Author: Jon Lebkowsky

Co-wrangler of Plutopia News Network, cohost Radio Free Plutopia. Podcaster, writer, dharma observer, enzyme. Former editor/publisher, FringeWare Review; associate editor at bOING bOING and Factsheet Five; writer at Mondo 2000, 21C, Wired, Whole Earth Review, Austin Chronicle; sub-editor at Millennium Whole Earth Catalog; blogger at Worldchanging. Digital culture maven, podcaster, writer, dharma observer, enzyme. On The WELL, Cohost of VC (virtual communities), Media, and Civil War (.ind) conferences.

Heads

In a conversation with a longtime friend, I just sent an email message that was fairly clear on some points I’ve been thinking about, so I’m reposting part of it here, ending with an unusual reference.

I’m currently into Buddhist practice and a related qigongish practice, and while many people who aren’t into those things mistakenly believe they’re “religious” or “spiritual,” they’re really just practices about understanding mind and self. In Buddhism we talk about emptiness, the realization that there’s no permanent real self. I heard a Buddhist say the other day something about not believing your thoughts. I think that’s really key to getting straight. We identify with thoughts in our heads as though they were real objects with weight and permanence, and it just ain’t so. The voices in your head aren’t necessarily your friends, and often it’s better to ignore them. I thought about all this when I read your paragraph above about identity and opportunity. I think it’s important to get behind your identity and realize there’s nobody behind the curtain. It’s a hard realization and it takes work. It leads to a real opening, potentially, though.

Truth, power, justice, framing, global warming etc. are just concepts and aren’t real things, and it can be helpful on some level to realize this. You do have to come back to a level where they’re treated as real – but there’s creativity in understanding that they’re not real things that are beyond your reach, but concepts that you’re co-creating with everyone else – that can be asserted, diverted, hacked, etc. They’re only real in a kind of mental consensus that we have about them.

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Our politicians are more focused on politics and power – concepts, not realities – and they’re not so much into focusing on what’s real. What are the markets of the future and what skills do we require to be competitive and have viable economies? My business partner and I have been saying that we’re moving away from economies where you make money by extracting resources, applying labor to produce products, and tossing whatever’s not used as waste – to economies where knowledge substitutes for labor and heavy equipment, and where we engineer to extract as much as possible from any resource. Knowledge and social capital become as valuable as, or more valuable than, finance capital. We’ve wanted to study this more and write about it more, but we’re working on our social media consulting business, where we have deep knowledge and understanding. However we see that social media is relevant to sustainability economy, so we’re moving in the right direction no matter what.

Around 1966 or 67, Bert Rafelson and Jack Nicholson made a film called “Head” starring the Monkees (Nicholson was the screenwriter). There’s a scene in that film, where the Monkees stumble into a steambath where a Maharishi-like yogi is sitting, and he says this:

We were speaking of belief; beliefs and conditioning. All belief possibly could be said to be the result of some conditioning. Thus, the study of history is simply the study of one belief system deposing another, and so on and so on and so on… A psychologically tested belief of our time is that the central nervous system, which feeds its impulses directly to the brain, conscious and subconscious, is unable to discern between the real, and the vividly imagined experience. If there is a difference, and most of us believe there is -am I being clear? For to examine these concepts requires tremendous energy and discipline. To experience the now, without preconception or beliefs, to allow the unknown to occur and to occur, requires clarity. And where there is clarity there is no choice. And where there is choice, there is misery. And why should anyone listen to me? Why should I speak, since I know nothing?

And now for something completely Python

The Monty Python crew was as wild and chaotic as the show would make it seem; it’s a miracle that the show ever pulled together and existed for any length of time. The (five of six) surviving members will have a reunion on October 15 at the Ziegfield Theatre in New York. [Link]

There was, to begin with, the Oxford-Cambridge split, with Mr. Jones, Mr. Palin and Mr. Gilliam (whom they made a sort of honorary Oxford man) on one side and Mr. Cleese, Mr. Chapman and Mr. Idle, all of whom belonged to the Cambridge Footlights troupe, on the other. And then there were the subgroups: Mr. Palin and Mr. Jones were a writing pair, as were Mr. Cleese and Mr. Chapman, even as Mr. Cleese (and everyone else) grew increasingly exasperated with Mr. Chapman’s unreliability. Somehow it escaped their notice that he had become a ruinous alcoholic who had to use a double in the rope-bridge sequence of “Holy Grail” because he was suffering from the shakes that day. And yet he was the natural leading man of the group, the only one who might have gone on to become a genuine movie actor. Mr. Cleese, who spoke affectingly of Mr. Chapman at his memorial service, says in the documentary: “Graham should have been sent back to the factory and fixed. He was not an efficient creature.”

A.I.G.: great story, wish it was fiction

Michael Lewis does a great job telling the story of A.I.G. and how it failed, bringing down the global economy. It’s fascinating, especially how much the tumble evidently depended on the failings of one guy, Joe Cassano.

The people still left inside A.I.G. F.P. like to list just how many things had to go wrong for their business to implode. Any one of a number of things might have sufficed to avert their catastrophe: our political leaders might have decided against the Wall Street argument not to regulate credit-default swaps; the ratings agencies might have resisted the Wall Street argument to rate subprime bonds AAA; Wall Street banks, in 2006 and 2007, might have declined to replace A.I.G. F.P. in the role of subprime risktaker of last resort; and on and on. Their list is mostly a catalogue of large, impersonal forces. But impersonal forces require people to conspire with them. Joe Cassano was the perfect man for these times—as responsible for a series of disastrous trades as a person in a big company can be. He discouraged the dissent of subordinates who understood them better than he did. He acted with the approval of A.I.G., but he also must have known that A.I.G. wasn’t able to evaluate his trades. Once he was persuaded to stop insuring subprime-mortgage bonds, the logical course of action was to reverse the deals he had already done. In 2006 he might have found a way to do this, if he had been willing to accept the costs involved, but he wasn’t. Had he been, the machine he helped to create would have kept running—by then it had a life of its own—and the losses would have simply wound up more concentrated inside the big banks. But he’d have saved his company.

Ginsberg: “everybody’s got a bodhisattva tendency”

Around 1969 I sent a short poem and a letter to Allen Ginsberg but saw my letter as neurotic “peter pan yak,” as he called it, or adolescent rambling.  At the bottom of the card he sent me, he suggested that I should take up dyhana meditation, which I did, and for the last 40 years I’ve been a hot and cold running Buddhist.

Tricycle has published in interview with Ginsberg, who calls himself a “flaky Buddhist.” Read the whole interview, and don’t miss the closing quote:

Everybody’s got a life to lead and they’ve got a bodhisattva tendency, everybody wants to do good…. On a larger scale, there doesn’t seem to be any hope unless compassion becomes a more widespread important teaching on how to live. Compassion to self and others

Joyce’s Ulysses

I not only read, but studied at length, James Joyce’s Ulysses, academically a “serious novel” though Joyce said, in 1922, “…the pity is the public will demand and find a moral in my book—or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honor of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.” More accurately, per Steven Kellman, “it elevates plebeian characters and banal actions to artistic consideration and, celebrating them, performs what [Declan] Kiberd, in an aptly Catholic metaphor, calls ‘the sacrament of everyday life.'” In Kiberd’s new book, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece, he says

this is a book with much to teach us about the world—advice on how to cope with grief; how to be frank about death in the age of its denial; how women have their own sexual desires and so also do men; how to walk and think at the same time; how the language of the body is often more eloquent than any words; how to tell a joke and how not to tell a joke; how to purge sexual relations of all notions of ownership; or how the way a person approaches food can explain who they really are.

Makes me want to read Ulysses again, if Pynchon will let me.

Data glitches: how to get right with your customer

My friend and colleague e-Patient Dave deBronkart explains how misinformation from a customer service agent for Verizon led to a massive international data charge on his mobile phone bill. Verizon was stellar in their handling of the problem. Key point: they didn’t try to make him wrong or make it his problem.

I won’t try to paraphrase his post – it’s pretty rich. Read it here. He explains Verizon’s checks and balances for mitigating the problem, what he did as an empowered/engaged/activated consumer, and what the implications are for empowered patients and people dedicated to improving healthcare, where data issues are common and a big deal.

Safety first

(Wrote most of this on the road earlier this week…)

Had an unintentional overnight stay in Providence RI September 11, following a talk with some friends about the future of the Internet, and because the Internet has become essential infrastructure for the ecology of business, the future of enterprise and economy as well. I woke at 3am to catch an early flight back to Austin, and while I was preparing to leave saw on MSNBC a replay of the 9/11/2001 news – the attack on the World Trade Center.

On the shuttle to the airport my attention opened and I noticed a lighted bus stop signboard, an ad for footwear, and something about that very traditional piece of advertising felt safe. Much of the conversation of the last few days had been about how crazy, chaotic, and unpredictable the world has become. I think most of us are feeling more anxiety than ever before – we don’t feel safe. Our perception is too often that the world is coming unhinged.

Seeing that ad, I thought how we all just need to feel safe.

Recently I was talking to a friend who does marketing, and I was saying that marketing is practically undone in the new world of fragmented, complex communications, where mindshare is focused more on media for connection and relationship than on the kind of one-way mass media that traditional media’s built on. Marketing professionals can and do work hard to understand the new media environment and adapt their skills, but do we really need marketing, or are we disintermediating the space between operations/production and the customer? Doc Searls has described a concept called “vendor relationship management” (VRM) that connects the customer more directly with product, a disintermediation of need and provisioning. In that context marketing may be replaced by customer ratings and reviews, and successful sales determined (as it should be) by product quality, driven by operations. In that context, more of the customer’s dollar is allocated to the producer; some part of it is possibly allocated to systems that manage connections, and the social interactions that provide product feedback (hence the great success of Bazaarvoice). Given all this, I wouldn’t feel especially safe if my skills were all about marketing, because marketing could become irrelevant.

I’ve just presented a scenario – it’s not real at this moment, only a conceptual projection based on trends in the world I know something about. If you’re a social media maven, you may nod your head as you read the paragraph above. If you’re a marketing profession, you’re probably shaking your head, thinking of all the ways this scenario could be wrong. But you don’t necessarily feel safe.

My point here is not to talk about marketing, but to talk about very real concerns about safety. A scenario like this that seems to marginalize the marketing profession can create instability as a whole sector of the economy is described as endangered species. Even if the scenario is completely correct, how brutal do we want to be about this? After blathering about the End of Marketing to my friend whose life is built around that industry, I was thinking we have a responsibility to help people feel safe, not endangered. That’s increasingly hard to do.

Someone said recently how we should consider the possibility of a 90% unemployment scenario, because we could be headed there, at least in the U.S. What does that world look like? It’s more like 90% no longer having what we traditionally think of as jobs; though they still find ways to put bread on the table. Will people work less, earn less?

We’ve discussed how we’re no longer in a world that can produce billionaires. We may no longer be in a world where we can guarantee even a simple majority a secure job with benefits.

But my point is not what changes and difficulties the future may bring. I’m concerned with the psychological and sociological impact of those changes, specifically how we can mitigate the potential profound insecurities, the sense that we are no longer safe.

At the same time, I’m reading a Scientific American Mind article that suggests a relationship of sociability to health. “Research shows that being part of social networks enhances our resilience, enabling us to cope more effectively with difficult life changes such as the death of a loved one, job loss or a move….Not only to our group memberships help us mentally, they also are associated with increased physical well-being.”

I suppose the message here is that connected, we feel safer. And I find that I really do want people to feel safe, to BE safe. Hence the urge to build communities, shared relationships, intimate connections.

More on Multitasking

Gary Chapman Facebook’d me a link to a New York Times article on the multitasking study I wrote about. Ruth Pennebaker writes

To the rest of the world, though, the people who trudge through life excited and unnerved by an occasional cellphone call while walking or watching the sun set (isn’t that multitasking?), the study’s findings aren’t quite so shocking. A constant state of stress, deluges of ever-changing information, the frenzied, nanosecond-fast hustle and bustle — this is bad for you? It’s surprising and it’s news that it’s bad for you? Before they lie down to take a well-deserved and uninterrupted nap, the trudgers of the world would like to say, “We told you so!”

Stop multitasking

Stanford has released results of a study suggesting that “the minds of multitaskers are not working as well as they could.” This isn’t news to me… I’ve been conducting my own self-study and repair for many months now.

For years, as I evolved as a supposed multitasker extraordinaire, facilitated by Internet technology, I was persistently balancing a large number of projects on my little nose. However I had a growing sense that things weren’t working as they should, even though I seemed to get a lot of things done.  I felt fragmented, and I was losing bits and pieces of conversations and occasionally missing appointments or failing followups. I was pretty clear that my mental faculties weren’t diminishing, rather, the demands on them were growing.

The solution (which I’m still successfully processing) came a couple of ways. For one thing, after 40 years as an armchair Buddhist, I got serious about the Buddhist practice of mindfulness. In Buddhist practice you step back and become aware of the workings of your mind, which in my case was pretty chaotic with all the facts and events and processes I was tracking. I could see clearly how my cognition was fragmented. It was like a cup filled to overflowing. I had “multitasked” beyond my ability to track and organize.

The other thing was seeing the problem reflected by my business partner, David Armistead, who has met with me almost every day for the last two years as we’ve worked to evolve our business. Our work has been demanding – we’re not just building a business, we’re also thinking through philosophical and practical impacts associated with the growing use of social media and the growing demand for sustainability – big subjects that require as much focus as we can muster, given their breadth. David could see in our various meetings that I was losing focus at points – actually shifting focus to other things that were urgent, if not critical. He’s given me persistent helpful feedback as I’ve pared down the number of projects I’m tracking and get laser-focused on our the work we’re doing.

If you need to “defragment,” you don’t necessarily have to adopt a Buddhist practice, but mindfulness exercises are helpful.  Feedback from someone close by is very helpful.  But the main thing is to stop thinking you can “multitask,” because you’re only ever focusing on one thing at a time, and what you call multitasking is exploding your focus into fragments.

Doug Rushkoff on Life, Inc.

For the last week and a half, I’ve been leading a discussion with Doug Rushkoff about his new book, Life, Inc. You can find us on the WELL. Doug’s analysis of the coevolution of the corporation and contemporary cultures and economies is important to consider; it points to the need for a new sustainability economy.

Of course centralized currency works for some. Hammers work for some. They just suck at brain surgery. Centralized currency is not the only kind of currency there could be, and it has certain biases to it. It would work a whole lot better if there were other currencies that promoted circulation over hording, and abundance over scarcity.

Yes yes yes. Some things are scarce, and scarce currencies can help orchestrate scarce markets for scarce things. They also help very wealthy people stay wealthy without working – and I make no judgment on that. There are many people who we might want to keep rich, even though they create no value. Or businesses that are just going through a rough century or two and need to be able to stay afloat by investing and growing rather than creating or innovating. And they should be entitled to use whatever they can.

But we – people who create value, who work, who innovate – should also be able to work with currencies that reflect the value we have created. Just as people used to get a grain receipt for every pound they brought to the mill – a receipt that could be traded – we, too, should be able to work currency into existence. We shouldn’t have to work *for* someone who has borrowed money at interest from the bank in order to pay us; we should be able to use a kind of money that reflects the abundance of our output rather than just the artificial scarcity of the treasury.

We’ve got a currency system that could not support the introduction of a renewable energy source. That should give us pause. We don’t have to destroy the Fed. We simply need additional mechanisms for value exchange.