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.

— E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful

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)

But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship [...] is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. [...] you will never have enough, never feel you have enough.

But the insidious thing about these forms of worship [(body, beauty, allure, power, intellect,...)] is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.

This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, [...] The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

[...] The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

— David Foster Wallace, Commencement Speech at Kenyon College, 2005-05-21

The whole speech is an inspiring read, (thanks to Maree,) — more inspiring than the commencement speech I heard last weekend.

I would only argue with Wallace in his labelling of societal norms as “our defaults.” Our real defaults are prior to and deeper than our ego-centric urges.

Our real defaults can be re-discovered by disconnecting from societal influences (a la various flavors and degrees of asceticism. (Don’t forget to recycle your television.))

Can they also be discovered by remaining immersed in society? Does it only demand watchful attention? Who that’s interested in cultivating awareness really wants to remain a part of pop culture?

path | ways...

I met someone, Friday, at the recycle bins behind the West Side Market. He was sorting for metals as I was making a drop-off. We talked; I have some things he might want. He showed me a few spots to leave him aluminum, brass, copper: toss it over this fence, cover it with these boxes, leave a bag as a signal under the corner of this dumpster's lid...

They have a bad name from the start -- "Scrapper" having a pejorative connotation -- and they've developed a worse one, as many are catching attention by stealing from and dismantling houses and buildings.

The profession, itself, though, is indispensable by nature, for nature, for all. I can't think of a much more admirable but undervalued pursuit than sorting others' trash to reclaim and reuse -- particularly considering our society's overconsumption, energy inefficiency, and pollution :: material abuse!

What if we started with a new, positive, name for the scrapper: Re-user? Re-claimer?
Help!

We could clean up our land, cut material costs, decrease waste, and employ many, if we would better codify the process and bring it out from underground. Formalize the networks of people and organizations involved: connect re-claimers with builders, deconstruction agencies, materials businesses, waste management. (Integral industry!)

It starts, though, with respect for and the re-naming of this pursuit and those that occupy themselves with it.

So we've interwoven:

• the means of connection
• the core of a connective network, and
• the part that provides that means.

Nexus comes from the Latin nectere, to bind, (not to be confused with nectar, which is the Latin drink of the gods, but from the Greek for death (think necro.))

Now we have a new definition. Nexus (n): a tool for visualizing your social connections. (Found via information aesthetics: facebook social network graph.) Install the Nexus Facebook app, and it generates a semi-interactive graph of all of your friends and how they're connected. Mouse over a friend-node, and all of her or his friends on your graph are highlighted.

I've said before, there's a ton of potentially interesting data here -- who's connected to whom -- free for the mining. (Is Valdis watching?)

But ... means and membranes ... What are the means of personal connections? Business, love, work: are these just platforms, and communication the only means of direct connection? (Is that a cop-out and re-definition?)

The comment box at the bottom of this post is also a means, (means: instrument or agency.)

Show me your membrane.

Chris Herbert just wrote in Aggregating My Online Presences about both consolidating [and cascading updates through] his various online personas, as well as aggregating them using FriendFeed.

I think of jeffschuler.net as a hub for my various web tendrils: my locally-hosted blog and an increasing number of off-shore services: Last.fm, Upcoming, Twitter, Flickr, del.icio.us, social networks, etc.

(Last week a professional acquaintance noticed that I've got "a lot of kooky stuff on there.")

I present many of these facets as widgets. While I appreciate that the widgets allow for content that isn't flat or normalized (like FriendFeed) -- each service shouldn't have equal footing or the same "shape" -- the page gets awfully busy as more info-sections are added. So I simply link to, rather than embed, certain services.

But what if these models (both the hub-of-widgets, which Facebook Apps also supports in building profiles, and the aggregation stream) would take into account the viewer's preferences?

For example: I, viewing your homepage (or "profile" or "personal hub") like to use Last.fm, so my browser expands your Last.fm widget. Likewise, it hides or collapses a side of you in which I'm not as interested.

Keep the distinct shape and texture of different services, and allow for dissemination from a single place without overloading the viewer.

cuz I ain't got no_body

But that function is only part of the story, and, really, a feature, [not a bug,] if viewed in context of longer and larger processes. The web is the frameworks for -- and accelerator of -- constant connection, explosion and re-arranging of minds and ideas.

Individual talents and perspectives don't have to shrivel within a retribalized society; they merely interact within a group consciousness that has the potential for releasing far more creativity than the old atomized culture. Literate man is alienated, impoverished man; retribalized man can lead a far richer and more fulfilling life--not the life of a mindless drone but of the participant in a seamless web of interdependence and harmony. The implosion of electric technology is transmogrifying literate, fragmented man into a complex and depth-structured human being with a deep emotional awareness of his complete interdependence with all of humanity. The old "individualistic" print society was one where the individual was "free" only to be alienated and dissociated, a rootless outsider bereft of tribal dreams; our new electronic environment compels commitment and participation, and fulfills man's psychic and social needs at profound levels.

[...]

the global village makes maximum disagreement and creative dialog inevitable.

-- Marshall McLuhan, The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan (March 1969)
(emphasis mine)

I'll split hairs and suggest that McLuhan was wrong when he said seamless. Separations exist, and are essential for growth within: polarization/contraction provides focus, cooperative motivation; pressure-cook. But the seams are more porous and flexible than in meatspace, due to the web's openness and allowed dynamism in personal identification.

(Build a highly-adaptable, low-bandwidth medium, and all sorts of social norms are discarded because of ease of anonymity. As bandwidth has increased and patterns have been been formalized, anonymity is somewhat less available, but adaptability and fluidity of interaction remain.)

Not that competition ever goes away because everything happens at once all the time. It's a rich situation. But we are learning global harmony.

[...]

Our social models, including our corporate world, were designed as mechanical models. But organism and mechanism are very different [...]

At present we're moving away from inventor-created, allopoietic systems to autopoietic systems -- literally self-created systems, living systems in holarchy instead of hierarchy, with negotiations instead of top-down command; systems that negotiate cooperation and thus design themselves from within instead of being engineered and repaired and redesigned by inventors or designers.

-- Elisabet Sahtouris, Living Systems, the Internet and the Human Future (May, 2000)

Paul Hawken gave examples and a very nice metaphor for this phenom in his Blessed Unrest SALT talk, (mp3 | summary.) ... Don't sweat global: think local and act local, and more appropriate large-scale results will emerge as aggregate.

(Last-quoted) Sahtouris is speaking on March 1st at River's Edge in Rocky River. Jenita calls her my new guru secret crush but got me a ticket for the workshop anyway.

The last time we were at River's Edge the audience was largely composed of the Sisters of St. Joseph from the congregation next door... I'm happily certain this won't just be an echo chamber for my pre-conceptions.

This post showed up in the Midtown Cleveland blog in my Google Reader this morning, though it was already removed when I went looking for it on their site:

Hacked

This site was hacked by the Iraqi e-Army. Tell your Mr Fool Bush to get outside our country; Iraq, or all American websites will be hacked. All the database of this website was hacked, all names, contact numbers, zip codes, everything is with us now. Bye - actually, see you a lot later.

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

Ilya thought our neighbors were celebrating the Chinese New Year, (2008 is year of the rat,) to one-up their Christmas decoration. AsiaTown is on the other side of MidTown, though.

I wondered if the rats in Public Square had fled uptown, escaping the poisoning of their boroughs.

John guessed correctly: a showing against non-union labor. We hadn't seen the scab on the rat's underbelly, but it was grossly apparent when I went outside to shoot {photos of / the bull with} the guys making their stand.

I'm moving my many masses of quotations into a database I used Dabble DB to create.

I like to capture and stash away quotes from books, blogs, essays, lectures -- to enjoy, refer to, and write about later. My old, long-growing quotes page currently stores the majority, .txt-style, on this server. Many more are on strewn about: in other files, on various pages on my personal wiki, in Google Notebook, elsewhere.

A few years ago I began blueprinting plans for a Mac software app called iQuote, (clever, eh?) outlining how it would begin as a personal, searchable quote catalog, and eventually grow into a net-aware, community-oriented (del.icio.us-like) quote-sharing system. My revenue stream would be in Amazon referral dough from click-throughs on sources.

I never got around to it. I give it to you, lazyweb... go for it. Open-source it, and I promise to maybe help out, (or at least report bugs and criticize your implementation.)

So, though a cosmic-sized, crowd-wise, social-ized, (lowercase-i'd,) quote-sharing system hasn't proved a pressing need for me -- Perfect is the enemy of good enough -- a bit more organization and efficiency has.

"Dabble DB helps you build an online database on the web." The interface is quick and slick, and it's free if you agree to share all of the data you stuff into it. Adding and editing entries, playing with columns, and creating views... all cake. It's responsive and so-far solid. I haven't played with relating tables yet, or querying from externally.

Here's the public page for my new Quotes database. I've already fed it a bunch of blog fodder (that I've been not blogging about.) Next up is my quotes page, for which I'll try out Dabble's Import functionality. Then, to make that page db-driven and searchable.

At a Christmas party, my mom was relating to someone the traits I earned from her and my father. She neglected to mention that I, too, am constantly "trying to get organized." I tend not to use her phrase, or I'd have to choke on all of the times I've buddhisty-boasted ~ emptier-than-thou ~ that it can't be achieved; her seeking precludes its own satisfaction.

We both know that sometimes it's just fun to sort stuff out.

I call them nature band-aids because there's a general idea in American that the remedy for mutilated urbanism is nature. And in fact the remedy for wounded and mutilated urbanism is good urbanism, good buildings. Not just flower beds, not just cartoons of the Sierra Nevada mountains...

-- James Howard Kunstler, The tragedy of suburbia (TED | Talks 2004)

[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

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.))