friday’s finds #292

by

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” —@kasparov63

“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”—Franklin Roosevelt via @lisarosa

“Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it.” —Simone Weil + “Only the good has depth that can be radical.” —Hannah Arendt via @monk51295

Read more

one person at a time

by

Are networks the new companies? Can our markets shift from capitalism to cooperativism? Can our institutions become networks? Can any of us escape our tribal roots and become network era citizens of the world?

We still lack good network models for organizing in society. Instead, many turn back to older, and outdated organizational models, like nationalism and tribalism, in an attempt to gain some stability. But our institutions and markets will fail to deliver in a network era society because they were never designed for one.

“It seems obvious to me that an individual value proposition for an organisation or nation state that makes a promise (which in itself is an outdated industrial concept) and fails to deliver will have to cope with every customer, citizen and employee holding them to account. In real time. From *within* their own organisations; not just by the hardening of their perimeters. The recognition that individual pathways transcend organisational boundaries is a good place to start.” —Robert Pye

Read more

a collective networked perspective

by

A network society needs networked models for organizing and for learning.

“More and more, the unit of comprehension is going to be group comprehension, where you simply have to rely on a team of others because you can’t understand it all yourself. There was a time, oh, I would say as recently as, certainly as the 18th century, when really smart people could aspire to having a fairly good understanding of just about everything … Well that’s the fragility, the hyper-fragility of civilisation right there. We could all be bounced back into the 19th century.” —Daniel Dennett

Cooperation is freely sharing with no expectation of direct compensation. It enables knowledge to flow freely. Large scale cooperation should be the dominant model in the network era, if not we may revert back to a tribal era.

Read more

only humans need apply – review

by

In Only Humans Need Apply, the authors identify five ways that people can adapt to automation and intelligent machines. They call it ‘stepping’. I have added in parentheses the main attributes I think are needed for each option.

  • Step-up: directing the machine-augmented world (creativity)
  • Step-in: using machines to augment work (deep thinking)
  • Step-aside: doing human work that machines are not suited for (empathy)
  • Step narrowly: specializing narrowly in a field too small for augmentation (passion)
  • Step forward: developing new augmentation systems (curiosity)

Read more

immunize for complexity

by

Have you heard the term VUCA? It comes from the 1990’s but is still in use to describe the complex and chaotic world of business, politics, and technology.

  • Volatility
  • Uncertainty
  • Complexity
  • Ambiguity

Peter Hinssen, in The Network Always Wins, describes the antidote to VUCA as VACINE.

  • Velocity
  • Agility
  • Creativity
  • Innovation
  • Network [Thinking]
  • Experimentation

Read more

chaos & cooperation

by

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. I am finishing three weeks in Europe so many of these posts reflect the interactions I had in Copenhagen, London, and Antwerp.

@umairh: “Fascism counts on you. Not on your support. But on your denial.”

@meacoopa: “every liberal democracy realizes early on there are some positions which must prima facie be aggressively excluded from public discourse … Fascism wriggles into democracies by insisting on the right to be heard, achieves critical mass, then dissolves the organs that installed it.”

@dabeard: “No science, no evidence, no truth, no democracy”

@SwiftonSecurity: “Trust me – modern information systems are a panopticon you are not qualified to defeat alone. Journalists are a very valuable resource here.”

@yonatanzunger: “Something you can do: Write down what happens in the news every day. Keeping a notebook helps remember, see trends, avoid gaslighting.”

Seth Godin: “Blogging is free. What matters is the meta-cognition of thinking about what you’re going to say…” via @dorait

Read more

we need faith in the future

by

This evening I will be presenting a session on Working in Perpetual Beta, at Implement Consulting in Copenhagen. I will be discussing the economic, technological, and communication shifts that are driving us to become a networked society. But as I mentioned in my last post, the Tribal form is posing a significant threat to the development of what David Ronfeldt calls a Quadriform society. This would be a society that includes Tribal, Institutional, and Market organizations, co-existing with dominant network organizations.

But at this time there are few positive network era organization examples to give inspiration to others. We are stuck between the Market and the Network era, with significant yearnings in certain sectors to go back to our insular Tribal ways. While the Tribal form may be comforting, its structure threatens the foundations of democracy.

Read more

tribal values are not democratic

by

David Ronfeldt, originator of the TIMN framework (Tribes + Institutions + Markets + Networks) has written a series of posts on what current political changes mean from this perspective.

“— From a TIMN perspective, the reasons for ‘American exceptionalism’ lie mainly in our approach to the T form. We have welcomed immigrants and found ways to enable people from all backgrounds and orientations to live together. Trumpish tribalism will undermine that basis of American exceptionalism, especially if he and his cohorts claim to be restoring it.

— TIMN implies that malignant tribalization will make our society far more vulnerable to information warfare. The ultimate goal of strategic information warfare at the societal level, whether waged by foreign or domestic actors, is to tribalize a society, the better to divide and conquer it.

— According to TIMN, America is moving into a new/next phase of social evolution — it’s evolving from a triform into a quadriform society. Just what the addition of a +N sector will mean is far from clear, and this is not the place to elaborate. But I do want to note that Trumpish tribalism, if it doesn’t abate, seems likely to imperil the prospects for getting to +N for years to come (though I can also see opportunities arising in some respects). ” —David Ronfeldt

Read more

bike friday

by

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. I am currently in Copenhagen, the most bicycle friendly city in the world. This edition is dedicated to one of my favourite activities.

Math myth-busting some of our worst urban planning misconceptions,  via @mobi_bikes

“A common political argument is that bike and transit riders should ‘pay their own way’. A study in Vancouver however suggested that for every dollar we individually spend on walking, society pays just 1 cent. For biking, it’s eight cents, and for bus-riding, $1.50. But for every personal dollar spent driving, society pays a whopping $9.20! Such math makes clear where the big subsidies are, without even starting to count the broader environmental, economic, spatial and quality-of-life consequences of our movement choices. The less people need to drive in our cities, the less we all pay, in more ways than one.”

Read more

mediated relatedness

by

I gave a presentation on ‘Understanding Media for Learner Engagement’ to the UNL Extension network yesterday. It was based on McLuhan’s laws of media which I have discussed many times here since 2004 (communication in evolution) and more recently (taking back our society).

One effect of the network era, and its pervasive digital connections, is that networks are replacing or subverting more traditional hierarchies. Three aspects of this effect are access to almost unlimited information, the ability for almost anyone to self-publish, and limitless opportunities for ridiculously easy group-forming.

Read more