Dave Pollard: Music, Film, Literature, Television and the Arts

The Politics of Conversation

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 03:21:23 GMT

Four years ago I read and reviewed Keith Johnstone's book Impro, in which he explains how pervasive dominance and submission behaviours are in human interactions. He describes an example of physical dominance and submission (status displays) in our encounters with strangers:

Imagine that two strangers are approaching each other along an empty street. It's straight, hundreds of yards long and with wide pavements. Both strangers are walking at an even pace, and at some point one of them will have to move aside in order to pass. You can see this decision being made 100 yards or more before it has to. In my view the two people scan each other for signs of status, and then the lower one moves aside. If they think they're equal, both move aside. If they both think they're dominant (or if one isn't paying attention) they end up doing the sideways dance and muttering apologies. But this doesn't happen if you meet a frail or half-blind person: You move aside for them. It's only when you think the other person is challenging that the dance occurs. I remember doing it once with a man in a shop doorway who took me by the forearms and gently moved me out of the way -- it still rankles. Old people tend to cling to the highest status they have had, and will deliberately 'not notice' others while clinging fiercely to the (often walled) inside of the walkway. A bustling crowd is constantly and unconsciously exchanging status signals and challenges, with the more submissive person stepping aside.

Shortly thereafter I read and reviewed Peter Collett's The Book of Tells that teaches you to read status displays in body language, and specifically these six displays:

Dominant/Threatening-Possessive (DT) signals -- "I'm the boss, do what I say or else"
Dominant/Relaxed-Confident (DR) signals -- "I'm the boss, so I can let my guard down"
Dominant/Controlling-Protecting (DC) signals -- "I'm the boss, and I make the decisions"

Submissive/Deferring-Inviting (SD) signals -- "You're the boss, make your move"
Submissive/Anxious-Shy (SA) signals -- "You're the boss, don't hurt me"
Submissive/Helpless (SH) signals -- "You're the boss, what should I do"

The picture above (selected randomly off the net), for example, includes several dominant displays (sitting very straight, turning away, arms raised or extended, sitting slouched back with legs extended, sitting at end of table) and several submissive displays (slouching forward attentively, sitting in middle of long side of table, sitting with legs drawn up beneath chair).

Collett includes, in addition to body, hand, eye and face signals, some examples of spoken signals of dominance and submission:

Dominant: talking first, talking most, interrupting, speaking loudly, speaking deeply
Submissive: talking breathily, high-pitched speech, ending phrases with upturn in pitch, dropping names, ingratiating speech

In my review of Impro, I lamented: "What disturbs me most is what this bodes for us idealists trying to establish non-hierarchical, leaderless political and economic structures -- communities of peers. Are such structures unnatural? Or do we simply need to learn to recognize the pecking order for what it is -- a primeval tool for minimizing conflict and deciding who will do the breeding -- and what it isn't -- a license to take an unfair share of wealth and power?"

Since then I have been speaking about the importance of Love, Conversation and Community, and specifically the integration of the three: Facilitating non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer conversations among people in community (i.e. with shared passions, shared objectives, or shared problems) who care about each other and their community. Today I asked myself:

Are these status displays, and our apparent unconscious need to make them, interfering with communication, and undermining the achievement of consensus, collaboration and non-hierarchical problem-solving?

Since our bodies are always 'saying' much more than our words, even if we monitor and try to extinguish (as facilitators) more obvious dominance behaviours (bullying) and submissive behaviours (wallflowers), there is almost nothing we can do to reduce non-verbal signals. Yes, we can create circles and get rid of tables, but you will still see a ton of such displays, in posture, eye, face, hand signals and tone of voice.

The courses I have taken in facilitation don't teach you to recognize or try to alleviate such behaviours, perhaps because it would be an impossible task. I know I am prone to slouch back, legs extended, hands on head with elbows out like antlers, a multiple dominance display. It must be very confusing to others when I try consciously to speak in an inviting, questioning, open-minded way while making such an aggressive non-verbal display!

Likewise I have witnessed people speak passionately and articulately about something, but leave the audience unimpressed because their body language betrays a lack of self-confidence in what they're saying. In particular I have watched a woman speak in a soft voice (raising her voice slightly at the end of each phrase) and be completely ignored and discounted, while a man a few minutes later, speaking in a soft, measured voice, said the same thing and was hailed as brilliant, everyone scribbling down what he said word for word.

So what do you think: Are there things we can do, both as facilitators and as conversationalists, to suppress power displays and displays of submission, so that listeners focus on what is being said, not how it is said or by whom?

Last Saturday I mentioned an article by Andrew Campbell that retrieves and elaborates on a fascinating model by Vincent Kenny on 'Dead Language' vs 'Live Language' and how power politics in conversation 'deadens' the language and dialogue and saps its power, creativity and usefulness. Language in conversation, the article explains, is sometimes wielded as a weapon, to stop thought and creativity and sharing and connection and everything else it is valuable for.

This is a second, more explicit 'abuse of power' in conversation. You know how it works: There are amazingly effective conversation-killers that those uncomfortable with change can use to stomp it out in a way that is almost impossible to defend against. "We tried that last year and it was a disaster." "If we allowed people to do that, we'd have chaos on our hands, costs would soar and productivity would fall." "We'd need to get the authority to do that from x and for reason y that would be almost impossible to get." Andrew's article provides more examples.

This raises a second question: Are there things we can do, both as facilitators and as listeners, to challenge and reject 'dead language' that stifles energy, innovation, courage and other collective qualities of a group necessary to bring about change?

I am very good at imagining possibilities (and throwing them out for consideration) and for gently (and not so gently) provoking people to want to change (themselves), prodding them to intend to act. I think these capacities are helpful in conversations in community. Maybe I'm meant to do these things in conversations, rather than being a 'neutral' facilitator. But since my imagined possibilities and provocations often produce these hostile dominance displays and 'dead language' responses, if I really want my ideas to get traction, I think I need to learn how to deal with these behaviours. What's your experience?

Category: Conversation

Saturday Links for the Week: July 19, 2008

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 03:39:13 GMT

Photo from birdstar.org, one of the amazing shots from the Bond brothers of SW Ontario.

Disparity, Poverty and Environmental Health: I'm reading Hervé Kempf's How the Rich are Destroying the Earth (review next week). His message, from France, is essentially the same as Ian Welsh's in his new article There Was a Class War. The Rich Won. The message, and the messages that naturally flow from it, are:

For the last 30 years, everywhere in the world, income and net wealth for the poorest 95% of the population has been, in real terms declining, even as income and net wealth for the richest 5% has doubled and redoubled. Disparity of income and wealth has never been higher. The top 1% in the US alone now receive almost 25% of its total national income.
This economic improvement for 1-5% has come at an astronomical environmental cost, a massive increase in pollution and waste, the desolation of much of the Earth, surpassing the climate change tipping point, increasing global indebtedness to staggering proportions, pushing us over the edge to the End of Oil and Water, ruining ecosystems in much of the world and accelerating ten-fold the biodiversity loss that heralds the sixth Great Extinction in the planet's recorded history.
There are no economic 'market' or technology fixes for either the economic disparity or the environmental devastation that continue to accelerate every day. What is left is belief in violent political revolution, belief in a collective new social consciousness that will drive a spontaneous plunge in global consumption and a massive redistribution of wealth, belief in the Rapture, or belief that our civilization is inevitably in its last century.

You know which I believe. Thanks to Jon Husband for the link.

A Plague of Economic Locusts: Andrew Leonard at HTWW adds up the factors that have caused me recently to liquidate most of my investments. Favourite quote: "Faith-based economics seems like an unsound management philosophy, for those of us without the power to part the Red Sea and make a getaway from a falling dollar, rising oil prices, and insolvent banks".

A Symbol for Gaia: When I write about a better way to live, or about wilderness, or the need to connect with all-life-on-Earth, I've been using a photo of a temperate rainforest in the US Pacific Northwest Olympic range to "illustrate" the article. This is because there doesn't seem to be a symbol or logo for Gaia, for living in balance with nature. When I did a search I found the old 1960s environmental symbol (a take on the Greek letter omega). I also found the symbol at right, developed by gaia.com member (and author of the Gaia Girls book series published by Chelsea Green) Lee Welles. I really like the logo, since it taps into the aboriginal importance of quartets (four elements, four seasons, four directions etc.) and is based on a circle. During the search, Barbara Dieu pointed me to flickrcc, which shows you a collage of photos on any subject you key in. Birds in flight, forests and waterfalls prevail for photos tagged 'Gaia'. To me this is a fascinating way to capture "the wisdom of crowds" about a subject visually.

Booking Time for Real-Time Chat: Google now allows you to put a badge, like the one below, on your blog to indicate if you're available for an IM/VoIP chat via GMail/GTalk. You don't even have to have a GMail account to ping me. Problem is, I'm not available for such chats very often. So before I put the badge on my sidebar, I need to add to it a Google Calendar showing my 'conversation office hours', the times when I will be available. Ideally, it would be interactive, allowing readers to say what they want to chat about, so I can invite others to join in. May take awhile for me to set up.

Imagine, blogs as a medium for real-time conversations! Thanks to Theresa Purcell for the link.

Manipulative Language, and the Abuse of Power in Conversation: Andrew Campbell retrieves and elaborates on a fascinating model by Vincent Kenny on Dead Language vs Live Language and how power politics in conversation 'deadens' the language and dialogue and saps its power, creativity and usefulness. I'm learning how to listen more attentively to conversations, their nuances, what is said and implied and unspoken, unconsciously conveyed. Now I'm discovering I must also learn to observe the way in which language in conversation is sometimes wielded as a weapon, to stop thought and creativity and sharing and connection and everything else it is valuable for.

The Wrenching Photography of Amy Stein: The photo above is an example of Amy Stein's disturbing and ominous photographs. Her full collection entitled 'domesticated' is here, and if you're not faint of heart it's worth a look. Don't say I didn't warn you. Thanks to Emily & Daisy at Our Descent for the link.

Why Is It Called a "Retreat"?: Evelyn Rodriguez writes about the need to turn off the noise from external sources, and to withdraw to our true selves, to rediscover them, to find our true bearings, our centre, before reconnecting with others, in order not to become too much Everybody-Else.

Geoff Brown Sketches the Civilization Bubble: A fascinating Nancy White style drawing by Geoff (above) shows us within Gaia, as a bubble, and the ways in which nature is pushing back against our unsustainable 'inflation' are depicted as pins, each threatening to burst the bubble if it expands any further. Brilliant.

Games for Change: If we're going to spend time playing video games, why not make them informative and get that energy directed at ways that can make the world a better place? Thanks to Graham Clark (who also supplied the quote in the thought for the week below) for the link.

This is the World Now: Another delightful miniature in words and images by Pohangina Pete. The world now does not make sense.

Thought for the Week: variously ascribed to Al Rogers or Eric Hoffer:

In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

Join Me September 28-October 1 in BC

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:03:33 GMT

Bowen Island by Richard Smith

I'm going to be on Bowen Island, near Vancouver BC, September 28 through October 1, for an Art of Hosting event. The program teaches several interactive meeting and facilitation technique skills -- World Café, Circle, Open Space Technology, Appreciative Inquiry -- and it would be great to have the chance to meet with as many of you as possible while learning something new and useful (and inexpensively!) together at the same time. Please look at the invitation, and if you decide to go, let Chris and me know ASAP -- it's not a large venue, though it is astonishingly beautiful. Hope to see you there!

PS: If you can't make that, I'll be in San Jose September 23-25 for KMWorld & Intranets, Quebec City August 8, Montreal September 18 and Vancouver September 26-27. Let me know if you're available for a meetup!

Friday Flashback: Twelve Ways to Think Differently

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:01:41 GMT

In May 2005 I wrote this post that, after it was picked up months later on Digg and other popularity lists of web articles, turned out to be my most-visited article ever:

Our minds are like our bodies -- fail to exercise them and they atrophy and break down. We live in an age of specialization, where we are encouraged to narrow our interests and our activities, to focus and limit ourselves to doing things at which we are very competent. So parts of our brain get a lot of exercise and other parts very little. What's worse, this can actually narrow our comfort zone, the range of things we enjoy doing or thinking about and are competent in. Many of our cultural activities and artefacts: political debates, win/lose competitions, hierarchies, laws, religions, 'best practices', systematization, uniforms, and monolithic architecture and design -- all tend to reinforce 'one right answer' thinking that discourages and ultimately excludes and prevents us from thinking differently. Even the mental exercises we do as we get older are designed to stem the loss of analytical skills and memory rather than broadening our thinking or our thinking ability. We live in a world of stultifying sameness and uniformity: physically, ideologically, intellectually. There is little motivation, little day-to-day need, to exercise the parts and processes of our brain that rarely get a workout.

Read the Twelve Ways

Reframing Questions

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 03:34:48 GMT

Kathy Sierra over on Twitter has been throwing two types of teasers at us this week. The first are what she calls 'rules that aren't always useful', that I'd call 'false myths and limiting generalizations', such as:

don't feed trolls
two heads are better than one
nobody reads the manual
there is no money in [x]
the customer is always right
grow or die
you can't be both profitable and socially responsible

In case you think 'false myth' is a redundant expression, a myth (literal meaning= word of mouth) is anything that has received such a wide degree of acceptance, or such passionate acceptance, that it is rarely questioned. Some myths are true.

The problem with the false myths are that they can blind you to the truth if you accept them uncritically. They can constrain your imagination of other possibilities that are contrary to the false myth 'conventional wisdom'. They can lead you to make very bad decisions.

The problem with limiting generalizations is that they can lead you to oversimplify ("to get ahead in business women have to think and act like men"), to draw false dichotomies ("we either have to find new domestic oil or be forever dependent on foreign suppliers") and to stereotype ("working class whites will always vote Republican" which can lead you to draw false inferences from correlations, to write off classes of people, and to inhibit your creativity.

The second teasers Kathy has been tweeting are what she calls 'perspective hacks' that I'd call 'reframing questions', such as:

What might change if you view the Big Thing You're After as a component/subsystem of a greater whole?
That really cool very specific thing you learned... what happens if you ask what else that might apply to?
Instead of trying to change this behaviour, what if we tried to understand how it came about and adapted ourselves accordingly?

Kathy has a flair for this type of thought-provoking meme. As I thought about what I'd put on my list of false myths and limiting generalizations, and reframing questions, it suddenly occurred to me that these two are linked: for every false myth or limiting generalization, there is at least one reframing question that can get you out of the uncritical, unimaginative thinking trap and help you discover new possibilities and achieve breakthrough perspectives.

Here, for example, are ten false myths and limiting generalizations that I encounter nearly every day in business, and how, instead of arguing with those who spout them, I might reframe the discussion with a question to show those people, gently, another way to see the situation.

false myth or limiting generalization	reframing question
talent shortage: if you want smart people to work for you, you have to pay them a competitive rate for their time	what if you could produce an invitation so compelling that smart people would be willing to come together and solve a problem for free?
business needs hierarchy: without instruction and supervision, work just won't get done	what if you gave people an interesting, challenging, attainable objective and just trusted them to figure out how to achieve it?
if you have a new business idea, you need to find 'angel investors' to finance it or there is no hope of it succeeding	what if you got the prospective customers for your new idea to 'invest' in it, in return for a say in design and a better rate of interest than the bank pays?
if you want to deploy a social network tool in the organization, you need to produce a 'business case' showing ROI and addressing security issues	what if you just did an experiment, outside the firewall on your own time, using young tech-savvy employees, and then just showed everyone how easy, inexpensive and useful it is?
marketing is expensive: if you can't achieve an x% market share with a new innovation in y months, it's not worth the risk	what if you just developed a simple, inexpensive demo/beta/prototype, and showed or gave it away, and relied on word of mouth to 'sell' it?
a company needs to provide an ROI to shareholders that is commensurate with its risk, or no one will buy shares in it	what if you organized the enterprise as a cooperative, with members who received products for their investment instead of shareholders demanding profits and dividends?
to make a new technology successful, you have to persuade management to make training compulsory for all, because otherwise people won't use it properly	what if you only used technologies that are so simple and intuitive that they need no training, and are open source and public so they need no development?
you need performance objectives and bonuses to motivate people to work hard and work smart	what if you made work fun, and let people choose their own hours, and then asked them what else it would take to get them to do their best?
a business that doesn't grow is doomed to die	what if you set the objective of the business to grow better without growing bigger, and left it to the employees to figure out how to do that?
you need to show your finished, quality product to customers; they won't ever buy an 'idea'	what if you abolished the idea of 'customer', and instead partnered with the people who might buy your product and co-developed it with them

Isn't this cool? It's a bit like the technique in some martial arts of parrying with a deflection, defusing the attacker's momentum by changing the rules of the contest and putting them off balance.

What are the false myths and limiting generalizations that you are struggling with, and how might you use appropriate questions to reframe them, disempower them, put them to rest?

Category: Our Culture

Five Ways to Make a Point

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:54:39 GMT

Take a look at this article from salon.com, written by UC Prof Mike Davis. The words that came to mind when I read it were succinct, witty, provocative, and well-researched. He manages to capture the essence of what has led our civilization to the brink of collapse in just two pages, packed with data, rhetorical questions and persuasive argument. This is the kind of writing that moves people to action, to change their minds, and to pass along the essay or its contents in conversations with others, virally.

Davis is, I expect, preaching to the largely converted. His work is rhetoric, which despite its modern negative connotations means simply persuasive, effective oratory (the word predates the printing press and hence initially referred to speech, not writing). Whereas some people believe that debate is the best means of persuasion, I have come to believe that most people will only accept an assertion or idea if they're ready for it. If they're not, a debate will only tend to polarize their view, put them off. Rhetoric at its worst can inflame ignorance, but at its best it can inform and stimulate those who are already inclined to believe something, so that they can then decide how to act on it, and pass on their learning, rhetorically, to others who are so inclined.

A rhetorical question is not (necessarily) one for which the answer is self-evident, but rather one presented for persuasive effect, to provoke thought consistent with the arguments the speaker has just made or is about to make. It is intended to evoke emotion, either positively or negatively. If the audience is ignorant, inclined to groupthink, insecure, frightened or incapable of critical thinking, it can be dangerous ("Are we going to let these people take what we worked so hard for?")

If the audience is informed, independent, self-confident and thoughtful, however, such questions are powerful and useful, because they force you to think, and sometimes to challenge conventional wisdom, to think differently. They are often preceded or followed by another useful device, the rhetorical or oratorical pause. Such a pause (which many speakers are afraid to insert into oratory in case it merely causes audience discomfort) is intended to cause tension, to force the audience to try to anticipate what will come next, or to reflect on what has just been said that was presumably important.

Davis' article is so compelling, I think, because of a combination of new information, provocative questions, and great rhetoric.

Recently I've been listening, paying more attention to conversations: their flow, their pacing, their iteration of ideas and comprehension and meaning, the power politics often present inside them, their effectiveness. Because Generation Millennium has somewhat rediscovered (texting notwithstanding) the oral culture of the pre-Gutenberg era, I've been listening to them practice conversation. Their ability to achieve comprehension (largely by successive approximation, iteratively, Q&A, action and reaction, until consensus is reached) is extraordinary: very effective and hopelessly inefficient, but done so quickly that it succeeds. But it is the opposite of rhetoric. Good rhetorical oratory rarely contains the most frequent two words in Gen Millennium speech: "I mean".

I also find that modern conversation contains few rhetorical questions or pauses: There is simply no time for them. And there is little time for information. When information is presented that is new, and not consistent with the worldview of the listener(s), and not presented in the context of a simple "A or B" dichotomy ("Is Obama better or worse at...?"), it is as if the audience simply doesn't know what to make of it. If you listen to this speech (thanks to David Parkinson for the link) you can see how new information that makes an oversimplified debate more complex leaves the audience (in this case mass media talking heads) utterly dumbfounded. If the new information doesn't fit, it is discounted, ignored, considered as outrageous, an affront. You didn't answer our simple dumb question!

Which of course it is: It is intended as an affront (literal meaning of affront: in your face). While this may not work in the context of dumbed-down mass media reporting, it can be extremely effective when the audience has the patience, curiosity and self-confidence to be affronted.

Generation Millennium has learned one traditional (and now rare) conversational skill: storytelling. They have discovered that the easiest way to create a context for understanding is to tell a straightforward ("and then...") story, instead of preparing and presenting an analysis. They 'get' that if they understood what happened, and what should be done about it, then so will the audience if they hear an accurate narrative that 'recreates' the speaker's learning.

Recently I've learned of another effective means of communicating information in a presentation or conversation: the use of simple visuals. I would highly commend to you Dan Roam's new book The Back of the Napkin, which explains how to use elementary visuals, skilfully sketched by hand on a napkin or whiteboard while the audience watches, to convey information and to persuade (the illustration above is from that book, and a video explaining the ideas in the book is here). It draws on the fact that we are all programmed, in our pre-civilization DNA, to learn, discover and understand visually, not by reading text. One of my most popular conference presentation subjects is Adding Meaning and Value to Information (largely through visuals), and most of my presentations now have no bullet points, just pictures that I talk to.

So in short I think there are five techniques that can be used to make a point effectively, in a conversation, presentation or written article:

Present new information, clearly and articulately.
Ask provocative questions.
Tell memorable stories.
Use visualizations to convey meaning.
Employ powerful rhetoric -- be clear, logical, clever, funny, well-paced, original, truthful, concise, provocative, and passionate.

All of these things take practice. There is no better way to get better at them than by putting yourself out there, and asking your audience for their honest assessment of what you did well and how you could do better.

How would you score yourself on the use of each of these five techniques? I think I'm pretty good at #1. I don't do #2 nearly enough, or well enough. I'm still poor at #3 (I need to craft and memorize my stories). I'm getting better at #4 but I need to practice sketching, and making my visualizations clearer and less dense. Dan Roam says: "All good pictures do not need to be self-explanatory, but they need to be explainable." And my rhetorical skills need a lot of work: I still often lack the courage of my convictions, and I tend to be too serious and too long-winded.

How about you (that's a rhetorical question)?

Category: Conversation & Language

Saturday Links for the Week: July 12, 2008

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 18:49:28 GMT

A Short History of the End of Civilization: Mike Davis is a brilliant and provocative writer. Just go read his brief and incisive summary of what has led our civilization to the brink of collapse. Mike, you need a blog! Teasers:

The UNDP...warns that it will require "a 50 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 2050 against 1990 levels" to keep humanity outside the red zone of runaway warming... Yet the International Energy Agency predicts that, in all likelihood, such emissions will actually increase in this period by nearly 100 percent -- enough greenhouse gas to propel us past several critical tipping points...

Let's just ask: What if the buying and selling of carbon credits and pollution offsets fails to turn down the thermostat? What exactly will motivate governments and global industries then to join hands in a crusade to reduce emissions through regulation and taxation?...

And what if growing environmental and social turbulence, instead of galvanizing heroic innovation and international cooperation, simply drive elite publics into even more frenzied attempts to wall themselves off from the rest of humanity?... We're talking here of the prospect of creating green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an otherwise stricken planet...

National Academy of Science...found that the richest countries, by their activities, have generated 42 percent of environmental degradation across the world, while shouldering only 3 percent of the resulting costs.

Humans Have 23 Years to Go: IFTF is creating a game set 10 years from now that gives the players 23 'years' to deal with five cascading social, ecological and economic crises that threaten to end civilization. Sounds like fun, if they'll let us play (full access to members only, and the link above was down at time of writing). Problem is, they're calling the game Superstruct (literally: build over top). Seems to me that the only viable solutions to this problem will be bottom-up, not top-down. Shouldn't the game be called Substruct? Thanks to Jerry Michalski for the link.

Discover Undiscovered Musicians: Some great hand-made music from unknown artists you can browse and play to your heart's content -- IACmusic.com. Here's my own 'station' collection of what I've been listening to there.

Pictures Without the Need of Words: My friend Melisa Christensen is the photo director of a sweet little film, lovingly and exquisitely photographed, about human relationships and priorities.

Great Green Events Calendar: Leafing Through tells you where to go, greenly, all over the world.

See What Global Warming Has Wrought So Far: A couple of years ago I pointed out the NOAA viewer that lets you see a movie of glaciation, coastal flooding and vegetation change over the past 21000 years (since the last ice age). If you haven't seen it, take a look. What would be interesting would be to project it forward, assuming a hundred-fold or thousand-fold acceleration of rate of change.

The Only Diet for a Peacemaker Is a Vegetarian Diet: "Conscience dictates that the grain should stay where it is grown, from South America to Africa. And it should be fed to the local malnourished poor, not to the chickens destined for our KFC buckets." Even the orthodox churches are starting to get it.

Who Are You Trying to Impress?: Justin Kownacki analyzes the politics of conversations, and how disruptive they can be to making the conversation meaningful, valuable, and informative.

The Mortgage Lender Implode-o-meter: Keep up to date with the collapse of IndyMac, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and all your favourite wacky trillion-dollar irresponsible lending characters.

Google Offers Animated Avatars for Google Chat: The poor man's Second Life app "Lively", has just been released. Limited avatar options. Agonizingly slow. Much work needed.

Doug Rushkoff on Open Space Democracy: Democracy is a collective choice and emerges through collective action, he says. If we only care about what it means to us individually, and what we do individually, democracy is lost. Branding, advertising, the mainstream media, corpocracy, hierarchy -- these are all directed at us as individuals. We have to get past self-interest, past individuation of everything. Don't ask What can I do?, discuss What can we do? Thanks to William Tozier for the link.

Unintended Consequences: George Monbiot's latest article about the Death of the Oceans raises some more interesting thoughts about unintended consequences in complex systems. Of course high oil prices will reduce (somewhat) demand for gasoline and hence reduce CO2 emissions. But that reduced demand in affluent nations will also allow Asia to continue to pick up whatever oil is not contracted for, pushing emissions right back up again. And while high prices will drive some people to switch to more efficient vehicles, will those more efficient vehicles then be driven further than the gas guzzlers? Monbiot explains that high oil prices are keeping ocean-devastating fishing trawlers in port, but it's also got fishermen striking for subsidies, pushing politicians who want re-election to divert money from worthy causes to subsidizing uneconomic activities. And environmental laws designed to prevent permafrost and glacial melt and ocean disasters are being abandoned in the desperate search for a little more cheap oil, accelerating global warming that will ultimately require huge taxes on oil to curtail. This is precisely why the "market mechanism" that so many conservatives trust to solve global warming and everything else simply does not work. Complex systems are inertial -- they tend to adapt to stay in equilibrium until forced to a new equilibrium by either decisive intervention, or catastrophe.

Canada's Conservatives "The Republican Farm Team": George Bush's (last?) lapdog, arch-conservative Canadian PM Harper, is refusing to allow conscientious objectors to the Bush war to come to Canada, ending a two-century-old tradition of providing sanctuary for Americans of conscience. Bush now beckons Harper obediently to his side by barking "Yo Harper!" Meanwhile, as they shrugged off their responsibility for the global food crisis, Bush and Yo Harper and the rest of the G8 gang of thieves chowed down on an extravagant 18-course meal of high-energy, high-cruelty imported foods.(Thanks to Meg Fowler for the links).

Alberta Hypes Bitumen Sludge Mining to Obama & McCain: Despite growing realization that the Alberta Bitumen Sludge Mining operation (what the industry prefers to call 'oil sands', depicted above) is the most ecologically destructive project on Earth, the government of Alberta, whose economy is utterly dependent on this horror, is busy lobbying both US presidential candidates to endorse buying its dirty oil. They will almost certainly succeed: It's not in their backyard.

Find of the Day, above, found on top of a baby change table in a women's washroom in BC. Thanks to Darren Barefoot for the link.

© 1997-2004 original work by Andrew Campbell & Marysa de Veer

Thought for the Week: Being A Part: I've been chatting recently with Andrew Campbell and Beth Patterson about connection with the land and all-life-on-Earth. Andrew has pointed to the work of Gregory Bateson (whose first wife BTW was Margaret Mead) and his discussion of immanence -- the quality of remaining within as a part (of the environment, Gaia, the complexity of all-life-on-Earth), while our minds furiously attempt to analyze, to dissect, to set ourselves apart. Beth has collected a remarkable set of stories from readers that answer the question "Where is Home?" I replied to Beth that I thought the most evocative writing I had read about this was that of Sam Mills of the now largely-lost blogs feral and thistle & hemlock (she now writes the blog bitterbrush); here's an example of how she tells us what it means to be a part.

Friday Flashback: Beginning Again

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 23:04:42 GMT

In September 2005 I summarized biologist David Ehrenfeld's prescient 1993 book Beginning Again, in which he lovingly tells the story of the giant green turtles of Costa Rica, who have lived there unchanged for 300 million years, skewers bureaucracy and hierarchy as twin evils of the modern era, laments the loss of the critical skills of craftsmanship and maintenance, insists that there is no adapting to catastrophes in complex systems (so we must learn to prevent them), champions generalists over narrow specialists, calls for restrictions on increase of human numbers, urges adoption of sustainable polyculture and permaculture to replace catastrophic agriculture, and warns (in 1993!) of the looming crisis created by the "bottomless pit of debt" in the US.

He likens our modern economy to "a massive flywheel, spinning too fast for its size and construction, coming apart in chunks as it spins". This, he warns, is what happens when you try to replace an effective complex natural system, with great resilience and redundancy evolved over hundreds of millennia, with an efficient complicated, man-made system, fragile, over-extended, unforgiving of any failure in any of its moving parts. The big losers when it comes apart, he warns, will be the poor and the young. The rich and old, who have hoarded what they need to pull them through, will increasingly closet themselves away from the masses as the cascading crises wreak havoc on everyone else.

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