February « 2005 « how to save the world

February 28, 2005

Why Do Progressives Like Centralization?

Filed under: How the World Really Works — Dave Pollard @ 15:01

The idea: There seems to be something in progressives’ DNA that inclines them to want to centralize, globalize, homogenize. It had its value once, but it’s rarely appropriate any more. And the better answer, helping communities revitalize themselves, with no strings attached, will be hard for progressives to learn to do.

I mentioned last week that, at my recent meeting on community-based renewable energy, one rabble-rouser wanted such projects banned in favour of centrally-managed, efficient ‘wind farms’. Turns out he’s a capital-l Liberal, and a self-professed small-l liberal. Our former alderman wanted to merge our exurban/rural community with Canada’s two fastest growing cities next door to make a super-regional community that would ‘have everything’. This misguided soul was also a self-professed liberal. In one Canadian community, a proposal by a prominent liberal to close all the community centres and replace them with regional Super Wellness Centres has, thankfully, been vetoed by clearer heads. The very pragmatic and progressive Peter Singer, writer of One World, likes the idea of a single, global government replacing the nations whose boundaries are largely historical accident anyway. Socialists have always had a passion for centralized, planned societies. What is it about progressives that makes them so averse to the idea of autonomous, self-managed communities?

In my earlier post on Balkanization I mentioned four reasons why small community political units tend to get supplanted by larger, more centralized regional and state governments:

Defense: In a heavily populated, resource-constrained world, despots and imperialists will inevitably arise. The easiest way to defend against attacks from these tyrants is through political union. Federation can also work, but it’s harder and more tenuous, since both political will and defense financing must be raised in each member country.
Economies of Scale: There’s lots of evidence that there is no such thing, especially in today’s connected world, as ‘economies of scale’. Bigger is as likely to mean less efficient as more efficient. But even if such economies are illusory, there remains a consensus that reaching a certain ‘critical mass’ allows delivery of services more cost-effectively per capita, and as long as enough people believe it, it will constrain balkanization. And it is true that the more governments you have involved in projects like transportation, energy, and even social policy and environmental protection, the harder the coordination gets.
The ‘Once You’re So Big You Might As Well Get Bigger’ Rule: To be truly responsive to individual people’s needs, a government needs to be really small and local. Is a state or provincial government looking after a million people really any closer to the needs of its constituents than a federal government looking after a hundred million? If not, the argument goes, it would make more sense to get rid of state and provincial governments than to devolve most political power to them. If you’re too big to look after a community, you might as well at least exploit your size and get as big as possible. This is the argument for some kind of loose ‘global’ government, and it’s hard to dispute.
Local Tin-pot Dictators: In the days of hunter-gatherer cultures and even more recently in pioneer settlements, communities were self-selected and their members knew each other intimately. More recently, local governments are often selected to represent disenchanted and politically active minorities, and local power often goes almost by default to those with ruthless ambition, wealth, or a propensity for influence-peddling. The consequence is that the reputation of local government is dreadful — they tend to be even less representative of the people than governments of larger political units, poorly trained and skilled for the job, biased, corrupt, remote and inefficient.

Defense can be handled by coalitions and alliances, rather than political union. But the myth of ‘economies of scale’ continues to have a strong hold on progressives. I think it’s the political creature in all of us: If our community model is wonderful, surely expanding it so it covers more people and more land and more resources would make it even better. We all want our personal models of the right way to do things to thrive, and we want to persuade others that ours are the best models available. This is healthy — it’s how ideas spread and how we learn from each other’s successes and failures. But in today’s networked world it is no longer necessary, or wise, to ‘grow’ infrastructure. We need to resist the impulse to push our ‘best practice’ on others. Every community is capable of designing its own best practices, and if they want help they can take advantage of the astonishing communication and information resources available globally now, to ask for it. But progressives are social creatures, and they like to get together and build stuff, big stuff built on big dreams. Progressives are also compulsive planners — we like to think things through in advance, rather than charging ahead and doing rapid prototyping and learning fast from our mistakes. And we’ve been taught to believe getting together in larger and larger groups and pooling resources is efficient, an economical application of the division of labour.

But just because something is efficient doesn’t mean it’s better. We could all design a better way for plants to produce energy and reproduce, but why? Nature’s extravagant and inefficient way works just fine, and has the advantages of evolution by experimentation, and robustness in the face of sudden change or adversity. Very efficient systems tend to be inflexible, resistant to change, and fragile. So even if there are ‘economies of scale’ (and that’s debatable, but the subject for a different article) doesn’t mean that bigger and ‘more efficient’ is desirable.

The ‘Once You’re So Big You Might As Well Get Bigger’ argument is perfectly valid, but defeatist. It assumes we simply will be unable to make community-based political and economic structures work. It’s the argument for a strong UN, and it’s a compelling one, but it’s settling for second best. As Singer says in giving qualified support for a global super-government:

It is widely believed that a world government would be, at best, an unchecked bureaucratic behemoth that would make the bureaucracy of the EU look lean and efficient. At worst, it would become a global tyranny, unchecked and unchallengeable. These thoughts have to be taken seriously. How to prevent global bodies becoming either dangerous tyrannies or self-aggrandizing bureaucracies, and instead make them effective and responsive to the people whose lives they affect? It is a challenge that should not be beyond the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration.

He’s right, but it’s a challenge that so far has been beyond the best minds on our planet to solve. The reality is that increasing size inexorably makes management harder, coordination more difficult. Why work so hard for one extreme — a global state — when the other extreme — a world of autonomous networked tiny communities — is easier and better?

One pervasive progressive argument for centralization is that larger political and economic entities can compensate for inequities between communities. Is it fair if one community is affluent and healthy and egalitarian, and the one next door poor, full of despair and disease, and repressive and intolerant? Here is where the progressive ideology gets most perverse. Progressives tend to be egalitarian and accept responsibility for those less fortunate outside their communities. The outpouring of support for tsunami victims reflects the preponderance of such progressive thinking throughout the world. But as humanitarian groups have pointed out, more children die from inexpensively preventable diseases every week than died in the tsunami. Where are the progressives in addressing this much greater, and simpler, need? Well, the thinking goes, there’s only so much we can do for other communities. To some extent, unlike the victims of natural disasters, the victims of chronic disease and violence should be taking more responsibility in their own communities, and if we just give them everything they’ll never learn to look after themselves, it will be a black hole sucking the resources out of us until we’re all poor and deprived. But these people do not have political power, they do not have education, they live in ecological disaster areas and what resources they do have are being stolen to repay their governments’ negligent or criminal debts to other nations. They are no more able to do anything about their situation than the tsunami victims.

Progressives need to learn to do intelligent triage with their generosity of time and resources. We need to acknowledge that some parts of the world, like Kerala, India, are going to do well even if we leave them entirely to their own resources. We need to acknowledge that some parts of the world, like Haiti and Afghanistan, are not going to do well no matter what we try to do for them. We should only be throwing money and energy at them when and if the rest of the world is doing well. What we need to do is focus on the middle group, the areas, both inside and outside our own countries, where investment of time and money will make all the difference in the world.

And then we need to focus even more, and choose among the alternative ways we can help this middle group of areas. Some methods, like bombing the country senseless to oust its leader, building giant prisons as the ‘answer’ to crime, and even airlifting food, are short-term solutions that are of dubious long-term effect or value. The most valuable assistance we can provide to most areas is education and expertise. But a great deal of our expertise is not given, but sold to the third world by Western corporations, which merely replaces a knowledge deficit with a financial deficit. We should be requiring corporations, as a condition of their corporate charters, to donate without strings attached a small percentage of their time and profits to teach and train and build infrastructure in any impoverished area, domestic or international, of their choosing. Meanwhile, as progressives, we should lobby governments to provide a tax credit to individuals equal to out-of-pocket costs plus say, a flat $50/hour for pure (non-religious, non-partisan, no strings attached) volunteer activities to areas in need. Not a tax deduction just for cash donations, which is worth much more to the rich and worth nothing to the unemployed — a tax credit that reduces taxes payable and can be carried forward or even claimed as a refund, worth exactly the same amount per hour spent and per dollar contributed regardless of the donor’s tax bracket or income.

This won’t by itself make communities that are currently under-skilled, under-resourced, dependent and poor into self-sufficient communities, but it will be a step in the right direction, where current efforts and energies and strings-attached ‘investments’ are not. Our current physical communities are not ideal: they were mostly selected for us by brokers, or singled out because of proximity to good schools, or because it was the best we could afford, or picked for some other reason that has nothing to do with the like-mindedness of the other community residents. But you have to start somewhere. We should build some Model Intentional Communities to show people what is possible with a completely decentralized, self-selected and self-reliant, sustainable community-based economy and society. But then we need to start applying our learning and our energies to helping today’s helpless and dysfunctional communities transform themselves into something close to that model ideal.

One step at a time. Learning from their many mistakes. Doing things their own way. Horrendously inefficiently. Showing hands-on. Providing examples and role-models. Failing and then getting up and trying again. Answering the difficult questions. And when our work there is done, when they’re doing it for themselves, leaving them alone and moving on to the next community. For progressives, this hands-dirty, painstakingly slow process will be agonizing. But it’s the only way to undo the millennia of dependence, ignorance, subjugation and hopelessness that have left broken, ecologically devastated, economically and psychologically depressed communities bereft of ability and racked by scarcity, where once stood proud and diverse and capable and independent communities amidst astonishing affluence.

It’s the only way that works.

Image: Part of a community of snow geese in flight, from photographer TeeKay.

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February 27, 2005

The Power of Ideas

Filed under: Preparing for Civilization's End — Dave Pollard @ 16:28

The Idea: Ideas have enormous power, since they form the frame of our understanding of the world, inform our beliefs and drive our behaviours. Great ideas are so profound and frame-shaking that they quickly topple many of the things we believe, and transform our worldviews, our values and hence our actions. We need more great ideas, and a deeper understanding of how and when they transform our understanding, our culture, what we do and who we are.

Last night I went to the neighbourhood bookstore, list in hand, looking for 18 books on my “to read” list, most of them suggested by readers, and to do some serendipitous browsing. I went through the politics, cultural studies, and science sections, but most of what I bought I found in the ‘nature’ section. For some reason I was dissatisfied with all the new books on political agendas and misdeeds, on Iraq, on the history of civilization. What I was looking for was new ideas. The most promising book I bought was Bernd Heinrich’s new book The Geese of Beaver Bog, which explains how geese make a living together, how their communities work.

And then it hit me. The Power of Ideas. I’ve long believed that there are no new ideas out there, just new articulations, conceptions, models, all based on what we sense and observe, first-hand, and to a lesser extent what we learn from others. But I’ve realized that our framework for understanding our world is like an inverse pyramid — each idea built on a simpler foundation, and that if you can change one of the foundation ideas in people’s heads, shake the windows and rattle the walls of their understanding, you can cause them to rebuild their entire frame of thinking on that new foundation idea. And since that frame of thinking informs our beliefs and cultural values, and those beliefs and cultural values drive all human behaviours and actions, if you can change one of those elemental, foundation ideas in people’s heads you can do anything.

The best-known case of this happening was the ‘discovery’ by Galileo that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. This discovery, like everything in science, is nothing more than an idea, a conception, a model, a representation of the physical world, interesting and occasionally useful. This model, this representation of reality, was so offensive, so threatening to the centuries-engrained religious dogma of the day that the mere act of expounding this model as a better representation of the physical world than divine creation would bring lifelong imprisonment or even execution. Such is the power of ideas.

Likewise, Darwin’s model of the evolution of all life so threatened the orthodoxy of ideas that to this day, centuries later, religious fanatics remain in denial about its validity, and try to deprive it of its credibility by calling a ‘theory’ rather than ‘truth’. But all science, all philosophy, all politics and economics and religion are just theories, alternative models of varying degrees of correlation with what we know of reality, from which each of us can choose. Politics is nothing more than the art of trying to persuade others that your model, your representation of reality, is more credible than others. Philosophy and religion are the arts of interpreting what an accepted model of reality implies for human values and actions, for those unable to make these connections themselves.

All of the books in my Save the World Reading List present elemental, foundational, frame-toppling ideas. For example:

Gaia: The idea that all life on Earth is one self-aware, self-sustaining, self-balancing organism. When I first heard it I was put off by the name, and dismissed the theory as romantic, mystical oversimplification. “You really have to be desperate to believe to buy this stuff”, I wrote to a friend who sent me Lovelock’s book. But the more I learn, the more I study, the more evidence I see in nature, the more this model makes sense. Over the last decade it has gradually become one of a handful of essential ideas that underlie everything I now believe.
Overpopulation as the root cause of all human problems. I used to be a technophile, and I was so put off by the embarrassing failure of Ehrlich’s neo-Malthusian population doomsday scenarios for the 1990s to emerge, that if you had told me I would come to believe this idea I would have laughed at you. That was until I read Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael and Story of B, recommended to me by a professional colleague, David Jones in Ottawa. Now I buy this idea without reservation, and I am impatient with well-intentioned world-changers who think we can cure the disease by treating the symptoms instead of the cause.
Civilization as a prison separating us from nature our home: A Language Older Than Words, Derrick Jensen’s polemic on human violence and the horrific psychological damage that civilization’s systemic and hierarchical abuse of power inflicts on each one of us, desensitizing us, imprisoning us, brutalizing us into conformity and passivity, is one of the most depressing books ever written. But it is also brilliantly argued, and, like the above two books, completely changed my worldview.
Stories are all we are: Thomas Kings’s book The Truth About Stories transformed my fascination with narrative and story-telling (I initially saw it as merely an effective way of articulating the need and opportunity for change in business) into a veneration for the art, and an appreciation that, as individuals, we create and live our own stories, and our culture is nothing more than the stories we share. I now doubt that you can effectively change anyone’s mind in any meaningful way, by replacing one of the foundational ideas on which all their beliefs and actions are based, without telling them a good story.

The most intriguing best-sellers of the past few years, books like The Tipping Point and The Wisdom of Crowds, also feature foundational, profound, essential ideas that change the way we see the world. Each threatens and undermines orthodoxy: The Tipping Point shows us that ideas propagate virally in a way that can be used for brilliant, inexpensive marketing or abused by propagandists, and that great ideas don’t need the backing of wealth and power to infect millions any more than pandemics need a perfect breeding ground of ignorance, bureaucracy and poor hygiene. The Wisdom of Crowds shows us that the best answers come from the masses, not from expensive experts, executives or consultants. These are powerful ideas that could potentially transform the way business is conducted and important information communicated.

Rob Paterson has just written a blog post that suggests that social networking tools could free the people from all the world’s agents, corporations, and bureaucracies, and let us re-communitize our culture, peer-to-peer. I’ll be writing about this idea later this week, but it’s another potentially foundational, frame-shattering, transformative idea. Here are 15 more such ideas, laid out as ‘laws’. This one, by Stephen J. Gould, has become another of my foundational ideas, upon reading his book Full House: If one could rewind the tape of life and let events play out again, the results would almost certainly differ dramatically. Had the major extinction of the dinosaurs occurred earlier or later, for example, or had dinosaurs never evolved, subsequent biotas would have been wholly different, and we almost certainly wouldn’t be here to contemplate nature and meaning.

And these two are specially pertinent, because they are, like this article, ideas about ideas:

Daniel Dennett’s Law of Needy Readers: On any important topic, we tend to have a rough idea of what we believe to be true, and when an author writes the words we want to read, we tend to fall for it, no matter how shoddy the arguments.
George Lakoff: Frames trump facts. All of our concepts are organized into conceptual structures called “frames” (which may include images and metaphors) and all words are defined relative to those frames. Conventional frames are pretty much fixed in the neural structures of our brains. In order for a fact to be comprehended, it must fit the relevant frames. If the facts contradict the frames, the frames, being fixed in the brain, will be kept and the facts ignored.

What are the implications of all this? If we really want to change someone’s mind, we need to understand not only the frame of the other person, but the foundational ideas that underlie that frame and the way in which that person internalizes information (how they process ideas and ‘learn’). For a new profound idea to supplant an old one, it has to get deep enough to displace another foundational idea, and cause everything on top of it to come crashing to the ground so it can be rebuilt in the listener’s mind. If it merely scratches the surface, the top layers, it will simply not penetrate, not ’stick’. You can’t convince a conservative that freedom of reproductive choice for women trumps the rights of the unborn by arguing at that high level. You have to get down to the core beliefs and rattle them, the way the founders of civilization did thirty millennia ago when they suggested that people could live better by staying in one place and cultivating crops instead of hunting and gathering; the way the founders of Christianity, Judaism and Islam did two millennia ago when they challenged animist and pantheistic beliefs; the way Galileo and the scientists of the middle ages did in turn; the way the industrial revolutionists did when they suggested that since energy and work were the same thing, maybe it made sense to have machines do things instead of people.

I’ve concluded two things as a result of my own thoughts about ideas: First, I’m going to try to put forth more foundational, profound, essential ideas in this blog. I’ve always prided myself on idea transfer, the ability to take an idea from one domain of knowledge or human endeavor and transplant it effectively into a completely new domain where it can take root and flourish. I don’t exercise that skill nearly enough on this blog, and I will undertake to provide more ‘original’ (transplanted) ideas and fewer regurgitations of others’ ideas on the pages of How to Save the World. Secondly, I am going to start each article with one or two sentences that convey its essential idea.

Is it possible that ideas are the elements of the much-sought-after universal taxonomy of the blogosphere and of all human knowledge? Are ideas, and not subjects, domains of information, the fundamental building blocks of human thought? If so, why not index everything we write and share according to its idea rather than its subject (now there’s an idea).

We need more profound, foundational, worldview-shaking, transformational ideas, and we need them now. But just as important, we need better mechanisms to understand how people come to accept, and sometimes change, the idea frameworks that inform our beliefs and values, and hence drive our behaviours and actions. And we need to understand what it is that causes us to supplant one idea with another, in a way that fundamentally changes the way we see the world — in other words, how we learn, and why we don’t.

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February 26, 2005

Politics and Environment: Readings for the Week

Filed under: How the World Really Works — Dave Pollard @ 13:50

Drilling in ANWR to be Hidden in Budget Bill: The Wilderness Society urges Americans to call or write their representatives to stop this ‘business as usual’ subterfuge from the Big Oil / Neocon cabal.

More Reasons for Vegetarianism: It’s three years old, but this article by Jim Motavalli is very timely in light of the dangers of avian flu, mad cow, and new concerns about toxins in our foods and the environmental damage and cruelty caused by factory farms. Thanks to the excellent environmental blogger Mikhail Capone for the link.

Hands-On Corporate Research Guide: For those who want to do investigative journalism on corporations, the CorpWatch site is sensational: Steps in the research process and some of the best links to go to first. Bottom Line: Never start your research with Google. Thanks to reader David Parkinson for the link.

Small Wind: If you’re interested in exploring personal or community-based wind energy generation, an excellent place for information is the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) Small Wind Systems site. For those in Canada, CanWEA has a similar site.

Big Wind: And if something really huge is more to your taste, here’s a link to a Wired story on a project to build the world’s largest single wind energy generator.

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February 25, 2005

New, Deadly, Easily Spread — the Avian Flu

Filed under: Our Culture / Ourselves — Dave Pollard @ 11:24

Just to make my point from yesterday’s post about the need for the media to make important things interesting, this week’s New Yorker features a lengthy explanation of the history, threat, and measures to contain the Avian Flu. At time of writing, the full text is not online, but this excellent interview with the article’s author Michael Specter is. Although, for the reasons I explained yesterday, you should read the entire article, here are a few excerpts to tease you::

The strain that killed an 11-year-old Thai girl last September is different; in the past two years, it has caused the deaths of hundreds of millions of animals in nearly a dozen Asian countries. No such virus has ever spread so quickly over such a wide geographical area. Most viruses stick to a single species. This one has already affected a more diverse group than any other type of flu, and it has killed many animals previously thought to be resistant: blue pheasants, black swans, turtledoves, clouded leopards, mice, pigs, domestic cats…The virus also kills people — so far forty-two have died, including thirteen Vietnamese since Christmas, 3/4 of all known avian flu infections — an ominous mortality rate…

A pandemic is the viral equivalent of a perfect storm. There are three essential conditions, which rarely converge, and they are impossible to predict. But the requirements are clear. A new flu virus must emerge from the animal reservoirs that have always produced and harbored such viruses — one that has never infected humans and therefore one to which no person would have antibodies. Second, the virus has to actually make humans sick (Most don’t). Finally, it must be able to spread efficiently — through coughing, sneezing, or a handshake…

It’s hard to overstate the damage that the death of sixty million chickens has caused to Thailand’s national psyche. Until last year, it had been the world’s fourth largest exporter of poultry…The FAO estimates that 200 million farmers in the region keep an average of 15 birds each — most prone to infection from migrating fowl on the Siberia-China flyway…Most of the [Thai] flocks have been killed. The government of Thailand compensated the farmers, but the money didn’t make up for their losses, or persuade them to change methods. It’s hard to change the habits of a nation, especially when it costs a great deal and may be futile…

During most flu seasons, as many as 20% of the American population becomes infected, about 36,000 die, and more than 200,000 are admitted to hospitals…Because this virus evolves so quickly, an annual flu shot is at best a highly educated bet on which strain is most likely to infect you…Ex-H&SS secretary Tommy Thompson cited a potential epidemic of Avian Flu as one of the greatest dangers facing the US…At least 180 million people would die in a pandemic of similar severity to the 1918 outbreak.

These viruses almost always appear in the most densely populated parts of densely populated third world countries, which is why Hong Kong has featured so prominently in the enormous but uphill battle to try to identify, contain and vaccinate against them. But as a Thai public health officer said “We are certainly better than we ever were at detecting viruses, but we are also much better at spreading them.”

As the online interview explains, the efforts of public health officers are all focused on trying to eradicate these viruses or inoculate humanity against them. Good doctors, everyone, doing their best to treat the symptoms of the illness and ignoring its cause. Viruses (like smallpox), bacteria (like anthrax) and prions (like Mad Cow) are nature’s way of saying Slow Down — there are too many of you, with inadequate biodiversity, living too close together for the good of the whole life organism that is Earth. Nature has been wired for billions of years to counter excessive growth of any species because that is the best way to optimize the overall health of the planet.

But, of course, no health official who wants to keep his job would dare say that all efforts are futile — indeed, worse than futile, because they just prolong and worsen the inevitable “correction” to restore natural balance. Don’t expect the WHO or the CDC to stand up and say:

We need to reduce and reverse human population growth rates quickly and drastically, and spread out, and stop sending animals across borders, and stop crossing borders ourselves if we don’t have to, and stop narrowing the global diversity of foods we eat to such a few homogeneous varietals of each crop and animal, and stop keeping animals penned up in large numbers in close quarters pumped full of antibiotics and hormones and soaked in other antibiotics, and stop poisoning the air and the water and the food we eat with stuff that makes everyone sick and weakens our immune systems, and stop swallowing antibiotics when we don’t need them.

After all, that would be heresy, outrageous, an insult to human pride and ingenuity, against the will of God, and a denial of our manifest destiny. But this is the obvious, and the only sure way to prevent pandemic. The only real question is whether we will be smart enough to realize it, and do something about it, before nature gets tired of waiting and does what she must.

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February 24, 2005

The Job of the Media…

Filed under: How the World Really Works — Dave Pollard @ 13:59

The job of the media is to make interesting what is important. That was Bill Maher’s challenge to CBS’s Lesley Stahl on his show last night. He’s exactly right. What the legacy media do mostly now, an indication of lazy, cowardly, chintzy, risk-averse journalism, is try to make important what the lowest common denominator of viewers find interesting — irrelevancies like celebrity trials and sensational crime stories. In a recent post I said it was time to give up on the mainstream media and create new ones with a progressive compass and a deep sense of journalistic responsibility — the responsibility to do precisely what Maher challenges them to do.

The example he used, and which he has used more than once on his show, is the environment. I’m delighted that he understands this as one of the most important issues of our time. He even took Howard Dean to task on this issue. The way you make this important issue interesting, he suggests, is to present it in a context that people can personally relate to, and can and should be outraged about — the poisons in the air, water, in our food, and in the medicines largely doled out to remedy the poisons in the air, water and food. He blames big agribusiness (and the massive agricultural subsidies paid to them by governments of every stripe) for the poor state of nutrition and the accumulation of toxic products in the food we eat — hormones and antibiotics in meat, over-marketed milk, and high-calorie low-nutrition corn-based sugars that are added to almost everything on the grocery shelves. (Contrary to rumour, he’s not a vegetarian, though, like me, he is working towards it). And he suggests that big pharma is quietly working in cahoots with big agribusiness — the former selling people treatments for the illnesses the latter are negligently and recklessly causing.

The American and Canadian media have been at least sporadically on issues like trans fats, asthma, and the dangers of aspartame, e coli bacteria infection, anti-depressants and, of course, the Swine Flu threat. They appreciate that these items are news, and they have even done a bit of investigative journalism on them. The problem is that the media are set up to deal with news that are either one-shot events that are reported and promptly forgotten, or ongoing stories where there is a continuous feed of new facts to report. Because they fit this model so well, stories about crime, law and justice make up over half of all legacy media news reports. “What is important” — issues like the environment, the debt crisis, the cycle of poverty and illness in the third world, global warming, domestic violence, the treatment of prisoners and the mentally ill and animals in factory farms and laboratories, the lunacy of the ‘war on drugs’, etc., do not lend themselves to this model — they are not manifested in a single ‘event’, nor is there a continuous daily flow of new information that ‘keeps the story alive’. So what are the media to do?

The answer: Change the model. Unless you’re cynical enough to believe most people don’t care or want to hear about issues that are really important, the media need to come up with a new model of how to report the news, one that does accommodate and “make interesting” important news stories. The New Yorker has done this by providing insightful, in-depth investigative reporting, and analysis, and allowing its journalists to write about meta-issues that have nothing to do with daily events — issues like learned helplessness, the tipping point, and the wisdom of crowds. The success of the magazine and the many successful books it has spawned (not to mention the volume of online journalism that has picked up the conversation on these issues) suggests that people do care and want to hear about these issues. Programs like ‘60 Minutes’ have tried to emulate this model by doing in-depth analysis and even some investigative reporting, and such programs are quite popular.

urgentimportant But as worthy as these attempts are, they do not constitute a new model, and have had minimal impact on the quality or quantity of information conveyed to the average viewer, listener, or newspaper reader. We need a completely different model to “make interesting what is important”. That new model cannot pander to the short attention span or passion for gossip of the audience, nor can it self-censor information that the audience might not really want to know, because it’s unsettling or suggests popular wisdom is wildly misguided. Such a model should be built on the following principles:

If a news item is not actionable by the audience, it isn’t news and should not be reported. This is a lofty principle, but if we really believe people are so busy they only have time for thirty minutes of new information a day, shouldn’t that scarce and valuable time be spent telling people about things they can actually act upon? This means an end to crime blotter reporting, coverage of local fires and distant natural disasters (unless they call for immediate humanitarian action), and regurgitation of ‘press releases’ and ‘press conferences’, the greatest abominations of the fourth estate, which are advertising, promotion and public relations, not news.
News items should be long enough to inform the audience what needs to be done. That means no sound bites, no items less than 1000 words or shorter than 15 minutes, and that time should be spent conveying only important information and discussing its implications in an interesting way. This will require a complete revamping of the layout of newspapers and news broadcasts, and weaning the consumers of news off the ‘empty calories fast-food’ news diet and onto a completely different one with a lot more fibre. The best way to do this is by simply presenting something that works better. If people realize that a nightly detailed, hour-long explanation and analysis of an important and actionable issue is useful and interesting, and that they don’t miss in the least the old-style news broadcast or newspaper with its useless and superficial coverage of events that they can’t do anything about anyway, they’ll vote with their feet, and the other media will be forced to switch to keep up. Just because that old model has been around since the invention of the telegraph doesn’t mean it’s the right one for today.
Reports should be assessed on their position on Covey’s urgent/important grid, and only items in quadrants I and II should be reported. And if someone asks the meaning of ‘important’, just tell them to consider whether ‘urgent’ news like the state of the Pope’s or Michael Jackson’s bowel movements or the arrest of a local arsonist will be remembered as important five years from now. If it won’t be considered important with the benefit of hindsight, it’s not important now.
The media should abandon the pretense of objectivity. There is no such thing, especially when you start telling people what action to take. The reason Faux News is so popular is that it tells people what to do with the (dis-)information it perpetrates — lobby their representative to attack Islamic oil states, assassinate abortion doctors, kill homosexuals, nuke Canada. The fact that this advice is abominable is beside the point — people want information that is actionable, and they want guidance on what to do. That’s why there was such a frenzy over duct tape and plastic sheeting after 9/11 — Ridge was the only guy meeting this need, albeit incompetently. Everyone else was just saying ‘be vigilant’, and the public found that advice completely useless. If there’s no action needed, it’s not news, so stop talking about it. And be honest enough to say ‘we believe’ before you tell the audience what you think they should do.
Every story should be followed up on a regular, scheduled basis. If it’s important, it’s not going to go away, and that means the actions you recommended on the first broadcast should be built upon in the subsequent programs. The media should actually like this, because it makes their job easier — every second Thursday is Environment Day, so they can stop running around looking for news and do some advance research, analysis, and investigation in an orderly, measured, scheduled way actually reporting the news — the important issues that five years from now people will look back and say “Whew, good thing we learned about that and took action in time.”

I think that’s all the principles. To me these are common sense, a simple explanation of “understand what the customer needs and deliver”. But the implications are enormous. Imagine a whole daily paper consisting of 50 in-depth stories on a single subject, each concluding with well-reasoned advice every reader can take. Imagine that at the bottom of page one of that paper it says “No paper tomorrow — our next issue on Saving the Family Farm will be out Thursday”. Imagine the content of these newspapers being so useful — so valuable — that readers keep them for years in their library and refer back to them regularly (especially if you’re an advertiser).

If you think this is a stretch, recall that newspapers started as broadsheets — partisan, single-subject reports cranked out by activists, and that at one time people were so engaged in long-term thinking that they flocked to meeting halls to hear advocates, philosophers, scientists, and writers talk at length about one subject, and then retired to the local bars to debate about what to do.

Now, think about the current model for online journals (blogs). Let’s see, we write mostly short articles talking about events we read or heard about in the legacy media, those articles are displayed in reverse date order, and after a week or so, they disappear into the ‘archives’ never to be seen again. Hmmm…

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February 23, 2005

From Framing to Naming

Filed under: How the World Really Works — Dave Pollard @ 09:34

A recent Common Dreams article by David Michael Green proposes that a key part of Lakoffian re-framing is re-naming conservatives, their programs and their ideological positions. But while Lakoff proposes re-framing as a non-confrontational way of showing conservatives the validity of progressive positions and ideas, Green’s re-naming is designed more to reassure and energize progressives and drive fence-sitters over to the progressive cause.

There’s some logic to both tactics, though they’re hard to mix. Before we assess the preferability of one or the other, let’s take a look at some examples of ‘re-naming’. Before we start, let’s recall the classic name game confrontation: the terminology surrounding the abortion rights debate. To progressives, the two sides are ‘pro-choice’ and ‘anti-choice’, the issue is the ‘terminating of a pregnancy’ involving a ‘fetus’, and the imagery is a woman dead from hemorrhage after a back-alley abortion, a coat-hanger beside her covered in blood. To conservatives, the two sides are ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-abortion’, the issue is the ‘killing of an unborn baby’, and the image is a blood-covered, magnified-to-life-size ‘child’ in a garbage can. In the shrill shouting matches on the subject, each side steadfastly sticks to its names, its terminology, its imagery. There is no middle ground, no room for compromise, no point even in debate.

Bush’s neocons have used this same naming technique to establish a conservative frame for each of the issues in its agenda. Progressives have cried foul, ridiculing but not (until now) using alternative names for these agenda items — names that are “just the right stretch from today’s conventional wisdom — distinctive, and far enough to do damage without not so far as to be immediately dismissed for lacking credibility (e,g, fascist)”. Let’s consider what some of those names might be. The ones suggested by Green are in italics:

Conservative Name	Progressive Re-Name
conservatives	regressives
war on terror	war against Islamic oil states
private accounts plan	pension theft plan
patriot act	abrogation of civil freedoms act
no child left behind act	education underfunding act
clear skies initiative	air pollution legalization initiative
digital rights management	corporate price-gouging protection
privatization	diversion of public property to private interests
death tax	estate tax
meritocracy	polarization of wealth
family values	regressive values
healthy forests initiative	give-away of public forests to corporate developers initiative
tort reform; class action fairness act	corporate crime indemnification act
Club for Growth lobby	billionaires against government regulation lobby
deregulation	removal of consumer protection
‘free’ trade	unfair trade
tax cuts	service cuts
Progress for America lobby	corporations for kleptocracy lobby
creationism teaching alternative laws	forced teaching of discredited Christian dogma in public schools
economic globalization	oligopoly corporatism

We also need to take the initiative in naming some programs with similar progressive frames that have no conservative name at all, because they’re not on the conservative agenda. But as Lakoff points out, they might get on the agenda, or at least conservatives might have to acknowledge them, if progressives consistently hammered away at them, as Dennis Kucinich did during last year’s US campaign:

a legacy for our children
a healthy life with decent nutrition and health care for all
a healthy, responsible, properly-managed, robust, self-sufficient and sustainable economy
sound stewardship of the Earth
affordable education that equips all children to make a decent living
the right to a living wage, decent housing and safe neighbourhoods
moral regulation to temper the excesses of the untrammeled market and greedy and unethical big business
freedom from unreasonable harassment and detention by untrained and overzealous government bureaucrats
mutual respect for, and collaboration with, all democratic nations

Green wants to use the ‘us progressive — them regressive’ frame for all the relabeling of the conservative agenda, but I’m not sure this would work — he may be too caught up in the progressive frame of thinking to realize that ‘going back to the old days’ is a good thing in the eyes of many conservatives and moderates with selective memories and nostalgia that grows with age. In fact, retro is fashionable. But Green’s heart is in the right place. If we start using the alternative names on the right side until they become common parlance, we could at least establish that the conservative agenda and framing are not the only intrinsically moral ones.

The issue of course is, Who are we trying to impress? If it’s progressives, we’re preaching to the choir, though at least giving them some better words for the hymns. If it’s regressives, we might as well save our breath — all we’ll do is radicalize and inflame them to more extreme positions and more aggressive action to defend them. If it’s moderates, we need to acknowledge that most Americans consider themselves moderates and many of them resent being forced to take sides on issues, and dislike hyperbole from either side. And. like it or not, without hyperbole, confrontation, outrage and spin in political matters, there is often no passion at all, allowing the status quo to continue unabated.

So we should probably acknowledge that these new names are mainly for us. They allow progressives to be active instead of reactive, positive instead of negative, on the offensive instead of the defensive, passionate instead of conceptual.

It’s a start.

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February 22, 2005

Intellectual Capital Report — Information and Anxiety Up, Knowledge and Decision-Making Ability Down

Filed under: Our Culture / Ourselves — Dave Pollard @ 16:39

We’ve all heard about the explosion of ‘information’ (or at least data) produced and available in the world. At the same time, there are some real questions about the value of this information. In his new book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell warns that over-reliance on information, and getting too much information, can both lead to worse decisions and actions. Terms like “information overload” and “analysis paralysis” suggest that more information does not always lead to more knowledge (”information that allows you to do something better than you could without it”), or improved decision-making.

At this month’s Ontario Library Association Superconference (BTW quite a few of the presentations are online — this site is worth checking out), Barbara Fister, a librarian from Minnesota, provided a presentation on Information Literacy and the Marketplace of Anxieties. Here are two intriguing excerpts from her presentation:

The National Forum on Information Literacy 1998 Final report stated: “The workplace of the present and future demands a new kind of worker. In a global marketplace, data is dispatched in picoseconds and gigabits, and this deluge of information must be sorted, evaluated, and applied. When confronted by such an overload of information, most workers today tend to take the first or most easily accessed information–without any concern for the quality of that information. As a result, such poorly trained workers are costing businesses billions of dollars annually in low productivity, accidents, absenteeism, and poor product quality. There is no question about it: for today’s and tomorrow’s workers, the workplace is going through cataclysmic changes that very few will be prepared to participate in successfully and productively unless they become information literate…”

Joel Best suggests there are four key players in the formation of social issues: the media who seek compelling stories to tell, activists who want to promote their agendas and solutions, governments that can use issues to gain support for regulating behavior, and experts, such as scholars who want their work to have influence. To this list, Mary DeYoung adds audiences. For an issue to take off, it must resonate with people’s lived experience so their attention can be recruited and retained even after the “facts” have been challenged. Lets take crime as an example. Everyone fears crime, yet crime stories are immensely popular. One study of Canadian news outlets found that over half of all news coverage was focused on crime, law, and justice.

She goes on to explain how these key players innocently or deliberately distort the information they present to audiences, often to induce fear and anxiety to provoke a desired response (such as political or financial support). Information is hence viewed as a political or economic weapon, rather than a commodity to inform players and audiences.

There is as a result enormous skepticism about information, and cynicism around the reasons for its promulgation. What’s worse, the purveyors of information are increasingly charged with bias for the information they ignore, discount or suppress as much as for the information they distort and then present. The blogosphere, and the increased interest in alternative press and investigative journalism, are in no small part a result of that skepticism and cynicism — people want to hear different views so they can make up their own minds, or they want to hear reassurance that what they already believe is true, even in the face of ‘conflicting information’.

So an enormous amount of this ‘information’ is produced, recycled, restated, misstated, strictly for purposes of political and economic argument, to affect actions no more significant than who and what people will vote for (or against) or what they will buy. The ‘audience’ is hence reduced to a passive information role: The role of voter and consumer. Mountains of information is created and disseminated to influence these passive voter and passive consumer decisions.

But these decisions are a minuscule proportion of the total number of decisions, actions and problem-solving activities that the average person faces in their lives. The more important decisions, actions and problem-solving activities — such as how to make a living, who to spend one’s life with, and how to live — are astonishingly uninformed by all this ‘information’. If knowledge is the ability to do something better than would be possible without it, what does this say about the quantum of knowledge — actionable information — in our world? I would suggest that this quantum is actually declining, that we are less capable of making informed decisions on how to make a living, who to spend one’s life with, or how to live, than those of previous generations. Not because those previous generations had any better information (and they certainly didn’t have any more) but because they were better taught how to do these things, how to make use of the information that was available to them, and to distinguish critically between good (useful) and bad (unhelpful or dubious) information. They were simply more grounded than we are today. The consequences of lack of ‘information literacy’ (defined by the ALA as “the ability to recognize what and when information is needed and to locate, evaluate, and use it effectively”) goes far beyond the business costs (low productivity, business errors and poor product and service quality) cited above. The consequences of today’s lack of information literacy include:

Learned helplessness — the sense that we are incapable of looking after ourselves and need other people and technologies (guns, mini-nukes, SUVs, big brother) to keep us safe and make decisions for us
Mental illness — stemming from the endless anxiety that information overload and learned helplessness lead to
Conservatism — arising from fear, longing for simplicity, nostalgia, and desperately seeking reassurance that “everything is all right, nothing needs to change”
Civil, political and economic incompetence and dependency — inability to take responsibility and make informed decisions
Violence — borne of frustration and an inability to see root causes, inarticulateness, ignorance of the lessons of history and of human nature, and inability to persuade others rationally
Fragility and vulnerability — from lack of exposure to alternatives, from passivity and reliance on others to take action, and from the increasing centralization of power, authority, and decision-making this has led to
Inaction — in the face of crisis, due to an inability to decide, to know what to do

There’s more, but you get the idea. What is the opposite of knowledgeability and decision-making ability? Stupidity (”inability to understand or learn from experience”)? Incompetence (”lack of ability or capacity to do something”)? Because that is the attribute that characterizes an increasing proportion of the population whose brains have atrophied from lack of practice in acting on information, even as the amount of information soars.

If this is the information age, I’ll take whatever comes next, please. I hope it’s something we can use to make the world better, ’cause information isn’t getting the job done.

Painting “Anxiety” by Regina Lafay from the amazing Survivor Art Gallery

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February 21, 2005

All About Power – Part Two – Free Information, Freedom from the Grid, and Peer-to-Peer Bio-Innovation

Filed under: Preparing for Civilization's End — Dave Pollard @ 13:30

In Part One of this series, I promised I would:

…explore some non-violent ways we can incapacitate the power elite, using this 4-step process,

Identify the vulnerabilities: Fragility, overconcentration, ignorance, arrogance, lack of diversity, centralization, lack of redundancy, popular disgust, anxiety, dissatisfaction or apprehension, ill-preparedness, lack of agility, overcomplexity (left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing), lack of imagination and creativity, etc.
Acquire resources stealthily: Put together what you need without letting your target know you’re doing so, or even what you are capable of doing with them.
Develop solutions that exploit the vulnerabilities.
Rigorously assess the likelihood of those solutions working effectively (incapacitating the incumbent power), and deploy only the high-probability solutions, quickly, before the incumbents have time to react and defend themselves.

and introduce ‘innovations’ that make our world a better place to live. The focus will be on new technology, new infrastructure, new models and new processes that replace the vulnerable ones that are the causes of so many of today’s global problems — and ensuring that these replacements are Open Source, and stay in the hands of all the world’s people.

In a brilliant and famous Wired interview with Freeman Dyson by Stewart Brand, Dyson identifies “a return to village culture” as the most important opportunity of the 21st century, driven by three technologies: global access to free information, local energy self-sufficiency, and biotech, which together could “gentrify” (bring affluence, population stability and ecological awareness to) the villages. Dyson predicts the “collapse of the market economy” will bring about this opportunity, in ‘rising from the ashes’ style. He’s a great believer in technology, and impatient with and pessimistic about our political and economic systems, but he has faith in human ingenuity, and the power of multiple, coordinated small-scale experiments.

But suppose if, instead of waiting for the collapse of the market economy and the crumbling of the power elite, we brought about that collapse, guerrilla-style, by making information free, by making local communities energy self-sufficient, and by taking the lead in biotech away from government and corporatists (the power elite) by working collaboratively, using the Power of Many, Open Source, unconstrained by corporate allegiance, patents and ’shareholder expectations’?

Let’s picture what that would look like: Imagine Canada, for example, with its 30 million people living in 200,000 communities with an average of 150 people each. Thirty people in each community work as partners in Natural Enterprises in the information sector — teaching, training, and managing the technology, information and learning resources of the community. Twenty people in each community work as partners in Natural Enterprises in the energy sector — operating and maintaining the community wind turbines, solar collectors, geothermal pipes and other renewable energy infrastructure that sustains the community. Thirty people in each community work as partners in Natural Enterprises in the biotech sector — growing and reforming proteins to produce foods, fibers, medicines and materials to feed and clothe the residents of the community, maintain its physical infrastructure and keep its citizens healthy. Everyone in the community plays a role in looking after each other’s well-being, raising the children, cooking, cleaning, and entertaining. Each community is completely self-sufficient for all of its essential needs. Its information, any surplus energy and biological products, and its artistic creations and productions are shared freely with other communities. Young people are the connectors and meme-spreaders in the community — part of their education is traveling and staying in other communities to find the people they want to live with and to learn hands-on how to make a living by trying out roles in each sector of the local economy. No one commutes and there is no need for private transportation other than bicycles — solar-powered vehicles are borrowed as needed for visits to other communities.

The first part of this guerrilla undermining of the corporatist-controlled ‘market’ economy — the ‘making free’ of information — is already underway. The war for free information between corporatists and people is occurring on multiple fronts: The attempt by large corporations to patent everything so it cannot be used by the people without paying an exorbitant and prohibitive fee; the attempt by large corporations to ban file-sharing without first paying extortion to the intellectual property ‘owner’ (little of which actually goes to the artist); the attempt to make more of the information on the Internet ‘pay for itself’. But the people are winning this guerrilla war.

I spent all day Saturday watching the first skirmishes in the second part of this guerrilla war, at a jam-packed information session on Wind Power, sponsored by the Canadian government, principally as an initiative to help enrich struggling family farms. Three hundred and fifty people packed a conference centre in a little town northwest of Toronto, and two hundred more were turned away, hoping to learn how to generate their own electricity, or to set up local energy co-ops in their communities. They were unfazed by the challenges — a five year process to locate the ideal site for wind turbines and to navigate the bureaucracy. The message repeated by the presenters over and over again during the day: Do this bottom-up, including your neighbours so this becomes a community project. If the community supports the project, the bureaucracy can be worked through more quickly, and the effort needed to succeed can be split up among more community members. The technology already exists, and is being improved at an astonishing rate. The economics of community-based all-renewable-resource energy production are already here. A representative of a local credit union, who has studied the European model by which local community energy co-ops are funded, was on hand with his chequebook and encouragement — money to pay for the infrastructure is available, no strings attached. The only obstacles are time, and paperwork, and…

One extremely agitated gentleman kept trying to sabotage the day’s events. Having all these local, piecemeal energy producers was ‘grossly inefficient’, he said, and for that reason (and because they are ‘eyesores’) they should be banned, in favour of large mega-farms of energy owned by private industry. Private industry would pick more ‘efficient’ sites, get economies of scale, and they ‘knew the business’ and would be motivated by profits to run these farms in a more businesslike way. This guy was utterly outnumbered on Saturday, but watch out — as word gets out that we can all be energy self-sufficient, and own our own ‘utility’, getting energy at cost (which is plummeting), the energy companies will join the war on the other side. They have billions to lose, and will not stand idly by as the peasants take back the means of their own production. In Canada, as in most of Europe, we have a liberal tradition in government, and governments here have ordered the owners of ‘the grid’ to allow local energy co-ops and even individual producers to feed their energy into it, and to compensate them at full retail price for what they contribute to the grid, on a ‘net-zero’ basis (if over time they actually put more into the grid than they take out, they only get a lower ‘producer price’ for the excess, but if they put in as much as they take out, they pay zero, not even a ‘rent’ for the use of the grid lines). It is doubtful that in the US and other conservative anti-government countries, the government will be as cooperative, and the struggle faced by local energy co-ops will be long, expensive and litigious.

We are not nearly so far along in the third part of Dyson’s vision for a community-based post-capitalist, post-’market’ economy — biotech. This will be a more difficult and complicated process. The key players — farmers and scientists — currently don’t work together directly. The middle-man is the giant biotech firms whose answer is patented genetically manufactured foods providing monstrous revenues for the corporations and equally monstrous dangers to the natural world. These companies are working hand-in-glove with the equally giant agri-business conglomerates who want to make agriculture into a factory business where farmers are merely dependent employees who do what they are told, where automation is used to minimize the number of jobs that need to be created, where horrific animal cruelty is just ‘a cost of doing business’, and where all the profits accrue to the large corporate owners — a replay of the feudal system.

I have argued in past articles that scientists will play a pivotal role in either averting or causing the collapse of civilization culture, because they ‘own’ the assets — scientific knowledge — that could either allow us to create a sustainable economy (if they’re in our hands), or contribute directly to the escalation of the current unsustainable economy past the point of no return (if they’re in the hands of greedy corporatists and their politician handmaidens). Developments to date are discouraging — most scientists are in the employ of corporatists, or tied up in academia where their knowledge produces almost no social value. And scientists in past have often been politically naive or at best neutral, and ignorant about economics. But there are signs this is changing — organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists are agitating for drastic economic changes to make our world sustainable, and credible scientists no longer work for the Bush Administration, Davos and other corporatist-controlled political entities who try to make them mouthpieces and apologists for corporatist excess. And as conservative as farmers have been in recent years, they were critical supporters of the union and co-op movements that led to the New Deal and almost all modern legislation for social responsibility.

It’s time for us to get farmers and scientists working together to undermine the corporatist Ag-Bio stranglehold by creating an innovative, entrepreneurial, people-controlled, socially and environmentally responsible and sustainable Ag-Bio coalition, to bring the third part of Dyson’s dream to fruition. We’re winning the battle for free information, and we’ve turned the corner towards freeing ourselves from the Big Energy-controlled grid. But we need to do a lot of work on this third front, where we start now from a position of weakness. If we can succeed in this, we will have dealt a fatal incapacitating blow to the existing power elite, and created the foundations for a truly sustainable and democratic economy to supplant the one that now threatens us all.

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February 20, 2005

Who Are You and What Do You Do?

Filed under: Our Culture / Ourselves — Dave Pollard @ 14:20

Jon Strande at Business Evolutionist has written a short questionnaire for bloggers that’s making the rounds. I found it through Aleah’s blog Incite By Design. Kind of a Friday Five type self-revelation, but with questions more oriented to what you do in your work life. Anything that adds context to what we write is helpful, so I’m in. They’re great questions, but if the superficial answers to these questions trip easily off your tongue, maybe it’s time to think deeper:

What do you do?
I write. I learn. I think. I design. I plan. I transfer ideas. I create dissatisfaction with the status quo. I foment dissent. I help people imagine a better world, or at least a better workplace.

What are the challenges?
Human nature. We fear change. We crave reassurance. We’ve forgotten the critical natural abilities of imagination, instinct, awareness, agility, collaboration, the sense of being an integral part of the whole. When you foment dissent, and make people unhappy with the status quo when they feel helpless to do anything about it, they don’t exactly thank you.

How do you overcome them?
I trust my instincts. They tell me we all want to do the right thing. Teach people, show them a better way, help them imagine, help them believe what’s possible, and you can overcome anything. And Cyndy at MouseMusings has taught me a process for dealing with challenges: Sense, Self-Control, Understand, Question, Imagine, Offer, Collaborate. It works well.

What is a typical day like?
Three hours a day reading, studying, and learning; three hours a day writing; three hours a day conversing, in one medium or another, with others; three hours a day in contemplation — thinking, walking, sensing, solving problems, imagining.

How do you manage information?
My blog is my filing cabinet. It contains everything of value I’ve ever learned or produced. Lately I’ve started using a simplified version of Getting Things Done, using a single spreadsheet, to organize, prioritize and process work-activities and information.

What are your favourite books?
Most enjoyable: Natural Selection by Frederick Barthelme.
Most powerful: Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban.
Most worldview-changing: Story of B by Daniel Quinn, one of the books on my Save the World Reading List.
Favourite poem: Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot.

What are your favourite web sites/blogs?
I have hundreds of different favourites (on my blogroll) for different reasons and purposes. I recently wrote that the blogosphere is like a railway network, with each blog being a station that provides certain amenities on the way to where you are going, or on your way home.

What tools/technology do you use?
My blog — which is both my filing cabinet and my memory.
My network/community — about 300 people, who I access in many different ways (RSS, Thunderbird and GMail, Skype etc.) Google and Google Desktop.
My own proprietary Creative Problem Solving process, which uses 24 different tools and methodologies from brainstorming and mindmapping to research and tapping the Wisdom of Crowds.
Because all these tools (and my complete music library) reside on my laptop, I use no other, more portable technologies. My laptop is my office — I have no physical office and haven’t for nearly twenty years.

What’s your favourite quote?
No one favourite. I’ve often quoted Einstein, Daniel Quinn, Bucky Fuller and Margaret Mead. Lately I like this one from Kurt Vonnegut: ” Human beings will be happier – not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia.”. And this one from Daniel Quinn: “People will listen when they’re ready to listen and not before. Probably, once upon a time, you weren’t ready to listen to an idea than now seems to you obvious, even urgent. Let people come to it in their own time. Nagging or bullying will only alienate them. Don’t preach. Don’t waste time with people who want to argue. They’ll keep you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to something new.”

What is your “secret to success?”
I’ll let you know when I’ve succeeded. It might turn out to be “Show, don’t tell” (ironic, perhaps, for a writer). As Eliot said “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

What are your greatest accomplishments?
I’ve learned two important skills that I definitely wasn’t born with: How to write competently, and how to be creative. I’m very proud of my two step-children and two grand-daughters, and pleased with the small part I’ve played in their lives. I’m proud of this blog, and some of the writing of different types on it. But an accomplishment is something you do that has an effect that endures after you’ve gone, so thus far my accomplishments have all been small. But I’m not through yet. My novel, my Model Intentional Community, and my public Think-Tank to collaboratively solve the world’s greatest problems will be my three greatest accomplishments.

What are your hobbies? Or, how do you break the monotony and stay energized?
My twelve hour daily regimen, outlined above, is enormously fulfilling and doesn’t really give me much time for anything else. I listen to music to relax and to be inspired. I occasionally compose my own music, play volleyball and poker, do crossword puzzles, try different cuisines. I’m never bored and never have writer’s block. There is far too much to do, and far too great a need that it be done soon, and well.

Illustration, like yesterday’s, is from Gaping Void.

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