News aggregator

• Stop Software Patents - Constant
• The LETSystem Design Manual
• Pope to Priests - get a blog: Message for the 44th World Communications Day, Benedict XVI
  "Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, videos, animated features, blogs, websites) which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization and catechesis."
• The 2009 Dialogue and Deliberation Practitioners Survey: What is the State of the Field? » About this Site
  an online survey of dialogue and deliberation practitioners conducted by sociologists Caroline Lee and Francesca Polletta during September and October 2009. This survey was conducted for the purpose of academic research on the deliberation field by the researchers. Please explore the site to find out more about the survey, to browse or download our findings, or to ask questions or comment on the survey.
• Guide to Creating Your Own Apps for Democracy | Apps for Democracy
  following guide has been provided in order to help governments and organizations around the world understand the ins and outs of how we’ve run Apps for Democracy contests over the past year+ and is structured in such a way that you’ll be able to start your own when the time comes.
• Grasshopr: The Grassroots Advocacy Platform.
  Grasshopr is a communications and grassroots advocacy platform for the 21st century. We’ve combined aspects of social networking with grassroots advocacy technology to empower individuals and groups – from official national organizations to informal local communities – to collaborate and get engaged in public policy at the federal, state and local level. And because advocacy on Grasshopr is authentic, elected officials can build sustainable connections with real constituents. Organizations of all types and sizes can use Grasshopr to know which districts their members reside and target messages, advocacy alerts, polls, and event advisories accordingly. In addition, they can use Grasshopr as a communication and collaboration tool to interact with their members and move beyond one-to-many blast emails.
• “Natural Savings”: A New Microsavings Product for Inflationary Environments. How to Save Forests with Savings for and by the Poor?
  Decentralized sustainable resource management in developing countries is important both from a poverty-reduction and an ecological viewpoint. At the same time, no financial instrument is available that enables small savings to be protected against the vagaries of monetary instabilities and inflation. This paper proposes a solution that would address all three issues simultaneously: an inflation-proof savings instrument, fully backed by the organic growth process of a local resource, which at the same time gives a market-based financial incentive to protect that natural resource. A specific example involving sustainable forestry plantations in the Third World is provided.
• The 3 Facebook Settings Every User Should Check Now
  "Those of you who edited your privacy settings prior to December's change have nothing to worry about - that is, assuming you elected to keep your personalized settings when prompted by Facebook's "transition tool." The tool, a dialog box explaining the changes, appeared at the top of Facebook homepages this past month with its own selection of recommended settings. Unfortunately, most Facebook users likely opted for the recommended settings without really understanding what they were agreeing to. If you did so, you may now be surprised to find that you inadvertently gave Facebook the right to publicize your private information including status updates, photos, and shared links. Want to change things back? Read on to find out how."
• The Great Transformation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Polanyi makes the distinction between markets as an auxiliary tool for ease of exchange of goods and Market Societies. Market Societies are those where markets are the paramount institution for the exchange of goods through price mechanisms. Polanyi argues that there are three general types of economic systems that existed before the rise of a society based on a free market economy: Redistributive, Reciprocity and Householding. Redistributive: Trade and production is focused to a central entity such as a tribal leader or feudal lord and then redistributed to members of their society. Reciprocity: The exchange of goods is based on reciprocal exchanges between social entities. On a macro level this would include the production of goods to gift to other groups. Householding: Economies where production is centered around individual household production. Family units produce food, textile goods, and tools for their own consumption.
• open money: techne
  a wealth-acknowledgment information system
• From Research Monographs to Story-Telling: New Forms of Communication in the Big Shift
  "We are moving from a world of deep analysis communicating explicit knowledge to a world of rich, personal narratives communicating tacit knowledge. " John Hagel on story telling.
• 438 – The Great Firewall of China « Strange Maps
• Opengazer: open-source gaze tracker for ordinary webcams
• Bandwidth Is Political
• The Distributist Review: Welcome to the Plutocracy
  With the Citizens United ruling, the court revealed the depth of its contempt for judicial restraint, original intent, and deference to the legislature. The ruling is nothing short of a coup, a fundamental change in the structure of the America polity. It will work not only to the defeat of democracy, but to the destruction of what's left of the small businessman. From this day forward, no one will hold office who does not have the approval of the corporations, no small business will exist save by their sufferance.

• The Daily Cardinal - OpenCourseWare brings both new benefits and questions to universities
  New technology for electronic course study is changing the way universities function.
• Podcasts can inform poor farmers - SciDev.Net
  Podcasts are helping people progress from subsistence farming in Zimbabwe, says Practical Action researcher Lawrence Gudza.
• Virt3c@Hull 2010 Speakers « VIRT3C
• RConversation: Google, China, and the future of freedom on the global Internet
  If executives at companies like Google conclude that it's in their self-interest to take a public stand against censorship and unlawful surveillance, and do things that contribute to freedom of information and openness, that is a good thing, whatever their deepest and truest motivations - which probably require years of psychoanalysis for even them to understand, at any rate.
• EuroITV 2010
  "web.sharing.tv.content" 9th-11th June 2010, Tampere, Finland
• Asking Citizens What They Want Out Of Copyright Law Is Really Just A 'Tactic To Confuse'? | Techdirt
  One of the more stunning realities that has become clear in watching the entertainment industry, as it responds to people who are actually impacted by ever more draconian copyright laws, is the fact that the industry doesn't view other positions as worth hearing at all. To the industry, copyright law has one purpose and one purpose only: to protect the big players in the content making business.
• Unlocking innovation | data.gov.uk
  government are opening up data for reuse. This site seeks to give a way into the wealth of government data and is under constant development. We want to work with you to make it better.
• Pirates Are The Music Industry’s Most Valuable Customers | TorrentFreak
  Once again the music industry has come out with disappointing results for physical music sales, which they blame entirely on file-sharing. What they failed to mention though, is that their findings show that music pirates are buying more digital music than the average music consumer. Since digital music is the future, pirates are the industry’s most valuable customers.
• Slyck News - IFPI Digital Report 2010 – The Sky is Falling, Again
  Although the situation appeared to be turning around for the music industry between 2006-2008, when the RIAA’s Mitch Bainwol declared that P2P piracy had been “contained”, things only seem to be getting worse – or at least that’s what the music industry wants us to believe.
• Top Ten Most Downloaded P2P File Sharing Clients
  To get a better view on how the peer-to-peer scene is evolving with respect to what file sharing software people prefer to download, we keep you posted weekly with the latest numbers. So here’s a list with last week's top ten most downloaded p2p file sharing programs
• Music Sales Increase In Sweden For First Time Since 2000 | TorrentFreak
  IFPI Sweden are celebrating after new statistics reveal that in 2009, music sales were up for the first time in nearly a decade. Digital sales have increased rapidly, with revenues from streaming services such as Spotify increasing impressively. Even physical CD sales showed a modest increase over the previous year.

Edward Berge

I’ve often quoted George Lakoff’s work (with Mark Johnson) in The Philosophy of the Flesh. He has a new article at the Huffington Post about returning to democracy after the recent events in the news. Read the entire piece, which is a call to action at this link. Here are some excerpts:

Which would you prefer, consumer choice or freedom? Extended coverage or freedom? Bending the cost curve or freedom?

This is exactly what Frank Luntz advised conservatives to say. They have repeated it and repeated it. Why has it worked to rally conservative populists against their interests? The most effective framing is more than mere language, more than spin or salesmanship. It has worked because conservatives really believe that the issue is freedom. It fits the conservative moral system. It fits how conservatives see the world.

The Democrats have helped the conservatives. Their pathetic attempt to make any deal to get 60 votes convinced even Massachusetts voters that government under the Democrats was corrupt and oppressive, not just inept, but immoral.

All political leaders argue that they are doing the right thing, not the wrong thing, that their policies are moral, not evil.

Conservatives understand this, liberals tend not to. Conservatives know a morality tale when they see it: Greedy Wall Street bankers, who have cost people their homes, their jobs, and their savings get billion-dollar bailouts from the government, while those honest hard-working people get nothing. Corruption. Oppression. A threat to freedom.

The conservatives are winning the framing wars again — by sticking to moral principles as conservatives see them, and communicating their view of morality effectively. In the 2008 election, Barack Obama ran a campaign based on his moral principles and communicated those principles as effectively as any candidate ever has.

But the Obama administration made a 180-degree turn, trading Obama’s 2008 moral principles for the deal-making of Rahm Emanuel and Tim Geithner, assuming it would be “pragmatic” to court corporations and move to the right, in the false hope of bipartisan support. A clear unified moral vision was replaced by long laundry lists of policy options that the public could not understand, and that made ordinary folks feel they were being bamboozled. And in many cases, they were.

Even the language was a disaster. Liberals thought that conservatives would like consumer choice. That’s why they used “public option.” As Harry Reid said, “It’s public and it’s an option — a public option.” But what did a conservative hear in the words “public option?” Say “public” and he hears “government.” “Option” is a policy-wonk term, from the language of bureaucracy. Say “public option” and the conservative hears “government bureaucracy.”

The results of deal-making in the name of pragmatism have been considerably immoral, as documented thoroughly by progressives like Drew Westen, Matt Taibbi, Robert Kuttner, and many others. Advice on what to do instead has not been lacking from other progressives. Advice is all over the blogs. Guy Saperstein is an excellent example.

We progressives are long on factual analysis, critique, suggestion — and ridicule. Rachel Maddow is one of the best, and her popularity is well-deserved. What’s more fun than ridiculing Tea Party-ers, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and the like, by showing the factual errors, the flaws in their logic, and the cruelty of their positions.

But we have been dealt a triple blow. A year of failed deal-making by our side, the Tea Party win in Massachusetts, and worst of all, the 5-4 Supreme Court decision to turn our democracy into a corporate plutocracy. This is serious.

Democrats still have the presidency and a majority in the House and Senate, but the momentum is on the conservative side. Their victories in the framing wars have inevitably led to a crucial electoral victory and to a Supreme Court death threat to democracy itself, framed as free speech.

Democrats have electoral power, but progressives have not created an effective movement to take advantage of that power.

Conservatives…don’t believe that government should serve public needs, that instead government should be privatized and shrunk to fit in a bathtub, as if governing would disappear with government. But governing doesn’t disappear when government shrinks; instead corporations come to govern your life — like HMO’s, oil companies, drug companies, agribusiness, and so on, with accountability only to maximizing profit, not to public needs.

• lg3d-wonderland: Project Wonderland
  Sun is pretty serious about wonderland for business and educational use.
• Play as Being Wiki - Play As Being Wiki
  They are group that is exploring the use of Virtual Worlds as phenomenological laboratories. Turns out virtual worlds are a pretty great environment for exploring the nature of being and reality (especially w/ the right community). We meet near a Zen monastary, where many avatars continue to gather daily to meditate.
• Friedrich Ochsenhorn - Play As Being Wiki
  Fred is intrigued by the idea of using virtual worlds as a richer set of metaphors for exploring the nature of Reality, Suchness, and Being. He is struggling to transcend the dualities that define our world, and hopes to occasionally experience the underlying unity of all-there-is. He is interested in helping to heal the the rifts between the sciences and religions, eastern and western traditions, and the Abrahamic faiths. He was also amazed to witness this seedling effort transform itself from a lab bench to a sacred space.
• Karl Polanyi's Concept of Embeddedness - Fred Block | Twine
  Polanyi's intent is to show how sharply this conceptualization differs from the reality of human societies throughout recorded human his tory. Prior to the nineteenth century, he insists, the human economy was always embedded in society.
• The Impact of Social Structure on Economic Outcomes - Mark Granovetter | Twine
  Social structure, especially in the form of social networks, affects economic outcomes for three main reasons. First, social networks affect the flow and the quality of information. Second, social networks are an important source of reward and punishment. Third, trust emerges, if it does, in the context of a social network.
• The Strength of Weak Ties - a Network Theory Revisited - Mark Granovetter | Twine
  In this chapter I review empirical studies directly testing the hypotheses of my paper "The Strength of Weak Ties" (hereafter "SWT") and work that elaborates those hypotheses theoretically or uses them to suggest new empirical research not discussed in my original formulation. Along the way, I will reconsider various aspects of the theoretical argument, attempt to plug some holes, and broaden its base.
• Rethinking Education as the Practice of Freedom: Paulo Freire and the Promise of Critical Pedagogy - Henry Giroux | Twine
  As the market-driven logic of neoliberal capitalism continues to devalue all aspects of the public good, one consequence has been that the educational concern with excellence has been removed from matters of equity, while the notion of schooling as a public good has largely been reduced to a private good.
• The Augmented Social Network - building identity and trust into the next-generation Internet | Twine
  Could the next generation of online communications strengthen civil society by better connecting people to others with whom they share affinities, so they can more effectively exchange information and self-organize? Could such a system help to revitalize democracy in the 21st century?
• PayPal Freezes Wikileaks Assets – The Command Line
  the timing of this story could not be worse as Wikileaks is in the midst of fund raising. It is unclear why PayPal has frozen out Wikileaks other than an implication by the person who submitted the story to Slashdot that PayPal’s owners or operators take issue with the web site. This is at least the second time PayPal has done this specifically to Wikileaks.
• Nina Paley v. Jaron Lanier – The Command Line
  Imagine my amazement to read Mike Masnick’s account of a radio debate between Nina and Jaron Lanier. I am disappointed, but not entirely surprised that Lanier was espousing much of the rhetoric of the recording industry in the face of the digital media/internet one-two punch. It sounds like Nina more than held her own.
• Amazon Makes DRM-Free E-Books Easier – The Command Line
  Several sources, including ReadWriteWeb, pushed out the news that Amazon was allowing some publishers and authors to opt out of DRM on the Kindle. Most are also sharing an update where the retail giant is claiming this was always possible, they are simply making the option easier.
• Cooperation and Experimental Evolution : Oscillator
  Cooperation and altruism are widespread in biology, from molecules and genes working together in a cell, to bacterial communities that require coordinated behavior to survive in a tough environment, to human relationships and societies. Our human cultural perspective (perhaps even more specifically our American cultural perspective, focused as it is on individuality, free markets, and the American Dream), however, treats cooperation as an outright anomaly that has to be explained away by science (or often, religion). If natural selection is about the "survival of the fittest" how can a selfless gene be rewarded evolutionarily, surviving to the next generation? If evolution is about individuals locked in a battle for resources, why would anyone share with a friend?

• state of the art criticism: subjective musings :: net critique by Geert Lovink
  The debate illustrated a few trends. Art criticism has entered the informal networked media age. There is no way back. As a consequence, the personal style has taken over from the formal language of theory. People who still discuss how to relate art criticism and new media in some near future missed the boat. We’re already there. As Jennifer Ellen pointed out, art criticism, be it online or in print, is failing to convince society of the relevance of the arts. “We fail to communicate the excitement and passion we have for culture.” Young people know so much about running shoes and cell phones, she observed. “Why not look at art as we look at cell phones?”
• BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Yahoo 'helped jail China writer'
  Reporters Without Borders said Yahoo's Hong Kong arm helped China link Shi Tao's e-mail account and computer to a message containing the information. The media watchdog accused Yahoo of becoming a "police informant" in order to further its business ambitions.
• Occupy the University: Reconsidering the Local
  As this article goes to publication, the University of California is erupting as a site of political conflict over the recent budget cuts, tuition increases and furloughs. A UC wide strike and walkout of faculty, staff and students has been called for on August 24th, 2009, the first day of instruction. It seems that the UC’s disregard for the health and wellbeing of their employees, as well as for the quality of education, has reached an intolerable point for many. Many academics have taken this opportunity to turn their research back to the university itself, which is exemplified by UC Berkeley’s colloquium event entitled “The University in Crisis: The Dismantling and Destruction of the University of California.”
• New Labour’s ‘urban renaissance’.
  Two recently published books – Anna Minton’s Ground Control and This is Not a Gateway’s Critical Cities – take stock of the accumulated effects of New Labour’s ‘urban renaissance’. In his double review, Owen Hatherley sees the tired politics of micro-resistance go head-to-head with some much needed materialist geography
• Dewey Music
  DeweyMusic is a new interface for Archive.org's wonderful public domain music library.You can listen to, download, remix, and share anything you see on this site legally and for free.
• Open kitchen clipart
  After the release of our Puerto Livre de Cuisine Kookboek, all the drawings and illustrations now are available as clipart on Open Clip Art Library.
• New Public Art: Redefining or Reconsidering Community-Based Art?
  Cruz and Lowe’s underlying debate – the redefinition of public art and artistic production. In their talk they proceed to discuss the ways in which artists can begin to reconfigure their practice, and thereby generate a new public art paradigm.
• Commentary: Are China's demands for Internet 'self-discipline' spreading to the West? | McClatchy
  China's annual "self discipline" award is for private sector censorship.
• art, science and tech.interactions: The Emergence of Open Design and Open Manufacturing from We-Magazine Volume 02
  Readers of this magazine will be familiar with the emergence and proliferation of a new form of value creation, peer production (as first defined by Yochai Benkler), in which communities of volunteers (but also in fact mostly paid creators and programmers once a project is successfull) create (open) content or (free) software, that is usable and accessible by everybody. Typical for peer production is that the producers create products (with both concepts being essentially misleading in this case!) in such a form that they form a commons which can be used and modified by others, who return it improved to the same common pool.
• Open Patents - P2P Foundation
  See: Global Innovation Commons
• P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » The tragedy of the distorted commons | Casa Robino
  "I call commons that are tied to capitalist growth distorted commons, where capital has successfully subordinated non-monetary values to its primary goal of accumulation. " // “Massimo De Angelis explains why capital’s commons will always be distorted – because they are based upon social injustice – and why we can only reclaim the commons from capital by constructing common interests.”
• Teaching Heterodox Economics | The Economics Network

• Biens Communs — Commons — Bens comuns — Bienes comunes » A2K4: Access to Knowledge and Human Rights Conference
  The Fourth Access to Knowledge Conference (A2K4) scheduled to take place at Yale Law School on February 12-13, 2010 is dedicated to a specialized theme: the intersection between access to knowledge and human rights.
• Biens Communs — Commons — Bens comuns — Bienes comunes » Intervention au FMSD pour une journée mondiale des biens communs
  Speach about the “day of commons” to be presented at the workshop “Commons knowledge” at of the French initiative of the WFSD.
• “BREIZH ENTROPY CONGRESS” sur la culture et les technologies Libres – du 15 au 17 avril à Rennes
  Des passionnés et des associations de la région de Rennes vous invitent à participer au premier Breizh Entropy Congress. Cet évènement inter-disciplinaire a pour thème la création et la culture libres.
• Biens Communs — Commons — Bens comuns — Bienes comunes » Bilan de la première édition de “Brest en biens communs”
  Du 10 au 16 octobre s’est tenue la première semaine “Brest en biens communs”. Après une ouverture réussie au Fourneau le 10 octobre, la semaine s’est poursuivie par des ateliers, débats, présentations organisées pour informer, discuter de ce mouvement qui des chercheurs aux enseignants, des personnes aux associations et collectivités publiques posent la question de biens numériques accessibles à tous.
• Cartes ouvertes au pays de Brest
  L’objectif de cette réunion est de recenser les projets autour d’Open Street Map sur le Pays de Brest, d’échanger sur les initiatives d’ores et déjà existantes, de faire émerger les envies de faire et de dialoguer sur les besoins autour de l’outil Chimère.
• How To Be a Woman in a Man’s World « emergent by design
  I felt a little karmically sick after leaving the comment because I don’t like that kind of name-dropping, but the point was just to illustrate that women don’t have to behave negatively in order to get noticed. A few days after that, I saw that social media researcher danah boyd also wrote a post in response to Shirky’s rant, titled whose voice do you hear? gender issues and success. It’s great to have a fellow female out there who can clearly articulate her thoughts and also expose her vulnerabilities without apologizing for it. She digs into the gender biases we face, and points out that female confidence and assertiveness often get labeled as bitchiness, but argues that there’s no point for us to try “outmanning the men.”
• Radio DNS - P2P Foundation
  a collaborative project to enable the convergence of radio broadcasting and IP-delivered services.
• Category:Agrifood - P2P Foundation
  This new section will cover p2p-oriented and relocalization trends in agriculture and food production.
• Sky Trust - P2P Foundation
  Proposed by Peter Barnes, described by David Bollier:
• Town-Green : Sustainable Urban Design and Town Planning
  Town-Green represents a group of dedicated 'green urbanists' who offer a comprehensive approach to sustainable community planning and urban design.

Edward Berge

Corporate capitalism had a huge victory today by buying the Supreme Court (now known as the Supreme Corp, the conservative majority, anyway), who ruled to remove all corporate political financing restrictions. Now corporations are free to literally buy whatever they want with unlimited funding of political ads. But this is how capitalism works, so should we be surprised? I’m really looking forward to seeing the “integral” spin on this one. That is, if they don’t just ignore it as irrelevant, which is more likely.

The argument in favor of this travesty is that corporations are “people” and thus have rights of free speech, which include freedom to contribute money to candidates of their choice. This will make an integral spin especially problematic, since corporations are in the lower quadrants and thus not “dominant monads,” i.e., people with consciousness. Thus the corp should not have the same rights. For those of you with memberships to IL etc. please forward such integral spin here for our consideration.

Fight back at www.savedemocracy.net

Here’s another link to voice your opposition: http://my.barackobama.com/FairElections

This led to further discussion of the Gaia Integral Postmetaphysical Pod in the Integral Capitalism thread. Here are a few excerpts:

Nickeson said:

Edward, do you think Harris in his essay Thoughts towards in integral political economy was in any way influenced by Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844? It has been 40 years since I read that little volume, but I recognized some distinct parallels. If I recall correctly he had an idealized semi-utopian vision there which was dedicated toward the humanistic, self-realization of the individual worker and thus the society at large. It was not too much different than the visions of the early anarchist thinkers. The problem that all of them have is the assumption of a highly advanced, fully industrialized, wealthy political economy as their basis. Later it became axiomatic for Marx that the worker’s revolution had to take place in a nation of advanced industrialization or else the sought for redistribution of wealth would just be a redistribution of poverty that would have a “trickle up” effect from the lumpen into the central government.

I said:

Harris is obviously influenced by Marx, and from knowing Ray he is also influenced by those early anacharists. And yet he is integrally informed so he adds to those theories while not being strictly limited to them.

And yes, all of this revolution of the masses does presuppose a relatively ample economic surplus brought on by the industrial revolution. Yet this revolution is not communist but rather democratic. It’s a fight to introduce democracy not only into politics but into business. Capitalism is not a democratic economic system and is not by necessity wed to our democratic political system, although we can see how it is corrupting that political system by such as the recent Supreme Corp ruling. And capitalism is not by necessity wed to the industrial revolution but one could argue it’s a holdover of feudal aristocratic governance applied to the new forms of market economy that emerged with industrialization. As I said in the spiritual commodity thread, using Wilber using Marx, the economic base advanced much more quickly than the societal worldview, with the latter trying to impose its view on the new economic structure.

Perhaps it’s time for the view to catch up to the economic base? We know that democratic businesses, like credit unions for example, are a very competitive and viable alternative to for profit, capitalistic banks. Same with worker-owned businesses. And these alternatives also create surplus that does not have to go to rugged individualistic shareholders as profit but can be redistributed to members and communities for more beneficial social purposes. Harris ideas about distributing such surplus on each level under the prime directive seem integrally apropos here. All of which seems more suitable expressions of democracy wedded to markets than the aristocratic capitalism currently in power.

• News analysis - The open-source hydrogen car set to change the industry - The Ecologist
  Cars are evil, right? But what if they ran on hydrogen, did 300 miles per gallon, were leased rather than owned, and were produced under an open source business model...
• ACTA: Entre les mailles du droit de l'Union européenne | La Quadrature du Net
• The Ruse of the Creative Class | The American Prospect
• YouTube - Collective Intelligence - The Vision
• DorfWiki: VideoBridge/PatternLanguage/Matrix by Franz Nahrada
  New learning environments, that are based on blending with traditional patterns: What will they look like? How will they appear spatially?
• Intellectual Property Watch » Blog Archive » United States Moves To Promote Internet Freedom, ‘Knowledge Commons’
• Tikva Morowati__Interventions For the Overly Connected
  researching other "Social Connectors" and their hyper-connected usage, and applying my research towards helping people who were dealing with stresses that came with their online lifestyles. "
• Protest Culture -- Ad Hoc vs Institutional, and What it Means (Event Video/Audio) | Berkman Center
  clay shirky in group discussion
• Social Technographics: Conversationalists get onto the ladder
  Two and a half years ago, Charlene Li and I introduced Social Technographics, a way to analyze your market's social technology behavior. Social Technographics was carefully constructed, not as a segmentation, but as a profile (that is, the groups overlap). That's because the actual data told me that people participate in multiple behaviors, and not everyone at a higher level on the ladder actually does everything in the lower rungs.
• All Things Web 2.0 - Home
• When Push comes To Pull: The New Economy and Culture of Networking Technology | Cooperation Commons
• Free Project Based Learning Resources That Will Place Students At The Center Of Learning « 21 st Century Educational Technology and Learning
  I am an advocate for Project Based Learning in the classroom. True Project Based Learning is a process that puts the student at the center of their learning. In this post I wish to share with you some of the top sites I found on the internet that promote true PBL.
• If Your Kids Are Awake, They’re Probably Online - NYTimes.com
  "The average young American now spends practically every waking minute — except for the time in school — using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device, according to a new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation. "
• Evolution - P2P Foundation

There is a phase of consciousness that is called Flow and every real mystic probably knows it well. It is the basis for my own idiosyncratic sense of mysticism, the sense of wholeness and integral and a corresponding sense of liberty. The last two paragraphs of the previous post are significant in the matter. Circumstances today reminded me of a short essay I wrote for an Integral related forum four years ago that needed a little update and a slightly different application. So I am posting it to Integral Liberties sort of as a node of awareness from which I can circle around. The following is the essentials of that essay.

I first encountered the Flow when I was 15 or 16 in a non-sexual spontaneous coming of age situation. I believe it was Loren Eiseley who once wrote that in a rite of passage, whether ritualized or not, “the boy becomes a man and the man sees god,” which would have been true if I had been habituated to myth. I was not, but nonetheless, the world changed in every way that could be perceived, and it has continued to do so with every subsequent experience. The texture of the air changes, as does the color of it all as well as the weight and dimensions of my body, the nature of sound and the velocity of time. And everything moves together with such precision that if I could distinguish any seams in the environment they were totally without significance. Those are just a fraction of the effects. Energy rises from just below the hips, firing up through the guts in surprisingly cool but dense flames that stretch the body, explode in the chest and free the lungs of all constriction so the next breath has infinite capacity. And those are just a fraction…

This is the place from where a shaman finds the shaman’s song. All of the current writers observing the shaman like to quote Knud Rasmussens interviews with Aua, the Eskimo Shaman. All of these shamanic overview authors pay Aua homage and weigh in with his story of how he learned his song. He seemed to have been in some sort of extremis one day when he saw a little shore bird called an aua, whereupon the man fell into an ecstatic rapture and spontaneously composed his power song. I could, as they say, relate to that.

Years ago as a teenage hobo I was hitchhiking west after visiting a friend on the Rosebud Rez in South Dakota. The scene was a backwater crossroads in the middle of northern Nebraska, in the middle of October, in the middle of the afternoon when the heat was unseasonable but had no sharp summer edges and it eased the time by as if it were wide and deep. It was a recently harvested landscape with stubbled ocher horizon hills and yellow cottonwoods mid-distance. There I pulled myself up into the cab of an 18–wheeler and settled in. I had just scored a ride almost all the way home. The driver waited for some traffic to pass, dropped in both boxes and bore down on the fuel. The trailer was overloaded so the tractor fell back hard on the rear axles, roared and quaked, hammered against inertia and surged out onto the blacktop. All that power trying to propel all that steel vibrated up from the ground through me and out into the entropic universe and I went into an ecstatic trance. It was not the first time, mystic that I was even then. But it had one memorable feature, for rising with that power came a song that was being composed down around my root chakra. It had no coherent words, but it was full of words that I had never heard before. They sounded through my heart and I let them go just short of my tongue. I had just enough presence of mind to keep them to myself lest I raise some alarm in the driver. That song rolled along with me for 30 or 40 miles and then faded late into the afternoon.

I am a sensualist and I relish living deep in the world because to it I trust my life. When a nondual experience of this kind arises out of an intense earthly situation I trust it is giving me the consciousness of the most profound truth of my body and capacity and the ability to translate it simultaneously into the harmonization of time, place, action and identity. I know I have forgotten any number of these events but I can list a few: working 30 hours straight on a sculpture, losing myself in composing poetry, walking into a badly storm torn sunset, stalking elk, running D.C. streets at dawn, realizing a guiding life-long truth—age 17–-hitchhiking east out of Flagstaff, realizing the liberating value of my total insignificance while driving down a highway in southeast Wyoming, waiting for a gunfight, doing shamanic style energy healing that worked, racing horses, racing cars, driving a much too tiny boat in profoundly bad water when one second finds me in abject terror of a standing wave I can’t see around, I can’t see over because I can see nothing but all that thick brown water and dirty white foam curling back down upon me. But the next second I am assured that I am immortal, that mistakes are impossible. I can read every molecule of water in that wave, time stands still and allows me to do everything I need to do with no effort at all…the world changes and all that happened three paragraphs above happens again.

The other things I trust explicitly are dreams. I have awakened with dream images perfect before my eyes and in full, ecstatic, non-dual awareness. In fact two such dreams and the awareness that arose from them prompted me to spend about five years (part time) trying to create a universal unified field theory not unlike Ken Wilber’s attempts to do so with AQAL. I quit that fool’s errand when I realized with almost absolute certainty that the image I thought I was drawing of the universe was actually the image of my psyche. I suspect the same of Wilber’s work.

I am a sensualist and not a thinker, nor a spiritualistic thinker. I do not hold with anything that has to do with any aspect of what could be called Spirit or The Divine or any of the other 10,000 names. I have no superstitions about these nondual suppositions. But I do have a theory. I am sure it is not unique and doubt if any of these conclusions are new and original and I have no authority on which to base them. But they have everything to do with integral, not the academic philosophical wannabe Integral®, but that which is material.

Until my participation on that particular internet forum compelled me to research Wilberismo and correlated tangents I had not read much except poetry for years. When I first heard there was a need for an integral philosophy and Mr. Wilber was slaving away, multi-media, to prove there was such a thing, I had to wonder why. Why develop a theory as to everything being integrated when anyone with half a set of senses and a shred of instinct left on how to use them could know for certain that integral reality is plainly, manifestly, there to be known and navigated? It exists on the leading edge of now when all that is within one’s sphere manifests into perception; when everything including the perceiver cascades into a spherical, dimensionless veil of the senses as a perfectly integrated pattern; an instantaneous, seamless legacy of 13.7 billion years (give or take) of uninterrupted cause/effect-cause. That this pattern is tumultuously dynamic does not change the fact that it has total formational integrity. I will call it manifest non-duality in the sense that the non-dual is not a static state but an emergent event. Like Whitehead said, everything is an event. And even though all the events are seamlessly bound and at once both cause and effect, this does not mean there is anything predetermined or intelligently designed in what I have perceived. (Both of those superstitions, I believe, are artifacts from dualistic thought and the desperate safety seeking of anthropomorphic projection.) There is an accidental and random quality to the patterns like the accidental and random quality of colored shards of glass tumbling past the mirrors and prisms of a kaleidoscope.

When an event cuts one loose from habituated conditioning that leads into a disorienting state, if the instincts for life outweigh the fear of living, the senses and instincts haul the consciousness into a much more complete alignment along the dimensionless front edge of now, manifestation and life. This is the only place I have found that is actual and whole, where integration is so complete that it is no longer of conscious consideration. Then the universe changes because one is no longer drawing back to observe it, but is pegged balanced and upright in one’s tiny, and totally insignificant vessel. Integral.

Edward Berge

There’s an interesting discussion on the above topic in a thread by that name at Gaia’s Integral Postmetaphysical Spirituality pod. Craig Hamilton’s conferences came up in this regard. Someone mentioned that while they didn’t approve of his marketing methodology they nonetheless would participate because of some of the presenters. I replied:

This goes to my point above, that sometimes we have to give up some valuable stuff to effect change. Yes, Hamilton brings together some key voices that might make a difference. But those voices, by participating in his conference, offer tacit approval to his commodified method. And many folks then also assume this is the proper way to proceed in the spiritual marketplace. I’m even wondering if those valuable presenters like Swimm, by participating, aren’t subconsciously influenced by such participation and such methods come to be seen as a necessary evil within a commodified culture, that we have to use such measures to reach people in the first place but once we do then we’ll change methodology. Unfortunately in the process we get corrupted and the methodology doesn’t change.

That’s why I boycott I-I and things like the Integral Conference. Yes, there are many people that go to these that challenge Wilber, even on issues such as this commodification. But the conference itself is promoted with such methods and financially supports I-I, which supports such methods. And by attending and participating we tacitly support such measures, measures that will continue because they are receiving support, even if one talks opposition.

What’s the alternative? Those that oppose such methods might form their own integral organization and conference and market themselves in a different way. But I-I has done all the work, it’s just easier to go to theirs, we don’t have the resources, maybe we can change it from within etc etc. To walk our talk is the hardest challenge imaginable. And we all know this has to be done because I-I is not going to change in this way, ever, even after Wilber is gone.

Edward Berge

There’s a new discussion on the above topic at the IPS pod at Gaia. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:

This weeks Integral Life audio offering is one of the more interesting ones lately.

The official statement here seems to be: We have to live with the Capitalist system right now, yes we know it has got failures and shortcomings, but if we try hard and meditate daily, we can improve the system into green and beyond. All we need is faith and patience.

But what if this is not true? What if the “small problems” of capitalism are sort of ‘built in’ the system and just won’t go away? What if a green capitalism won’t change a thing about the inequalities and injustice of the world?

Edward Berge

The December edition is now online at this link. It contains a special section about measuring developmental levels. One article is entitled “Do heart and ego develop through hierarchical integration?” Michael Baseches, in “A personal counterpoint to Stein and Heikkinen,” says:

“I begin to address the more pragmatic aspects of Stein and Heikkinen’s argument, ‘If we want to see an integral and developmental worldview gain a real institutional foothold—radically reforming business, government, education, therapy, and our own sense of human potentials—we need to get serious about our quality control standards’ (p. 19). Whether or not I want to see that happen would depend on how such a world-view might gain a foothold. Because I view as dangerous the idea that any kind of empirical validation of measures could substitute for the philosophical arguments on behalf of the value of developmental phenomena, the quote above raises for me the specter of people who neither understand nor are convinced by the arguments beginning to systematically evaluate other people, even choosing who to hire or who to promote in the workplace, based on standardized measures of developmental phenomena. I find this terrifying. It suggests a tyranny of measures that replaces respectful discourse and collective adaptation as the social context in which development does or doesn’t occur. It suggests those with an integral and developmental world view becoming an elite that would use social institutions to ideologically and socio-politically dominate the ‘developmentally inferior.’”

And Theo Dawson emphasizes the need to use such testing results responsibly, as “few consumers of tests are aware of their inherent limitations.” Finally, my 2004 warning in “Giving guns to children” is perhaps finally relevant? Although I haven’t as yet seen anyone address the need to evaluate those business leaders to whom they sell these tests, the latter of which are the ones that use such measures for hiring, promotion etc. without such awareness.

Edward Berge

There’s an interesting discussion on the above topic going on at the Integral Post-Metaphysical Spirituality pod at Gaia. From the first post:

kela: On the question of magic and myth, I think that perennialism and integralism are also steeped in both. The whole conception of “transformation,” for example, implies, in my opinion, a myth and a magical causal conception. I’m not sure how we could have either religion, or “spirituality,” without some degree of both.

Edward Berge

Obama administration files to dismiss case against John Yoo

Jonathan Turley, lawyer and Law Professor, makes a compelling case that the Obama administration is using the same arguments used by lawyers and jurists of the Third Reich on trial at Nuremberg. Arguments that the world, and the US, has heretofore found unacceptable. And all the more ironic since Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. So this is the change we can believe in?