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Text | Author | Work | Date | Work Link | Notes | Date Added | Used | Tags | My Source | Author Link |
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One of the disappointments about enlightenment [...] is we often [...] think, "I am going to get enlightened... I will become free." And if I am free, it's great, right...? I'll become the most enlightened guy on the block [...] But it's a misunderstanding; enlightenment doesn't make you free. Enlightenment is you giving everything it's freedom. It has nothing to do with you at all; that's why it's so disappointing. | 2008-06-26 | |||||||||
| A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse (generous gifts) from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence. From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance, from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back into bondage. | Anonymous | From the 1950s. Often mis-attributed to Alexander Tytler, circa 1787, The Fall of the Athenian Republic. | 2008-02-05 | democracy politics empire nation complacency abundance | http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/08/surprises_on_th.html | |||||
| A key aspect of regional sustainability will involve softening the hard edge between urban and rural. | Brad Masi | The Edge Effect: Finding New Solutions in that Space Between Things | 2007-11-16 | sustainability, urban, rural, city, agriculture | ||||||
| A lot of people think or believe or know they feel (experience) -- but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling (experiencing). Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel (experience). Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel (experience), you're nobody-but-yourself. To be nobody-but-yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. | Buckminster Fuller | Critical Path | 2008-02-21 | thinking, knowing, feeling, experiencing | http://ming.tv/flemming2.php/__show_article/_a000010-001668.htm | |||||
| Acutely aware of our beings' limitations and acknowledging the infinite mystery of the a priori universe into which we are born, but nevertheless searching for a conscious means of hopefully competent participation by humanity in its own evolutionary trending while employing only the unique advantages inhering exclusively to the individual who takes and maintains the economic initiative in the face of the formidable physical capital and credit advantages of the massive corporations and political states and deliberately avoiding political ties and tactics while endeavoring by experiments and explorations to excite individuals' awareness and realization of humanity's higher potentials I seek through Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science and its reductions to physical practices to reform the environment instead of trying to reform men being intent thereby to accomplish prototyped capabilities of doing more with less whereby in turn the wealth augmenting prospects of such design science regenerations will induce their spontaneous and economically successful industrial proliferation by world around services' managements all of which chain reaction provoking events will both permit and induce all humanity to realize full lasting economic and physical success plus enjoyment of all the Earth without one individual interfering with or being advantaged at the expense of another. | R. Buckminster Fuller | What I am Trying to Do, (as printed in Saturday Review) | 1968-03-02 | http://www.bfi.org/our_programs/who_is_buckminster_fuller/design_science/what_i_am_trying_to_do_by_r_buckminster_fuller | When asked by "Who's Who?" last year to write a one-sentence statement of his life objectives on the model of de Tocqueville's 152-word "aphoristic declaration", in characteristic fashion wrote the above declaration about himself. | 2008-01-11 | humanity, design, science | |||
| Aficion means passion. An aficionado is one who is passionate about the bull fights. Somehow it was taken for granted that an American could not have aficion. He might simulate it or confuse it with excitment but he could not really have it. When they saw that I had aficion, and there was no password, no set questions that could bring it out, rather it was a sort of oral spiritual examination with the questions always a little on th deefensive and never apparent, there was this same embarrassed putting the hand on the shoulder, or a 'Buen hombre!'. But nearly always there was the actual touching. It seemed as though they wanted to touch you to make it certain. | Milan Kundera | The Unbearable Lightness of Being | 2005-11-19 | passion | ||||||
| All nature is your congratulations and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself... Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes? | Henry David Thoreau | 2007-09-04 | nature, intoxication, breath | |||||||
| alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin. Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical…buried under the ubiquity of the dust. By then, naturally, he himself would be dead, another interesting event to anticipate as he stood here alone with the lungless, penetrating, masterful world-silence…Better, perhaps, to turn the TV back on. | Philip K. Dick | Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? | 2008-02-26 | future, dystopia, television, | http://techgnosis.com/chunkshow-single.php?chunk=chunkfrom-2008-01-22-1647-0.txt | |||||
| and to verbalize for me my present attitude towards music: it isn’t useful, music isn’t, unless it develops our powers of audition. But most musicians can’t hear a single sound, they listen only to the relationship between two or more sounds. Music for them has nothing to do with their powers of audition, but only to do with their powers of observing relationships. | John Cage | Indeterminancy #47 | http://www.lcdf.org/indeterminacy/s.cgi?47 | 2006-12-20 | music, hearing | |||||
| And when, after long centuries of slow forgetting, migration, and climatic change, the knowledge of the mystery was finally lost, we in our anguish traded partnership for dominance, traded harmony with nature for rape of nature, traded poetry for the sophistry of science. In short, we traded our birthright as partners in the drama of the living mind of the planet for the broken pot shards of history, warfare, neurosis, and —- if we do not quickly awaken to our predicament -- planetary catastrophe. | Terrence McKenna | Food of the Gods | 2006-02-16 | http://www.jeffschuler.net/archive/2008/06/layers-of-paint-and.html | genesis | |||||
| Any approach to environmental problems must be sufficiently flexible and adaptable to encompass the entire environmental matrix, which is in constant flux. I consider myself a generalist, not a specialist who has staked out a tiny plot of study as his intellectual turf and is oblivious to everything else. Actually, my work is a depth operation, the accepted practice in most modern disciplines from psychiatry to metallurgy and structural analysis. Effective study of the media deals not only with the content of the media but with the media themselves and the total cultural environment within which the media function. Only by standing aside from any phenomenon and taking an overview can you discover its operative principles and lines of force. | Marshall McLuhan | The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan (Playboy Magazine, March 1969) | 1969-03 | http://www.digitallantern.net/mcluhan/mcluhanplayboy.htm | 2007-05-02 | environment, specialization, generalism | ||||
| artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience. | Marshall McLuhan | The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan (Playboy Magazine, March 1969) | 1969-03 | http://www.digitallantern.net/mcluhan/mcluhanplayboy.htm | 2007-05-02 | art | ||||
| As the layers of paint and mystery are pulled away, it becomes apparent that unpredictability, chaos, and madness are some of the most important cogs in the city's machinery. The deck is stacked with jokers. There is a ghost in this machine, and it appears to be stupid and/or drunk. This situation will not change, because the human condition is its source. | Robert Hurst | The Art of Urban Cycling | http://books.google.com/books?id=kiEIAAAACAAJ | 2007-12-07 | http://www.jeffschuler.net/archive/2008/06/layers-of-paint-and.html | city | ||||
| As we reacquaint ourselves with our breathing bodies, then the perceived world itself begins to shift and transform. When we begin to consciously frequent the wordless dimension of our sensory participations, certain phenomena that have habitually commanded our focus begin to lose their distinctive fascination and to slip toward the background, while hitherto unnoticed or overlooked presences begin to stand forth from the periphery and to engage our awareness. The countless human artefacts with which we are commonly involved -- buildings, automobiles, television screens -- all begin to exhibit a common style, and so to lose some of their distinctiveness; meanwhile, organic entities -- crows, trees, rainfalls -- all these begin to display a new vitality, each coaxing the breathing body into a unique dance. Even boulders and rocks seem to speak their own uncanny languages of gesture and shadow, inviting the body and its bones into silent communication. In contact with the native forms of the earth, one's senses are slowly energized and awakened, combining and recombining in ever-shifting patterns. | David Abram | The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World | 2008-07-25 | sense, natural, artificial, reality | http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2004/04/14.html | |||||
| At that moment I understood, with an unshakeable clarity, two things: that the causal, billiard-ball flow of the world proceeds absolutely lawfully, and that I suffer because the bright shards of witnessing angelstuff that lie at the root of my being get caught up in attempting to push and pull this procession, to cling and resist and identify. | Erik Davis | Diamond Solitaire: Washing Beets with God | 2007-11-28 | http://techgnosis.com/chunkshow-single.php?chunk=chunkfrom-2007-11-28-1702-0.txt | 2008-01-10 | |||||
| awe, night-rest and neighborhood | William Shakespeare | on what cities are to provide | 2007-09-04 | city, urban | ||||||
| Be as shrewd as serpents and gentle as doves. | The Bible, Matthew 10:16 | (relates to quote from MLKJr., The Strength to Love) | 2007-05-02 | malicia | ||||||
| Because they cared more about adapting to the cosmos than to a society bereft of restraint, the Shakers--like the red man--could love craft and yet never become materialists. | William Least Heat Moon | Blue Highways | p. 25 | 2007-10-24 | materialism, cosmos, minimalism, craft | |||||
| Begin with art, because art tries to take us outside ourselves. It is a matter of trying to create an atmosphere and context so conversation can flow back and forth and we can be influenced by each other. | W.E.B. DuBois | 2006-11-22 | art | |||||||
| But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down. Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship. Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship [...] is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. [...] you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship [(body, beauty, allure, power, intellect,...)] is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, [...] The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. [...] The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing. | David Foster Wallace | Commencement Speech at Kenyon College | 2005-05-21 | http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html | 2008-05-22 | http://www.jeffschuler.net/archive/2008/05/conscious-decisions.html | awareness worship desire attention choice | Maree | ||
| But now let us suppose that those who make it their business to apply the results of pure science to economic ends should elect to do so, not primarily for the benefit of big business, big cities and big government, but with the conscious aim of providing individuals with the means of doing profitable and intrinsically significant work, of helping men and women to achieve independence from bosses, so that they may become their own employers, or members of a self-governing, cooperative group working for subsistence and a local market. [...] local production by individuals or cooperating groups, working for subsistence and a neighbourhood market, is more economical than mass production in vast centralized factories. And to these economic advantages of decentralization must be added the social advantages of a more humanly satisfying life for more people, a greater measure of genuine self-governing democracy and a blessed freedom from the silly or pernicious adult education provided by the mass producers of consumer goods through the medium of advertisements. | Aldous Huxley | The Ring of Peace | http://www.ringofpeace.org/media/sciencelibertypeace.html | 2007-12-18 | work, independence, empowerment, government, local, cooperation, decentralization, institutions, consumption | |||||
| But the chief ground of Skepticism is that to every reason there is an opposite reason equivalent, which makes us forbear to dogmatize. | Sextus Empiricus | 2005-08-29 | open-mindedness | |||||||
| Chaos mathematicians (and the economists who depend on them) regard systems theory as an entirely new understanding of the inner workings of our reality [...] Scientists find themselves abandoning a theory of anthill organisation that depends on commands from the queen, and replacing it with a bottom-up model of emergent organisation that depends on the free flow of information between every member of the colony. More importantly, however, these flashes of insight and radical reappraisal of formerly sacrosanct ideas are followed not by a retrenchment but by a new openness to reflection, collaboration and change. The greatest benefit of a shift in operating model appears to be the recollection that we are working with a mere model. | Douglas Rushkoff | Open Source Democracy | 2003 | http://www.demos.co.uk/files/opensourcedemocracy.pdf | 2007-06-15 | http://www.jeffschuler.net/archive/2007/11/citizen-re-organization.html | chaos, systems, reality, model | |||
| cities remain important because they create the intellectual connections that forge human capital and spur innovation. People in cities are much more economically productive; urban density has been a wellspring of innovation for many millenia. Cities sometimes have a bad reputation because of their association with problems like poverty, pollution, and disease; but this association does not imply causation. Cities are not factories. They are the concentration of people at high densities, and that concentration is pretty green. After all, we use a lot less energy when we cluster together in cities than when we spread throughout the country and drive hundreds of miles each day in commuting. | Edward Glaeser | How Should We Be Thinking About Urbanization? A Freakonomics Quorum | 2007-12-11 | http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/how-should-we-be-thinking-about-urbanization-a-freakonomics-quorum | 2008-01-10 | suburbia, city, urban, rural, america, growth, land use | http://ksgfaculty.harvard.edu/Edward_Glaeser | |||
| Difficult to tell whether we are looking at "Stagnant Lake at Edge of Columbia Glacier Beside Ruff and Tuff Island" by Bradford Washburn, or "Vascular System of Yolk Sac of Shark Embryo," courtesy Harvard Medical School. Gyorgy Kepes, on this ambiguity, from another indispensable book, The New Landscape of Art & Science (1956): "Seen together, aerial maps of river estuaries and road systems, fethers, fern leaves, branching blood vessels, nerve ganglia, electron micrographs of crystals and the tree-like patterns of electrical discharge-figures are connected, although they are vastly different in place, origin, and scale. Their similarity of form is by no means accidental. As patterns of energy-gathering and energy-distribution, they are similar graphs generated by similar processes." | Jonathan Williams | Some Speak of a Return to Nature--I Wonder Where They Could've Been (from The Magpie's Bagpipe) | 2005-11-19 | pattern | ||||||
| Direct your eye right inward and you'll find a thousand regions in your mind yet undiscovered. | Henry David Thoreau | 2007-09-04 | contemplation, meditation | |||||||
| Do you know what I hate about computers? The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them. This is why I can't use them for very long. Do you know what a nerd is? A nerd is a human being without enough Africa in him or her. I know this sounds sort of inversely racist to say, but I think the African connection is so important. You know why music was the center of our lives for such a long time? Because it was a way of allowing Africa in. In 50 years, it might not be Africa; it might be Brazil. But I want so desperately for that sensibility to flood into these other areas, like computers. | Brian Eno | Gossip is Philosophy (Wired) | 1995-05 | http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.05/eno.html | 2008-01-28 | computing africa western art soul | http://blog.longnow.org/2008/01/25/art-by-accident/ | |||
| ecology is absolutely essential to making sense of the Web, let alone helping to grow and evolve it. In many ways the Semantic Web and the collective minds, and the global mind, that it enables, can be seen as an ecosystem of people, applications, information and knowledge. This ecosystem is very complex, much like natural ecosystems in the physical world. An ecosystem isn't built, it's grown, and evolved. And similarly the Semantic Web, and the coming global mind, will not really be built, they will be grown and evolved. The people and organizations that end up playing a leading role in this process will be the ones that understand and adapt to the ecology most effectively. In my opinion ecology is going to be the most important science and discipline of the 21st century — it is the science of healthy systems. What nature teaches us about complex systems can be applied to every kind of system — and especially the systems we are evolving on the Web. In order to ever have a hope of evolving a global mind, and all the wonderful levels of species-level collective intelligence that it will enable, we have to not destroy the planet before we get there. Ecology is the science that can save us, not the Semantic Web (although perhaps by improving collective intelligence, it can help). Ecology is essentially the science of community — whether biological, technological or social. And community is a key part of the Semantic Web at every level: communities of software, communities of people, and communities of groups. In the end the global mind is the ultimate human community. It is the reward we get for finally learning how to live together in peace and balance with our environment. [...] if the global mind ever emerges it will not be in a world that is anything like what we might imagine. It won't be like the Borg in Star Trek, it won't be like living inside of a machine. Humans won't be relegated to the roles of slaves or drones. [...] the global mind can only come to pass in a much greener, more organic, healthier, more balanced and sustainable world. | Nova Spivack | Minding the Planet: The Meaning and Future of the Semantic Web | http://lifeboat.com/ex/minding.the.planet | 2007-08-10 | ecology, community, systems, global mind, semantic web, dystopia, environment | |||||
| Ensuring free access and enabling modification at each stage in the process means that the evolution of software occurs in the fast Lamarckian mode: each favorable acquired characteristic of others’ work can be directly inherited. | Eben Moglen | http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_8/moglen/ | 2007-01-30 | software, open source | ||||||
| Environmental destruction proceeds apace in spite of all the warnings, the good science, the 501(c)3 organizations with their memberships in the millions, the poll results, and the martyrs perched high in the branches of sequoias or shot dead in the Amazon. This is so not because of a power, a strength out there that we must resist. It is because we are weak and fearful. Only a weak and fearful society could invest so much desperate energy in protecting activities that are the equivalent of suicide. we are so frightened by the prospect of stepping outside of the market system on which we depend for our national wealth, our jobs, and our sense of normalcy that we will let the logic of that system try to correct its own excesses even when we know we're just kidding ourselves. What the environmental movement is not very good at is acknowledging that something in the very fabric of our daily life is deeply anti-nature as well as anti-human. It inhabits not just bad-guy CEOs at Monsanto and Weyerhaeuser but nearly every working American, environmentalists included. Believing in powerful corporate evildoers as the primary source of our problems forces us to think in cartoons. corporations are really powerless to be anything other than what they are. it's not as if businessmen perversely seek to destroy their own world. They have vacation homes in the Rockies or New England and enjoy walks in the forest, too. They simply have other priorities which are to them a duty. Tribes are capable of exerting will based on principles, but they are capable only with the greatest difficulty of willing the destruction of their own principles. It's as if they feel that it is better to stagger from frustration to frustration than to return honestly to the question, does what we believe actually make sense? The belief that corporate power is the unique source of our problems is not the only idol we are subject to. There is an idol even in the language we use to account for our problems. Our primary dependence on the scientific language of "environment," "ecology," "diversity," "habitat," and "ecosystem" is a way of acknowledging the superiority of the very kind of rationality that serves not only the Sierra Club but corporate capitalism as well. This mindset is generally called "quantitative reasoning," and it is second nature to Anglo-Americans. Corporate execs are perfectly comfortable with it, and corporate philanthropists give their dough to environmental organizations that speak it. Unfortunately, it also has the consequence of turning environmentalists into quislings, collaborators, and virtuous practitioners of a cost-benefit logic figured in songbirds. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth may have distressing things to say about global warming, but subconsciously it is an extended apology for scientific rationality, the free market, and our utterly corrupted democracy. Gore doesn't have to defend these things directly; he merely has to pretend that nothing else exists. | Curtis White | The Idols of Environmentalism, Orion Magazine | 2007-03 | http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/233 | quotes are extracted from various places in the work; non-consecutive | 2007-06-15 | environment, corporations, capitalism, market, power, western, language | |||
| Every economist and businessman is familiar with the distinction [between income and capital], and applies it conscientiously and with considerable subtlety to all economic affairs--except where it really matters: namely, the irreplaceable capital which man has not made, but simply found, and without which he can do nothing. | E.F. Schumacher | Small is Beautiful | p 14 | 2007-12-18 | nature, natural capital, capitalism, externalities | |||||
| Every morning I awake torn between a desire to save the world and an inclination to savor it. This makes it hard to plan the day. But if we forget to savor the world, what possible reason do we have for saving it? | E.B. White | 2008-09-10 | enjoyment, relaxation, work | an email from Marty Lesher | ||||||
| Everyone, this people, too much in their world. | Jhumpa Lahiri | "Mrs. Sen's" story in Interpreter of Maladies | speaker: Mrs. Sen | 2007-04-20 | reality | |||||
| fall in love when you work | Maurice Sendak | Pilobolus & Maurice Sendak in Last Dance, a film by Mirra Bank | 2007-03-26 | work | ||||||
| First, we were all told to "buy organic" food because it's better for our health, and for the earth. Then we were told that buying organic wasn't enough [...] we were told to buy locally produced foods (and organic, if possible) it turns out eating local can have unintended consequences as well. [...] the trend toward "eating local" may hurt farmers who depend heavily on overseas markets to make a living. we would do well to eschew zealotry -- organic, locavorean, or fair-trade -- in exchange for a mix of all three. | Erica Barnett | Eat Organic! Eat Local! Eat...What? (WorldChanging) | http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007603.html | 2007-11-27 | food, organic, local, sustainability, environment | |||||
| For just as from the heavens the rain and snow come down And do not return there till they have watered the earth, making it fertile and fruitful, Giving seed to him who sows and bread to him who eats, So shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; It shall not return to me void, but shall do my will, achieving the end for which I sent it. | The Bible, Isaiah 55:10-11 | http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/isaiah/isaiah55.htm | 2008-01-11 | word, god, meaning | ||||||
| Frankly, I don't want that version of America to survive -- the America of chain stores, and muscle cars, and grown men obsessed with video games, drugs, and pornography, and women decorated like cannibals, and the vast, crushing purposelessness of it all. I have no doubt we're heading into a convulsion that will wring much of this junk and dross into the backwaters of history. We're capable of being something better than this, of putting our time on earth to better use, including a more respectful treatment of the land we inhabit. This year and the next will be the years of letting go, and out of that we'll commence a re-becoming. | James Howard Kunstler | The Coming Re-becoming (Clusterfuck Nation) | 2008-07-28 | http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2008/07/the-coming-re-becoming.html | 2008-08-01 | america, consumerism, culture, environment, crash | ||||
| Freedom of the press is only guaranteed when you own the press | Frances Cerra, (formed New York Times reporter) | 2005-11-19 | media | |||||||
| God is a trap. God is the answer when we don't know the answer. | Philippe Starck | TEDTalks 2007 | 2007-12-13 | religion | ||||||
| He who through the error of attachment loves his body abides wandering in darkness sensible and suffering the things of death, but he who realizes that the body is but the tomb of the soul rises to immortality. To the ignorant the body is supreme and they are incapable of realizing the immortality which is within them. Knowing only the body which is subject to death, they believe in death because they worship that substance which is the cause and reality of death. 'Because the father of all things consists of Life and Light, whereof man is made.' If, therefore, a man shall learn and understand the nature of Life and Light, then he shall pass into the eternity of Life and Light. Let the man endued with a Mind mark, consider, and learn of himself, and with the power of his Mind divide himself from his not-self and become a servant of Reality. | Poimandres to Hermes | 2008-01-11 | body, mortality, life, death, reality, attachment | Secret Teachings of All Ages, Manly Palmer Hall | ||||||
| Here's what four year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Media that's targeted at you -- but doesn't include you -- may not be worth sitting still for. | Clay Shirky | Cognitive Surplus (talk) at Web 2.0 Expo 2008 | 2008-04-25 | http://blip.tv/file/855937 | 2008-04-30 | media, consumption, web2.0 | http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/010218.html | |||
| I don't think of my what I do here as production of "information" that others "consume". Nor do I think of it as "one-to-many" or "many-to-many". I think of it as writing that will hopefully inform readers. Informing is not the same as delivering information. Inform is derived from the verb to form. When you inform me, you form me. You enlarge that which makes me most human: what I know. I am, to some degree, authored by you. What we call "authority" is the right we give others to author us, to enlarge us. | Doc Searls | We are all authors of each other | http://doc-weblogs.com/2007/02/20#weAreAllAuthorsOfEachOther | 2007-11-28 | information, consumption, media, blogging, citizen journalism | |||||
| I like the idea of a noun like "community" (something often presented as a fixed entity) instead being the dynamic result of a million personal decisions. Community is what comes of many, many small investments. | Kate Sopko | Community is Conversation (Stewards of the Lost Lands) | 2008-03-19 | http://stewardsoflostlands.blogspot.com/2008/03/community-is-conversation.html | 2008-04-07 | community | ||||
| I never found a companion that was as companionable as solitude. | Henry David Thoreau | 2007-09-04 | solitude | |||||||
| I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live. You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid. You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand. Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. You died when you refused to stand up for right. You died when you refused to stand up for truth. You died when you refused to stand up for justice. | Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | From the sermon “But, If Not” delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church | 1967-11-05 | 2008-09-17 | work, duty, attachment, passion | http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2008/09/04/stop-rationalizing-and-make-hard-decisions-learning-from-dr-king/ | ||||
| I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop. At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I'm not one. I'd rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can't ignore. | Robert Rauschenberg | 2008-05-28 | understanding, boredom, ideas | http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1029-robert-rauschenberg-on-process-change-boredom-and-more | ||||||
| if America could harness the power it wastes blowing smoke up its own ass, we could magically escape our energy-and-climate-change predicament. | James Howard Kunstler | Blowing Green Smoke | 2007-04-16 | http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2007/04/blowing_green_s.html | 2008-02-16 | america, environment, pollution, waste, energy, climate change | ||||
| If an artist is not a Modernist when he is young, he has no heart. And if he is a Modernist when he is old, he has no brain. | Einojuhani Rautavaara | (in a press interview in Philadelphia, April 2000) | 2005-03-24 | art | ||||||
| If greed were not the master of modern man -- ably assisted by envy -- how could it be that the frenzy of economism does not abate as higher "standards of living" are attained, and that it is precisely the richest societies which pursue their economic advantage with the greatest ruthlessness? | E.F. Schumacher | Small is Beautiful | p 38 | 2007-12-18 | greed, wealth, capitalism | |||||
| If the physical form of a neighborhood is conducive to community, so is its virtual form. But the other striking thing about the list [of America’s Top 10 Bloggiest Neighborhoods ( http://outside.in/news/bloggiest_neighborhoods.php )] was that all the neighborhoods were in a state of change—gentrifying or recently gentrified. It’s certainly demographic: a neat and obvious alignment of hipster and blogger. But it also means that the newly emerging character of these places is being forged, at least in part, online. These are incontrovertibly real-world neighborhoods, but their community is as virtual as it is physical. | http://www.andrewblum.net/typepad/2007/10/local-cities-gl.html | 2007-12-19 | neighborhood, community, virtual, gentrification, blogger | http://future.iftf.org/2007/12/blended-urban-r.html | ||||||
| If you want to express the truth, throw out your words, throw out your silence, and tell me about your own Zen. | Ekai, "Mu-Mon", transcribed by Nyogen Senzaki & Paul Reps | "21. Without words, without silence", from The Gateless Gate, in Zen Flesh Zen Bones | 2005-05-27 | zen, koan, truth, silence | ||||||
| In my son's eyes I see the ambition that had first hurled me across the world. In a few years he will graduate and pave his way, alone and unprotected. But I remind myself that he has a father who is still living, a mother who is happy and strong. Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on 3 continents, then there is no obstacle he can't conquer. While astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly 30 years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination. | Jhumpa Lahiri | "The Third and Final Continent" from Interpreter of Maladies | 2005-04-20 | travel, time, life, age | ||||||
| In the future, instead of striving to be right at a high cost, it will be more appropriate to be flexible and plural at a lower cost. If you cannot accurately predict the future then you must flexibly be prepared to deal with various possible futures. | Edward de Bono | 2008-02-07 | pluralism generality prediction future uncertainty | http://www.chrisperruna.com/2008/02/07/can-we-stop-with-the-predictions/ | http://www.edwdebono.com/ | |||||
| Individual talents and perspectives don't have to shrivel within a retribalized society; they merely interact within a group consciousness that has the potential for releasing far more creativity than the old atomized culture. Literate man is alienated, impoverished man; retribalized man can lead a far richer and more fulfilling life--not the life of a mindless drone but of the participant in a seamless web of interdependence and harmony. The implosion of electric technology is transmogrifying literate, fragmented man into a complex and depth-structured human being with a deep emotional awareness of his complete interdependence with all of humanity. The old "individualistic print society was one where the individual was "free only to be alienated and dissociated, a rootless outsider bereft of tribal dreams; our new electronic environment compels commitment and participation, and fulfills man's psychic and social needs at profound levels. | Marshall McLuhan | The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan (Playboy Magazine, March 1969) | 1969-03 | http://www.digitallantern.net/mcluhan/mcluhanplayboy.htm | 2007-05-02 | http://www.jeffschuler.net/archive/2008/01/selfarranging-explod.html | tribalism, interdependence, communication, community | |||
| It is important that design not constrain the human or natural economy; people should be free to determine spatial utility. Design should never dictate, but be didactic only as part of a larger environmental education. If ecological constraints are too strong, it may be best not to build anything new, but instead retrofit what we have so that as little damage is done as possible, while ensuring that the city allows for the presence of nature throughout its fabric. | William McDonough & Partners | The Hannover Principles: Design for Sustainability (Prepared for EXPO 2000, The World’s Fair, Hannover, Germany) | 2000 | http://www.mcdonough.com/principles.pdf | 2007-08-10 | design, city, reuse, architecture | ||||
| It will be a totally retribalized world of depth involvements. Through radio, TV and the computer, we are already entering a global theater in which the entire world is a Happening. Our whole cultural habitat, which we once viewed as a mere container of people, is being transformed by these media and by space satellites into a living organism, itself contained within a new macrocosm or connubium of a supraterrestrial nature. The day of the individualist, of privacy, of fragmented or "applied knowledge, of "points of view and specialist goals is being replaced by the over-all awareness of a mosaic world in which space and time are overcome by television, jets and computers--a simultaneous, "all-at-once world in which everything resonates with everything else as in a total electrical field, a world in which energy is generated and perceived not by the traditional connections that create linear, causative thought processes, but by the intervals, or gaps, which Linus Pauling grasps as the languages of cells, and which create synaesthetic discontinuous integral consciousness. | Marshall McLuhan | The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan (Playboy Magazine, March 1969) | 1969-03 | http://www.digitallantern.net/mcluhan/mcluhanplayboy.htm | 2007-05-02 | organism, cosmos, happening, consciousness, media | ||||
| It's true that we evolve our technology as we understand more, but our understanding of life has been limited by the pretense that nature is complex machinery. We have failed to investigate living systems in their own right, without the assumption that they are mechanical, until very recently. For example, we used to think the brain functioned like an input-output plumbing system -- a system of pipes and valves in which things got jammed up and had to be released and flushed: the Freudian model of the brain. Then we invented the telephone and suddenly the brain was a telephone system. The neurons were wires relaying the messages down the wires, and things like that. Then we invented the computer and, lo and behold, the brain became a computer. Then it became a holographic camera and projector. Then we invented parallel processing. So the brain became a parallel processor. In other words, as technology comes closer to emulating our observation of life, we continue to project the latest technology onto life itself, ever confusing our models with natural reality. | Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D. | Living Systems, the Internet and the Human Future, Talk presented at Planetwork, Global Ecology and Information Technology | 2000-05-13 | http://www.ratical.org/LifeWeb/Articles/LSinetHF.html | 2006-12-20 | http://www.jeffschuler.net/archive/2008/01/selfarranging-explod.html | evolution, biology, brain, systems, technology, reality, models, metaphor | |||
| It’s a great place to live and to work. But then some time around 6:30 or 7:00 in the evening, most of the people that come into the city during the day are gone, they start leaving, places start closing, and I have had some trouble with some of the basic things, like grocery stores, convenience stores, places to go to eat that aren’t $300 a plate or whatever it is over on West 6th, and there’s sort of an element of that missing. I think the potential to start new businesses in New York is basically only limited to those individuals, those entrepreneurs that have access to investment funding, to significant resources. In Cleveland, even in downtown Cleveland, I think it’s possible to start an amazing tech company without having somebody hand you a $100,000 or a million dollar check. I think in Cleveland it’s a lot easier and a lot more possible to really get innovative ideas off the ground. [...] but on the down side, I’ve seen a lot less people who want to start those type of things in the Cleveland area. New York seems to have this very creative entrepreneurial spirit about it. Everybody’s an entrepreneur in New York, and in Cleveland it’s not quite the case. | Richard Zack | interview in Cool Cleveland | http://www.coolcleveland.com/index.php?n=Main.CoolClevelandPeopleRichardZack | 2006-12-20 | cleveland, city, entrepreneurship, economic development | |||||
| I’ve never been a conspiracy theorist. I’ve never believed there are a bunch of people out there who are pulling all the strings and pressing all the buttons. And the reason is that the older I get, the more time I spend meeting people in government or in the corporate arena, the more human everybody becomes. What I do believe is that those with money, those with influence, those with control over how resources are allocated in our society, are very protective of their interests, and they can rationalize infinitely the reasons why they should have more money and power than anyone else, why that’s somehow good for the society as a whole. | Barack Obama | The Audacity of Hope | 2008-01-28 | 2008-01-30 | conspiracy, politics, human nature, greed, power | http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/05/07/070507fa_fact_macfarquhar?printable=true | ||||
| Knowledge increases unreality. | William Butler Yeats | 2007-08-04 | reality | |||||||
| Like it or not, we are the custodians of the destiny of this planet; our decisions affect every life form on the planet, and yet we are still communicating with each other with the extremely precise medium of small mouth noises mediated by ignorance and hate. This doesn't seem like the way to do business as we approach the third millennium. [...] Language is the unique province of human beings, and language is the unique tool of the artist. The artist is the person of language. [...] Science is the special province of the ego, and magic and art are the special province of something else. | Terence McKenna | Opening the Doors of Creativity | 2008-01-20 | language art science ego | http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=252 | |||||
| Living as he does much of the time in a world of metaphor, the poet is always acutely conscious that metaphor has no value apart from its function; that it is a device, and artifice. So that while others may look on the laws of physics as legislation and God as a human form with beard measured in light-years and nebulae for sandals, Fausto's kind are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the "practical" half of humanity may continue in the Great Lie, confident that their machines, dwellings, streets and weather share the same human motives, personal traits and fits of contrariness as they. | Thomas Pynchon | V. | 2006-12-20 | poetry, reality, metaphor | ||||||
| Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and, I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. | Carl Sagan | Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space | 1994 | http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan | also attributed to a commencement address Sagan gave on May 11, 1996 | 2008-01-05 | cosmos universe meaning ideology earth war | |||
| Malícia, which is non-rational, lived, experiential knowledge, can become a very heavy load. And this has happened to many players. The inexperienced apprentice, when impregnated by this kind of "vision" of human beings, can become a cynical, dry, and egotistical person. In the end he will transform himself into a lonely being always unsatisfied with the world and with him/herself. Someone incapable of relating to other people in a positive way. Someone who has become incapable of enjoying life. | Nestor Capoeira | Capoeira: Roots of the Dance-Fight-Game | 2007-12-22 | capoeira | ||||||
| Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side. Until quite recently, the battle seemed to go well enough to give him the illusion of unlimited powers, but not so well as to bring the possibility of total victory into view. This has now come into view, and many people, albeit only a minority, are beginning to realise what this means for the continued existence of humanity. | E.F. Schumacher | Small is Beautiful | p 14 | 2007-12-18 | nature, humanity, environment | |||||
| My country is in ruins. So I’m a fish in a poisoned fishbowl. I’m mostly just heartsick about this. There should have been hope. This should have been a great country. | Kurt Vonnegut | Verbatin, The last interview with one of America's great men of letters (US Airways Magazine, June 2007) | 2007-06 | http://www.usairwaysmag.com/2007_06/verbatim.php | 2007-12-11 | america | ||||
| Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today. | Marshall McLuhan | The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan (Playboy Magazine, March 1969) | 1969-03 | http://www.digitallantern.net/mcluhan/mcluhanplayboy.htm | 2007-05-02 | mysticism, science, future | ||||
| No intelligent person should restrict himself to artificially segregated fields of spiritual or intellectual adventure. | Alan Watts | 2007-12-20 | open-mindedness | |||||||
| Not that competition ever goes away because everything happens at once all the time. It's a rich situation. But we are learning global harmony. We are able to have air traffic control all over the planet. We have a global communications system. We have the Internet. There are lots of examples of our great ability to cooperate at the global level. It's just that our global economy is so out-of-whack with living systems, that it stands out as glaringly inappropriate, as we've seen. The reason we haven't noticed this glaring problem is that our economy was developed in denial of our role within nature and great ignorance of how nature works. Our social models, including our corporate world, were designed as mechanical models. But organism and mechanism are very different [...] At present we're moving away from inventor-created, allopoietic systems to autopoietic systems -- literally self-created systems, living systems in holarchy instead of hierarchy, with negotiations instead of top-down command; systems that negotiate cooperation and thus design themselves from within instead of being engineered and repaired and redesigned by inventors or designers. | Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D. | Living Systems, the Internet and the Human Future, Talk presented at Planetwork, Global Ecology and Information Technology | 2000-05-13 | http://www.ratical.org/LifeWeb/Articles/LSinetHF.html | 2007-09-04 | economy, globalism, gaia, systems, nature, models, mechanical, organic | ||||
| Old divisions between “city” and “countryside” have become misleading in urbanized nations like the U.S. “City” in the U.S. today really means “metropolitan region,” because we are a predominantly suburban nation. After almost two centuries of peripheral urban growth, American suburbs have overwhelmed the centers of cities, creating urban regions largely formed of suburban parts. By 2000, more Americans lived in suburbs than in central cities and rural areas combined. Since the mid-1930s, the federal government has encouraged green field development on raw land outside of urban centers, usually through tax subsidies rather than direct spending. These incentives account for extended metropolitan expansion promoted by “growth machines” — alliances of bankers, developers, and business leaders profiting from hidden federal subsidies for suburban development. Excessive green field growth lies behind the national energy shortage and the mortgage crisis. Using federal incentives to constantly expand urban peripheries with commercial and residential development has had serious consequences. Reliance on imported oil, pursuit of war in the Middle East, and the credit crunch shaking Wall Street suggest that wise patterns of urban land use are more important to economic well-being than many Americans recognize. | Dolores Hayden | How Should We Be Thinking About Urbanization? A Freakonomics Quorum | 2007-12-11 | http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/how-should-we-be-thinking-about-urbanization-a-freakonomics-quorum | 2008-01-10 | suburbia, city, urban, rural, america, growth, land use | http://www.doloreshayden.com | |||
| once a surgeon becomes personally involved and disturbed about the condition of his patient, he loses the power to help that patient. | Marshall McLuhan | The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan (Playboy Magazine, March 1969) | 1969-03 | http://www.digitallantern.net/mcluhan/mcluhanplayboy.htm | 2007-05-02 | |||||
| Once we are enmeshed in the magical resonance of the tribal echo chamber, the debunking of myths and legends is replaced by their religious study. | Marshall McLuhan | The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan (Playboy Magazine, March 1969) | 1969-03 | http://www.digitallantern.net/mcluhan/mcluhanplayboy.htm | 2007-05-02 | myth, media, religion | ||||
| openness, in a context of unequal power, just puts more power in the hands of those who already hold it--those with the guns, the funds, or other ways of controlling the public agenda. | Andy Oram | "Yochai Benkler, others at Harvard map current and future Internet" (O'Reilly Radar) | 2008-05-15 | http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/05/yochai-benkler-others-at-harva.html | 2008-06-02 | openness, open, information, power | ||||
| Our basic knowings are no longer of 'things' and their 'properties,' but of structures -- usually implied structures. In other words, events at the level of nuclear, atomic, and molecular levels, cosmic ray phenomena, and events at the level of the extremely large, as in astrophysics, are not visual experiences, but logical and mathematical derivations from instrument-observations and hypotheses. The inferred structures and events, then, are never directly experienced... | S. I. Hayakawa | The New Landscape in Art and Science | 2005-07-25 | pattern, reality | ||||||
| Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits. | Robert Louis Stevenson | 2008-02-05 | positivity | http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/08/surprises_on_th.html | ||||||
| People who have studied the issue of intellectual property rights carefully (such as lawyers) say that there is no intrinsic right to intellectual property. The kinds of supposed intellectual property rights that the government recognizes were created by specific acts of legislation for specific purposes. | Richard Stallman | GNU Manifesto | http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html | 2006-02-10 | http://www.jeffschuler.net/archive/2007/11/properly-passive.html | property, ip, open source | ||||
| Personally, I have a great faith in the resiliency and adaptability of man, and I tend to look to our tomorrows with a surge of excitement and hope. I feel that we're standing on the threshold of a liberating and exhilarating world in which the human tribe can become truly one family and man's consciousness can be freed from the shackles of mechanical culture and enabled to roam the cosmos. I have a deep and abiding belief in man's potential to grow and learn, to plumb the depths of his own being and to learn the secret songs that orchestrate the universe. We live in a transitional era of profound pain and tragic identity quest, but the agony of our age is the labor pain of rebirth. I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey. To be born in this age is a precious gift, and I regret the prospect of my own death only because I will leave so many pages of man's destiny--if you will excuse the Gutenbergian image--tantalizingly unread. But perhaps, as I've tried to demonstrate in my examination of the postliterate culture, the story begins only when the book closes. | Marshall McLuhan | The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan (Playboy Magazine, March 1969) | 1969-03 | http://www.digitallantern.net/mcluhan/mcluhanplayboy.htm | 2007-05-02 | evolution, cosmos, renaissance | ||||
| Poetry is not prose simply because poetry is in one way or another formalized. It is not poetry by reason of its content or ambiguity but by reason of its allowing musical elements (time, sound) to be introduced into the world of words. Thus, traditionally, information no matter how stuffy (e.g., the sutras and shastras of India) was transmitted in poetry. It was easier to grasp that way. | John Cage | found in Jonathan Williams' "Publishing Bucky's Epic" from The Magpie's Bagpipe | 2005-07-15 |