[LINK] The PLAN, and broadband speeds? - tome warning

[Janet Hawtin]

On 6/20/07, David Lochrin <dlochrin at d2.net.au> wrote:

> >  I think we can farewell the idea of rational government for and by the people for the time being.  The political right unreservedly considers itself "the party of business" and the political centre-left is too afraid of rocking the economic boat.

Is that really who we are? As with any starting point most people have
a life embedded in the status quo Some have investments geared for
more extreme iterations of the same broken pattern, but surely we can
all see that we need a pattern which can guarantee environmental
sustainability? We want to have a community which future generations
will enjoy? Do we have a longer term vision or commitment ourselves?

>    Why does the electorate generally allow such stupendous incompetence or outright lying and manipulation?  My only guess is that most people are too busy and/or frightened by keeping their job and paying the mortgage, and don't have a critical mind anyway.  But I believe High McKay thinks we're waking up at last and starting to take notice.

>From a layperson perspective it feels as though there is a focal length problem.
The information models and economic patterns we use to describe our
world currently are win lose abstracted systems for mapping profit as
the core value.

OK hypothetically, if say democratic governance was dead in the water
at the hands of international capital, either directly or simply as a
model of understanding which has overwritten other values, what
options does an electorate have?
It is increasingly hard to spend your way to local value and fair principles.
Voting saves a fine but does not offer alternative policy.
I think the electorates are well cranky enough, its just very
difficult to re-engineer the scale of conversation we are having, with
the detail we need, to do it in a better way.

As a social system I do not think we have [developed/maintained/chosen
to use] skills to negotiate win win policy which retains local diverse
social ecological value at the distance/scale at which we are now
making decisions.

I feel we take life> photocopy> copy through n statistic models> copy
through n business goals> copy through n electoral political tennis>
to get a 6 gen photocopy of something in which you can not recognise
the origins but can see the trademarks of its journey. A journey which
will likely to be consistent through any conversation because it will
represent the power journey which the message travels. The same
entities will regularly win. The original concept is pretty much
irrelevant any conversation will result in further aggregation of
value around the same power nodes or thoughts. Without some kind of
core values and commitment to finding an authentic workable solution
for the original question I cannot see where government has the means
to govern in any real democratic sense.

If we have diffuse interests based on our social diversity, and want
to sustain an environmental diversity and ecology, how are those
priorities meshed into something coherent which does not get
abstracted into a bottomline which
is blind to social and ecological values?

I think the electorate is in a challenging position because it is not
a problem which can be fixed by the means we are provided through
elections. Likely to be even less effective if we move to bodgy
digital voting systems =/

For me the IP question feels central to a lot of issues.
Seeing ideas and information as individual property is a factor in
much of our inability to understand our ecological systems and
sciences and medicines holistically. We have stopped being able to
talk about information and dialogue as a flow, a discourse, a context
for community, because we see it in individual servings like
restaurant butter. Kids posting on youtube are expressing themselves
in context with their culture. Adding their voice to the mix of who we
are.
What possible purpose is there in telling the next generation they
have no right to express themselves as members and children and
derivatives of the preceding culture?

A2K is a group of public interest groups meshing around access to
knowledge principles.  What other aggregations of 'public good' are
finding threads of common interest? What are the dimensions that need
to be negotiated and flexible in order to make diverse communities.
What are the core ideas which optimise ecological diversity and social
freedom and participation.

What happens if we remove the brokers of governance and grow some
sense of responsibility for who we are? Can we relook at democracy and
our new shiny web2 understanding of personal voice and participation
and find ways to see multiple synchronous multi-dimensional
conditional choice and to use that as input? We probably have the
granularity of data.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU8DcBF-qo4
We can choose to have open code.
We do not yet have the real access/connectivity(back to bandwidth or
more fundamental social connection?) to each person to carry something
participative off using technology even in AU, but perhaps we have
ways to start thinking about these issues differently? As something
which we fix?

We need to systemically understand our ecological context.
We need to unpack our social anomalies so that we are just and healthy
as a world community.

Frankly our planet, ecology, habitat, communities, cannot afford for
us not to care.
Stuff is broken. Bees are broken. Ocean temperatures and cycles are broken.
Climate is broken. Solutions which generate more toxic waste and
underground resevoirs of unresolved ill conceived private profiteering
will not be good outcomes. They will break. They are non-solutions.
Communities are dying of AIDS and may not use generic drugs because it
will infringe someone's 'property'. Someone complained because CSIRO
was developing vaccines for a virus which was owned elsewhere.
Patented private control of deliberately non viable life forms.
Genetic end of line organisims because they are profitable.
Categorically broken value systems. Our world is being governed using
models which are breaking earth as an ecology and humans as a
community of sentient responsible individuals. You can't get more
borked than that without going out of business.

Perhaps it will happen more easily in places where government is able
to orient towards better kinds of thinking, but if governments are not
capable the changes will happen outside that framework and the
question 'what is government for' might become more familiar.

We will probably also need to rethink ideas around what is national
interest, are there nations of congruent thought, how do we make safe
and negotiated coexistence of diverse thought. Currently we subscribe
to 'nations' of commercial interest. We need to think less feudally.
(Drahos)

TV/broadcast media is to internet participative culture as Government is to ?

</tome warning>

Back to your regular viewing  ;)