blog (June, 2007)
implicit complicity
Asserting support for arts in American schools, she reminded us that well-rounded future citizens will be necessary for continued successful competition with the rest of the world.
No one batted an eye.
Did you?
That we compete with the rest of the world -- and should continue to do so -- is inherent and assumed.
I hope our well-rounded future citizens realize we should more effectively cooperate.
We-B 2.0 buzzwords
We are just about witnessing the dramatic reordering of the media industry, and in fact many other industries driven by the falling cost of technology, the fact we are a We species, and the fact that today we are all capable of creating and distributing, knowledge, information and culture.
So what next? The next is the reordering of Medicine – Education – and Politics. No aspect of what makes our civil society tick will be left untouched. [...]
Transparency, co-creation, participation, harnessing collective intelligence, authenticity and trust are all part of the language and equation. Its not a tweak of the old industrial model. Its a fundamental reshaping of how we will live in the very near future.
-- Alan Moore, What comes after Communities Dominate Brands? (emphasis mine)
Lessig's shift of focus
I count Lawrence Lessig as one of my real-time mentors, (though he doesn't know me.) I've been very influenced by his work on intellectual property and his views on free software, open spectrum, Free Culture.
Considering he is at the very forefront of his field, his decision to change the focus of all his attention -- especially to a field where he'll face severe opposition and in which he is "nothing more than a beginner" -- is remarkable and, I think, admirable.
He'll continue as CEO and boardmember of Creative Commons, boardmember of the iCommons Project, and head of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, but:
I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues.
"Corruption" [...] will be the focus of my work.
I mean "corruption" in the sense that the system is so queered by the influence of money that it can't even get an issue as simple and clear as term extension right. Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide. In the US, listening to money is the only way to secure reelection. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars.
I am 99.9% confident that the problem I turn to will continue exist when this 10 year term is over. But the certainty of failure is sometimes a reason to try. That's true in this case.
Instead, what I come with is a desire to devote as much energy to these issues of "corruption" as I've devoted to the issues of network and IP sanity. This is a shift not to an easier project, but a different project. It is a decision to give up my work in a place some consider me an expert to begin work in a place where I am nothing more than a beginner.
-- Lawrence Lessig, Required Reading: the next 10 years, Lessig Blog; (emphasis mine)
city/country nutritional flow
A city could be the home of technical nutrition, and the countryside the home of biological nutrition. And as the city brings in biological nutrition-its food, its natural resources-from the country, it utilizes them to good effect to support its people, and then it returns them to the countryside to rebuild the health of the soil. On the other hand, the city could be the place where we make things, where the industrial producers of cars, tractors, computers and communication devices send beneficial goods out into the world and accepts them back as resources for new products that only cities can make.
-- William McDonough, A New Design for Human Enterprise: Address to China-US Center Meeting, 2002; (emphasis mine)
org flatness through info flow
We [at Google] have something called a project database, which is visible to all employees, which lists all the projects, and we use that to manage a lot of the remote stuff. There's also something called the snippets database where people put in what they are working on.
... a culture which requires, if you will, people to write down what they're doing and then other people get a chance to see it, even if they're not in the same place. That seems kind of obvious but it's not true in almost any organization. At other organizations they can't see what the other organization is doing, and the CEO can't see either because the management prevents communication.
So you get a flatter organization -- flatness is not a function of reporting hierarchy, it's a function of information flow.
-- Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google Inc., My [Fred Vogelstein's] other interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt (Wired)
interdisciplinarian's renaissance
in one felt swoop, torn
ripe, spoiled jackfruit.
rise: gather...
shatter paralysis shackles.
crackle matter-of-fact to fractals.
now un-nouned, now atoned
(some renown but too unknown.)
a Lowne -- not alone -- but to all,
a lack we'll own...
his sharp tongue twiddled
in a sweet story twisted.
a spring shoot wilted
leaving soul-windows misted.
but the he still aflow
til anon from ago.
that mad hot mind glow
searing each it would know.
spreading fecundity
Not only has it been diluted through achieving buzzword status, but sustainability isn't even an adequate objective:
When I won the award from Clinton at the White House, the press all came up and said: "Oh, Mr. Sustainable, what does it all mean?" and I said I'm not that interested in sustainability, really, because if it is just the edge between destruction and regeneration, if sustainability is just a kind of maintenance, is this exciting?
If I were to ask if you were married and you said "yes," and I asked, "What is the relationship to your spouse like," and you said, "Oh, ah, sustainable."
Who cares? What we are looking for is fecundity, sex, children, movement.
-- William McDonough, Designing the Next Industrial Revolution (talk at Bioneers 2000)
I doubt fecundity has the phonemes for memetic procreation, but intending that the world should improve because we're here is a more appropriate ambition.
Mr. Sustainable spoke at the Cleveland Clinic's Ideas for Tomorrow series last week (PD review.) I instructed that others not miss the event, but was crushed (like so much recycled glass) when I found I'd committed myself elsewhere.
