non-geeky

Choose this category to filter out all the geek stuff that I write about.

confucianism, standards, and culture

Published on by zippy

In a previous post, I talked about how there are two different kinds of trust, and how important that is to understanding what needs to happen in the currency world. Here is a fantastic essay on confucianism technical standards and culture, which gets to the same essential pattern but in a different arena. The essay includes the following quote from Confucious’ Analects:

Lead the people with administrative injunctions and keep them orderly with penal law, and they will avoid punishments but will be without a sense of shame. Lead them with excellence and keep them orderly through observing [禮] and they will develop a sense of shame, and moreover, will order themselves.

This is exactly related the trust question. Do we organize ourselves through internal or external processes? Shame and punishment are both processes that can lead to social conformance. The first is internal the second external.

proof is in the pudding

Published on by zippy

The power behind the open source/creative commons movement lies in the value of letting go of ownership of your productive work and trusting that the value you could have charged for directly by not doing so, will instead be returned to you indirectly.

So, I did this for my paper on the process revolutuion and I have thereby experience this fact directly. Zack Clarck has “forked” my paper, changing various terms I used to describe concepts, changing the flavor of the paper by making it less neutral and more strongly worded, and adding new ideas as well. The power of this occurrence is tremendous. The old model would have been to find a journal to publish the idea in, and collect money on the sale, and sue for copyright infringement because of lost sales, blah, blah, blah.

It all points to the difference between money and wealth.

community currency and trust

Published on by zippy

When ever I introduce people to the idea of community currencies, I have experienced that the question of trust comes up again and again. This is reasonable, but I’m quite convinced that the breadth and depth of what trust is, is very poorly understood. Trust seems to be a word that, in the case of money, is hiding at least two forms of something that are actually quite disparate. I think this is because experientially, these forms of trust feel the same, but they arise from entirely separate circumstances. Some examples to get at this:

  1. What kind of trust does it take to ride a bicycle? It’s not trust that the bicycle will stay upright. If you are afraid of falling over, and you want to entrust that functionality to the bike itself, that would be misplaced trust. Instead of trusting the bike to not fall over, what we do appropriately trust is that that it won’t fall apart. The former kind of trust you can give to a trike.
  2. What kind of trust is necessary to write a post on the Wikipedia? This might sound like a funny question, but why spend your time writing something that anybody in the world could just erase? Your efforts are certainly not “safe” from being changed, deleted, or even edited beyond recognition perhaps into meanings opposite of the ones your intended. Just like the bike, the Wikipedia is not engineered for certain kinds of stability, in fact, like the bike, its value arises from an intentional decrease in stability, a letting go of a “security,” in this case, that my words won’t be deleted. The value comes from the fact, that by allowing some “insecurity” the whole endeavor will proceed more rapidly and be more adaptable (incidentally that’s exactly the advantage a bike has over a trike).

What I hope that these two examples reveal is that we can gain a sense of safety and security by a stability imposed externally, or by understanding and control achieved internally. The experience of safety and security is identical. The process by which this experience is achieved is radically different, both in terms of external mechanisms or infrastructure and internal education and knowledge.

In the currency world, the same truth is in play. What we want is safety and security. What we need to achieve financial independence is to get off our trikes and learn to use a new machine that is less stable, but infinitely more maneuverable and, fun to ride.

Is the Creative Commons movement reall about the commons?

Published on by zippy

If you’ve been involved in the creative commons, open source, free software, or any of the many strands of thinking that are developing along these lines, then Copyright, Copy-Left, and the Creative Anti-Commons by Anna Nimus is a must read. She provides a very provocative understanding of the fundamental idea of copy-right, from it’s historical genesis, to how it relates to the Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons work. The paper is long, but it’s very well worth the read.

[tags]creative commons,cc,copyright,copyleft,gnu,FLOSS,open source,free software,Lawrence Lessig,commons[/tags]

sousveillance and subvision

Published on by zippy

One of the many very nice concepts that I learned about first in Jean François Noubel’s work on collective intelligence is sousveillance which is the inverse of surveillance. It was first coined by Steve Mann and then later picked up by Howard Rheingold.

Besides the concept itself and it’s obviously deep ramifications on political and social structure, there are two things that keep coming to mind:

  1. “sousveillance” is a sucky English word. It’s a problematic concept vehicle for the concept because aurally (for English speakers) it’s almost indistinguishable from surveillance, and it’s hard to spell :-). So I’d thought of the term: subvision as the inverse of supervision, which then also could have the verb form “to subvise” (instead of “to supervise”).
  2. Sousveillance almost necessarily will have a deeply negative effect on privacy, something that I’ve hold to be very important. But then I found this little parable (also by Steve Mann), which clearly shows how many of the ways we protect privacy is through pseudoprivacy measures that actually decrease the possibility of true privacy in the long run.

[tags]sousveillance, surveillance, language, privacy, pseudoprivacy[/tags]

What is it all coming to?

Published on by zippy

Well, Bruce Sterling, as usual, has an idea. It seems to me that we are walking a knife edge, nay, a ceramic blade edge of incredible sharpness, on one side of which is evolved conciousness, and the other, dismal slavery. That blade hurts my feet.