February 2012
3 posts
Warrior Queens and the Western Culture
[Yet again, I have been too lazy to come up with my own idea for a topic, but have just reponded to someone else; in this case, Vinay on gender: http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/tantra-race-and-feminism-3016/comment-page-1#comment-10701]
I thought I might weigh in on Cultures, because we are in danger of failing to compare like with like here.
First: Most cultures will have some deep...
*Ahem* →
“But we are beginning to recognise that simply handing over the valuable code of localism, connectivity and gift entrepreneurialism to governmental forces might just be to further enable the dismantling of the protective aspect of the state, and thereby extend techno-capitalism’s mass-appropriation of our lives.”
...
January 2012
5 posts
Best Quotes and Links from The Well Conversation
http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/occupy-foreclosures-and-a-chart-of-changing-tactical-innovations-in-protest-movements/
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fiction-no-211-william-gibson
http://emergentbydesign.com/2012/01/10/core-principles-for-the-new-economy-human-agency-enlightened-self-interest/
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/twenty-years-fore-aft/
...
Demeaning Spires
I held back on commenting on this Guardian article by noted Oxbridge-cynic Elly Nowell, not least because it is the kind of non-story that is perpetuated by people like me getting needlessly involved, and the girl doesn’t really deserve to have a private joke raked over by the “intelligentsia” (sic) of the UK. Also, this comment pretty much said what I would have said if I ever...
"Only slowness is fast." →
Dougald writes a thing
So Dougald wrote a thing. And I wrote a thing back:
Interesting how easy it is to talk to people when you share an identity or a common task. Travelling abroad, British people suddenly become uncharacteristically gregarious with one another - since, by comparison with everyone else around them, communication is so easy and they have so much in common. On protests, as a film extra, when sweeping...
Real Time Control
Mad Hatter Clock, by Rima Staines (http://intothehermitage.blogspot.com/2010/04/mad-hatter-clock-and-some-spring-fairs.html)
So I’m following the slow evolution of Jon Lebkowsky and Bruce Sterling’s annual end-of-the-year State of the World prognistication-jam over at The Well.
The Well itself has remained magnificently lo-fi. You just read the text off the screen. Back text on...
December 2011
2 posts
“It’s what I call the “snafu principle.” Communication only occurs between equals...”
– Robert Anton Wilson
The Desert of the Unreal
From the archives: “Desert of the Unreal” conference paper, delivered Oslo University, August 2006.
This seems oddly retro to me now - I gave the paper when ‘progress’ in Iraq still led many news bulletins; the illusionary wealth of high finance was continuing to spiral upwards on the updraughts of Imperial hubris; 4 months before the execution of Saddam Hussein...
November 2011
2 posts
The Laputan Fallacy
Just a quick one, then…
Background: http://storify.com/leashless/at-leashless-19-november-2011
How do the police maintain the belief that the protestors (sic) they are attacking with blunt instruments and chemical weapons are simply an unrepresentative rabble of unkempt ne’er-do-wells, even when they are 84-year old women, even when they are retired Police Chiefs?
Do...
October 2011
3 posts
Location Location
So that’s the one thing I haven’t heard anyone talk about in relation to #Occupy yet - the role of location. There is a slightly awkward compromise within the movement between saying “we are not protesting - that would be to place ourselves in the position of petitioning inferiors; our gaze is focused within, where we are building our own parallel structure of governance”...
OccupyEverywhere Newsround [updated 5/11]
I’ve read so much good background and analysis over the last few days on this emerging Global Justice Movement phenomenon which is happening in cities all over Europe & America (and then Canada, and the UK…) that I thought it might be useful to collect some links together in one place to which you can direct people who want to know more:
[Disclaimer: More than anything else,...
Crunchy global justice metamovement floor plan →
Happened to notice there was some Stuff going on in America, and I thought this might be a good time to mention that, if anyone just happened to be thinking of trying to organise an open-source holarchic global justice metaswarm at this particular moment in time, a somewhat edit-needy document from the summer Interdependence Day work now exists at the above link, sketching out a rough example of...
September 2011
2 posts
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little...
Exciting! leavergirl over on Leaving Babylon has a post up about me old “Reality as wotsit wotsit” thing: http://leavingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/09/23/multiple-realities/#comment-1332
She says smart things like:
“But has humanity ever inhabited a single reality? Isn’t the longing for one a totalitarian trap, an old hankering of the civilized? When everyone converts to...
Battening down the hatches
Nothing like a seasonal change to remind us it is time to change gear. Walking round the old gravel pits, watching the adolescent coots steer randomly across the rippled mirror of clouds - still unaware that life is not an endless summer - and the steel-grey heron, hunkered down on a submerged branch over the water; seeing the first touches of russet staining the upper leaves of the canopy.
...
August 2011
3 posts
A Mad Max future
Can we just establish something? When people accuse movements like Dark Mountain of deludedly fantasising about “a Mad Max future”, they are actually thinking of Mad Max II: The Road Warrior, right?
Because, as I remember it, the setting for the first movie in the Mad Max series is a world where oil scarcity has led to economic disaster and the beginning of the breakdown of social...
Whatever happened to Interdependence Day? (Part 1)
…I hear you all cry. No, really, I do.
The short answer is “I went on holiday(s)”. It’s summer, people! Get out there! Eat barbeque! Meet new and interesting and naked people!
The other answer is that I needed some time to digest. The bit where ideas meet reality is always a difficult juncture, and Interdependence Day (aka ‘The Global Justice Movement / Future We...
July 2011
5 posts
So you want it even shorter?
today: not problems, but meta-problems.
strength flows from face-to-face, but disquiet remains - ‘Fabian’ environmentalism; “it just doesn’t do to say that sort of thing out loud”.
all a little bit strange. Problems; solutions; an integrated clusterfuck: we no longer inhabit a single reality.
climate change deniers retreat to a bubble; “reality insurgents”. Apply 4GW! Understand the...
Reality as failed state - tl;dr version (I like...
So maybe what we have today are not problems, but meta-problems.
It is very useful to confirm our understanding with others, to meet with fellow humans – preferably face-to-face – strength flows from this.
However, disquiet remains - no pre-catastrophic change of course seems in any way likely. What we might call ‘Fabian’ environmentalism has failed.
Occasionally a scientist will be so...
A speech I will probably not be giving at...
So maybe what we have today are not problems, but meta-problems. Let me explain.
We all spend time discussing with one another the urgent problems humanity faces at this critical time in history: the imminent decline in rates of fossil fuel extraction; the possibility of near-term phase-shifts effects in global climatic destabilisation; the accelerating destruction and toxification of ecosystems;...
Zeitgeist:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/keith-kahn-harris/naming-movement
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/aaron-peters/movement-that-needs-no-name#
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/joss-hands/digital-activism-and-anti-cuts-agenda
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jun/21/charles-secrett-open-letter-activists?CMP=twt_fd
...
Watch
June 2011
12 posts
Shroom logik →
Whither idealism?
From the archives: Spengler/Baudrillard mash-up excerpt #1. (© me, c. 2005.)
Spengler maintains that the objective data of science is only understood through the cultural screen of the time - “Mechanics is a copy of the logic of its day and vice-versa. The picture of thought as psychology builds it up and the picture of the space-world as contemporary physics describes it are reflections of...
“Organisations are obstacles to organising ourselves. In truth, there is no gap...”
– The Invisible Committee
“Every neurosis…is a miniature ecological crisis, and the worldwide...”
– Ken Wilber Sex, Ecology and Spirituality (1995)
Sorry, we're doing what now?
Mm, so I’m starting to see why people have been responding to Modular Thought Tank post with statements like “so when’s the first meeting?” and “glad to see you have volunteered to singlehandedly save the world with your exciting new project” (OK, fine, I made that last one up). I suppose, if you screw your eyes up tight and look at it from a funny angle (and...
Building a (modular) thought tank
[These thoughts have been with me for a while. But a couple of things have sparked me off today: Emily James, talking about her documentary Just Do It, remarked that filming the young activists that are the subject of the film had made her come off the fence – where she had previously said “’it’s not my place to tell others what to do’ – in a sort of late-’90s relativist...
Towards a Gift Entrepreneurialism - tl;dr version
[Ed: To be fair, I could have just said the last two paragraphs of that post. But if I hadn’t written everything that went before it, I’d never have known that this was what I thought!:]
***
We are beginning to create an incredible new form of society, part-reversion to tribal gift economy, part reputation-based hypernetworked entrepreneurialism. There remains, unfortunately, the ...
A scientific analogy
Once upon a time there were a group of individuals who lived in a large windowless building, consisting of a central living space and many other rooms and doors leading away from it. In time, the inhabitants came to know the details of their environment very well - the number of bricks in the walls, the temperature of the floor tiles, the precise design of the chairs and tables.
The inhabitants...
Towards a Gift Entrepreneurialism
So everyone has gone education nuts today: AC Grayling is in the Standar’, talking about his New College for the Humanities boondoggle.
Meanwhile, That Guardian is talking about some place called ‘Oxford’ which voted against some guy called ‘Willetts’. Presumably he now has to leave the house or doesn’t get to be Maria or something.
And Charles Hugh Smith...
May 2011
5 posts
KidHacks
Great thread on Reddit on crafty parental strategems. Have Fillit-ed it for the best.
[disclaimer - obviously I think everyone should just be 100% honest with their kids and not try to manipulate them by leveraging affection, literacy or their own superior knowledge of the world. But I also think everyone should quit work and live in magic ecovillages on the moon, so maybe some of this will be...
l'il babies and skool and that
Thought I would throw up some resources on Continuum/attachment parenting, unschooling etc. All pieces of the bigger picture, i.e. why industrial civilisation is really bad for us, how we got to this point, and where we should go from here (clue: not back. There is no back).
Birth and Parenting:
http://motheranarchy.blogspot.com/ (great blog, esp older articles, very honest on difficulties of...
Unconscious Insight into Mechanisms of Fascism -...
from: http://jungcurrents.com/dreams/hilter-and-dreams/ :
In the 1930′s psychoanalyst Charlotte Beradt recorded and collected people’s dreams during Hitler’s rise to power: The Third Reich of Dreams. The material had to be smuggled out of Germany in code. In his essay at the conclusion of the volume, published in 1966, Bruno Bettelheim remarked that it was a shocking experience reading...
April 2011
1 post
“Do not seek fame. Do not make plans. Do not be absorbed by activities. Do not...”
– Chuang Tzu