Details at http://www.vta.org/xbus Gilroy to Lockheed Light Rail in just over an hour, with wifi http://www.vta.org/schedules/SC_121.html There is zero reason to not have self-driving, 100% solar-powered, electric-engine buses running in synchronized pods well before 2030. Only reason forecast is not for 2020 is widespread institutional mailaise and incumbent energy interests working to slow progress. This too is evidence for how industrial era capitalism continues to hobble Accelerating Sustainability.
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X-Bus: Transform Your Commute
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"Capitalism has shortfalls," says Richest Man in the World, Bill Gates.
“Capitalism has worked phenomenally. Look at North Korea versus South Korea, or China before and after 1979. Capitalism has shortfalls. It doesn’t ... take care of the poor, and it underfunds innovation, so we have to offset that. We don’t have to [ask] whether capitalism is wrong.” - Bill Gates: 'I wrote Steve Jobs a letter as he was dying. He kept it by his bed’ - TelegraphThis is precisely the premise of our work in these pages. It's not about whether an abstract system is right or wrong, but whether or not it's accomplishing all of our human objectives. Industrial capitalism worked for the stage of civilization that the so-called advanced west traversed over the past 150 years; it's simply not adequate for the next leg of the journey. We can and should immediately offset poverty and homelessness with Basic Income and continue to evolve toward maximum human flourishing.
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Wireless Slum Lord Data Pricing Turns Back Clock 20 Years or More
The most ancient of readers will recall when “Ma Bell” tried to charge us for connecting a second rotary-dial phone to the same line, in the same home. So obviously full of #FAIL on a thousand metrics. Grown ups in general will remember when incumbent DSL internet providers in the 1990′s tried to charge us for using a home hub or router to share our land line internet connection with more than one computer. Absurd, right?
When we access telecom services, we're paying for a signal, a service, which has nothing to do with the devices connected to that service. Just like electricity or water. Today's oligarchs want to charge us extra to use water from the tap when filling different shaped glasses, pitchers, carafes; or charge more if the water you get from the spigot is intended for cooking, drinking, or cleaning.
This oligarchic, bit-measured (they don’t even really exist, except as energy, humans!), device-centric contrivance is and always was nothing short of an abomination to common sense; the equivalent of having to pay extra for plugging in a toaster or blender to household electricity. Electricity has peak use and hence a kind of “congestion” too, yet nobody would ever dream of paying extra every time they plug in another desk lamp. Here’s the latest example from VerizonWireless, foisting precisely that model onto a captive, closed market: Galaxy Nexus by Samsung: “Data packages may not be used to tether your smartphone or basic phone to a computer or tablet, or as a Wi-Fi hotspot, unless you subscribe to Mobile Hotspot/Mobile Broadband Connect.”
Telecom oligarchs are the slum lords of bandwidth. They only build the bare minimum and then do everything they can to raise rents at the fastest possible pace while putting off improvements until someone takes them to court. The biggest #WIN for oligarchs, like slum lords, is that the vast majority of their tennants are in absolutely no position to be able to hold them accountable. The answer to carrier complaints of “bandwidth hogs” (i.e., Smartest Innovators on The Network) is the same as it ever was: open networks, open markets up to more competition to keep building more capacity, faster, so that more innovation can continue to improve the entire interdependent system.
Cisco’s John Chambers answered “the congestion question” in the 1990′s and it’s still true today, there’s no scenario in which installing sufficient capacity doesn’t successfully and effectively kick the congestion can down the road. Unlike politics, in technology, kicking the can down the road isn’t a bad solution at all; in fact, it’s almost always been the way we grow into where we’re going, from where we are, with what we have on hand.
The answer for consumers is to Just Say No and/or practice Peaceful Conscientious Resistance through superior understanding and knowledge of their own, including opening more unlicensed spectrum and building our own nationwide mesh networks.
If we don’t realize that energy companies are watching carefully, and will try to pull the same stunt with ephemeral photon from the sun that oligarch telecoms are attempting — in pretending data packet of photons consist of mass and cost — then we have only ourselves to blame. Once the optical fibers and microwave towers are in place, the marginal costs of moving bits are as close to zero as one can get without literally vanishing into oblivion.
The bit-measured, device-centric telecom pricing phantasm is so ipso facto absurd that I can’t believe so many of us have spent 30 years explaining this in such excruciating detail, still to be met with a deer-in-the-headlights responses, more often than not. It’s just not that hard to grok; really it isn’t. I am definitely not that much smarter than the average bear; I know some really damned smart bears who remind me of this on a daily basis.
If supply and demand had anything to do with the way the world really works, then WATER should be priced like bandwidth and bandwidth like water. This is just one of the thousands of ways that we continue to see that the old capitalism has already passed, and the next capitalism, continues it’s evolutionary emergence. The olden ways were fine for the olden days and those days are long gone. It’s as fundamental as the Rights of Mankind to restate the aphormism that nobody can own the sun, the stars, the wind, or the sky. They are here for all, and apart from the initial cost of building the physical collectors and connectors, it’s all virtual FREE LUNCH. That’s what we mean by Apprehending Postscarcity. The world has changed.
To remix the late great Walt Kelly, “We have met the future, and it is us.”
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Core issue that killed #MLK was #EconomicInequality #ItsNotAboutRace It's about #BasicIncome Sustainable #Postscarcity #EndPoverty
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/capitalismplusplus/~3/lxUkOz-YcnM/core-issue-that-killed-mlk-was.html
It's so not about race. The core issue that killed #MLK was moving beyond superficial distinctions of color and creed, taking on the core malignancy of the human condition: escalating and unsustainable economic inequality. King's evolving political advocacy in his later years ... paralleled the teachings of the progressive Highlander Research and Education Center, with whom King was affiliated. King began to speak of the need for fundamental changes in the political and economic life of the nation. Towards the time of his murder, King more frequently expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice. Though his public language was guarded, so as to avoid being linked to communism by his political enemies, in private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism. In one speech, he stated that "something is wrong with capitalism" and claimed, "There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism."Of course, the word distribution has long since become an emotionally hijacked firestarter keyword of the fundamentalist tinfoil hat lexicon; and actually, it's perhaps not the most accurate word to describe the challenges of a sustainable postscarcity circulatory system. Notwithstanding, a preponderance of economic scholarship over the most recent half dozen decades or so has gradually converged on the most logical first step, variously described as Basic Income, Universal Basic Income (UBI), Basic Income Guarantee (BIG), and similar language-specific nomenclature that crosses virtually all ephemeral cultural and language boundaries.Follow, learn, and join the rapidly rising global #BasicIncome trend on twitter:@BasicIncome@RentaBasica @RevenuDevie@BasicIncome_J@Grundeinkommen @BINewsAnd if all that is still not enough to bring you up to warp speed, here's Captain Picard: Make it So.
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5 Utter Fictions of Money and 10 Solutions
When the tinfoil hat brigade says that our economy is a Ponzi pyramid, they're essentially right. After U.S. President Lincoln was assassinated (perhaps in part because he printed the Greenback; the people's currency), the banksters hijacked the system. "So it was a large fraud that was backstopped by a sort of over-fraud." - Ellen Brown. Cue the 20:25 mark to get the 30 seconds prior that provides context for that quotation. Where thinking people of conscience can legitimately differ is considering the matter of which form of social capitalism, or free market socialism, which mashup of an adaptive mixed economy to implement in order to address the resulting unsustainable resource skews, to provide sustainable currency circulation -- not distribution -- via a Basic Income, or similar program that ensures consistent, healthy, transpiration at the capillary level of the economic body. Regardless of what you might have been told by an abusive parent or others, you're smart. Probably very smart, or you likely wouldn't be reading these words. So, instead of spoon feeding you yet another forgettable Top 10, the subject of this post is your assignment: watch the full video. Do the homework. Write your list of the the top 5 Utter Fictions of Money and 10 Solutions that you discover in the comments here. We can do this. We can increment the system, raise it to a more sustainable, adaptive level without throwing out the baby with the bath water. That's the '++' of Capitalism++.
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Wholly GRAIL #in2012
The Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) arrived in lunar orbit today. It’ll enable us to learn more about the moon’s lumpy gravitational field and internal structure of the moon. This year, school kids will begin controlling the lunar platform and snapping pictures of the moon using the UCSD Moonkam. Pause to consider. This will be the only boring, drab, normal world that today’s 12 y.o.’s have ever known. Their world view: “Yes, of course I can personally control and perceive the universe through sophisticated robotic platforms orbiting other bodies in space; who can’t? Duh.” It’s always boggled my mind that these are the kinds of everyday experiential and perceptual deltas that so-called normals utterly fail to incorporate into their puckered expectational world model. Yet millions of everyday futurists like us immediately, instinctively echo, “Duh? No Duh!” I’ve always wondered how and why is it that so many humans can immediately and vividly comprehend just how rapidly the perspectives of today’s 12 y.o. will come to shape the entire world, while so many others believe that 12 y.o.’s (or children of any age, 12 to 62) are powerless snot-faced punks to be “put in their place.” May 2012 also be the year of the 12 y.o. Let’s listen and learn where the future is going from the people who are right now best positioned to decide and execute such visions. It ain’t you and it ain’t me. We’ll be long gone, six feet under, while they may be setting foot on moons orbiting the sixth planet from the sun, without the slightest reservations about whether or not robotic embodied cyborg reality is reality. It’s all RL.
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@whitehouse what #40dollars means to me: 1 week groceries
The ability to buy oatmeal for breakfast. Vegetables for lunch. Rice and beans for dinner. Without coming up short for rent.
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Grokking Higgs Boson
via Matt Riddley, WSJ: “The most memorable metaphor was offered by David Miller of University College, London. Since Mr. Waldegrave had been a colleague of Margaret Thatcher, Mr. Miller chose to portray the Higgs field thus: “Imagine a cocktail party of political-party workers who are uniformly distributed across the floor, all talking to their nearest neighbors. The ex-prime minister enters and crosses the room. All of the workers in her neighborhood are strongly attracted to her and cluster round her. As she moves, she attracts the people she comes close to, while the ones she has left return to their even spacing.” The party-goers are the Higgs field, which gives mass to particles like electrons (Lady Thatcher) by viscously impeding their progress. “Once moving, she is harder to stop, and once stopped, she is harder to get moving again because the clustering process has to be restarted.” The Higgs boson itself he compared to a rumor spreading through the party, causing a wave of local clustering in the Higgs field.”
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Cyborg Psychology, Transhuman Psychiatry
Given the pace of development and disruptive implications of the accelerating changes I’ve variously vamped on in recent years, and considering the Cyborg Anthropology field is now well represented, a couple particular facets of curiousity keep glinting in the future light, beckoning to find the right team to invent a PhD in some field like Cyborg Psychology or Transhuman Psychiatry. While the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) has long been the thought leader in expounding the ethical dimensions of the changes underway, Google still doesn’t seem to associate too much with terms like Cyborg Psychology or Transhuman Psychiatry although Cyborg Psychiatry provides some interesting reading. Maybe it’s time we begin formalizing some of these. Will there inevitably be a Cyborg Medicine, Cyborg Law, and other Cyborg Holistics that branch distinctly from their earlier counterparts? How well are hominids adapting to the merger of human and machine minds in an age of cochlear implants, BCI-controlled robotic prosthetics, Adderall overachievers and Nuvigilantes? How can we do better? What does it even mean to do better and to stay healthy, thriving, as our bodies and minds get tweaked and upgraded in ways that have never before been possible? Even if we won’t know these answers until later, now is one of the richest times in human history to attempt to quantify and document the impending metamorphosis. Where are we failing, or missing opportunities? Are some humans simply unfit for these new prosthetic, extended capabilities? What is our collective cyborg obligation to them? Should we be thankful that certain minds can’t or won’t grasp the significance, much less master the means of even today’s rudimentary mind amplification tools and techniques? How do we then address opposition from those who fear being “left behind?” Who are we to say, anyway? How do we help to foster adaptive, resilient, flourishing cyborg lives? As we reach even further toward extending the duration of healthful biological life and repairing disease through intracellular engineering technologies, should people who exhibit histories of manifestly anti-social or violent, lynch-mob like behaviors be permitted access to such technologies? Should fighters win these spoils, or the meek inherit the earth? Who gets preferential access to the most consequential human enhancements, and why? Is wealth or any other caste system a valid rationing program for the kind of positive transhuman capabilities we’d hope to lead us into the next era of human technological evolution? If not, what is?
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Kinesthetic UX: A 2012 theme for device interaction, design
Today’s 2012 candidate buzzword: “Kinesthetic UX.”
It’s an election year, so it can’t hurt to don the 2012 trending, branding, and positioning hat and declare 2012 the year to (among many other equally important things):
.1. Break the Screen Trance
Across tablets, smart phones, and game pads, our current perpetual face-glued-to-palm (facepalm) catatonic state deserves one huge collective flash-crowdsourced palmface. We, the utterly spoiled top 60% or so, all possess these super nifty handhelds; wearable, accessorizing, super skinny cute cyber work-n-play-mate devices that are supposedly doing all this uber neighborly, lifestyle integrating, big data inclusive, cloud synergizing, socialish stuff. And they do, sort of. Except for a few minor side-effects.
.2. Narcissistic Mono-Screen Attention Disorder
Kinesthetic UX means please give us reasons to look up and re-connect with one another, across and through our growing constellation of displays and devices! It’s a theme inspired by this presentation by Marco Tempest.
Until we can get to the full-on fruition of Steve Mann’s lifelong work, forever dreaming the impossible stream while going about our daily post-singularity grind; please, device manufacturers and designers, at least give us reasons for our devices to actually want to cooperate, collaborate, and interact, kinesthetically. At the very least, we want the experience of our mobile devices to feel more like Marco’s marvelous artistry.
.3. Prying Open My Third Eye
Maynard James Keenan loyalists may not require any further explanation at this point of departure. For the sake of legacy 44 & 2 humanity, we’ll add that features like augmented reality, ubiquitous computing, collaborative social cognition, social tv, the cloud and the crowd, won’t be discarded or lost, they’ll simply become recombinated and incremented into new species that exhibit all the earlier behaviors plus vastly simpler and more accurate geo-fencing and tagging capabilities; improved contextual salience (what matter most to me in this particular place and this unique circumstance); increasingly effective ad-hoc intentional communities for travel, learning, political action, business; more intimate bodily kinesthetic awareness (external and internal); real-time understanding of the gravitational pull of time constraints and scheduling; shockingly higher resolution direct neuro-discernment (yep, respectable degrees of thought and mood reading are not far away, now) and associated mind amplification tools and processes; all assisting us in selecting, affecting, and optimizing both material and immaterial aspects of our environment to better fit the architecture of our intentions; individual, group, regional, global; recreational, educational, aspirational, and occupational.
For devices, there’s got to be more to this particular technium evolutionary branch than endlessly fidgeting with 4” or 7” or 10” or 11” experimentation. Yeah, yeah, size matters; to a degree. So does fit and function; usually more so. The point is, especially with NFC on the scene, we’ve finally got all the pieces to go wild with the multi-device, multi-screen, multi-surface, multi-sensor, multi-player, multi-ulti-everything experiences; not just for mobile, but incorporating public kiosks, displays, entertainment, transportation and transit, work group round tables. We want Microsoft Surface like capabilities on every display surface, in every size, shape, and setting.
Each of those contexts, and many more, are teaming with potential for new mutations of open, semi-shared, specific-use, general purpose swarm cams, swarm sensors, swarm screens, human-machine synthesized compound-mind’s-eye perspectives; in addition to vastly accelerated and extended social cognition tools that are right now delivering incomprehensively complex, yet elegant and easy to interact with, limitation-shredding, human-machine-mind-melding, problem solving capacities.
Given the pace of development and disruptive implications of these and other accelerating changes, and considering that the Cyborg Anthropologist field is already well represented, I’m leaning more and more in the direction of finding the right people to help me invent a PhD in Cyborg Psychology. If there isn’t such a field, maybe it’s time we create it. How well are hominids adapting to the merger of human and machine minds? How can we do better? What does it mean to do better and to stay healthy, thriving?
Where are we failing, or missing opportunities? Are some people simply not fit for these new prosthetic, extended capabilities? What is our cyborg obligation to them? Should we be thankful that certain minds can’t grasp the significance, much less master the means of various mind amplification techniques? How do we help to foster adaptive, resilient, flourishing cyborg lives?
As we reach even further toward extending biological life and repairing disease through technological means, should people who exhibit histories of manifestly anti-social or violent, lynch-mob like behavior be permitted access such technologies? Who gets access and why? Is money or any other caste a valid rationing program for the kind of positive transhuman capabilities we’d hope to lead us into the next era of human technological evolution?
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#OWS as Global Startup
Yep, I have to insert an AdSense waypoint click here, instead of directly linking you to the post above, because G+, like Facebook, and others, still not enabling us to somehow capture our own Content Creation value. It remains to be seen whether Chime.In succeeds in moving the needle in this regard. Actually, there are two inserted waypoint clicks in this funnel. One here to encourage a microscopic chance of AdSense revenue and a second on G+ to keep building the curation network. In the current social media model, I am not in any way incented to actually direct readers directly to content. I am incented to divert and capture and redirect, to hopefully sink attention into my properties. Is this model encouraging and fostering the most productive use of such powerful extended cognition tools? Clearly not.
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To Dream the Impossible Stream
I think Microsoft and I join Steve Mann in respectfully disagreeing with Will Wright. Many people will vastly prefer the convenience of AMS-HUD (Attention Management System – Heads Up Display) over having to constantly dig into pockets and purses, look down and away from the the people and activities we’re engaged in. It’s just another organic form factor that will improve the integration and usefulness of information and physical layers of our world. If we can’t convince Jony Ive or @ideo to build our iGlasses, maybe it would be a fun Kickstarter project; as dreamed by the true pioneers of this technology, we can finally build this functionality into a product that is stylish enough to credibly accessorize. Observing the pace of product evolution in the past decade, it’s almost as if when enough of us express any given intention with some semblance of coherence and clarity, the global cognition grid makes it happen. “Yet, we’re not amazed.” – Kevin Kelly
Go ahead. Try to tell us WE CAN’T. We dare you. Yeah, I’m mashing up the best of Microsoft, Apple, and Ideo to make the point. Let’s get started now.
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A Man Was Lynched Yesterday
- “The NAACP would hang a banner from its offices in New York City the day after a lynching to alert people of the city to what had happened” (PictureHistory). Yes, we could have used this flag last October. Thank you to all our friends in the truth loving North. Perhaps this year we’ll begin recovering sufficiently to gradually start repairing some of the deep damage done by fearful and ignorant Southerners. It’s fine to understand the nature and impetus of ignorance and fear – to live Unbiased Compassion – but it’s not okay to let violence crush reason or acrimony damage fine reputations.
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Who is a Biophilosopher? #OpenScience
A biophilosopher is: “Someone who draws upon the scriptures of nature, recognizing that we are the product of the process of evolution, and understands that we have become the process itself, through the emergence and evolution of our consciousness, our awareness, our capacity to imagine and anticipate the future, and to choose from among alternatives” (Jonas Salk, Wikipedia). Rediscovering Jonas Salk Jonas Salk, a quintessential Long Now scholar, half a century ago correctly extrapolated trends that we’re only now experiencing, particularly along the lines of realizations about world population trends, mid to long term: He went into more detail … including his feeling that a sharp rise and an expected leveling off in the human population would take place and eventually bring a change in human attitudes: “I think of biological knowledge as providing useful analogies for understanding human nature…. People think of biology in terms of such practical matters as drugs, but its contribution to knowledge about living systems and ourselves will in the future be equally important…. In the past epoch, man was concerned with death, high mortality; his attitudes were antideath, antidisease”, he says. “In the future, his attitudes will be expressed in terms of prolife and prohealth. The past was dominated by death control; in the future, birth control will be more important. These changes we’re observing are part of a natural order and to be expected from our capacity to adapt. It’s much more important to cooperate and collaborate. We are the co-authors with nature of our destiny.” It’s encouraging to be reminded of the unquestionably rational and noble genesis of such ideas, having learned about such analogies as they pertain to economic systems in the context of human circulatory systems.
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Space as Earthward Frontier: When You’re 100 ft. Above Space Station, What is Your First Thought? INEQUITY
Astronaut Ron Garan, founder of Fragile Oasis, is one extraordinary human being. He does a singularly excellent job of communicating what so many astronauts attempt to communicate, from the moment they first experience the ineffable context of space. The glaring, outsized economic inequities between individuals seem shameful; pointless; avoidable; destructive; unnecessary. Sixteen nations have worked together to engineer the miracle of the International Space Station, yet somehow, to date, we simply haven’t found a way to engineer a sustainable platform for ending poverty. Not in America. Not anywhere. For decades this has seemed to me utterly, incomprehensibly, unacceptable. How can others not see this as such an obvious, soluble, top priority for our nation and humanity? All the material accomplishments in the universe completely lose their meaning if we can’t even meet this first fundamental human-scale need. Here’s an excerpt of what Ron wrote, about his third space walk and the revelations that led to the creation of Fragile Oasis: At the top of the arc, I was 100 feet above the space station with the Earth 250 miles below. It was absolutely incredible to see this enormous orbiting space station — the tremendous achievement of sixteen diverse nations working together on Earth to accomplish a goal in space. Seeing humanity’s magnificent accomplishment against the backdrop of our indescribably beautiful Earth 250 miles below took my breath away. I wasn’t just looking down at the Earth. I was looking at a planet hanging in the blackness of space. It was very moving to see the beauty of the planet we’ve been given. But as I looked down at this indescribably beautiful fragile oasis, this island that has been given to us and has protected all life from the harshness of space, I couldn’t help thinking of the inequity that exists. I couldn’t help but think of the people who don’t have clean water to drink, enough food to eat, of the social injustice, conflict, and poverty that exist. The stark contrast between the beauty of our planet and the unfortunate realities of life for many of its inhabitants reaffirmed the belief I share with so many. Each and every one of us on this planet has the responsibility to leave it a little better than we found it. Apprehending Postscarcity is about taking that responsibility seriously. We can engineer human scale solutions to human scale problems. We must. I sorely wish that people could understand and mobilize with urgency under the banner of peace; however, that’s never been the case throughout human history, so I suppose the only thing we can do is re-launch the War on Poverty, to cater to the blood lust of those who don’t know how to, are somehow genetically incapable of, responding to anything else. To get the job done this time, however, we will need Space Soldiers, Scientists, and Engineers, and interdisciplinary Citizen Scholars all out on the front lines. I’d like to ask readers to question the same biases I began with; to please deeply investigate this topic, and learn firsthand about the math and behavioral economics equivalents to the laws of physics and nature that make a U.S. Basic Income Guarantee not only sensible and achievable, but ultimately optimal in a global context for the 22nd century civilization that we are building for our grandchildren, today.
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497+ Reasons I’m Seriously Getting Over The Internet and Just 1 Thing I Wish for this #99percent #OccupyWallStreet Week
Look no further. There may be more than 497 reasons there by the time all three of you read this, in case you needed a few more. Thing is, I bet that our good neighbor and colleague, the author of that post, even agrees with me. At least he’s not shy to say he’s only in it for the nookie. Regardless, the past couple weeks have been utterly amazing. Much needed vacation (first time taking an entire week totally #offgrid in I don’t know how long) provided some positively transformative context. There are still far more goals on the todo list than a single lifetime will likely allow, short of reaching escape velocity of course, but it will be interesting to explore this refreshed perspective on what really matters and what doesn’t in the days ahead. The one thing I wish for This Week in Planetary Self-Realization is that more people will follow @BasicIncome and get more educated about how this will actually work to decrease the costs and abuses of antediluvian needs-tested programs that cost orders of magnitude more than they need to and still don’t work as intended. Granted, it’s complicated, and yet, so simple. Economies are circulatory systems. If 80 or 90% of the liquidity is clotted up in 1 or even 10% of the body — it doesn’t matter what part of the body — the whole body is going down. This much is not rocket science. Currencies go in and out of circulation, not distribution. The latter only becomes an issue if there are unsustainable abuses and skews that cause such a word to describe the return to sustainable circulation. There are countless workable Basic Income models and plenty of IRL examples that can explain all this far better than I’m able to do in this brief space; so feel free to start here or here, or just go to town searching via DuckDuckGo if you don’t want the Google Filter Bubble biasing your thorough, fair and balanced, investigation. And so, onward.
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House Sings The Blues
Baby, if you ain’t on the cognition grid, You Don’t Know My Mind. Many actors take a blithe pleasure in pretending to be somebody else, but Laurie seems more interested in blotting out his own personality. When he’s acting, he doesn’t have to be himself. From this perspective, the role of House is a first-class vacation: an abrasive and acid-tongued American doctor. The longer Laurie plays House, though, the more of himself comes through in the part: his comic timing, his musical ability, his fondness for motorcycles. He has slowly remodeled House in his own image: a charming rogue trailed by a black cloud. Escaping yourself, it turns out, is never as easy as it seems. Is Laurie happy playing House? “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s not a question I ask myself very often. I equate happiness with contentment, and contentment with complacency, and complacency with impending disaster.” Laurie doesn’t make pronouncements like this in the morose tones of Marvin the Paranoid Android; he remains affable, as if he were describing somebody else. “I have spent part of my life projecting what’s expected,” he said. “People expect me to be foolish and goofy, but essentially cheerful. But I am closer to myself than I used to be.”
Gavin Edwards (ge@rulefortytwo.com) is the author of “Is Tiny Dancer Really Elton’s Little John? Music’s Most Enduring Mysteries, Myths and Rumors Revealed.”
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People shouldn’t see man-made global disasters as a bad thing #PostFuturePresentTense
“People shouldn’t see man-made global disasters as a bad thing,” Oberst added. “They should see them as scientific breakthroughs waiting to happen.” TheOnion just may be the greatest think tank in all the interwebz.
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How to Burst Your Own Bubble. Well, #FilterBubble Maybe.
If you don’t have time to read Eli Pariser’s book. DontBubble.Us pretty much sums it up. DuckDuckGo provides one way to experiment with various goodies.
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100+ : How the Coming Age of Longevity will Change Everything #100plus #newbook #mustread #AdaptiveFuturetechture
Yay, Sonia! Disagree, debate, embrace, or freak out. Whatever your reaction, resistance to engaging with these realities is futile. Buy, buy, buy!
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Real Names Are Not Required For Real Socializing. Um, No Duh, Mom.
Yawwwwn. So it’s ground hog day all over again with tired debate over Accountable Anonymity and Online Identity Management in general. Really? This is a valid topic of conversation among educated, intelligent interwebs inhabitants in 2011? If I had an decent CPC for every time I’ve had to defend Bruce Schneier’s 2006 infinitely logical position on accountable anonymity – a position I independently began fighting for as early as 2001, if you must know – I probably wouldn’t bother posting another blathering blog entry on such a long-expired and utterly resolved basic topic. Please, our collective intelligence and attention are far too valuable to squander on this again. Let’s not continue wasting valuable extended cognition resources on yet another naval-gazing rehash of this long resolved, non-problem. We desperately need some fresh, new global conversation conductors for this online orchestra. Conductors who will whisk us past superfluous accidentals and distractions and get on with the opus of fixing What’s Most Broken on the planet: The future that is already here — and nowhere near sufficiently evenly distributed. This challenge, along with climate change, is arguably the urgent matter of our era. We need entirely new ways of circulating value throughout a global economic circulatory system that is rapidly transitioning to a social capital substrate. As tweeted earlier: “… as quantum physics differs from newtonian, so does social capital growth differ from industrial capital decline …” People and communities are suffocating at the economic capillary level. This debt ceiling theater — focusing all too scarce and shallow public attention on histrionic, superfluous cardiac bypass procedures — won’t do a thing to support or supply nutrient-starved capillaries. Please, let’s have the courage to finally move forward to solving the big problems, building upon the best of what’s worked and discarding all that has not worked well; setting forth upon a global course correction, an #EarthOS reboot worthy of the best of our collective intelligence; accelerating change to cultural escape velocity sufficient to finally begin apprehending postscarcity. At the very least, there is no further excuse to postpone ending poverty, beyond our lifetimes. Avoidance of our fundamental, inter-generational responsibilities will not make them go away. The world has dramatically changed because our understanding has so dramatically changed. What we once thought was a cold, barren universe is in fact full of water, oxygen, and we ourselves are made of the stuff of stars. Amidst all these no longer shocking realizations, isn’t it time to grow up and be responsible, Earthlings? “All this is about stewardship.” – Harry Hellenbrand, Cal State University Provost.
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Open Call for Collaboration on Pentagon Meme Tracker
Between our extraordinary social network and extended network, we can totally do this. Unless, of course, you’d prefer to let it go to the usual gang at Halliburton. Interested? Terrified? A little of both? What if we turned this whole exercise on it’s head with a KickStarter project to make this happen? Could such a key strategic national and global security capability be developed via Open Source? What would Paul Baran say and do? Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) Solicitation Number: DARPA-BAA-11-64 Notice Type: Presolicitation Synopsis: Added: Jul 14, 2011 2:48 pm DARPA is soliciting innovative research proposals in the area of social media in strategic communication. Proposed research should investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems. Specifically excluded is research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to the existing state of practice. See the full DARPA-BAA-11-64 document attached. [Ed: also, amendment1] Proposal Due Date: Initial Closing: August 30, 2011, 12:00 noon (ET) Final Closing: October 11, 2011, 12:00 noon (ET) Industry Day: Tuesday, August 2, 2011 Time’s a ticking! “All this is about stewardship.” – Harry Hellenbrand, Cal State Provost.
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MyBarackObama Didn’t Just Read George W. Bush’s Lips
He obeyed every word. “No new taxes” on the insane sociopathological hoarders. Paul Krugman: by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status. Make no mistake about it, what we’re witnessing here is a catastrophe on multiple levels. In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t. Maybe the fact that we let people do this to us in our own neighborhoods every day is contributing to the problem. This isn’t okay. Lying, cheating, stealing, hoarding, mean people suck and perhaps it’s time to start standing up to them, up close and personal. Thing is, there’s no way we can go it alone. If ever there were a call for concerted systemic #mindap #cooperation #collaboration, this is it.
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What if our world is not what we have thought? A #PoisedRealm
“Heraclitus taught us 2700 years ago that the universe “bubbles forth.” For the becoming of the biosphere and all of life, we hold that Hericlitus was right. Life bubbles forth.” Depending upon your context, academic predisposition, and frame of reference, the following bio-ascendant worldview is presented for your half-baked, pretzel-cogitation enjoyment, or potentially for a mind-blowing, reductionism toppling, existential revelation. Excerpted from Lifeboat News, by way of +Jef Allbright. Stuart Kauffman and Giuseppe Longo: … we provide strong grounds to say that the long held belief that there is a theory entailing all that happens in the universe is false. No Law entails the evolution of life. If so, reductionism is false, and we must think anew. Our world is not what we have thought. Quantum mechanics has, in effect, replaced the determinism of the classical physical world with indeterminism. … the fact that quantum mechanics and classical physics in the form of General Relativity have NOT been united since 1927, while both play a role in biological evolution, is consistent with the possibility that the evolution of the biosphere is ENTAILED BY NO LAW AT ALL. A collectively autocatalytic set is an example of a Kantian Organized Being. The parts … exist in the universe for and by means of the whole which organizes their catalytic behaviors, while the whole exists in the universe for and by means of the parts. … the Kantian whole remain as a self sustaining, partly quantum, partly classical, perhaps partly Poised Realm, process … we cannot mathematize beforehand the becoming of the biosphere. In short, we can have NO LAWS OF MOTION for the evolving Kantian wholes literally co-creating the biosphere. We are at a terminus of Reductionism, the belief that there must be a law or set of laws “down there” that entails all that becomes in the universe. References:
Forthcoming: Terrance Deacon, “Incomplete Nature,” U.C. Berkeley. 2011: F. Bailly and G. Longo, “Mathematics and the Natural Sciences: The Physical Singularity of Life,” Imperial College Press. 2008: S. Kauffman, “Reinventing the Sacred,” Basic Books. 2000: S. Kauffman, “Investigations,” Oxford University Press.
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Yet Another Pathetic Perversion of #Postscarcity Fundamentals
One of the most glaring examples of manufactured, make-believe scarcity to date. Next, it’ll be, “there’s a shortage of fiber optic photons in the universe! Raise prices!” Basically, ISPs claim our data usage is going up and they must react. In reality, their costs are falling and this is a dodge, an effort to get us to pay more for services that were overpriced from day one. Basically, they’re quietly raising our rates while pretending to prevent a tragedy of the commons.
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Google TV #SocialTV Update
Dear Consumers: We can only do so much. If you don’t make your voices heard, all the coolest #SocialTV tech in the world will never reach you. Please … help us, to help you. When your eyes glaze over about Open Access and Net Neutrality, this is the 100% predictably irrational outcome: “big media quickly killed the buzz by restricting access to all the online viewing locations. Google TV promised the world and delivered it. The world just wasn’t ready. The original intent of Google TV sitting between a cable box and your TV to serve as a universal search tool and online streamer is genius. It was never supposed to replace cable. It worked as advertised until big media pulled back their cards.” Full story: Logitech Loses Big on Google TV, SeekingAlpha
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Your Daily Google+ Revelation: Listening and Engagement vs. Talking Past One Another
If you actually want to follow me — or anyone on Google+ for that matter — you need to follow my Comment stream. I’ve decided to not blast the G+ public timeline with my very own, all-self-important, bit-by-bit copy of whatever everyone else is talking about. Not that I’m exactly above doing so, it’s just that I think it’s a game that’s already played out and there are more interesting, vastly higher value opportunities emerging throughout the awkwardly, unevenly, imperfectly evolving attention economy. And despite the admittedly ego-stoking early fun, I never have, and never will engage in games like the pathetic pumping and dumping for follower numbers or gaming higher Klout scores. If you actually want to follow me, you’ll find me engaging in the little side conversations with the nobodies and everybodies of the interwebs, seeking out new insights, and new extended cognition; not boldly going, rather plainly refusing to go where everyone else has gone before. Sadly, there is still an overwhelmingly clamor for A-Lister micro-validations amidst the 900 pick me! pick me! comments per post amongst the flitterflutterflapperatti on Google+. This may or may not change, over time; and may not even be a particularly bad thing, as one mode of use for such platforms. What’s happening is that even the coolest of the cool periodically ask their audiences, “Hey, don’t you have something more meaningful to do than cling to my every word?” One such character, went so far as to challenge all of us with: “How do you improve the world with Google+? What would you say to a crowd of 90,000 people? Can we improve the human condition? I only have X days left with you all. What I find fascinating is EVERYONE here has 90,000 followers. Don’t believe me? Everyone who comments here has the same power I do. What will you tell 90,000 people to do? What actions should we take to make this “field trial” more than just a place to post cute photos? Go ahead, take the microphone and focus our attention on an issue you care about! Or, tell us about a way we can make a difference in someone’s life.” Arguably, a man with one of the more compelling claims on the title of Father of Social Media, is almost begging us to grok the concept of #cognosphere vs. #egosphere; to figure out how to use these tools to better think together. My own About page approaches it like this: “You’ll see no public posts here. I’m conducting an experiment which I’ll further detail a bit later. In short, we are all talking past one another, so I am using G+ to focus on listening and engagement, instead. This is not a matter of right and wrong usage; rather, in the interest of learning how to most effectively harness the breathtaking potential of an emerging and evolving global cognition grid.” Once the Google+ API comes out, I suspect there will emerge a Worldwide Google+ Presentation Layer that will consist of dozens, yea hundreds, perchance thousands of portal sites — like Alltop’s fledgling Pluserati — offering to parse and primp activity and conversation steams, just the way you believe it “should have been done in the first place.” That’s just one facet of the genius of Google+ design. Perhaps an even greater genius lies in the way that Google has invited some 20 Million of it’s closest frenemies and future-builders to co-product-manage the Google+ user experience; something that has clearly never been attempted in the history of human kind; indeed could not have been attempted, except by a company with the audacious mission “to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” I’m not drinkin’ the kool-aid, I’m makin’ new flavors and mixin’ bigger batches. Why? Because I see this as the most viable and shortest path to constructing Eywa; but that’s another streaming of impossible dreams, altogether.
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We No Longer Have Physical Bodies #SubstrateIndependence Since 1977
McLuhan, 1977. Sometimes, it’s as if I reached many of the same conclusions — living the experiences McLuhan foresaw — without ever knowing about this guy in any detail. Or did I consume all his ideas while baked in high school and not realize his effect on me? Does it matter? Probably not. It just is. “Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It’s called being Mass Man.” – Marshall McLuhan
“The future of the future is the present, and this is something which people are terrified of.” – Marshall McLuhan
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Why I’ll Never Write that Book
Why? Because I respect your scarce and valuable attention. I respect your kaliedoscopic curiosity and fractal focus. I respect the entirely new species of kinds of cognitive literacies, distributed attention, mind amplification, and extended collective cognition that you’re developing and demonstrating every day. I’m honored that you’d invest in browsing this blog post. Books are awesome. I love books. I’m confident that I’ll still read them from time to time, for years to come; and sure, if someone were to sport me some nifty advance, I’d probably even consider writing one. I’m not counting on it. From this tiny corner of the universe, it’s my observation and experience that the entire practice and domain of knowledge creation, validation, transmission, consumption, synthesis, has already forever changed; yet, we’re still shackled to the practice of printing bound artifacts, stacking them in the back rooms of bookstores, gaming the New York Times bestseller list, etc., all because we haven’t figured out a sane, scalable, sustainable interchange for the economic value of collaborative knowledge exchange. This is not a new problem. It’s been a fleeting hot topic across a vast range of disciplines, from science fiction to graduate business school curriculum. Yet, we still haven’t figured it out. As far as I can tell, conversation has become preeminent, yet bound archives remain dominant as the vestigial method for generating revenue from writing. We can and must figure this out, moving forward. AdSense definitely ain’t it. Imagine an AI bot able to search the web for every character, word, and sentence you’ve ever contributed to every forum, discussion, blog, newsgroup, mailing list over the past 20 years. I guarantee there would be plenty of ink to fill the pages of a traditional volume or three. So, for people like you to answer the question, “are you a writer?” with “no,” because you’ve not lined up some custom tailored collection of characters into a proper 17th century presentation, is not wholly accurate. Actually, it’s absurd. Of course you’re a writer. We are all writers. “It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.” – Gerald Brenan “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” – Ernest Hemingway If you write a blog, if you use social media, if you have a stack of emails to wade through every morning, odds are you’ve been sitting down to write every morning for quite some time. We’ve become an entire planet of writers. We’re all creating, exchanging, and accelerating value creation as part of the conversation. It’s worth repeating, “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” It’s time to put our heads together and figure out how to circulate the literally incalcuable literary value surplus that is growing every day by virtue of our interaction with the global cognition grid, which we austerely refer to as the Internet. At least, we should start.
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Attention Economy could Blindside Sight Licenses
As usual, I’m inspired and enthusiastic about the vast majority of Jamais Cascios’s fundamental ideas about Sight Licenses. Here’s the unexpected twist that I continue to assert will fundamentally change everything: Human Attention is the Scarcest Commodity of Production. If anything resembling free markets survives the zombie apocalyptic singularity (and I hope so; albiet, in Mixed Market mode with fundamental housing, food, healthcare, and bandwidth as Basic Human Rights), then the paywall could — maybe even must, in the vim and vernacular of market forces — become reversed. If the Personal Data Store (Harvard 2009, Hamlin/Sabadello, oStatus, Project Nori 2010, et al) can gain traction, then individuals might have some slim chance of reclaiming their individual bargaining power in the Mixed Economy of the future. Or not.
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Popular, well-loved, well-connected hermits
Lore Sjöberg nails a common allure of social media in Wired Alt Text: Google+ Is the New GeoCities. For those who recall WTF GeoCities or Usenet ever was, he writes:
… the herding instinct is strong in our species. We move from GeoCities to LiveJournal to MySpace to Facebook, looking for the perfect experiment in mass intimacy rather than just admitting that we don’t want to swallow a glistening golden stream composed of the mental excretions of everyone we know. We want to be part of the in-crowd without having to be part of the crowd. In short, we all want to be popular, well-loved, well-connected hermits.
Lore’s got it right. Partly. Okay, in some cases, maybe entirely. Yet, turning back from today’s global cognition grid, or noosphere, or world brain, to “the front porch as the main locus of information exchange,” as he puts it, is not only not an option; it’s no panacea, either. We are growing up as a species, connecting in evolutionarily disruptive ways, and hopefully, we’ll continue to do so. If and when we grow out of Sjöberg’s PWLWCH stage of interconnected global cognition grid early posthumanish development, we’ll discover that an expansive Worldwide Front Porch awaits, a place where we relax after a hard day’s work of multi-media multiplexing, co-systems architecting and coding, a place to all Hang Out together, one global family; whether we’ve met one another yet, or not. What if a growing number of us just want to be happy, well-adjusted, fully-interconnected, healthy, adaptively mind-machine-integrated, organic, socio-technologically balanced, flourishing human beings? What if it’s about enjoying the expansive liberating experience of sharing and participating in one glimmering global gem of community, reflected through 9 billion facets of ultra high def 3D IRL diversity? What if that Internet thing you’re always on … is people … connected with people, attuned and in harmony in a way only dreamt of by sages of old? What if it’s all RL, and RL is more strange and wonderful than ever imagined? So call me a hermit if you like, but my front porch is always open to the world for hanging out, any time.
P.S. Of course, these days you’ll find me there about as often as I have time to sit on any front porch; because most of the time, we’re all chasing and racing and stressing to find some kind of elusive justification of being for which society will trade us pieces of paper accepted in trade by the keepers of housing, healthcare, and food. Which, personally, just seems kind of short sighted and wasteful when we’ve finally reached a stage of post-information age efficiency and human evolution where so much more is possible.
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Social Networking for Apartment Complexes
This idea has been bouncing around in my head in recent months; will probably attempt to implement here in Sunnyvale, pretty soon. Just found this http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2011/01/04/apartment-landlords-embrace-social-networking/ while thinking about the idea. Observation: I don’t even consider using the web as “searching for stuff” any more … it’s all part of extended cognition, right? It’s just part of the the thinking process; hence, “while I was thinking about the idea.” The cognitive behavior commonly referred to as “thinking about stuff” left the human skull long ago.
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Scotland 2030 Scenarios
Scotland 2030. The Scottish Parliament was reconvened in 1999 after almost 300 years, having been adjourned on March 25, 1707 when members passed the Act of Union combining the Scottish and English Parliaments at Westminster in London. In 1997 a referendum in Scotland resulted in a large majority voting in favour of a Scottish Parliament with tax-raising powers. Westminster then passed the 1998 Scotland Act which assigned the devolved powers. In 1999, an election was held in Scotland and the first 129 Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) elected. On July 1, 1999, they gathered at their temporary home in an assembly building on The Mound in Edinburgh and the Parliament was reconvened.
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#EarthOS: Government is an algorithm. Intellectual property is a protocol.
Hierarchical titles are increasingly obsolete. Only strategic influence and tactical execution matter. The entire role of government is an algorithm. We can debug it; recompile it better than it was. Patent costs are obscenely undemocratic. IP requires a free method for rapidly and openly publishing on the web. One that establishes provenance, affords peer review, establishes indisputable originator authenticity. Totally doable.
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