Just Be And You Are

The alternate reality of the internet becoming one with the offline world:

The Internet’s primary effect on how we think will only reveal itself when it affects the cultural milieu of thought, not just the behavior of individual users. The members of the Invisible College did not live to see the full flowering of the scientific method, and we will not live to see what use humanity makes of a medium for sharing that is cheap, instant, and global (both in the sense of ‘comes from everyone’ and ‘goes everywhere.’) We are, however, the people who are setting the earliest patterns for this medium. Our fate won’t matter much, but the norms we set will.

Full post by Clay Shirky here.

If we’re all oarsmen on a ship, who’s manning the sails?

The golden rule, both in economics and ethics, aims to find the balance with what we have today and we aim to have tomorrow. Knowing either can be very subjective; it’s defined relative to where you are in the world. It’s possible that boundaries exist for this very reason. To allow a society of individually capable members to construct a vision that balances the present and the future. To that effect, are boundaries actually working?

One of Drucker’s key qualitative metrics of success for an organization is each member having a general idea what the top three goals of the organization are. From the janitor to the middle manager to the CEO, being able to state 1, 2 and 3 without much effort. It could be the mission statement, but most often its much simpler; make money for stakeholders, increase speed of delivery, improve quality of care, educate X% of the population, and so on. That’s cohesiveness. The sails are set and the ship is moving.

The golden rule goes well beyond this in trying to optimize the decision making behind the three objectives. “Why?” do we set these goals in the first place and “How?” did we come to agree upon them. Put simply,

…if a society could choose a savings rate that maximized its own consumption, it would save nothing and consume everything. But that would leave future generations in a lurch as no capital would have been built to enhance future output and consumption. If, conversely, the current generation saved so much that future generations would in fact be better off than the current, then we are also violating “Golden Rule” as we are not doing unto ourselves what we have done for posterity. Thus, the “Golden Rule” condition is that the collectively-chosen or policy-imposed savings propensity is such that future generations can enjoy the same level of consumption per capita as the initial one.

When I studied economics, it was mathematically proven that in our current state, one generation (approx. a 25-year cohort) would have to maximize savings and reduce consumption to such an extreme point in order to create the foundation for an optimum savings rate for future generations. Implying our savings/consumption ratio in the past generations has been highly skewed to the lower end. Not much of a surprise.

I wonder now if we’re creating the psycho-social environment for that “sacrificial” generation to emerge. They certainly won’t view themselves this way and taking a step back and doing less will seem like the right thing to do. The trends towards reduced consumption didn’t just start with the recession. They’ve been building for a while, along with ethnic and gender equality, at least in some parts of the world. The global power struggle is still ongoing, but there’s definitely a trend towards the “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” philosophy. It’s certainly been repeated enough. Time to practice it. Daily.

John Robb’s writing has been on my mind a lot lately. He’s coming at ideas wearing many hats and most of them very different from mine. Hence, the initial attraction. I keep being pinged though by his idea of a Darknet, which I imagine he will have to rebrand. It sounds too ominous and few would appreciate the irony.

My understanding of resilient, networked tribes is that it’s a representation of hyper-localism. Similar to slow food or open-source networks that band around specific themes, these tribes would come together based on mutual needs and interests. What differentiates that from a special interest group? Not much actually, but it harks back to the original idea of a special interest group, before corporate donations and government lobbying made them a little too special for the rest of the public.

I’ve seen the hyper-local idea in many places, in fiction within For Us, The Living, Childhood’s End, and Speaker for the Dead, in the real world within spas & resorts, elderly homes and foreign communities in India, Hong Kong, Thailand and Singapore funded by the non-resident superrich. The latter is the closest the idea comes to reality.

Robb puts it best here:

My solution is to form a tribal layer. Resilient communities that are connected by a network platform (a darknet). A decentralized and democratic system that can provide you a better interface with the dominant global economic system than anything else I can think of. Not only would this tribe protect you from shocks and predation by this impersonal global system, it would provide you with the tools and community support necessary to radically improve how you and your family does across all measures of consequence. Of course, this may not be the right solution for you, but if it is…

The ancient Rome of Caesar, Crassus and Pompeius differ from modern America primarily on the education level and resources of the middle class. Power is slightly more distributed and in the event of downfall, there are more alternatives than diaspora and cross-pollination of cultures. Preservation of culture isn’t as important as preservation of information and human capital. Realizing this, people will band around similarities not on political viewpoints, but ideological ones. And what separates the ideologues of today from the Lockes, Kants, Humes and Marxists of the 19th century that spawned some of the most disturbing and historic wars of the 20th?

Technology. Specifically the communication networks developing over the internet. Transparency IS important and Robb poses a lot of questions on where to draw the line between privacy and security. While history teaches us where we went wrong, it also glaringly points out how much we thought we were right. So is the point to doubt our thinking now and stall? I don’t think so.

Evolution requires iteration and we’re simply at one point of the cycle. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for past mistakes. Just another reason to keep doing and risking, without worrying about making mistakes since they only help speed the cycle of iteration. This is what “Beta” really means. Google being the best example, of course.

What we can’t do is continue to do business as usual. It isn’t working. Next steps are tenuous and may not happen as a mass whole. Disbanding and communicating across shared networks is another version of a population coexisting. We’re experimenting with Life 2.0, or whatever version we’re in now based on historical viewpoint.

John Robb’s links alone would suffice in connecting you to the myriad future world. Here’s a recent link to predictions for the decade ahead by Kazys Varnelis. Reading it in entirety is worthwhile but draining. I left feeling potentially optimistic and assuredly pessimistic. Lots of “ifs”. Here are the highlights:

China will start slowing. The United States, EU, the Mideast and East Asia will all make up a low growth block, a slowly decaying imperium. India, together with parts of Africa and South America, will be on the rise. To be clear: the very worst thing that could happen is that we would see otherwise.

I disagree on most counts here. China’s manufacturing of inelastic goods is too entrenched for it to slow. East Asia is lower growth post-recession but they are also more recession-proof due to their “immateriality” (as mentioned in the post) and service good production. India and Africa are too rife with corruption and dependent on non-resident financial funding to thrive on their own. The reverse brain drain is helping them out, but for how long?

A greater divide will open up between three classes. At the top, the super-rich will continue controlling national policies and will have the luxury of living in late Roman splendor. A new “upper middle” class will emerge among those who were lucky enough to accumulate some serious cash during the glory days. Below that will come the masses, impossibly in debt from credit cards, college educations, medical bills and nursing home bills for their parents but unable to find jobs that can do anything to pull them out of the mire.

So much of this is self-created. The party of the 1990s and 2000s (again, credit goes to the author) and even the “progressive” consumer spending of the baby boomers has brought us to this point. Many went into debt willingly expecting a positive ROI in the end, unaware of the champagne glass tower their investments were built on. While trust in financial structures is all but gone, the mental shift from consumption to value still hasn’t occurred, primarily due to the “upper middle” class continuing with business as usual.

Some cities are simply doomed, but if we’re lucky, some leaders will turn to intelligent ways of dealing with this condition. To me, the idea of building the world’s largest urban farm in Detroit sounds smart. Look for some of these cities—Buffalo maybe?—to follow Berlin’s path and become some of the most interesting places to live in the country…

…These cities will not see real estate values increase greatly. The new classes populating them will not be rich, but rather will turn to a of new DIY bohemianism, cultivating gardens, joining with neighbors communally and building vibrant cultural scenes.

What struck me was the mention of Buffalo, where I lived for the past few years. Cost of living is certainly an attraction and if you’re not into global arbitrage, it’s a great option on the national scale (same language, same culture, no need to adopt/adapt). With dilapidated storefronts ready to be revamped, a large elderly AND student population and shoestring entrepreneurship on the rise, there’s a lot of promise. Fresh blood needs to pour in waves though because of the conservative, revisionist mentality that still holds these kinds of cities back.

The divisions in politics will grow. By the end of the decade, the polarization within countries will drive toward hyper-localism. Nonpartisan commissions will study the devolution of power to local governments in areas of education, individual rights (abortion will be illegal in many states, guns in many others), the environment, and so on. In many states gay rights will become accepted, in others, homosexuality may become illegal again.

Hyper-localism is happening right now in “green” communities, spa-like baby-boomer villages, and open-source networks (think small; journalism to blogosphere for example). In Gladwell terms, it’s 10-15 years away from achieving critical mass, and when it “tips”, the trending will drive away those who began it to either accumulate wealth quickly and estrange themselves from the crowds or go back to creating mini oligopoly-like systems of government to hold onto power. Early adoption will become a skill.

As Varnelis iterates several times cautiously, this is a fun exercise blogs like to get into. It does shape bias mindsets of readers to a certain degree so being involved signals the belief that your voice is your vote. The U.S., being beat up so often based on Rome-downfall analogies, trumps Rome on the spectrum of freedom of speech. The internet only enhances that freedom. Take a bath in information and you don’t know what you’ll come out with. Join the fun.

You showcase and you prepare to showcase. The latter builds character, strength, perseverance, confidence, yet it’s the former that’s judged, rewarded, critiqued and talked about. There’s an enormous amount of pressure to reach the end goal when the process is much more valuable. The end is a fabricated expectation that gets you to do the things that make you who you are. Usually people become the versions of themselves they want to be (or others want them to be) well before they reach their destination. The word, “perfectionist”, is an unfortunate result of people working to exact measures of success that, once achieved, leave them wanting for more. More they have to fabricate once again.

If you quit, make a mistake or get lost, it’s your recovery not your breakdown that matters. My piano teacher taught me to practice how to continue when I slipped, because she said, “what makes a master pianist is no one notices when he hiccups.”

A results-oriented culture tips the favor to those who are naturally meticulous and driven. A theme or mission or goal creates a dividing line between the haves and the have nots, defined relative to the what that society values. Can you make the cut? And if you can’t, why do you stay?

There’s a conflict of interest to note here. I love watching Dinner:Impossible, those “making-of” shows on Discovery and reading howstuffworks.com. I’m naturally a process guy and hence I’d prefer a world much more process-oriented. There is certainly self-interest involved in this post and that bias is echoed throughout the blog. Recognizing this, I make an effort to understand the reasoning behind result-orientation, though I usually come up lacking. The winners write history and it goes without saying that the more active, driven and goal-minded have primarily been the authors. The internet offers each one of us a voice to create the history we see in the moment, and this is mine.

Self-improvement tactics like posture correction, speech intonation and maintaining eye contact almost seem deceiving. On the receiving end, it looks like charm and confidence. Even those knowledgeable of such methods succumb to them.

They make a presentation more powerful, a marketing message more provocative, a simple introduction more meaningful.

Whether purposeful or natural, these techniques aren’t deceptive at all. They’re rooted in our cultural perception. We define the words, “charm” and “confidence”, in such an exact way that the components of each can be practiced and replicated. It’s a game like any other.

If someone tells you they’re a salesman or psychologist, you start looking for the telltale signs of their profession. If they don’t mention their line of work, they’re simply great conversationalists and listeners.

We’re actually allowing ourselves to be deceived. Priming and classical conditioning prove this easily. Non-verbal cues are extremely powerful. In conversation, we subconsciously note things like pupil dilation, forehead creases, body positioning, voice modulations and such. Used effectively, one person can guide another through a whole maze of experiences. It’s what successful storytellers do best.

Bottomline: Learning how to manipulate a conversation may seem like a deceiving exercise, but our cultural frame is set in a way to allow for that deception to occur. We’re simply playing a game within a boxed point of view. If it’s possible to master this game, taking a person at face value takes on a new light.

We have little choice but to do that though. Relationships, conversations and trust evolve over time. If the charm and confidence are a charade, it’ll be known. The initial interaction is only a beginning.

Settling is the key word. Once we have X number of things we are set, we’ve made it. The status quo: a family, a house with a backyard, a dog, cars, TVs, possessions, wealth. Do you actually need these things or have you convinced yourself that you want them?

What don’t you need that you think you want?

There are people who do want the societal status quo (or portions of it). There are those who rebel against it because, well, they’re rebels and they need something to be against. There are those who want to provide others the opportunity to achieve the status quo. Those that want to build something new. Those that want to sleepwalk through it all. Those that want to be engaged fully in everything. Those that want to communicate. Love. Cherish. Hate. Heal. Discover. Run. Escape. Observe. Just be.

Again, what do you want? There are lots of different modes of thinking. Exposing oneself to information is hard to beat.

Manliness is doing what’s necessary in the moment. As an overall disclaimer, using the word “manliness” depends very much on the culture. In America, a generally paternalistic culture, manliness is simply the word of choice to describe taking charge, responsibility, doing what’s necessary. In a maternalistic or female-driven culture, the word may be something else, but the essence still remains the same.

Manliness may be what’s necessary, but isn’t necessarily what’s right. When your buddies (or girlfriends) egg you on to chug a beer, it doesn’t make it right but it certainly is considered manly. When you take on a dare to ask a girl (or guy) out, again it may not be what’s right, but it fits the definition. Another example would be saving someone from danger while putting yourself in harm’s way. Same thing; not smart, but gutsy in most books.

That’s how I believe manliness is defined today, but it’s slowly taking on a different mold and starting to encompass more “right” scenarios. Men who stay home for example because their wife brings in a higher salary, a couple sharing housework, drinking responsibly (even joining AA), saying no to life-threatening activities like jumping off a 45-ft cliff into the water just for kicks. Does this make life a little boorish and manliness less, well, manly? Yes. But it balances the scales for men who aren’t guy’s guys. There are other ways to be manly now.

Doing what’s necessary changes with time anyway. As a culture adapts to take on a new image with advanced technology, workforce equality and acceptance of a diversity of lifestyles, so do the epithets used to “separate the men from the boys,” for lack of a better phrase. Stepping up to the plate depends completely on current context and where you are in the world.

Knowing what your culture requires can either empower you to become “manly”, motivate you to reshape the definition, or ignore it altogether and just be yourself.

Most brand names, celebrities, hot-shot companies work from an old model of selling content – here is who or what I am and I’m going to market myself to the point you either love or hate me. Paris Hilton comes to mind, maybe Geico, and how about Dove.

The new model is one of experience – I’m going to simulate a version of my reality for you to live and offer tons of testimonials so you either join the club or feel left out. Apple is first and foremost with iPod mania underway. I’d put Google in this category and one of my favorite actors, Daniel Day-Lewis.

Experience will certainly win out in the short-term and our sense of individual reality will be skewed proportionally to how much TV we imbibe. What’s next? How will the consumers’ hearts and wallets be won over? My guess is through connection. Generating a tie-in with the consumer’s life and the company’s agenda. The green community is definitely keying in on this.

The point? The core of day-to-day living remains relatively the same. We get more tools and neat stuff to tackle it. The process of convincing people to buy stuff continues to evolve. Decade to decade since the 50’s, we’ve been on a sine curve with “stability” on one end and “change” on the other. 50’s: stability, 60’s: change, 70’s: stability, 80’s: change, 90’s: stability, 00’s: change.

Money is still made trading and bartering. People still gossip. We try to understand ourselves and our place in the world. We look to the sky and dream. We build amazing things. We fight over those things, natural or otherwise. We try to get along. We seek laughter over pain, comfort over loss, safety over disconnect. And the cycle goes on and on and on.

My new favorite saying is “relative to what?” Works great for opinions disguised as facts or judgments disguised as questions.

Man, the food here sucks. – Relative to what?

They could do a better job at ______. – Relative to what?

What do you think of so and so? – Relative to what?

Do you think I look fat? – Relative to what?

We’re all absolutists. Our local environment becomes the world and it’s easy to forget the value of relativity. If we hang out with our family or local peer group most of the time, groupthink cocoons us even more. As Yogi Berra might say, “We don’t know what we don’t know.”

Another way I look at it is how we view tribes and villages in third-world countries. Their ideologies seem so backwards to us, even though that’s the only world they’ve ever known. Then, just a little bit of education has an overnight effect on women’s rights, child labor, and mortality in general. They go from an absolute context to one relative to the global spectrum.

Same goes for developed countries. The moment they start thinking they’ve made it (relative to what?) is the moment they stop evolving. Information exposure alone is so powerful.