Does it matter if he’s right? Perhaps not. But Ted Nelson offers a perspective on Bitcoin which we don’t get to see often. Questions about the future of digital exchanges are, in fact, best tackled by mathematical minds. Shinichi Mochizuki fits the description.

More importantly, however, if we are going to have workable exchange systems, we have a lot of thinking to do because such systems require a deep appreciation for – among a long list – human psychology, behavioral economics, security, and social structures.

Anyhoo, here is Ted’s video:

[Link to Youtube]

What posts such as these miss, however, is that it’s not about Platforms – it’s about Missions. Platforms are simply buttresses for missions. Google’s mission is *extremely* stable – its Mission Statement is the most brilliant mission statement of any company – it’s the most encompassing yet focused corporate mission statement ever written. Google is currently the 3rd largest VC in the United States. It can afford to put its hands on anything, walk away from it, and then pick it up later (either via acquisition or reclamation) if there’s a pertinent market interest in it.

Does it “get” Social? It doesn’t matter because there isn’t much to “get”…other than creating a clean well-lit place for people to be social – whatever the heck that means when people are separated by electrons and keypads. Besides, time will tell – the social media stunads might not care for it, and it may not be all popular yet, but Google (unlike any other company) has plenty of time to grow the place. All that matters is data-collection for ad-placement upon *other* real-estate. Unlike every other social platform, G+ won’t need to insinuate advertisements into its users’ social streams (which would, in fact, make it a far more attractive social site once people get sick of algorithmic-based ads and sponsored non-sense on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. – how’s that for user-respect and Social-as-a-service?).  Google can afford to fund the Social game long-term because it’s the data that informs the revenue streams…not the LOLcats.

Google has the following: Mobile (Android), Cloudy Stuffs, Social, Search, Maps, Youtube, Chrome, Chromium, APIs out of their gord, BigQuerry (and Dremel), and a panoply of diversified assets to spiral out from its empiric center.  It also employs some of the smartest people in the industry, and has equity in ventures that very few people know about across multiple verticals, including: Life Sciences, Payment Processing, Energy, Gaming, Business Intelligence, and Data Analysis (think also indirect benefits arising out of symbiosis with CIA/NSA).

No other tech company comes remotely close to the shear size of cross-vertical power that Google possesses and expands. Google’s future has nothing to do with these little trinket toys like Keep or Reader (users may not see them that way, but in the big scheme of things, they’re just toys). RSS was a nice little scrape-script written when content on the web was becoming more dynamic. The times they have changed, however, and interfaces have matured (besides, what you are looking at when viewing social media sites is effectively RSS – FB, Twitter…they’re effectively RSS with CSS and other scripting commands layered on top to tart things up).

As for Google’s willingness to risk losing millions of Reader users (and I am one of them), Google’s omniscience of every single link clicked-through to ads informs the value of its assets. Google Reader may have benefited tech and other blogs, but Google knows just how tangible value all of that traffic actually did or did not render to its clients. Now, Google is privy to these numbers – whether or not they themselves were stunads in terminating the service (either as a move to force users towards G+ or for some other reasons) remains to be seen. But their decision only serves to lead to the essence of this post.

I’ve said it too many times – you own nothing on the web except your own domain. No company owes you anything. Google Reader isn’t yours, Facebook isn’t yours, Twitter isn’t yours, WordPress’ file-structure isn’t yours. The ‘self-hosted’ website you think is self-hosted isn’t yours – only if you own the servers that echo content to visitors. And even that ownership is tenuous. This is the nature of the Web. It will always be this way.

In a sense, “Stability as a service” may sound like a good thing to have in our time. The Internet, however, breeds nothing but instability. Alan Watts, not Seth Godin, is the man to pay attention in times like these.

Curious, then, that the ideologues of Open Source, Information-wants-to-be-free, Disruption-as-a-service, and the Social Media Revolution would be let-down when the planks drop out from under their feet.

Silicon Valley (the place and the metaphor) – and the stunads mesmerized by an ideology that sees life as a sequence of equations to be solved by algorithms - have a very important question completely inverted:

The question isn’t: “How will technology revolutionize the world”. The crucial question of our time is: “How will we revolutionize the technology.”

Google does what it does and will continue its shuffle of platform instability to serve its mission.

Complaining about the instability of a corporation’s data-traps isn’t terribly revolutionary, is it?

Then again, nor is this post.

But hopefully at least, it got you to think a bit regardless of how close to or far from the mark I am. And, in thinking a bit, you’ll think-through the importance of selecting ideologies that subsume and command technology’s trajectory and not the other way around.

Google products are free…of charge.

Democracy is not free. Its almost-impossible mission is to liberate us from our collective Stupidity-as-a-service.

Let’s not be stunads.

(Comments can be emailed – it’s more social that way.)

All these efforts to ease the torments of existence might sound like paradise to Silicon Valley. But for the rest of us, they will be hell. They are driven by a pervasive and dangerous ideology that I call “solutionism”: an intellectual pathology that recognizes problems as problems based on just one criterion: whether they are “solvable” with a nice and clean technological solution at our disposal.

Digital Rose

In our time, questions concerning technology are becoming not only harder to answer, but harder to *ask*. “Harder” in the sense that we are becoming increasingly resistent to challenging the emerging ideologies about just what technology can do for us. The persistant problem we always face with technological changes is that our thinking is delinquent – that is to say, we always live behind-the-times of technology, not ever quite catching up – no matter our power to imagine the future.

Among the many reasons for our delinquency, there is one today that is very disturbing – namely, the set of ideologies emerging largely out of Silicon Valley (both literally and figuratively).

The following are examples of these ideologies and claims:

• The Quantified Self Movement
• The Social Media Revolution
• Digital Liberation
• Open Government
• Real-time sharing of our lives
• Healthcare Social Media
• Big Data Business Intelligence
• The Singularity Movement

It’s an endless list. It just so happens, that in every single ideological category someone stands to reap enormous benefits. And it just so happens that those “someones” are the Digital Architects.

The Digital Architects have their congregants, evangelizing the rapturous trajectory of technological angels. Were the evangelizing rooted in critical thinking and the nobel cruelty of questioning, we would be in a stronger position to assess and shape the trajectory of our vital hopes.

But a common feature of these ideologies is that technology (or more typically *media*, which are different from technology, but that’s another topic of discussion) can now enable us to open-up our lives, share and exchange our data, and then use more technologies (e.g. digital algorithms) to “synergize” all of these atomic bits of our selves and release their stored energies.

You are a nuclear device! And your inner data-energies can be harnessed. (Horses are harnessed too…just a reminder).

Certainly, we have the ability to use technologies in meaningful, targeted, and purposeful ways to improve research, identify important hidden patterns, etc.

Having access to the number of steps you take or having an iPhone version of a Holter monitor has its benefits. But…that’s not Healthcare. No, we aren’t killed by what we know – we’re killed by what we *don’t* know. You can track all the data you want, but if you don’t know about that little thrombus that’s been fashioned out of those micro-vascular tears from all of that Cardio your iPhone app has succeeded in getting you to perform meticulously? That little thrombus doesn’t care about iOS.

The over-arching tone of these movements – and the digital architects programming them – is that we can achieve these improvements without doing the difficult dirty work.

This is the real danger that we face in our time: a surrendering of our utter devotion to doing whatever it takes – regardless of the cost to ourselves – to achieve the ‘impossible’.

Our ancestors got here using technology. But they didn’t get here by surrendering to it nor by expecting it all to be painless. For them, life’s meanings always came out of the struggles against inner temptations and outer threats.

There’s no guarantee, however, that their descendants will be as fit as they were. Evolutionary bottlenecks ramify the universe.

The state of today’s technology didn’t arrive randomly – specific people made specific decisions at specific times. And these decisions shaped the course of technology. 160 characters in a text message was a decision. Hypertext Protocols were the result of specific decisions. Somebody had to create the Back Button (that person had a forward-thinking brain…some of his colleagues? Not so much).

Therefore, we aught not surrender ourselves to technological determinism, nor the specific ideologies of technological decision-makers with their own world-views. Our technologies should compliment our true selves – not de-salinate them of their rich tonicity.

Bad ideologies have held our species back. Every single utopian ideology had its underbelly – and every underbelly was regressive, not progressive.

It’s not technologies which will usher in Holocaust 2.0. It’s the unvetted ideological agendas about those technologies, supported by superficial thinking, which will do that.

Technology works best when it enables us to do the hard stuff, not the easy stuff.

If I had to sum up the core problem with the philosophy of The Digital Architects of Painless Love, it would be this:

Chutzpah without the chutzpah.

[Video]

Imagine a world where everybody claims to be in a constant state of love, where there is no temptation to hate, there is no heartbreak, there is no risk of falling and hitting the pavement, no danger of tumbling into the abyss of unrequited love, no sweat-soaked sheets after making love.

A world of light without shadow.

This is the Painless Love promised by the Digital Architects.

Chutzpah without the chutzpah.

Love without its melancholy.

Dreams without alarming nightmares from which to wake up.

…the pressure to constantly frame original creative content as part of this or that Internet fad stifles real creativity. When you can get 10 million views and everyone’s attention making the 10,000th edition of Harlem Shake, why take the risk of writing something personal or maybe a bit unexpected or offbeat?

Healthcare Communications matter.

Pharmaceutical Communications matter.

True news of the universe matter.

Internet memes? Not so much. Not when your going concern demands a focus on the needs of consumers.

You don’t have to replicate – or, worse mimic – a meme to be interesting, informative, educational, or…funny. In fact, building on Lon’s points, in order to be any of those you must be everything *but* a meme.

Lately, even hospitals have begun to film video parodies of Internet memes (there’s no need for me to link – by the time this post gets published, there will be new ones to float). What’s disappointing about hospitals or Pharmaceutical or other life-science industries entering the meme-mimicking business, is that the *opportunity costs* are high.

You might say “Well, let’s not take this too seriously: we’re just having fun”. Indeed – but here’s the problem: If you want to have fun, why settle on someone else’s version of it?

Why any hospital would choose to do an Internet parody when there are so many stories being told in the day-to-day flow of business? Everyday, dozens – if not hundreds – of stories are told in hospitals: babies born, mothers dying, nurses beating the system, physicians struggling to improve outcomes, etc.

It’s out of those stories that brand values are made.

Meme-mimicking is not creation nor relevance nor value. It’s just mimicry.

I know that Healthcare has severe deficits in patient and provider education. I also know that video can be an incredibly accessible, memorable, and effective learning tool. A smart and creative nurse, physician, or marketing agent (all working together) can do amazing things with video. Even the most drab clinical concepts can be uplifted into extremely valuable educational assets – that’s what patients need. Not your take on someone else’s take on someone else’s take on some ridiculous and flittering meme.

Patients need valuable information – especially in our time where horribly inaccurate and de-contextualized material circulates the Web (via memes by the way).

Colostomy bags don’t make for terribly exciting material, do they? Well, to someone who needs help with her colostomy bag, she could benefit from a creative, expert information on care of it. You owe that to her. You *owe* it.

Instead of spending that time and money on that meme-mimicking video, how many more pertinent videos could you make? Your audience is your audience. Treat them well – not as passive meme-potatoes, addicted to social media junk food.

When thinking about where to invest valuable resources, ask: Is this the best that we can do? If not, then why cheat your “community” from your best?

Patients first. Employees first. Students first. Social media viruses? Last.

If mimicking an Internet meme is your best, either you have low organizational self-esteem, you don’t know the stories that you can tell, or you hired a costly social media dope, or…you forgot that you can do better. Way better.

A hashtag that has been around for years is #AcctgChat. Tell your sexy accounting friends.

The capitalism of Social Media is hard labor.

— Phil Baumann (@PhilBaumann) May 22, 2012

The philosophers don’t paint pictures of watery lilies.
They trudge their way toward the snowcaps.

The philosophers don’t carve love poems into the bark.
They dig beneath the roots to where the core burns, or dies.

The philosophers don’t prescribe the antidote to ignorance.
They underwrite the persistence of curiosity.

@PhilBaumann

The medium is the message.

The Internet – as mother of all media – evolves and coalesces new media and inter-relationships among media.

Regardless of the content, the connections, the people, and the machines which it subsumes, the Internet  exerts its own selective pressures on the world and itself.

Unlike a medium, which is its own message, the Internet is its own force – and it is a force that is more powerful than any message.

The Internet is the force. Be careful.

When Descartes initially published those words, he was thinking about proof of existence – but he was also echoing the direction of civilization: from myth to reason.

500 years of thinking ourselves into being.

That has been the pump driving civilization: the linear, categorical, mechanical, reasonable world-view (including the derangement of the instruments of reason: holocausts, wars, national debts, mind-numbing factory jobs, libido-depleting consumer economies).

It’s a world that you can mostly conceive of a priori: scientific inquiries, democratic governments, railways, electric grids, computers.

It’s a world that helps us to overcome the ravages of nature and superstition. It’s also a world that misplaces creation with replication, and weakens our emotional immune system.

It’s a world where our being derives out of thinking.

Je part, donc je suis. Now.

I share, therefore I am. This is the world into which we are moving into everyday: I share with you, you share with me. All of us sharing tiny sumulacrum – tweets, status updates, hyperlinks. Maybe you share with me something I shared to someone else three days ago.

In fact, it’s sharing of sharing of sharing ad infinitum. Taken to its logical conclusion: a world of shells forms, like some strange cloud of simulacra.

It’s not curation – it’s just sharing.

And although these sharing acts can have value, what’s happening in the larger scheme of things is that we are becoming the sharing.

Not 500 years of thinking into being, but 5 years of sharing into being.

Ours is a world where our being derives out of our sharing.

It’s not a world that’s easily imagined. What does it look like? What do virtual nations look like? What do our brains do all day? What of democracy and reason and meditation?

We move from Pense to Part – from contemplators to particles.

But this second step in our societal evolution – it’s not where we aught to go, is it?

Just because we can, it doesn’t mean we aught.

So, what to do to avoid this opiate sleep of being that piles around us like alluring falling snow, tweet by tweet?

What wakes us into the fullness of being?

For that matter, what conveys us beyond mere being into presence?

Je crée, donc je suis.

Our being – if it is to have meaning – must derive from creation.

I create, therefore I am.

The more you share, and the less you create, the less you truly are.

This is the danger facing us if we do not bring forth the effort to create ourselves into being: We may vanish into electronic simulacra that give us the seductive illusion of social exchange.

You can think. You can share. You can create.

Do all three, and you might find yourself awake to a better world.

And if it’s not a better world – if it’s a destroyed world – the being you create becomes a presence onto itself. It’s yours and nobody else’s.

Nous créons, donc nous sommes!

- Phil Baumann

It will be hyped. Then the idiots will fade away to hype about something else^*. Finally it will used by people who know what they’re doing.

Here’s the visual:

^*Note: The duration of Silencing of the Idiots may take longer – a lot longer – than illustrated.

@PhilBaumann

Not to mention, who would replace him? His replacement is probably as – if not more – psychotic and powerful than him.

The damage here, in my opinion, is that the messages eventually arrive in two extremes: a) social media (SM) is utterly ineffective and b) SM activism can change the world. Neither is realistic, but my guess is that the first is closer to the sad truth.

Perhaps SM ultimately propagates and amplifies our ignorances and misunderstandings of complex social and geopolitical matters.

I hope I’m wrong. But as the younger generation masters these technologies – as more and more of their education and knowledge of the world comes to them via SM – will they also master the arts and sciences of knowing how to effect true change?

Ah – there’s a question.

@PhilBaumann

I wish there were a huge philanthropy organization focused on Domestic Violence.

DV is as much a killer as is cancer or diabetes or sepsis. What’s worse: it’s a primary root in violence at large – it breeds dictators, influences foreign policies, and mutilates childhood development.

I would argue that Domestic Violence is one of the largest Public Relations opportunity of all time.

If you don’t understand what I mean, I’ve proven my point.

@PhilBaumann

Since I’ve been running two of them (RNchat being one of the first chats – and the first chat for clinicians), I thought I’d share my experiences and offer tips and recommendations.

HISTORY

I started RNchat as a way to get nurses to A) get up-to-speed with social media (nursing an medicine is/was really behind here, and I thought Twitter was a good gateway drug) B) I wanted to give nurses an easy and open forum to network, express themselves, trade war stories, etc.

Then I started MDchat, which was the first chat for physicians, for pretty much the same reasons as RNchat but for docs. Each had their similar and different trajectories since the general cultures have their difference.

Co-branding. Then I wanted to get the two communities to cross-pollinate. That worked well, and I wanted it to work especially for docs and nurses since there’s often a disconnect between the two professions.

Running two chats can be tough due to limitations of time and resources, but I’ve learned how to be efficient. So here’s what I’ve done, offering the value propositions, insights and business uses and purposes:

VALUE PROPOSITIONS

Some of you may have specific business/enterprise goals in mind. With these chats, that wasn’t my intent. BUT, there have been surprising incidental benefits which I’ve since learned to fold into my businesses and personal life.

(Update: I’m adding this post by Dennis Howlett (@dahowlett) since he articulates a reasoned acknowledgment of Twitter nay-saying while expressing the important (but perhaps hidden) value-role Twitter can play for accountants. …As a side note: having started my career in accounting, I know a ton of ways the profession could value-extract – from education to promulgation interpretation to professional development. I shall profess those in a future post.)

^ Surprising Journeys: I’ve gotten a decent amount of business as a direct result of leading the chats. Attribution management has verified that.

^ Speaking/workshop opportunities – I’ve gotten some really cool (and paid) gigs at off-the-beaten path. Not the typical social media conferences, but universities, health systems, retreats with physician practices and other leaders. I really don’t think I’d ever get those without these chats.

^ It’s been a really cool experience. For example, I’ve had IBM Watson’s team participate in two chats to discuss Waton’s role in medicine – I don’t think I’d ever have that opportunity w/out the chats. What’s more: the community at large benefits from these exchanges – think of the enormous impact Watson could have on Healthcare, Finance, Manufacturing, etc. To have physicians, nurses, HIT specialists and others involved in this unique ecosystem is truly amazing.

^ Respect. These chats have allowed me to gain respect. They’ve also honed my insights into and responsibilities to my communities.

^ Personal/professional connections – I’d say my network has grown by a large factor as a result. I’ve developed a whole CRM from people I’ve met and who’ve approached me.

^ There are others – you can set your goals and/or take advantage of serendipity. It’s all good.

INSIGHTS, PROCESSES

^ Early on, I set up landing pages/blogs for the chats. I also set up newsletters that I’ve used for “special” chats and other updates, giving readers easy sharing options to spread the butter. (I’ve slacked, but at this point it’s fine for me.)

^ Thanking participants via email. It’s easy to get lazy and to depend on Twitter, but I took the time early on to add participants into my CRM, ask for emails if I couldn’t find them and send over a brief thank you. I’d also include content I thought they’d be interested – e.g. sending doctors lists of other docs they might want to network or other stuffs. Immense value there.

^ Transcripts. These can be kinda “Meh”, but there are people who read them. More importantly – especially for docs and nurses who wanted to get their facilities/colleagues involved, having a document to share helped spread the *offline* awareness of the brands. (I know of at least 5 cases where those hand-outs lead to in-bound prospects.) For Healthcare chats, there’s the Healthcare Hashtag Project but it’s only for healthcare-related chats. There really does need to be a solid transcript service beyond healthcare (I have ideas, so if you know any developers I’d be happy to share them). I’ve slacked on doing them every time, but they’re worth it if you’ve got nothing better to do.

^ Slideshare/Scribd/Storify – Building on transcripts, these are where their value can be enhanced. Storify is a great concept, but it’s still difficult to work with. I used it a few times to build some privately for a few clients and they loved it. Offers more context – especially to “non-savvy” C-Suiters.

^ CRM – As I said I basically converted the community into a crm. I did so both manually and by using online tools. It’s been a while, but there are tools that allow you to download the search results for a hashtag and convert it to a .csv file. Then you can create a ghetto crm from there.

^ Promotion: I didn’t promote these chats so much – a few tweets from my own account, but I wanted organic growth and I got it. But as the Twitter accounts associated with the chats grew, promotion took on its own life. RT and # can be powerful in this context.

^ Topic Suggestions Form – I developed forms for the chats where the community can not only offer topics they’d like to see discussed but also provide feedback/suggestions. Again, this helped in widening my network and enhancing relationships.

^ Time – this can be a bit hard to figure out. A lot depends on your audience – in my case , docs and nurses come from all walks of life and have weird schedules. I run mine on Tue and Thur nights. But lately I’ve thought about moving to another day/time. It’s OK to play around with times – the community will follow if the changes work for them.

^ Outsourcing: Get other moderators to lead. People love to be hit up, and they offer different styles so they can mix things up. Again, they have other followers who may be interested. This has helped me immensely. Also, cultivate those relationships. Not to mention: they have so much experience to offer – why not let them shine and add value to what you’re building for them?

^ Personality and Leadership: These are crucial. Curiously, I’d be as bold to say that personality is even more important than leadership (they’re both key). I’ve go my own personality – actually I have several online personas – @HealthIsSocial – @RNchat – @MD_chat – @PhilBaumann), and they all are on the edgy side in their own way. I can afford to be a bit…shall we say…risky. You’ll have to decide yourself how to act, but being humorous, kind and being able to manage trolls adroitly are all important ingredients in baking a great chat.

BUSINESS CONTEXTS

^ Purposes: I can’t say Twitter chats “work” for most for-profit or non-profit going concerns. But they can be a great way for brands to have a regular living presence in an intimately ambient setting. It builds their responsiveness, especially if they’re relatively new to this craziness. (More about the *process* than direct results necessarily.)

^ Branded Hashtags: I think hashtags are way abused – it’s a shame, because they *do* have a lot of value. Still, it’s probably not a bad idea for a brand to have its own hashtag. This can be a two-edge blade, since it could be hijacked during a PR crisis, and triage could be a disaster. Still: if the people behind the brands have built trust over time and have the skills, they’re better off than sweating it out last-minute and ultimately reducing shareholder value.

^ Participation in other chats. Again, I do think there’s value in brands participating in chats (you all know, not in a spammy way of course). A) It’s a good way to keep a pulse on things. B) It humanizes things much easier. Rather than all that “RT others, and be human in your regular tweets” advice from social media “gurus”, the chats make it inherently human and useful.

^ Cohesion – a hashtag and its related chats/tweets can be a functional way to “tie-together” the entire online stream – and *offline* efforts too. Attribution management might be tough, but I’ve found bit.ly, geolocation, conferences, etc. to be revealing info.

^ Attribution Management – I’ve found this to be difficult. Obviously bit.ly helps – not just clicks from Twitter, but from your blog/site (but in my experience hasn’t been very revealing without a good amount of elbow grease). Geolocation and other metadata are often overlooked, but they can be useful depending on the business. I take issue with QR codes and MS tags (whole other post), but if a client has a heavy paper presence with a decently savvy demographic, it can’t hurt to slap one linking to the landing page for the hashtag/chat. (Think customer service, etc.)

WRAP-UP

So there’s how I’ve been doing this stuff. It’s worked for me. Not sure if it’ll work for you. If you haven’t started a chat, give it a try if you think there’s value to your audience.

Remember: Twitter *isn’t* community – but it can spur community in the true homes of community. That alone is valuable.

On one hand, this all could be totally useless. But if you’re creative and gutsy, there’s definitely a lot of value to be extracted – and, more importantly, to be provided.

Phil

@PhilBaumann

484-362-0451

Democracy depends on Reason. Social Media propagates Emotion faster than Reason. This will be the 21st Century problem.

— Phil Baumann (@PhilBaumann) December 29, 2011

[Original tweet.]

[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/26908424"]

Favela Tweets

Over the hill, the priest weeps.
Under the bridge, the foreman dies.
At the station, the lover leaves.

The millions march into mace.
The cameras whirl into dizzy aim.
The bloody stains cake and dry.

You can hear the blood beat.
You can feel the voices cry.
You can watch the horses cringe.

The sidelines are elegant.
The frontlines are shifting.
The storylines are corrupted.

The sparrow tweets a symbol
And a Call is Answered.

The Answer drops into the ears
of the mad crowd where it
resonates, fades and dies.

A child is born into a favela,
plays under the guava tree
and learns to listen to the breeze.

Phil Baumann

I went to Wikipedia tonight to look up Steve Jobs’ birthday to write this post.

I got to the word “was” and cried.

That’s all I can write. It’s all I need to write.

Thank you, Steven Paul Jobs.

Phil Baumann

and love you.

It doesn’t matter if any of this is intended or random.
What matters is your willingness to learn
when to submit, when to cut loose
and when to look up, rise and assert your presence here.

The loneliness you feel is a hurting gift, a nudge
that says “you belong here, among the others”,
that you are co-writing this world’s enigmatic plot.
It’s a reminder that love is just over your shoulder.
You don’t need to look back.
Simply trust the dark before you.

It’s not upon the length nor roughness of your troubles
that you have to expend and muster all of your might.
No, it’s those last slivers of them,
when the straining edges seem impossible to connect,
those thrashing moments when you – and only you -
get to be the many heroes of your short, but profound, story.

Phil Baumann

It’s a wild kind of story – not only are you the author, but nature is the author; other people are authors; loss and love are authors; hate and greed and war are authors; grace and fortune are authors.

It’s a story which flows through the media of time and space.

You can’t see time nor space – but they’re there. And you get to create with them.

Facebook claims it’s a place to tell your story.

No, Facebook is just one medium where things that aren’t really you radiate onto glowing screens.

Others may choose to believe Facebook’s claim as they let the radiation dart through they’re glimmered eyes, but you don’t have to believe any of it.

You may get knocked down, beaten and lost in life.

You, however, are the main author. You’ve been given just enough time and space to create your story.

Please don’t forget this.

##

I originally posted this here.

@PhilBaumann

Master resurrection.

When you pan ever farther back, you have to ask yourself: what’s is all for? What’s it about really?

And if it’s about money, what happens after that multi-million dollar flip? What do you end up doing? Where do you go?…

…Why back to the Web, launching a new product or start up or tweeting that new cats-on-acid blog.

Is the Web, in its essence, the Mother of all Trolls, conveying us – little hamsters – on an electric sea with no land at any edge?

@PhilBaumann

I posted this originally on G+.

484-362-0451

Yes, they’re convenient – and definitely offer advantages. But if we overdo them, what do we lose? What – or whom – do we give up.

If all we pay attention to are the things that matter to us, who cares for anybody else? For the world is you plus not you.

Video with more:

@PhilBaumann

484-362-0451

It’s clear that books – the traditional kind: made of paper and ink and labor – are being replaced by digital media. The Kindle and the iPad and other tablets are making it easier to acquire and consume material once only available on books.

For children today, the iPad is very intuitive. In fact, some parents have reported that their children have become so used to the iPad screen, that they “pinch” pages in books – expecting them to zoom-out.

Perhaps some parents believe we can let books go and just let our kids skip them in favor of digital media without any cost. They *may* be right. Or they may not.

As for me, books are still a critical foundation for civilization.

Neurons are amazing things: the more they’re used, the better they get (generally). So as a child grows, the more exposure they get to different kinds of learning and feeling and experiences, the healthier their brains grow.

We still don’t have enough longitudinal research to know for sure that it’s OK to just skip books and let our kids do everything electronically.

In my opinion: let them explore; let them have fun; let them watch TV or play games. BUT: *be there* with them. Explain to them what’s going on. Step back an observe their behavior before, during and after their interactions with different media.

I know too many people who are letting the infiltration of technology into our lives go on without enough critical awareness and thought and discipline.

When my son and I read books with each other, we enter a world created by our ancestors for the pleasure and wisdom and civility of our minds.

I can’t tell other parent what to do.

But I do hope they keep reading books with their kids for as long as they can.

I’ve many regrets in my life. I’ll never regret reading books with my son.

@PhilBaumann

484-362-0451

It may help to read Marx’s Capital and Smith’s Wealth of Nations for deeper understandings of the ramifying influences of capitalism on the world (new conceptions of time, impacts on culture and class, etc.). But what matters most is to understand the key role of the separation of means of production from its ownership.

That separation has always created conflict: labor seeks better wages, hours, conditions; capital seeks lower wages, longer hours, cheaper conditions and more capital.

Until now, technology has been the primary agent in creating and enforcing this fundamental dichotomy. If a printing press cost too much for a writer to own and run, she had to rely on a capitalist to supply the ability to publish.

Now, the Web and cheapening technologies open the possibility of the proletariat and the capitalist to ‘fuse’ – that is, it’s now possible to use *and* own production.

It’s becoming more of a reality that workers (labor) can fund their own endeavors (capital).

You can see this fusion as the emergence of a new kind of cyborg, an economic one – let’s call it the Prolecapatarian.

The proletarian can now embed/extend capitalist features into her presence in the economy. Same thing for the capitalist.

But what’s the effect of these new economic cyborgs? Specifically, what happens to the classic conflict between labor and capital? Does it become internalized?

Does the Prolecapatarian face internal conflict? What does that look like?

It’s something to think about, because those of us who live the 24/7 nomadic life have to contend with being both the user and owner of production.

How about you: do you think we’ll see the emergence of this new kind of economic being? Or do you think we’re in a transition period and that eventually we’ll be back to the schism between labor and capital and the emergence of wholly larger concentrations of capital accumulation and labor surplus?

Are you a Prolecapatarian?

@PhilBaumann

484-362-0451

But what – in truth – is the default mode of social media? On the surface, one would think “social”. That can’t be true though, for no technologies have social implanted in them – by definition, human-social belongs to humans.

So when I dip into my Twitter stream, for instance, I see huge volumes of people saying nice things, quoting positive aphorisms, replying to each other with accolades. If you didn’t know any better, you might conclude these are conversations between people who’ve know each other for decades.

The reality of ‘social’ however isn’t all happy and conversational and collaborative. The truth of our human nature is complex and contrary. Anybody who is happy all the time, who never expresses a dark thought, who never stands up against what’s clearly wrong – or just plain stupid – is not being honest.

These media, however, do make us want to behave as if we’re all brothers and sisters. Nobody – except terrorists and people with childhood issues – wants these media to be anti-social.

So here’s the danger, the threat to our sociability: if the default of these media is to force us into particular frames (140 characters, video, audio, etc.) then how honest can we be – might we be automatically ‘phonyfied’ – regardless of our intent?

For if we are all brothers and sisters among these media, what happens to the elders? What happens to a civilization which no longer looks upward, but only horizontally?

I, for one, don’t want to see a world where everybody’s treated as if they’re clones, where nobody expresses themselves, where we’re all dictated to be social but in fact relegated to being alone.

The phrase itself – “social media” – should be a red flag. It’s not unlike Brave New World, or Orwellian Newspeak: the very words which claim “solidarity”, “security”, “community” hide the very nature of the State: discord, violation, fragmentation.

By inverting our notion of social media to phony media, we at least stand a chance of being who we are – which is what we want, right?

@PhilBaumann

484-362-0451

Social Media wants…

• Your time
• Your attention
• Your friends
• Your brand
• Your business
• Your data
• Your privacy
• Your publicity
• Your location
• Your behaviors
• Your wants
• Your life

There’s nothing wrong with “want” in itself – maybe it’s OK that Social Media wants all these things – and more.

The more critical question, rather, is: What do you want?

As the power of technology increases the number of choices we can make, we will have to intensify our awareness of who we are and where we’re headed.

Whatever Social Media wants, what you want determines how much it gets.

@PhilBaumann

484-362-0451

More on this video over on Health Is Social.

@PhilBaumann