Public Spaces

I've been advocating for new, truth-telling media sources/social networks for the public because communication and factual information is crucial. No doubt our "electronic" spaces have come under much scrutiny and debate these last few years, and there is much work to do there. That said, we must not forget about the original "town squares"... the physical places we have forgotten and taken for granted. We need spaces for us to socialize and communicate in personal and intimate ways. This is why we need free, open, public spaces for us to relax, reflect, discuss, or connect. Safe, but not surveilled, beautiful, but not walled gardens.

https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_diller_a_stealthy_reimagining_of_urban_public_space

Art Informs For Social Change

"Grief carves a place in the heart and sits there forever, but when focused it can be a powerful motivator; sadness becomes resolve, and pain becomes action."

- A Discovery Of Witches

Takeaways From Inauguration Day

It's obvious the political class has learned NOTHING these last few years. The democrats vomit platitudes, ceremony, and elitist decorum...the republicans spew delusional lies, fundamentalism, and complete selfish indulgence.

By the way, if you haven't learned by now, "Unity" means the cowardly democrats will concede massive amounts of power and policy to corporations and republicans.

Jingoism, anthems, poems, ceremony... wasteful, meaningless gestures and performance. If these events are any indication, that is what we'll likely see for the next four years. I am VERY open to being proved wrong... but we're being given no reason to have a lot of hope.

Enjoy the first 100 days; Biden will likely use his executive orders to try to project competency, and be the most productive of his term.

Beyond that, the people need to leap light-years in understanding and maturity, massively organize, put their bodies on the gears of the machine, and choose leaders who will do what's right and needed.

Show, Not Tell & How To Think, Not What To Think

Remember when stories used all your senses to tell stories, hinted and suggested, and inspired you to think. No longer, we are now in the age of preachy cinematic universes. Now, I'd actually forgive them if they did it well... I mean we just came out of 4 years of Trump, so obviously peoples intellectual and moral compasses are far from calibrated... and the "Heroes Journey" can probably be a propaganda tool for good... BUT we aren't getting good lessons, we aren't being challenged to raise the intellectual bar. No, we are being preached Identity Politics, Market Fundamentalism, and some warped post-modern, Christian-ish spiritualism.

Hey media, please stop... we don't need your minority / gay / trans / impoverished, (insert more Identities here) character to create absurd stories that STEAL from the actual experiences/struggles of REAL people. I mean it's a good psychological trick... "hey, she's not just a super hot girl in spandex, she's a lesbian, feminist, freedom fighter! yeah, that's the ticket! please, let us sell sex for a few more decades..." Give it a rest. If you're going to use sex to sell shit, at least be honest about it, and stop trying to run a psy-op on the public... that's why they are so confused and cognitively dissonant. Stop suggesting a lack of religiosity is a lack of morality, it's almost always the opposite. Stop telling us that our unsustainable economic practices are the "end of history" and that anything that deviates is some scary "other" something, something, Communist, government is coming for you, conspiracy, baby eaters, (insert tribal fear tactic here).

Bottom line, there is no replacement for skilled storytelling that make people critically think about important topics. There is no replacement for actual wisdom and diligently reasoned ethics...you can't just ask any old writer to manufacture it for you, or any old supermodel to communicate it. I know our society runs purely on profit-motive these days, but it really bugs me that we THINK it doesn't. We think our news anchors tells us truths, we think our traditions give us good morals, we think our systems are proven and functioning...the reality is we are in free-fall on all fronts.

The Lesson Being Taught

We have been and are doing everything we can to create peaceful change through rational discussion... but what lesson are our leaders teaching at this point? I've never seen them move so fast to meet out justice since THEIR lives were in danger. Political leaders have taken corporate money, done all the bidding of their donors, ignored and openly refused the will of the people, parties unfairly interfered in elections... and only when they feel fear for their own lives, does justice even get discussed. Only now is there serious talk of removing the President and all the Congresspeople who've been committing crime after crime. Now to be clear, the rioters in DC were unhinged maniacs, and I'm not condoning what they've done nor do I think have any legitimate grievance. But...

Hey politicians, YOU are making the case for authoritarian and/or violent practices. Those scenarios seem to be the only times things get done.

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

-John F. Kennedy

Trump's "Sedition"

Hey (every media personality)... SAVE IT. Trump has been unhinged from the very start. Stop pretending like -all of a sudden- he's crossed some line that nobody could have seen coming. You didn't learn when we found out he was a serial sexual predator? How about when he used his power to enrich himself? No? How about when he assassinated the top general of a sovereign nation without being at war? How about when he said we'd steal the resources of countries we were supposed to be helping? How about when he became the face of the White Supremacists movement? How about when he used nationalist rhetoric and authoritarianism to bully our government and anyone who dissented? How about when he murdered hundreds of thousands of people, via Corona Virus, through negligence and apathy?

The sad truth is Trump is a mob boss, and 90% of our "leaders" are in the mob with him. If you've only just woken up to this truth you've been grossly negligent...YOU are part of the problem. Before Trump set one foot inside the White House, every sane person knew he was unfit to be there...and everyone who allowed him to actually have the power, have his finger on the button, etc.... you all have the worst judgment imaginable.

Life isn't a game, and if you treat it as one you are GOING to make horrible-irreversible decisions. The environment isn't a game, war isn't a game, human suffering isn't a game... it's not about tribes, personalities, scores... it's about REAL outcomes, real suffering, real damage. If this one day of rioting at the Capitol was your awakening, splash some more cold water on your face because it's likely you've been sleeping on much more than this subject. Make today the day you start questioning EVERYTHING in your life.

More Science, Less Engineering

I've always said that neuroscience will likely figure out consciousness/generalized intelligence before the AI engineers do. There is something fundamental to letting facts and data lead you rather than working from a conclusion or goal and trying to fill in the gaps with brute force or intuition. That said, if history is any indication, I'm sure it will be tech engineers who profit on any discoveries first...because 👉 greed/capitalism.

Whether or not history unfolds this way, it's a lesson we should consider; that we spend far too much time trying to create "products" (i.e. Business/Engineering) without sound conceptual models or understanding of the repercussions (i.e. Science). Using technology before truly understanding it, has been the cause of just about all modern material problems.

This is not a call to ludditism, but a warning that we are not intelligently creating/managing human civilization. At this point in time, our "system" is thrashing out of control, and we are just desperately clinging to its ankles. We must be wise, we must slow society down, build understanding, take care of our people, and take care of our environment.

Economic Gamification

Capitalists constantly say they believe that capitalism generates so much "innovation" or something similar. It is true in one sense, capitalism is the gamification of economics. Elements of it are used for incentivization, elements of it are used to keep a symbolic score, etc. The problem with all this is it is no longer economics at this point...we are not "economizing" anything, that is we are not conserving resources or making their distribution and utilization more efficient. We have enhanced the "game" aspect and lost all the "economic" aspects of our "system." I hate to tell you if you don't already know, but capitalism is a really crappy economic "system."

Sure, we should take note of what elements we might be able to salvage regarding incentivization, tracking of transactions, transactional group collaboration, etc. BUT we definitely need to realize that the system we have now is a really bad game...a game that has dire consequences for the environment and all the players. We need to build a new economic system, FIRST on principles of actual economic sustainability and efficiency. Then, if we are still bored and require a layer of amusement, add some game layer separate and largely inconsequential to our overall environmental sustainability and human flourishing.

Mood Altering Plastic

I've recently been hearing more about the chemicals in plastics that that affect everything from cancer chance to mood. It makes me wonder, if we ever realize our folly about how we are living and our relationship to our evolutionary development, and get over our fossil-fuel addiction (hopefully forcing a heavy reduction in our use of plastics)...we may wake up one day and realize that some of our neurotic behavior was environmentally induced. What if half of what we think are psychological or personality problems are externally caused...I mean even if we know that someones hormones or neurotransmitters are off balance...we don't always know what caused those to get off balance. I'm really not trying to sound "hippy-ish" but as we reconsider how we treat our environment, we may also want to seriously rethink what conditions our bodies are historically/naturally adapted to and restructure society and our behaviors accordingly.

Artificial Scarcity Of Vaccines

You are going to get a lot of reasons why there isn't enough vaccine in the coming months. Yes, I get it, rolling out billions of doses of vaccines is a logistical nightmare, but when we want to roll out troops or steal resources, we got boots on the ground in seconds. Maybe it's the cost you say...the cost of these vaccines is NOTHING compared to the damage COVID-19 is doing to the world, even from just a short-sighted financial view. It must be a supply thing, you say...but when we want to manufacture single use plastic or even sophisticated (yet planned obsolescent) electronics, we find ways to make PLANET POLLUTING amounts of stuff. No, the reason we will likely be in perpetual need of vaccines is Intellectual Property. While we rejoice for the medical science that can design a vaccine, we also bathe in our ignorance and apathy about inequality and the sharing of knowledge...we still haven't matured enough as a species to recognize that information should be free, open, and shared. We haven't learned, as a species, that we'd gain more by nurturing, uplifting, educating our population than by neglecting it. We haven't learned that we are ALL more healthy when the least among us is healthy.

So let us burn this lesson into our brain now while it's in our face, Intellectual Property is anathema...the concept of owning ideas has always been a grave mistake and it is no less abhorrent now.