Category: value

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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The End of Architecture

Published June 26, 2009 by cgerrish

It was when the web site entered its Baroque era that the job description of the information architect seemed to crystallize. The ornamentation decorating the dizzying heights, the complex taxonomies of categories, and various drawers into which content was stuffed, all this required the vigilant organizational skills of the architect. The web site seemed to pattern itself on the design of the altar of a Baroque Cathedral. Information organized for the greater glory of the product. The value of the space radiating out from the home page expressing the theology of the brand. The adjoining chapels and the stories of the saints told in shards of glass extend the value proposition. User-centered design assumed the supplicant wished to have the most useful experience of prostration before the brand.

Room after room was added to the structure, each cleverly tucked into some classification that related it to the whole. Of course, while all of the rooms were smartly decorated, there was almost no foot traffic. The monitors of the brand wander the halls, peeking in to the this room and that one, checking to see whether dust is accumulating. The small portion of the structure that attracted use and generated revenue serves as a keystone to the entire surrounding architecture.

Wikipedia, for the moment, has this to say about architecture:

Architecture (from Greek word ἀ�?χιτεκτονική – arkhitektonike) is the art and science of designing and constructing buildings and other physical structures for human shelter or use. A wider definition often includes the design of the total built environment, from the macro level of how a building integrates with its surrounding context (see town planning, urban design, and landscape architecture) to the micro level of architectural or construction details and, sometimes, furniture and hardware. Wider still, architecture is the activity of designing any kind of system.

The reason that the Baroque era of web design signals the end of architecture, is not that the task is complete. Nor is it that another style, Bauhaus, for example, will replace the previous style. Architecture is an art and discipline that organizes things in physical space. The Network is not a physical space. When we speak of it as a space, we project attributes on to a blank screen. Doc Searls talks about the Giant Zero, the idea that the distance between endpoints on the Network is zero. In the manifesto he wrote with David Weinberger, World of Ends, he describes the thoughts sparked by Craig Burton:

When Craig Burton describes the Net’s stupid architecture as a hollow sphere comprised entirely of ends, he’s painting a picture that gets at what’s most remarkable about the Internet’s architecture: Take the value out of the center and you enable an insane flowering of value among the connected end points. Because, of course, when every end is connected, each to each and each to all, the ends aren’t endpoints at all.

Even this description relies on a spacial metaphor. If there’s no distance between the startpoint and an endpoint, why do we talk of starting and ending at all? What are these points that have no distance between them? We gut the history and most resonant qualities of a word, and then persist in using it as a tool for thought. We ask what are the qualities of the space of the Network? What’s the most user-centered approach to building out a site in that space?

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
– Ludwig Wittengenstein

The end of architecture doesn’t mean the end of thinking about the Network, or standing up new nodes of connection. It’s only that we stand at the edge of our language and words come slowly. Rather than looking for an external model out in the world, perhaps we should look for an internal one. Or something that stands at the threshhold between the two: Language itself might serve as a point of departure.

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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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