Elsewhere

Dear God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I first remember learning this insightful, elegant prayer at a young age from a wooden inscription hung above the door of a neighbor’s kitchen. It’s been stuck in my head ever since.

Something quite interesting and significant about the second of the prayer’s three parts is the implication that we should change things when we can.

It makes me think of some of my new friends in Austin, including Steve Harper, Asha, and MagnumVox–a self-described “change agent.” That’s a good term. We should all consider whether or not we are acting as change agents, both personally and professionally. (OMG, sorry, but perfect moment to plug Steve’s The Ripple Effect again.)

When I was a boy scout, whenever we’d go camping in the wilderness, our motto was, “Leave it better than you found it.” Pack out any trash you find (even if it’s not your own), don’t trample or otherwise vandalize the area.

Once, in my early teens, someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up. My response was something like, “I hope I never grow up. I hope I never stop growing.”

***

Growth and change are an integral part of life. Life is growth. Without growth, and change, we’d still be a bunch of random chemicals floating around on a primordial planet.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that there is some end-state, some point in time at which everything levels off and they can just comfortably cruise through the rest of life.

Any such security is an illusion, and temporary at best. Just ask anybody who’s lived through the uncertainties and surprises of the past century. The only constant is change.

Would you prefer to be reactive or proactive in dealing with the inevitable changes of life? Which one do you think might bring you more success and happiness?

If you choose to be proactive, you are choosing the path of creativity, in which you attempt to anticipate external changes and also create the changes that you want to see. But in order to create, you must have a vision of what you want, and your vision will be informed by your desires, which are dictated by your values.

That’s a long-winded way of saying, if you want to do more than just survive–if you want to prosper–you must first get down to basics and really figure out what you are about.

Without moral traction, you’re just spinning your wheels. The scenery might even change, but when the screen falls away, you’ll realize you never actually moved.

**

Humanity is a continuum. We inherited this reality from the generation that came before us, and they from the generation before that. Our children will inherit the sum of what we inherited plus the changes we make to it. To proactively manage that change so we can leave a positive legacy, we should:

1) Accept and engage the reality that we have inherited (serenity)
2) Use our vision and creativity to “leave it better than we found it” (courage)
3) Continually grow and refine our awareness to find the best balance between the two (wisdom)

***

As a mental “cheat sheet”, just remember: VISION, ACTION, and FAITH are the fundamental pillars of successfully creative behavior. This is my own personal paradigm which I’ve developed within the last year or so. I’ve been wanting to blog about it for a long time. Consider this a teaser. It might not be tomorrow, it might not be next week, but… sometime soon. I’m a little busy with the ACTION part of it at the moment.

Here I use the term technology in a very broad sense to mean any skill, technique, or body of knowledge which is intellectual rather than instinctual and improves human productivity; for example, language, religion, and agriculture were some of the earliest technologies; internal combustion engines, democracy, computers, psychology, and quantum physics are some more recent examples.

The promise of technology is to give us the tools we need to transcend mere physical survival so we can focus our time and energies on higher purposes (which are, as of yet, undisclosed to us, except in subjective beliefs).

We are in a race against time, however, to improve and refine our technologies to the point where they are indefinitely sustainable. The resource consumption and infrastructure necessary to support our current technologies cannot be sustained — and we are already feeling the negative consequences in very tangible ways (hurricanes, heat waves, etc.).

But this is not to say we should abandon technology; in fact, we couldn’t even if we wanted to. We’re simply wired for it. We passed the point of no return when we developed opposable thumbs. The trick is to advance to the point of sustainability before we burn ourselves up.

What should we be working on to reach true sustainability? Art, spirituality, politics, science, culture? All of the above, of course, because they are all technologies with complex interactions.

Personally, I’ve got a special preference for information systems and digital media because I think it’s the most unique tech of our time with the highest return on investment as it accelerates improvement in all other technologies simultaneously. I also have a penchant for spirituality and personal growth technologies that allow individuals to maximize their positive contributions to the world.

“Life in the so-called space age“, the semi-ironic sub-title of this blog (and lifted from a rather good and underrated album by God Lives Underwater, who apparently lifted the phrase from the booklet of Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration — fun trivia!), reflects this theme of a technology-centric life, working to get us a little closer to technology’s ultimate promise — while trying not to kill ourselves in the process.

I heard someone mention it on TV the other day — “Youth is the engine of the world.” Apparently this phrase can be credited to Matisyahu, though I haven’t heard his music yet. (Just added it to the list of things to check out, though.)

The truth of the phrase has stuck in my head. Teenage angst is not just a hormonal thing, it’s also the result of innocent idealism crashing into the vagaries of the real world. It’s the purest reflection of the values we teach children conflicting with the values we are actually living, before “maturity”, with its practical goals and responsibilities, catches up to them. It’s vitally important to pay attention to teenage culture as it’s often a truer commentary on the state of our society than anything else. (Marilyn Manson understood this too well.)

All of the following things, in my brain, are connected:

• The independent spirit and authenticity of entrepreneurship, as witnessed at South by Southwest
• The civic-mindedness and involvement inspired by Second Life (see Eric Rice’s blog for more on this)
• The concepts of free culture and intellectual property espoused by Lawrence Lessig
• Open Source software
• Creative Commons intellectual property licensing
• Social software and democratic media, ala blogs, del.icio.us, shadows.com, ad nauseum

It has long been my belief that we need new paradigms–social, spiritual, economic, and political–to deal with the demands of the information age without losing our humanity, and I think it’s starting to happen. A movement is coalescing, though still embryonic. These are exciting times.

Signs, synchronicities, serendipity, fate, destiny, yada yada. Some people poo-poo these concepts because, they say, it is a selfish and egocentric worldview. “The world doesn’t revolve around you, you know.”

I say, the world revolves around all of us. I believe that the universe is big enough, complex enough, and crazy enough, that every single person, fish, and rock has a destiny, a plan, a story, all of which are interwoven to create this fabric of reality that we experience. And some courses of action are more in harmony with the universe than others; if one is open to and aware of the signs and synchronicities occuring around them, one can sometimes discern, and, with practice, develop an instinctual gut feeling for navigating the forks in the path that every decision in every moment brings.

No, I can’t prove it. But can you disprove it? Enter: faith. It’s a lot more fun than nihilism, I’ll tell you that much.

I’ve mentioned respect twice in recent posts. Respect, to me, is a principle value. Respect everyone, everywhere, all the time. Assume that everyone is doing they best they can given their circumstances, until repeatedly proven otherwise. Respect is necessary for trust, and trust is necessary for any kind of meaningful and productive relationship. Respect inspires and motivates and can be infectious, like laughing. It’s why, for example, I generally won’t make ribbing jokes until I get to know someone pretty well, in case they take it the wrong way. It’s why I always say “please” and “thank you”, even if the service is grumpy.

Some people are so used to feeling disrespected that they stop respecting themselves, and in turn, have trouble respecting anybody else. Some people are so used to feeling disrespected that they cynically interpret signs of respect as being a smartass. In this case, there is nothing to be done except to calmly explain that you really do respect them, and listen to their needs, and extricate yourself from the situation if they don’t turn around. Such people have their reasons for behaving the way they do–cultural attitudes, economic conditions, emotional environment, whatever. But, however, if you haven’t *always* show them respect in the past, from the very beginning, then you must accept some amount of fault yourself and make sure you’re doing your due diligence to earn their respect back.

This is the fundamental problem I had with the Bush administration’s response to Al Qaeda. There was lots of talk of revenge and good and evil, and not much effort into understanding *why* they did what they did, and working to resolve those issues.

Some people see a show of respect as a show of weakness, which is not true. There is a difference between respect and fear: fear is submission, while respect includes boundaries. Certainly there are some actions which are unacceptable, such as violence or other unconstructive damage. Actions must be taken, as a coworker once said, to “first take the knife away from the baby, and then stop the bleeding”–interrupt the actions however possible (through interception, restraint, or controlled retaliation), but then you must *continue* to respect the person enough to figure out how to rehabilitate them.

This is where I think Bush might have it right, in spirit, by attempting to take power away from tyrants and return it to the people, but he’s struggling in execution–the post-war plan doesn’t seem to have been very well thought out.

And this is where I think our criminal justice system has it really wrong. I have recently hopped off the fence and decided that I am opposed to the death penalty. Which might make for an interesting conversation given that I am also pro-choice. I can hear it already, “How could you spare a murderer and yet murder an innocent?” Oh yes, I’ll be preparing a respectful response to that.

A little over a year ago I was finishing up my BS in CS (well, close enough anyway)
with an elective class in Knowledge Management Systems, in which we
gave group presentations on this big new idea called the Semantic Web.

It
boils down to the idea of a global, standard meta-tagging convention,
in which every data element in every webpage is tagged with the kind of
information it contains in such a way that “semantic engines” can
recognize data in a linguistic fashion… i.e. you tell your computer
something and it understands what you mean enough to search online web
services for the answer to your question, the resources you need,
related info, etc… basically an intelligent web search enabled by
thorough tagging of web data.

Two big questions arose from this discussion:
1) How do we maintain and enforce a set of standard tags?
2) Who is going to bother to tag all of their data?

It’s
fascinating to me, now, to see the answers to these questions start to
bubble up from the ether. We thought it might require some sort of
forced “web revolution” to bring about these changes, but they are
happening on their own, in a way. It’s being referred to as “social”
web services.

A few that I know of (in no particular order):

• Flickr (photo sharing)
• Technorati (blog searching)
• del.icio.us (web bookmark sharing)
• digg (tech news)
• Wikipedia (encyclopedia)
• YubNub (command-line interface for web services)

Some older, more recognizable but more narrow uses:

• Amazon.com reviews
• eBay user reviews
• iTunes (iMix)

Each
of these services operates on a “social” philosophy in that the
content, and related metadata such as tags or ratings, are created and
maintained by the end user audience. Some of these sites even help
users choose the right (i.e. most common and therefore de facto
standard) tags by suggesting tags based on how similar content has been
tagged by other users; and users are encouraged to tag well and tag
often because it will increase the likelihood of their content turning
up in the search results of other users… hence the social dimension
of the service.

Still a long way away from the true Semantic Web
vision, but it’s quite an interesting step in that direction…
although, whether or not any of these services will catch on among
mainstream users, much less significantly change the web for anyone but
the tech elite who are up on such things, is yet to be seen. Then
again, who heard of blogging a few years ago, or podcasting six months
ago? And now they are everywhere

rn5009: $ ssh dh^H^H
ssh: dh\010\010: host/servname not known
rn5009: $ sstty ersae
ksh: sstty: not found
rn5009: $ stty eras ^He
unknown mode: eras
rn5009: $ stty ersae ^H
unknown mode: ersae
rn5009: $ stty erse
unknown mode: erse
rn5009: $ stty erase ^H
rn5009: $ jesus
ksh: jesus: not found
rn5009: $

A nation can reach the point at which
it does not buy more security for itself simply by buying more military
hardware. We are at that point. The decisive factor for a powerful
nation already adequately armed is the character of its relationships
with the world.

– Robert S. McNamara, U.S. Secretary of Defense, 1966

This is in reference to chlamygirl’s
comments on my “Visualizing Human Networks” post. She pontificates upon
what seems to be an increased difficulty to make close friends as she
gets older.

I’ve experienced the same thing and thought a lot
about it. Nothing seems as sweet or intense as the relationships we
made when we were younger. I have an idea of the reasons behind it,
although I don’t know that it has much to do with the ideas in my
original post. It’s about shared contexts, and lack thereof, because as
we grow older our individual contexts grow increasingly deep and narrow.

—

When
we are children, we are a clean slate. We may have certain genetic or
karmic predispositions, but generally, we are open to being friends
with anything and anyone, because of a wide curiosity and fascination
with the world. If you imagine life as a big system of pathways (vs.
threads), we all start out with an entire horizon of pathways before
us, going in all directions.

As we get older, we learn more, our
experiences shape us, and we develop more narrowly defined
personalities — I am a musician, not a jock; I like math but not
history; I enjoy hip hop but not heavy metal; … etc. With each
passing year, we become less curious about the world, more focused on
the interests and attitudes we have built. We are not as interested in
things outside of our own ideas because we’ve “been there, done that.”
And therefore it becomes harder to find new people with similar
interests and attitudes, because we have all continued down our own
individual paths which are increasingly divergent from other paths.

People
who have known each other for a long time have a history of shared
experience which gives their current relationship a thick context, and
that relationship, if it remains close, can shape them and keep their
paths from diverging too much. It can be difficult for new people to
come into this situation because they don’t share that context and
don’t understand a lot of the ideas or idiosyncronicities that the
others take for granted, and the others can’t make this new person
understand their pre-existing, shared, deep context, which makes the
relationship with the new person not as satisfying as with the existing
people, and not as likely to last; in fact it can be quite awkward.

And
so, in order to make new friends, people will often choose a very
narrow context of a specific interest, such as a favorite author, or
sport, etc. and then bond over that. And since their new relationships
are based on these very narrow commonalities, some people become almost
evangalistic about their chosen specific interest and start to define
themselves solely in relation to it, and end up being pretty boring,
narrow, “I’ll blindly follow and defend that interest because it’s the
basis of my entire life” people. Or, if you don’t want to restrict
yourself to a single category, then you feel kinda lonely and
disconnected because nobody else seems to “get” the same combination of
different things that you are into, at least not at the same level of
commonality as you used to have with others when you were younger.

—

For
a more scientific explanation — I recently saw a show about teenage
brains which said that they look more like child brains than adult
brains, which explains why teenagers are still emotionally unstable and
have trouble making good decisions, even though they physically look
more like adults. And during the teenage years, the brain begins to
hard-wire itself into its adult form, and so whatever you’re doing as a
teenager gets hard-wired into your brain — and anything you’re not
doing, doesn’t. They aren’t called “the formative years” for nothing –
activities you pursued and friends you made during this time will tend
to stick with you more than anything else you do afterward.

—

On
the other hand, you could argue that as we grow older and experience
more things, we can understand more and appreciate more, and perhaps
bond with people over things that we never understood when we were
younger. And that’s true, but at the same time, that bond can almost
never be as strong as those that you formed with people when you were
younger, as those were more natural and immediate bonds.

(But
even the bonds that you formed when you were younger can dissipate if
you don’t maintain a close relationship with those people; you’ll still
end up going in different directions. Years later you’ll meet,
reminisce about “the good old days” for a little while, and suddenly
find you don’t have much else in common to talk about.)

It
sounds depressing. I’m not saying that you *can’t* make new, meaningful
friendships as you grow older, only that it becomes more difficult,
because your paths are divergent. When you are young, friends just
happen, whether you intend them to or not, because your paths start out
so close together; later on in life, you have to more actively work to
create a shared understanding in spite of all your differences. If both
people are doing that, your paths can start to converge, and your
shared context grows. The trick is finding people who are interested
enough in each other to devote that time and effort to forming a
relationship, and it can be difficult to find those people since most
people have so many pre-existing relationships which seem more
immediately satisfying to them.