A good rule of thumb for life is that if the Chinese government is against it, you're probably doing something right. The latest evidence to support this axiom is the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has spread from lower Manhattan to cities around the globe, including London, Auckland, Toronto, and Rome, among many others. Terrified by OWS' viral growth, the oppressive regime controlling China is taking measures to ensure the protests don't happen there. And it's starting with the internet.
We’ve been hearing for two decades now about television/computer/Internet convergence. Televisions sets today are advanced digital products, and we connect computers and specialized set-top boxes to ‘em, but they’re still primarily display devices.
In his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson writes that Jobs ““very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant.”
Jobs told Isaacson that “I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud. No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.”
More on the Jobs/Apple vision of convergence here.
I’m imagining a media device that, like the Internet, swallows all other forms: television set, movie theatre, stereo, juke box, etc. But it would also be interactive, a window on the rest of the world. This isn’t exactly cutting edge – those who think about such things expected it before now.
Phi Beta Iota: Our own collective epiphany (translation for Democrats: “aha”) came in connection with the Contact endeavors of Doug Rushkoff, where we realized that connectivity comes first, and that public intelligence will evolve from that, not the other way around. HOWEVER, apart from Range Networks, we see no one seriously pursuing the OpenBTS “dumb” cell phone for free or $2 a month maximum (subsidized in the Third World), nor have we been successful at breaking through to the Vatican (read letter) or Sir Richard Branson (read one-pager), both of whom could have come together in Assisi to converge connectivity with the eradication of secular corruption.
This week, on October 20, a diverse assortment of forward-thinking, Internet-savvy, solutions-oriented people gathered in New York City for Contact Summit, a project-focused event organized by Doug Rushkoff and Venessa Miemis. I was originally planning to attend, and was plugged into the small team of organizers. I couldn’t make the event, but have been available as a resource for organizers of related global Meetups, and will help sustain the converation following the event.
Doug had created a prologue video for the remote Meetups scheduled to occur synchronous with the main event. Here’s a summary of his comments in that video – this gives a good idea what the gathering was about:
Click on Image to Enlarge
It’s time to take back the net. Currently the Internet is much too concerned with marketing, IPOs, and the next killer app, and too little concerned with helping human beings get where we need to go. We want to use the Internet effectively to promote better ways of living, doing commerce, educating, making art, doing spirituality. To collaborate on ideas about how to use the net well. There are a lot of projects that need our assistance. From Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, people are rising up. We need solutions. Contact is about finding the others, and working and playing with them to find solutions to age-old problems.
1. OccupyCafe.org – a linked phone and online forum space for conversations among everyone “who cares about what is happening on Wall Street and around the world.” Its phone mode uses the advanced MaestroConferencing system that enables activities like breakout groups and hand-raising. Topic conversations begun on the phone can be continued in the online forum, and vice versa. The first phone call is Monday morning. See details below.
2. Organizational consultants study grassroots activist communities – This article didn't exist online, so I got a blurry scanned copy from one of the co-authors and typed it up over a couple of days so I could post it and send it to you. The next day the other co-author posted a clear pdf online, so that's what you get below. I think it is applicable and potentially useful to the Occupy movement.
3. Some very clear advice from nonviolent activist Sharif Abdullah of Commonway in Portland Oregon. Sharif's the fellow who spread the phrase “create a world that works for all” into movement circles. Taking lessons from Gandhi, King, Argentinian activists, and his own work in Sri Lanka, he offers guidelines to help the folks in the Occupy Together movement sustain their transformational impact.
Bit by bit, action by action, conversation by conversation, we develop the collective knowledge we need to make a world that works for all…
I'll have more coming out about this in a few days, but there have been two disgusting developments in the realm of plutocratic intervention on behalf of Wall Street that everyone protesting should take note of.
The fact that both of the following things took place in the middle of the full fever of OWS, when everyone is supposedly trying to placate anti-banker sentiment and Obama and the DCCC are supposedly pledging support of the protesters, shows how completely bankrupt this system is and how necessary street-level protests have become. Popular uprising is probably the only move left to stop developments like the following:
Phi Beta Iota: This is why US Day of Rage and Phi Beta Iota both feel so strongly that Electoral Reform is the only immediately reasonable and achievable demand. Congress and the White House are under the delusion that they are going to be in power after 2012, and that #OWS is a light rain that will disappear over the winter. We do not agree. Politics has finally become very personal to the 99%. That is what's new. The lack of intelligence and integrity in the US Government is not new, but God willing, will be old news by 2012.
Managers work to get their employees to do what they did yesterday, but a little faster and a little cheaper.
Leaders, on the other hand, know where they'd like to go, but understand that they can't get there without their tribe, without giving those they lead the tools to make something happen.
Managers want authority. Leaders take responsibility.
We need both. But we have to be careful not to confuse them. And it helps to remember that leaders are scarce and thus more valuable.
Phi Beta Iota: We also exclude from management those who focus on inputs, as with the US agencies and Cabinets generally. They are over-paid clerks (or in Madeline Albright's infamous phrase, “gerbils on a wheel.”) Real managers create value added.
Phi Beta Iota: This is the single best reality rant we have seen, kudos to Brother John for pointing it out. No one is qualified to run for office without reading this first. No on is qualified to vote without reading this first. This is the “reset” button on reality & integrity in the USA and elsewhere.
