This week the theme really seems to be content worth spreading; some serious high grade amazing coming below. Take the time to explore it.

First, we catch up with some best-of collections of last year, with a focus on things that should be more widely known.

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- Project Censored’s top 25 under-reported news stories of 2011 and 2012. Always worth catching up with.

- Global Voices 20 most read stories of 2011.

(For those who aren’t familiar with them:

Global Voices is a community of more than 500 bloggers and translators around the world who work together to bring you reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media.)

- Huffington Posts lists the 18 best TED talks of 2011. Some interesting stuff in there.

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Now three really interesting and inspiring ones:

Building sustainable community – literally:

The Open Source Ecology project applies open source principles to creating tools capable of building sustainable communities using recycled and scrap materials.

The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) would lower entry into farming, building and manufacturing.

It’s perhaps best explained as Lego-like construction tools, which can be used to create entire economies. This sort of technology can be used in urban redevelopment or in the developing world.

The technology is a inexpensive, DIY, high-performance platform that enables the creation of 50 different industrial machines it would take to build a small, sustainable civilisation with modern comforts.

This seriously sounds six shades of awesome.

Here is a 2011 TED talk by the founder.

This is the free contents of their DVD explaining what they are on.

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Fascinating Guardian opinion piece linking personal debt, national debt, and banks creating money out of nothing: Yes, defaulting on debts is an option.

What really got me was this bit:

After a bit of research, I realised the debt collectors buy debts for less than 10p in the pound, after the bank writes the debt off. I also found out that under the Bills of Exchange Act 1882, the debt collector is actually paying off our debt when they buy it. I also realised how debt collectors trick us into contracts with them, by asking us how much we could pay. When you agree to one pound a month, which costs more to administrate, they now have a contract with you, where none existed.

Now, this is from England, so the same may not apply here, but that is still really interesting.

The guy’s site is Getoutofdebtfree.org. Definitely seems content worth spreading. Spreading memes along the lines that “money created out of nothing really doesn’t exist, so why pay it back with real money?” gets us closer to the actual state of things: “money only exists since we believe in it.” Which is probably still too drastic for most people to face up to.

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Introducting Yoxi:

At Yoxi, we search for amazing people who work hard to change the world, and we connect them to new opportunities by telling their stories in the most creative, compelling ways. We call these people Social Innovation Rockstars (SIRs) because they are original thinkers, creative problem-solvers, and fearless leaders who care about creating lasting social value. The world needs them to have more visibility and influence, so we do our part by helping them reach a mainstream audience. When a movement for social innovation becomes part of pop culture, we can make a real difference.

Basically, they want to hack culture and make it about awesome stuff instead of braindead stuff. (If this seems pie-in-the-sky, Yoxi’s founder brought you American Idol.)

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And a couple to make you think about the nature of reality a touch.

Technoccult interview with Douglas Rushkoff. Most interesting to me was him talking about balancing engaging with magic as a path with real world concerns (house, wife, kid). Fascinating as a metaphor in general for anyone getting older.

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Another entry in the Jodorowsky is so cool stakes: Alejandro Jodorowsky leads group of 3000 in Psychomagic ritual for casualties of the War on Drugs in Mexico. Yup.

The call made by the cult mystic Alejandro Jodorowsky said the event would seek to “heal” the country of the cosmic weight of so many dead in the drug war, by gathering for something he called the March of the Skulls.

(Context on Mexican drug violence: Mexico Violence Threatens All Sectors of Civil Society)

The Citigroup Plutonomy memos quite bluntly assess the size and power of the wealthy minority in the world economy, and how this distorts a number of economic indicators. Basically argues that companies servicing the rich will continue to do well, since they have all the money, so invest in them.

In 2005 and 2006, several analysts at Citigroup took a very, very close look at the economic inequalities within the USA and other countries and wrote two memos which were addressed to their very wealthy customers. If there is one group of people who need to know the truth about what is really going on within the society and the economy, minus the propaganda, then it’s businesspeople who have a lot of money to invest, and who want to invest wisely.

Fascinating. Apparently these have been fairly successfully suppressed, yet are reasonably available online. The trick is to know to look for them. Particularly relevant in terms of the Occupy 1% – 99% dialogue.

Footnotes to a changing world: Brazil has overtaken Britain as the world’s sixth largest economy.

Saber rattling between Iran and USA

A senior Iranian official on Tuesday delivered a sharp threat in response to economic sanctions being readied by the United States, saying his country would retaliate against any crackdown by blocking all oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital artery for transporting about one-fifth of the world’s oil supply.

This would actually lead to war, so it will be interesting to see who backs down and how.

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A quick few interesting tech tools:

“I’m getting arrested” android app – alert lawyers and loved ones with one click when you are being arrested. Evolved from OWS/protestors needs.

Tasker. Total automation for your android. Looks real high powered, but overkill for casual users.

Okay, this looks like it has really interesting potential: if this, then that: an automation tool for online stuff. Basically lets you automate repetitive online tasks between different programs you use daily, and more.

Also looks really interesting: hypothes.is.”The Internet, peer reviewed.”

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A few kinda nerdy notes:

Some surprising uses of wolfram alpha for word-professionals.

Large Hadron Collider discovers its first new particle

This is quite fascinating, on a philosophical/thinking level:  answers to the question “what it’s like” to have an internalized sense of very advanced mathematical concepts“.

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A few tracking the nasty weird future coming soon/now:

The Future of Drone Warfare – deeply weird and fascinating extrapolation on the likely direction of drone warfare. For bonus points, introduced me to the fact of Bonjwas.

System D – the 10 trillion dollar black market global economy – Foreign Policy article by the excellent Robert Neuwirth (author of Shadow Cities).

More on the emerging warlords of our near future: Mexico’s cartels build own national radio system. (via @nils_gilman / @deviantglobal)

Tracking this stuff is pretty relevant to what things are going to look like when things fall apart more openly: empowered non-state actors doing it themselves.

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And some random shit:

How to open a padlock with a coke can

Mad monks shut down by Pope

“a renowned monastery in Rome where monks staged concerts featuring a lap-dancer-turned-nun and opened a hotel with a 24-hour limousine service has been shut down by the pope.”

Global Drug Commissioner Richard Branson (huh?) on lessons from Portugal after a decade of decriminalistation.

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And to go out on: Wax, Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees

By all accounts about the most impossibly weird film ever.

Watch it free online here.

Anyhow. Here are the results of my first dedicated info trawl in a long long while, scrying the emerging future in the froth of the web… Much of the best of this comes from the already indispensable Innovation Patterns, the rest from the mutants list, and generally revisiting some of my haunts.

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Michael Ventura steps into prophet mode again. Three parts, necessary reading/analysis of what the fuck is going. (Subtitle: “The Worldwide End of Capitalism and Its Replacement by a Mode of Commerce for Which, as Yet, There Is No Ism.”) Flash Mob Dance Revolution Parts One Two & Three. Two parts analysis, third part an attempt at solution.

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fighting muppetocracy: pretty brutal and punchy look at how fucked we are, well worth reading and distressingly difficult to argue against.

This show brought to you by the international community, by government, by the NGOs, by well-intentioned individuals, by the UN, and all the rest of it. The same cast of clowns that screwed up Haiti.

Get it yet? Is it landing?

We are screwed. We don’t need to speculate on how or why, but we have an absolutely clear and rational expectation that there will be no sudden, effective, global and complete transformation in our global governance systems resulting in an effective resolution to our climate crisis.

We did not do it for poverty.

We do not do it for natural disasters.

We will not do it for climate.

Everything rests on us getting a technological fix for climate, and we’re massively, dramatically underfunding research into those breakthrough technologies in favour of continuing to subsidize oil. These are the facts.

Really worth reading the whole thing for context etc.

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kind of an antidote to that: recent interview with zen buddhist master Thich Nhat Hahn :

“Without collective awakening the catastrophe will come,” he warns. “Civilisations have been destroyed many times and this civilisation is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little. The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different.

“If you meditate on that, you will not go crazy. You accept that this civilisation could be abolished and life will begin later on after a few thousand years because that is something that has happened in the history of this planet. When you have peace in yourself and accept, then you are calm enough to do something, but if you are carried by despair there is no hope.”

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Excellent Foreign Policy article about the logical limits to China’s growth, and the rise of Turkey, India, Mexico, Brazil, and Indonesia.

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DARPA trying to hack the neurobiology of narrative in order to bring in a whole new generation of propaganda control.

Once scientists have perfected the science of how stories affect our neurochemistry, they will develop tools to “detect narrative influence.” These tools will enable “prevention of negative behavioral outcomes … and generation of positive behavioral outcomes, such as building trust.” In other words, the tools will be used to detect who’s been controlled by subversive ideologies, better allowing the military to drown out that message and win people onto their side.

“The government is already trying to control the message, so why not have the science to do it in a systematic way?” said the researcher familiar with the project.

Um. WTF? Disturbing as fuck anyway.

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The Case Against the Spirit World Model of Psychedelic Action

Pretty fascinating/challenging read for entheogenic enthusiasts.

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Cyborg future news: A team at at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen says it’s built the foundation for devices to communicate directly with the human brain.

The researchers’ new graphene-based transistor array is compatible with living biological cells and can, for the first time, record the electrical signals they generate.

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Have you missed these posts? Or are you happier not knowing?

(Hell, for that matter, have I missed making these posts, and am I happier not knowing?)

It has arrived in the form of bitcoin.

If you can begin to grasp the implications of an untraceable, untaxable, global, uncontrollable-by-governments currency, you ought to know about this.
Moreso if you can’t.

- The British royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

- The beatification of Pope John Paul II. (Man, the new pope just looks evil all the time.)

- The spontaneous party on the announcement of the successful revenge killing of Osama Bin Laden.

Psychologically and emotionally, we are fully living a thousand years ago.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates bluntly told an audience of West Point cadets on Friday that it would be unwise for the United States to ever fight another war like Iraq or Afghanistan, and that the chances of carrying out a change of government in that fashion again were slim.

Stiglitz continues to talk economic sense, in this case how to reduce deficits, and also explains why it will continue to be ignored…

There’s only one problem: it wouldn’t benefit those at the top, or the corporate and other special interests that have come to dominate America’s policymaking. Its compelling logic is precisely why there is little chance that such a reasonable proposal would ever be adopted.

Wifi hacking dangers: “Like it or not, we are now living in a cyberpunk novel,”

The Last Ring Bearer: apocryphal revisionist history of Lord of the Rings.

Somehow missed that they think they have found a gas giant 4 x bigger than Jupiter way out at the edge of the solar system… introducing Tyche

Psyops moving into social media

It’s recently been revealed that the U.S. government contracted HBGary Federal for the development of software which could create multiple fake social media profiles to manipulate and sway public opinion on controversial issues by promoting propaganda. It could also be used as surveillance to find public opinions with points of view the powers-that-be didn’t like. It could then potentially have their “fake” people run smear campaigns against those “real” people. As disturbing as this is, it’s not really new for U.S. intelligence or private intelligence firms to do the dirty work behind closed doors

And hey, why not some total crazy:

DNA from William Burrough’s shit to be turned into bio art

In this project, a DNA sample from William S. Burroughs will be isolated, amplified and shot into the nuclei of some cells.

What is the process? –

1: Take a glob of William S. Burroughs’ preserved shit
2: Isolate the DNA with a kit
3: Make, many, many copies of the DNA we extract
4: Soak the DNA in gold dust
5: Load the DNA dust into a genegun (a modified air pistol)
6: Fire the DNA dust into a mix of fresh sperm, blood and shit
7: Call the genetically modified mix of blood, shit, and sperm a living bioart, a new media paint, a living cut-up literary device and/or a mutant sculpture.

Maybe he would approve.

* Josh Harris (of We Live in Public fame) makes a bid to head the MIT media lab

“If I become director of the MIT Media Lab, the institution’s primary focus will be to build a working singularities effect of the future, now, in order to understand how it all works.”

* Psychedelic sequence removed from Avatar would probably have made it more interesting.

The ritual consists of the initiate having to eat a worm as well as endure the sting of a scorpion-like creature.  The worm is significant as it eats from the “sacred tree,” presumably the Tree of Souls, and contains a psychoactive alkaloid.  The scorpion provides a potent neuro-toxin that brings the Na’vi close to death.  When combined together, the two compounds unleash a powerful psychedelic experience that allows for the initiate to go on a “dreamhunt” and attempt to contact their “spirit animal.”

* The Big Deal. Heavy think pieces from Vinay Gupta, who is way out ahead of the curve, about what the hell is going on.

I’ve recently written four essays, The Big Deal (#thebigdeal) which combine to paint a new picture of the current state of the world and a future picture showing how grass roots political power can achieve what current models of governance, including government, cannot do alone. This work is partly a critique and expansion on the British government’s Big Society concept, but it also draws heavily on my own experience in futures, complexity science and engineering for the bottom billion. It is an attempt to model the world in a new way; a way which reveals otherwise hidden paths to achieve change.

Yet to read them but flag them necessary.

* Ten myths about welfare. Actually not via the mutants, but this is getting around. If you are in NZ you probably need to read this as we roll into election year.

* Uncontacted Amazon Indians face annihilation Kind of amazing that this sort of thing is still happening. Also amazing that it can still happen, that there is anyone left out there.

* According to this fun sliding tool, all income growth in America in the past three decades has gone to the top 10% of the population. Thus income has declined for the bottom 90% of people. (Yay for unfettered capitalism!) The same sort of trend is probably at work here, as these things go.

Of course, now the real task begins. Setting up and maintaining the life you want to lead. Because the way things are will do all it can to propagate itself in a new guise with pretty words and a new face at the top.

And yeah, once again, it is amazing to have it reaffirmed that massive change is in fact possible, out of seemingly nowhere, peacefully, through the actions of people working together to make things better.

This is what the future looks like.

We can change. The choice is when, and to what.

Way back I quote Ventura thusly:

We are neither governed nor ruled. We are ignored. That most of usdon’t make a peep about it is perhaps an indication that we deserve to be ignored. We’ve demanded to be flattered, agreed with, and comforted; we’ve demanded almost anything but competence. Only a massive shift in public sentiment – and public action – will change things, and no one knows if that’s afoot.
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The only antidote for a failure of democracy is the exercise of democracy. What every government fears most is a million citizens peaceably assembled at its front door, people who won’t go home until they get what they came for.

Wow, and just while trawling through old quotes, here is James Baldwin

But for power truly to feel itself menaced, it must somehow sense itself in the presence of another power – or, more accurately, an energy – which it has not known how to define and therefore does not really know how to control. For a very long time, for example, America prospered – or seemed to prosper: this prosperity cost millions of people their lives. Now, not even the people who are the most spectacular recipients of the benefits of this prosperity are able to endure these benefits: they can neither understand them nor do without them, nor can they go beyond them. Above all, they cannot, or dare not, assess or imagine the price payed by their victims, or subjects, for this way of life, and so they cannot afford to know why the victims are revolting. They are forced, then, to the conclusion that the victims – the barbarians – are revolting against all established civilized values – which is both true and not true – and, in order to preserve these values, however stifling and joyless these values have caused their lives to be, the bulk of the people desperately seek out representatives who are prepared to make up in cruelty what both they and the people lack in conviction.

(No Name in the Street, 1972)

And as ever, Bucky needs to be reaffirmed:

whether it will be utopia or oblivion will be a touch and go relay race until the very end.

People do stuff, and make stuff happen. Inactivity is also doing. What is your activity, and inactivity, producing in the world? And what do you think the world needs? Because when enough people feel the same, the streets are full.

Turns out it is sinking, both economically and, well, physically.

I guess this is what you get for being the ideal location for a JG Ballard novel.

Julian Assange has WMD

Regardless of their truth value, the sexual misconduct claims against Assange are being used politically to distract the discourse from the revelations of wikileaks. Sex scandal is easier to write about than the detail of political machinations which go against the prevailing propaganda line.

And, like WMD in Iraq, it is a politically acceptable solution, to allow the targetting of an anointed and demonised “bad guy”; in this case to enable a chain of extradition of doubtful legality in the name of vengeance and to protect the freedom to conduct lawless wars.

Remember, Iraq could be invaded by simply being mentioned in the same sentence as Al-Qaeda and 9-11 often enough for a majority of americans to think they were related, and that Iraq was even responsible for 9-11. In the same way, wikileaks, Assange, sexual assault are being deliberately associated.

However, Assange’s alleged sexual misconduct, and what wikileaks is and does, are two totally different things. It feels ridiculous to need to make the distinction, but the discourse needs clarity.
As Anonymous points out, “Neither Wikieaks nor its founder have been charged with any crime in connection to any of the published leaks.”

(Rape and sexual violence, etc, is a serious thing in society, and a conversation that needs to be had; but it is a separate conversation from Wikileaks.)

Wikileaks: Right or wrong?

Wikileaks is not perfect. But perfection is an unreasonable standard, invoked by those choosing to ignore the staggering systemic imperfections they can live with daily as the status quo. Reality is a moral quagmire of grey zones. You do your best, operating in an imperfect world.

If there was nothing to hide, wikileaks would not exist. Those who live in glasshouses are in no place to cast judgement.

Wikileaks is a response to the twisted reality we live in. As it holds up the mirror, do you complain too loudly about what you see?

Wikileaks = napster.

Sharing digital media online has increased exponentially since napster was taken to court.

The attempt to punish wikileaks will fail to achieve its actual goals of stopping leaks. It is the blind reaction of a wounded monster.

The genie is out of the bottle. There are many other leak sites. The principle is established and the means will increasingly be in our hands. The pace and intensity of leaking – of truth coming to light – will increase. And this is on average going to be a very good thing.

What I want to see is ChinaLeaks. NorthKoreaLeaks. RussiaLeaks. Let’s truly globalize and democratize this openness.

The End of Make Believe

I am coming to view the fable of the Emperor’s new clothes as one of the most important statements about human psychology ever made. (The earliest recorded form is actually a very old Arab story, from, if memory serves, the 12th century, or possibly 1200 years ago, memory being funky like that; I am tempted to apocryphally attribute it to the Sufis, who have a way with such tales.)

In ‘Here Comes Everybody’, Clay Shirky talks about the phenomena of “everyone knows everyone knows everyone knows” as a metric of when change happens. This means, for example, I know something, I know you know it too, and you know I know you know it. At this point, the pretense cannot continue. (He gives the example of the year the Berlin wall came down. Everyone knew the situation was fucked, everyone knew that everyone knew the situation was fucked, but when a stream of unchallenged public protests went on, everyone knew that everyone knew that they knew, too, and then it changed.)

Wikileaks achieves the state of everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows.

Wikileaks is not revealing anything new, or at least surprising, to informed observers. Yes, US conduct in Iraq has been appalling. What is new is now we can’t pretend it isn’t, reassured by official spokesmen. We can point to the proof. Yes, the US puts inappropriate diplomatic pressure on other countries, and what is said in public does not match what is said in private. Now we can’t pretend. We can point to the proof. Etc.

Wikileaks makes it hard to pretend not to know – by providing proof of reality, it changes the stakes, and the perception of reality. This is the revolution it poses – a means for the child to say the emperor has no clothes, and for all to hear.

Truth vs Illusion

Thus ultimately, the Wikileaks saga is about truth vs illusion in the modern world. And I am on the side of truth, because, ultimately, illusion kills, and living under illusion brings suffering. Truth kills and brings suffering, too, of course, for that is the nature of our world. But such deaths and suffering by truth are unavoidable; deaths and suffering by illusion are avoidable.

[Edit: this is the most interesting thing I have read about the what and why of wikileaks, and particularly where Assange is coming from. A must read if you are interested in this.]