The Bloom on the Peach
Howard Bloom is a disturbing man.
In The Lucifer Principle,
he demonstrated what Richard Dawkins simply stated in The
Selfish Gene. The Lucifer Principle tells us why people can't help doing
stupid, evil things: Our genes invented you and me as mini-experiments in their
drive to take over the known universe. Saddam Hussein is driven by the same
imperative.
He also demonstrates that evil things are not necessarily stupid and stupid
things are not necessarily evil. In fact, the term evil means nothing in a gene-driven
world. His points are interesting at this moment because our republic is about
to realize its imperial destiny by colonizing Iraq for oil and air bases. Most
bloggers think that is a stupid, evil thing. Genetically, it's just business
as usual.
Here's the truth we have to deal with:
- Nations, like companies, are intrinsically ruthless. You might sacrifice
your life to pull your neighbor from a house fire, but nations and companies
never do that for each other. Why expect anything different?
- Nations and cultures are superorganisms, like the collection of bees called
a hive and the collection of surprisingly self-sufficient cells called a human.
- Like organisms, superorganisms always know where they are in the pecking
order (remember grade school recess? That's how life is in every pecking order).
- Individuals in a superorganism (you and I) depend on the superorganism's
status in its superorganistic pecking order. If your family or company or
country or religion is rising in its pecking order, you'll feel energetic
and purposeful. If it's falling, you'll feel listless and confused. That's
the source of the energy fueling Islam and the ennui our culture is experiencing.
I Hate This Shit!
This stuff is contrary to everything I believe about how life should be lived:
that strong people deal gently with each other, their strength affording them
the luxury of equanimity, their reason energizing their actions.
But that kind of reasonableness also demands reason when confronted with the
inquiries of Bloom, Dawkins,
Blackmore
and others. How can reasonable people reconcile the biological and anthropological
record with our urge for a more humane existence? Denying the record would be
like a fundamentalist denying natural selection because it's not mentioned in
the Bible.
Where's MY Superorganism When I Need It?
I want a new superorganism - a culture - that reflects my values and beliefs,
and I want that culture to take over the world as soon as possible. I want freedom
from want through economics based on abundance, not scarcity. I want young people
raised by adults confident enough to be gentle, reasonable and informed enough
to mentor them skillfully. I guess I want to live in Jean-Luc Picard's world.
Above all, I want patriarchy and fundamentalism to be a distant bad dream. Is
that too much to ask?
It certainly is if you're doing well under the current system. Our best and
our brightest are doing very
well under the current system, so they're not likely to be much help in this
renaissance of reasonableness. We who would promote this dream (if there is
a we) are probably not the best and the brightest, or we would have
given up on these Victorian notions long ago. No matter how compelling our logic
and our blogs, we're not going to jawbone our culture into adopting reason and
gentleness as its theme, so e-thepeople,
moveon.org, and EFF
need a different approach - writing our politicians is useless.
The Internet Really DOES Change Everything
But we the true belivers are not acting like we're believers. Where are the
web applications to achieve the things we say we'd like to change? How are we
going to leverage the power of open source into a disciplined mechanism for
attracting people who hunger for reasonableness and
a virulent new Pax Internetae that sweeps undesired protocols before
it and unreasonably imposes its intractable standards of reasonableness? Are
we prepared to wage peace aggressively?
Doing What We Do Best - Develop a Language, Hack some Code
Who gave us bloggers and bloggees the right to be passive, scared and directionless
in the face of cultures clashing over ageless hate and the illusion of scarce
resources? Let's get off our collective ass and try to do something,
even if it doesn't prove out. Why do we need permission and capital to do this
stuff? Here are some design studies I'd like to see taken up:
P2P E-Commerce
That would be this Xpertweb Design Study.
It's based on a new Open Resource economic model, connecting peers
around the globe. From the Xpertweb perspective, the greatest threat to world
peace is the lack of a P2P linkage between faceless Islamic women who know
how to make their own Burkas and prosperous western women who buy their Burkas
for outrageous sums to demonstrate their solidarity with their Islamic sisters.
And, of course, introduce a subversive new source of woman-controlled capital
into the Arab World.
Anonymous, Reliable Internet Banking
We need a P2P system for people to store and control whatever bit of capital
they can raise over the web, perhaps through Xpertweb. PayPal's doing great
but its FDIC banking partner didn't pan out. But there must be an open source
way to concentrate spendable cash in cyberspace for those Islamic women and
others so their masters can't extract it and buy guns or whiskey with it.
This feels like a feminist project. Any takers?
An Electoral Collage
In the western world, politicians who need our votes are acting like they
don't. They're behaving like the RIAA, pretending they can treat their customers
like thieves. Why do we spend so much time worrying about the RIAA and so
little time managing our elected toadies?
An online Electoral Collage would be based, of course, on our right to actually
vote and to enforce full, fair and equal representation, but the Electoral
Collage would see suffrage as a wireline protocol, with other, behavior-based
protocols lying on top of voting, like the HTTP overlay on the IP open standard.
The Electoral Collage would be a massive distributed database of real people
who have abdicated their secret ballot to advertise their real-time responses
to current issues and current outrages. The database would use a kind of namespace
to match issues and outrage with politicians and their current actions. Voters
would link their next vote with their current values and beliefs so that a
politician's cynical work against choice would publicly guarantee my wife's
vote against him. Combined with other uppity women, some politicians would
see that this particular form of cynicism is foolish, at least in his district.
(Cynical because most politicians don't give a rat's ass about abortion.
They do care about voters who care about choice).
Sample Electoral Collage Report:
"The Fleemer amendment to HR 419 has caused a plurality of Mr. Fleemer's
voting constituents to commit to vote him out of office in November. Based
on commitment data from 73% of registered voters, It appears that Rep. Fleemer
will lose his seat by a 9% margin unless the amendment is withdrawn.
This data has been communicated to Mr. Fleemer's staff and is summarized
at http://www.electoralcollege.com/fleemer.";
C'mon, e-thepeople, moveon,
etc. How about helping us help ourselves?
Culture-wide Blog-based Knowledge-Logs
Let's take all blogs' RSS feeds and slice and dice them to aggregate our combined
sensibilities.
1) Create a mechanism for people to identify and define the
issues they care about, and the major positions that surround each issue.
2) Inspire and help bloggers to structure their RSS feeds
to expose which issues they're discussing and where they stand on each issue.
3) Let bloggees indicate where they stand on each issue as
they view it. Compile all these data points and let a million flowers bloom.
Alan Kay famously said that "it's easier to invent the future than to
predict it." And, one assumes, than fighting it. Every invention starts
with a design. Why not design the web applications that might take us in the
right direction?
7:07:04 PM 
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