References – Page 123 – Public Intelligence Blog

The Tree of Life may be the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (or not); in his film called “The Tree of Life,” Terence Malick plays with the universals – grace and nature parallel good and evil. Nature is will, ego; grace is nurturing. The film’s narrative plays out in Waco, Texas and in the vast cosmos, infinite space and time, surrounding it; it places one very human story in a vast transhuman context. In one primeval scene, one dinosaur, a predator, chooses not to kill and consume another… this establishes grace as something that precedes the human; I think the point is that nature and grace always coexisted, and always will, and grace seeps into nature. “Good” and “evil” are complex and intertwingled.

I thought the film was magnificent; in it I saw scenes familiar from my own life growing up in a Texas town in the 50s and 60s, though I wasn’t in that family, and I was far more innocent. And Malick’s family has no television set in the living room… imagine what a difference that would make.

The vision of the “tree of life” represents a sense that all life on earth is related… and there’s a tree of life web project that shows that connectedness. The planet is teeming with life, but all species are endangered by the actions and operations of one – is this nature acting without grace? Last night Oliver Markley spoke to the Central Texas World Future Society on the subject of risk and resilience – is civilization at a tipping point toward collapse?

Continue reading “Jon Lebkowsky: The Tree of Life”

2011/06/22

Tom Atlee: Seeking Leverage for Deep Transformation

Blog Wisdom, Cultural Intelligence

June 21, 2011

Seeking leverage for deep transformation

I have long been fascinated by efforts to clarify which approaches to change work are most needed and effective. Among my favorite models are:

* Donella Meadows' Twelve Leverage Points to Intervene in a System

* Joanna Macy's Three Dimensions of the Great Turning

* Sherry Arnstein's Ladder of Citizen Participation

Each of these has informed and shaped my thinking. I'm looking for guidance for activists, philanthropists, and others who wish to make a positive difference. I seek not only to identify what actions offer the highest leverage — the “more bang for the buck” factor which is so important right now. I seek also to understand the value each different approach offers and how all the approaches might usefully fit together. Finally, I tend to think of all this in evolutionary terms: What will help us make the collective evolutionary leap we need within the next few decades?

In recent years a new approach to this has been slowly coming together for me. I offer here an outline of its current form, in which I appreciate each approach for its real value while listing them in order of what I consider their increasing transformational leverage, where #7 offers the highest leverage.

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2011/06/192011/06/19

Seth Godin: Paradigm Shift toward Cooperation

Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics

Coordination

Our economy is almost entirely based on a Darwinian competition–many products and services fighting for shelf space and market share and profits. It's a wasteful process, because success is unpredictable and unevenly distributed.

The internet has largely mirrored (and amplified) this competition. eBay, for example, not only pits sellers against one another, it also pits buyers. Craigslist makes it easy for buyers to see the range of products and services on offer, making the marketplace more competitive. Google, most of all, encourages an ecosystem where producers can evolve, improve and compete.

I think the next frontier of the net is going to use the datastream to do precisely the opposite–to create value by making coordination easier.

Continue reading “Seth Godin: Paradigm Shift toward Cooperation”

2011/06/182011/06/18

Campaign for Liberty: Steele on IC and DoD

Advanced Cyber/IO, Articles & Chapters, Autonomous Internet, Blog Wisdom

Home Page

National Intelligence and National Defense

By Robert David Steele Vivas

Published 06/17/11

Right up front, here is the value proposition: a revolution in national security affairs can immediately deliver three things:

1. Permit the rapid (four years) reduction of the secret intelligence community budget from $80 billion to under $20 billion and permit the rapid (four years) reduction of the active and reserve military budget from over $1 trillion a year (which is how much the US Government borrows every year “in our name”) to under $250 billion a year, with a strict focus on defense against real modern threats instead of fabricated or exaggerated threats;

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2011/06/18

Jon Lebkowsky: Collaboration, Cooperation, Democracy

11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence

Everybody’s head is a strange universe filled with echos of voices they’ve heard over and over again. Against this, we try to manifest our intentions, to persuade with more voice, more conversation. Sometimes we get through, but even when we get through, we’re often filtered, just as we’re filtering. Is it any wonder that it’s so difficult to build and sustain an effective collaboration?

I’m looking at the ways that we strive to aggregate our attentions, find common ground, and work together. Over the years I’ve approached this through the lens of democracy, or what I’ve referred to as the “democratic intention” to create a participatory process that works. The older I get and the more I think about it, the more I realize that this intention, though we so often profess it, is actually rare. Most of us would really like to assert our self interest, our own preferences, but society is a collision of interests and preferences, we have to give in order to take. In a recent discussion of the book The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod, I was struck by the hardwired assumption that self-interest inherently rules, and cooperation is reached most effectively with an understanding of that point, thus the prisoner’s dilemma. In fact, I find that real people are fuzzy on that point, they’re not necessarily or inherently all about self-interest. We’re far more complex than that.

Continue reading “Jon Lebkowsky: Collaboration, Cooperation, Democracy”

2011/06/17

Seth Godin: How We Pay for Crap from Media

11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Media

Who pays for the news media?

It's easy to act as though the news media is something that is done to us. Some alien force, projected onto all of us, pushed out by them.

Of course, that's not true. It's something we buy, something we pay for.

We're paying for superficial analyses, talking points, shouting heads, *****gate of the moment, herd journalism and silly local urgencies instead of important international trends. We're paying for fast instead of good. We believe we're paying for hard questions being asked, but we're not getting what we're paying for.

We might pay with a dollar at the newsstand, but we're probably paying with our attention, with attention that is turned into ad sales.

Too often, we fail to stop and say, “Wait, I paid for that?”

Almost everything else we buy is of far higher quality than it was twenty years ago. The worst car you could buy then was a Yugo… clearly we've raised the bar at the bottom. Is the same thing true of your news?

As the number of outlets and channels has exploded, media companies have faced a choice. Some have chosen to race to the bottom, to pander to the largest available common denominator and turn a trust into a profit center. A few have chosen to race to the top and to create a product actually worth paying for.

I fear that the race to the bottom will continue, but it's hard to see how anyone could be happy winning it.

Their civic obligations aside, it's up to us to decide what to buy.

2011/06/13

Seth Godin: Organization, Movement, or Philosophy?

Blog Wisdom, Cultural Intelligence

Organization vs. movement vs. philosophy

An organization uses structure and resources and power to make things happen. Organizations hire people, issue policies, buy things, erect buildings, earn market share and get things done. Your company is probably an organization.

A movement has an emotional heart. A movement might use an organization, but it can replace systems and people if they disappear. Movements are more likely to cause widespread change, and they require leaders, not managers. The internet, it turns out, is a movement, and every time someone tries to own it, they fail.

A philosophy can survive things that might wipe out a movement and that would decimate an organization. A philosophy can skip a generation or two. It is often interpreted, and is more likely to break into autonomous groups, to morph and split and then reunite. Industrialism was a philosophy.

The trouble kicks in when you think you have one and you actually have the other.

Continue reading “Seth Godin: Organization, Movement, or Philosophy?”