blog (January, 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
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)
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)