stargeek
FOUR STORIES THE MEDIA MOSTLY MISSEDFOUR STORIES
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 Some interesting stories this week, that, for
the most part, escaped major media
attention. They're all about complex issues with long-term
implications, so maybe the big media didn't want us worrying our
pretty
little heads about them. Republicans break into private Democrat databases, use and leak what they find for partisan purposes: First up, via Atrios, another Bush Republican scandal, this one very reminiscent of Watergate. What these clowns, including Novak, did, is completely illegal, and they should all be in prison. Here's the lead from the Boston Globe, with a link to the full story: Republican staff members of the
US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for
a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on
copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe. From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics. The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November. [More] Canadian sues Ashcroft & Ridge for knowingly & illegally sending him to Syria for torture sessions: The US Torture Victim Protection Act, ironically passed by Bush I to extend Americans' ability to sue for torture overseas, makes illegal the practice of 'extraordinary rendition' -- the practice of using other countries to extract information through torture and other methods illegal in the US. Maher Arar, who was intercepted at an airport stopover on his way home to Canada from vacation, deported by US authorities without evidence, due process, or notification of Canadian authorities, and then tortured by Syrians for over a year before being released without charge, wants to prevent others from being subject to extraordinary rendition. In his case, Arar makes it clear his release was a Syrian screw-up -- he was supposed to 'disappear' in Syria's prison system to keep his case from coming to light. The second irony is that, although never charged with anything, he's banned from entering the US for five years so he can't testify personally in the case. Sixty Minutes has covered the story but the US print media have hardly mentioned it. [Full Story] Senior CIA advisors tell Bush of high probability of Iraq degenerating into civil war I've only made two major predictions on this blog and this was one of them -- that regardless of what Bush tries to do to 'impose' order, democracy and constitutional liberalism on Iraq (and Afghanistan), the people of those countries will determine their own future on their own terms and in their own time -- and that will inevitably be by way of further bloodshed, totalitarianism and civil strife. It's encouraging to see that someone in a position to get Bush's attention is saying the same thing. Not that he's likely to listen. Here's the lead from Knight-Ridder, picked up by Common Dreams and not many others: CIA officers in Iraq are warning
that the country may be on a path to civil war, current and former
U.S.
officials said Wednesday, starkly contradicting the upbeat assessment
that President Bush gave in his State of the Union address. The CIA
officers' bleak assessment was delivered verbally to Washington this
week, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because
of the classified information involved.
The warning echoed growing fears that Iraq's Shiite majority, which has until now grudgingly accepted the U.S. occupation, could turn to violence if its demands for direct elections are spurned. Meanwhile, Iraq's Kurdish minority is pressing its demand for autonomy and shares of oil revenue. "Both the Shiites and the Kurds think that now's their time," said one intelligence officer. "They think that if they don't get what they want now, they'll probably never get it. Both of them feel they've been betrayed by the United States before." These dire scenarios were discussed at meetings this week by Bush, his top national security aides and the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, said a senior administration official, who requested anonymity. Another senior official said the concerns over a possible civil war weren't confined to the CIA but are "broadly held within the government," including by regional experts at the State Department and National Security Council. [Full Story] Photo above: Tens of thousands of Shiites demonstrate in Baghdad for an end to foreign occupation Oh, and my other major prediction? That the crushing Bush debt will plunge the world into economic collapse. The IMF are my strange bedfellows on that one. It's going to be a fun year. Environmental groups grapple internally with the explosive issue of population -- and immigration Last but not least, a story from the LA Times about how environmental groups like the Sierra Club are waking up to the terrifying prospect of One Billion Americans, with the consequence of coast-to-coast sprawl, eco-catastrophe and zero green space. The debate pits two core liberal values: environmentalism and openness to immigration, head-to-head. The result, not surprisingly, is a headache. The discussion is long overdue and important. The LA Times did a great job on this story, and since it's passed into the archives, I'm posting it, courtesy of the Ecological Weblog, in its entirety: An unusual alliance of
anti-immigration advocates and animal rights activists is attempting
to
take over the leadership of the Sierra Club, America's oldest national
environmental group, in what is emerging as a bitter fight over the
future of the 112-year-old organization founded by Scottish immigrant
John Muir. Leaders of a faction that failed to persuade the club to
take a stand against immigration in 1998 are seeking to win majority
control of the group's 15-member governing board in a spring election
-- this time, as part of a broader coalition that includes
vegetarians,
who want the club to denounce hunting, fishing and raising animals for
human consumption. In response, 11 former Sierra Club presidents have written a letter expressing "extreme concern for the continuing viability of the club," protesting what they see as a concerted effort by outside organizations to hijack the mainstream conservationist group and its $95-million annual budget. Some of the insurgent candidates vying for the five available seats on the governing board only recently joined the Sierra Club. If they win, they will control eight of the 15 seats. Members will vote in the board elections in March, with the results tallied in April. People who join the club by the end of January should be able to vote. The election has attracted the interest of anti-immigration groups, which are encouraging their members to join the club to help elect the insurgent candidates. "What has outraged Sierra Club leaders is that external organizations would attempt to interfere and manipulate our election to advance their own agendas," said Robert Cox, a past Sierra Club president. Moreover, club officials argue that members of the two insurgent groups share fundamentally anti-human views, in their opposition to immigration and in their belief that people should take a backseat to other species. The Sierra Club's "dominant perspective has been to protect nature for people," said Executive Director Carl Pope. "But by pulling up the gangplank on immigration, they are tapping into a strand of misanthropy that says human beings are a problem." Pope noted that 18% of Sierra Club members like to fish or hunt, and he worried they could be driven out by the new agenda from animal-rights advocates. "It's important to have hunters and fishermen in the Sierra Club," Pope said. "We are a big-tent organization. We want the Sierra Club to be a comfortable place for Americans who want clean air, clean water, and to protect America's open spaces." The list of insurgent candidates features some high-profile names, including former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm, Cornell University entomology professor David Pimentel, and Frank Morris, former director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. All three have been outspoken advocates of controlling population growth or restricting immigration. Lamm is coauthor of "The Immigration Time Bomb: The Fragmenting of America." Club officials say the campaign got underway quietly with the recent election of three activists, including UCLA astronomy professor Benjamin Zuckerman, a longtime champion of curbs on immigration; and Paul Watson, head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a marine environmental group perhaps best-known for ramming whaling ships. During their campaigns, the candidates downplayed the views they are now advancing. Club members who support the insurgent candidates accused the organization's old guard of trying to demonize them as radicals to head off the increasingly popular efforts to win a new majority. "I really think we ought to be judged on our merits and what we've done in the past, and not divide the Sierra Club," Pimentel said. Political squabbles are hardly new to the 750,000-member Sierra Club, whose members squared off just last year over whether to take a stand against the war in Iraq. But the dispute over this spring's elections is becoming especially rancorous. Some longtime Sierrans worry that a takeover by the insurgents would brand the organization as bigoted and xenophobic. "I don't think that Lamm, Pimentel and Morris are racists," Pope said. "But they are clearly being supported by racists." Zuckerman and Watson call those claims ludicrous. They argue that the club has a responsibility to take strong positions on the issues affecting the health of the planet. "Everything else the Sierra Club is doing is doomed to fail if the United States continues on its rapid population growth," said Zuckerman, 50, who was the leading vote-getter in the Sierra Club board election two years ago. "There are people who are being born today who will see a California that has more people than the entire United States when I was born," he said. Asked what the Sierra Club could do to curb population growth, Zuckerman said the group must "talk about the numbers -- how much immigration we should have and how many babies -- so the mix of fertility and immigration is debated and we can come to a level where the population will stabilize." Watson, who was a co-founder of Greenpeace but who broke ranks with that organization because he advocated more aggressive tactics, said he did not expect the Sierra Club to adopt the confrontational methods of Sea Shepherd. But the club, he said, should promote eating habits that protect Earth's other inhabitants. "Human beings are literally stealing resources from all the other species on this planet," said Watson, a Canadian immigrant. In an e-mail response to the letter by the 11 former presidents, Watson wrote, "Is the advocating of low-impact vegetarian diets a cause for concern? I guess it is if you have a vested interest in grazing or the beef or poultry industry. I fail to see how vegetarianism in the age of Mad Cow Disease, E. coli, PCBs in fish, etc., can be considered anything but practical and realistic." Sierra Club President Larry Fahn and the other prior presidents have pointed out that the club's members already voted to remain neutral on immigration in 1998 after a lengthy public debate, and said that revisiting the divisive dispute would detract from what board members have agreed is the most immediate action needed to protect the environment: unseating President Bush. The presence of the anti-immigration candidates has led civil rights leader Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks what it considers hate groups, to join the Sierra Club and run for its board. Dees said he decided to throw his hat into the ring to generate publicity after his staff found that anti- immigration groups were urging members to join the Sierra Club and help swing the vote. "I'm not running to win a seat on the board," Dees said. "I'm running to sound the alarm of an attempt to take over this organization by the radical element of anti-immigration people. They are interested in keeping this country white." Earlier this month, VDare.com, an anti-immigration website founded by former Forbes senior editor Peter Brimelow, author of the book "Alien Nation," ran an article discussing the Sierra Club elections. The article referred to Dees as a "left-wing smear artist" and urged immigration-control activists to join the Sierra Club and vote for like-minded candidates in its upcoming elections. The article in turn was picked up by an anti-Semitic website and topped with a homophobic, anti-Semitic headline. The author of the article, Brenda Walker, said she was dismayed at that, but Sierra Club officials cited the recycled article as evidence of extremist support for the anti-immigration candidates. Roderick Nash, a retired UC Santa Barbara historian who has tracked the environmental movement, noted that since its early days, the Sierra Club has struggled with tensions over humanity's imprint on the environment. Gentlemen hikers and climbers -- who wanted to preserve America's beautiful places so the privileged could visit them -- wrote diatribes in the early 20th century about Anglo Americans being overrun by unsavory immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, he said. Nor is it the first time the Sierra Club has been the target of a supposed takeover. In the late 1970s, when the club was embroiled in a battle with Walt Disney Co. over a proposed ski resort in Mineral King near Sequoia, the ski industry ran a slate of candidates to push for support of more ski resorts, Pope said. Those candidates lost. |
 A test batch of Monsanto's new genetically modified grass. A bunch of interesting news and links from the past week or so: Pro ject Censored list -- Project Censored lists the top events of 2003-04 that went unreported in the media. Leading the list are the accelerating gap between rich and poor, and Ashcroft's corporatist agenda. US doctors and pharmacists refusing to dispense birth control pills -- Members of right-wing religious groups are now arguing that the birth control pill is a form of abortion and urging their members to refuse to dispense it, and arguing that any employment action stemming from this refusal constitutes an infringement on their religious freedoms. So far twelve US states have passed laws protecting their 'right' to refuse to provide birth control pills to women, many of whom already have little or no access to abortion services. Lea ding economist refutes benefits of outsourcing and offshoring -- Paul Samuelson, the economist whose textbooks in the subject most of us studied in university, has refuted what he calls "the popular polemical wisdom" that the benefits of outsourcing exceed its costs. Because of historical distortions in the market, he says, outsourcing and offshoring can bring about large net disadvantage to first-world countries, and most notably to their workers and the environment. Mons anto unleashes another monster -- I reported recently that Colombian cocaine growers have now developed a coca plant that is resistant to Roundup, the Monsanto weedkiller that has been aerial sprayed in massive quantities by the US across much of Colombia in an attempt to eradicate the crop, devastating natural vegetation and helping to ruin that country's agricultural economy in the process. Now Monsanto, which makes its money by selling patented seeds resistant to the poisons it manufactures, wants to sell a new patented grass, also resistant to Roundup, to golf courses. The move is opposed not only by environmentalists, but by the US Forestry Service and Bureau of Land Management as well. Genes from test batches of the new grass have been found as much as thirteen miles from the test area (as far as the test looked for it), raising fears that the new patented grass will proliferate across the country, supplanting natural grasses and transferring its DNA to new weed species that will be similarly weed-resistant. TiVo , Replay agree to limits -- In a sad acknowledgement of the strength of the entertainment media oligopoly, the makers of personal video recorders have agreed to incorporate new technology that will prevent multiple viewing of recorded pay-per-view programming. Another great essay from Tony Kushner -- As an antidote to the five stories above, Natasha at Pacific Views points out a great essay called Despair Is a Lie We Tell Ourselves. It's a great remedy for the sense of hopelessness a lot of progressives are feeling these days. Last year I published excerpts from Kushner's wonderful commencemen t address to Columbia College. |
 I've written
before about
stories being subversive.
Now, in the 2003 CBC
Ideas/Massey
Lectures,
Native author and scholar Thomas King shows they are much more than
that -- they are the very foundation and compass of our culture.In the first lecture, King tells a story about his (optimistic and self-sacrificing) mother, and about his (enigmatic and thoughtless) father, to illustrate how much these stories have shaped him. Then, shifting perspective, he contrasts the Judeo-Christian creation myth (the story in Genesis of the fall from grace after succumbing to the temptation to eat from the tree of knowledge), with a Native creation myth (the wonderful story The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, which relates whimsically how a woman named Charm worked with the animals she encountered after accidentally falling from the sky to a water-filled planet, to create the Earth on the back of a turtle). Then he explains: A theologian might argue that
these two creation stories are essentially the same. Each tells about
the creation of the world and the appearance of human beings. But a
storyteller would tell you that these two stories are quite
different...The elements in Genesis create a particular universe
governed by a series of hierarchies -- God, man, animals, plants --
that celebrate law, order and good government, while in our Native
story, the universe is governed by a series of co-operations that
celebrate equality and balance. And then King hits us with the hammer: The truth about stories
is that that's all we are.In Genesis, all creative power is vested in a single deity who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. The universe begins with his thought, and it is through his actions alone that it comes into being. In Native creation stories deities are generally figures of limited power and persuasion, and the acts of creation and decision are shared with other characters in the drama. In Genesis we begin with a perfect world but after the Fall we are forced into a chaotic world of harsh landscapes and dangerous shadows. In our Native story, we begin with water and mud and move by degrees and adjustments to a world rich in diversity, complex, wonderful and complete. In Genesis the post-garden world we inherit is martial and adversarial in nature, a world at war -- god versus the devil, humans versus the elements. In our Native story, the world is at peace, and the pivotal concern is not the ascendancy of good over evil but with the issue of balance and harmony... Perhaps that is why we (in the Judeo-Christian culture) delight in telling stories about heroes battling the odds and the elements rather than the magic of seasonal change. Why we relish stories that lionize individuals who start at the bottom and fight their way to the top, rather than stories that frame these forms of competition as insanity... Is it our nature? Do these stories reflect the world as it truly is, or did we simply start off with the wrong story? And if we'd started with a different story, what kind of a world might we have created? There's much more in the lectures, which I'm still working through. You can buy the book, The Truth About Stories, containing the full set of lectures, from House of Anansi. This guy is an amazing story-teller. His message to me, already, and his message perhaps to writers and bloggers all, is to stop preaching, interpreting, proselytizing, advocating, prescribing. Just tell your story. "Don't show them your mind. Show them your imagination." Much to think about. My head hurts. (Thanks to Chris Corrigan for telling me about this) |
 Take a look at the categories of movies in the video store, or the categories of fiction in the book store, and you'll discover that the vast majority of stories in our culture are about struggle, about conflict between 'good' and 'evil', and ultimately about heroes overcoming adversity. Dramas, biographies, sports stories, war stories, mysteries, action & adventure stories, even horror stories and most romances and fantasy stories fit into this category. Most video games are the same. The only exceptions seem to be pure comedies, some children's stories, and stories from other cultures. Why is this? Isn't there enough struggle in our daily lives already? Is it schadenfreude -- the secret pleasure we get from witnessing others' misfortune and knowing it is worse than our own? I remember as a child asking why the Lassie stories "were always about bad things happening", Once we get past the very earliest stories of infancy, most of the stories we are told involve struggle -- Grimm's fairy tales, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Grinch etc. Or is it about adrenaline? Do we need stories to excite us, to vicariously involve us in danger? Or do we need stories to provide us with escape, a way to get away from our own unhappiness, boredom, misfortune? The other day I picked up an award-winning children's book called The Salamander Room written by Anne Mazer and beautifully illustrated by Steve Johnson. It's the simple, wonderful story of a boy who brings a salamander home, and wants to keep it in his room, and then in response to questions from his mother, imagines converting his room into a wilderness paradise where he and the salamander can both be at home. There is no struggle, no conflict, no hit-you-over-the-head moral. Why do adults find such stories so unsatisfying? I have been told that in many tribal cultures the stories rarely involve struggle, and are instead about discovery, exploration, learning from others, but when Westerners read them, they assume they are "just children's stories". And when I outlined my idea for my novel on one of the environmental discussion boards several people said I should place it in an apocalyptic future, not an idyllic one, if I wanted anyone to buy it. Why can we not be engaged by stories that don't involve conflict and suffering? What's wrong with us, anyway? |
 Ton Zijlstra is on to something. He describes blogs as "personal presence portals", and then goes on to describe the "awkwardness" that we feel when we go from 'knowing' someone through their blog to meeting them in person. His solution to that is simple: acknowledge the awkwardness explicitly in the first face-to-face conversation, and then work through it. Jon Husband chimes in with the observation that on-line 'presence' is still foreign to us, and we need to learn how to use it, much as at one point in our lives we first learn to use the telephone. So why is it that learning to use the telephone is childsplay, while learning to use blogs, especially when 'enriched' with Skype VoIP telephony, IM, wikis and webcams is so awkward, so hard? It all comes down to the subject of Ton's post: presence. Ton refers to this article that defines presence as a high-quality simulation of actual personal existence, high-quality implying socially rich, perceptually and socially realistic, transporting (in both senses of the word), immersing, and natural. Do blogs, with or without add-on multimedia tools, provide a high-quality simulation of the author's existence, do they have presence? To understand why this question is meaningless, we need to turn to the guru of media, Marshall McLuhan. In his landmark book Understanding Media, almost half a century ago, he explained the difference between media and tools. Communications media are place holders for content, for the message ("the medium is the message"). Communication tools are technologies that deliver the content, the message . In today's electronic age, he said, the two have become blurred together. So my communication media decision tree from last year, reproduced above, while useful, is somewhat flawed, in that it mixes the two together. But if we want to understand blogs, which are part media, part tools, we need to unblur these distinct characteristics. The best way to do this is to understand what, in McLuhan's terminology, the constituent parts of blogs are extensions of. The telephone, a communication tool, is an extension of the ear and the voice. Radio is a communication tool, likewise an extension of the ear and voice, but the radio program is a communications medium, an extension of the programmer's memory (and, if we tape it, an extension of our memory as well). Blogs, like newspaper columns or news digests, are essentially communications media, extensions of our memories, place holders for our ideas and messages. They are not really extensions of our brains, because they capture, like a snapshot, our thinking at one point in time. Although we can try to make them conversational and describe our thought processes in a blog article, they do not, in their simplest form, allow the reader to truly engage our brains in real or close-to-real time. Now, blogs also have two communication tools included: a publishing and subscription tool (RSS), which does transmit our messages (very well), and the rudimentary comments 'thread' functionality which, like a poor web forum, does allow some dialogue with the author and with other readers. The thread is a (lousy, and because it's asynchronous, jerky) extension of our brains. To some extent the Internet itself is a communication tool that disseminates our blog comment; it is the blog's 'printing press'. And by that analogy, RSS is like the delivery truck that takes the newspaper to the subscriber's house -- both are communication tools, though RSS is clearly the superior delivery vehicle. So what? Well, there is a huge amount of discussion about how to make blogs better, how to use them in business, and what their future is, none of which makes the essential distinction between their role and value as communication media and their role and value as communication tools. I would argue that the critical functionality of blogs, both in personal and business use, is as a personal communications medium i.e. a storage space for everything of consequence in our memories, and everything of consequence in that other extension of our memory, the filing cabinet (and its electronic analogue, the 'My Documents' folder). As I've said in my posts on the future of blogs and in my future state visions, I think blogs will eventually (and properly) morph into purer, simpler versions of this one critical functionality -- they will become the proxies, the substitutes for our memories, for use by friends and business contacts when we're busy or away from the high-presence communication tools, by vendors to ascertain our need for their offerings, and by ourselves as a place to organize, store and access our own thoughts and memories, thus freeing up more of our real memories for new ideas and perceptions. There have been some interesting articles lately by people who say that making and keeping huge numbers of dynamic lists and notes, instead of trying to keep all that in our memories, we can actually enrich our brain's power, our intellectual effectiveness and even our intelligence by 'freeing up memory and brain CPU'. Next-generation blogs could be perfect for that, not only freeing up our memories but also allowing others access to our ideas and learnings. So to that limited extent, blogs have presence -- they can be excellent simulations, surrogates, proxies for our personal memories. But what if we need more context to be able to properly understand the message, or effectively use or build on the content of this virtual memory? Then we need high-quality, high-presence communication tools, not communication media. We are rapidly moving towards a convergence of several 'online' communication tools: telephony, e-mail, IM, and potentially voice-mail and videoconferencing. Right now, the content, the stored messages of these various tools are unintegrated, but voice recognition and transcription is quickly improving and we will soon be able to 'record' conversations in any of these media in one simple, intuitive way, and with Simple Virtual Presence we will also have a simple intuitive way to connect with people using any or all of these media. Then we'll need a 'bridge' to allow each of the participants in a conference to see anything in the blog/virtual memory of any of the participants. Until that day arrives, blogs get high marks as a communication medium, but barely a passing grade as communication tools. If the technology developers understand the distinction, and start building tools that are properly engineered for simple, seamless connectivity, then one day the blurring won't matter, and the integration between media and tools will be complete. |
 Yesterday I
received a delightful note* from Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Support Economy, which
describes what I listed as one of the most
important political & economic ideas of 2003. Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria, who
wrote The Future of Freedom,
wrote to me last fall about my review of his book on these pages. And
I've communicated recently with one of the editors at Fast Company. I didn't take the
initiative in any of these communications.The fact that leading writers and journalists know we bloggers exist, and take the time to thank us and clarify their thoughts (and ours) in correspondence with us, comes as something of a surprise to me. It is at once sobering and flattering that we even appear on their radar screens -- there are, after all, millions of us, and, at least in this corner of the blogosphere, we're not even A-listers. I think in fact we play a much more important role in the media than we might think. That role is a result of the power of our networks, which are more dynamic, sensitive and agile than those of print journalists and book writers. We can sense quickly and effectively when there's something happening -- a shift in public consciousness or attitude, a new issue or idea gaining traction -- because of our connectedness, because of the strength of weak ties and those ties' ability to create at least small tipping points. If the mainstream media are the stomach of the media beast, its power plant, we are its antennae. This role provides us with both opportunities and responsibilities we might not realize. The opportunity depends, of course, on what your blog is about, but there should be some general principles that apply to any of us in this periphery of the information society. Here are a few ideas on how bloggers could connect better with other media, and perhaps raise our profile and expand our role in the process:
* I wrote: Idea #8: The next economy will support consumers holistically to solve their problems, not just sell them products - In her book The Support Economy, Shoshana Zuboff argues that what is needed is a new economic layer, a 're-intermediation', between the producer and consumer, which consists of 'federations' of businesses and 'advocates' who work collaboratively to look after the busy consumer's needs cradle-to-grave and deal with the multiple suppliers in the product/service delivery process. I confess I don't share the author's exuberance that such 'support' will be affordable by any except the rich elite. Professor Zuboff replied: Federated support networks are not intended as a reintermediation or as an additional "layer". If that were the case, then your skepticism would be well founded. It would cost too much. You can't preserve the status quo and just add another layer, we will all drown in cost and administration and end up further away from the support we desire. Sometimes even the book's most avid fans think of advocates as some kind of super concierge. I suppose because that's the closest model we know that can help us imagine "support". But concierge services exist to buffer us from the adversarial DNA of the enterprise system. Our argument is that the conditions are ripe for the emergence of a new system with wholly different DNA. It won't need buffers, or layers, because it is either fundamentally aligned with my needs, or it fails. Federated support networks exploit the digital medium to eliminate the administrative hierarchy we just spent 100 years building and expanding. That's what we call "infrastructure convergence", and without it there is no way to think radically about new cost structures. We needed that hierarchy, or at least some of it, when these integrative technologies didn't exist. We don't need it now.(this is the history of the literature on transaction costs, and Chandler's basic point.) The key issue now is the way in which a distributed model, now made possible by technology, can subsume the old models based on concentration. That is the step function that can eliminate massive cost and allow the whole enterprise system to be reconceived and reorganized around the needs of individuals and families, instead of around products or services. As Seymour Melman demonstrated half a century ago, managers are never going to stand in line to give up all the stuff that reports to them. These institutions probably can't be rescued from the downward spiral in their entirety (some assets will survive, but reconfigured). We need new ways of starting, just like Ford did a century ago. I also really appreciated the Fast Co. Wal-Mart piece, and especially the way it vividly illustrated this endgame. |
 Ira Basen, a producer
with the CBC and a friend of mine from Carleton University days, is
writing a book on media spin,
a term often used interchangeably with bias. But Ira says spin is actually subtler and more
insidious. It is the shading of
meaning or interpretation of events in favour of a particular point of
view, and it is sometimes inadvertent or even unconscious.
There are several ways spin will creep into a story, including:
Finished? Did you shudder a bit when you read, in an article written about Clinton in 1998, "Is bin Laden's new assignment perhaps to be a bogey-man of convenience whom the U.S. government can link to any government it wishes to bomb?" With the benefit of hindsight (and the opposing political party in power) it's easy to see the incredible spin in the venerable Times' reporting in 1998, and to see that to some extent this ubiquitous media spin contributed to the overwhelming bipartisan approval for the US to launch a war against Afghanistan, against precisely the people we had supported and financed earlier in their war against the USSR, the enemy of that earlier day. I confess that I had few misgivings about war with the Taliban, despite the fact that I am a life-long pacifist. Why? Because nowhere (except the discredited extreme conspiracy-theorist papers) were we presented with spin-free reporting (or opposite-spin reporting, if you think spin-free reporting is an oxymoron) on what exactly was, and had been, going on in Afghanistan, and why things were the way they were. There is almost always a rational explanation for things that appear absurd or unreasonable in the absence of the facts. We are just now beginning to realize the degree to which our money and support made the Taliban both popular and tyrannical in Afghanistan. And still we are missing most of the facts about that country, and about Iraq. The facts, alas, are not the same as the news. The media's job is to report the news, not to dig up the facts. Investigative journalism is what we desperately need, but there is no money in that, surprisingly little demand for it, and precious few willing to take the enormous risks to pursue that thankless career. It's easy to take sides, especially when the current US administration is so unapologetically propagandizing (i.e. deliberately and systematically spinning) every issue it deals with, to a degree not seen since the Vietnam War. But the reality is that the media, taken as a whole, are neither liberal nor conservative. The political position of each media outlet on any given issue is somewhere in the middle of (a) the position of its editorial board, (b) its perception of the position of the 'average' reader/viewer, (c) the position of the reporters covering the story, and (d) the position of the people presenting the story (usually the administration of the day). That means that to right-wingnuts like this guy, the media will always appear liberal, and to unabashed left-wingers like me, the media will always appear conservative. But the truth is, at least in their story reporting (editorials and schlock talk radio aside), there is no vast media 'conspiracy' at either end of the political spectrum. Most people in the media are doing their best to do their jobs in a way that balances the views of the above four 'interest groups'. They are vulnerable to the spin techniques listed above -- if you've ever interviewed someone, you'll appreciate that unless you're really treated abusively there's an earnest desire to represent what they had to say clearly, favourably, but above all objectively. To the extent they get it right, they deserve a lot of credit -- it's a difficult, thankless, often dangerous and tedious job. To the extent they, and their editors, let spin creep into their stories, we have a duty as readers and viewers and citizens to recognize it, and discount it accordingly. The fact that so many of us are using the Internet to learn more, to check out other interpretations of events, and to get behind the stories so we can understand and talk about the issues facing our world more knowledgeably, we are contributing to the democratic process, and helping to reduce spin. At the same time, there is a tendency in the blogosphere to frequent sites authored and populated by like minds, and some of the hysterics of extremists of every stripe are quite frightening. My blog wears its left-spinning, overtly editorial stripes quite proudly and unapologetically, but I make a point of reading a few of the more moderate conservative blogs on each new issue, and occasionally some of the bizarre extreme leftist blogs -- because the danger of exposing yourself to a lot of spin is that, if you're not careful, you can find yourself permanently off-balance. And as we all know, "fair and balanced" is another term that's subject to a lot of spin. George O. must be 'spinning' in his grave. |
 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. |
 Time
for another of life's imponderables. Both in Canada and the US, family
farmers and small business people have, in recent years, consistently
voted conservative, and show every intention of doing so again this
year. This makes absolutely no sense: Most farm states and provinces
are net recipients of government largesse (i.e. they receive in
equalization payments and services more than they pay for, subsidized
by the more urban and more liberal states and provinces). And even
though in the past 20 years conservative governments have spent more
than liberal governments, that money has largely gone to tax cuts for
the very rich and defense spending, creating huge deficits that small
farmers and small business people have to repay in taxes, and receive
almost no benefit from.I talked to a few local farmers and small business people to try to find out why they vote conservative. This small sample may not be representative, but what they told me was:
In Canada, which has five parties to choose from, the 'first past the post' electoral system undoes the benefits of party pluralism. With the three small parties all socially liberal, Canadian liberals are forced to 'vote strategically', which means voting for the Liberal Party instead of their real choice, the NDP or the Green Party, to prevent the 30% of Canadian conservatives, who have only one voting choice, from stealing the election. We'll find out in ten days whether they did so or not. Alas, both the US Republican and the Canadian Conservative parties are consistently and heavily propped up by small farmers and small businesspeople. Without that support, these parties would be history. It doesn't make any sense, but it's the reality that both right-wing parties are counting on for election success this year. It's a brilliant con. |
 Red Herring has published its list of the top ten technology trends to watch for 2005:
The innovation process at the top of this post is from Credit Suisse First Boston and is explained in more detail in my innovation paper. |
 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. |
 Schadenfreude. It's a German word that literally means "joy from damage". It refers to the perverse pleasure we take in observing or hearing about the misfortunes of others. That pleasure seems to be enhanced by talking about it with others -- gossip would be empty without it, and when we hear about a disaster, like the horrendous catastrophe of this week's Asian earthquake and tsunami, we have an almost instinctive need to share the news with others. If you don't think it's pleasure we feel in these situations, here are some more examples:
Writer Valerie Weaver-Zercher suggests< /a> what may be behind this is our dual need to see others as needy (which plays to the nurturer in us) and to see ourselves as not needy (which plays to our egos, and our feelings of learned helplessness). She calls this the "head-shaking syndrome". Some writers say it reflects a subliminal (or not-so-subliminal) desire for revenge against those we feel have wronged us or shown us up in some way. I confess I'm like Calvin's Dad in the cartoon above: I don't get it, though I recognize it seems to drive an enormous amount of human behaviour and activity. I loathe reality TV and the plethora of programs and films that wallow in human misery and suffering. I love games, and play to win, but afterwards I feel badly for the 'losers', and it is the social and learning aspect, rather than the competitive aspect, that I enjoy: I would get as much, if not more, pleasure from a collaborative social activity that everybody 'won'. I find comedy that ridicules and humiliates people to be pathetic and exploitative, not funny at all. And although I have been predicting a growing cascade of social, economic and ecological catastrophes, I will get no pleasure from being proved correct. I change the station when news comes on about disasters, crimes, and the undoing of celebrities: If there's nothing I can do about these things, to me it seems merely morbid to dwell on them. Can someone please explain to me how these things are pleasurable, or even cathartic? What perverse joy can anyone get watching people eat worms, women screaming at the loss of a child, athletes and film stars humiliated, losers of card games groan, or stand-ups reveal grotesque embarrassments from their past? Taking joy from these things seems deranged to me, evidence of great mental distress and anguish, or at best a bizarre, reality-detached ennui. But I will admit to a strange desire to spread bad news about others (though only if I know the news to be true -- I don't traffic in rumour). I don't know what's behind this. Maybe it's my natural pessimism, an opportunity to say 'I told you so', to warn people: If John and Mary are breaking up, we should all be alarmed -- maybe all marriages are doomed, or maybe monogamy itself is unnatural, unsustainable, and Tom Robbins' warning of the staggering difficulty of 'making love last' needs to be heeded. If Frank lost his job, perhaps this shows that all business hierarchies are fragile, uncaring, poised to destroy the lives of those who rely on them and allow them to continue. If Bill took his own life, maybe he's the brave one, the harbinger of the future, the canary in the coal mineshaft. I love to learn, to attach meaning to things, and bad news seems to call out for explanation, for interpretation of meaning. Why would our amazing planet be designed to suddenly shudder, and drown millions of her creatures in a tidal wave of misery, and destroy the joyous lives of tens of millions of others? What possible reason could there be for such cruelty, such devastation? Someone, please, stop telling me how many died, and instead tell me why? |
 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 sold back to the local energy co-op. The cars themselves will have no engine, no pedals, clutch or gearshift, make no noise and produce no harmful exhaust. The entire process will require no burning, no pollution, and no grid at the mercy of multinationals and sheikhs. What are the two catches? First, the current cost of electricity produced from non-renewable sources is very expensive, and the process is cumbersome and not yet terribly efficient. Even more problematic is the $100 billion cost of building the infrastructure to generate, distribute and store the electricity and hydrogen, obsolescing a comparable amount of existing energy infrastructure, and probably causing some consternation to and resistance from the owners of that infrastructure.  Yesterday the University of New South Wales
predicted that by 2010 a new generation of photovoltaic
'harvesters' based on titanium dioxide ceramics will both collect
solar energy and
use that energy to produce compressed hydrogen from water. A 10m
square
array, such as that depicted at right, mounted on just half the
households in a sun-rich country like Australia, could produce the
entire country's energy.This would allow an even more distributed, decentralized model than that depicted above: With each household able to produce its own energy, the local energy co-op might be nothing more than a virtual market, and the need for local service stations selling or even producing compressed hydrogen would be obviated. We'd all change from consuming to producing energy. The university has even higher hopes for the titanium dioxide technology behind this advance: They believe it will allow innovations in other areas such as "water purification, anti-viral and bacteriacidal coatings on hospital clothing and surfaces, self-cleaning glasses, and anti-pollution surfaces on buildings and roads". Anyone know anything about titanium? I know it's a metal, but is it plentiful and easy and clean to extract? Is it recyclable? Durable? Toxic in landfill sites? I sense a bit of grandstanding and breast-beating by UNSW here. Is there another catch they're not telling us about? |
 Even the pessimists didn't expect the horrendous February employment report issued by the labour department today. Employment grew by an insignificant 21,000 people, compared to the increase in the labour force of 150,000, and the forecast just last month from Bush's office that between 2.6 million and 5.0 million net new jobs would be created this year. As I promised, I'll be tracking this each month. But it's even worse if you read the whole report. The entire increase in February was a result of hiring by federal and state governments. Private sector employment actually declined. And the labour department also admitted they had overstated January's and December's employment growth numbers by 15,000 and 8,000 respectively. So total US employment at the end of February was actually 2,000 people less than last month's reported number. In light of record profits by many large corporations in recent months, no one should have any illusions that Bush's tax cuts for the rich will ever somehow 'trickle down' to the rest of the people. This data shows that profit growth is now occurring entirely on the backs of American workers, and from 'productivity' improvements due to downsizing, outsourcing and offshoring. Big corporations are already gouging as much revenue from struggling American consumers for their overpriced, increasingly imported products as they can, so future 'growth' must come by cutting and exporting jobs. Not surprisingly, the stock market shrugged off this horrible news, since although it doesn't bode well for consumer buying power, it allows the Fed the excuse to keep interest rates low for another month, keeping the cost of massive corporate borrowing (and the interest cost on the astronomical and still-soaring Bush debt) manageably low. But like everything else in our economy, these stock market levels and interest rate levels are unsustainable. Big bubble ahead. |
This
is the first of five
articles in a series that will be published intermittently this month.
This article summarizes what I believe were the most important ideas
of
2003 in the world of blogs and blogging. The other articles in
the
series will propose the most
important ideas of the year in:
BLOGS & BLOGGING -- THE TEN MOST IMPORTANT IDEAS OF 2003  During the year, the blogosphere doubled in size, and began to mature into a true alternative medium for information and connection. My nominations for the most important ideas of the year* in blogs & blogging are:
* Yes, I know some of these ideas are themselves not new this year. There is nothing new under the sun. But I would argue that the application and implications of these ideas were first manifest some time in 2003 |
 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. |
 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. |
 My daughter spends much
of her workday at the computer, but has no interest in blogging. Her
hobby is scrapbooking,
a hobby that now supports a $2.5 billion industry. A scrapbook is
essentially a photo album on steroids, replete with souvenirs,
commentary, and now, special thematic papers to make your collage a
work of art. Special scissors are involved, as are many art media
(paint, chalk, etc.). Stores catering to the hobby are springing up
everywhere. People belong to scrapbooking circles (where you share
your
technical skills in scrapbooking, more than the actual scrapbooking
content, with others), and are signing up for classes in scrapbooking
and attending scrapbookng conferences. There is a Scrapbooking for Dummies book. Last week, during a delightful dinner with fellow Canadian bloggers Seb Paquet and Gary Lawrence Murphy, we talked a little about this, and my dinner companions defined the hobby as Blogging + Permanence. Where a blog consists of nothing but bits and is totally etherial, a scrapbook is tangible. It has heft. It has presence. It is also a social hobby, far less solitary than blogging. Mothers and daughters work on their scrapbooks together. And the subject matter is much more personal than most bloggers' writings and photos (livejournal bloggers excepted). This is perhaps because the privacy of scrapbooks allows this intimacy -- no fear of stalkers stumbling on your scrapbook the way they can on your blog. And scrapbookers are overwhelmingly female. They are also, photobloggers aside, of a more artistic bent than the vast majority of bloggers. The whole point of blogs was to make website composition simpler, so the writer could concentrate on the words. Scrapbooks are all about composition, and that composition is getting more sophisticated all the time. Some scrapbookers are even taking art classes so they can supplement their photos with portraits and other works of art. The hobby is even encroaching on genealogy, with much richer stories about, and embellished with artefacts of, one's ancestors than one finds on the usual 'bare' family tree. I keep thinking there should be more overlap between the two hobbies, but while there are lots of websites on how to scrapbook, there are very few blogs devoted to scrapbooking (and those that are seem to have mostly been abandoned, presumably so their writers can pursue their favoured hobby instead). There is certainly a ready opportunity to bring the hobbies together: Scanning the pages of a scrapbook into a blog would not be difficult, and would create a backup copy of the scrapbook that could be given to others or shared with those far away. And if the blogging tools weren't so clumsy, they could allow us to print out our blogs and preserve them, with some of the related real-life scraps, the comments threads etc., in a hard copy archive that those (like my father) who say they find reading online too hard on the eyes could browse. Why doesn't this happen? Probably because the content is different, and the intended audience is different. The audience for your scrapbook (besides yourself) is the person sitting beside you, commenting on each page, sharing your art in a very tactile way. The audience for your blog (besides yourself) is the vast, mostly unknown horde of readers who find your ideas interesting, your compositions provocative or inspiring, your information useful, but who, for the most part, won't miss what you've written next week when it disappears into the impenetrable blog archives. Blog posts are ephemeral, quick flashes, fireworks, left brain stuff. Scrapbook pages are memories, permanent vehicles to recall, richly, again and again, treasured memories. Drawing on the right side of the brain. |
 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. |
 A member of the Derrick Jensen mailing list pointed out a brilliantly-written letter to the editor of a small Virginia community newspaper, describing new laws to increase penalties for 'eco-terrorism', a vaguely defined term which appears to include acts of sabotage to corporate 'property', even if they do no harm to any individual. The law was apparently designed to discourage acts against the property of logging, mining, and factory farm corporations, developers and SUV retailers. Here's the letter in its entirety.
Last week, you used the term "ecoterrorist"
with
regard to the Earth Liberation Front (ELF). A note on semantics: The
Department of Defense defines terrorism as "The unlawful use or
threatened use of force or violence against individuals or property to
coerce or intimidate governments or societies, often to
achieve political, religious, or ideological objectives."
Somehow, burning a bulldozer fails to meet these criteria. Unlawful and ideological, yes. But they intended to coerce corporate entities (United Land, Virginia Land, Kessler Group, Regency Centers, and Dierman Realty Group), not governments or societies. Do you feel "terrorized" by the loss of the Land Company's trackhoe? Even developer Wendell Wood seems non-plussed. "You can go buy another." What is scary is how terms like "ecoterrorist," "cyber-terrorist," "narco-terrorist" and "special-interest terrorist" are slipping into our vernacular. Know this: "Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act" legislation was proposed in Texas and New York, to officially label many forms of advocacy as "terrorism." Plus, President Bush's proposed Patriot Act II hopes to broaden the definition of terrorism and make it easier to sentence such "terrorists" to death. Now, who's scaring who? Indeed, the ELF is the FBI's top priority regarding domestic terrorism. But I, for one, would hope they'd instead focus more on whoever mailed U.S. military-manufactured anthrax and ricin to Congress. Truth is, most people agree with ELF's intentions. A recent national survey found that two out of three people think the environment is more important than property rights, corporate profits, or even creating jobs. The ELF usually targets only the most egregious of industrial polluters and ecology-destroying profiteers. Take Nestle's Ice Mountain bottled water, which built a plant in Michigan's Mecosta County (despite a 2-1 resident vote to deny them zoning) and then proceeded to violate state and federal water rights by siphoning from public rivers and streams. ELF activists, after exhausting legal avenues of dissent, tried to blow up the plant. Is the sprawling Hollymead Center as bad? No. But Richmond's SUVs were arguably an environmental and social menace. Objectively speaking, SUVs kill more Americans than al-Qaeda does. The last word: There was a time when we had a very different term for those who sabotage avaricious corporations. As John Adams said of the Sons of Liberty who dunked East India Company tea into Boston harbor: "There is a dignity, a majesty, a sublimity in this last effort of the patriots that I greatly admire." Brian Wimer Charlottesville P.S. This week, Bush's Education Secretary called the National Education Association teachers union a "Terrorist Organization" for criticizing the shortcomings of Bush's No Child Left Behind Act. Who's next? Editorialists? |
| Four
years ago I wrote a well-received paper entitled A Prescription for Business Innovation:
Creating
Technologies that Solve Basic Human Needs. I've updated it,
broken it into three manageable pieces, and present the second part
below. The first part, which reviewed the history of human innovation
and technology, is here
and the third part will follow next Tuesday. Four: Innovation & Society: How Technologies Limit Freedom, Human Nature Confounds Innovation, and Consumer Decision Tools Doom Marketing  Those
of you with HR backgrounds are probably wondering why I have not
spoken
about non-individual, community aspects of civilization and why and
how
these arose if the innovative individual is perfectly able to do it
all
him- or herself. These issues are relevant because of the role of
teams, organizations and other social constructs in the process of
innovation.Let's take another look at our proto-human, now equipped with the six basic types of manually powered machine (lever, wheel, screw, pulley, plane, and wedge -- the latter in the form of flint-head arrows), plus other early innovations like controlled fire, animal domestication and crop cultivation. Like other creatures he's adopted the family unit as a social convention, but now he's experimenting with a more sophisticated social construct, the tribe. Question is, why? Is it Darwinian -- Did humans that banded together have a higher likelihood of survival than loners? Or is it purely social -- Do humans, like other creatures, have a basic need for social contact with others that goes beyond family? Whichever it is -- a survival need or a social need, it required innovations to make it work, innovations like a code of laws and behaviours to prevent and resolve disputes between individuals, and shared language. At this point, in the view of some anthropologists, a tug-of-war began between our essential individual, autonomous nature and the perceived benefits of increasingly advanced, abstract and restrictive 'technologies' like division of labour, specialization, private and communal property, governments and other hierarchical social organizations, including the modern corporation. All these social 'technologies' limit individuals' freedom, and much of our civilization has been about trying to find a delicate balance between individual 'rights' and the apparent benefits afforded by technologies that compromise them. This tug-of-war continues to play out today, in our suspicion of government, the existence of 'militias', libertarian movements, evolution of privacy laws, and struggles over property ownership. The battle is far from over, with slavery, one particularly extreme social construct favouring hierarchical efficiency over individual liberty, still practiced in many countries, and women, children and animals treated as property with no rights or freedoms whatsoever in many others. This tension also plays out in the modern corporation, itself a feudal social construct which is neither egalitarian nor democratic. Corporate efficiencies have produced technologies that have massively improved material wealth and (most believe) quality of life in the few centuries since they were invented. But these advantages have come with a huge cost of personal freedom -- In many countries employees are virtual slaves of their employers, with no hope of realizing their full personal potential. In many companies promotion and remuneration have nothing to do with performance or competency. Here are some of the consequences for innovation of this individual/collective tension, in today's companies:
Perhaps this is a universal trait that we need to consider when designing innovation programs: Everyone loves to engage in social activities that are fun, challenging and unthreatening, but when the social activity impinges on individual 'territory' or property, or on scarce resources, social and collaborative behaviour ceases and confrontational, competitive behaviour takes over. But isn't competitive behaviour exactly what business thrives on? Doesn't the rush of adrenaline and testosterone in the quest for competitive advantage and 'winning' yield high productivity, sharpened customer focus, and more new ideas? I would argue that competition is at best a neutral factor in engendering innovation, and may in fact be detrimental. Most of the books on teamwork, such as The Wisdom of Teams, stress two essential preconditions to effective team behaviour:
Furthermore, many businesses are now reaching out to involve customers, alliance partners and even competitors in their problem-solving teams, because they help bring different points of view to the creative process, and because these external partners share both the defined problem and the sense of urgency with the internal team. In a world of accelerating change, no competitive advantage is sustainable -- innovations and new technologies can almost instantly reinvent industries, products, services, and offerings, and eliminate any competitive advantage the old ones may have had. Despite massive and sustained oligopolistic efforts to prevent it, customers are beginning to wrest absolute control of business direction and success from almost every industry's producers, management strategists and marketers, and now set the agenda and reward companies that respond to their needs and build new serving capability, not those that bash the competition, sue their customers, or create barriers to competitive offerings. The Bush regime's corporatist agenda has been only a temporary setback in this inexorable trend. A side-note about branding: Many marketing people, lamenting over the passage of market control from producer to consumer, cite the increasing importance of branding as an organizational strategy, and of brand loyalty as a success factor. For this reason, they argue, aggressive, proactive marketing is not dead. They fail to appreciate that consumers, faced with the severe scarcity of (a) time to assess product alternatives and (b) objective comparative analysis like Consumer Reports, tend to use 'brand' as an unsatisfactory surrogate decision-making tool. If you as a consumer want to buy a car, or select a television program to watch, the ideal decision-making process would be:
Tools like these exist today (Consumer Reports is an example of the former; the Recommendations Lists of Amazon.com are an example of the latter), but they are not yet very robust or reliable. In their absence, brands and brand loyalty are the surrogates: 'I always buy Chrysler products' or 'I usually watch CSI on Thursday nights' is your brain's way of substituting brand for the more ideal tools noted above. Once these tools exist (and the Information Age is ripe for them), product brands will simply become community-identification brands ('I drive Chrysler products because they reflect who I am and I want others to see that and associate with me, or not, because of that identification'). At this point, brand community-association becomes merely one more selection criterion of the analytical tool. With the advent of the near-perfect consumer information these tools provide, traditional marketing has no remaining role, and the knowledge-driven transition of power from producer to consumer is complete. Five: The Structure & Culture of Innovative Organizations: Business Gets Feminine and Consumers Seize Power from Producers It is now accepted wisdom that the organization of the future must be flatter, more empowering, less hierarchical and more networked, in order to be sufficiently agile and responsive to the ever-more-powerful customer's needs. Much has been written about organizational 'ecology' and the ability of communities of practice to self-organize to solve identified common problems more quickly and effectively than command-and-control driven organizational structures. There is a growing awareness that self-organizing communities operate best when their leadership uses what are usually considered 'female' modes of operation rather than the traditional 'male' ones:
These issues are important to the future of business innovation. We must decide whether an organization saddled with the structures and controls of an old 'management' style can hope to be sufficiently agile, responsive to customers, creative and focused on new product development, to survive when that survival depends on strategic improvisation and continuous innovation. There are two huge and contradictory trends occurring in organizational structure today: globalization and fragmentation. Globalization is occurring because small organizations cannot achieve the scale and resource capacity needed to be viable, and fragmentation, the spinning off and incubation of small, narrowly focused 'best of class' companies, is occurring because large organizations are too unwieldy, inefficient and inflexible to be innovative and respond to customers' rapidly evolving needs. So we have today the worst of both worlds: large, fat, unresponsive global companies and emaciated unscalable small ones. Furthermore, because of today's concentration of money and power in the hands of increasing global corporate giants, this system is in disequilibrium, with dysfunctional non value-added consequences such as these:
Those with an entrepreneurial bent would form, or join, one or more Producer or Innovator enterprises over their working life. Those with a productivity bent would gravitate towards the Global Utilities. Many others would be self-employed, providing niche advisory services to all three types of enterprise. You may think this is a very idealistic view of how 'organizations should be reorganized', but it is also a very logical one, and one that could easily be achieved today because of growing dissatisfaction with the dysfunctionality of today's organizational structures, and the ability, thanks to the Internet and other powerful new 'organizing' infrastructure technologies, to bring this 'reorganization of organizations' about. Only a poverty of imagination, opposition from elite vested interests, and the inequitable distribution of power and resources, all of them well within human capability to rectify, are preventing us from realizing this potentially liberating, perhaps even Earth-saving, reorganization. In fact, this customer-driven revolution is already happening, quickly, quietly, and non-violently, its first manifestation being what Shoshana Zuboff in her best-seller calls The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and The Next Episode of Capitalism. The advent of a New Economy, with Innovators focused intently and exclusively on solving real human needs and problems (and not on the hyper-marketed, artificial incrementalism and 'copycat' and 'sequel' new product development that today's risk-averse oligopolies have our most creative minds fruitlessly working on) offers the potential of astounding acceleration of innovation and resolution of seemingly intractable human problems: pollution, over-population, unemployment, inequality, human and animal suffering, disease prevention, war and cruelty, biodegradation, mental illness. Some would say it's not a moment too soon. What does all this mean for today's company looking to jump-start its innovation programs and processes, and today's individual looking to participate in making his or her own, or his or her employer's, enterprise more innovative? From the discussion above we can add six principles of innovation strategy to the eight principles developed earlier:
Attributes of 'Female' versus 'Male' Organization Structures (Adapted from Imperato & Harari, 'Jumping the Curve') So now we have fourteen principles to guide us in creating innovative organizations. Next Tuesday: In the final part of this paper, a prescription that draws on these principles, that organizations can use to evolve themselves into innovative companies. It will also explain the new 8-step Innovation Process diagram at the top of this post. |
 In a recent
post
I advocated almost a complete replacement of existing knowledge
management systems and intranets with a three-tiered set of simple,
intuitive tools consisting of:
On giving it further thought, however, I wondered whether PPI was the solution to the wrong problem. If the tools and information on people's PCs and intranets are unduly complex, counter-intuitive, and inappropriate for the key business problems that front-line people need to solve, so that people use other processes (walking down the hall to speak to colleagues), other tools (the public Internet) and other sources of information (the people in their rolodex) instead of the ones supplied by their employer -- doesn't this suggest it's the tools that need 'improving', not the users and the processes they use? I believe personal content management tools are the place to start, because since the earliest days of business, the principal way of sharing information has been peer-to-peer, the most valued 'repositories' of business information have been personal filing cabinets, and the principal schema for organizing work has been the personal desktop. It makes sense, therefore, that tools that facilitate and reflect these well-established 'knowledge processes', information sources and networks should be much more successful than the complex, centralized, hierarchical knowledge management tools and repositories that have been foisted on users for the past decade. I wrote the other day about attempts to replace paper, and about Gladwell's study of why paper and documents have proven so durable and successful even in this electronic age (spatial flexibility, tailorability, browsability). And I believe any schema for personal content management needs to reflect and honour our most established 'information behaviour' -- the shuffling of paper. The founders of a company called Alias Research (now part of Silicon Graphics, but in the process of being spun off again) were powerful advocates of making technology adapt to human behaviour rather than the other way around, and I agree with them 100%. Lowest common denominator, across all job descriptions, levels and industries, are these fundamental 'knowledge worker' behaviours and needs:
I'd start by creating a machine-readable analogue of the physical workspace. We need a Workspace Tool that allows us to shuffle virtual documents the same three-dimensional way we shuffle physical ones. That tool should replace the 'arrow' cursor with a 'hand' cursor, like the Acrobat pdf cursor but a lot more flexible. The 'hand' needs to be able to pick up and move a document, and to pick up and read and browse a document, and to be able to clip a document or a piece of a document to another, either temporarily (so the documents could be separated again) or permanently (so they would become a new document), and to be able to place any document anywhere in a stack of documents. The 'hand' needs to be able to put two documents side by side and browse them simultaneously. The tool needs to allow the user to do this on multiple three-dimensional virtual workspaces, that the user can label as they see fit. It must allow the user to make multiple copies of the document, and move or change each copy in different ways. And it must allow the user to send any copy of the document to any number of other people (without opening another 'application') and to 'permission' the document to identify who else can 'subscribe' to it -- the set of people who they will allow entry to this virtual workspace to access it. Such a tool would allow us to capitalize on the economy of 'virtual' space by doing away with the 'filing cabinet' -- that horrible black hole invented by Dewey the librarian into which documents disappear never to be found again, which Windows has tragically copied. Instead, we would 'save' the entire workspace, with its three-dimensional array of documents intact. It would be neatly put away but, if we needed something in that workspace again, we would simply open the entire workspace again, arranged in the way that made sense to us, and instantly find what we were looking for by where it was in the space, not by having to remember what awkward name we gave it. And then on to the next project with a 'clean' new workspace. This tool would need to be indifferent to the document's format -- whether the suffix was .doc or .xls or .ppt or .html or .pdf would be irrelevant. More importantly, e-mail messages and other 'recorded conversations' would need to be seamlessly accommodated just like any other document. There are some tools today that do limited parts of the above, but in awkward and unintuitive ways. This needs to be as simple as child's-play, and will probably require software designers to start from scratch and throw away all their familiar technological architecture constructs in favour of the human information constructs we have used at least since Gutenburg. The Workspace Tool could eliminate the need for Windows Explorer and similar 'file management' tools on most computers. OK, that's a start on the spatial flexibility and paper-shuffling spec for the tool. Let's go on to annotation. I've seen some limited annotation functionality in a program called FolioViews, that 'labels' each user's notes and/or changes in a publicly-accessible and centrally-controlled document. MS Word has some such functionality in its 'edit mode'. E-mail uses blacklining or indenting to create 'threads' of consecutive commentary. And wikis take it to the next step -- collaboration -- but at the cost of not distinguishing which individuals contributed and changed what, which requires enormous trust. All of these are forms of annotation. But you have to admit they're pretty clumsy. Again, let's look at how it happens in the physical world, and emulate that. For short additions we use the carat and write above the line. We cross out, without eliminating legibility, to indicate deletion. We use the margins, and, if that isn't enough, a separate page with a numbered reference for commentary and longer additions. We may use post-its for the same purpose, or for personal notes pertinent to the document. There are three reasons this is much easier with a pencil and paper than on a laptop. The first is flexibility -- by writing smaller or at an angle we can squeeze a lot of changes into a small area, and we can use graphics as well as text. And we can move stuff around within the document easily. The second is recognizability -- we can tell by the handwriting whose changes are whose. The third is comparability -- we can put two pieces of text side-by-side to compare them or see if they're compatible as we decide what edits or annotations to make. How could we do this in a simple, intuitive way on a laptop? This is much more challenging because of the different native formats of all the documents we annotate. I suspect any intuitive Annotation Tool would need to quietly convert each document to a bitmap in the background. It would also need to pre-set the user's annotation 'voice' -- using some distinctive font, typestyle, textstyle and/or font/background colour to set off the annotations from the rest of the document. It would use the pencil, rather than the hand or arrow, as the cursor symbol. It would need a simple 'insert or comment' functionality that would automatically expand the available space -- exactly at the point of insert -- to contain all that the user wanted to add. That functionality would include a simple freeform drawing tool for graphics. The tool would need a 'mark to delete' functionality that didn't obliterate what was proposed for deletion. It would need a 'replace' functionality that combined the 'insert' and 'mark to delete' functions. It would need a 'highlight' function. It would need a 'move' function. It would ideally need a 'cross-reference' function that would allow the annotator's inserts and comments to dynamically link to another place in the document, or a section of another document. The key again is simplicity and intuitiveness. When the user places the 'pencil' cursor in a space and starts drawing or typing, the tool would automatically interpret this as an 'insert or comment'. Click and drag would first 'highlight', and then if the user started drawing or typing it would be treated as a 'replace', whereas if the user hit the 'delete' key it would 'mark to delete' and if the user then moved the pencil cursor elsewhere in the document and hit the 'insert' key it would leave a numbered flag at the original point and move the highlighted content to the new location. The key sequence 'cf.' could activate the 'cross-reference' function. No menus, no special function keys to remember. In fact, this simple analogue to the pencil could even replace the word processor and html composing tool for all but the most sophisticated document preparation. For what is composition beyond starting with a blank page, and successively inserting, replacing, deleting, moving, annotating and cross-referencing?  Even
if this Annotation Tool isn't able to interpret and spruce up the
hand-drawn graphics into more professional form, as long as it is able
to compress the annotated document to a reasonable file size for
storage and transmitting to others, its product could become the
ubiquitous standard format in which virtually all documents are
maintained on our computers. And most important, the
Workspace Tool and the Annotation Tool together could obviate the need
for most of us to ever print out anything in hard copy. So not
only would we save a lot of paper, we'd no longer have to worry about
page size, page cutoff or printer compatibility.As I've mentioned before, I think UXGA technology is also essential to getting us to this state, since it allows the user to review, without eyestrain or scrolling, two complete pages side-by-side on the screen. I also think significant productivity improvement will only come when the third 'layer' in the chart above -- social networking applications that allow us to identify relevant contacts, connect to them powerfully, simply and virtually, and share our permissioned content with them -- have been built on top of these newly-improved personal content management applications. Only the three 'layers' of tools working together can enable powerful, context-rich virtual conversations, so that Dr. Nonaka's famous 'virtuous cycle' of knowledge creation (pictured just above right) can finally become a reality. And then, decision-makers will no longer be able to blame awkward and inappropriate technology for being uninformed. |
| Four
years ago I wrote a well-received paper entitled A Prescription for Business Innovation:
Creating
Technologies that Solve Basic Human Needs. I've updated it,
broken it into three manageable pieces, and present the third part
below. The first part, which reviewed the history of human innovation
and technology, is here,
the second part, which described the current environment for
innovation, is here. Six: Prescription for an Innovative Organization The
first four years of the century have seen some serious setbacks in
business innovation. The corporatist-backed Bush administration has
introduced legislation to reduce corporate liability to consumers, and
has been extremely lax in enforcing social and environmental laws.
Organizations like the RIAA and Nike have showed that the courts will
allow large corporations great latitude to sue customers (including
infringing on their privacy rights) and to lie to customers in their
advertising (about sweatshop operations, offshoring etc.) Corporations
like Enron have abused public trust and destroyed thousands of
families' livelihoods and life savings. And massive defense and
security expenditures have siphoned off funds that might have been
invested in innovation, and have made corporations and lenders nervous
about any investment while governments and corporations are so
seriously overextended and exposed to interest rate fluctuations. The
result is a climate of great animosity between corporations and
customers, and unprecedented risk aversion.At the same time, recent surveys indicate a growing corporate awareness that "you cannot cut (or offshore) your way to greatness", that the limit to improving profitability by reducing costs and margins has now more or less been reached, and that innovation must again move to the forefront if corporations are to have any hope of sustaining that profitability. So corporations are looking for low-cost, effective ways to develop new products, new processes, new delivery channels and new technologies that will meet important human needs, provide real value to customers, and be affordable by those customers. This challenge occurs at a time when the distribution of wealth among customers is massively skewed, both within and between nations, towards a tiny elite, when many governments and most corporations and individuals are buried under a crushing debt load, and when the need for innovation to solve critical environmental, social and political problems has never been higher. Simply put, we are living in an age when we cannot afford innovation, and cannot afford to be without it. Perhaps the most critical innovation need therefore is for creative mechanisms to finance, price and pay for the costs of innovation itself. Funding, pricing, and cost management are now inseparable parts of the innovation process. The prescription I propose draws on a wide variety of innovation processes that have been advanced by thought leaders on the subject, especially during the 1990s when the appetite for investment in innovation peaked, including Peter Drucker's, Cap Gemini's, Credit Suisse's, Gary Hamel's, and others listed in the bibliography below. This prescription draws as well from several innovation processes that I am personally aware of from my years working with Ernst & Young and its clients, and some lessons from how nature, which has been innovating since long before we appeared on the planet, goes about it. This prescription has eighteen steps in eight stages illustrated in the chart above: Listen, Understand, Organize, Create, Experiment, Listen Again, Design, and Implement. The three stages shown in blue -- Understanding, Organizing and Implementing -- are analytical processes, well-suited to the left-brained deductive thinkers who predominate in most organizations. The three stages shown in green -- Creating, Experimenting, and Designing -- are creative processes, better suited to right-brained inductive thinkers who are relatively scarce in most organizations. The two Listening stages shown in red are communication processes, that need to involve customers and other stakeholders, and everyone in the organization involved in the innovation process. Assigning (or contracting) the right people for each stage in the process is essential to its effectiveness, and to its affordability. If it's done well, it can draw on the strengths of everyone inside and outside the organization who has a stake in a successful innovation effort. Here are the eighteen steps. They are in reasonably sequential order, but are somewhat recursive: For example, as part of creating alternative solutions (step 12) it may be necessary to go back and scan for some additional ideas (step 1). Who should do each step depends to some extent on the industry and size of your organization: Large organizations may benefit from having a dedicated Innovation Team responsible for this, while in a very small organization it may be a scheduled part-time task of the whole management team, drawing as well on the diverse backgrounds and ideas of an informal Advisory Board. Listen 1. Listen broadly for ideas: Appoint your Innovation Team and have them set up an 'environmental scan' that systematically looks for innovations and connections not only in your industry but also outside it, outside your country, outside of business entirely. Have the Team read about, learn about, and meet with people from the broadest possible spectrum of human enterprise and natural discovery. Subscribe to journals like Innovation, and the RSS feeds of periodicals and websites that report ideas and new technologies from a wide range of disciplines. Reward members of the Team for serendipitous readings and meetings, debrief with them promptly and regularly, filter, refine and inventory their ideas and learnings for consideration at the Understand, Create and Design stages of the innovation process. Inputs: readings, newsfeeds, conferences, interviews, meetings. Outputs: a manageable inventory of ideas and insights (categorized and contextualized appropriately so that they can be simply understood and practically applied). 2. Listen to 'pathfinder' customers, competitors, and colleagues: Plug yourself in to the 'voice of the customer'. Set a minimum time quota for everyone in your organization to spend face-to-face with business customers, or with customers' customers or end consumers. Identify 'pathfinder' customers -- those who are most attuned to their organization's future direction and its need to change. Employ a 'Think the Customer Ahead' program that engenders effective listening, elicitation skills, story-telling skills, and creative thinking skills , a capacity explained in Imparato & Harari's book Jumping the Curve. Often the customer isn't able to articulate his or her needs in a way that lends itself to quick technology solution development. Listening to the customer is an iterative process, that entails learning about the customer's business, understanding the things that keep them awake at night, suggesting a lot of 'what if's', proffering opportunities, points-of-view and possibilities, not just asking baldly about needs and offering off-the-shelf solutions. Connect with customers indirectly as well, using all the media at your disposal -- phone surveys, e-mail, website surveys, customer satisfaction surveys (with lots of open-ended questions), self-diagnostic tools, videoconferences, etc., to capture as much information as you can about your customers, their customers, and their markets. Inputs: conversations, interviews, surveys. Outputs: needs, ideas, stories, industry future state visions, five-forces and SWOT analyses. 3. Listen to the front lines: Talk with the people who hear directly from customers and other stakeholders every day -- people in sales, customer service, even delivery and reception staff. Ask them what they're hearing, and what they think most needs improvement or rethinking. Create 'space' -- physical and electronic -- where everyone in the organization can surface, discuss and advance problems, needs and ideas collaboratively. Let anyone 'subscribe' to the inventory of news and ideas created in step 1 above. Consider maintaining a running list of the company's Top 10 Challenges to encourage focus and creative thought from everyone in the organization. Make sure top-level executive sponsorship for innovation is visible to everyone on the front lines. Give people time off their 'regular work' to focus on organized innovation projects, and tools and process guidance to use that time effectively. Reward front-line people for new product and other innovative ideas that they surface from their conversations with customers and others. Inputs: conversations, idea & collaboration spaces, interviews. Outputs: needs, ideas, stories. Understand 4. Understand who your actual and potential customers are: Study companies like The Body Shop that know their customers, their needs, their buying preferences and criteria intimately. These are companies that spend a lot of face time with customers and have rigorous processes in place to capture what they learn, probe what they need, and explore the potential market for new innovations. And identify and get out and meet with potential customers as well, to understand why they're not already customers and what could change that. And then have your Innovation Team cast a wider net and ask who might be customers that are currently not served by either your company or your competitors. Learn the lessons of Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution -- how disruptive innovations can (sometimes inadvertently) transform whole industries, and how that presents your company with both threats and opportunities that could completely change the profile or even definition of your customers. Inputs/Outputs: list of actual and potential customers and what they currently buy, could be buying, and will and won't be buying in the future, and why. 5. Understand and respect what end-consumers want and need: and based on that 6. Understand what immediate customers will need: Start with the end-consumer of your products and services, and the end-consumer of the products of your immediate customers. Their buying patterns, needs and preferences will determine the success of your customers, and that will in turn determine their buying patterns, needs and preferences. The end-consumer has the ultimate power, and, unlike corporations', their buying decisions are based on broader and more subjective criteria than business need and affordability. They buy things they want, not just things they need. If you sell to the auto industry, you need to understand why consumers, against all logic, buy SUVs. And if your company is making money from sweatshop labour or old growth forests, better come clean now. Business needs to end its abusive relationship with consumers -- overcharging them, misleading them, suing them, and selling them inferior, imported merchandise and services. Once consumers realize their true marketplace power, they will get back at adversarial suppliers with a vengeance. Business needs to respect them, respond to them, and be responsible members of the communities in which they operate. The Reputation Economy isn't here yet, but it's coming. If you cause consumers to dislike you or distrust you, you'll soon be dead. Inputs/Outputs: current state analysis and future state vision of wants and needs for both current and future immediate customers, and end-consumers, and a resultant future state vision and emerging needs profile for your industry. 7. Understand why these wants and needs aren't already met: Here's the hard part. Things are usually the way they are for a reason. You know there are wants and needs that aren't being met. The challenge is not to throw in the towel when you find out why. The technology doesn't exist? The solution would be very costly or risky to develop? The solution is not affordable to customers? The solution is too radical for customers to accept or too complex for them to understand? The organization currently lacks the capacity or competencies to produce the solution? That's what innovation is about. Take up the challenge with your eyes open about what must be overcome, but take up the challenge. If it was easy someone else would have already done it. Inputs/Outputs: list of challenges. Organize 8. Organize those with a stake in solving the problem: Now you know what needs to be done, the next step is to organize the troops. Who can help solve the problem, assess the alternatives, provide the needed resources? Outputs: project team member list, including 'pathfinder' customers and other outsiders. (Note that the project team is responsible for solving a specific problem or need, while the Innovation Team has oversight over the entire innovation effort of the organization -- they aren't the same group). 9. Organize the program for solving the problem: There are a lot of techniques and methods that you can use to break through a problem and come up with solutions. The bibliography below is replete with them. In my experience, creative minds need a very broad framework (schedule, budget, high-level process) and a lot of freedom to figure out how to solve the problem within that framework. Self-organizing, self-managed innovation project teams seem to work well in some organizations but not in others. If you insist on imposing more discipline on the process, more hoops to jump through, control points and early-stage go/no-go filters, make sure the people you're imposing it on see the value in these constraints, and that they don't squeeze the boldest and potentially most successful ideas out in the process. Outputs: project schedule, budget, program. 10. Organize the resources needed to solve the problem: The project team needs sufficient tools and knowledge to be able to understand the problem, the customer need, and the variables that could impact the potential solutions. Inputs: all the Outputs from steps 1-7 above, redrafted into a cogent and digestible form. Create 11. Create an environment and capability for innovation: Give the Innovation Team and the project teams permission to fail, and teach them how to fail early and inexpensively. Prevent executives from pushing their 'pet' projects to the detriment of others. Don't let the 'black hats' deep-six good, hairy, audacious ideas prematurely, and ensure that 'black hat' behaviours are not rewarded by senior management. Help the team avoid slipping into excessive caution or incrementalism. Keep the marketing group from unduly influencing the process with antiquated ideas for 'creating market demand' and launching products with press releases and self-serving promotional and advertising campaigns -- In the emerging customer-driven market these techniques will no longer make a mediocre product a success. Provide rewards and incentives for team members, and for other contributors to the innovation effort. Don't tolerate hoarding of ideas and knowledge, or inter-department 'charges' that block knowledge transfer and cross-functional collaboration. Share credit for good ideas and successes, and don't make innovation an area of internal competition. Help bright, creative, quiet people find their voice, and let people promote 'crazy' ideas without fear of ridicule. Teach the Innovation Team and the project teams (and others in the organization who show interest) techniques that will enhance their creativity and improve the innovation process, and give them time and resources to discover other techniques and try them out. Invest adequate, patient capital and resources for innovation. Give ideas sufficient time to find their market but don't throw good money after bad, no matter how well-intentioned. Understand sunk costs and learn from failures. Consider letting those involved in the innovation 'invest' personally in return for a share of the ultimate revenues or profits: Having some 'skin in the game' can be very motivating and empowering. Inputs: time, training, tools, space, sponsorship, leadership and resources. Outputs: people who are inspired, capable and encouraged to contribute productively to the innovation effort. 12. Create lots of alternative solutions: Don't put everything at risk on one option. Use scenario planning and other techniques to identify and assess alternatives. Don't reject the really far-out alternatives prematurely -- cost/risk/benefit decisions usually can't be properly made until the customers have had the chance to say their piece again in step 15 below. Outputs: alternative solutions. Experiment 13. Experiment: Try many things, learn fast from failures, tinker, iterate, combine, transfer: Try several alternatives simultaneously in different markets to speed up the assessment process. Use rapid prototyping and other iteration techniques to expose as many alternatives to the market as possible. Outputs: test results. Listen Again 14. Listen to potential customers and help them imagine: Use prototypes and stories to make the innovative product, service, channel or technology as concrete as possible. Beware customers' propensity to say 'yes' at this stage when there's no required commitment. Go back to what you learned from customers in steps 1-7 and recite what you heard back to the customers for confirmation, explaining how the innovation addresses the need articulated by the customers. Listen objectively for confirmation or dissonance. Outputs: customer evaluations 15. Listen to acceptance criteria -- the ‘if’s: If the product appears to meet the need, the next task is to assess the customers' buying criteria: price and affordability, convenience, options, delivery time, upgradability etc. Some of these criteria may be show-stoppers that will require re-invention or other creative brainstorming, while others may be able to be addressed in the design stage below. Outputs: customer buying criteria 16. Listen to ‘what could go wrong’: Here's where you let the 'black hats' say their piece: What competitive threats exist or could arise? Is the innovation vulnerable to disruptive innovation from unexpected sources? Are there unforeseen production, quality control, political, regulatory, financial, marketing, or servicing landmines? What's the shelf-life? Could it become a commodity prematurely? Will it be prohibitively expensive to produce or to buy? Will it cannibalize existing product sales? Is it a strategic fit for the organization? Some of these 'what could go wrongs' may require re-invention or other creative resolution by the project team, while others may be able to be addressed in the design stage below. Outputs: list of threats and risks, and resolution plan. Design 17. Design: consider customer-valued attributes, cost, intuitive ease of use, ease of change, ease of enhancement: The greatest idea in the world can still be torpedoed by bad design. The designer has to be told, in no uncertain terms, what attributes are important to the customer, how much at most the solution can cost, and the trade-off between ease-of-use and power. Technology products especially are often over-engineered because additional functions and features are easy and inexpensive to add, but they add complexity disproportionate to the benefits of the additional functionality, often to the point of turning off potential customers. And in this age of constant upgrades and inter-operability requirements, the solution must be easy to change, redesign and enhance. Inputs: specifications based on Outputs from steps 12-16 above. Outputs: completed designs. Implement 18. Make the final go/no-go decision, then implement: If there are still several alternatives on the drawing board, whittle them down to a manageable number. If necessary, send the idea back for reinvention (step 11), re-testing (step 13) or redesign (step 17). If the previous steps have been done properly, this step should be the easiest. Once the decision has been made to go, the set-up, production, viral marketing, sales, distribution, employee and user training, partnering, after-sales service, success measurement and continuous improvement should be problem-free, since the 'what could go wrong' possibilities have already been considered and addressed, and people from all functional areas of the organization should have been involved and consulted during the Create and Design stages. Seven: Applying the Prescription: Some Examples To give you a flavour for how this prescription could work in practice, here are eight fundamental business problems from different industries, and some innovations that have recently been (or are currently being) successfully commercialized to solve them. In each case, the solution shown could reasonably have been derived using the principles and process in the prescription above:
Conclusion This presentation was itself the result of addressing an unmet need: After reading dozens of books on innovation, I was unable to find one source that explained in clear terms what innovation is, in a business context, conveyed the urgent need for businesses to become more innovative, and provided an actionable prescription for doing so. This paper was initially developed to provide the Core Innovation Team of Ernst & Young with background on the history, current state and leading practices in business innovation, and I am now using it to develop part of a core curriculum on entrepreneurship, of which innovation is a critical element. I hope this analysis has given you a better understanding of the subject and its importance, and some useful tools and ideas that you can use to make your organization more innovative as well. I would welcome the opportunity to continue the discussion on this subject, by e-mail or through the comments thread below. You can find more of my writings on business innovation in this index. While I'm optimistic that this prescription will work within business and other organizations, large and small, I am less convinced that it will work to solve some of the more deep-seated human needs and inexorable problems that plague us today, such as global warming, pollution, the energy crisis, biodegradation, endemic war, violence, mental illness and disease, animal cruelty, urban sprawl and decay, crime, unemployment, and the inequitable distribution of resources, income, wealth and power. While the process should work in principle, it is unlikely that this process can be followed with sufficient rigour or resources without (a) a willingness by governments to spend much more money (paid for by taxes) to solve these problems, (b) a political will to solve such problems creatively and by consensus, rather than leaving it to private interests to address them or dealing with them by brute force, and (c) a much greater awareness, commitment and sense of responsibility by the body politic of the urgency and opportunity to solve these problems. But just as business will be driven once again to invest in innovation in the search to sustain profitability, it is likely that private citizens and public institutions will ultimately be driven to invest together in innovation in the search for a liveable, sustainable world. The process they then use will probably look a lot like this prescription. Bibliography
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All great ideas are
dangerous, wrote
Oscar Wilde. And someone else said that every great idea is initially
ridiculed as absurd or reviled as heresy. Philosopher Glenn Parton,
whose essay The Machine In Our Heads
I recommended
recently, has a new, great and dangerous idea. It builds somewhat
on the ideas in James W. Prescott's paper I wrote
about
earlier, that human violence stems from a combination of childhood
neglect and adolescent sexual repression. Glenn has given me the
honour
of allowing me to publish his essay on it first on this blog. Although
this may be hard to believe, Glenn's idea is more radical than
anything
I have ever written, perhaps even more radical than anything I have
ever dared think. It will probably trouble you, as it did me.
Please take the time to read this essay in its entirety -- it will requre an hour's investment. The first two sections are below, and the link at the bottom will take you to the whole essay. If it seems overly long, bear with it -- it has a lot of well-entrenched preconceptions about our culture to challenge before what he proposes will seem at all acceptable to most readers. And if it seems overly preoccupied with the sexual aspect of relationships, substitute the words 'love' and 'emotional' for 'sex' and 'sexual' respectively, and plug on. You may have some deep misgivings about what Glenn has to say, but if this article affects you as it did me, you will not be the same person when you finish reading it as when you began. Please let me know what you think. I'll add my own comments either in the comments thread below or in a follow-up article. I'm sure Glenn will be interested as well. LOVE POLITICS: A Case Against Monogamy by Glenn Parton  Introduction Let's shift the focus from the question, what is to be done? to the question, Why can't people see the obvious? If people could see what is self-evident to the rational mind, then appropriate action would soon follow. That Americans do not see the obvious truth is amply demonstrated by the popularity of George W. Bush. Outline of a strategy for human renewal: One: Americans cannot think deeply because the heart is closed. When the heart is closed, then Reason, the mind, becomes a calculator, an instrument, a machine that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. It is hard-hearted people who are unknowingly supporting world-disaster. True knowledge, wisdom, must be informed by sympathy, feelings, and heart. Two: The American heart has turned to stone due to sexual repression, stretching back to our Puritan beginning. Everyone in this culture is, as a manner of upbringing, sexually wounded, resulting in fear, shame, guilt, and resentment. The wound festers; self-doubt and self-hatred prevent us from loving others. Generosity, the opening of the heart, begins with the ability to experience sex as a gift. If you cannot do this, then all your good deeds will be wrapped in resentment. The Christian concept of love, which desexualizes it (Agape instead of Eros), leaves the person sick and suffering at the core. Three: To open the heart so we can think deeply it is necessary to search and find our erotic nature, accept it, and freely express it. This is not something that can be done alone -- through Yoga, Tantra, for example -- but requires a new man/woman relationship. The old relationship -- namely, monogamy (whose first historical form was patriarchy, but which is now co-dependency or co-ownership) is unnecessarily restrictive, a bedrock value, an unquestioned premise, the ideological basis of State Monopoly Capitalism which is destroying this planet. In short, we will not think deeply unless we love, and we will not love unless we practice a free sexuality. Dare to love more than one person! It's a simple idea that's hard to do. Consult your daydreams! Beginning The integration of politics and sexuality is the best way to build a social movement for resolving the ecological crisis which is threatening to bring Life on this planet to a crash in probably one or two generations, perhaps sooner? Traditional politics, party-politics, and protest-politics, are necessary for postponing world disaster, for providing time and space for fundamental lifestyle changes, but is not sufficient to heal us from the ground up, according to the original-natural order of things. For this task we need to mobilize a different kind of energy, not negative energy, but positive energy, the energy of Eros. Sexual love is the prototype of all human happiness. If we let this joy, instead of conscience or duty or protest be the source of our community building, it would bring together and hold together aware people. Necessity alone, the advantages of work in common, even the primary work of saving the planet and ourselves, will not hold us together because the psychological damage in America is too great. Americans have a defensive ego-structure -- a system of self-deceptions, projections and prejudices that distort our perception of the world -- the cost of survival in this harsh and grossly unfair society. This makes us, “as we are”, incapable of forming enduring political communities for social transformation, which is precisely what we must do in order to avoid eco-catastrophe. We cannot get along well enough with one another for long enough to do the things that must be done. All our sincere and noble efforts self-destruct, but we can no longer afford to fail, for now the planet as a whole is in jeopardy. What will bring us and hold us together for world transformation? Erotic love is the last remaining force in the modern world capable of mobilizing, sustaining, and perfecting us for this long and difficult task. But not if the erotic life-force is damned by monogamy. A transforming political community of monogamous couples is impossible because monogamous love places itself first and everyone else second; it produces separation and tension between lovers and everyone else, couples and society. However, by refusing monogamy in favor of a highly discerning free love, there is a chance of knitting a community that will not easily unravel. The pairing process, as far as I can see, will remain the basis of the social structure, but we could all work more easily and much better in a network of loving relationships, pairing without exclusivity, opening lines of deep communication that are presently jammed by jealousy, competition, mistrust, fear and arrogance. The key is not to abolish one-to-one love, but to multiply it. There is already a manifest hostility between the sexes, which is going to get worse. Much of it is a result of a false morality that prohibits us from knowing one another. Each man is "allowed" to intimately know only one woman, and vice versa. How can we expect to find and work out answers to the critical problems we face, if a vital point of discovery, wisdom and sustainability -- love between men and women -- is so limited! The age of discovery and togetherness between the sexes has not yet begun, so let it begin now with a few individuals who defy the sacred cow of conventional morality -- namely, monogamy-- in favor of political love, which means loving the “highest” in oneself and others, making one's political destiny with a lover clear and binding, creating diverse relationships, loving communities, in which women draw out the best in men (infusing men's minds with love), and men draw out the best in women (inspiring them with intellectual theory and global political priorities). Real love is transcendence, beyond the mutual validation of empirical egos, toward a shared commitment or vow, not just between two people, but to a new commonwealth. The function of these erotic-political inter-relationships is to accelerate evolution, nature's effort to become aware of itself as a whole, before an eco-catastrophe resets it back to the stage of the cockroach. Why not affirm sexual love as a vehicle for progressive social change; it is presently misused for every moneymaking purpose imaginable -- with great success. That should tell us something. This retail culture would collapse if people tasted real happiness, instead of being locked in monogamous relationships that cannot satisfy the mass of humanity for a lifetime (even if a few simpletons stick to a single spouse), driving people elsewhere for satisfaction, finding everything but the real thing. When material circumstances are ripe, an idea, Learn to love more than one person, can be a decisive force in history. It depends on a handful of living examples that prove the reality of the concept, and then thousands and tens of thousands will spontaneously respond to it. Today, the information and organs of communication for world transformation are in place: it is the inner readiness for widening the domain of love that is lacking, as Lewis Mumford said. That is our challenge, for without a positive concentration on love, understood as the integration of sexual desire and political awareness, we will not be able to rescue the planet and its creatures from the growing forces of hate and violence. Did everyone who is dissatisfied with his or her love life make the wrong choice, or could there be something inherently wrong with monogamy? The American way is to always want to solve every problem with a new and improved technique, rather than consider a bold, new reorganization of life. The solution of the sexual problem, however, takes us to the core of human nature, and demands that we come to terms with the human role in the greater scheme of reality, our place in the cosmos. According to the German philosopher, Maik Hosang, the logos of love can save us: evolution occurs through qualitative leaps, from matter to life to human life. Love among the parts sets the stage for the emergence of higher reality. The gravitational order of the celestial bodies generated life, and the balance and harmony of living beings gave rise to humankind. A just and peaceful world-order is the next step forward, but we need to untie the knot of monogamy and let the whole of evolution flow through a new and free man/woman relationship, creating loving and lasting human communities, which will rationally regulate our relations with nature. Frederick Engels' book, The Origin Of The Family, Private Property And The State, argues that "group marriage" is characteristic of hunter-gatherers, whereas horticultural people prefer "pairing marriage." The later is more hedged around with restrictions, but is not based on any assumption of sexual exclusiveness for either partner. Pre-European America, according to Lewis Morgan on whose empirical research Engels based his theory, is the classic soil of the pairing family. The Iroquois, for example, simply dissolved relationships at will by going back home, and held festivals every year when tribes came together for the purpose of wider sexual enjoyment and cultural enrichment. According to Engels, “monogamous marriage”, the third historical stage of the man/woman relationship, results from the influence of private property (beginning with the domestication of animals). Its express purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity (so women cannot be permitted to have sex with other men), which later come into their father's property as his natural heirs. Engels shows what a small part individual sex love played in the rise of monogamy. It has an economic origin. And along with permanent monogamy there soon appeared prostitution (for men) and adultery (for women), with no cure for either one. According to Engels, women brought about the transition from group marriage to pairing marriage, with its greater equality and joy, but men introduced strict monogamy -- though indeed only for women. In her introduction to Engels’ great book, Eleanor Leacock argues that it is crucial for women to understand that the monogamous family as an economic unit is basic to their subjugation, calling it, quoting Engels, “the world historical defeat of the female sex.” Monogamous marriage, characteristic of modern people, imposes too heavy a weight on human beings. It is not the natural form of human association that corresponds best to human nature; it was a wrong turn, a historical mistake, perhaps facilitated by natural selfishness, but the important point is that it is not irreversible. We need to recapture the freedom and happiness of pre-monogamous tribal love relationships. L. Morgan, after studying the American Indians, came to the conclusion in his book, Ancient Society, that the advanced forms of civilization “will be a repetition, but on a higher level of the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity which characterized the ancient gens.” Love Politics is the idea that sex, the oldest force in the world for building community, when linked throughout to emancipatory consciousness, is still the basis for building a political community that puts us on the path towards a good society. The way to make us strong enough, wide enough, and deep enough to carry out the required socio-economic changes is to make the entire process an erotic adventure. A group of monogamous couples is a boring place, dead spirit, because you cannot stifle the erotic basis of community and hope to keep it alive and well. Gatherings and meetings of any kind do not work. Politics is bleak in America; we have come down to the primal energy of Eros as the source for a genuine political revival. Only by allowing sexual energy to flow more openly, as in aboriginal societies, can aware people create and sustain enough human cohesiveness and solidarity to make a true beginning... Read the whole essay (includes the above extract; scroll to the third section of the essay, entitled "Family", to continue reading where the above extract leaves off). ©2004 Glenn Parton |
 A
new Dutch government program called SeniorStart
"aims at stimulating successful entrepreneurship by older (45+) people
who have lost or left their jobs or are re-entering the workforce
after
an extended period, by
creating a dedicated (virtual) professionally-staffed National Service
Centre and supporting the
sharing of knowledge and experience between experienced senior
entrepreneurs and new startups through regional networks".The National Service Centre offers the following services.
The project is financed by the Taskforce on Older People and Employment, the GAK (Industrial Insurance Administration Office), the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the WISE (Working Network and Information Centre for Senior Entrepreneurs) Foundation. It was co-developed by WISE and MKB, an umbrella group of over 500 trade organizations and business associations. This is a wonderful initiative, one that deserves to be studied and emulated in other countries. Now, what I'd really like to see is a network that connects these older, experienced aspiring entrepreneurs with the other group that desperately needs advice on how to set up a new business -- young people just graduating from school and unwilling to enter into a lifelong contract of wage slavery as menial employees to pay off their student loans -- and then advises both groups on how to set up and operate a successful entrepreneurial business. |
 Figure 1 Richard Manning's book Against the Grain is a remarkable work -- succinct, well-researched, solution-oriented and mind-altering. It's an absolute must-read. Please don't settle for the synopsis below, and don't assume that because it's about the history and economy of agriculture it's a dull read. It's riveting. The issues that Manning describes in the book were first raised in his Harper's Magazine article last winter called The Oil We Eat. But the book goes much further. In my earlier root-cause analysis of what 'caused' us to invent civilization, to abandon our joyful hunter-gatherer cultures, the cause-and-effect went like this:
 Figure 2 The 'discovery' of grain monoculture in areas of recurring natural catastrophe (like floodplains) was only possible where man was already settled, which only occurred in areas where fish were plentiful, which is where all agricultural cultures began (the birthplaces of civilization) before they expanded and merged into the single civilization culture we know today. Sedentary life, and soft grain gruels, also allowed a higher birth rate, since babies no longer had to be carried for four years until they were weaned -- and the population explosion began. The ability to store food also allowed the provisioning of armies, and the need to keep people from going back to their instinctive hunter-gatherer ways and abandon the farms required the use of force, which required hierarchy and government. The provisioned armies conquered the remaining hunter-gatherers (most notably in Africa and the Americas) and made them slaves on the farms. To keep unnatural hierarchy1 from crumbling, the governors bribed subordinates with extra resources, larger homes, and their own 'private' land, as long as the subordinates kept the slaves and peasants in line2. Wealth, and its inevitable partner poverty, were born. Dependence on monoculture, which failed often, gave rise to the first famines. Average human heights plummeted due to disease and poor, unvaried diet, bone deformities from constant stooping became commonplace, and grain monoculture and crowded villages allowed previously rare diseases to flourish: anemia, arthritis, malaria, syphilis, and tuberculosis, and, finally, plague, all of them unknown before agriculture. And the high-carb diet of grain monoculture also brought with it other new and unnatural phenomena: tooth decay, obesity, diabetes, lactose tolerance, and alcoholism, which devastated many hunter-gatherer cultures when they were suddenly exposed to this deadly and seductive diet. So agriculture was irresistible to man, the ultimate devil's bargain. By doing so, man threw in his lot with a host of life forms that co-evolved with man and grain monoculture: this 'coalition' included the rat, insect pests, weeds and parasites as well as the aforementioned diseases and a handful of animals suited to domestication, all of which thrive with monoculture. In fact much of the 'conquering' of the hunter-gatherer world by 'civilized' man was really accomplished by our coalition partners: it was our diseases, to which hunter-gatherers had no exposure and hence no resistance, that killed most of them, not our weapons or their years of subsequent slave labour. The introduction of our domestic animals likewise altered the New World's terrain, since these animals had few natural predators and exploded in population, literally eating the natural flora to extinction. Like us, these domestic animals paid the price of civilization -- they are smaller, sicker and poorer than their wild counterparts, but the ultimate test of evolution is endurance, and our unholy coalition has passed that test with flying colours. Humans, members of the six domestic animal groups and the big five monoculture grains, and the rodents, insects, weeds and disease parasites that come with them have all flourished, at least in numbers, together, and together they now constitute a huge and growing proportion of Earth's biomass, while the millions of non-coalition creatures almost all face extinction. Although our diseases did most of the dirty work, Manning argues that our civilization culture committed systematic genocide against every hunter-gatherer culture on the planet, from the Cro-Magnon man in Eastern Europe (whose language, intriguingly lives on only in the tiny Basque community whose culture is still under siege), to the First Nations of the Americas and Oceania. The result was what anthropologists have called "remarkable cultural homogeneity" and "pathological conventionality". Its sustained hallmark has been ever-increasing famines, the "very badge of civilization". The worst famine ever, and one of the most recent, in Mao's China, killed 80 million people. The second worst, in Russia, was also in the past century. Famine, a sudden and severe shortage of vital resources, breeds hunger, and that always breeds imperialism in turn. The alternative, common and legal in China for millennia until quite recently, is an invention called "Swapping Children / Making Food" -- in times of famine you exchange your children for your neighbour's, and then kill them and eat them and use their bones for fuel. Modern mythology would have us believe that famine is a political problem -- a consequence of bad distribution of food and bad government -- and while this is in part true, famine is ultimately an inevitable consequence of our fragile monoculture and massive overpopulation. This quote, describing one such famine in Ireland, where potato blight in one year eliminated 90% of the monoculture potato crop and hence 90% of the food, has given me nightmares: In the first hovel, six famished
and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a
corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged
horsecloth, and their wretched legs hanging about, naked above the
knees. I approached with horror, and found by a low moaning that they
were alive, they were in fever -- four children, a woman, and what had
once been a man. It is impossible to go through the details. Suffice
it
to say that, in a few minutes, I was surrounded by at least 200 of
such
phantoms, such frightful specters as no words can describe.
All of this because we threw ourselves out of the Garden of Eden, seduced by the lure of uniform plenty. Why and how did we get into this mess, and who is to blame? Manning recaps: "A population explosion generates the need to grow more food, but agriculture is the cause of that population explosion, and agriculture creates the need for government. The hierarchical, specialized societies that agriculture builds are wholly dependent on the smooth operation of their infrastructure, on transportation, on stability. Dams must be built, canals must flow, roads must be maintained and government must be established to order these tasks. Government leaders emerge from the social hierarchy that agriculture's wealth makes possible. Failures are human and inevitable. To hold agriculture blameless and government responsible for famine is like holding a lion blameless for a child's death on the grounds that it was the lion's teeth that did the damage. Poverty, government and famine are co-evolved species, every bit as integral to catastrophic agriculture as wheat, bluegrass, smallpox and rats." Our solution, of course, was not to blame agriculture, but to try to make it more efficient. Although we now produce a massively excess amount of monoculture food, famines, starvation and poverty remain commonplace. So lately we developed the Green Revolution to increase efficiency of grain production, to increase yields and edible mass per acre and per plant. The theory was that these high-yield crops could be grown closer to the starving. But fifty years later this has not solved the problem, and it has in fact increased the fragility of the system. Plants are now patented, and GM now threatens existing plant species and diversity and their utter homogeneity exposes them to new vulnerabilities as nature evolves new pests and diseases to try to bring back into balance this massive, ecologically unsustainable and undifferentiated surplus. And these higher yields come with a huge price tag. Whereas a calorie of your home-grown carrots requires less than a calorie of non-photosynthetic energy to produce, a calorie of grain requires ten calories of energy to produce3, mostly in the form of Mideast-oil-based, highly processed nitrogen fertilizers poured onto severely and evermore soil- and nutrient-depleted land. Ironically, that fertilizer replaces animal manure, which is no longer economical to truck from the new concentration-camp factory farms (also developed to improve 'efficiency'). So most of the oil-based fertilizer runs off into the water supply, along with massive amounts of pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics and other by-products of 'efficient' agriculture and the mountains of shit from the factory farms, which no longer has commercial 'value'. And if the smell of that shit makes living in the area unbearable, that's fine, too, because Archer Daniels Midland and the other handful of companies that run this entire system can then buy up and concentrate the farms more cheaply. Besides, we don't want nosy 'eco-terrorists' and news media poking around and seeing what really goes on in those factory farms anyway. The cost of this is so phenomenally high that government subsidies now exceed the entire 'commercial value' of the food produced. It's a massive corporate welfare scheme originally designed to keep families on farms and now accruing primarily to the few corporations that control the industry. Taxpayers pay for these corporations to produce and process an absurd excess of bad food and to finance governments who pursue Middle Eastern wars to get the oil needed for fertilizer. And in return the taxpayers get cheap, tasteless, unhealthy, polluted food, monstrous animal cruelty, massive pollution of the air and water, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, tooth decay, alcoholism, ruined land, and unemployment. And still there is famine. So what are we to do? Manning starts by pointing out what not to do -- try to get government to change the system. "The political system cannot be counted on to reform agriculture because the political system is a creation of agriculture, a co-evolved entity". Of course we should try to end agricultural subsidies, but Manning says we are unlikely to succeed. Vegetarianism can help, but not much: As long as the vegetables come from the same commodity system, they're still causing massive environmental and social damage and animal cruelty. And we couldn't go back to hunter-gatherer culture, at least not in our current numbers, even if we wanted to. But reducing human population is a necessary condition: "I do not take human population as a given; if we accept six billion as inevitable, we are doomed". Beyond that, Manning's solution is the same one that a rising chorus of radicals and revolutionaries is calling for: A walking away from this system and its products, and the creation of a new, healthy culture and economy. To Manning, focused on the food economy, this means:
|
 The Linus
Pauling Institute at Oregon State University has a site with
useful information about 'micronutrients': vitamins, minerals, other
nutrients (like Omega-3 Fatty Acids and Co-enzyme Q10),
phytochemicals (trace chemicals in various plants), and the foods that
contain all these nutrients. For each nutrient, you can learn its
impact on the body, diseases it can help prevent or treat, where you
can get it, and interactions with other nutrients, foods and drugs.
The
entire database can also be sorted by disease instead of by nutrient.
Pauling was known, of course, for his controversial claim that large
doses of vitamins can prevent the common cold and other diseases. The site is very thorough, quite technical (but still comprehensible), and makes fascinating reading. Thanks to tudogs.com for the link. Speaking of health information, Health Central (the Dr. Dean Edell site) hosts the full (from what I can ascertain) contents of one of my favourite books, The People's Pharmacy. Learn how to make safe, effective treatments from natural, common ingredients that work better than most over-the-counter remedies. Find out which alternative remedies work, which are placebos and which are downright dangerous. |
 I have just updated the
full Dire
ctory of Active Salon Blogs.
You can download it in Excel format by clicking on the link at the top
of the right sidebar just below my e-mail link. It contains current
information on the owner and subject of each blog, plus current
sortable data on hits/month and inbound blog counts. Please send
me details of any missing and new Salon Blogs, and any errors in the
Directory. I promise to post any updates I receive to the Directory
spreadsheet regularly. Here are the summary statistics for the last
month:
Insights from Today's
Gospel (#3342)
Boomer Mom / Suburban Malaise (#3343) Tales of a Stone Pilgrim (#3346) Reading A1 (#3364) Fortinbras Radio Weblog (#3368) The Fix-It Chicks (#3378) What Would Dick Think (#3379) Reggie E. Scott's Radio Weblog (#3388) I Cover the Blackboard (#3398) The Irregulars Blog (#3403) Post-Coital with a Modern Primitive (#3409) The Adventures of Sophie's Dildo (#3411) If I've missed your Salon Blog, or if you know of any active (posted within the last month) active Salon Blogs not in the directory, please let me know. |
 As promised in February, here's an update on the US employment data. After a lot of ballyhoo in recent months, the US Department of Labour has released terrible July employment growth data, and quietly revised downwards the employment data for the previous two months. The latest 'preliminary' (subject to additional revision) numbers for June and July are 131.24 and 131.27 million respectively. Even assuming a resumption of the very modest increase rate in the Spring, employment is unlikely to reach 132 million by the end of the year. This compares to 132.4 million when Bush 'took' office four years ago, and 135.3 million promised last January (though by one interpretation of his mangled speech, he was really only promising 132.5 million). This would make Bush the first president since the great depression to record an absolute loss in total employment during his administration. In order just to match the 150 thousand new entrants to the labour force each month due to population increase, employment should be rising by 1.8 million per year, and should now be nearing 139 million. What's worse, the quality of the new jobs created has been exceptionally poor. Rather than creating high value, knowledge-intensive jobs to replace the jobs offshored to lower-wage countries, nine out of ten of the highest-growth sectors of employment are low-wage, low-expectation jobs (food service, secretarial etc.) Most growth continues to be in part-time and temporary jobs. No surprise that so many have just given up looking for work. So much for trickle-down economics, and the promised stimulus of Bush's tax giveaway to his rich friends. Yet a recent AP-Ipsos poll reports 46% of Americans 'approve' of Bush's handling of the economy. Who are these people and what have they been smoking? |
 In last week's post on
Assembling
the Team for Natural Enterprise* I promised that I would present
an Elevator
Pitch
for such enterprises. Although this post is too long to deliver in an
elevator ride, it does explain what Natural Enterprise is and why you
might want to set one up or join one.What is Natural Enterprise? A form of self-organized, self-managed, community-based business partnership in which two or more people agree to make a living together as collaborators and peers, to strive to attain what each member needs to achieve for his or her personal well-being, to accept substantial responsibility for each other, and to respect and help the community or communities in which the enterprise operates. It is 'natural' because this form of socio-economic activity occurs ubiquitously in hunter-gatherer cultures and in non-human animal cultures. Why is it different?
What's the catch? Natural Enterprise could be to the modern economy what the Internet has become to modern politics and society -- an anti-hierarchal mechanism that democratizes and liberates economic power and opportunity the same way the Internet has democratized and liberated social and political power and opportunity. Both innovations fundamentally threaten established power, authority, 'wisdom' and control, by undermining them and rendering their hierarchies vulnerable and potentially obsolete. Large corporate oligopolies will recognize Natural Enterprises as threats to their power and profitability, and, much as they have responded to labour unions, will attempt to ignore, circumvent, weaken or crush them. For at least a generation, pionering Natural Enterprises, much like the fledgling Internet of the 1980s, will have to be content to play a minor role. Charles Handy envisions this as being like the relationship of the flea to the elephant -- Natural Enterprise will contract mainly with large corporations as suppliers, and will be to some extent dependent on these large corporations' largesse and their increased proclivity for outsourcing, along with the Natural Enterprises' own innovativeness and agility. As Handy says, such uneven contracts will at least be an improvement on the wage-slave employer-employee contracts they supersede. And eventually Natural Enterprises will become so numerous, and specialized and adept in so many industries and aspects of business, that they will start networking and contracting and associating with each other, using the power of the Internet. And much as specialty stores undermined and largely replaced the large, cumbersome, general-purpose department store, Natural Enterprises could ultimately eliminate the need for and replace large, cumbersome corporations. Just as the Internet created a socio-political and information 'World of Ends', where central control and authority are not needed and all value is created at the 'ends', so, too could Natural Enterprise create an economic 'World of Ends' where corporatism, oligopoly and massive size are not needed in economic entities and where all value is created at the 'ends' -- face to face with customers. It's a revolutionary and powerful and liberating idea, but it will take time, patience and energy to bring it about. How do I set one up? The Handbook is now being written. The framework is illustrated above. You can learn more about them here. * What's In a Name? I have used the terms New Collaborative Enterprise, Existential Enterprise (Charles Handy's term), and New Tribal Ventures (Daniel Quinn's term) to describe such enterprises. The 'new' in these terms suggests there are 'old' collaborative enterprises, the term 'existential' has been voted off the island by readers of this blog as too highfalutin' and intimidating a term, and terms like 'tribal' conjure up images of war paint and noble savages. Autopoietic Enterprise (it means self-creating and self-managing) is accurate but unpronounceable and would probably be perceived as pretentious. Readers have suggested the terms 'Natural Enterprise' (Harold Jarche) and 'Organic Enterprise' (Don Dwiggins), which I like because they're simple and descriptive. I like Natural better because its opposite (unnatural) is exactly what the modern corporation is, while the term 'organic' is a bit ambiguous (it means 'related to organs', 'related to organisms', 'carbon-based', and 'instrumental', of which only the second definition is a propos). I' almost decided to keep 'Collaborative' in the term for two reasons: To stress that these enterprises entail more than one person working together (a sole proprietor, to me, does not an enterprise make, even if s/he is a powerful networker -- enterprises are about people making a living together), and because it would allow me to continue using the acronym NCE, which has gained some common parlance over the past year. But in the end, simpler is better, Natural Enterprise is inherently collaborative, and I was taught 'when in doubt, leave it out'. So Natural Enterprise it is -- thanks to Harold for the inspiration. |
 Graham Westwood of ProCarta gave me a copy of Bill Jensen's Simplicity, a book that claims
most business problems are a result of unnecessarily complex
decision-making processes. I recently
wrote
that if Knowledge Management were relabeled Work Effectiveness
Improvement, both the requirements of the job and the customers'
expectations would be much clearer, and we might finally get the job
done. Jensen's book offers a prescription for WEI.Jensen's thesis is that poor decision-making is the root cause of business error and ineffectiveness, and his diagnosis of the four causes for it is shown at right. Most employees, he says, want to do good work, but are impeded by these four causes, which produce unnecessary complexity in each of our jobs. I concur with this diagnosis, though I'm not sure large organization have either the capacity or the will to fix these four problems. At the individual and team level, Jensen suggests* five behaviour or learning changes that could alleviate these problems:
These are useful suggestions for improving work effectiveness and hence decision-making in organizations, but none of them is new. Those that would take up WEI (or KM) as a career need to understand why these techniques have not worked in the past, before they attempt to implement them in their organizations. In many companies, both employees and managers raise their eyebrows at 'soft skills' courses like time management, effective communication and story-telling. We know how to do that, they will say, the problem is more systemic, more entrenched than merely teaching common-sense skills can hope to solve. These critics are half-right. Many problems in business are structural, strategic, or systemic, and raising people's hopes by suggesting that these basic work management techniques are suddenly going to work bottom-up when they didn't work before, will merely create disappointment. Excessive size and hierarchy, poor managers, and inappropriate success measures (that reward executives more for cutting staff than for making staff more effective, for example) are at the heart of much work ineffectiveness, and need very different solutions. But these critics are also half-wrong. Each of us today is increasingly in charge of our own careers, our own jobs, and hence our own work effectiveness. The five skills listed above are critical skills for every entrepreneur and every front-line worker, and we should each ensure we have these 'core competencies'. If the big, cumbersome organizations we work for do not allow these skills proper exercise, then the answer is either to leave them or reform them, not to revel in our ineffectiveness and just blame management (even when they are to blame). The remainder of Jensen's book prescribes some higher-level organizational 'disciplines' that can enable improvements in work effectiveness:
Nevertheless, this book provides some of the much-needed definition for WEI, which I believe will be the next wave of organizational change, and will accomplish much of what reengineering and knowledge management failed to do. The #1 purpose of management must become empowering people to know and do what's important to achieve the organization's goals, and enabling them to stop doing the other stuff that, today, takes up most of their time. * Jensen uses different words for these, and for many of the key ideas in this book. As much as I liked his messages, I found sometimes his choice of labels for his key concepts confusing. |
 We went out for a delicious dinner last night at a wonderful, and completely packed, restaurant in downtown Toronto (it's called Mildred Pierce, for those who live in the area), and spent some of the time unobtrusively eavesdropping on the conversations at nearby tables. The discussions, much like the one at our own table, vacillated between the very personal (who's dating who, personal anecdotes) and the impersonal (entertainment, sports, weather). But not a single word was uttered about politics: Nothing about Canadian politics (collapse of the right), Ontario politics (health care and education strikes threatened), Toronto politics ('new deal' for cities in peril), US politics (Bush/Kerry), or international politics (Iraq etc.) Not a word. This was a Sunday night so there were no obvious business reasons for steering away from the subject. It just never came up. And it occurred to me that at our annual neighbourhood BBQ on Saturday night no one talked about politics either. Is politics just too boring in Canada or has it become tacitly PI to talk about them, because of the political polarization that seems to be happening everywhere? Is the left-right gulf getting too wide to even try to broach in 'decent conversation'? I appreciate that there is less urgency about politics here in Canada than there is in the US, at least. The election here is over. And I'm told that at least 40% of Americans know personally at least one person on active duty in the Mideast, and that, I would expect, would probably make it a more likely topic of conversation. But some of my American readers tell me that talking about politics in face-to-face conversations is just too uncomfortable for them these days as well -- too likely to lead to arguments. So outside of political rallies and other meetings of like minds they don't talk about it much either. What does this mean? First, it means the end of true political debate -- I don't mean those phony, scripted events where politicians roll out their rehearsed one-liners, I'm talking about articulate exchange of political views and information between real people. If you don't talk with others about politics, how do you form your viewpoints and where do you get your information? From attack ads? I don't think so -- maybe I'm naive but I don't think they work; most people know when they're being manipulated, and won't fall for it. From radio talk shows or editorials or blogs? Most of them are only for people who have already formed an unwavering political opinion on everything, and are merely looking for reassurance and justification for their belief. From television news and the print media? There isn't enough information content in the sound bites and newswire rehashes in most of them to allow an informed decision or point of view on anything. It seems to me that, on almost any political issue, 50% or more of the population is completely disengaged -- even if they care, they don't think anything they do or say or feel will have any impact, so they can't be bothered to voice, or sometimes even form, any strong opinion on it. And the rest are in two, polarized camps, each believing that the other is irrational or immoral or misinformed, hopelessly so, so that meaningful discussion with the 'other side' or with the disengaged majority is impossible or fruitless. So except for the one-way palaver from the political flaks and political advertisers and partisans and oversimplifying mainstream media, there is no political information flow. And there is no discourse, no exchange of ideas or views, no balanced presentation of opposing views, no true political conversation. Because what purpose would it serve? I see an astonishing paradox in modern society -- in an era with unprecedented access to information, most people are ignorant of even the basic facts on most political issues, from the connection between 9/11 and Saddam, to the causes and implications of global warming, to the political situation in Sudan and Venezuela and Chechnya< /a> (not to mention parts of the world less in the news), to the numerous ecological and humanitarian crises that everyone from the Union of Concerned Scientists to Amnesty International is shouting about. Why are so many so ignorant? I think because they choose to be uninformed. Why? Perhaps either because they they can't relate to the issue, or because they don't think there's any point in getting stressed about issues they feel they can do nothing personally about. So you end up in a vicious cycle: The less people know about a subject, the less inclined it is to come up in conversation, so the media conclude there is no interest in it, so they don't cover it, so people know even less. And if they do know about it but feel helpless or disinclined to do anything about it, they don't share their knowledge with others, and eventually with enough indifference the situation gets worse and the solutions become more intractable so people feel even more helpless and disinclined to try to do anything. Political disengagement is infectious, and it's reached epidemic proportions, especially among the young. All of this supports Richard Manning's argument in Against the Grain that politics was and is designed to protect and entrench the status quo. As a result, nothing pleases those with power and money and influence more than massive political indifference and disengagement -- what Gene McCarthy in the 1960s during the fight against the Vietnam War called 'acedia' -- a Greek word meaning spiritual torpor, lack of care, apathy and inactivity in the practice of virtue. Unlike the 1960's, the numbers of politically disengaged is inversely proportional to the age bracket -- it is the young who I love so much and have such great hopes for who are least engaged in the political process, who infect each other with their indifference to global issues. But I don't think it's that they don't care. Most of the young people I know are overwhelmed and intimidated by how much those of us who are politically active know about global issues. My teenage granddaughter has read my blog, but says she "doesn't understand it". The young focus their energies and their passion instead on issues in their own networks, local things, things that they can do something about. We need to show them the way to do more. We, who have been in the streets, need to reach out to the young and not-so-young who have given up on the political process (often before they began), and stop drowning them in facts and laying guilt trips on them and filling them up with bad news and instead:
The real 'swing voters' are the ones who have never voted before and don't expect to vote in future. Rhetoric won't bring them to the polls. If we can 'activate' them, then conversations about politics will no longer be politically incorrect, and political activism will spread like a virus. As those who fought against the Vietnam War can tell you, political activism is as infectious as political apathy. The defenders of the status quo will be shaking in their boots. And then the revolution we all need, the revolution to save the world, can begin. Cartoon by the incomparable Robert Mankoff (from the New Yorker, of course) |
 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. |
 Two weeks ago I reported on the upcoming June 28 Canadian election, and predicted that there would be a Liberal minority government, with the NDP holding the balance of power. Since then, groupthink has taken hold, and the anger that many Canadians feel about the incompetence of the federal Liberals to detect either wasteful spending or the 'sponsorship' fraud by some government workers, plus the anger of many Ontarians about the new Provincial Liberal government's reneging on promises to avoid tax increases, has led another 8% of Canadians to vow not to re-elect them. This 8% swing has been predominantly older men in Ontario, who seem unwilling to believe that the Conservatives are as right-wing as Liberal Prime Minister Martin has portrayed them, and younger people, whose support for the Green Party has significantly increased. The province-by-province projections now stand as follows -- 155 of the 308 seats are needed for a majority:
Next week we'll hear the all-important leader debates, but they are likely to change nothing. The Conservatives are muzzling their own right-wing extremists, who are virulently anti-abortion, gay-hating, anti-gun control, anti-immigation, pro closer ties with the US, anti-Kyoto accord, and militaristic (Stephen Harper, the new Conservative leader and former head of a Western separatist party, wanted Canada in the Iraq war). The Conservative strategists are determined to portray Harper as a moderate, despite the fact that he is on record as having taken right-wing positions on many social, economic and environmental position. If this sounds a lot like Dubya, and the spin doctor white-washing of his extremism reminds you of 'compassionate conservatism' in 2000, it should, because the tactics are the same -- say anything to get elected, and then trot out the real agenda of the people who paid for the campaign. But it's even more frightening than that. Small-c conservatives make up only 30% of Canadians, and the capital-c Conservatives are already above that point, with some of their voters coming from angry liberals. But if the figures above don't change, the Conservatives will get 38% of the seats with 33% of the vote. And the Bloc Québecois, the Québec separatist party that runs candidates only in that province, will get 19% of the seats with only 11% of the vote. Add them together and you get a distortion almost identical to what happened in the US in 2000, where Dubya 'won' with only 46% of the popular vote. If the Conservatives and Bloc combine their seats in a strange-bedfellows anti-federalist coalition, they'll have 57% of the seats with only 44% of the votes, while liberal-centrist parties will have only 43% of the seats, even though they will have received 56% of the votes. There is no other coalition that would have enough seats to form a government. Problem is, this coalition won't hold for more than a few months. The Bloc is a left-wing, Francophone party, liberal on all social, economic and environmental issues. The Conservatives have diametrically-opposed views on every issue but one: their dislike of federalism. The cost of Bloc support would be to grant Québec limited sovereignty, kind of 'independence light'. The very idea of this is repugnant to core Western Conservatives. And the Bloc has already said that it would not support any Conservative government that tried to recriminalize abortion, and has made it clear that it would not tolerate abandoning Canada's support for the Kyoto Accord, or anti-gay laws, both of which are bedrock principles of the Western Conservatives. And Ontario Conservatives would quickly cross the floor to the Liberals to save their political skin if the Bush-style right-wing social agenda of the Western Conservatives was trotted out. The role of the media in the final two weeks of the campaign will be interesting. Conservative media are likely to present Harper as the 'heir-apparent', the surprise winner and a fresh new face for Canada. Liberal media will be torn over whether to simply relate the campaign stories as they are spun out by the parties, or to go behind the scenes and surface what Harper has said, in writing, in past, on many issues he is now trying to paint himself as moderate on. The current Liberal campaign has attempted to do just that, but it has backfired, being portrayed as negative 'US-style' electioneering, sour grapes or desperation politics, so the liberal media could be subject to similar admonishments if they get proccupied with the 'secret agenda' of the Conservatives. But media being what they are, expect Harper, the new frontrunner, to face increasing heat over unanswered questions from his decidedly non-moderate past. Not to mention some of his decidedly wacko neophyte candidates. So what do I think will happen? The Conservatives will win a small plurality, and have to either form a coalition with, or try to manage with the tacit support of, the Bloc Québecois. Paul Martin will resign right after the election, and the Liberals will choose a new leader not tainted by the recent scandals. The Conservatives will start to self-destruct right after the election, with hard-line right-wingers expelled or resigning, and moderates crossing the floor to the Liberals, especially after it selects a new leader. The new government will last 3-6 months, accomplish nothing, and fall when the Bloc Québecois withdraws its support. Then we'll have another election, and perhaps even a third, until the 70% of Canadians with moderate-to-liberal social and political views get a government they can live with. Ontario and Québec have 60% of Canada's population, and no party has ever successfully governed the country without healthy support from both provinces. Stephen Harper is on record as opposing bilingualism, although he is now waffling on what his precise position on this is, which makes him unelectable in Québec. And his previously stated positions on many other issues will, if they become widely known, make him unelectable anywhere. It's going to be messy, and stay that way for quite awhile. And if the Martin Liberals hadn't been so politically stupid, it could all have been avoided. Cartoon by Tom Cheney -- buy his stuff at Cartoon Bank. |
 Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) recently released its list of the ten most under-reported humanitarian events of 2003. The map above shows which countries these events occurred in. Although the MSF site is temporarily down, you can read the complete details of these stories here. The top 10 stories are:
Why aren't the media covering these stories? None of them is physically close to the West. None of them involves countries with resources of strategic importance to the West. Almost all of them are ongoing, so there is nothing 'new' to report each day. None of the people in these countries has resorted to terrorist attacks against the West to bring attention to our indifference to their plight. And all of them are intractible problems, and therefore issues that those of us in the West would rather not know about. |
| Well, thanks to readers much
more tech-savvy than I am, I think I may be able to get Google to
start
picking up my posts again, and, by tightening up the code of my
blogroll, also make the page load faster for those patient readers
with
dial-up access. So far I have moved the blogroll to the right hand
column, so Google will not get bogged down in the blogroll code and
give up before it gets to the actual posts. In the process I messed up
the masthead, so I've adopted a simple one-piece masthead
temporarily. If this post works properly, I'll then make an additional change to my blogroll, stripping out the table HTML and replacing it with a simple list separated by line breaks. Next post will report on the results of that. Keep your fingers crossed for me. |
 I have very limited patience with those who deny human responsibility for upper-atmosphere pollution and ozone depletion, or deny their impact on the geothermal dynamics of our planet, or the potentially disastrous consequences of the resultant climate instability on Earth's ecosystems. To me there is no intellectual difference between the Lomborgians who steadfastly refuse to accept the overwhelming evidence of human-caused global warming from scientists of unquestioned reputation, and the neo-Nazi holocaust denyers of Ernst Zundel's ilk. Unfortunately, the Lomborgians are heavily financed in their campaign of misinformation by Big Oil and other corporate oligopolies, who bear a disproportionate responsibility for global warming. Sooner or later they will, like Big Tobacco, be called to account financially and criminally for their negligent actions and fraudulent misrepresentations. In the meantime it has been expedient for George Bush, who received a huge proportion of his campaign moneys from these liars, to reward their thinly-disguised bribes by undoing almost all of the US environmental regulations and enforcement instituted by previous governments to try to limit atmospheric damage, and to exercise political muscle to prevent the ratification of the Kyoto Accord. By the time these regulatory reversals and delays are rectified, it may be too late for our planet.    Should you have to deal with these dangerous idiots, here is a short list of resources that you can call upon to understand and/or dispense with their ludicrous arguments quickly: US NOAA synopsis of US scientists' consensus on the causes and consequences of global warming Bill McKibben's article in the UK journal Granta explaining the psychology, and cynical political expediency, of denial NASA's studies of urban microclimates and how they contribute to local climate change and instability Union of Concerned Scientists' consensus on global warming and warning< /a> on the Bush regime's distortion of scientific research to forward its own political agenda Fortune Magazine's article on the possibility and chilling implications of global warming producing sudden drastic climate shifts Blogger Carpe Datum's brief but thorough explanation of the science behind global warming, and the reasoning behind scientists' connecting it to human activity and worrying about the risks of resultant instability (it includes the charts above) Each of the above sources have links and references to further studies. |
 Things are usually the way they are for a reason.
But there are few situations in the world that appear, from a
distance,
as unreasonable as the war between Israel and Palestine, a war that
has
been going on, in essence, without let-up for more than half a
century.
At one point the efforts to reach a peace settlement got so close to
success that the negotiators on each side received Nobel Peace prizes
for their efforts. But the dream didn't last, and for reasons we
couldn't fathom, the cycle of bloodshed, escalation and retaliation
cranked up again and is now at firestorm levels, threatening to push
the entire Mideast into even more cataclysmic violence.The reason we couldn't fathom this, is because we've never lived there, never walked a mile in their shoes. In The New Yorker this week, Jeffrey Goldberg provides us with an excellent proxy for such an experience, as he crisscrosses the area, from Israel's "ideologues of aggressive settlement" to Palestinian mothers teaching their children the honour of death in the holy war against the Jews, describing what he sees and what he hears from those in power, and from those who have nothing. It is a gut-wrenching, depressing journey. You'll need to buy the May 31 edition to read it, and I would recommend it highly. Alternatively, you can listen to Goldberg summarize his findings, along with a slide show of photos by Gilles Peress, here. One of those photos, of a Palestinian woman peering through a temporary gap in the new Israeli Separation Wall, is reproduced above. Goldberg makes no secret of his personal view of all this: The
leaders of the Jewish national-religious camp do not adhere to
observable reality, They exist in the glorious Jewish past and in the
messianic future but not in the reality of today, in which Jewish
soldiers give their lives to protect settlements; in which
Palestinians
live and die at checkpoints; in which Israel is becoming a pariah
among
the nations; and in which Israel may one day cease to exist as a
democratic Jewish state.
[Michael Tarazi, legal advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team says] "Settlements are the vanguard of binationalism" -- a single state that would soon have an Arab majority. "I don't care if they build more. The longer they stay out there, the more Israel will appear to the world to be essentially an apartheid state."... "We have to look at the way the South Africans did it. The world is increasingly intolerant of the Zionist idea. We have to capture the imagination of the world. We have to make this an argument about apartheid." The view of the moderate majority on both sides is that the best of a sorry lot of options is to have Israel dismantle the settlements and withdraw from the pathetic Gaza Strip and the volatile West Bank, to the so-called Green Line, the UN-brokered treaty line after the last "official" war. But that majority view is very fragile, and violently opposed by a significant minority on both sides. The settlements in the occupied territories are the flash-point, where hugely outnumbered Jews, many of them vehemently anti-Arab, provocative, and uncompromising, are surrounded by largely militant Palestinians ready to lay down their lives to reclaim "their homeland", and protected by an Israeli army that has ceased being protectors and become an army of occupation, many of whom are all too willing to demonstrate violently which side they support, as Goldberg reports. There are no good guys and bad guys in this war, and every confrontation, of which there are thousands, at every checkpoint, every attack by Arab militants (many of them children), every razing of Palestinian homes to make way for more Iraqi settlements, every suicide bombing, radicalizes both sides and renders the position of the moderate majority untenable. The extremists on both sides, outnumbered though they may be, are firmly in control of the political agenda, and their every provocative act strengthens their position rather than ostracizing them. The "ideologues of aggressive settlement" on the Israeli side, and especially in the settlements, largely believe that all of the occupied territories are theirs by divine right, and that it is the will of God that all Arabs be expelled from their holy land in its entirety -- that, as their website says, "There is no Palestine". And the militants and zealots on the Palestinian side, among the poorest and most destitute people on the face of the Earth, and with one of the highest birth rates, state categorically that they would not stop fighting if Israel withdrew from Gaza and the West Bank, but would merely be encouraged to continue the war until all Jews were extinguished from their holy land. The rabidly intolerant have the will and the ready means to scuttle every attempt at compromise, to embarrass moderates, to incite violence and then say "I told you so." There is nothing particularly unique in this, of course. Many of the tribal wars in Africa, the ethnic wars in the Balkan states, and the insane religious war in Northern Ireland, exhibit the same shameful, and shameless, pattern of violence and intransigence. The next, inevitable attack by Islamic fundamentalists on US soil will surely produce the same knee-jerk result in the US, and launch another war to treat the symptoms and exacerbate the disease. Ariel Sharon, less moderate than most but less extreme than the extremists, has taken an impossible 'middle' course sure to satisfy no one: Withdraw from Gaza, kind of (there are a host of conditions that render the withdrawal largely a joke to Palestinians), and bulldoze Palestinian homes to build a mammoth wall, not along the Green Line but deep inside the West Bank to "protect" the Jewish settlements, which are everywhere, not just in the border areas. The partisan, bipartisan support he has received in the US shows how little America's leaders understand the realities of the area's politics. As I've said before, the only answer, and it will take decades, perhaps centuries to achieve, is to deal with the underlying humanitarian issues, to give Palestinians a reason to value peace, "something to lose", and help them build infrastructure and educational institutions, and a future to believe in. Poverty, ignorance and inequality, not religious and ethnic hatred, are the real enemies of peace. It doesn't matter whether the area is partitioned into two states, fairly or unfairly, or made into a single apartheid state. Things are the way they are for a reason, and in Israel-Palestine the reason is entrenched, and there is no short-term answer. No matter who represents the two sides, there will be decades of violence, war, and bloodshed to come, and it is inexcusable and ignorant of those of us who don't live there to take sides for cynical political gain. Let us instead -- as we should be doing in Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the other areas we have recklessly meddled in, in the absurd and arrogant belief that we understand the problems and have all the answers -- let us instead invest in infrastructure, in education, in building a better world even as the zealous minorities try to tear it apart. The founders of the religions we all claim to believe in would surely understand, and nod in assent. |
The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry:
I've now finished Jim
Merkel's book 