Posted 4/12/2002 02:01:45 PM
typing is one of those new fundamentals that has become a real barrier for some trying to communicate online. a quote from a friend sent to me today: I
GET SO CONFUSED THINKING ONE LETTER AT A TIME. literacy continues to spiral toward greater sophistication. or does it? perhaps typing is no different from writing with the pen in terms of sophistication. it certainly requires a more sophisticated instrument. perhaps in fact digitally mediated writing and the technique it requires makes communication more tenuous... being translated from finger to file to person--engaged in digital and wetware encoding and decoding at various points along the way. there was once a perception of authority with the written word. books communicated a 3rd party, objective authority. the play of digital communication underscores a more distributed and attributed authority. along the network authority is something other. perhaps more childlike. playing and fighting and making up and moving on. more relationship based, introduction based, reputation based, blab blab blab...

Posted 4/12/2002 12:27:48 PM
Albert Einstein - You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.

This is the errata that makes my day. Specz again delivers in the area of techno cool. For $4.95, an empty Pringles can and some ingenuity you can now lounge even further away from your 802.11b WAP (I use a Lynksys NAP connected to my SMC Barricade router).

Posted 4/12/2002 10:22:56 AM
a couple posts on US foreign policy, diplomacy and our generation. 1 2

Posted 4/12/2002 08:41:12 AM

it looks like mozilla rc 1 might actually be released before i have grandchildren. ~ i'm ready for another browser war.

Posted 4/11/2002 11:50:47 PM
the people behind the long now project have been trying to get us hyper-short-term thinkers looking further ahead since the beginning of the new economy in 01996. their stated aim is to help shuttle us back from the brink of faster/cheaper is good thinking to a slower/better long view.

these folks have now debuted a pretty cool new form of "online gambling"--long bets. they are taking real philanthropic bets on interesting predictions years or decades away. My favorite: "In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site."

Posted 4/11/2002 11:24:57 PM
unamerican activities - you're elected, now what

maybe put some of these up at your next party...

Posted 4/11/2002 11:14:00 PM
How dumb can educated adults be? The ninth circuit US court of appeals recently sent down a ruling in Kelly v Arriba Soft Corp that equates linking between websites with copyright violation.

It is difficult to fathom this depth of misunderstanding of such a fundamental medium of our day by wealthy, powerful government officials. It sounds like we need to bring standardized testing to the judicial appointment/election process. Why not? That is the standard line federal politicians are ramming down local school throats! Why stop with our children? If it is so effective why not have an equivalent yearly test for judges? Maybe we can stop wasting my third grader's time prepping for an end of the year test she could pass at the beginning of the year and instead send her and her class over to the court house once a week to teach our public servants the deep mysteries of new media.

Posted 4/11/2002 10:49:14 PM
The Atlantic | April 2002 | Seeing Around Corners | Jonathan Rauch - George Kingsley Zipf was a Harvard linguist who in the 1930s noticed that the distribution of words adhered to a regular statistical pattern. The most common word in English—"the"—appears roughly twice as often in ordinary usage as the second most common word, three times as often as the third most common, ten times as often as the tenth most common, and so on. As an afterthought, Zipf also observed that cities' sizes followed the same sort of pattern... Nature is replete with such mysteriously constant statistical relationships. "Power laws," scientists call them, because the relationship between size and rank is expressed as an exponent.

Posted 4/11/2002 10:22:05 PM

Ok, so you heard about the early screenings of Star Wars to help disadvantaged children. Four days early, big dollar, media frenzy, kids in wheelchairs, hundreds of people dressed like wookies outside… Yes, it is upon us again. Anyway, I was reading the BBC tonight and this just blew my mind. There are people, now as I type this, sitting in line waiting for these early shows that are a month away… and they have been there since January! Amazing. What sheer insane, laudable commitment. Here is an early review from a pirate SXSW showing.

Posted 4/11/2002 09:20:06 PM
From my friend sotto’s blog. He quotes Christenson from his, The Innovator's Dilemma.

Precisely because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.

He goes on to support a fascinating argument:

What this implies at a deeper level is that many of what are now widely accepted principles of good management are, in fact, only situationally important. There are times at which it is right not to listen to customers, right to invest in developing lower-performance products that promise lower margins, and right to aggressively pursue small, rather than substantial, markets.

The implications for spiritual organizations intrigue me. How has the consumer church implemented and been burned by "aggressive investment" in the new and cool and enacted "widely accepted principles of good management" in a situation that may call for a prophet or a sage or a mystic where now a CEO sits.

Just stream of consciousness rambling...

Posted 4/11/2002 06:38:55 PM
what emerges when infrastructure and superstructure enfold each other in a double helix without opposition or preeminence? a bazaar spirituality. a market of meaning exchange. a smelly village path of narrative direction... a solidarity of simulation, a faith of enactment, a hope of impossibility, a truth of paralogic, above all an engagement of love. we are all in this together.

new structures emerge and evolve when we start to move beyond redecoration (reformation) and scientific religion (restoration). what is beyond? a going over into the always intersubjective, networked signs of signs, that open a space for going under in altogether other ways.

Posted 4/11/2002 01:16:35 PM
Information is disruptive. Period. Want people to be subject to you, your ideology, your political agenda, your economic exploits? Keep them uninformed. This is the fundamental basis from which direct slavery and more generalized despotic subjugation works. This is the keystone in the arch of the subjugation of women, the lynch pin in child labor, the cornerstone of ecological rape. Information is disruptive. When acted upon wildly disruptive. This impacts more than just the aforementioned social evils of which there are few who would openly advocate on their behalf. Any hierarchy that is sustained by secrecy, disinformation or intentional ignorance is on the cusp of being dismantled. Any organization that claims to mediate The Secret, becoming a kingdom gatekeeper, is set for destruction. Twice the child of hell we will no longer stand to be!

edited [4/11/2002 05:43:27 PM | Dan Hughes]

(i just realized how dissimilar these two rambling thoughts were so i broken them apart.)

It takes great leaders to walk an apostolic path with contrition and courage--without certainty yet with authority. This is across all spheres of life. The great plague of a time soon to come (at least in the worlds of the North and West) may be a loss of courage under the sloth of entertainment, creativity and dissent under fascist media-democracy, sacrifice and love exchanged for expediency and instant pleasure. Freedom's metanarrative must ring anew. Perhaps from the South and East?

Posted 4/11/2002 01:10:06 PM
my comments on suicide bombing, zionism and world perceptions of the usa. check out the article that started it off -- I Helped Kill a Palestinian Today.

Posted 4/11/2002 10:18:37 AM
within the confines of the chemical network that we exist within and through, every inner and outer action deemed predisposition or natural state is simply the progeny of habit and discipline--patterns and intentionality over time. what of chance? chance is another name for habits and disciplines meeting across the network. is this deterministic? everything is on the continuum of determination. can there be freedom within the system? this is the story we tell in life and word. it too is metanarrative. incredulity is the wrong response. speak on. with irony, speak on.

Posted 4/11/2002 08:37:37 AM
genealogy dismembers origin, restoration and any moralized claim to hierarchical monopoly.

Posted 4/10/2002 01:59:38 PM
lots of disappointment last year. thought about loss a bit during lent 2002. loss and giving up have the same outcome potentially, but are so different in other respects. a job vs. a buddha. i am more job than buddha at this point it seems. perhaps once job is in the ashes there is no distinction, save he eventually gets up and reengages the world. perhaps job is, in some senses, a hebrew model of active dharma. the end of desire in the mystery of the tetragrammaton, the undecidable sign, the i will be what i will be. maybe not.

Posted 4/10/2002 11:39:22 AM
i almost feel guilty for using blogger. it is my public enactment of humility. maybe it's not humility. it feels too much like being a poser. perhaps it is simply my prioritization of life at this point. ambition seems rather central to presentation. ambition seems so far away. thus, blogger mediates where once hand rolling would dominate. seasons of life...

Posted 4/10/2002 09:56:42 AM
I much prefer a person who can love God enough to take a handout of bread, to a person who can give a hundred dollars for God's sake. . . . The giver buys the honor the receiver sells. . . . The giver is glad to be good-natured and is proud of it but the taker has to subdue his feelings and despise his status. The giver is much courted for his gifts whereas the beggar is despised and rejected for being a taker. -Meister Eckhart, Fragments, 6

Posted 4/10/2002 09:48:20 AM
what do you see among the sleepers? a happy horde of apostle anarchists overwhelming and recalibrating the heirarchical world of empowerment by enacting a kingdom without ownership, that cannot be co-opted, that demands a loss of self and a following, thus spake nonzero.

Posted 4/10/2002 09:24:26 AM
i have been thinking about the material structure of the organization called church for some time now. it seems this generation of leaders is attempting to emerge local legitimacy with a more nuanced spiritual expression and dogmatic flexibility when compared with even the best of their reformed/neo-orthodox/vatican2/whatever mothers and fathers. some of the basic premises that i find coming together are as follows:

1. authority follows responsibility


2. responsibiliy follows competency in action


3. people connect as families (definition not restricted to nuclear) then as tribes then as networks of tribes


4. connecting as families provides natural connections of love and communication that form a networked structure for pilrimage together


5. tribes have people, leaders and councils to provide flowing, networked structures of group pilgrimage and identity


6. by definition networks have no center, just nodes


7. nodes have varying degrees of relevance to any other point on the network due to a cacophony of relative circumstances: proximity (in space, in time), history of interaction (offense, obligation, indifference), et al.


8. a 'main node' from a given perspective does not act as center, but as switch and protocol for communication "following a networking logic rather than a command logic in their performance." (Manuel Castells)

Posted 4/10/2002 09:04:10 AM
we had a meeting monday. crazy how perspectives can be so different--there are times where difference is recognized as irreconcilable and one accepts that one will not find agreement and moves on. we are not there yet it seems. this disagreement seems contrived in a way that is difficult to comprehend. the first strike defense of haughtiness and self-serving spiritual one-upmanship makes it that much more difficult to navigate. enough. so tired of this. so much preaching about "it's not about you" and in the final analysis it seems to be. it is tough being an alpha male. so few people appreciate them enough to challenge them. most of them prefer the appreciation of those who will not.

Posted 4/9/2002 08:47:19 AM
first post: kind of pissed. tired of the bullshit that i hear from people "in authority." too much self driving the meaning train.

edited
[4/10/2002 10:57:47 AM | Dan Hughes]

OK, pissed morphed to disappointed morphed to confused morphed to at peace. sent cecil my response that I had crafted on april 1 and held. looking forward to many conversations about leadership, life and the kingdom going forward.

_________________

Brad,

Thank you, again, for making an appearance Monday. I'm sure that was not your idea of an ideal Monday night. There wasn't even any beer. People may not agree with you, but they love you.

I wanted you to know that I wrote a reply to you at the beginning of April re: our back and forth over leadership, killing axxess, et al. I never posted it or sent it to you because I wanted to see your eyes and hear your voice and see your posture in person. Monday was weird, but better than text devoid of what it is to be human being shipped back and forth over electronic networks.

Here is a link to my response: ***. There is an introductory letter because I had intended to send this to you right after leadership Monday. I have been considering it and trying to find some perspective with time before I send it thus the delay. We have moved past some of the details of my reply, but I thought it perhaps useful to let the conversation take its course between us.

I hope that our disagreements can be wrapped in a more originary agreement to be bound in love. I long for disagreements that can be worked out in the space opened by love and trust. Dissonance is one of the key things missing in hierarchy. I see no sides here or advantage or place for pride or shame. I see faulty humans trying to navigate life and spirit as together as they can.

Peace to you,

dan