Consciousness & Social IQ – Page 13 – Public Intelligence Blog

2013/07/20

Rickard Falkvinge: New Book Swarmwise Now Available

6 Star Top 10%, Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Democracy, Governance, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), P2P / Panarchy, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Politics, Priorities, Public Administration, True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Book Launch: SWARMWISE

Swarm Management: After four years of work, the leadership book Swarmwise is finally published. It is a book filled to the brim with the experience from leading the Swedish Pirate Party from zero into the European Parliament, spreading the movement to 70 countries, and most importantly, beating the competition on less than one percent of their budget – being over two orders of magnitude more cost-efficient. It is available as a paperback and a PDF, with more formats to come.

Yesterday afternoon, I hit the “publish” button, and as of this morning, the book is available on Amazon (US, UK, DE, FR). It is also available as a PDF for free sharing (download and torrent). This is the culmination of four years of work, after I decided to write down and share my experiences with forming, leading, and winning with a swarm-style community.

The book doesn’t go into theoretical detail, psychology, or deep research papers. Rather, it is very hands-on leadership advice from pure experience – it covers everything from how you give instructions to new activists about handing out flyers in the street, up to and including how you communicate with TV stations and organize hundreds of thousands of people in a coherent swarm. Above all, it focuses on the cost-efficiency of the swarm structure, and is a tactical instruction manual for anybody who wants to dropkick their competition completely – no matter whether their game is business, social, or political.

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2013/06/082013/06/08

Worth a Look: The Good Life Lab: Radical Experiments in Hands-On Living

5 Star, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Worth A Look

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,871 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

#2 in Books > Crafts, Hobbies & Home > Home Improvement & Design > How-to & Home Improvements > Do-It-Yourself
#12 in Books > Crafts, Hobbies & Home > Sustainable Living
#34 in Books > History > Americas > United States > State & Local

This is the inspirational story of how one couple ditched their careers and high-pressure life in New York City to move to rural New Mexico, where they made, built, invented, foraged, and grew all they needed to live self-sufficiently, discovering a new sense of value and abundance in the process. Alongside their personal story are tips and tutorials to guide readers in the discovery of a fulfilling new lifestyle that relies less on money. Tremayne wholeheartedly believes that everyone has the skill, imagination and creativity to make it work.

Tremayne not only teaches the art of making biofuel, appliances, structures, gardens, food, and medicine but also presents reasons for makers to share their innovations and ideas through open source and creative commons licenses. She shares the joys of creating out of waste, home manufacture, and reconnecting with nature, and she teaches readers how to live off the grid. Practical, contemplative, and action-oriented, The Good Life Lab is the manual for life in a post-consumer age.

In addition, The Good Life Lab is filled with illustrations contributed by a community of artists — Alethea Morrison, Allegra Lockstadt, Andrew Saeger, Bert van Wijk, Christopher Silas Neal, Gina Triplett, Grady McFerrin, Joel Holland, Josh Cochran, Julia Rothman, Kate Bingaman Burt, Katie Scott, Kristian Olson, Mattias Adolfsson, Meg Hunt, Melinda Beck, Miyuki Sakai, Rachel Salomon, and Sasha Prood — making the book itself a work of art.

2013/05/282013/05/28

Review: Le management de l’intelligence collective – Managing Collective Intelligence – Toward a New Corporate Governance

6 Star Top 10%, Change & Innovation, Communications, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Democracy, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Philosophy, Politics, Public Administration, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Olivier Zara

5.0 out of 5 stars Sensational — Free Online in English Translation — For Sale Online in French, May 28, 2013

I just read this book in the free online English translation and have very high praise for the original content, the translation, and the graphics. It is a short book, 88 pages in English, with a self-testing appendix that will reveal that most organizations are leveraging, at best, 20% of their collective intelligence potential.

As the European Union, NATO, and the USA all re-examine their fundamental premises in the aftermath of failed elective wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and all too many adventures, including a predatory attack on Libya to steal its gold, water, and oil, this book is the single best book I have found that could help the new generation of leaders in the EU, NATO, and the USA. The Cold War generals have failed for 50 years — we are long overdue for a new generation of leaders that understands the true cost of war and the fractional cost of waging peace to create a propserous world at peace.

In my own experience with Cold War flag officers, I find they understand three colors — red, yellow, and green. The new generation seems to be much more nuanced, much better read, and much more open to the reality that in war everyone loses except the bankers, and that Sun Tzu had it right centuries ago — the acme of skill is to defeat the enemy without fighting — better yet, utilize collective intelligence to achieve Non-Zero, a prosperous world at peace, a world that works for everyone.

Buy the book in French at AxioPole.com. Read the book free online in English.

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2013/04/272013/04/27

Review (Guest): Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

5 Star, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Information Society, Information Technology

Shirley Turkle

5.0 out of 5 stars No robot could have written this February 16, 2011

Diana Senechal

That was one of my thoughts as I read Sherry Turkle's Alone Together: no matter what robots learn to do, they will never learn to write a book as thoughtful, informative, and intense as Alone Together. They would not know how to pose the questions, let alone use such discernment in addressing them.

It is interesting that Turkle chose to discuss robots in the first part of the book and the Internet in the second part. By presenting the “strange” part first, she gives us a sense of how strange our everyday lives actually are, how far we have moved away from enjoying each other's presence.

Turkle quotes children and adults who hesitate to use the phone because it seems awkward and intrusive; it is much easier, they say, to dash off a text or email. At the same time, Turkle points out, because of this very convenience, people expect quick responses. She describes the anxiety of teenagers when they do not get an immediate reply to their text messages. One girl talks about needing her cell phone for “emergencies”; it turns out that what she means by “emergency” is having a feeling without being able to share it.

Turkle shows how our Internet communications mix the deliberate with the unconsidered. On the one hand, people put great effort even into short email messages. On the other, they “test” ideas and expressions in formation to see how others react. Some create fake online profiles just to try out different sides of their personality. The problem with such experimentation is that it is conditioned almost entirely by online reactions, often reactions of strangers. There is little room to form thoughts independently.

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2013/04/202013/04/20

Review: Ending the Male Leadership Myth – How Women Can Save Us from Destroying Ourselves

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Intelligence (Public), Leadership, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Fernando Pargas

STUNNINGLY Intelligent, Timely, A Study in Ethics, Business, & Governance, April 20, 2013

I received this book as a gift because I have been telling people for over a decade that the 21st Century is going to be the Century of women, whose compassion, intuition, and smaller egos make them so much superior to men in an age that will be vastly more complex and nuanced than the Industrial Era with its willful ignorance of the true cost of everything including the true cost of colonialism, unilateral militarism, and predatory capitalism.

First, for context, a few of the books that have caused me to appreciate this one and recommend it without reservation, the bottom line being that muscle (and blind heavy metal militaries) are out, brains and heart and “non-zero” are in.

Philosophy and the Social Problem: The Annotated Edition
THE DAWN OF THE AGE OF AQUARIUS
Improper behavior
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future
Mapping the Moral Domain: A Contribution of Women's Thinking to Psychological Theory and Education
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

First off, the author's background is relevant: business professor and corporate time with Time-Warner. This is a serious guy that has done hard time in both the academic and corporate media worlds–he is inteimately familiar with the pretensions and limitations of men, and with the cavalier manner in which we have treated women. I like to point out to people that it used to be legal to abuse women and people of color, and to deprive both groups of voice and vote. This is also an author with a very broad international perspective, who teaches for the United Nations and understands the challenges and the requirements for stabilization & reconstruction.

I am quite taken with the author's discussion of “tribalism” and how modern tribalism combined with media manipulation make us all both stupid and dangerous. As one who has studied the origin of the state (including matriarchs as the first leaders, because lines of inheritance from women were absolutely known) and also the preconditions of revolution (concentration of wealth and huge disparities of income being number one), I see the author's introduction as long overdue common sense. I have been charting what I call “information pathologies,” my reflections on this are easy to find online, they boil down generally to men being able to get away with insanely criminal corruption because of secrecy and the willingness of men to assume that they are entitled to deprive others for their own advantage.

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2013/02/252013/02/25

Review (Guest): The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture (1984)

5 Star, Consciousness & Social IQ, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Spiritual), Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Frank Capra

5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant and important book. July 30, 1999

A Customer

It's all here. Everything we ever needed to know to begin to change our world and ourselves. Totally brilliant. Many years in the making, this book covers a very wide spectrum of knowledge and is fascinating all the way through. Like The Tao of Physics, this book looks toward a world view that encompasses a balance of science and spirit. Capra is also not shy about deconstructing or critisizing popular economic and political mythology, which may disturb some readers, but he has the benefit of input from some of the greatest minds of our time and his analysis is unassailable. Female readers will probably appreciate his sensitivity and balanced approach to feminist perspectives as he discusses what's wrong with our world and what we can do to change things.My experience was that I read his other book “Uncommon Wisdom” first, which was in large part about Capra's experiences leading up to the writing of The Turning Point with the people and minds that inspired and enlightened him. Reading that first made all of The Turning Point flow even smoother. But Uncommon Wisdom is getting hard to find, so don't quibble. Read Turning Point no matter what! It is still 100% relevant to today and comes from a man who has been at the forefront of cutting edge thinking since the 1960s.

This book is filled with Capra's take on insights obtained over the years from people like Werner Heisenberg, E.F. Schumacher, J. Krishnamurti, Hazel Henderson, Gregory Bateson, Pitirim Sorokin, Stanislav Grof, Margaret Locke, R.D. Laing, David Bohm, Adrienne Rich, Lyn Margulis, and many others. With The Turning Point, you're getting into the thoughts of a whole lot of brilliant thinkers, both male and female, that Capra has known personally or studied thoroughly.

All of Capra's books are fascinating. Check out “The Web of Life” which is another 5 star book in my opinion.

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative Status-Quo)

2013/02/112013/02/11

Review (Fiction): Truce – The Day the World Was Perfect

Consciousness & Social IQ, Fiction

5.0 out of 5 stars WOW. An awakening kind of book — a powerful shock to the conscious, February 11, 2013

This book (also in Kindle) was recommended to me by one of the top minds in US cybernetics (complex whole systems, feedback loops, second and third order consequences and inter-relationships) and I put that up front because this is a WOW book.

I am NOT a New Age type of person, far from it, but over the past ten years, under the guidance of people like Harrison Owen, Tom Atlee, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Susan Cannon, and Steve McIntosh, I have come to deeply respect collective intelligence and integrated or integral consciousness, and what this book means to me is that the story can finally be told at the dummy level (me) and therefore this book is priceless to anyone that wants to have an “aha” experience on what it means to NOT be subject to the criminal insanity of corrupt banks, corrupt corporations, corrupt governments, corrupt religions, etcetera etcetera etcetera.

I want to insert here two quotes from my favorite systems pioneer, Dr. Russell Ackoff:

ONE: Reformations and transformations are not the same thing. Reformations are concerned with changing the means systems employ to pursue their objectives. Transformations involve changes in the objectives they pursue.

TWO: The righter we do the wrong thing, the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right. This is very significant because almost every problem confronting our society is a result of the fact that our public policy makers are doing the wrong things and are trying to do them righter.

This book inspires in me — and I hope in all others who venture to buy and read this in either paperback or Kindle — an awe for how EASY it would be for all of us to create a prosperous world at peace, a world that works for all (as Buckminster Fuller suggested we could and should with existing resources and existing technologies).

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