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Change the Color of Visited Links (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)Change the Color of Visited Links (Jakob
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About a year ago,
I made my first public commitment<
/a> to stop just talking about How to Save the World, and actually
do something about it. Here's
my progress report:
Not a perfect scorecard, but not too bad either. The problem is, even if everyone in North America did these things it wouldn't be enough. As the acceleration of global warming and other interminable bad news on the environment, the endless victories of corporatists over citizens and consumers, our continued theft of our children's and grandchildren's heritage, the prevalence of suicidal economic policies, the endless global thirst for blood and imperialist adventure, and last month's US elections all showed, we're losing ground fast. We need to be doing much more. So while I'm still working on completing the actions I committed to last year, reading Bill Moyers' stirring and depressing speech has convinced me to add some more radical, and controversial, actions to my 'to do' list, to publicly commit to do more. Earlier this year I set out the political and ecological philosophy behind what I called 'Plan B', a set of radical solutions to use once it becomes clear that social and political activism, networking, education, and the plodding pace of new technological innovation simply aren't going to be enough to save the world from inevitable social, political and ecological catastrophe and collapse in this century. The principles of this philosophy are:
Plan B is designed to give people no choice but to change. Let's take fossil fuels as an example. We could have started developing alternatives to fossil fuels a century ago. There was no burning platform. In the 1970s, prices spiked modestly. The reaction of the vast majority was to demand that the government increase the supply and reduce the price. Governments complied, even though that meant first getting into bed with and becoming dependent on ideological enemies, and later launching imperialist adventures to take over the major sources of supply economically and politically. As long as there was any choice, no matter how socially, politically, economically and environmentally high the cost, people would not change. As we near the end of oil, we will see a resurgence of nuclear power plants, more strip-mining and burning of coal, the destruction of arctic wilderness, the ruin of coastal waterways, massive, and bloody and incessant imperialist wars with oil-rich countries -- anything to forestall the need to change. The cost will be horrendous. That's human nature. That's nature, period. Do not change until you absolutely must. For oil, the answer is to not give people a choice. That means rationing supply, and imprisoning those that buy in the black market. That means huge oil tax increases to make it unaffordable for most people to buy oil beyond the bare minimum, tax-free ration, with the taxes used to finance fast-track research on alternative renewable energy. That means prohibiting bringing on-board new sources of supply that merely delay the inevitable crisis, prolong the bad habits of reckless consumption, and ruin the environment for the sake of a few month's supply. That means higher income taxes to pay for the development of a completely new infrastructure based on alternative energy (corporations won't pay for it). All of these options are anathema to North American governments, which understand human nature and won't dare impose these draconian solutions on people after seventy years of preaching that government and taxes are bad and the market will fix everything automatically. So we need to make sure there is no choice. Since we can't do this by changing human nature, persuading people to voluntary reduce consumption, we have three options: Precipitate a crisis by interfering with supply (socially and environmentally conscious sabotage), precipitate a crisis by interfering with price and supply (persuade OPEC to quadruple prices and curtail production), or avert the crisis by coming up with innovations that reduce demand. The third of these options is not available because those with wealth and power would have to invest massively in these innovations, innovations that would reduce demand for their products, so it would be both politically insane for them to do so, and a violation of the modern 'maximize short-term profit at all costs' corporate mantra, and hence would subject these courageous corporate idealists to legal action and dismissal from their posts. We can and should encourage OPEC to drastically cut production and to quadruple prices (that's what many OPEC members believe is a fair price for their product now, but they're unwilling to risk an invasion by the West if they raised the price). Production cuts aren't in their short-term interest either, though steep price increases are (I'm sure awareness of this is what's behind the recent crude price volatility). Why would OPEC nations sell for $40/barrel when they could sell for $160/barrel with little drop in demand? The only conceivable reason is military threats from the West. If OPEC doesn't have the courage to confront Bush & Co and charge fair market rates for their increasingly scarce products (which seems to be the case), the only solution left is sabotage of the energy and transportation systems, done in a way that doesn't cause human or environmental injury -- preventing the supply from getting to the market. We need a lot of individuals to sabotage the system at its most vulnerable (probably pipelines, dams, power transformers, tankers, refineries, drilling platforms, border crossings and major hubs in transportation routes). At the same time, we need to take the opportunity to block traffic in the despicable goods that finance the flow of oil -- arms flowing out to oil countries, and the IMF-mandated flow of other underpriced locally-needed raw materials and slave-labour-produced manufactured goods from poor countries to rich. This monkey-wrenching needs to be done in a coordinated but non-hierarchical way by a large number of caring, ingenious, enterprising, self-disciplined individuals. But before we can do it, we need to research how best to do it, what and where the vulnerabilities are, hand ow to achieve maximum disruption of supply with minimum effort and no serious injury to people or the environment. I am confident that most of this knowledge is online, and the rest can be put online by those in the know so that the rest of us can share it. The result would be a constant and debilitating disruption of supply to the point where both consumers and producers say 'uncle' and start to change their behaviour because they have no other choice. I think it can be done. It will take great courage (I expect this blog is already under government surveillance and will probably eventually be attacked or taken down). And it will take great intelligence, to avoid it backfiring on us, and to ensure that, once the media get addicted to this story, they are getting our message loud and clear: We are selectively sabotaging the most serious excesses of the modern economy to bring about conservation of resources and the environment the only way we know will work. If we're going to save the planet, we all need to consume less, and we're doing our part to make that happen. So here are my additional commitments for actions for 2005.
It is absolutely critical that these million individuals take great care to avoid causing harm or suffering, other than economic harm. Otherwise, extremists on either side of the political spectrum, and government agents, could exploit or defeat this movement. We need the media to understand that this principle is inviolate, so that they immediately rule us out as the source when an act occurs that causes harm or suffering. We are not terrorists, we are anti-terrorists. Corporatism is economic and political terrorism, and it is threatening all life on Earth. Our goal is simply to disrupt this economic and political system before it destroys our planet, so that there is no choice but to find a better way to live. |
 Yesterday I was checking my referrer log and came across a weblog called PTypes, which rates famous people, and bloggers, by personality type, and also draws linkages between three well-known personality typing schemas. I have commented before that the majority of bloggers seem to be INTPs or INFPs on the Myers-Briggs personality test, but the PTypes blogger list contains more 'Counselors' (INFJ) than either 'Architect' (INTP) or 'Healer' (INFP) personalities. More surprisingly, How to Save the World is identified as an 'Inspector's' (ISTJ) blog, which surprised me. I had always been a strong NT, and right on the line between E-I (to quote Neil Young, who seems to have a similar personality to mine, "I need a crowd of people, but I can't face them day-to-day"), and right on the line between J-P (I'm a compulsive list-maker, but I hate inflexibility). So I couldn't understand how the author of PTypes assessed me as ISTJ. Rather than argue, I decided to re-take the Myers-Briggs test. I Googled 'Myers-Briggs' and took the first four tests that came up, including this quite detailed one, which all produced the same answer: my personality has changed markedly since I started blogging. I've plotted the shift on the charts above. Using a small letter instead of a capital for close-to-the-border (less than 55-45%) scores, I've gone in one year from iNTj (a Thinker) to eNfP (a Change Agent), after not moving on the test for a decade. I suspect my blogging is more a reflection of changes in my 'personality' rather than a cause of them. But it's interesting -- is anyone else's personality changing, and why? Are personality changes fundamental and enduring, or situational and transient? Oh, and there is a 'disorder' associated with each of the 16 personality types when that personality becomes extreme or pathological. For INTPs it's schizoid (disengagement) behaviour, for INFPs it's histrionics, for INFJs it's avoidant, for ISTJs it's depression (maybe that's why the author of PTypes pegged me as ISTJ), for INTJs like I was last year it's schizotypal (social anxiety), and for ENFPs like I've apparently become this year it's paranoia. Not sure I buy this last stretch, since if I were borderline paranoic I would have self-censored some of my recent blog posts. |
 Seth Godin
of Fast Company and
Purple Numbers fame has a new BHAP (big hairy audacious project)
called ChangeThis.
The idea is that we need to be more open to well-articulated opposing
(or at least different) points of view on important issues. The 'This'
in ChangeThis is Your Mind,
and by changing it, you will become part of a broader, urgent change
movement. The vehicle that gets the ball rolling is something called a
Manifesto. Seth has plans for some online Manifestos penned by some
very big
names.It's a very intriguing idea, but I don't think it will work, not because of the Internet's limited reach or because of anything inherently wrong with Manifestos, but because it's out of sync with human nature. Here's why, IMHO:
(Diagram is from an earlier post on The Decision-Making Process) |
 We have many myths about nature. Most of them are about 'wildness' -- savagery, hardship, suffering. Most of our stories about nature are of the 'Man vs. Nature' variety, about 'survival in the wild', as if that were some extraordinary thing. We build these myths to keep people from running away from our well-meaning but damaged, terrible, unsustainable culture. Richard Manning in Against the Grain has just exploded another of the myths about our culture: He provides a compelling argument that the Great Wall of China, a work of staggering and gruelling human labour visible with a telescope from the moon, was not built, as we were told, to keep the Northern hunter-gatherer cultures (the 'Mongol Hordes') out, but rather to keep the stooped, slave labour in the 'new' civilization culture's peasants in. If you really believe nature is savage, turn off the hysterical nature documentaries and read Bernd Heinrich's Winter World, about how, even in Northern winters, even the tiniest 'wild' animals live joyful, carefree, comfortable lives. And then read David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous to find out how you, too, can reconnect with lovely, peaceful, easy, sustainable nature. The myths we teach our impressionable children about nature, from dragon fables to Old Yeller, are usually about nature's terror and the need to defend and return back 'home' to our 'safe' civilization. There is an astonishing amount of animal cruelty in children's stories, and it is an extremely predatory and desensitizing indoctrination technique. We reinforce these dreadful lies about nature's savagery by sending our children to under-supervised day-care operations called Summer Camps, which, despite their locations and stated objectives, are not at all about nature, but rather deplorable and usually incompetent immersion courses in social skills. At least the British are honest enough to do this without pretext of it being a 'natural' experience: Their social indoctrination is called Boarding School and occurs principally indoors. Whatever its intention, the principal effect of Summer Camp is to untether children from their parents' protection and their need for privacy, and force them to 'get along' with others, find their place in the social pecking order of their 'peers'. For the shy, the weak, the uncoordinated, the physically and emotionally scarred (and that's most children) it can be living hell. For psychopathic children and predatory adults, its lack of supervision provides the ideal environment for honing their manipulation skills on unprotected and vulnerable victims. Whatever this may be, it is certainly no way to introduce a child to nature. Even psychopathic adults use the 'natural experience' cover to prey upon weaker adults. This activity was most famously depicted in the film White Mile, where the aggressive company CEO (played by Alan Alda) bullies younger staff who want to 'get ahead' to go on a 'character-building' white-water rafting trip where they are absolutely at his mercy, and where nature is set up as the straw-man enemy. This psychological brutality is also evident in many cults which use social isolation and deprivation in a pseudo-'natural' setting to break down resistance to the cult leader's propaganda. I recently witnessed a plane-load of teenagers returning from a six-month 'working field trip' billeted in peasants' homes in Paraguay -- these kids were raw with emotion and filled with horror and loathing at the thought of returning 'home' and 'abandoning' the poor Paraguayan families who had opened their homes and hearts to them. Absolute gut-wrenching culture shock. We humans are so easy to socially recondition, so vulnerable to programming and re-programming! Our psyches are so fragile that, especially with the young, we must take great care not to tear them even by the simple act of exposing them to new ideas. This is very dangerous stuff. Damn our adaptability. Not surprising, then, that most people view nature with great fear, as something to be conquered or survived. Most of us have no alternative experience of it. And not surprising that so many of the well-intended 'communing with nature' alternative living experiments have collapsed or been hijacked by psychopaths or megalomaniacs. If we were to start with young people, how could we expose them 'naturally' to nature: Teaching them gently the Spell of the Sensuous without so unhinging their psyches that they would be incapable of returning to civilized life and working within it, and without exploiting their ideological vulnerability? (I know, I'm a hopeless liberal -- I refuse to use propaganda to advance the cause). Because if we don't show them nature, what possible hope is there for our world when we can only romanticize (or demonize), idealize, try to imagine a natural way to live and love and be? We learn (especially as children) what we're shown, not what we're told. There are almost no remaining models of natural life to show them, to correct the entrenched, neolithic misperception of nature as something brutal, savage, dangerous, frightening, threatening, hard, and apart. As James Taylor puts it in his song Gaia, we are taught, and left with no alternative but to:
Turn away from your animal kind,
Try to leave your body just to live in your mind, Leave cold cruel Mother Earth behind -- GAIA, As if you were your own creation, As if you were the chosen nation, And the world around you just a rude and dangerous invasion. I was at a conference a week ago with some of the most creative and intelligent people on the face of the Earth, but when I talked to them of the importance of wilderness, these mostly urban geniuses had no idea what I was getting at -- they could not imagine what I meant. I think we need to abandon the route of in-class nature documentaries and the one-day (or six-month) field trips (and 'summer camps'), and instead invent and design something completely new: Model Intentional Communities that will give children and adults the opportunity to rediscover nature, and our true nature, first hand. Just as we save endangered species and try to build their populations back up in 'natural' settings, we should try to recreate, and show, alternative human cultures, so that people brought up in our monolithic and troubled culture can be exposed to people living in balance with wilderness. Not in order to learn how to 'survive' it, but to learn how to be part of and at peace with it. Glenn Parton talks about this in his essay Humans -In-The-Wilderness. I advocate the development of a
human lifestyle in which people live in small villages sparsely
scattered through a wilderness environment. Although this framework or
groundplan is borrowed from aboriginal peoples, it is far more
flexible
than has been thought. We can devolve or scale-down modern
civilization
to closely fit ancient land use patterns without returning to the
Stone
Age.
So we're not talking about a back-to-the-land commune that refuses to use technology and shuns the 'civilized' world, but rather a series of communities of, say, 100-150 people each, plus perhaps another 20 guests at any one time who would stay no longer than a month, and bring in new ideas and take away their learning of another way to live. These model communities would meld the best of do-more-with-less innovation and technology (the Internet, solar energy, hydroponics etc.) with the best of natural community (zero growth, 100% sustainability, everything recycled, no pollution, no hierarchy, LETS money, no private property or separate 'family' dwellings etc.) These communities would 'use' only a tiny proportion of 'their' land for human purposes, leaving the rest as wilderness for other creatures, for learning and exploration and discovery and reflection and connection but not exploitation. Their population density would vary depending on the carrying capacity of the area, but on average would probably not exceed one person per four acres (a globally sustainable level). Everyone would live as part of a self-sufficient, self-managed and self-selected community, and everyone would also live on the doorstep of wilderness. The people would work only as hard as they needed to, to be comfortable -- perhaps an hour per day each (as primitive man did according to revisionist history, and certainly enough in a modern egalitarian society with the benefits of today's technology). The rest of the day could be spent in leisure, in learning, in discovery, in making love (possibly, as Glenn suggests, with more than one partner, at the collective discretion of each community), in art, in writing or other expression -- whatever each individual wanted to do. Members would be free to travel, and through the Internet and communications media and visitors there would be lots of interaction with other Model Intentional Communities and with the 'outside world', but if they stayed away too long they would be asked to give up their membership in the community. What would be needed to make this work would be someone to donate the land, without recourse or obligation, and some self-selection mechanism for determining who the members of the communities would be. Building on a small standard set of inviolable principles to ensure egalitarianism, no-growth, and wilderness protection, each community could develop its own rules and code of conduct (or operate without rules, if it so chose). It would probably take some time, and learning from failure, before these model communities would stabilize and be ready to accept visitors -- their only obligation to the civilized world. Now imagine a young person exposed to such a community for a month in adolescence or high school. She would probably find it fun (certainly more than classwork, anyway), charming, stimulating, but not appealing enough to want to stay. But when she graduated and realized the devil's bargain of civilization -- the trade-off of ecocide and wage slavery and emotional suffocation in return for 'financial security', she might well decide then to join an existing Model Intentional Community, or start her own, spreading out and refusing to buy the crappy consumer products and over-priced postage stamp building lots that drive the current economy. In short, she, and many or most or all of her similarly-exposed classmates, might walk away -- millions each year, until diverse Model Intentional Communities flourish across the globe, and the old economy, with no 'consumers' left to sustain it, crumbles away, and with it the old politics and the old social rules and the old hierarchies and the old education systems, and a new culture that values wilderness and well-being rises in its place. That's my dream. It cannot work, of course, in a world of six billion people, let alone the 12-14 billion we are likely to see by the end of the century. But if we show people another model now, a better way to live, maybe it's not impossible to believe that people will willingly, eagerly reduce their family sizes to no more than one child per female adult, so that, within a couple of centuries, our population is down below one billion and we can all live this way. We could therefore do what early 'civilizing' cultures like the Anasazi and Incans perhaps did, when, after experimenting with urban civilized culture, they suddenly and inexplicably walked away from their cities and returned to a non-hierarchical and natural life. What a valuable education that could turn out to be. |
 My Salon Blog colleague Ted Ritzer keeps a list
of Useful
Web Sites (for all web users, not just bloggers) originally
compiled by Kevin Kelly, of Wired,
The Well, and Whole Earth Catalog fame. Kevin no
longer maintains his list, and instead has an intriguing Cool Tools site, but it's only
for the rich -- virtually everything on the site costs money, often a
lot of it. So Ted and I agreed it's time to update the Useful Web
Sites
list, and we need your help. What links and free
downloads should every self-respecting Internet user have on their
desktop?The list should not include pay sites, nor should it include news sites, blogs or other sites that appear on blogrolls (too many, and too subjective). Nor should it include highly specialized sites (I have a personal list of favourite genealogy sites, but I realize that few people would consider these 'essential'). To make the list manageable, I've identified 21 categories for the essential links (let me know if you think I've missed an entire category). If I get enough response, I'll publish a list of the Top 3 in each category and keep it on my sidebar or Spurl it (Spurl lets you keep your web bookmarks online and share them with others). The examples shown for each category are my personal favourites and some of them are eccentric, so they may not make the Top 3 list. Quite a few of them come from the excellent Jason Lefkowitz' Quality Software list (thanks to Internet Time for the link):
|
meish.org/014253.php
track this
site | 2 links
I've visited seventeen countries so far (I'm sure I've left some out), and if I could remember the names of the places I went to in America I'd do the dedicated map for that too. But I can't. Why not play too: Create your own visited country map.
Here's a quick little graph showing how traffic has
increased over the last eight months. Click the little image (or here)
for a much larger version.
The trendline tells the story — we've solidly doubled page hits. And this is just to the HTML pages — God (and Webalizer) only know what's happening on the RSS feed.
The spikes you're seeing there are posts that got linked to from high-profile sites. The Bill Gates post got a link from Boing Boing a few months ago and then there was the Basecamp review that got linked by Kottke a few weeks back. I think the smaller spikes further to the left are a couple entri es that got linked from Scripting News.
The regular spikes you see are the difference between weekday and weekend traffic — proof that we're all reading when we should be working.
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Google: An explanation of our search results: Google bought their own AdWord for the "jew" search term and uses it to link to a page explaining why the first link is an anti-semitic site. If you're confused, here's the background of the problem.
If you use Google to search for "Judaism," "Jewish" or "Jewish people," the results are informative and relevant. So why is a search for "Jew" different? One reason is that the word "Jew" is often used in an anti-Semitic context. Jewish organizations are more likely to use the word "Jewish" when talking about members of their faith. The word has become somewhat charged linguistically...
I did like the text of the AdWord link:
We're disturbed about these results as well. Please read our note...
However, here's the interesting thing: the Wikipedia entry for "jew" is on top now because of an organized GoogleBombing by people concerned about the results. Thousands of sites had a single entry of the word "jew" linked to Wikipedia's entry on the term. That was enough to push Wikipedia up the results and knock JewWatch out.
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Web Developer Extension: I don't remember where I heard about this one, but it's a peach of an extension. We've talked about the Web Developer extension for Mozilla and FireFox before, but the latest version comes with the sweetest sidebar you could ever imagine...
You can open the stylesheet for the current page in a sidebar, make changes to the CSS, and the page changes in real time.
You cannot believe how handy this is. Play all you like, and watch your changes happen, then just copy all the CSS and paste it into the actual stylesheet (or you can save directly from the sidebar). If the page has inline styles, they open in the sidebar too under a different tab.
Add Web Developer's ability to display the CLASS and ID of every element on the page, and you never have to touch the HTML to re-do the style. Just fiddle with the CSS in the sidebar, and if you ever need to figure out how to "get at" something, just display the CLASSes and IDs for a second, then hide them again.
If you need to figure out how the spacing on the page works out, just add a quick CSS rule to outline all the DIVs in, say, green. Or use Web Developer to outline them.
This is as close to CSS heaven as I've come.
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world66.com/myworld66/visitedStates
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I just don't get it I catch another angled story today about how Hotmail is going to be re-vamped and with storage improvements will be offering some expanded service. Reading the Microsoft press release their isn't that much substance to it. Just appears to be a lot more of the same. Time will tell but excitement in a post from a Micr osoft employee I guess we will have to sit back and watch.
cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/05/19/cyber.church.ap/index.html
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Thanks to Scoble for the link if you are still following the Spaceship One story. One of the attendee's to the historic flight took some amazing pictures that can be reviewed at [www.richard-seaman.com/Aircraft/AirShows/SpaceShipOne2004 /index.html]
Time for a Redesign: Dr. Jakob Nielsen: Here's a good interview with Jakob Nielsen about general Web usability in which he has some strong words about the state of search and information design.
[...] the individual pages, or units of information, are typically poorly described in terms of things like the headline and the summaries, which is all people have to choose from when they get the search-results listing. So if there was just one thing we could fix on the Web, and for intranets as well, I would say let's fix search; that's still the number one single thing that's causing people problems.
The second thing that's causing the most problems is information architecture [...]
And I'll just mention one glaring mistake that most companies make: They divide up their networks or Web sites between products and supplies and service. [...] For a customer, however, if I have a certain copier, let's say the X17 copier, and I want toner for that machine, or I want to get it serviced — well, what I want is to go and find my copier and, once I find it, I want to get supplies for my copier, I want to get some trouble-shooting, self-service information.
I agree very much with what he says about search. I believe that a well-crafted and tuned search engine and interface trumps all else. If you set up the keywords right, and have a good interface, you can get away with that being your main way of getting users around your intranet.
I've even heard of situations where all index pages were just canned searches (but I won't mention any names...Joe).
I often thought that would be a handy way to go in a static HTML intranet: just generate all index pages as searches against a page's META tags, so page authors could add their own pages to the intranet's index pages based on what they put in the META. You could likewise order them by the a "date published" META tag. So long as your trust your page authors to be intelligent with their META, you're in good shape.
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