“American soft power is vanishing”

by jonl on January 6, 2011

Bruce Sterling and I are well into our annual State of the World conversation over on the WELL. Bruce, who’s traveled the world all his life and has been in unique situations (like his travels through Russia and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain), truly thinks globally, whereas I’m virtually global (via the Internet) though not as well-traveled. I tend to write from a U.S. perspective, which means less these days… sez Bruce,

Back in the 90s, when I was travelling in Europe, I used to get a lot of eager queries about the USA. What’s new over there, what are you doing with your lives and your riches and your technology, why is your government like that? This was considered a matter of urgency, and most Europeans I met, who were naturally from techie, artsy and literary circles, held views of America that were surprisingly like contemporary paranoid Tea Party views. They had interestingly wacky private theologies about the Pentagon, the CIA, Wall Street, the malignant military-industrial complex and so forth… Not that they ever bothered to find out much about the factual operation of these bodies. Stilll, they were sure that the USA really mattered.

Nowadays, the Europeans are just not all that concerned about Yankees. They don’t ask; they’re incurious about America, they are blase’. Being an American in Europe now is rather like being a Canadian, and it’s trending toward being a Brazilian.

…

American soft power is vanishing. Foreigners are much less interested in American television, movies, pop music… America once had a tremendous hammerlock on those expensive channels of distribution, but those old analog megaphones don’t matter half as much in today’s network society.

The USA has become a big banana republic; in other words, it’s come to behave like other countries quite normally behave. The upside is that we don’t get blamed for what happens; the downside is, nothing much happens. Decay and denial. Gothic High Tech.

Phi Beta Iota: the below comment in the larger dialog was especially interesting–the world is giving up on governments, the era of global hybrid networks that are evidenc-driven and amass more spending power than governments and corporations is nearing. Religions might–but with grave doubts–be a starting point, but only if they accept evidence-based sense-making in support of faith-based truth and reconciliation.

inkwell.vue.400 : State of the World 2011: Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky
permalink #16 of 73: gmoke (gmokecamb) Mon 3 Jan 11 18:19

One thing I see on the horizon and which I think will be the next step for 350.org is a kind of ongoing global brainstorm on local, practical solutions and adaptations to climate change. Since the international diplomats aren't going to do anything until 2020 and the incoming US Congress refuses to do anything constructive, those who want to address climate change will have to do it themselves. Online repositories of information where people can share what works where and what doesn't will help speed our climbing the collective learning curve and the replication of successful experiments.

There are some groups online which are trying to pull together parts of this puzzle but no central nexus that I know of. Yet.

2011/01/072011/02/21

Reference: The Web as Epoch B Leadership

Advanced Cyber/IO, Autonomous Internet, Blog Wisdom

Epoch B Swarm Leadership Final JPEG — Click on Image to Enlarge

Thursday, January 6, 2011

The Web Is a Customer Service Medium

By Paul Ford

I look forward to your feedback.

The Fundamental Question of the Web

One can spend a lot of time defining a medium in terms of how it looks, what it transmits, wavelengths used, typographic choices made, bandwidth available. I like to think about media in terms of questions answered.

. . . . . . .

But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It's its own thing. And like other media it has a question that it answers better than any other. That question is:

Why wasn't I consulted?

Why Wasn't I Consulted?

“Why wasn't I consulted,” which I abbreviate as WWIC, is the fundamental question of the web. It is the rule from which other rules are derived. Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively.

I first wrote about this in 2007, after 18 months of isolating and frustrating work on a website:

Brace yourself for the initial angry wave of criticism: How dare you, I hate it, it's ugly, you're stupid. The Internet runs on knee-jerk reactions. People will test your work against their pet theories: It is not free, and thus has no value; it lacks community features; I can't believe you don't use dotcaps, lampsheets, or pixel scrims; it is not written in Rusp or Erskell; my cat is displeased. The ultimate question lurks beneath these curses: why wasn't I consulted?

Read this long and very provocative–illuminating–article–relevant to all eight tribes.

Tip of the hat to Peter Morville, brilliant guru for “ambient findability,” at LinkedIn.

Phi Beta Iota: This is Epoch B leadership emergent. Smart phones are stupid–they are walled gardens. The Industrial Era “owners” including Microsoft are having real difficulty understanding that the information commons is now outside the wall, and cannot be owned or controlled, only shared and made sense-of. The cloud is stupid as well–until someone “gets” the concept of call centers empowering the poor free, one cell call at a time, while harvesting the questions–Hackers in Silicon Valley understood this in 1994, but Silicon Valley–notably Oracle and Microsoft–are still focused on walled gardens. 5 billion poor, four times the annual economy of the one billion rich–really does not seem that complikcated, but evidently it is.

Journal: Juggling, Life, & Bureaucracy

Blog Wisdom

Seth Godin Home

Two truths about juggling

1. Throwing is more important than catching. If you're good at throwing, the catching takes care of itself. Emergency response is overrated compared to emergency avoidance.

2. Juggling is about dropping. The entire magic of witnessing a juggler has to do with the risk of something being dropped. If there is no risk of dropping, juggling is actually sort of boring. Perfection is overrated, particularly if it keeps you from trying things that are interesting.

Hence the tricky part–you want to ship in a way that (as much as you can) avoids failure, but when failure comes, moving forward is more effective than panic or blame.

See Also:

Best Practices in Management (128) . . . . . .Change & Innovation (140)

Complexity & Resilience (112) . . . . . .Leadership (57)

2011/01/052011/01/05

Reference: WATER–Soul of the Earth, Mirror of Our Collective Souls

12 Water, Blog Wisdom, Book Lists

Robert David Steele

Comprehensive Architect, Prime Design

Huffington Post, Posted: January 5, 2011 21:08 PM

Last week I examined how we might create Infinite Wealth for All, but left for this week the most vital element of life on earth, Water. It is the soul of the Earth, and it is black with the sins of humanity, on the verge of becoming Lucifer's salve for Hell on Earth.

Water is–in its purified form–Heaven on Earth. The water cycle cannot be owned, but it can be destroyed. It is the ultimate manifestation of why we must, as a human species, achieve conscious evolution, integral consciousness, and an active appreciation for clarity (the truth), diversity (the sources of multiple forms of truth), and integrity (the enabler of inter-faith and multi-cultural wisdom and tolerance).

This review focuses on books about water suitable for drinking–less than 1% of the total water on the planet, most of which is oceans and a great deal of which is polluted.

Continue reading “Reference: WATER–Soul of the Earth, Mirror of Our Collective Souls”

2011/01/052011/01/05

Reference: Cutting the Defense Budget + RECAP

10 Security, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Budgets & Funding, Military, Officers Call, Strategy, Threats, White Papers

Phi Beta Iota: The author, Michael O'Hanlon, remains one of our most respected commentators on defense, and his suggestions within this document are entirely reasonable. However, he does not go far enough. A 10% reduction of a military-industrial complex budget that has nearly tripled in 30 years is not serious, nor is there innovation in this document. The military-industrial complex must be reduced by 40% if not 50%: one third direct cuts; one third reallocation to Program 150 (diplomacy & development); and one third to thinkers and actual shooters–Cyber and Advanced Information Operations, Civil Affairs, Multinational Decision Support Centres, and long over-due investment in tactical intelligence, surveillance, & reconnaissance that is Of, By, and For the Strategic Sergeant, NOT Of, By, and For Lockheed, Harris, or the U.S. Air Force.

2008 U.S. Naval Power in the 21st Century

2009 Perhaps We Should Have Shouted: A Twenty-Year Restrospective

Continue reading “Reference: Cutting the Defense Budget + RECAP”

2011/01/052011/01/05

Reference: Bioterrorism Threat and US Preparedness

07 Health, White Papers

berto small — Berto Jongman Recommends...

Ready or Not? Protecting the Public from Diseases, Disasters, and Bioterrorism

In the eighth annual Ready or Not? Protecting the Public from Diseases, Disasters, and Bioterrorism report, 14 states scored nine or higher on 10 key indicators of public health preparedness. Three states (Arkansas, North Dakota, and Washington State) scored 10 out of 10. Another 25 states and Washington, D.C. scored in the 7 to 8 range. No state scored lower than a five. . . . Thirty-three states and Washington, D.C. cut public health funding from fiscal years (FY) 2008-09 to 2009-10, with 18 of these states cutting funding for the second year in a row.

2011/01/042011/10/22