blog (November, 2007)
citizen.re.organization
Citizen journalism, citizen medicine...
[Physicians] don't have the same investment in our health as we do, and they can only devote so much time to each case.
This makes me think of blogs as opposed to mainstream media. A mainstream journalist devotes a limited amount of time to a story, then moves on to the latest, more "newsworthy" thing. [...]
"The old, Industrial Age paradigm, in which health professionals were viewed as the exclusive source of medical knowledge and wisdom, is gradually giving way to a new, information-age worldview in which patients, family caregivers, and the systems and networks they create are increasingly seen as important healthcare resources." (Dr. Tom Ferguson, aka DocTom.)
-- Jon Lebkowsky, Empowering Patients With Information Technology (WorldChanging)
It's just what happens when it's easier to share information. But, individual empowerment is dangerous to some:
I suggest that the noble amateur is itself part of an ideological construct; it's part of the idealization of innocence, of authenticity [...]; it's a dangerous romanticism. It's dangerous because one of its unintended consequences is the undermining of authority, the undermining of mainstream media, the undermining of expertise.
-- Andrew Keen, Interview on Tech Nation (author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture (check out Lessig's scathing review))
Undermine: dig beneath the foundations and make them shake.
Scientists find themselves abandoning a theory of anthill organisation that depends on commands from the queen, and replacing it with a bottom-up model of emergent organisation that depends on the free flow of information between every member of the colony. More importantly, however, these flashes of insight and radical reappraisal of formerly sacrosanct ideas are followed not by a retrenchment but by a new openness to reflection, collaboration and change.
Douglas Rushkoff, Open Source Democracy
And, a different sort of bug:
given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow
(Linus's Law according to) Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar
eye and I and I:
perethuvaedayana : 10,000 eyes, high, with full knowledge
-- Manly Palmer Hall, Secret Teachings of All Ages
crazy do-loops, mental poots
I twittered this morning to talk about laundry, a-mung other things. Could be one of this life's low points.
Gab for gab's sake.
In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people I have reviewed the expectations of waking adults and wise experts, and I can affirm that this comprehensive wealth of material, available on demand and free of charge, was not in anyone's scenario.
-- Kevin Kelly We Are the Web, Wired, 13.08 (August 2005)
Nor is it always meaningful.
technological significance and technological novelty are rarely the same--indeed, a given technology's grip on our awareness is often in inverse relationship to its significance in our lives...we are wrong to associate technology solely with invention, and that we should think of it, rather, as evolving through use.
Steven Shapin, What Else Is New? (The New Yorker), found via Heather Rae's Ductless on the Cleantech Blog
So, now I prolong the insignificance by commenting on it using a different medium.
The day for blogging about blogging and podcasting about podcasting is long gone.
-- Chris Pirillo, 10 Ways to Eliminate the Echo Chamber
Sure it is.
George Clinton called it Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis. (YGIAGAM (Your Google Is As Good As Mine.))
properly passive
"Any one who frees himself from the crudest materialism readily recognizes that as a legal term, "property" does not denote material things, but rather certain rights. In the world of nature . . . there are things but clearly no property rights.
Further reflection shows that a property right is not to be identified with the fact of physical possession. Whatever technical definition of property we may prefer, we must recognize that a property right is a relation not between an owner and a thing, but between the owner and individuals with reference to things." (Morris Cohen, 1933, "Property and Sovereignty")
This becomes unmistakable if we consider intangible property, which constitutes an ever increasing part of the capitalized assets of corporations. "[T]he essence of private property is always the right to exclude others." Corporate private property rights exclude individuals and communities from access to commonwealth and power.
-- Corporations and the Public Interest (PDF), Karen Coulter selected articles from Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy from the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy (POCLAD)
People who have studied the issue of intellectual property rights carefully (such as lawyers) say that there is no intrinsic right to intellectual property. The kinds of supposed intellectual property rights that the government recognizes were created by specific acts of legislation for specific purposes.
...Celebrating amateur culture; by which I don't mean amateurish culture, I mean culture where people produce for the love of what they're doing, and not for the money.
[...]
You can't kill the instinct that technology produces, we can only criminalize it.
We can't stop our kids from using it, we can only drive it underground
We can't make our kids passive again, we can only make them "pirates."-- Larry Lessig, How creativity is being strangled by the law, TED Talks
the dregs
In the Terma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, this period is called Dü Tha, or the Age of Dregs, and during this time it was predicted that people would have lost their spiritual moorings and be attracted to illusory ways of creating happiness.
-- Paul Hawken, Paul Hawken, Bill McKibben on Blessed Unrest and Deep Economics, (interview by Jon Lebkowsky, Worldchanging.com)
Oh, I know, it's nothing new. The marketing cretins of Madison Avenue long ago caught onto the not-exactly-innovative scheme of sucking all joy from a given cultural phenomenon or movement or honest spiritual practice, from yoga to skater culture to surf life to rap, and then co-opting it and rebranding it and injecting it with sugar and corn syrup and caffeine and sex and 5,000 silly Swarovski crystals then selling it right back to you as a gold-flaked diamond-studded $25 energy drink. Yawn.
-- Mark Morford, Let us get drunk and meditate (SF Gate)
eating the finger that points at the moon
... to point at the moon a finger is needed, but woe to those who take the finger for the moon.
-- D. T. Suzuki
That is why a theology of the Church has to begin with a consideration of the Church as the sign or sacrament of Christ and the kingdom he inaugurated, rather than the Church as an institution, but fidelity to Christ and to the kingdom of God that he embodies.
-- William Shannon, Seeking the Face of God
'[I]nstitutions create the needs and control their satisfaction, and, by so doing, turn the human being and her or his creativity into objects'.
Modern societies appear to create more and more institutions - and great swathes of the way we live our lives become institutionalized. 'This process undermines people - it diminishes their confidence in themselves, and in their capacity to solve problems... It kills convivial relationships. Finally it colonizes life like a parasite or a cancer that kills creativity.'
-- Mark K. Smith, ivan illich: deschooling, conviviality and the possibilities for informal education and lifelong learning
with quotes from Adult Education at the Crossroads, Matthias Finger and Jose Manuel Asun
I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a lifestyle which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows to make and unmake, produce and consume - a style of life which is merely a way station on the road to the depletion and pollution of the environment. The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies.
-- Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society
sprouts (staring at the sun)
What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere; The smallest sprout shows there is really no death; And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.
All goes onward and outward-nothing collapses; And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
-- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself (14.)
Maybe that's the idea.
I'm part of a performance tonight in tribute to Masumi Hayashi. Our vignette is the last of four about dealing with loss:
Confirmation, the letting go, the moving on.
Confirmation?
I'm sticking in (new(dew)-due-)difficulty with the openness of improv.
In which moment does indirection decide?
In finding freedom's focus, and does it hold tension?