by Dave Pollard, November 2005 The four-part, 21-word message is a tiny play on words. If you just want to print out the blank grid for solving, find it here. If you get stumped, the answers are here.
ACROSS: DOWN: |
December 21, 2005
Dave’s Christmas Crossword 2005: A Message from Gaia
December 20, 2005
What Good is Technology Anyway?
 There have been a few articles lately suggesting that perhaps technology is running out of meaningful things to do, that we already have all the technology we need. This reminds me a bit of the articles in the 1950s that estimated that there was need for at most a dozen or so computers in the world. What good is technology anyway? I’ve argued before that the purpose of science is to “discover things that are interesting and sometimes useful”. The purpose of technology is to put those discoveries to use. It is true that in recent years, with most of the world unable to afford even the necessities of life, a lot of new technology has been frivolous, providing the very rich and very powerful with cute trinkets and toys that advertise and secure their wealth and power. It is equally true that technology can enable atrocities that would be impossible without it. As John Gray says: If anything about the present century is certain, it is that the power conferred on ‘humanity’ by new technologies will be used to commit atrocious crimes against it. If it becomes possible to clone human beings, soldiers will be bred in whom normal human emotions are stunted or absent. Genetic engineering may enable centuries-old diseases to be eradicated. At the same time, it is likely to be the technology of choice in future genocides. Those who ignore the destructive potential of new technologies can only do so because they ignore history. Pogroms are as old as Christendom; but without railways, the telegraph and poison gas there could have been no Holocaust. There have always been tyrannies, but without modern means of transport and communication, Stalin and Mao could not have built their gulags. Humanity’s worst crimes were made possible only by modern technology.
In an article last year, I solicited those in IT to please get out. But my argument was not anti-technology, it was rather that IT has become an organizational ghetto where some of the brightest people in the world are wasting their talent designing entertainments when what is really, urgently needed are Science-Based Enterprises addressing some of the world’s most challenging problems. McLuhan was fond of saying that technologies are extensions of our bodies, our appendages and senses, allowing us to do things beyond our physical capabilities. So technologies don’t really do anything substantially different from what humans do, they allow us to do more of what we already do, sometimes a lot more than even a large number of humans working in parallel or in series could do. We can, I think, break these ‘capacities’ of technology down into five categories:
Examples of technologies with these five capacities respectively are: Machines, Agriculture and the Wheel; Language, Radio & Telephony; Paper and the Internet; A-V Storage Devices; and Electricity, Drugs & Birth Control Devices. Like our bodies, these technologies all require energy, most of which now comes from burning hydrocarbons. Those who are dismissive of the need for additional technologies, and disdainful of the value of technology, are most likely focused on some of the more wasteful, non-labour-saving technologies of type 1, the technologies of type 3 that provide us only with non-actionable, useless, distracting information, and the pandering technologies of type 4. Most of the problems we currently face on this planet (such as overpopulation and overconsumption) are due in no small part to some type 1 and type 5 technologies (such as agriculture and drugs) that, at the time, were essential to our survival. Our closest cousins the bonobos have developed only the first two types of technologies: They use simple tools to dig out food, and facial, hand and vocal language to communicate with each other. They have all the time, information and entertainment they need, so they have not bothered developing technologies for these purposes, and the only additional control over their lives they need is a way to fend off human poachers, farmers and loggers encroaching on their dwindling habitat. They are unlikely to develop such technologies before they become extinct. In a recent article I referred to the Lakota doctor who described four essential human capacities:
We sometimes use technology to extend these capacities: We join ‘virtual’ groups that we could not join without technology. We ‘master’ video games (and some of us are perhaps too reliant on such technologies for our sense of self-esteem, though that is a topic for another article). We use the Internet to teach ourselves and to give to others. What new technologies do we really need today? My answer would be primarily technologies that temper the unintended harmful effects of existing technologies, or help us devolve power and support essential social activities:
So the answer to this article’s question is that technology is potentially a great good for our society. All it would take to realize that good is for the bright underemployed minds to get out from under the suffocating organizations that waste their talents and drain their energies, and learn how to create their own businesses, substantial, networked, adequately-resourced, innovative entrepreneurial businesses that can give us not what the rich think they might want, but what we all really need. Image: Experimental fusion energy machine from Lockheed Martin’s 100% government funded Sandia military research corporation. Your tax dollars at work. |
December 19, 2005
Our Bonobo Forebears Tell Us Why We Want To Have So Much Sex
 Much has been written in the last few years about bonobos, the branch of the chimpanzee family that remained in the African rainforest when chimps expanded to less abundant areas and which, to cope with that scarcity, evolved the more aggressive, male-dominated societies we now commonly associate with chimps. Although they are facing extinction due to habitat encroachment and hunting, the bonobos retain the temperament and social behaviours that have always suited the Eden-like tropical African wilderness:
Bonobo females first give birth at around age 14, and thereafter carry and nurse their young for about five years, rarely becoming pregnant again until the baby is self-sufficient at age 6 (very much as humans did, until the invention of agriculture freed mothers from the need to carry young offspring everywhere with them). Bonobos’ average lifespan is unknown though it is estimated to be 40-60 years. They use hand, voice and facial gestures extensively for communication, though their voice is a higher-pitched ‘barking’ sound than that of the low “ooh, ooh” sound of the common chimp. Their forest environment has caused them to evolve a unique primate feature — opposable ‘thumbs’ on their feet, which allow them to use all four limbs to pick up things. Their DNA, like that of the common chimp, is at least 95% the same as ours. What differentiates bonobos most from other primates (other than ourselves) is the frequency of their sexual activity. Most bonobos engage in a wide variety of sexual activity (including every variant engaged in by humans), often several times a day. Sexual activity is quite casual, engaged with with almost any other member of the community without commotion, and with each sexual act lasting a very short time. Females are sexually attractive and active throughout the month and year, and initiate most sexual activity, both with males and, primarily using genital-to-genital rubbing, with other females. Face-to-face sex is common, again a behaviour they share uniquely with human primates. The obvious question is, why? Research to date, which is currently very active since the opportunity to study bonobos in the wild is quickly disappearing, suggests that there are several reasons, including the use of casual sex as a means to curry favour and extract food from other community members, but most notably as a means to reduce and avoid conflict and to make up after conflict. Sex usually occurs before feeding, where the pleasurable, relaxed feeling it presumably brings encourages more sharing of food in the afterglow. It usually occurs as well before play, and hence presumably leads to less aggressiveness and more cooperation and learning during play. And it usually occurs after (rare) conflicts, apparently to reconcile the community members and ease bad feelings between the disputing parties. When you think of it, it’s kind of obvious, in a society that lives in abundance. In the societies of relative scarcity that common chimps live in, however, a lot of sex before feeding would exhaust the hunters and allow the prey time to escape — not a good idea. But in bonobo society it makes perfect sense. What does this suggest about why humans, the other constantly horny primate, have so much sex for reasons largely unrelated to procreation? Could it be that we, too, are so frequently aroused in order to reduce and avoid conflict and to make up after conflict? Most of us now live in densely packed cities where poverty and scarcity are endemic, and primatologists have said that if the aggressive, male-dominated common chimps tried to live in such conditions the result would be constant warfare and bloodshed that would make their social order break down completely. So it would make sense that crowding, and stress, might cause the human body to secrete more pheromones and other sexual hormones to persuade us we should be lovers, not fighters — in other words to behave more like our bonobo cousins than our common chimp cousins. How many of us will admit to having had great sex as a reconciliation after a really knock-down, drag-out fight with our partners? Is it just a coincidence that going out for dinner is the primary seduction mechanism in human urban society, that the food-sex connection is so strong? The problem occurs when this natural inclination to ‘make love not war’, to be casually polyamory creatures within our communities, comes into conflict with (a) the breakdown of the barriers between tribes and communities, so that there are simply too many people to have sex with without life becoming extremely complicated, and (b) the religious and political taboos against non-monogamous sex. Why shouldn’t the church and state support us having wild sex with everyone in our communities, behaving like a bunch of bonobos? After all, they want us to be placid and obedient, and it’s pretty hard to get angry and plot revolutions with the blissful rush of endorphins running through your bloodstream all the time. However, the church and state want you to be locked and isolated in your nuclear family, not comparing notes with others in your community and loving them more than God and Nation. Their control over us is threatened by the liberation that a polyamory lifestyle and a community deeply bonded by love could bring about, so both church and state have strict laws trying to prevent it. And since business (in its quest for specialization), immigration and the automobile have all pretty well broken down the tribal barriers between communities, it would now be very difficult to reestablish largely closed, intimate communities to allow this to happen anyway. So instead of easing the stress of close proximity and scarcity, as nature intended, our rampant sexual desires paradoxically increase our tension and conflict. Modern human society tolerates sex only between consenting monogamous partners, converting a polyamory abundance of sexual freedom and relaxation into yet another civilizational scarcity. Like all scarcities, that leads to hoarding (leading in turn to sexual jealousy and psychopathic over-protectiveness), covetousness and violence (leading to sexual coercion, abuse, cruel manipulation and even murder), and a black market in the artificially scarce commodity of sex (leading to prostitution and sexual exploitation). All, perhaps, an ironic, tragic and unpredictable consequence of nature’s giving us an appetite that worked so well for so long for our close siblings, the now soon-to-be-extinct bonobos. |
David Brower’s Credo for the Earth
| I had meant to include this in yesterday’s post on The Challenge of Wilderness Environmentalism and the Four Myths of Civilization. It is a Credo (statement of personal belief) written by naturalist David Brower, whose essay Healing Time on Earth I referred to in that post.
There is but one Ocean,
though its coves have many names — a single sea of Atmosphere with no coves at all; the miracle of soil, alive and giving life, lying thin on the only Earth, for which there is no spare. We seek a renewed stirring of love for the Earth. We plead that what we are capable of doing to it is often what we ought not to do. We urge that all people now determine that an untrammeled wildness shall remain here to testify that this generation had love for the next. We would celebrate a new renaissance. The old one found a way exploit; the new one has discovered the Earth’s limits. Knowing them, we may learn anew what compassion and beauty are, and pause to listen to the Earth’s music. We may see that progress is not the accelerating speed with which we multiply and subdue the Earth nor the growing number of things we possess and cling to. It is a way along which to search for truth, to find serenity and love and reverence for Life, to be part of an enduring Harmony, trying hard not to sing out of tune. |
December 18, 2005
The Challenge of Wilderness Environmentalism and the Four Myths of Civilization
We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent upon its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed for our safety to its security and peace, preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and I will say the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate and half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave to the ancient enemies of mankind and half free in a liberation of resources undreamed-of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all. – Adlai Stevenson, 1965
It takes great courage for an environmentalist of any political stripe to come out in favour of wilderness. The overwhelming orthodoxy of our times is the four great myths of civilization:
An orthodoxy of any kind is extremely difficult to dislodge, because all human systems — political, economic, religious, educational, even sometimes the ‘agnostic’ artistic and scientific systems — reinforce the orthodoxy and fiercely resist any arguments that might undermine the orthodoxy’s defining myths. This was true in the 16th and 17th centuries when Copernicus and Galileo paid a huge price for debunking the first myth. At the time not only were scientists persecuted for espousing such heresy, but the very validity of the scientific method was called into question: If science did not support the orthodoxy that the planet made specifically by God for man was the centre of the universe, well, then, there must be something wrong with science. Skip ahead to the 19th century and a similar violent reaction, continuing to this day, greeted Charles Darwin when he used science again to debunk the second myth, and cast some serious doubts about the third. Again, religious zealots bent over backwards to try to suggest that the science was flawed, and we see today, 150 years later, in the ludicrous fiction of ‘intelligent design’, a continuing frenzied attempt to rationalize away science and re-establish the myth of ‘divine’ creation. Myths die hard. By Darwin’s time, the main job of maintaining the orthodoxy had shifted from the church, which had bungled the job badly, to industry, which was content to use science rather than trying to repudiate it, and to use science to strengthen what remained of the orthodoxy. So the third and fourth myths remain substantially intact, and modern laws and business activity exemplify and perpetuate these myths. Economics books promoting GDP as the ultimate measure of human ‘success’, and the holy books of the major organized religions, remain the unquestioned propaganda manuals for our reckless civilization. So when the environmental movement began seriously in the 1960s to question the third and fourth myths, they decided to focus on the fourth rather than the third, and not bite off too much of a challenge at once. They immediately encountered ferocious resistance from the business elite, whose wealth has always depended on continuous and accelerating development, and from economists, the new preachers of the remaining two myths of the orthodoxy, and from the religious establishment, whose future survival depended on its members continuing to have lots of philosophically pliable babies and continuing to believe in the orthodoxy. Perhaps not surprisingly, the environmentalists blinked — they were not scientists or economists, and had limited scientific evidence to support their beliefs. What emerged was a kind of ‘soft environmentalism’, a warm and fuzzy movement that argued that perhaps skinning baby seals alive was excessive enforcement of the third myth, that we needed to keep replanting and conserving resources at least until we had invented new ones to use when they ran out, and that our spiritual health required that we keep a few trees and samples of animals around to contemplate what life was like before we conquered nature, and for human ‘recreation’ (perhaps the most ironic word in the English language). Most environmentalists therefore abandoned the more contentious challenges to the third and fourth myths — that human population growth threatened the planet and that growth and development were simply not sustainable. Orwellian oxymorons like ‘smart growth’ and ‘sustainable development’ were invented that environmentalists were all too eager to embrace. So environmentalists really had no expectation that any wilderness agreement, such as the agreement not to drill in the ANWR, would be honoured once it appeared to be in conflict with myths 3 and 4, and their pessimism has been justified. The preservation of wilderness is seen as elitist, anti-human (especially in struggling nations that are encouraged to ‘develop’ their way out of the desperate overpopulation and environmental devastation that they, and their colonial exploiters, have wreaked), impractical, romantic, and unaffordable. As a consequence, in the areas of high biodiversity on this planet, only three areas of significant wilderness remain — in Northern South America, Central Africa, and the island of Papua New Guinea. These areas, shown in dark green on the map above in the equatorial areas of the planet, are being ‘developed’ at a frightening rate, converted recklessly, mostly by slash & burn techniques, into ‘farmland’ that is ill-suited for that purpose. At current rates of ‘development’ it will be gone by the middle of this century. The wilderness areas of more marginal biodiversity — mostly the boreal forests and tundra of the Northern and Southern high latitudes and the world’s most inhospitable deserts, also shown on the map above, will survive perhaps another century or two, but even when they remain most of the planet’s astonishing diversity will already have been squandered and lost. So what? Why should we care about wilderness? Biodiversity has been disappearing from the planet for a century at a rate faster than that of the known Great Extinction events of the past, and, except for a few consequences like global warming that the Lomborgian defenders of the orthodoxy are all-too-willing to shrug off as of no consequence, humanity has hardly missed it. In the remarkable essay Healing Time on Earth by the late David Brower, which I would encourage readers to spend an hour and absorb fully, especially his re-enactment of the entire history of the planet time-compressed to six days, naturalist Brower makes the following arguments for wilderness:
It seems to me that environmentalists — or perhaps we might better call ourselves ‘naturalists‘ in a new sense of the word meaning those believing that a way of living that is respectful of, and balanced with, all life on Earth is the healthiest and sanest and most sustainable way to live — need to pay less attention to arguments 1 and 2 for wilderness, and more to argument 3. Arguments 1 and 2 are essentially clinical, and it is difficult to get people excited about clinical arguments. Argument 3 is essentially emotional, spiritual, and intuitive, but still not outside the domain of scientific argument. It seems to me that
we just might have a chance of convincing humanity (other than the political, economic and religious elite wedded until their deaths to the orthodoxy) to quickly and voluntarily reduce human numbers so that such re-integration was possible, and to reduce human consumption so that wilderness could again flourish. Everything — my instincts, my acquired knowledge, my emotions — everything tells me that Thoreau was right when he said “In wilderness is the salvation of the world”. I see no other way to prove it, in time — to debunk forever myths 3 and 4 and end the well-intentioned but now disastrous hold of the orthodoxy on humanity, and to save the world. Like Copernicus and Galileo, like Darwin, we have a difficult and important task ahead, changing the fundamental thinking of our species, showing there is a better answer. And we have no time to lose. |
December 17, 2005
Saturday Links of the Week – Dec. 17/05
Bush Secretly Signs Law Allowing Unlimited Spying on Americans Without Warrants: In a blockbuster revelation, the NYT yesterday broke the story of the year: That early in 2002 Bush introduced a secret law allowing the NSA foreign spying agency to spy on ordinary Americans without limit, without warrant, without notification, and without the need to demonstrate cause. He effectively created a Police State in America without telling anyone. The law, which is clearly unconstitutional, essentially proclaims:
In any other democracy this kind of action, introduced subversively without notification to the people, would be grounds for immediate impeachment of the president and criminal charges against the perpetrators. But the reactions to this astonishing revelation have been unbelievably meek — the mainstream media have provided little editorial commentary, lobbing softball questions to the government and merely reporting verbatim what government leaders of both parties have said. Bush’s Minister of Torture Alberto Gonzales shrugged it off, saying it was all necessary in the “war on terror”. What is equally remarkable was the fact that the NYT sat on this story for a year at the government’s request, essentially allowing Bush to be reelected. They chose to release it just in time for the revelations to block Senate renewal of the abominable Patriot Act — an act for incursion on civil liberties that, at least, the public was told about. But the Republican leaders see no problem getting the Patriot Act renewed indefinitely, viewing the revelation as a mere setback. What will it take for moderate Americans to get up in arms about this reckless and arrogant government? Where the hell was the rest of the media? When your government sees itself as above the law, and is allowed to break the law and ignore both the law and the constitution of the land with impunity, how big a step is it from there to simply suspend the constitution, abolish Congress, and install a one-party ultra right-wing Christian state “until the government is convinced the war on terror has been won”? Pentagon Keeps Blacklists of Americans Indefinitely, Breaking the Law: In a related story broken by NBC news, it has been discovered that the Pentagon has been routinely breaking the law requiring removal of names from its blacklists after 90 days if there is no evidence the person posed a security risk to the country. This revelation is less surprising than the one above, since it is widely accepted that security authorities can always find ways to keep ‘backups’ of blacklists of innocent people, but it is further evidence of the general sense of the administration that it is above the law. Black Ink Monday: Ironically, last Monday was Black Ink Monday, mourning the decision by Tribune newspapers to get rid of a number of their editorial cartoonists to shore up corporate profits at the expense of informing their readers. The rest of these links, just for balance, are good news: Reading Glasses that Read: An interesting innovation suggestion by M.O. Thirunarayanan — glasses that ‘read out loud’ what you’re looking at, instead of just helping you do so yourself. Thanks to Innovation Weekly for the link. Earth-Friendly Living: A new e-mag, GreenLight, provides a host of information on living in a more socially and environmentally responsible way. Easing the Energy Crisis with Ships and Trains: A logistics expert says using ships and trains to ship most cargo in Nortyh America, instead of huge wasteful truck fleets, would cost a fortune but would go further to reduce non-renewable energy consumption than any other proposal. Do It Yourself Everything: ReadyMade, a magazine and now a book, provides hints on how to make and do almost anything yourself, often using used or recycled materials. Anyone actually read this and know if the ideas work? Broadcast From Your Cell Phone: A new technology from ComVU Mobile allows you to use your cell phone to broadcast full-motion video on the fly. Very simple and interesting stuff. Thanks to Bruce Winter for the link. Too Cute for Words: Although currently suffering from technical difficulties, Cute Overload has a daily dose of cute imagery. The picture above is a sample. Thanks to Brad Mills for the link. |
December 16, 2005
The Philosophy of Loren Eiseley, in Verse
The Star Thrower, by Loren Eiseley Once upon a time, there was a wise man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work. One day, as he was walking along the shore, he looked down the beach and saw a human figure moving like a dancer. He smiled to himself at the thought of someone who would dance to the day, and so, he walked faster to catch up. As he got closer, he noticed that the figure was that of a young man, and that what he was doing was not dancing at all. The young man was reaching down to the shore, picking up small objects, and throwing them into the ocean. He came closer still and called out “Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are doing?” The young man paused, looked up, and replied “Throwing starfish into the ocean.” “I must ask, then, why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?” To this, the young man replied, “The sun is up and the tide is going out. If I don’t throw them in, they’ll die.” Upon hearing this, the wise man commented, “But, young man, do you not realize that there are miles and miles of beach and there are starfish all along every mile? You can’t possibly make a difference!” At this, the young man bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the ocean. As it met the water, he said, “It made a difference for that one.” Loren Eiseley died in 1977. He was a scientist and humanist greatly alarmed at the accelerating destruction of our planet in the last century, and would, I am sure, have been horrified at the setbacks at the start of the 21st century. Eiseley wrote several books on anthropology and natural philosophy, and, in a very different style, some dense, complex and (to me) inaccessible poetry. What I find astonishing is that his prose seems more lyrical, more moving and profound and passionate than his verse. So, below, I’m taking the liberty of presenting some excerpts from his scientific and philosophical writing as poetry, parsing them as I think they would flow if Eiseley himself were to read them aloud. The ‘titles’ are my own ostentation. our reputation precedes us I have never entered a wood dying to remember Man would kill for shadowy ideas “the notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing” Let men beat men, if they will, This is why I am a wanderer forever in the streets of men, It is not because I am filled with obscure guilt I am not ashamed to profess this emotion, nor will I call it a pathology. Only then will his gun arm be forever lowered. nothing sacred Modern man, the world eater, The march of the machines has entered his blood. And if inventions of power outrun understanding, on playing with a young fox for just a moment by the simple expedient it is the gravest, most meaningful act I shall ever accomplish, there is no use reporting it to the Royal Society how we learn The teacher must teach men It has ever been my lot, Nevertheless, I venture to say but along an endless wave-beaten coast at dawn. re discovery Every time we walk along a beach other one does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human pacing many of us the secret there are things the gift The power to change is both creative and destructive – Mostly the animals understand their roles, or has gotten wrong. a difficult re-entry The nature of the human predicament For what, increasingly, is required of man Yet man does not wish to retrace his steps Instead, men prefer to hide alchemy I have lifted up a fistful of that ground. There went phosphorus, there went iron, “and time future contained in time past” we lack the penetration to see the present and the onrushing future contending for the soft feathers of a flying bird, or a beetle’s armor, or shaking painfully the frail confines of the human heart man is himself a flame — it has been said repeatedly that one can never, and if it should turn out it seems a pity that we should involve the violet the mystery In the world It is as if matter dreamed But why, A couple of readers have asked me to explain the expression aprˆ®s nous les dragons that I have used in several of my essays and one of my poems. It’s adapted from this excerpt from Eiseley’s book The Night Country: Shake the seeds out of their pods, I say, launch the milkweed down, and set the lizards scuttling. We are in a creative universe. Let us then create. After all, humans are the unlikely consequence or such forces. In the spring when a breath of wind sets the propellers of the maple tree whirring, I always say to myself hopefully, “After us the dragons.” It is not out of sadistic malice that I have carried cockleburs out of their orbit or blown puffball smoke into new worlds. One out of these seeds may grope forward into the future and writhe out of its current shape. It is similarly so on the windswept uplands of the human mind.
When Eiseley says “After us the dragons” I take this to mean that, as an anthropologist (as fellow anthropologist Stephen Jay Gould explained so well in Full House) he understands that the emergence of humans (and even animals with backbones) on the planet was an improbable accident, a one in many million unlikelihood, and that the emergent forms of previous evolutions of life on our planet and all the other planets that support it in the universe were/are undoubtedly strange, unimaginable, perhaps even unrecognizable to us as life. He would be aware, too, of the evolution of birds from the dinosaurs, and their ability to survive when the dinosaurs perished. Are his “dragons” birds, strange flying reptiles? Or perhaps dragonflies, a member of the other genus, insects, that thrives on catastrophe and is so adaptable it is likely to outlive us and do well in the next phase of life on Earth? Or is he being metaphorical and referring to dragons as any strange, unimaginable, wonderful species that will rise after our fall? Or all three? I have translated Eiseley’s phrase into French a bit mischievously, since the word ‘dragon’ in French has the additional connotations of monster, demigogue, or soldier. Another inspiration for the translation to French: It was Louis XV, the end of a line, the king who presided over a horrifically inegalitarian empire, bankrupted, its treasury looted by the rich (sound familiar?), who, realizing its instability and unsustainability, said “Aprˆ®s moi le deluge” — after me come the floods (as an additional historical irony, part of his empire at that time was New Orleans). If I haven’t been sufficiently pretentious so far, I’d like to conclude with a concatenation of another quote from Eiseley, in italics below (which I only just discovered yesterday, from his 1978 book The Star Thrower), followed by one of my own poems, written 35 years ago, dream-inspired, after a night sleeping under the stars. I think they just go together, almost eerily: With time, At night the forest is not what it seems, Thanks to the many Loren Eiseley fan sites for the quotes above, especially Tom Thomson’s wonderful Earth Talk and, for the starfish story, MuttCats. |
December 15, 2005
Blogging’s Simple Future
 It’s been awhile since I forecast the future of blogs. I am increasingly convinced that what will drive almost all technologies for the foreseeable future is simplicity, disguising under-the-hood sophistication, enabled by elegant design. The digital divide is getting ever-wider, and we need to have tools that will let us more easily pull friends, colleagues and family members who are quickly being left behind, into the information age. As I’ve mentioned before, my father is my benchmark for technology — I can get him to use e-mail (though attachments are a challenge), and Skype, and even to view our daughter’s wedding pictures on Flickr, but not to get a webcam or to participate in online forums. That’s the dividing line that will, I believe, largely determine the future success of technologies, including blogs. What is the simplest way to allow people to ‘publish’ and otherwise share their stuff with others? Drop it in an electronic ‘mailbox’. Bandwidth and storage are now both so cheap that we will soon not care about ‘mailing costs’ or ‘storage costs’ for information, photos, software, or anything else that can be represented in bits. So why not just have a folder that sits on our hard drive for everything we are willing to share with others? Whenever we initially save or change a document, message, or other file, we would be prompted to decide who it could, and who it should, be shared with. It would then be tagged, indexed and permissioned, and a shareable (XML+) version would be created automatically. All of the stuff in the Shareable Stuff folder on our hard drive would be subscribable by others, using the indexing and tags, and subject to permissioning access restrictions we had personally decided on. Google and other search engines would spider it (and probably keep archive copies of it). A viewer trying to access this via a search engine, via a bookmark, or via a subscription, would be able to view it either in the context of other articles with the same index or tags, alphabetically (for browsing), or in reverse chronological order (blog-style, for ‘newsreading’ and getting up to date). Eventually this Shareable Stuff folder might cease to reside on our hard drives entirely (except as a back-up and off-line version) — it could sit out in cyberspace, accessible anytime from any device anywhere. The next stage would be to make this Shareable Stuff collaborative. If I’m reading something from someone else’s Shareable Stuff, I would be able to comment, adapt or annotate it and then, if I’m appropriately permissioned by the original author(s), those additions and changes (appropriately ‘signed’ to show they were from me) would be made to the authors’ ‘original’ version. Alternatively, if I just want to annotate or change it for my own purposes, my ‘copy’ (with the original authors identities or ‘signatures’ maintained) would be added to my own Shareable Stuff folder. It would, in turn, be accessible by those I have permissioned to view my Shareable Stuff folder, and they might further annotate it. This would create wiki-style collections of stuff that would ultimately become ‘collectively’ owned — each of the ‘collective’ owners would have their own copies with any private annotations they did not want to share, but there would be an emergent ‘collective’ collection that would in effect be owned jointly, with each of the members agreeing to honour a particular indexing, tagging and permissioning protocol for the collection that might, for example, allow (a) anyone to subscribe, (b) only certain specified people to append comments, and (c) only members to edit or change. The ‘official’ copy could reside anywhere (it would be any member’s copy minus that member’s ‘private’ annotations). I know this sounds complicated, but all this detail would be hidden under the hood, invisible to the individual writer or reader. From their perspective, it couldn’t be simpler:
Defaults would usually make this decision as simple as clicking ‘OK’, drawing on the indexing, tags and permissioning that applied the last time you saved the file, or those that were suggested by the initial author of the document or message, or the permissioning you have assigned to other files with the same index or tags.
So in an extreme case, you could simply make all your stuff available to anyone who was interested. Your entire hard drive would then become (a) a filing cabinet — in the form of a huge wiki — open to the public to browse and (b) a weblog documenting everything you write as you write it. You wouldn’t have to do a thing except write (or draw, or podcast, or whatever it is you do to communicate and record your stuff). No need to set up and maintain separate weblogs or wikis, no need to ‘publish’ anything, no need to keep e-mails in a different format from anything else you write. No need to worry about different formats at all. The system would automatically ‘blackline’ the changes and annotations you made to any file since your last ‘save’ so that people who should or could read them get to see precisely what changes you have made in context, and don’t need to re-read the entire file. You may have noted that this ‘system’ uses the ‘save’ command as the trigger to share stuff. And of course we don’t just ‘save’ when we’re finished writing. We ‘save’ often because of the shoddy and unreliable hardware and software we are forced to use by the technology vendor oligopolies (sorry, I couldn’t resist). So we would need to differentiate between ‘save in case the system crashes’ and ‘save because we’re done writing’. Maybe we call these ‘save’ and ‘done’ respectively. My father could handle this. With this system, everyone becomes a blogger and a wiki writer, just by writing in whatever applications they’re comfortable with. In fact a single meta-application, a kind of superwiki, could be developed for producing bits in any format, with all the underlying applications and translation code shoved under the hood where the end user needn’t worry about them. You know who could rather easily do all this for us, of course. I’ll give you a hint — their name starts with a G. Cartoon above is from this week’s New Yorker by ex-National Lampooner PC Vey. It brilliantly and poignantly captures what all of us (and our spouses) felt and feared when we started blogging (and sometimes still do). I’m getting it as a sweatshirt to go along with my Alex Gregory dog cartoon. Get your favourite New Yorker cartoons as prints or apparel here. Cartoonists need our support. |
December 14, 2005
Why We Don’t Innovate
 Things are the way they are for a reason. I know I keep saying that, but it’s true: If we want to change anything, we need first to understand why it is the way it is. The answer, more often than not, is human nature. Or more precisely, in very large organizations, the collective nature of thousands of people. And in the world as a whole, the collective nature of billions of people. If humanity were but a tiny group, scattered pockets across the globe, and reasonably well-connected, we could and would probably change rather quickly.
Paradoxically, however, if that were the case, we probably woudn’t need to. Our species is like the Titanic or the Exxon Valdez — far too massive and unwieldy for our own (or anyone else’s) good. The more there are of us, and the greater our footprint, our collective action on the planet, the harder it becomes to steer us in a different direction from the one our horrific momentum is taking us in, the harder it begins to overcome the inertia needed to even think about changing direction on a global scale. When our organization or civilization is small, and someone comes up with a credible, compelling model of a better way of doing things, we can simply nod and adopt or adapt that model. That is how most organizations began, full of hope, following one model or another that sounded magnificent at the outset but soon becomes a victim of its own success — the model just doesn’t scale well, and modern humans have this propensity to grow and centralize and increase things until the model becomes dysfunctional and breaks down completely. That’s happened to every organization and every civilization in human history. If size is the enemy, of organizations and of civilizations, it is also, in the human way of doing things, inexorable. Rather than throwing up our hands and letting the ship crash when it gets too big to handle, we need to understand why it is human nature to demand that perfectly wonderful small organizations and civilizations grow (and, what’s worse, become increasingly hierarchical). And then we need to find some humanly natural way to allow these small organizations to stay small, and to allow large organizations and our Godzilla-sized civilization to become small and workable again. Is that too much to ask? After all, we fancy ourselves pretty smart creatures. And although we do have an addiction to power and wealth and consumption and debt, we also seem to have an instinctive revulsion to other people having too much power, to tyranny, to gross inequity of wealth (aka poverty), to stealing our children’s future, and even to the destruction of nature. Those addictions have been exploited by those with great wealth and power to try to hold on to that wealth and power. That’s not to sat that those with wealth and power are ogres — beneath the apparent greed and paranoia and violent defence of the status quo they are as much addicts of their possessions and prisoners of our civilization as the rest of us. What is it about human nature that drives us to want to grow beyond reasonable limits? What is it about human nature that makes us so susceptible to addiction to things that are ultimately no good for us? Did nature or evolution screw up in imbuing our species with self-defeating ambition and addiction? Australian reader and blogger John McCann writes (emphasis, and square-parentheses comments mine): I am interested in your observations on why there is so little innovation in most organisations today (as someone who has tried to sell innovative ideas from within organisations for several years unsuccesfully). I agree absolutely that it’s not for lack of creative talent within organisations, or information washing around both within and around the organisation. I agree that organisations are not set up to ‘tap’ that creativity, but that is more a symptom than a cause, and the cause I think gets back to the other point you mention – management’s lack of trust, and the ‘steady as she goes attitude’ that says ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’.
I’ve come to the view that organisations have a natural (and almost inevitable) ‘inertia’ which is (paradoxically) driven by their success. Whatever works very well (some new or cheaper product, or a captive market) tends to, over time, make the the organisation risk- and change-averse. This flies in the face of logic, but while I agree that organisations are ‘not stupid’, they are not always rational. Of course the organisation ‘in crisis’ should (if one accepts this argument) be far more willing to ‘innovate’ their way out of trouble – except that organisational crisis usually results in a very standard response of shedding staff. Time and time again I’ve seen this process ‘depopulate’ organisations of the very best creative talent – even seen organisations ditch these people overboard deliberately as they were seen as ‘non-core’. At the end of the day I think if we are looking for innovation we’ll find it in the wreckage of companies that have collapsed [they're once again small], and in start-up companies [while they're still small] – situations where individual talent and creativity have a chance to ‘stand out’ from corporate mediocracy and aversion to change. There is now overwhelming evidence that life on our planet, the human species to some extent excluded, operates as a single, coordinated, self-regulating organism. Why should this be so, rather than the savage, selfish and self-interested world most of us were taught we live in? Simple — because it works. As we are learning, dangerously late, our planet is a hugely variable and often life-hostile place, and the best way to protect and optimize life on this place is to create an atmosphere (in both senses of the word) that regulates the planet’s extremes and gives life more time to adapt to changes. This has taken billions of years of work and careful trial-and-error experimentation to get right, and it is an astonishing accomplishment, sustained only by collaboration, cooperation, and lots of diversity to keep it agile and adaptable when catastrophes like meteor strikes and sun-obliterating volcanic eruptions and ice ages caused by minor perturbations in the planet’s rotation occur. A species that becomes ambitious, and refuses to participate in this extraordinary and never-ending balancing act, is, like a cancer, a huge threat to the whole Earth-organism, and of course to itself as a part of that organism. A species that becomes addicted to things that are not good for it, to the point it becomes fragile, violently hostile to others who threaten its supply of that to which it is addicted, and disconnected from the Earth- organism, is likewise a huge threat to the whole of life on the planet and to itself. So how did humanity get to this point? How did the ever-adapting and self-regulating Earth-organism allow itself to create a monster that now threatens its creator’s survival? A number of studies have been done that show, in ant colonies for example, how rhythmic order (in the best interest of the whole) emerges out of (apparent) chaos, and how self-organization and self-regulation (with no need for hierarchy or top-down control) naturally produces the best result for the greatest number. Some companies, like WL Gore and Semco, have replicated this model, and when the embedded hierarchical behaviours humans have learned over the past 30,000 years can be shaken off, it seems to work well. But most people describe such a model, whether for an organization or a state, as anarchy, and they use the term disparagingly. But anarchy literally means ‘without established political control’ — no one in charge, i.e. self-regulation. What has caused our species to depart from this evolutionary successful ‘rules’ of self-regulation and, along with cancers and a few other rogue species, replace these rules with single-minded, selfish and ultimately unsustainable ‘human-made’ rules, and to continue the folly of following these rules for 30,000 years despite overwhelming evidence still staring us in the face that the much, much older self-regulating rule-set is sustainable and healthier for all? If it’s our ambition, or our addiction, how was this allowed to occur? When Ronald Wright wryly says If we fail — if we blow up or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer sustain us — nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea.
how can we account for nature having such a “bad idea” in the first place? In Arthur C Clarke’s book and movie 2001: A Space Odyssey he introduces the idea that human civilization was ‘suggested’ to us by an alien ‘monolith’. I haven’t read enough of Clarke’s work to know if there is a reason the monolith — literally a massive, rigid, uniform object — is chosen as the ‘model’ for civilization. Was Clarke saying that size, inflexibility and homogeneity (all of them undesirable qualities in a self-regulating planetary organism) are inevitable elements of any civilization? I don’t happen to believe that civilization, and humans’ contrarian way of trying to run the world, are the result of alien (or for that matter, divine) influence. The invention of the wedge (the arrowhead and spear) was a perfectly understandable evolutionary adaptation by a species that necessarily had a large brain (without evolving a large brain we would never have survived, since our ‘natural’ survival tools — speed, sharpness of teeth and claws, reflexes, sensory acuity — are pretty pathetic by nature’s standards). Ravens, another species that evolved a big brain because it had to to survive, use curved hooks routinely to dig prey out of hard-to-reach areas. As a consequence of the arrow and spear, we quickly decimated the numbers of the large predators upon which our survival depended (helped in part by the onset of ice ages), and as a result the only alternative to extinction was to invent agriculture and animal farming, which Jared Diamond has sarcastically called “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”. Agriculture was the genesis of the “bad idea” of civilization, because it wasn’t (and isn’t) suited to a self-regulating, ‘anarchic’ species or a self-regulating world. For agriculture (and the subsequent development of industrialization) to ‘work’ requires that people specialize, and that the land ‘specialize’ in the growing or grazing of one crop or food animal. We had to give up our self-sufficiency, our personal autonomy, and become, for the first time, utterly dependent on many other humans doing other specialized tasks that dovetailed with our own. If one group abandoned their work and returned to an ‘uncivilized’ natural gatherer-hunter lifestyle (which could no longer support the number of humans that were living at that time) the entire pyramid of the new civilization would collapse. Therefore, specialization had to become mandatory. I have written elsewhere how all this led to hierarchy, the genocide of ‘competing’ predators and ‘farm pests’, political states, state warfare, overpopulation and all the other consequences that civilization has bestowed upon us, but it’s not hard to see how, once we started down this path, there was no going back — nor why we had no alternative but to start down that path. One could speculate that, had we been able to invent the Internet before we invented agriculture, civilization might never have been necessary. When agriculture and civilization began, there was simply no alternative ‘self-regulatory’ way to get large groups of people to cooperate and specialize and trade with others. We had no language to convey this sophisticated need at the time anyway (language and mathematics were invented because agriculture and civilization needed them for hierarchical instruction and centralized planning). Had we invented sophisticated language for self-expression, and communication tools that would allow large and physically disparate groups to network and self-organize much earlier, we might have been able to create a non-hierarchical self-regulating system that would have allowed us to prosper as a species without the need for slaves to work the fields, without the need for political states, without the need for war and laws and prisons and other tools to perpetuate the fragile civilizations that we found counter-intuitive and which encroached so much on our freedom. We soon found that it was useful (for keeping people in line) that many of the artifacts of civilization were addictive, physically and psychologically. We found that, in hierarchical systems, the bigger the better — more slaves at the bottom to leverage, more built-in redundancy, and less competition. We found, too, that this strange, man-made construct, so different from everything in nature, gave us an evolutionary advantage — it appeared to support more people per square mile than ‘natural’ systems, and power brought more power and wealth brought more wealth, to the point we really believed we had ‘improved’ on nature. And after a few generations, the essential survival skills for self-sufficient living had been lost, so we could not go back to a pre-civilization self-regulating lifestyle even if we wanted to — we were prisoners of our own invention. It is not surprising, then, that as our economy evolved, economic organizations used as their model not the ‘anarchic’ self-regulating model of nature but the hierarchical, command-and-control specialization model of the political state. I doubt that we have either the time or, with our current massive numbers, and our civilization’s huge momentum in some areas and inertia in others, the adaptability, to evolve our political system (forward, not back) to a self-regulating, networked, natural model. I am less certain that the economic system we have developed cannot evolve forward to such a model. There is a lot of attention being paid now to aspects of just such a self-regulating, networked, natural economic model: Entrepreneurship, the starting of one’s own business, is finally getting the attention it deserves (thanks to the fact the corporate giants have, for ROI reasons, stopped hiring) and, as John points out above, innovation can thrive in such businesses, giving them an enormous competitive advantage over the corporate giants, to offset the giants’ enormous political and wealth advantage. The Internet offers the promise of allowing vast self-regulating networks of entrepreneurs to self-organize and collaborate while staying small and agile, and to get their message and products out to billions of customers increasingly dissatisfied with the monolithic (had to use that word somewhere in this essay!), shoddy, remote and overpriced offerings of the giant corporate oligopolies. And the emergence of the Gift Economy, where human generosity and technology are allowing people to provide other people with many things for free, can also powerfully disrupt the ideology that nothing has value unless it is paid for, upon which absurd measures like GDP and absurd prices charged by greedy corporations for essential goods like medicines rely for their perpetuation. So I see a World of Ends as the future of business, a world made up of hundreds of millions of sustainable (changing but not growing) entrepreneurial businesses giving away and selling at modest prices high-quality, personalized, healthy, socially and environmentally responsible, innovative, mostly locally-made products and services, as part of a vast self-regulated economy where the customers — the people (let’s not call them ‘consumers’) call the shots. It could be the real ‘market’ economy we always dreamed of and have so long deluded ourselves we actually had. And the giant corporations, even with the subsidies and payoffs from politicians, won’t have the agility to survive it. I’m skeptical that innovation and technology can get us out of the other messes we’ve created for ourselves (overpopulation, overuse of resources, political subjugation and environmental destruction etc.), but an economy that is resilient, sustainable and really focused on people’s needs would certainly be a step in the right direction. Things are the way they are for a reason. Yes, we’ve gotten to where we are now because of “the worst mistake” in our history and because of a “bad idea”, but at the time, we had no alternative except extinction. We did what we had to do. But today we do have alternatives. The answer is not to deny that the way we live now is massively destructive and unsustainable. The answer is not to assume that the only way we still know how to live is the only way to live. And the answer is not to try to go back: Neoprimitivism is just romantic folly. The answer, the only real option available to us now, is to evolve forward, quickly, to innovate a whole new economy by merging the empowering new technology of our age with the wisdom of natural models that have always been with us, showing us how to allow egalitarian self-organization and sensitive self-regulation to emerge out of complexity and chaos, for the benefit of us all. ‘Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour Receding, or those who will disembark. Here between the hither and the farther shore While time is withdrawn, consider the future And the past with an equal mind. At the moment which is not of action or inaction You can receive this: “on whatever sphere of being The mind of a man may be intent At the time of death”óthat is the one action (And the time of death is every moment) Which shall fructify in the lives of others: And do not think of the fruit of action. Fare forward. O voyagers, O seamen, You who came to port, and you whose bodies Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea, Or whatever event, this is your real destination.’ So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna On the field of battle. Not fare well, But fare forward, voyagers. — TS Eliot, The Four Quartets |
December 13, 2005
Getting Things Done: The Procrastinator’s Version
 It’s been over a year now since I started using David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. I have a mania for simplicity, so I keep streamlining it, but I’ve also made some enhancements to the GTD ‘list’ to suit my procrastinating style. As I explained earlier, I’ve taken the various lists that the book (and the accompanying software) employ — the ‘waiting for’, ‘appointment’, ‘next action’, ‘someday’ and ‘project’ lists and consolidated them into a single list with three columns: date/time, proposal & action, and context (location, time duration, urgency/importance). Lately I’ve started using colour coding and split the list into four two-column sections that look like this:
My actions are colour-coded according to the type of project (red for Innovation, blue for KM, green for Writing, purple for Entrepreneurship, orange for projects I lack competency in (and need more study before proceeding) and black for recurring and one-off non-project actions. Actions that are urgent are italicized; actions that are important to me personally are boldfaced. Here’s the process I use:
Calendar, Tickler, Obstacles, Inspirations. This is the organization that works for me. And GTD has rid me of the procrastinator’s twin dreads: forgetting something urgent, and leaving an action too late to do it properly. I was maintaining the list in Word, but since I rarely use Word for anything else I’ve transitioned it to a simple HTML table. Unfortunately NVu, my current HTML editor tool, doesn’t have a feature for sorting tables by date, so I have to cut & paste when actions get rescheduled, but that’s a minor inconvenience. This file, called GTD, sits on my computer ‘desktop’ 24/7. I’ve recently started playing with a new, free, dead simple, award-winning tool called EverNote. It’s a useful adjunct to GTD when the stuff you want to remember (phone numbers, URLs, meeting agendas etc.) doesn’t fit on a single line in the GTD list, but isn’t substantial enough to create a document about. It’s essentially a free-form endless roll of e-Post-Its that you can access through the icon on the taskbar. I transfer these notes to blog posts or other documents as I need them, and when the post, document or action is done, I delete them. |
