment.  People who invest time and money in media creation and production have a right to charge for it, but we need to rethink how that works in the 21st century networked world.

As a follower of the “Quantified Self” work catalyzed by Kevin Kelly et al, I was eager to see Laurie Frick’s exhibit “Quantify Me” at “women and Their Work” – Marsha and I hung out there last night exploring the aesthetic representation of Frick’s mind.

Using her background in engineering and technology she explores self-tracking and compulsive organization. She creates life’s most basic patterns as color coded charts. Steps walked, calories expended, weight, sleep, time-online, gps location, daily mood as color, micro-journal of food ingested are all part of her daily tracking. She collects personal data using gadgets that point toward a time where complete self-surveillance will be the norm.

Though I’m interested in the subject, I’m not into self-surveillance because it takes too much metatime. I’m a cyborg at heart, but not particularly organized about my cyborganic data. Building a project like this around it is a way to make it more attractive to track and evaluate processes of body and mind.

Bruce Sterling and I are holding forth in our annual State of the World conversation on the WELL. Here’s the short url for access: http://bit.ly/yNcL9L If you have questions or comments for us, and you’re not a member of the WELL, just send them to inkwell at well.com.

It’s a pretty juicy year for this sort of thing; we’ll have some apocalyptic fun surveying the wreckage. (If you happen to be Lester Brown, and have practicing global prognostication much longer than we have, we especially welcome your comments.)

See larger image Gothic High-Tech (Hardcover) By (author) Bruce Sterling List Price: $25.00 USD New From: $16.50 In Stock

New short story collection from Bruce Sterling.

“He’s the legendary Cyberpunk Guru. He roams our postmodern planet, from the polychrome tinsel of Los Angeles to the chicken-fried cyberculture of Austin… From the heretical Communist slums of gritty Belgrade to the Gothic industrial castles of artsy Torino… always whipping that slider-bar between the unthinkable and the unimaginable.

“He’s a Californian design visionary. He’s an European electronic-art curator. He’s a Swiss professor of media philosophy. He’s a Prophet of Augmented Reality, even. He’s an author, journalist, editor, critic, theorist, futurist, and blogger. Obviously he’s pretty much anything that he can get his hands on.

“And he never stops typing. This sixth collection of his fantastic stories is a comic arsenal of dark euphoria. It’s even weirder, harsher and more twisted than the scary decade that inspired it. Boy, that’s saying something.”

Adriana discusses her thinking about heterarchy, including initial thoughts about five laws of heterarchy.

“Hierarchies seem to be like oxygen: they’re all around us, pervasive, visible only to those who study them. Hierarchies are the most efficient system for management and distribution of scarce resources… given that the physical world is defined by scarcity of all sorts, it goes a long way toward explaining hierarchy as our default organizational structure….There is potential to come up with alternatives to our hierarchical organizational defaults, and I think that would be good news for all those trapped in stifling and disempowering organizations.”

Tree Bressen, guest-posting at Dave Pollard’s “How to Save the World” blog, has a helpful summary of consensus process mistakes and barriers, and how to avoid them. This is a followup to Pollard’s earlier post, “When Consensus Doesn’t Work.”

In my experience, a good first step is to admin that consensus is hard, in fact that all social/communication processes are difficult. To have a productive meeting resulting in a decision by consensus requires leadership, and the leader’s agenda should be more about achieving consensus than getting a particular result. The word for this kind of leadership is facilitation. A good facilitator parks her ego outside the door, and has no preferred outcome other than consensus. One reason the consensus process is hard is that the facilitation mind-set is hard to develop. The set of consensus mistakes presented by Bressen could also be characterized as signs of poor facilitation. E.g. “when the facilitator is also the person offering information and context on an issue, it lessens safety for those who may disagree with the general thrust, putting them immediately on the defensive.”

A truly democratic political process would require a facilitated conversation producing consensus decisions. This is what I see the Occupy groups trying to do with General Assemblies; their success would depend on the quality of emergent leadership and the degree to which the emergent leaders understand facilitation and consensus. Occupy points to a crucial issue, that political leaders are not leading by consensus, and their decisions are driven by self-interest rather than commitment to greater good of all. Political self-interest is always present, but consider Plunkitt’s concept of “honest graft.” In a meeting run by a selfish leader, dissatisfaction is probable and mutiny is always possible, especially where there’s a strong expectation that leadership will honor consensus. In the national ongoing “meeting” that is U.S. politics, I would argue that consensus is broken and backlash is likely unless leaders left and right start listening to the real concerns of real people.

We’re packing for a move, and when you move it shakes out all the dust and skittering spiders in your head, and thoughts ordered and disordered collide and melt into each other. There’s an insecurity you feel when all your physical analogs are packed in boxes ready for the movers.

I took a break today and drove down to Occupy Austin, but I was too early for the union march that was set for 12:30pm. A friend who was going to meet me there hadn’t made it yet, and I didn’t have time to wait, so my visit was short. Austin’s City Hall was reserved for a Green Festival, so the die-hard “Occupants” were forced to move across the street from City Hall, where there’s an island large enough to hold the encampment, though it was a little cramped. I wandered through. People were wrangling about the day’s march and demonstration, which I later found was moving to the plaza at the Wells Fargo building on Congress Avenue, a few blocks away. I heard later that things were pretty disorganized, or as we like to say, emergent.

My thoughts about Occupy were in flux. I was thinking we don’t really need a radical transformation here, just a restoration of a balance that was lost in the first decade of the 21st Century. We need less “every man for himself” and more “love thy neighbor.” Our economy works when there’s a widespread ethical commitment to each other, a balanced economy, and a real hope for the future. I hear people talk about reinventing economies and reinventing society, but I don’t think we have to boil the ocean.

Bucky Fuller:

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary—the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab.

It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.

So I said, call me Trim Tab.

At the Contact Summit. Photo by Steven Brewer

This week, on October 20, a diverse assortment of forward-thinking, Internet-savvy, solutions-oriented people gathered in New York City for Contact Summit, a project-focused event organized by Doug Rushkoff and Venessa Miemis. I was originally planning to attend, and was plugged into the small team of organizers. I couldn’t make the event, but have been available as a resource for organizers of related global Meetups, and will help sustain the converation following the event.

Doug had created a prologue video for the remote Meetups scheduled to occur synchronous with the main event. Here’s a summary of his comments in that video – this gives a good idea what the gathering was about:

It’s time to take back the net. Currently the Internet is much too concerned with marketing, IPOs, and the next killer app, and too little concerned with helping human beings get where we need to go. We want to use the Internet effectively to promote better ways of living, doing commerce, educating, making art, doing spirituality. To collaborate on ideas about how to use the net well. There are a lot of projects that need our assistance. From Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, people are rising up. We need solutions. Contact is about finding the others, and working and playing with them to find solutions to age-old problems. In New York on October 20th, we’re having unconference-style meetings plus a two hour bazaar where people will demo their projects. We’ll select projects that most need help, help them get funding and move forward. What it’s really about is planting a flag in the sand, saying the Internet is really about us, not about aiding the bottom line of a few corporations. This goes as deep and as far as we want to take it. The Summit is just a trigger point. It’s time to fold the fringes of the Internet back into the middle and re-ignite the passion and practicality of the Internet. If there were another name for Contact, I would call it “Occupy the Net.” We will collaborate to bring disparate projects with similar goals into harmony, so that anything we can dream will emerge.

Here’s a list of the winning projects from the Bazaar:

• Freedom Tower, Free Network Foundation.
• Freedom Box
• 3D Printing: Community Collaboration Catalyst at the Fayetteville Free Library

Here’s a list of winning sessions (selected by attendees):

Upgrading Democracy: Representation is a fundamental concept of our governance, but is encoded in the technology of the 18th century. The modern networked world enables a truer form of representation known variously under the names Dynamic Democracy, Liquid Democracy, and Delegable Proxy voting.

Local Foodsharing platform: I don’t have details on this yet

Kick-Stopper – Crowdsourced Unfunding: This group is dedicated to creating online organizing tools to organize large scale divestment and debt strike campaigns. Join here: http://groups.google.com/group/debt-strike-kick-stopper

Online General Assembly: This group folded itself into the Upgrade Democracy group, but has its own mandate: to create an online version of the General Assembly technique (as practiced by Occupy Wall Street) for consensus building.

Collaboration Matchmaking Application: The idea is to create an application that helps creators, particularly artists, find collaborators on projects. During the final session on this concept, participants decided that this project should grow at its own pace and with a relatively smaller circle.

DJ Lanphier shot video at the event, and has gradually been uploading those to http://www.youtube.com/contactsummit. Here’s an example, a video of Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation: “We are discovering together how we should be working.”

Photo by Steven Brewer.

A couple of @jonl tweets re #OWS:

#OccupyYourHead #OWS is great, but demonstrations are meaningless if we don't go deeper.

October 16, 2011 9:33 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@jonl

Jon Lebkowsky

@arfisk Deeper in the sense that we become fully awake and come to know our own minds, experiences, and limitations with real clarity.

October 17, 2011 10:10 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@jonl

Jon Lebkowsky

Revolutions won at a superficial level take us into similar power games because we haven’t addressed fundamental issues that are deeply embedded in our thinking.

“A man will renounce any pleasures you like but will not give up his suffering.”

“Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.”

Both quotes from G.I. Gurdjieff

Earlier this week I attended a breakfast panel sponsored by Gensler (http://www.gensler.com), an architecture, design, planning and consultation firm that focuses (among other things) on effective workplace environments, consulting for companies like Google, HP, Yahoo and Facebook. The title of the panel was “Designing your workplace for a competitive edge.”

Here’s my set of notes from the panel:

Evolving workplace:

Version 1.0: Move fast and break things. Emerging culture. Workplaces built for speed, transparency, flexibility.

Version 2.0: 8×8, 1:1. Cubic farms on vast floor plates. Cube dwellers. Butts in seats. Embedded hierarchy.

Version 3.0: (Now). Activity-based era. Changing work process. Mobile, remote work. “We” spaces, not “me” spaces. Support for collaboration. Drivers: faster pace, distributed teams, lean and mean. Changing work processes (from waterfall to agile). Closed to open. Get products to market faster. Multiple space times for multiple work modes. Coworking. Workers not tethered to one company.

Panelists
Derek Woodgate, The Futures Lab: futurist perspective
Eden Bruckman, International Living Future Institute: sustainability perspective
David Bumgardner, HP: real estate acquisition and management perspective.

Bumgardner’s job is to maximize HP’s real estate portfolio. He has to consider how employees work and what kind of environment is conducive to productivity, at the same time maintaining standards across the global HP properties. He focuses on optimal use of all properties, noting that the workforce increasingly consists of mobile employees who require no office or desk. The need for consistent standards is so that wherever the mobile employee goes to an HP facility, the work environment is fairly consistent. Other factors: environmental sustainability, affordability.

A green and sustainable workplace environment can be a competitive edge: some of the most talented employees will factor environmental impact into their decisions about where to work.

Google is another company that focuses on sustainability. The focus is authentic, no greenwashing. Google wants to move beyond LEED, looking through the lens of the Living Building Challenge (https://ilbi.org/lbc).

The build environment is an extension of who we are. We see increasing interest in building bio measurement and feedback into environments. China is looking closely at metrics in building 20 megacities.

Community will no longer be a matter of who’s aggregated in any place, but also how they share and manage resources.

Health and well-being is the new perq for employees; it’s no longer about having a corner office or other sings of hierarchy.

At Zappos, the number 1 priority is company culture, feeling that if you get that right, the rest will happen naturally. How does the built environment impact that culture?

The contemporary work environment needs spaces for energizing and spaces for discharging that energy.

Technology is moving fast, but the build environment is inherently slow.

HP created the Halo Room (http://www.humanproductivitylab.com/archive_blogs/2007/08/28/hp_halo_releases_hp_meeting_ro.php), a set of global networked technology-mediated remote conferencing environments. As these kinds of environments proliferate, travel requirements will decrease. “You’re not going to see that people interaction go away. You’re going to see better ways to get it.”

Increasingly building sustainability into design standards, which may have to vary for different (non-U.S.) contexts. Striving for a zero effect (carbon neutral). Changing densities.

Currently workers don’t feel the same commitment from companies as before, and vice versa. Companies are reducing the numbers of employees and relying more on contractors. We’re creating a world of experts (consultants).

Future workers (currently under 25 years of age) are growing up with a different set of assumptions. Their world is a world of peer groups, not authoritarian hierarchies. It’s a world that’s saturated with technology, especially for communications. For the first time ever, we’re starting to see multiple generations of employees working together in the same office.

#OccupyWallStreet is just the sort of movement I’ve been expecting. It’s a true grassroots movement catalyzed and sustained by social media (which is probably crucial, as I explained in an earlier post). While there is an overriding agenda about economic justice, OWS represents a diversity of interests and concerns. It’s a working class phenomenon, but it includes both blue collar and white collar workers, many of them newly unemployed. These are the statistics that corporations ignore when they cut jobs and strip healthcare benefits. These are people who heard a promise throughout their lives and saw it shattered to dust over the last decade. These are people who have created much of the value that millionaires and billionaires have captured and stashed in their Swiss bank accounts. These are honest, hardworking swimmers who didn’t see the sharks coming until it was too late.

Remember Frank Capra’s film “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” where an ordinary guy played by James Stewart takes on Washington corruption? Sending a true-blue Mr. Smith to Washington didn’t work to his advantage, the level of corruption almost took him down. What happens, though, if you have an army of idealistic, straight-shooting Mr. Smiths who actually believe that the system should work for everybody, not just the wealthiest 1%? To me the Occupy movement is that army, and they’re occupying not Washington D.C., but Wall Street, which has become the real seat of power as corporations ascend and governments weaken.

I saw a talk last night by David Cobb, a former shrimper and construction worker who got his law degree in 1993 and was the Green Party’s presidential candidate in 2004. He’s currently active with MoveToAmend.org, and organization that seeks an amendment to abolish the concept of corporate personhood, arguing that corporations never should have been assigned the rights normally assigned to a person in the first place. Why is this a problem? The biggest issue currently is the assertion of a corporation’s Constitutional right to contribute to political campaigns. The question is the extent to which corporate power and influence over government should be limited. Cobb’s argument was that the supposed American democracy is not really “of, by, and for the people” because corporations are making and enforcing (through influence) decisions that we should be making together. What’s an example? One might be the complex of government decisions connected with the recent “too big to fail” financial crisis and bailouts, including weakened regulation of banking and credit card industries. It’s the financial crisis, and more so the response to it, and resulting loss of jobs and benefits, that’s brought diverse citizens to the streets in the “Occupy” movement. Also, for that matter, it was an inspiration for the formation of the Tea Party on the right side of the fence.

Like Cobb, I don’t think the issue is the idea of the corporation, of people coming together to create an entity to accomplish something, like building a business or fulfilling a not for profit mission. The problem is an imbalance of power and influence, and the growing sense that a few rule the many. Most of us grew up believing in something called democracy, which is difficult to achieve and too easy to game. Cobb pointed out that there’s been a democratization trend – more and more people assigned the rights of a person, women minorites, etc. But at the same time there’s a corporatist trend, a kind of gentler version of what we used to call fascism, that has been growing and is currently ascendant and taking as much power as possible.

I don’t think it’s too radical for the people to demand their rights as persons and as citizens, and assert those rights against the rights of “legal fictions,” i.e. corporations. But (as I posted in Facebook and Google+ earlier), we have to stop feeling outraged and start feeling a tranquil and firm sense of empowerment. That’s what I think I’m seeing in the OWS demonstrations so far.

Nasa’s lunar reconnaissance orbiter caught a nice shot of the Apollo landing site, including tracks left by astronauts in 1969-72. The moon’s such a bleak landscape, odd that it so captured our imagination back then. Article in the GuardianUK.

Then again, there’s Gurdjieff’s view: “Everything living on the Earth, people, animals, plants, is food for the moon…. All movements, actions, and manifestations of people, animals, and plants depend upon the moon and are controlled by the moon…. The mechanical part of our life depends upon the moon, is subject to the moon. If we develop in ourselves consciousness and will, and subject our mechanical life and all our mechanical manifestations to them, we shall escape from the power of the moon.”

More from Richard Myers:

Within the polytheistic world there is a partial correlation with The Fourth Way’s teaching regarding man as a food for the moon. In the mythology and the teachings of several of these polytheistic religions is found the belief in the moon as the repository of the finer bodies of man. In Etruscan mythology, the moon or “Luna” is the underworld, where souls go to rest and the production of new souls begins. In Greek mythology, upon death the soul and psyche first go to the moon and then go to the underworld where there is a second death and a separation. The soul then goes to the moon and the psyche to the sun. The Bhagavad-Gita describes two paths souls travel after physical death; one is the path of the sun, also known as the bright path, and the other is the path of the moon, known as the dark path. Gurdjieff states that man is a food for the moon and these myths and beliefs to a degree correlate with his statement. Gurdjieff also states that, “We are like the moon’s sheep, which it cleans, feeds and sheers, and keeps for its own purposes.” Though pantheistic religions and mythology put man under the sway of the gods they do not equate man to the status of domesticated sheep. This degree of mechanical control by the moon over organic life on Earth and man in particular is probably unique to Fourth Way teaching. Gurdjieff’s statement also implies that the moon is somehow feeding man. There is indeed some basis in Hindu beliefs that man does, at least indirectly, receive something from the moon in the form of soma. Soma in Hindu mythology is an elixir of immortality that only the gods can drink; the moon is said to be the storehouse or cup of soma. Though soma is believed by some to be a plant-derived intoxicant or hallucinogen, this may be a distraction from its real meaning. A verse from the Bhagavad-Gita speaks to this: “Permeating throughout the planetary system I maintain all moving and stationary beings by my potency and having become the essence of the moon, I nourish all plant life.”

It’s a weird culture that mashes Chekhov into the same week with Optimus Prime, but we followed an experience of Uncle Vanya (with terrific performances by Rob Matney and Liz Fisher, and staging that puts you right there on the farm) with a 3D romp through the Transformers universe, and somehow I’m trying to connect the dots. In Chekhov’s play, you could see trouble brewing – Rob says “that Vanya is about the moment before an epochal and cataclysmic culture shift as a culture and these lives look into a future that appears to promise little.” Sound familiar? Transformers, on the other hand, offers a world where one set of massive robotic aliens wants to enslave the human race, and another set – against all logic – are sworn to protect us. A massive battle levels Chicago; at the end, humanity is free from Decepticon enslavement (but not necessarily from our own particularly human enslavements, not addressed in the film, though the nastiest character on board is the human accountant, played by Patrick Dempsey, who makes a devil’s deal with the Decepticons).

While I experienced fanboy delight at the expert use of 3D and exquisitely choreographed robotic battles in the Transformers film, the very real tensions within Uncle Vanya were more real and more compelling. No Decepticons there, but the sense of a subtler, willing enslavement – hard-working farmers exploited by a spoiled elite, and everyone miserable except perhaps the character Sonya, who ends the play with these words: “We shall hear the angels, we shall see the whole sky all diamonds, we shall see how all earthly evil, all our sufferings, are drowned in the mercy that will fill the whole world. And our life will grow peaceful, tender, sweet as a caress. . . . In your life you haven’t known what joy was; but wait, Uncle Vanya, wait. . . . We shall rest.” (This makes me think of the idea of grace in Malick’s Tree of Life, which is probably a reference to the concept of “actual grace”: a supernatural gift of God to intellectual creatures (men, angels) for their eternal salvation, whether the latter be furthered and attained through salutary acts or a state of holiness.)

After Vanya and Transformers, we had a muted 4th of July – in the midst of drought, no fireworks, surely a metaphor for our times.