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"We don't want the future we're getting — but most of us shrug our shoulders at the end of the day; only to wake up panicked, the next — and begin the cycle all over again.
Welcome to the Great Collision. In the aggregate, our preferences are savagely at odds with our expectations; the future we want is at odds with the present we choose."
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We want work that fulfills — but we're not often willing to spend an extra penny, let alone a dollar, euro, or yen, to ensure others can take on fulfilling work. In the sagging, tube-lit aisles, it's the everyday low price that we chase with a vengeance.
We cry out for better leaders — but it's rare that we take the dangerous, decisive step to lead ourselves, choosing instead to remain obedient, pliable followers.
We want education, healthcare, and transportation that works — but we're reluctant to pay the costs of these public goods. When it comes to the bare-minimum building blocks of a functioning society, they're someone else's responsibility.
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What I'd say "we" want is to escape the toxic tradeoffs of the industrial age — now savage dilemmas, choices between bad alternatives, that drive more and more of us into a sense of crisis, leave us feeling lost and unmoored in the human world. But what we choose, over and over again, is the vicious cycles that make up the grinding gears of the blind machine that's remorselessly devouring not just a prosperous future, but maybe even, bit by bit, our better, higher, truer, worthier selves. Local, personal choices are colliding with their global, social consequences — and the result is futility, frustration, and fury.
If Hipstamatic hangs in and establishes itself as the go-to digital snapshot brand, it could double as a parable of commerce for the flat-world age: an industrial-era end-user experience without benefit of a workforce, a community or a pension plan.
"And on and on. If futurists have become almost too good at technological foresight, we remain woefully primitive in our abilities to examine and forecast changes to cultural, political, and social dynamics.
Why is this? There isn't a single cause. "
"In the United States, I think the specific move that needs to be made is the recognition that the rank-and-file hostility of Tea Party adherents and sympathizers towards “big government” has an intimate, potentially generative connection to the possibility of a wider mobilization against the powers-that-be, that this is the cognate American form of the energy that’s flowing into protests in India, in Egypt, in the European Union. Which in turn requires a less knee-jerk response by progressives about the wonderful things that government can do or already does. It’s true that government action at all levels of American life could do a great deal of good, that it already secures many fundamental rights and protections, that we are dependent upon that power in so many ways. But when our first response to a fierce, wild and often reactionary anger at “government” is to recite a litany of its benefits, I think we disclose too much our own desire to retain an intimate access to acting within as well as against a deeply entrenched political class. "
"There's a glum desperation in the air that's hard to escape: volatility, futility, and a McFuture ghoulishly wagging its skeletal finger at a lost generation."
"As developed in techniques like the door to door canvass, direct mail and, recently, Internet mobilization efforts, mobilizing politics divides the world into good versus evil, whips up emotion, and shuts down critical thought. A final element is the implication that those doing the mobilizing will rescue people. Senator Clinton voiced this perspective in the Democratic debate in Philadelphia last night, when she said she had devoted her entire life to “empowering people.�? Mobilizing politics is technocratic politics: control by well-intentioned but elitist experts who see themselves as separate from the people they are attempting to rescue.
A great challenge of our time is to develop an alternative to technocratic politics. We need a politics in which people are not empowered by leaders but rather empower themselves. "
"I would also add --- and this is something Henry and I have ben thinking about a lot --- that it is often not at all trivial to figure out what your interests are, or how to achieve them, and that (small-d) democrats should try to find ways to help people work that out. Actually having political clout is often going to depend on collective action, but this needs to be complemented by collective cognition, which is how people figure out what to want and how to achieve it. That, however, is part of a much larger and rather different story, for another time. "
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All of this can be boiled down to something much shorter (and perhaps should have been at the start): "When you tell us that (1) the important thing is to maximize economic growth, and never mind the distributional consequences because (2) we can always redistribute through progressive taxation and welfare payments, you are assuming a miracle in step 2." For where is the political power to enact that taxation and redistribution, and keep it going, going to come from? A sense of noblesse oblige is too much to hope for (especially given how many of our rich people have taken lots of economics courses), and, for better or worse, voluntary concessions will no longer come from fear of revolution
"In the 1930′s psychoanalyst Charlotte Beradt recorded and collected people’s dreams during Hitler’s rise to power: The Third Reich of Dreams. The material had to be smuggled out of Germany in code. In his essay at the conclusion of the volume, published in 1966, Bruno Bettelheim remarked that it was a shocking experience reading this book of dreams and seeing how effectively the Nazis murdered sleep, forcing its enemies to dream dreams that showed that resistance was impossible and that safety lay only in compliance."
"What do I learn from this life lesson, buttressed as it is by a quotation from my favorite philosopher? Very simply, I learn that although as a blogger and an author of political writings I can with no effort at all proclaim on the largest of questions -- the future of capitalism, the possibility of socialism, the imperial thrust of American foreign policy -- when it comes to actually trying to change the world, the most I can hope to do is to make a tiny impact, utterly unnoticed by any regional, national, or transnational measures. Because the gap between what I earnestly want and what I can realistically accomplish is so vast, I must find quotidien satisfactions sufficient to sustain me, so that I will, day after day, year after year, continue to make the effort. Not to do so would be shameful, an abdication of my humanity. But to expect triumphs, or even measurable results, would be foolish indeed."
Differentiates some of the categories that connect social media and political change.
"This time when we go down it will be global. There are no new lands to pillage, no new peoples to exploit. Technology, which has obliterated the constraints of time and space, has turned our global village into a global death trap. The fate of Easter Island will be writ large across the broad expanse of planet Earth."
"The number and density of feelings of this kind in my life lately has a lot to do with why I found President Obama’s “Win the Future” slogan to be one of the more repellant political visions of the past three decades.....
Behind the slogan was the 21st Century version of dark satanic mills: we must be ever more dire and invasive in the way we ratchet competitive pressures into education and work, ever more aggressive in how we extract productivity at every stage of social and economic life. The speed setting on the treadmill must go up each week without fail. The usual range of boogeymen was trotted out: in China they are prepared to eat their own young, so we must as well! In India they chain their elementary-school students to a slave barge fueled by the study of calculus and SQL, and so must we! "
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Paul Krugman’s March 6th column on education underlined a similarly disorienting moment. Krugman’s argument is that most college education is rapidly losing value because most of those educations trained a white-collar middle-class to do modestly skilled but repetitive forms of clerical work that can now be done much more cheaply either directly by computers or by using information technology to subcontract such work to similarly trained workers outside the United States. Whatever you think of Krugman’s argument that the decline of the union movement is the key explanation for this transformation, I think the basic observation is fairly accurate. Maybe one thing this shift tells us is that those jobs were always a profound misuse of human capital. On the other hand, I’m as optimistic as anyone that there are new professional niches and functions waiting for the properly educated college graduates of the future but even I don’t really have an idea of how those niches could possibly support a white-collar middle-class the size of what we had thirty years ago. Without some kind of far broader commitment to restock the economic and social middle of the income distribution and to pinch back the tails, there’s nothing that even the best-designed system of higher learning can do to make headway. Again, it just feels like life is worse and it’s not clear why it must be so.
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Where’s the vision of an easier, better, more satisfying life? A richer life in both material comfort and leisure time? A more satisfying spiritual life, or a life more fulfilled by intimacy in family, community or love? A life which progresses us towards freedom or discovery or truth? Towards new technologies whose deliverables are something other than, “Work hard to make more technologies after this technology!” A future based on reflection or wisdom or understanding? Anything besides, “Those guys over there are coming to eat your lunch, better get your nose to the grindstone!”
"At its best, revolution is an urban phenomenon. Suburbia is counterrevolutionary by design. For revolution, you need to converge, to live in public, to become the public, and that’s a geographical as well as a political phenomenon. The history of revolution is the history of great public spaces: the Place de la Concorde during the French Revolution; the Ramblas in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War; Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 (a splendid rebellion that was crushed); the great surge that turned the divide of the Berlin Wall into a gathering place in that same year; the insurrectionary occupation of the Zocalo of Mexico City after corrupt presidential elections and of the space in Buenos Aires that gave the Dirty War’s most open opposition its name: Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the Mothers of the Plaza of May."
"Nomic is a game I invented in 1982. It's a game in which changing the rules is a move. The Initial Set of rules does little more than regulate the rule-changing process. While most of its initial rules are procedural in this sense, it does have one substantive rule (on how to earn points toward winning); but this rule is deliberately boring so that players will quickly amend it to please themselves. The Initial Set of rules, some commentary by me, and some reflections by Douglas Hofstadter, were published in Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas" column in Scientific American in June of 1982. It was quickly translated into many European and Asian languages. Games were regularly played, and kicked off, the ARPANET, the Defense Department network which sired the Internet. Nomic has been used to stimulate artistic creativity, simulate the circulation of money, structure group therapy sessions, train managers, and to teach public speaking, legal reasoning, and legislative drafting. Nomic games have sent ambassadors to other Nomic games, formed federations, and played Meta-Nomic. Nomic games have experienced revolution, oppressive coups, and the restoration of popular sovereignty. Above all, Nomic has been fun for thousands of players around the world. For me, it was intended to illustrate and embody the thesis of my book, The Paradox of Self-Amendment, that a legal "rule of change" such as a constitutional amendment clause may apply to itself and authorize its own amendment."
"Transhumanism is a big, complicated, sprawling idea. The central concept – that humans can be made better with technology – touches on a lot of hopes and fears about the future of humanity. Though I’m always going on about how great human enhancement could be, I’ve got my fair share of fears myself. But my fears are probably way different than many of your fears. But how in the world can we represent those concerns? As it turns out, I’ve found a pretty good set of archetypes that represent our hopes and fears: Marvel Comic’s Avengers."
News post on an optimistic report on changing world energy supplies. We just need to divert 3% of world GDP to efficiency, renewables, and infrastructure. Whew!
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