Category: tribes

Buddhist Economics, Cool Enough To Touch

Published June 28, 2009 by cgerrish

The light and heat generated during the late 60s and early 70s was the result of challenging boundaries, and to some extent testing the possibility of actually setting up a tent and living on a boundary. Living an everyday life in that high intensity environment proved untenable, but the artifacts thrown off from those expeditions have started to cool off enough that we can finally pick them up and examine them.

McLuhan, in Understanding Media, (another artifact from that era) talks about about how high-intensity experiences initially overwhelm the senses:

Intensity or high definition engenders specialism and fragmentation in living as in entertainment, which explains why any intense experience must be “forgotten,” “censored,” and reduced to a very cool state before it can be “learned” or assimilated. The Freudian “censor” is less of a moral function than an indispensable condition of learning. Were we to accept fully and directly every shock to our various structures of awareness, we would soon be nervous wrecks, doing double-takes and pressing panic buttons every minute. The “censor” protects our central system of values, as it does our physical nervous system by simply cooling off the onset of experience a great deal. For many people, this cooling system brings on a lifelong state of psychic rigor mortis, or of somnambulism, particularly observable in periods of new technology.

In 1973, E.F. Schumacher published a collection of essays under the title: Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered. In the essay Buddhist Economics, Schumacher points out that value in economics is derived from our system of values. Suppressing all systems of values in favor of the idea of economic growth has allowed capital to emerge as an other-worldly abstraction. Like any successful creature, it fights to preserve the particular state of the ecosystem that allows it to flourish. Buddhist Economics posits that other systems of value are possible.

Economists themselves, like most specialists, normally suffer from a kind of metaphysical blindness, assuming that theirs is a science of absolute and invariable truths, without any presuppositions. Some go as far as to claim that economic laws are as free from “metaphysics” or “values” as the law of gravitation. We need not, however, get involved in arguments of methodology. Instead, let us take some fundamentals and see what they look like when viewed by a modern economist and a Buddhist economist.

It is clear, therefore, that Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilization not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character. Character, at the same time, is formed primarily by a man’s work. And work, properly conducted in conditions of human dignity and freedom, blesses those who do it and equally their products.

Recently, Umair Haque has reintroduced us to the idea that value must return to earth, must live amongst people again, must be socialized. The value system of growth has been playing a zero-sum game. The monoculture of economics must change its farming practices and think of the fields once more as a garden. I wonder whether these ideas have cooled enough to be considered possibilities. Has the ecosystem changed enough to uncover interfaces by which they could be assimilated?

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus noted that we cannot step into the same river twice. And yet I swear I’ve seen this piece of the stream before…

TS Eliot, Burnt Norton

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden.

Shall we follow?

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Her Explicit Intention Was a Signal Of Something Else Entirely…

Published June 22, 2009 by cgerrish

Listening to John Cage talk about music, sound and silence causes me to think about data. We talk about data in similar terms, we think of it as structured, semi-structured and unstructured.

I don’t need sound to talk to me…
– John Cage

We often talk of trying to capture the intention of a person’s activity on the Network. Google has done this through providing the mechanism through which a question about the location of something is asked. In our age of quantification, it seems rational to dedicate our efforts to locate the consumer’s stated intention to buy. The rational engages the rational in a structured transaction where the best feature/function/price ratio is determined by auction in real time. This is a vision of humanity as a population of buying machines.

There’s a magic trick that’s often used to sell the non-verbal within the corporate environment. A series of visual illusions are displayed to prove the point that each person brings something of themselves to every situation. Usuallly a test is then given— and a person’s set of answers are then mapped to a psychological profile. Colors or archetypes predict what each person might bring to the party. These maps are then provided to make visible the invisible threads running through our everyday interaction. Magic, of course, is entirely rational. Diverting our attention between the Turn and the Prestige is its art.

Image advertising works at a lower level, it creates a personal connection to the economics of a person’s psychological ecosystem. The image asks for completion: I want to be that; I want that social status; I think that’s sexy; I think that’s funny; That thing is practical, like I am; I’m frightened, that thing looks safe. Is it really possible that advertising on the Network could be all ego and no id? Can brands survive as pure feature/function/price sets to be compared in a data matrix?

Crusades are being launched to structure and link all the data on the Network. The age of enlightenment strives toward its completion. And yet, I wonder, as I listen to John Cage talk about the sound of the traffic on 6th Avenue in New York City, how much of what goes on between people works at the level of the rational, unambiguous signal? How much more can we learn about what’s going on right now by listening to the sound of the traffic?

Take a moment, what is the sound of the traffic on the Network from your particular vantage point?

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Climate Change: The Temperature of the Network

Published June 13, 2009 by cgerrish

We seemed to first learn about this framework for understanding media when talking about the Kennedy/Nixon debates of 1960. It was said that Nixon won the debate on the radio, and that Kennedy won on television. Television, it was said, was a “cool medium,” while radio was a “hot medium.” Nixon was called ‘too hot’ for the cool medium of television. The words “hot” and “cool” were, and are, overdetermined. It’s very difficult to keep them focused to look through the lens that McLuhan provided.

Because television was (is) so new and we were struggling to comprehend its impacts on society, the idea of a cool medium stuck to television. However, all media have temperature characteristics, and as we look at text, hypertext, document-based web pages, and the real time web of FriendFeed, FaceBook, Microsoft Mesh and Google Wave — we might keep a thermometer handy. In order to better understand what McLuhan was getting at, let’s look at some fragments from his book, published in 1964, Understanding Media:

A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition.’ High definition is the state of being well-filled with data.

The telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in or completed by the listener.

On the other hand, hot media, are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.

The hotting up of the medium of writing to repeatable print intensity led to nationalism and the religious wars of the sixteenth century.

The waltz was a hot, fast mechanical dance suited to the industrial time in its moods of pomp and circumstance. In contrast, the Twist is a cool, involved and chatty form of improvised gesture.

If we journey into the thermoclines and fronts of the current media environment, the places where hot and cool touch, we’ll find a turbulent search for identity.

Newspapers have employed the medium of typography, ink and paper to translate and relay stories back to the culture. The hot textual medium of the newspaper is dumbfounded by the cool medium of hypertext on the Web. The typical complaints are trotted out, this cool new medium doesn’t have the high definition professionalism/specialization of the incumbent hot medium. Attempts are made to colonize it by heating it up and filtering out the high-definition bits. But the reverse is happening, the cool medium is engulfing the hot medium.

Public relations has traditionally been a hot medium deploying high definition communications to influence the direction of public opinion. As social networks have emerged as the most visible sites for the citation of public opinion, the corporate communications industry has been serving up recipes for the best method of heating up ‘communities.’ We might ask, once a community has been fully cooked, will it have any flavor left?

The economics of high and low definition media are very different. When the anchors on CNN read tweets on air for an hour, their advertisers are being cheated. They’re paying for high-definition hot media, and they’re getting a relayed and filtered low-definition signal instead.

The blending of Hot and Cool media is a new media type. The result shouldn’t be luke warm– the hot needs to stay hot; and the cool must stay cool. As McLuhan reminds us, the content of the new media is the old media. Our fingers are twitching nervously over the remote control as we endlessly change the channel searching for the new container…

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Digital Identity, Like Putting on your Sunday Best

Published June 4, 2009 by cgerrish

dressed_up

When we talk about internet identity, it seems as though we’re only speaking of consenting adults. We discuss women and men of free will accepting or rejecting products from the open market place of identity. The user of identity products is a consumer, shopping for the best deal on identity– as though it were a suit of clothes. (We can make inferences about the politico-economic environment of such a free agent, but let’s bookmark that for later discussion).

Those of us who are digital immigrants view the Network as something selected, a destination we chose. And as the Network is optional, so too is the digital suit of clothes we call internet identity. For the digital native, the Network merely is. It’s a quality of the environment into which a person is born. It’s a bell that cannot be unrung.

Can internet identity restrict its sphere to the population of adult consumers? Is identity really only a matter of commerce? Sitting across the table from Doc Searls at the recent IIW, we were discussing the future of digital identity. The extent of the lifecycle of digital identity has its origins in the discussions of the adults who’ve freely taken on the responsibility of shepherding the direction of the discussions on identity. Doc quotes Lakoff on the embodied mind, our metaphors– our frameworks for thinking are hard-coded into original equipment manufacturer’s hardware.

…we produce moral metaphors that equate light and up with good and dark and down with bad because we are diurnal animals that walk upright.

When we use the word “we,” we also make assumptions about who we are and who we aren’t. Let’s take a moment and enlarge the set of all those with a digital identity. Each day, some number of people are born and some number of people die. When a baby is born, it is given a name. That name is entered into a database on the Network. At what point does digital identity bind to a new person? Is it at the moment of conception? The quickening? At birth? Or is digital identity more like a contract or an oath with suitability requirements.

I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion

Children begin life as a part of their mother, and then they live within the identity of the family. During the teenage years they go through the painful process of separating and establishing a unique identity. They visit the thrift stores of our culture and try on various suits of clothes in various combinations. An adult identity is fashioned from the iterative process of finding the pieces that seem to work.

Phil Windley told me that he’d reserved gmail addresses for his children. I wonder if a digital native, when thinking of names for a new baby will consider what’s available in the dominant digital identity name spaces. One can imagine the middle name gaining a new prominence in this kind of economy.

At what point do we teach our children about the Network and the digital identity they already have on it? A librarian friend told me that, in addition to teaching children how to find a book in the stacks of the library, she teaches them how to search for things online. Is learning about the Network still an elective course of study for the digital native?

At the other end of the spectrum, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil— what is to become of our digital identity? When our affairs are put in order, will that include signing out of the Network? Shall our last will and testaments specify the dispensation of our blogs, waves and twitter streams? Shall they be withdrawn from the Network (to the extent that anything can be withdrawn) and cremated? Or shall they be embalmed and left as a standing monument to one’s sojourn? Will the digital identities of the next Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean be reincarnated into corporate entities that will continuously animate them as long as they are profitable? Will each person’s 15 minutes of fame be cataloged, indexed and searchable for the rest of eternity? A kind of eternal recurrence of the same?

Martin Heidegger writes about human beings (dasein) as a thrown project. We are thrown into the world and land with a particular trajectory. None of us select the world into which we emerge.

Heidegger proclaimed that we are ‘thrown’ into the world and that our Being-in-the-world is a ‘thrownness’ [Geworfenheit]. To Heidegger this concept is a primordial banality which had long been overlooked by metaphysical conjecture. Humans beings are thrown with neither prior knowledge nor individual option into a world that was there before and will remain there after they are gone.

The digital natives born into this time will pull on digital identity like a well-worn leather jacket. They’ll put on their Sunday best when trying to make a good impression. They’ll wear a t-shirt with a company logo while out for a Saturday jog. They’ll wear an orange vest, picking up trash on the side of the road, doing public service. They’ll carry a handbag whose primary design is the maker’s logo to impress their friends. They’ll resent wearing the uniform of the fast food worker for their first job out of high school. They’ll be proud to wear the uniform of the military of their country. They’ll create fashion out of the thrift shops of the streets of the inner city and watch it reflected on the runways in Paris and Milan. They’ll settle on a comfortable daily uniform and declare that style is too much trouble. They’ll declare that they won’t wear fur because it troubles their conscience. After buying their first custom tailored suit of clothes, they’ll look in the mirror to take in the full effect, and then smile and nod. They will judge and be judged by the clothes they wear.

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