Weak Signals: Reality Sandwich Business Shamanism

03 Economy, 04 Education, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Corporations, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence

Business Shamanism

Daniel Pinchbeck

Using the tools of corporations to reprogram global society and distribute a new cultural operating system

Image by fdcomite, courtesy of Creative Commons license.

Now that the Evolver network and brand have established themselves to a certain extent, I want to look ahead to developments I hope to see in the near future, with this organization and other initiatives. For the next phase of development, I propose the term “business shamanism.” “Corporate alchemy” would be a viable alternative.

. . . . . . . .

We tend to forget that Roosevelt's New Deal was not a good-hearted gift to the working classes but a compromise to stave off mass uprising. The current oligarchy has determined that it will make no such deal this time around. I suspect they assume that the pulverizing of the populace with mind-numbing media, psychotropic drugs, police state tactics, and poison food had the desired effect. And they may be right.

. . . . . . . .

Phi Beta Iota: Below the line are excerpts.  Click on the title to read the entire rant.  The author is educated and thoughtful, his rant is provoking and worth studying.

Continue reading “Weak Signals: Reality Sandwich Business Shamanism”

Journal: Eradicating Poverty One Micro-Job at a Time

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Augmented Reality, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Geospatial, Historic Contributions, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), International Aid, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Key Players, Maps, Methods & Process, microfinancing, Open Government, Policies, Policy, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Reform, Research resources, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Tools, Videos/Movies/Documentaries

Working for change: Samasource redefines international aid

December 10, 2010

On Need to Know, we do a lot of reporting about the world’s problems. But we’re premiering a new series about people coming up with creative solutions — it’s called “Agents of Change.”

Click on title to read short intro and option to view video….

9 minutes — summary

Social entrepreneur challenging conventional wisdom

Samasource–microwork (small digital tasks that can be done on an inexpensive computers).

Building 21st Century assembly line that can break down massive tasks (e.g. updating addresses for Google maps, or translating emergency messages from Creole to English).  Won contracts with Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft.

15% premium for socially-conscious companies, AND competitive on cost, quality, and turnaround time.

Small scale digital tasks did not exist before.

Transforming lives, especially women, young men, and refugees.  $5 a day is very much better than local norms, and buys an active English-speaking brain with hands able to do quality work.

IMPORTANT:  Developing world is out-pacing USA and West generally in extending Internet infrastructure to the poor–centers created, humans come in, also doing viewing (Gorgon Stare, take note!), creating logs of store videos on shopper buying habits, anything that can be noticed and logged by a human–$5 a day.

Phi Beta Iota: We could not, in a million years, have found a better “off-set” to the USAF Gorgon Stare program.  This micro-tasking, combining human brains and hands with Internet access, is one of  the most profoundly intelligent and socio-economically useful ideas we have seen in our lifetimes (there are 800 of us here).  BRAVO.

Worth a Look: LibraryThing Online Public Library & Social Network

About the Idea, Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Augmented Reality, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Geospatial, History, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Key Players, Methods & Process, Policies, Policy, Strategy, Threats, Tools
Home Page

Check it out

What’s Good?

  • Join the world’s largest book club.
  • Catalog your books from Amazon, the Library of Congress and 690 other world libraries. Import from anywhere.
  • Find people with eerily similar tastes.
  • Find new books to read.
  • Free Early Reviewer books from publishers and authors
  • Enter 200 books for free, as many as you like for $10 (year) or $25 (life).
  • Available in many languages: (others)

Phi Beta Iota: This is fascinating and has enormous potential from local to global.  It is what Amazon SHOULD have been, a means of harnessing the distributed intelligence of authors, reviewers, and readers.  Phi Beta Iota was created to meet this need for one collection, cataloging Robert Steele's reading across 98 categories.  We are contacting this group to suggest they create Global to Local Citizen Intelligence, Policy, and Budget Councils.

Journal: Get America Working–A Conversation

Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Corporations, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), International Aid, IO Sense-Making, Key Players, Methods & Process, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Officers Call, Open Government, Policies, Policy, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Real Time, Strategy, Threats
Open Everything

PART I: The Only Way to Fix the Deficit–Multiply Jobs (William Drayton)

PART II: Nice Ideas But So Is Icing Cover Feces (Robert Steele)

PART III:  Create Jobs?  As an End In Themselves?  To Do What?  Why? (Alexander Carpenter)

PART IV:  Related Recommended Reading (Robert Steele)

The core take-away (from PART III)

Beyond its inherent merit and explicit substance, William Drayton: The Only Way to Fix the Deficit: Multiply Jobs is a great example of unconscious status-seeking righteousness – well-meaning ineptitude and irrelevance, trapped in the old paradigm of debt-money, growth, and social conditioning. This kind of thinking is exemplary of people who are focused on the superficial “economic crisis,” not going deeper to see that we have a political (and even a social) crisis with, of course, an economic manifestation. This represents the success of the pseudo-science of “economics,” originally created with the intention to get most people to believe that objective “natural” forces are running their lives, not other people, classes, and institutions (Thurmond Arnold, 1937). Good problem-solvers always begin with as much accurate information about the overall problem as possible. It's incompetent – or unconscious self-deception – to assume human nature isn't the core and essence of the problem, and Bill Drayton isn't necessarily incompetent…

Perspective (from PART III Reference):

“By providing the funding and the policy framework to many concerned and dedicated people working within the non-profit sector, the ruling class is able to co-opt leadership from grassroots communities, … and is able to make the funding, accounting, and evaluation components of the work so time consuming and onerous that social justice work is virtually impossible under these conditions” (Paul Kivel, You Call this Democracy, Who Benefits, Who Pays and Who Really Decides, 2004, p. 122 )

Phi Beta Iota: In Advanced Information Operations (IO) terms, we cannot fix the military until we fix government, we cannot fix government until we fix Wall Street and Main Street,  we cannot fix the economy until we fix the society, and all of that requires a firm focus on human nature and the relations among humans.  We live is a “whole system” and are mis-managing it by being ignorant and delusional about root causes and actual relationships.  Until we get the truth on the table, we cannot deal with it.  Good news:  all it takes is ONE node able to blend intelligence & integrity, that “spike” will proliferate.  The bottom line is that DEMAND creates jobs, and EDUCATION creates the demand for the RIGHT jobs.  Taking one example, the US Army, it could apply Advanced Information Operations to create a 180 degree maturation of the mind-set of its personnel, and use that to “eat the old” and create the new.  The US Army is going to suffer a nose dive in financial resources (as will the other services); the US Army is the ONLY service that must might be capable of “beating the dive” by re-inventing itself from inside out–starting with Advanced IO being about minds, not technology.  Similarly, a single multinational could “get a grip” and re-invent itself overnight–the example will proliferate.

Continue reading “Journal: Get America Working–A Conversation”

Tom Atlee Proposes distributed-intelligence, crowd-sourcing participatory think tank for popular common-sense policies, unhindered by party affiliations and ideology

Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, IO Sense-Making, Mobile, Policies, Threats
Tom Atlee at Phi Beta Iota

Phi Beta Iota: There is no other person we hold in higher esteem than Tom Atlee.  For America the Beautiful, at least, he is this generation's Wise Man.  Below in his own words.  We urge one and all to contribute to his sustenance.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Dear friends,

I have been talking a lot lately with strategists in the Coffee Party movement (CPM).  If you don't know much about the Coffee Party, I urge you to check out their website and Wikipedia's well-referenced short article on them.

While the Coffee Party has definite progressive roots, it also features bright transpartisan energies.  Most Coffee Party members — and co-founder Annabel Park — promote civil dialogue about public issues.  They also promote democracy-building policies, especially ones to address the democracy-degrading influence of money in politics.

I much prefer the Coffee Party's brand of transpartisanship to the more recent No Labels movement whose goal is “to encourage politicians to come together to develop pragmatic and workable solutions.”  Politicians?  What about We, the People? What about citizen deliberations and stakeholder dialogues?  I can't help but wonder what informed citizen deliberative councils would have to say about the issues the No Labels site addresses…

Although I'm still open to evidence to the contrary, it seems to me that No Labels is trying to co-opt the very real frustration most Americans feel for the political polarization and legislative logjam they see every day.  I fear No Labels is cleverly reframing the meme of transpartisanship to rally growing populist energies around a hidden special interest agenda — perhaps building a movement to support a Bloomberg presidential bid in 2012.

Check out “No Labels: What’s Behind “Forward?” Pro-Corporate Economic Policy.”  While I don't agree with everything Jim Cook writes or implies there, I think it is significant that all three No Labels co-founders are professionally involved in promoting corporate interests, and that they advocate tapping Social Security to reduce the debt — when SS is not actually a part of the federal budget, per se, but is a collective retirement account into which workers have paid for decades which has lately been ripped off for budgetary expenditures.  Their budget concerns do not highlight the gigantic portion of the actual budget that goes to military expenditures — to say nothing of the non-budgeted expenditures for the wars in Iraq and Iran which constitute a gigantic part of the federal debt — military expenditures that are greater than all other military budgets in the world combined.  Nor do they feature the many forms of corporate welfare and the option of raising taxes on the hyper-wealthy to the 1950s levels.  Notably, they depend heavily on the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a very partisan source, as their favorite budgetary reference.

The whole thing doesn't smell right to me. But I do see it as another indicator of how powerful the emerging transpartisan populist trend is, that so much elite attention is being dedicated to co-opting it.

Continue reading “Tom Atlee Proposes distributed-intelligence, crowd-sourcing participatory think tank for popular common-sense policies, unhindered by party affiliations and ideology”

Journal: Wind Power Boondoggle–and the Information Operations (IO) Challenge of Energy and Time in Relation to Policy, Acquisition, and Operations

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, History, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Key Players, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Open Government, Peace Intelligence, Policies, Strategy, Threats
Chuck Spinney Recommends...

My good friend Robert Bryce, author of the must-read Power Hungry: The Myths of ‘Green' Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future just launched this little torpedo.

A Wind Power Boonedoggle

T. Boone Pickens badly misjudged the supply and price of natural gas.

By ROBERT BRYCE, Wall Street Journal, 22 December 2010

After 30 months, countless TV appearances, and $80 million spent on an extravagant PR campaign, T.

Boone Pickens has finally admitted the obvious: The wind energy business isn't a very good one.

Read full article….

Click to Enlarge

Phi Beta Iota: Buckminster Fuller and Russell Ackoff nailed it–everything has to be evaluated in relation to energy source and cost and time cost, and you have to focus on doing the right things, not doing the wrong things righter.  Where Mr. Pickens went wrong was in sticking with the centralized ownership concept.  Wind power and solar power are best for localized applications.  The central grid–the Industrial Era top down control grid, is DEAD.  Similarly, water and sewage should not be centralized grids demanding massive investments in collection and processing.  The graphic to the right shows corruption in the center–when analytics and decision-making lose their holistic integrity, they inevitably fail to achieve the desired outcome while creating cascading costs everywhere else.  Military spending in the USA is at the beginning of a nose dive–our military leaders would be wise to get a grip sooner than later, and “beat the dive” by making evidence-based decisions (Advanced IO) sooner than later.  Now a really advanced thought: 21st Century national security is about eradicating corruption at home and abroad–this makes possible the creation of a prosperous world at peace.  The breadth of that challenge is in the graphic below.  That is an IO challenge, not a kinetic challenge.  IO must be co-equal to kinetics beginning immediately.  In our humble opinion.

Click to Enlarge

See Also:

Journal: ‘Systemic Corruption’–Daunting Challenge in Globalized Era

Reference: Frog 6 Guidance 2010-2020

Reference: Transparency Killer App Plus “Open Everything” RECAP (Back to 01/2007)

Reference: Cultures of Resistance–A Look at Global Militarization

Worth a Look: Steel on Wheels–The Dylan Ratigan Show (MSNBC)

About the Idea, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Methods & Process, Policies
Post Your Solutions--Town Halls Across the Country

For the past few years, in response to the topics I speak about on my television show and write about on The Huffington Post, people have asked me how they could contribute to help fight for what I call “Truth to Power.” Previously there has been no mechanism to allow people to participate in this, but it is clear that we need to form an Alliance – a formation of like-minded individuals fighting for the same ideals.

With that, let me invite you to join The Alliance to help us all fight for the truth. It is clear that our country is divided in two – not left and right, but those who wish to change the status quo for better, and those who wish to keep it to protect their interests.

The problem is that the Democratic and Republican parties have lost their focus. Instead of fighting to empower the people, they are now only fighting to keep their own power. Only through the full engagement of the people can we change this.

Continue reading “Worth a Look: Steel on Wheels–The Dylan Ratigan Show (MSNBC)”