Glamour Profession, like many Steely Dan songs, tells a great, twisted story - filled with metaphors and suggestive lyrics. This one paints a great picture of drug culture in L.A., e.g. "local boys will spend a quarter, just to shine the silver bowl." I'm not sure what that is to this day, but it sounds drug-related. Right?

Update: There's a good write-up on these lyrics here. It all makes perfect sense now! http://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107858654303/

Policy of Truth - Remastered - by Depeche Mode

Just experimenting here with the embedding feature on Spotify. Works pretty well!

The New Collaborative Economy Needs a New Visionary Language

Writing A Language of Possibilities

Content Development Service for the Collaborative Economy from Lee L. Chazen, M.A.

Surfing the Future Part 1

Photo Credit: Expats Portugal Life

By Edward Mulder

We are entering times of unprecedented change. Not since the Renaissance and the Industrial Age have we seen anything comparable. What is coming will surpass even those revolutions. Every facet of civilization will be impacted.

Change will happen faster than our economic, governance, and cultural institutions can keep pace with, resulting in the collapse of the weakest and great distortion for the stronger and more entrenched. It will be technology vs. technology. What does this mean?

According to Wikipedia, technology is “the collection of techniques, skills, methods and processes used in the production of goods or service or in the accomplishment of objectives …” By this definition, technology extends far beyond what we usually associate it with: gadgets, machines, computers, etc. It also includes economic systems (capitalism and socialism), governance systems (representative democracy and the nation state), and so on. From this perspective, one can see that there are great tensions building between technologies not unlike two tectonic plates grinding past one another where one moves slowly, and the other’s motion accelerates.

The slow moving technology plates representing economics, governance, etc become distorted by the fast moving plates racing past them. As some begin to distort and crumble, they send out shock waves. A good economic example is capitalism. Capitalism, though a slow moving plate, has weathered many storms and has served as the engine that has spawned much of the innovation occurring in the plates racing past. Because of this, few could foresee the distortion whereby capitalism would begin to cannibalize itself via accelerating technological evolution. As companies worldwide seek greater efficiency and profits through ever greater automation and cognition, jobs are lost faster than new ones are created and most people can retrain. And there is more.

Human beings can perform two types of labor: physical, and cognitive. When automation began to replace physical labor, people were able to move for the most part to cognitive labor. It was not easy, but it was doable, and it happened over a long period of time. What happens next as machines begin to replace cognitive labor? There is only one place to go: more complex cognitive labor. Not everyone is capable of this at the speed required for them to do so and there is actually a ceiling: the capacity of the human brain. It does not take a stretch of the imagination to see that machine cognition could indeed replace labor as we know it.

Where does modern capitalism go when the consumers it depends on no longer have the income to buy the products it produces? When the attainment of greater efficiency for greater profit leads to reduction in demand for all products?

Capitalism is old technology not adapted to a world of lighting fast innovation and evolution. It is essential to question and rethink our paradigms from the ground up. To think about what kinds of economic technologies are possible and compatible with other fast moving technologies.

First we must realize that all technologies exist in an ecosystem, a context. They arise and evolve based on other types of technologies available at the time. Our present economic and governance technologies were born in an era of slow communications, laborious record keeping, and human computation where automation of physical labor saw the proliferation of hierarchical organizational structures and governance models. Realizing this, it is possible to construct new economic and governance technologies that are based on fast, cheap, global communications, computation, and decentralization. We can begin to use the Internet, mobile computational capacity, artificial intelligence, and decentralization technologies such as P2P and the blockchain to create new technologies.

We can begin to surf the future.

Calling All Creative People to Rise Up

Something is missing from the discussion in the 2016* race for the Presidency. What is it? An untapped wealth of resources -- creative and intelligent people everywhere who are ready to help. 

But, no one is calling on them. 

by Lee Chazen, GliderCell 

you are disillusioned because the reality of what you are seeing each day does not match the great potential for what you envision and you realize that many of the problems we see are the result of outmoded philosophies, systems and structures -
And if you understand that such structures in need of massive reform include education, the banking system, government, insurance, health-care, the political system, etc. 
And if you believe that such systems are systemically flawed in that they are top down in nature, hierarchical, rigid and lack the ability by their very nature to empower and enable people to reach their full potential as human beings -- 
And if you believe that underemployment is just as great a problem in this country and in the world as un-employment - in that there are so many talented, creative and intelligent human beings that are not being enabled to help in solving some of the dramatic problems in the world today… and that such people are not rising up to positions where they can be of service, whether because of economic inequality, lack of support or because they are being drowned out by a sea of louder and wealthier voices --
And if you believe that even our great leaders or political voices or candidates out there, well-intentioned as they may be, are not employing advances in data science, technology, medicine, the human brain and the potential in things like crowdsourcing, collective intelligence and Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) to name but a few -- 
And If you believe that classrooms, textbooks and standardized tests are exclusionary and seemingly built around a model of rewarding the few and that such systems tend NOT to offer recognition for imagination, critical thinking and problem solving abilities and that they tend mostly to cater to a small subset of a wider intelligence spectrum -- 
And if you believe that such constructs tend to favor good or fast test takers and that we are often asked to learn, do business or participate in society in ways that do not necessarily match the types of people or learners that we really are -- and that games and projects in the classroom, while acceptable now, are still not widespread -- 
And if you believe in the power of “multi-potentialsim” (the notion that we can have more than just one pursuit or potential in life) and that many of our innate talents and abilities are being under-utilized on a daily basis -- 
And if you believe that incremental change is not good enough — and that, in order to make real changes, there is not a solution in one candidate or one person, but rather, solutions lie in fixing the very nature of our institutions -- 
And if you are someone with a set of good solutions and are effectively being shut out of producing said solutions because of a lack of support or funding or because you are tied down in a job that takes away your time and energy to get to work on such solutions -- 
And if you find it frustrating that those with money and the ability to make such changes or innovations, do not have or share your abilities, or vision or talent or imagination, and that the two “sides” (you and them) even lack the vocabulary or understanding to communicate on the same level --  
And if you believe that there are those with great math, science, technological, musical, artistic or imaginative skills who are not being “tapped” to be part of the greater good -
And if you believe that such people, if given the chance to start a company, share their ideas, or start a new political party could more effectively fix problems in education, energy, transportation, infrastructure, government, the economy, etc., in a way that doesn’t have to be dogmatic or ideological or filled with hatred and fear  -- 
And if you believe that our leaders and decision makers, in so many different ways are actually no more intelligent or creative than many of us who have not had the same opportunities or who may not have an equal level of drive or ambition or fearlessness -

perhaps it is time, in the middle of our tumultuous political season to either start a massive new political movement  -- or it is time to create our own visionary programs.

Note: Special thanks to Ed Mulder for his help on this.

Sources: 

Thriving On The Edge Of Chaos: An Argument For A Complex Adaptive Theory Of Education
DAOs and the Power of Self-Organization
The Global Challenge Project

Also see: Ed Mulder's essay: Surfing the Future, Pt. 1

An example of non-ideological problem solving

Tags: Education, Edu, EdTech, Tech, DAO, Bitcoin, Thinking, Innovation, Creativity, Collective Intelligence, Self-Organization, Politics, Third Party, Democracy, Independents, Election 2016, economy, income inequality, Media, Standardized Testing, Game-Based Learning, Bitnation, BTC, ETH, Holacracy

*2020 Could be different.

DAOs and the Power of Self-Organization

We’re aware now. The power and the opportunity to be visionary and creative is right before us. We can do our own thinking and have people join us. The most hopeful changes I see have less to do with the tangible technology (great as it is) that is in front of us, and more to do with the underlying structures and philosophies. I can only describe these the same way a mathematician describes a formula as elegant, or the way a musician hears a drum corps, all in a line, bells up, full volume, coming in step towards the screaming crowd. It is triumphant, simple and empowering. I am talking here about bottom-up, emergent behavior. Self-organizing systems. Rather than “executing notes on a page” or top-down spoon feeding of content to students or playing video games that everyone else is playing, we might use video game hours onine to fix real societal problems or, as students, start working on real problems to solve and building businesses or portfolios online. 

Distributed Autonomous Organizations now give us the potential to create self-organizing systems which could provide opportunities to creative people and visionaries to be part of larger, like-minded groups. The words that Robin Williams spoke in the movie Dead Poets Society reappear in my head… “that you are here--that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.”

Note: I excerpted this from a piece which I wrote for the artist Sebastian Schmieg. 

For more on DAOs, I highly recommend this article: