Ninjaclectic

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

-Marshall McLuhan

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Saw a tweet from @epolitics today linking to an interesting Slate piece about Occupy Wall Street.

The article gets to the ‘why’ behind the narrative the “Occupy Wall Street lacks a coherent message” meme which is so ubiquitous:

Occupy Wall Street is not a movement without a message. It’s a movement that has wisely shunned the one-note, pre-chewed, simple-minded messaging required for cable television as it now exists. It’s a movement that feels no need to explain anything to the powers that be, although it is deftly changing the way we explain ourselves to one another.

Think, for just a moment, about the irony. We are the most media-saturated 24-hour-cable-soaked culture in the world, and yet around the country, on Facebook and at protests, people are holding up cardboard signs, the way protesters in ancient Sumeria might have done when demonstrating against a rise in the price of figs. And why is that? Because they very wisely don’t trust television cameras and microphones to get it right anymore. Because a media constructed around the illusion of false equivalencies, screaming pundits, and manufactured crises fails to capture who we are and what we value.

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This youtube vid pretty much gets to pretty much the same conclusion:

“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” -Einstein

I have been thinking some about problem solving…

Specifically what seems to be an ontological paradox at the heart of all problem solving: the tendency to become entangled in the existence of the problem we are trying to solve.

When trying to make a problem disappear, a certain mindset takes hold: “without me, this problem will not get solved,” “I must exist for this problem to no longer exist.”

As much as we get existentially wrapped up in the problems we are trying to solve, when they go away, so do we.

In a subtle but important way, our existence begins to depend on the existence of problems.

I find this Carl Jung quote on problems very useful…his framing seems to offer a solution to the paradox:

“All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble… They can never be solved, but only outgrown. This “outgrowing” proves on further investigation to require a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest appeared on the horizon and through this broadening of outlook the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms but faded when confronted with a new and stronger life urge.”

Looking at problem ‘solving’ from Jung’s perspective, one has to ask not how to logically solve a problem (I think we all do this every day), but how to grow one’s consciousness, possibly even how to grow one’s ontological freedom so that a problem does not begin to condition one’s being.

I think this very subtle dimension of problem solving often gets overlooked: how to avoid subconsciously wedding our own existence to the existence of the problems we imagine ourselves solving.

Final word goes to the Tao Te Ching:

Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.

Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn’t possess,
acts but doesn’t expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.

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X Guard

This:

This is what Haiti is both victim and symbol of—this new, rapacious stage of capitalism. A cannibal stage where, in order to power the explosion of the super-rich and the ultra-rich, middle classes are being forced to fail, working classes are being re-proletarianized, and the poorest are being pushed beyond the grim limits of subsistence, into a kind of sepulchral half-life, perfect targets for any “natural disaster” that just happens to wander by. It is, I suspect, not simply an accident of history that the island that gave us the plantation big bang that put our world on the road to this moment in the capitalist project would also be the first to warn us of this zombie stage of capitalism, where entire nations are being rendered through economic alchemy into not-quite alive. In the old days, a zombie was a figure whose life and work had been captured by magical means. Old zombies were expected to work around the clock with no relief. The new zombie cannot expect work of any kind—the new zombie just waits around to die.

Yochai Benkler’s new paper, “Networks of Power, Degrees of Freedom,” in the International Journal of Communication is available online.

Thought this part was particularly interesting:

When we speak, then, of networked society or networked economy, we are speaking primarily about an understanding of a particular historical moment when computer-mediated networks of information and communications have come (a) to play a particularly large role, and (b) to realign in fairly substantial ways the organization of production, power, and meaning making in contemporary society, relative to how similar aspects of social life were organized in the preceding century or earlier (Benkler, 2006; Castells, 1996, 2000). As with other moments experienced as major transformations, this moment too has generated its own utopias and dystopias, but more important, it has also produced plausible hopes and fears. The latter range from the creation of a much more thoroughly instantiated surveillance society, where everything we do is visible to the state and/or to one or more major corporate behemoths; to a cyber-terrorism Armageddon; to a loss of community and identity; and to a fragmentation of the public sphere. The “hopes” include an unleashing of new, higher-velocity innovation and increased growth, shared across a wide spectrum of political-theoretical traditions: first, a liberal-social democratic cluster of hopes loosely termed democratization—of the polity, or cultural production, or economic opportunity, or of government transparency and accountability; and second, a libertarian-anarchist cluster of radical individual freedom—in the case of the former, from the state, and in the case of the latter, from both the state and corporate power.

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Networks of Power, Degrees of Freedom

http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/viewFile/1093/551

Humberto Maturana:

“I think there is a fundamental alienation to which we are prone: the search for truth, the search for the absolute, the desire for ultimate stability through the denial of change; the desire that the world should be in the manner that satisfies our desires, and as such and with respect to that, stable. … But how do we act? We invent systems of consensual stability that we claim are absolute truths that must be protected against change because we deem their value to be universal. In their name we deny the individuality of others that live in a different consensus and, without allowing them to disagree, we submerge them in a systematic social abuse that we expect they should accept as legitimate. This is our most frequent alienation: our blindness about the world of relative truths that we create with others, and in which man is the absolute reference, and our immersion in an ideology that justifies this blindness.” (Maturana, 1985, p. 29; author’s original English text, unpublished.)

(via Poerksen’s End of Certainty)

Came across this interesting passage from Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks:

“Technology alone does not, however, determine social structure. The introduction of print in China and Korea did not induce the kind of profound religious and political reformation that followed the printed Bible and disputations in Europe. But technology is not irrelevant, either. Luther’s were not the first disputations nailed to a church door. Print, however, made it practically feasible for more than 300,000 copies of Luther’s publications to be circulated between 1517 and 1520 in a way that earlier disputations could not have been. Vernacular reading of the Bible became a feasible form of religious self-direction only when printing these Bibles and making them available to individual households became economically feasible, and not when all copyists were either monks or otherwise dependent on the church. Technology creates feasibility spaces for social practice. Some things become easier and cheaper, others harder and more expensive to do or to prevent under different technological conditions. The interaction between these technological-economic feasibility spaces, and the social responses to these changes–both in terms of institutional changes, like law and regulation, and in terms of changing social practices–define the qualities of a period. The way life is actually lived by people within a given set of interlocking technological, economic, institutional, and social practices is what makes a society attractive or unattractive, what renders its practices laudable or lamentable.”

This Benkler excerpt was in a comment thread of an also very interesting @techsoc blog post on how the recent protests in Tunisia and Egypt were organized.

@techsoc‘s numbered breakdown of the characteristics of the protests’ organization made a lot of sense, especially numbers 4 and 5:

4- The specific kind of social-media assisted movements are most likely to erupt in situations where there is already widespread dissent and a fairly-clear problem, i.e. a dictatorship, stolen elections or an authoritarian, corrupt regime like those of Egypt and Tunisia. In other words, social media is best at solving a societal-level prisoner’s dilemma in which there is lack of knowledge about the depth and breadth of the dissent due to censorship and repression and a collective-action barrier due to suppression of political organization. (I wrote more about this here)

5- Thus, social media probably has so far been best at triggering a “empire has no clothes” moment. The role such tools play in situations where there is polarization and strong vested-interests on multiple sides remains unclear. In polarized situations, this dynamic might increase polarization through the facilitation of the “dailyme” in which people filter out dissent from their exposure stream and retreat into epistemic enclosures of the like-minded.

Strong people don’t need strong leaders.
-Ella Baker

According to Wael Ghonim (@Ghonim), the Egyptian Google exec who is emerging as the most recognizable face of the resistance movement in Egypt, the activists who planned the Egyptian uprising “designed their movement to be anonymous and faceless, without a clear leader.”

In her piece on Wael Ghonim and the Egyptian uprising (which  touches on the role the net played in encouraging dissent), TechPresident’s Nancy Scola (@nancyscola) mentions this same theme of a leaderless movement, an idea she borrows from another well-known Google employee @JaredCohen:

It’s anecdotal, sure, and it’s easy to overextend the idea, but there’s a way of looking at what’s actually happening in Egypt as much as a “basically leaderless” movement, to borrow a phrase from State Department official-turned-Google official Jared Cohen, perhaps, as one that had a Facebook group as a leader-by-proxy until the human behind it emerged.

A while back a friend sent me an article called ‘An End to Movements’ by media theorist Douglas Rushkoff (@rushkoff).  According to Rushkoff the failure of mass movements in the US is their inability to connect us to each other and to reality…instead mass protest connects us to image, to myth, to abstraction:

In our current position, when disconnection from the real world is itself a cause for concern, movements only serve to disconnect us further from the actionable. They give us content for websites, language for our bumper stickers, and faces to put on our ideals. But they distract us from the matter at hand, and worse, turn our attention upward toward brand mythologies instead of immediately before us to the people and problems that need our time and energy. In the place of real connections to other people, we get the highly charged but ultimately fake connection to an image.

While Rushkoff’s article addresses mass movements in the US, I would like to hear Rushkoff’s take on the Egyptian protests, especially given the role that many-to-many communications channels appear to be playing in cultivating human-to-human connections on the ground in Egypt.

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From the  Tao Te Ching:

Revolution

When people have nothing more to lose,
Then revolution will result.

Do not take away their lands,
And do not destroy their livelihoods;
If your burden is not heavy then they will not shirk it.

The sage maintains himself but exacts no tribute,
Values himself but requires no honours;
He ignores abstraction and accepts substance.

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Thanks to @antheawatson from @neworganizing for the nice tweet!

Be sure to check out Anthea’s recent blog post – “In Search of A Humble, Charismatic Leader” – about an NOI-sponsored panel discussion (#noiegpyt) on leadership and organizing within the Egyptian revolution.