Benblog

The Olfactory Truth

I hope that the experience of the 2008 Olympics begins to help people understand the true cost of our own throw away society.

When China eats itself up from the inside out, will they simply colonize the rest of the world? Rewarding the overlords, and sending the disenfranchised to disenfranchise others?

The pollution in Beijing is us. Us as in U.S. - buying crap that does nothing to satisfy us, taking our soma in the meantime.

Scalability

I wonder if the advent of more creative class professionals will harken a return to a more intermediate technology based society, one that would likely require less energy and less governance in exchange for greater plenitude shared among many.

I am thinking that once things get going with Left Brain, I may see if I can run the company at some point for an entire year, hiking the Continental Divide, or some major trail. Or traveling the world.

I can think of no problem right now that couldn't be resolved over the internet via video chat.

Having the ability to create in a more mobile fashion, shouldn't the traders and merchants of today be better able to find one another?

The captains of major corporate ventures become the transporters rather than distributors of goods, realty becomes a small market again, and people are able to live and work closer to denser population centers, but more clustered into manageable communities.

I am still fascinated by the idea of smaller faster transportation systems, built on the idea that we maintain the level of freedom permitted by the individual passenger vehicle - allowing that person to go wherever they want to go - but more efficiently. Highways would be replaced by multilane tracks, where people could determine their own risk and speed levels, number of passengers, payload, etc... and then buy what they want or need right there, rather than "owning" a vehicle. They would be buying transportation on a per need basis, paying a premium for going outside an flexible public transportation system.

Vehicles could also be owned across a spectrum, as long as they conformed to some basic chassis, allowing a tremendous amount of flexibility for the marketplace to operate as well.

As if economics were an idea

If we really wrapped our imaginations around that, what could economy look like? If we still want to exalt those heroes in our midst, indulge them, what would that look like?

If some people just wanted more stuff, and others didn't, what would that look like?

I think many of the same market mechanisms would be in place, becoming increasingly refined.

We would still maintain a highly diverse economy, even money market, based on the reality that some people are born into situations with different resources to access. That's just a fact of geography that I hope we don't damn the planet into a solution for.

But we could eliminate starvation and most disease right now, without a significant dent in our quality of life in the United States.

If we made that process a precious commodity, one where social ventures equalled or outstripped their purely commercial counterparts in value (and we will always have commercial companies, thank God - that's how needs are fulfilled efficiently), because there were even some economic measures to show the real value, we could have our cake over time and eat it too, sustainably, with more and more cake to come, and less strife for future generations of our own blood.

That's the key to a more and more liberalized global society. It will become more a vision of B'hai's idea of nationhood.

Where economy just a theory, and governance a happy necessity.

Real prosperity

When we advance to the point as humans that we do not create at the expense of others, including future generations, that will be the turning point.

When the fear is suddenly replaced by an understanding of the neighbor.

Moral Geography

I think one of the aspects of globalisation most insidious to the way we express our values is that we offload the child labor, the pollution, the poverty far enough away that we no longer see it.

As marketing and communications catch up with the global market place, sophisticated consumers will begin a new age of enlightened consumption, provided we have the underpinnings of global governmental authority to make the price too high to pay to avoid the high prices we should be paying for the products and services providing our illusory prosperity.

Those we rob most egregiously from right now are future generations, who will face strife and resource wars brought on by our own worship of Mammon.

Ethical competition

If you have a better idea than someone else, and are willing to commit yourself to making your idea more successful than another idea or product, I think the ethical course to pursue is to try to demonstrate why your idea or product is better. Part of that equation includes playing on the playing field provided by the marketplace. Now, you may wish to get involved in the marketplace because you want to establish your own sub-set of rules that will begin to alter the way the marketplace itself behaves, but you still must get yourself in a strong enough position within the field that you can have such influence.

That's why I think we need to be more competitive in general, but make the competition open to more and more ideas.

Which is another beauty of open source, in providing a mechanism for people who want to compete with ideas on a more and more level playing field, where you enjoy the game for the sport of it, not so much for the conquering over, but the conquering of self.

You find your level, to each according to ability, to each according to need, but it's not nearly as brutal as it is today.

We have so much abundance, that I would deny no other human being the right to safe streets, good healthcare, enough to eat, the enjoyment of leisure and education time, though what people do with that leisure time should be entirely up to them, with some regulation on the distribution of drugs through regulatory authority - those can mess up neighborhoods and communities pretty devastatingly, crossing ethnicity and class.

I just don't think that would cost that much to do in today's world.

It's almost like we rushed into the Industrial revolution thinking we were still confined to a Hobbesian world.

And the economics and markets and communication and interdependency has multiplied exponentially since then.

We are still simply being ruled by the reactionary limbic brain, frightened of change, unwilling to alter HIS fight or flight mentality to the new world in which we live.

I think the problem is partly socially evolutionary, partly biological.

I think there is present, in some ways  self evident, that some of these conquering ways worked and were important. I think the path though has always led to an evolution of greater cooperation.

Use of violence as a tool, use of oppression as a tool, slavery and all the ideas of power over that are part of our history does not mean that they are an inexorable part of our future.

Some of those tools of human misery were used for mostly worse, from my perspective, but not difficult to understand why those forces existed at those times, especially seeing how primitive our minds remain today.

It makes it even crazier to think of people like Jesus or Mohammed or Abraham or Zoraster or all the names that caught a breeze and moved on into future conciousness did what they did back in their times. They pretty much knew what was coming to them, and it wasn't pretty, and they didn't have good food and drink or even safe streets.

If we can't get our stuff together in these times to be able to live to the glory of creation, at least over the next few generations, we don't deserve to exist as a species. We will have failed by any measure, divine or scientific.

But if we believe in the idea, we have to fight for it. I think part of the schism in the left today is that there are people who are living more and more of the quality of life we could all live with - some people would always have more, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing - if people are motivated to create and pursue a new idea by getting a nicer engineered car, let that be so.

How can I say that is any better or worse than being motivated by the idea of having many people speak your name, or read your books, or sing your songs? But people shouldn't be living in a world that is still better at organized violence than it is at organized peace - and that's still just an idea we need to work to change, not an inevitability.

If nothing else, I want to spend the rest of my days here more and more engaged with the people who believe in no inevitability beyond individual intention, working towards a world where we can maximize the number of people living awake to the profound implications of life and living.

If companies were go carts

Microsoft would be like the rich kid on the block who, after everyone agrees to use a standard wheel size and engine, and build it really, really solid, MS comes up with their own standard, less reliable and more prone to break, and puts a sleek molded plastic shell around it and sells it to all the kids in town. Who then wonder in wander at why the kids in the go cart group that gets together and exchanges information so the point becomes winning by being the best at using the abundance of the information out there, rather than by enforcing false scarcity with a massive FUD campaign.

I hate the fact that you can write a site that is totally compatible with every other modern browser, degrades nicely, does everything it's supposed to do, and yet you have to spend two to four hours additional, if not massive amounts of hours, adapting it so it will work in IE as well - in a way that is completely unnecessary, adds no value to the browsing experience of Microsoft Only Users (MOUs). It makes no sense as a cost saving strategy, it requires that they write and support more code. The only reason to do it is to mess with open source community. It is a completely transparent and flagrant attack on open source, and a means of trying to extend their monopoly.

That's the thing that continues to amaze me. Microsofts Anti-trust violations would not have stood muster in the 1930's, and yet today, his business model is built on monopoly, with monopoly itself a core strategic and ideological approach, as much as a business precept. They are literally monopolizing mind share, including and especially the cancerous patent industry strangling, rather than protecting, intellectual capital.

I hope we make it through the information wars unscathed - I know we will. But I hope people understand these times in an historical context, and how important it is for thought leaders and individual consumers now to become more aware of how intellectual property and copyright impact our lives more so than ever before. We're not just talking about material goods, but the very technology that we use as part of our global conciousness, in a very, very literal way.

The world is convex

Friedman was writing a different book, but if I think the world is convex, with an escalator to the top - something we know as the Internet.

Once you get over the lip of the ridge atop the valley of our own perception, the view is marvelous, and hard to not wonder at.

I've had more of an appreciation for the global economy in these last weeks, working closely into the wee hours of the night as they awake, and during the wee hours of the morning saying my farewells as they go off to sleep.

This is the type of flattening that allows people to collaborate like never before. And collaboration breeds interdependency more quickly even than traded goods.

Individuals in economies across the world with some access to technology and some skills can plug in rapidly to the global economy, without much access to capital, at least in the knowledge economy.

Of which I realize I am a part.

I could not afford to do the work I'm doing with U.S. programmers.

Gift Economy

Since deciding to take Left Brain non-profit, I've been thinking again of different operational models within the concept of economics. I just keep being so boggled by the evolutionary possibility of gift economy - the deliberate sharing of an asset so that many individuals profit from the upside of a business model, which is the ability to provide deliverables to your client and get paid, while sharing the downside - developing the tools and owning them. This is the return of the Commons.

Party On

As much fun as Mardi Gras is for many, including those of us wandering around in wonder, it's the excess with no subsequent sacrifice that undermines what could be a fantastic last hurrah. In days of old, this would be the eating of the larder, going through the last fat stores, before we trudge on into the last days of winter, hoping that those last winter stores will get us through until spring.

Today, this is just another party, sponsored by corporate interests who want us to buy into their brand. The only thing organic that remains is the display of bodies.