The second post in the series, Sharing circles and tribes, considers how tribes are formed online. Tribes emerge when participants share with select users, who return the favour by sharing with them. These sharing circles are typically based in common values and interests – hence, so are tribes. I indicate the unstable nature of sharing circles and how an affirmative attitude towards gifting helps sustain them. Imbued with the ‘spirit of the gift’, the gift becomes a token of gratitude for the sharing circle and the tribe it maintains. The more that we cultivate this spirit in our online exchanges, the more robust and fulfilling they become.

This post considers the challenges of sharing across multiple systems online. Active users of social media are often engaged across multiple sites, groups, and activities in real time. Multi-tasking online can be a source of signficant consternation. While missteps (below the threshhold of the screaming faux pas) are mostly overlooked, this doesn’t reduce the anxiety that users (particularly new users) feel when tasked with sharing across multiple channels in real time. It is easy to lose track of how one is expected to behave in different contexts.

When tech journalist Paul Miller returned to the internet after a year off, he was surprised to find how stressful it was to multi-task across services. ‘I had, like, three tabs open and I just didn’t know what was going on’, Miller complains. This is a familiar experience for users of social media, who struggle to keep up with the flow of information on multiple channels.

The solution is to find your tribe. Sharing across multiple channels is easier when we share with our tribes in mind. A thriving tribe gives back more than we contribute to it. Tribes are a living reservoir of cognitive capital and an infinite human resource.

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Imagine, somewhere in the pre-colonial Pacific, an archipelago of islands, each home to a different tribe. The tribes share a Potlatch gift culture, but in most other respects, they are quite distinct. The islanders to the north are fierce and warlike. When they attend a Potlatch, they expect gifts of weapons and booty – nothing else will suffice. The islanders to the south are peaceful and reflective. When they attend a Potlatch, they expect gifts of poetry and cages of birds that they release into the air. The islanders to the east are bon vivants. When they attend a Potlatch, they expect food, rare delicacies, and rice wine – the more the better. The islanders to the west are hard-working and industrious. They have less time than the others for Potlatch ceremonies, but when they do, they expect practical gifts that assist them in their daily endeavors, like axes, hoes, hammers, and nets.

Now imagine travelling from island to island in the archipeligo. At each landfall, you must engage in a bout of gift giving. Because each tribe has different expectations, you need to carry all sorts of different gifts with you: an armoury, birds in flax-weave cages, salted pork wrapped in banana leaves, and farming equipment from the subcontinent. In keeping with the spirit of gift culture, you will carefully adjust your speech and behaviour at each port of call to fit in with local custom. You will be bold and direct with the northerners; gentle and graceful with the southerners; revelrous and exuberant with the easterners; on point and punctual with the westerners. By leveraging personal gifts of tact, charm, and diplomacy, you deliver your offerings with the appropriate show of gratitude, ensuring that they are well-received by your island hosts.

We can see this as a metaphor for life online. Users of social media are like travellers in a Potlatch archipeligo, simultaneously engaged across multiple sites and communities, enmeshed in multiple gift exchanges. If we are using a desktop or laptop computer, we open up multiple tabs in our browser. If we access the cloud on mobile, we run multiple apps. Either way, we plug into multiple social channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google [Gmail, G+], Pinterest, Tumblr, etc), and spend our day jumping back and forth between sites, crowds, and conversations.

The upshot is that we are dynamically engaged in multiple gift cultures on a daily basis. It is no wonder that new users find social media challenging. Not only do users need to come to grips with a new set of tools. They need to negotiate a proliferating set of social media gift cultures, which operate on totally different principles to the cultures they are used to. Fortunately, the ins and outs of social media gift culture are easy to appreciate. Social sharing involves a reputation game – a virtuous competition aimed at winning the favour of virtual tribes through exorbitant gifts. It may sound daunting, but it is intuitive and straightforward. See this post if you are still unclear.

The psychological challenge of engaging with multiple social channels becomes apparant over time. Sooner or later, we feel exhausted by all the activity, tired of drinking from the firehose, riding the rivers of information pouring out of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google [Gmail, G+], Pinterest, Tumblr, etc. It is not just a matter of consuming all this information. The fact is we consume only a fraction of the information out there. It is the difficulty of servicing the needs of diverse online crowds (on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google [Gmail, G+], Pinterest, Tumblr, etc).

Each social media site is like an island in a Potlatch archipeligo. It is a gift culture, which means that it attracts a certain crowd. Each crowd has its own its own set of interests and expectations. These differences are subtle but decisive. We must respect them or suffer the consequences. You can’t post the same content on LinkedIn as you do on Facebook. You can try but at the risk of damaging your professional reputation.You can’t share news on Facebook the way as you can on Twitter. Believe me, I’ve tried. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google [Gmail, G+], Pinterest, Tumblr etc comprise an archipeligo of tribes with a range of interests and expectations.

Like travellers in a Potlatch archipeligo, social media prosumers should try to match their gifts to tribes. The LinkedIn crowd expects tech content with a business focus – so give them FastCompany, Wired, and Mashable posts. The Facebook crowd expects cheerful updates from friends – give them photos from the weekend. The MySpace crowd expects celebrity gossip – give them trawlings from Tumblr and Reddit. The Twitter crowd are omnivorous news junkies – give them articles and updates from the Guardian and Reuters.

Source: Marc Ngui http://tinyurl.com/d8bdm9

Figuring out the right gifts to dispense is just part of the challenge of dealing with multiple tribes. Social media prosumers also have to cope with the sense of personal dis-integration that engaging with multiple tribes creates. Engaging with the social web demands that we cultivate (what I call) a prismatic self. The key to engaging different audiences across multiple sites is to understand the self as prismatic and to express different parts of your person in different contexts.

The French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) popularised the idea of the self as a single unified identity in his book the Meditations (1656). Descartes’ famous phrase, ‘I think, therefore I am’, gave rise to a subjectivist movement in philosophy that decisively shaped the modern age. These days, a better adage would be: ‘I gift, therefore I am’. Facebook and Google would like you to see yourself as a single unified identity because they’d like to track your actions across their various data-based services on the web. The fact is, however, the moment that we go online, we are voyagers in the Potlatch archipeligo, gifting different aspects of our person to different communities.

Descartes got it wrong. Then again, he never had to mark up a document on Google Drive while trading IMs with friends on Facebook and WhatsApp, checking his email. As Chris Poole argues, our identity is multi-faceted and prismatic. The prismatic self is a reality for the 1.5 billion people on the planet who engage with social networks and the Potlatch archipeligo.

Being disconnected was also empowering in a way. Miller wasn’t subject to constant interruptions and requests, and so he was at liberty to decide what to do with his day. He could get things done. He started working on the book that he envisaged coming out of the experiment. He was able to engage with lengthy reading projects, and spend quality time with himself and others. Unfortunately, the initial burst of productivity only lasted so long. Miller disconnected from the internet in the hope of re-engaging creative touchstones and overcoming blocks to his productivity. In the end, he discovered that his productively problems ‘didn’t have a lot to do with the Internet’. The same problems ‘manifested differently on and offline’.

Positive insights that Miller gleaned from his experiment include the importance of having good habits and the value of mindfulness and presence in life. ‘I want to practice things like patience’, Miller claims in an interview with CNN. ‘Just being present with people and not having so much noise in my head’. Miller found that without a connection to the internet, it was easier for him to be present in the moment. Yet, presence is something we have to work at. In the context of smartphones, laptops, and wearable computers, it is more important than ever that we practice the virtue of disconnecting our minds from the internet so that we can genuinely connect with a real person before us. Miller pledges: ‘Now that I’m back on the Internet I really want to be the shining example of what it’s like to actually pay attention to somebody and put away your devices’.

There is a lesson here for us all. Sometimes we need to disconnect from our devices in order to discover what real connection is about.

]]> http://philosophyforchange.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/i-want-to-practice-things-like-patience-paul-millers-year-of-exile-from-the-internet/feed/ 6 timrayner web-paul-miller http://philosophyforchange.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/2045-united-federation-report-on-the-great-transition-the-culture-of-transition/ http://philosophyforchange.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/2045-united-federation-report-on-the-great-transition-the-culture-of-transition/#comments Tue, 30 Apr 2013 05:55:44 +0000 timrayner http://philosophyforchange.wordpress.com/?p=6664 ]]> The following passages are taken from the 2045 United Federation report on the Great Transition. This report, released on the eve of the East-West Realignment and founding of the United Federation in December 2045, was the first comprehensive account of the shift in social and economic relations that swept the world between 2015 and 2040, a period known as the Great Transition. The paragraphs are taken from Part 3 of the report, which deals with the role of sharing and social innovation in the Great Transition. For the complete report, see Realignment Mandate 12337 (released by authority of UF Secretary-General Tirrab Hassan 04/04/75).

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2045 United Federation Report on the Great Transition

Part 3: The Culture of Transition

Parts 1 and 2 of this report have outlined the policy and strategic planning work that underlay the Great Transition. We have described the vision shifts in energy and carbon policy that enabled the rapid development and roll out of carbon negative infrastructure, and the social policy associated with the transition to a Totally Mobilized Agenda, including the adoption of civil agency and ‘zero unemployment’ schemes, massive federal and state investment in sustainable cities, and the expansion of the social enterprise sector as a viable hub for commercial investment. We have seen how these policy and planning shifts contributed, between 2015 and 2040, to the re-engineering of the international economy and the creation of a global carbon negative environment.

Part 3 of the report looks at the social and cultural changes associated with the Great Transition. We leave aside the oppositional and countervailing views expressed in parts of the online and corporate media in this period. These views, and the reasons why they lost purchase on the public imagination through the 20-teens, are discussed in Part 4 of the report (see also Appendix 2: Dangerous Liaisons: Big Oil Inside the Beltway). Part 3 seeks to explain the widespread and well-documented shifts in social and creative culture that gathered steam in the 20-teens and fuelled the forces of Transition. We are particularly concerned to understand the role of ‘open source culture’ in this period and how it contributed to new historical framings and existential orientations.

The Great Transition was deeply indebted to open culture. This culture, which initially developed in online software development communities at the end of the 20th century, entered mainstream consciousness in the 21st century thanks to the success of open source products such as Linux and the Mozilla internet browser. By the 20-teens, it was bleeding offline to inform new collaborative ventures. The sharing economy and the maker movement were early indications of this cultural evolution. These movements were enabled by the rich data interfaces and tools of the social web. But their success must be attributed to a complex shift in social and culture understanding, as notions of sharing, openness, and co-creation achieved new importance in the context of an urgent struggle to save the planet. More so than any technological developments, it was this shift in social and culture orientation that inspired the creative foment of the Transition. The idea of an ‘open source offensive’ on common challenges enabled diverse agents to feel personally engaged with the project of Transition. It inspired individuals to commit to diverse projects for social change and to understand their place in history in a dramatic new light.

1. Making and sharing: the meaning of transition

Prior to the Great Transition, people derived meaning from many sources, including friendship and family relations, work-life balance, and consumer goods. The dominant model was the ‘middle class dream’ of property ownership combined with corporate success. Though it was widely regarded as unsustainable for a planet of eight billion people and climbing, the model was a source of meaning for many people. It provided a yardstick by which a shrinking (yet powerful) sector of society could measure the success of their lives and focus their energies in a meaningful way.

The US SuperStorm season of 2015 popped the middle class reality bubble once and for all. In its wake, people were presented with a fateful choice: to assent to a nihilistic view of the future as a dystopian landscape of decline, or to switch frames and adopt an alternative vision of the meaningful life. At this point, the concept of co-creation came to the fore. The value of co-creation was well established by 2015, having proved its worth through successive iterations of the open source software, social media, sharing, and maker movements. Archival research from 2015 shows that 70% of Generation Z and 55% of Generation Y ‘strongly’ identified with the proposition that ‘openness and collaboration’ was pivotal to a meaningful life. This view rapidly acquired currency as the Great Transition got into gear.

The award-winning Makers campaign run by the Havas Group played a major part in accelerating this shift in perspective. This campaign, developed in 2018 to promote the IKEA home model 3D printer, resonated with a much broader audience than the target market for this particular product line. Havas’ vision of a world transformed through making and sharing was embraced by activists, social entrepreneurs, and ordinary citizens alike. The Makers campaign provided a focal point for an accelerating series of policy shifts and commercial innovations through the late 20-teens, as the world moved in earnest to respond to the threat of climate change.

2. The return of history

Pre-transition society had an ahistorical perspective. In the developed nations of the North, society existed in the perpetual ‘now’ of utopia achieved. Insofar as people thought about the future, it was a vision (shaped by political sound-bites and advertising regimes) of slow but inevitable economic growth. The fact that this vision failed to square with reality rarely undercut the optimism of its adherents. The question was always: ‘when are things returning to normal’? with ‘normal’ conceived as a continuing future of high consumption and growth.

With the onset of the Great Transition, society created a new sense of history. Three factors contributed to this development:

1. The Long Recession disrupted projections of economic growth. By 2018, it was clear that the growth paradigm was an infeasible frame of reference for thinking about the future.
2. Climate modelling became more accurate through the teens and twenties. Research shows that by 2018, 85% of people were using climate modelling as a template for imagining the future.
3. The making and sharing movement, through the 20 teens, inspired people to believe that a genuine social-economic revolution was under way. This sentiment came to a head in 2017, when the Eurozone Emergency Parliament announced the inception of a transitional sharing economy. This event is commonly perceived as the tipping point into the Great Transition.

Because it wasn’t invited to the party, Generation Z was ambivalent about the consumerist status quo. The present with which this generation identified was a time of cultural disruption and rapid social innovation. This vision of the present was crystallized in the Makers campaign, which underscored how making and sharing was changing the world. Unintentionally, the campaign also articulated a new understanding of history, which turned out to be tremendously influential. Where previously history was understood as something that lay in the past, which was responsible for having created the present, the new vision of history encapsulated in the Makers campaign posited that history lay in the future, and was something that each human being was responsible for creating.

This historical sensibility keyed in perfectly with the ambient ethos of making and co-creating. Generation Maker was literally tasked with making history. The fact that it rose to embrace this task testifies to the eternal value of meaning and historical purpose for the human soul.

In sharing content online, we are playing a reputation game. The object of the game is not to beat other players but to challenge them to greater expressions of generosity. It is a battle of abundant spirits that contributes to the common good.

This post shifts geographical focus from North America to the Western Pacific. I want to look at the Kula ring of the Kiriwina Islands to reflect on the nature and origins of social media tribes. Your tribes are comprised of people with whom you commonly chat and share online. Sometimes they are based in offline friendships, but not always. Shared values and interests are ultimately all that are required to hold a tribe together. If you are wondering who among your followers count as members of your tribe, make a list of the people who commonly like, favourite, share or RT the things you put online. Make another list of the people whose content you like, favourite, share and RT. Look for names that appear on both lists. These are the members of your tribe.

The unstable economy

Tribes emerge in a spiralling pattern as three or more individuals cluster about a topic of common concern or interest. For the circle to become a virtuous spiral that feeds off its internal dynamic, it is necessary that there be an uneven number of participants. Three will do. By way of example, when I published the first post in this series, I shared it with David Amerland, who shares my interest in social media gift cultures. David, in turn, shared it with Mark Traphagen, who has published a fine article on sharing circles that I happened to have read while writing my post. I thanked David and enjoyed a brief exchange with Mark, promising to cc him on future posts in the series. Later that week, I received a cheerful hello from him, reiterating his desire to stay in touch. Mark’s enthusiasm inspired me and made me feel that I ought to do something special for him (such as mentioning his work in my next post, for instance). At the same time, it left me feeling doubly grateful to David for making the connection.

Now that I have written these words, I feel certain that David, Mark, and I will stay in touch and continue sharing content that interests us. We are part of the same tribe. It is not just shared interests that bind us together. We have formed an unstable economy between the three of us – a gift economy that resists closure and invites contribution. As Mark observes in his article, the structural imbalance created by three-way sharing is a positive phenomenon. It presents a challenge, perpetually reiterated, that tests participants’ commitment to the sharing circle.

A sharing circle is always on the brink of collapse. It needs a constant flow of gifts to sustain it.

Dyadic sharing relationships are easily resolved. When one person shares something with someone else, the other simply needs to return the gesture in order to balance things out. Reciprocity is achieved. The cycle is complete and moral equilibrium is restored. When three people share in a group, however, the play of exchanges tends to be unbalanced, since it is hard to establish mutual reciprocity. Imagine that I give something to you and you return the favour by giving something back to me. If there is a third party in our circle, this exchange unbalances things, placing the third party in the position of the one who is yet to contribute – who must contribute in order to maintain an equal status in the economy of gifts. When they add their gift, balance is restored. Until the moment, that is, that one or other of us presents yet another gift, either to a specific person or the group. This throws the economy out of balance again. And so the cycle continues.

Mark compares the unbalanced economy of the sharing circle to the falling-stepping motion of a runner. ‘A human preparing to run actually leans forward, intentionally (though not consciously) throwing off his balance, which is corrected by putting the first foot forward–as step’. Similarly, a three-way (or odd-number) sharing circle constantly teeters on the brink of collapse on account of the moral disequilibrium that is created by the participants. A flow of gifts is the only thing that keeps it going. The gift is like the forward step the runner takes that catches their fall and perpetuates their forward motion. As Mark writes: ‘The lean is the loss of equilibrium; the step is the “gift” that restores it’. Just as a runner will fall flat on her face without the fore-step there to catch her, a gift economy requires a proactive spirit of generosity to stay in motion. Ultimately, it is the spirit of gifting that keeps the sharing circle alive.

The classic example of a sharing circle is the Kula ring of the Kiriwina (previously Trobriand) islands, off the north-west coast of Papua New Guinea. To substantiate these reflections, I’d like to consider the Kula ring, cognizant of the fact that Mark has already done so in his post; aware that I am building on his insights and hopefully adding to the common power of our tribe.

The Kula ring

Between 1914 and 1918, as imperial war raged about the planet, the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski conducted fieldwork on the Trobriand islands, a spiralling archipelago of coral atolls in the Solomon Sea. Malinowski famously abandoned the colonial settlements on the islands to ‘go native’, living with the islanders and observing their customs. The results of Malinowski’s studies, published in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), transformed the way that Western researchers thought about native cultures and gave birth to the discipline of modern anthropology.

Malinowski was intrigued why tribal leaders would travel about the archipelago exchanging gifts with one another. Some of the islands in the archipelago were separated by hundreds of kilometres of unpredictable waters. Chiefs would risk life and limb rowing from island to island to exchange apparently worthless trinkets – shell necklaces and armbands – which they treated as precious goods. Over time, Malinowski teased a surprising truth from his hosts. The entire Trobriand archipelago was linked in a ceremonial gift exchange, which the islanders called the Kula ring. The Kula ring was the heart and soul of the native culture.

It was a privilege and sign of political authority to participate in the Kula ring. High status participants would often have dozens of partners that they commonly exchanged gifts with. The protocol was to exchange red shell-disc necklaces to the islands to the north and white shell armbands to the islands to the south. If you received either of these gifts, you were obliged to pass them on to a chief or notable on a neighbouring island. The gifts were delivered with great pomp and ceremony, despite the trivial nature of the items themselves. The process would continue until the necklaces and armbands had completed a full revolution of the archipelago, the necklaces circulating in a clockwise direction and the armbands circulating the opposite way.

Malinowski was puzzled why the trinkets exchanged in the Kula ring were treated with such reverence by the islanders. If tribal leaders wanted to impress one another, why didn’t they construct more elaborate gifts, or give more of these items? In the north American Potlatch, volume of gifts was important. Volume was a sign of power, wealth, and generosity, all of which were reflected in the prestige that the giver earned for their gifts. In the Kula ring, however, volume of gifts wasn’t important. Giving was the important thing. Clearly, Malinowski reflected, there was a symbolic dimension to the Kula ring that held the process together. So what was it?

The answer came to light in the course of a debate with Marcel Mauss, who responded to Malinowski’s work in his essay On the Gift in 1925. Mauss argued that each Kula gift was a ‘total prestation’ of the culture of the Trobriand archipeligo. Each item had its own complex history of journeys and passages from one recipient to the other. To pass on one of these items was to affirm this history, and by extrapolation, the traditional culture of gift exchange. Mauss drew on the Maori word hau, which means ‘spirit of the gift’, to explain the reverence with which the Kula gifts were treated. The gift is not just a gift: it a spiritual token of the culture of exchange. Continuing the exchange is a spiritual act that affirms the unity of the culture. As in the Potlatch, it is a celebration of tribal solidarity. The spirit of the gift is the spirit of the tribe.

We have much to learn from indigenous gift cultures. The more that online sharing becomes a core part of work and sociality in our high-tech, postmodern, societies, the more it becomes evident that traditional Western values and philosophical perspectives are inadequate to our situation. From ancient Athens, through early modern Europe, to the expansionist frenzy of the Industrial age, the Western imagination has been preoccupied with the individual, his rights and possessions. With the rise of the social web, this mindset and frame of reference is coming undone. As we look into the future and survey the incredible challenges that we face as societies and a species, it is clear that we need a rapid evolution in social consciousness, at least insofar to enable us to collaborate together in order to present a worthy response to these challenges. For this, we will require a new form of ethics, by which I mean both ‘morality’ and ‘conception of the good life’. We urgently need to evolve beyond the closed, possessive, mindset of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to embrace the open, generous, mindset of gift societies. Fortunately, the sharing culture that is evolving online is driving this ethics through the heart of our societies just as we need it.

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Read the third post in this series: The prismatic self.

Do we live in a Nietzschean world today? In many respects we do. Yet, creators walk a lonely path, for they engage in a disruptive activity, and they ruffle as many feathers as they release birds into flight. I dedicate the following passage from Nietzsche’s book Thus Spoke Zarathustra to the passionate dreamers of the world – the pathmakers, philosophers, and radical entrepreneurs. It is titled ‘The Way of the Creator’. It has helped me to find my way. I hope it helps you find yours.

Would you go into solitude, my brother? Would you seek the way to yourself? Then wait a moment and listen to me.

“He who seeks may easily get lost himself. All solitude is wrong”: so say the herd. And long did you belong to the herd.

The voice of the herd will still echo in you. And when you say, “I no longer have a conscience in common with you,” then it will be a grief and a pain.

Lo, that same conscience created that pain; and the last gleam of that conscience still glows on your affliction.

But you would go the way of your affliction, which is the way to yourself? Then show me your right and your strength to do so!

Are you a new strength and a new right? A first motion? A self-rolling wheel? Can you even compel the stars to revolve around you?

Alas! there is so much lusting for loftiness! There are so many convulsions of the ambitious! Show me that you are not a lusting and ambitious one!

Alas! there are so many great thoughts that do nothing more than the bellows: they inflate, and make emptier than ever.

Free, do you call yourself? Then I would hear your ruling thought, and not merely that you have escaped from a yoke.

Are you one of those who had the right to escape from a yoke? Many a one has cast away his last worth when he has cast away his servitude.

Free from what? What does that matter to Zarathustra! But your fiery eyes should tell me: free for what?

Can you give yourself your own evil and good, and set up your own will as a law over you? Can you be judge for yourself, and avenger of your law?

Terrible is it to be alone with the judge and avenger of one’s own law. Thus is a star thrown into the void, and into the icy breath of solitude.

Today you still suffer from the many, you individual; today your courage and hopes are undiminished.

But one day the solitude will weary you; one day your pride will yield, and your courage quail. You will one day cry: “I am alone!”

One day you will no longer see your heights, and see too closely your depths; even your sublimity will frighten you like a phantom. You will one day cry: “All is false!”

There are feelings which seek to kill the solitary one; if they do not succeed, then they themselves must die! But are you capable of this — to be a murderer?

Have you ever known, my brother, the word “contempt”? And the anguish of your justice in being just to those that despise you?

You force many to think differently about you; that, they charge bitterly to your account. You came near to them and yet went past: for that they never forgive you.

You go beyond them: but the higher you rise, the smaller do you appear to the eye of envy. But the flying one is hated most of all.

“How could you be just to me!” — you must say — “I choose your injustice as my proper lot.”

They cast injustice and filth at the solitary one: but, my brother, if you would be a star, you must shine for them none the less on that account!

And be on your guard against the good and the just! They would rather crucify those who create their own virtue — they hate the solitary ones.

Be on your guard, also, against holy simplicity! All that is not simple is unholy to it; it likes to play with fire and burn — at the stake.

And be on your guard, also, against the assaults of your love! Too readily does the recluse offer his hand to any one he meets.

To many you may not give a hand, but only a paw; and I want your paw to have claws.

But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you ambush yourself in caverns and forests.

You solitary one, you go the way to yourself! And your way leads you past yourself and your seven devils!

You will be a heretic to yourself, and a sorcerer and a soothsayer, and a fool, and a doubter, and a reprobate, and a villain.

You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes!

You solitary one, you go the way of the creator: you will create a god for yourself out of your seven devils!

You solitary one, you go the way of the lover: you love yourself, and on that account you despise yourself, as only the lover can despise.

The lover wants to create because he despises! What does he know of love who has not despised that which he loved!

With your love and with your creating go into your solitude, my brother; only much later will justice limp after you.

With my tears, go into your solitude, my brother. I love him who seeks to create beyond himself, and thus perishes.

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

It comes down to how we relate to our followers. If we feel alienated from them, or intimated by them, sharing in public can be difficult. We are uncomfortably aware that our content is tagged with an existential marker: ‘I like it – it reflects my values and interests’. Like prisoners in a Panopticon, we can’t help feeling that we are judged on the basis of our posts and shares, and it is hard to shake the sense that we need to prove ourselves in some way. If, on the other hand, we feel supported and empowered by our followers, sharing  in public is a different experience. We feel like valued participants in a multi-player game. We feel able to make valid contributions to the mix – to add content that may be passed around and enjoyed, that enriches the social experience. The fact that the content of our posts and shares reflects personally on us becomes a positive thing. We want to be known for the things that we share. We affirm our right to step forth and lead the conversation. It is by leading that we develop a positive reputation.

Don’t think of your followers as judges. Think of them as your tribe. Yes, they implicitly judge your contributions. Yet, for the most part, they value your gifts. Think of yourself as a tribal chief, competing for status in a virtual Potlatch. The crowd is there to witness your gifts, not to judge and condemn them. Your goal is to enrich your tribe with whatever gifts you have to offer.

Play the reputation game. Celebrate the virtual Potlatch and give.

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The Potlatch is a gift-giving ceremony practised by the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada. The word itself comes from the Chinook language, meaning ‘to give away’ or ‘a gift’. In the traditional Potlatch, a chief or leader would gather their tribe or clan together and present them with a massive gift of food, blankets, furs, weapons, canoes, and crafts. The gifts were presented at the end of an elaborate festival involving speeches, songs, and spirit dances that could sometimes last for days. The native people also bartered and exchanged goods, but the Potlatch had nothing to do with a market economy. It was all about social and cultural capital. In the Potlatch, the greater the gift, the more social capital it produced.

The European settlers who drifted west in the nineteenth century didn’t understand the Potlatch at all. European missionaries thought it was a waste of time and resources and an impediment to the ‘civilization’ of the native people. It was banned by the US and Canadian governments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, contributing to the decimation of the tribes up and down the Pacific coast. The Potlatch continues today in a diminished form – less a celebration of abundance, more an affirmation of heritage. Cash and appliances have replaced pelts and dried clams as gifts of choice. But the logic of the ceremony resonates. In the transparent environments of social media, the Potlatch has a particular resonance. The Potlatch is an ideal model for understanding the gift cultural basis of online social sharing.

The Potlatch works to circulate goods and resources within a community. But the point is not just to share things around. The Potlatch enables the wealthiest and most powerful members of a tribe to establish status and prestige in the eyes of their community. This is why chiefs would give so exorbitantly - for the sake of the reputation and prestige that came with it. As Marcel Mauss observed, in the Potlatch, ‘[t]he man who [gives] recklessly is the man who wins prestige’. Prestige was the primary motivation for hosting a Potlatch. Sometimes, if a leader had fallen low, they would host a Potlatch to recover their lost prestige. Other times, at a gathering of clans, multiple leaders would compete for prestige, each seeking to give away the greatest and most remarkable gifts so to cast the others in their shadow. Sometimes this could lead to ruin. Sometimes ruin was intended. The Potlatch could be used as a tool of war, compelling a rival to beggar or shame themselves by engaging in an exchange that they could not possibly hope to compete in.

Gifting for the sake of prestige seems self-serving. But, since gifting in a Potlatch is always directed towards a tribe or community, the act of gifting has a social benefit, strengthening kinship bonds and ensuring the welfare of the community. As the anthropologist David Graeber points out, in a gift culture, ‘there is no contradiction between what we would call self-interest … and concern for others; the whole point of the traditional gift is that it furthers both at the same time’. Gift giving is simultaneously an act of personal and communal affirmation. It celebrates the abundant gifts that are bestowed by nature and the noble spirit that would share these rewards with a community.

Try looking at your Facebook or Twitter feed as a virtual Potlatch. It brings the spirit of social sharing into focus. With a gift culture perspective, it is clear what is empowering about sharing and why people get hooked on it. It is not just that people like to share. Sharing is gifting. It elevates and promotes the giver while enriching the tribal community. In posting and tweeting, we are playing a reputation game that hinges on the question: ‘Who can give the greatest gifts?’ This is not a zero sum game. Strictly speaking, there is no winning it. Success lies in the way that you play it. The more value you can create for the greatest number of people, the higher you’ll be ranked as a player. So set aside the ‘winner takes all’ mentality of competitive sports. The kind of competition involved in a reputation game is a virtuous competition, not a vicious one. The object is not to beat the other players but to challenge them to ever greater expressions of generosity. It is a battle of abundant spirits that contributes to the common good – a celebration of sociality as such.

Let’s return to the notion of social media as a virtual Panopticon. The Potlatch model casts this idea in a positive light. Open social environments are Panopticonic insofar as everything that we share in these environments is visible to a crowd. This transparency makes us feel anxious. Like prisoners in a Panopticon, we try to second guess the expectations of the crowd and play to them.

The way to overcome the anxiety of judgement is to learn to love your tribe. Your tribe is not a panel of judges, itching to take you down. Your tribe is a witness, whose role is to acknowledge and affirm your gifts. Transparency is vital to the Potlatch gift-exchange. An anonymous gift simply doesn’t make sense in this context. It is only because the tribe can witness the gift that the giver can earn prestige for it. If the gift warrants it, it will be spoken of for years to come, ensuring a legacy for the chief and a lasting sense of solidarity for the tribe.

The witness transforms the gift, investing it with sacred value. It is heartening to imagine a future generation of social media prosumers celebrating the act of sharing in similarly reverent tones.

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Read the second post in this series: Sharing circles and tribes

The essay was a bit of dog’s breakfast. But the crux of the argument resonates today. I have pasted some paragraphs below. If you are into Deleuze and social movements, this one is for you.

Re-reading ‘Refiguring the multitude’ for the first time in years, I am struck by how much of this material has become part of my mental DNA. I didn’t realise at the time, but ‘Refiguring the multitude’ was crucial to my intellectual development. Multitude certainly resonates with the high-tech world of 2013. Empire and Multitude are books you should have on your shelf, whatever part of the political spectrum you inhabit. They are books about globalization. Hardt and Negri are essentially right. Of course, they are wrong in important respects too.

The paragraphs from ‘Refiguring the multitude’ that I’ve pasted below are the crux of a line of thought that I started developing in 2002 or 2003. It was a response to the failure of the anti-globalization movement that got started in the 1990s. I was looking for a theoretical trajectory that would enable me to continue on the line of flight that I’d experienced at the height of this movement (’99-01), this time reflecting on how swarms and social movements could contribute to creating something, in the first case, a new set of norms.

In retrospect, it is easy to see how I stepped from this argument to write Coalition of the Willing.

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Source: Marc Ngui http://tinyurl.com/d8bdm9

An advantage of reading [Hardt and Negri's concept of the multitude] through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between major and minor life is that it enables us to attribute a much broader set of capacities to the multitude than are granted by Hardt and Negri. Deleuze and Guattari define a ‘minority’ as the process by which a (social) mass departs from a given norm. The means and objectives of this departure can take many forms: from exodus for the purposes of altering the terms of a struggle to the articulation of demands for sovereignty and the recognition of rights. Deleuze was critical of universal human rights; yet minoritarianism implies the possibility that minor becomings can proceed in the name of rights. As Deleuze claims, ‘there are no “rights of man”, there is life, and there are rights of life. Only life proceeds case by case.’

Minor becomings can spearhead changes in jurisprudential convention. Becomings happen through the conjunction of radical differences, triggering complex reciprocal processes of transformation. We see an example of this when social movements trigger progressive developments in the normative structures of political and legal regimes. Paul Patton has persuasively argued that the jurisprudence of native title in countries such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand can be understood in terms of the ‘becoming-minor’ of the legal fraternity, coupled with the ‘becoming-indigenous of the social imaginary.’ Such an application of Deleuze and Guattari’s work not only suggests a new and rich territory and research agenda for Deleuzean studies, but a strategy for deterritorialising the multitude from its metaphysical basis, opening a vast new range of capacities and possibilities.

Source: Marc Ngui http://tinyurl.com/d8bdm9

The ICT revolution is a sine qua non condition of the contemporary multitude. The multitude could not acquire the power to meaningfully affect global political arrangements without these new technologies. To be sure, it is doubtful that the multitude could emerge as a global phenomenon without the aid of internet and e-mail. Hardt and Negri are well aware of this fact. In their view, the contemporary multitude is a species of cyborg life. In the later twentieth century, they argue, new ICTs transfigured the object of biopolitical control, transforming human corporeality from an element of processes of production to a productive force in its own right.

This argument is fundamental not only for Hardt and Negri’s account of immaterial labour, but for the account of the democratic potential of contemporary TSMs. The contemporary multitude comes into being when biopolitics and technology conspire to create a virtual power, when ‘naked life is raised up to the dignity of productive power, or really when it appears as the wealth of virtuality.’

Source: Marc Ngui http://tinyurl.com/d8bdm9

The problem with collapsing absolute democracy into insurgency is that it leaves us incapable of using the concept to theorise the true powers of TSMs. To develop this theoretical platform, we need to wrest reflection free of trans-historical, metaphysical, schemas, and grasp the multitude in properly historical terms. This is what I have sought to achieve in this essay. I have argued that the contemporary multitude has its basis in the biopolitical networks set up by governments and international aid organisations, and its ontological genesis in the enabling power of new ICTs.

The multitude is a technologically mediated collectivity that leaps to the global level with demands that the world cannot ignore. In place of Hardt and Negri’s insurgent multitude, driven by the ‘will to be against’, I would posit an insistent multitude, driven by the right to life.”

You don’t need a university degree to be a philosopher. All that you need is a dose of courage, a questioning mind, and a passion for meaning in life. Academic philosophers like to put truth at the head of the inquiry, but in fact meaning is the most important thing. Who would set out in search of truth if the search itself was not a meaningful one? Ultimately, it is the desire for meaning in life that draws people to philosophy.

The ultimate goal of philosophy is not knowledge or truth. It is the rejuvenation of life itself.

Most people today value happiness over meaning. Happiness is easier to acquire. You can buy happiness at the mall, but it doesn’t last for long. Happiness tends to be shallow and fleeting. As a forthcoming study in The Journal of Positive Psychology argues, happiness is focused on the here and now. It reflects the satisfaction of our immediate wants and needs. Meaning, by contrast, takes a broader focus on whole-of-life experience. When we dwell on the meaningful life, we expand our horizons beyond the present moment to reflect on the significance and purpose of our existence.

The Swiss psychotherapist Victor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), argued that having a purpose in life can be a source of immense satisfaction and personal resilience. In the Nazi concentration camps in which Frankl was interned during World War II, those who had a sense of purpose and reason to live were determined to endure the suffering rather than allow themselves to be overcome by it. Frankl remarks:

A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the ‘why’ for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any ‘how.’

What is the ‘why’ of your existence? What is the meaning of your life? If you are struggling for an answer, ask: ‘What do I bring to the world through my gifts? What can I give the world in order to make it better place? How am I living right now? Is there a better way?’

These are not ‘classic’ philosophical questions. But by asking these questions and staying with them, reflecting deeply and honestly on the meaning of life, you become a philosopher. It is really that simple. The meaning of philosophy is to reflect on meaning. Reflecting on meaning makes life more meaningful, which is why there have always been and will always be philosophers.

The talk began without a word. Alt-rock icon Amanda Palmer sauntered onto stage at TED Long Beach, a flower and hat in her hands, nudging a plastic crate along the floor before her. At centre stage, she upturned the crate and positioned the hat in front of it. Stepping up on the crate, she raised her arms to shoulder height and froze.

It was Palmer’s way of introducing the topic of her talk: ‘The Art of Asking’. Prior to finding success with the punk-cabaret outfit, The Dresden Dolls, Palmer had earned a living busking as human statue, the ‘Eight Foot Bride’. She claims in her talk that this provided her with the perfect education for the music business. Becoming a human statue was certainly a great way to capture the audience’s interest. Holding the pose, Palmer held the audience’s attention. She looked left, looked right. Not a word. The TEDsters shivered with anticipation.

Palmer’s talk has generated a great deal of discussion and debate online since TED uploaded the video in February. Two things have captured people’s interest: the fact that Palmer advocates crowdfunded file-sharing as a business model for musicians and artists (she claims: “I firmly believe in music being as free as possible. Unlocked. Shared and spread. In order for artists to survive and create, their audiences need to step up and directly support them”), and the fact that she has been so phenomenally successful at doing this herself. Last year, Palmer raised $1.2 million dollars through Kickstarter to fund ‘Theatre is Evil’, the first album by her band, The Grand Theft Orchestra. In the hit and miss world of crowdfunding, this makes her a guru. No doubt there were a smattering of dark cabaret fans in the audience at TED Long Beach that night. But the majority of people in the audience were there to learn how Palmer worked her money magic.

What they got was a human statue. For a moment. There was magic in that moment – and an important lesson for crowdfunders, too.

Crowdfunding is a fascinating topic for anyone who is concerned with creating thriving online communities. The question is the same whether you are trying to launch an album, start a social movement, or build a wiki: how do you get people to contribute? For every high profile success story, there are a thousand forgotten failures. Drafting an invitation to contribute and slapping it up online is easy. Getting people to pitch in hard.

Palmer’s advice is more subtle than it appears. It all comes down, she says, to learning how to ask. Ask with an open heart (and a cap in hand). Show humility – this is important. Genuinely expressing need makes us vulnerable. Embrace it. It takes courage let down one’s guard, but it can work in our favour. When people sense vulnerability, it affects them. Some people become haughty and disdainful and look the other way. Other people grasp that there is a human being before them and they feel drawn to connect with them.

This is the key. Asking from a place of vulnerability can transform our relationship with strangers. It inspires empathy. It creates a sense of connection and, through connection, trust. Since her days as a busker, Palmer has sought to apply this ethos to her relationship with fans. At a Kickstarter backer party in Berlin, she took the ethos to an extreme, stripping naked and inviting fans to draw on her body with marker pens. She recounts:

Let me tell you, if you want to experience the visceral feeling of trusting strangers, I recommend this, especially if those strangers are drunk German people. This was a ninja master-level fan connection, because what I was really saying here was: ‘I trust you this much. Should I? Show me’.

Some bloggers have suggested that Palmer’s advice is platitudinous. Of course one needs to ask in order to receive. Surely Palmer is not just saying: ‘Ask nicely and good things will come to you?’  Not at all. Palmer’s point is that there is an art to asking – a performance art. Check out the video on Palmer’s Kickstarter page to get a taste of it: simple, heartfelt, and endearingly human.

Now, there’s an insight that follows from this observation that Palmer doesn’t articulate in her talk, although it is implicit throughout. The art of asking involves a certain performance. And a performance, like all forms of art, is a gift. If you want to receive gifts from strangers, it is only right that you start by offering them a gift. So play for your peeps. Work a little magic. A winsome performance goes a long way. Think of how Palmer opens her talk with her evocation of the Eight Foot Bride. This performance puzzles, intrigues, and engages the audience. It adds something unexpected. It is a simple gift. Yet it is a supremely powerful device.

The gift transforms social space. It says to people who are open to it: ‘Here’s an opportunity for us to experience something special. Here’s an opportunity for us to forge a connection’.

Years of performing as the Eight Foot Bride would have drilled this insight into Palmer’s DNA. A human statue changes the social space of the street. When the performer is in motion, setting up her props and materials, she is just another oddball in the urban zoo. The moment that she freezes, everything changes. Not for everyone. Plenty of people keep on walking, frightened of what might happen if they pay attention, pretending that the performer isn’t there. For others – those who become the audience – the moment is an invitation and gift. The city street has changed. It is no longer a through way - it has become a magical space where a unique experience can take place. Can – not does. If the magic is to work, the performance requires the reciprocity of the crowd.

It is only when the audience participates in holding the space that a subtle economy of exchanges can take place. This is a gift exchange – it pivots on emotional connection. Palmer’s account of this exchange is perhaps the most moving moment of her talk:

I had the most profound encounters with people, especially lonely people who looked like they hadn’t talked to anyone in weeks, and we would get this beautiful moment of prolonged eye contact being allowed in a city street, and we would sort of fall in love a little bit. And my eyes would say, “Thank you. I see you.” And their eyes would say, ”Nobody ever sees me. Thank you”.

A human statue is in the business of making money. Obviously, as a mime, she can’t come out and ask for it. The ‘ask’ is in the art. The art involves (literally) stepping up in public and performing a set of gentle human gestures. For people on the street who are open to connection, this is an opportunity to enjoy a rare experience that removes them from the pace of the day. By stopping and attending to the performance, they create a shared space for magic to occur. They join in creating and holding the space. They enjoin in a moment of theatre.

Theatre can be created in any place. It creates its own space so long as the audience is willing to participate in making it happen. Performers must initiate the process: this is essential. Theirs is the first gift. Be it a joke, a song, or a simple gesture, it is ultimately an invitation. It says to people: ‘here is an opportunity for us to experience something special together’. The gift implies an ask: ‘will you help me/us to create this space? Will you participate in making the magic happen?’ The audience returns the gift by affirming the invitation. A community is born to hold the space. A community that is emotionally invested in keeping the space open.

Asking for money is never easy. Many people feel ashamed to hold out the hat. But there is no shame in trying to sustain a meaningful connection. When you create a meaningful connection, people want to help you sustain it. They recognise that you are offering them a social experience over and above whatever project or product you are trying to fund. They already feel invested in what you are trying to do. The crucial thing is to create a shared space where simple exchanges become meaningful gifts. Create a space and invite others to help hold and enjoy it. This fosters connection and trust and lays the soil for reciprocity to bloom.

When people try crowdfunding, they tend to ask: ‘how can we get people to contribute?’ But this, as Amanda Palmer reminds us, is the wrong question. The right question is: ‘how can we ask people in such a way that they want to contribute? How can we make space for community?’

‘Empty is that philosopher’s argument by which no human suffering is treated. For just as there is no use in a medical art that does not cast out the sickness of bodies, so too is there no use in philosophy unless it casts out the sickness of the soul.’ ~Epicurus

I started studying philosophy because I thought it would answer my questions about life. I was young and confused and in a hurry to figure things out. Other people I knew took their parent’s advice and enrolled in practical subjects like law, engineering, or business and economics. I thought I was clever by diving in at the deep end. I figured that once I’d answered the big questions of life (like ‘What is goodness?’ What is truth?’ ‘How do I know I’m not living inside the Matrix?’), the other subjects would be easy. First things first, right? Aristotle would have been proud. My parents, who’d never read Aristotle, were not so impressed.

But I persisted. I soon realised that I’d been wrong about philosophy. Not that it didn’t tackle the big questions of life. It was just that it didn’t produce many answers. Philosophy offers lots of theories, but these only seem to create more questions. Semester by semester, year by year, I watched my philosophy buddies and fellow seekers give up in frustration. I kept on. After a while, I had an epiphany. I realised that philosophy isn’t about answers at all. Philosophy is about asking the right questions. It is unlike other disciplines, which focus on communicating knowledge about the world. Philosophy isn’t really about anything. Nonetheless, it is a practical discipline insofar as it teaches us to step back, zero in on this or that aspect of life, and ask: why?

Anyone can do philosophy, but it takes practice. The point is to learn how to question things, and through questioning, to reflect deeply on them. Knowing how to slow down and ask questions is an extremely valuable skill in our age of on-tap answers and constant action. This is why I say to people: read the philosophers, learn what have to say, by all means. But once you’ve done that, ignore them. Put the books aside and for heaven sakes, don’t bore everyone by talking about them. Stop talking about philosophy and do it.

You might ask: what’s the payoff? What does one get from learning to question things? I am fond of the answer that Martin Heidegger gives to this question. Instead of asking what we can do with philosophy, we should ask what philosophy does with us.

Philosophy opens our mind to the mystery of being. This can be unsettling, at first. But if you can find your way to this state of mind and stay with it awhile, it’s liberating. Philosophy has always been associated with freedom. Freedom from unwarranted fears and desires. Freedom from easy answers and shallow beliefs. Freedom from poorly-founded passions. Freedom to make real choices about things that really matter in life.

Ancient philosophers understood this better than their modern counterparts. Take the philosopher Epicurus, whose timeless wisdom heads up this post. It is from Epicurus that we get the idea of an ‘epicurean’, someone who enjoys good food and wine. Epicurus, however, wasn’t a hedonist. He was a practical philosopher who taught simple wisdom for life-long happiness. Epicurus lived in a garden with his friends and followers. The Epicureans enjoyed food and wine, though only in moderation, for overconsumption of anything was the cause of displeasure, they stressed. Mostly the Epicureans spent their time chatting, questioning, and reflecting on life – in short, doing philosophy.

We can learn a lot from Epicurus. Sometimes we don’t take the time to question and reflect. We race through life hot and bothered, building, connecting, accumulating and consuming, until life has become so crammed full of people and experiences that we can scarcely breathe, much less turn around and take a look at how we are living.

Does this sound like you? You need to learn to wonder, my friend. Slow down, take care. Spend some time looking at the stars. Question. Reflect. Try to take stock of it all. This is how you become a philosopher.

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This post was written for the community blog of The Centre for Personal Development, Chicago USA. Many thanks to Christopher Zurawic, PsyD, for inviting me to contribute.