Category: Collaboration Zones

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Journal: Supreme Court Sells America’s Birthright

09 Justice, Cultural Intelligence
Chuck Spinney Recommends

The Cash Cow of Anonymity

Posted on Oct 4, 2010

By Eugene Robinson

The Republican grab for Congress is being funded by a pack of wolves masquerading as a herd of sheep.

How sweet and innocent they seem, these mysterious organizations with names like Americans for Job Security. Who could argue with that? Who wants job insecurity?

It turns out, according to The Washington Post, that an entity called Americans for Job Security has made nearly $7.5 million in “independent” campaign expenditures this year, with 88 percent of that total going to support Republican candidates. Who’s putting up all that money? You’ll never know, because Americans for Job Security—which calls itself a “business association”—doesn’t have to disclose the source of its funding.

Read full article online….

Phi Beta Iota: The Supreme Court is no longer the arbiter of the Constitution or of Justice–the decision to ratify corporate personality, the most anti-democratic concept after slavery–and to allow organizations to spend freely on manipulating elections, is the nail in the coffin of the Republic.  The original Republic is dead–Benjamin Franklin was correct, we could not keep it.  Whether a Second American Republic arises from these ashes remains to be seen.

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Journal: Software Should be Free…

Collective Intelligence

Seth Godin Bio

The business of software

Inspired by a talk I gave yesterday at the BOS conference. This is long, feel free to skip!

My first real job was leading a team that created five massive computer games for the Commodore 64. The games were so big they needed four floppy disks each, and the project was so complex (and the hardware systems so sketchy) that on more than one occasion, smoke started coming out of the drives.

Success was a product that didn't crash, start a fire or lead to a nervous breakdown.

Writing software used to be hard, sort of like erecting a building used to be hundreds of years ago. When you set out to build an audacious building, there were real doubts about whether you might succeed. It was considered a marvel if your building was a little taller and didn't fall down. Now, of course, the hard part of real estate development has nothing to do with whether or not your building is going to collapse.

The same thing is true of software. It’s a given that a professionally run project will create something that runs. Good (not great) software is a matter of will, mostly.

The question used to be: Does it run? That was enough, because software that worked was scarce.

Now, the amount of high utility freeware and useful free websites is soaring. Clearly, just writing a piece of software no longer makes it a business.

So if it’s not about avoiding fatal bugs, what’s the business of software?

Read the rest of Seth Godin's post…

Phi Beta Iota: This is a very important post, read the whole thing.  Earth Intelligence Network has been saying for four years that cell phones should be free to the poor, and so also call centers that educate the poor one cell call at a time.  This post by Seth Goden helps explain the economics of that: the wealth is in the aggregate, in the new wealth creation, and in the outreach from the five billion poor.  Software, like air, should be free–it powers life.

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Journal: Where Ideas Come From–the Hive Mind

Collective Intelligence

Jon Lebkowsky

Where ideas come from

Wired News hosts a conversation between Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson, who’ve written similar books… Steven – Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation; and Kevin – What Technology Wants.

Steven “finds that great creative milieus, whether MIT or Los Alamos, New York City or the World Wide Web, are like coral reefs—teeming, diverse colonies of creators who interact with and influence one another.”

Kevin “believes “technology can be seen as a sort of autonomous life-form, with intrinsic goals toward which it gropes over the course of its long development. Those goals, he says, are much like the tendencies of biological life, which over time diversifies, specializes, and (eventually) becomes more sentient…”

WIRED Story Online

I’m glad Kevin and Steven are making the “hive mind” point, a rationale for softening rigid proprietary systems and encouraging collaboration and interaction… sez Steven: “innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.” Great ideas emerge from scenes, the solitary inventors are just catalysts for the execution (no mean feat, though).

See Also:

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Civilization-Building

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Collective Intelligence

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Common Wealth

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Conscious, Evolutionary, Integral Activism & Goodness

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Journal: Census of Marine Life Astonishes & Enlightens

Academia, Earth Intelligence, Real Time
Full Story Online

Census of marine life shows how various underwater life forms are connected to one another

Census of marine life took place over a ten-year period and cost $650 million. Over 200 thousand life forms were identified in the census of marine life.

. . . . . . .

“We didn't know so much about the deep sea…,” Arbizu said. “We believe now that the deep sea is more connected, also the different oceans, than we previously thought.”

Phi Beta Iota: Science is on the cusp of a major new learning period, finding connectivity and co-evolution in tangible forms that can be documented.  Science is also on the verge of a mental and ethical meltdown, between fragmented sub-specialties and rampant fabrications.  Changes to the Earth that used to take 10,000 years now take three.  It's time we rescued education, intelligence, and research, together.

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Journal: Tea Party Prostitution Exposed…

Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence

Full Story Online

Op-Ed Columnist

The Very Useful Idiocy of Christine O’Donnell

By FRANK RICH

EXTRACT:

Such deep-pocketed mystery benefactors — not O’Donnell, whose reported income for this year and last is $5,800 — are the real indicators of what’s going on under the broad Tea Party rubric. Big money rains down on the “bottom up” Tea Party insurgency through phantom front organizations (Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Job Security) that exploit legal loopholes to keep their sugar daddies’ names secret. Reporters at The Times and The Washington Post, among others, have lately made real strides in explaining how the game works. But we still don’t know the identities of most of those anonymous donors.

From what we do know, it’s clear that some Tea Party groups and candidates like Sharron Angle, Paul and O’Donnell are being financed directly or indirectly not just by the Kochs (who share the No. 5 spot on the new Forbes 400) but by a remarkable coterie of fellow billionaires, led by oil barons like Robert Rowling (Forbes No. 69) and Trevor Rees-Jones (No. 110). Even their largess may be dwarfed by Rupert Murdoch (No. 38) and his News Corporation, whose known cash contributions ($2 million to Republican and Republican-tilting campaign groups) are dwarfed by the avalanche of free promotion they provide Tea Party causes and personalities daily at Fox and The Wall Street Journal.

Phi Beta Iota: The author provides a long and compelling description of how the Tea Party is a front for big money; most Tea Party candidates are not what they claim to be, and the public–the ignorant, angry, naive public–is falling for the shell game.

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Journal: Neither Twitter nor Facebook Lead Revolution

Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence
Chuck Spinney Sounds Off
The attached critique of network centric change has facebook/twitter evangelicals in uproar, but it is very insightful, and, I would add, consistent with every treatise on guerrilla warfare and revolution I have read.
Chuck

ANNALS OF INNOVATION

SMALL CHANGE

Why the revolution will not be tweeted.

by Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker

OCTOBER 4, 2010

Social media can’t provide what social change has always required.

EXTRACT:

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.  . . . . . . . In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.

Full Article Online

Phi Beta Iota: What is revolutionary about Twitter and Facebook is the ability to move information.  Nothing more.  It is the content, the nature, the biting, arousing, energizing nature of the content that moves people to burn tires in the streets or do other non-violent mass demonstrations.  We are not there yet because nobody–not Ralph Nader, not Ron Paul, not Cynthia McKinney, not Jackie Salit, and certainly not Mike Bloomberg, who could be President–is actually trying to create public intelligence in the public interest.  Our Virtual Cabinet series at Huffington Post is a start, but until funding or cognitive surplus can be found for the World Brain and Global Game, Twitter and Facebook will remain in grade school and not graduate to real life.  IOHO.