be the change you want to see in the world

People tend to misunderstand Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum “the medium is the message.” What he means is that the various technical environments we build for ourselves condition the direction our society evolves. The medium of television is itself the message we should be listening to and watching because it is television’s influence on our cognitive, economic and social development as a species that is far more important than anything the television can be used to tell us. Same goes for railroads in the past, and nanotechnology in the future.

Enter Nintendo’s new game controller device(s). In addition to defining a whole new spectrum of repetitive stress disorders, this device is utterly ingenious and utterly familiar. So familiar that I wonder if it isn’t already old, but more on that below. It combines new technologies with old technologies, and it taps into very deep structures already in place for decades. Here is is: Read more

Is Bill Clinton the first (unofficial) President of the World? I mean, really. Where does a guy like Clinton go once he’s finished in US politics, having been taken out at the top of his game by the US Constitution? Well, first he has a heart attack, undoubtedly brought on by having nothing to do, sitting on a couch eating pizza watching George W. Bush on TV. Then he recuperates. Then he gets involved in a multi-national initiative like the response to the Asian Tsunami. Fresh from the insights gained throught that experience, he does what other Democratic Presidents have done (if they aren’t assassinated) and founds a global civil society organisation. Bill’s is called the Clinton Global Initiative.

Jimmy Carter did it and his Habitat for Humanity is a paradigm example of what global civil society needs to look like. Can Clinton do the same? I hope so. I don’t expect a world saviour, but I expect Clinton will show the difference between Democratic Presidents and Republican Presidents. Can you imagine seeing George W. Bush out building houses for poor people five years from now? I didn’t think so.

Anyway, Bush-bashing aside, networks are replacing nations. They have done so on the economic side in the process known as globalization, and now they need to do so on the political side. This will happen first through the emergence of a global civil society with serious actors like Clinton leading the charge. It will happen equally at the grassroots level with social networking technologies allowing activists from all parts of the world to coordinate global actions.

Networks cross borders, but the globe is the current delimiting container. Our economy is now global. A side-effect is that our society is now global. Time to reflect that in our institutions.

Two things that frustrate me in life are wires and keys.

Wires spontaneouly tangle as I approach. Example: I neatly wrap my headphones and put them away, only to find upon retrieval that their are hopelessly tangled and deserve to be thrown across the room. Time and patience lost. Neatly wrapped computer cables always become entangled when out of view. Removing one USB device from its jack inevitably leads to a power shutdown and data loss.

Keys are no less irritating and conspiratorial. When carrying multiple items approaching a door, keys are always in the wrong pocket, or wrong hand and, as I fumble with them, they inevitably drop to the floor. If there are two keys that look the same, I pick the wrong one first and must switch. Time and patience lost.

Today I picked up my iPod and the wires had become entangled in my keys. As I pulled, the whole Medusian mess upset became tangled with other objects on my desk and they all wound up on the floor. I’ll remember not to leave them alone together again.

I for one look forward to the time of ubiquitous, standardized bluetooth and inexpensive biometric security. The time and patience savings of never having to think about wires and keys will be a great advancement - at least in my books.

The Danes are a brilliant people…ahem. They have now invented a technology that could prove to be very effective at taking the risk and size out of storing hydrogen for use in vehicles and other applications. Pehaps we could trade them for that island they want…

Yesterday I returned to academics after a thirteen year hiatus. I have been granted the privilege of auditing a graduate-level seminar lead by Dr. Arthur Kroker. Dr. Kroker is a widely acknowledged Canadian theorist, and, with his wife Mariloise, is editor of the venerable and now entirely on-line journal ctheory.

Six years ago a film took the pop culture world by storm. It was called The Matrix. Everyone thought this film was about the Internet and our virtual future. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Matrix was about the Body. The most important moment in the Matrix is the one that confused people the most. It is the moment when Morpheus and his followers locate Neo’s pod on the great biochemical power grid that supports the machine world.

Sitting in the room with the mirror, Morpheus offers Neo the choice of a red or blue pill. The pills are little trojan horse software programs. One would fix Neo so he can live a quiet life on the Matrix and not be bothered by the things that keep him up at night. The other will help him to “see how far the rabbit hole really goes.” In other words, it will free him from the Matrix and help him see the world as it really is. In the words of Morpheus, “The Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”

This was the key theoretical insight that drove much of cultural and political theoretical praxis in the nineties. The Matrix was the Foucauldian paradigm of power - not the power of violence and death at the hands of the King, but the power of dominant disourses and disciplines to achieve confomative compliance. As with the Matrix, deviance is dealt with as a programming problem. Read more