Democracy

Democracy

a convenience truth

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Probably one of the greatest barriers to positive change is convenience. For example, we know that automobiles contribute significantly to pollution, obesity, and greenhouse gases. However, most of us own at least one car and many of us own more than one. Why? Cars are extremely convenient. Having lived car-free in a rural North American town for the past three years I can attest to how inconvenient it is to not own a car. We are even thinking of buying a car since our car share program shut down this Winter.

Drugs, as in pharmaceuticals, are also convenient. It’s easy to take antibiotics, just in case. Pain relief is only a tablet away. As a result we are so over-prescribed that: “Antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today”, according to the World Health Organization.

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gamers, artists, and citizens

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Gamers

Learning is the new literacy. Personal computers are just one example. We buy new ones every few years. Operating systems change. Programs change, get replaced, or become obsolete. But we often continue with the same habits until something goes wrong. Few of us do the equivalent of ‘looking under the hood’. We learn enough to get our work done, but often do not take time to understand the underlying systems and logic.

By not being active learners we lose the agility to react quickly to changing situations. We have to take the time to keep learning. It’s an effort that too many of us avoid. When was the last time you learned a new computer program? How many books do you read? When did you try to master a new skill? These are things we need to make a priority. If not, we risk becoming obsolete before our time. Aiming for retirement is not a bad thing, but what happens when it is forced on us and we are not ready?

“Statistics Canada estimates 158,400 people aged 55 to 64 were handed permanent layoffs in 2015. Is there any hope of a comfortable retirement for those folks?” – CBC News

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populism is the first refuge of a scoundrel

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Why is populism so darned popular in many parts of the world today?

In stark terms, Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist, has defined populism as “an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite.'” … “Populism presents a Manichean outlook, in which there are only friends and foes,” Mudde has written. —Aaron Wherry, CBC 2017-02-26

As we shift from a print and market dominated economy to a digitally networked economy, much of what we take for granted about how society should work goes out the window. Our institutions were not designed for a network era. At the same time, with social media, we all have the ability to participate in global conversations. Many of us want to be heard, but few of us listen. We have no history of engaging in meaningful global conversations on a mass scale and few examples to guide us. In this networked world we are mostly illiterate, digital natives and immigrants alike.

Network literacy is needed everywhere but most of us do not have even the basic skills to sift through the fake/alternate news that flows by each day. Disciplines like personal knowledge mastery are no longer a luxury. We all need trusted knowledge networks to help us make sense of the shifting world. We have to build these soon, before we drown in an ocean of manipulated data.

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one person at a time

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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

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a collective networked perspective

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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.

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tribal values are not democratic

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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

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the secret of freedom

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“Le secret de la liberté est d’éclairer les hommes, comme celui de la tyrannie et de les retenir dans l’ignorance.” —Maximilien Robespierre (1758 – 1794)
Translation: “The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.”

Is there more ‘fake news’ today than in previous decades, especially before the web? I think there is probably more only because there are more sources of information. It used to be that you bought a newspaper to get some depth of reporting, complete with advertisements, or watched television to get ‘up-to-the-minute’ news. Of course it was all edited and curated. As time goes on we find out many of the truths we were told in the past were ‘well-massaged’ by the power elites. But if we are in a post-truth moment then we need to understand the tools we have at hand to deal with falsehoods.

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taking back our society

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Monopolies & the Human Condition

“When monopolies succeed, the people fail …”, Henry Demarest Lloyd wrote in March 1881, denouncing the practices of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. Almost a century later, John Kenneth Galbraith warned of the dangers of blindly having faith in our capital market system and the organizations and institutions that support it.

“The greater danger is in the subordination of belief to the needs of the modern industrial system … These are that technology is always good; that economic growth is always good; that firms must always expand; that consumption of goods is the principal source of happiness; that idleness is wicked; and that nothing should interfere with the priority we accord to technology, growth, and increased consumption.” —The Atlantic 1967-06-01

Both Demarest Lloyd and Galbraith saw the flaws in the capitalist system, especially the tendency to think of people as mere replaceable human capital. In 1994, Peter Drucker discussed the rise of the knowledge worker, a term Drucker coined in 1959. This had the potential to shift the focus of our production systems from capital to labour. But Drucker saw that the shift to a society of knowledge workers would not be easy, as we are still struggling with it today.

“It is also the first society in which not everybody does the same work, as was the case when the huge majority were farmers or, as seemed likely only forty or fifty years ago, were going to be machine operators.

This is far more than a social change. It is a change in the human condition.” —The Atlantic 1994-11-01

Today, we deal with some of the same struggles against monopolies as Demarest Lloyd, but we are several billion more people, facing climate change and environmental degradation. At the same time, our democracies are under attack from the abuse of surveillance technologies by corporations and governments.

The political tide is shifting to embrace tribalism. The change in the human condition identified by Drucker requires new thinking and putting new models in practice. Our existing institutions do not offer these. Our markets, especially our labour markets, are not designed for this change in the human condition. Automation, coupled with non-routine work as the norm, fundamentally changes our concepts of labour and earning a living.

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countering fascist thinking

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Jason Kottke reviewed an article by the philosopher Umberto Eco and summarized it as 14 features of eternal fascism.

“These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.” —Umberto Eco

These 14 points can be used as a way to ensure that each one of us does not tend toward fascism. As a core part of my work is the democratization of work, fascism is the opposite of what I am trying to achieve.

“Fascism is a form of radical authoritarian nationalism … Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete, and they regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties. Such a state is led by a strong leader—such as a dictator and a martial government composed of the members of the governing fascist party—to forge national unity and maintain a stable and orderly society.” —Wikipedia

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our post-truth moment

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post-truth (adjective) Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. —Oxford Dictionaries

Social media extend emotion, obsolesce the linearity and logic of print, retrieve oral speech, and when pushed to their limit, reverse into constant outrage. This is the post-truth era. Our society has had a couple of decades to adapt to a shift that has been coming since the telegraph turned words into electrical pulses, but has increased its velocity with the advent of the web. This communications shift to the network era will continue to accelerate. We are the media, and the media are us.

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