Sometimes Things Just Don't Come Together

That's me trying to light a folded piece of news paper. The folds are quite simple; a piece of newspaper is folded much like an envelope. At the center where the corners of the paper come together they're twisted a bit, then the construction puffed up a little. The tricky part is to quickly light the four corners and then allow the flaming contraption to float into the sky from the updraft of a camp fire. Done right it can float high and then the disintegrating embers float wildly to the ground. I hardly ever get it right; the paper is in flames and simply drops into the fire. Some people have a knack for it.

I like having the MyBlogLog widget here to see who's been stopping by. I thank BlairSupporter for leaving a comment on my last post. Daisy of Daisy's Dead Air commented too and Phil Jones gave me a nice shout out about the post. I see that Linda Nowakowski has been around and Geoffrey Philip too. I end up spouting off on the Internet quite a lot, but the idea that anyone reads what I write is a bit frightening. Most of the time it doesn't come together.

Daisy's Dead Air always gets me thinking. I didn't link to anywhere for Linda Nowakowski because I'm not sure of the etiquette about linking to content on social networks. But she writes at Ned.com among other places and what she writes always makes me think hard. Linda often writes on the subject of Buddhist economics. There are many schools of thought outside the mainstream of economic orthodoxy, often together called heterodox economics. Heterodox economics are not simply anti-neoclassical economics, or at least that's not what I find so interesting about them. What's important is cross fertilization across schools of thought in economics and with other disciplines.

Daisy posted a long post Ash Wednesday ruminations on feminism, religion, etc. During the week I had been struggling to write something regarding a proposal Linda was making to make a presentation at the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions. I'd written many pages, but it just wasn't coming together. Reading Daisy's ruminations on religion among other things caught my attention because I was thinking and trying to write about that too.

One of the reasons I enjoy reading Daisy's blog so much is I get to click on links to feminist blogs. It would be great to say I would find such links otherwise, but that's probably not the case. Part of her "ruminations" post has to do with how commentary at feminist blogs sometimes runs towards vitriol. That's a more general fact of the Internet which often seems impossibly hard to figure out and to imagine how to stop. Phil Jones has written smart commentary about this phenomenon, including Sarcasm Doesn't Scale. Phil has really smart comments on his blogs and various discussions on them have clued me in about what a knotty and interesting issue this is. Something I love very much about Daisy and Linda online is their arguments. It's not just that their arguments are good, it's also their fearlessness in engaging that I admire.

Nowadays more people my age are getting online and getting involved in the social Web. I've got one friend who's been involved since before there was a World Wide Web, so of course she knows a thing or two about Internet discourse. But talking with most of my friends about arguments online I'm greeted by blank stares, apparently they've never encountered such. I can't imagine how this is possible. The exciting thing about the Internet is people can engage in discussions across all sorts of boundaries. As it turns out this is very hard to do, not for technological reasons but for social reasons, and fireworks ensue.

More generally, it's difficult for people immersed in disciplines to engage with people immersed in different disciplines. But such interdisciplinary work is fertile ground for increasing knowledge.

Ethan Zuckerman has written brilliantly about xenophilia, which is a love of engaging across boarders. Homophily is the opposite number of xenophilia, meaning "birds of a feather flock together." Zuckerman observes:

Homophily can make you stupid.

Daisy's post notes that religion seems a sure fire way to kindle big and unreasonable arguments on the Web. That's of course true in meat space too. Mother always told us to avoid sex, politics and religion at the dinner table. I don't think she mentioned sex come to think of it, but sure she meant to.

Something really interesting about Buddhist economics is the intersection of religion and what is considered by many the dreadfully dull subject of economics. I had been vaguely aware of E. F. Schumacher before encountering Linda Nowakowski, but was quite uninformed about Buddhist economics, a term Schumacher coined in 1955, the year of my birth. Buddhist economics is not a huge school within economics, but is remarkably widespread. I'm impressed with the spread and durability of the whole notion of it.

Collen Wainwright *[update] writes a wonderful blog Communicatrix. I'm a bit confused about religion, I tell people that I don't believe in God, and yet I "hew to the woo." I knew I'd read that last bit somewhere, but couldn't remember where. I searched the term and Communicatrix came up and as thought to myself, "yes, of course." This isn't the post that came up in search, but is the post I remember reading it. I'm pretty skeptical about The Law of Attraction which communicatrix writes about, but her approach to thinking about it won me over.

I think about all sorts of issues in religious terms. Because of my upbringing I tend to think in terms of Christianity. I just do. I'm also skeptical of these habits of thought. Far from rebelling and turning into a staunch atheist in response to my internal dialogs, thinking about how my thoughts turn to religion seems to inform the subjects I'm thinking about. But what comes out of this sausage making is hardly ever doctrinally sound in any religion!

Linda is sure that economics must take into account not only value in economic terms, but human values as well. That is a subject near and dear to my heart. My thinking about values is somewhat peculiar and overlaps with iconoclastic thinking about God. The really odd thing about my thinking of values and God, is these come into play when I'm trying hard to be rigorous in my thinking, that is, when I'm trying to think about science in a formal way, or philosophy and other subjects. What I've just written seems easily misconstrued, and I'm not sure how to correct that. I'm not saying that I think it's necessary for people to think of God when they think about science, philosophy and other subjects in a formal way. What I am saying is that when I do that thoughts come together in some surprising and fascinating--to me--ways.

Alas, most of the times when trying to show others these patterns I've imagined too often things just don't come together.

The deadline for Linda's proposal has passed. I've seen the drafts of it and they look great. I didn't contribute a thing, but am very happy she opened up the process to view and comment. I think there are some parts in the draft I'm writing that make some good points. I won't give up trying and one day will share them.

What this post is about is really how people on the Web share the process of thinking. Their sharing changes my thinking, but not always, or even most of the time, by argument. Rather, first is a modeling of good thinking and second by their wonderful creations the encouragement to think. Sometimes thoughts come together nicely, but often not. Often that's when the most joy comes, like a puzzle where there's clearly a solution and the fun is in trying to discover it.

Cheers to the generous souls on the Internet who don't hide their light under a basket.

*Update: I'm not sure why, but I mistakenly identified Joann Wypijewski as the communicatrix. I apologize both to Colleen Wainwright, the real and inimitable the communicatrix and to JoAnn Wypijewski. Furthermore I must apologize for not only the misidentification, but also for butchering the spelling of JoAnn Wypijewski's name.

Most of the time when I screw up I can't figure out why. In this case I'd just watched a videonation video at YouTube Church Sex Scandal: False Memories, False Justice, the print version of the story is here and took note. I probably wrote down JoAnn Wypijewski's name on the same scrap of paper I wrote down Colleen Wainwright's name.

I've mentioned that religion is a hard topic for me, especially the notion of collusion and conspiracy. I took note of JoAnn Wypijewski's report about a Massachusetts court taking up the scientific, evidentiary basis for repressed memory, because the subject of repressed memory is such a staple or the conspiracy minded. A big part of that conspiracy are attacks on the reporters who report that scientific studies do not tend to support repressed memory claims, neither have courts who've examined the issue.

Knowing what a hot button issue repressed memory is on Internet discussion boards, I was impressed that Wypijewski is willing to report on the issue and to do do a video too. Taking up subjects ignored by most, but which are so vigorously attacked by a few, seems hardly a great career move. Wypijewski must see her role as reporter to present the facts in news stories and not to back away, even when it might be advantageous to do so. I applaud her gumption.

Toss Pot Wanker

The image is a T-shirt design available at Fuctup, an online retailer in the UK.

On a thread I was participating the other day concerning Obama House Parties, a commentator queried:

just a thought guys... have you ever considered you might all just be a bunch of middle aged old toss pot wankers who just talk a lot about the "issues"...

Okay deliberately didn't post a link, questions like that are ripe for piling on. One of the responses seemed to take offense at the "old" bit. I suspect that's because he'd never heard "toss pot" directed at him. I hadn't either, so consulted the Urban Dictionary an invaluable online reference site. Hum, it seems "toss pot" essentially means "wanker," so added as an intensifier.

I didn't respond to the comment on the thread. If I would, I suppose it would follow along the lines of: "What's wrong with wanking?" Heavens knows I've seen plenty of similar comments more or less directed at me, so it seems worth my while to come up with some sort of come back. I never seem to manage one. Here's my problem: On one horn I am really jazzed about commons-based peer production. On the other horn, I sure do a lot of talking--writing--and other than that it's hard to point to doing much else.

The Urban Dictionary is a good example of what can be done by peer production. It's remarkably complete and accurate all from the distributed gifts of content from many users of the resource. Consider a single entry for the word jagoff. I strongly associate the word with my locale and its charming local dialect. The definitions note the geographic use of the term, but also suggest alternate entomologies and word histories. One of the subtleties of the term's meaning is not just a jerk, but a mean jerk.

When President Bush visited Pittsburgh on Labor Day 2002, I went to greet him. At the time I thought that with enough public outcry, the nation might avoid another Iraq War. One of the signs I took, with wording specially crafted by a friend read:

Hey Bush
We Scoff
Yinza
Jagoff

After a full afternoon behind a tall fence and police cordon, one of those infamous "Free Speech Zones," it became pretty clear from insults hurled from the other side of the fence that my high hope for avoiding war were rather too lofty. And I wonder now just who was the bigger jagoff that day? Yep, I've still got the sign to prove it.

It's too easy to be a mean jerk on the Internet. Lisa Derrick is cool. I mean I really like what she says on her blog most of the time; I don't really know her. Friday night she did a piece about the One Laptop Per Child. She wrote:

They'd like folks to donate to provide kids everywhere with a computer. Which is real nice, except potable water, food and vaccines are a more pressing concern for kids in under-developed and developing nations.

The "real nice" part got under my skin. I've read and written a lot about the One Laptop Per Child effort over the last couple of years. I think it's a project that deserves more careful attention. So I left a comment, and suggested Derrick was self-righteous. I could search the Urban Dictionary for just the right word to fit my asshatiness, but I'll go with jagoff because it's local.

After my impertinent comment at La Figa--Derrick's blog--I headed over to Daisy's Dead Air, one of my favorite reads. Daisy had just posted Part 1 of a two part post Feminists on High Horses. Two problems with the comment I left there: 1) too long and 2) my asshatitude.

There must have been something wrong with me that night. I've done far worse. The remarkable thing about publishing on the Internet is stuff you put up sticks around, maybe forever. If I ever feel too full of myself I know just were to find evidence of me being a jagoff online--sorry no links. In part 2 Daisy picks up on the subject of people being accountable. I'm so math challenged that "accountable" isn't one of my favorite words, but I agree with what she says. When we're out there online, we're accountable in more ways than people of my age, i.e. people who for most of their lives there was no Internet, tend to anticipate.

There's a lot going on in Daisy's post, but there's a part in it I want to bring up. Daisy is working class. When she was younger she was part of "very rigorous political collective." It turned out that the collective was dominated by rich kids. During one of their meetings she asked: "[W]asn't it impossible for rich kids to have the proper class consciousness?" For that she was thrown out. Going out on a limb here, I'll suggest that Daisy feels some resentment about it. She's quite dispassionate in making the point that it's not so strange really that the children of the rulers of the world would presume to be rulers in every setting they find themselves in.

I don't know if Daisy would call it resentment. Over all, especially Part 1 is a bit scathing. But her language about the double bind that the rich kids' presumptions present is quite cool. Because wealth is a factor in the issue which provoked the post in the first place, it seems to me she's tried to lay out this aspect of the discussion in a calm and rational way. But, you know, it feels really bad to be put down like that and the feelings really matter.

I'm a white middle-aged white guy, even if I consider myself poor, I've got privilege that I take for granted. Over the last few years I've tried to collaborate with a couple of friends in Uganda. This is an important part of my life, but a part I find surprisingly hard to tell about.

This afternoon I was chatting with one of my Ugandan friends online. I'd written an email to him, which after I sent it worried some of my privileged presumption was showing. The good thing is we've been corresponding for years, and have developed strong regard for one another, so I didn't worry too much. What he told me in our conversation really moved me, but it's hard to relate because it's got to the feelings part of the double binds created by unconscious privilege.

He talked about how years ago he worked as an organizer in Kenya. He said people really listened to him there. A big part of the willingness to listen to him came from his being from a different place. Then he talked about hearing tributes to Christina Jordan of Life in Africa and that part of that respect came from something like what he'd experienced in Kenya; she wasn't from there. It's hard to relate a conversation, but the meaning I felt from what he wrote was how discouraging it feels when you are poor and put down over an over in little things everyday. My friend is courageous, but told me he felt fear. The fear comes from being told in so many ways you're no good. And his point was how hard it is to organize among people who feel the same way.

I've read lots of what Christina Jordan has put up online over the years, and participated in online social networks she's participated in too. She has been enormously transparent in all she's done. My friend has heard me mention Christina, but doesn't have the same experience of knowing what she's written over time. I hope he comes to see that the Ugandans who are running Life in Africa are confident and competent. Nevertheless, the point my friend was making about the sort of paralysis poverty causes in people is something not lost on those who've worked long and hard with Life in Africa. Getting over the hurdle of people thinking they have nothing to offer is tough.

Sometimes I despair that my online collaboration with my Ugandan friends has yielded not much. I can't dismiss it because, if nothing else, there are genuine bonds of affection. Still there's precious little tangible to show for it.

I turned 53 on the winter solstice. I think Daisy is younger than I am, but I've seen her use the word "old" to describe herself. I prefer the word "experienced." I know Daisy is experienced. Over the past year of reading her posts, I see she's adept at naming her fears and thereby conquering them. I felt my friend was taking a big step in revealing to me the fear he sometimes feels. We all know about fears, it's part of being human. Unfortunately it's probably also a part of being human to exploit the knowledge that we've all got fears. Some people are masters at it and most of us clumsy and unthinking at one time or another.

All of us can create something good. Every one of us has something important to give. What any one of us has may be small, but taken together it's a large amount.

Too many of us live lives in dire need of the essentials. Buckminster Fuller liked to say we live on Spaceship Earth. We've got to find ways for every person here to have enough while recognizing the confines of our little blue planet. Fuller demonstrated doing more with less in so many different ways. Designing ways to create value, to provide us with what we need, by doing more with less is one way. And it's an approach that fits nicely with a confidence in the creative capacity of everyone. But the most popular way of looking at needs in a limited world, one Spaceship Earth, is to imagine that it's fundamentally a problem of distribution. At least here in the USA the plan follows: making yours so the other are left without. There are so many reasons to think that the zero-sums strategy of taking yours before everyone else gets theirs ultimately leaves everyone the loser, but that's a whole other post.

For the purposes of this post I'll just say the zero sum game feels bad. Of course people feel all sorts of ways, so many ways that our feelings often seem unruly. What makes World Wide Web so engaging is we're reading and writing, both consuming content created by others, and making content of our own available. It's pretty hard not to have feelings or not to let our feelings show. A thick skin helps to negotiate around the world, especially around the online world. Ultimately I suspect a compassionate heart is better. Far from getting in our way, feelings can guide the way. It's better if "we give a fig" as Lisa Derrick suggests.

You remember Lisa Derrick? She's the blogger I accused of acting self righteously in re her opinions about One Laptop Per Child. Did you click any of the links to the Urban Dictionary? Maybe you've been there before, or already know our language is rich in words to ridicule. It seems pretty clear the Internet is speeding up the creation of new words to ridicule others. We're making our feelings known online and perhaps that's not so bad. Maybe the engagement with others can help us develop a more evolved emotional intelligence. Maybe we'll learn that our happiness isn't something we can take from others for ourselves, but rather something we can have only by creating it with others.

So It Goes

Victor Papanek from Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change

Writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. died Wednesday night, April 11th. His books were important to me and my generation. So I've been enjoying reading pieces that mark his passing. 3Quarks Daily links to a half dozen: here, here, here, here, here, and here.

On Tuesday I went to a visitation for a friend who died. Such a sad occasion, for she was a most beautiful and charming friend, still madly in love with her husband and their lovely children. It was nice to see so many long-time friends. We are all in a state of shock still imagining ourselves too young to die of disease. Many of us have known each other for over twenty five years, and my thoughts turned to our youth together in the early 1970's.

Eric Hersman has been running a series called African Digerati where he's been interviewing African technologists. It's a great series and his blog White African is always information rich. His most recent post in the series was with Ethan Zuckerman. Zuckerman says he doesn't "really qualify as a member of the African Digerati," but his contributions to the Afrosphere make him a significant contributor.

I was particularly interested in this exchange:

What do you see as the biggest advantage or opportunity for African technology development?

Something that’s very important in technology research is problem selection. If you choose a boring problem to solve, you get boring technologies. If you choose a fascinating problem and are able to solve it, you can start a revolution. Right now, there are much more interesting problems in African technology than there are in the developed world, in my opinion. I think that smart computer science students around the world should be looking at the developing world for challenges to address – power usage, wireless networking, non-verbal interfaces, computer-based systems for microentrepreneurship. It’s a huge advantage for African innovators to be surrounded by interesting, worthwhile problems.

Reading perhaps more into Zuckerman's answer than is proper, my sense of it was that creating solutions applicable to the developing world is smart because those solutions will be useful everywhere.

The jump from my friend's death to Zuckerman's point about "interesting problems" is a long one. What I'm thinking about is how, back when my cohort was younger, we were indeed engaged by interesting problems. Back in the day most of us would have liked the idea of ourselves as "counter-cultural." We hardly turned out that way.

When I was in college Papaneck's book Design for the Real World captured my attention.

There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. And possibly on one profession is phonier. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don't need, with money they don't have, in order to impress others who don't care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today. Industrial design, by concocting the tawdry idiocies hawked by advertisers, comes a close second.

None of us flinched reading lines like that; instead, many of us really did respond: "Right on!" Our ecological understanding sometimes wasn't very deep, but there was no mistaking a passion about it.

Looking around the room full of mourners I wondered, "What happened?" I drove down to the funeral home with a friend. On the way back home she remarked about what could have been. She was referring to the political follies of the years, but there's no escaping the fact most of us played along.

It's the construct of telesis that stuck out in Papanek's Function Complex diagram when I read the book almost thirty years ago. Telesis isn't a word I've run into much since. Merriam Webster defines:

progress that is intelligently planned and directed : the attainment of desired ends by the application of intelligent human effort to the means

Papanek relates telesis to design:

[C]ontent of a design must reflect the times and conditions that have given rise to it, and must fit in with the general human socioeconomic order in which it is to operate.

As a generation we wanted to run counter, but in our designs lacked the creativity to fashion a fit with the socioeconomic order in which we function that was anyway more ecological. In fact, we seem to have fallen for precisely the program--"It's the system, man"--we once so enthusiastically mocked.

Vonnegut's writing always seems so simple, but the ethical dilemmas he exposes are never so black and white, us and them; but nuanced. General humanness and the socioeconomic order are problems that won't go away and are the subject of much of Vonnegut's storytelling. We have to navigate through them, and Vonnegut showed that harsh judgments aren't a particularly useful way to do so.

Something about online social networks and all the content people put up on the Web is how blindingly stupid too much of it is. Geez! At least that's my reaction when reading some of what I've contributed. I'm not an African blogger, but I do want attend to the Afrosphere. The beauty of the Web is contained in the dialogs. It's worthwhile participating. But when we do, our local perspectives, our telesic baggage, influences us to such an extent we often can't see how wildly inappropriate our designs and solutions are in different contexts.

Eric Hersman responded to a comment I left at on his post with the Zuckerman interview:

I’m particularly in agreement with his belief that Africans are responsible for making Africa better. It’s up to those educated techies in the diaspora to apply their years of experience to solving Africa’s technological problems. Many of these technological problems, once solved, will likely solve a number of economic and social issues as well (my opinion).

Eric seems to be saying a number of things, not the least of which is coming from a perspective of a diasporian. I may be wrong, but I took it that he was also pointing to the problem of people in the West designing inapt solutions, ignoring the importance of place to functional design. I don't deny Eric Hersman's concerns, but I also think that Zuckerman's "worthwhile problems" is a critical and fascinating point.

Zuckerman wrote a provocative piece, The moving circus, the post-national, the Global Soul and the xenophile which inspired Joshua Goldstein on In An African Minute to respond. I'd like to put myself in a line with these two, but feel obliged to point out that I'm goof and neither of them are. Still, we're three white Americans who follow and participate in the Afrosphere. I'm a product of the Baby Boomer Generation, Zuckerman, I presume, a Gen X Generation guy, and Goldstein Gen Y.

Zuckerman wrote:

Xenophilia believes that the world is made of diverse, culturally and socially different, yet interconnected spaces, and that the ability to encounter these different spaces without getting on an airplane is one of the most exciting aspects of the 21st century.

Goldstein makes the case for the "Local Soul," but observes:

Local Soul is no longer enough. We know that our (local) way is not the only way, and for personal and creative reasons it is necessary to reach beyond the bounds of the Local Soul.

And he asks: How can we balance the tension between the necessity for a deep understanding of our place with a growing need to expand our boundaries toward a Global Soul?

The question is such a good one in that Goldstein focuses on "a balance" and not reduced to an either/or bifurcation. Balance seems the core of Hersman's emphasis on African responsibility for solving challenges in Africa, tilting the weight towards the Local Soul. And Zuckerman's point about the importance of interesting problems, and how smart computer science students around the world should pay attention to solving African challenges concerns balancing this tension, perhaps by tilting the weight towards the Global Soul.

So Kurt Vonnegut has died, one of the Greatest Generation. As much as those of us Baby Boomers rail against the notion, we're getting old and our influence waning. That realization is a small part of the shock we all felt with my friend's passing. Being among my friends, so many of them have created some very good things. As the sad sack among them, my yelling: "Sell outs!" would be ridiculous. I wouldn't say that, in any case, but I'm enough of a Boomer to know that the accusation still carries a sting. That seems a very good thing. My generation holds within a deep critique of the socioeconomic order and a vision for a more just and ecological way of living. Vonnegut was very influential in helping to shape that vision.

Rene Dubos is often credited with the maxim: Think Globally, Act Locally. Dubos, was part of a generation before Vonnegut's but coined his famous maxim while an adviser to the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. Sociologist Lester Frank Ward, a couple of generations older than Dubos coined the word "telesis." There's not an imaginary straight-line that connects the generations, rather threads which extend to and beyond. Dubos's meaning in "Think Globally, Act Locally," isn't far from Zuckerman's view of the world which is "diverse, culturally and socially different, yet interconnected spaces." And the mission of World Changing where Zuckerman is a board member and contributor bears a thread that extends to Lester Frank Ward's vision of telesis.

Vonnegut's last book of is entitled, A Man Without a Country. Vonnegut's meaning isn't precisely what Zuckerman is referring to in his The moving circus post, but a a thread of humanism connects them. Many of the essays in the book are available online at the In These Times Web site. Cold Turkey is worth reading. Something that's reassuring is that even while wisdom comes from experience, a wise man like Vonnegut doesn't claim to have the meaning of it all figured out.

Verlyn Kinkenborg in The New York Times suggests that for those of us who read Vonnegut's work twenty or thirty years ago, our sense of those works now is a bit disquieting. She writes:

So you get older, and it’s been 20 or 30 years since you last read “Player Piano” or “Cat’s Cradle” or “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Vonnegut is not, now, somehow serious enough. You’ve entered that time of life when every hard truth has to be qualified by the sense of what you stand to lose. “It’s not that simple,” you find yourself saying a lot, and the train of thought that unfolds in your mind as you speak those words reeks of desperation.

But then she concludes:

And yet, somehow, the world seems more and more to have been written by Vonnegut and your life is now the footnote. Perhaps it is time to go back and revisit that earlier self, the one who seemed, for a while, so interwoven in the pages of those old paperbacks.

When I gathered with my friends earlier this week to grieve for our friend's passing, I remembered us when, and those memories were comforting.

I'm probably just lost in the weeds alluding to comparison between the tension between a generations and a Global Soul and a Local Soul. But I realize as I write that using a metaphor of a balance beam and weights to compare Zuckerman and Goldstein's positions is exactly the wrong sort of metaphor for the balance involved. Quantitative measures are nonsense when the issues are the quality of connections.

Food, shelter, clothing are essentials, and we imagine these things as something we have. Perhaps the very closeness of these essentials make it easy to neglect the basic needs for clean water and the atmosphere we breathe. Water and air we all share and so it's harder to expand our attention to the kinds of cooperation necessary for them. Vonnegut in Cold Turkey says we're addicted to oil. He's right about that of course, but like addicts we steep ourselves in denial about it. That's why it's so hard for us to get our heads around Global Climate Change, and to move our butts.

One of the reasons that Ethan Zuckerman's suggestion that smart computer science student look to the developing world for problems to address seems so interesting is because it's a way to think outside the limitations of oil addiction. No doubt Eric Hersman is correct that Africans are the ones best equipped to tackle African problems. But the problems people face today include existential challenges of a global scale. What could be more global than the composition of the Earth's thin layer of atmosphere. The interesting part is the solutions to the global problem depend upon the behavior of billions of people in hundreds of thousands locales.

World Changing's Manifesto works from a premise:

that the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us. That plenty of people are working on tools for change, but the fields in which they work remain unconnected. That the motive, means and opportunity for profound positive change are already present. That another world is not just possible, it's here. We only need to put the pieces together.

Vonnegut's literary legacy presents that putting the pieces together is no simple matter, because all sort of truly lunatic combinations are probable.

Cynics in Grecian antiquity believed that virtue is the highest good. I don't really know much about history, so I wonder how the present meanings of cynic has come to be. I've seen Vonnengut called a cynic, I've seen him called a misanthrope. And I find it strange for someone who so strongly believed in kindness and loving one another to be so cast. It's the quality of the connections that matters most. I'm grateful to have been connected to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. through his paperback books. I'm delighted that others can connect to, even while he's flown the cage.

Stop Cyberbullying Day

Andy Carvin pronounced today as Stop Cyberbullying Day, as a result of a very public and serious online harassment of a widely read tech blogger, Katha Sierra.

One of the nice things about being such a casual blogger is not having enough visibility to be the object of online feuding and blog wars. One of the sad aspects of Kathy Sierra going public with her ordeal is, that as a result, she's gotten even more vitriolic and hateful messages directed at her. So I'm loathe to blog about that incident, as if I would even have something worthwhile to say. But it's not correct to think I'm unaffected by such awfulness, directed at Sierra and many others. One of the most direct impacts I can feel, if not measure, is the voices I don't hear online because bloggers are tired of the BS.

Of all the bad things someone might say about me, to be labeled a misogynist would cut me to the quick. That's not how I want to be identified, and the idea of hating women boggles. From my position as man, not very manly sort, but a man none the less, I don't have to endure the cruel assaults which too many women face all the time. Vile verbal attacks against women are a particular problem; a subset of the larger problem of hateful speech. All of us have some experience with the ways words wound, but it's useful for guys like me not to imagine I can truly understand the impact of sexual objectification and threats of sexual violence against women. To get a sense of how clueless men can be about this, consider the justification sworn in some cases where a man is accused of murdering a gay man: "He was coming on to me." And then to consider how often such testimony results in acquittal. Men know the power inherent in such assaults, but not a clue what it feels like to be on the receiving end.

So this disturbing aspect of misogyny is an important part of the discussions going on all over the blogosphere about cyberbullying, but there is so much more. Andy Carvin has set up a Ning site Stop Cyberbullying. Ning is Web site that allows people to create their own social network with profile pages and forums. so the turn around from Sierra's post on Tuesday to a site that up and running in response now is just remarkable. Go there look around, the discussions are thoughtful, there are numerous resources about cyberbullying; and it's a great example of "create something good" when confronted by evil.

Surely most of us have noticed how tempers can flare as the result of Internet correspondence. I have unintentionally pushed those buttons and pulled the leavers to make others livid with me. When that's happened I've wondered: What the heck did I do? That's different, of course form cyberbullying, but those instances provide a window to view how powerfully emotions can be engaged, and how difficult it can be to repair online relationships.

Any regular readers of blogs or Newsgroups are familiar with Internet trolls too. Considering my own instances of infuriating people and my own annoyance at trolls, I've poured over various list like Giveen's Guide to Internet Trolls. I've wondered: What kind of Internet troll am I? I'm not a troll! Clueless and insensitive at times, maybe, but I don't intentionally strive to sow discord. So the issue of trolls is a bit different from cyberbullying too, but it's subject that's hard to avoid when considering the broad issue.

Among my online African friends I've heard their experiences with Westerners, in particular Americans, hurling racist language in their direction. As a white guy, muzungu, and an American who's never been to Africa, how to talk about racism here in America is a subject I've never figured out the words to tell the story. It's not like it's easy to talk about with other Americans. Certainly one of the first things I discovered going online was how terribly much racist talk floats around on the Internet. One particularly frustrating situations that comes up is over advance fee frauds and being tarred with the broad brush: "You people!"

Come to think of it when the sentence begins, "You people.." it's pretty easy to predict nothing good is coming after it. Except, who isn't prone to generalities and stereotypes? We all are, it seems it's part of the way people in general create a map to navigate around in the world that's compact enough to actually be usable. It's a good thing to be aware of this tendency. In any case we can be fairly sure that "You people..." is the beginning of an expression of anger.

There are many things we can be reasonably angry about too. Nigerian Letters in my email box don't make me angry, but it's easy to see why they make some so angry; their intent is fraud after all. It seems helpful to recognize there's another perspective from just the consumer of such fraud, and in some cases the intent of the fraud isn't so very different from that of the cyberbully. The various ways of scamming people on the Internet again isn't exactly cyberbullying, but something to consider in the whole ball of wax. On the Internet scams are truly International affairs.

Dave Winer has made some very important contributions to the current discussion. He wrote:

So if we have a code of conduct, it can't just talk about how trolls behave, because truly we have no control over that. It should talk about responsible people whose names we know with reputations they care about -- what should they do when abuse happens? That is something we can do something about. There should be 18 steps before something like Kathy Sierra's post appears in the midst of the blogosphere, and it shouldn't come from teh person who has been victimized, someone else should stand up for them and explain what happened. For so many reasons this is a much better way to go, and I'm sure the victim would like it better too (I speak from experience).

This blog is hardly a piffle, but in my best imagination it belongs to the so called "bridge blogs." Like other bridge bloggers I encourage people to blog, to tell their stories. We have a special responsibility as bridge bloggers to respond to abuse in our connected communities. It's not always obvious what to do, but at least we can stand by and support our friends when they are subjected to cyberbullying. At a minimum we can take care and be mindful.