Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
WorldChanging.com is a weblog edited by Alex Steffen and Jamais Cascio, at 
http://worldchanging.com/. The dozen contributors come from all parts of 
the world, with diverse backgrounds but a shared focus on tools and ideas 
to make the world better. The best way to introduce WorldChanging is to 
repeat the how-to post from the site:

"WorldChanging.com works from a simple premise: that the tools, models and 
ideas for building a better future lie all around us. That plenty of 
people are working on tools for change, but the fields in which they work 
remain unconnected. That the motive, means and opportunity for profound 
positive change are already present. That another world is not just 
possible, it's here. We only need to put the pieces together.

"Informed by that premise, we do our best to bring you links to (and 
analysis of) those tools, models and ideas in a timely and concise manner. 
We don't do negative reviews - why waste your time with what doesn't work? 
We don't offer critiques or exposes, except to the extent that such 
information may be necessary for the general reader to apprehend the 
usefulness of a particular tool or resource. We don't generally offer 
links to resources which are about problems and not solutions, unless the 
resource is so insightful that its very existence is a step towards a 
solution. We pay special attention to tools, ideas and models that may 
have been overlooked in the mass media. We make a point of showing ways in 
which seemingly unconnected resources link together to form a toolkit for 
changing the world.

"Every link we post is informed by technology, but the new possibilities 
we cover aren't just high-tech. Sure, we all need to understand the uses 
(and dangers) of advances like biotechnology, the Internet, ubiquitous 
computing, artificial intelligences, "open source" software and 
nano-materials. But we also need to know how best to collaborate, how to 
build coalitions and movements, how to grow communities, how to make our 
businesses live up to their highest potential and how to make the promise 
of democracy into a reality. We need to understand techniques as well as 
technologies, ideas as well as innovations. How we work together is as 
important as the tools we use.

"Therefore, we focus on resources that help people collaborate and 
cooperate, for we believe that collaborative technologies and cooperative 
models the keys to working together more effectively, and that working 
together is the revolution..."

The panel assembled for this conversation includes WorldChanging editors
Steffen and Cascio, along with contributors Dawn Danby, Emily Gertz, Jon
Lebkowsky, and Taran Rampersad. Bios of all are posted at the
WorldChanging web site.
  

    
I suppose the best way to start would be for everyone to make an 
introductory comment.  I'm Jon Lebkowsky, and I've known Jamais for 
several years; we were both involved with Howard Rheingold's "Electric 
Minds" community site during the 90s, and both on the WELL, so we've 
stayed in touch off and on ever since. I met Alex through Bruce Sterling's 
Viridian Design movement, and I met Dawn when she was living in Austin. 
When I saw what they were doing at WorldChanging, just after it launched, 
I had to sign up. The WorldChanging site filled the void left when the 
Whole Earth Review went away, I thought, and so much of my life had been 
shaped by Whole Earth.
  

    
Jon, I can't remember -- did Electric Minds or South by SouthWest come
first? We were on a panel together in 1996 on the "politics of cyberspace"
-- Steve Jackson, who had been recently raided by the Secret Service because of
the Cyberpunk game his company was working on, was also part of the
discussion. Funny how much of my present-day life was shaped by that one
hour panel.

I'm Jamais Cascio, co-founder of WorldChanging. I bill myself these days as
a "freelance world-builder," which covers most of my current professional
manifestations. I specialize in the creation of plausible, consistent, and 
compelling future worlds for strategic and entertainment use. On the business 
and government strategy side, I do scenario planning; on the entertainment 
side, I've worked on a couple of science fiction TV shows and am the author of 
a couple of science fiction game books. Alex and I came up with WorldChanging 
last year largely because we wanted to work together, and a blog seemed like a 
good thing to do while we figured out what we wanted to do as work together. 
Little did we know...

For me, WorldChanging sits at the intersection of two very smart observations 
about the future by two very smart fellows: Bruce Sterling said, "the future is 
a process, not a destination;" and William Gibson said, "the future is already 
here, it's just not well-distributed yet." We are trying to chronicle the 
process, and speed up the distribution.
  

    
We met on eminds, then you came to SXSW and we made a point of hanging 
out.

It's funny how many of rolled into that axis of Whole Earth/the 
WELL/the farm/Global Business Network/Electric Minds etc. But it really 
all goes back to Stewart Brand, I guess, and his eclectic blend of past, 
present and future tools and ideas.
  

    
Hey everyone, Alex Steffen here. Besides co-editing (and editing here
is used in the loosest of ways) Worldchanging, I freelance as a writer
and consult to organizations which are trying to figure out better ways
of changing the world. There's more about me on my bio at
Worldchanging.

My particular obsession at the moment is looking for ways in which we
might design a future which is both more prosperous and more
sustainable, which is both bright and green. To do that, I think we
have to change both the goals we're pursuing and the means we're using.

My book Bright Green (coming soon from Chelsea Green) looks at how we
might use new technologies and new approaches to create sustainable
prosperity for as much of the planet as possible. I've also been doing
some consulting looking at how environmental and social change groups
can use new network-centric tools to build a different kind of
movement, some other work with George Lakoff at the Rockridge Institute
on how to "reframe" environmental issues to appeal to more Americans,
and a grab-bag of other small projects on related topics.

Whole Earth is indeed worth mentioning here. Being a commune kid, I
grew up reading it. I remember paging through the Catalogs as a small
child (along with comics like "Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth," Chinese
Communist agitprop, and R. Crumb's stuff). My dad still has all his
old CQs.

The interesting thing that I didn't realize until much later was that
where I think a lot of people read it as a set of far-out
possibilities, I read it as *news*. I thought the whole Earth actually
did this stuff. (It's easy to forget that countercultures can be as
parochial as any small town, and I grew up surrounded by yurts and
geodesics, windmills and solar panels, whale songs and world music,
Humboldt County homesteaders, paleo-geeks with piles of punchcards,
early EarthFirst!ers, radical feminist businesswomen, Sufis,
Buddhists... the whole works. I thought everyone was like that until I
was seven or so.) So the worldview of the network of people that Whole
Earth emerged from and spoke with is stamped pretty deep in my cultural
DNA.

I still think the Whole Earth Catalogs stand up well as a brilliant
bit of information design. In some ways, they were the Web before HTML.
For a while last year I was even talking with the Point Foundation
(before they went bust) about doing a 21st Century Global Whole Earth
Catalog. Worldchanging is what I did instead.

All that said, I think there are many ways in which that worldview --
though it's been incredibly important (I have a whole theory about how
the Left Coast counterculture and SunBelt neo-conservative insurgency
are the two dominant strains in American culture right now, but I won't
bore you with that here) -- is now pretty woefully out-of-date.

One part of what we're trying to do, in an obviously humble way, with
Worldchanging, is to figure out how to take some of the best parts of
the Whole Earth approach (for instance, only reviewing things you feel
are positive and worthwhile) and apply them to finding ways of changing
the world for the better in the 21st Century.
  

    <scribbled>
  

    
Alex, can you say more about your work with Lakoff? Some of the politicos 
I work with have been influenced by his analysis of liberal vs 
conservative politics. Talking about his thoughts about framing might be a 
great way to start this discussion.
  

    
Well, framing debates is not a new concept. What is new is the way in
which advances is several fields, including cognitive linguistics, have
given us new understanding of how frames work in people's minds.

George has done a bunch of writing on this topic, so if folks are
really interested, I'd refer them to his books or the Rockridge
website.

I'll post on Worldchanging in the next few days about my own work on
looking at new environmental frames, which is a longer topic, really.

But I think that the problems the environmental movement are having
these days are only partially about *what* enviros are saying. I think
there are also real problems with where they're saying it (enviro
groups as a whole have been really slow to pick up on networking
technologies and even slower to learn how to speak effectively on the
Web). And no amount of reframing or better technology will help if they
don't have new things to say, and many of the old-guard big
environmental NGOs are really stuck in their thinking.
  

    
Looking more broadly, though, I think that the frame through which
most Americans are currently viewing the planet -- the "war on terror"
-- could not be more damaging to our longer-term ability to understand
(and thus work effectively) with the rest of the world.

George points out two things about the war on terror frame: first,
that terror is an emotional state, and by constantly evoking it, the
Right plays to its strength, which is being perceived as the side
concerned with discipline, authority and force (which means that
rational arguments about the effectiveness of certain actions -- e.g.,
the Patriot Act -- will consistantly lose when stacked up against
emotional plays to patriotism and war-unity); second, that terror is a
concept, and one cannot effectively wage war on a concept, and to
suggest we do so is to plunge the nation into a mental world where the
planet is divided between homeland and terror (which completely
obliterates all useful nuance from our discussion of foreign policy).

This has enormous repercussions for the kinds of things we cover on
Worldchanging. Very, very few of the world's most serious problems can
be solved by unliateral military force. Very, very few of the best
solutions available to us have to do with building an even larger
military with more incredibly expensive weapons systems. Almost nothing
we're doing in terms of foreign policy is making the world safer or
more united. Yet to try to make those points within a debate framed by
a War on Terror is to lose before you ever started.
  

    
So what's the viable alternative?
  

    
Well, in the immediate term, reframing the debate by using the phrase
"war on terrorists." That at least makes our enemies a specific group
of people, rather than an emotional concept.

In the longer term, I think we Americans need a new frame for
describing our role in the world. "Superpower" no longer serves well.

But that probably has to co-emerge with a new understanding of our
role in the world. And that will be difficult, since our actual role in
the world is far different than the role we think we play (just as a
for instance, most Americans think foreign aid is one of the largest
expenditures in the Federal budget, when in fact it's less than 1%,
according to the Council on Foreign Relations, and less than 0.1% of
our GDP).

Critical in the process of changing the way we look at our role in the
world, though, is having better information about the world and what's
going on in it. I think the points Ethan Zuckerman makes about the
"attention gap" are absolutely right:

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001098.html

All of us in the developed world need to know more about the problems
faced by our panetary neighbors, and the kinds of models and tools that
are out there to work on them. That's really what we're trying to do
at Worldchanging.
  

    
How well do you know our audience? We haven't really discussed that 
before, but I don't have a clear sense of our impact yet. Is there some 
strategy for ensuring that we're reaching the people who can make 
effective use of the information we're publishing?
  

    
The short answer is that we don't know who our audience is, at least not very
well, and we're not sure how to best reach the people whom we need to reach.
That's in part a result of the immaturity of the medium (blogging), in part a
result of the opacity of the network (RSS aggregation makes it really easy for
material from a site or a given post to propagate, but makes it damnably hard
to figure out who has actually seen the site/post, for example), and in part a
result of what Zuckerman talks about in the interview linked above, that this
is a very technocratic medium. Network benefits and reputation tend to accrete 
fastest around technology-related ideas.

I know, that's hardly a surprising assertion, but it means that, at least for
now, the mechanisms which exist for getting attention from a large set of
readers involve soapboxes which are friendliest to discussions of technology.
We got Slashdotted today for Alex's interview with Zuckerman, but they
emphasized his relationship to "Geekcorps." That's the hook for them, and it's
completely understandable.  Conversely, we weren't Slashdotted for my interview
last week with Adam Kahane about his problem-solving philosophies, or for
Nicole's article from a few days ago about the ways in which the Google IPO
mapped to the "Wisdom of Crowds" concept, and I didn't expect us to be.

We do know, from site logs, that we get visitors from over 70 different 
countries (based on top-level domains; we probably get more than that, but who 
knows where a ".com" is located?), including places that aren't exactly dense 
network environments. But the non-Americans/non-Europeans account for *maybe* 
10% of our traffic, and probably less than that. We'd like to change that, but 
aren't really quite sure how. Looking at our Technorati cosmos is a bit more 
exciting, as a decent portion of the sites linking to us seem to have an 
environmental, political, or developing-world/non-Western-culture focus.

We'd love to hear good ideas about how to strengthen that, how to make 
ourselves more visible -- and more useful -- to audiences who would find our 
stuff more inspiring and applicable.
  

    

Jumping in here while we're underway:

Hi, I'm Emily Gertz, a contributor to Worldchanging.  I'm a freelance
writer and web producer/internet strategist based in New York City, with
particular experience in environmental issues, creative arts, and
progressive and/or social service non-profits.  More about me in my bio at
Worldchanging.

I've known Jamais and Jon here on the WELL for some years now, mostly via
our shared interests in science fiction.  Although I've been following the
Viridian list since its inception (even interviewed bruces about the
Viridian manifesto, global warming and gizmos in early 2000 for an Oregon
'zine), and knew that Jon was managing the Viridian web site, the pieces
didn't all fall into place until this past winter, when I discovered
Worldchanging.com and wrote Jamais this breathless, excited email about
joining up.

I have a political activist background, but I gradually left that work
behind over the course of the 90s, feeling frustrated with the ambulance-
chasing approach and the sometimes blinkered worldview.  I'm thrilled to be
contributing to Worldchanging's combination of bright green
environmentalism, celebration of global culture, thoughtful observations
and solutions-oriented approaches.

I even have a Whole Earth connection, although it didn't come back to me
until I read Alex's post above:  I was surrounded by the original magazine
and catalogs as a kid.  I recall poring over the Last Whole Earth Catalog
for hours. My brother and sister-in-law were planning to homestead in West
Virginia, a real back-to-the-land plan, so there were a lot of WEs laying
around.  I'm sure they've contributed to my adult perspectives, although
growing up in Queens and then moving to suburban New Jersey--we never made
it to West Virginia--some of it seemed really far out and exotic.

I remember tring to make "lembas bread" from a recipe in an issue of Whole
Earth--someone tried to style a chapati recipe as the magical elfin
waybread, and I was deep into Tolkien at the time...it tasted terrible!

OK, back to Alex and Jon.
  

    
Jumping in... 

I'm Taran Rampersad, a contributor at WorldChanging.com - a freelance
writer, a Free Software developer and advocate, a Knowledge Management
Consultant and an aspiring human being. I'm involved in Digital Divide
issues as well as the developing world. I'm presently based out of
Trinidad and Tobago, a dual island country that you can find next to
Venezuala on a map of South America. 

Interestingly, I haven't met anyone from WorldChanging.com previously
- but I have always enjoyed the posts, and was happy to see that my own
weblog at the time was listed as a similar site. Later, Jamais asked
me if I would consider contributing - and I gratefully accepted the
chance to become part of this team.

My own background is fairly diverse. I was born in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, grew up mainly in Trinidad and Tobago, and have seen a lot
of other countries at my own expense, as well as at the expense of the
United States Navy. I've pumped gas for a living, as well as studied
Naval Nuclear Propulsion for a living. It's the grey area in between
that's the most interesting, I think. 

Next week I'll be flying off to take part in a workshop related to
Caribbean Diversity and it's affect on ICTs, and I've been spending a
lot of time preparing for that, as well as working on things that help
pay the bills. 

Solutions that minimize impact and maximize efficiency have always
attracted me, and the problems that I face when dealing with many
issues in the developing world give me a focus on not only what could
be done, but also the far reaching implications of why things should be
done in certain ways. It's a learning experience, and I hope my
contributions to WorldChanging.com - and the world as a whole - not
only share solutions, but the process by which those solutions came
about. 

There's an amazing world we all live in every day. Sometimes we just
don't know it.
  

    
Speaking of knowing more about our neighbors, I heard an interview
with Jeremy Rifkin yesterday on WNYC, New York public radio.  He's got
a new book out: "The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future
Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream."  

I'm looking forward to checking this book out.  Although it's
unnecessarily antagonistic to promote a dichotomy where the "European
dream" wins, America's loses, or vice versa, united Europe (one which
is much more clear-eyed than our current political establishment on
global warming and cross-border chemical issues, for instance) may be
the most effective counterweight--in the developed world--to an
American hegemony of ideas and practice.  


A streaming archive of the interview, including a good back and forth
with a listener who challenges some of Rifkin's rosy Eurocentrism, at:

http://www.wnyc.org/stream/ram.py?file=raotl/bl082604d.ra
  

    
Emily,

Outside of Europe and the United States, there is also a lot of
conjecture related to India and China as well. I don't know how much of
this is a major discussion mainly because the media in the United
States and Europe is dominant. Food for thought; just because the rest
of the world isn't heard certainly doesn't mean it's not talking.
  

    
Rifkin seemed to be speaking of the quality of existence--what
constitutes a "good life" (worker's rights, health care, education)more
than centers of innovation or sheer economic weight.  A duel for the
heart of Western cultural values.
  

    
Interesting, but these days I'm beginning to wonder whether Western
and Eastern culture are separate anymore; I think we're in a grey
period where we will have to look back and talk about the differences
in Eastern and Western culture before this period.
  

    
I don't know. Many Europeans have told me they admire the freedom
Americans have when it comes to entrepreneurship, personal expression,
mobility and the like.

That said, I think the United States has, quite objectively, lost the
position of being the best country in which to live in terms of quality
of life (compared with many European countries, we work more days, we
are less safe at home and at work, many of us have poor or no health
care coverage, we get shorter maternity leaves and child care is harder
to find, etc.). And there is no doubt that the United States
government is now pretty universally despised. Poll after poll shows
that.

But I think the larger point is that the role America has played in
the global popular imagination since the end of World War Two -- the
vanguard of material progress and personal freedom, the land of the
American Dream -- is ending. For the last 50+ years, American culture
was the lodestar towards which ideas of progress ran (or against which
they rebelled). That ain't so no more. Which raises the questions:

1) What does the idea of progress look like now?

2) Can the US become a home to 21st Century progress? What would it
take? What happens if it can't?

3) Who's likely to replace the US as the next global role model, or
have we entered a multilteral, networked culture era? Is it in the very
nature of the trajectory of globalism that there is now no one center?
And, if so, what are the various multiple centers, and what do they
offer?

4) Where do ideas of sustainability, of egalitarian development, of
fair trade, of democracy, of human rights and of technological progress
play into all this? In short, how might these changes impact our
ability to face the really grim trends headed our way, and build a
bright green future?
  

    
Oh, you slipped in before me there, Taran! Good point, though.

3a) East and West. The twain have met. Buddhism is the fastest-growing
religion in the US, the press claims, and more high-rise skyscrapers
have now been built in East Asia than in North America. What are the
implications of all this? 
  

    
Alex,

My answers;

(1) To myself, the idea of progress is more in the abstract domain
than that of the concrete. Over the latter part of the last century,
mankind as a whole has shown mastery of the physical materials we have
on hand, and in doing so has only begun tampering with things on a more
abstract level. A problem we are facing as a species is that sometimes
we treat the abstract like concrete, and the concrete like abstract. 

What is progress now? It has many meanings. To someone in the 3rd
world, it might mean being able to sustain themselves and their
countrymen through the growing of crops - though GM crops are a point
of contention for philosophical and cultural reasons. For someone in
the first world, it may mean faster internet access. 

Perhaps the best measure of progress is the decrease in time required
to improve the quality of life for our species.

(2) 21st Century progress and America requires some reconciliation, I
think - and I move dangerously close to an area I am loathe to tread in
(politics). But it's not politics so much as building a device for
communication and subsequently ignoring or not liking what comes back
out of the device. This would be the internet in it's various forms. 

Unlike the days of the traditional media, the internet introduces
truly random factors - the average person in a society has been given
their own 'printing press', and can post their opinions and thoughts
just like anyone else. This means that interaction is no longer
happening at the molar level, but at a more molecular level (As Pierre
Levy wrote of in "Collective Intelligence"). This means that public
opinion is not as bounded by geographic or political boundaries. We
have new boundaries that we are still trying to find.

Can the United States keep up? We can hope, but many obstacles have to
be overcome - and the first would have to be the stereotypes that the
traditional media have given in the past, and a bit of acceptance and
increase in the level of communication throughout the United States -
with people outside of the United States.

This holds true of every country, I suppose.

I do not believe that there will be a 'failure', so I cannot discuss
what would happen if this fails - but I believe that not keeping pace
at that level will cause the United States to fall behind. Right now
the United States is dominant on the internet, which is understandable
given the combination of DarpaNet roots and corporate strength. Yet
just because a man can fashion a hammer does not mean he can use it
properly; using the tool in a more social manner outside of the United
States is required. This, too, is true of any other country. 

(3) I don't know that the United States will be replaced as a role
model. Even here, 13 degrees from the equator, cable television is
still predominantly from the United States. The internet is
predominantly American, and so on. But opinions I have heard from
throughout the Caribbean and South America by email and otherwise seems
to point to China, India and Brazil. But personally, I think it will
be more of a networked role, as you hinted at.

(4) As we create a global culture, a lot of this will have to be done
on the fly. Governance of the internet is one such topic, but there are
others - such as the use of tetraethyl lead in gasoline, or CFCs, or
what have you. Certainly, the developed countries have made great
strides in these areas - and yet, there are some companies within these
countries that make money selling them to the developing world where
strict measures are not in place or remain unenforced. Yet what happens
in the developing world affects the pollution of the entire world. 

More global perspectives are required. 
  

    
(NOTE: offsite readers who have comments or questions can email them to
<inkwell-hosts@well.com> and they'll be added to the thread)
  

    
I'm wondering if any of you read my interview with Jim White of the 
University of Colorado - http://www.weblogsky.com/white.html. I posted 
about it at WorldChanging. He was saying that there's *no way* that 
everyone in the world can have the same standard of living we enjoy in the 
U.S. - the resources aren't sufficient to support that standard for 
everybody. (I think it's hard for us to imagine the extent of the gap 
between the average American and the average citizen in one of the 
developing nations, especially the poorest). It's going to be harder and 
harder for the U.S. to sustain its wealth in the face of global poverty - 
and I'm not saying that we'll become altruistic and share, or that they'll 
tear us down. I just think that an inevitable complexity of forces will 
have a leveling effect, and this is assuming we don't have some natural 
catastrophe, which is beginning to seem pretty likely.

I don't think what I just said is inconsistent with Taran's comments, just 
a little different perspective. I think it's critical that developed and 
developing nations build closer relationships, because we're going to be 
thrown together more than we realize.
  

    
This is what some environmental and social justice activists have been
saying for years, though--that it is simply impossible for everyone on
Earth to have the material wealth of the average American.

Some good thinking has come out of that--the 'live simply' submovement of
deep green environmentalism, and probably a synergy with the growth of
Buddhism in the U.S.  But overall, it's a moral hammer that's had litte
impact on most Americans.  This is part of what I like about the Viridian
movement--design that dispenses with the lifestyle evangelism and simply
DOES what needs doing--using energy efficiently, biodegrading, cradle-to-
cradling.
  

    
Right, we're not going to see a major change that's due to some kind of 
greening of America, with a sudden mainstream realization that we're out 
of balance with the rest of the world. Viridian Design was a more 
realistic way to face the problem, but I think we'll evolve to a more 
balanced position because of global forces that are not driven by human 
decision or will, at least not at a conscious level. That seems to be the 
way it works, anyway... major changes don't seem to be the product of 
human action alone, but the result of complex forces within which our 
actions are aligned (or misaligned) with a combination of ingredients. 
That's where I object to much of what passes for foreign policy. You can 
surf the wave but you can't subdue it.