Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

Edward Albee

This is indeed the oddest thing about SETI—that we are so plainly surrounded with alien intelligences—bees, whales, porpoises, chimpanzees, DNA molecules, computers, dung beetles, slime mold, even the planet as an ecosystem—but still feel lonely and unable to communicate. How much intelligence and wisdom are found in Chinese civilization, for instance, and how ignorant the West continues to be of it! Why do we seek distant alien intelligence when we hardly know what to do with our own? The huge barrier here is the strangeness that we never see: our faces. We haunt ourselves like aliens. The main ghost that stalks me is my self, the only person whom everyone else knows but I never can… Our failure to recognize ourselves fuels our thirst for confirmation from alien intelligences.

John Durham Peters, Speaking into The Air (p. 256)

“Frames” are cognitive circuits that determine how we think about things. Corporations spend billions convincing us to go against our better interests using their own frames. Here are some suggestions to change the discussion surrounding climate chaos:

How We Talk About the Environment Has Everything to Do with Whether We’ll Save It | Environment | AlterNet:

First, the public’s very understanding of nature has to change. We are part of nature; nature is not separate from us. Nature nurtures us. The destructive exploitation of nature is evil. What is good is the use of nature that doesn’t use up nature.

Second, the economic and ecological meltdowns have the same cause: the unregulated free market and the idea that greed is good and that the natural world is a resource for short-term private enrichment. The result has been deadly, toxic assets and a toxic atmosphere.

Third, the global economy and ecology are both systems. Global causes are systemic, not local. Global risk is systemic, not local. The localization of causation and risk is what has brought about our twin disasters. We have to think in global, system terms and we don’t do so naturally. That is why a massive communications effort is needed.

Fourth, the Right’s economic arguments need to be countered. Is it too expensive to save the earth? How could it be? If the earth goes, business goes.

Fifth, we are the polar bears. Human existence is threatened, and the existence of most living beings on earth.

Sixth, we own the air jointly and we can’t transfer ownership. Polluting corporations are dumping pollution into our air. They need to gradually be made to stop, two-percent less a year for 40 years: that is what a “cap” on carbon dioxide pollution is about. And meanwhile the polluters should pay us dumping fees to offset the cost of fuel increases and pay for the development of better fuels.

Seventh, even the most successful emissions cap would only take us halfway. Business needs to do its part to take us the rest of the way. Large corporations need to face up to reality and join in the effort.

Finally, for those in the business world: Corporate interests are constantly putting forth arguments based on cost-benefit analysis. But the very mathematics of cost-benefit analysis is anti-ecological; the equations themselves are destructive of the earth.

David Suzuki is one of the most inspirational speakers I’ve ever seen. I’m truly in awe of his ability to connect science with culture and the environment. As this trailer for the documentary for his film, Suzuki Speaks, says volumes about his inspiring vision. If you have a chance, see the whole film. You can view all the documentary’s segments here.

From the author of Here Comes Everybody, some inspiring ideas…

A Wiki for the Planet: Clay Shirky on Open Source Environmentalism | Wired Science from Wired.com:

Wired.com: Can you talk about how social applications could help solve environmental problems?

Clay Shirky: There is no larger collective-action problem than the environment. The three biggest lies of the environmental movement is that every little bit helps, you can do your part, and together we can do it. [Compact fluorescent lightbulbs] are nice, but people going down and changing CFLs in a handful of fixtures isn’t going to cut it.

It’s a collective-action problem. The difference between what all the people can do individually and the global consumption of nonrenewable resources is huge. The tension is … what will it take to get people to act in concert? There isn’t any additive solution to the problem. It will be both governmental and social because that’s the scale of the problem.

And this little zinger about Bill McKibben, who wrote The Age of Missing Information. I concur with Shirky about the book, but for slightly different reasons. I found the book problematic because it makes a false dichotomy between nature and media by using the logical fallacy of a straw electronic man. Of course sitting in a room for a weekend and watching nothing but cable is going to be benal compared to the experience of nature. But few people live in a prison cell watching nothing but TV (but thanks to Bush, that is a reality for more and more people). People’s lives are far more complex, and they don’t own a duck pond. (Still, 350.org may be a solution. More later.)

Wired.com: What do you think about organizing efforts like Bill McKibben’s 350.org?

Shirky: I sort of reflexively dislike McKibben. He wrote a book with a section about the value of a duck swimming around a pond and contrasting that with the vast wasteland of television. But he made a whole point of not telling people about where it was. It’s private property. He owns it and he’s able to go there. Any solution that doesn’t work for cities doesn’t work. McKibben’s natural splendor argument is so unfit for the 21st century. That said, I haven’t seen 350. Maybe his thinking has changed.

PS If you haven’t read Here Comes Everybody, you really should. Along with Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture, it’s required reading of understanding the emerging media paradigm.

45 years later, still worth revisiting.

I read the following and wondered if the “big mind” that Suzuki speaks of could also be applied to media:

That everything is included within your mind is the essence of mind. To experience this is to have religious feeling. Even though waves arise, the essence of your mind is pure; it is just like clear water with a few waves. Actually water always has waves. Waves are the practice of the water. To speak of waves apart from water or water apart from waves is a delusion. Water and waves are one. Big mind and small mind are one. When you understand your mind in this way, you have some security in your feeling. As your mind does not expect anything from outside, it is always filled. A mind with waves in it is not a disturbed mind, but actually an amplified one. Whatever you experience is an expression of big mind.

The activity of big mind is to amplify itself through various experiences. In one sense our experiences coming one by one are always fresh and new, but in another sense they are nothing but a continuous or repeated unfolding of the one big mind.

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

One of my favorite books is The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again). This might sound unbelievable, but I actually think Warhol was an enlightened master who simply spoke in the language of his time: mass media. What makes his contribution so important is that he went against the grain of a 2000 year legacy that distrusts images. While it is necessary to be skeptical of visual illusions as a kind of perceptive magic, at the same time the reaction to it can be just as bad. The striving for some unattainable Utopia also causes incredible suffering. Is it possible to interact with media in a way that is both skeptical but also incorporates a willingness to take responsibility for our own happiness here and now instead of blaming society?

The solution may be to mindfully engage the illusion, and I think that is what Warhol was cryptically alluding to.

Some of the best quotes from his book are:

“The camera turns [people] on and off.” (p. 80)

“Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there. I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it’s the way things happen to you in life that’s unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it’s like watching television— you don’t feel anything.” (p.91)

“At the end of my time, when I die, I don’t want to leave any leftovers. And I don’t want to be a leftover. I was watching TV this week and I saw a lady go into a ray machine and disappear. That was wonderful, because matter is energy and she just disappeared. That could be a really American invention, the best American Invention— to be able to disappear. I mean, that way they couldn’t say you died, they couldn’t say you were murdered, they couldn’t say you committed suicide over somebody.” (P.113)

“Space is all one space and thought is all one thought, but my mind divides its spaces into spaces into spaces and thought into thoughts. Like a large condominium. Occasionally I think of about one Space and the one Thought, but usually I don’t. Usually I think about my condominium.” (p.143)

“Before media there used to be a physical limit of how much space one person could take up by themselves. People, I think, are the only things that know how to take up more space than the space they’re actually in, because with media you can sit back and still let yourself fill up space on records, in the movies, most exclusively on the telephone and the least exclusively on television.” (p.146)

“You should have contact with your closest friends through the most intimate of and exclusive of all media— the telephone.” (p.147)

“I always bring everything back to chemicals, because I really think everything starts and finishes with chemicals.” (p.?)

PS Another fave is POPism: The Warhol Sixties. It’s a great chronicle of life and experimentation at the cusp of the social revolution.

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Yochai Benkler is one of my favorite thinkers writing about the network economy. He argues that new networks are reversing the centralized control of industrial media. His book, The Wealth of Networks, is required reading. If you don’t have time to read it, try watching this video.

The Surveillance Camera Players doing tactical media.

One of my favorite media theorists, Geert Lovink, wrote the indispensable Dark Fiber, a collection of critical essays published by MIT about media activism and networks. His discussion of tactical media as an alternative to culture jamming is why I put any kind of media activism under that category of the same name.

In a recent interview, he discusses politics and social media.

net critique:

SBJ: Have social medias taken over the political debate and activism or do real life debates and organisation still serve a purpose–and if so which?

GL: Taken over? No, there isn’t any statistical evidence for that. Television, assisted by newspapers and radio, are still dominating the political agenda. The Web is playing a strange, new role in all this. For many, Internet is the perfect place to hang out and escape the boring, pre-programmed world of the ‘old media’. Simultaneously, society is moving into the Internet at the same time, just think of the re-invention of advertisement out there. What we see happening is not an easy convergence of media. Real and virtual mix but in unexpected manners. That’s the fun of it. However, the current crises are not properly addressed either in cyberspace. It’s really questionable to think that the paperless Internet is contributing in a positive way to the global warning and environmental pollution that we have in China as the place of production and Africa as the waste basket. But I remain positive. Remember that all these hyped-up self-important dotcom people in the late nineties had no idea about their own upcoming crash, let alone about the social aspects of Web 2.0. This makes me optimistic about Web 3.0, 4.0 and so on. Why won’t some Afro-Brazilian consortium draw up the principles for the Internet architecture in 20 years time?