Death to the Infidels
Who knows where the phrase came from, but it's interesting that we think it's
Islamic; or maybe Christian. Actually, the protocol is built into all species.
If you meet someone who's not of your clan, kill him or run from him seems to
be the rule. Many tribes have a term that translates as "human" and
another word that means the opposite. It turns out the first term refers to
tribe members and the second to non-tribe members.
Howard Bloom, in The Lucifer
Principle, describes how cuddly a nest of rats is. They snuggle and preen
each other like a litter of kittens. But drop a rat from another nest in there,
and they tear the newcomer from limb to limb.
The harsh but interesting experiment is to take one of the nest mates out,
clean off the scent, and roll him around in another nest's materials until he
smells like one of the others. You guessed it: drop him in with his loving kin
and they tear him from limb to limb. Death to the strange-smelling-carrier-of-my-genes.
Bloom uses the story to demonstrate the beginnings of the meme as a support
system for the selfish gene. It's a reasonable enough marker to make the hostilities
manageable, except for the occasional meddling researcher.
The Inclusion Revolution
I've suggested before that we, the inclusionists, are the interlopers here.
We're inclusionists because we're computer/Internet/blogging people with real
problems to solve and we need real help from each other. If you need to get
your server back up, you'll take help from anyone. If you disagree with someone's
sound bite, her blog may let you in on the quality of her thinking, and you'll
begin to see your similarities hidden among your differences.
When you're troubleshooting, the enemy of your problem is your friend.
Troubleshooting doesn't have much of a history. It's not clear that prehistoric
humans even possessed consciousness, if you buy Julian Jayne's point of view.
In The
Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, He
argues convincingly that, until about 22,000 years ago, the halves of the
brain didn't communicate so well, so their world was not causal but inspirational.
When Homer describes the gods speaking to the Greek warriors, Jaynes takes
it literally: the voice came from outside the brain the warriors normally
used. If you've ever tried to manage a rigorous data or IT project through
an organization, you know that most of the forces acting on its design are
about turf, image, wishful thinking and ego as they are about listening to
the technology.
Now that most of us have to deal with computers and complicated systems, we're
developing new skills. The adoption seems glacial, but it's happening.
In his current InfoWorld article, XML
for the rest of us, the ever insightful Jon Udell describes the enabling
technology for developing useful XML schemas to map Office 11 docs to company
needs:
...you can bind one or more XSLT stylesheets to the [Word] document,
each of which can generate WordML styles and formatting.
The XML expertise needed to create schemas and XSLT transformations is
scarce today. Once Office 11 hits the streets, its mainstream applications
could arguably commoditize those XML skills more quickly and broadly than
have Web services technologies.
Naturally, my ears prick up at the mention of carbon-based solutions, since
that's the world Xpertweb wants to support.
Shared Problems, Shared views
The nearly atrophied visionary within me has a sliver of hope. What if a public
utility, Find-The-Expert, were developed, available to all
and decentralized enough to be as scalable as the BIND DNS protocol. What if
the mere availability of the right expert at the right moment unearthed a mountain
of expertise to contain the reservoir of confusion that technology never promised
but delivered anyway?
What if Udell's recruits for building WordML XSLT transformations and WiMedia's
need for circuit designs and HP's need for printer drivers and our useful web
logs could be found and indexed and groomed and rewarded and partnered with
to master these technologies that have made us so efficient we don't have weekends
any more?
If enough of us emigrate to a virtual workspace on the Internet, solving common
problems to realize common dreams, we might learn that people are not believers
or infidels, but rather children who become parents.
4:24:13 PM 
|
