Author: Richard

“You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
But you may be able to fool enough of the people enough of the time to get what you want.
(According to The Illinois Historic Preservation Agency there is no evidence that Abraham Lincoln ever made this famous quote, but heh.)

Today I started writing a piece on the relationship between luck and success. Looking through some of my earlier posts on this theme, I found this that I wrote over three years ago that I thought was worth repeating in full:
“More than luck
Early last year I posted a short piece, “Mostly Luck”, where I drew attention to an interview in Edge with Nassim Taleb and his view that the key factor in whether someone became a millionaire or not was luck. I was reminded of that post by another interview in Edge with the social pyschologist, Philip Zimbardo where he says:
“When you grow up in a privileged environment you want to take credit for the success you see all around, so you become a dispositionalist. You look for character, genes, or family legacy to explain things, because you want to say your father did good things, you did good things, and your kid will do good things. Curiously, if you grow up poor you tend to emphasize external situational factors when trying to understand unusual behavior. When you look around and you see that your father’s not working, and you have friends who are selling drugs or their sisters in prostitution, you dont want to say its because theres something inside them that makes them do it, because then theres a sense in which its in your line. Psychologists and social scientists that focus on situations more often than not come from relatively poor, immigrant backgrounds. That’s where I came from.”
I was going to leave it at that, but writing on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, what he has to say in the rest of the interview seemed too important to neglect. To crudely summarise what he has to say, yes bad people do bad things, but more importantly good people put into bad situations also do bad things. I urge you to read the full interview, where he puts forward a more nuanced argument.
For myself I take away three thoughts from the interview.
The first, is that talk of ‘evil’ and ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people is largely an obstacle to doing anything to create a more decent human world. It simply puts any reasoned explanations and hence any preventive action beyond anything we can do much about.
The second is that if we want people to behave well we should give more attention to designing in civility into our institutions, organisations and built environments. If you like, an extension of Oscar Newman’s ideas about defensible space.
The third is that we should do more to celebrate those people who ‘do the right thing’ even in situations where everything conspires against it. The sad fact is that those extraordinary people are more often punished than acknowledged, despite the lip service we pay to their moral courage. Perhaps, we should create something like a Nobel prize to celebrate those people who display human decency in intolerable situations.”
(More than luck, January 26, 2005)

“… One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an in. situation. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger in. creases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production. all the people’s material wants usually can be easily satisfied.
The world’s most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo.”
Marshall Sahlins

In 1997 I voted Labour. I, like, I suspect, many other people, didn’t vote for Labour, I was voting against a nasty, corrupt party in government that deserved to get thrown out. Although, at the time, the choice seemed clear, I was concerned that with so many self-righteous, self-regarding Christian Stalinists in key positions I might be voting in another nasty party. Almost immediately my fears were realised as the Government took courageous “hard” decisions to bash the weak and powerless while sucking up to the wealthy and powerful. So, as I wonder who I could possibly vote for in the next General Election, I was pleased to see that I was not alone in my view of Nu-Labour:
“.. for all its economic incompetence and mad attachment to nationalisation, the old Labour party was basically an honourable and decent one. It was New Labour, which presented itself to the electorate in 1997 as soft-focus, cuddly and moderate, which has nastiness running through its DNA. Nastiness towards individuals: think Dr David Kelly, hounded to his death because he threatened the government’s news management, 94 year old Rose Addis, smeared as a racist for daring to find the NHS of less than platonic perfection. Nastiness towards groups who can safely be cast in the role of scapegoat: smokers, fox-hunters, children. Nastiness towards anyone who dares question. All this combined with a cringing attitude towards multinational corporations and unpleasant foreign regimes and a nest-feathering instinct that would not disgrace an arctic eider points to one thing: New Labour nastiness is the nastiness of the bully.”
Thanks to Stumbling and Mumbling for the pointer.

I have spent the past few days working with Mimi to transform my nicotine stained work room at the top of our house into a welcoming guest room. Now some of you may have guessed that this project does not have my unqualified enthusiasm – something for a later post. But one thing that did cheer me considerably was the discovery a couple of days ago that Billmon was back.
As I wrote in post a little over a year ago, “Missing Billmon”, Billmon was “a voice of sanity, who wrote about US politics and the war in Iraq, with a clarity, insight and bitter humour that was good for my mental health. Sadly, he burnt out, got a life or just gave up in despair. What ever the reason I still miss him.” You can see what I mean here.
So thanks to Dave Pollard for alerting me to his return. From a remark Billmon made in the comments to one of his recent posts it looks unlikely that he will re-open his Whiskey Bar. But maybe posting occasionally on the Daily Kos will be a more sustainable strategy and allow us to enjoy his insights over a longer period without the stresses and demands of maintaining his own site.
You can read his posts and comments at the Daily Kos, here, here, here and, my current favourite, here. If you want to find out more about him there is a little information here.
With all the idiocy in the world I felt he couldn’t resist making a return and I, like many of his other readers, am delight that he has.

The late Claudio Ciborra is one of those writers whose prose is so closely woven that it is hard to extract nuggets as quotes that still make sense. So bear with me on this one, which I can’t resist quoting and preferably then go on to the original and read it in context:
“On the other hand,tactics, ruses, improvisations, of which drifting is the product and outcome, are contingent procedures indexed by the here and now, and meaningless outside a specific time-tagged situation. Given a linear, pre-planned procedure made of a sequence of actions, tactics are precisely those scrambling interventions, multiple variations, those fleeting creative acts that transform the expected neutral situation into a situation perceived as favourable or pleasant”
Claudio Ciborra,The Labyrinths of Information: Challenging the Wisdom of Systems, OUP Oxford,2004, pp93-94, ISBN 0-19-927526-2

Opening a page at random in John Chris Jones’s “Essays in Design” (one of my all time influences), I found this:
“Context (a name I prefer to environment, because it sound less like a separate thing from ourselves) is the hardest thing to perceive, because it includes us, our ways of thinking. The fish cant see the water. ‘It’ is the source of change, of unexpectedness, the real generator of newness, design, of evolution. Aims, purposes, requirements, functions: these are words for how we see what is needed. But when we name them we tend to exclude the main part, the least predictable: ourselves, our minds, and how they change, once we experience something. It is ourselves, not our words, that are the real purpose of designing. The biggest mistake is to take the product alone as the aim. Its always secondary. Always a means, to process, to what we’re doing now or will be doing later. Dont comprise the process: get it right.
The best kinds of evolution we know, natural, linguistic, hand-crafted, are planless but highly responsive to change of context. With astonishingly coherent results.
The first step to attempting something similar in design, in continuous designing, is, I think now, to acknowledge publicly from the start that when we design our knowledge is of necessity incomplete. And to design the design process to reflect that modesty, that expectation of learning what the problem is as we try to solve it, discarding first thoughts. To make the meta-process sensitive to what is learnt in the highly informative process of designing.”
J. Christopher Jones, “Essays in Design” John Wiley & Sons, 1984, pp 212, ISBN 0 471 90297 7
Oh serendipity!

Peter Senge, Bryan Smith and Nina Kruschwitz get it in one:
“Bubbles are not entirely pernicious; indeed, they usually provide some real benefit — at least to some people or for some time. Some dot-com stocks were great assets. Some subprime mortgages did improve lives. The longer the bubble endures, the more people and re­sources get drawn into it, the more people benefit from it, and the more the beliefs supporting it become en­trenched. If a bubble can last for generations, it becomes hard to imagine an alternative to it. But at some point the tensions and inconsistencies between life inside the bubble and the larger reality outside it must be resolved. The bubble cannot expand indefinitely.
The industrial age constitutes an extended bubble of just this sort. Its expansion has continued for more than two centuries, so it is easy to assume that it will continue forever. Its positive impact has been undeniable: Life expectancy in the industrialized world has roughly doubled since the mid-1800s, literacy has jumped from 20 percent to more than 90 percent, and benefits hitherto unimaginable have sprung up in the form of products (canned foods, machine tools, iPods), services (air travel, eBay), and astounding advances in health, communication, education, and entertainment.
But the more harmful side effects of the industrial age have also been apparent from the beginning, at least to those who looked for them. They include a host of environmental crises, including increased waste and toxicity, growing stresses on finite natural resources, a loss of community, and a commodification of daily life that led to a widening gap between the rich and the poor. Biologist Edward O. Wilson calls the view from outside the industrial age bubble “the real real world.” From this perspective, no matter how valuable the assets of industrialization may be, their overall costs make the bubble unsustainable. One might argue about exactly when or how the bubble might end, but there are already signs that the kinds of investments of money, effort, and attention that brought success during the bubble are less likely to yield the same benefits now. Investments outside the bubble are another story. They will produce both more wealth and a more sustainable life, as people leave their old assumptions and practices behind.”
You can read the whole article in PDF format here or in HTML here.

And yes, “It is absurd to live in a cage…”

I meant to post something immediately after I watched Douglas Rushkoff’s keynote at Personal Democracy Forum in June, if only to say, watch this, it is important. But I didn’t, I just sent the link to a few friends. But anyway, do watch it, it’s worth your time.
My motive for talking about it now is slightly different. He has recently put a transcript of the talk on-line, which means I can read it – a different experience from watching or listening and one that highlights different things. (The significance of being able to experience the same thing in different modes is something I covered briefly in a piece “The Perfume of Sight” awhile ago after listening, watching and reading a speech by Bruce Sterling, which curiously echoes a similar theme to why I am writing now.)
The passage from Rushkoff I picked up on reading what he had to say as opposed to watching him say it was this:
“The next renaissance (if there is one) — the phenomenon we’re talking about or at least around here is not about the individual at all, but about the networked group. The possibility for collective action. The technologies we’re using—the biases of these media—cede central authority to decentralized groups. Instead of moving power to the center, they tend to move power to the edges. Instead of creating value from the center—like a centrally issued currency—the network creates value from the periphery.
This means the way to participate is not simply to subscribe to an abstract, already-written myth, but to do real things. To take small actions in real ways. The glory is not in the belief system or the movement, but in the doing. It’s not about getting someone elected, it’s about removing the obstacles to real people doing what they need to to get the job done. That’s the opportunity of the networked, open source era: to drop out of the myths and actually do.”
One of the reasons I welcome the current financial turmoil, despite its personal cost to me and the profound unfairness of the suffering it brings to those who don’t deserve it, is that it part of the process of removing the obstacles to positive change. With each financial crisis, and there will be more, the Emperor’s clothes are gradually being show to be empty fantasy – wealth capture does nothing but shift resources from the many to the privileged few. More importantly the pursuit of money for nothing diverts attention from the stuff we really need to do if we are to survive and thrive on this planet. As Rushkoff points out it is time to drop out of the myths and actually do.
As Bruce Sterling vividly put it:
“We’re on a kind of slider bar, between the Unthinkable, and the Unimaginable, now. Between the grim meathook future, and the bright green future. And there are ways out of this situation: there are actual ways to move the slider from one side to the other. Except we haven’t invented the words for them yet. We’ve got smoke building in the crowded theater, but the exit sign is just a mysterious tangle of glowing red letters.”
My own view, as regular readers will know, is that the exit signs wont come from any master plan or leaders with grand visions of the the future, but will come from a kind of purposive drift of people doing stuff, some of which will work and some of which wont, but gradually muddling our way through to a new kind of civilisation.