stargeek
RADICAL SIMPLICITY: A SECOND LOOK, AND LESSONS LEARNEDRADICAL
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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. |
 Malcolm does it again.
My favourite New Yorker
writer this week (it's not in the online edition, alas) psychoanalyzes
America's passion with the SUV and provides some frightening
conclusions on automobile safety and driver psychology, and then wryly
hints at, but leaves unsaid, some deeper truths that might naturally
follow.The first part of the article basically says that Americans love SUV's because they make the driver feel safe, powerful, in control, under any driving conditions. They love them so much in fact that one Ford SUV plant in Michigan grossed 11 billion dollars last year (almost as much as McDonalds nationwide). And the automakers love them because SUVs are not subject to the same regulations as cars and minivans, and as a result are much cheaper and easier to build. Gladwell then shows, by means of a visit with Consumer Reports and a review of accident statistics, that the feelings of invincibility and control in an SUV are sheer myth. Bottom line is that the benefits of an SUV's size and weight in an accident are more than offset, much more than offset, by the higher risk of getting into an accident in the first place due to less precise and responsive handling, longer braking speed (AWD notwithstanding), and fewer signals to the driver of poor road conditions. And that's despite the marginal advantage of visibility due to the height of SUVs, itself offset by a higher risk of rollover. Ultimately the problem is all in the driver's mind. If drivers realized that they are no safer (in fact somewhat less safe) in an SUV than in a subcompact, their concentration and driving behaviour would compensate, SUV accidents would fall, and millions of ruined lives would be spared the consequences of this unwitting recklessness. Unfortunately, as long as SUVs convey the illusion of control and safety, that's not likely to happen. And the answer isn't to make SUVs and trucks subject to the same regulations as cars (though such regulations would vastly improve SUV product quality and gas mileage, which would be a good thing). That would increase the price but wouldn't change the pyschology. It's like when young hockey players were required to wear helmets, face guards and neck braces: Injury rates actually rose, because players suddenly felt safer taking more risks, and became careless, even aggressive, with elbows and sticks, feeling like they and their adversaries were immune to harm with all the padding. Gladwell ascribes the insatiable passion for control and safety and invincibility to a syndrome called Learned Helplessness. The syndrome reinforces the exaggerated feeling of lack of control, of enormous danger, of inability to respond to danger, by repeated exposure to actual or apparent threats: "Learned Helplessness is now
thought to play a role in such phenomena as depression and the failure
of battered women to leave their husbands, but one could easily apply
it more widely. We live in an age, after all, that is strangely
fixated
on the idea of helplessness: we're fascinated by hurricanes and
terrorist acts and epidemics like SARS -- situations in which we feel
powerless to affect our own destiny. In fact, the risks posed to life and limb by forces outside
our control are dwarfed by the factors we can control. Our
fixation with helplessness distorts our perceptions of risk."
Two years ago, millions of cows were slaughtered to contain a 'mad cow' breakout in Britain, and recent events in North America have whipped up the hysteria again, on the offchance that a small number of people could catch a rare form of CJD from infected cows. This week in China tens of thousands of wild civets are being slaughtered because someone thinks they might be connected with one new SARS case there. And as Gladwell reports, three years ago the greatest auto industry scandal in decades brought Firestone to its knees due to 271 tire failures in 630 billion tire miles, possibly contributing to a mere 0.00005% of auto accidents in the US that year. Gladwell leaves it at that, but the reader's mind cannot. The reality is that this delusion of danger, and the illusion that something can or has to be done, that someone -- British cows, Canadian farmers, Chinese cats, Firestone, Saddam Hussein -- must be brought to account in order to give us back control, is literally making us all crazy. It causes us to believe we cannot let children out of our sight even for a moment. It causes us to wildly change our diets, to avoid visiting whole countries, to fingerprint whole nations of visitors, to suspend civil liberties, to put barbed wire around our communities, to drink only bottled water, to wear masks, to introduce five levels of increasingly hysterical 'threat' to everyone's safety. It is irrational, neurotic, panic-stricken behaviour, a wild over-reaction to a tiny uncontrollable risk while we recklessly disregard risks we could control and which kill and destroy lives in large numbers everyday -- air and water pollution, tainted food from corrupt and underregulated meat packers, drugs in sport and airplane cockpits, drunk drivers, kids with guns, corporate frauds, a prison system that incarcerates the mentally ill and encourages criminal recidivism -- and on and on and on. Unfortunately, it is also in the best interest of the media and governments to focus on the uncontrollable risks, and to pander to public fear and fascination with them. They're more sensational, more visceral. And since there's really nothing that can be done about them, you can do anything, or nothing, in response to them, and not be held accountable, or responsible. The risks we could control, on the other hand, are mundane, day-to-day, hard and expensive but not impossible to remedy, would if remedied save thousands of lives, and is the responsibility of all of us. Viewers, voters, and consumers don't like to think about such things. Messy. Complicated. Nagging. Costly. And the media, and politicians, are glad to oblige. P.S.: The reason you never see photos of the esteemed Mr. Gladwell, he of the Tipping Point, is that he is only 39, and looks younger. His credibility demands we think of him as older. Besides which, he's (shhh -- don't tell anyone) a Canadian. Also, this week's New Yorker also has a great article that is, at least for now, online: James Surowiecki's summary of war profiteering in Iraq and the insanity and cost of outsourcing 'non-core' competency military activities to Bush's buddies (oops, I mean, to the private sector). |
 Vanessa wants to see the world, give something back, stop hoarding stuff But stays a meek consumer out of fear of 'not having enough'. And Billy hides his genius, and acts and dresses like his friends For fear of seeming different the means will justify the ends. The NRA sticks to its guns, Bush rolls back freedoms -- 'Red Alert!' -- They terrorize us and exploit our morbid fear of being hurt. Katrina cleans the house and clothes with germicides, her expertise Is making sure the world is free from her great fear of strange disease. Gerard works eighty hours a week, his job, his life a gaping void, His lifelong dreams sad victims of his fear of being unemployed. Joanna's child stays close at hand, a microchip in his left ear, As homage to her greatest dread: The fear of losing someone dear. He cut down all the trees nearby and, locked inside, John spends his days-- His artificial universe, in fear of nature's savage ways. When Karen's husband beats her up, she thinks it's her job to atone. Her shame and grief the ghastly cost of fear of being left alone. And all the while the chance of these things happening's remote, or less -- The greater dangers we ignore, distracted by learned helplessness: Pollution, global warming, wealth imbalance, population stress, Injustice, power run amok, farm factories, the world's oppressed. And while we look the other way, extinction looms within the fog Divert attention for too long and we become The Boiling Frog. |
 If
you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that I'm
opposed to unregulated 'free' trade, very worried about the
extraterritoriality of the WTO, NAFTA, Davos and other corporatist
captives, strongly opposed to domestic corporations 'offshoring' jobs,
using influence with the Bush regime and other right-wing governments
to circumvent social and environmental laws and responsibilities, and
a
great believer in taking the pledge to buy local, and in community
self-sufficiency.At the same time, I'm a strong supporter of the UN and other multi-lateral NGOs, and I believe that we each have a responsibility for the well-being of all the people and creatures of this world. Some readers have said this view is inconsistent, and I wasn't quite sure how to respond to such charges. Fortunately, Peter Singer, in his recent book on global ethics, I'll have more to say next week about Bush's fraudulent and despicable Earth Day media blitz, and the major media's shameless lack of critical evaluation of the utter nonsense that his propaganda machine has been churning out this week on the environment -- newspeak of Orwellian proportions. The first part of Singer's book deals with environmental responsibility, and his prescription for increasing it -- immediate ratification of Kyoto by the US and other holdout countries, and introduction of an emissions trading mechanism to make the realization of Kyoto feasible (subject to the need for some oversight on the disposition of the proceeds of such trading when it involves autocratic governments). The second part of the book deals with the global economy, and Singer adroitly tears apart the Economist's (and other neocons') naive assertion that economic globalization somehow benefits both rich and poor countries. He then goes on to prescribe a substantial reform of the WTO and the GATT, which could actually lead to more equitable distribution of wealth and more efficient production of economic goods, while safeguarding human rights, labour and the environment. Unfortunately, the multi-national corporations and corporatists who hold sway in the WTO would never tolerate Singer's prescription, since it would entirely divert the benefits of economic globalization from their pockets to those of the world's poor. The third part of the book deals with international law, and Singer lashes out at Bush for his unconscionable refusal to ratify the International Court of Justice, and for the UN's continued hesitancy to accept a duty (not a right) to intervene in situations of genocide and other humanitarian crises, even within a single nation. Singer is sanguine about the limitations and dangers of 'global government', but supports strengthening the UN to enable it to act as a 'protector of last resort', and including in its mandate the responsibility to supervise elections in all member nations. The fourth and final part goes back to ethical principles and proposes that countries must, in this world where national boundaries no longer have any logistic meaning, set aside national interest and embrace, once and for all, global interest, impartially. That does not mean cultural homogenization, but imposes a responsibility for the reduction of inequality, both of economic resources and personal rights and freedoms. Always the pragmatist, Singer concludes by worrying out loud about how the responsibility for a global ethic could be managed: It
is widely believed that a world government would be, at best, an
unchecked bureaucratic behemoth that would make the bureaucracy of the
EU look lean and efficient. At worst, it would become a global
tyranny,
unchecked and unchallengeable. These thoughts have to be taken
seriously. How to prevent global bodies becoming either dangerous
tyrannies or self-aggrandizing bureaucracies, and instead make them
effective and responsive to the people whose lives they affect? It is
a
challenge that should not be beyond the best minds in the fields of
political science and public administration.
I'd like to believe that this was possible, because if it isn't, we're in serious trouble. We cannot expect national governments to set aside parochial interests, especially when this entails accepting a responsibility that would, for the richer nations, inevitably lead to a drastic redistribution of wealth to poorer nations and hence a sudden and sharp reduction in, at least, economic living standards (if not necessarily well-being). But as John Ralston Saul has so eloquently argued, larger organizations and institutions, whether public or private, are almost always, and inherently, less efficient, less agile, more resistant to change, more hierarchic, and less transparent than smaller organizations. So the challenge is to achieve the best of both worlds, having organizations of global scope and authority and responsibility, but broken up into sufficiently small, autonomous and dynamic units that they are sensitive, resilient, responsible and responsive to the people and communities they serve. We can only hope that "the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration", wherever they are, are up to the task. |
 In order to test Edward Hall's hypothesis< /a> that population stress is the fundamental cause of human violence and war, I decided to see if there was a correlation between the state of civil unrest and the density and growth of human population in various countries around the world. Using data from the FAO, I computed the population per arable hectare of land for each country in the world with at least a quarter of a million people. Then, using data from the Population Reference Bureau, I mapped this to annual population growth rates (%) for these countries. Initially, I produced the scatter diagram shown below:  In this chart, about a third of the countries, those with annual growth rates under 0.5%, are excluded to keep it from being too busy. The overall global population per arable hectare (4.0) and overall global annual growth rate (0.8%) are shown by a large blue dot. The sustainable global population per arable hectare (1.0, per a variety of sources I have cited in earlier posts) and the sustainable overall global annual growth rate (0%) is shown by a large green dot. No country has achieved that sustainable level -- every country in the world has either positive growth rate or a density over 1 person per arable hectare. Sure enough, the countries furthest from the green ideal point are also, almost without exception, the most violent and war-torn countries. At the far extreme, you find Palestine and Kuwait, with Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt and most of the MidEast countries close by. In the upper central part of the chart you find most of the war-ravaged sub-Saharan African countries, led by the Congo, with its horrendous and incessant war, Sierre Leone, where militias amputate their enemies' limbs as a symbolic warning, and Rwanda & Burundi, site of the bloodiest massacre of the last half-century. Here, too, you'll find Colombia, where anti-drug spraying and civil war have killed thousands, destroyed the economy and poisoned 80% of the arable land. And you'll find Haiti, site of this week's coup, and several Central American states that have witnessed horrendous warfare in recent years. I then decided to multiply the two factors -- density and growth -- together to produce what I call the Population Stress Index (PSI). The calculations are shown graphically (I have tables if anyone wants them as well) on the map above: Purple for a PSI over 10 (extreme), Red for 4-10 (very high), Orange for 2-4 (high), Yellow for 0.5 to 2 (moderate), and White for less than 0.5 (low). If you were to correlate this index against the propensity for violence and war in the past few decades, I think you'd find a nearly perfect match. What's more interesting is that if you repeat the exercise using data from a century ago, you find the major belligerants of the world wars have the highest scores. By the middle part of the last century, China, Vietnam and Korea had exceptionally high scores. So what can be done to bring annual growth down to, and below, zero, to achieve globally a zero PSI, a situation that today exists nowhere on Earth? In his essay How to Influence Fertility, John R. Weeks, Director of the Population Center at San Diego State University suggests the following programs to reduce population growth, and ultimately reduce global human population to the sustainable level of one billion, no more than one person per arable hectare:
It's certainly a solution set worth striving for. I am, however, pessimistic that it's sufficient to overcome the enormous population momentum that I've written about on these pages. Nor do I have much confidence that, when we have an American regime that is hell-bent on banning abortion again, which deprives foreign aid and support to countries and agencies that practice family planning, and which funnels money to religious groups hostile to birth control, there will be enough political will or economic investment worldwide to bring these programs to fruition. You would think that, when evidence indicates that overpopulation is the key cause of environmental degradation, violence and war, and human suffering, there would be an unstoppable groundswell of support for programs to reduce our population back to sustainable levels. But that's the power of our culture: In the face of irrefutable proof of its folly, we continue to chant the mantra of Growth. Postscript: 3pm -- Just found this interesting site from Matthew White, who tabulated the death rate from war and atrocities during the period from 1975-2000, and conveniently mapped it like I did the PSI. His colour code is: bright red over 1% of the population (extreme), dark red 0.1-1% (high), maroon 0.01-0.1% (moderate), black under 0.01% (low):  Sure looks like a close correlation to PSI to me. I'll have to go back and plug in his data to my table to calculate the r2 correlation coefficient, but I'm willing to bet it's very high. |
 In his book The Future of Freedom, Fareed Zakaria argues that democracy cannot be imposed on countries that have no foundation of constitutional liberalism. Without such a foundation, he says, there are not sufficient self-imposed checks and balances to prevent the government from falling victim to a predisposition to nationalistic excess and corruption that political power inevitably brings with it. I've been watching the situation unfolding in Haiti and Venezuela, where once well-intentioned and widely-supported populist governments have fallen out of public favour and are in the process of being overthrown by Western-backed opposition groups. It occurred to me I've seen this all before, and it's like a bad replay of a vicious cycle that seems to play itself out again and again in most of the so-called third world 'democracies'. I've illustrated it, in over-simplified terms, in the chart above. The boxes in red show the phases of the cycle where nationalists and populists are in power, and those in blue show where pro-Western elites are in power. It's an endless cycle of hope, disillusionment, corruption, cynical foreign interference and despair. In countries with sizeable resources, like Iraq, the West tends to intervene to short-circult the cycle and replace one pro-Western government, when it gets too corrupt or independent, with another. In countries that are resource poor, like Bolivia, the West tends to ignore the woes of the prevailing governments regardless of their political stripe, using economic restrictions to keep them in line, and allowing prolonged crises to remain unsolved, stalling the cycle where Argentina and North Korea are shown on the above chart. This space is the hardest and most important to move forward from, and it is the space that many African nations have occupied for most of the time since they became independent of their colonizers. Occasionally, countries break out of the cycle. This usually happens of the country's own accord, on its own schedule, and only once constitutional liberalism has taken root. Chile and South Africa, for example, after each going through a particularly bloody cycle, may have finally had enough. They look, at least for now, to have imposed enough checks and balances on government, and enough institutions of constitutional liberalism, to have escaped the cycle. In his new book, Forging Democracy, Geoff Eley argues compellingly that democracy is a relatively recent, fragile, and hard-won accomplishment, one that still exists legitimately in very few countries. All it takes is a coup, an invasion by a non-democratic neighbour or a stolen election to take a country out of the virtuous cycle of democracy in the upper left of the chart, and hurl it back into the lower right where the cycle begins all over again. For most of the world, for most of human history, that much power has been just too much to handle. The message, which Zakaria and many others have made, is that countries without a heritage of democracy and constitutional liberalism need our (non-military) investment, our support and our patience. They do not need oppressive and unrepayable debts or 'free' trade rules rigged in favour of heavily-subsidized Western multinationals. They do not need military intervention or political interference every time they slip, as we all did, on the hard road to democracy, and every time they elect or find themselves ruled by a government whose political and economic ideas are at odds with ours. Let them build their own nations, supported by Western humanitarian and educational aid with no strings attached, and democracy may eventually take hold. Fail to do so, and the cycle will continue forever. |
 During
my ten years as a Chief Knowledge Officer, I spent a lot of time
trying
to figure out how people should use knowledge, and to some extent how
people learn, but it never occurred to me to develop an overarching
'theory of knowledge' until I decided to write a book called The Cost of Not Knowing. This
article summarizes that theory.This is not a new epistemology. I am disinterested in academic arguments that use language, a clumsy and artificial abstraction, to try to justify theories that to me are needlessly complex, counter-intuitive and of no practical use. For students of philosophy, and I'm sure this will come as no surprise to my regular readers, my theory is consistent with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological view of epistemology. For those interested in the philosophical basis for this theory, I would recommend David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous, much of which is devoted to explaining Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. I'm merely interested in its practical implications, in work and in life. My theory starts with learning. Learning is the process of direct and indirect experience and observation, and knowledge is simply the personal, collected, internalized result of learning. We learn in different ways (fig.1): The best way is through active participation, which engages all our senses in the learning experience. Next best is observation, where we see or hear but where some of our senses are not engaged. The least effective way is second-hand, through communication of reports from someone else. When a squirrel learns, by personal trial and error, how to defeat a baffle on a bird feeder, this is powerful knowledge, well retained and employed. When that squirrel instead watches another squirrel show how to do it, the knowledge is less valuable, less credible. The observing squirrel may not be able to replicate the other squirrel's moves, and the method may not be the best one for the observing squirrel, which may have a different body-weight or dexterity than the demonstrating squirrel's. And if one squirrel merely tells another, unfamiliar squirrel of the presence of food in a bird-feeder 'over there' that can be accessed by navigating around the baffle, that knowledge is even less valuable. The squirrel listening may doubt whether the baffle was or even can be overcome -- perhaps this second-hand report is merely bragging or a ruse on the part of the reporting squirrel. In human activities, we now get almost all of our knowledge second-hand, through books, newspapers, television and online, and its relative lack of credibility causes us to develop and assign a trust 'rating' to different sources, based on how often, in our experience and that of others we trust, that report has turned out to be accurate or useful. A blogroll is one manifestation of that need to rate the trust-worthiness of second-hand sources of knowledge. Schools, unfortunately, now provide almost all learning second-hand, and it is not surprising that 'field trips' are so loved by students -- an experience to learn something first-hand. It is also not surprising that the most effective and credible form of second-hand report is the story, which conveys knowledge in a way highly analogous to the way we might have experienced it personally. Why do we learn? The squirrel learns in order to survive -- by direct participation at first in play and then, often by observing its parents, in gathering food, building a nest etc. The squirrel draws as well on instinctive knowledge, which is coded in its DNA as an evolutionary advantage, which 'teaches' it the knowledge of its ancestors, for example to 'freeze' when it senses a predator species, which is often more effective than fleeing predators whose eyesight is attuned to motion, more than shape. That instinctive knowledge also tells it at what point, as the predator approaches, to flee, based on its ancestors' cumulative learnings of that point at which the probability of evasion through flight begins to exceed the probability of non-detection by the predator. Instinctive knowledge doesn't need to be learned, so it doesn't appear on fig.1 above. We're born with it. In natural systems, where the community, the physical area in which animals spend their entire lives, is small and almost completely 'knowable', we learn only to survive and make a living, and because nature has evolved us, as an adaptive mechanism, to find learning fun (fig.2). In such closed systems, we can get almost all the knowledge we need from direct experience and observation, and from our instincts -- there is little need to rely on second-hand reports as a source of learning. As that physical area that we need to know to survive increases, we can no longer get by with direct experience and observation, so we need to evolve languages to convey more and more knowledge second-hand. Our society becomes inevitably more interdependent, and in addition to survival there are now three more reasons to learn:
I had dinner last evening with some of our neighbours, and we were talking about some of these immense problems, and one of my neighbours, a student of history, said that no problem in history has ever been solved until it got so bad for so many that there was a spontaneous revolution. What would it take, he asked, before these problems -- overpopulation, famine, oppression, violence, disease, resource scarcity, pollution, war, suffering, cruelty, misery -- got bad enough that people would rise up and demand immediate resolution? I think the massive unrest and strife we see everywhere in the world indicates that we have already passed that point. However, in order to have a revolution there must be (a) consensus on the need for change, (b) consensus on the change that is needed, and (c) a simple process to bring about that change. Historically, the solution has been political -- to oust, violently if necessary, an identifiable oppressor, the cause of the problem, and replace him (or them) with new leaders committed to the consensus solution. And although billions have shown that they see Bush's corporatist imperialism, and the oligopolists' 'free' trade and globalization, to be causes of some of the major problems we face, once we get rid of these scourges, most of the biggest problems will remain. These more intractable problems have no identifiable enemy and, as yet, no consensus solution. They are systemic problems that can only be changed by a radical change to our entire global economic and political systems. And changes to these massive, entrenched and leaderless systems have historically almost never come about by political means, but rather by introduction of disruptive technology innovations that undermine the existing system, as the agricultural and scientific and industrial revolutions did. It is tempting to believe that scientists, not collective human energy and collaboration, are the only hope we have for saving us from ourselves, of rescuing us from our colossal ignorance. What is the cost of not knowing when, even if we could communicate enough knowledge to achieve global consensus on the need for change and the change that is needed, there is still no simple process to bring about that change? If we were to magically and suddenly be able to bring knowledge to bear that would persuade the vast majority of people on the planet that unless we quickly reduce human population below one billion and reduce each human ecological footprint to no more than one eighth of the current Western footprint, would that be enough to precipitate a combination of voluntary abstinence, intense social pressures, and (over the objections of the very powerful elite) laws and taxes and sanctions, to ensure that these targets were met? We did bring about the end of slavery this way, and the end of the Vietnam War, and in much of the world women's suffrage. Is the intractability of our greatest problems really the lack of a simple, known solution, or is it rather the lack of consensus on the problem, and of its severity and urgency and what needs to be done to find a solution? -- The cost of not knowing. Until the reactionary cult of leadership took over business thinking a few short years ago, there was a consensus that the best way to run a business was to agree on and articulate the business' objectives, get each employee to define their role in achieving those objectives, remove the obstacles that prevented them from fulfilling those roles effectively, and otherwise stay out of the way and trust the Wisdom of Crowds to produce better results than the arrogance of a few. Could the same principle, applied to the world's most challenging and threatening problems, work in society as a whole? And if not, why not? It is the examples of slavery and the 60s peace movement and women's suffrage that have caused me, insufferable optimist that I am, to think that there is hope. The solution of reducing human population by 90% and ecological footprint by 10% (in the third world) to 90% (in the West) is daunting, but it's also a simple, clear, measurable objective. And if we have six billion people working on it, convinced that this is what must be done to save the world, there's no reason why it shouldn't be achievable. Women choose not to have babies if they know pregnancy would put their lives in danger, why wouldn't they choose likewise if they knew it put their world in danger? Would knowledgeable people agree to participate in an annual lottery for the right to have a baby, and live with the results, as they now compromise so many of their 'rights' for the greater good? Would they agree to a 100% tax on all wealth beyond sustainable consumption levels, to be distributed to the poor? Would they shut down permanently businesses that knowingly damage the environment? Would they abandon urban sprawl and big centralized governments in favour of self-managed, self-selected, self-sufficient communities if it could be shown that these are more socially and environmentally responsive, and responsible, political units? Would they wrench power, by citizen and consumer action, from unrepentant corporatists who refused to give up their excessive wealth and influence? It is hard to give up old paradigms. I know a lot of people that see the salvation of the world in global government, to which all states will cede authority. I see no reason to believe that bigger more powerful governments, which largely got us into this mess, and which are more removed from the people they supposedly represent, would do anything but make the problems worse. But as the Internet has shown, the real power in any system remains at the ends: The front lines, the communities, where people learn by direct experience what works and what does not, what makes sense and what does not. It is as individuals and as members of small communities that we define ourselves and establish our belief systems and commit ourselves to action and to change. As citizens and consumers and members of communities, if we only knew, we could accomplish what needs to be done. It is time for a bloodless coup, the taking back of power and authority from central corporatist political and economic institutions and its reinstatement in local communities and in individuals. To bring it about, we need only accomplish these four daunting tasks:
The cost of not knowing is the end of our world. It's too great a cost to pay, and the answer, if we use the power of knowledge, is within our collective reach. |
 As you may know, I've been maintaining (manually) detailed tables of contents of my blog posts (one per blog 'category') since I started. They're a bit clumsy, but they get a fair bit of traffic so I know people are using them. Right now they exist as six 'stories' and I thought it might be interesting to try to put them together into a single, interactive index. I'm competent in neither HTML nor Radio's 'outlining' function (I confess I don't even know how to use anchors properly -- the twisties below and the links in the graphic above don't work, and links below should really take you to the specific subcategory within the table of contents), so I can't make it pretty or functional, but you can get the idea of how it might work:  BLOGS
& BLOGGING:BUSINESSSocial
Networking
Blogs in Business Knowledge Management & Learning Innovation Entrepreneurship New Collaborative Enterprise Advice for Knowledge Workers ARTS
& SCIENCESLiterature, Language, Communication
Stories and Narrative The Arts Sciences & Social Sciences Technology Miscellaneous Posts ENVIRONMENTAL
PHILOSOPHYHow to Save the World
New Collaborative Enterprise Other Environmental Articles Overpopulation Animal Rights Activism Environmental & Social Economics & Law Stories and Narrative Other Philosophical Articles POLITICS
& ECONOMICSLiberty,
Democracy and the World
The Bush Regime & US Politics Globalization, Corporatism, Free Trade Governance & the Political Process Economics Environmental & Social Economics & Law The Education System Canadian Politics Iraq & the Mideast CREATIVE
WORKSMy six categories have a total of 40 subcategories, of which five (Blogs in Business, Technology, Stories & Narrative, New Collaborative Enterprise, and Environmental & Social Economics & Law) overlap categories and hence appear under two categories each. The ten most popular subcategories (most linked, and most commented-on) are shown in bold. This taxonomy is essentially the same one I use for my filing cabinet tabs and for my My Documents subfolders, except that they omit the 'housekeeping' type tabs and subfolders that house my background papers, messages and private and personal records. I am not offering this as any kind of framework for a 'universal' taxonomy. In fact, I've been adamant that any personal content management system needs to allow us to index our documents and messages any way we want, our way, at whatever level of granularity works best for each individual. Universal taxonomies just don't work. But if we think of a blog as the 'public area' of our personal content, the shareable part of our personal 'filing cabinet', I thought it might make an interesting case study in how we might best 'present' each individual's publicly-available 'stuff' for effective browsing by others. I see the blog, and at a broader level the 'tabs' of our personal content management system, our 'filing cabinet', as nothing more than 'addresses' or destinations to send content to. So although Microsoft would have us believe that 'saving' a document or message, 'sending' a document or message to someone else, and 'publishing' a document or message to a blog or website, are three fundamentally different functions and applications, I see them as conceptually indistinguishable -- they're all actions that move content from one specific space to another. That's why I have proposed a single, intuitive Workspace Manipulation and Document Annotation tool to replace virtually every application users have on their PCs today, a tool that would finally make PCs accessible to the billions of technologically challenged among us. But I digress... I can envision the Interactive Blog Table of Contents working in one of two ways:
Ultimately, I can see the development of an invisible (to the user) 'metadata layer', which would take our preferred organization of our personal stuff and translate it into some universal standard, and then as needed into each reader's personal organization of his/her content, so that for example if Jon Husband wants to browse my publicly permissioned content, he won't see it organized as I have, above, but will instead see it automatically reorganized and relabelled using his personal taxonomy and nomenclature. I believe this 'metadata' layer development will be one of the most interesting and important technology challenges of this century. In the meantime, if there's sufficient interest, I'll buckle down and learn enough HTML and Outlining to implement either solution (1) or (2) above for my blog. |
 I've written recently about the future state of business, a world incorporating powerful, versatile social networking tools. And I've played with most of the first-generation social software and read volumes about how it will, or won't, work in business and ultimately affect our daily lives. The concept is wonderful, and the technology is fun, but the tools developed so far suffer from three fatal flaws:
In an earlier post I stressed the importance of allowing each individual to maintain and organize their own content and their own networks their own way. At that time I said: "When you force people to adapt their mental models to a standard model (inevitably a complex one to accommodate a variety of specifications), a standard model that is dictated by the technology and its designers, you will get no usage, or at best reluctant, inefficient usage." If I were start all over again, to design the second generation of social software, it would be transparent to the user, wouldn't require any submissions, wouldn't keep any content in any central location, and would be so simple to use that even people without computers would use it.  That
may sound like a tall order, but it really isn't. It would be like
building a house. Let's start with content, the foundation of the
house. Rather than getting people to submit stuff, we need to help
people to organize the personal information they already have, and
then
harvest it automatically. When I talk to people in the front lines of
just about every business, from proprietorships to large companies,
they confess their filing cabinets, the document folders on their hard
drives, rolodexes and other personal collections of information are
chaotic and impossible to find things in. They also say no one ever
taught them how to organize these personal repositories so that
content
could be found easily. Everyone just assumed that the skill to do this
comes naturally. So first order of business is personal content management. No
rules, no standards. Just some simple
tools that allow people to organize all the information and documents
they have into some order so it can be readily found again when
needed.
Let a whole bunch of PCM tools loose on the market, and let them
evolve
as people learn what they need and what they don't and what
organization makes sense to them as
individuals. Weblogs would be a good source of ideas for the
design of PCM tools, since essentially that's what blogs are.The next floor of the house is the metadata. Software developers would work with the users of individuals' content other than the individual him/herself to ascertain how they might want to use the individual's newly-ordered content, and develop tools to harvest the relevant metadata to do that. This second layer of tools essentially reorganizes the individual's content, transparently, in ways that make it more useful to the individual's networks -- actual and potential friends, associates, customers, suppliers etc. These tools would spider the content and essentially 'fill in the forms' that those in each of the individual's networks might need to access the individual's information in the format they want it in. The PCM tools would allow people to specify which content could be seen and accessed by others with the appropriate 'permissions', and the metadata tools would repect these permissions. These metadata tools would be invisible to the individual user, and would work automatically in the background as the individual added, deleted, and changed the content using the PCM tools. Still with me? Now comes the pièce de résistance. The third level of the house is the networking and connectivity tools, the ones that, analogous to the telephone switch, actually enable the identification of relationships, the making of connections, the transfer of information, and ultimately even collaboration and other more dynamic interactive applications of connectivity -- transactions. These applications harvest and mine the metadata, and have no content of their own. They operate on a just-in-time basis. These tools might include an Expertise Finder, a Connector, a Super Address Book, a Network Builder, a Publisher, and a Subscriber. So for example, if I'm researching solar power for my new house, or looking for people to work with me on a Meeting of Minds business assignment, I could use the Expertise Finder tool to identify who I could and should talk to, what information each of those experts has in their personal content that is permissioned for me to look at, multiple contact information for each of those experts, and the cost, if any, of contacting the expert and/or accessing their personal content. A Connector tool would then enable one-click connection to the selected expert(s) regardless of medium selected -- telephony, instant or asynchronous messaging, Simple Virtual Presence, etc. The Connector tool, just like a telephone switch, would connect people within an organization, or between organizations, or between an individual and someone in an organization -- it wouldn't matter. So if I work for a bank and I need to find an expert in financial derivatives, it would work exactly as my personal solar power search did. I could then choose between 'found experts' within the bank and those outside. If I want to contact my father in Winnipeg, or the group I play poker with on Friday nights, I would use the Super Address Book instead of the Expertise Finder before using the Connector tool, but the process would be analogous and as simple and intuitive as looking in a rolodex or phone book. And if I wanted to build a new network of people interested in discussing New Collaborative Enterprises, or whether Kerry should pick Kucinich as a running mate, I might use the Network Builder tool, which would function exactly like the Expertise Finder except it would identify people with particular interests rather than particular expertise. Finally, I could use the Publisher tool to 'push' selected content out instead of waiting for people to come and get it, and a Subscriber tool, based on RSS, that puts out a 'standing order' to pull in and aggregate others' content that meets my specified criteria. Just-in-time. Dead simple. Built on information I maintain, control and organize my way. Personal versus business information, internal or external, doesn't matter. A utility. An appliance. You could even build additional commercial and transaction tools on top of this. Buy a 'smart' fridge/freezer that takes inventory of what you have, 'permission' it to feed your PCM tool, and your grocery supplier can automatically compute, fill and deliver your order with no intervention by you at all. There are some important lessons to learn from the success and failure of previous technologies. A combination of simplicity-of-use, personalizability and adaptability has made tools like paper, books, pencils, paints, diaries, typewriters, newspapers, timepieces, telephones, radio & TV, personal calculators, CDs and DVDs ubiquitous and hugely popular. In contrast, the lack of these attributes in tools like the PC, musical instruments, the VCR, the fax machine, almost all software, PDAs and videoconferencing, has severely limited the market for these tools, and caused millions to curse their complexity. I don't blame first-generation social software designers for making the three mistakes that already have detractors raising their eyebrows. We need to do lots of experiments to see what will work and what won't. There's no harm designing and playing with skylights and new types of shingles even before the foundation is ready to be poured. And as Stowe said, social software "will become the cornerstone of a revolution in IT", not to mention a revolution in how we connect, network, and organize and share information -- activities that comprise much of the fabric of our lives. We just need to remember: Simple, Personal, Decentralized, Just-in-time. |
 One of my peers in the badly-named discipline of Knowledge Management is IBM's complexity guru, Dave Snowden. Last year Dave wrote a paper entitled Managi ng for Serendipity, which I really enjoyed. Dave appears to share my disdain for the context-free capture and 'codification' of people's business knowledge in massive 'knowledge bases' just in case someone else might be able to benefit from that knowledge sometime in the future (assuming they can find it). Dave's paper explains how senseless this expensive exercise is. I have outlined in my Personal Knowledge Management articles why I think Knowledge Management energies would be much more effectively spent (1) developing social networking applications and competencies, and (2) developing personal content management applications and competencies, focused on the specific, individual needs of the organization's front-line knowledge workers. In the above-mentioned article, Dave asks the question: If capturing 'best practices' and similar context-deficient knowledge in central repositories is, except in limited cases*, ill-advised, what if anything should organizations be collecting in centralized 'knowledge bases' and what centrally-coordinated programs should be used to encourage learning and knowledge transfer? He suggests three possibilities:
* Dave acknowledges the value of 'best practices' in internet payment systems and safety procedures in a nuclear power plant, for example. |
 Sudan has a great deal in common with Afghanistan. Both countries are horrendously overpopulated relative to their carrying capacity, and have exploding populations -- Sudan's population of 40 million people is doubling every 25 years and that rate is not slowing, raising the spectre of its population topping a half billion by the end of the century. Both Sudan and Afghanistan are also desperately poor, with only 7% of Sudan's land and 12% of Afghanistan's capable of supporting agriculture. What's worse, over-farming, over-grazing and global warming are producing chronic drought, which in turn causes massive famine and desertification. Encroaching desert has already halved arable land in Afghanistan since 1975, and the same phenomenon is happening in Sudan. Both countries have long legacies of brutal and repressive dictatorships, foreign occupation, savage and interminable civil war, lawlessness, genocide and, in the case of Sudan, slavery. And both countries provided safe harbour for Osama bin Laden. What is happening now in the Western Sudanese provinces of Darfur is merely a continuation of a centuries-long legacy of misery, poverty, conflict and violence. In this week's New Yorker Pulitzer Prize winner Samantha Power reports from Darfur, with first-person interviews with government and rebel leaders and the victims caught eternally in the middle. Some of the information she reveals in telling the agonizing story of this impoverished and hopeless nation:
What about invading Sudan? Its government is much more popular, at least in the North, than the government of Afghanistan, and the end result of an invasion would inevitably be the same as what we see in Afghanistan: Tyranny replaced by anarchy, the retrenchment of the power of local warlords, massive resentment by the locals of the invading force's inability to bring order or build infrastructure to allow even the promise of a normal life. Intractible civil war and strife. And quagmire for the invaders. Should we arm the non-Arab people of Darfur so they can defend themselves? After all, the weapons used in the genocide against them came from the West and from Russia, so can two wrongs make a right? And we can't disarm the janjaweed -- in Sudan, as in Afghanistan, there are so many weapons that disarmament is an impossible objective. This was, of course, how we dealt with the earlier problem in Afghanistan -- providing arms to the Taliban and other extremists to allow them to defend themselves from the invading Russians. We all know how successful that was. Should we relocate a million or two million people to Chad, and pay Chad to take them in, and protect their borders? This was how we dealt with the persecuted Jews after World War II, helping them build a new homeland in Israel. That, too, has been a political nightmare. Why would the people of Chad, itself overpopulated and struggling, be willing to give up part of their homeland to accommodate a huge exodus of destitute foreign refugees? The sad reality is that there is no answer. The problem is that there are too many people and not enough land, water, or resources to support them. Throughout human history, the maximum sustainable population has been 160 people per arable square mile (1 person per 4 arable acres), which would mean that Sudan should have no more than 11 million people, a quarter of its current population. By the end of the century it could have fifty times this maximum sustainable population, and if desertification isn't halted, it will be even worse. If we think democracy, 'free' trade, education and technology are somehow going to prevent this situation from being catastrophic, we're wildly deluding ourselves. What's happening in Sudan, now, is foreshadowing what will happen worldwide by the end of this century if we don't address massive overpopulation, unsustainable resource consumption, and all the consequences that these two excesses produce: famine, war, destitution, lawlessness, epidemic disease, terrorism, tyranny, oppression, suffering, genocide, and ecological collapse. Sudan is a country out of control, and while we must of course provide humanitarian aid to its needy masses, and do everything we can to persuade its government to allow us to help it broker a lasting peace, this is only a stop-gap. We must convince the government and the people of Sudan that it must reduce its population and start stewarding its resources in a sustainable and responsible way. Otherwise the next war, the next genocide, the next famine, the next epidemic, the next oppressive government, will be incomparably, unimaginably worse. They say you can't get blood from a stone, but there seems to be no limit to how much blood can be wrenched from an ocean of sand. Photograph of a Darfur refugee camp from this remarkable online portfolio by Bruno Stevens at New Yorker online. |
 Last year I waded through Jeremy Rifkin's The Hydrogen Economy and wrote a blog post that explained what's promising about hydrogen as a fuel, and its two major drawbacks. I used two charts, reproduced here, to explain how it works and what's holding it back. The chart above shows the energy economy we have today. Red boxes are non-renewable, polluting and environmentally damaging energy sources and green ones are clean and renewable. Whether we use hydrocarbon fuels or electricity to light, heat and cool our homes, it's likely that non-renewable, damaging sources are producing it. Our cars likewise burn fossil fuels, and although hybrid cars are certainly an improvement, they still depend on fossil fuels to create ('reform') the hydrogen that the fuel cells convert into electricity. The chart below shows the energy economy in twenty years, if we can solve the two major dilemmas of the hydrogen economy.  Under this scenario, hydrocarbons are replaced by solar, wind and other renewable, non-polluting, non-damaging energy sources. The central hydro utility is replaced by a local energy co-op, which produces energy for your community from its own solar collectors, wind turbines etc. The compressed hydrogen used to power next-generation pure hydrogen vehicles is produced from some of this electricity, and distributed through local service stations. The excess electricity produced by these cars can be used to provide light, heat and cooling to the home or sol |
I've now finished Jim
Merkel's book