Xark is a group blog with primary authors in Charleston, SC, and Nashville, Tenn. It dates back to June 2005.
A sister blog,xarkGirl, launched here in October 2008.
Dan makes a brilliant point in The Power of Pace: "...we tend to underestimate the significance of the pace of change and is effects on powerful institutions."
I’d take it even further: We underestimate the effects it has on us as individuals, and thus on every aspect culture and society. Tools have always changed civilizations, but 21st century tech isn’t about tectonic shifts like the invention of the steam engine. It’s about a thousand aftershocks that change the ground we walk on. It alters not only what we do, but who we are as human beings. Brain connections First, we have to understand how our minds affect our brains. Neuroscientist Michael Merzenich explains the full implication of how massively what we do changes how we think:
Our individual skills and abilities are very much shaped by our environment and that environment extends into our contemporary culture, the thing our brains are challenged with.
What we pay attention to physically alters our brains, determining which synaptic connections and neural pathways get stronger and which atrophy. Merzenich uses the example of young soccer players in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Their ability to head a soccer ball occurs at a rate higher than in populations of boys from a U.S. city. This is not because U.S. kids don’t have the same motor skills or brain power. Rather, they don’t pay as much attention to developing soccer skills. Their culture doesn't value those skills in the same way.
ALLENDE: From a conceptual basis, then, what year marks the beginning of the 21st century?
WANG: I don't know that I could pick one year that encompasses the entire shift. But I think we can definitely state the exact moment that the 20th century ended.
ALLENDE: Yes?
WANG: Nov. 4, 2008, and it ended sometime between the moment Barrack Obama stepped onto the stage at Grant Park and his first words to the nation as president-elect.
ALLENDE: So it was a political shift?
WANG: Not at all. It was a shift in possibility. The 20th century was predicated on material possibility, which included a mechanistic sense of weight and inevitability. A president like Obama wasn't supposed to be possible, because people believed the message that "the system" would never allow it. Electorates, agencies, corporations -- people understood them to be flawed, but people accepted the inhumane and inefficient authority of these institutions out of an ambient belief that high levels of friction, waste and corruption were inevitable in human society.
"Flu is a highly political issue, to put it mildly," Terry Jones wrote this morning, and that's what I'm going to talk about -- not the science of it. Because science is only part of what we'll be facing in the coming days.
Whether or not history records April 2009 as the genesis of a global pandemic, there are some things we can expect with near certainty: Rumors, reports, controversy, credibility gaps and fear. So please bear these things in mind and, if you agree with these ideas, help spread them. Because fear is a deadly virus, too, and just as networked media can help spread it, network media can also serve as an immune system response to fear IF WE KEEP OUR HEADS AND WORK TOGETHER.
The biggest public health event of 2005 was probably the non-mutation of bird flu, a hyper-lethal form of influenza scientists call H5N1. Sixty percent of the humans who caught this virus died, but the good news was, few people caught it.
There are times in the history of our nation when
our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to
the challenge of a present danger. In such moments, we are called upon
to move quickly and boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old
habits and rise, clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes.
Those who, for whatever reason, refuse to do their part must
either be persuaded to join the effort or asked to step aside. This is
such a moment.
“Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing
100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean
carbon-free sources within 10 years. This goal is achievable,
affordable and transformative. It represents a challenge to all
Americans – in every walk of life: to our political leaders,
entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers, and to every citizen.”
Well. There's a simple, visionary plan from a guy whose life has earned him the credibility and stature to propose it: Reverse the trend in carbon emissions, end our dependency on foreign oil (thereby changing our relationship to the Middle East) and kick start our economy with new industries, new products, new services, new public works projects.
We rallied around Kennedy's call to put a man on the moon in 10 years and to do other grand things, "because they are hard." Well, we've got a better reason to do this: Because it's going to save our sorry asses.
Sure, we'll have the usual people telling us this is just more stupid libtard stuff. And to put it bluntly, screw 'em. They've had their time, and they blew it.
Anyway, I've just started a group at MyBarackObama.com to encourage the explicit adoption of this challenge. I'll post the URL as soon as it gets processed.
I built this blog began in the summer of 2005 based on a couple of insistent thoughts:
The standard media/cultural categories for topics and discussions were entirely too sterile and limiting for the way I wanted to think and talk;
Based on my mode of working as a reporter (diving intensely into one topic after another) it was increasingly obvious to me that my learning in one area (quantum physics) influenced my thinking about another subject (microbiology), which provided insight into seemingly separate topics (mass media, sociology, politics, etc.).
Our thought? Maybe by involving people from multiple backgrounds in multiple topics, we'd have more interesting and productive discussions and insights. I based this on the notion that communites that grow up around "themed" blogs tend to evolve into monocultures. Ecosystem biology teaches us that a monoculture (tree farm) simply isn't as sustainable, healthy or as valuable as a naturally diverse ecosystem (rainforest).
These days I'm happy to observe how well those concepts fit into our developing understanding of knowledge and human intelligence in the networked world. From Peter Morville and his book Ambient Findability to Dave Weinberger and his Everything is Miscellaneous, the leading edge of the culture is rapidly incorporating radical ideas about the semantic structure of information -- quite literally, how the Web works better when we pattern our information systems on human-ness. The Web has rather haphazardly grown into an extension of ourselves. The next step (generically, The Semantic Web) may be very deliberately built as an extension of human consciousness.
So Ted Nelson's notion of Intertwingularity (1974) re-emerges in a new contest and reflects its futuristic light on the notion of Xarking.
Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged -- people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchaical, categorizable and sequential when then they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.
So Anthropology professor Michael Wesch begins to make sense instantly: Everything is connected. Nothing is separate.
I suspect it was always this way. Perhaps we saw it differently before because information and communication was so slow and precious and difficult before. It took improvements in maritime and navigational technology before we could "see" the Earth as round. Maybe it takes the explosion of networked media for us to "see" that everything is an expression of the one, that technology is evolution by non-biological means, that political, economic and social systems based on keeping us artificially separate and oppositional are wasteful relics.
The rest of the world doesn't think this way right now. We're still in the minority. But that could change.
Visual attentiveness is born of limited resources. “The basic problem
is that far more information lands on your eyes than you can possibly
analyze and still end up with a reasonable sized brain,” Dr. Wolfe
said. Hence, the brain has evolved mechanisms for combating data
overload, allowing large rivers of data to pass along optical and
cortical corridors almost entirely unassimilated, and peeling off
selected data for a close, careful view.
Which brings me to an observation that struck me whilst smoking pot back in the early 1980s: Pot-smokers don't forget what they're talking about in the middle of a sentence because pot makes them stupid, they forget because pot seems to take down the filters that keep sensory input at bay. They're distracted because it's almost impossible to concentrate when there's that much sensory noise.
Three words of infinite simplicity and value (via Dave Weinberger):
"Control doesn't scale."
Want to understand the convulsion that lies ahead of us? The transitions in economics, technology, management, politics, media and art that must be made if we're to benefit from the new tools? The divisions that animate our "culture war" bullshit sessions?
Three words: "Control doesn't scale."
Think that's a recipe for anarchy? Think again. Think it's unprecedented? It isn't. Think distributed control is a geektopian pipedream? I disagree.
Human beings have been giving up control in exchange for the expanding wisdom and benefits of freedom for as long as we've been a species, so there's plenty of historical precedent to instruct us on what course to follow. The unprecedented part is actually the rate of change, which means that the challenge in the scaling issue really lies in the feedback loops we imagine. We can't wait around and expect the old culture to vet new ideas for us. We'll have to invent the "new normal" on the fly, and we'll certainly screw that up a few times.
But this is the central issue. And the other thing history teaches is that the people who have control generally don't like giving it up. So that's our short-term future in a nutshell.
I’m not a particularly active dreamer, so when I get strong messages in
my sleep I tend to pay attention. On Saturday morning I woke up with an
odd idea in my head, which made me take notice. On Sunday I woke up
with more of it in place, as if my dreaming self had been installing
the idea in segments.
It’s a Singularity idea, although I don’t think it’s necessarily just a
post-Singularity idea. And here’s the way I think I’m supposed to
introduce it:
We understand cyberspace to be the virtual space between all the nodes
on all our computer networks. And I’ve defined my concept of Spookworld
as being everything that exists between the nodes of organized
deception.
This new concept is called The Construct, defined as everything that
exists between nodes of intent. And since I’m really introducing two
ideas here (The Construct and “nodes of intent”), I’d better start by
explaining the foundational idea: scaling humanity to the Law of
Accelerating Returns.
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