Howard Rheingold: SmartMobs Revisited

more about “Howard Rheingold – Smartmobs Revisite…“, posted with vodpod

Howard Rheingold attends the Amsterdam MoMo Conference and revisits his prescient work SmartMobs.

Howard Rheingold: Sharing and Caring

On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 10:39 AM, Howard Rheingold <howard@rheingold.com> wrote:

I think you are exactly correct about these issues.

Howard Rheingold howard@rheingold.com http://twitter.com/hrheingold

http://www.rheingold.com http://www.smartmobs.com

http://vlog.rheingold.com

what it is —> is —>up to us

On May 17, 2009, at 5:48 AM, grant czerepak wrote:

Hi Howard,

I am almost finished your recommendation, Bastard Culture, and I can only reach one conclusion.

We should make it possible for everyone to set the price of their content as easy as possible.

If you want to share for free, just set the default to zero.  However, if you come up with a goody it should be just as easy to set a price you want.

If Google can make it possible to display and bid on advertising on the scale they have set up, it would be just as easy to make every piece of content on the web valuable monetarily.

What is an ad but a post?

The result would be a global circulation of capital that would make international free trade in information a major contributor to the stimulation of new economies.

Information does not want to be free, Howard.  Information wants to have the price the market will bear.  And you and I and everyone should see the value in sharing (advertising and brand identity) and caring (buying and selling for sustenance).

–
Grant Morgan Czerepak

Link:

• Bastard Culture

Marshall McLuhan: The Reversal of Media

I just read a great blog post by Michell Tripp.  She announced that she was offended that Guy Kawasaki revealed he had ghost twitterers and unfollowed him comparing him with Milli Vanilli.  But along with her thinking declaring herself a heretic as original being quite boring, I think she is missing a significant point.

The entire trend of the web and technology as a whole is democratization.  By democratization, I mean individuals taking control of technology personally.

After democratization there is the commons that Howard Rheingold talks about: Cooperation.  Individuals opening up to each other and sharing themselves.

However, what Guy is doing is not at all bad.  He is going one step further.  He is turning his cooperative persona into a business.  He has done the personal computation thing. He has done the personal cooperation thing.  Now, he is doing the personal corporation thing.

So, you may have unsubscribed to a corporation, seeking cooperation.  But Michelle’s comparison to Milli Vanilli is off.

Milli Vanilli started off as a corporation posing as personalization.  The incongruity offended everyone.

So, maybe in a sense it is Michelle.  Maybe she is just behind the curve a little.  She does not see the reversal of the phenomena that Marshall McLuhan talked about regarding media.

Personal computation; Personal cooperation; Personal corporation.  What’s next in line?

Jared Diamond: Societal Collapse

more about “Jared Diamond: System Collapse“, posted with vodpod

If you listen carefully to what Jared Diamond is saying in the TED video above, he is describing not a five part, but a six part power curve into a systemic singularity. This has been one of the core themes of discussion of this blog.  We all seem to be too close to our problems to see the commonality.  The interrogatives come into play here:

1. Goals
2. People
3. Functions
4. Forms
5. Times
6. Distances

Times and Distances being the basis on which the higher orders are built.

When we look at the recent economic “crisis” we see 300 trillion in currency circulating and roughly 1 trillion to 2 trillion shifting suddenly and unexpectedly.  We witnessed a systemic collapse, a singularity, a tipping point, a power curve, an exponential change, a phase transition or whatever label you want to call it.  These have been happening everywhere since Time and Distance began in different contexts and orders both in human and non-human systems.

What Jared Diamond and other alarmists are implying is that human society is now a system approaching its final singularity in this century on this planet.  We are implying that today we are experiencing a less than one percent crisis on a power curve into a singularity.  How many more iterations will the global system withstand?  Will humanity make the step into space successfully before we experience a global dark age?  How will the six or more factors in the power curve play out?

The truth to me appears to be that power curves whether they play out or not result in either a systemic climax or anti-climax followed by a systemic collapse.  Would it not be better if we experienced a systemic climax that led to us expanding into the solar system?

Systemic collapse seems to be the fashion of this generation.  Every generation looks with fascination at its own youth, maturition, reproduction and acceleration into mortality.  Some die early, some die late, but all die.  It is an irrevocable law of nature.  It is not about self-interest.  It is about what self-interest is defined as.

Related Posts:

Beyond the Singularity

Servitas and Libertas

Cooperation Studies: A New Story

Howard Rheingold, introduces a new story regarding how human systems are acting collectively. Cooperation has created entirely new systems with new motives, organization, processes, inventory, geography and tempos. And new technology is becoming a ever more powerful catalyst for cooperation as we are experiencing in smart mobs and wikinomics.

Here’s Howard’s own video on Blip.tv

Here’s Howard’s presentation at the TED 2005 Conference