Marketing involves spending money and it's fraught with the fear of failure (because it often doesn't work).
This mix creates the perfect opportunity to play it safe and to follow the leader.
Jumping on the brandwagon, if you must coin a phrase.
Here's the thing: while the second imitator might make it pay, the third, the fourth, the tenth–not so much. The more you try to fit in, the worse you do. The more you rush to follow the leader, the less likely you will be to catch up.
Phi Beta Iota: A major negative feature of bureaucracy, apart from its inherent propensity to magnify fraud, waste, and abuse, lies in its eradication of diversity and innovation. It is a bureaucracy precisely because the past demanded control and repetition and reliability from small cogs in big machines. That is NOT what we need now, in fact it is counter-productive. Live free or die….
The Citizen Initiative Review is a major development on the road to sustainability. It should be supported and promoted by everyone involved with environmental, ecological, and sustainability issues. Let me explain.
1. INTELLIGENCE
Think about what intelligence actually is and why it evolved in the first place. Intelligence evolved because it helps us make better decisions about how to engage with the world around us. It enhances our ability to be “right”, to see what's really going on and act accordingly. Organisms and societies that make stupid decisions get weeded out by natural selection — sooner or later.
Thus there is a tight relationship between intelligence — the ability to learn our way into congruence/fit with our environment, adjusting to changes and challenges as we go — and sustainability — the ability to maintain our society over time in the face of changes and challenges. Collective intelligence at the societal level — the ability of a society as a whole to perceive, reflect on, understand, and act on the real conditions it faces — is an obvious and absolutely fundamental necessity for developing sustainability. To the extent we can't collectively perceive, reflect on, understand and act on the real conditions we as a civilization face, we will collapse, taking down much of nature with us (because we are so big and powerful and have our fingers in virtually every natural pie). On the other hand, to the extent we can engage intelligently with the world around us, we will survive — or, to speak ecospeak, we will “be sustainable”. This follows the pretty standard Evolution 101 survival-if-you-fit logic.
The only reason I can see why all this is not totally obvious to everyone is that the societal capacity — and the field of inquiry and practice — that I and thousands of other theorists and practitioners call “collective intelligence” is simply not widely known or understood by society at large and by activists in particular. While this is understandable — because the field is so new — it is a potentially fatal area of ignorance.
The naming of this phenomenon — “collective intelligence” — has been a vital a step in its development — as vital as Newton naming “gravity”. Before Newton, apples just “fell”. We had apples and we had “falling”. We didn't have “gravity”. Once Newton framed this phenomenon of “falling” as a force acting on the apple and gave that force a name — “gravity” — he instantly made modern astrophysics and space travel possible. Before that, those things were simply beyond our reach.
Similarly, to the extent we understand (a) that collective intelligence — especially societal intelligence — is a vital whole-system capacity without which we WILL NOT achieve sustainability and (b) that there is a rapidly growing body of wisdom and know-how about how to enhance that capacity, then and only then will mass movements for a sustainable society include the development of that capacity as a priority in their work — right up there with spreading the word on climate change, stopping the destruction of rain forests, and developing sustainable agriculture, transportation, buildings and energy.
2. CITIZEN DELIBERATION AND SOCIETAL INTELLIGENCE
One of the most powerful innovations to further collective intelligence at the whole-society level is the citizen deliberative council. It is important because citizens individually lack what they need to practice high quality citizenship. They lack sufficient time, sufficient quality information, sufficient freedom from distraction, and sufficient opportunity to talk with each other productively. So they fall back on partisan opinion leaders to tell them what to do — or else they simply slide along the well-greased track of entertaining or bread-winning distractions-from-citizenship. This leaves the field open to massive manipulation — a process in which environmentalists only occasionally get the upper hand, only to be defeated repeatedly by the self-interested agents of collective stupidity.
SEATTLE — Microsoft is starting to incorporate what your friends do on Facebook right into its Bing search engine.
A new feature rolling out Wednesday will start showing what Facebook friends “like” on the search results page.
On Facebook and sites around the Web, people can click a “like” button to show support or share information with friends. On Bing, if you search for a topic in the news, articles friends have shared on Facebook might appear. Restaurants and movies that friends have “liked” could help you decide what to do on your next date.
Microsoft has been working with Facebook since 2006.
The feature could help distinguish Bing from Google, which only has access to information users make public.
Phi Beta Iota: The various Microsoft initiatives are both inspiring and troubling–inspiring because Microsoft is clearly struggling with its inner demons and reaching out to “not invented here” options; and troubling because there does not appear to be any over-arching strategy. Amazon is the mother lode for intelligent content–when will Microsoft bite the bullet and make Jeff Bezos an offer he cannot refuse? THAT will be a game changer.
This one book will explain more history than any other I have ever read. South Pole Sends.
Phi Beta Iota: The public is starting to do to the Rothschilds, Central Banks, and the Federal Reserve what plane spotters did to CIA rendition flights. We support truth & reconciliation; we do NOT support revenge or expropriation of illicit assets. The ill-gotten gains of the Rothschilds and the banks that front for them, notably the Federal Reserve, are a drop in the bucket compared to the infinite wealth that the five billion poor can create if these parasitic “elites” will just get out of the way. So that is the deal: stay out of the way and keep what you have. Interfere with the emergence of the global community of informed participatory democracy, and the deal is off.
This time the big banks and mortgage servicing companies, with their long, one-sided fine print contracts, may have outsmarted themselves. The newspaper headlines and the network television news are blazing news of the erupting fraudulent foreclosure process. This long-overdue coverage is generating public visibility and suddenly hundreds of thousands of foreclosures may be questioned due to what one commentator delicately called “flawed paperwork.”
Ralph Nader
That is a euphemism for fraudulently executed contracts violative of state laws regarding home title changes. Read full article online….
There are some problems that neither pure capitalism nor charity can solve. Social capital is a new way of looking at solving those problems. This month, people from all over the world came to SOCAP10 in San Francisco to talk about social capital, and put their money where their mouths are.
Over the next several days we’ll be posting stories about companies that have what is called a “triple bottom line” — where they measure results not just in profit, but also in the business impact on people and the planet.
Our first video focuses on just what the social capital movement is about. We talk with people who run social capital companies such as Firefox maker Mozilla, people who are seeking funding for their businesses, and journalists who are covering the social capital movement.
In his book, “NATO's Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe,” Daniele Ganser described their clandestine Cold War operations, run by European secret services, collaborating with NATO, the CIA and Britain's MI6 and Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) against a possible Soviet invasion, internal communist takeovers, or others on the political left gaining power.
EXTRACT:
In Italy, against both communist and socialist parties, it was claimed they wanted to weaken NATO “from within,” Italian judge, Felice Casson, learning that right-wing terrorists carried out bombings against civilians, blamed them on the left, neo-fascist Vincenzo Vinciguerra explaining the scheme as follows:
“The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished, because the state cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened.”
In 2000, the Italian Senate was more explicit, saying:
“Those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as had been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence,” meaning CIA mainly.
Former director William Colby admitted in his memoirs that covert western armies were a major CIA initiative, begun post-WW II, and restricted “to the smallest possible coterie of the most reliable people, in Washington (and) NATO” to keep the initiative secret.
Phi Beta Iota: CIA's importation of 100 Nazis a year after WWII (and probably many more, it has always considered itself above the law, both domestic and foreign) fueled a truly psychopathic perception of communism that led to policies and programs that today are clearly seen to be crimes against humanity, but back in the day were seen as “collateral damage” essential to contain communism while maintaining “control” over key governments.
