 12 THINGS YOU CAN DO TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE It's been awhile since I updated my article on "What You Can Do (to Save the World)". The revisions depicted in the chart above reflect my recent disenchantment with idealism (which too often makes us inconsolable, inflexible, inattentive and intolerant), my realization that the world can't be saved, only made better than what it is, and my recently-acquired preference for collective action over personal self-change. On this final point, I'm beginning to believe that we cannot be, or become, what we are not, but that, particularly if we organize with others, we can bring about significant change through collective, effective, considered and focused action, even without changing anyone's mind, values or beliefs. So here's a brief summary of the 12 things you can do to make a difference, to make the world a better place: Knowing and Learning:
Teaching and Sharing:
Excuses, excuses. I'm not saying they aren't good excuses. But how do we get past them? How do we just start? As a terrible procrastinator myself, I have been giving this a lot of thought, and I've discovered that I can get some real answers to this 'how do we start' question by asking some underlying, positive, affirmational, excuse-challenging questions. I credit Patti Digh and David Robinson, who are currently offering a course on getting past the 'blocks' in our lives, for some of the impetus behind these questions. Here are the four questions I asked myself: 1. Learning Action Challenge: What
one
additional capacity or skill,
more than any other, do you
think you need to acquire or learn, to equip yourself to make the world
a better place, and why?
What is the single best way for you to acquire or learn (or motivate yourself to learn) that additional capacity or skill? What's really holding you back from doing so? What can you do to get past this block? 2. Personal Action Challenge: What
one additional
action, more than any other, do you think you
can take, personally, to make
the world a better place, and why?
What's really holding you back? What can you do to get past this block? 3. Community Action Challenge: What
one additional
action, more than any other, do you think you can take, in your
community, to make the
world a better place, and why?
What's really holding you back? What can you do to get past this block? 4. Workplace Action Challenge: What
one additional
action, more than any other, do you think you can take, in your job or
enterprise, to make the
world a better place, and why?
What's really holding you back? What can you do to get past this block? Here are my answers. I am embarrased by them, frightened by them, ashamed of them, annoyed by them. But they are having an effect: I am edging closer to the edge of the ledge of inaction on which I sit, no longer satisfied pontificating about what I or others should do. Yikes. This is pretty raw, almost too honest to admit:
Whew. Deep breath. This is heavy stuff. I'm looking myself right in the face and recognizing that my excuses for inaction are pretty feeble. Do I really want to make the world a better place? Unquestionably. Is there any logical reason I can't and shouldn't take the 'What can I do to get past this block' steps, right now? Uh, no. OK, then. Put it in your calendar, Dave. Make it happen. What's really scary is that I can see, for each of these questions, the next thing I can do that would make a difference to the world, and what's holding me back from doing each of those things, and the equally startling things I could and should do to get past those blocks. And so on. OK, now it's your turn, dear reader. Time to face what's really holding you back, and what you can do about these blocks. Here's a blank form for you to fill in:
Tell me how this works for you. Go. Just start. Category:
Activism:
What You Can Do
|
People often ask me how to visualize information. They ask things like “How can I visualize my industry ecosystem?” or “How can I visualize how my product works.” My first instinct is to try and back them up a bit. This is because they are already defining their project in terms of an answer or solution, and before you can deliver an answer you need to know the question. Getting the question right is the most important component in information design, and it’s the most common point where information design goes wrong.
This is because information is always relative. Always. Before you can undertake any kind of visualization exercise, you need to know what question you want to answer, and for whom. A look at the history of information will confirm this point.
Science is a process by which we attempt to compare our perceptions with something we call “reality” but in fact reality is something we can never really know for sure. Like the flickering shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave, reality is something we can only see dimly, because it’s distorted by our perceptions and beliefs. Every observation and fact has a margin of error, which is directly related to the observer’s background, beliefs, culture and limitations. It is written in the Talmud, “We see things not as they are, but as we are.”1
By beginning with an audience and a question you give yourself a focusing device. Like a flashlight, the audience and question will illuminate the information that’s relevant to your goal, while leaving the rest in the dark. Good information design is as much about what you leave out as what you put in.
What to put in: Information that’s relevant to your target audience, and that answers a real question that they have. What to leave out: Everything else. The best rule of thumb is “When in doubt, leave it out.”
So if you want to create a visual in order to explain something, ask yourself the following questions first:
“Who am I explaining it to?”
“What do I want them to do?”
At XPLANE we call this the WHODO, and it’s a required input to any project we undertake. Once you understand the WHO (your audience) you will have a sense of their level of existing knowledge of the subject.
For example if you are explaining scientific or technical information to engineers or scientists you can assume a high level of sophistication and readiness. Based on the cultural expectations in science and engineering fields, you can also assume a high level of skepticism and a need for evidence and proof.
Explaining the same information to a group of executives, or salespeople, would be a completely different exercise. You can expect that they will have a different set of questions and probably will be more focused on practical applications and will get impatient with scientific or technical explanations.
Thus, the same information will need to be presented very differently based on the audience that you are talking to.
Understanding the audience is only part of the equation. The other half of the WHODO is DO. Before you can undertake any explanatory task you need to know what outcome you expect. Describing this as a change in understanding is not enough. Understanding is difficult to observe. People often will say they understand something just to get you out of their hair.
People will also believe that they understand something when they don’t really understand it. Have you ever left a meeting where everyone seemed to be in agreement, yet their later actions made it clear that they didn’t agree after all? It’s common to see nodding heads in a room when people don’t agree – they think they agree but in reality they don’t. This is because when an explanation is sufficiently vague, people are free to believe what they want to believe. Politicians often use this rhetorical principle to great effect. Words like “freedom, justice and fairness” mean different things to different people. Vague explanations are common in business, and they can give the illusion of agreement. But they don’t get results.
Here’s the key: When people understand things differently, they do things differently. What they say is less revelatory than what they do. So if you want to build a rock-solid explanation, focus on what you want people to do. If they understand what you are saying, what changes in behavior would you expect to see?
Once you have defined your WHODO, next you need to anticipate the questions they will ask. This again will depend on your audience and the information they will need to make a decision. Part of this is also cultural. Scientists will want to see scientific evidence. They will want technical explanations and probably a lot of detailed analysis. Busy executives may want different kinds of proof, such as what customers are buying and what competitors are doing. They will also be less generous with their time and expect you to get quickly to the point.
But you don’t have to go in cold. If you understand the mind of your audience, you will be able to generate a list of questions that they are likely to ask.
Once you have defined your WHODO and generated a list of questions, you can start thinking about how to visualize the information. Will they need a broad overview or detailed charts and specifications? Will they need to see the value to the customer, or the technical operational details?
In the fields of information science and knowledge management there is a model known as the Data Information Knowledge Wisdom Hierarchy, or DIKW for short. This has become a standard for defining the terms and how they relate to each other.2 Here’s how defines the hierarchy:
Data has no particular significance beyond representation. It consists of symbols that stand for objects, events or their properties. Data is a collection of facts3 – also called “know-nothing”4 to reinforce the point that data, by itself is dumb; it has no meaning.
Information is data that has been organized so that it is useful, usually because of relational connections – also called “know-what.” Information answers questions like who, what, where, when and how many.
Knowledge is information that has been integrated into the mind, memory and body, such that it can be applied to doing and making things, also called “know-how.” Knowledge is usually acquired through experience, or through stories about other people’s experiences.
Wisdom is the ability to perceive value, make judgments, and evaluate long-term consequences. Russell Ackoff describes the difference between knowledge and wisdom as the difference between doing things right and doing the right thing. Wisdom requires values, and values are perhaps the most relative thing of all.
So I propose the beginnings of a theory of information relativity:
1. All information is relative, and it’s always relative: relative to the observer and the observer’s point of view; relative to the culture and its values; relative to the situation; relative to what has come before, and to what will come next.
2. The value of information is always relative because it is directly related to it’s usefulness, which depends on the user, the context and the situation.
3. Information design must therefore be driven by the context within which it will be experienced. Information design must serve the needs of real human beings doing real things. Information wants to be used.
At its heart, information design is about change. It’s about increasing the amount of useful information in the world. Good information design should result in changes to understanding – increases in knowledge and wisdom – which can be directly measured by observable changes in human behavior.
Notes:
1. Also attributed to John Milton, H.M. Tomlinson, Anais Nin and others.
2. Harlan Cleveland first wrote about the DIKW hierarchy in a December, 1982 article “Information as Resource” in The Futurist, citing inspiration from the following lines written by T.S. Eliot:
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
~T.S. Eliot, The Rock, 1934
3. Even the things we think of as facts are relative to the observer and a particular point of view. The problem of facts is as old as science itself and is still unresolved. See “Free the Facts” by Dave Gray, 2009.
4. Milan Zeleny, “Management Support Systems: Toward Integrated Knowledge Management,” Human Systems Management 7, no 1, 1987.
 conception of post-civilization all-weather wear by mary mattingly My regular readers know that I don't expect we will be able to resolve the combination of cascading crises -- led by climate change, the end of oil, and the collapse of the unsustainable and debt-laden industrial growth economy -- that will face us in the coming decades. While I don't advocate doing nothing to mitigate the damage we are doing now, just because it won't be enough, I also think it would be useful, for our descendents who survive the end of our civilization, to imagine how they might live, with much smaller numbers and at a subsistence level, sustainably, responsibly, comfortably and joyfully. I think the crash of our culture will be ghastly, but I see no reason why life for those after the crash should not be delightful. So here is a dispatch from the future, a report from a member of one of many diverse post-civilization communities, telling us how they measure 'success':  conception of art after the collapse of civilization culture by afterculture June 28, 2110:
A letter to my great-great-grandfather, who died 100 years ago today:
It's funny: By the measures of humans from civilization culture, our community would be described as migratory, but we think of it as just the opposite. Yes we migrate around a territory that provides us with all the food and resources we need, in a twenty-year cycle, but the whole territory is our community. We share it with many other creatures, some of which also migrate, but we do not go beyond it -- our community is defined by this territory, this land that we belong to and are a part of. By contrast, civilization culture humans could never sit still, they had to travel all over the world, to places not even suited to human habitation, and then create artificial environments to allow them to live in those hostile places. To us, they were the migrants and we are the settled ones. Our community's culture is very different from those of our neighbouring communities, even though the natural environment is not dissimilar. That's a mark, I think, of the fact that after civilization's fall we self-selected into new communities, and as we formed the differences between these communities were immediately pronounced, because of our different interests, beliefs and strengths, and as time has passed the isolation of our communities, which we have negotiated deliberately to limit our vulnerability to the plagues that wracked our species in the final years of civilization culture, has entrenched and enhanced the differences between communities. While all six of the communities in our tribal federation use sign language for oral and visual communication, we are the only one of the six to use English as our written language. The clothing, body decoration, festivals, entertainments and art of these six communities are also very different, and while we study the others, the divergence and uniqueness of how we communicate, live and interact becomes ever larger with the passage of time. We understand that this was also true among pre-civilization and non-civilization indigenous cultures in the millennia before the crash. What is also interesting, in terms of cultural diversity, is how each community here chooses to measure its 'success', or what might better be called its 'fitness', its ability to adapt to changes in the environment of which we are a part, and to co-evolve that environment in ways that work for us and delight us. We began with a 'scorecard' that was developed by an Internet philosopher (of all the things we lost in the crash, the Internet is what I mourn most) almost a century ago. We found this scorecard well-suited to us and we have not changed it very much since. The purpose of our community self-assessment is to set the agenda for our community meetings. While we have learned to adapt and co-evolve well as a community, and we take pride in the fact that we assess ourselves generally as very 'fit', there are always some areas where our self-assessment is low enough for us to discuss and achieve consensus on some options and possibilities for action. In accordance with the wisdom of our aboriginal ancestors, those who were wiser than the civilization culture leaders, we do not make decisions on what individuals should or must do. Our meetings are focused on the areas where we have assessed ourselves as not very fit, and at those meetings we tell stories that suggest why that is the case. There is no group decision coming out of the stories. The decision on what to do is left to the individual members to make; it is their responsibility. We do not tell people what to do or criticize them for what they choose to do, or not do. Our self-assessment has three sections: Individual Self-Sufficiency and Well-Being, Community Self-Sufficiency and Well-Being, and Community Sustainability. Here are the elements of each of the self-assessments, as they have evolved to date: Individuals' Self-Sufficiency and Well-Being:
Community's
Self-Sufficiency and Well-Being:
Community's
Sustainability:
At
each of our meetings there is something to discuss, something that does
not fit well. Usually it is some unhappiness of an individual member,
which we address by listening, empathizing, acknowledging, and telling
stories that might be helpful. We generally do not proffer advice
unless it is specifically requested. Sometimes the issue is a dispute
or conflict between members of the community. We use the same approach,
encouraging each member to hear, acknowledge and appreciate the
position of the others. Usually that understanding is sufficient that
the conflicted members resolve the issue themselves. In rare situations
where there is no resolution, one or more members will elect to leave
the community. This is a time of sadness for us, but we respect and
honour the decision. Likewise, we will occasionally welcome to our
community someone who has elected to leave another community in our
tribal treaty area.
Perhaps because of our strong focus on learning and practicing capacities, we have been much more successful at this than many other communities. These less competent communities seem to have more conflict, more anger, more dysfunction than ours, and this causes us great concern. Our study of civilization culture suggests it was this lack of individual capacity, and the related lack of community cohesion and competency, that led to the massive centralization of authority, the dysfunctional hierarchies of large, rigid and unsustainable systems, and the atomization of community. Without the strength of community, it is hard for us to even imagine how civilization culture lasted as long as it did. Category:
Creating
a Community-Based Society
|
 An example of snow sculpture and sand sculpture (from a competition on PEI) by Delayne Corbett. Here are more of the PEI entries (thanks to Tree for the link). What motivates an artist to create something that will last for a shorter time than the time it took to create it? The Psychology of Consumption: From The Oil Drum, this study by Nate Hagens is a must-read. It examines the theory of natural selection and how humans have evolved to be addicted to certain behaviours that enhance survival. Our economy has likewise evolved to exploit these addictions. The problem is that all these addictions are driving us to short-term behaviours that are totally at odds with our long-term sustainability. In other words, we want to believe that climate change and the end of oil will not happen, to the extent that we embrace denial (it won't happen) and technophilia (we'll fix it before it happens), and do essentially nothing to address these increasingly likely (but not certain) outcomes. So "we all have to start to change now" is an impossible, hopeless admonition: It is not ever in our nature to "all start to change now". The Downside of Hubbert's Peak: Also from the Oil Drum, David Murphy argues that the back end of the oil peak curve will be more like the blade of a shark's fin, because of the ever-increasing input energy cost that will be needed from now on to extract each barrel of oil. Gladwell on Why Awareness Doesn't Change Behaviour: In the first 17 minutes of a TVO program taped last November, Malcolm Gladwell uses examples like US seat belt laws (when government raised awareness of dangers of not using seat belts, behaviour didn't change, but when they made them mandatory for children, adult use rose from 15% to 75%) to argue that we need to make knowing subservient to doing. We have done the 'awareness' thing on climate change and peak oil, he says, but behaviour change has been negligible. Yet we forgave Al Gore for doing nothing as US VP for eight years but gave him a Nobel and film awards for raising awareness after he'd lost the power to do anything. Conformity as the Enemy of Resilience: A new study of civilizations suggests that cultural homogeneity breeds conformity which in turn reduces innovation and resilience of those civilizations, in the face of change or limits to growth. Thanks to David P for the link. Ending Mountaintop Coal Mining: A plea from NASA climate scientist (and now arrested protestor) Jim Hansen to end a devastating process. Thanks to Graham Clark (who also points us to a new online carbon counter) for the link. If you're a subscriber, the June 29 New Yorker has a great profile of Hansen by Elizabeth Kolbert (summary here). Can Stories Change the World?: Dave Eggars argues that teaching the poor and disenfranchised how to become good story-tellers, and then providing time and space for their stories, is essential to their emancipation. Thanks to Jerry Michalski for the link.  Canada's Environmental Backwardness: The right-wing Harper minority government is exempting 14,000 projects from environmental assessments, another gift to their funders in Big Oil and Big Construction. This is a classic Bush technique: don't bother changing the law to favour polluter friends, just don't let anyone enforce it. Meanwhile, environmentalists are pleading to Hilary Clinton not to permit Canada's incredibly dirty tar sands oil into their country. A Peer-to-Peer Virtual Support Network for Women: An intriguing application of the Gift Economy that draws on the mutual trust of women and reciprocality of needs to ensure fairness. Started by my friend Indigo. Roger Ebert on Food Inc: The famous film critic, suffering from diseases caused by our dangerous food production system, lashes out at that system in a review of a new documentary about it, which is based on Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. Thanks to Tree for the link.  Part of a collection of very cute animal photos going around. More here. Thanks to Tiffany for the link. Just for Fun: A hilarious list of 10 reasons not to buy a firefly cell-phone for your 4-year-old. Thanks to Dermot Casey for the link. Thought for the Week: From Paul Hawken (thanks to Samuel Richard for the link): "We are the only species on the planet without full employment." |
Hope you caught the announcement this week on boosting e-learning. My worst fears about Digital Britain are coming true. Hot on the heels of the retro Digital Britain day and visionless report, we have the first major act and it’s the same old establishment rot.
<span style=" Arial","sans-serif";font-family:";font-size:10.0pt;color:black;">The Open Learning Innovation fund will team up established laggards with large US corporations to fritter away yet more of your money. Have they learnt nothing from BBC Jam, UKUniversities, NHSU etc etc. Having already poured well over £100 million into these disasters, the powers that be are determined to burn even more of our money.
<span style=" Arial","sans-serif";font-family:";font-size:10.0pt;color:black;">And it gets worse. It will be chaired by Dame Lynne Brindley, the CEO of the British Library. So the future of innovation in e-learning will be in the hands of a librarian! Don’t worry though, Microsoft are also on the board (yikes!)....and the British Council (why?). Then there’s the good old BBC in as advisors. So BBC Jam has been quietly buried. The very people who frittered away tens of millions in a failed attempt to produce content (while destroying the market) are seen as the best of breed advisors. You couldn’t have gathered a more useless, backward looking bunch of laggards if you tried.
 It's
not easy being Canadian. You get ignored by most of the world, and
never taken seriously (Ambrose Bierce's definition of humanity: "An
animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to
overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is
extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however,
multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole
habitable earth, and Canada.") You are expected to understand both
Americans and Europeans, and sometimes help mediate between them.
Outside your own country, you are generally taken to be an American,
which is rarely good. There are enormously high expectations of you,
based on the country's natural wealth, education and proximity to world
markets. Everything is miles (kilometres) from everything else, which
is tough when transportation gets expensive, or if you don't like
driving in snow. The weather is, in most places, brutal -- as Bierce
implies, not really meant for human habitation at all. And we have royally screwed up. Our treatment of aboriginal peoples -- whose land we stole, and who we slaughtered without a thought -- has always been and continues to be abominable. In the Alberta bitumen sludge mines ("tar sands") we have created the greatest single ecological disaster in the history of civilization, and in the face of all the evidence about climate change, this disaster grows worse daily. Our treatment of animals, wild and domesticated, is appalling. We have squandered our natural resources -- fish and forests especially -- and now they are mostly gone forever. We have sold most of our land, resource ownership, and industry to foreigners who don't give a damn about this country, and who don't live here, and we sold it for an absurdly low price. Most of Canada's large private employers are foreign-owned, which means that a large proportion of us work for foreigners, selling our labour, our resources and our intellectual capital, and getting very little in return. We have emulated, at one time or another, all the worst rules, behaviours and beliefs of both Americans and Europeans, and few of their best. We have a federal government run by an arrogant ideological extremist supported by only 30% of us, yet we are not outraged when he asserts that his government, and not the 70% supported by the opposition, represents the Canadian people. Yet this country could be great, and its people could be models for the rest of the world at a time when sustainable, responsible, humble models are so desperately needed. Author (and spouse of the former governer-general) John Ralston Saul explained in a TVO podcast last month why our legacy offers us some clues of how we could be great. Highlights:
A few years ago I wrote about Hugh Brody's book, The Other Side of Eden, an anthropological study of indigenous peoples, and it contained some clues. If our nation adopted an authentic indigenous mythology, and accepted this as our innate culture, in addition to entrenching the seven elements Saul notes above, we would:
I am no longer idealistic enough to advocate the systematic breaking up of Canada into small self-selected communities; in a globalized world that's no longer feasible. But there are ways in which this national character, this authentic mythology of our nation might be institutionalized:
Category:
Our
Culture
|
 At
a meeting of Canadian IT leaders today, I was charged with explaining
Google
Wave to them. The objective was
for them to appreciate how GWave
will change the way people in business communicate.I've viewed the videos and some online explanations of the product, which is due for public release in the fall. But none of these really gives the end-user a sense of what GWave is, or does. So I decided to tell a story instead. Here's the story I told them: One
of our tasks is to provide guidance on how the transition of Canadian
companies to IFRS (the new global accounting standards) will affect IT
departments, and specifically how financial and reporting systems will
have to change to accommodate these new standards. We've prepared an
online training program (a webcast), a recorded interview with some IT
experts who have implemented IFRS in Europe (a podcast), and an article
in our association magazine. These three resources have been posted to
our
website, but we're struggling to get the intended IT audience to visit
the site, because they're not aware of it. Marketing is, alas, not our
strong
suit.
Some remarkable things have happened here. There is no marketing
involved. People invite people who invite others, and all are
immediately included and engaged in the conversation. They can
subscribe to the whole wave or just wavelets. They can have sidebar
conversations, with full discretion over whether they are public or
private. There is a complete, organized transcription of the entire
'conversation'. The conversation is collectively managed and
collectively edited and formatted to suit the needs of the
self-selecting participants, and it's easy to follow the threads.
Updates and notifications occur in real time, and several people can be
changing any part of the wave at the same time. With Google
Voice (also
new from Google), voice conversations can be recorded and transcribed
and fed into the wave as well.Suppose we had done all of this in 2010 instead of 2009. In 2010 we will have access to Google Wave, a new tool that integrates the functionality of e-mail, IM, wikis, blogs, Twitter, and other social networking tools. Here's what we would do instead of our 'IFRS for IT' web page, and what might happen as a result:
Inventing the story above (based on the features described in the Google Wave publicity materials) led me to an Aha! moment: Google Wave is the
wikification of conversation
You read it here first. I predict this will be the tagline of this new tool, and that GWave will render e-mail largely obsolete. And why would you send an IM or a tweet when it's just as easy to start a wave, and capture and archive the entire multimedia 'conversation', and when waves can be linked together (a tsunami?) Here's another story, this one about (perhaps) the future of this blog:
On the way home from the meeting I listened to a great David Weinberger podcast from TVO, dating back to February. It just reinforced my sense that GWave, by adding context to conversations, will revolutionize the way we communicate. Highlights from David's presentation:
Category:
Communication
Technology
|
 Nature
tends to determine the right size for things. If they're too
big, then they can't manoever, or they get stiff and break easily. If
they're too small, then they don't have enough space for the complexity
needed to sense and adapt to the environment. Evolution involves a
continuous right-sizing. Everything is more or less just the 'right'
size, until something changes and everything has to adapt again.We do our best, in human constructions, to make things the right size, but we don't have the billions of years of experience or the capacity to do massive parallel incremental experiments that nature does. So our constructions are usually the wrong size. For the first million years of humanity's presence on Earth, we did things pretty well, because we mimicked what nature did, and we didn't try to do anything very complicated. We learned by trial and error, with nature's help, that clans of about 50 humans worked best. We formed tribes made up of many clans, but they were loose federations -- most of political, social and economic activity was at the clan, at the community, level. Workgroups for gathering and hunting (our early enterprises) involved around 5-8 members, enough to enable collaboration, but not so many that the group couldn't self-organize, or would need some kind of hierarchy. Then about 30,000 years ago we discovered agriculture. As Jared Diamond and Ronald Wright have explained, it wasn't an invention, but rather an observation: after severe fires or floods, the first succession of new plants were monocultures, and having no immediate competition they flourished. They were not sustainable, however, and only in the presence of continued catastrophes to stunt the succession process did they continue. So, brilliant creatures that we are, we arranged for continuous burning off or flooding of the land to keep the catastrophes coming, and discovered that we could live off these prolific monocultures, and no longer needed to gather or hunt for food. We became settlers. There were a number of unintended consequences of this discovery however. The first of these was chronic malnutrition, since our new food sources lacked diversity, resilience and micronutrients (this is still true today, despite the obesity epidemic). Health became much worse, and diseases flourished in the denser concentrations of sickly humans. When the new crops failed because of weather or plant diseases, the result was a new, cruel, previously unheard-of phenomenon: famine. And whereas women previously had children only every four years or so (because of the necessity of moving them as the clan migrated), settled women could have children every year, and did. Settlements also allowed for protection against natural predators, so while the death rate from disease and starvation grew, the death rate from being eaten plummeted. In short, we created a new, artificial, man-made environment in which natural balances and evolution were taken out of the equation. We had thrown ourselves out of the garden, and now it was up to us to make our own rules. The right size for everything, in this new, complicated and fragile human 'civilization', as this man-made culture came to be called, seemed to be the bigger the better. More people meant more workers in the fields, more soldiers for the armies when the crops failed and it became necessary to steal from other settlements to live, and more police to prevent people walking away from the inevitable poverty (for all but the elite few) and hardship of settled life. Soon we had created cities, initially as fortresses but then as labour pools. Soon we had created a political system with a strict hierarchy to ensure law and order in this unnatural, crowded, scarcity-plagued, stressful environment. We had created an economic system to ensure that the power elite had the money to coerce obedience and threaten the poor with deprivation if they did not toil for the rich. And we had created an education system (working hand-in-hand with the religious elite) to brainwash everyone to believe that this was the only way to live, and to blame all the failings of these fatally-flawed systems on nature, on some outside enemy, or on our own personal inadequacy and 'sinfulness'. To survive, the institutions of these massively oversized systems have waged a continuous and brutal war against communities, the natural human structures that we instinctively seek to belong to. Aboriginal communities all over the world have been systematically exterminated, their members slaughtered or moved into institutional structures and forced to adopt the civilization monoculture constructs. Everything that could not be institutionalized has been atomized, so that communities no longer own anything; it is corporations and individuals who own everything. Our memory of the value and experience of community has been eradicated from our memories, relegated to 'prehistory' which has been rewritten to depict life in all non-civilization cultures as "nasty, short and brutish", a propaganda coup. So what we have now is a political system (nations, governments, cities, educational institutions, legal regimes) that is too big to work, and too big to be allowed to fail. We have an economic system (corporate oligopolies, industries, health care institutions, banks) that is too big to work, and too big to be allowed to fail. We have not only crop monoculture, we have human monoculture, what Terry Glavin has called "a dark and gathering sameness" all over the world. These are complicated, mechanistic structures, not the complex resilient ones that nature has evolved. They are fragile and vulnerable, constantly at risk of flying apart. The latest edition of Orion magazine describes the Transition movement as one that attempts to rediscover community, the natural 'right size' of human relationship and endeavour, between the atomized individual/family and the massive, groaning and ungovernable political and economic institutions and systems we have created that currently hold sway over our lives. We need to reframe the discussion away from big government versus big corporations versus libertarianism versus anarchism. The first two are different flavours of the unsustainably large and hierarchical, and the latter two are different flavours of the unsustainably small, narcissistic and atomized. The only structure of human relationship and human endeavour that has ever sustainably worked was and is community. As Rob Paterson wrote today, "We have to change the prevailing story from 'its all about me' to 'it's all about us'. The first step is that each of us has to take is to start to live this new story. We cannot lecture. We cannot explain. We have to live it." One way or another, we need to facilitate the breaking down of the complicated, dysfunctional and unsustainable hierarchies and systems of civilization culture, and the building up from alienated, atomized, narcissistic individuals, into community-based structures, relationships and endeavours. It is naive to believe that we can do just one or the other; we need activists breaking down the too-big and communitarians building up the too-small, until what we have is organizations of the right, natural size. Rob calls these right-size groups 'natural organizations'. I have used the terms 'natural enterprise' and 'natural community'. The right size is, usually, dense clusters of about 5-8, networked into larger communities of about 50. It is the only size that has ever sustainably worked, and it worked for a million years. What can we do to break down the too-big and build up the too-small? The whole point of this is that, as individuals, we can't do much, and we certaintly can't do enough. So while I certainly encourage everyone to live a responsible and radically simple lifestyle -- buy less, use less, get out of debt etc. -- the important actions are all ones we have to do in community. Step 1, I would suggest, is to take stock of and assess your communities, and how active you are in them. Communities aren't groups you merely belong to, they're groups you do things with. That can include learning, but it doesn't include just complaining. What communities do you belong to, how active are they, and how effective, how useful, are they? Step 2, naturally, is to mobilize your communities -- use the groups and relationships you already have, and make them more useful, and active. And remember, this is something you do collectively -- don't tell them what they should do, work with them to assess what you can do to be more effective, to carry out actions you collectively care about. Step 3 is to organize -- create new communities of passion, new natural enterprises, and new local living communities of people who share your purpose in life, and grow (within reason) existing communities so that they have more resources to deploy, and can therefore do more, and better. In both steps 2 and 3, consider using a skilled facilitator. Such a person can help provide a framework and structure for community-building, and help negotiate the challenges such as how to intervene effectively in an existing system to bring about change, and how to build consensus and resolve conflicts. What you specifically do -- which causes you embrace, from blockading mountain-top or bitumen sludge mining to creating an enterprise or a support group to meet an urgent local need -- is up to you, collectively. When you cease to behave atomically, as an individual or nuclear family member, and start to behave collaboratively, as a community member, your communities will figure out what needs to be done, and where they have the power to act in an effective way. A nation and a world of strong local communities will start to break down the too-big systems by showing the world how dysfunctional they are and by demonstrating better ways to live, make a living, and do things that are important and necessary, thus rendering these large institutions obsolete. And it will build up strong communities that will have the organization, the skills and the knowledge to take over as these too-big structures crumble, and which will show the libertarians and individual narcissists that trying to do everything yourself, for yourself, is unhealthy, ineffective, and unnecessary. Imagine a world where, when you are asked to describe yourself, you don't tell people about your personal skills and accomplishments and data, but rather which communities you belong to and what they have done. Imagine a world where, instead of feeding our low self-esteem by buying and showing off extravagant wealth, we fed our sense of belonging and love for all-life-on-Earth by creating and showing something we did together, exclaiming, We did that! Category:
Building
a Community-Based Society
|
Today is a big day. It is the first time that we can offer a view of something I have been working on for the past year. About one year ago, we began an undertaking that some described as bold, and others characterized as foolhardy. The first product of this effort is just now being released – we call it the Shift Index. Hopefully the scope and size of this undertaking will help to explain why it has been a while since I posted to this blog. I have been just a bit distracted.
The catalyst for this effort was a meeting about one year ago. We were looking at economic indices and struck by the fact that most of the well-known indices focus on very short-term cyclical events – unemployment, inflation, purchasing activity, consumer confidence levels, etc. Of course, these are extremely valuable in helping executives to assess the current context for their operations.
On the other hand, everyone acknowledges that we are in the midst of a fundamental shift playing out on the business landscape on a global scale over many decades. We may not all agree on the exact dimensions of the big shift, but the reality is so widely recognized that it is often unstated. When we looked for indices that gave us some insight into the nature and pace of this big shift, we pretty much came up drive. There were isolated measures and one-off analyses, but there was nothing resembling a comprehensive index of key metrics updated on a regular basis.
So we decided to develop one. We had a team work for about six months developing the conceptual framework for describing the dimensions of the big shift and how these dimensions related to each other. We then spent the next six months working to define the specific metrics for a Shift Index and collect and analyze the data related to these metrics.
The result is now being formally launched – we call it the 2009 Shift Index. It initially focuses on the US economy although over time we intend to expand the Shift Index to cover other economies around the world. In the fall, we will release a separate report pulling apart the data for fifteen industries in the US economy and comparing performance at the industry level.
For the moment, though, we have a report that draws attention to some of the key findings in the Index. The report is accessible here. Perhaps the most interesting findings can be summarized as follows:
- Return on assets (ROA) for U.S. firms has steadily fallen to almost one-quarter of 1965 levels at the same time that we have seen continued, albeit much more modest, improvements in labor productivity.
- The ROA performance gap between winners and losers has increased over time, with the “winners” barely maintaining previous performance levels, while the losers experience rapid deterioration in performance.
- The “topple rate,” at which big companies lose their leadership positions, has more than doubled, suggesting that “winners” have increasingly precarious positions.
- U.S. competitive intensity has more than doubled during the last 40 years.
- While the performance of U.S. firms is deteriorating, the benefits of productivity improvements appear to be captured in part by creative talent, which is experiencing greater growth in total compensation. Customers also appear to be gaining and using power as reflected in increasing customer disloyalty.
- The exponentially advancing price/performance capability of computing, storage, and bandwidth is driving an adoption rate for our new “digital infrastructure” that is two to five times faster than previous infrastructures, such as electricity and telephone networks.
Given these long-term trends, we cannot reasonably expect to see a significant easing of performance pressure as the current economic downturn begins to dissipate—on the contrary, all long-term trends point to a continued erosion of performance. So what can be done to reverse these performance trends?
The answer to this question can be found in the three waves of deep change occurring in today’s epochal “Big Shift.” The first, the “Foundation” wave, involves changes to the fundamentals of our business landscape catalyzed by the emergence and spread of digital technology infrastructure and reinforced by long-term public policy shifts toward economic liberalization. The metrics in our Foundation Index monitor changes in these key foundations and provide leading indicators of the potential for change on other fronts. Changes in foundations have systematically and significantly reduced barriers to entry and to movement, leading to a doubling of competitive intensity.
The second, the “Flow” wave, focuses on the key driver of performance in a world increasingly shaped by digital infrastructure. This second wave looks at the flows of knowledge, capital, and talent enabled by the foundational advances, as well as the amplifiers of these flows. Because of higher unpredictability and volatility created by the Big Shift, knowledge flows are a particular key to improving performance. Developments on this front will likely lag behind the foundations metrics because of the time required to understand changes in foundations and develop new practices consistent with new opportunities.
The third, the “Impact” wave, centers on the consequences of the Big Shift. Given the time it will take for the first two waves to play out and manifest themselves, this third wave—and its related index—provides an even greater lagging indicator.
While current trends in firm performance indicate sustained deterioration, we expect, over time, that performance will improve as firms begin to figure out how to participate in and harness knowledge flows. Doing so will require significant institutional innovations, not just changes in practices, resulting in value creation through increasing returns performance improvement. In the end, these innovations will lead to a fundamental shift in rationale from scalable efficiency to scalable learning as firms use digital infrastructure to create environments where performance improvement accelerates as more participants join. Early signs of these changes are visible in the varied kinds of emerging open innovation and process network initiatives underway today.
The Shift Index seeks to measure these three waves of deep and overlapping change operating beneath the visible surfaces of today’s events. The relative rates of change across the three indices will help executives understand where we are in the Big Shift and what to anticipate in the future. Current metrics indicate that we are still in the first wave of the Big Shift and facing challenges in moving forward into the second. Changes still manifest themselves much more as challenges rather than opportunities because our institutions and practices are still geared to earlier infrastructures. At the same time, an understanding of these three waves leads to significant insights about the moves required to reverse current performance trends.
I would love to get your comments and reactions to this report. Are we on to something? What does it mean? Are we missing anything? What additional research could be done to build on this initial work?
Alas, the release of this report does not mean that I will be soon picking up on posting here. I am now in the middle of a book project that will consume me for the summer. The book basically picks up where the Shift Index leaves off and focuses on what executives need to do in order to thrive in the Big Shift. If you haven’t already checked it out, I am posting some early views of the book themes at my blog, The Big Shift. This is all in real time development so a great opportunity to help me shape the perspectives and ideas in the book. I’ll look forward to hearing from you.
Despite more than doubling the spend in UK schools, only marginal, measurable improvement has been seen. Yet even this may not be down to schools themselves. Interesting data is emerging about the dramatic increase in that same period of private tuition. The Sutton Trust has found that 43% of 11-16 state pupils in London have been tutored. Could it be that schools are delivering less and that private tuition and parental support are the real causes behind the measured improvement?
Is tuition legal?
Teachers who fight tooth and nail against the influence of the private sector in schools are coining it of an evening through private tuition. And how many of those thousands of tutors declare this on their tax returns? The acceptance of middle-class 'cash-only crime has always been part of British culture. How many have done a risk assessment when they deliver this service from home? How many have a contract (as they should with the parents/carers)? How many have insurance? What would happen if there was an accusation of assault or inappropriate conduct?
Schools spend unbelievable amounts if time on this stuff (Governors meetings are largely about reading and approving such policies), yet how many tutors pay even lip service to these issues when moonlighting? How many have even checked with their employer that they’re allowed to do this, especially with students from the school in which they teach?
Duplicity?
I’m fine with teachers doing private tuition, although I’m not fine when it’s combined with complaints about long hours and being worked too hard. If you don’t have time to mark homework, or commit wholly to your main job, I’m not sure you should be topping it up with more teaching. I’m also against the anti-corporate views expressed by teachers in schools, who are quite happy to play the game themselves outside of the school gates.
Get it into the open
Wouldn’t it be better to get this all of this into the open? Why doesn’t the school openly offer these services on behalf of the teachers who want to make some extra cash? It’s all so ‘cloak and dagger’ at the moment. I suspect that it’s all a bit of an embarrassment.
 Patti Digh and David Robinson recently offered an audioconference on the subject of "playing with blocks", which was kind of a riff on the issues I've been talking about recently in my posts on the fictitious stories we tell ourselves and the emotions they evoke, learning to live in 'now time', and about the need to slow down and know and appreciate yourself for who you are. Part of the problem is that in our busy modern life, we are often unconscious of why we do and think what we do, and what is 'blocking' us, holding us back. There is just not enough time to reflect on this, so we end up, Patti and David explain, following the path of least resistance. In the process, we start to create our own stories about ourselves, which include falsehoods and excuses that block us from being who we are and doing what we can do. When we pay attention to the language we use in describing our lives and situation, they say, we start to notice how we use self-description to abdicate responsibility for our blocks, lower our self-expecations, and resign ourselves to having fewer choices than we really do. We convince ourselves that we're 'broken' and need to be 'fixed' (hence the popularity of the self-help section of the bookstore). What we need to do, they suggest, is to apply the power of attention and participation, to become the expert of our own self-management process, to become more conscious of and attentive to who we are and what is really holding us back, which is, often, our own stories about ourselves, stories we have the capacity to change. The original block in all our lives, they explain, comes from the experience in each of our childhoods when we first separated ourselves from ourselves -- when we first judged ourselves (probably critically) in the third person. This separation then becomes the frame for all the stories we subsequently tell ourselves about ourselves. The blocks that stem from this original block are of three main types, they propose:
"The
life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one
story and writes another, and his humblest hour is when he compares the
volume as it is with what he vowed to make it."
If we want to move from the story we are living to the one we mean to live, we must first have the humility and wisdom to understand both stories and the differences between them, and the reasons for those differences. Patti and David go on to suggest things that can be done to 'play with' and work through these blocks, these false comparisons, false self-expectations and beliefs in false stories. Here are several ideas they noted:
Pete McGregor told me that, often, as soon as he has identified something that seems to make real sense, ring true, hold great promise, be the right thing to do, he confounds and stymies himself by doubting, by seeing all the reasons why it might not be right. I am the same way. On the one hand, I think too much and too long, before taking action, before just starting. On the other hand, I don't allow myself enough time to really think, reflect, slow down and do nothing and let ideas percolate and flow and emerge and take form. In recognizing myself, acknowledging and understanding who I am (not who I would ideally like or hope to be, just who I really am, nobody-but-myself), it seems to me that I need to do five things, more or less simultaneously:
The important message from Patti and David, I think, is that we should stop trying to "self-improve" to be better or other than all we are, and focus on doing instead of being, and that key to that is to understand what is blocking us from acting. They have planned a 12-part series of audioconferences that you can sign up for, that dive much deeper than the one-hour teaser this article summarizes. I intend to sign up, mostly because I think these two people are brilliant and I really enjoy their ideas, but also because I think this series would be a great capacity-builder. The purpose of the course ostensibly is to teach you how to 'play with blocks' and move through them for yourself, but my guess is that the higher value of the course could be to teach participants how to help others, one-on-one, to do so. We need millions of competent facilitators to make this world a better place, and it seems to me that teaching people how to facilitate others to understand and move past what is blocking them from acting, would be a priceless gift. Maybe I'll 'meet' you at Patti and David's class, and we can grow our capacities together. Category:
Human
Nature
|
 Tweemap of my 700 Twitter 'followers': Special tweetout to the surprising number in Brussels, Raleigh-Durham and Portland. My guess is that a map of my blog readers would look very similar. Surowiecki's Answer for Gasoline Conservation: Suro's New Yorker column this week suggests that even without the incompetence/greed of the banks, the recession would have happened anyway because of last year's gasoline price spike. And he suggests a terrific idea, that could help solve global warming: Fix the retail price of gasoline once each year, at an annual graduating amount, regardless of the wellhead price. When wellhead price was low, the difference would be collected as tax and reinvested in renewable energy. When wellhead price spiked, the tax would drop to compensate, so that consumers would know exactly what they'd be paying for the next year, and not radically change buying behaviour or spook the economy every time the price suddenly changed (which it will, more and more). By increasing the price each year, more and more conservation behaviour would be encouraged. Of course it won't happen, because price controls are considered 'socialism' and are hence anathema. But we can hope. Plotting to Impose Canadian Health Care: Nick Kristof explains why a Canadian-style health care system, for all its flaws, is the best answer for the US today. Except for the very rich. The 100 Most Beautiful Words in the English Language: An eloquent, evocative and becoming assemblage of effervescent and lilting terms. Thanks to Jodene for the link. How Language Shapes the Way We Think: How the words available to us in our language affect how and what we perceive and conceive. Thanks to Shawn for the link. In a related story, scientists have implanted the human 'language' gene in mice, and changed the way they communicate. How Open Money Works: How community currencies complement and protect against the collapse of central bank fiat currencies. A 12-part series. Thanks to Sheri H for the link. The 7 Myths of Relationship Marketing: A smart, sassy repudiation of marketers who try to use social media to hawk their wares, and pretend that having followers of their business' Facebook page or corporate blog implies some kind of real social relationship. Thanks to Kathy S for the link. Just Plant Trees: Planting millions of trees can help address climate change, poverty, soil degradation and a host of other social and environmental problems. Thanks to Craig for the link. Temple Grandin, Shill for McDonalds?: Melissa Holbrook Pierson questions whether the uncritical celebration of the writing of the autistic Temple Grandin is warranted, especially if you are an animal welfare advocate. WAGN: Wiki + Database + Content Management System. The next great social networking tool? What Ning should be? The Orchard Harvest: Tree's top links of the week (editorial comments below are mine, not hers): Peter
Block on Civic Engagement: A
very useful
and succinct summary of Block's book Community.
Just
for Fun:Michael Moore's Prescription for GM: Convert it to a high-speed public transit company and make the US the world leader in rapid rail transport. Michelle Obama's Garden Poisoned With Lead: Mother Jones tracks down the culprit. Global Climate Change Impacts in the US: A region-by-region analysis of how climate change will affect Americans' life, livelihood and ecology, from the US Government no less! US Cities May Have to Be Bulldozed to Survive: Is this plan from Brookings a wise scheme to manage descent of overbuilt cities and remediate brownfield lands, or an unfeasible resettlement of the poor to rescue property values for the rich? Colleen Stephenson's Art of Hosting Graphics: A stunningly beautiful graphic representation of key learnings about the Art of Hosting Jason Bradford's 7 Points on Civilizational Collapse: What we have to realize, and do, for a managed descent:
ALL NATURE'S ART,
by
Felix
Dennis
(thanks to Michael Wiik
for the link)
All Nature’s Art is purest accident, Not in or of itself— how should she know?— But in the quality of what is lent By those who view what Providence made so. Take grass of softest green— in beetles’ eyes A dreary, harsh savanna, spiked and bound In monochrome and perilous disguise: To us a lawn— to hens, a killing ground. And so it is, my love, with you and me— This old fool’s eyes were ever drawn to youth; While Nature’s Art lies not in what we see, Such ‘seeing’ smooths the wilderness of truth. Though as for that, no truth was ever known To topple skin-deep Beauty from her throne. MOTHERLESS, by Dave Bonta I am holding a small mammal against my chest. When it cries, I try my best to sway like a tree. When it speaks, the words come from a great distance & I can’t make them out. We are hiding in abandoned tunnels under the streets of a city that has engulfed the earth. Our skin has turned pale blue in the absence of sky & our minds are grim reapers: drift nets set to catch rare flashes of joy. A twitch travels from muscle to muscle before lodging permanently in my left eyelid. It’s a lucky thing I’ve still got sunglasses on. The motherless creature in my arms has imprinted on its own reflection & would wail if I ever took them off. With cars above & trains below, the ground never stops trembling, even in its sleep. |
You know you’re in for disappointment when the opening sentence is, “On 26 August 1768, when Captain James Cook set sail for Australia, it took 2 years and 320 days.....” Stevie boy then compares this with Google. Some comparisons are odious, this is just stupid.
The report landed in my inbox like an octopus falling from a tree. Is this the best they can do? Carter’s badly written, novel-length report is a charter for the analogue professions; luvvies, farmers and lawyers. It’skewed towards old media like TV and radio, lacks vision, focuses on the past not the future, and stinks of lobbying by the professions. Where’s the citizen in all this? Most of us will simply end up paying more and being threatened by lawyers over peer-to-peer use.
TV talk digital future, geeks create it
The London Luvvies, and press, immediately leapt on the BBC/ITV/C4 funding stuff. Who gives a toss? The BBC, ITV and C4 are TV companies. The digital future is about the web, not TV! I don’t give a damn how they slice up the licence fee among themselves. In practice this brouhaha is only of interest to London media types. The reality is that there’s been a vast overpayment to the BBC for the Digital Switchover (a mess of a project) that would be better spent elsewhere. Simple as that. The National Audit Office calculate this at around £250 million. How did that happen? It makes £75 million wasted on BBC Jam seem like a bar bill. The controversy in all of this should be incompetent budgeting, not slicing up the TV tax? TV people love to think that they’re creating the digital future, when the reality is that they’re mired in the past. Can you name a single person in TV, or from a TV background, who’s created a Google, Youtube, Wikipedia, Facebook, Myspace, iTUNES, Flikr,Twitter or anything meaningful and long-lasting on the web? Of course not. While TV people run conferences on the future, businesses and geeks create it.
Digital Radio
Again, who gives a damn? Radio’s an old analogue medium that’s not worth mentioning in this report. We’re going to scrap millions of domestic and car radios at an enormous price environmentally to replace them with expensive digital radios that give you the same thing? Radio’s an analogue footnote.
Is Carter boss of Inland revenue?
So Carter has decided he’ll slap a poll tax us urban types to pay for laying in broadband for those lovely country folk. So I pay for twats who run around in 4X4s while living off vast EC farm subsidies. If you want to live in the country for the ‘peace and quiet’ why do you want the cacophony of the internet and broadband access to play Halo? They’re perfectly happy listening to crap like the Archers. Leave them alone.
And if we do go ahead and give BT and others this money, surely we should have a stake? When we subsidised the banks, we took equity. This is public money raised by a tax, so why not demand a stake? Carter’s revealed his background here – he’s a telco business guy at heart. What’s worse this levy is likely to stick and be included in future pricing.
Criminalise customers
This was the funny bit. The government pass the buck to OFCOM who pass the buck to the ISPs who pass the buck to the rights holders who take kids to the courts. This, of course, is unworkable. It’s a charter for lawyers. “a court-based process of identity release and civil action" We’ve been through all of this. You can’t take millions of people to court, most of them children. Send them letters if you will – they’ll be ignored. Customers will be outraged that their services will be cut because of file sharing by their children from sites they’ve never heard of and over which they have no control.
IP for gardeners
“NESTA will pilot a simplified IP framework for digital media bringing together PACT, the Cabinet Office, Kew Gardens and Arts Council England.” Kew gardens? This bag of quangos will take years to get an agenda together and another couple of years squabbling and by that time the world will have moved on. On p199 there’s a peculiar paragraph on Botanical gardens and Kew. They’re a leading edge digital media organisation, allegedly!!!! Someone on the report team must be fond of gardening.
Digital inclusion
Martha Lane –Fox is our new Champion for Digital exclusion. Martha is to represent the estimated six million adults who are both socially and digitally excluded. I think not. Martha, bless her silk socks, doesn’t know any poor people. This is like appointing Wayne Rooney as Champion for Higher Education.
Digital self-exclusion
Here’s an interesting paragraph...“Among non Internet using groups a common response to “digital self-exclusion” is that they say they are living contentedly offline and see no real need or benefit to going online. Despite the advantages of digital participation, as outlined in this document, 43% of those asked in a recent Ofcom study said that even if offered a ‘free computer and broadband subscription’, they still would not choose to be online.” Wow! It pops up, is ignored, yet the whole report is premised on the idea that it’s good for them. This is an idea that needs to be explored further, but it is not.
The reports a messy, fudge that focuses far too much on old media. BBC is mentioned 169 times, Google gets 6, FaceBook 5, Twitter 3, YouTube 2, iTunes 1, Games 0, Xbox 0, Playstation 0, Second Life 0, Wikipedia 0. It’s as if the internet doesn’t really exist and that the digital future is an issue for broadcasters.
 OK, let me start by saying I'm a Twitter user and fan. But something about it disturbs me. Like the near-defunct Usenet, the now-collapsing MySpace, and the soon to collapse under its own weight Facebook, Twitter doesn't make sense. For that reason, I predict it will soon suffer the same fate, replaced by tools that will do all the same good things, and which do make sense. For those unfamiliar with Twitter (and users who haven't really thought about it), here is what Twitter is in a nutshell: Twitter is an instant
messaging tool where the recipients of the messages
are determined by the recipients, not by the sender.
HOW TWITTER WORKS So you sign up, and send a bunch of IMs (instant messages -- short electronic messages that are delivered immediately and pop up on the recipients' laptops or phones) into cyberspace, into the void. Just like a newbie blogger, no one reads what you write, at first. Eventually some people will 'find' you and subscribe to your messages ('tweets'), and if they like them, they'll rebroadcast them ('re-tweet') to the people who subscribe to their tweets. Some of those second-hand readers will like what you say and subscribe to your tweets. When you subscribe to others' tweets, some of them, out of curiosity or a sense of reciprocity, may subscribe back to yours. You can post your Twitter name on your blog, and on your Facebook page, and send it out to your friends to get them to subscribe. This way, you build an audience. Just as there are 'A-list' bloggers with thousands of readers, there are 'A-list' tweeters who have audiences in the tens of thousands. And just as there are organizational and ghostwritten celebrity blogs, there are organizational and ghost-written tweeters, trying, mostly futilely, to market their product or information using this new medium. Unsurprisingly, there are bloggers who simply 'tweet' links to their latest blog posts. Tweets are supposed to be conversational (more than half of them are replies to previous tweets, identified using the @ sign before the original tweeter's username), so most of these lazy 'broadcasting' machinations are considered bad 'twitterquette', and generally fail. (Businesses, spammers and people trying to sell stuff through Twitter, please take the hint and stop). The catch with this reverse-IM tool is that the maximum length of a tweet is 140 characters, including the characters needed to acknowledge the original sender(s) in a re-tweet. You can extend this somewhat by linking to something longer by putting its URL in your tweet, or linking to a photo or video or song with its URL, and if the URL is long you can use any of the URL-shortening services to save precious characters. But there is no effective way to link tweets together to make a longer one. Brevity is everything. If you can't say it in 140 characters, it doesn't belong on Twitter. WHAT'S WRONG WITH TWITTER What you end up with, mostly, is a lot of cryptic messages you don't understand. In the process of squeezing your message to 140 characters, you will generally squeeze almost all of the meaning out of it. For example, when I've read the rapid-fire tweets of people tweeting from conferences, one highlight sentence or quote at a time, I've found it impossible to fathom most of what the tweeter found remarkable, or even what s/he meant. There is simply no context to provide meaning, so most of what you read is meaningless. What's worse, when most of the tweets of people you've subscribed to are replies to (or retweets from) people you are not subscribed to, it is almost impossible (and rarely worth the effort) to chase down the original thread to understand the context for the reply. In fact Twitter is in something of a war with users, since they have tried to reduce volume by suppressing these replies, so you only see replies to you, and to people who both the replier and you subscribe to. Users have developed ways around this, of course, and the war continues. Currently I 'follow' (subscribe to the tweets of) about 100 people, close to the Twitter median, who between them produce about 10 tweets an hour. I probably find time to read about 1/4 of the tweets they send. On top of this, I try to read any replies to my own tweets (those that have @davepollard in the message are displayed for me on a separate Twitter tab), and I read any direct messages sent specifically and only to me (traditional IMs, displayed on yet another separate tab). I have about 700 'followers'. The protocol for IM replies has generally carried over to tweets: Unlike e-mails, which you are generally expected to reply to, it is perfectly acceptable not to acknowledge or reply to IMs, and the same applies to tweets. This is one reason why I like IMs and Twitter more than e-mail. Based on some research I did the other day, I would estimate that, per year, for 240 hours' time investment, I scan about 36,000 tweets (most of them unintelligable) and in so doing discover about 200 interesting or memorable thoughts or ideas, identify a third of the content of my Links of the Week blog posts, have perhaps 20 useful follow-up one-on-one conversations and maybe make two new real friends. If I spent that 240 hours in other social activities, would the yield be higher or lower?  WHAT TWITTER SHOULD BE Twitter has been important in emergency relief and grassroots organizing, and the reason for this is simple: It is currently the most globally ubiquitous real-time text communication tool. But the tool we should have is an IM tool that allows you to send real-time messages either to people on your IM/e-mail contact list, or to people who subscribe to your IMs, or both. This would be a simple add-on to GTalk or other IM tools, and it would render Twitter obsolete because it would have all Twitter's functionality, and more, in an existing ubiquitous tool. Tweets you receive would simply appear alongside your other incoming IMs, and you'd likewise be able to send tweets the same way you send IMs. In fact, Twitter originally did have an IM interface for GTalk like the one depicted above, but Twitter (perhaps fearing that IM tool developers would soon co-opt and obsolesce Twitter's functionality) disabled that interface some time ago. Such a send-publish-and/or-subscribe IM tool would also have great value within medium-to-large organizations, and could substantially replace internal e-mail. It appears that Google Wave will incorporate it, but expect to see IM and Twitter-type reverse-IM tools integrated within the next few months. It just makes sense. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TWITTER What is it that makes people sign up for, and spend time with, Twitter? I think there are two reasons:
As
Dermot Casey
has pointed out, we've been through all this before, with Usenet,
twenty years ago. Tens
of thousands of Usenet forums were inundated with millions of short
messages, some of them fired off in such rapid succession that they
were close to real-time, and the only substantive difference between
Usenet and Twitter is that instead of
subscribing to a person you subscribed to a group about a particular
topic (perhaps Noam Chomsky, or nude celebrity photos, or how to commit
suicide
painlessly). Your posts were supposed to be 'on-topic', but as long as
you marked the article 'OT' (for 'off-topic') it was OK, and what
happened is that people formed clique communities where the people in
the group, and their relationships, were more important than the
ostensible topic.
What
happened to Usenet, and many other online forums that played
around with social networking in those Web 1.0 days? Mostly, people
realized that they weren't building real
relationships, real
friendships, that the information they were exchanging was ephemeral,
and that the online relationships they thought they had built were more
imagined, idealized, than real. This same phenomenon is evident in
Second Life, where text is preferred over voice for communication
because it's easier to sustain the illusion of an idealized,
reciprocal, perfect relationship. With online tools like this, we're
clever,
we're witty, we're knowledgeable, we're articulate, we look good and
sound good. We're always on. Totally addictive.
We are inundated with mainstream media that feed a dumbed-down populace with propaganda and pap. It is not surprising then, that a medium like Twitter, with its immediate, unrehearsed, uncontrolled, authentic messages would have enormous appeal, and feed our addiction for information at the same time. Likewise, we live in a fragmented, stressful, isolating world, where despite the crowded cities most of us live in we find it difficult to make true connections, to build deep and enduring relationships, to be appreciated and get attention for who we really are and what we do. So we shouldn't be surprised, or ashamed to admit, that real-time, social networking tools like Twitter can fill an emotional void in our lives, a craving for connection. Is this harmless? For most people it probably is. We all have our little addictions, whether it be chocolate or sudoku. Recreation is good for us, and forty minutes a day Twittered away is pretty benign, I'd guess. It depends on what you'd do with that forty minutes a day (or more), if you weren't tweeting. I think what we will see, over time, is that our longing for authentic, one-on-one connection, and for context, will win out, and wean us off tools like Twitter in favour of richer and more personal ones. And the technology, with bandwidth and memory becoming almost unlimited and free, will enable us to approximate genuine physical meeting and rich face-to-face conversation more and more. There are a few tools out already that hint at what this might look like. The challenge is not in making the conversation real; it is in finding the people with whom to engage in conversation. This is the real magic of Twitter, and of other 'tools of discovery' like blogs: The onus to search for someone of like mind is moved from the searcher to the audience. The people you're looking for find you, based on your simple advertisements, in Twitter, blogs and similar media, that say, simply: Hey, world, this is me! Anyone want to connect? Category:
Communications
Technologies
|
Where did this one come from? She’s the new “champion for Digital Inclusion”
Now just look at this picture for a few seconds. Does this look like someone who is familiar with exclusion? I can just hear those civil servants, ponder, “We need someone who understands the problems of the underclass, poverty and exclusion. Someone who gets the whole sink-estate, drugs, wrecked lives thing. Barrow Boy Sugar’s been snapped up by Mandelson. How about that well-heeled, posh bird who built a website a few years ago? Yeah, her, the private school, Oxford educated one with the double-barrelled name". Absolutely perfect.
To be fair she has kept in touch with the inclusion agenda, and poor people, as she’s set up an ‘interior design’ company ‘mydeco’ and is on the board of Marks & Sparks.
The Digital Britain conference ended with a speech from Stephen Fry. The Digital Britain report has a quote from Stephen Fry. Why Fry? Why has he become the touchstone for technical advice? Because he uses Twitter. That’s about it folks.
Well not quite. Those civil servants love meeting celebs, especially posh, foppish, Oxbridge, Footlights celebs, as it doesn’t make them feel grubby. He’s one of them. There’s no other group in the world that would see a fat, ugly, posh bloke in a bad suit as a role model. Actually, there is another group – TV types. He’s loved by Luvvies. Public broadcasting loves the ‘Fry’. He’s appeals perfectly to the Archers listening, Middle-England audience, who need to have gay issues and other risqué topics mediated by one of their own in that annoying 50s BBC English voice
I also hate the quiz show QI (is that the most patronising title for an entertainment show ever?), with the smug Alan Davies et al playing around with puns in that sneering, pseudo-intellectual style, so beloved of Radio 4 listeners. The tour of the US in a London Cab was pathetic, a truly patronising piece of junk. All of those bit parts in third rate British movies and now the awful Kingdom – a drama about a lawyer (compelling idea eh?). Then there’s that pathetic letter he wrote to himself, pretending to be some sort of modern Voltaire.
Don’t get me wrong I don’t hate Stephen Fry, it’s the idea of Stephen Fry and his sycophantic audience I dislike. What, in the end, is Stephen Fry? He’s a TV presenter and bit actor who’s written some pot-boiler paperbacks. A National Treasure they say, one I’d like to bury.
Yuri Engelhardt's notes, taken when he was working on The Language of Graphics. Click here for a closer look.
 One of the events at last weekend's extraordinary Toronto arts festival, Luminato, was a panel discussion put on by Atlantic magazine on the subject of Why Fiction Matters. My friend Miranda and I checked it out, but came away disappointed: The moderator talked too much, some of the panelists were unprepared (a surprise, given that the title was a dead give-away for what the questions would be), and most of the responses, at least in my opinion, showed why the panelists made their living writing and not speaking (though I was sufficiently inspired to pick up a copy of panelist Anne Michaels' best-seller Fugitive Pieces). So, over afternoon drinks at one of Yorkville's trendiest bars, we decided to come up with our own answers to the three key questions that the panel had attempted to address: Why does fiction matter? Miranda said she thought that stories are a form of communication between the writer and reader, an implicit conversation. It's important, she said, because these stories tell us about the reality in which we are living. We can learn more about the real world from fiction than we can from non-fiction, perhaps more than from direct observation. My answer? Fiction enables us to imagine possibilities. The power of such imagination and realization is transformative. As I've said before, if we can't imagine (what is really going on, that we can't see directly), we can do anything (including tolerate factory farms, the abuse of spouses and children, atrocities in prisons and foreign wars, etc.) Once we can imagine, through powerful writing, what is really happening, we cannot sit by and let it happen. We are propelled to change our thinking and then our behaviour. And we can also become aware of things we might love, things we might be good at, things that are needed that we care about, and hence discover what we are meant to do in our lives, that, without such stories, we might never have realized. What makes a good story? For Miranda, a good story is one that captures a fundamental truth about human experience. In the process, she said, a good story must engage us, with an appropriate rhythm and pace that draws us in, and it must be compelling and transporting -- it must begin with something familiar enough that we can relate to it, but then it must take us off in an unfamiliar direction. In the process, she concluded, it can prepare us if and when we face a similar situation ourselves. To me, a good story is one that draws our attention to something important we hadn't noticed. Much as the job of the media, according to Bill Maher, is to make what's important interesting, the job of the story-teller is to draw our attention to things we wouldn't normally consider or look at -- sometimes even things we shudder to think about. What is the wellspring of your creative writing? Miranda declined to answer this because, she said, she is not a writer of fiction. My answer, which is close to the one Tim O'Brien proffered, and which resonated with Miranda, is imagined myths about things we care about. That's a complex answer, so let me break it down. We all write about myths, because the story, even the one in our heads that is not yet transcribed to language, is a fiction, it is not real. It is our limited view of what happened, why it happened, what it meant, filtered by our own subjective worldview. It is a myth if it is believable (whether or not it is true). A myth is the currency of story, it is what we can accept and understand at a deep level, even though our experience as the reader is different from that of the writer. Without that currency, that tapped capacity for common understanding, there can be no communication. So every story begins with a myth -- a powerful, shared, uncritically received and accepted belief. In fiction these myths are imagined. That means they might be based on some 'true' story or event, but they are fictional -- they are invented, 'brought into being' through the writer's mind. And as the word 'imagine' comes from the word 'image', this also means that they are pictured, portrayed, made vivid. And the third element is that it must be about something we (writer and reader) care about. One of Frederick Barthelme's brilliant 39 steps to great fiction is "We can't care about sand mutants. If you do, or think you do, kill yourself." Stories are about emotion, about pain and love and passion and the whole damn thing. So the wellspring, the source, I think, of creative writing is the convergence of these three things: a believable, compelling myth; a vivid, 'image-ined' portrayal that 're-presents' that myth; and the evident, driving passion in every word that tells the readers that the author cares, and therefore so should they. Example: from Barthelme's Elroy Nights: As
I drove across the bridge, I thought how we'd started as young people
insisting on living the way we wanted, and how we'd gradually retreated
from that, from doing what we wanted. Things change. What you want
becomes something you can't imagine having wanted, and instead you have
this, suddenly and startlingly not at all what you sought. One day you
find yourself walking around in Ralph Lauren shorts and Cole Haan
loafers and no socks. You think, How did this happen? It isn't a
terrible spot, and you don't feel bad about being there, being the
person you are in the place you are, with the wife or husband you have,
the step-daughter, the friends and acquaintances, the house and tools
and toys, the job, but there is no turning back. You have a Daytimer
full of things to do. You have a Palm PDA and names and addresses and
contacts, and there is no way back. Even if there were a way back, you
couldn't get there from here, and you probably wouldn't go if you
could. The effort required isn't the kind of effort you can make
anymore.
This is a powerful re-presentation of the myth of those of us who grew up in the 1960s, idealistic, passionate, intense, and somehow became what we are now. I have gone for walks and drives at 3am and the picture he paints of his protagonist is my story. You can almost taste the bewilderment, the loss, the resignation, the sense of self-irony in every word. He speaks directly to my soul. The wellspring of his art is mine, too. This is why fiction matters. Category:
Language
& Storytelling
|
 After the Bioneers conference last year, I wrote about the 24 steps to make political activism more effective. And, as the chart above shows, activism has long been part of my "what you can do to help save the world" list. Recently, however, I've become more skeptical in my writing about whether or not political activism really has any effect. Most of my attention has been focused on personal change, on adapting to the world rather than trying to make it better. More recently still, I've begun to think that personal change is equally futile: that we cannot be other than who we are, and that the best personal coping strategy is to know and accept yourself. My friend Janene has tempered my thoughts on this somewhat; she says that while we may not be able to change who we are, we can change what we do. To some extent this takes us full circle. If we have the opportunity and responsibility to change our behaviour, our activities, to make different choices about what we do, and don't do, what is this if not political activism? And if those actions do make a difference, then skepticism about the effectiveness of political activism is at best unwarranted, and at worst defeatist. My political activist friends have called me on this, and I promised to recant any suggestion on these pages that political activism is a waste of time and energy. So I'm doing so. As Margaret Mead said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." She was right. Social and political movements have always pushed people and institutions to make important and meaningful change that they would not otherwise make, by appealing in part to their sense of what's fair and just and reasonable (an intellectual appeal), but more importantly by appealing to human emotion, by moving them. Without such movements there would be no movement, and we would probably be living in a world with much more slavery, violence, destruction and tyranny than the one we live in now. I've been trying to figure out why this is so. I have a fairly optimistic view of human intention and behaviour, as befits an incurable idealist. But I also confess to being misanthropic -- I don't much like most people. I find them stupid, unimaginative, indifferent to the suffering of others, and conveniently ignorant and agnostic. It is easy to give up hope on people, and to blame "the system" that grinds the sense and sensibility out of them, and just give up. I believe, as John Gray has argued, that we humans, like most creatures, are preoccupied with the needs of the moment. We are myopic, both in time and space -- unable to really care about what we cannot see and feel, or about what the future consequences of our actions might be. That's not a criticism, just a Darwinian truth. That is who we are. The problem is one of scale. When something affects us, or our immediate circle, personally, it is in our nature to care about it, and, with some struggle (because in our modern world we do not get much practice building consensus, resolving conflicts, and really caring about those we haven't personally selected to be part of our networks) to resolve it congenially, fairly and effectively. But the further away something gets from those intimate circles, the less capacity we have to understand it, to care about it, or to deal with it effectively. With distance and size it becomes remote, invisible, complex, unfathomable. We introduce hierarchy (whose effect is to increase efficiency and the concentration of power and reduce effectiveness, resilience, information-sharing and peer communication). We introduce agents, brokers, intermediaries, media and 'representatives' to whom we cede power and responsibility.  As we become more distant and as the circle becomes much larger, we cannot care as much. Soon it takes a massive fear-based propaganda machine just to make us vote, or fight a foreign 'enemy' thousands of miles away. Likewise, when politicians are far removed from their constituents, they cease to know or care what those constituents individually want or feel, and focus instead on how to broadcast messages to get re-elected. If they're business leaders, likewise removed by many layers and floors and oceans from the front line people, they cease to care about those people, and begin to think of them merely as 'resources' to be managed. There's a new book out about government corruption in Kenya called It's Our Turn to Eat. The title refers to the appeal of each elected government to its own tribal supporters that they have to seize power and gorge themselves quickly because after the next election some other tribe will be in power and they too will look after 'their own'. The twist is that the elite in Kenya, across all tribal groups, exploits this tribal animosity and fear to distract the electorate from the fact that, whoever is in power, the elite still pull the strings, pay off the politicians, and hoard the resulting wealth. The objective is to subjugate and discourage the people, because that allows the elite to continue to rule unopposed. Then it all becomes a game of perpetuating power and wealth -- stealing elections, ever-increasing disparity, police state laws, bribes, pork, subsidies and payoffs, propaganda, intimidation, media control, divide and conquer, and massive corruption. US 2000, Kenya or Iran 2009, it doesn't matter. To think that this is a struggling-nation problem only is pure conceit. Thanks to distance, size, and scale, the benign inclinations of human nature are coopted, perverted and corrupted. Everything that works at a community level fails at the level of corporation and nation. We have shown, all over the world, again and again, that once we reach a certain size we become depraved, ungovernable. The role of the activist is to act as a counterbalance to this perversion, to speak truth to power, to bridge the distance, to hold those who are irresponsible and unaccountable, responsible and accountable. To intervene. To break down what is already broken. To enable what the people really want to be realized, despite everything. A step forward for every step back. A holding action. This is thankless work. So I want to say thank you. Without activists, the Republican neocons would still and forever control the US government. Without activists, the world would be full of gulags, torture prisons, brutalized, silent spouses and children. Without activists, the forests would all be gone, the air fouled, the oceans dead, the glaciers and ice-cap and permafrost melted into a brown sea. Without activists, women would have no vote and no right to choose, and people of colour would have no freedom. Without activists, the books with the most important ideas in human history would be banned, or never published. Without activists, the world's children would be working in mines, and the world's adults would be working in chains. Without activists, we would all be addicted to the poisons that Big Tobacco and Big Agribiz and Big Pharma and Big Energy try to convince us we cannot live without. Without activists, the only non-human animals would be farmed animals. Without activists, the world would be awash in billions of unwanted children. All of us must be activists, if we are to give this world a fighting chance.  What should you do? Picking your cause is just like picking the work you're meant to do, as I explain in my book Finding the Sweet Spot. This is not work for the half-hearted or easily-discouraged. So, just as in choosing the paying work that gives your life meaning, you need to identify and choose a cause that's in your 'sweet spot' -- something you love doing, and that you're good at, and that is needed in the world, and that you care about. If you are no good at it you'll get discouraged or burned out. If you don't love the cause, you'll end up disengaged. If it's not really needed, if the world's not ready for it, you'll be unappreciated and frustrated. To find this, you must learn something about yourself, and then do some research about the world, about what's really going on, about the points of intervention that will allow you to make a difference. There are a few ideas in the brown box in the top chart above, but it's only a tiny segment of the work that needs to be done. Whether your cause is health or corruption or energy or pollution or water or food or conservation or animal welfare or urban despair or suburban sprawl or power or inequity, the process is the same: Find partners, a community of people who share your purpose and your cause and whose work and strengths complement your own, so that you get to do what you love and are good at and so that the sum of the team's work is greater than its parts. Next, you need to be for something, not just against something. Always fighting against, as important as that work is, will drain your energy unless you also have a vision of a better way, something to replace what you're battling. So you need to be not only an informed warrier but also an innovator, an entrepreneur, a visionary. And you need to be prepared to search insatiably and undogmatically for the truth, because ultimately that is your most powerful, and sometimes your only, weapon. Without it, your belief and passion are not enough. You also need to be able to articulate, simply, clearly and honestly, what you believe and why. There is power in intention and strength in numbers, but you will be unable to achieve either unless you are able to convey what is, and what needs to be done, to those who are ready to listen and to make common cause with you. You cannot do it alone, and you have to pace yourself. You need to understand too that many people will not be ready for your explanation, and that your response when you meet them is to be polite and to move on, not waste your energies trying to make them believe what they are not ready to believe. You must have faith that they will come around, in time, and you or one of those you have joined in common cause will be there, then, to welcome them.  And at times you need to be ready to fight. You might think this would require courage, but if you believe in the cause, and you know it's right, fighting for it will not be hard; in your mind there will be no choice. (What else, activists? What am I missing? Lessons from the trenches? Secrets of success?) We must all be activists, and relentless, and patient, and brilliant at it, because as long as the majority are hopeless, there is no hope. And because we cannot fail. We cannot. Until the day when it's no one group's turn to eat. Until there is enough for all, and more. Category:
Activism:
What You Can Do Now.
|
 this is my first
attempt at
translation of a
creative work. i hope the author will forgive my misunderstandings and
my
clumsiness.the poem is the first prize winner of the en route poetry prize for 2009. it was written in french. comments and corrections to my translation are welcome. 6:20 by judy quinn december 6, 1998 you are already into the second chapter of it, and not a word has been said. you are just an extension: the flower spike that opens and scatters its seeds. your happiness is joyless, your pain exposed. you no longer belong to yourself. sainte-justine, montreal, just like at saint-raphael, san jose -- 4:50, notes the nurse: you make your way earthward where even invisible things fragment apart, one year pressed against the other, your forehead pressed against the table: to replace, says the book, break apart, then replace. towards those who, before you, dressed up their web of illusions, a picture of hands, lost, bubbles trapped on the surface of a lake, bloop, blip: all these lives that once were yours. they have plugged in their probes, plunged into the restless waters. you see nothing, but everything's clear. on the screen, a raised arm hails a taxi, a lawnmower scrapes the sky, let me out of here before the storm. they have pumped the blood, drawn back the doors, and remade the bed. they played with your mother's hair, and said: it's nothing, relax, this is normal, everything's perfectly normal. 5:03, notes the nurse, and leaves: for millennia, our words depreciate each day, the same lamp, carried from room to room shines on each blinding day: it's been this way for millennia, she writes, and leaves. your mother admires the houseplants, the green unpleated drapes, your father, sitting, his schoolbag at his feet. an island that the merest word cracks. 5:53, december 6, 1998, what separates the sky from the window, your father's bedside chair, disappears, the centrifugal force that glues us, skin to skin, time has left the room. one day, you'll see, says your mother, no one will have to be buried anymore. and the nurse notes: elevated pulse bloodshot eyes slight delirium everything is perfectly normal. silent bell-towers toll our distress. dressed in green feathers, under the worried eyes of the stars, we will cease all procreation -- my child you will be born without me. 6:20, december 6, 1998 buried in billions of light-years of dust, silent and sterile a hand unblocks a plumbing pipe. from black to red, nail polish like the beginning of the cosmos. 6:20, local time peeps, diving flights, the yellow pink of a summer evening's heat -- the rain, the clouds of bees, complement each other. you are coming. we will empty the world. outside the room a tree sways in the languid morning, the final outcome of the growing dawn. a brown apple pressed against a face. when you get free from the vice, the one you weren't even aware of, when you have not cried, in today's book, you were already real enough. for a first note: nine out of ten, white, you failed the colour test. when you came, carrying on your skin that whiteness from the time before we each looked out for ourselves, and the tree, and the rose. this counterweight so sensitive to words that without them, it would have fallen over. you are this spot, as soft as infinite clay. your eyes are the seal of renewal. you expect heaven -- do not seek it. smell the soiled linen, the vomit and blood, these diapers down here, nothing higher. you would have to have been born in another time. here, they've placed a limit on our dreams. once you've frowned, looked at nothing, your black almond eyes, with no blue hue, unable to tell your mother from a blot of ink you already knew that to live, you must forget. omit what's essential, don't be concerned about it. it's a long trek. on the uneven road you'll get lost a million times, and a million times lay down your dusty burden looking for the break in the wire that holds your life back at the starting line. 6:20 am they tossed you on top of your mother, the frozen ghost, under the neon lights of the room furnished to please the administrators. i love you, and i want so much to love you says your mother, so much that i want you to live forever. without asking, they picked you up again. you will set up so many ideals, says your father and they will rise up against you he says, for his own benefit. there will be enough of them, they'll beat you back and stay alongside the living. don't pay any attention: everything is perfectly normal. just born, mechanically, you brought your lips to your mother's breast and sewed her back up with a web of drool. your mouth is partly played. you were baptized even before you were born, this twisted name swollen with a russian hero's pride. it carries the scent of the plains. in the moment when the earth steals it, a field of wheat at the other end of the world grows and moves with the sound of your name. they wish you to be noble, but you will be nothing but earth. they will prevent you from leaving. you'll be left alone. they will regain their former whiteness. don't think about it, it will be done for you. head turned towards childhood, your hand feels out eternity, and with the other you hold death by its collar, its body on the cross. don't think about it. they barely had to wash you, they wiped out your nostrils, cleared your lungs, they drew from your mouth your mother's voice which called out the world's promises, then they threw her away. they dug for the words that you threw out to her without finding them, threw them out with the water. only one remained. only one was never delivered. they tagged you, measured the rest of the night on your wrists. weighed your future with nothing but a sketch of your heart. then they put you in a bell jar: so wise. perhaps they dreamed about the sunken cheeks they gave you. that they raised, meager offerings from the bottom of a well. these cheeks where laughter will take shape in you will capsize boats which, within you well before this december 6, nineteen hundred and... at 6:20 am dead planets drifted. image: from salon.com |
Web 2.5, Web 3.0, Web 4.5, Web n: whatever it is, I'm enjoying the ride. The pieces are coming together. Glue, indeed.
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