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If, in your deepest hopes and ambitions for a better self and a better world, you’ve sensed that something more is possible–yet has so far eluded us–you’re right.
A devastating earthquake struck Port-au-Prince on January 12, 2010. Two weeks later, on January 27th, a CrowdFlower was used to translate text messages from Haitian Creole to English. Tens of thousands of messages were sent by affected Haitians over the course of several months. All of these were heroically translated by hundreds of dedicated Creole-speaking volunteers based in dozens of countries across the globe. While Ushahidi took the lead by developing the initial translation platform used just days after the earthquake, the translation efforts were eventually rerouted to CrowdFlower. Why? Three simple reasons:
CrowdFlower is one of the leading and most highly robust micro-tasking platforms there is;
CrowdFlower’s leadership is highly committed to supporting digital humanitarian response efforts;
Haitians in Haiti could now be paid for their translation work.
Imagine that the year is 1543 and you have just completed reading Copernicus’ newly published book, On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, that has attempted to convince you that your daily experience of the sun moving around a stationary earth is an illusion. What do you think the chances are that you would have accepted the Copernican argument that violates your direct perceptions?
Thomas Gentry, Nonlinear Dynamicist, 1995
Is Integral Science related to Paul Ray’s work on Cultural Creatives?
Yes, ISI is working toward the same Integral Society identified by Paul Ray (see Cultural Creatives, 2003). We believe Integral Science provides a clearer understanding of why Integral Society is emerging and a more solid foundation for understanding what the Cultural Creatives must do to make it sustainable.
Is Integral Science related to Ken Wilber’s vision of Integralis?
Though there are some overlaps, Integral Science’s empirical foundation leads to some different conclusions from Wilber’s Integral Psychology and Integralis. Both views, for example, integrate spirituality and the evolution of consciousness, Integral Science integrates them into a seamless view of physical reality, using serious work from across disciplines, and taking great care to logically connect the dots from different fields.
Why is Integral Society emerging?
What does Integral Science say about what it will be like? Great changes are driven into being by the failure of the previous system, a breakdown whose root cause is cultural decay and whose main marker is a web of crises popping up in every sphere. Vowing to find a better way, a new cultural thrust then builds itself up around a new noble vision and defining metaphor that it believes will avoid the fiascoes of the old.
Hence, today’s great change, like those of the past, is being propelled by crises felt in every field. Think of education, health care, politics, energy, the economy, community, justice, and the environment. Yet, while these individual calamities grab attention, it is slowly becoming clear that the root problem is cultural decay. Late Modern culture has become a malady and late Modern America epitomizes the result.
Lying becomes essential to protect privacy. The speaker was a co-founder of WorldChanging.org.
Jamais Cascio discusses the Participatory Panopticon, Privacy & Secrecy, the ramifications of Disconnecting from the Chorus, what it means to be a Futurist, the Arc of Human Evolution, Artificial Intelligence, the Need for Meaning, Building Agents to Listen to Us, WorldChanging.com / OpenTheFuture.com, Geoengineering and the Viridian Green movement.
As long as the strategy of “war on terrorism” remains the same, it's against the interests of the Pentagon to admit their strategy isn't working. In theory that could embolden the enemy. But let's look at two sides of that. The enemy seems to know better than we do how futile our strategy is in the long run. What they don't know is how long we'll be committed to it. So if the Pentagon were to publicly admit their strategy isn't working, that would be a sign that they may be on the verge of abandoning it, which could be useful information for the enemy. It could lead them to change their strategy.
Unfortunately this dynamic leaves Bush and Cheney with the perfect excuse for not admitting that their war policies were perhaps the most disastrous decisions made in American history. So it's very convenient for them. To publicly admit their enormous errors could have a negative effect on the war effort. That lets them off the hook.
But it also prevents America and Americans from learning from our mistakes. And this has been the dynamic since the end of World War II. Our policies in the Middle East have caused blowback on a scale that's unmeasurable. The war between Islamists and the West may not exist otherwise. And this war is shaping up to be far more complex than a war against communism, because the front lines aren't as clearly marked and terrorist can be anywhere.
After Eisenhower resolved the Suez Crisis, Arabs in the Middle East were cheering and holding up signs that said We Love America. How times have changed.
President Obama's declared goal of making his “the most transparent Administration in history” generated successive waves of enthusiasm, perplexity, frustration, and mockery as public expectations of increased openness and accountability were lifted sky high and then — often, not always — thwarted.
Every Administration including this one presides over the release of more government information than did its predecessors, if only because more information is created with the passage of time and there is more that can be released. But President Obama seemed to promise more than this. What was it?
Part of the problem is definitional.
“Although there are laws that affect access to government information, there is no single definition for what constitutes transparency– nor is there an agreed upon way to measure it,” observes a new report from the Congressional Research Service.
