@stoweboyd: 40% of Americans as Independents in ‘11, highest since Gallup began measuring party affiliation http://t.co/nvcASkCJ fall of mass identity
Why (The King Of Love Is Dead) - Nina Simone
Once upon this planet Earth,
Lived a man of humble birth,
Preaching love and freedom
For his fellow man.
He was dreaming of the day
Peace would come to Earth to stay,
And he spread this message
All across the land.
“Turn the other cheek,” he’d plead.
“Love thy neighbor,” was his creed.
Pain, humiliation, death he did not dread.
With his bible at his side,
From his foes he did not hide.
It’s hard to think that this great man is dead.
Will the murders never cease?
Are they men or are they beasts?
What do they ever hope to gain?
Will my country stand or fall?
Is it too late for us all?
And did Martin Luther King just die in vain?
But he had seen the mountaintop,
And he knew he could not stop,
Always living with the threat of death ahead.
Folks you’d better stop and think,
Everybody knows we’re on the brink.
What will happen, now that he is dead?
He was for equality,
For all people, you and me,
Full of love and goodwill,
Hate was not his way.
He was not a violent man,
Tell me folks if you can?
Just why, why was he shot down the other day?
But he had seen the mountaintop,
And he knew he could not stop.
Always living with the threat of death ahead.
Folks you’d better stop and think, and feel again
Cause we headed for the brink,
What will happen, now that the King of love is dead?
(via underpaidgenius)
@stoweboyd: ‘Social networks are intricate things of beauty.’ 1st line in Connected by Christakis and Fowler, which is going to change me, and you.
Re: Sara Horowitz #Rethink Mutualism talk
My friend Paul Higgins (@futuristpaul) saw the comments about a way for Freelancers to bank money pretax to be able to draw down when work is scarce, and offered this about the Australian Farm Management Deposits program:
I owe Sara a short precis of what her ‘New Mutualism’ might do for us, might offer us: an elevator pitch to make it clear and easily understood. But, consider this as a first effort:
In a world where our traditional institutions — and their leaders — are hopelessly out of date and failing at insuring our well being, we know that something new has to take their place. And fast.
Whatever the individual paths that led us to this insight, we need to first find solidarity in a challenging and chaotically changing world, because the financial and political forces that are increasingly influencing our economic and political systems seem to have small concern for us. Consider the growing income inequality in the US, as an example.
We, those of us that have come to realize that we are living precariously, living at great and increasing risk due the actions of failed institutions and broken policies, must rapidly move past the passive, consumerist, individualist mindset of the industrial era.
We, the Precariat, need to create alternative institutions, controlled by us and dedicated to investing in activities that will benefit us, rather than global corporations and the magnates that control them. We need to find common cause and grow local, regional, national, and international mutual associations, owned by the members and dedicated to decreasing the staggering risks that confront us, individually and in common. These organizations can be as diverse as unions dedicated to protecting the interests of freelancers (like the Freelancer’s Union), local food cooperatives, or international policy organizations.
Mutualist Manifesto:
We need to commit ourselves — individually and collectively — to finding common cause and the general recourse to a mutualist response to problems that confront us at every scale: in our neighborhoods, cities, regions, nations and globally. We can’t wait to be saved by others.
Core mutualist principles:
- Ownership and governance of new institutions by members.
- Benefits-based, not profit-based, organizational principles.
- Cooperative orientation toward asset allocation, investment, and distribution of benefits.
- Mutual support of the activities of other mutualist organizations.
More to follow.
Twitter Interactions On Mac Client?
When will Twitter make an API with ‘interactions’ — their new take on social gestures? Must be a severe disadvantage to all other clients. Or is that the point?
Google Buys Katango To Solve The Labor Of G Circles - Jon Mitchell via ReadWriteWeb
What’s wrong with this picture?
Jon Mitchell via ReadWriteWeb
Ever since we broke the news about Google’s circles, it seemed like a necessary new social networking feature. The ability to selectively share with the right groups of people is an important part of being oneself on the Web. But the effort required to maintain G circles is discouraging. Facebook’s smart lists solve the problem remarkably well. Hopefully, the Katango team will help Google help us keep our online social lives organized.
A feature that is touted as ‘helping’ us with the ‘management’ of our social connections turns out to be too time consuming: the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
But instead of realizing that obsessively segregating and resegregating your friends into different cliques is a bit obsessive, and basically impossible if you have a lot of connections, the brilliant folks at Google decide to use software to be obsessive on your behalf.
Now, in some cases, having software do things for you makes sense, like backing up your file system. But there is a reason that our operating systems don’t automatically create the folder set up on your hard drive: we are too idiosyncratic about where we want to put our files. Same thing with friends.
As far as I can tell, every person that I know who is going to CES views it as more of a chore. They’re not excited to go; they dread it. PR people may seem overly enthusiastic about it (27 emails about iGoldenShower or whatever — really?), but following this tweet, a few messaged me to say that they actually hate it more than any other week of the year. By all accounts, CES is a shitshow. And to make matters worse, it’s not even timed with the porn convention this year.
- MG Siegler, For The 5th Year In A Row, Apple Wins CES. Before It Starts. Without Showing Up. via TechCrunch
Why I don’t go to CES.
Announcing Arc: a new magazine about the future from the makers of New Scientist
February 2012 will see the debut of Arc, a bold new digital publication from the makers of New Scientist.
Arc will explore the future through cutting-edge science fiction and forward-looking essays by some of the world’s most celebrated authors – backed up with columns by thinkers and practitioners from the worlds of books, design, gaming, film and more.
Arc 1.1 is edited by Simon Ings, author of acclaimed genre-spanning novels The Weight of Numbers and Dead Water. Simon, who made his name with a trio of ground-breaking cyberpunk novels, is a frequent commentator on science, science fiction and all points in between.
“Arc is an experiment in how we talk about the future,” Simon explains. “We wanted to get past sterile ‘visions’ and dream up futures that evoke textures and flavours and passions.” The response, he says, has been amazing. “I feel like the dog that caught the car,” he says. “The appetite to be part of this project has been huge. Writers have seized the opportunity to showcase their thoughts, their dreams, their anxieties and their opinions about our future.”
For New Scientist editor Sumit Paul-Choudhury, Arc is an opportunity to explore new territory. “We’ve known for many years that our readers are fascinated by the future and all the possibilities it raises. But as a magazine of science fact, we can’t indulge that fascination very often,” he explains. “Arc will explore the endless vistas opened up by today’s science and technology. While it’s a very different venture from New Scientist, it will share its unique combination of intelligence, wit and charm.”
John MacFarlane, Online Publisher of New Scientist, says “I am thrilled to be involved in the launch of this new title. The combination of superb content and an innovative digital publishing model make for a very exciting project and I am sure a broad range of readers will love Arc.”
Arc 1.1 will be available from mid-February 2012 on iPad, Kindle and as a limited print edition.
This sounds interesting. Although science fiction authors might not be the best sources for actually predicting the future, they certain can write about it well.
(via underpaidgenius)
Getting To Trust: Better Swift Than Deep
Venessa Miemis is trying to get a group of ‘change agents’ to collaborate, and is finding it hard going:
Venessa Miemis, How Will We Collaborate if We Can’t Trust Each Other?
The next few years are going to be defined by a culture of learning and interactivity that involves more trust, and so naturally, more risk. If we’re going to go beyond just sharing links with each other to actually *helping* each other, working together, experimenting, prototyping, and adapting to changing circumstances, *we* have to first change in order to make that possible.
I’m in the process of experimenting with this firsthand, bringing people together into an online collaboratory space, and I’ll admit – it’s not easy. We’ve got a group of ‘change agents’ who want to do things together, to form ad-hoc teams around short-term projects, make something cool happen and improve our world and our lives — but how to begin?
Each of us is a free agent, delicately riding the edge of chaos and uncertainty as we try to pave our own path. Each of us likes the sound of a peer-to-peer culture, a transition from scarcity to abundance, a move from a transactional economy to a relational economy (ht jerry michalski), and a redefinition of value and wealth. Each of us sees the promise of a new way of working, living, and Being.
And yet there is still fear.
Are you gonna steal my idea? Are you gonna follow through with your commitments? Are you gonna take the credit? Am I gonna get screwed — yet again?
My question to you is: How do we transcend this, surrender, and take the next leap of faith?
(ponder it)
Assuming you are curious enough about the possibility to find out how it could work, what is the critical component that’ll inspire you to jump?
For me, it all comes down to trust.
Not just blind trust in everyone else, but trust in myself and a commitment to move past fear and into action. Lead by example and see who wants to come with me. Become aware of who I’m connected to and choosing carefully with whom I want to build things. Take small risks together so we can gain momentum. Start having some Collective Epic Wins.
I think Venessa is trying to do something that’s very hard: she’s trying to get a group to form a collective, with a shared set of principles and shared goals. And she’s right. To get there you have to build deep trust: a polite way to say that the folks in the collective have to sort out the politics involved. In general that can take months, even when the participants share a great deal in common in education, background, and temperament.
But why form a collective? As she points out, it’s risky. If you want to build things, you can define a small project to test some ideas, and form a Hollywood-style project team to accomplish it. Instead of trying to collaborate on a big, wholly integrated vision of the future — where everything has to be discussed and agreed on before the first thing gets done — just cooperate on something fast, small, and low risk.
The way of the future is cooperation, not collaboration.
Among other reasons cooperation merely requires swift trust, a well-researched human universal. People are capable in some circumstances of relaxing their general desire to establish deep trust — that time-consuming, political practice —and will simply adopt a role in a project, and suspend their disbelief about other’s motives, etc. This is a way to get folks to suspend their innate concerns about trust and control. In these contexts, people start with the presumption that the others in the project are professionals and that everyone will focus on doing their jobs as best as the can. A lot of communication is needed to keep it all working, but much less than in deep trust organizations, like the conventional enterprise.
This is how freelancers generally work, and it’s the way that cities work.
But Venessa and her friends are involved in forming a collective, and there is no short cut for them. They will need to build deep trust, and establish processes and practices, and politics to manage them.
My recommendation to Venessa was and still is to take the short cut, though. Define some constrained projects, with more modest goals and defined time frames, and work on them with a few others. It might lead to deep trust, but even if it doesn’t you can still be working, making headway, and maybe some money, too.
Me, I’m trying to work on a few interesting projects with some smart people, but I am not pushing them into one group and trying to create a way that all of us can be involved in everything. I’m going to work with Teresa DiCairano of Intervista on ‘ambient innovation’, which is our term for social, bottom-up innovation. I’m going to work with Claude Théoret of Nexalogy exploring the science underlying social networks, and trying to make that more accessible to the average person. And I am going to push ahead with my analysis in work media — the use of streaming social media tools in the enterprise — and I will be pulling a few others into that project with me, too. But these will be three discrete projects, with non-overlapping groups of participants. I am not making everything, everything.
I am trying to remain liquid, loosely connected to others, heading the same general direction. I am specifically not trying to solidify relationships — build deep trust — before getting something done with others.
So, my general recommendation is that people should favor loose connectives — social networks with less tight ties — that rely only on swift trust. If and when you establish deep trust with individuals, perhaps during short-term, swift trust-based projects, then perhaps your can form a collective, where the principles shared common, long-term purpose.
But such collectives are not a higher form of human solidarity that we should aspire to, and are not what we have to build in order to get big things done. On the contrary. An increasing proportion of professional work is being performed by freelancers, who live in a short-term project based economy. Why should I have to agree on a long term strategic vision about the future of work media just to work with other researchers on the state of that industry, for example? Or to take the example of the city, all the stores on Main Street do not have to agree to not compete with each other, or to pool their profits, or even to paint their storefronts the same color.
The costs of deep trust are too high, in general, for what they return. This is one reason that work is changing so quickly. Companies are loosening their hold on employees, providing them more autonomy, relaxing the requirements for deep trust: becoming more like cities and less like traditional armies, with everyone is made to march in step, and pointed in the same direction, all the time.
Cut the working week to a maximum of 20 hours, urge top economists - Heather Stewart via The Observer
If we were rational about the new world of work, we would accept the idea that people should work less, since productivity has climbed so much in the past few decades. But will that be accepted doctrine of Western countries? Can we shift to a 20 hour work week?
Heather Stewart via The Observer
A thinktank, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), which has organised the [recent London] event with the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics, argues that if everyone worked fewer hours – say, 20 or so a week – there would be more jobs to go round, employees could spend more time with their families and energy-hungry excess consumption would be curbed. Anna Coote, of NEF, said: “There’s a great disequilibrium between people who have got too much paid work, and those who have got too little or none.”
She argued that we need to think again about what constitutes economic success, and whether aiming to boost Britain’s GDP growth rate should be the government’s first priority: “Are we just living to work, and working to earn, and earning to consume? There’s no evidence that if you have shorter working hours as the norm, you have a less successful economy: quite the reverse.” She cited Germany and the Netherlands.
Robert Skidelsky, the Keynesian economist, who has written a forthcoming book with his son, Edward, entitled How Much Is Enough?, argued that rapid technological change means that even when the downturn is over there will be fewer jobs to go around in the years ahead. “The civilised answer should be work-sharing. The government should legislate a maximum working week.”
People would be able to spend more time in community activities and growing their own food, for example.
However, the inherently Calvinist mindset that animates much of the policy discussion around unemployment and the inequitable distribution of income will likely block productive course of action around new work models. The answer will lie in more people dropping out, adopting a freelance lifestyle, and dialing down their consumption: a bottom-up adoption of slow, no-growth lifestyle.