11AM Friday 13th January 2012.
…she’s trying to get a group to form a collective, with a shared set of principles and shared goals. […] To get there you have to build deep trust: a polite way to say that the folks in the collective have to sort out the politics involved. In general that can take months, even when the participants share a great deal in common in education, background, and temperament.
But why form a collective? As she points out, it’s risky. If you want to build things, you can define a small project to test some ideas, and form a Hollywood-style project team to accomplish it. Instead of trying to collaborate on a big, wholly integrated vision of the future — where everything has to be discussed and agreed on before the first thing gets done — just cooperate on something fast, small, and low risk.
The way of the future is cooperation, not collaboration.
— Stowe Boyd, Getting To Trust: Better Swift Than Deep
I think this is a pretty good summing up of my problems with consensus movements (communes, for instance, and the various Occupations), and a good description of the direction I'd rather go in. Decentralisation, looser ties, more flexibility, less permanence.
permalink
2PM Thursday 12th January 2012.
For some decades the green movement has emphasised personal action, which is an important part of responding to climate change. But what is becoming ever clearer is that massive change is needed at an infrastructure level to enable people to make changes to their lifestyle. This is especially true in transport.
Local and central government policy and funding has made it much cheaper, easier and more convenient to travel by personal car around our towns and cities, and to travel around the country by plane as our passenger rail services have languished. Meanwhile, it has become much less convenient, less safe, sometimes more expensive, and sometimes impossible to travel by train, bus, or on foot or by bicycle.
— Julie Anne Genter, Cycling to Southland
permalink
10AM Tuesday 3rd January 2012.
Here it is my usual year-in-review. ‘Read more,’ you know you want to.
Read the rest (3 comments)
1PM Wednesday 30th November 2011.
I wrote the following comment in response to this post on the Netsafe blog, regarding the agreement between Netsafe and RIANZ to carve out an exception to the three-strikes copyright legislation for schools. My comment hasn't yet shown up there, so I'm archiving it here.
My concern isn’t that Netsafe is being incoherent, but that this will be used as a defense of a broken law in terms of “see, it’s not so bad.” Depending on copyright holders and their representatives (here, both complainant and judge) to be carving out and acknowledging exceptions is a bad bad look for the rule of law.
We shouldn’t be dependent on informal back-room deals for things that should be included in the law.
permalink (2 comments)
12PM Sunday 6th November 2011.
A travel book may tell us, for example, that a narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and, after a night in its medieval monastery, awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply journey through an afternoon. We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The seat cloth is grey. We look out of the window at a field. We look back inside. A drum of anxieties revolves in consciousness. We notice a luggage label affixed to a suitcase in a rack above the opposing seats. We tap a finger on the window-ledge. A broken nail on an index finger catches a thread. It starts to rain. A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where the ticket might be. We look back out at the field. It continues to rain. At last the train starts to move. It passes an iron bridge, after which it stops inexplicably. A fly lands on the window. And still we might only have reached the end of the first minute of a comprehensive account of the events lurking within the deceptive sentence ‘he journeyed through the afternoon’.
— Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel
permalink
11AM Thursday 27th October 2011.
The point being: we have a massive police force in America that outside of lower Manhattan prosecutes crime and imprisons citizens with record-setting, factory-level efficiency, eclipsing the incarceration rates of most of history's more notorious police states and communist countries.
But the bankers on Wall Street don't live in that heavily-policed country. There are maybe 1000 SEC agents policing that sector of the economy, plus a handful of FBI agents. There are nearly that many police officers stationed around the polite crowd at Zucotti park.
— Matt Taibbi, Wall Street Isn't Winning It's Cheating
permalink
10PM Thursday 20th October 2011.
There's something about electric communication that is a little bit unsettling to the consciousness or puts us in a state that's relatively unsettled. This has been the case for over 150 years now with the invention of the telegraph. We feel like we're speeding up and accelerating and that can be very exciting and useful in some ways but in the end it doesn't afford focus the way that non-electric modes of reading and experiencing information do. That's something we're still wrestling with.
If you're really a digital person and you have been spending your days connected and you haven't had time away from the screen for weeks or months or even years for some people, it's very hard to even grasp what it feels like to spend a couple of full days offline and how different it is. The way in which your perception and your thoughts and really your whole experience just go into a different gear. You can't do it by going offline for one day.
— William Powers, author of Hamlet’s Blackberry – Boing Boing
permalink
9AM Tuesday 18th October 2011.
Wall Street, after all, hasn’t got a list of demands that it makes one protest at a time; it exerts constant, unyielding pressure on the engines of power and arranges to continue to bully policymakers in perpetuity. If the Occupy movement expands and persists, it can conceivably arrange to bully policymakers even more fiercely. That would result in the achievement of real democracy, and all of the policy goals that implies.
— Anatomy of a Victory: Occupy Wall Street Wins a Big One | Truthout
permalink
4PM Monday 17th October 2011.
At Mother Jones, ‘Foodies, Get Thee to Occupy Wall Street’:
As of 2007, six companies owned 75 percent of the global pesticide market, and four companies sold half of the globe's seeds, ETC Group reckons. Here's the kicker: Three of them—Monsanto, Syngenta, and Dupont—are on both lists.
Just four companies—Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, and Louis Dreyfus—control up to 90 percent of the global trade in grain.
permalink
9AM Tuesday 11th October 2011.
Wall Street has no incentive to change, because it has a monopoly on our lives. We can't buy houses or go to college without bank loans; we can't drive without oil companies; we can't eat without agribusiness. Predictable assholes are saying we have no right to protest if we use products made by the systems we're protesting against. They're so wrong, they're almost right: the whole reason we're protesting is that we can't get what we need without going through corrupt systems; but until we have other ways of getting what we need, we have no leverage to do anything but shout into the wind.
— Ran Prieur
permalink
More