 “If you must tell me your opinions, tell me what you believe in. I have plenty of doubts of my own.” – Goethe I‘ve never been a fan of small-talk. I appreciate that you need a personal context for conversation — I’ve tried to have meaningful conversations (via IM or voice-to-voice) with people who have commented on my weblog posts, and face-to-face with people I’ve just met, but it’s hard. As soon as I have that context, however — a subject of shared passion, an understanding of why the person I’m conversing with cares about that subject, and an appreciation of how they communicate (not how well, just how: we all converse differently and you need to chat long enough to pick up a sense of their conversational style) — as soon as I have that, I’m ready to waltz them outside the rest of the crowd and engage one-to-one (or occasionally in small groups) in deep, intense, serious conversation. In such situations I try to adhere to my ten steps to effective conversations. But often I get so carried away that these conversations tend to go off on wild tangents, exploring a wide terrain in search of especially fertile common ground. What surprises me, though, is the large number of people who have no interest in ’serious’ conversation. This crowd includes many intelligent, creative and informed people and at first I thought it was just me — surely such people with imaginative ideas, important knowledge and powerful insights would want to share them with someone. But I’ve come to believe that the large universe of conversationalists (people who love to talk) and the smaller universe of people with something considered and important to say, are two different (and only partially overlapping) groups. To make things worse, even when I manage to find meaningful conversations, the majority of them are theoretical, not actionable, and accordingly, while stimulating, not terribly interesting to me. I am learning to pay better attention, but my attention span is still childishly short. As I mentioned in Pilgrimage Part Two, I’ve always found it challenging to discover people who care to talk about things I think are important. In every country I’ve visited, in every community in which I’ve lived or spent time (in Second Life, and elesewhere online, as well as in real life) most people seem content to talk about immediate and superficial things — gossip, recent news, sports, weather, entertainment, work, what to eat for their next meal etc. So few people seem to care about what it all means, why we’re here, where we’ve come from, where we’re going, or what we can or should do about it. I am tempted to chalk this all up to what I see, globally, as three endemic human malaises: (a) imaginative poverty, (b) lack of intellectual curiosity, and (c) anomie:
Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that places and opportunities for meaningful conversation are so rare — parts of the blogosphere, book clubs, and some universities — and places and opportunities for meaningful, actionable conversation even rarer. That’s why I’m so obsessed, these days, with finding more powerful, interactive ways to communicate with you, dear online friends, than through the comments thread or e-mail. So if you’re fed up with my lack of response to these clumsy communications media, then IM me (via GMail/GTalk), schedule a voice-to-voice conversation (GTalk Call, orSkype), or meet me in Second Life, and let’s talk. A friend of mine recently offered me these great ‘lead-ins’ to meaningful conversation:
Works for me. Category: Conversation
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January 31, 2008
In Search of Meaningful Conversation
January 30, 2008
Ten Signs the US and Canada are Failing States
 Last year I reported on Jeff Vail’s analysis of Mˆ©xico as a ‘failing state’. The signs he reported included the presence of independence groups (the Zapatistas) who have just given up on the dysfunctional government, the collapse of key economic resources (agriculture and oil), vast disparity of wealth, cynicism about the purpose of voting and other democratic behaviours, the use of ‘manufactured’ crises and fear to distract the people from government incompetence and impotence, and the growing prominence of organized crime and corruption. These same signs are prevalent in Belize, and I witnessed them all last week, since an election there is on the horizon. It confirmed my sense that the nation-state has largely outlived its usefulness and is on its last legs everywhere as our unsustainable civilization nears its inevitable collapse. Outside of Europe, which has problems of its own, the balanced-economy model that allows both government and individual enterprise to each do what they do best, seems to have been given up as hopelessly idealistic. And that got me thinking about whether the US and Canada are likely to follow Mˆ©xico quite quickly into disintegration and anarchy as the central authority simply no longer offers enough to the people to warrant its continued support. Here are the ten reasons why this just might happen, and sooner than we think:
The answers are obvious, but probably beyond the political will of our dumbed-down, disenfranchised, propagandized electorates. Like other failed states, we will wait for the collapse to occur before we act, belatedly and inadequately. Our biggest challenge in North America will be that, unlike most struggling nations, we lack the self-sufficiency to live without institutional education, employers, technology, experts to do all the basic things we’ve forgotten or never learned to do, doctors with their drugs,packaged, imported foods, and cheap oil. The Long Emergency is coming, and we’re the least prepared people in the world to cope with it. Category: Why Civilization is Unsustainable
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January 29, 2008
Pilgrimage, Part Two: A Night in the Rainforest
 It’s only 90 minutes in the rickety old Blue Bird school bus (whose drivers navigate the twisting mountainous roads of Belize way too fast) from the impoverished Southern coastal Garifuna village of Hopkins that I described in Part One of this article yesterday, to the daunting entranceway to Caves Branch, in the rugged interior of West Central Belize. The bus drops me off at the edge of the highway, and it’s a mile hike in sweltering 90F heat and occasional torrential rain up the mountain road through stunning tropical rainforest to the ecotourist Caves Branch “jungle lodge” owned by Vancouverite Ian Anderson, who I meet almost as soon as I arrive. On the trek up, I keep stopping and staring, taking photos of the towering tangle of ferns, vines and immense (100′) trees that extend darkly into the distance on both sides of the road, and create an imposing archway over the dirt and stone road. And I think to myself, breathlessly: I am home. This is where we humans were meant to live. The jungle calls me, inviting me in. I have no fear of the poisonous snakes and spiders, or the jaguars and other wild cats whose last remaining Earthly refuge is in this country. I haven’t felt this way, this sense of instinctive belonging, about a place I do not live, since I walked through the temperate rainforest in Qualicum BC, and the 300′ redwood forests of the Pacific Northwest. The other people staying at the lodge are all North Americans — couples in their 50s and 60s, some with kids and inlaws in tow. The cheerful workers, mostly Mayan youngsters, are as culturally different from the Garifuna I’ve been living among for the previous three days, as day is from night. They patiently explain their history, culture, lifestyle, and the nearby archaeological sites, to me and the other curious tourists. They ask no questions of me, about how I live, what I think, or the unimaginable snow-covered country I come from. I keep looking for good conversation in Belize, but, other than with Joe Bageant, I haven’t found it. The Garifuna, the North American tourists, the Mayan workers, all seem to live in their own narrow, isolated worlds, and are disinterested in the future, in philosophy, in the purpose of life or in any other profound or long-term subject. Their intellectual curiosity is shallow, their imagination dormant. More than anything in this natural paradise I miss you, dear online friends. This is a staggeringly beautiful land, but to me, except when I imagine you here with me, it’s an intensely lonely one. The night in the rainforest, in my bug- and water-proof but authentic-looking cabana, is delightful. I awake to the cries of the howler monkeys, the macaws, and the driving downpour of a wall of rain so heavy I cannot see through it. The forest smells are so dense and rich I can taste them. The foolishness of the sense of invulnerability I feel in the rainforest becomes apparent the next day when the inner tube I’m riding down the the river through Belize’s vast rainforest cave system hits the rapids, and I cannot stop from crashing into the riverbank, carving up my arms and spraining two fingers in a spiky stand of bamboo, and losing my only pair of glasses in the process. One of our young guides has to steer me through the rest of the journey, hooking her feet under my tube and answering my questions about Mayan history and culture as I squint to see at least the nearby sights. I complete the arduous five-hour tour in tow, but I feel humiliated, and worried about the risk of infection and making my way home visually impaired. I decide to cut my trip short, a day early, and book a flightback home. Paradise found, and lost. Category: Memoirs and Dispatches
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“Community is Born of Necessity”
 Joe Bageant, at home in Hopkins, Belize The above quote is from Joe Bageant’s son. It came up in our recent discussion on Intentional Community versus ‘Accidental’ Community. Community is born of necessity. This one sentence, Joe believed, explained the success of Accidental Communities, and the failure of so many well-considered Intentional Communities. I should have realized this, of course; it’s an affirmation of Pollard’s Law — we do what we must, then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. My ancestors, thrown together with strangers in a frontier land two centuries ago under harsh conditions, American ex-pats sharing a common passion (loyalty to the King of England) had no choice but to make their Accidental Community of 13 families work, carving homes out of the frozen wilderness without electric light, electric power or hydrocarbons. Thousands of Canadians can now, like me, trace their ancestry to this community. Likewise, the Garifuna of Belize, who bailed out of shipwrecked slave ships over three centuries ago, had no choice but to make their Accidental Community work, and its culture remains, improbably and against all odds, prevalent today in much of the country. Meanwhile, the Intentional Communities of the world have a low success rate and an average population of just eleven people. They are the product, often, of affluent, comfortable people who have selected each other carefully and patiently, and who have a shared passion that most Accidental Communities lack. They are experiments of joy designed to discover what works and what doesn’t, by learning from failure. They never reallysucceed, most of them, perhaps because they don’t have to. Category: Intentional Community
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January 28, 2008
Pilgrimage, Part One: What Globalization Has Wrought in the World’s Struggling Nations, and Why They Put Up With It
 One of the benefits of blogging is the opportunity to make friends all over the world who invite you to stay with them if you ever visit their country. Not only is this economical, it’s a wonderful way to discover how other people really live their lives, and to learn and experience their ’stories’. I was privileged to have the opportunity, on only a couple of days’ notice, and on impulse, to spend last week visiting Belize, the home of essayist, journalist and storyteller extraordinaire Joe Bageant, author of the moving and brilliantly satirical Deer Hunting with Jesus. Joe has largely walked away from civilization (a lovely home in Virginia) and now lives much of the year in a tiny cottage by the Caribbean Sea in the village of Hopkins. Whatever he earns from his writing he shares with the Garifuna family on which his cottage, and the 600 s.f. cottage where his hosts, Len and Marie* and their six children (and three dogs) live. A third cottage (the raised bungalow in the picture above), which Joe helped build and finance, now provides rental income for the family, and an affordable home for a hardworking immigrant family from Guatemala. I bunked in with our hosts in return for paying for groceries for the family during my three day stay (very inexpensive by our standards, a lot by theirs) and a few gifts I bought for the youngsters. Their home is quite affluent by Belizean standards. They have a small TV, a stereo, and a compact (mostly empty) refrigerator. All the lights in the homes here are compact fluorescents, which gives the place an eerie pale glow at night. Len brings home leftovers for the dogs from the tourist resort where he works. As a result, their dogs are well fed compared to most, a lot of which are strays. (All the dogs seem to be the same medium size and similar black and brown mixed colouring — I guess for evolutionary reasons.) The minute I showed our hosts’ dogs affection, however, they began to push each other away, vying for my attention (it’s not in the culture of the people there to play with or pat their dogs). From that point on they followed me relentlessly, though I never fed them. Just like humans, it seems, relationships and attention and love are more important than any other sustenance. Just like my daughter on her recent trip to Costa Rica, I wanted to adopt and ’save’ (and neuter) all the dogs I saw in Belize, most of which were emaciated (and some near death). We in the world’s affluent nations have ruined the Belizean economy. The fisheries that once sustained them have been ruined by overfishing and industrial pollution. So the locally-grown rice and beans, and hand-made tortillas, are the staples on which they live (despite the huge groves of citrus trees, there was not that much local fruit — the citrus is almost all squeezed and concentrated for export). These are supplemented with many expensive, imported, packaged foods. Other than staple foods and wood, as one local citizen I spoke to put it, “everything we buy in this country is imported”. Imports are too expensive for most residents, and most of the packaged imported foods (Coke, candy bars and chips) are the same addictive, empty calories people all over the world are addicted to. Non-food imported goods are mostly Chinese crap (just like everywhere else). Because of their poor quality, and the fatalism of a people who know that a hurricane could easily destroy everything they own in a heartbeat, there is not much motivation to maintain or repair anything. Global warming will not be kind to Belize, though this danger is almost unknown to its people. Because of this dysfunctional economy, the country is an enormous irony: Against a backdrop of bountiful provenance and staggering natural beauty (Cousteau has made both their rainforest and their offshore cays internationally famous) almost everything man-made in this country is in disrepair. Construction projects sit unfinished, most wood buildings are sadly weather-beaten and dilapidated, rusty metal scrap is piled by roadsides, plastic garbage blown from everywhere litters the beach and yards (except for those scrupulously maintained by their owners, like our hosts). It is simply too expensive to maintain buildings and infrastructure. Part of the modest tax revenue of the country is misspent, to be sure, but even if it weren’t there wouldn’t be enough. Just as in affluent nations, the people of Belize work too long and too hard (often at multiple jobs), get exploited by the rich, and do whatever they can, day and night, to make ends meet for their families. They have neither the time nor the money to maintain and repair things. So just as in affluent nations, infrastructure is crumbling — roads, bridges, sewers, water pipes left unfixed and unreplaced long after their intended useful lives. Road and other projects are started just before elections and then abandoned. We are all, rich and poor, living beyond our means, living unsustainably. While affluent nations borrow more and more to consume more and more, and then throw away more and more, struggling nations borrow more and more (from the usurious IMF) to compensate for what has been stolen from the people by the complicity of greedy affluent corporations and corrupt local officials, to try to provide for their oversized (seven children is average) families. The combination of affluent nations’ overconsumption and struggling nations’ overpopulation is destroying our planet. None of us can hope to repay the debts (to creditors, to future generations, and to nature) we have so recklessly piled up. The people of Belize (all the different cultures I saw there) are strikingly attractive. They spend more on beauty aids and hair care than on clothes, which seems to me a wise sense of priority. And just like us in affluent nations, they live by Pollard’s Law: They do what they must, then they do what’s easy, and then they do what’s fun. (Or perhaps, being more physically fit than us, they do what’s fun before they do what’s easy.) Like us, they have no time or energy or resources left for what is merely important, for what should be done or would be nice to do. One of my reasons for visiting was to learn what it is like to live in a real community. With such large families, many of the people of villages like Hopkins are related, and immediate family size (8-10 people) and extended (3-4 generation) family size (40-80 people) are very close to the optimal community sizes I wrote about in my recent post. Poor as they are, these communities appear to be peaceful, loving, happy, and relatively crime-free. They are not, however, intentional communities, and I had an interesting debate with Joe about whether intentional communities (whose members self-select and agree to be bound by shared principles and ‘intentions’) could ever work as well as these accidental communities bound by simple common ancestry. I continue to believe that intentional communities (hard as they may be to establish and find members for) should ideally work better than struggling nations’ accidental communities. I would acknowledge, however, that both likely work better than the anonymous, transient, accidental communities of affluent nations (suburbs and urban condos), built for the profit of developers and whose members have nothing in common except proximity to workplace. More about accidental vs. intentional communities later this week. It’s very easy to understand the explosive growth of the cities in struggling nations once you’ve spent a few days with a family who lives in one of them. Once the seven or more children in the family finish school (in their mid teens) they really have no other choice but to migrate to the cities to find work. College is unaffordable for almost all families, and parents are only in their mid-thirties when children reach majority, so there’s no room for them at home or work in their home villages. Only one (usually oldest male) child will likely inherit the family home (and often the father’s livelihood). The rest end up in the cities. The fisheries are in decline, and the farms are mostly run by conglomerates with no need for more labour. No surprise, then, that cities are rife with desperation, alcoholism, drugs, theft and other crime and chronic, hopeless unemployment. If you’re a young woman, even a good school record is not enough (unless you’re wealthy or land a rare scholarship) to expand your life choices beyond early marriage (and young motherhood) or low-paying domestic work, or both. The same population growth that offers some security in old age, eyes to watch over your possessions, and built-in baby-sitting and role models for younger children, also feeds this cycle of urban explosion and despair. In Belize, the Internet is the white man’s addiction and the Internet Cafe is the white man’s hangout. To young Belizeans it’s just a vehicle for downloading music. These Cafes are otherworldly not only because of the colour and accents of their denizens, but because these denizens’ average age is at least three times the Belizean average. A few rich Belizeans have cellphones with texting and MP3 players, but most get their music fix from bootleg CDs, radio and dance clubs. Reggae still rules in Belize, though rap and (in the Garifuna South, anyway) local Punta music are also popular. My beloved Soca is “only for the old and the tourists”. It’s really hard to gauge the influence that religion plays in Belizean life and culture. The Catholic Church runs most of the schools (with some government subsidies) and among parents you’ll find some fervour for spiritualism (among the Garifuna, it seems, it is one’s ancestors, more than god(s), who provide both guidance and punishment for one’s sins). But religion doesn’t seem to be a big factor in family size, belief systems or behaviour. Why, I kept asking, do young women keep having so many children when birth control is available, accepted and necessary to get out of poverty? Large, unplanned families are, for them, what urban/suburban living is for us affluent nation city dwellers — the only life they know. There are simply no models of a different, more viable, sustainable way to live for them, anymore than there are models of self-sufficient, sustainable, responsible, loving, community-based living for us to follow. There is much we could learn from them, and much that they could learn from us. But much of our ignorance, our inability to imagine possibilities and conceive of better ways to live, are, it seems, universals. We cannot follow whenthere is no working model to show us where to go and what to do. Tomorrow: Part Two, and more on Intentional vs. Accidental Community. * The real names of the family members have been changed to protect their privacy. Category: Why Civilization is Unsustainable
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January 27, 2008
Pilgrimage — A Paradise Found, and Lost
 I‘m back from a week-long, impulsive trip to Belize (some photos here), where I visited with Joe Bageant, one of the greatest storytellers of our generation, lived with a struggling family in a struggling nation (to learn whether all the ideas I write about on this blog have any kind of universal applicability), walked an ocean beach that has not yet become coveted and secured property, and slept in a tropical rainforest. So stay tuned for:
Many thanks to Joe, and to my wonderful, gracious and generous Belizean hosts — the Garifuna family I stayed with in Hopkins and the Mayan youths who worked at the rainforest lodge and told me about theirculture. |
January 18, 2008
Friday Flashback — Ten Steps to Great Conversations — and a Week’s Hiatus
 This week’s Friday Flashback is from September 2006: Ten ways to make your conversations more effective, enjoyable, and valuable for all. Summary: The reasons we converse: to remember, reassure, educate, conceptualize, prompt action, convince, assist, think through, entertain, and socialize. The ten steps to great conversations: Prepare, set the stage, listen (with your whole body), collaborate (yes…and), think through your response, listen to yourself, learn to speak well and facilitate well, resummarize often, think what could have beenbetter, and use simple conversation protocols. And practice, practice, practice. Artwork “In Deep Conversation” by Irish artist Pam O’Connell PS: I’m going to be away from technology, and this blog, for a week. Just a vacation. See you all again on the 28th! |
January 17, 2008
Love as Play
 I spent a couple of hours after work recently with a sweet friend I hadn’t seen in a couple of months. We talked mostly, as is my wont these days, about love, conversation and community. Since she is polyamorous, I had the rare luxury of bouncing some of the criticisms and doubts about the lifestyle of loving many people, off someone who supports that lifestyle — usually I’m the one defending it against skeptics. While many of these criticisms and doubts are, I think, borne of misunderstanding (or even fear), there are two that, from my perspective, have some validity. So I asked Lea (not her real name): How do I know that my passion for simultaneously loving a lot of people isn’t a rationalization of either:
I was willing to confess both insecurity and addiction, but Lea’s answer was What difference does it make? Why does it matter why polyamorous people are driven to love many others instead of just one? So what if it reflects insecurity, or addiction, or both? She’s right. What was making me defensive, I think, is that I’ve known people who have kept lovers ‘in reserve’ because they’re deeply neurotic, perhaps as a result of devastating pain after loss of a love so severe that they swore they would never allow themselves to suffer that way again. And, I’ve known people whose addiction to love (not the same thing as sex addiction, although some people can have both) has been very hurtful to the people they ‘drop’ as soon as the euphoria of the early-love hormonal cocktail starts to wear off. But I know myself well enough to know I’m not neurotic, or even particularly insecure (I think we all have insecurities, but my big ego tends to overcome my insecurities most of the time). And I think I’m sensitive enough that I would not knowingly or deliberately hurt or abandon anyone in the ebb and flow of my passion for them. I believe in complete honesty in relationships, and not making promises or commitments without being positive of being able to live up to them. I believe we are capable of loving many without, in the process, diminishing our love for any one. Most of all, though, my passion for polyamorism is because it’s just fun. Most of us get too little fun in our lives. For so many, everything we do is serious (even games, for so many, are such a terribly serious endeavour!), and for so many, everything we do is work, struggle, effort. Perhaps I’m lazy, but at this point in my life, and believing what I do, I don’t want to work that hard. Love is conversation (from the Latin meaning turning with) and I love moving with, exploring with, other people. Love is play, and I love to play. Just to be clear, my love for Lea, and hers for me, are not erotic. She’s too young for me and my ‘paternal’ feelings for her would make any kind of relationship of that kind just feel entirely wrong. She’s an amazing young woman who has accomplished a remarkable amount in her life strictly by her own wits, talents and character and I am immensely proud of her. And she is remarkably courageous in her exploration of love and her openness to it, and in that sense she is a great inspiration to me and a sounding board for my thoughts and feelings. She will forever have a place in my heart. I said I was through talking about polyamorism on this blog, but as I keep saying, a principal purpose of my writing is to think out loud, to sort things out in my own mind. I’m through trying to persuade people that loving many others is a more natural way to live. But Lea’s words, and her own life experiences, have persuaded me even more that it’s a possible way to live, one that need not be that difficult, and a joyful and healthy way to live. If you could see my smile, the one I show all the time, and which some people recognize and others are blind to, you would know that I’m not crazy, or dangerous, or wasting time that should be spent on more serious, urgent pursuits. I’ve found my better way to live. Love, conversation, community. Easy, responsive and responsible, sustainable, and fun. The way life should be. You don’t like that model, that’s fine, show me another that works better. I’m listening, I’m paying attention, I’m open to suggestion. Help me imagine the possibilities you see, and I’ll helpyou imagine mine. Playfully. Category: Human Nature
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January 16, 2008
Conversation in Virtual Communities: What Happens When You Change From One Medium of Communication to Another?
 Our fledgling Intentional Community in Second Life. It’s a simple, natural setting. We sleep in a cave beside a waterfall. Yesterday Mia, the woman with whom I’m creating an experimental Intentional Community in Second Life, and I, and our friend Mich, had a long conversation, using Second Life’s voice-to-voice facility, about the nature of new social media, and about when each is appropriate, and about the challenges of transitioning from one medium to another. Specifically, we talked about:
in the context of both 2-person and multi-person conversations. These 7 media each represent (in approximate increasing order) different levels of intimacy with one’s conversants. One of the issues Dave Snowden describes in his work on how complex systems operate (and social networks are complex systems) is the fact we act in multiple identities. My work identity, my neighbourhood identity, my identity in interactions with my First Life friends, and Second Life friends, and my identity on each of my blogs, are each different, sometimes accidentally (because of how people using these media have come to ‘know’ me, and in what capacity) and sometimes deliberately (because of the need to keep our work persona and our ‘personal life’ persona separate, sometimes even for legal reasons). So when you switch from one medium to another, it can be wrenching or jarring for several reasons:
As David Wong points out, text is poor communication (easily misunderstood) and less communication (lacking sensory clues to meaning and nuance). But it has its advantages. It gives the inarticulate time to think about a response, which generally makes them sound smarter. It allows for mystery, through deliberate ambiguity — which can be alluring. It is easier to archive and re-read later than voice conversation. And it allows people to role-play, which is (a) fun and (b) safe — you can more easily create and sustain an identity significantly different from your ‘real’ one when you only use text and self-created avatars. I can absolutely understand why some people vow never to ‘confuse’ or ‘cross over’ from an online identity to a more ‘real’ (what Mich calls ‘meatspace’) identity. Each identity is kept completely separate from the others, with no online clues anywhere that might allow someone to track them from one identity or another, and no overlap between the communities and networks they are a part of in each identity. This can be a major juggling act, and necessarily makes you a bit schizophrenic. The issue of moving from one medium and/or identity to another gets even more complex when the relationship, the community, or the conversation has multiple conversants. What do you do when you’re in a four-way IM conversation and two of the people decide it should jump to voice-to-voice? What if the other two are uncomfortable with this? What if some of the conversants want to go to a whiteboard to sketch out their idea collaboratively, or webcams so they can ’see’ what each other ‘mean’, and others either refuse or can’t muster the technology to make the transition? Important relationships are built on trust, and trust can be lost easily when one person wants to ‘change’ the relationship suddenly (by moving to a different medium and, by implication, to a different persona or identity). But sometimes the advantages of changing media (and the frustrations of more limited media) are such that the desire to force such a change can be overwhelming. Add love into the mix and things really get interesting. When two people who have never met in ‘real’ life fall in love, and one of them wants to change media, the challenge to the relationship can be gut-wrenching. When I first went into Second Life, I was perfectly content to keep my ‘Second Life’ and ‘Real Life’ identities strictly separate. I didn’t want to know who any of my new SL friends were in the ‘real’ world and didn’t want them to know about my ‘real’ identity either. And I didn’t want to use voice-to-voice — as a writer I’m just more comfortable using text than speech to convey what I think is important. But when Mia agreed to help me build a model Intentional Community in Second Life, she quickly persuaded me that clear, fast, candid communication demanded voice-to-voice contact. I was terrified (of what each of us would think of each other) but she was absolutely right, and now I nudge those with whom I share virtual community to talk voice-to-voice as much as possible. I really love the new social media (like GMail/GTalk) that allow you to jump from one medium to another (e.g. IM to v2v) with a single click. Is it possible to get too caught up in the ‘game’ to the point you begin to take your online identities (and others’ online identities) too seriously, to the point you starve your ‘real’ identity and end up with a stunted social life, neglected ‘real’ world friends and family, and an inability to function properly in the ‘real’ world? My answer to this question, perhaps surprisingly, is no. Stephen Downes’ brilliant speech on the elusive nature of reality has persuaded me that what we think of as ‘real’ life is just as much a figment of our imaginations as any virtual place we could inhabit. people in ‘real’ life fall in love with fictions, people they just imagine others to be, as readily as if the object of their affection were an invention. And David Wong’s explanation of why virtual worlds are just as healthy places to live in as the ‘real’ world is very compelling. You can learn as much, experience as much, love as much in virtual worlds, interacting with ‘real’ people, as in the real world. You arguably do less damage to the environment through such virtual entertainments than you would driving long distances to consume and then discard crap in the real world. It’s been argued that it’s irresponsible to ‘hide’ in virtual worlds when so much work needs to be done in the ‘real’ world. I have some sympathy with this argument, for the very few who don’t spend their ‘real’ world waking hours merely reading unactionable information, engaging in impotent debate, and consuming violent, desensitizing video and music ‘entertainment’ that is surely far more escapist than many of the intense virtual world discussions I’ve experienced. That’s why I’ve been adamant about how I spend my online time, purposefully, in Second Life, and in my IMs (and e-mails when I can’t persuade friends to move to real-time media) with friends I’ve met through my blogs, real-life contacts and other social networks and communities I am a part of. I don’t engage in fantasy, or small-talk, or echo-chamber mutual reassurance conversations, or debates. Every conversation has a purpose — which may be to give attention to learn something new, to understand something better, to convey an important idea or an imagined possibility, to express love and appreciation, to collaborate, or to build community through consensus or exchange. I am a model-builder, and about as far from a cult leader or cult member as you could imagine — I’m neither a leader or a follower by nature: I hate hierarchy and everything meaningful in my life has come through Letting Myself Change and peer-to-peer conversation and collaboration and tossing out possibilities that I hope will be useful to others, when they are ready, and adapted to their own use as part of their Let-Self-Change process. That’s all I could ever ask for. In a world that permits of infinitely many personas and identities, I am increasingly presenting to the world just one — my authentic self, to the extent my slow learning process has allowed me to understand and represent it. I finally know myself, this one identity, as well as I could ever hope to. I haven’t time to go inventing others, and my oneself has too much to do as it is. Categories: Conversation, Intentional Community
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January 15, 2008
Sustainability: Two Irreconcilable Perspectives
 I spent today with four different groups of business executives. Much of the discussion of these meetings was on the subject of ’sustainability’ — both in the environmental sense (companies’ environmental impact, and the impact of possible environmental catastrophes on companies) and in the business continuity and resilience sense.
David Suzuki’s (”Sustainability Within a Generation“) presentation to one of the four groups went surprisingly badly. He took a somewhat adversarial position towards self-proclaimed “green” events (such as today’s) — saying that by now they should be just the way companies do business and need no longer be labeled “green”. He was also unimpressed by the lack of gender, age and ethnic diversity among the executives in attendance.
I detected six consistent messages from these executives:
There is a clear disconnect between those who are highly informed about, and up to date on, social and environmental issues (who are astonishingly pessimistic) versus the astonishingly optimistic (or hopeful) political and business leaders whose actions and behaviours, more than individuals’, will have to change rapidly and radically if we are to mitigate or avert these pessimistic prognostications. This does not bode well for our future.
That is, of course, to be expected. We do what we must, then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. Until they absolutely must act (by which time it will be too late) or unless we make it really easy for them to act, they will continue to do what they are doing now. And so will we all.
Students of history know what happens then. Category: Why Civilization is Unsustainable
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