Category: About the Idea

A tiny handful of stories about what Alvin Toffler called “the rival store”–hence, not something to be embraced by the status quo ante.

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Reference: Emergent Democracy

11 Society, About the Idea, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Methods & Process
Jon Lebkowsky Bio

EXTRACT from Google Group Next Net:

That made me think of the Emergent Democracy paper that Joi Ito authored collaboratively (2001-2003) with several other folks (including Ross Mayfield and I) a few years ago. Digging into my files I found the attached marked up version…  it aligns pretty well with some of the discussions here.

There's been a lot of interesting thought about the Internet and the web as platform for enhanced social activity. That idea of “finding our tribes and ourselves” was a core aspect of FringeWare, the company/community that Paco Nathan and I started in 1991. We realized that like-minded fringe thinkers and doers were scattered everywhere, and the Internet gave us a platform where they could find each other and form community.  All it took was an email list and a compelling concept (“fringeware”) to catalyze that community.

“Declaration of Interdependence” sounded familiar… I did some searching…

https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html – Barlow wrote this, and I think he referred to it (earlier or later, not sure which) as a declaration of interdependence).

http://notanmba.com/blog/2008/03/a-declaration-of-interdependence – This notes that the Whole Foods mission statement is called “declaration of interdependence” – http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/company/declaration.php. This also refers to the Barlow document and our 2008 EFF-Austin party.

Interestingly, Will Durant made a “declaration of interdependence” in 1945. http://www.willdurant.com/interdependence.htm

See Also:

Journal: Politics & Intelligence–Partners Only When Integrity is Central to Both

Review: Evolutionary Activism by Tom Atlee

Review: Philosophy and the Social Problem–The Annotated Edition

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Seth Godin: Wasting the Digital Dividend

About the Idea, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, IO Impotency
Seth Godin Home

Wasting the digital dividend

The internet means that many time-consuming forms of white-collar drudgery have disappeared, or at least been offloaded to cheaper people who aren't you, permitting you to spend more time on things that are actually productive and highly leveraged.

No more standing in line at the copier, trudging to the Fedex box, waiting two weeks for a letter to be returned, leaving voice mails, searching for the right person to contact, waiting months to learn a skill or a fact, discovering that a project is hopelessly broken, and on and on.

It's a little like the bump we got after the Cold War ended. The peace dividend was there, just waiting for us to repurpose our military, our military budget and our military research. We didn't. We squandered the window, wasted the money and didn't rush to fill it with the sort of top-down industrial projects (like high speed rail and efficient new forms of energy) that could have changed everything.

So, what are you going to do with the digital dividend? Cruise Facebook?

Phi Beta Iota: The blatant dishonesty of the US Government is breath-taking in that it fails to inspire a public backlash.  Instead of spending $12 billion a year on Internet freedom, it spends it on corporate vapor-ware ostensibly to achieve cyber-security.  NEWS FLASH:  The current grid is impossible to defend and not worth defending; what we can steal is not worth the cost or time.  For the public to not realize that one third of the federal budget, over one trillion a year is borrowed, and to allow the “debate” to be about less than $100 million, suggests that the US public has the government it deserves: the stupid “led” by the unethical.

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Search: “the truth at any cost reduces all other

About the Idea

This is Robert Steele's core phrase, apart from the two Latin mottos (at end).

“The truth at any cost lowers all other costs.”

Citation (2 options):

Robert Steele, “About” at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, 4 July 2010.

Robert Steele, “Cyber-Command or IO 21,” US Army Information Operations Conference, 6 April 2011.

It was inspired by Herman Daly and other champions of “true cost” and ecological economics.  Also influencial were these two quotes as found on the About page of Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog.

Fedor Dostoevsky: A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else.

Bob Seelert, Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide (New York): When things are not going well, until you get the truth out on the table, no matter how ugly, you are not in a position to deal with it.

Latin mottos

E Veritate Potens.  From Truth We (the People) Are Made Powerful. Created for OSS.Net, Inc.

Connexum Sumus Unum.  Connected, We Are One. Created for Earth Intelligence Network, 501c3.

Still need a Latin scholar to certify the new one (Connexum…)

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Japan Case Study in Nuclear Information Ignorance

08 Proliferation, 08 Wild Cards, About the Idea, Advanced Cyber/IO, Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Policies

Time does not permit the detailed study a topic of this importance merits (it would be an excellent PhD project for a bi-lingual Japanese-English speaking PhD candidate) but here is what we do know:

1.  The risks were known.

2.  A tsunami risk was specificially brought up and dismissed at a critical juncture.

3.  There was no “what if” planning or critical supply chain planning for contaminated water and food.

We speculate that an intense look at the information terrain surrounded Japan's nuclear and global warming and related environmental degradation and energy-commercial competitiveness discussions will yield an almost perfect understanding of where the data asymmetries and information pathologies were that allowed Industrial Era decision systems (inherently secret and corrupt) to ignore open source information on risk.

This is also a good place to study how disasters turn into catastrophes instead of remaining disasters, for lack of the proper political-legal, socio-economic, and ideo-cultural mindsets.

Fifty years from today, the catastrophe in Japan may be regarded as the moment of awakening for the global mind.

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Reflections on Revolution, Information & Civil Affairs

About the Idea, All Reflections & Story Boards, Cultural Intelligence

The globalisation of revolution

Taral Barlaawi

Al Jazeera, 21 March 2011

Revolutions are caused by human agency; not telecommunications technologies, scholar argues.

To listen to the hype about social networking websites and the Egyptian revolution, one would think it was Silicon Valley and not the Egyptian people who overthrew Mubarak.

Via its technologies, the West imagines itself to have been the real agent in the uprising. Since the internet developed out of a US Defense Department research project, it could be said the Pentagon did it, along with Egyptian youth imitating wired hipsters from London and Los Angeles.

Most narratives of globalisation are fantastically Eurocentric, stories of Western white men burdened with responsibility for interconnecting the world, by colonising it, providing it with economic theories and finance, and inventing communications technologies. Of course globalisation is about flows of people as well, about diasporas and cultural fusion.

But neither version is particularly useful for organising resistance to the local dictatorship. In any case, the internet was turned off at decisive moments in the Egyptian uprising, and it was ordinary Egyptians, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, who toppled the regime, not the hybrid youth of the global professional classes.

Nothing new about globalisation

Are there other tales of globalisation, perhaps those told by rebels and guerrillas?

Read full article.

Robert David STEELE Vivas
Click Here to See Personal Page

ROBERT STEELE: Revolution is about the combination of three things:  grotesque imbalance combined with evolutionary psychology of a public to the point that the cognitive dissonance is paradigm shattering; a precipitant or catalyst, and the Davies J-Curve, a “sense” on the part of sufficient numbers that there is light ahead, that they might actually win.

When they come–relatively infrequently–revolutions are best supported with information and civil affairs capabilities.  A massive public intelligence effort to help the people, the true custodians of their own commons, understand where the wealth is, where the opportunities are, whom to hold accountable; combined with a precision civil affairs effort, ideally manned by individuals who are ethnically and spiritually homogeneous with those they are helping, are the two best things well-intentioned external powers can provide.

Along with precision information–which no government is capable of today for failure to invest in the open source tri-fecta–comes precision stabilization & reconstruction assistance, of 21st Century Civil Affairs–a civil affairs cadre for a multiniational endeavor that is C4I heavy, truly multinational, and focused on delivering just enough just in time “peace from above.”  That too is beyond the capability of any government today, not for lack of capacity, but for lack of mind-set.

2012 is a year of Awakening.  The traditional colonial powers can remain comatose as they are now, or they can push the “re-set” button and actually participate in what could be the greatest renaissance of humanity in modern history.

See Also:

Continue reading “Reflections on Revolution, Information & Civil Affairs”

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Kickstart the Freedom Box–Micro-Giving Rocks!

07 Other Atrocities, About the Idea, Augmented Reality, Autonomous Internet, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Key Players, Peace Intelligence
Click Here to See & Be

As of today, 29 February 2011:

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Phi Beta Iota: Along with OpenBTS, SolarOne, VECTOR, and “Buy This Satellite,” Freedom Box joins the vanguard of the global revolution.  “Connected, We Are One.”  [Connexum Sumus Unum–scholarly check welcomed].  Please give as generously as you can, this is the non-violent equivalent of Bunker Hill in the global war against corruption and the many attrocities associated with repression of diversity and dissent.