What I'm planning on writing about soon:
- The Role of Art and Artists in Social Change: Was Eminem's failure to get Kerry elected the beginning of the end?
- Experience-Based Decision Making: It seems an obvious choice, until you understand why the alternatives hold sway.
- Making
Blog Comments and Forums and Wikis Work: Do we need groundrules to
enable real conversations, and would anyone follow the groundrules if
we did?
- Ways
of Thinking, Imagining and Communicating Without Words: Other species
manage just fine without language. Maybe it's time we (re-)learned.
- Love: Can we be in it, and be activists at the same time?
- Survey Results: The winner of the contest I ran a year ago to predict what would happen during 2006.
What I'm thinking about:
Too Many Chiefs: More and more people, Stephan Harding tells us in Animate Earth, a book praised by James Lovelock, Fritjof Capra, David Abram,
Jon Porritt and Lynn Margulis, are recognizing the urgency of dealing
with the imminent crises precipitated by our political, economic and
social systems, and recognizing Gaia theory as a means to do so. But
the bookstores and the blogosphere and the works of philosophers and
knowledge managers and social network theorists and economists and
political scientists and ecologists (not to mention my e-mail inbox)
are now full of a dizzying array of diverse models, standards and
principles for diagnosing, understanding, coping with and surviving our
fragile civilization. There is no cohesion to these models, and, it
seems, a thousand sellers of ideas and analysis for every buyer.
But
we don't need more leaders, more gurus, more one-size-fits-all
prescriptions. They're for simple and complicated problems. For complex
problems we need something better, more emergent, more democratic. We
need ways to enable billions to sync with us, on their own terms, in
their own context, developing their own plan of action, and then we
need ways to let those billions connect and collaborate in powerful
ways, in experiments and in creating and refining working models in
their own self-selected communities, so that they no longer need the
systems that are destroying our world, so that we can all walk away
from them and build new sustainable ones. But how do we do this?
Certainly not the way we've ever tried to solve a problem of this type
and scale before.
One of these conflicting models is laid out in U of Toronto professor Thomas Homer-Dixon's book The Upside of Down,
which I'll write about a bit next week. What's interesting about it is
that (like me) he's resigned to the inevitability of the collapse of
civilization in this century, and therefore preoccupied not with
preventing it but with contingency plans to enable a "healthy renewal"
after the collapse. More soon.
What's on your mind this unseasonably warm January? |
5:53:35 PM 
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
