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This is my dynamic, frequently updated homepage. This is a NewsLog, also known as a WebLog or Blog.
Everything is evolving, so don't assume too much.
People to watch:
Adina Levin
Andrius Kulikauskas
Britt Blaser
Catherine Austin Fitts
Chris Corrigan
Clay Shirky
Dan Gillmor
Dave Pollard
David Allen
David Weinberger
Dewayne Mikkelson
Dina Mehta
Doc Searls
Elisabet Sahtouris
Elizabeth Lawley
Euan Semple
Florian Brody
Frank Patrick
Gen Kenai
George Dafermos
George Por
Graham Hancock
Greg Elin
Hazel Henderson
Heiner Benking
Inspector Lohman
Jean Houston
Jerry Michalski
Jim McGee
Jim Moore
John Abbe
John Perry Barlow
John Robb
Joi Ito
Jon Husband
Jon Lebkowsky
Jon Udell
Jonathan Peterson
Judith Meskill
Julian Elvé
Julie Solheim
Kevin Marks
Lawrence Lessig
Leif Smith
Letecia Layson
Lilia Efimova
Lisa Rein
Marc Canter
Mark Oeltjenbruns
Mark Pilgrim
Mark Woods
Martin Dugage
Martin Roell
Mary Forest
Matt Mower
Max Sandor
Michael Fagan
Mike Owens
Mikel Maron
Mitch Kapor
Mitch Ratcliffe
Nathalie dArbeloff
Netron
Noam Chomsky
Paul Hughes
Peter Kaminski
Phil Wolff
Philippe Beaudoin
Ray Ozzie
Raymond Powers
Rebecca Blood
Roger Eaton
Roland Tanglao
Ross Mayfield
Scott Lemon
Sebastian Fiedler
Sebastien Paquet
Skip Lancaster
Spike Hall
Steven Johnson
Stuart Henshall
Thomas Burg
Thomas Madsen-Mygdal
Thomas Nicholls
Timothy Wilken
Todd Suomela
Tom Atlee
Tom Munnecke
Tom Tomorrow
Ton Zijlstra
Lionel Bruel
Loic Le Meur
Nancy White
Mark Frazier
Merlin Silk
Robert Paterson
Colby Stuart
Nova Spivack
Dan Brickley
Ariane Kiss
Vanessa Miemis
Bernd Nurnberger
Sites to watch:
Action without borders
BoingBoing
Co-intelligence Institute
Disclosure Project
Disinfopedia
Disinformation
Edge
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Explorers Foundation
Forbidden Science
Free Expression Network
Friendly Favors
FutureHi
Global Ideas Bank
Greater Democracy
HeadMap
Imaginify
Independent Media
Manufacturing Dissent
MetaFilter
Nanodot
Smart Mobs
ThoughtsOnThinking
WorldChanging
YES Magazine
Absara
Collective Intelligence
Collective Web
Do No Harm
Emergent by Design
Escape Velocity
Junto
NotThisBody
Openworld
Rhizome
Space Collective
Webcamorama
French:
Emmanuelle
Manur
Elanceur
Loeil de Mouche
IokanaaN
Blog d'Or
Le Petit Calepin
GeeBlog
Absara
Guillaume Beuvelot
Ming Chau
Serge Levan
Jean Michel Billaut
C'est pas Mécanique
I live in Toulouse, France where the time now is:
01:02
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 My friend Paul Hersey has one of the most enjoyable user interfaces I know on his home page. Meet Electric Liz. He did both the body painting and the Flash animation himself. Click on the bullets and different things happen for each one.
So, what is good design for webpages? Jakob Nielsen is the guru on web usability. Much interesting stuff there. Like Don't Listen to Users. I.e. watch what people do and see what works and doesn't work for them - don't just ask them what they want. Hm, that does bring to mind a very similar principle I was evangelizing when leading a group of programmers developing a big insurance claim processing system years ago. Listen to what people do and what they're trying to accomplish, watch what they actually do, and then go off and figure out how best to serve them. How about the Eyetracking Study of Web Readers. People's eyes jump around, look at headings, graphics. People often have several windows open and jump back and forth between them. Users don't just "visit a site". They are likely to jump around between sites, and be in several sites at once. Good design must accommodate that people come and go frequently, and must make it quick and easy to reorient oneself.
The Internet will eventually change everything about how companies do business. But it is unfortunately still possible to trick and bully people into buying overpriced mediocre products from dishonest people. Slashdot reports how Robert Novak, the owner of Pets Warehouse, has filed a $15 mill lawsuit against some individuals who commented about his company's poor service on a mailing list. And several little people unable to mount the legal defense have been forced to settle and pay the guy money or give him their websites. Just to let you know. Shop somewhere else.
I noticed in my server logs that there are people coming to my personal page from The Useless Wackos site, which lists the worst wackos the guy could find on the net. Well, the list is a couple of years old, but he obviously thought I was a good candidate. I bet I know a few of the other guys too. At least I've been a member of all the three top-rated wacko religions he lists, and the creator of one of them came to one of my events once. ... Geez, and its not the only one, I'm also one of the weirdest sites on the net.
Well, Hahah, I don't care, because I'm the number one authority on Transformation on the Internet, according to Google. #1 out of 4,370,000 websites that say anything about it. That's actually more scary than being one of the worst kooks. I'm not sure I believe my website is really the best place in the world to go and study transformation. For one thing, most of it hasn't been updated for years. But in Google's algorithms, what makes a big difference is how many other sites are linking to a certain site, and how many other sites are linking to them. And around 900 other sites, many of them very popular, have links pointing to mine.
Do you remember, when you were a child, the sun was yellow? Have you noticed that now it is white?
Dialtones - A Telesymphony was a concert performed entirely by the audience's ringing cellphones. Through an elaborate system of hardware and software the result became something rather remarkable.
[ Diary | 2002-10-04 02:47 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 By now I have had many experiences of how people come together in useful ways online, and I probably have more experiences of how people didn't succeed in coming together in a useful way. Anyway, it is probably a good thing to learn from some of that, so let me start with one of the stories. This is a story of both failure and success. I'll change the names for now, but if anybody wants to look more closely at it, you can quickly figure them out.
A few years ago an NCN member (let's call him Uriah Rex) had a vision of a company that would be a creative hub. It would facilitate the creative expression of many people. Film, books, art, and whatever new outlets the participants could think up. He wanted to bring together some people to manifest the vision. And the vision was strong and big and compelling.
[ Projects | 2002-10-02 19:19 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Al Joy is good at getting through to me about things I do 'wrong'. I often speak to the wrong people. I sometimes act as if I'm organizing a bunch of people who washed up on a desert island after a shipwreck. But really, the people I hang out with don't feel very shipwrecked and are kind of busy with other things. I create spaces and announce that people can do whatever they want in them. Except for that it better be diverse and positive and world-changing, and better nobody try take the thing over and give it any different direction, or I'll go intervene. A slight bit of a logical problem there. I'd like to make certain things happen, to spearhead something, to bring a certain message into the world. But yet I prefer to be invisible, and I'll insist that I'm no leader. Really what I want to do would be to create a technology, a device, a system, which allows a new kind of collaborative communication to happen. I'd like to stand up and speak for its virtues once in a while, but otherwise I'd prefer for it to be something people could just take away and use whichever way they imagine. Not anything I'd have to manage. So, I'd like to invent a telephone, but I don't really want to run a phone company, and I'd really prefer to not have to be involved in everything everybody says. I'm an independent. I can be a real good advisor. Or a messenger. But I change my mind about things too often to be much of an organizational leader.
I started going to an improv acting class again. It has been around 5 years or so, but I've really enjoyed the time I've spent in improv workshops. Its a great way of getting out of one's head, into being present and creative in the moment. Works really well for me, and it's something I need. But it is also scary.
Randy Schutt has gathered some great resources on Nonviolence, Cooperative Decision-Making, and Inciting Democracy.
SEAS offers a $1 million prize for a testable new energy device with the potential to be mass produced, preferable an over unity / zero point kind of device that might independently power a private home. SEAS (Space Energy Access Systems) is an offshoot of the Disclosure Project.
Reuters: shoe size and penis size not linked. No?!? There goes my plan for an MLM penis enlargement business.
"If it works, itÂ’s obsolete" --Marshall McLuhan
[ Diary | 2002-10-02 00:37 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 The open space of the NCN member area keeps being a puzzling creature, with a somewhat dysfunctional life. It is meant to be a meeting place, a grand central station, where assorted world changers might come by, share their stories, put up their business card on the wall, find some good people to work with, borrow a conference room, make grand plans, and go off and rock the world. A good deal of that has been going on over the years, but it also often happens that somebody will join, as if joining an organization or cause, with great hopes for what we will all accomplish together, and then will hang around talking with people in the lobby for a couple of months, waiting for things to happen, waiting for a common agenda to crystalize. And when they suddenly realize that no such thing is happening, and they're really just standing in the lobby talking with people -- they get angry, and they feel betrayed and cheated. People get into fights about what is supposed to happen in the lobby, and whether it really is a lobby, and who's in charge of the lobby anyway. And small groups of disgruntled travelers sometimes gather, with torches, looking for somebody who's fault it might be. And if it is anybody's fault, it is probably mine. I just haven't figured out yet what I'm doing wrong. People wouldn't stay upset for months if it were just a matter of bad software design - they would just go use something else. Maybe I put the wrong sign at the door. Maybe there should be a sign saying "No loitering in the lobby. Please go straight to your train or to the appropriate club lounge to meet with your group."
I'm reading in "Human Action" by Ludwig von Mises. I somehow ended up in the chapter on monopoly prices. The ideal presented is that, if there's a free market, everything sort of adjusts itself, and things get produced and exchanged at the most fair price. But there's the phenomenon of monopoly pricing which screws things up. It is when somebody has such a grasp on a certain market segment that they will profit more from limiting the supply of a certain good and fixing its price, than from producing and selling as many as they can produce, or as many as people want. It isn't just that there's only one supplier of an item, or that the supply is limited. It is when somebody artificially limits the market, in order to get himself the highest possible profit, rather than trying to serve the wishes of the consumers. I can think of many examples of that. Microsoft is an obvious example. The price of Windows doesn't change according to market conditions - it is kept high and distribution is kept limited to those who will pay it, in order to maximize profit. The music distribution business is another example. CDs cost so-and-so much, and if you don't want to pay that much, you can't have the music without 'stealing' it. Wouldn't income tax be another example? It is calculated to bring in what the government wants, regardless of how people value it. Well, Mises says there has to be a monopolized good which is withheld for it to be monopoly pricing, so I don't know. Anyway, he doesn't seem to have a whole lot against monopolies, other than those owned by governments.
Stepford Citizen Syndrome: Top 10 Signs Your Neighbor is Brainwashed. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were both involved in the coverup around MK-ULTRA, one of CIA's Mind-Control experiments, feeding LSD to unsuspecting subjects. It sort of got off track when somebody jumped off a roof.
MIT has started an OpenCourseWare pilot. The aim is to put up the full curriculum and all materials for many different courses, for the common cause of shared learning.
Li Ching-Yuen died in 1928 in China. He was a Chi Kung master, an herbalist, and spent much of his life in the mountains. He founded Nine Dragon Baguazhang. It appears that he was born in 1678, which made him 250 years old at his death. A piece of advice from him: "Keep a quiet heart. Sit like a tortoise. Sleep like a dog. Dance like a Dragon. In this way you will attain long life."
I was just watching Amelie. Ah, what a delightful, quirky, life affirming film. Like it says about the plot: "Amelie, an innocent and naive girl in Paris, with her own sense of justice, decides to help those around her and along the way, discovers love."
"I hate quotations" --Ralph Waldo Emerson
[ Diary | 2002-10-01 00:24 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 I'm very interested in how a free market economy acts as a signaling system, facilitating communication about what people need and want, and what should be produced, in what quantities. And I'm interested in it the other way around, in regards to how an information sharing network can act like an economy, automatically adjusting supply to demand and measuring value. Apparently the "Austrian School" of economics have some clues for some of this. Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises are good places to start there.
Chris Corrigan mentions this amazing article about Lois Weisberg who was the original inspiration behind the "six degrees of separation" hypothesis. The type of person who somehow, magically, is able to connect people together in unexpected ways. You can get to just about anybody in 5 or 6 jumps, but most likely the path will go through one or more people like that - the people who know everybody. Quote about an interesting aspect: "When we say, then, that Lois Weisberg is the kind of person who "knows everyone," we mean it in precisely this way: It is not merely that she knows lots of people. It is that she belongs to lots of different worlds." Aha. Yes. I get to think about the role of diversity in evolution. The people who can walk between worlds and link people (and ideas) up regardless of where they are - they're key.
The Library of Alexandria was considered one of the greatest repositories of knowledge of all time. The Egyptian government decided to build a new library on the same location, to mark it as a focal point for culture, education and science. It is supposed to open on October 16th.
The Internet Archive is an equivalent of the Alexandria Library for the Internet age, attempting to store most of the information on the Internet, including the added dimension of time. See for example, past versions of newciv.org. Not that it is overly interesting, as it mostly shows that I haven't changed the design for 6 years.
Bowing to pressure, U.S. Automakers have now agreed to make public the diagnostic codes used to service modern automobiles. They were previously only made available to authorized dealers, forcing car owners to either pay much higher prices, or to leave their cars un-repaired.
"The greatest fear in the world is accurate telepaths" --Ingo Swann (discussing why the U.S. government halted its remote viewing program at SRI, after the remote viewers increasingly were picking up the contents of people's minds)
[ Diary | 2002-09-30 00:52 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Realities, world views, multiple dimensions. We don't all seem to live in the same world. I find that fascinating. Reality seems to be an increasingly fluid phenomenon. I should probably start by transcending my own matrix.
Alexander Chislenko wrote an interesting essay about identity, from a trans-humanist sort of perspective. "I always wondered how far I can evolve without stopping being myself... It seems possible that the identity issue can be the ultimate limit to growth." Sasha (short for Alexander in Russian) was a person I considered a friend and ally, although we had relatively few conversations. He died in 2000. I always felt honored, but slightly embarrassed about being included in his Great Thinkers and Visionaries page. Sasha also was a pioneer in various things I'm very interested in, and I'm sorry I didn't work more closely with him - collaborative filtering, intelligent agents, enhanced reality and more.
In "The Law of Convenience" Jerry Michalski says some intelligent things about the ecomics of convenience. "Every additional step that stands between people's desires and the fulfillment of those desires greatly decreases the likelihood that they will undertake the activity".
Hazel Henderson: Wanted: Regime change in the USA.
French engineers unveil an air-powered car, which runs on compressed air and doesn't pollute. It costs about $1.50 to fill it up.
From the Chicago Sun-Times: Burlington Homes in Bakersfield, California has announced that it will no longer sell homes to lawyers. They say their "experience is that home buyers who are also lawyers threaten litigation (requiring significantly greater management time as well as legal fees and resolution costs) at a dramatically higher rate than home buyers who are not lawyers." A lawyer is suing.
"It's either the wallpaper or me. One of us has to go." -- Oscar Wilde on his deathbed
[ Diary | 2002-09-29 02:18 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 In the community areas of NCN rumors frequently go around that so-and-so is maybe a fake virtual person, and maybe just an alias of somebody else. And apparently some people think that I too have multiple personalities. I have a hard time thinking of any situation where I would actually want that, online or off. I have a hard enough time keeping track of who I am when I'm just trying to be myself. But it also gives me the unique dillemma that I can fairly easily shed light on any such suspicion of others by analyzing the server logs, but since I'm currently the only webmaster and server administrator for the site, you can't necessarily trust my own statement about whether I really am who I say I am. An existentialistic puzzle. Maybe I'm not who I think I am. Maybe I'm Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde. At any rate, the reasonable solution would be to have several webmasters and server administrators. Also to avoid that the whole thing would just disappear if I suddenly die and I don't get around to whispering the root password to somebody else before I breathe my last breath. "The password is .... gasp.. phhft!"
There are several movies that I really enjoy that are about how our physical reality isn't real, but just a convincing virtual simulation. The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor and Dark City are the ones that come to mind first. Great stuff. Makes people think about how they really know things. How do you know that the world really is what you think it is? What is your evidence?
Catherine Austin Fitts: "What's up with the black budget?". Very interesting stuff from a quite reliable source, about black projects and about the U.S. Navy trying to figure out how best to break the news about extraterrestrials to the public. One thought that I think I agree with: "The alien question is the single largest and most expensive disinformation campaign in the history of our race".
The Disclosure Project has gathered hundreds of videotaped testimonials about that kind of stuff from very reliable sources - the intelligence officers, military personel, pilots, etc. who were there. Stephen Greer is the coordinator of this very substantial effort.
Stephen Bassett is running for Congress in Maryland. The main focus of his campaign is to push for the U.S.government to bring out the truth about extraterristrial issues. See his Pravda interview. Quote from his site: "It is time for the United States of America, a nation which views itself as a leader of nations, to formally acknowledge this extraterrestrial presence. During the campaign the premise will be put forth that conditions under which the United States government can end the UFO/ET truth embargo will be ideal in the coming year"
"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity." --Albert Einstein
[ Diary | 2002-09-28 16:56 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Four years ago I was stopped for driving without insurance, and the court then gave me a big fine. I couldn't afford to pay either at the time, and even when I later got insurance, the fine sort of was forgotten until recently. But it all brings up reminders of the way I used to live, struggling with some different impossible financial situation every week. And it reminds me of the bureaucratic cruelties and insanities that certain segments of the population will have to put up with on a regular basis. "Oh, you can't afford to pay for insurance? Let's slap an extra $1000 on top of that for you to pay, and maybe that'll motivate you a little better!". And I realize now that it isn't just somebody being cruel. It is that the system is made by and for capitalists, and not for poor people. You know, if you sit at home with your bank statement and a spreadsheet, trying to optimize the use of your funds, you can quickly calculate that it serves you better to pay the insurance than to have to pay a fine. Then it's all quite logical and reasonable. But many people don't live in that world and don't experience themselves having such luxurious options.
But that principle of individuals rationally choosing how best to use the available resources, that isn't a bad principle at all. The problem is only if we focus on just one kind of resource, to the exclusion of all others. Traditional capitalist thinking focuses on the resource of money. Which is a little silly since the money itself is just a made up symbol, with no inherent value or use. There are other types of capital which are more grounded in the real world, and which have interent value. There is human capital - people and their labor, intelligence, culture and organization. and there is natural capital - living systems, natural resources, ecosystem services. Human and natural capital is inherently of value. When you make them thrive and expand it isn't just bigger numbers in computers - things are actually better. New awarenesses of these things are arising rapidly. More and more companies are starting to look at the "triple bottom line", or "quadruple bottom line". Different people define those in different ways, but the idea is to include several more dimensions in addition to financial results (benefitting shareholders): the social results (benefitting employees, customers, society), the environmental results, and possibly also the corporate or cultural values at play. An excellent starting point for revolutionary new thinking about natural capital is Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken and Amory and Hunter Lovins.
It appears that the ozone hole is getting smaller, and might actually be gone by 2050 at the current rate.
There are signs of life on Venus say some scientists.
A Canadian Senate Committee calls for legalizing marijuana. The prohibition of marijuana use must end, proclaims says the Committee on Illegal Drugs. The unanimous report hopes to bring Canadian policy into the new millennium and out of the politically motivated and costly US-led War on (Some) Drugs. "Scientific evidence overwhelmingly indicates that cannabis is substantially less harmful than alcohol and should be treated not as a criminal issue but as a social and public health issue,” explained Senator Pierre Nolin, the committee’s chairperson.
A Brief Introduction to the American Civil Liberties Union
"Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines." --Buckminster Fuller
[ Diary | 2002-09-26 23:37 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Its my birthday today. Not that it suits me very well. I'm usually sort of depressed on my birthday, or things go wrong. Like, today my driver's license expires, and some old forgotten court citation suddenly popped up that I'll have to go pay before I can renew the license. And its all in different parts of town, and its rush hour. And I can't do it anyway, because I have no money to pay it with right this second, and tomorrow I'll have no driver's license. Pfptth! Nothing that can't be solved, but not the kind of fun I'd really like to have on my birthday.
The picture of the cigar-smoking "capitalist" from my 9/23 post was actually of Che Guevara, the infamous and legendary South American revolutionary guerrilla leader, known for his intransigence towards both the capitalist and communist establishments. Quote: "Man really attains the state of complete humanity when he produces, without being forced by physical need to sell himself as a commodity".
The MacArthur Fellows Program announced 24 new winners of their genius grant. Each one receives $500K, no strings attached. Some cool stuff there: reconfigurable robots, bacterial communication, evolution of ideas during the Renaissance.
British composer Mike Batt was sued for copyright infringement and plagiarism for his composition "A Minute's Silence" on the "Classical Graffiti" CD. Apparently it was thought to infringe on John Cage's equally silent composition "4'33". The case was apparently settled out of court by Batt paying an "adequate sum" for his shameless plagiarism. Batt has since been busy copyrighting chunks of silence of various lengths other than the four minutes, thirty-three seconds of silence owned by Cage. Story here. Batt sounds like a cool character. He apparently orchestrated Vannessa Mae's career amongst other things.
[ Diary | 2002-09-25 15:16 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 All the FAQs on Capitalism I can find [link][link][link] are written in a propaganda double-speak that says nothing about capital, but pretends that it is all about the morality of self-interest. The last part might be true, even if I think it is wrong. I believe strongly in a free market or free space where free individuals can make choices. I believe that such a system can add up to something intelligent and useful. Co-intelligence. But it has nothing to do with capitalism, and it is not primarily about self-interest. It is about intelligent, feeling, consciencious individuals making the choices that they deem will best serve the aims that they focus on, in concert with other individuals doing the same. Some people are unscrupulous and will try to get ahead individually by keeping everybody else down. But most individuals in the world are simply trying to do the best they can for themselves AND their family, their friends, their organizations, their causes and beliefs, and for the world, within the constraints of the environment they live in and the resources and knowledge they have. But corporations and investment funds and banks are not people. They don't come with hearts or consciences, so the principle of bestowing them the right to act exclusively in their own self-interest, is disasterous for the free market of individual choices. You can let a hungry tiger loose in a kindergarten, and sure it has a right to serve its own interests and seek food, and the kids are free to serve their interests by choosing where to stand, but it isn't quite fair to begin with. I think capitalism is really about ensuring the right for tigers to serve their self-interest, and making sure nobody else has any say about it. It is about protecting the rights of people with resources to be self-serving in their struggle to increase their resources. And it isn't very helpful for people who don't already have resources to play with. And it doesn't serve people who want to decide things in other ways than by buying and selling stuff, such as those who would might want a democracy. It is actually all quite pure and logical.
Anyone wants to guess on who is the cigar-smoking capitalist on the picture from my posting yesterday?
32.9 million people live in poverty in the U.S. Well, poverty here is like luxury in many other places. You know, not being able to afford to fix the air conditioner in your car - that kind of thing. Where elsewhere on our planet it is a matter of whether you have shoes or fresh water. But it still represents unhappiness with one's circumstances.
Thousands of regular folks in India come up with creative innovations. Anil Gupta has organized the Honey Bee Network to channel grassroots creativity. Why "honey bee"? "The Honey Bee does two things which many of us don't. The Honey Bee collects pollen without impoverishing the flowers, and it connects flower to flower through pollination. The idea is that when we collect knowledge of people we should ensure that people don't become poorer after sharing their insights with us". The English on the site is a bit weird, but it looks promising. See the Innovation Database.
"Dream as if you'll live forever...live as if you'll die today." -- James Dean
[ Diary | 2002-09-24 21:33 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Virginia Girl Gives Leg-Up to Kenyan Village; out of Poverty into Self-Sufficiency
-By Cathy Dyson in The Free Lance-Star
While on safari with her family last summer, 17- year- old Christina Morin spent four days in Kenya with people of the Samburu tribe. Two years of drought had killed their cattle and left the tribe with nothing to eat. Christina helped the owners of a tourist lodge pass out flour and sugar rations, but she wanted to do more....
[ Articles | 2002-09-24 18:29 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Its a bit pathetic, but it seems like the only place I can find a proper definition of capital and capitalism is in Karl Marx' Das Kapital. He explains it clearly and simply, albeit he's a bit longwinded. Capital is simply money that is circulated in a different way in relation to commodities. The most basic pattern, that most people recognize from their daily lives, is C-M-C. Commodities to Money to Commodities. You've got some stuff, you sell some of it, and then you can buy some other stuff. Or you perform a job, you get some money, and you spend it on buying stuff. You know, a paycheck-to-paycheck wage slave kind of thing. Or the old-fashioned going-to-the-market kind of thing, where you sell one of your cows so you can buy some more chicken.
Capitalism is born when the pattern instead is M-C-M. That is, you've got some money, you invest it in some stuff, and you sell it again, getting back more money than you started with. Money is transformed into capital the moment you buy goods or services, not because you really need or want them, but because you're planning on making a profit from them. So, capitalists are people who look at the world that way, looking for opportunities to get more back than they give out.
Obviously a market of buyers and sellers will help a capitalist operate. But it is just as obvious that a free market is not what is required. On the contrary, to do really well, you'd want to have an advantage that nobody else has, and you'd do better if somebody can skew the rules in your favor. Best of all is a monopoly on something that everybody has to have.
Excellent article by John Perry Barlow: Why Spy? about open source intelligence. Robert Steele whom he mentions, is in the NCN directory and I exchanged a few messages with him years ago.
John graciously came and talked about a new civilization at the opening of a community center we had in Venice, California a few years ago. I gotta put up the video at some point. He's one of my favorite people.
Interesting paper about the subject of Being Real from MIT Media Lab. It goes in depth on many of the issues involved in virtual interactions with others.
"If only one person knows the truth, it is still the truth" -- Gandhi
[ Diary | 2002-09-24 00:32 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 "Capitalism" is often presented as synonymous with "Free Market", which I think is totally bogus. I don't have any doubt that a truly free market is inherently fair and productive and intelligent. I just think that the core of capitalism is about something totally different: The centralized, monopolistic, private ownership and rental-for-profit of all the capital that everybody else has to use, and the hierarchy that flows from that. Simply a clever way of confiscating and socializing the majority of the wealth on the planet, without hardly anybody noticing. Would anybody like to disabuse me of that idea? Anybody has a definition of "Capitalism" that explains what it does with capital, rather than just extolling the virtues of freedom and individual liberty, of which I need no convincing. capitalism.org appears to say nothing about capital. Ludwig von Mises: Human Action: A Treatise on Economics is weighing down my bookshelf, and I haven't gotten around to reading it. Is it about free market economics or about capitalism?
Excellent article by Catherine Austin Fitts: Narcodollars for Beginners. First of all, her "Solari Index" of the health and safety of a neighborhood is wonderful and simple. And then she gives one of the most lucid explanations of the economics of drug trade, and how absolutely obvious it is that it pervades the whole U.S. economy and is kept in place from the highest levels of authority.
Rupert Murdoch's media network is planning a television game show that over a two year period will pick the best person to be president of the United States. Hey, I think that's quite a good idea. I doubt that they would pick an illiterate oil millionaire who cheats in elections.
In 1901 divers off of Antikythera, Greece uncovered a clock-like mechanism from an old shipwreck. It apparently would acurately keep track of the positions of the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, as well as the time, the moon phases and other good stuff. It resembles a well-made 18th-century clock, and used technology previously believed to have been developed the first time in the 17th century. The problem is that it is more than 2000 years old, and was calibrated for a time period around 80B.C.
I really like the word "Holonomics". It sort of conjures up for me an integrated whole systems discipline that illuminates economics, society, reality, thinking, acting, feeling, etc. It is a very under-used term. Jose Arguelles spread it around a bit and said some promising things about it, but nobody filled in the details. Ha, I just found a little essay I wrote about it in 1994, on a nice site in Malaysia that I didn't know.
"In this Jump Time of whole-system transition we can no longer afford to live as half-light versions of ourselves. The complexity of our time requires a greater and wiser use of our capacities; a rich playing of the instrument we have been given. The world can thrive only if we can grow. The possible society which includes the emerging global business world can become a reality only if people learn to be the possible humans we are meant to be." -- Jean Houston
[ Diary | 2002-09-22 17:08 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Hm, interesting with the HOT or NOT rating for my newslog. OK, only 12 people rated it sofar, but there's a certain interesting pattern there. If we just average the ratings, I SUCK. However, the graph of what ratings people have chosen show a more nuanced story. At this point 6 people have given the rating 1, 2 said 5, 1 said 6, 1 said 8 and 2 said 10. Obviously people are free to pick any number from 1 to 10, but the lack of nuance in the lower region sticks out. The people who didn't enjoy my newlog all gave it a 1, whereas the more positively oriented people gave nuanced responses. It is only a guess, but it would seem to me that, except for maybe 1 or 2 people who actually know me and don't like me, I got 1s from sort of binary oriented people. People for whom things eithes suck or they're cool. Thumbs down or thumbs up. Or maybe my newslog is really repulsive to some kinds of people the moment they look at it. Now, I'm a great fan of Collaborative Filtering. But Collaborative Filtering requires something more than averages of course. I don't care at all if what I write appeals to less than 50% of web surfers. I'd be very happy if it were even 10%. But then again, those people would be the ones I'd want to speak with.
I've decided to make my public newslog accessible from [link] because that's fun and easy to remember.
Excellent interview with Howard Rheingold, who's one of the big virtual community gurus, in part about his latest book "Smart Mobs". Quote: "It's really not about the technology, it's about collective action. It's about the way people are able to do things together in ways that they weren't before because of these technologies. And I was really awakened to these potentials when I began reading things in the newspaper about the Philippines' peaceful revolution against President Estrada, in which people mobilized to telephone text messages to assemble in the streets of Manila and bring down the government. That signaled to me that something new was happening. And I began looking at the strong implications of this new technology."
The Ladies of Liberty are a group of libertarian women from North Carolina who's "turn-ons are long walks on the beach, candlelit dinners and free-market economies", and who made a pin-up calendar as a political fundraising effort. Hey, that works perfectly fine for me.
Edgewalkers defined: "Edgewalkers are the translators, bridge-builders and communicators of a rapidly transforming world. They lead the way. They pioneer new paths, connect divergent worlds, facilitate change, and make the hard choices that create a better, more fulfilling, safe and prosperous future for us all. In essence, they are the creators of our world. So the support and development of Edgewalkers is paramount — for their leadership, presence and contribution are the key to managing in an increasingly uncertain, transforming world. "
[ Diary | 2002-09-21 23:25 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 A concern for any virtual community space is how we can verify whether people are who they say they are, or whether we even care if anybody is who they say they are.
If people can just go and create a profile by filling in a name and an e-mail, we're not really going to be sure who they are at first, beyond what they say. They might create several accounts and pretend to be different people.
We can of course make more stringent criteria for opening new accounts. For example, that one has to be referred by some already known person, and that one has to fill in a considerable amount of information about oneself, and somebody has to examine that and approve the application.
But it still comes down to something more fundamental. Community doesn't happen just because some people fill in profiles, even if they do it correctly and truthfully. Community is something that happens between specific people, not something that can be automated in a database.
[ NCN | 2002-09-21 22:12 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 This is the future. We should have had flying cars by now. But wait, there's a very sensible engineering effort that might actually make it happen. The Moller Skycar appears to be about 3 years away from production. 300+ MPH and 28 miles to the gallon. Cost expected to be like a midrange Mercedes, and it will fit in the same parking spot.
I made some changes in the newslog program so that links to past articles should be be more digestible by search engines. I should know in a couple of days how much difference it makes. Seems that Google gets to my newslog every 2 days at this point.
Mitch Ratcliffe: "Our President has a doctrine The new Bush Doctrine, that the U.S. may rightfully strike first against any nation or group in order to protect its way of life and the free market system, is going to get us into a world of hurt. It is very much like the intransigent German policy of confrontation that followed the dismissal of Bismarck in 1890 and led intractably to World War I. You can read the 35-page document justifying this aggressive new foreign policy at the White House Web site."
Conform. Consume. Obey.
[ Diary | 2002-09-20 16:22 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 One of the things I'm interested in is how to recognize and expose deceptive information, and how to recognize communication that is meant to mislead and control you.
That takes many different forms, and is a whole big subject of study. So here are just a few hints about it, particularly as they apply to interactions between a few people in places where more people are watching, such as panel dicussions or online forums.
Our use of abstractions and symbolism in our language and in our thinking opens up the door for many different ways things can be twisted. Many of them are harmless or accidental. The main thing to watch out for is when somebody would like to give you an untrue picture of something in order to make you think or do something that really isn't in your best interest.
[ Information | 2002-09-20 13:10 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Nice display in the sky this evening in Los Angeles. The picture there shows pretty much what I saw from my front yard, even though I didn't take it. Supposedly a Minuteman ICBM missile from Vandenberg airforce base.
The Hathaway family in Virginia built an all solar powered house, without having to compromise on domestic appliances.
Kuro5in: Five Ways to Lose an Argument on Iraq. Just because you're against attacking Iraq is no reason to be naive and mis-informed.
Lawrence Lessig is a law professor who used to be a right-wing Republican. He's now one of the key freedom fighters for the Net. He's going to argue in front of the U.S. Supreme Court for tranforming copyright law.
"Only a minute to minute relentless struggle can balance one's natural but stupefying insistence to remain unchanged." -- Taisha Abelar
[ Diary | 2002-09-19 23:02 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 The Choose Positive Energy campaign, launched by Greenpeace and The Body Shop, challenges world governments to provide access to renewable energy for all, in particular the two billion people who live without any power, within ten years.
Tim O'Reilly has some good thoughts on Science and Consensus. It starts with a discussion of the idea (which I happen to agree with) that scientific "facts" are really just a form of consensus reality. That is, the facts are not really facts at all, but rather postulates that have become generally accepted through a process of social consensus-building. Some good references to general semantics.
Is my NewsLog HOT or NOT?
A couple of people who don't like me much, Tom Loeber and Richard Carlson, have been distributing a phoney interview with me as a sort of satire. No big deal, they seem to enjoy it, and even though they didn't exactly have my best interests in mind, it is fairly harmless. But it might be in order to link to some of the real interviews that were used for part of the content, for the sake of anybody who might be confused: Spiritech, UK, SagePlace. OK, they're really old, and here's an even older one: Internet Underground (1995). Oh, and a newer one: Catalysts for Change. Really, if anybody really wants to bother to do a good satire of me, there's plenty to make fun of. I sometimes take myself much too seriously, and sometimes say things in overly idealistic or abstract ways.
"Our choicest plans have fallen through,
Our airiest castles tumbled over,
Because of lines we neatly drew,
And later neatly stumbled over". -- Piet Hein
[ Diary | 2002-09-18 17:20 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Wú-MÃng is mandarin for 'no name'. In China, that is often used as a signature for dissident writings. The Wu-Ming Foundation, is an Italian collective of writers and activists who believe in experiments towards social cooperation.
Heiner Benking reminds me of the Wholeness Seminar which is one of the many great things that live here on my server. An amazing collection of materials on whole systems thinking. Heiner is a member of the Club of Budapest, and a big champion for whole systems, dialogue and other good things I believe in as well.
A pacifist teenage anarchist puts up a good fight when her high school tries to shut her up. You go girl!
Bruce Kodish handed me a copy of his book "Drive yourself Sane" which appears to be an excellent introduction to the principles of General Semantics. General Semantics was created by Alfred Korzybski and presented in his somewhat overwhelming tome "Science and Sanity", written in 1933. I managed to read it and I think it is great, but most people nowadays can't be expected to even be capable of reading it, as it is very dense and academic. And what General Semantics teaches is of immense importance, now more than ever, so it is good to have some more approachable presentations of the principles.
".. it would be very unlikely for unlikely events not to occur. If you don't specify a predicted event precisely, there are an indeterminate number of ways for an event of that general kind to take place" --John Allen Paulos
[ Diary | 2002-09-17 22:59 | | PermaLink ] More >
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This is a collage of things that catch my eye, things that need to be said, and stuff I really care about
TRUTH
BEAUTY
FREEDOM
LOVE
TECHNOLOGY
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