The People have power and we can tap into that again. —Lowell Christy Last July, as the media reported on Edward Snowden, the NSA, and surveillance through phone and internet service companies like Verizon, Google, and Microsoft, I spoke with Dr. Lowell Christy about his research on the American Revolution and the logic of 21st […]
Original Wisdom
In order to organize society, we create institutions, we build buildings, we train millions of people to perform very specialized activities. We make endless forms to record and report what we are doing. We create armies of people to supervise other people, and of course the supervisors themselves have to be supervised as well. These […]
Designing Anew
I’m endlessly fascinated by how minority groups absorb majority standards as a measure of value, even when those standards press the minority to pervert its native expression and don’t elicit the best of what the minority group could bring to the common table. I was heading to a work dinner with my favorite person yesterday […]
Beyond the Vote: Political Meta-narratives & Asking the People What They Think
In this talk, Eric X. Li offers a provocative discussion of political meta-narratives—the stories we tell ourselves about our political systems—based on his study of the People’s Republic of China. At 15:08, Li makes some bold predictions about China’s future in comparison to the US and peer nations within the next decade. I hope someone checks […]
Storify: Who Is My Neighbor?
Misanthropes and philanthropists enjoy the same sunlight and we’re naturally interdependent with other living and non-living aspects of our ecosystem. Our ecosystem includes human systems too—families, governments, ethnic-cultural groups, religions, and economic models. Even when we have individual preferences about these things, the dominant models in our environment still affect us. Someone who never builds […]
On Understanding
Convenience of conceptual analogies is no substitute for usefulness or rigour. —R. Brennan & S. Henneberg One understands a phenomenon only when one has a holistic view of [it], a view that integrates all of its known components and all of its known manifestations. —T. Bouldin & L. Odell Pulling a mechanical thing apart to […]
