Thunderstorm

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He, inspired: "Let's go for a walk."

"What? It's pouring out there." Her face added, "Dumbass." She turned again to her book, a love story, a bestseller.

He stared at the TV again where gleeful children muddied their clothes and an equally gleeful mother cleaned them with Tide. No sound, he muted commercials. He listened to the rain and wondered.

Three years now, they'd become a ritual. She went to work each day, worked late, ate at the office, came home to sit in her chair and read her book. He worked from home, wandered the empty apartment, scanned the paper for fun things to do they never did.

"Movie?"

"I'm too tired, I just want to read this and go to bed," she said.

He listened to the rain and imagined himself going for a walk in it.

The Cluetrain Manifesto

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This conversation may be irreverent of eternal verities, but it's not all jokes. Whether in the marketplace or at work, people do have genuine, serious concerns. And we have something else as well: knowledge. Not the sort of boring, abstract knowledge that "Knowledge Management" wants to manage. No. The real thing. We have knowledge of what we do and how we do it — our craft — and it drives our voices; it's what we most like to talk about.

But this whole gamut of conversation, from infinite jest to point-specific expertise: who needs it?

Companies need it. Without it they can't innovate, build consensus, or go to market. Markets need it. Without it they don't know what works and what doesn't; don't know why they should give a damn. Cultures need it. Without play and knowledge in equal measure, they begin to die. People get gloomy, anxious, and depressed. Eventually, the guns come out.

There are two new conversations going on today, both vibrant and exciting; both mediated by Internet technologies but having little to do with technology otherwise. Unfortunately, there's also a metaphorical firewall separating these conversations, and that wall is the traditional, conservative, fearful corporation.

-- Christopher Locke, The Cluetrain Manifesto

 

The Secret Agent

photo © satanslaundromat.com CC:Attribution-NonCommercial

The enormous iron padlock on the doors of the wall cupboard was the only object in the room on which the eye could rest without becoming afflicted by the miserable unloveliness of forms and the poverty of material. Unsaleable in the ordinary course of business on account of its noble proportions, it had been ceded to the Professor for a few pence by a marine dealer in the east of London. The room was large, clean, respectable, and poor with that poverty suggesting the starvation of every human need except mere bread. There was nothing on the walls but the paper, an expanse of arsenical green, soiled with indelible smudges here and there, and with stains resembling faded maps of uninhabited continents.

-- Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

 

silenced

photo © Michael Jastremski for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike

One of the most important trends in recent years is the growth of multinational corporate censors whose agendas are very different from those of governments. It is arguable that in the first decade of the 21st century, corporations will rival governments in threatening Internet freedoms. Some American cable companies seek to turn the Internet into a controlled distribution medium like TV and radio, and are putting in place the necessary technological changes to the Internet's infrastructure to do so. Aggressive protection of corporate intellectual property has result in substantial legal action against users, and a corresponding deterioration in trust across the Internet.

-- Privacy International and the GreenNet Educational Trust, silenced

Everyone In Silico

photo © Nikki Levine for openphoto.net CC:Attribution

By the time he got home, Cheryl was white. Doug didn’t say anything about it, just looked around their new apartment. It was about the same size and appearance as their place in Vancouver, with an extra room. Doug looked in.

“I figure that could be the study,” Cheryl was saying, looking in with him.

The room had semi-opaque crystalline walls, a featureless cube. “Gets a lot of light,” Doug joked.

“You just touch the walls,” she said, demonstrating. As she moved her fingers across the surface, it cycled through the colour spectrum. “The whole place looked like this when we arrived. Looked like something out of a science fiction movie,” Cheryl said.

Doug thought briefly about how so much of Frisco was inspired — or perhaps limited — by the gutter genre. “Lots of work,” Doug said, nodding at his wife appreciatively as they left the room.

“I figure I’ll leave that room to you,” Cheryl said. “If we don’t end up using it much, we can delete it. It’ll decrease our monthlies by,” she consulted a spreadsheet that appeared in the air. “$542.”

-- Jim Munroe, Everyone In Silico

Open Source Democracy

photo © Frank Ulbrich for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-NoDerivs

We are living in a world of stories. We can’t help but use narratives to understand the events that occur around us. The unpredictability of nature, emotions, social interactions and power relationships led human beings from prehistoric times to develop narratives that described the patterns underlying the movements of these forces. Although we like to believe that primitive people actually believed the myths they created about everything, from the weather to the afterlife, a growing camp of religious historians are concluding that early religions were understood much more metaphorically than we understand religion today.

-- Douglas Rushkoff, Open Source Democracy