Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
 R.U. Sirius (rusirius) Sun 10 Jan 2016 (01:25 PM)

There’s a narrative that’s popular particularly among economic
conservatives, but also among mainstream politicos in general, that
contrary to popular sentiments, things are going pretty great
because the poorest of the worlds’ poor people are doing better …
there has been a global reduction in poverty. They point to UN
statistical reports and so forth. We’re supposed to conclude that
neoliberal globalized markets are pretty awesome.  I wonder if Bruce
has explored this arguments and what his thoughts are about them.

********************

*Well, I've certainly noticed such screeds myself. I applaud RU/Ken
for his sensitive cultural antennae there. However, I don't entirely
agree with the premise of the question.  

*Commonly, yes, it is conservatives who like to trot out the
ever-popular Pangloss "Best of All Possible Worlds" line. 
Conservatives are always in favor of the established order, for
conserving it is their very purpose.  "If it's not broke, don't fix
it."  They may be benefiting by it personally -- but they don't lie
about it their fondness for it.  They live sincerely within the Dad
Knows Best camp.  

*I can hear that argument: because I've lived in places where the
established order went straight to hell.  Hell: pretty bad! 
Bridges, plumbing, power lines, health-care, education, civil
rights: pretty good!

*With that said, the Right has no lock-in on empty, upbeat
motivational chatter.  It is very human.  The Left has quite a
similar line, almost as rigid, just as time-honored.  

*"Keep Hope Alive. We Shall Overcome." The people of the Left need
to struggle. Why? Because the aspirational, progressive vigor of
"the  struggle" is inherently good in and of itself, regardless of
the pragmatic outcome.  Whatever is conserved by the ideological
adversary is whatever should be changed.  If we don't find some
popular discontent, we gotta whip up some. For the sake of our grand
old party tradition, basically.  

*In this oppositional cultural sensibility, a "progressive" can
never err, any more than a "conservative" can err within his own.
Even though time passes relentlessly, no "progressive" can ever
become archaic, by definition. If some failure within that alleged
"progress" occurs, it is never some straightforward political
blunder -- like, say, the catastrophic Prohibition amendment in the
USA.  No: any failure of the aspirations of the Left is always about
a poisonous false consciousness. 

*The people need to rise up, stand up, that's all!  If only those
disenchanted, sadly pessimistic masses could catch onto their actual
class interests!  Get out there, pep 'em up, organize them for a
better world!  One rush and a push and the land is ours.

*I don't want to engage in false-equivalencies here; I don't claim
that the left and right in 2016 are merely Red versus Blue.  The
American right has visibly lost its senses and has abandoned contact
with objective reality. The American left is conservative: it's
reduced to the prosper of Hillary Clinton, an elderly,
backward-looking figure whose meager political appeal, such as it
is, is 1990s nostalgic. 

*That's a painful thing to say within an American domestic context.
However, nobody living outside the paranoid armed borders of the USA
has any delusions about the state of sentiments within it. Even a
teenage semiliterate Kurdish rug-weaving housewife can read the
political barometer about (a) some inevitable Yankee bombs and (b)
frenzied waves of Yankee bombs.
  

    


*So: what is really different in 2016 about the modern radical
"conservatism"?  The problem is that the global market neoliberal
capitalism of the go-go 1990s, the Washington Consensus child of a
previous Clinton Administration, has nothing much to offer to
"conservatives."  It is a libertarian ideology, it is globalized,
flat, de-cultured, agnostic, value-free.  The economic liberty
offers nothing to conserve. There is no cozy status-quo to be
conservative about, under Internet Counterrevolution.  

*The haywire global market is not a force for anyone's cultural
stability.   It suffers repeated wrenching crises -- vastly bigger
and weirder than bonkers little Bitcoin, even -- while the only
visible major winners from the decaying status quo are the Chinese
Comintern and maybe 80  people, the lottery-winners, the few,
freaky, off-the-charts mogul oligarchs, who are the one percent's,
1% one percent.  These freaked-out Koch Bros types, yanked from
their obscurity by the invisible robot hand of the 2010s market, 
are nowhere near "conservative."  No genuine and sincere political
or cultural "conservative" would ever trust these contemporary
monsters with a burnt-out match.  

*The "Stacks"?  Worse!  Bezos owns the Washington Post!

*So, the dismally bewildered American "conservative" Right is, in
historical fact, super-radical now. They're not conservative in any
historical sense of that term.  They're  one sneeze away from armed
insurrection.  They would promptly go for that,  in a full-bore Tea
Party style, except for the stark fact that the various cults of the
fractured Right would first turn their Walmart guns on each other. 
Like any social group seized by unreasonable fanaticism, they fear
their own heretics much more than they fear the unbelievers.
  

    


*That's the existent 2016 situation.  It's acute within the USA, but
not different in kind from political developments elsewhere; it's
just the manifestation of genuinely global problems within the
hegemon power.  It's pretty bad news that we lack a functional
conservative attitude  (conservatism should never be a "movement"). 
In many ways, it's like the world-wide destabilization of Islam,
where a customarily sleepy and silent demographic loses its
composure and starts blowing up its own mosques. 

*So, to return to RU's assertion there, I do get it about the peppy
Optimists Club attitude -- it's a matter of temperament, some people
like it and emotionally need it. However, this forced-march optimism
that RU is talking about has a creepy, whistling past the graveyard
feel to me. I don't think it's healthy for us.  

*Sure, it's great that infant mortality is down within the Former
Third World. That happened because the medical fixes became cheap,
not because the powers-that-be give any damn about the well-being of
infants. Infant mortality in the US is sky-high -- not to mention
the USA's unique and endless political frenzies about abortion and
child-care.

*But why dwell not the problems?  "Things are groovy, calm down,
there's never been a better time to be alive!" I do hear the
rose-tinted goggles appeal, but I don't just parse the UN
statistics, I actually live in this world. I'm out for lunch today
on Jan 11, 02106.  It is shirt-sleeve weather on the Danube today in
early January, on a river where people use to ice-skate.  

*I don't have to be a professional grievance-monger to recognize
that the planet's physical reality is seriously imperiled.  It's not
the immediate, biblically Apocalyptic end of the world that the
world's poles are melting away in 2016. However, any society that
would allow that numbed drift into  genuine, world-scale security
threat should never be preaching a hands-off, go along get along,
laissez-faire philosophy.  Nobody can laissez their faire when their
house is underwater and their suburbs are on fire.  It's unbearably,
fatally stupid,like dreamily saying that malaria comes from bad air
while your child dies of fever sweating on a cot.
  

    

*The morale-boosting gets tragicomical after a while, ludicrous,
like that raucous last reel of MONTY PYTHON'S LIFE OF BRIAN, where
the main lead of the film has been crucified, and the miserable
doomed and condemned are cheering one other up with fatal nails
pounded through them.  "Aw c'mon Brian!  Chin up boy!  Give it a
little whistle!  Always look on the bright side of life!"

*I saw that film, and I laughed raucously, but I don't want to
convince everyone that that movie scene is funny.  For me, sure,
yeah, but I don't seek to harsh the mellow of the self-appointed
motivationalists for mankind.  Especially if they're fellow science
fiction writers who are trying to recapture a popular genre's lost
jet-pack propeller-head whirliness.  I understand and sympathize
with the problem there. It's important for a literary tradition to
closely compare itself to previous generations of writers.  We
should earnestly strive for some benchmarks of human sanity.  How
can you know if you're miserable now, if you don't hearken back to
the expressed attitudes of other people at other times, and see how
it is possible for people to feel?   

*Cultural periods have a sensibility.  So does our own cultural
period.  If you lack any understanding of other historical
sensibilities, then you might be innocently happy, but you're a
hick.  Your culture is mere folk-culture. You know very little, you
are a naif.
  

    


*I hear that praiseworthy struggle for awareness within the literary
version of the neo-optimist ramble. However, that neo-optimism is
not "mainstream conservatism."  It doesn't really deserve the
dignity of that large, grand label, because it's reactionary, and
not conservative.  It doesn't sincerely claim that we ourselves
should properly be happy at this time, because our situation is
really truly genuinely good now.  It is deceitful: it hearkens back
to earlier standards of more apparent cultural vigor, and it
reproaches us for a present-day bad attitude.

*When you look at the achievements of a genuinely dynamic culture,
this phony boosterism is absent from their scene.  Nobody is
pounding the podium, like these confused or disingenuous
neo-optimists, and telling everybody to cheer up.  Whenever things
are genuinely prosperous, that fake-cheerful rhetoric is entirely
unnecessary to people. People are immersed in the general frenzy of
the forward rush, like they were during, say, the 1990s dot com
boom.
  

    

*I enjoyed that 1990s Long Boom quite a lot.  In fact, I went well
out of my way to publicly enjoy it, because I knew it wouldn't last.
And it did not, in fact, last, but while it did, I used to invite
every  wacky lunatic at Austin SXSW over to my house for huge
beer-busts.  We enjoyed that hugely. 

*The tone of WELL State of the World 2016 is quite dark, dank and
sticky, but that's because things are really are, objectively,
statistically, no-kidding, dark, dark and sticky. We cyberpunks can
party when things are good.  Give us a chance: free information,
miniskirts, recreational smart-drugs, extensive credit lines, who
can't like all that.
  

    

*People want things to turn out well in the future. It's human:
people tell each other "Good Morning," they don't say "It's another
bleak day where you're on your own!"  

*If you understand human behavior historically, within the broad,
multi-century scale, you can second-guess people; you know that
their gold rushes finish ugly, that every boozy night at the sexy
pick-up bar ends sad for the last ones out the door.  

*For a long time, I wrote speculative, future-oriented science
fiction, and the general reaction was, "Wow, these literary
fantasies are really dark and scary." Were they, in fact, dark, or
just well-researched?  What kind of world do we actually inhabit
during 2016?  It's certainly not the kind of world where perky,
self-satisfied, and confident bourgeois people can properly say, "Oh
well, William Gibson was merely a morbid eccentric."  

*On the contrary, our 2016 is a world where the recently deceased
David Bowie, he who composed the utterly apocalyptic DIAMOND DOGS
album: "Ten thousand people split into small tribes, coveting the
highest of the sterile skyscrapers like packs of dogs assaulting the
glass fronts of Love Me Avenue" (forgive me here, I'm quoting the
deceased poet entirely from memory) -- anyway, David Bowie died, and
people in 02016 are like: "David! Yeah! What an artiste!  A prophet!
Yeah!  Thin White Duke, he was so great!  He sang to millions yet we
heard it within our own hearts!"
  

    

*So, RU, to sum up, they are wrong but I forgive them.  I mean that
I forgive the neo-optimists.  I would never presume to forgive
Bowie: he did splendidly; real futurists have children, and Bowie's
son, Duncan Jones, is a major creative figure in 2016.   I follow
Duncan's work with all due care.  I am sorry for Duncan's human loss
this week. My own parents are dead, I understand this tragic aspect
of human experience, though there is never much one can say to cheer
up the bereaved.

*As for the neo-optimists, they're trying to cheer us up, but it
doesn't work on me because I kind of worry about them.  They're not
realists.  They're not teaching us reality, they are obfuscating
reality because, at heart, they are fearful.  If they had any real
answer's to mankind's predicament, they wouldn't wave their cheer-up
banners, they'd shut up and do something useful, large-scale and
effective.

*They won't get that done.  They're not a powerful, influential
group, they're too small scale, and they won't deserve a lot of
attention because they are self-deceitful. So, although I know they
are there, I don't like to beat them up.  That quarrel is not worth
it.  I get their motives, they'll find some small audience: I can't
cruelly deny them their sensibility.  It's like beating up
steampunks because they like top hats.  

*No, worse: it's like beating up Parsees.  An ancient, dogged,
dwindling people, the Parsees.  May their God bless them.  I despise
people who bully the Parsees.  "Zoroaster doesn't exist, you fools!
What about Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Moses, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva:
stop worshipping some Ahura-Mazda that no player cares about, and
get in the goddamn ranks!"  Let them be, the Parsees. Of course they
are metaphysically wrong, and in the long term doomed, but who
isn't?  Give them space!  Give them duration!
  

    
Here's a direct link to Vales's newsletter:

http://www.researchpubs.com/category/newsletter/
  

    
For those of you off Well:

(This asynchronous conversation will continue for two weeks, so
check back every day or two if you find it interesting.)

(Only members of the WELL can post directly to the conversation, but
others can send questions or comments to inkwell at well.com, and
our hosts can post them here.)
  

    
(Slippage)

Classic (bruces) rant, which we all live for here on the WELL. Thank
you RU, for sparking that.

So, Bruce, we are "here", now, we knew chaotic disruption was coming
and in fact many us us were cheering for it, like Country Joe and
the Fish's anthemic "whooppee, we're all gonna die"...but it's not
looking as cool as we might have hoped for after all.

The world-wide governments seem incapable of addressing the real
problems, the money folk seem to just want to ride it out and hope
their space vehicles might be built in time to escape (to
where?)...for the rest of us, bound to the planet, where do we go
from here?

Seems like we need to work up some new paradigms, but will they be
any more successful, or just co-opted by the men in back rooms
smoking cigars and drinking their cognacs at their private clubs and
secure retreats.  Current mantra has been "go local" "sustainable",
yada yada. Not to seem too pessimistic but I don't see how that
changes "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" routine?

What chances do 'new' paradigms and out of the box thinking have?
How do we break out the us/them box and forge a "we" box...Or is
that naive thinking as well?
  

    
We chuckle and nod and say what a great rant that was, do we really
get it?

If you look through historical cartoons from magazines like the New
Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post, you'll find as one of the
recurring images a bearded guy in a robe on a street corner,
carrying a sign that says something like "Repent - the end is near!"


A guy in a college class I took on "The Question of Authority in
Literature" called _Gravity's Rainbow_ "just another shaggy
apocalypse story," a phrase that stuck with me... dismissive of the
apocalypse, "can't happen here..." 

I was raised on a diet of 50s television, where there was no hint of
apocalypse, no war, no genocide, no real peril, where father knew
best and all the lawns were well-manicured, the order of suburban
America. A naif, as Bruce says. "Heart of Darkness" was, after all,
just a story...

Life in Metropolis, life on Elysium, orderly, clean, manageable... 

It's tempting to dismiss signs of apocalypse, and to grin when you
consider potential human extinction, as though it's just a fiction,
one of many potential paths forward, but always avoidable... always
a happy ending. Once, after a long night of meditative consideration
(and possibly alteration), I watched the sunrise, felt the music
swell within me, watched for the credits... "The End." But nothing
happened. The sun rose, the day was bright, life went on. A bit
frightened that, in fact, life does go on, there's no happy ending,
and then the inevitable - at some point life does NOT go on, but
ends, and the end is ... an unknown. 

After many years of meditation I've matured in my thinking about all
this... about the cycles of life, as sure as you have pleasure
you'll have pain. As sure as you have your life to live, you'll die,
ultimately, and your death will be yours alone... in a sense, you're
alone in the universe. In a sense, you're not you at all, you're
just a bundle of process with an illusory executive, a biological
operating system....

But I digress... I know that human apocalypse is potential, probably
inevitable, as our habitation renders the earth uninhabitable, at
least by this one crazy species. At the moment I see blue sky and
sunshine, but storms are inevitable... 

Anthropogenic climate change presents a problem of coordination, a
requirement for agreement to change whole cultures, ways of life
that have emerged around seemingly boundless sources of energy and
associated uncontrolled spew of by-products, the implications of
which became too slowly clear to the smartest, and are still unclear
to those with less comprehension and foresight.

It's become a political issue, because politics is how we
coordinate. No obvious political solution to a problem that is, to
many of us, so clearly real, and eventually catastrophic. This is
frustrating: we don't have any system of control that will mitigate
the problem with any kind of urgency. We can barely control our
individual selves, really, so why should we think that we can find
the global political will to fix a problem before it is completely
in our face obvious, which will be too late?

I'm not chuckling at Bruce's rant, it's actually chilling.

And I'm not doing enough, are you?
  

    
One thing I *am* doing, with RU Sirius, Krist Novoselic, et al:

http://opensourceparty.net/

"The Open Source Party is a political movement that derives both
inspiration and methods from Open Source software principles. The
fundamental Open Source principles as they apply to this party,
where laws, policies, and political processes are seen as a body of
code, are:

* Transparency: the code, and any changes to the code, are visible
and understandable.

* The code is accessible and modifiable.

* Inclusion: anyone can access the code and propose modifications,
which may be accepted by democratic consensus, or by executive
decision in a framework decided democratically.

As a matter of scope, we limit our activity to the United States but
encourage development of a global Open Source party that creates
models to work in other national contexts.

Our effort is meant have a democratizing transformative effect that
is fair to all. We’re committed to uses of technology to create
platforms that will support our mission."
  

    
It's notoriously difficult to start a political party or movement
and have any real influence or effect, but old ways of thinking
about, and doing, politics are literally killing us.
  

    
Via email from our pal, Stefan Jones:

On my walk home from the supermarket* last night I heard a great
piece on Fresh Air; a contemplation on the word "gig" and the future
of work:

http://www.npr.org/2016/01/11/460698077/goodbye-jobs-hello-gigs-nunbergs-word-
of-the-year-sums-up-a-new-economic-reality

This is relevant to me, because in 2015 the last vestige of Silicon
Valley coolness got sucked out of my job. Stable and good money and
really the kind of thing only utterly impractical romantics walk
away from, but . . . man, I moved out of my parents' basement and
across country in '97 to get rich *and* have fun, and the latter is
in way short supply. It doesn't help that the constant-deadlines of
a DevOps software development happens in the same place where I once
witnessed real crunchy applied computer science and hardware
engineering taking place.

I find myself with the luxury of asking myself what I want to do
next. And deep uncertainty over whether I'm up to the new styles of
employment.


* (My small contribution to green living is walking to the
supermarket. 3.2 miles, round trip, to Fred Meyer. Great way to stay
keep up to date on podcasts. During the summer, free blackberries in
the vacant lots along the way. Hey, maybe free blackberries in the
spring, as the weather keeps weirding.)
  

    
Wow. Thanks Bruce for so much response. 
  

    
(jonl) We're on the same page brother, but if you can't laugh and
find some joy in this horror of a world, what's the point? Yes, it's
a wake up call, it's sobering and apocalyptic and at the same time
hope is embedded in the rant. You can't get to there, if you don't
truly know where you are at the "you are here" spot on your map. 
Bruce nailed it the "now" we're living in, all I was asking is how
and where to next?  You are both futurists, I'm most certainly
not...I can only see that we might make it to 2050 and the time and
space between now and then truly sucks. For me, it's only a question
of are we living above or below the ground. Don't see anything past
that, just possible futures and most of them are bleak. But first we
have to make it to 2050.
  

    
*Signatures of the Anthropocene.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-07/welcome-to-the-anthropocene-
five-signs-earth-is-in-a-man-made-epoch
  

    <scribbled by julieswn Tue 12 Jan 16 22:31>
  

    


via email from Brian Slesinsky:

So speaking of cheap medical fixes, I'd like to point to some nice
animated maps about malaria in Africa:

https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/post/2015/12/bednets-have-prevented-450-millio
n-
cases-of-malaria/

I wonder if buying hundreds of millions of bednets counts as
"useful,
large-scale and effective." Some scientists have written papers that
say it's working, and I believe them. Does that make me a
neo-optimist?

I keep up with the effective altruism folks and I've sent some money
their way. And it seems like there are other folks who think it's
better than arts funding:

http://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/with-millennial-philanthropy-money-f
lo
wing-arts-groups-miss-out/

They say that for somewhere around $1k-$2k you can save a
statistical
life. Of course everyone involved knows these are numbers in a
spreadsheet and there are large error bars. But reading scientific
papers and crunching numbers seems fairly reality-based (I hope -
I've
outsourced it to GiveWell).

It's all rather abstract so it doesn't give me warm fuzzies. It's
also
not going to help the refugees in Dadaab or Syria or stop global
warming. Optimizing for economic efficiency tends to avoid the
really
tough problems.

And maybe gene-drive mosquitoes will make all that effort obsolete
someday.

But in the meantime, does anyone have a better idea?
  

    

via email from William Cunningham:

"It's tempting to dismiss signs of apocalypse, and to grin when you
consider potential human extinction, as though it's just a fiction,
one of many potential paths forward, but always avoidable... always
a happy ending."

Avoiding extinction almost never equates to a happy ending though,
and extinction isn't even the likeliest of outcomes of a Cataclysmic
Anthropocene.

I mean, human animals are resilient. We live in every heinous
environment on the surface of the planet and we've demonstrated in
every era that we will do absolutely anything we have to in order to
persist. Aggressive inhospitality on the part of the climate is not
likely to erase us. There may well have been a time some extended
angry weather ground us down to about 40 breeding pairs and some
stragglers, but here we are no in numbers sufficient to allow us to
acidify the whole pacific ocean with our vile seeping civilization.

http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-alm
ost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c

If climate disruptions perturb the global political and economic
network enough to fragment it a lot of things we think of as our
sophisticated technological civil society will become really, really
difficult to maintain. Nations will get smaller, more selfish and
warlike. Fringe characters with practical traditional knowledge will
become more important. Un-mitigatable disease, death and decay will
be attributed to providence. The time tested standbys of racism,
xenophobia, dominance hierarchies and religion will re-assemble what
was once a global society into the loosely related cells of primate
tribes that haven't ever really left us. 

The scope of human aspiration will phase shift back from yearning
for the Best of All Possible Worlds to hoping for an alliance with
the Best of All Possible Warlords.

We lived a very, very, very long time like that. Most of our time as
a species. It got us through roughly 1.8 million years of
environmental outrages.

That seems to me to be the much more likely apocalypse. Not human
extinction, but the loss of a global consciousness. Planetary brain
damage. Self inflicted.

When people are dismissive of shaggy apocalypse stories I think it
is to some degree because mostly we know this. We know there were a
lot less of us and life was really hard, and we can probably do that
again if we have to. So the idea of us literally wiping ourselves
into extinction seems far fetched.

But I think a lot of people stop there at skepticism and don't think
through the likelier failure scenarios. Especially the super
wealthy. I don't think they have a realistic notion of just exactly
how necessary a global network of trade among relatively stable
political entities is to projects like advanced gerontology, Moore's
Law or even just being a foodie. Every dream of the contemporary
elite will become fantasy when our apocalypse forces us to avoid
extinction the old fashioned way.

Maybe the kids will figure a way around this but I don't really hold
out a lot of hope. Lots of the things I grew up expecting the
population to generationally die out of, the sexism, the racism, the
militarism, they all have just waves of young enthusiasts using the
equalizing miracle of the open internet to find each other and
amplify their influence with no checks on their behavior or growth
that I can see.

I'm personally sort of ok in life right now. Things are pretty good
for me. But I can't imagine it will end well for me even in my own
lifetime and I genuinely can't think what kind of action on my part
could possibly make a difference in this. I guess I'll try to make
sure my nieces have some resources to call on if they get any good
ideas in a decade or two and in the meantime try not to worry?

It's hard to read basically essays in thermodynamic realism and not
want someone smarter than you to offer suggestions as to what to do
about it all that feel like they might plausibly have a positive
effect. Eat local I guess? Practice for when you won't have a
choice?
  

    
The Anthropocene concept is crucial. As a deep fan of the geosciences, I've
watched the concept burgeon since its creation. It felt like inside-baseball
stuff, something for geochronologists to wrangle over, and then the public
took it up and turned the Anthropocene into something much more important.
It puts our future into our hands in a wonderfully visceral and focused way.
Even as a minor science writer, I'm feeling like my work means more now. If
it encourages enough of us, in all walks of life, to up our games, then the
Anthropocene idea will do the world much good.
  

    
Once again I'm left with the feeling that this topic should be
renamed "State of the Developed World".
  

    
We have seen the emergence of online learning and watched it cycle
through to a dispirited realization of its real reach. It seems like
without clear vision this phenomenon directs a restless
self-improvement toward a couple of clear realms: - maybe with new
skill xxx I can get a better job at yyy corporation and/or - I'mna
learn me some new skills, start up one of them startups and cash out
via email from mcc_p:


with a big payday in next to no time. I wonder how the MOOC model
could be used to impart survival skills rather than simply engender
better compensated employees or naify would-be entrepreneurs
expecting to win some kind of VC lottery?  Is there some way to
direct this willingness to expend cognitive processing toward an end
that preferences utility to the race over of improved utility as a
stacks lackey? Perhaps there is something already happening in that
regard? Or, more broadly and saliently which few skills would be
optimally useful to distribute at large accross the population? Any
hope that these systems can change things for the better for their
stakeholders? or just for their founders and shareholders...
  

    
<121> William:

"I'm personally sort of ok in life right now. Things are pretty good
for me. But I can't imagine it will end well for me even in my own
lifetime and I genuinely can't think what kind of action on my part
could possibly make a difference in this. I guess I'll try to make
sure my nieces have some resources to call on if they get any good
ideas in a decade or two and in the meantime try not to worry?"

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/ John Robb

http://www.openthefuture.com/  Jamais Cascio @cascio

https://t.co/x4ih0X9WgH Cory Doctorow @doctorow

Pebbles in the pond William....think of cyberspace as a pond, think
of your life here on the sphere as making ripples in the sea of
people and places around you....cast your pebbles (thoughts,
actions, posts, love, heart and soul (fill in the blank on
'soul')into the sea...

I know it doesn't seem like much, but as Margaret Mead said: yada, 
yada,
(https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1071-never-doubt-that-a-small-group-of-though
tful-committed-citizens)

It's a ripple effect....gather local friends, makers,and encourage
resilient people and businesses in your town, village, whatever !

Once in awhile roll a boulder down a hill :) Tsunamis can sometimes
be good. But mostly it's pebbles and you don't see how far they 
extend, how they merge with others, ch, ch, ch changes a la
Blackstar, Mr. Bowie