5.0 out of 5 starsA unique and timely integrative overview with many original insights, August 22, 2013
I received this book as a gift, and am glad that I did as I normally would not have noticed it, bought it, or reviewed it. I hope my review will inspire others to buy the book, and if not, provide a summary of some of the highlights that I consider quite timely, original, and useful.
This is a manifesto of sorts, on CRITICAL INFORMATION, or stated another way, on public decision-support needs and the urgency of restoring both integrity (tell the truth) and holistic soundness (report on everything, and on the cause and effect cost and consequences of everything in relation to everything). Of course modern media fails this test, and the author should be credited with providing a manifesto and high-level handbook of how we might proceed.
7 Stars Life Transformative Foundation Work for Everything Else
This is a remarkably coherent book about the most important topic for all of us, the matter of complexity and more to the point, thinking about complexity. I certainly recommend it most strongly, along with two other books by the same author that I have reviewed:
The Foreword by Alfonso Montuori is easily the equal of the main body by Edgar Morin, and I am totally awed by the mastery demonstrated in Montuori's synthesis and framing of Morin's work. I venture to say that I would not have gotten as much from the main body without the structure of the Foreword.
Montuori, always drawing on Morin, emphasizes a number of core concepts that I note down:
01 We must abandon the architectural or machine metaphor that assumes a foundation or base for what is actually a complex complete whole that can be viewed from any point.
It is seriously ignorant to complain about their interest in our technology when we are our own worst enemy — corporations keeping technology off the marketplace to milk legacy systems and externalize costs to the public; government ignoring my 1994 letter on the urgency of starting to spend $1 billion a year on cyber-security, cyber-education, and cyber-standards (search for <1994 sounding the alarm source=phibetaiota>), and then of course we have NSA and the Department of Defense being retarded and lazy for the past quarter century, with NSA explicitly refusing to do its assigned duty of protecting US corporate and public communications.
There is not much left to steal in the USA, Goldman Sachs and the rest of the Wall Street financial terrorists have looted us all, and the government not only let them do it, it legalized their crimes and to this day the FBI is a protective service for Wall Street elite. On this point see, for instance:
The book should be read by specialists. The general public will be better off reading across my reviews in 98 categories, most easily accessed at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, with each review leading directly back to its respective Amazon page.
5.0 out of 5 stars6 Star Authentic World-Changing Book , July 20, 2013
EDIT of 19 AUG 2013: Finish book, adding my new remarks at the top, dropping the preliminary review to the end.EDIT OF 13 AUG 2013: I have a 17 hour aviation trip coming up Friday-Saturday, will try to get the detailed review posted sometime in the days after I reach my destination. I regard this book as one of a half dozen essentials for hybrid public governance in the 21st Century — for participatory panarchy in which the public achieves consensus using collective intelligence methods that leverage ethical evidence-based decision-support that is transparent, truthful, and that produces TRUST as the “glue” for holistic ecologically and socially sound decision-making.
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My last comment first: this book ends beautifully, and I am personally deeply inspired. Rickard Falkvinge has been and will continue to be a change agent, and this book is a form of persistent, ubiquitous sharing of insight that could help accelerate and broaden the emergent public bottom up demands for clarity, diversity, integrity, and sustainability.
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.
Amazon Page
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.
4.0 out of 5 starsSickening at Two Levels — Superb Indictment of Periphery, Completely Avoids Two Party Tyranny Issue, July 19, 2013
This book makes me sick at two levels.
Level 1: It is the best treatment available of what I and many others have been saying for years. My own treatment was provided in a Preface, “Paradigms of Failure,” in the book under my signature below, that also had a preface by Thom Hartmann, another by Tom Atlee, and a third, reprinted, from Senator Bernie Sanders. The entire book is free online, so I am not pimping it.
Level 2: The book is at best naive and at worst deliberately misleading in suggesting that Congress somehow needs to be “empowered” to resist. This is absolute and utter bull. I ran for President in 2012, accepted by the Reform Party, listed at Politics1, interviewed for On The Issues, and I ran for two reasons: to get all of the best ideas in one place (We the People Reform Coalition) and to test the boundaries of the two-party tyranny as immortalized in Theresa Amato's outrageously superb Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny. I specifically ran to be able to contact every single other Presidential candidate from the small parties, and to learn — as I did — that not a single one of them could overcome their ego (as Occupy could not overcome its mob) to come together in a demand for Electoral Reform from 2011 in time for 2012. That report to Hackers on Planet Earth and also published in Reality Sandwich is easily found online by searching for “How I Tested the Boundaries of the Two-Party Tyranny.”
Here is what this book does NOT tell you, and the reason it gets only four stars from me (it is superb in what it does tell you, but misses the key point): NINE TIMES the US Congress has been asked to pass legislation that would mandate — for federal elections only — that the six small parties blocked from ballot access (Constitution, Green, Libertarian, Natural Law, Reform, and Socialist) — and Independent candidates — be guaranteed both ballot access and debate access. NINE TIMES, the last four sponsored by Ron Paul, the two-party tyranny has refused. They have a deal: they borrow one trillion a year in our name, one third of a federal budget that is documented to be 50% waste, and in return they share the right to loot the public treasury and pay off their voting blocks — corporate welfare and the banks for the Republicans, individual welfare for the Democrats. Obama is an anomaly — Wall Street bought the white half, the Progressives got the black half, and we all know how this turned out.
Recommended — but also misleading, in that democracy was lost the day JFK died, and no later than 1978 when the economy peaked against the middle class.
Amazon Book Description: Fresh from the first $10 billion election campaign, two award-winning authors show how unbridled campaign spending defines our politics and, failing a dramatic intervention, signals the end of our democracy. Blending vivid reporting from the 2012 campaign trail and deep perspective from decades covering American and international media and politics, political journalist John Nichols and media critic Robert W. McChesney explain how US elections are becoming controlled, predictable enterprises that are managed by a new class of consultants who wield millions of dollars and define our politics as never before.
