We recently watched all episodes of HBO’s intense, realistic miniseries about the brutal and devastating war in The Pacific; it was a jaw-dropping experience – watching human beings blow each other apart, a real nightmare of violence. I was realizing how transformative that experience would be – you can’t go home again after that kind of experience.

Artist Krzysztof Wodiczko has an exhibit in London currently that is dedicated to war veterans who “might have a roof over their head but it doesn’t feel like home anymore. They are traumatized to various degrees and feel like they’ve become strangers to the place where they used to live. They don’t function like they used to. They have been conditioned to be constantly on alert, to react on the spot to any unexpected light, move, noise, etc. It is difficult for them to turn off that aggressive instinct once they are back to civilian life.” This resonates with the thoughts I was having as I watched the miniseries. We should wonder about the role of post-traumatic stress disorder in shaping postwar culture.

Shown above: “His War Veteran Vehicle is a ex-military vehicle complete with missile launcher converted into a mobile video projector with loudspeakers. Words, coming from interviews with homeless veterans were magnified and projected from the vehicle in buildings and monuments in Liverpool two years ago (a year before, a military Humvee had screened the words of American veterans on the facade of a homeless shelter and of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts during the Democratic National Convention.)”

Naomi Wolf in The Guardian: we hear that Occupy Wall Street has no clear message, but is it precisely because the dis-organization has a clear message, set of goals, and growing force that we’re seeing efforts to shut the 24/7 demonstrations down?

The mainstream media was declaring continually “OWS has no message”. Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online “What is it you want?” answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.

The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.

No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.

When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

Update: Joshua Holland at AlterNet says Naomi Wolf’s piece “takes an enormous leap away from any known facts to suggest that Congress is ordering cities to smash the Occupy Movement in order to preserve their own economic privilege.”

Photo by Lily Rothrock

Pete Cochrane at TedX Brussels, speaking on the requirements for intelligence, entropy, singularity, the Internet and evolution. “Are we going to be smart enough to recognize new intelligences and new life forms when they spontaneously erupt on the Internet?”

A lesson in memory.

I showed up ten minutes early for a meeting this morning at Sweetish Hill, paid for coffee, took a cup and filled it half caf, half decaf, found  a table for two and hung my sturdy black leather jacket on the back of my chair. My Nikon was in the left pocket of the jacket. I thought to myself, “better remember your jacket when you leave.”  Matt Glazer showed up for our meeting, we dove into a focused conversation of less than an hour, said goodbye and both wandered off to our respective Fridays. 

I drove a few miles south and noticed on the left, as I turned onto Manchaca Road, that there was a truck with a piece of earth-moving equipment on it and a sign, “For Sale 44K.” I wondered if the price included the truck and trailer, and realized I hadn’t seen anything like that by the side of the road for sale by owner before. Another sign of economic instability, I thought, and thought I should take a photo and share it online, though I figured I couldn’t pull out phone or camera and get a shot before the light changed. Somehow my network of memories made an association: photo | camera | jacket pocket. Oops, no jacket. It was hanging on the chair at Sweetish Hill. I turned quickly around, headed north again, and called Sweetish Hill. The good folks there nabbed my jacket and held it for me, so all was good.

This left me thinking how the mind works. I spend more time now than ever watching and assessing my mental operations, influenced by Buddhism, and lately by the Gurdjieff work. Much of the visible wrangling of the mind is forming associations, like the association that began with a piece of heavy equipment for sale and ended with my jacket-saving realization. There’s also forgetfulness: having proactively realized I might walk off without my jacket (I know that I’m “absent-minded”), why did I not remember? The associations running through my head as I left my meeting were all about what was discussed and what’s next. It wasn’t cold enough to think about putting on the jacket. Somehow I wandered off unthinking, and who knows how long it would’ve taken me to remember, had I not made the association describe above?

I’m tempted to say something about how imperfect and error-prone our thinking can be, but the wonder is that our minds and memories work as well as they do. Memory is a mystery, no one quite knows how the mechanism works.  For many years I had complete faith in my memory, which I thought to be accurate. As I’ve grown older I’ve come to understand that memory is usually imperfect. I passed the “For Sale 44K” sign again and realized it didn’t look as I remembered it – I recalled a black on white sign, but part of the sign was orange. How many of my memories are constructed incorrectly? I have a reputation for good and accurate memory, but it’s more effective about some kind of memory than others. My wife can remember details about trips and restaurants that I’ve completely forgot, for instance, though I have a good memory for meetings I’ve been part of and projects I’ve worked on.  

Much of memory, I’m convinced, is about where you place your attention. My attention is often on my thoughts, in my head, thinking something through internally and detached from what’s happening externally. Hence “absent-minded”: the absent-minded professor stereotype is about sinking deeply into thought. P.D. Ouspensky, a student of Gurdjieff, had this to say about this sort of thing, referring to it as “identification”:

A man identifies with a small problem which confronts him and he completely forgets the great aims with which he began his work. He identifies with one thought and forgets other thoughts; he is identified with one feeling, with one mood, and forgets his own wider thoughts, emotions, and moods. In work on themselves people are so much identified with separate aims that they fail to see the wood for the trees. Two or three trees nearest to them represent for them the whole wood.

‘Identifying’ is one of our most terrible foes because it penetrates everywhere and deceives a man at the moment when it seems to him that he is struggling with it. It is especially difficult to free oneself from identifying because a man naturally becomes more easily identified with the things that interest him most, to which he gives his time, his work, and his attention. In order to free himself from identifying a man must be constantly on guard and be merciless with himself, that is, he must not be afraid of seeing all the subtle and hidden forms which identifying takes.

It is necessary to see and to study identifying to its very roots in oneself. The difficulty of struggling with identifying is still further increased by the fact that when people observe it in themselves they consider it a very good trait and call it ‘enthusiasm,’ ‘zeal,’ ‘passion,’ ‘spontaneity,’ ‘inspiration,’ and names of that kind, and they consider that only in a state of identifying can a man really produce good work, no matter in what sphere. In reality of course this is illusion. Man cannot do anything sensible when he is in a state of identifying. If people could see what the state of identifying means they would alter their opinion.

Tying a few things together here, starting with the mysterious 8-foot Lego Man that “washed up” on a Florida beach. The front of his “shirt” says “No real than you are,” and the reverse side has the name “Ego Leonard.” Ego has a website based in the Netherlands, but nobody knows how he got to Florida (vacation?). Lego Man appears by inference (link on the site) to be a project of St. Art Gallery.

Ego’s a cheerful sort: “I come from the virtual world. A world that for me represents happiness, solidarity, all green and blossoming, with no rules or limitations.” However, he says, “my world has been flooded with fortune-hunters and people drunk with power.” Maybe we’re looking at a potential Occupy Legoland.

Ego Leonard’s visit was timed just before the world population hit 7 billion more or less (who’d have a precise count?), and that’s supposedly today, Halloween 2011. How fast are we growing?

1 billion – 1804
2 billion – 1927
3 billion – 1959
4 billion – 1974
5 billion – 1987
6 billion – 1999*
7 billion – 2011

The crazy and wildly diverse human race, is clearly a successful species, as of the 1800s – we’re producing new humans faster than Lego’s producing its brightly-colored simulacra. How successful we can remain, growing at this accelerating rate, is another question. How do you employ and provide resources for a population of 7 billion and counting? While people are staying around longer, crowding the new kids. (Perhaps this is why some of my libertarian acquaintances have argued against spending resources on aging citizens – arguing to end Social Security and Medicare, let ‘em drop, defer resources to the next batch of humans).

You’ve been hearing a lot about economic injustice in the US, with the high-rolling, elite top 1% controlling 40% of the wealth and striving to get more. Perhaps they see the handwriting on the wall and want to make sure they have theirs as resources are stretched to the limit by 7 billion demands. However if the global economy collapses under the weight of this growing crowd’s demand for resources, it’s questionable what value the wealth of the wealthy will actually have in that context.

Meanwhile climate is increasingly whacky. Latest is an “unusually early snowstorm” leaving ~3 million in the eastern US without power. A decade ago, a climate scientist told me that, while climate change is driven by global warming, but not all the effects will be “warm.”

Some argue that climate change is unrelated to the substantial emission of gases associated with the growing numbers of people in the world (with their exhaust-ing cars, boats, and airplanes, and their aggregated farts). This is because they want to sell more: the current world economy pivots on the burn.

We should all move to Legoland.

And now for something completely different… but possibly related…

Did you know that Steve Jobs was a Buddhist? My pal Steve Silberman has written a great piece on Jobs’ Buddhist history. Maybe the best thing I’ve read about Jobs, and incidentally a striking perspective on American Buddhism. Excerpt:

Why would a former phone phreak who perseverated over the design of motherboards be interested in doing that? Using the mind to watch the mind, and ultimately to change how the mind works, is known in cognitive psychology as metacognition. Beneath the poetic cultural trappings of Buddhism, what intensive meditation offers to long-term practitioners is a kind of metacognitive hack of the human operating system (a metaphor that probably crossed Jobs’ mind at some point.) Sitting zazen offered Jobs a practical technique for upgrading the motherboard in his head.

The classic Buddhist image of this hack is that thoughts are like clouds passing through a spacious blue sky. All your life, you’ve been convinced that this succession of clouds comprises a stable, enduring identity — a “self.” But Buddhists believe this self this is an illusion that causes unnecessary suffering as you inevitably face change, loss, disease, old age, and death. One aim of practice is to reveal the gaps or discontinuities — the glimpses of blue sky — between the thoughts, so you’re not so taken in by the illusion, but instead learn to identify with the panoramic awareness in which the clouds arise and disappear.

Punctuation: Steve Jobs’ last words: “Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow…”

Notice a lot of ads and marketing activity in your virtual ‘hood? Other forms of media are moving online, so the Internet is inherently where you go to get attention for whatever it is you’re selling – widgets, written content, audio and video, political or economic movements.  Our former research and development platform, which became a platform for digital content, then a social platform, is now also defined as the marketing platform of choice. Ads are everywhere, many of them hostile to the user (e.g. those lightbox ads that overlay the content you were hoping to read).  The real stars of the Internet today are not bloggers or other content providers, but marketing mavens like Guy Kawasaki, Robert Scoble, and Pete Cashmore. 

As someone who consults about the Internet and as a web developer, I watch these developments with a large salt shaker within reach, taking everything with a grain of salt. I realize that there are many with online marketing expertise who understand how to run the numbers and have a sense what works and what doesn’t.  I’m sure they’re seeing results for what they do, or they’d be canned. But much of what I’m seeing doesn’t make sense. Those lightboxes I mentioned are a great example: they’re clearly hostile to the user. You can’t avoid ‘em, they’re completely in your face, but users I’ve seen are quickly entrained to find the “close” button and shut the ad down without giving it any mind, and to the extent they notice the thing advertised, it’s with some level of irritation and a mental note not to buy from the advertiser who set out to ruin their browsing experience.

One big question for me has been the relationship of marketing to social media. Social media marketing is conceptually so close to spam, and as with spam, I’m constantly surprised that it seems to be working.  My substantial experience working with social media has proved to me over and over that subtle is best, that social media works to facilitate customer engagement, but overt marketing pitches feel wrong in that context. I was talking to Josiah Sternfeld of the Austin-based company Integrous Marketing about this. Josiah, who focuses on search marketing, noted that marketing professionals are rewarded for acquisition, which social media doesn’t do that well – and not for retention, which social media does do well. Broadcast approaches have traditionally driven customer acquisition, and many marketing pros who use social media are broadcasty about it. This seems to work, but I wonder if other approaches could work better – approaches that are more long term, harder to measure, and not productive of rewards and continued employment for marketing pros.

One of the more promising conversations I’ve been in lately is via Project VRM, Doc Searls’ fellowship project at Harvard, and an extenion of his Cluetrain Manifesto thinking. Project VRM is about empowering the customer in relationship with the seller, and it’s similar enough thinking to the participatory medicine concept I’ve been working with that Doc and I (et al.) have been thinking how to bring the concepts together.  As a result of the Internet’s democratization of knowledge and access, it’s possible have a more symmetrical relationship between customer and seller, and between the patient and the healthcare system. In this context, marketing becomes more of a conversation (which is hard, but important, to scale).  An example of VRM is the beta site Buyosphere, “a tool to help you take control of your shopping history: organize it, share it and track how you influence others.” Bazaarvoice also strikes me as a (possibly slightly off-balance) VRM company as it helps businesses “capture, display, share, and analyze customer conversations online.” I say off-balance because it still leans more in the direction of the business than the consumer… but if you dig through Bazaarvoice you’ll find a lot of interesting information about “social commerce.”

My own thought is that much of the online marketing activity we see now is transitional; that we’ll have customer-centric tools and strategies that haven’t quite been defined yet, but as they emerge and mature will change the way marketing works online, and will yield better metrics than we can get today for social media.

When I started this piece, it was going to be a response to CRM.com piece on “The Digital Age of Marketing,” an article discussing Gartner’s forecasts for online marketing. Gartner’s Adam Sarner is quoted as saying “Successful campaign management strategies have shifted from
interruptive push toward two-way conversations and addressing mutually
beneficial approaches to customers’ wants and needs, which a digital
marketing approach can provide.” I’m not sure this is completely correct (nor is the author of the article, who quote a skeptical Esteban Kolsky of ThinkJar: “You’re basically saying that four out of five people will be basing
their decision on social media. We don’t have that today, and
we won’t have four out of five people actually connected to social
media in 2015.”)  Kolsky, as many others I’ve run across, favors an integrated approach with some social media along with traditional marketing approaches. My point, though, is that the relationship of the customer to the business will likely be redefined, not by social media but by a broader set of tools and new contexts for relationship. And we don’t quite know what that is yet, though Project VRM is a pointer.

RU Sirius reviews Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, which is one wave of a supposed “tide of cyber-skepticism [sweeping] the US.” I haven’t read Turkle’s book. but RU’s review suggests an exploration of the disconnect between expectations of “social” media – that it will make us more social – and the reality, that it can make us more aware how alone we are.

I have a problem with broad assumptions about any phenomenon, and I know that the perception and reality of social media is too complex for any kind of generalization. Experiences differ: some have complete and powerful social experiences in virtual environments, while others might find that they’re lost in the funhouse.

And I think it’s misleading to analyze online social experience as somehow divorced from physical experience of the world and other people. While some might feel even more alienated as they’re exposed to the myriad plancasts within the social stream, others are living in what you might call a post-technological reality, where connected technologies are as inherent in the environment as running water, and are used to coordinate more expansive social experiences in the “real” or physical world. With smartphones, SMS, augmented reality, location-aware services we are doing more than merely “friending” on Facebook, and as we stare into the large and small screens within our environment, we see them not as trap doors, but as windows on the world.

Part of the problem may be in our expectations for “social.” Wikipedia tells me that social “refers to the interaction of organisms with other organisms and to their collective co-existence,” and that sounds right to me. But the “interaction of organisms” is not always wonderful. Humans interact and exist together, but the social parameters are as often challenging as satisfying. I.e. social interaction, however mediated, will have inherent frustrations, missteps, disconnects, and conflicts… parties are social events, but so are wars. In fact communities are often defined by their wars; the joining together of people by affinity or geography is as likely to produce conflict as harmonious connection.

I don’t know that I’m responding to Turkle’s book here, since I haven’t read it, and I probably should do that and write more in response. These are just some thoughts inspired by RU’s take on the book, but really more about my take on “social.” As so often happens, we’re using a word broadly, I think, without being clear as to its meaning.

Empathy slaps me silly sometimes, and the “joy of Christmas” can be elusive when you see any fraction of the real pain and suffering in the world. In Buddhism, “suffering” is a technical term that has meanings so deep that words don’t suffice, but the fact is that many people are disrupted and disappointed in ways that scale from trivial to tragic. In this solstice celebration with its Christian religious and spiritual resonance, we try to be festive, to celebrate the life of someone who would have been bemused if not horrified by the material orgy produced in his name, now so vital a part of our economic life that we couldn’t lose it, even if we wanted to.

My paternal grandmother died on Christmas Eve when my father was ten years old. He revealed this to me when I was around the same age, and I realized from then on that Christmas had a far different sense for him than it had for me. Each year at Christmas he was reminded of death, loss, sadness.

I’m aware of many trails of sadness through this year’s holiday season, disconnections and deaths, as well as ordinary frailties and broken promises. In fact the whole world seems to be trembling at the moment, and our future is a blur. Celebration, like nirvana, seems almost selfish at the moment; the bodhisattva path makes more sense. I will celebrate this year as ever, and appreciate those close to me, but I will also find time to mourn the many losses and disappointments, and the divisions that have emerged in my life and others.

I do hope you have a Merry Christmas, forget for a moment the difficult realities that confront us and surround us, take the day to focus on love and fellowship. Subvert the darkness.

O you, happy roots,
with whom works of miracles
and not works of crime,
for burning predestined you were planted.

And to you, thoughtful fiery voice,
becoming the whetstone,
subverting the darkness.
Rejoice in that which is on top.

Rejoice in him,
who the many did not see on earth,
although they ardently cried for.
Rejoice in that which is on top.

~ Hildegarde von Bingen, translation by Rupert Chappelle

So this is Christmas
And what have you done
Another year over
And a new one just begun
And so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear ones
The old and the young

~ John Lennon

Airport or UFO?

Feeling nostalgia for 60s airport culture, not that I spent a lot of time in airports back then (I was a mere tad). But we saw the images reflected in popular culture. The Dapper Dude has posted a few — the futuristic airports of the past, when flying was a Big Deal, something you dressed up for. “Nowadays people fly in their goddamn pajamas because they want to be ‘comfortable.’ Its embarrassing. The future was going to be so cool, and look what we did to it.” [Link]

This reminded me of Stanley Kubrick’s vision of the spaceport of the future, operated by PanAm:

Cross-posted from http://effaustin.org.

Two great events coming up this weekend in Austin, sponsored by EFF-Austin.

Friday, join us at NPO Camp – a Barcamp for Nonprofits and Techs. We had one of these several months ago, and it was a real blast! The idea here is to bring the nonprofit and technology communities together for a day and talk about the technical challenges the NPOs face, while educating the techs about that world. Last event, we had 200+ attendees forming into sessions and pods; all were lively.  Greg Foster, our newest EFF-Austin board member, has done most of the legwork in organizing the event, with major production assistance from Maggie Duval, also a board member and producer of the annual Plutopia event during SXSW. Sign up here.

Saturday, coders and journalists come together to build innovative news applications at the Austin News Hackathon, cosponsored by EFF-Austin and the local Hacks Hackers chapter led by Cindy Royal.  The day will begin with a presentation by Matt Stiles and Niran Babalola of the Texas Tribune, talking about some of the news apps they’ve been developing. Then teams will form to match ideas from journalists with technical expertise from the coders who are attending. These kinds of events are the future of journalism!  This event also benefited from Maggie Duval’s production assistance. Sign up here.

Both events will be catered by Pick Up Stix of South Austin.