Give up the need to be right
Learning comes with a risk because it’s hard to unlearn what we have learned.
The best people I know have the ability to give up their position and know when it’s time to concede and replace old knowledge with new.
When we are weak we tend to ram our point home by using fear and agression to win an argument; usually followed by a wry smile as we lose all respect for the person who gave up on the truth in order to avoid conflict.
Does your happiness or emotional stability depend on being right?
We are time
Many of us are looking for stability but too many are looking outside of themselves without realising that stability comes from within. Many of the easy problems of mankind have been solved using the logical processes of business but not all problems can be solved with logic alone and now we find ourselves with a crisis of leadership as the old system makes way for the new.
Times of transition are times of opportunity yet charlatans surround us, mixing with the phantoms that pass us by all claiming to know what the future holds and appealing to our sense of greed which all too often blinds us to truth.
But you can’t con an honest man. We don’t spot lies by using our wit, we know them when we refuse to be lied to and that requires having respect for the truth ourselves. We are all leaders now, the old monarchies and one to many broadcast systems have made way for a new form of communication one often described as ‘many to many’ communication and with this has arrived a new found responsibility one which not all of us are ready to take.
Here is a wonderful quote I found in the book The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
A victim act is a form of passive aggression. It seeks to achieve gratification not by honest work or a contribution made out of one’s experience or insight or love, but by the manipulation of others through silent (and not-so-silent) threat. The victim compels others to come to his rescue or to behave as he wishes by holding them hostage to the prospect of his own further illness/meltdown/mental dissolution, or simply by threatening to make their lives so miserable that they do what he wants.
I meet too many people who just want to make a fast buck. They aren’t interested in building a future; on the contrary they want to borrow from it to maintain the status quo. In order to build the future we have to look back and accept that the past isn’t over. Just as the Renaissance ‘forged new philosophies’ out of Plato[1] we too need to look to our past, break it down unpack those ideas and feel them in a way appropriate to the age.
Ultimately I think it all boils down to this: It’s not money we are short of it is time, for once it is gone it never comes back. The truth is bearing down on all of us and while some are embracing it with an open ended curiosity others are waiting to be taken to the brink because they think that what they need to compel them in to action must come from outside of themselves, they don’t believe they have what it takes from within.
Finally then we need to stop thinking of ourselves as victims of time and realise that we are time; we bring our past experiences to our future projects and weave them together to produce a present moment[2]. We need to stop finding time and instead start making it to do the things we care about.
- Renaissance Neo-Platonism By Richard Hooker↵
- Heidegger’s Being and Time, part 8: Temporality – The Guardian 27 July 2009↵
Previously on Twitter: Rupert Murdoch learned how to talk to the public
Take your pick!Lower big salaries, lower all taxes, lower govt payouts, encourage self reliance and thereby real happiness.
— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) February 10, 2012
@rupertmurdochIt comes down to whether or not people trust big business or big gov’t. I don’t trust either, really. but one is culpable
— Will Urich (@friendlydugong) February 10, 2012
@friendlydugong no, both are culpable
— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) February 10, 2012
Online identity – calling in the tab
Imagine walking backwards down a path, you can see where you’ve been, you can see where you are now but you can’t see where you’re going.
Keith Johnstone[1]
And this is how we experience life is it not? Now more than ever we can see further down that path and we can see more clearly where we are now. We no longer hear of that tsunami a week later, an hour later or even after a few minutes. Now we can share the horrific experience with the people on the ground in the present moment.
We have a relationship with these events that thanks to the internet no longer feels historical. It’s not that they did not impact us before, rather now we feel them more closely. It’s analogous to the difference between sight and smell; if we see something it could be lightyears away (such as a star) or it could be right in front of us (like our fancy Apple laptops) but in order to smell something it must be in our immediate vicinity, and knowing this a priori, our behaviour changes. We are smelling the world now rather than merely seeing it, the internet has given us this sense of smell, this feeling of closeness. These events matter to us in a way we have never known before.
Isn’t it about time we stopped saying “in the real world” when talking about offline activity? I don’t know what planet you go to when online but I feel very much at home. When we say “in the real world” we are kidding ourselves in to thinking that what goes on online isn’t real. Try telling that to someone who lost their job because of something they wrote on Facebook or Twitter.
For a while now facial recognition software on Facebook has been standard[2][3][4] and stylometry, a technology that, for example, can identify us based on our style of writing,[5][6] is following close behind. Now I don’t wish to scare monger but most probably Facebook has your legal identity which forms a large part of its value proposition to the markets. That’s right Zuckerberg did “what the CIA failed to do in 60 years”[7] just by saying “look the other way!” You went online to connect with your friends but you forgot that all the while you were running up a tab.
Our identity is tied to a balance sheet such as when the police say “we need to identify a man in connection to…”. In order to hold someone to account we must first have their identity. It’s as if the internet while in its infancy allowed us to hold multiple balance sheets, masquerading among different people and groups under pseudonyms. Each one had a different history, level of trust and reputation; much the way it is offline. But with the internet, like no other species, we have transcended space and time.
While every life form invents its world with its own sense of space and time, human culture further extends the variability.
Pierre Lévy[8]
Hear that? Space and time are for the birds, literally. We laugh in the face of geographic boundaries. When offline where we go depends on things like how close we are, how able bodied along with pesky economic factors like whether we can afford that airline ticket. However in an online environment the only thing that stops us from going anywhere is how much we care; on the web we are guided by our passions and interests.[9]
What’s that? Really, you don’t think people are interested in you and won’t bother looking you up? Oh please. Try switching roles for a moment. What if you needed to meet someone new in order to fill an important role in your life? Let’s assume for a moment your network of friends doesn’t accomodate every possible need you will ever have. If we really want to get to know someone we don’t ask them what they think, that will just cover us in spin with lashings of self deception. No, if we want anything resembling the truth we ask the people around them,[10] it’s the best way of speeding up that never ending journey we call “getting to know someone”.
Pseudonyms don’t prevent identification, they simply slow the process down. If someone cares enough they will find the truth eventually. Conversely if someone doesn’t want to hear the truth then they will believe what they want to believe.
If it can be said that man collectively shrinks back more and more from the Truth, it can also be said that on all sides the Truth is closing in more and more upon man. It might also be said that, in order to receive a touch of It, which in the past required a lifetime of effort, all that is asked of him now is not to shrink back. And yet how difficult that is!
Martin Lings[12]
Truth is repetition[11] and more and more I am coming to think that the enemy of the radical transparency movement isn’t privacy, it’s change.
To be continued…
Further reading & criticisms of the views in this post
Dana Boyd Real Names” Policies Are an Abuse of Power & Facebook and “radical transparency” (a rant)
Paul Bernal gives a wonderful analogy of these issues in his post Privacy… and the Phantom Tollbooth!
Wikipedia Radical transparency versus accountability
Christopher Poole speaking out against Zuckerberg’s assertion that anonymity is cowardice: ”Anonymity is authenticity. It allows you to share in a completely unvarnished, raw way.” 4chan Founder Christopher Poole’s SXSW Speech
- Keith Johnstone, paraphrasing as I can’t locate source. He was speaking on the subject of acting and improvisation↵
- Search Engine Watch How to Disable Facebook Facial Recognition 8 Jun 2011↵
- PC World Is Facebook Sharing Your Face With the Cops? 1 Feb 2012↵
- EPIC Calls for Moratorium on Facial Recognition Technology 31 Jan 2012↵
- Wikipedia Stylometry↵
- University of Arizona Authorship Analysis see full paper A Stylometric Approach to identity-level identification and similarity detection in cyberspace↵
- Forbes Profile of Mark Zuckerberg↵
- Pierre Lévy Becoming virtual: reality in the Digital Age 1998↵
- ibid↵
- Wikipedia Looking glass self↵
- Ancient Beliefs and Modern Superstitions via E.F. Schumacher Small is Beautiful p. 249↵
- Søren Kierkegaard “Truth as subjectivity” Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments link to Daniel Johnson 2003↵
Hitler reacts to SOPA/PIPA
I spent a lot of time yesterday trying to educate people on the SOPA bill in order to raise awareness of the issue, especially here in the UK. It is being seen too much as American problem . I am great advocate of building on the work of other people which means that where possible I try to find out if someone has said better something that I want to say myself. I found this video via the Guardian blog; perfect.
Here are some great lines:
[The internet] was supposed to be a vast network of infinite human knowledge, expression and creativity.
You don’t get to destroy the Internet because it doesn’t fit your business model!
Congress wants to cripple the only medium that’s consistently creating jobs and growth.
Piracy is a service problem. The way to defeat piracy is to provide a better service than the pirates.
And my personal favourite:
Don’t cry, Disney owns the rights to that emotion.
Please share this video on your Facebook, G+, Twitter or whatever your preferred weapon of choice.
Footage from The Downfall (2004), Copyright © 2004 Constantin Film AG, portions published under Fair Use, Title 17, U.S.C., Section 107.
This site is a work in progress
Dear Friends,
This site has been a struggle. It’s challenged me to think about who I am as a person which is of particular contention to me; always has been. And I’d really like your feedback on where I am going with it.
Take a look at the image above, this is where I want to go. I want it to be ‘earthy’ I want it to be enjoyed on mobile device like an iPad. I want this blog to be “Best read in a garden”. Or maybe a park. I want it to be a pleasure to look at.
But not at the expense of legibility. Can you read it okay?
I am going to get a business card made on a paper stock that looks like this, in fact the design of this site was heavily influenced by this. So I will get it made on the same stock.
A few thinks explained:
I don’t like boundaries, or rather I don’t like fixed ones. That’s why there is a lack of boxes on this site.
Blue and brown has long been a favourite colour combination. The blue reflects the cold corporate, the corpus, collection of bodies, many people making up one body. The brown represents the earth, from which we come from. Human means ‘of the earth’ from the latin humus.[1]
The bar along the top is at a slant, that’s not your eyes. I like asymmetry, everything loses its symmetry when you change your point of view.
Please leave comments in the comment section or email me. Tell me how easy it is to read. Do you think it’s over the top?
Warmly,
Chris
Making it safe to touch
One of the most important features on the original iMac was its handle. It gave us permission to touch it at a time when for most people technology felt unfamiliar and daunting. It’s not hard to understand why, just skim through the popular culture of the previous 30 years, look at how machines were represented in films like Terminator. Albeit well meaning, thinkers such as Cameron who wanted to give us a warning sign inadvertently fed in to a fear and instead of working to get the best of human and machine what resulted was a polarisation; we either saw the machine as a tool or a toy.
Jonathan Ive, head product designer at Apple, designed the case for the iMac G3, which allowed us to see the inner workings of the machines and gave us a new found connection with technology. That is despite increasing the cost of each unit by $60, a high price for what many manufacturers would have considered a pointless design aesthetic, Steve Jobs put pressure on the board at Apple insisting that this was how the company was going to make its comeback.
If we’re going to help the over 50s who have thus far been working mainly in the physical realm of existence in to computing; if those laid off in Calais and Dover are to stand any chance of getting jobs in the future we need to learn to think the way Ive did when he conceptualised this iMac.
To understand is to forgive. One of the distinguishing features of humankind has been our ability to go beyond the physical and create a space that exists in a virtual realm. We risk leaving these people behind.
SOPA
Join me & change your profile picture to protest SOPA: BlackoutSOPA.org #BlackoutSOPA
— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) January 9, 2012