Inadvertently stumbled across this remix on a slow starting Saturday morning, due to Pandora playing in the background. To recreate: 1. Queue up 04.18.09 NPR Weekend Edition’s interview with Joe Queenan, author of "Closing Time". 2. Queue up the following 4 artists/songs: NiN / Suck, Tool / 46&2, RATM / Killing in the Name, Massive Attack / Teardrop. 3. Mix volumes to taste. "Over the course of time, I got tired of listening to middle class and upper middle class people’s stories, and I got tired to listening to their problems, ‘cuz they didn’t have problems. You know, problems are food, problems are shelter, or problems are somebody down the street has got a gun. Problems are not ‘my daddy doesn’t appreciate me enough’ or ‘I didn’t get into Middlebury,’ those aren’t problems. I wanted to write about what poverty is really like. I wanted to make it clear to people that we don’t all come from the same background. Just because I speak this way, and just because I’ve been to La Sorbonne, and just because I’ve read Marcel Proust: I didn’t start out like you, and there’s a lot of people like me. Don’t you ever think that we all started out the same way, and don’t you ever take your own good fortune for granted.” — Joe Queenan This remix of NPR segments with industrial metal (or anything, for that matter) strikes me as an interesting idea to play with later; overlapping progressive music with progressive dialog.
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Posted to michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us
Remix for Progressive Effect
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=976
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Posted to michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us
On Democracy & Technology
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=959
Updating this old favorite topic, perhaps the best way that I can be of service to our little global community is to echo Amy and David Goodman; specifically, by continuing to raise awareness to the fact that the so-called mainstream media has inexorably evolved into a patently polarized & palpably polarizing Extreme Media. There is almost nothing mainstream left of the Big 3 or Big 5 broadcast news networks; they’re crumbling under the weight of their own supererogatory influence; the mainstream is becoming the old stream and the infinite recursion and recycling what was once passed off as “news” is immediately obvious to anyone looking at the latest Google News headlines, feature five thousand five hundred and fifty three versions of the exact same AP story. This, how can I put it gently, is not simply unsustainable as a communication or business model, it’s utterly absurd and broken. In fortunate contrast, emergent new stream internet journalism sites like Democracy Now, LinkTV, AlterNet, CurrentTV, and others clearly represent a rising tide of Democracy-powered perspectives, driving Technology. We are not just witnessing a technology-enabled Renaissance of Democracy expressed by way of our new video-mediated telepresence canvas, we are becoming — each and every one of us who so choose — essential Participants in, and co-Architects of this online digital age of enlightenment. Hyperbolic? Perhaps. Yet, it’s nearly impossible to not acknowledge the rise of an increasingly well-educated, and web-educated, grass-roots Populism of the Pen; Digital Pen, that is, etching out an evolving and adaptive, increasingly collectively-written, edited, and performed New Americanist canon. A participatory canon consisting of individual videos, web sites, blogs, instant messaging, texting, and the rapidly expanding twitterized cognosphere. If I were pile on with the advent of the coming overlapping Whispernets, at this point, I may lose the small handful of readers who are still here, at this point. So we’ll save that for later. In this New Americanist context, the significance of the Obama administration’s embrace of revolutionarily democratizing technology like peer-to-peer video, can not be overstated. By electing this president, We The People have opened a literal – not virtual, for this is the Real Deal – National Kitchen Table open discussion space. Now this point is crucial: WE did this. Not “the government” … not some shadowy “them” … WE are, you and I, shaping the fate of our democracy using the innovative technologies of our own making. Whether or not we choose to participate in this evolution, and to what degree we participate, is of course an entirely different matter; a matter of individual liberty that should never be co-opted or coerced. The take-away here is that the Obama Administration’s mature and pragmatic use of Social Media has already permanently altered the trajectory of not just uppercase American Democracy, but lowercase global democracy. Arguably, so far, this has been accomplished in one the most positive, peaceful, and non-violent ways imaginable. Openness, Transparency, Communication, Inclusion, and Freedom of Expression are some of the key watchwords of any vibrant democracy and these are values that technology can help to either expand or contract. Naturally, the potential bifurcation of values at this juncture is also a topic better suited for another post. Before I wrap up this little dropped packet of consciousness, I do think it’s noteworthy to call out one generally contrasting threat to the nascent democracy and technology renaissance that I see presently underway. It is a perspective argued through what I personally consider to be the old-stream, fear mongering rhetoric of the last of the radical right wing elitist extremists. Generally, the arguments consist of grossly oversimplified, dumbed down specters; shadows of filigrees of historical clichés: Tea Parties, Torches, and Pitchforks, oh my! These non-arguments strike me as crass, even doltish and manipulative kindergarten nursery rhymes that are indeed most effective with the segment of the population most prone to believing in nursery rhymes and superstitious old wives tales. Frankly, I don’t care if this sounds academic or egg-headed to some, it is empirically observable human behavior and therefore pragmatically important for us to realize just how many humans are directly moved to political action by such silly fairy tales. The cost of ignoring what we might otherwise consider pure silliness is far too high; we’ve learned this the hard way during the past several radical right wing elitist administrations. Radical right wing elitism is an elitism of superstition and easy-meme nursery rhyme; either one “gets” the fairy tales, or they don’t; and this creates a very dangerous black and white world of right wing elitist hegemony that can only ever drive deeper wedges between peoples and cultures. So it is very important to repeat and repeat and repeat the message that today’s technology-mediated grass-roots populism has nothing to do with torches and pitchforks. People simply want and need what every vibrant democracy always wants and needs: a voice, an informed vote, accurate and meaningful representation through frank, vibrant, un-edited, authentic People-2-Power-2-People communication. To my mind, that’s the intrinsic nature of today’s democracy and technology partnership; and now it is ours to leverage for the good or squander for the bad. So call it a big, messy, noisy, and often perplexing Global Online Public Piazza, or the Universal Citizen Cognition Space, or the Totally Awesome Kickin’ InterwebZ, or the OMG-WTF-Net, or whatever you want to call it. To the extent that we Keep Connecting and Empowering More and More People with these tools, it is the greatest technological opportunity for democracy that the world has ever seen. The question is, what are we going to DO with it? What are YOU going to do with it? We’ve already seen and read thousands of tercentennial-leaning Declarations of Independents published all over the web during the course of these first few decades of beta-testing the web. Perhaps what I’m personally looking forward to most, is the opportunity that technology now affords me for participating in what develops next. I look forward to learning from, and interacting with the product of literally billions of individual and small group efforts now underway. I look forward to being included with and encouraged by the rapidly accelerating numbers of insanely intelligent and broadly informed online autodidacts; who are increasingly liberated from the obsolete exclusivity of polarizing old stream narratives; who are finally in possession of the tools, skills, and aptitudes to lead the world forward toward A More Perfect Union – a more cohesive and peaceful democratic global union – marked by genuinely, materially increasing experiences of authentic Liberty and Justice for All.
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Posted to youtube.com
Change We Can Believe In - Matt Miller on the Tyranny of Dead Ideas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1k_bw4sReM&feature=youtube_gdata
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Posted to michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us
Singularity University: FutureSkew U ?
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=895
Let’s see if I read this right: Pay $25,000 for the privilege of pitching the VC’s so you can give away 80% of your total Return on Innovation to the same 8% of the population who already owns 80% of the wealth? Please do blast my biases to smithereens, but this doesn’t exactly strike me as a Roadmap to Postscarcity.
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