A Stoic cure for consumerism

The Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius was raised surrounded by beautiful things: fine wines, sumptuous foods, artfully tailored robes, beautiful art and architecture. All too often, however, the affairs of the Empire would take him far from Rome, to defend the borders against the Goths, the Parthians, or the Persians. For the greater part of his life, Marcus was forced to endure the rigors of the battlefield, where beauty was rare and brutality the order of the day.

To maintain his composure through these years of hardship and toil, Marcus sought to transform his perception of the objects he desired. Rather than think of beautiful things – clothes, jewelry, food, art and architecture – in the manner that they were commonly perceived, he sought to see them as simple material objects and evaluate them accordingly. In his notebook, Marcus presented this as a simple technique:

‘When we have meat before us and other food, we must say to ourselves: “This is the dead body of a fish, and this is the dead body of a bird or of a pig, and again, this Falernian [wine] is only a little grape juice, and this purple robe some sheep’s wool died with the blood of a shellfish” … so that we see what kinds of things they are. This is how we should act throughout life: where there are things that seem worthy of great estimation, we ought to lay them bare and look at their worthlessness and strip them of all the words by which they are exalted. For the outward show [of things] is a wonderful perverter of reason, and when we are certain the things we are dealing with are worth the trouble, that is when it cheats us most’ (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.13).

Swarm politics

I spoke about swarm politics at the F5 festival in NYC in April 2009.  Simon Robson and I were there to present shots from our upcoming film, ‘Coalition of the Willing’. Popdesign captured the moment and put it  flickr. Thank you Popdesign. To see the photos of Simon and I, you can either scroll left through the photostream or follow a tag (better).

One of these shots contains a minute-and-a-half segment from my on-stage discussion of swarm politics. Wow! Unfortunately, the clip finishes before I tie things up with the point that a swarm is mutually empowering for participants. A mob becomes a swarm when a mass of people discover that together they can be more, in every sense of that word, than they could be alone. Swarms are mutually empowering for participants – this is why people join them.

What led a disorganized mob of hackers and geeks to collaborate on designing the Linux system before anyone knew it would be so successful? The collaborative project became a source of mutual empowerment and the mob began to swarm.

Learning how to love

I caused confusion, and a little consternation, at my brother’s wedding when I announced, in a speech before family and friends, that I didn’t know what love was, but I had always been interested in learning. It was supposed to be a Socratic gesture, but it backfired. I had forgotten, of course, that weddings are places where the idea of love is not called into question. Fortunately, few people at the event made sense of what I was saying and I was duly ignored. In my defense, I was simply recounting one of my favorite of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas about learning how to love. This comes from The Joyful Wisdom (Die Frohliche Wissenschaft) of 1882. I hope you come to love it as much as I do.

‘One must learn how to love. — This is what happens to us in music: First one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life. Then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearances and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity. Finally, there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing; and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.

But that is what happens to us not only in music. That is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way; for there is no other way. Love, too, has to be learned’.

Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom (also trans. The Gay Science), aphorism 334.

Definition of innovation

Here’s my proposal for a definition of innovation. Tell me what you think:

An innovation is anything new that is applied in the context of a practical system that changes the system, either [1] expanding what is possible within the system or [2] transforming the system, making what was previously impossible possible.

F5, New York, April 16-17, 2009

Knife Party/Philosophy for Change production

On April 17, 2009, Timothy Rayner and Simon Robson will be speaking about their film (working title) ‘Coalition of the Willing’ at the F5 creativity conference in New York. See this website for details.

‘Coalition’ is a short (6-8 minutes) animated  film presenting a vision of how the internet can be used to inspire, mobilize, and coordinate the global public in combating climate change. It is currently in production.

Watchmen in times of change

I’ve been a fan of Watchmen from the early ’90s, when Mark Pollard let me read his sacred twelve. I’ve since then purchased the graphic novel myself, read it several times (it requires several readings), and generally developed a love of the work. I approached Zack Snyder’s Watchmen with mixed feelings. I had heard we were going to get the real Watchmen – not some hosed-down version of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s creation, but the whole beautiful, dark, gritty, brutal, angry, sad animal. I also knew that the movie ran to 160 minutes, so some stuff would have to go. But something inside told me that even a diminished version of Moore’s Watchmen could have a massive impact on the big screen.

I was impressed by the movie. I think that it has lots of flaws, but also some big ideas, and lots to say about how we should understand change.

The Watchmen, for those not in the know, are a loosely-affiliated group of costumed vigilantes who live in an alternative 1985. There is a Cold War backstory — a sort of hyped-up version of the real 1985, shown mainly in shots of Richard Nixon (in this universe in his third term), a poorly made-up Robert Wisden, suffering under a prosthetic nose, sweating while he calculates the fallout should America launch a preemptive strike on the Russkies. I’m not sure if the anxiety and dread of this backstory really permeates the rest of the movie — much of which seems to take place in a relative detachment — though it is obviously supposed to be reflected in the action of the characters, and turns out to be  important for the narrative. But we’ll come to Ozymandias his final solution in time.

I’d like to reflect on the characters of this movie in relation to how change figures in the arc of their stories. How are the Watchmen agents of change? How do they understand, anticipate, deal with, and rationalize change?

The idea of the mask, and what wearing costumes and masks can do to people, is a constant theme in the movie. The Watchmen are costumed vigilantes. The conceit of the story is that these (bar one exception) are ordinary people — with excellent training but without any genuine superpowers — who take it upon themselves to wear masks, go out on the street at night and beat up criminals. What kind of person would do this kind of thing? Moore provides us with the psychological profiles. There is the disturbed seeker of vengeance, Walter Kovacs, a.k.a. Rorschach. Rorschach is a cross between Sam Spade and Jason Voorhees. At the end of the movie, we are supposed to see him as a blinkered hero. Eddie Blake is the Comedian. The Comedian was a member of the original costumed vigilante group, The Minutemen. He soon became disillusioned with street work and started doing operations for the government (including acting as second gunman on the grassy knoll). The Comedian is murdered by a mystery assailant at the start of the movie.

Rorschach and the Comedian both use masks to establish secret identities. Rorschach discovers the Comedian’s secret identity soon after his murder. This sets him on the trail if the ‘mask killer’, whom he thinks he must track down and bring to justice — for ‘an attack on one is an attack on all’. Rorschach hates his life without his mask. It is the mask that makes him Rorschach, or enables to become Rorschach. When Roschach is captured by the police and his mask ripped off him, he screams: ‘Give me back my face!’

Moore’s narrative is a masterclass in the deconstruction of the superhero. The Watchmen, for the most part, are driven by weak and selfish motives — anger, resent, lack of self-esteem — or violent ends, which are ignoble even when they’re fueled by the desire for justice, or the desire to change the world.

This brings us to what I think is most interesting feature of the Watchmen movie. To appreciate this, we need to reflect on how Watchmen implicitly resonates with the climate crisis of today. (The following discussion contains what are commonly called ’spoilers’, which means the revelation of important details of the plot of a movie, so those who have not yet seen Watchmen may wish to stop reading now). A lot has been made of how Watchmen recreates (or fails to recreate) the paranoid Cold War atmosphere of 1985. But the Cold War is over. Cinema audiences today no longer experience the mortal dread of nuclear annihilation that MAD left hanging above our heads from the ’50s to the ‘80. Instead, the plot of Watchmen resonates with present day concerns over climate change. Adrian Veight, or Ozymandias, the ’smartest man in the world’, is an environmentalist. He used to be a member of Watchmen. But after the Keene act of ‘77, outlawing masks, he made a huge profit from exploiting his ex-superhero status. He is now a billionaire environmentalist, determined to free the world of its dependence on oil and coal through the production (with Dr Manhattan, a nuclear physicist transformed into a buff, glowing, blue man at an accident at the Gila Heights research facility in the 1950s) of clean energy reactors based on Manhattan’s superpowers. It turns out that Ozymandias is preparing to frame Dr Manhattan for the blitzkreig annihilation the great cities of the world, killing millions of people. The double twist is that his ideals are noble ones. Ozymandias, who models himself upon Alexander the Great, aims to unite the world to save it from impending nuclear war. He does this by convincing the world that it’s being attacked by the wrathful, God-like presence of a rogue Dr Manhattan. At the end of the movie, we are left to assume that Ozymandias’ massive act of murder has succeeded in uniting the world in peace. Some critics find the ending ’saccharine’ — as if the world would take the bait? — but as the Comedian would say, this is all part of the joke.

It is interesting to reflect on Ozymandias as a psychological type of our times. I think  Ozymandias is a provocative and thought provoking figure. I imagine that a number of people may leave this movie thinking: ‘Isn’t that what we really need today? Perhaps Ozymandias is right: perhaps we need to find a way of forcibly convincing the world that massive social, cultural, political, and infrastructural changes are necessary?’ These are unsettling questions. But they are basic ethical questions for our time. I wouldn’t condone Ozymandias’ actions. But I’m not entirely sure I’d want to condemn them. Ozymandias is, after all, saving the world. Doesn’t that make him a hero? What do you think?

My personal feeling is that the moral weight has to lie with the negative case. A utilitarian response to the climate crisis, exterminating millions for the sake of saving the world, is morally untenable. If Watchmen makes it appear tenable, this is on account of the svelte charisma of Matthew Goode, who portrays Ozymandias. We must remember that fascism has many faces. Adrian Veight is as much a fascist as Rorschach or the Comedian. This, I think, is one of the most subtle and interesting points that Watchmen makes — and perhaps the movie makes it even better than the novel. It provides us with a new face to be afraid of. The friendly face of fascism.

If Ozymandias represents more than just a figure from an alternative 1985, but a genuinely disturbing figure for our times, then Watchmen may turn out to be more than just another Hollywood feature. It may be that rarest of things — a genuinely provocative, intelligent blockbuster.

Aspire to change the frame

Making any genuine change in life calls for innovation. Sure, you can throw yourself into the cut and thrust of changing circumstance, see what happens. But the play of events can only change you so much. There comes a point where you have to take an active role — re-imagining life and acting to redefine it. That’s a moment of personal innovation.

At the same time, innovation implies change. The great innovators are powerful agents of change — they aspire to change the world. Even if one only intends to transform the order of practice in a restricted domain, the same rule applies. Innovation is an aspirational pursuit. The will to innovation says: ‘Aspire to change the frame’.

I’m currently developing a perspective on innovation as an aspirational pursuit. By ‘aspirational’, I mean that innovation can be more than just a tool of entrepreneurship but a dynamic catalyst for personal empowerment and elevation. The following theses indicate the direction that the ideas are taking. These theses aren’t intended to describe every act of innovation. They are provocative ideals intended as spurs to thought.

Thesis #1: The logic of innovation is: change the part to change the whole. Innovate to change the frame.

Innovation bears upon a specific aspect of the whole. But it should aspire to transform the whole as such. The initial thing is to develop a conception of the whole that you intend to transform. Perhaps this is the set of styles, approaches and techniques employed in your creative discipline. Perhaps it is a restricted set of techniques comprising a creative method. Perhaps it is a commercial market, or the order of practice in a institution or a business unit. It could be a traffic system, a military strategy, or a political culture. Whatever the whole, an aspirational innovation should seek to transform the frame of reference on this context completely. Innovate to change the frame.

Thesis #2: Identify what’s empowering about transforming the whole.

Challenging the order of things is hard. Our thinking is couched within habits and rituals that stifle creative thought. Innovation requires you to break out of all that. It is usually necessary to prepare yourself first.

Think about how the innovation stands to empower you. How might it boost your spirit, kindle new energies, heighten your capacities to act and exist? How might it open up new time-lines and existential possibilities, freeing space on the horizon and reinvigorating life? You’ll need to be fired up and hungry for change to take that soaring leap of imagination beyond the limits of convention. Innovation shouldn’t only transform the whole — it should transform you in the process.

From this I get the third aspirational thesis:

Thesis #3: Innovate to transform your life as a whole.

Commit your person to the process of innovation. Step into the fires of creation — emerge renewed. Innovators shouldn’t lack for ambition.

Global warming debate heats up – or changes tone?

Dr John S. Theon, onetime supervisor of NASA scientist and originary proponent of the anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming thesis, Dr James Hansen, dropped a bombshell into the global warming debate yesterday by declaring himself a global warming sceptic. Theon (now retired) claims that Hansen was never muzzled by the US government, as he claimed to be, and asserts that the models used by climate scientists to forecast global warming are ‘useless’.

Not surprisingly, Theon’s claims have provoked a furore in the blogsphere, the ubiquity of which suggests that the global warming meme has passed out of fashion with the commentariat. How much this will slow the international march towards emissions cap and trade systems and green power strategems remains to be seen. Despite (reportedly) growing dissensus to the majority view, the climate change lobby now has the ear of government in the US, Europe, Australia and elsewhere. More significantly, President Obama is poised to unveil an innovative sets of proposals to ‘repower America’, which will have far-reaching implications for US consumers, industry and industrial innovators. Facing the prospect of the worst reccession in 60 years, many heads of state and business leaders may well surmise that a green revolution is exactly what is needed to reinvigorate markets and kick start the flagging global economy.

This indicates a salient point that is mostly overlooked in the continuing global warming debate, on the internet at least. Defenders of the anthropogenic global warming thesis who claim that the debate is over are dead wrong insofar as they mean the scientific debate. Science is never settled – argument stops only when interlocutors lose interest in the topic and move on to other themes. This is unlikely to happen with respect to global warming anytime soon. Having said this, it would appear that the debate concerning global warming has changed in both tone and substance in recent months, to the point that questions of climate science are less the central issue. Increasingly, debate is taking a positive and pragmatic turn, as political leaders and opinion makers consider the problem of global warming (whatever its provenance) in the context of associated problems such as energy dependence and economic crisis. Only months ago, Al Gore, for example, was ratcheting-up anxiety levels by presenting anthropogenic global warming as an existential crisis threatening human civilization. While Gore has lost none of his conviction, since Obama’s election he has taken to framing the problem as a positive challenge to repower and reinvent the US. Here is an excerpt from Gore’s address to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 28, 2009:

‘For years our efforts to address the growing climate crisis have been undermined by the idea that we must choose between our planet and our way of life; between our moral duty and our economic well being. These are false choices. In fact, the solutions to the climate crisis are the very same solutions that will address our economic and national security crises as well.’

The productive tone of this new discourse is to be welcomed. For too long, our talk of global warming has been cast in quasi-religious, apocalyptic tones, in which an immense range of scenarios and possibilities are reduced to the simple of option of damnation or salvation. By casting the problem in a positive, constructive light, we place the greater burden of our salvation on our own shoulders, which is precisely where it should lie. God will not save us from global warming – nor will Obama and Gore. It is we – meaning each and every one of us – who must take on this responsibility, each in our own small way.

The problem is not one of stopping global warming, or of simply learning to adjust. The problem concerns how to recreate (and repower) society for the 21st century, so that we leave a greener, happier, and healthier world for the century after that.

Timid targets: reflections on the Rudd government’s emissions trading white paper

The Australian Rudd Government has realeased its White Paper on greenhouse gas reduction targets up to 2020. Lenore Taylor in The Australian describes it as a ’safe course’ in the context of present economic circumstances.

‘In a move that outraged conservationists and only partially appeased industry, Kevin Rudd made an unconditional promise to reduce Australian emissions to 5 per cent below 2000 levels by 2020.

But if other major emitters – including developing countries such as India and China – signed on to substantial emissions reductions in a UN agreement due to be finalised in Copenhagen late next year, Australia could cut its greenhouse pollution by up to 15per cent by 2020.’

As Greenpeace Australia Pacific states, a 5% cut would be meaningless. Is this a failure of Australian political leadership – or common sense in the context of an uncertain economic environment, with the major players as yet uncommitted to a global climate deal?

I think the Rudd government’s decision to start slow on cutting national emissions is a political and economic miscalculation. Rudd is securing the short term stability of the Australian economy at the cost of dangerously imperiling its future after 2020.

Ben Cubby in the Sydney Morning Herald points out that lack of resolve on the issue of emissions reduction targets means that the Australian government continues to send the wrong signals to green investors.

‘[A] soft start to emissions trading, together with the modest ambitions for carbon cuts, is unlikely to create a jobs boom’, Cubby writes. Quoting Matthew Warren, the chief executive of the Clean Energy Council, Cubby argues that ‘”[a] soft start [to emissions trading] only works if it is backed with aggressive investment signals in energy efficiency and clean technology. … These [signals would] deliver the biggest emissions cuts in the first years and prepare the Australian economy for the changes to follow”.’

Cubby is right. What Rudd’s modest target regime fails to account for is how Australia is to prepare itself for the major cuts it needs to make after 2020. Rudd seems to be proceeding on the expectation that the world will not be attempting to cut CO2 emissions by 80% or more after 2020.

What if this is a historical mistake?

Rudd is forgetting that the road to 2020 is just a run-up to a far greater leap. Top scientists claim that if society as we know it is to survive this century, we need a deep cut in global nett carbon emissions of 80% or more from 1990 levels. How is Australia to make this change smoothly and efficiently if it hasn’t trained and prepared itself for a massive infrastructural leap into a sustainable future? A slow start to emissions cuts means that industry and consumers do not get ready for the shift in gear. We need government policy that works to inspire and create the investment decision and business infrastructure that will shift Australia into a green economy post-2020.

Anatomy of desire

Diogenes the Cynic lived in a barrel. When Alexander the Great asked him: ‘What can I do for you?’, he replied: ‘Please step out of my sun’.

Diogenes could have asked for anything — wealth, power, fame. But he chose to sit in the sun. What a fabulous example of philosophical asceticism!

Philosophers through the ages agree that to change ourselves for the better, we must get a grip on our desires. Does this mean limiting our desire, desiring less? Perhaps it simply means distinguishing good and bad desires — desiring those things that make us happy and healthy and rejecting the contrary.