This week, almost by theme…

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An unexpected clump of data on prisons:

Analysis of incarceration and death rates (abstract) turns up some weird nuggets :

Black male prisoners, however consistently exhibited lower death rates than black male nonprisoners did.

Cue this tweet from Nils Gilman: “Stat of the day: More black men are disenfranchised today (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than when the 15th Amendment was ratified”

(Oh, and there are now more Americans in jail than there were in Stalin’s gulag archipelago.)

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All about information:

* A universe of self-replicating code – Brain food from George Dyson.

* Fascinating short piece with graph revealing that lots of books written in the 20th Century have effectively vanished/no longer available due to being copyrighted: the missing 20th century

* Apparently there’s been an explosion in the number of retractions in scientific journals.

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Randomness from around the world:

Chinese wedding with a 6 ferrari dowry and 70 million overall price-tag.

Micro-chip embedded intelligent t-shirts used to track student truancy in Brazil.

(Man school uniforms are going to be fun in the future.)

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And a wee dose of utopian future, almost: Free ebook of Lester Brown’s World on the Edge – How to prevent economic and environmental collapse.

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)

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?)

(Yet another entry in the utopia vs oblivion stakes.)

I have had the privilege of reading widely and in depth during a prolonged period of self-education. This is a rare thing, and I am very grateful for it.

So: here is a list of the non-fiction books that are most highly recommended by the moose.

This is a really hard list to make. I want to get a sense of what has most influenced me, and what would be most useful for others to read. The real challenge is what amazing mind-blowing stuff to leave off; what entire disciplines don’t even get a mention.

I could rant at length about each of the books listed, and someday mean to, but for now the list and a brief precis will suffice.

Over time I have found the one of the most important laws of scholarship to be “always read the original”. Reading these volumes will repay truly great dividends. In some cases I am picking authors rather than books, as it is difficult to fit many thinkers into one volume.

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Robert Anton Wilson: Quantum Psychology.

Wilson is like the Irish Buddha. Compassionate, funny and wise, with an uncanny ability to explain complex things in ways that make you feel much smarter than you are, as he teaches you how to think for yourself. His books are wide ranging and profound, and totally unique.

QP deals with quantum physics, language, the mind, and how we make ourselves a reality tunnel to live in; it is gentle and funny and unspeakably brilliant, and will free up your view of things by stealth with its mix of theory and practice.

Prometheus Rising, and Cosmic Trigger Vol 1, are the other two must reads of his non-fiction. They are both also pretty indescribable, but totally worthwhile. (Also recommended is the audio set Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything, particularly the 2nd and 3rd lectures.)

His humour, and staggering originality and clarity of communication, make him the best entry point into the world of ideas that interests me.

David Bohm: Wholeness and the Implicate Order; Thought as a System.

Quantum physicist and philosopher whose thought touches on the most fundamental questions of existence. Bohm is much more than a physicist. In my eyes he is quite possibly the most important philosopher of the late 20th century.

WATIO is about his take on quantum physics, and relativity, and their implications for everything else. There is one long chapter with many equations that will be over most people’s heads (sure was over mine), but it is interesting to read along the development of the logic. Also discusses language and philosophy, putting forward fascinating and brilliant stuff as he grapples with the deepest issues of meaning and existence.

TAAS is much easier going, taking the form of a weekend long dialogue he led, and covers analagous material in a completely non-technical fashion. Both are very brilliant.

(I often feel much of my own work is covering ground that Wilson and Bohm covered better.)

PD Ouspensky: In Search of the Miraculous; Tertium Organum.

Russian philosopher from the early 20th century. Genius in his own right, while perhaps best known as a disciple of Gurdjieff.

ISOTM introduced me to the best, most lucid, most grounded and practical model of human psychology and spirituality I have encountered; a genuinely life-changing experience.

The first ten pages of TO are still probably the most comprehensively mindshattering thing I have ever read; in fact, in many ways that is where my journey began, and the return was being able to say what had already been said, but from myself, in my own words.

Buckminster Fuller: Critical Path

Visionary genius, design scientist, humanist; original thinker par excellence; world-system thinking at its finest; one of the most optimistic paradigm shifting thinkers of all time.

Want to save the world? Start here. Not easy reading, but off-the-charts brilliant. Written the year before he died; a summation of his life’s work. Almost impossible to communicate just how powerful, joyous, and uplifting this work, and Fuller’s vision, is. (Actually, we wrote a – frankly awesome – song about Bucky in Idle Faction: right click to download Go Bucky Go, which maybe captures some of how rocking this stuff really is )

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Those four, in particular, are giants whom I am standing sheepishly on the shoulders of, feeling out of place.

Now two which are just things any intelligent person in the West should have read, or the equivalent thereof, in answer to the basic questions of where did we come from, and how our current world and ideas about the world came about:

Richard Tarnas: The Passion of the Western Mind

The best one volume history of western thought I have encountered. A truly incredible performance, weaving together the many strands of thought into one amazing narrative.

(An excellent Eastern complement to this is Heinrich Zimmer’s “Philosophies of India”.)

Arnold Toynbee: Mankind and Mother Earth

The best one volume history of the world I have encountered. Written the year before he died, and after his mammoth 12 volume history of the world, here Toynbee brings it all together, revealing the patterns of things across time.

History, in general, is vital for any understanding of what we are. Though also a highly problematic, impressionistic art. A discipline I wish I was better read in.

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While I could go on and on listing many great books, with vital insights, I am also aware they form part of my process, and may or may not be essential to anyone else.

Honestly, the above would keep most people going for quite a while, and would gird you well to take on the world; the first four in particular feel essential, and have done a lot to shape my thinking and experience.

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.

This time via providing this treasure from Ubuweb, a documentary about Buckminster Fuller..

“This film by Oscar-winning filmmaker Robert Snyder, like his other documentaries on “the greats” (Michelangelo, Henry Miller, Willem de Kooning, Pablo Casals, among others), transports the viewer into Fuller’s mind and soul. Told entirely in his own words, the film is an intimate, personal and inspiring message from Fuller to our fragile world.”

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.
[...]
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.

Once again, Kiwiburn was amazing, awesome, wonderful, intense, powerful, challenging, etc. And full of people who are amazing, awesome, wonderful, etc.

It’s funny, I was particularly ambivalent about going this year – mostly I went to screen the doco, in situ – but I came away wanting to still be in the paddock way more than any previous year. The quality of the people, the quality of the interactions, and the energy of the place, is just flat out better. Strangers from all over the country and the world come together in spontaneous community. It is a strange and beautiful phenomenon. All these people are still in my heart and mind.

The doco screened twice, in appropriately DIY paddock conditions, once in a torrential downpour, and once after the temple burn. It was fascinating to observe the audience responding to the film, as the screenings were very different. It seemed to go down pretty well, which was nice.

I never saw the first Zeitgeist film, and don’t plan to. I saw the second one, and found it to be a reasonable presentation of issues around the money system – the kind of stuff I have been ranting about for a while now – along with some fun techno-utopian bullshit called the Venus Project.

The third one was long. Four parts, the first focusing on epigenetic effects on behaviour – essentially rejecting genetic determinist type arguments, and arguing for the influence of the environment – and was pretty solid. The second was more on the money system, this time focusing on its role as our environment, and its effects on us. The third part was an interesting if incomplete techno-utopian model of how we could run the world instead once we stop being so f**king stupid, but it struck me as a hyper rationalist vision curiously lacking insight into human values. The fourth part I forget exactly, but it got a bit more peak oil on our asses, and a bit more urgent about the need for change.

For anyone who has been paying attention, there is not much new here. The dude could use an editor/input from someone who isn’t him. From the kinds of things he feels the need to clarify – (eg) this is not communism! – he is clearly operating from deep inside an American consciousness. At times it is preachy, and flawed in its argument. But as a freely available idiot friendly introduction – and one with a lot of momentum behind it – it could be much worse.

As ever, it is easier to critique what is going on than produce alternatives. The critical comments are worth knowing about, and the alternative, while limited and flawed, contains some good stuff, and is more use as a contribution to a conversation rather than a viable model. (Following Monbiot, I feel more than justified in saying this, as most of my writing is about creating viable solutions to this sort of thing. Just need to get them published in some form :/)

Mostly what interested me about it was the social phenomenon. I forget the stats exactly, but the dude who spoke before it played said it was launched on the same day in (something like) 280 cities in 65 countries around the world, via a grassroots movement.

Now that is interesting.

Thing is, the Paramount was *completely* sold out – people sitting in the aisles – sold out with normal looking people, not obvious freaks.

Normally this stuff is encountered alone in your room late at night in front of your computer, or maybe with a few similarly cracked out friends. While widespread, it is underground. It is being thought about and talked about but it is not visible. Bringing thousands of people together, in public, around the world, for a shared experience of this material, interests me – it brings things closer to the “everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows” phenomena Clay Shirky talks about in Here Comes Everybody (which I talked about in the last section of this post). It is powerful in some sense.

I don’t know if we will look back on this as some sort of moment that mattered, but it is well named – there is a trend, a movement, a zeitgeist, towards the general awareness that we have comprehensive problems that require comprehensive solutions. Its value is in reaching “the masses”, and opening up these sorts of conversations. In this sense I am not the ideal audience – I am further down the rabbit hole than most people. But those I talked to afterwards had found new thoughts moving in themselves after the film.

It will be available for free download from the 25th of Jan.