The annual Bruce S. - Jon L. "state of the world" conversation launched today on the WELL. I'm feeling a serious H.G. Wells Mind at the End of Its Tether vibe. [Link]
Now the Americans have clearly lost the thread... the Americans are really just horribly out of it, they're like some giant fundie Brazil, nobody takes their pronunciamentos seriously or believes a word they say... Whereas the world is much more seriously global now. China and India are real players, they're part of the show and they matter."I'd rather be blogging"
Serious-minded people everywhere do know they have to deal with the resource crisis and the climate crisis. Because the world-machine's backfiring and puffing smoke. Joe and Jane Sixpack are looking at four-dollar milk and five-dollar gas. It's hurting and it's scary and there's no way out of it but through it.
Everybody's reluctant to budge because they sense, probably correctly, that they have to wade through a torrent of mud, blood sweat and tears. Maybe, then, they emerge into the relatively sunlit uplands of something closer to sustainability.
So: I don't expect too much to happen in 2008: except for that intensified smell of burning as people's feet are held to the fire. "Nothing changes if nothing changes." But if nothing changes, then more and more china is going to flat-out shatter and break.
THEN they'll move. If they see somebody making money at it, they might move pretty fast.
As November sets in and the weatherman promises a temperature drop below the 80s (we're living i n the New Tropics here), I find myself thinking about time, which is always Running Out – and later in life, time runs faster and faster. Last night I resigned as president of EFF-Austin. a significant step considering that I've been president since 2001, when Steve Jackson and I revived the organization, then a decade old and fallen dormant. It had become a habit, not particularly effective; hopefully the remaining board members can make something of it.
People say that they don't understand how I can do as much as I do, and it's true that I'm pretty good at handling many tasks and responsibilities at once, though in heavy overcommitment phases some projects inherently suffer, and I'm learning to be more careful about commitments and drop stuff that's lower priority. This is just good time management.
The down side of well-managed overcommitment can be that you drop things that are fun, and things that you care about, because as your calendar fills to the brim, they become the low priority items. Over the last few months I've been in startup phase with a new company, and I've also been building structure for an existing company after a reorganization; now I have two companies. I started writing a weekly column for Worldchanging, and I'm active with Bootstrap and the Digital Convergence Initiative, and working on other economic development projects. I also started intense daily workouts that take over an hour.
Some things I care about aren't happening, though, especially this blog. I've heard people say that blogging is passé, blogs are dying, everybody's on Facebook now, or Twitter, instead. I occasionally tweet on Twitter, and I spend time on Facebook, and I really get it... that's where the action is. Or Second Life/World of Warcraft, if you prefer virtual worlds. Many places to go online, much to do, new stuff popping up every day.
I thought about creating a bumpersticker that says "I'd rather be blogging." Blogging really works for me, I'm not going to stop, even if a team of social scientists produce clear proof that this was just a fad... I ain't buying it.
Blogging is just one of those things I care about that I shoved onto the back burner. My early new year's resolution: I'll make time for it again, and write more and better stuff.
In just a minute....
The Freakonomics boys interview the randomly intelligent Nassim Nicholas Taleb. His book The Black Swan should be a great followup to Everything is Miscellaneous, which I'm reading now. [Link]
Theorizing is the default activity for our brain; suspension of belief is an active one. Because of the narrative fallacy, our minds default to theory making. It takes more conscious effort – and energy - to suspend beliefs. It also takes more training – we train children to find “explanations” instead of just teaching them to have the guts to say, “I don’t know” in certain circumstances.Bruce at SXSW
In a way, it is Aristotle’s pupils that I am after – the proponents of the superiority of “knowledge” over saying “I have no clue.” I have been trying to revive the class of skeptical thinkers who resisted Plato and Aristotle. I have also tried to revive pre-enlightenment thinkers – people who focused on the fallibility of human understanding.
Brad King has a good summary of Bruce Sterling's closing rant at SXSW Interactive. [Link]
"Mash-ups are in vogue," Sterling said. "People on the Internet like to think that mash-ups are incredibly great. Mash-ups are like novelty music. They are like The Monster Mash. It's bad music. Just because you can do it with a laptop and find an audience for it doesn't mean it's a cultural advance."
The audience sat quietly throughout much of the rant. The SXSW crowd, after all, is made up of the very people who are populating YouTube with videos, who submit mash-ups to YouTheManNowDog.com, who download music using peer-to-peer networks before reassembling it into new music. And here was one of their heroes telling them that what they were doing was no good, unworthy of being shown to sophisticated artists and craftspeople because their art--their culture--was a bad knockoff of other people's hard work.
State of the World 2007
Once again, I'm leading a "state of the world" discussion with Bruce Sterling. Feel free to chime in - if you're not a member of the WELL, where we're holding forth, you can send questions and comments to inkwell /at/ well.com. [Link]
VisionsIt's not the sugarplums, but the visions that dance in your head.
I'm trying to find that Christmas spirit again... neither the Christian festival, nor the commercial extravaganza, but the underlying swirl of magical energies that gather around solstice, a sense that seems to emerge as well in other traditions (Chanukah, Kwanzaa). It's in the air, not in the packages.
I found an interesting piece on Buddhism and Christmas at About.com, which says "though Christmas is a Christian religious tradition, the virtues it extols also feature quite strongly in Buddhism." It talks about Buddhist traditions of dana or giving, metta or loving kindness, karuna or compassion. These are part of the real tradition of Christmas, thought we all know they can be totally, completely absent from the holiday as redefined as a commercial driver. Black Christmas, indeed.
The visions that are dancing in my head right now are all about a possible future that sustains human life on earth, in a future where everybody has a shot at a decent existence; enough food and shelter for all, positive work experiences, economic justice, fair trade.... sugarplums.
95 Theses of Geek ActivismThis llittle manifesto is pretty good... nail it to your door and read it. I was surprised the author thought "geek activism" was something new... I was moved to post the following....
Your initial premise ("Geek activism has not taken off yet") is incorrect, I think. There was plenty of geek.activism in the 90s: EFF, of course, but also EPIC and CDT, CPSR and NetAction, GILC, the Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, 2600, Wired Mag's activist days, netizen, Jon Katz' Geek Force, my own Electronic Frontiers Forum at HotWired, etc. That said, there's good stuff in your theses... I might disagree with a few. For instance, there's no guarantee that we'll still have a public domain in the future... legislators have talked seriously about permanent copyright. Proprietary data formats can store public information as long as the information remains public and is stored in other formats that aren't proprietary (but I know what you meant). I'm not sure that spimes are a sign that things are going well... spimes have a sinister side (read Everyware).
A couple of suggestions. One is to read Extreme Democracy (http://extremedemocracy.com), a book that Mitch Ratcliffe and I edited. This may be seen as a shameless plug, but it's a pretty good anthology of geek activist writings.
The other suggestion is to consider going to the League of Technical Voters programmer lock-in October 13-15 (http://www.leagueoftechvoters.org/drupal/). That's a good way to be both geek and activist.
I left a few things out of that historical rant: FringeWare, Cypherpunks, Fight Censorship, and, of course, EFF-Austin.
Seven deadly sins of Web 2.0This had me laughing... David Galbraith nails it (and I hope he doesn't mind that I've quoted his post in full):
A list of recent web design trends that are about to jump the shark:It floats away?1. Obsession with rounded corners everywhere.
2. Pastel colors.
3. Linear blends.
4. Fonts bigger than 15 pixels.
5. Avoiding tables, when they are the best solution.
6. Stretchable text columns that are too wide to read comfortably.
7. Ajax use that makes things difficult to link to.
These things are so commonplace now that sites designed this way seem like the web design equivalent of a fashion victim. When the bubble bursts there will be big pastel shade mess.
Procter and Gamble may be washing its hands (ha ha) of Ivory Soap (it floats!), according to a Cincinnati Business Courier article called "Clean Sweep," which says that "some branding experts suspect that Ivory soap is on the bubble." Puns abound. I was drawn to the story because I was just thinking yesterday about Ivory Soap, how I hadn't seen it around. It's still there, of course, but it's not blurbed because it's not sexy, and there's a zillion soap products on the shelves – commodity soaps, store brands, specialties (those $5 patchouli-scented bars you buy at Whole Foods Market). What's kinda sad is this bit from the end of the Business Courier article:
"Companies birth brands that have great lives, and sometimes they bury them," said branding expert Karen Post, author of the book "Brain Tattoos." "It's very normal and acceptable and common."Remember Schlitz beer? My father was a Schlitz distributor when it was one of the most popular beers in the USA; now it's an cheapo brand brewed by Pabst, which has survived by picking up two dozen familiar brands including Texas stalwarts Lone Star and Pearl. (Beware the monstrous Pabst Flash site, which would give Jakob Nielsen a myocardial infarction.) Everybody I know drinks specialty microbrews or high-priced Mexican beer – my colleague Ethan Burrow brews his own.
It's sad to see the old brands waste away, but we have many more choices, which may be a great thing. Then again, remember what the swami in the steambath said (in the film Head, starring the Monkees, written by Jack Nicholson): "... where there is clarity there is no choice. And where there is choice, there is misery." Yikes!
State of the World 2006
Once again, I'm leading a State of the World discussion with Bruce Sterling on the WELL. Bruce has just finished a year-long gig as Visionary in Residence at Art Center College of Design, and is in Austin for the holidays before setting out for Belgrade and other parts of the world.
India and China are tremendous stories. Even big pieces of Eastern Europe are getting onto the EU carousel. America's being run by corrupt Lysenkoist morons, but, debilitating as that may be for us Yankees, it also means that the remaining 94 percent of the planet has some chance at the limelight. Hey, South Korea could have been full of cloning superstars -- if they could just get over their endemic Asian urge to cook the books.
The USA right now is the buried shadow of the Confederate States of America. You can watch GONE WITH THE WIND, and it's the secret textbook of the Bush Administration. The South lost that war for a reason. The South didn't have it in them to be a major power, because they were bold, gallant, devout, crooked, dumb and full of unexamined anxieties.
The thing is, though: when a culture is "gone with the wind," it's never utterly and entirely gone. You can't make things go away by distributing them into the wind. It's just... up in the atmosphere. The emissions of the past form a smog. A breathable compost. You can't throw the past away and start over with a Year Zero. There is no "away." Tomorrow is this place, at a different time.