I just got back from a great trip to Burlington, VT, where I touched base with Amy Kirschner of the Vermont Sustainable Exchange. She and cocreator Kyra Pinchiera have been working on creating an inquiry process to assist people in making ideas happen.
Many of us have grand visions of the future, but to be able to tranform those into a “minimum viable product” – something tangible and actionable – can be a bit of an art.
She showed me her sketches for taking idea to action, and i made them into a little graphic. Enjoy!
Phi Beta Iota: Where this disappoints is in turning to art in the early stage when the marketplace does not “get it.” Some kind of mass educational shock appears called for–Shock Education. Revolutions start with violent shocks–no one has achieved a non-violent shock that leads to a non-violent revolution Of, By, and For We the People, that we know of.
At no time has the U.S. based its foreign policies on facts — as opposed to its conceptions reliant on sheer wishes, interests, or pretensions, (its ambitions are often a mixture of all of these). Nor has it had fears that are warranted by reality. It has needs, whether economic or geopolitical. It has, however, often had the correct intelligence and the facts before it to warrant entirely different policies on its part. At the same time as it gets into tenuous military situations, situations it is often destined to lose and pay a great deal for while in the process of doing so, it employs people to produce rational analyses—which it then ignores. Why?
Phi Beta Iota: This is one of the longest, most cogent pieces we have seen on the internal and external contradictions inherent in the CIA archipelago of contrasting functions, values, and marginal outputs. It is totally consistent with the many books reviewed here on intelligence.
Clay Shirky has the best overview I’ve seen/heard/read of PIPA and SOPA and the context from whence they emerged; the bottom line: the legilsation’s about wanting us to be passive consumers, not producing and not sharing.
Phi Beta Iota: To this we would add it is also about a criminally negligent and corrupt Congress exercising its power against the public interest (treason), and a criminally negligent and corrupt combination of Hollywood and Internet Service Providers seeking to legitimize vigilante arbitrary untempered attacks on anyone anywhere without due process.
At “JOHO the Blog,” David Weinberger has a simple and very cool summary of the meaning of yesterday’s SOPA-induced blackout. “This is our Internet. We built it. We built it for us, not for you. We get to turn off the lights, not you.” Yes, indeed. It took a long time for the the Internet to smell like money to those folks who like that smell more than they like the smell of creativity, innovation, fellowship, commons, etc. Now it’s a platform for all media in digital formats that are easily replicated, therefore distribution is hard to control. Much of what flows across the Internet is freely shared by its creators, and there’s also channels for media that people pay for (like Netflix). A system that facilitates all that sharing, along with a high degree of interactivity, also makes it easy to do the natural sort of sharing that peopel will inherently do. Content providers could spend less time figuring out how to stop sharing, and more time figuring out how to build a business model that works in a social/sharing environment. People who invest time and money in media creation and production have a right to charge for it, but we need to rethink how that works in the 21st century networked world.
The black that covered so many sites yesterday spoke well. I think there were four messages.
First, This is our Internet. We built it. We built it for us, not for you. We get to turn off the lights, not you.
Second, we are better custodians of culture than are culture’s merchants because we understand that culture is what we have in common. We feel pain every time something is held back from this Commons.
Third, just as we can make someone famous rather than having to passively accept the celebrities you foist upon us, we can make an idea politically potent. Going dark was the self-assertion with which political engagement begins.
Fourth, there’s a growing “we” on the Internet. It is not as inclusive as we think, it’s far more diverse than we imagine, and it’s far less egalitarian than we should demand. But so was the “we” in “We the People.” The individual acts of darkness are the start of the We we need to nurture.
The only serious opposition to this arrogant Ruling Party is coming not from feckless Republicans but from what might be called the Country Party — and its vision is revolutionary. Our special Summer Issue cover story.
When Codevilla’s article appeared I stated that it was the most important essay I had ever read. I still believe this because it is a superb synthesis of class analysis with keen insights on contemporary power elite relationships regarding today’s rulers and the ruled.
This class division of present-day America into two factions, Court and Country, has absolutely nothing to do with any Marxian view or analysis. It is a reaffirmation of the seminal insights of Bernard Bailyn’s Pulitzer Prize winning volume, The Ideological Origins of the AmericanRevolution, and Murray N. Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty.
These books demonstrate that the Founders’ world-view saw the crucial struggle of the Revolution as a battle of liberty versus power. Codevilla posits today’s battle in the same dramatic terms.
Every political movement needs a manifesto. The Tea Party surely needs one. So do other grassroots political resistance organizations. They don’t have it yet, but they now have its preliminary foundation, Angelo Codevilla’s essay, “America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution.”
. . . . . . .
I regard this essay as the finest statement on the two-fold division in American political life written in my lifetime — more than this, in the last hundred years. He has laid it out clearly, accurately, and eloquently.
. . . . . . .
Codevilla correctly identifies the source of legitimacy for the ruling class: Darwinism. Darwinism removed God from the vocabulary of self-accredited academia. Once liberated from the doctrine of original sin, the Progressives regarded as illegitimate the Constitutional limits placed on the Federal government.
Let's see, 12,000 US troops going into Libya? Undeclared war on Iran? Absolute US guarantee of energy supply for Israel “no matter what?” Whatever could we be borrowing money for?
HOUSE TO VOTE JAN. 18 ON OBAMA'S DEBT-LIMIT INCREASE REQUEST
Two days ago we wondered how long it would take for Obama to restart the debt ceiling theater. Not that long it turns out.
OBAMA SENDS CONGRESS REQUEST TO RAISE DEBT CEILING
OBAMA NOTIFICATION STARTS 15-DAY CLOCK FOR CONGRESS TO VOTE
So with Congress in recess, will Obama succeed in passing another automatic vote using base trickery? The same Obama, who as recently as 3 hours ago warned Congress that any attempts to pass approval on the Keystone Pipeline without his involvement are “counterproductive”… In other news, America' new debt ceiling of $16.3 trillion, or 107% of GDP is now just a formality, about to be interrupted by a little circus clowning.
The classical definition of a darknet is: a private file sharing network. That's a bit outdated (those of you that have been reading Global Guerrillas for a while are already way ahead of the power curve on this). It's time to update/widen the term to accommodate a wider range of modern activity. A darknet:
is a closed, private communications network that isused for purposes not sanctioned by the state (aka illegal).
Darknets can be built in the following ways:
Software. A virtual, encrypted network that runs over public network infrastructure (most of the US government/economy uses this method).
Hardware. A parallel physical infrastructure. This hardware can be fiber optic cables or wireless. Parallel wireless infrastructures (whether for cell phones or Internet access are fairly inexpensive to build and conceal).
IN most cases, we see a mix of the two.
Examples of Darknets:
The Zetas have built a huge wireless darknet (a private, parallel communications network) that connects the majority of Mexico's states. Most of the other cartels also have wireless darknets and there are also lots of local darknets.
