blog (category: society)
framing our discussion
I walked out of Art Etc. feeling full, connected, buoyant: way more than I paid for.
The look of the frame is called distressed, and that was probably the look on my face, too, when I saw it. That splotching wasn't there in the frame sample I'd chosen last month, though the previous attendant had spent quite awhile helping me select just the right match for the photo. Edie cheerfully offered to do it over. That would've required more time and another cross-town trip, though, and I explained I'm not so mobile with such parcels on bicycle. (I didn't tell her Jenita's Christmas present was already 7 months late.)
She said she carries framed photos on her bike all the time, but offered we experiment with the frame a bit -- and brought it into the studio. Steel wool and solvent to tone down the high-contrast speckles. Evened it down and odded it up ~ til I was happy.
She asked about my least favorite routes to ride.
Begin with art, because art tries to take us outside ourselves. It is a matter of trying to create an atmosphere and context so conversation can flow back and forth and we can be influenced by each other.
-- W.E.B. DuBois
Commiseration / Bridging: the Lorain-Carnegie puncture lane, fishtailing after rain on Columbus's slippery steel grating. Charging up Cedar, freedom on Hough, the highway that is Chester. Roads and roads.
She and her husband ride the winter too. Wool, neoprene, gore-tex. Balaklavas, breathe-ability. Boots in 40-or-below to avoid losing feet heat through clipless cleats. Racks, fenders, panniers. They have 18 bicycles in the garage: cargo bikes, winter bikes, touring bikes, a tandem...
Cars beget rage. The people inside, cagers. ("private metal pods with blackened windows".) Her cager friends ask just how to say "Hi." Two short beeps means hello. Anyone that lays on the horn is obviously saying something else.
She packaged and wrapped it when the paste had dried. I sat down and we continued talking. The world of cars, our house of cards. The future, if people don't wise up. The fun of slowing down. (If only they knew!) And one's freedoms at another's peril. Interdependence. The brick roads underneath the asphalt will resurface.
The gift of the multiple crises we face is that in order to address them successfully, we will have to fundamentally change who we are. Some say people don't change, but they do when they have to. And part of that change is the capacity to listen, to put aside those things that separate us as unimportant, and honor the core values that unite us.
-- Paul Hawken, on Blessed Unrest and Deep Economics, (interview by Jon Lebkowsky, Worldchanging.com)
We're wary but hopeful. She calls it skeptimism.
She's sure that we'll see each other out riding soon.
I'm sure that I'll suggest Art Etc. to anyone that wants a really great custom frame, and to find out what Etc. can mean for them.
So how about this? How about we plan our communities to be social and business hubs that people can walk to and from--cars unrequired--and participate in in meaningful way? How about we attach these hubs by public transportation? How about we build our communities in ways that both help people feel less alienated and let them lead less resource intensive lives?
-- Colin Beavan, (aka No Impact Man,) More on community versus consumption--smart growth
layers of paint and mystery
And when, after long centuries of slow forgetting, migration, and climatic change, the knowledge of the mystery was finally lost, we in our anguish traded partnership for dominance, traded harmony with nature for rape of nature, traded poetry for the sophistry of science. In short, we traded our birthright as partners in the drama of the living mind of the planet for the broken pot shards of history, warfare, neurosis, and -- if we do not quickly awaken to our predicament -- planetary catastrophe.
As the layers of paint and mystery are pulled away, it becomes apparent that unpredictability, chaos, and madness are some of the most important cogs in the city's machinery. The deck is stacked with jokers. There is a ghost in this machine, and it appears to be stupid and/or drunk. This situation will not change, because the human condition is its source.
-- Robert Hurst, The Art of Urban Cycling
cultivating freedom
The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase of needs tends to increase one's dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear. Only by a reduction of needs can one promote a genuine reduction in those tensions which are the ultimate causes of strife and war.
The point of an economy, even a dynamic economy, is not to have more and more; it is to liberate us from the economic--to provide a material platform from which we may go on to build the good life. That's the alternative American dream.
-- Jerome M. Segal, Graceful Simplicity: Toward a Philosophy and Politics of Simple of Living (found via No Impact Man: An alternative American dream)
return to suburbia
Ten miles out of town, a cut-through from mall transit center to community college. Through residential neighborhood side-street-sides, past a high school. Conspicuously strange to not worry about surrendering peripheral vision by raising my hood to the cold -- no one else was out except the cars, (for whom the highway only ends at the driveway.)
According to health statistics, you're about twice as likely to be injured in a car accident as by physical assault. And you're much more likely to suffer that car accident in a sprawling exurban location where people drive more.
-- Safer and greener in the city, an email from GreenCityBlueLake
In the city, I feel safer on the street, in the open.
In the suburbs, on the sidewalk, out of traffic's way.
And what goes through the minds of people with the luxury of seeing these things from a "safe distance" -- white minds or black minds -- is this: "Thank God I've moved farther away, where nothing like that could happen."
-- Dick Feagler, Beating in Shaker leaves some ugly cultural welts (Cleveland Plain Dealer)
It had been awhile since I'd experienced that public privacy, safety.
Secure but desolate.
Still in my head, partly framing the experience:: an image of the great American disconnect conjured by Kate Sopko, reading from her new book last weekend: (Just $7 for local light, bright!)
Yet, suburban culture (especially as our suburbs move more toward the 'gated community' model) does not have much within it to encourage connection between people, and has a lot within it that encourages isolationism. If someone would like to disconnect from people, little will stop them: they can retreat into a single-family home, vast entertainment complexes, virtual reality an a daily series of scripted social interactions. This is far less likely for people who grow up in poorer communities, though, for sure, entertaining ourselves to death is becoming an accessible option across class lines in America.
-- Kate Sopko, Systems are Cowards, from Stewards of the Lost Lands
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
enclosure and the death of cities
There is one important thing automobiles provide that bicycles do not: enclosure
the enclosure of the automobile also holds some far-reaching negative implications for the general character of American cities.
Perhaps the most valuable point in [Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American Cities] is the idea that vital, flourishing, and safe city neighborhoods owe their success to what she calls "an intensity of users."
This coming and going leads to face-to-face contact among strangers and neighbors. According to Jacobs, these seemingly insignificant social contacts are the basic building blocks of safe, vibrant cities.
In his book Emergence, Steven Johnson celebrates Jacob's version of the city as an "emerging system," and compares it to the common anthill, in which individual ants at the bottom of the ant hierarchy exchange basic information in random nose-to-nose contacts, and, unbeknownst to these individuals, form a sophisticated community that can "engage in nuanced and improvisational problem-solving." The same is true of the cells in the human body, and the people on the street in the city. They all contribute intelligence, from the bottom up, to create successful self-organizing systems.
However, when everybody climbs into a car for every conceivable trip, no matter how short or insignificant, the face-to-face contact among strangers is drastically diminished. When city dwellers stay enclosed even when they leave the apartment, going from garage, to drive-thru, and back to garage in their private metal pods with blackened windows, this behavior casts a chill over neighborhoods and cities. [...] If Jacobs is right, then, American car culture starves the cities of their self-organizing fuel.
-- Robert Hurst, The Art of Urban Cycling (review w/ excerpts)
(bold: mine, italics: Hurst's)