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Capitalism, Meet GlobalismCapitalism, Meet GlobalismCapitalism, Meet Globalism 01/07/2004 01:57 PM Capitalism has met the enemy, and it is capitalism. Just ask the pharmaceutical industry. This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)Capitalism, Meet GlobalismGrok Headline matches for Capitalism, Meet GlobalismGlobalism or Nationalism, which will it
|
 The
same day I posted my article about William McDonough, reader Brian
Dear
pointed out the work that Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute
has been doing in much the same vein. Lovins, with colleagues Paul
Hawken and L. Hunter Lovins, wrote a (fully downloadable) book
entitled
Natural Capitalism that, like McDonough's Cradle to Cradle,
suggests pragmatic, creative ways for man to stave off environmental
disaster by simply thinking and working better, more organically, with
nature as the model. If McDonough's bottom-line message was Learn from, and imitate, nature -- nature
knows how to design and build things right, everything recycled, zero
waste, Lovins' could be Shift
the economy to recognize the inherent value of people and natural
resources, and you can transform the world. While
McDonough, the architect, is focused on physical design, Lovins, the
economist, is focused on systems design. They are perfect complements,
with similar, optimistic, "let's get on with it" worldviews and
concrete prescriptions for change, a refreshing change from the
relentless pessimism in so many analyses of the world's environmental
problems.You can get an excellent idea of Lovins' prescription by reading the chapter summaries of his book online (I'm going to buy the whole book for my reference and "lending" library). Or, read the HBR summary, A Road Map for Natural Capitalism. Using case studies and small successes achieved already, the authors explain how each industry and each facet of the economy can be transformed by looking at it differently, more holistically, including the natural capital that we currently don't value and waste, and step-by-step changing its operating principles, structure, strategy, practices, rewards and governance, and drawing on biologically inspired design principles. Everything in Lovins' prescription is achievable, sensible, and consistent with looking at the economy and markets as a means of maximizing human well-being instead of wealth. But it is in the final chapters, where he takes on the environmental pessimists (like me) and the unrepentent markets-need-growth traditionalists, that I start to lose conviction that this prescription will do the job. After effectively destroying the myth that our economic markets are free and efficient, he describes ways (e.g. tax shifting, changing our measurements of success, encouraging risk and innovation, improving regulation and information) that we can reinvent markets, much as he proposed in earlier chapters how to reinvent industries. His ebullient description of the economic and cultural transformation of Curitiba, Brasil, by a succession of architect-mayors who have redesigned one of the world's poorest and fast-growing cities into a city that works for people, is truly inspiring (anyone know if it's really that successful?) But ultimately, the economy is designed the way it is to funnel power and wealth to those that have it and plan to keep it. It is not designed for efficiency, equity, fairness, and optimal distribution of resources -- in fact, as the extent of poverty, famine, and destitution in a world where a small minority have unimaginable wealth demonstrates -- political and social structures are designed to keep the status quo, to hoard resources, and to create and sustain inequitable distribution of wealth and power. Lovins suggests that the four groups in our political and economic systems: the blues (free-marketers), reds (socialists), greens (environmentalists), and whites (pragmatists), need to set aside their differences and opposing worldviews and respect the fact that each is partly right, and collaboratively assemble an "operating manual for Planet Earth". If there was a more equitable distribution of the resources, power and knowledge needed to assemble such a manual, and if the population and average footprint of humans on this planet weren't both catastrophically soaring, and if the horrendous consequences of these two realities (consequences like war, famine, global waming, epidemic disease, violence and crime, despair, hopelessness etc.) werren't preoccupying all our time and attention, such a manual might be possible. But ultimately, Lovins' prescription is like asking the crew and passengers of an airplane that has been struck by lightning to collaborate and share knowledge and energies to assess how to bring the plane to a safe landing, while it is plummeting to Earth. It's a nice idea, but I think it's a little late for that. |
One bit of joy amidst the sadness of leaving Creative Commons is the opportunity to introduce you to Mia Garlick, our new General Counsel. Mia is an IP expert who just recently came to CC from the Silicon Valley branch of the top-notch law firm Simpson Thatcher and Barlett, which she joined after getting her LLM from Stanford (specializing in Law, Science, and Technology). Before coming to the States, Mia had a far-ranging and powerful IP and media law practice in Australia, her home. I've gotten to work with Mia over the last two weeks and am wildly excited both for the staff and for her, as the great CC experiment continues to expand. Mia's strengths in media, international law, and science fit the organization's future needs to a T, and her quick wit and energy will make her a blast to work with, inside CC and out. Congrats and best wishes to you, Mia!
With Joel out experiencing the Great American Christmas Road Trip, the news posting responsibility has fallen on me for the day, with our friend Brian from Kotaku pitching in when he can. I was supposed to be able to check Joel's email for whatever juicy bits might come to us through that avenue, but unfortunately it seems I can't, so if you have any hot news that we need to be aware of (or you just want to engage in hot man-cyber) please hit me up at ryan [at] this website. Thanks!
OK - multi-post sequence - all based upon this post......
See my comments at the end........
Here's Ted Leung.......
Back. Well, I"m finally back in the saddle after a week at OSAF. It was five months since my last visit, which was probably a little too long. Some of the things that I talked about this week included several meetings on Item Clouds, a long clarifying discussion on our Data Model, and several discussions on Item Sharing. Anthony Baxter dropped by to tell us about shtoom, encourage us to think about voice in Chandler and suggest some ways to get more involved with the python community, so I suppose I'll forgive him for greeting me by telling me that I looked like ****. It was also a good time to be around to accelerate the coordination needed for planning the 0.4 release, and since we've hired a number of new folks, it was good to meet all of them, and spend some time developing existing relationships.
This trip I also managed to have an active evening social calendar. I spent one evening with our old family friends David and Katherine Fedor. It's been entirely too long since I saw them -- hopefully we'll be able to get the families together sometime soon. I spent another evening with fellow Brownies David Temkin and Sarah Allen who are both at Laszlo. David and I worked on Newton together, and it was interesting to hear his reflections on the project now that a number of years have passed.
I also ended up spending an evening with Marc Canter, his wife Lisa, and Phil Wolff. Marc is doing a bunch of open source style projects in addition to his consulting with various companies in the social software space. A lot of what he's doing right now centers around FOAF, and I'm looking forward to seeing the results soon. I think that there could be a nice tie in between the PeopleAggregator and Chandler's "sharing circles". One thing that Marc's interested in is being able to build another user interface on top of Chandler functionality. If we do a good job at MVC in CPIA, then this shouldn't be that much labor. Something that struck me as I talked with Marc was the long term view that he's taking of the stuff that he's working on. He's thinking multiple years worth of effort, a point of view that's been in short supply / disfavor since the dot com boom and "internet time".
Phil Wolff has gotten a fair amount of reading in our house -- he's hit both my and Julie's aggregator. In fact, when I told Julie I was meeting Phil too, she exclaimed "the thousand beers guy". You never know what will stick... Phil's been doing a lot of work with the Kerry campaign, and thinking about the issues related to taking the software artifacts created by campaigns and making sure that they have a life so that succeeding elections/campaigns could make use of them. He also asked me some interesting questions about Chandler. How will Chandler compete with a "Google in a box" appliance that includes search, e-mail, etc? How will Chandler do calendar support for events like Muslim prayers which occur a sunrise and sunset in your current location? This requires knowing where you are in the world so that you can compute when sunrise and sunset are. Food for thought, indeed. Phil had two thought provoking posts earlier that day, one on the 'Perfect' Corporate Weblogging 'Elevator Pitch' Competition (which he is judging) and another on social network software.
Lisa, Marc, and Phil got me the last night I was in town, and by then I was slightly draggy (I didn't say that Anthony was wrong), so I hope that I was suitably interesting company. [Ted Leung on the air]
It was great to meet Ted Leung - someone who I have been reading and who's working at one of my favorite entities - OSAF. When Mitch and Andy were on their original road show - showing off version .1 of Chandler - they promised me that we'd be able to build on the APIs and data structures - utilizing what's known as an 'object store'.
Dave Winer had built an object store - it was called the XML storage system - so I knew that the world needed an open source of of those. When I heard Chandler had one - I got excited!
So we all have vested interests in seeing the OSAF succeed.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people all come up with the same conclusions on FOAF, sharing and multiple accounts being aggregated together. This meme is taking off.
A mash-up that was bound to happen sooner
or later. Link
(Thanks, Vincent!)
Oh, it looks like
the USB GPS Receiver in Microsoft Streets and Trips 2005 is ... the
same one from 2004, the Pharos iGPS-360. Who knew finding that
information on the internet could be so easy? Frank Townend,
apparently, because he told me.
All the specs, and I launch my own personal satellite with my mind, after the jump.
The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry: capitalism and globalism
