I hope we can agree that moral politics should be a thing of past. If that is the case then I would like to share an idea with you.
I thought to myself: How could politics become tangible so more people could get into it? A democracy, from my point of view, is something that requires people to be active. Voting every four years is a mockery of that ideal. The public should be a lot more hands on with this; their system of choice.
So what could spark this involvement?
Well perhaps transparancy and responsibility could. Why not introduce a new approach that requires all new bills and laws to refer to at least one relevant scientific study done on the subject? Politicians are paid handsomely to do their job, and I would find politics a lot more interesting for sure, if I could back track their work and see how they made the conclusions they did. If you can get into the mindset of the politicians you would be a lot more likely to want them as your representatives as well. It would indeed motivate them to be and work for the people.
Consider how much more sense new laws would make if it held a clear reference to a scientific article explaining in detail the research done on the matter. And as a database programmer I can promise you that it would be easy to make a central hub of politically used articles, so that the voting community can keep up to date with when the science is surpassed and obsolete as grounds for law making. It could be an online community of sharing information about what is new in social science. What do we know about society today?
I would log on to my voter's account every day keeping myself up to date with what is new from the politicians. Which articles are they currently reviewing, and what laws could be extracted from this work? Just like checking my online bank account. I would give my daily votes towards what articles I would like to see as basis for new laws, voting up the work of the progressive social scientists that used to be stuck in the old system where their work would be overlooked.
Example: Is the change in the law that reduces the age at which you can be jailed from 15 to 14 reasonable or not? The answer is: We do not know. What we need is research on the subject and proof before we come to a conclusion. What we also need is at least one clear referencing point for this potential law or bill, which will serve as a connecting hub for it, meaning that it is discarded and reverted to its prior state when new science emerges that disproves the old assumptions.
To me that sounds like a democratic society of the year 2012.
Monday, 30 January 2012
Sunday, 29 January 2012
Feudalism
Before feudalism society was built and made by slaves. Now instead of a history lesson on that shift, I'll just move ahead to the point. Feudalism is economic slavery. Your survival was contigent upon what you were able to yield from your land. Does that sound at all familiar?
What you need to do to make economic slavery, which can in some cases be much more devious than physical slavery, seem appealing is to sell it off as an idea of liberation. Physically you are shackled no longer so go and prosper!
The age old residue of this is something that has shaped into an understanding of some ideal of independance. An ideal that is unrealistic for a species that is socially dependant almost from the moment of conception. Still it is considered to provide motivation for live improvement for people to understand themselves as responsible and self-providing.
The issues of this make themselves abundantly known in societies such as western culture where this independance ideal has gone way too far. There is no humility anywhere anymore. As soon as you reach voting age in your country you are legally considered old enough to be a part of the group in society aiming to be self-sufficient. And through the century old process that has made this ideal emerge and take hold we have completely lost sight of the fact that this has no natural basis.
Anthropologists would point out that tribal cultures show no signs of this striving towards self-sufficiency. They understand the interdependance of their culture and work to further the tribe as a whole rather than themselves as individuals. For each of them to try and accrue more riches than their neighbours would be sociocidal (the act of a person which adversely impacts upon a society or culture to a negative degree).
I did a highly relevant post to this topic called Meritocracy in which Allain De Botton details how it has a very negative reaction in society that everyone is responsible for their own position, when there is a sense of total equality socially. It was much easier to deal with not being the king of your country in the times of old, but it is near devastating for teenagers to get dropped off a pop star program today, because it is made to feel achievable.
So what does this advanced stage of feudalism we live in really entail for us?
What you need to do to make economic slavery, which can in some cases be much more devious than physical slavery, seem appealing is to sell it off as an idea of liberation. Physically you are shackled no longer so go and prosper!
The age old residue of this is something that has shaped into an understanding of some ideal of independance. An ideal that is unrealistic for a species that is socially dependant almost from the moment of conception. Still it is considered to provide motivation for live improvement for people to understand themselves as responsible and self-providing.
The issues of this make themselves abundantly known in societies such as western culture where this independance ideal has gone way too far. There is no humility anywhere anymore. As soon as you reach voting age in your country you are legally considered old enough to be a part of the group in society aiming to be self-sufficient. And through the century old process that has made this ideal emerge and take hold we have completely lost sight of the fact that this has no natural basis.
Anthropologists would point out that tribal cultures show no signs of this striving towards self-sufficiency. They understand the interdependance of their culture and work to further the tribe as a whole rather than themselves as individuals. For each of them to try and accrue more riches than their neighbours would be sociocidal (the act of a person which adversely impacts upon a society or culture to a negative degree).
I did a highly relevant post to this topic called Meritocracy in which Allain De Botton details how it has a very negative reaction in society that everyone is responsible for their own position, when there is a sense of total equality socially. It was much easier to deal with not being the king of your country in the times of old, but it is near devastating for teenagers to get dropped off a pop star program today, because it is made to feel achievable.
So what does this advanced stage of feudalism we live in really entail for us?
Friday, 27 January 2012
Piracy
The hot topic of january certainly has been piracy. No less than three bills, SOPA PIPA and ACTA, have been discussed in order to further combat piracy. You may recall the Pirate Bay trial of 2009 and 2010. The case was appealed twice and in 2012 the supreme court in Sweden will provide a response.
The point brought forth by the defense lawyer is applicable as a general idea of why file sharing should be completely legal. It is no different than producing cars that can drive faster than the speed limit, he says. I would then start comparing that to owning a gun and other non-sense like that, but I am sure you got the point.
What is relevant to this blog is to discuss is how piracy can been understood. Obviously it can be stealing. But it has other facets to it as well. Socially it is an expression that consumers want easier access. Whether this means cheaper, completely for free, without the hassle of getting physical copies or whatever else we certainly do not know at this point. It is, however, obvious that these could be issues that made piracy so prevalent in the first place.
Regarding whether pirates are thieves you have to step outside the traditional mindset for a second to fully grasp the situation. This author agrees that stealing something physically is quite different from copying something digitally accessible. Certainly something can be said for the fact that the copy right owner may have been deprived of some income had his legal property not been copied. He may have. He probably has to some extent. But is the extent as vast as the expanded exposure his work recieved? And is that not a relevant question?
You have to remember that the entertainment industry (which holds the majority of complaints towards piracy) is more interested in keeping their produce solely for paying costumers, than they are in promoting their subjects, the artists that actually create the expressions the industry is profiting from. This means that if the industry gets to earn x amount of dollars on a product with a 0% piracy rate, that is more interesting for them than to earn x amount of dollars on the same product with a 50% piracy rate. In essense they want to fence down their work, because they see the pirates also as potential costumers, so what they want is for pirates to stop pirating and start spending money instead.
Again it is of no interest to achieve the possibly massive exposure that free file sharing can offer for the work of the artists. What is interesting is to earn as much money as possible.
I doubt they expect piracy rates to completely convert into paying costumers, but even if one pirate is turned (or discouraged through increasingly tougher regulations) then it is a win for the share holders expecting bigger turn outs.
Not only is this greed socially offensive on multiple levels it is also directly harmful. Just like the Pirate Bay regular people are being made an example of by the twisting of the legal system which is extremely toxic. It may function as an immediate detergent, but just as when you bring the millitary into another country to fight a war, you may win it in a couple of weeks, but you will have your work cut out for you with the uprisings your transgrassion will spark.
A final point that I will make is that you should consider that piracy rates far exceed what is possibly consumable, both economically but also in simple human life. The sea of content available is simply too vast. And quite a lot of that content is of medium and lower quality. Probably the majority of the content. Artists are not all Van Goghs, and a lot of them would be stretching it calling themselves artists in the first place. So in this world of currency drains I can certainly see the logic in the consumer crowd moving away from traditional patterns of purchase towards more egoistic ones. It makes perfect sense that as soon as technology arose to offer deliverance from wrongful purchases, in this time when wrongful purchases could be among the most prevalent, people starting utilising this tool to avoid disappointment.
A lot more could be said on this part of the discussion, but I will leave it here and we can discuss the issue of boredom and entertainment another time.
Also, this post will most likely be used to vault off into another post outlining an alternative system based on access rather than ownership, but since that will take some effort to piece together it might not be the subsequent one.
The point brought forth by the defense lawyer is applicable as a general idea of why file sharing should be completely legal. It is no different than producing cars that can drive faster than the speed limit, he says. I would then start comparing that to owning a gun and other non-sense like that, but I am sure you got the point.
What is relevant to this blog is to discuss is how piracy can been understood. Obviously it can be stealing. But it has other facets to it as well. Socially it is an expression that consumers want easier access. Whether this means cheaper, completely for free, without the hassle of getting physical copies or whatever else we certainly do not know at this point. It is, however, obvious that these could be issues that made piracy so prevalent in the first place.
Regarding whether pirates are thieves you have to step outside the traditional mindset for a second to fully grasp the situation. This author agrees that stealing something physically is quite different from copying something digitally accessible. Certainly something can be said for the fact that the copy right owner may have been deprived of some income had his legal property not been copied. He may have. He probably has to some extent. But is the extent as vast as the expanded exposure his work recieved? And is that not a relevant question?
You have to remember that the entertainment industry (which holds the majority of complaints towards piracy) is more interested in keeping their produce solely for paying costumers, than they are in promoting their subjects, the artists that actually create the expressions the industry is profiting from. This means that if the industry gets to earn x amount of dollars on a product with a 0% piracy rate, that is more interesting for them than to earn x amount of dollars on the same product with a 50% piracy rate. In essense they want to fence down their work, because they see the pirates also as potential costumers, so what they want is for pirates to stop pirating and start spending money instead.
Again it is of no interest to achieve the possibly massive exposure that free file sharing can offer for the work of the artists. What is interesting is to earn as much money as possible.
I doubt they expect piracy rates to completely convert into paying costumers, but even if one pirate is turned (or discouraged through increasingly tougher regulations) then it is a win for the share holders expecting bigger turn outs.
Not only is this greed socially offensive on multiple levels it is also directly harmful. Just like the Pirate Bay regular people are being made an example of by the twisting of the legal system which is extremely toxic. It may function as an immediate detergent, but just as when you bring the millitary into another country to fight a war, you may win it in a couple of weeks, but you will have your work cut out for you with the uprisings your transgrassion will spark.
A final point that I will make is that you should consider that piracy rates far exceed what is possibly consumable, both economically but also in simple human life. The sea of content available is simply too vast. And quite a lot of that content is of medium and lower quality. Probably the majority of the content. Artists are not all Van Goghs, and a lot of them would be stretching it calling themselves artists in the first place. So in this world of currency drains I can certainly see the logic in the consumer crowd moving away from traditional patterns of purchase towards more egoistic ones. It makes perfect sense that as soon as technology arose to offer deliverance from wrongful purchases, in this time when wrongful purchases could be among the most prevalent, people starting utilising this tool to avoid disappointment.
A lot more could be said on this part of the discussion, but I will leave it here and we can discuss the issue of boredom and entertainment another time.
Also, this post will most likely be used to vault off into another post outlining an alternative system based on access rather than ownership, but since that will take some effort to piece together it might not be the subsequent one.
Thursday, 26 January 2012
You
Today I stumbled upon the lecture on the perception of the self. To achieve some of the social changes discussed on this blog it could very well be needed to shift more towards this understanding of ourselves.
The idea is to look at ourselves not as entities in and of themselves, but as processes and collections. In this sense we all become interchangable, which is highly relevant to any social change. Indeed, understanding society as interchangable is probably the only thing that ever has changed our societies. The problem then is that we currently understand ourselves as these rigid entities that already have been shaped. We believe we mature into hardened shells. As grown ups we could not start changing our lives too roughly or we might be faced with a loss of identity, something none of us wish for.
We could potentially start bringing about some very needed change, were we to fully grasp this philosophy of chaos. Because it is chaotic, and that is what frightens us. There is no order other than what we introduce to the mess of the universe. But percieving that as either good or bad is up to the individual.
We are what we are shaped as, but unlike the other species on this blue planet of ours, we have been invited to join into the process of this shaping. Disregarding this is as irresponsible as over-feeding half the world while starving the other half.
Wednesday, 25 January 2012
Economic Globalisation
Yesterdays piece on ACTA came with a comparison between the European Union and the United States. I would be unfit to furter that comparison and try to argue in political terms how alike these two unions are starting to become, but I do find it interesting to keep watching from the side lines and see what the next moves by these players will be.
Perhaps David Rovics can lighten the mood a bit with his satirical take on the similarities.
It should be clear to everyone that the east is rising to compete with the west globally, and soon the super power status will be shared, and in turn handed over. To whom is a good question. Many say China looking at their enormous growth rates. But these people often only look at numbers. Numbers that their government is responsible for, but that overlook gaping holes in their society. Some would argue that they are creating a bubble economy much greater than ours by building without respect for what their population can afford. By keeping the machines building homes and roads running you can create a sense of growth that looks good enough on paper.
That issue is again not dissimilar from what we experienced closer to home with our own bubble. What is interesting, however, is to look at how people percieve this economic breakdown. Some start swallowing apocalyptic stories, some throw their hands up before their eyes and again some try to argue for rewinding the system to a prior state.
To me it is obvious that none of those perceptions will bring us anywhere. There is only one way and that is forward. We can change direction, but the relatively docile part of history where Europe went almost without war during the past 60 years, is over. We chose to join the wave of globalism.
The hidden warfare of today is economic warfare. Nation states are trying their best to stay afloat, and when resourceful enough they also try and acrue more for themselves. They join alligiances and trade unions to benefit from the increasingly expanding amount of transactions going on in the world today, but they all do it to try and bring more riches home. A game that was much more physical and bound by the resources supplied by nature before we had paper money, gigantic oil tankers, air planes, derivate trades etc.
Just remember one thing. The situation is actually quite simple. No matter what these politicians and game players tell you, the situation really is simple. They do not see it, but the world of today is turning around one question: How to distribute the wealth nature has for us?
Most people still believe that money is the way to go. That politics is the way to go. That democracy is the way to go. But what do these institutions bring in a world where we are at a tipping point now where we can actually automate more sectors of society than what is applicable economically due to job losses? They seek to be the glue holding it all together on moral grounds. They argue and argue and argue away with symbolism and morale, but refuse to look at how far science has taken our potential.
This is fear. Fear of a tomorrow different from today. Because today is calculable, today is marketable and today is comprehendable. So by spreading this irrational fear to the public, they succeed in holding on to their power, because now everyone else is afraid of tomorrow as well. And if we are not, Hollywood can always be invested in to produce another horrifying post-apocalyptic vision of what the world would be like without government.
You might think that was a silly remark, but just try and talk to people about what is possible to automate in society and they will immidiately draw upon the illusion of knowledge they believe to have yielded from movies such as Terminator or i-Robot. This is standard psychology. They have to keep reminding the public that this process of moving into the future is dangerous, or they might just start wishing/voting/acting for it to happen.
Perhaps David Rovics can lighten the mood a bit with his satirical take on the similarities.
It should be clear to everyone that the east is rising to compete with the west globally, and soon the super power status will be shared, and in turn handed over. To whom is a good question. Many say China looking at their enormous growth rates. But these people often only look at numbers. Numbers that their government is responsible for, but that overlook gaping holes in their society. Some would argue that they are creating a bubble economy much greater than ours by building without respect for what their population can afford. By keeping the machines building homes and roads running you can create a sense of growth that looks good enough on paper.
That issue is again not dissimilar from what we experienced closer to home with our own bubble. What is interesting, however, is to look at how people percieve this economic breakdown. Some start swallowing apocalyptic stories, some throw their hands up before their eyes and again some try to argue for rewinding the system to a prior state.
To me it is obvious that none of those perceptions will bring us anywhere. There is only one way and that is forward. We can change direction, but the relatively docile part of history where Europe went almost without war during the past 60 years, is over. We chose to join the wave of globalism.
The hidden warfare of today is economic warfare. Nation states are trying their best to stay afloat, and when resourceful enough they also try and acrue more for themselves. They join alligiances and trade unions to benefit from the increasingly expanding amount of transactions going on in the world today, but they all do it to try and bring more riches home. A game that was much more physical and bound by the resources supplied by nature before we had paper money, gigantic oil tankers, air planes, derivate trades etc.
Just remember one thing. The situation is actually quite simple. No matter what these politicians and game players tell you, the situation really is simple. They do not see it, but the world of today is turning around one question: How to distribute the wealth nature has for us?
Most people still believe that money is the way to go. That politics is the way to go. That democracy is the way to go. But what do these institutions bring in a world where we are at a tipping point now where we can actually automate more sectors of society than what is applicable economically due to job losses? They seek to be the glue holding it all together on moral grounds. They argue and argue and argue away with symbolism and morale, but refuse to look at how far science has taken our potential.
This is fear. Fear of a tomorrow different from today. Because today is calculable, today is marketable and today is comprehendable. So by spreading this irrational fear to the public, they succeed in holding on to their power, because now everyone else is afraid of tomorrow as well. And if we are not, Hollywood can always be invested in to produce another horrifying post-apocalyptic vision of what the world would be like without government.
You might think that was a silly remark, but just try and talk to people about what is possible to automate in society and they will immidiately draw upon the illusion of knowledge they believe to have yielded from movies such as Terminator or i-Robot. This is standard psychology. They have to keep reminding the public that this process of moving into the future is dangerous, or they might just start wishing/voting/acting for it to happen.
Tuesday, 24 January 2012
ACTA
With the death of SOPA becoming a reality you might think it is over. The fight was won and democracy prevailed, expelling this evil dictatorial tool of opression. That is unfortunately not the case.
Behind the scenes the European Union has been cooking up something equally as toxic as SOPA. It is called ACTA and is thoroughly explained in this following introduction.
It would appear that it is quite important to keep repelling these waves of attempts to circumvent digital freedom. The issue here is more than just data protection, it has something quite abstract embedded within. The internet is irrespective of borders and it should be. These ridiculous attempts to seize control of the internet are nothing less than the objectification of a global freedom to communicate and share.
And as an object laws must be applied to regulate.
Behind the scenes the European Union has been cooking up something equally as toxic as SOPA. It is called ACTA and is thoroughly explained in this following introduction.
It would appear that it is quite important to keep repelling these waves of attempts to circumvent digital freedom. The issue here is more than just data protection, it has something quite abstract embedded within. The internet is irrespective of borders and it should be. These ridiculous attempts to seize control of the internet are nothing less than the objectification of a global freedom to communicate and share.
And as an object laws must be applied to regulate.
Saturday, 21 January 2012
Meritocracy
A few days ago I was inspired by a quite decent lecture by Alain de Botton on atheism. Due to exams, however, I have not been home a lot and so the past two days I skipped my routine with writing at least a small piece every day.
The lecture I am refering to is the following one.
He does put out some interesting ideas. It is nothing new to be inspired by perspectives that will not be adopted by oneself. It is quite intelligent in fact, to enable further understanding of a subject, which in this case is life and thereby quite substantial, by a way of discovering the insights others might have had on the subject.
The point that struck me the most in this lecture is definitely the one about infantilisation. The idea that many religious texts refer to humans as children of God (or whatever other concept they believe in) is quite profound if you only look at postmodernism. Because we spend just about all our lives trying not to be children. Even when we are. It is simply not a part of life that has any value, since this hyper-individualism we have entered into has taken over.
Everyone has to assume responsibility for their own lives and this is where I will begin talking about the meritocracy. Unlike a democracy a meritocracy is defined as a society where actions speak the loudest. You gain merit for your output and this in turn gives you the ability to choose where you want to be. This means that there are no social boundaries installed at all, and as such any one can achieve anything.
To the postmodern person this should sound like the apex of democracy. The peak of the mountain. Where we want to be. It is everything we strive for and everything we hope for, because it is just and righteous for everyone to have equal opportunity. By the sweat of our brow and so on.
However, this is where we should allow ourselves some inspiration from the lecture by Mr. Botton. He treats the issue with respect and acknowledges the fact that most religions enter into this infantilisation of human beings because they recognise something very basic about our nature, and this is what faith normally capitalises on. We do not understand everything. And the implications of not understanding everything are quite important when it comes to how we comprehend life and the purpose of it.
In a meritocracy such as we aspire to currently, and somewhat already have achieved (social mobility statistics prove that we are not there yet), there is a rather significant issue of responsibility. Since everything is attributed through merit, everything is your own doing. So sitting in the street begging for money becomes your own doing. You have engineered this situation yourself by not getting and education and a well paid job. On the flip side of this you have the implication that the millionare and the billionaire deserved what they earned. It was won through the merit of their investments or work.
So when we do not fully comprehend the situation and the rules of the great societal chess game, we get bumped into and shoved out of the way by the people who understand enough of it to start making their social climb a reality. This is all very individualising.
This is also the time for the final point, and I will bring back Mr. Botton to make it for me. Two years prior to the talk on atheism he gave another lecture, this time on the cause and value of the meritocracy. He outlines specifically the point about responsibility and sense of self-value as an issue for this social construct. Because after all in a meritocracy you have only yourself to blaim for not being Bill Gates. This is why so many books have been written on just accepting yourself. The merry-go-round of society tells you a completely different story and shoves in your face the demotivating motivational mantra: "Climb, climb, climb!"
The lecture I am refering to is the following one.
He does put out some interesting ideas. It is nothing new to be inspired by perspectives that will not be adopted by oneself. It is quite intelligent in fact, to enable further understanding of a subject, which in this case is life and thereby quite substantial, by a way of discovering the insights others might have had on the subject.
The point that struck me the most in this lecture is definitely the one about infantilisation. The idea that many religious texts refer to humans as children of God (or whatever other concept they believe in) is quite profound if you only look at postmodernism. Because we spend just about all our lives trying not to be children. Even when we are. It is simply not a part of life that has any value, since this hyper-individualism we have entered into has taken over.
Everyone has to assume responsibility for their own lives and this is where I will begin talking about the meritocracy. Unlike a democracy a meritocracy is defined as a society where actions speak the loudest. You gain merit for your output and this in turn gives you the ability to choose where you want to be. This means that there are no social boundaries installed at all, and as such any one can achieve anything.
To the postmodern person this should sound like the apex of democracy. The peak of the mountain. Where we want to be. It is everything we strive for and everything we hope for, because it is just and righteous for everyone to have equal opportunity. By the sweat of our brow and so on.
However, this is where we should allow ourselves some inspiration from the lecture by Mr. Botton. He treats the issue with respect and acknowledges the fact that most religions enter into this infantilisation of human beings because they recognise something very basic about our nature, and this is what faith normally capitalises on. We do not understand everything. And the implications of not understanding everything are quite important when it comes to how we comprehend life and the purpose of it.
In a meritocracy such as we aspire to currently, and somewhat already have achieved (social mobility statistics prove that we are not there yet), there is a rather significant issue of responsibility. Since everything is attributed through merit, everything is your own doing. So sitting in the street begging for money becomes your own doing. You have engineered this situation yourself by not getting and education and a well paid job. On the flip side of this you have the implication that the millionare and the billionaire deserved what they earned. It was won through the merit of their investments or work.
So when we do not fully comprehend the situation and the rules of the great societal chess game, we get bumped into and shoved out of the way by the people who understand enough of it to start making their social climb a reality. This is all very individualising.
This is also the time for the final point, and I will bring back Mr. Botton to make it for me. Two years prior to the talk on atheism he gave another lecture, this time on the cause and value of the meritocracy. He outlines specifically the point about responsibility and sense of self-value as an issue for this social construct. Because after all in a meritocracy you have only yourself to blaim for not being Bill Gates. This is why so many books have been written on just accepting yourself. The merry-go-round of society tells you a completely different story and shoves in your face the demotivating motivational mantra: "Climb, climb, climb!"
Wednesday, 18 January 2012
SOPA
The Stop Online Piracy Act is generating quite a fuss today. Wikipedia and others have taken it upon themselves to openly demonstrate this piece of legislation over the next 24 hours by blacking out completely.
If you are a busy person without the time to properly study the bill and reflect upon it, the short version is that it simply removes official judges from the equation of shutting down supposed pirate bays online. If the bill is passed lawyers employed by an entertainer (or the industry) can petition the FBI to have a certain site or sites shut down without notice, if they display over 16 seconds of copy righted material. It used to be that sites were safe so long as they just did not host the content but merely linked to it. That will end with SOPA. Any individual forwarding copy righted content will face up to 5 years in jail in the US, if it is not a first offense.
Basically this means that the entertainment industry, who can afford the lawyers needed to perform this legal move, will recieve a fully authorised red button they can push whenever they want and use FBI resources to check any site they suspect for infringement.
Your favorite media sites like Facebook and YouTube will face problems with this bill as well. Just think of how many songs or videos with clips from copy righted material you have seen since you joined those communities. There will most definitely be a huge reworking of how those sites work. It could be the next step for them to inform you that you are held legally responsible for anything you link to on your profile (or perhaps that others link to on your profile).
The list of items that raises issues in this bill is quite extensive, but the online community has to remain vigilant. As the first article I linked to states this bill may have been made overly aggressive so they can make a similar one that, by comparison, will not look as bad. This is the true fight for free speach. Recently a very hot topic in my country, Denmark. You may remember the cartoons and the ensuing debate. Any compromise is still compromise, no matter how you look at it.
At the moment we are putting up with monitored just about everywhere we go online. This should be the apex of what they achieve. It really should. Make no mistake, this is a tool for the elite. It allows the industries to maim smaller businesses and persons, first of all because they did the lobbying for this bill and so has inspired quite a lot of what is in it, second of all because legal action is rarely a service rendered by the people at the bottom. Like I said it is a big red button in the big office.
If you view this from another perspective you might draw attention to the fact that studies have been done on how censoring, even on a small scale, affects the online community. Eli Pariser draws a verbal canvas of the situation in this presentation, where he talks of how the social media sites have already started filtering content to stream line your intake of their service.
If you are a busy person without the time to properly study the bill and reflect upon it, the short version is that it simply removes official judges from the equation of shutting down supposed pirate bays online. If the bill is passed lawyers employed by an entertainer (or the industry) can petition the FBI to have a certain site or sites shut down without notice, if they display over 16 seconds of copy righted material. It used to be that sites were safe so long as they just did not host the content but merely linked to it. That will end with SOPA. Any individual forwarding copy righted content will face up to 5 years in jail in the US, if it is not a first offense.
Basically this means that the entertainment industry, who can afford the lawyers needed to perform this legal move, will recieve a fully authorised red button they can push whenever they want and use FBI resources to check any site they suspect for infringement.
Your favorite media sites like Facebook and YouTube will face problems with this bill as well. Just think of how many songs or videos with clips from copy righted material you have seen since you joined those communities. There will most definitely be a huge reworking of how those sites work. It could be the next step for them to inform you that you are held legally responsible for anything you link to on your profile (or perhaps that others link to on your profile).
The list of items that raises issues in this bill is quite extensive, but the online community has to remain vigilant. As the first article I linked to states this bill may have been made overly aggressive so they can make a similar one that, by comparison, will not look as bad. This is the true fight for free speach. Recently a very hot topic in my country, Denmark. You may remember the cartoons and the ensuing debate. Any compromise is still compromise, no matter how you look at it.
At the moment we are putting up with monitored just about everywhere we go online. This should be the apex of what they achieve. It really should. Make no mistake, this is a tool for the elite. It allows the industries to maim smaller businesses and persons, first of all because they did the lobbying for this bill and so has inspired quite a lot of what is in it, second of all because legal action is rarely a service rendered by the people at the bottom. Like I said it is a big red button in the big office.
If you view this from another perspective you might draw attention to the fact that studies have been done on how censoring, even on a small scale, affects the online community. Eli Pariser draws a verbal canvas of the situation in this presentation, where he talks of how the social media sites have already started filtering content to stream line your intake of their service.
Tuesday, 17 January 2012
A mix of things
In the post Core I briefly touched upon the idea of a resource based economy and let a slide show do the talk for me. This does no justice to how paramount this subject should be for this blog. The goal with this project is to detail various aspects of the progressive mindset required to make a resource based economy function, and more importantly healthy for the inhabitants.
Personally I find diet to be a subject of interest, and I would very much like to move into more discussions on how this new society might handle nutritional care. Social relations could also be a nice focus, as there are many things that would likely change in how people interact with each other in the future.
So what of all this change? Why is it needed? Well no matter who you are, you must have noticed something or some things that seem curious to you about how we go about things in the societies of today. I recently had a big laugh over this picture, because it really made my day to see that some one else had thought about the very zombie-like nature of my generation in some aspects of life.
This is a wonderfully comic example of how we are being homogenised as a species. You could draw many parallels from this, but I will not be the one to uphold "the good old days". I was born in 1987 so I was not a part of that period any way. But even so I still prefer looking ahead.
If the present is undesirable I prefer to attritute that to a sense of fate. The past has lead to the present, and so we might not have seen it coming, but the past did indeed produce the present, so there should be no glory to the past if the present is inglorious.
George Carlin does a piece on something similar, and you should be able to see the connection in this clip. He is talking about how we hone our focus towards the immediate center of the fire, instead of taking a step back and asking ourselves what created the mess in the first place. He takes a gigantic leap into the offensive position and starts slashing paradigms all over the place. For this alone George Carlin is sorely missed as a comedian and a social observer. He is quite pessimistic and he does uphold "the good old days" sometimes, but he makes up for that by giving the more ghastly, realistic world view a twist with a sinister smile.
Personally I find diet to be a subject of interest, and I would very much like to move into more discussions on how this new society might handle nutritional care. Social relations could also be a nice focus, as there are many things that would likely change in how people interact with each other in the future.
So what of all this change? Why is it needed? Well no matter who you are, you must have noticed something or some things that seem curious to you about how we go about things in the societies of today. I recently had a big laugh over this picture, because it really made my day to see that some one else had thought about the very zombie-like nature of my generation in some aspects of life.
This is a wonderfully comic example of how we are being homogenised as a species. You could draw many parallels from this, but I will not be the one to uphold "the good old days". I was born in 1987 so I was not a part of that period any way. But even so I still prefer looking ahead.
If the present is undesirable I prefer to attritute that to a sense of fate. The past has lead to the present, and so we might not have seen it coming, but the past did indeed produce the present, so there should be no glory to the past if the present is inglorious.
George Carlin does a piece on something similar, and you should be able to see the connection in this clip. He is talking about how we hone our focus towards the immediate center of the fire, instead of taking a step back and asking ourselves what created the mess in the first place. He takes a gigantic leap into the offensive position and starts slashing paradigms all over the place. For this alone George Carlin is sorely missed as a comedian and a social observer. He is quite pessimistic and he does uphold "the good old days" sometimes, but he makes up for that by giving the more ghastly, realistic world view a twist with a sinister smile.
Monday, 16 January 2012
Economisation
According to the free dictionary the word economisation means: To practice economy, as by avoiding waste or reducing expenditures. Now I bet you would be scoffing at that if you know how anti-economic we are being in contemporary society.
Most of what is debated in constructive parts of society is economy. People spend hours, days, weeks, months and even years of their lives to try and grasp the concept of maximising output at minimal expenditure. But with all these collectively abundant thought processes going on, it is still a broadly held view that the first part of the idea is the most important one. To maximise output. The second part; to do so at minimal expenditure, must take a back seat if there is a conflict.
So the point of this short post was really just to point out an ironic but common misconception.
You may have heard of The Story of Stuff Project. It is indeed a nicely simplified introduction as to how anti-economic this global economy really is. If you have not yet seen any of their work, you should check out this brief walk-through of consumption.
Most of what is debated in constructive parts of society is economy. People spend hours, days, weeks, months and even years of their lives to try and grasp the concept of maximising output at minimal expenditure. But with all these collectively abundant thought processes going on, it is still a broadly held view that the first part of the idea is the most important one. To maximise output. The second part; to do so at minimal expenditure, must take a back seat if there is a conflict.
So the point of this short post was really just to point out an ironic but common misconception.
You may have heard of The Story of Stuff Project. It is indeed a nicely simplified introduction as to how anti-economic this global economy really is. If you have not yet seen any of their work, you should check out this brief walk-through of consumption.
Saturday, 14 January 2012
Functional Sociology
Marketing 101 will teach you that relating to success can achieve success. So in my moment of weakness I have decided to let myself become rigorously inspired (steal) the name of my new favourite concept: Functional medicine.
Watch this following presentation by Dr. Mark Hyman and then continue with this post to witness my attempt at expanding on his perspective. It is a piece on health care looked at in a refreshing way, because it brings back the scientific method to a field that has long been like a library, as opposed to a vibrant, dynamic art of complimenting health systems through research which medicine should be.
I am no scientist. I hold no degrees and though I may be studying at a university right now, I will hardly have anything professional to say on neither the medicinal matter nor the sociological matter, as I am studying IT which is about as far from health as you can get in the sphere of knowledge. Or well it is not, but you get my point. However, this will not stop me from comparing this piece of science to my own theory of how societies work.
Because I believe that if Mark Hyman was working in the field of sociology rather than medicine, he would be suggesting that we start using a systems approach to how we govern our societies. He would point out that we are currently upholding thoughts and ideas on how to treat societal issues that are centuries old if not millennia.
Hyman says that diseases do not exist. Not in the sense that we understand diseases. They are not bad things that just happen and have to be treated. They are the responses of your own body attempting to deal with an imbalance. What does that mean? It means that diseases are currently understood in a way that does not help us with anything other than categorising the fallout they produce.
From this perspective we can try and understand diseases in a new sense. Diseases are the general categories we deal with when we collectivise symptoms, a package of symptoms that when appearing simultaneously makes up a collection of unwanted physical reactions in a body and we label that a certain title, like cancer or pneumonia, so we can quickly reference how we normally proceed with treatment.
But perhaps we should start looking at causality instead? Because you can cure as many symptoms as you want, it will make no difference if you load your diet with the wrong food, get no exercise and maintain a stressful position at your job. Conventional methods do attempt this. But they will never succeed because their perspective is based on a per case basis.
A diagnosis will be damn hard to do if you cannot identify the problem, and you mainly do that by looking at symptoms. I do the same when I build web pages or software solutions. I try to recreate the issues brought up to me by a client on my own screen, so I can see the "leakage" and seal it. This is a symptom-oriented treatment and it works only in secluded, primitive systems.
You could probably relate this to problem solving in your own life as well. Issues are easy to deal with on a per case basis so long as they are kept in a neat and orderly pile. As soon as they are no longer kept in that neat and orderly pile, you will start experiencing a growing sense of stress, whether or not you get the symptoms is irrelevant, because you can no longer manage the entire pile mentally. This is the reason you started using the systems approach that led you to conclude that the neat pile would be optimal in the first place. Even if this happened subconsciously, it did happen none the less.
Attempting to be bold I will now directly attack a major paradigm that is older than I care to try and guess at.
Crime does not exist. Not in the sense that we understand crime. It is not a bad thing that just happens and has to be dealt with. It is a response given by parts of the social community caused by an imbalance in the system. What does that mean? it means that crime is currently understood in a way that does not help us with anything other than categorising the fallout it produces.
From this perspective we can try and understand crime in a new sense. Crime is the general category we deal with when we collectivise incidents of violence, whether material as physical violence or intangible as theft. It is a package of social symptoms that when appearing simultaneously makes up a collection of unwanted social reactions in a community and we label that a certain title, like murder or embezzlement, so we can quickly reference how we normally proceed with treatment.
But perhaps we should start looking at causality instead? Because you can imprison as many people as you like, it will solve no problem if you load society with inequality, bridge no differences and maintain consumption patterns at the price of social capital. Conventional methods do attempt this. But they will never succeed because their perspective is based on a per case basis.
And crime is just one single element on a list of the issues society is attempting to handle in this fashion, with a less than optimal result yielded in almost every case, due to faulty measures believed to be correct. I could draw this same parallel with obesity, teenage birth rates, mental health, child well-being, social mobility, drug abuse etc.
I believe you understand my point by now though, so I see no reason to repeat myself further. If you want you could try doing it yourself and you will start to see an emerging pattern.
This is the basis of a systems approach. It is the mechanisation of problem solving, the automation of re-indexing, and it frees up your time as a mental librarian and gives you more time to do abstract work on solving new and exciting issues instead.
Watch this following presentation by Dr. Mark Hyman and then continue with this post to witness my attempt at expanding on his perspective. It is a piece on health care looked at in a refreshing way, because it brings back the scientific method to a field that has long been like a library, as opposed to a vibrant, dynamic art of complimenting health systems through research which medicine should be.
I am no scientist. I hold no degrees and though I may be studying at a university right now, I will hardly have anything professional to say on neither the medicinal matter nor the sociological matter, as I am studying IT which is about as far from health as you can get in the sphere of knowledge. Or well it is not, but you get my point. However, this will not stop me from comparing this piece of science to my own theory of how societies work.
Because I believe that if Mark Hyman was working in the field of sociology rather than medicine, he would be suggesting that we start using a systems approach to how we govern our societies. He would point out that we are currently upholding thoughts and ideas on how to treat societal issues that are centuries old if not millennia.
Hyman says that diseases do not exist. Not in the sense that we understand diseases. They are not bad things that just happen and have to be treated. They are the responses of your own body attempting to deal with an imbalance. What does that mean? It means that diseases are currently understood in a way that does not help us with anything other than categorising the fallout they produce.
From this perspective we can try and understand diseases in a new sense. Diseases are the general categories we deal with when we collectivise symptoms, a package of symptoms that when appearing simultaneously makes up a collection of unwanted physical reactions in a body and we label that a certain title, like cancer or pneumonia, so we can quickly reference how we normally proceed with treatment.
But perhaps we should start looking at causality instead? Because you can cure as many symptoms as you want, it will make no difference if you load your diet with the wrong food, get no exercise and maintain a stressful position at your job. Conventional methods do attempt this. But they will never succeed because their perspective is based on a per case basis.
A diagnosis will be damn hard to do if you cannot identify the problem, and you mainly do that by looking at symptoms. I do the same when I build web pages or software solutions. I try to recreate the issues brought up to me by a client on my own screen, so I can see the "leakage" and seal it. This is a symptom-oriented treatment and it works only in secluded, primitive systems.
You could probably relate this to problem solving in your own life as well. Issues are easy to deal with on a per case basis so long as they are kept in a neat and orderly pile. As soon as they are no longer kept in that neat and orderly pile, you will start experiencing a growing sense of stress, whether or not you get the symptoms is irrelevant, because you can no longer manage the entire pile mentally. This is the reason you started using the systems approach that led you to conclude that the neat pile would be optimal in the first place. Even if this happened subconsciously, it did happen none the less.
Attempting to be bold I will now directly attack a major paradigm that is older than I care to try and guess at.
Crime does not exist. Not in the sense that we understand crime. It is not a bad thing that just happens and has to be dealt with. It is a response given by parts of the social community caused by an imbalance in the system. What does that mean? it means that crime is currently understood in a way that does not help us with anything other than categorising the fallout it produces.
From this perspective we can try and understand crime in a new sense. Crime is the general category we deal with when we collectivise incidents of violence, whether material as physical violence or intangible as theft. It is a package of social symptoms that when appearing simultaneously makes up a collection of unwanted social reactions in a community and we label that a certain title, like murder or embezzlement, so we can quickly reference how we normally proceed with treatment.
But perhaps we should start looking at causality instead? Because you can imprison as many people as you like, it will solve no problem if you load society with inequality, bridge no differences and maintain consumption patterns at the price of social capital. Conventional methods do attempt this. But they will never succeed because their perspective is based on a per case basis.
And crime is just one single element on a list of the issues society is attempting to handle in this fashion, with a less than optimal result yielded in almost every case, due to faulty measures believed to be correct. I could draw this same parallel with obesity, teenage birth rates, mental health, child well-being, social mobility, drug abuse etc.
I believe you understand my point by now though, so I see no reason to repeat myself further. If you want you could try doing it yourself and you will start to see an emerging pattern.
This is the basis of a systems approach. It is the mechanisation of problem solving, the automation of re-indexing, and it frees up your time as a mental librarian and gives you more time to do abstract work on solving new and exciting issues instead.
Friday, 13 January 2012
Core
Today this blog will reach 300 unique page views, and I thought I would mark this by cutting to the chase with what I originally had planned for this blog. No use dragging you around any further if you would disagree completely with this post and never return.
As with so many other things in life I did feel like buttering my audience up first. To give a broader perspective on my perspectives, so it is not just a label I will be attaching to myself and then having that be my official tag. So you would know that there is so much more to these opinions than what I can express in this post.
What I am interested in is sociology. I believe that is the correct word to use when describing an interest in knowledge about society. I want to understand the building blocks of societies and all possible evolutions of them, and I think this stems from a sizable curiosity about the future. Obviously there is a personal element to all of this, which I may return to at a later point, but for now I want to keep this abstract to fully visualise for you an alternative perspective on society.
If I asked you what is the most fundamentally unchallenged element of society what would you say?
I would say: The monetary system. It is like a religion that has been scientifically accepted. Adam Smith's invisible hand guiding the world. Few people can even imagine what the world would be without it. Most would probably say that without money we would return to barter, goods and live stock trading, but that not imaginative in any way. It is not a step forward, it is not evolution. It would be a huge leap backwards technologically and culturally.
So the question becomes: Is there an alternative? And in spirit of my post from yesterday, you would have to also apply the secondary question with primary significance: What would make such an alternative preferable? An underlining of the "why". For this would not just be a game of innovation beyond cultural barriers, it would have to be a clear cut investigation into the possibility of the next large cultural paradigm shift.
At this point I had to decide in what direction I wanted to take this post. Did I want a wall of text describing my personal take on this, or could a slide show presentation make do? I decided that there are people much better suited than myself to describe such an awesome (the old meaning of the word) concept.
As a bonus Mr. Peter Joseph will in this TEDx presentation also be answering my secondary question with primary significance. Enjoy!
As with so many other things in life I did feel like buttering my audience up first. To give a broader perspective on my perspectives, so it is not just a label I will be attaching to myself and then having that be my official tag. So you would know that there is so much more to these opinions than what I can express in this post.
What I am interested in is sociology. I believe that is the correct word to use when describing an interest in knowledge about society. I want to understand the building blocks of societies and all possible evolutions of them, and I think this stems from a sizable curiosity about the future. Obviously there is a personal element to all of this, which I may return to at a later point, but for now I want to keep this abstract to fully visualise for you an alternative perspective on society.
If I asked you what is the most fundamentally unchallenged element of society what would you say?
I would say: The monetary system. It is like a religion that has been scientifically accepted. Adam Smith's invisible hand guiding the world. Few people can even imagine what the world would be without it. Most would probably say that without money we would return to barter, goods and live stock trading, but that not imaginative in any way. It is not a step forward, it is not evolution. It would be a huge leap backwards technologically and culturally.
So the question becomes: Is there an alternative? And in spirit of my post from yesterday, you would have to also apply the secondary question with primary significance: What would make such an alternative preferable? An underlining of the "why". For this would not just be a game of innovation beyond cultural barriers, it would have to be a clear cut investigation into the possibility of the next large cultural paradigm shift.
At this point I had to decide in what direction I wanted to take this post. Did I want a wall of text describing my personal take on this, or could a slide show presentation make do? I decided that there are people much better suited than myself to describe such an awesome (the old meaning of the word) concept.
As a bonus Mr. Peter Joseph will in this TEDx presentation also be answering my secondary question with primary significance. Enjoy!
Thursday, 12 January 2012
Rhetoric
No post yesterday due to my exam today. Its one for project oriented work and communication. Very interesting topics in some aspects and very not in others. I will spare you the details, but I will comment on the idea of teaching communicative and specifically rhetorical skills.
Obviously our educational institutions strive to make us successful in our future endavours as that would in turn mean that they have succeeded in their task to steel us for our goals. But what I dislike specifically about rhetoric is that it is simply a tool that allows any master of it to do disasterous things. Politicians are a great example.
So what I think is, and I did voice this concern for my professor but he brushed me off with some excuse about differing disciplines, that along with a rhetorical course should always follow a course on how to determine the primary value of ones objective. I know this will seem foreign to most people, but why would you not want to self-evaluate and analyse your reasoning behind your argumentation while analysing your argumentation anyway. Its like the goal makes the initiation immune to scrutinisation. Which is fairly unnerving to say the least.
We already deal with the fall out of this problem, in that the people responsible for your take on the world used their rhetorical power to change a world view that was once different, and in many cases we have no evidence to support the reasoning behind this.
Rhetorical training basically makes you a salesman outside of just selling and buying. You start being able to shift not commerce but thoughts and ideas. Hitler did this.
The sollution is not to disregard the field of rhetoric, for it certainly has a lot to teach us. Specifically it can teach you how to locate these "sales pitches" you often hear from people who want to sell you ideas. Or as it should be called, take your own ideas and substitute them with new ones, making you think that they are better.
And this does not mean that you should always stick to your initial assumptions and disregard new information. Obviously that would be foolish. Bush did this.
The sollution could be to take a more scientific approach to personal development though. Giving students a chance to analyse their current paths, where they might lead them and what the alternatives could be.
Self improvement should be social improvement.
Obviously our educational institutions strive to make us successful in our future endavours as that would in turn mean that they have succeeded in their task to steel us for our goals. But what I dislike specifically about rhetoric is that it is simply a tool that allows any master of it to do disasterous things. Politicians are a great example.
So what I think is, and I did voice this concern for my professor but he brushed me off with some excuse about differing disciplines, that along with a rhetorical course should always follow a course on how to determine the primary value of ones objective. I know this will seem foreign to most people, but why would you not want to self-evaluate and analyse your reasoning behind your argumentation while analysing your argumentation anyway. Its like the goal makes the initiation immune to scrutinisation. Which is fairly unnerving to say the least.
We already deal with the fall out of this problem, in that the people responsible for your take on the world used their rhetorical power to change a world view that was once different, and in many cases we have no evidence to support the reasoning behind this.
Rhetorical training basically makes you a salesman outside of just selling and buying. You start being able to shift not commerce but thoughts and ideas. Hitler did this.
The sollution is not to disregard the field of rhetoric, for it certainly has a lot to teach us. Specifically it can teach you how to locate these "sales pitches" you often hear from people who want to sell you ideas. Or as it should be called, take your own ideas and substitute them with new ones, making you think that they are better.
And this does not mean that you should always stick to your initial assumptions and disregard new information. Obviously that would be foolish. Bush did this.
The sollution could be to take a more scientific approach to personal development though. Giving students a chance to analyse their current paths, where they might lead them and what the alternatives could be.
Self improvement should be social improvement.
Tuesday, 10 January 2012
V For Revolution
Another great movie from the Wachowski brothers, also holding a great deal of social commentary beneath the initial layers of visually well made action, is the movie V For Vendetta. This movie is certainly one of my favorites, and it achieves such status with me because of how it propels an alternate perspective on these increasingly harsher measures being taken in the time of crisis. All in the name of seizing control of the issue before it gets out of hand.
While I can sympathise with the inherit logic in such a sentence that is it for the good of the people and the good of society, it simply fails to roll out in such a fashion in quite a few attempts. As we have discussed prior terrorism is not just some random idea brown people start thinking about out of nowhere. It takes a big spark to motivate such violence. Most of them have witnessed horrible things to get to where they needed to be to make such drastic moves.
To be clear I am not condoning any act of terrorism, but I will certainly be the one to argue for the understanding of the core nature of it. The media portrays it as close to being the number one issue for any contemporary society.
So to spread it out even thinner one could theorise that terrorism can be diluted and "fought" in this manner, by reducing the amount and size of the measures being taken to prevent it. Perhaps the resistance movements would have been less prevalent if the germans had been more civil in occupied territories during the war? Inhumanity can easily stir violence where otherwise there was no basis for it.
Something else to think about is also the fact that too many people are labelled terrorists when they are no such thing. The rebels in Iraq for instance might consist somewhat of organized terror cells still fighting for Al Qaeda or Saddams memory or whatever, but would you not even consider that some of them just fight the occupation because of the endless stream of unfortunate events the millitary has been involved in ever since the beginning of this pitiful war?
And with that I think I will let V talk to you all about the very possible future of our society, assuming no measures are taken to remove this inconsistent fear that makes us grip the hands of any who endows to save us. He is talking to you about you and it is relevant for you because you are the one who will bring yourself in this situation.
While I can sympathise with the inherit logic in such a sentence that is it for the good of the people and the good of society, it simply fails to roll out in such a fashion in quite a few attempts. As we have discussed prior terrorism is not just some random idea brown people start thinking about out of nowhere. It takes a big spark to motivate such violence. Most of them have witnessed horrible things to get to where they needed to be to make such drastic moves.
To be clear I am not condoning any act of terrorism, but I will certainly be the one to argue for the understanding of the core nature of it. The media portrays it as close to being the number one issue for any contemporary society.
So to spread it out even thinner one could theorise that terrorism can be diluted and "fought" in this manner, by reducing the amount and size of the measures being taken to prevent it. Perhaps the resistance movements would have been less prevalent if the germans had been more civil in occupied territories during the war? Inhumanity can easily stir violence where otherwise there was no basis for it.
Something else to think about is also the fact that too many people are labelled terrorists when they are no such thing. The rebels in Iraq for instance might consist somewhat of organized terror cells still fighting for Al Qaeda or Saddams memory or whatever, but would you not even consider that some of them just fight the occupation because of the endless stream of unfortunate events the millitary has been involved in ever since the beginning of this pitiful war?
And with that I think I will let V talk to you all about the very possible future of our society, assuming no measures are taken to remove this inconsistent fear that makes us grip the hands of any who endows to save us. He is talking to you about you and it is relevant for you because you are the one who will bring yourself in this situation.
Monday, 9 January 2012
Wayseer Manifesto
This video and initiative was shared with me yesterday. I had already seen it a few months back, and I thought it was a nice perspective, but left it soon after again because it seemed a little too emotional for me. Normally I like the idea that there are many people who see society as miscalculated and counter-productive, but the way people conduct themselves these days I have a hard time believing that.
What I do like about this perspective though, is that it shines some hope on a spot that needs it. The pocket of society that was later occupied by outraged protesters. They called themselves the 99% and while that is merely a symbol, it does reflect some very interesting ideas, among those the perspective that you can actually fight for rights people do not know or understand.
Very Matrix indeed. If you recall the movie, you will probably think about special effects, corny dialogue and slow-motion fight scenes. But if you understood the plot, if you saw what the Wachowski brothers probably could have meant. Then you will see the metaphor in this video. You will recognise that the plot is what carried this movie. The masses swallowed the movie for what it did visually, but philosophically this movie is relevant to discuss because of how it analyses layers of society.
That it would be possible for the masses to live sheepish lives against their own natural interests because they have been cultivated to accept such norms. Is that not interesting? Is it not brilliant to conceptualise such massive deciet and societal manipulation? They managed to make that movie one of the most remarked action movies of all time.
Like the main character in the movie, and a Wayseer such as the song talks about, you probably have also experienced the time stop scene at some point in your life. You suddenly felt different and alienated from everyone else, because the truth was apparent to you and you alone. It can be as tiny as seeing someone eat something commonly regarded as healthy, when you know that it really is not, that sparks this thought that you have begun to see more truth that other. Or at least percieve the world differently. You have started to think unlike a grain of sand in the desert. Unlike a fish in the sea. Perhaps you are swimming against the current already. But the fact is that this is a new world for you. And new can be scary.
So this is why I like this video, for even through all its cheerful ignorance towards the harsher reality of actual activism and social therapy, it does light a torch and attempts to lead on anyway.
What I do like about this perspective though, is that it shines some hope on a spot that needs it. The pocket of society that was later occupied by outraged protesters. They called themselves the 99% and while that is merely a symbol, it does reflect some very interesting ideas, among those the perspective that you can actually fight for rights people do not know or understand.
Very Matrix indeed. If you recall the movie, you will probably think about special effects, corny dialogue and slow-motion fight scenes. But if you understood the plot, if you saw what the Wachowski brothers probably could have meant. Then you will see the metaphor in this video. You will recognise that the plot is what carried this movie. The masses swallowed the movie for what it did visually, but philosophically this movie is relevant to discuss because of how it analyses layers of society.
That it would be possible for the masses to live sheepish lives against their own natural interests because they have been cultivated to accept such norms. Is that not interesting? Is it not brilliant to conceptualise such massive deciet and societal manipulation? They managed to make that movie one of the most remarked action movies of all time.
Like the main character in the movie, and a Wayseer such as the song talks about, you probably have also experienced the time stop scene at some point in your life. You suddenly felt different and alienated from everyone else, because the truth was apparent to you and you alone. It can be as tiny as seeing someone eat something commonly regarded as healthy, when you know that it really is not, that sparks this thought that you have begun to see more truth that other. Or at least percieve the world differently. You have started to think unlike a grain of sand in the desert. Unlike a fish in the sea. Perhaps you are swimming against the current already. But the fact is that this is a new world for you. And new can be scary.
So this is why I like this video, for even through all its cheerful ignorance towards the harsher reality of actual activism and social therapy, it does light a torch and attempts to lead on anyway.
Sunday, 8 January 2012
Conformity
Last year I took a psychology course and while most of it was relatively uninteresting and 101, near the end of the course we were introduced to some of the larger concepts in social psychology. There are some very interesting theories out there about what makes the human mind work the way it does.
Just to get you up to speed, you may have heard of the Asch experiments seeking to some extent to prove social dependance in humans. A sort of built in mechanism to ensure conformity and group normalisation. Strategically it makes sense for us to work this way, but it also marks up some very realistical borders to our potential.
In this following 10 minute presentation you are introduced to the basics in the studies of conformity.
It should be obvious that this is the natural part of our ways that ensures survival of the fittest, because in a social context the fittest might just be the leader. We see this in all pockets of nature.
What is interesting is how this should touch on your feeling of self-sufficiancy. Would it upset you to know that 37% of all people would stay in a room filling with smoke past their choking point, if at least 14 other people (actors) were sitting still in that room without reacting? Is this culture or biology?
What the goal is for me, is to upset the idea that people can trust their own decisions, because more often then not we choose to do something that is not in our best interest, simply because of some series of implications leading us to judge a course of action as the best suited one. This can be spurred on by group norms and pressure, but it does not dilute our responsibility for our own integrity on a theoretical level.
If we choose to part take in political, economical and sociological debates, we should be prepared to consider what part of our argumentation comes from others and what part comes from ourselves.
Just to get you up to speed, you may have heard of the Asch experiments seeking to some extent to prove social dependance in humans. A sort of built in mechanism to ensure conformity and group normalisation. Strategically it makes sense for us to work this way, but it also marks up some very realistical borders to our potential.
In this following 10 minute presentation you are introduced to the basics in the studies of conformity.
It should be obvious that this is the natural part of our ways that ensures survival of the fittest, because in a social context the fittest might just be the leader. We see this in all pockets of nature.
What is interesting is how this should touch on your feeling of self-sufficiancy. Would it upset you to know that 37% of all people would stay in a room filling with smoke past their choking point, if at least 14 other people (actors) were sitting still in that room without reacting? Is this culture or biology?
What the goal is for me, is to upset the idea that people can trust their own decisions, because more often then not we choose to do something that is not in our best interest, simply because of some series of implications leading us to judge a course of action as the best suited one. This can be spurred on by group norms and pressure, but it does not dilute our responsibility for our own integrity on a theoretical level.
If we choose to part take in political, economical and sociological debates, we should be prepared to consider what part of our argumentation comes from others and what part comes from ourselves.
Saturday, 7 January 2012
Economic Hitmen
Today I wish to familiarise my readers with the person John Perkins. Mr. Perkins has wide experience with the private sector in the states associated with facilitating international industrial expansion. What does this mean you ask? Well I will so gentle as to let a short animation tell the story for you.
For a full personal account on Mr. Perkins' personal experiences and knowlegde from the inside of this business check this interview.
So what have we here then? The initial response you are suppose to extract from this is obviously that this is how guerilla fighters and “terrorists” are made. That is the main point. And it makes reasonable sense. I do not know your personal standpoint on whether terrorism goes before empire expansion or whether you think it is the other way around, but those two elements certainly seem linked together.
What else can we extract? We can look at how a country is flooded with debt and cheap industrial pollution to make it another production chamber to keep our ever growing consumption rates rising. Turn that around again and you will note that most of the things on your desk you are sitting at right now were probably produced in some poor country that was exploited in this fashion. The IMF and the World Bank accepts this as collateral damage, and this should solidify the argument that they most certainly are western banks for the west – not the world.
This growth economy has to stop before the last tree is cut down and the last lake is polluted with oil waste.
For a full personal account on Mr. Perkins' personal experiences and knowlegde from the inside of this business check this interview.
So what have we here then? The initial response you are suppose to extract from this is obviously that this is how guerilla fighters and “terrorists” are made. That is the main point. And it makes reasonable sense. I do not know your personal standpoint on whether terrorism goes before empire expansion or whether you think it is the other way around, but those two elements certainly seem linked together.
What else can we extract? We can look at how a country is flooded with debt and cheap industrial pollution to make it another production chamber to keep our ever growing consumption rates rising. Turn that around again and you will note that most of the things on your desk you are sitting at right now were probably produced in some poor country that was exploited in this fashion. The IMF and the World Bank accepts this as collateral damage, and this should solidify the argument that they most certainly are western banks for the west – not the world.
This growth economy has to stop before the last tree is cut down and the last lake is polluted with oil waste.
Thursday, 5 January 2012
3D printing
Today I saw something remarkable. You probably already know about 3D printing and the prospects of such an addition to society in terms of production. But with this following example you should be able to take it a step further and visualise just how absolutely gigantic a step this could be socially. To enable costumisation on a completely new level along with reducing imports and exports.
Consider the opportunities.
Consider the opportunities.
Wednesday, 4 January 2012
Experiments
Today I learned of an experimental dietary treatment for a chronic disease I happen to suffer from, and among other things it made me consider just why exactly there are so few dietary treatments going on. Obviously everything is experimental at first. One can have a scientifically backed expectation towards the outcome, and in medical science one probably should, but it will be experimental none the less. So the wording is not my issue. What I take an issue with is that treatment such as this is natural. Now I for one am not the one to label tradition as something positive in and of itself, however, I do entertain the following philosophy.
The body appears to be a bio-mechanical machine hard wired to sort out internal problems. This is scientifically proven, so there is not a lot of philosophy contained in this. But then the general belief goes on to denote that the mind is what we have for external problem solving. What I would propose, however, is that the mind is very much involved in both. How we think and feel will change patterns in how our body works. You can tell by the countless studies in psychology that proves rises and drops in various types of body-functions based on the mood swings of the test subjects. Stress is the big subject now, and it is very related to our physical well-being. For instance placebo pills in some cases work to rid the patient of self-inflicted symptoms. The mind is a powerful tool.
So returning to the subject of diet again, I would venture the guess that the fuel for the body should be very much a factor in how well the inner machinery works to keep itself healthy. Most people already know this, so instead I will try to be a little more abstract.
As a society we hold a common responsibility to work to further the understanding of everyone of what their diet should and should not contain. It is quite possible to poison the body into a state of weakness exposing it to a wide variety of diseases, both the ones commonly known to be related to unhealthy life-styles like diabetes and the more complicated diseases. Now I am not attempting to preach that a healthy diet can keep you disease-free. But I could certainly preach that it would help. I will refrain from that at this point though.
About the responsibility, one could hope that society would realise it as a duty to keep its inhabitants as healthy as possible. This is why the free market model is counter-productive when it comes to collective health. In the book The Spirit Level the first basic graph introduced is one that shows how the GDP of nations only work proportionally with standards of living below a certain threshold. It bends off at a point where people start being able to take care of themselves, and this means that some of the poorest countries out of the richest ones (western ones, generally) are very equal to the much richer ones.. The point to make here is that the idea of rapid expansion and consumption only gets us to a certain point. This cannot be stressed enough, because it is the principle argument that the neo-capitalistic machinery we have installed to run our world for us, serves us no longer and today it is in fact an inhibitor to our true potential.
Do some research on your own. Next time you go grocery shopping check out how expensive it would be for you to buy only organic food highly based on fibres and less based on meats and dairy. You will note that it gets a lot cheaper for you if you buy unhealthy, non-organic products because this is what industry can produce cheaply. It is a lot cheaper to produce long-lasting (genetically modified, filled with additives) food products than it is to produce short-lasting (natural) food products that would benefit the consumer much more.
Considering the value of money today, you could say we are actually making it a rewarding game to try and spot the better deals and shake up a good price. The exact opposite of what people should be doing. And then we ask ourselves why sickness, depression and cancer rates all are off the chart now.
A doctor I spoke with today concerning this experimental diet actually told me that he had patients who had gone to Thailand on vacation, and while there they experienced almost complete remission in their symptoms. His thoughts on the matter were that the patients had been staying outside of general tourist areas and therefore been eating locally produced, natural meals loaded with vegetables and without a lot of meat. It should come as no surprise that this is much better for the body, but what should come as a surprise is that these conditions are regarded as unsuccessful in normal terms, because that rural area was probably highly impoverished and this is the reason for their inability to import fizzy drinks and mass-produced meat.
This is especially relevant to consider during this period of global economic unrest, because now is when we simply should not and cannot accept, for the sake of the future heirs to this planet, a continual lowering of quality in our food. It is unacceptable, and just like it was an economic bubble that burst, so too will the health bubble burst when we not only have the demographic issue of too few working people versus too many retired people against us, but also the issue of too many sick people versus too few healthy people.
As a future project I would like to blog for a week about a healthy, easy diet. Be sure to check back as February will most likely feature such adventures.
The body appears to be a bio-mechanical machine hard wired to sort out internal problems. This is scientifically proven, so there is not a lot of philosophy contained in this. But then the general belief goes on to denote that the mind is what we have for external problem solving. What I would propose, however, is that the mind is very much involved in both. How we think and feel will change patterns in how our body works. You can tell by the countless studies in psychology that proves rises and drops in various types of body-functions based on the mood swings of the test subjects. Stress is the big subject now, and it is very related to our physical well-being. For instance placebo pills in some cases work to rid the patient of self-inflicted symptoms. The mind is a powerful tool.
So returning to the subject of diet again, I would venture the guess that the fuel for the body should be very much a factor in how well the inner machinery works to keep itself healthy. Most people already know this, so instead I will try to be a little more abstract.
As a society we hold a common responsibility to work to further the understanding of everyone of what their diet should and should not contain. It is quite possible to poison the body into a state of weakness exposing it to a wide variety of diseases, both the ones commonly known to be related to unhealthy life-styles like diabetes and the more complicated diseases. Now I am not attempting to preach that a healthy diet can keep you disease-free. But I could certainly preach that it would help. I will refrain from that at this point though.
About the responsibility, one could hope that society would realise it as a duty to keep its inhabitants as healthy as possible. This is why the free market model is counter-productive when it comes to collective health. In the book The Spirit Level the first basic graph introduced is one that shows how the GDP of nations only work proportionally with standards of living below a certain threshold. It bends off at a point where people start being able to take care of themselves, and this means that some of the poorest countries out of the richest ones (western ones, generally) are very equal to the much richer ones.. The point to make here is that the idea of rapid expansion and consumption only gets us to a certain point. This cannot be stressed enough, because it is the principle argument that the neo-capitalistic machinery we have installed to run our world for us, serves us no longer and today it is in fact an inhibitor to our true potential.
Do some research on your own. Next time you go grocery shopping check out how expensive it would be for you to buy only organic food highly based on fibres and less based on meats and dairy. You will note that it gets a lot cheaper for you if you buy unhealthy, non-organic products because this is what industry can produce cheaply. It is a lot cheaper to produce long-lasting (genetically modified, filled with additives) food products than it is to produce short-lasting (natural) food products that would benefit the consumer much more.
Considering the value of money today, you could say we are actually making it a rewarding game to try and spot the better deals and shake up a good price. The exact opposite of what people should be doing. And then we ask ourselves why sickness, depression and cancer rates all are off the chart now.
A doctor I spoke with today concerning this experimental diet actually told me that he had patients who had gone to Thailand on vacation, and while there they experienced almost complete remission in their symptoms. His thoughts on the matter were that the patients had been staying outside of general tourist areas and therefore been eating locally produced, natural meals loaded with vegetables and without a lot of meat. It should come as no surprise that this is much better for the body, but what should come as a surprise is that these conditions are regarded as unsuccessful in normal terms, because that rural area was probably highly impoverished and this is the reason for their inability to import fizzy drinks and mass-produced meat.
This is especially relevant to consider during this period of global economic unrest, because now is when we simply should not and cannot accept, for the sake of the future heirs to this planet, a continual lowering of quality in our food. It is unacceptable, and just like it was an economic bubble that burst, so too will the health bubble burst when we not only have the demographic issue of too few working people versus too many retired people against us, but also the issue of too many sick people versus too few healthy people.
As a future project I would like to blog for a week about a healthy, easy diet. Be sure to check back as February will most likely feature such adventures.
Tuesday, 3 January 2012
Spirit of the Age
Life is busy at the moment. Family stuff is going on and I have exams coming up, so I had to skip writing yesterday and today will almost be a skip as well.
Just a reminder to everyone that independant film director Peter Joseph will be releasing his fourth documentary in late 2012 or early 2013. The title is "Zeitgeist: Beyond the Pale", and he says it will be an artistic expression on the spirit of the age (the latter being the direct translation of the german word Zeitgeist).
As a supporter of the movement associated with these films, I felt it was in my best interest to share with you the news of this very relevant upcoming movie. If you have not yet, you should treat yourself to a nice evening with the third film in the series. Even if you are not convinced about the concept of a resource based economy, you would most likely appreciate the amount of social research that is highlighted. Many of the experts I link to in my other posts are people I have learned about through the Zeitgeist Movement.
Give it a watch if you feel like it. Even if you disagree with every single piece of research within it, you should see it as a challenge and a way to understand yourself better.
Just a reminder to everyone that independant film director Peter Joseph will be releasing his fourth documentary in late 2012 or early 2013. The title is "Zeitgeist: Beyond the Pale", and he says it will be an artistic expression on the spirit of the age (the latter being the direct translation of the german word Zeitgeist).
As a supporter of the movement associated with these films, I felt it was in my best interest to share with you the news of this very relevant upcoming movie. If you have not yet, you should treat yourself to a nice evening with the third film in the series. Even if you are not convinced about the concept of a resource based economy, you would most likely appreciate the amount of social research that is highlighted. Many of the experts I link to in my other posts are people I have learned about through the Zeitgeist Movement.
Give it a watch if you feel like it. Even if you disagree with every single piece of research within it, you should see it as a challenge and a way to understand yourself better.
Sunday, 1 January 2012
My fractal theory
This will be a purely metaphorical piece attempting to project an idea of similarity.
A fractal has been defined as "a rough or fragmented geometric object that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced size copy of the whole", a property called self-similarity.
If that does not make any sense to you, perhaps Ben McLeish explains it better than I can in this part of this lecture on science.
And let me tell you why this concept is relevant to know about. Because other than the fact that fractals clearly do exist in nature, which is profound when you first think of it, you will recognise that fractals exist not only in snow flakes but in many intangible areas as well. Such as science, technology, philosophy, engineering, economics and so forth.
This becomes interesting when you start to see how nature is being intelligent in its design.
Any chemist will tell you that the universe consists of atoms (and smaller parts that I do not understand well enough to bring into the equation), and these atoms all try to achieve a specific binding with other atoms to attain sustainability. All the cells in your body work towards the common goal of sustaining your existance as the host. Its a family effort you could say. Now if you scale out, you could see how each of your organs do the same thing. None of them work with the intention of harvesting all the nutrients for themselves. They share because that is how they would optimally get by. It would be sustainable only for a temporary period to exhibit different behaviour for the body. You would certainly start to break down, even if it did boost your performance in certain areas initially, had your body been in a capitalist system of self-maximisation. You will have guessed by now where I am going with this.
But instead of preaching about some higher community construct of society, where everyone shares everything and work to reduce understood infections, delivering the community or host body from "diseases" like crime and greed, I will try something different and leave this part of my fractal theory incomplete.
Instead we take a few steps outwards and look at how the larger order of things fit into this picture. In the animal kingdom you might think you have a counter-argument to this in the fact that other species also exhibit the asocial behaviour of over-acquisition. This is true, but if you saw the post from yesterday featuring a link to a lecture by Robert Sopalski, you will recall what he said that the groups of animals that end up working together are those with stronger communities. Without having seen all of it, I believe he debates the same issues in this lecture.
Furthermore the earth is a closed system. The resources that we are using at ever-accelerating rates now took millions of years to develop into what we see today, and if you look at fossil fuels like oil it is quite evident that in less than 300 years we will have completely drained out this resource.
The stardust we know as planets also work in a looping and self-similar way. Most people know that all planets and moons follow paths around the sun and each other. I am not sure how this works, but I would venture the guess that a planet has to stay in its course. The ultimate self-correcting system perhaps.
This is where we would start a lot of guess work, and while this work is by no means scientific, I did think it was an interesting train of thought, so I wanted to share it with you. It could be that the answer to a lot of the social problems this blog, and a growing part of the world, is concerned with lie within many of the systems that our most intelligent minds already understand. Maybe the self-similarity is too obvious to consider applicable to society as a whole.
Am I proposing that crime be viewed by society in the same way disease is viewed by the immune system? I could be.
A very well-written and interesting book comparing a societal state to a physical disease is, and the name is the brilliant part, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism by John McMurtry.
The introduction in the preface really describes well how the writer came to the conclusion that there might be something to this similarity across the various categories of systems. Physically and conceptually.
The title of this book is not a provocative metaphor. It is the conceptual outcome of long personal experience and deep-structural social investigation over 30 years of research across disciplinary boundaries. During this period, I have been involved with my brother, a medical researcher, in ongoing co-investigation of pathogenic patterns at the highest level of abstraction. I have also been the husband of the mother of my four children who was overwhelmed by deadly anaplastic cancer, and a serious student of a non-lethal carcinogenic invasion of my own body. These prolonged events of learning life and death sequences of disease and immune responses have led to the deepening recognition of common principles of growth and disease between social and cellular life-organization.
A fractal has been defined as "a rough or fragmented geometric object that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced size copy of the whole", a property called self-similarity.
If that does not make any sense to you, perhaps Ben McLeish explains it better than I can in this part of this lecture on science.
And let me tell you why this concept is relevant to know about. Because other than the fact that fractals clearly do exist in nature, which is profound when you first think of it, you will recognise that fractals exist not only in snow flakes but in many intangible areas as well. Such as science, technology, philosophy, engineering, economics and so forth.
This becomes interesting when you start to see how nature is being intelligent in its design.
Any chemist will tell you that the universe consists of atoms (and smaller parts that I do not understand well enough to bring into the equation), and these atoms all try to achieve a specific binding with other atoms to attain sustainability. All the cells in your body work towards the common goal of sustaining your existance as the host. Its a family effort you could say. Now if you scale out, you could see how each of your organs do the same thing. None of them work with the intention of harvesting all the nutrients for themselves. They share because that is how they would optimally get by. It would be sustainable only for a temporary period to exhibit different behaviour for the body. You would certainly start to break down, even if it did boost your performance in certain areas initially, had your body been in a capitalist system of self-maximisation. You will have guessed by now where I am going with this.
But instead of preaching about some higher community construct of society, where everyone shares everything and work to reduce understood infections, delivering the community or host body from "diseases" like crime and greed, I will try something different and leave this part of my fractal theory incomplete.
Instead we take a few steps outwards and look at how the larger order of things fit into this picture. In the animal kingdom you might think you have a counter-argument to this in the fact that other species also exhibit the asocial behaviour of over-acquisition. This is true, but if you saw the post from yesterday featuring a link to a lecture by Robert Sopalski, you will recall what he said that the groups of animals that end up working together are those with stronger communities. Without having seen all of it, I believe he debates the same issues in this lecture.
Furthermore the earth is a closed system. The resources that we are using at ever-accelerating rates now took millions of years to develop into what we see today, and if you look at fossil fuels like oil it is quite evident that in less than 300 years we will have completely drained out this resource.
The stardust we know as planets also work in a looping and self-similar way. Most people know that all planets and moons follow paths around the sun and each other. I am not sure how this works, but I would venture the guess that a planet has to stay in its course. The ultimate self-correcting system perhaps.
This is where we would start a lot of guess work, and while this work is by no means scientific, I did think it was an interesting train of thought, so I wanted to share it with you. It could be that the answer to a lot of the social problems this blog, and a growing part of the world, is concerned with lie within many of the systems that our most intelligent minds already understand. Maybe the self-similarity is too obvious to consider applicable to society as a whole.
Am I proposing that crime be viewed by society in the same way disease is viewed by the immune system? I could be.
A very well-written and interesting book comparing a societal state to a physical disease is, and the name is the brilliant part, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism by John McMurtry.
The introduction in the preface really describes well how the writer came to the conclusion that there might be something to this similarity across the various categories of systems. Physically and conceptually.
The title of this book is not a provocative metaphor. It is the conceptual outcome of long personal experience and deep-structural social investigation over 30 years of research across disciplinary boundaries. During this period, I have been involved with my brother, a medical researcher, in ongoing co-investigation of pathogenic patterns at the highest level of abstraction. I have also been the husband of the mother of my four children who was overwhelmed by deadly anaplastic cancer, and a serious student of a non-lethal carcinogenic invasion of my own body. These prolonged events of learning life and death sequences of disease and immune responses have led to the deepening recognition of common principles of growth and disease between social and cellular life-organization.
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