Wednesday, April 02, 2003

More Karass and Granfalloon I find this syuch a helpful concept - any more thinking like this out there? Conversations with Dina. Great new weblog from India-based qualitative researcher Dina Mehta. It's filled with interesting insights and links to unusual sources for understanding cultural and social patterns. Dina has an ability to bridge cultural gaps and put complex patterns into understandable terms. Good stuff. Go grab her RSS feed. You'll be glad you did. 'Karass' or' Granfalloon' ... you choose. Neat piece by Steven Johnson in the April 2003 issue of Discover.  Talks about two types of networks - the self-organising and social 'karass' and the more bureaucratic 'granfalloons', drawing examples from personal and corporate life. He goes on to describe the role of emerging social mapping software in detecting and mapping social networks - at the workplace in large organisations and in book-buying patterns at Amazon.    Some excerpts : "Karass is that group of friends from college who have helped one another's careers in a hundred subtle ways over the years; the granfalloon is the marketing department at your firm, where everyone has a meticulously defined place on the org chart but nothing ever gets done. When you find yourself in a karass, it's an intuitive, unplanned experience. Getting into a granfalloon, on the other hand, usually involves showing two forms of ID." [...] ["Conversations" with Dina] [b.cognosco] 5:30:44 PM    comment []

The institutions of Journalism are in deep trouble Here are Andrew Sullivan's stats for the war - HOME NEWS: March was another record traffic month: 1.88 million visits to the site from almost half a million separate people. 2.5 million page views. But my favorite piece of data is from Alexa.com. They rank websites, and like most such rankings, they're fallible, so don't put too much weight on this little piece of information. But according to Alexa, this site is now neck and neck, in traffic terms, with the Nation. In fact, the very latest data show this site just ahead of the Nation: we were ranked 6,116 Monday; they were ranked 8,728. No, I'm not putting out a full-fledged magazine, but the more you think about that simple statistic, the more remarkable it is. This site didn't exist three years ago; the Nation has been around for a century. This site, thanks to you, is comfortably in the black with no debt. The Nation has bled money for decades, as most such magazines do. Moreover, compare the stats for last month with the same month a year ago: we had 805,000 visits in March 2002 and 1,880,000 in March 2003. Yes, the war has boosted traffic this month, and that may subside in the future. But the trend is really strong. Thanks so much for your support, your faith and your constant criticism. 2:13:30 PM    comment []

More on a Renaissance for Our Time A friend asked me this morning how I found the ideas that I am attached to. Did I intuit them or do they come directly from my reading and hence have some attributable source? I had never given much conscious thought to how I think and so Jean got me going - here is my reply plus a bit more   What a good question! I start with an intuition but thankfully I am finding more and more science to back me up. I ground all my work in a hypothesis..Which is -   I think that we have been blinded from a proper understanding of nature by our manufactured modern dogma just as the medieval mind was in its own turn blinded by the dogma of its time. I believe that if we could see our nature and nature more clearly that most of our problems could be made better.   Much of what I read is either intuitive - Robert Ardrey speculating on the unit size of a hunting band in 1970 which is then supported later in science by Robin Dunbar who today has found the neocortex formula for human groups and Magic Numbers.    Often I take an idea from over there and apply it over here. I read about chaos theory and apply it to culture shifts. I read about Information Theory developed for rangefinding and telephone networks and apply it to human communication.   I rarely speculate entirely. Most importantly I filter everything I read through a point of view. I read incessantly about physics, nature, evolution and networks. I am an Historian by education and have discovered that the higher, or the longer the time frame,  the more clearly the patterns of history are revealed. So I also look for bifurcation in history. My timetable has extended back to the beginning of the solar system. I look at the evolution of life and of living systems My main interest today is the study of early man and our development as primates and hunter gatherers.   I am hopeful as we stand at the edge of either a catastrophe or a renewal. I think that have the potential to experience a new renaissance and that if we look at the last one, we can see the pattern for this type of event.   The medieval world worked well until the 14th century when the complexity of life overwhelmed its ability as system to solve the problems of the day.The Black Death had killed 30% of the population ending the feudal relationships. There was a mini ice age. Civil War in Europe had become pandemic and Christendom as a group was engaged in a 300 year war with Islam  Navigation had extended the world beyond Ptolemaic math for navigation. Weapons had become democratic - a Welsh Bowman could kill many expensive Knights - and the reality of military power had been upended asymmetrically. The advent of the printing press had revolutionized the cost and reach of communication putting huge stress on the existing power structures such as the Church and the Monarchy.   Many of these conditions are evident again in some form today. The stress of the medieval world ended when a few men "saw" the ancient world with clear eyes and also the natural world with the dogma stripped off. So for a while, the meaning of the ancient texts was revealed to intellectuals like Petrarch and the meaning of the solar system was revealed to men like Galileo.Observation and intuition became important. Power  and relationships shifted and new institutions arose   I feel that we have become blinded by our own set of dogma today as well. Our dogma has shut down as unacceptable our powers of observation and our use of our intuition as to how things are. The good news is that those today who are using their intuition are finding that science is rapidly catching up. As in physics, the breakthrough comes intuitively and then is grounded in observation.   So what is our modern dogma that puts up barriers to intuition and observation? There are four strands that I can see.   The first begins with the Judeo Christian myth than man is put by God in dominion over the world. In other words, that we are not an animal and part of the world but are in fact a unique godlike being who has the right to do anything he wants to the planet and to all others that inhabit it. This idea survived the Renaissance and has become, I think, our biggest block to renewal. It holds in it 3 subset ideas that drive further problems as well. Dualism which prevents us from seeing systems - paradox and complexity. Like the medieval time, our modern world view has worked well but now there is too much complexity for it to cope. Our life has shifted up several gears in complexity and rational thought, the child of dualism, cannot cope with complexity and the unknown. Rational thinking alone is a weak tool as it can only cope with the known. Every breakthrough in science, every great piece of art,  has come from the intuitive yet we shun the intuitive as unscientific and un-business like. Rational thinking alone causes us to develop much of our operational dogma of today. These ideas about who we should be are  "artefact's" of our mind and are disconnected from observed reality. I suspect that these are ideas based in the longing for humans to escape their heritage as primates. They include ideas such as: men and women are the same. All  humans are created equal. We should find strangers appealing. We are really peace loving beings. If only we were only richer we would be happier and so on. You can feel immediately how heretical it would be to challenge these ideas today. Finally this meme also drives the idea of Redemption after life which allows us to avoid seeing how precious life is while we live it. When we believe in redemption, we can live the live of a slave in hope for a better afterlife. We can work as a drone in the hope of a retirement and so on. We lose the joy of the day.   We have become a planetary species but we think that we are still a village species. I think that these ideas allow us to treat the planet with disrespect and all animals as if they were our objects. This is village thinking where there are no consequences outside the visible and the local. Consequently, we destroy the very systems that support us without "seeing" what we do.We set up aspirations about behaviour and our nature as humans that we can never reach so we feel guilty all the time.   The second set of dogma comes from our Judeo Christian background as well. This time from the Reformation. The kingpin idea is the idea of "success = the chosen". In the medieval times the aspiration was grace. Not often achieved but the medieval worldview was not driven by the idea of commercial everything. The reformation brought into play the meme of the "elect on earth" who could be observed by how well they did. As a result, doing, activity and success became the measures by which we were measured. This I think has driven the Secular age that we live in now where nearly every act and thing has a commercial value and our principal aspiration is to have more things. This is the now secular consumer meme that Islam seems to have such a problem with and the meme that is at the heart of our current religion the consumer economy.   As a consequence, we live a life now of frenetic activity with a goal that cannot give us satisfaction.   The 3rd dogma is how we make things. Our basic transformative process for materials has been the use of heat and pressure. I think that this came from our experiments with fire and later pottery. The problem with this meme is that it makes all our processes environmentally destructive. Nature makes much better materials than we do and uses chemistry, proteins, water and room temperature.   The result is that we are doing a good job of reversing a key work of evolution which has been to bury heavy metals deep below the surface so that life could live.   The last dogma that I see is the dogma of our view of organization which is driven by the metaphor of the machine. Tools and hence machinery have taken us from the plains of Africa to the modern world. We are tool makers. I think that we have fallen in love with the machine and we use it as a metaphor for most things. A machine is a dualistic concept. They only connect directly to  inputs and outputs. They have a cause and an effect which is predictable. They have to have parts in them that "fit". They are based on the idea of engineering efficiency. They need an outside force to power them. The machine world is a zero sum game   BUT nature does not organize that way. It organizes in nested networks that all interact. We have in the west nearly institutionalized, or put into a machine context, all social aspects of life. We put our children into daycare and then into a school system that teaches dualism and obedience. We work in institutions and when we can work no more we end up in an old people's home. We have lost adventure, each other and ourselves in the process. Most western families are one parent families now - can't get any smaller. So we have become parts of a machine like in the film the Matrix. The irony, like in the film, is that we don't even know it.   The result is that we are stuck as was the 14th century western world.   So where is the new Renaissance? It is surely to be found by looking back at our lives as Hunter Gatherers and "seeing" the wisdom of our heritage and then applying this to our lives today. I don't mean living in a cave. Petrarch did not try and recreate Athens either. He took the meaning from the ancients and made it real again for his own time. It is is having the humility to observe nature afresh. Just as Galileo looked through his telescope and saw that the Sun and not the earth was the centre of the local system It is to give up intellectual artifact, or the equivalent of religious dogma of the medieval world, wherever possible and to look to nature herself for design for materials and for organization. It is to see that we too are animals and are partners in the biosphere with all other life and so to treat it with the same respect that we want for ourselves.   The huge collective outpouring of ideas around networks, emergent democracy, natural organization etc I find very encouraging. So much is happening in this regard in blogging itself. How do I feel? Frightened. The Renaissance had no guarantees and as two world views clashed at its birth life was especially hard   10:37:06 AM    comment []

The Peace - How you behave will be the Key Two ways of seeing the world. From the Fortress as a Conqueror or from the Community as a Partner  Telegraph Continue reading 'British show the way' The impression the American forces give as they thunder up Route Tampa towards Baghdad is that everyone outside their ranks is a potential enemy: certainly the awe-struck peasants whose nervous waves are met with blank stares; and possibly the "unilateral" independent news teams whose pleas for food, fuel and shelter are brusquely rejected. Indeed anyone who is not in a uniform that they instantly recognise is seen as a threat. The other day, British soldiers who were working on the edge of a camp I was staying in were fired on by a passing American convoy, who thought it was easier to shoot than to ask questions. The British troops, by contrast, seem remarkably well disposed towards the Iraqis, even though among those smiling and cadging cigarettes are men who would be happy to kill them. The confidence-building got off to a slow start. Then, as always, it was the children who came forward first. Now the gates of the bases in Umm Qasr and Zubayr have a permanent throng of the curious, the friendly and the importuning, just as they did in Bosnia and Kosovo. British soldiers seem to have a natural sympathy for the poor foreigners they habitually find themselves having to sort out and a mild interest in the political and cultural forces that created the mess. If they are in a place long enough, they play football with the local men and sleep with and sometimes marry their sisters. The right and wrongs of the situation may be of less concern now that the war has started, than the result of the Ireland-England rugby game. That is not to say that they don't have their own opinions, usually shrewd when they are expressed and laced with a genial cynicism that would probably dismay Tony Blair. The American troops whom I have come across appear uninterested in their immediate surroundings. They do, though, pay attention to their leader and seem to accept the White House version of what this is all about. They talk without embarrassment about honour and duty. The boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne feel these things as profoundly as any American, but they would die of shame before they uttered the words. They look on their allies with a mixture of alarm and condescension. The Septics, as the Cockneys call them, are often the first suspects when there is news of casualties. The Brits distrust their reliance on technology and laugh - though perhaps not without envy - at their superabundance of kit. Many feel disquiet at the massive use of force that seems to accompany the most minor operations. Last week. British troops watched with horrified fascination as an empty building near Umm Qasr, which sketchy reports said may have contained a handful of Saddam's men, was bombed and rocketed continuously for several hours. The British are uncomfortable with displays of military macho. The American military's awkwardness with the people it finds itself among used to be blamed on its lack of experience in messy, complicated places like Northern Ireland. But that has not been the case for some time. American troops went into Bosnia in 1995 as peacekeepers and later to Kosovo. In both deployments there was minimal contact with the locals and off-duty life was lived behind the ramparts of gigantic enclosures. The American soldiers' conduct is the consequence of a doctrine that puts the security of the military - force protection - at the forefront of all thought and action. Even though the prosecution of this war is exposing American forces to far greater risk than any recent such conflict, and even though their rules of engagement are more restrictive than ours, that disengaged, by-the-book form of warfare continues to dominate their style in the field. In practice, this means having as little to do as possible with civilians. On garrison duty in Europe or Asia, this attitude may not matter much, but in Iraq it has the potential to derail the mission. Many, probably most, Iraqis are willing to be persuaded that the Americans are in their country as liberators, not invaders. To do that, American soldiers have to not only curb their trigger-happy ways, but also come out from behind their Ray-Bans. They must start to recognise when it is time to forget the rule book and think of local sensibilities. They should learn to do simple things like waving at the children and saying hello in Arabic to their elders. In short, they must work harder to show that they belong to the human race. They do not have to look far to see how this is done. They are sitting alongside the most professional and humane army on earth. Britain's contribution in men and weapons to the campaign may not be large enough to give us much say in how the fighting is done. But the weight we bring to the parallel allied effort to persuade the Iraqis not to hate us is enormous. Posted By Gabriel Syme (Samizdata) at April 2, 2003 04:52 AM | TrackBack 8:36:30 AM    comment []

This war is probably helping China. James Moore China as the winner of US v. Iraq Joi Ito just wrote from Japan, and I recall that at last summer's Fortune Brainstorm conference Joi was emphasizing the hidden power of the Chinese--and that the Chinese really aspire to superpower status, and a major form of global leadership. I think that the Chinese are the real winners in the war on Iraq. While the United States blows resources on a destructive cause, the Chinese are staying focused on strengthening their core economy. The United States ties itself up in years of economically and morally-draining occupation of Iraq--while the Chinese stay free and focused. I figure that the war on Iraq probably will hasten Chinese leadership over the US I was invited to the Forture conference last year and Japan had become so insignificant that as probably the only participant from Japan, I was stuck on the China Panel. (There was no panel or session on Japan.) ;-) Pretty good indication of what people are interested in these days. I didn't remember this conversation with Jim until he blogged it, but, yes. I think China is obviously shooting to be super-power and in my recent visits to China at least some of the people presented the situation to me as "so you should choose China instead of the US as your primary partner since we're (China) going to beat the US soon." I think that if the US totally botches the Iraq thing and China ends up being the force that neutralizes the North Korea situation, China could potentially be catapulted into quite a strong geopolitical position. It's interesting to watch China's foreign policy right now. [Joi Ito's Web] Good point. Did this not happen to the US as a consequence of the two world wars of the last century? Europe was devastated by the conflicts. America took off as the new power in the vacuum 8:31:05 AM    comment []