“What is keeping us from thriving?” asks the new movie, Thrive. The answer it gives is “the global elite,” the people who control the financial system that in turn controls everything else. Operating through the power institutions of our society, this elite pursues a conscious agenda of total world dominance, purposely suppressing anything that would disrupt their power: from clean energy to alternative cancer cures.
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If there ever was an Illuminati orchestrating world events, it has lost control. Today, the atmosphere among the financial elite fluctuates between panic and resignation. They cannot be bothered to suppress films like Thrive, like What on Earth, like Moon Rising, magazines like Infinite Energy, and all the information freely available on the Internet that is accelerating the shift of consciousness away from separation and scarcity.
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Despite its flaws, in its invocation of evil and in its appeal to technological salvation, Thrive arouses our conviction that the world isn't supposed to be this way, and that a much better world is closer than we dare think. Even if it wrongly ascribes the source of the problem and misidentifies the essence of the solution, still it will stimulate people to deepen their questioning of the boundaries of consensus reality. This is a good thing. Once the questioning starts, it will not stop until we arrive at a new story aligned with the spirit being born today.
Berlin, 1 December 2011 – Corruption continues to plague too many countries around the world, according to Transparency International’s 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index released today. It shows some governments failing to protect citizens from corruption, be it abuse of public resources, bribery or secretive decision-making.
Transparency International warned that protests around the world, often fuelled by corruption and economic instability, clearly show citizens feel their leaders and public institutions are neither transparent nor accountable enough.
The United States Report summarizes and analyzes 73 bribery demands in the U.S. reported anonymously to TRACE’s online Business Registry for International Bribery and Extortion (BRIBEline) between July 11, 2007 and November 15, 2011.
A key finding from the United States report is the prevalence of bribe solicitations made in exchange for an undue advantage. Over one-third of bribe demands in the United States – the highest rate among countries studied to date by BRIBEline – are premised on an improper quid pro quo, such as winning new business (25% of all reported demands), agreeing to attempt to influence a government official in exchange for a bribe (5%) or receiving inappropriate favorable treatment, such as a favorable court ruling (4%).
Phi Beta Iota: Both recommended for a full reading (neither is very long).
“A new concept is coming out from the fogs of the present situation: a right to insolvency. We’ll not pay the debt.
The European countries have been obliged to accept the blackmail of debt, but people are refusing the concept that we have to pay for a debt that we have not taken. Anthropologist David Graeber, in his book Debt the first 5000 years, (Melville House, 2011), and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato, in La fabrique de l’homme endetté (editions Amsterdam, 2011), have started an interesting reflection on the cultural origin of the notion of debt, and the psychic implications of the sense of guilt that the notion of debt brings in itself. And, in his essay, Recurring Dreams The Red Heart of Fascism, the Anglo-Italian young thinker Federico Campagna locates the analogy between the post Versailles Congress years and the present in the debt-obsession:
Phi Beta Iota: Gripping. Mankind is at a philosophical turning point. Organized people are confronting organized money, and the integrity of humanity is in the balance.
Just the other day, a colleague asked me whether I could suggest some examples of organizations that have been successful with “innovation initiatives” in a commercial setting? He said that he had a CEO who wanted to launch an “innovation initiative” that would provide a laboratory for experiments in-house, so that his firm could become known as an idea factory in their sector.
I replied that I didn’t know of any “innovation initiative” that was ultimately successful on a sustained basis. That’s because if an organization is looking at innovation as “an initiative”, and it introduces that initiative into a culture that doesn’t support innovation, then the culture will sooner or later crush the initiative—usually sooner. So you can have temporary “successes” as “initiatives” with a lot of flag waving and hoopla ceremonies and celebrations of victories, but they don’t last.
If the firm wants innovation, which they should, since innovation is an essential ingredient for survival in today’s marketplace, then they need to ask themselves why are they thinking of an innovation as “initiative”. They need to look more deeply at how the organization is being run and think through what would be needed to make innovation a central part of the organization’s culture.
The three phases of the 20th Century organization
In the 20th Century, organizations tended to go through three phases, as sketched by f Robert X. Cringely’s Accidental Empires, by analogy with a military operation.
In the first phase, you had startups run by commandos. They were unpredictable and uncontrollable yet remarkably productive. They worked hard and fast. They succeeded with surprise and teamwork, establishing a beachhead before the enemy is even aware they exist. They pushed the state of the art, ideally providing creative solutions to customer needs and making existing products irrelevant. However most startups fail because they don’t meet customer needs. Sometimes the product was close to meeting customer needs but it wasn’t ideal and had bugs or even major failings that need more work. However commandos were useless of this type of work: they got bored.
In the second phase, the infantry moved in, i.e. the obedient workers who followed orders and methodically grew a company from its IPO to market dominance. They exploited the opportunity created by the commandos. They took the prototype, tested it, refined it, made it manufacturable, wrote the manuals, marketed it and ideally produced a profit. This work was governed by rules and procedures—all the stuff that commandos hated. While the commandos make success possible, the infantry makes success happen.
In the third phase, the firm was run by police: the bureaucrats and middle managers who defend the entrenched position of an established market leader. The third phase was an occupying force intent on holding territory. A middle manager’s job was to say no to ideas that don’t originate from on high, preferably near the CEO, or which don’t improve the bottom line for the quarter.
In the 20th Century, “management” was seen as the set of bureaucratic practices designed to run the second and third phases. Management comprised hierarchy, command-and-control, tightly planned work, competition through economies of scale and cost reduction, impersonal top-down communications, all focused on making money for the shareholders.
These management practices were seen as timeless truths of the universe, so obvious that there was scarcely any need to articulate them, let alone re-examine them. They are still pervasive in large organizations, business schools and management textbooks. John Sculley tried to run Apple [AAPL] as a third-wave organization. Most big old mastodons today like GE [GE] or Walmart [WMT] are still third-wave organizations.
This way of managing systematically kills innovative activities in organizations. The phenomenon can be observed in:
Forgoing the plan to build independent floating cities away from chafing laws, some libertarians—led by Milton Friedman’s grandson, no less—have found something better: desperate countries willing to allow the founding of autonomous libertarian cities within their borders.
The seasteader-in-chief is headed ashore. Patri Friedman (that’s Milton Friedman‘s grandson to you), who stepped down as the chief executive of the Peter Thiel-backed Seasteading Institute in August, has resurfaced as the CEO of a new for-profit enterprise named Future Cities Development Inc., which aims to create new cities from scratch (on land this time) governed by “cutting-edge legal systems.” The startup may have found its first taker in Honduras, whose government amended its constitution in January to permit the creation of special autonomous zones exempt from local and federal laws. Future Cities has signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to build a city in one such zone starting next year.
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The brainchild of New York University economist Paul Romer (read his thoughts on FCI here), a charter city combines a host nation’s vacant land (in this case, Honduras) with the legal system and institutions of another (e.g. Canada) and residents drawn from anywhere. Romer’s central insight is that good governance is transplantable—rather than wait for a basket case nation to come around begging, a charter city could help show it the way, as Hong Kong did for Deng Xiaoping.
Phi Beta Iota: The focus on eradicating corruption from day one is most interesting. While the group does not appear to have fully thought through their role as a magnet for criminals, there are regions of Africa, Latin America, and even the now warming Arctic North that could permit this kind of innovation to test its premises.
The Internet isn’t really a technology. It’s a belief system, a philosophy about the effectiveness of decentralized, bottom-up innovation. And it’s a philosophy that has begun to change how we think about creativity itself.
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The ethos of the Internet is that everyone should have the freedom to connect, to innovate, to program, without asking permission. No one can know the whole of the network, and by design it cannot be centrally controlled. This network was intended to be decentralized, its assets widely distributed. Today most innovation springs from small groups at its “edges.”
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I don’t think education is about centralized instruction anymore; rather, it is the process establishing oneself as a node in a broad network of distributed creativity.
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