wrythings

I’ve meant to come back to this for some time. Adventitiously, the Upward Spiral has been coming up a lot lately. This piece is a kind of parable on Life and Ecology.

We’re facing big problems, and we are less able to dismiss them from consciousness. We recognize the complexities of governance and so aren’t surprised as issues blend into each other and over national, jurisdictional, institutional and conceptual boundaries… It can be overwhelming.

We need new narratives of governance, cooperation, freedom and accountability in order to meet challenge to the species. The Great Turning offers a narrative that more accurately frames our situation and allows us to collectively align our response grounded in the heritage of human dignity.

David Korten has written extensively on this.   Here’s a related piece by Joanna Macy (pointed out on Weblogsky).

I composed a short list of some essential readings that reflect a world-view appropriate to the Internet Era, I shared it with friends studying Community Informatics and Civic Entrepreurship, two domains seeking a better world. Since I recently catalogued (part of) my personal library using LibraryThing, it makes sense to share these here as well (as they are part of my virtual library).

These writings provide a conceptual matrix for an interesting breed of Civic Entrepreneur- (it’s a partial list) … really a new model of Citizenship and Society/Polity. They aren’t new to a lot of you - and if you have other works that you think really need to be on the list, please let me know.

Movement as Network, by Gideon Rosenblatt, also: The three pillars of social source

David Isenberg’s Rise of the Stupid Network

Pushing Power to the Edges (pdf) by Jillaine Smith, Martin Kearns, Allison Fine

The Cluetrain Manifesto (Doc Searles, et al.)

Cory Doctorow’s Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom

Coase’s Penguin: (by Yochai Benkler … his book The Wealth of Networks is also recommended. There’s a wiki inviting discussion of his ideas.)

The list doesn’t represent any hierarchic ordering.

A cool site/tool I was recently made aware of… LibraryThing.

I like that it uses an open standard for managing my book collection: Z39.50.

I also like that I can export my data.

You can see a more extensive listing of my library here.

Free and Open Source Software Rules, and so do Free and Open Networks.

(Let’s not neglect open-hardware nor open-standards!)

With commodity tech running Free & Open Source Operating Systems and Software, priced at $300 $200, new (do I hear $100 per new system yet?) and with plenty or older hardware available for re-purposing, not to mention a proliferation of new networking and communication devices … we might take a moment to think of the potential ready to be unleashed, and to view how far we have come an achievement worthy of note.

What is next? Take our cheap hardware running software we’re free to modify and improve and interconnect, and let’s start interconnecting on our own terms.

We can and must move civil society communications infrastructure to the next level.

The International Summit for Community Wireless Networks is on the horizon… these are the folks who have been leading the way. We have the power to create the networks we want and need. If you were outraged at efforts to sink Net Neutrality or by the lack of a National Broadband Policy worthy of the name, if you are shocked by aspirations to filter, block and spy on content and services over the ‘Net, now is the time for us to (re)build our own.

A year ago, I had just returned from Memphis where the National Conference for Media Reform had convened. The timing and location of the NCMR gatherings has always been well considered. I rushed back in the wee small hours of the morning to be among friends at the annual i. c. stars gathering, marking the day we honor the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Memphis the location of the “Mountaintop” speech and where assassins bullets made a great man a martyr the following day.)

Dr. King shall always hold a place of honor in the American Pantheon. Democracy Now has done great service today in honoring his memory by playing parts of several speeches.

I was especially struck by the importance of history, and the idea that the thugs that enforce order do not know history and while they might know physics, they do not know trans-physics. Human History is more than an unfolding of physics. Physics (here) is force, and those who govern with only guns, batons, and dogs, and water-cannons and fear and threat and not with understanding of history and appreciation of social progress (and the potential to slip) are but shallow “leaders”.

Dr. King’s lessons are important for us today, not just as record of where the nation has come from, but how far we still have to go.

The “Beyond Vietnam” speech, offered a year to the day before his murder forces a reflection on our nation’s presence on the world stage. Dr. King’s message was evolving. Social and economic justice are deeply entwined.

Having grown up post-Dr. King, after the many victories of the civil rights movement, I often reflected upon the meaning of injustice in the present day. Surely racism and other categories of injustice still exist, and we live with the effects of prior unjust policies, but when injustice no longer has sanction of government the strategy for addressing it must change. The injustice of person over person along categorical lines sanctioned by the state seems fairly distant from our (my) day-to-day life. It doesn’t mean it isn’t occurring. Indeed, on the world stage we are deeply enmeshed in this sort of thing, we’re just fairly insulated from most of it.

Here we are in 2008. What is injustice today?

How we choose to live together, how we conduct ourselves in our homes and neighborhoods, and our nation’s conduct upon the world stage, these demand reflection.

Are we on the right side of history? How can we know unless we know history? Our methods demonstrate we are not on the right side of history. We accept the necessity of force, the exigency of torture; we suspend due process.

If we justify these methods out of fear of failure, we have failed. We as a people will be so much stronger if we stand by our principles.

Dr. King concluded his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” with an indictment of the lovers of order over justice. The stumbling block and frustrating impediment to human social progress is the

moderate, more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is an absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice…

Dr. King’s wisdom is grounded in the ecology of community. There is an ecology to the history of peoples and nations, an ecology of human knowledge and right conduct, and a general ecology of human practices on this Earth. Our economic and social bonds, the practices by which we perpetuate an unsavory and unhealthy order must give way. We can choose health, but it must be an active choice.

Rules always have exceptions…

… except this one?