stimulant

As people have pointed out, I’ve been derelict in living up to the “weekly” name in addressing a question. And I’ve found that I’ve made the silly mistake of delaying writing about other things because I want to get out “this week’s weekly” first. So, I’m suspending them. Which doesn’t mean I’m actually suspending them, just the named practice. I’ll continue to ask and answer questions, but I think getting off a schedule is a good thing, particularly because I’m not going to be thinking wholly about that question each week. In fact, my activities are pretty far removed from the questions I’ve asked so far.

Several weeks ago, Charlie DeTar at the MIT Media Lab emailed out some notes (see the end of this post for a transcript) from a casual gathering of affiliates of the Center for Future Civic Media. There are lots of ideas in the email; however, I’m curious about where one in particular leads:

Manuel Castellas — place of space, place of flows. Balkanization - information silos. Is hyper-localization just going to encourage balkanization? We focus politics in this country specifically on the level of 300,000,000. What about the level of 6,000,000,000? How do we strengthen local politics, while at the same time working at the world level? At the mass level of media, people commonly play lowest common denominator, and people usually watch what they already agree with. People seek validation, and seek out what they like. There’s too much media - it would take 10 times real speed to watch everything that is being produced. _Something_ is filtering what you see. How to build a better filter?

So, the question for this week:¹ to what extent is affecting the flow of information relevant to changing people’s minds? What about changing their information diet: what type and quality of information people expect to consume? When it comes to the filters that govern people’s information access, where do they come from? How many are implicit?

My interest in these questions comes down to the following: in the context of education, where should I push to make information available? What media are most useful for changing the right people’s minds?

Original email

Hi all, I took some sketchy notes during the Civic Media Bull Session last night. It would be overly charitable to describe them as “minutes”, but perhaps they can help trigger further discussion of some of the issues we raised. Here goes: —  — Civic media bull 2008-06-27 Youtube: what’s it for? Is it for diversion, or subtle discussion? “I’m Voting Republican”, “It’s Raining McCain”, “McCunt” vs. rational discussion of issues straw man, comedy, maybe not real (but maybe?) youtube [sic] is for publishing. People don’t go to the front page to find videos, they get links from friends/family. But is this good for engaging real discussion? Hubert Chang: “I helped invent google [sic]”. True, interesting, but not viral. Video production not so good. Should there be instructions, tutorials for making a good YouTube video? Templates for proper video format to get big and viral? Is it a good goal to have radical decentralization? No band should sell more than 10,000 records; no band should sell just 1. Decentralized communities forming around local interests. Lots of porn stars are very local. “Cam girl” phenomenon. Each has a few hundred to a few thousand subscribers, working in dorm rooms, etc. The big budget porn movie is basically gone. The same thing is happening with bands on MySpace, where the relationship is personal. People talk directly to the bands. On the other hand, there are news and images that are so important that as many people as possible should see them. Expert systems, reflexive democracy — Jurgen Habermas, U. Beck. Consider the different types of risks, and experts, who do you listen to? Do you listen to the people warning about global warming, or the people talking about economic danger? U. Beck talks about going for hyper-local, reflexive democracy which allows a local community to create power structures locally. You have to at the same time pay attention to the global voices and the local voices, pay attention to the majority and the minority. Manuel Castellas — place of space, place of flows. Balkanization - information silos. Is hyper-localization just going to encourage balkanization? We focus politics in this country specifically on the level of 300,000,000. What about the level of 6,000,000,000? How do we strengthen local politics, while at the same time working at the world level? At the mass level of media, people commonly play lowest common denominator, and people usually watch what they already agree with. People seek validation, and seek out what they like. There’s too much media - it would take 10 times real speed to watch everything that is being produced. _Something_ is filtering what you see. How to build a better filter? How do you create discourse, dialog, critical thought? The mississippi [sic] right now, some communities build large levees which flood other communities, and there is no communication. Lots of quiltwork. Would like to generate dialog that engenders understanding rather than derision. Is “I’m Voting Republican” the wrong way? A balance between talking to your communities, and not watering down the upset, emotion, reactionary things. You need to be able to express that stuff. Are republicans/democrats a community? Is voting for a president enough for a community? A shared space, What defines community? A set of people affected by a common thing? Communities seem to cut at many levels, on macro and micro scales. The Boston Public Transportation system is a community; you should talk to it on that level. An email from a women’s technology group in Sweden, “she-geeks”, which has an awful connotation among CS students in Switzerland. Since “geek” has a positive connotation everywhere else, should they change their name? Noone has a problem with the name except for a small community of local, backwards CS students. Should they cater to those interests by changing their name? The OLPC has an app called “hippy” which can be offensive in some spanish dialects, and they had to change the Application name. There are times to stand up for a particular word, and other times when the word isn’t that important. A catalyst in engaging a dialog may be humor. Sarcasm (such as “I’m a Republican”), presenting the facts (such as the Daily Show)… Paul Otlet — the web, 1934. Tried to catalog all the books in the world, but “invented the internet”, but conceiving of a network of telephones/monitors that allow you to call up any book. “The Treatise on Documentation”. Emmanual Goldberg, an engineer/scientist, worked for Zeiss Icon in Dresden, Germany, and invented the first system to use electronics to access documentation. Used microfilm, with a pattern of opaque dots and lights, like punch cards, to access microfilm. Vannebar [sic] Bush — 1945, “memex”. What matters about this? Why have we never heard about this guy? What’s important? Is it that this guy was the “first”, or far before the others? But why is it that Wikipedia one [sic], and not the others — or Edison, instead of the others? There are certain social moments… American journalism is very different from journalism elsewhere in the world. America seems to make news items out of what is really advertising or marketing. Conspiracy: Bohemian Grove. Onion News Network: Deibold releases presidential election results early. Enka: a Japanese middle-aged musical style, done by a guy from Pittsburgh (Jero). Lame for young people, but done by a stereotypically urban young guy. Two very local communities communicating. How do you navigate popularity to create community dialog? PORN!!! If you want to engender discussions that bridge conservative/local dialogs, you have to use humor, or other apolitical ways to generate interest.

1. As some people have pointed out, I flaked on keeping my thinking about last week’s question open. But, I think I’ve arrived at answer, nonetheless (about which I will write, shortly) [↩]

Progress is the problem

Illich was the first to point out to me the potentially toxic nature of the idea[l] of “progress.” And I have yet to come up with a satisfactory outlook on how to couch progress in a consistent, empowering, and safe way. I don’t want an asymptotic vision of progress that requires relinquishing our desire for scientific, technological, and artistic¹ development: while it’s clear that people should have the option of refusing the material trappings of progress to live alongside Walden Pond, it is also clear that I do not want to approach social engineering with that as a unifying vision.

I want a vision of progress that provides for its material trappings while stripping away its psychological baggage. This will be the topic I’ll explore this week,², but a provisional explanation follows.

What’s wrong with the world?

As I’ve tried to understand the overarching structure of those factors which make the world shittier, the need for a good definition of progress has appeared increasingly frequently.

If you consider the world’s problems, you can start backing out causes. Our judicial system is partly responsible for exacerbating many of society’s problems, ranging from drug crimes to corporate corruption. While fighting each problem is worthwhile, you are treating symptoms, not curing a disease.

As I trace the causes of the problems I see back further and further, I reach a relatively independent set of broken systems. “Independent” does not mean that they do not affect one another; it simply means they do not require one another. The judicial system is one example: even if the law affects our education system through its support for a litigious society, the law does not require schools to exist and botch other issues. Our approach to health care is another independent system. You could imagine compiling a list of these root problems, and then begin thinking about how to address them.

I’ve found that the several of the first-order solutions I dream up to these problems share a possible design defect: it is not clear to me why the current problems would not simply reappear, mediated by market pressures.

An example

To make this problem concrete, let’s consider consumerism and materialism. These words’ definitions are diluted; so, I want to begin our discussion with a constrained definition of consumerism: the placement of enough spiritual and emotional weight on the consumption of goods and services that the act of consumption and the products consumed become the primary modes to achieve “happiness.”

Now, even that definition suffers for a lack of precision — “happiness” is a slippery word — but it should be sufficient for our purposes. What if we break down consumerism into its constituents: what do people spend their money on? Food, housing, consumer electronics, entertainment media, appearance accouterments (clothing, makeup), etc. Each one of these pillars, holding up consumerism, seems like the right scale for a DIY revolution: it is on this scale that the technical concerns of making a set of activities and goods DIY-approachable converge. Furthermore — and perhaps, more importantly — it is on a scale at which social concerns also converge. If you wanted to popularize a set of tools and ideas in the DIY food and DIY science domains, you would suffer from a muddled message. The technical concerns involved in knocking down these pillars are straightforward. The social concerns are far more daunting. It seems that there is a proper scale: where you can both “stay on message” in hawking your solution and confront technical concerns cohesively. Independent of how convincing these broad strokes of a taxonomy are, if you are convinced that such a taxonomy exists, my uncertainty will be understandable.

Why is this a problem?

Division of labor evolved because of the productivity and quality gains it offered. This balkanization continues, with efficiency gains being eked out from further separation of concerns. Unfortunately, we passed long ago the scale of production at which individuals can derive personal satisfaction (a la “Shop Class as Soulcraft”): people often talk about how satisfying and empowering it is to cook one’s own food (much less farm it or make it from scratch). But at this point, we can have microwave dinners delivered to us. At some point along this spectrum of dependence, there is an efficiency sweet spot.

While there are plenty of savings to be made making and fixing things on your own, those savings come from trimming the fat that Main St. has slathered onto our existences by manufacturing demand. Here’s the real question: does DIY philosophy³ have as much of a place in an efficient, sustainable society as I hope?

Returning to the example of food: it is clear that making your own food is less sustainable than agribusiness could be (which is to say nothing of the industry’s current sins). What does this mean for where someone interested in revolutionizing how we approach food production and consumption should aim?

Assume DIY farming becomes mainstream. Even if DIY farming is empowering, market pressure will want to divide labor. And I don’t see⁴ how we can then avoid climbing back up the balkanization ladder — or even if there’s a reason to resist that ascent (other than avoiding our current situation).

No answers, yet

This specific example contains the seed of my problem: I don’t know how to reconcile my proclivity for DIY, decentralized solutions with market pressures. And this is why defining progress becomes important, and tricky. If we accept inefficiency, then this question is moot. Personally, as I said at the beginning of this post, I’m ambivalent. How do you reconcile a powerful desire for technological, scientific, and artistic development and exploration with an acceptable inefficiency?

I’ve painted an incomplete picture of these concerns, and as it stands, this concern doesn’t have any legs. Unfortunately, it will sprout some as the week goes on. But, please don’t let that prevent you from offering feedback of any sort!

1. And whatever modes you can fathom [↩]
2. See this post for more information on my writing schedule. [↩]
3. And yes, this is a poor phrase for a broad idea. I consistently have trouble characterizing this community — suggestions welcome! [↩]
4. Note that by “see” I really mean “imagine how you could guarantee:” I’m not suggesting that these enormously complicated systems will play out as I guess they will, but I think I can make statements about what seems like a bad possibility [↩]