Robert Paterson's Weblog

You Don't Need a Banker - Book 2 in series of the shift to Networks coming next week

With a bit of luck - Keeping on the right side of Murphys' Law - I will publish next week Book 2 in my series describing  the shift from a machine to a network world will affect us.

Just as many of us have found that we Don't Need a Job to earn a decent living and to have a good life, many of us are also learning that just because the banks won't or cannot lend to you does not mean that you cannot get credit.

The barrier to accessing this new world of community based credit is Mindset. Just as it is Mindset that makes us so fearful of not having a Job. Many try and use the new tools in the old way - just like this with the same results:

It's 1940 - what do you see here and what did the French General Staff see?

 

A Tank right? This is a Char B. It was much better than nearly all the German tanks of the time.

But in reality this is what the French General Staff saw. They saw this as a mobile pill box that could be deployed as moving strong points with the infantry.

Now let's look at the Germans at the same time.

Here they are about to launch the first Blitzkrieg in Poland. These are Mk II's a vastly inferior tank to the Char B. 

This is how the German General Staff really saw them and how they were used.

A raging but narrowly confined Torrent that would destroy and disrupt all in its path - it is an idea all about controlled chaos. Only the German Army with their highly devolved culture that pushed command down could cope with such an idea.

This idea was truly "disruptive". The actual tools were inferior to the opposition. Their context was superior.

THIS is what my new book is all about.

It is a contextual guide that will, I hope, help you see the context and so the mindset issues that can either trap you or empower you.

Watch this space.

 

Public Media and Sandy - Shameful Coverage #sandy #pubmedia

Here is what Doc Searls - a huge fan of Pub Media - discovered about Pub Media's pathetic efforts to cover Sandy in his area.

"12:48pm: In a crisis like #Sandy, one of the great failures of public television is exposed: there is almost no live local coverage of anything, despite a boundless abundance of presumably willing helpers in the Long Tail.

Public TV’s connection with What’s Actually Happening is astoundingly low, and ironic given its name.

Scheduled programs throb through the calendar with metronomic precision. About the only times they ever go live is during pledge breaks, which always give the impression of being the main form of programming.

If they were as good at actual journalism as they are at asking for money*, they would kick ass. I’ve included local public stations in my list here. None of them are go-to sites for the public. I just scanned through them, and here’s the rundown:

• Maryland Public Television displays no evidence that a hurricane is going on.
• WHYY Philadelphia-Wilmington: Pointage to Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane, which ran from 10-Noon today. The top Special Announcement is “Visit NewsWorks.org or follow @NewsWorksWHYY on Twitter for continuing coverage of Hurricane Sandy.”
• WNET in New York is itself almost inert. But it does have links to its three broadcast outlet pages. thirteen.org in Metro Focus has a scary visual of likely flooding in New York, last updated at 7:38pm Sunday. WLIW, another of its stations, has the same pointage. That’s about it. Its NJTV site is a bit more current. They post this: “Committed to serving Garden State residents during what is predicted to be an exceptional storm in Hurricane Sandy, NJTV will provide updates throughout the day plus Gov. Chris Christie’s next press conference. Monday night, join Managing Editor Mike Schneider for full storm analysis during live NJ Today broadcasts at 6 pm, 7:30 and 11 pm. Residents can also expect ongoing weather-related news updates on the network’s Facebook andTwitter sites. NJTV is also planning a joint broadcast with WNET’s MetroFocus news program on Tuesday night at 9:30 pm, to assess the effect of the storm on the Tri-State area.” Can’t wait.
• WETA in Washington, D.C. has exactly nothing. WHUT appears to be down.
• CPBN, the Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network, has nothing.
• WGBH in Boston points to a show about the great hurricane of ’38. Almost helpful, that."

So when is Pub Media going to go to the public and crowd source important events? Andy Carvin was covering Sandy from his appartment - it's not even hard to do. So what is the reason that most stations don't do this?

 

 

Co Working will be part of your future

(Source)

If you want to find out what the real new network economy is all about - Join a Co Working space like Scrib

If you want to know why - Read my new Book - You Don't Need a Job

Candy for Halloween - How about some beaver anal glands?

As you hand out the candy - do you know what is in it - other that HFCS etc?

Here are some surprises (Source here)

• Beaver Anal Glands: This bitter, very smelly, orange-brown substance is also known as castoreum. In nature it’s combined with the beaver’s urine and used to mark its territory. In the processed food world it’s commonly used in both food and beverages, typically as vanilla or raspberry flavoring. Watch out though, you won’t find it on the ingredient list since processed food manufacturers can legally call it “natural flavoring.”
• Cow’s Stomach: Known as rennet and derived from the mucosa of veal calves’ fourth stomach, this ingredient is frequently used in the production of cheese to curdle the milk. Often listed simply as “enzymes” on an ingredient panel, it can be very hard to know exactly what you’re eating when you buy cheese.
• Hair and / or feathers: Called L-cysteine or cystine by the processed food world, this non-essential amino acid is made from human hair or duck feathers and is used as a dough conditioner to improve the texture of breads and baked goods. Again, since cystine comes from natural sources, you can eat “natural” and still have hair in your food.
• Beetle Juice: No, I’m not talking about the 1988 movie starring Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis. This beetle juice is used in our food and is often called shellac, resinous glaze, or confectioner’s glaze on ingredient labels. Made from the secretions of the female lac bug, this substance is scraped from trees and branches then processed to be used on some of your favorite shiny candies and sprinkles.
• Crushed bugs: Known as Carmine, Crimson Lake, Cochineal, or Natural Red #4 on ingredient labels, this red food coloring additive is made from insects like the cochineal beetle. Frequently used in yogurts and beverages to give them a ruby-red color, a cochineal beetle can be a tough to spot on ingredient labels since it can be listed as a natural color.

Makers by Cory Doctorow - A Lord of the Rings Culture War Ahead - My Review

Here is my review on Amazon.ca

"Makers worked for me as a novel and as a view of a likely future. So if all you want is a great read, this is it. But if you want to also see what the struggle will be like as the new decentralized, more personal and more human world of the Maker emerges - this is the bible!

The central theme that I found in the book was the conflict between the worldview of the "Suit" and the worldview of Perry the main protagonist who is a Maker.

The suits are in the background as a archetype. Some are allies of the heroes. But the true Villains are still in the corporate world who are trying their best to survive the Maker revolution. The central "Villain" of the book, Jimmy, uses all the normal trappings of the old world to attack the new. In other words he uses the law and in particular copyright. But even he begins to see that what he really wants to do is to create and not to destroy. The secondary villain, a rip and burn journalist, Freddie, can only destroy and is in the end destroyed.

Death or Life are the choices that Cory Doctorow puts out for us.

We see that the pragmatic world of Ford is actually all about destruction and constraint. It is why, I think, that so many people today just cannot work that way anymore. In Makers we see that the old focus is all about death. In Makers we also witness the joy of creation and of participation. The Character of "Death Waits" is the embodiment of the darkness of the old - he is a Goth - and the awakening of the creator as we see him broken physically by his persecutors rise to discover his own worth. And talking about creation and life, Cory writes one of the most erotic love scenes in literature in Makers as well.

My bet is that in 20 years time, we will look at this book in the way that many looked back in the late 1990's at the early work of Arthur C Clarke. We will see that Cory has shone a clear light into the issues that will be central for our future. A future that will see the clash of culture between the forces of true darkness and the forces of hope and life. If Tolkien was the metaphor, CD is the searchlight on the conflict that is arising. We live once more in a time like the Reformation where the world will be divided not by national boundaries but by cultural boundaries.

There will be no middle ground. This is not about left or right. It is about what is human or not. I hope that much of the left and right can find common ground in what is human.

Read this book!"

In a real revolution like this one - Watch out for the Inquisition #Makers

We laugh at the Monty Python Spanish Inquisition. But it was no laughing matter to reformers or the innocent of the time. It was a tool of the establishment of the day to crush dissent.

Well it is here today. All the fuss about copyright is its battleground. In the guise of protecting rights, it crushes the new.

We have seen this in digital media. This has been but a skirmish. Wait until 3D Printing takes off and all who make things in factories feel the threat! Here is the Economist on this threat with a warning for the new Makers: (HT Michael Rose)

"Rallying under the banner of piracy and theft, established manufacturers could likewise seek to get the doctrine of "contributory infringement” included in some expanded object-copyright law as a way of crippling the personal-manufacturing movement before it eats their lunch. Being free to sue websites that host 3D design files as “havens of piracy” would save them the time and money of having to prosecute thousands of individuals with a 3D printer churning out copies at home.

Some also expect incumbent manufacturers to try to stigmatise CAD file-types, in the same way the record companies hounded the bit-torrent and MP3 formats as piracy tools. That could slow the mainstream adoption of 3D printing and imply that anyone uploading CAD files to a public site was somehow infringing on rights, notes Cory Doctorow, a Canadian science writer who blogs for Boing Boing.

Today’s 3D printing crowd—tucked away in garages, basements, small workshops and university labs—needs to keep a keen eye on such policy debates as they grow. “There will be a time when impacted legacy industries [will] demand some sort of DMCA for 3D printing,” says Mr Weinberg. If the tinkerers wait until that day, it will be too late."

"Ownwork" Another Definition of the Maker Economy & so Why You Don't Need a Job

Here is another view of the economy that is emerging. It is from a book by James Robertson called Future Work.

When people who have never met or talked arrive at the same conclusions you can trust what has been discovered.

JR describes this new way as "Ownwork" - More recently it has been given the label of the "Maker Economy".

"Ownwork means activity which is purposeful and important, and which people organise and control for themselves. It may be either paid or unpaid. (Check out my podcast with Cynthia Dennis who helps us understand this point)

It is done by people as individuals and as household members; it is done by groups of people working together; and it is done by people, who live in a particular locality, working locally to meet local needs.

For the individual and the household, ownwork may mean self-employment, essential household and family activities, productive leisure activities such as do-it-yourself or growing some of one's own food, and participation in voluntary work. For groups of people, ownwork may mean working together as partners, perhaps in a community enterprise or a cooperative, or in a multitude of other activities with social, economic, environmental, scientific or other purposes in which they have a personal interest and to which they attach personal importance.

For localities, the significance of ownwork is that it contributes to local self-reliance, an increased local capacity to meet local needs by local work, and a reduction of dependence on outside employers and suppliers. (Here is a nice example in New York)

The actual future will, of course, contain employment, leisure and ownwork — all three. There will almost certainly still be conventional jobs for many people; there will almost certainly be some increase in leisure, perhaps for most people; and ownwork will almost certainly play a larger part in many people's lives and in the life of society as a whole.

But it will be the third of these — the expansion of ownwork — that provides the key to the future of work and leisure. Only the expansion of ownwork will create conditions in which the problems of employment and leisure will be satisfactorily resolved. Only the expansion of ownwork will reflect the shift of values underlying the transition to a post-industrial future which has now begun. Only the expansion of ownwork can bring about the next stage in the liberation of work foreshadowed by the earlier historical progression from slavery to serfdom, and then from serfdom to employment. 

If you check out my book You Don't Need a Job - you will see the match

 

Why the next industrial revolution will start with food

 

HT Harold Jarche

The Big Lie is that ONLY industrial Ag can feed the world. This short video shows that this is a lie and that only a system made up of small holdings using natural principles has any chance.

(PS I have a bad secret to tell you. I was one of the first in Big Ag to use the term Feeding the World - Yes I was one of THEM - So I know what I am talking about)

Did you know that the last industrial revolution was begun with an Ag Revolution. (Here is a piece that I wrote that offers you more detail if you want) New farming techniques then, meant that land owners no longer needed a tied workforce of peasants. They threw them out. But not before they built a new transportation system that was then used to send goods and material all over the world. The Agricultural Revolution set up the Industrial Revolution.

History is repeating itself.

Today the Tech Revolution means that industry no longer needs that workforce any more. It too is creating the new web based infrastructure that will ironically support the new Industrial Revolution Where instead of huge concentrated hubs we have a system of many small nodes connected by a network as I describe in my book - You Don't Need a Job.

Time to go home and make a living growing food. We will only be able to feed ourselves if we do this. Time to take our power back.

Remember in 1900 80% of us in North America lived that way. In a time when there are no jobs and the jobs have no meaning - growing food is a great option.

Can you stand having a job anymore? Many cannot. Here is why

I think we can all accept that it is hard to get a job these days.

But, we rarely talk about whether a person can live with having a job anymore. More and more people just cannot submit to the strictures of a typical job. The fixed hours. The facetime. The brown nosing. The endless meetings. And worse of all the contemptible goals and the tiny narcissistic focus.

I know in my case that I would do anything to avoid having to be that obedient anymore.

I had to leave the job. My job was killing me.

What I am noticing is that I am not alone and that many of my kids generation just cannot stay in Jobs. They are not lazy. They are not stupid. They have great skills. They, like me, just cannot put up with the strictures and rules of how jobs work.

Here is my good friend Cynthia Dennis - one of the smartest and hardest working people I know - aged in her early thirties - on why she cannot submit anymore to having a job.

And more important at the end of her podcast - why she has no desire for all the stuff that the job is meant to get for us. Warning - The Recording is only 17 minutes - I have a glitch that tells you that it is 34 minutes long. Don't worry - when it ends after 17 minutes - it's over - I will get better at this - promise.

 

More on this in my new book - You Don't Need a Job

 Cynthia's talk focuses on two elements of the Job question. The first is the Strictures and the Structures of the Job and the second is that what the Job offers her, she does not need or want. In summary these are:

The Strictures and Structures

Time- Having the time that she works set as if she was in a factory - 9-5 or fixed hours does not fit how she and many of us work. She is best early and late in the day. I am best early. How about you? The idea of flipping a switch and being productive is inhuman. It's not that she is lazy, it is that a set of fixed hours is not using her best.

Minutiae - The focus seems mainly to be on the little things and endless process - all those meetings that really are all about power and role and not about getting important things done. Few jobs are about anything that has any reral meaning. She needs meaning. Do you?

Being herself - In the Job, we put on a role. We are not allowed to be who we really are. She needs to be herself and finds acting out a role all the time numbing. 

The Rewards?

If Cynthia, or I or maybe you, had a job, we would earn more money. That would enable us to have a mortgage, a car loan, credit card debt to enable us to have lots of stuff.  It would give us stuff but limit our freedom.

With a job, we have no time. With no time, we lose touch with ourselves, with those we love and care for. We make keeping the debt to keep the stuff going the centre of our lives.

Do we need the big house? Do we need to own our own car? Do we need all the stuff?

Cynthia feels not. She has the things and access to things that she really needs. AND she has the time to invest in her network that gives her all that she really needs. This I think is the aha that I got from listening to Cynthia.

The Job - takes away our humanity. It replaces it with stuff and with stress. It takes away the time we need to invest in the people that are important to us. And so it makes us helpless and dependent on the system. For we have to buy everything we need and we often have to medicate ourselves to keep us going in this inhuman system.

Anyway - she says it all much better than my simple synopsis.  Listen to her!

The End of the Republic? The Billionaires take over control of the money

The Roman Republic fell into civil war and then into an autocratic empire when the big money took control of the politcal process. The Big Money has taken control of the process in the US.

A full report in the NYT here

They will own the President and the House and so they will own the system and malke it even more their own. This is not a good thing for the 99%