4,417 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2021
    1. Hobbes and Rousseau told their contemporaries things that werestartling, profound and opened new doors of the imagination. Nowtheir ideas are just tired common sense. There’s nothing in them thatjustifies the continued simplification of human affairs. If socialscientists today continue to reduce past generations to simplistic,two-dimensional caricatures, it is not so much to show us anythingoriginal, but just because they feel that’s what social scientists areexpected to do so as to appear ‘scientific’. The actual result is toimpoverish history – and as a consequence, to impoverish our senseof possibility.

      The simplification required to make models and study systems can be a useful tool, but one constantly needs to go back to the actual system to make sure that future predictions and work actually fit the real world system.

      Too often social theorists make assumptions which aren't supported in real life and this can be a painfully dangerous practice, especially when those assumptions are built upon in ways that put those theories out on a proverbial creaking limb.


      This idea is related to the bias that Charles Mathewes points out about how we treat writers as still living or as if they never lived. see: https://hypothes.is/a/VTU2lFvZEeyiJ2tN76i4sA

    2. Now, we should be clear here: social theory always, necessarily,involves a bit of simplification. For instance, almost any humanaction might be said to have a political aspect, an economic aspect,a psychosexual aspect and so forth. Social theory is largely a gameof make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument,that there’s just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everythingto a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would beotherwise invisible. As a result, all real progress in social science hasbeen rooted in the courage to say things that are, in the finalanalysis, slightly ridiculous: the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud orClaude Lévi-Strauss being only particularly salient cases in point.One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. Theproblem comes when, long after the discovery has been made,people continue to simplify.

      revisit this... it's an important point, particularly when looking at complex ideas with potentially emergent properties

    3. Let’s consider a fairly random example of one of these generalistaccounts, Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order: FromPrehuman Times to the French Revolution (2011). Here isFukuyama on what he feels can be taken as received wisdom aboutearly human societies: ‘In its early stages human politicalorganization is similar to the band-level society observed in higherprimates like chimpanzees,’ which Fukuyama suggests can beregarded as ‘a default form of social organization’.

      The answer to my earlier question: They are taking Fukuyama and others to task here.

      One should note that even among our primate cousins, there are a variety of social structures and social norms beyond only the chimpanzees. Folks forget about the differing structures of animals like bonobos which show much different structures.

    1. there's a great literature in 00:21:37 anthropology about the way that hunter-gatherer societies and many other societies action flip and alternate between very different kinds of political 00:21:49 arrangements depending partly on the time of year so one will have periods of great economic abundance let's say when the Bison or the deer or the woolly mammoth if we're in the Pleistocene 00:22:03 europe are coming through the valleys and you'll have extremely elaborate social measures put in place to make sure that hunting is successfully completed and during those periods you 00:22:17 might have a very authoritarian kind of political organization but once it's all over the society changes shape Marcel Mauss actually used the term social morphology I think to describe this 00:22:30 society moves and transforms

      Marcel Mauss defines social morphology as a way that societies flip or alternate between social structures depending on the seasons based on availability of food and potentially other factors.

      Perhaps to be found in Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo: A Study in Social Morphology #

    1. Health Nerd. (2021, December 13). Accusing everyone you disagree with of being a shill for pharmaceutical companies is a very simple way to tell anyone with even the slightest insight that you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about and no desire to do simple things to educate yourself [Tweet]. @GidMK. https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1470287869168152576

    1. In an effort to mitigate these issues, some book contracts now specify the number of posts required before and after a book is published.

      Perhaps better would be stipulations in the contract that incentivize authors to leverage their platforms in the form of bonuses while removing the advance money in lieu. Make the author part of the promotion, which has been part of the movement in publishing for the last decade.

    2. Tamika D. Mallory, a social activist with over a million Instagram followers, was paid over $1 million for a two-book deal. But her first book, “State of Emergency,” has sold just 26,000 print copies since it was published in May, according to BookScan.

      Following numbers can't matter as much as something like daily or weekly engagement, which might be a better predictor for book sales.

    3. “It’s become more and more important as the years went on,” said Marc Resnick, executive editor at St. Martin’s Press. “We learned some hard lessons along the way, which is that a tweet or a post is not necessarily going to sell any books, if it’s not the right person with the right book and the right followers at the right time.”

      This seems like common sense to me, why hasn't the industry grokked it?

    1. An analogous situation is the use of visiting cards: “ One arrives at one of the famous spas, a couple of hours after arriving one sends out a few hundred visiting cards, and the same day one is introduced to the whole society of the resort, and acquainted with two to three hundred people as if one had already lived

      with them for many years.” 62

      What ever happened to visiting cards? They should make a resurgence in the social media space, n'cest pas?

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  2. Nov 2021
    1. article explores how annotation with digital, social tools can address digital reading challenges while also supporting writing skill development for novices in college literature classrooms. The author analyzes student work and survey responses and shows that social annotation can facilitate closer digital reading and scaffold text-anchored argumentation practices.

      Writing to understand what I read is critical to my practice. Doing so socially is particularly helpful when I don't understand something or am lacking the motivation to keep reading.

    1. i think the focus was very much on energy supply and to a limited extent on things like um yeah technologies and like vehicle 01:00:07 technologies for example but um much much less in terms of getting people to particularly in developed countries to use less energy and to change diet and to travel less and fly less and all these these things and i think part of 01:00:19 that and it is also reflected in the fact that it was fairly much absent in the uk's net zero strategy is that it is seen as being politically difficult that it might be a you know it might mean that they that politicians lose votes that 01:00:33 it's just too difficult to get people to change their behavior that it's threatening that it might mean lower standards of living um in developed countries etc so i think kind of it's still it's still seen as something and that that was quite explicit i think in 01:00:45 the forward to the uk strategy um so i think in terms of how we move beyond that that's that's difficult but i think it is about reframing behavior change and demand demand management in 01:00:58 much more positive terms to say this isn't a threat there are actually opportunities there are opportunities to improve people's health and well-being to create green jobs to reskill people in new sectors and 01:01:09 and so on and it is not about you know reducing uh quality of life or well-being it's not about people losing jobs etc so this is i think there's a job here to kind of reframe it in terms of those those opportunities and those 01:01:22 co-benefits so that would be my my initial thought

      Reframing loss as gain is one strategy worth exploring for behavior change. Also explore social tipping points of complex contagion.

    1. We said we were going to take ex-convicts and ex-addicts and teach them to be teachers, general contractors, and truck drivers. They said it couldn’t be done. We said we were going to take 250 people who had never worked and had no skills and teach them to build a 400,000 square foot complex as our new home on the waterfront. They said it couldn’t be done. We said we were going to partner with colleges and get people who started out functionally illiterate to achieve bachelor of arts degrees. They said it couldn’t be done. We said we were going to run successful restaurants, moving companies, furniture making, and cafés and bookstores without any professional help. They said it couldn’t be done. We said we were going to do all this with no staff, no government funding, and no professionals. They laughed and said it couldn’t be done.
    1. social change typically spreads as ‘complex contagions,’ requiring multiple sources of social reinforcement to induce adoption,”

      Climate change requires large investment in behavior change. It is a case of complex contagion, not simple contagion. Wide bridges are the key to bringing about social tipping points of complex contagion.

    1. Social convention, which has for so long worked against us, can if flipped become our greatest source of power, normalising what now seems radical and weird. If we can simultaneously trigger a cascading regime shift in both technology and politics, we might stand a chance. It sounds like a wild hope. But we have no choice. Our survival depends on raising the scale of civil disobedience until we build the greatest mass movement in history, mobilising the 25% who can flip the system.

      This is the core philosophy behind Stop Reset Go, but NOT NECESSARILY just in the direction of civil disobedience. To invest only in that is to put all our eggs in one basket that top down actors will be pressured beyond a certain threshold. It may happen, it may not, or it may just take too long. We must diversify and also invest in systematized bottom-up efforts.

    2. Another paper explored the possibility that the Fridays for Future climate protests could trigger this kind of domino dynamics. It showed how, in 2019, Greta Thunberg’s school strike snowballed into a movement that led to unprecedented electoral results for Green parties in several European nations. Survey data revealed a sharp change of attitudes, as people began to prioritise the environmental crisis. Fridays for Future came close, the researchers suggest, to pushing the European political system into a “critical state”. It was interrupted by the pandemic, and the tipping has not yet happened. But witnessing the power, the organisation and the fury of the movements gathered in Glasgow, I suspect the momentum is building again.

      The space is ripe for interventions that can facilitate social tipping points.

    1. In addition to the daily limits, there are follow ratios that go into effect once you’re following a certain number of accounts:Every Twitter account can follow up to 5,000 accounts. Once you reach that number, you may need to wait until your account has more followers before you can follow additional accounts. This number is different for each account and is automatically calculated based on your unique ratio of followers to following.

      Hello. I am a paying subscriber, now, after all these years… I may or may not have become a paying subscriber just to justify this particular feedback after all this time.

      Ultimately, though, I’m giving you a real substantial bullet point to put on that very wispy-looking full features list of Twitter Blue!

    1. hen social relations with friends diminish, the meaning of the social home undesirably changed forthe participants.

      When social relations with friends diminish, the meaning of the social home undesirably changed for the participants.

    1. "The Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving is aimed at those engaged in the cycle of research, from applying for a research grant, through the data collection phase, and ultimately to preparation of the data for deposit in a public archive: " from tweet

    1. social interaction with face-to-face discourse, such as conversation

      social interaction with face-to-face discourse, such as conversation

    1. Twitter Blue Publisher network

      Hey Twitter,

      I love that you chose to show support for Lists by sharing the list of Blue publishers, this way. This is a decision I want to celebrate!

      However, this hyperlink isn’t particularly useful in that the user has no ability to actually follow the list. Aside from manually bookmarking it on a browser (since you can’t if you let the deeplink open the native app,) there is no way to save it!

    1. The only complaint about Twitter I remember that hasn't already been addressed here is the capability of editable 'toots.' Is that a possibility? That won't happen. There's actually a good reason why they don't do that. It's simply because you could make a toot about one thing, have people favorite it and share it, link it from other places, and then suddenly, it says 'Heil Hitler,' or something.

      Addressing this issue in my upcoming review of Twitter Blue.

    1. and in that uh i would sort of say that that dave queller and jones strassmann again sort of approached this these problems as to how you transition across social groups and 00:08:18 their emphasis or at least they put an emphasis on the idea of that one way you can look at groups is you can look at their relative similarity or genetic similarity 00:08:32 so groups can range from being you know entirely fraternal in which place we're looking at genetic clones all the way out to what might be called egalitarian 00:08:44 with unrelated individuals or even individuals from from from different species so in essence groups can be placed somewhere along this continuum of 00:08:56 similarity of identity from again completely identical to very very different fraternal to egalitarian

      The radical collaboration that is required during the climate crisis is on the egalitarian end of the spectrum.

    1. The liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, writing at about the same time as Hawthorne, made a similar argument. Much of his most famous book, On Liberty, is dedicated not to governmental restraints on human liberty but to the threat posed by social conformism, by “the demand that all other people shall resemble ourselves.”
    2. Source: De Agostini Picture Library / Getty

      This is a searing image for what this article is about:

      Muted dull painting of what appears to be a 17th century gallows being erected in front of a line of soldiers with guns and bayonets and a  crowd with shovels. Instead of a gallows, the structure being erected is a large Facebook thumbs up image on a pole. Various flags with the Facebook logo fly around the scene.

      Could be entitled "A different kind of social justice."

    3. The purpose here is not to reinvestigate or relitigate any of their cases. Some of those I interviewed have behaved in ways that I, or readers of this article, may well consider ill-judged or immoral, even if they were not illegal. I am not here questioning all of the new social codes that have led to their dismissal or their effective isolation. Many of these social changes are clearly positive.

      This sounds a lot like the article How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life though in that case it was a single instance and these examples here may go beyond social media.

      Though I'm curious if all of them will entail social media as a (major?) factor in how they played out.

    4. In America, of course, we don’t have that kind of state coercion. There are currently no laws that shape what academics or journalists can say; there is no government censor, no ruling-party censor. But fear of the internet mob, the office mob, or the peer-group mob is producing some similar outcomes. How many American manuscripts now remain in desk drawers—or unwritten altogether—because their authors fear a similarly arbitrary judgment? How much intellectual life is now stifled because of fear of what a poorly worded comment would look like if taken out of context and spread on Twitter?

      Fear of cancel culture and social repercussions prevents people from speaking and communicating as they might otherwise.

      Compare this with the right to reach, particularly for those without editors, filtering, or having built a platform and understanding how to use it responsibly.

    5. Lily Hajdú-Gimes, a celebrated Hungarian psychoanalyst of that era, diagnosed the trauma of forced conformity in patients, as well as in herself. “I play the game that is offered by the regime,” she told friends, “though as soon as you accept that rule you are in a trap.”
    6. Right here in America, right now, it is possible to meet people who have lost everything—jobs, money, friends, colleagues—after violating no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules either. Instead, they have broken (or are accused of having broken) social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behavior, or even acceptable humor, which may not have existed five years ago or maybe five months ago. Some have made egregious errors of judgment. Some have done nothing at all. It is not always easy to tell.
    1. Since around 2010, Morton has become associated with a philosophical movement known as object-oriented ontology, or O.O.O. The point of O.O.O. is that there is a vast cosmos out there in which weird and interesting shit is happening to all sorts of objects, all the time. In a 1999 lecture, “Object-Oriented Philosophy,” Graham Harman, the movement’s central figure, explained the core idea:The arena of the world is packed with diverse objects, their forces unleashed and mostly unloved. Red billiard ball smacks green billiard ball. Snowflakes glitter in the light that cruelly annihilates them, while damaged submarines rust along the ocean floor. As flour emerges from mills and blocks of limestone are compressed by earthquakes, gigantic mushrooms spread in the Michigan forest. While human philosophers bludgeon each other over the very possibility of “access” to the world, sharks bludgeon tuna fish and icebergs smash into coastlines.We are not, as many of the most influential twentieth-century philosophers would have it, trapped within language or mind or culture or anything else. Reality is real, and right there to experience—but it also escapes complete knowability. One must confront reality with the full realization that you’ll always be missing something in the confrontation. Objects are always revealing something, and always concealing something, simply because they are Other. The ethics implied by such a strangely strange world hold that every single object everywhere is real in its own way. This realness cannot be avoided or backed away from. There is no “outside”—just the entire universe of entities constantly interacting, and you are one of them.

      Object Oriented Ontology - Objects are always revealing something, and always concealing something, simply because they are Other. ... There is no "outside" - just the entire universe of entities constantly interacting, and you are one of them.

      This needs to be harmonized with Stop Reset Go (SRG) complimentary Human Inner Transformation (HIT) and Social Outer Transformation (SOT) strategy.

    1. A final cluster gathers lenses that explore phenomena that are arguably more elastic and with the potential to both indirectly maintain and explicitly reject and reshape existing norms. Many of the topics addressed here can be appropriately characterized as bottom-up, with strong and highly diverse cultural foundations. Although they are influenced by global and regional social norms, the expert framing of institutions, and the constraints of physical infrastructure (from housing to transport networks), they are also domains of experimentation, new norms, and cultural change. Building on this potential for either resisting or catalyzing change, the caricature chosen here is one of avian metaphor and myth: the Ostrich and Phoenix cluster. Ostrich-like behavior—keeping heads comfortably hidden in the sand—is evident in different ways across the lenses of inequity (Section 5.1), high-carbon lifestyles (Section 5.2), and social imaginaries (Section 5.3), which make up this cluster. Yet, these lenses also point to the power of ideas, to how people can thrive beyond dominant norms, and to the possibility of rapid cultural change in societies—all forms of transformation reminiscent of the mythological phoenix born from the ashes of its predecessor. It is conceivable that this cluster could begin to redefine the boundaries of analysis that inform the Enabler cluster, which in turn has the potential to erode the legitimacy of the Davos cluster. The very early signs of such disruption are evident in some of the following sections and are subsequently elaborated upon in the latter part of the discussion.

      The bottom-up nature of this cluster makes it the focus area for civil society movements, human inner transformation (HIT) approaches and cultural methodologies.

      Changing the mindset or paradigm from which the system arises is the most powerful place to intervene in a system as Donella Meadows pointed out decades ago in her research on system leverage points: https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/

      The sleeping giant of billions of potential change actors remains dormant. How do we awaken them and mobilize them. If we can do this, it can constitute the emergence of a third unidentified actor in system change.

      The Stop Reset Go (SRG) initiative is focused on this thematic lens, bottom-up, rapid whole system change, with Deep Humanity (DH) as the open-source praxis to address the needed shift in worldview advocated by Meadows. One of the Deep Humanity programs is based on addressing the psychological deficits of the wealthy, and transforming them into heroes for the transition, by redirecting their WEALTH-to-WELLth.

      There are a number of strategic demographics that can be targeted in methodical evidence-based ways. Each of these is a leverage point and can bring about social tipping points.

      A number of 2021 reports characterize the outsized impact of the top 1% and top 10% of humanity. Unless their luxury, high ecological footprint behavior is reeled in, humanity won't stand a chance. Annotation of Oxfam report: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Foxfamilibrary.openrepository.com%2Fbitstream%2Fhandle%2F10546%2F621305%2Fbn-carbon-inequality-2030-051121-en.pdf&group=__world__ Annotation of Hot or Cool report: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhotorcool.org%2Fhc-posts%2Frelease-governments-in-g20-countries-must-enable-1-5-aligned-lifestyles%2F&group=__world__

    2. For low-carbon practices to grow and displace high-carbon ones, integrated action across disparate spaces and coordination between many different actors are necessary (161). For example, mobility scholars (166) highlight the extent of reconfiguration required to disassociate academia from high-carbon travel, including altered institutional cultures, funding practices, and student recruitment to support virtual ways of working. Although novel low-carbon practices may emerge, policy must ensure these stabilize and become prevalent, as well as impeding the circulation of high-carbon practices.

      A new social imaginary of cosmolocality, where we spend most of our time locally, but use information technology as the prime method for nonlocal communication. In other words, replacing transportation with lower footprint communications.

      https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Cosmo-Localism https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Cosmo-Localization https://medium.com/@joseramos_30450/the-cosmo-local-reader-invitation-to-participate-dbcb6248f54b

      In the field of production and provisioning systems, cosmolocal production implies designing and sharing designs globally, and downloading the appropriate ones for local clean production, thereby minimizing global supply chains.

      Graduated relocalization that begins to replace auto transportation with pedestrian and bike traffic can result in huge decarbonization impacts. This relocalization movement is also an economic reconfiguration, echoing what community economist Michael Shuman refers to as the movement from Wall Street to Main Street - decentralizing centralizing organizations when feasible, and creating more community wealth while decarbonizing unnecessarily long supply chains.

      https://michaelhshuman.com/store/

    3. Many high-carbon activities are also highly routinized. From a psychological perspective, this bears the hallmarks of habitual behavior, in that environmentally significant actions are often stable, persistent, and an automatic response to particular contexts (159), e.g., commuting by car repeatedly over many months or years. Theories of social practice offer a contrasting account in which routines coevolve with infrastructures, competencies, conventions, and expectations (160). For example, developments in urban infrastructure, everyday routines, and the shifting social significance of private transport have culminated in the car becoming a dominant mode of mobility (161). Elsewhere, coordinated developments across spheres of production and consumption have led to the freezer becoming regarded as a domestic necessity (162), and changing patterns of domestic labor and shifts toward sedentary recreation have contributed to the rise in indoor temperature control (163). Although such assemblages shift over time, policy and action intended to reduce emissions have been ineffective in coordinating changes throughout these social and material configurations. As a consequence, routinized, commonplace, and largely unconscious behaviors remain mostly unaffected, with many high-carbon activities even growing and expanding (e.g., frequent flying).

      New stories and narratives, in other words, new social imaginaries of viable low carbon life styles can help bring about a shift. By adopting the viable story, it primes individuals to seek technology elements that are designed to fit that new social imaginary.

      As mentioned above, community economists Michael Shuman demonstrates how relocalizing can create new patterns of behavior consistent with a desirable future.

      The Swiss 2000 Watt society is another example of such a new social imaginary https://www.2000-watt-society.org/what as is Doughnut Economics https://doughnuteconomics.org/

      We must engage film-makers, artists, playwrights to create stories of such alternative futures of living within planetary boundaries, doughnut economics and eco-civilizations.

    4. As the emerging field of energy humanities (168) is beginning to show, the traditions, cultures, and beliefs of contemporary, industrial societies are deeply entangled with fossil fuels in what have been called petrocultures and carbonscapes (169). Future visions are dominated by such constrained social imaginaries (170), and hence rarely offer a “radical departure from the past” (171, p. 138).

      Constructing social imaginaries that are alternatives to the petrocutultural, carbonscape ones is critical to shift the mindset.

      Carbon pollution cannot be disentangled from colonialism and social imaginaries must consist of stories that tell alternative futures narratives that address both simultaneously.

      Replace petroculture with ecoculture, doughnut economics, living within planetary boundaries and eco-civilization

    5. Critical to historical and ongoing carbon lock-in has been the pervasive failure in industrial, modern societies to imagine desirable ways of living that are neither wedded to the carbon economy nor dependent on narratives of progress reliant on perpetual economic growth (see Section 4.1). This scarcity of plausible imaginaries underpins many of the factors discussed in this article and persists for a number of interconnected reasons.

      It is critical to create stories and narratives of what an ecologically regenerative society living within planetary boundaries looks like at a local level that we are familiar with. We need enliven and enact futures studies and backcast to our current reality.

      Imaginative storytelling by the artists is critical at this time so that we can imagine and not be so afraid of what a transformed future looks like. Indeed, if we do it right, it can be FAR BETTER than our current unbalanced civilization.

    1. I created a social justice metaphor library to help explain concepts like why you can't just create a "level playing field" without acknowledging the economic impacts of history (see, even saying it like that is complicated).

      I love that Dave has started a list of these useful social justice metaphors.

      I got side tracked by the idea this morning and submitted a handful I could think of off the top of my head.

      • Baseball fence
      • Parable of the Polygons
      • Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

      I'm curious if there are any useful ones in the neurodiversity space? I feel like I need more of these myself.

    1. "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" and "Some Notes for Facilitators" by Peggy McIntosh https://via.hypothes.is/https://nationalseedproject.org/Key-SEED-Texts/white-privilege-unpacking-the-invisible-knapsack

      "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" first appeared in Peace and Freedom Magazine, July/August, 1989, pp. 10-12, a publication of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Philadelphia, PA.

    1. ffost guides to research devote a few pages to methods of note takingW but they lag behind thenew technologiesi seeW for exampleW xacques parzun and venry tY uraffW The ́odern ResearcherS]gcei postonW ]gg‘TY

      Might be interesting to look at this reference to see what she's referring to specifically.

      It would be interesting to see how note taking is changing with even newer digital tools like Hypothes.is, Diigo, Twitter, Readwise, etc.

      Perhaps the growth of digital gardens in public may be a place for study as well? Though one would need to be wary of the idea of performative note taking as these are often done specifically in public as opposed to private as is more common in the past.

    2. ut personal notes can also be shared with othersWon a limited scale with family and friends and on a wider scale throughpublicationW notably in genres that compile useful reading notes for othersY

      Written in 2004, this is on the cusp of the growth of blogging and obviously predates the general time frame of social media and the rise of social annotation. Personal notes can now be shared more widely and have much larger publics.

  3. Oct 2021
    1. sometimes you de- yelop a whole passage, not with the intention of completing it, but because it comes of itself and because inspiration is like grace, which passes by and does not come back.

      So very few modern sources describe annotation or note taking in these terms.

      I find often in my annotations, the most recent one just above is such a one, where I start with a tiny kernel of an idea and then my brain begins warming up and I put down some additional thoughts. These can sometimes build and turn into multiple sentences or paragraphs, other times they sit and need further work. But either way, with some work they may turn into something altogether different than what the original author intended or discussed.

      These are the things I want to keep, expand upon, and integrate into larger works or juxtapose with other broader ideas and themes in the things I am writing about.

      Sadly, we're just not teaching students or writers these tidbits or habits anymore.

      Sönke Ahrens mentions this idea in his book about Smart Notes. When one is asked to write an essay or a paper it is immensely difficult to have a perch on which to begin. But if one has been taking notes about their reading which is of direct interest to them and which can be highly personal, then it is incredibly easy to have a starting block against which to push to begin what can be either a short sprint or a terrific marathon.

      This pattern can be seen by many bloggers who surf a bit of the web, read what others have written, and use those ideas and spaces as a place to write or create their own comments.

      Certainly this can involve some work, but it's always nicer when the muses visit and the words begin to flow.

      I've now written so much here in this annotation that this note here, is another example of this phenomenon.

      With some hope, by moving this annotation into my commonplace book (or if you prefer the words notebook, blog, zettelkasten, digital garden, wiki, etc.) I will have it to reflect and expand upon later, but it'll also be a significant piece of text which I might move into a longer essay and edit a bit to make a piece of my own.

      With luck, I may be able to remedy some of the modern note taking treatises and restore some of what we've lost from older traditions to reframe them in an more logical light for modern students.

      I recall being lucky enough to work around teachers insisting I use note cards and references in my sixth grade classes, but it was never explained to me exactly what this exercise was meant to engender. It was as if they were providing the ingredients for a recipe, but had somehow managed to leave off the narrative about what to do with those ingredients, how things were supposed to be washed, handled, prepared, mixed, chopped, etc. I always felt that I was baking blind with no directions as to temperature or time. Fortunately my memory for reading on shorter time scales was better than my peers and it was only that which saved my dishes from ruin.

      I've come to see note taking as beginning expanded conversations with the text on the page and the other texts in my notebooks. Annotations in the the margins slowly build to become something else of my own making.

      We might compare this with the more recent movement of social annotation in the digital pedagogy space. This serves a related master, but seems a bit more tangent to it. The goal of social annotation seems to be to help engage students in their texts as a group. Reading for many of these students may be more foreign than it is to me and many other academics who make trade with it. Thus social annotation helps turn that reading into a conversation between peers and their text. By engaging with the text and each other, they get something more out of it than they might have if left to their own devices. The piece I feel is missing here is the modeling of the next several steps to the broader commonplacing tradition. Once a student has begun the path of allowing their ideas to have sex with the ideas they find on the page or with their colleagues, what do they do next? Are they being taught to revisit their notes and ideas? Sift them? Expand upon them. Place them in a storehouse of their best materials where they can later be used to write those longer essays, chapters, or books which may benefit them later?

      How might we build these next pieces into these curricula of social annotation to continue building on these ideas and principles?

    1. Active involvement in and building of autonomous and popular social movements, which is described as the process of “social insertion.”

      Nice!

    1. We do, even asking in our conclusion, “How might the social life of annotation serve the public good?” Any social benefit mediated by annotation must address power.

      The parallel structure here reminds me of the book The Social Life of Information which is surely related to this idea in a subtle way. I wonder if they cited it in their bibliography? I wonder if it influenced this sentence?

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Life_of_Information

    1. Facebook could shift the burden of proof toward people and communities to demonstrate that they’re good actors—and treat reach as a privilege, not a right.

      Nice to see someone else essentially saying something along the lines that "free speech" is not the same as "free reach".

      Traditional journalism has always had thousands of gatekeepers who filtered and weighed who got the privilege of reach. Now anyone with an angry, vile, or upsetting message can get it for free. This is one of the worst parts of what Facebook allows.

    2. Facebook has dismissed the concerns of its employees in manifold ways. One of its cleverer tactics is to argue that staffers who have raised the alarm about the damage done by their employer are simply enjoying Facebook’s “very open culture,” in which people are encouraged to share their opinions, a spokesperson told me.
      1. Share opinions
      2. Opinions viewed as "fact"
      3. "Facts" spread as news.
      4. Platform accelerates "news".
      5. Bad things happen
      6. Profit
    1. White finds reason for optimism: the end of protest inaugurates a new era of social change.

      Beginning, Middle, End

      Micah White wrote of the end: The End of Protest.

      Micah White is the award-winning activist who co-created Occupy Wall Street, a global social movement, while an editor of Adbusters magazine.

      Occupy Wall Street was a constructive failure but not a total failure. Occupy demonstrated the efficacy of using social memes to quickly spread a movement, shifted the political debate on the fair distribution of wealth, trained a new generation of activists who went on to be the base for movements ranging from campus fossil fuel divestment to Black Lives Matter protests. Occupy launched many local projects that will have lasting small-scale impact. Occupy buoyed many institutional activist organizations that were able to materially profit from the renewed interest in protest. All of these are signs that our movement was culturally influential. It may be comforting to believe that Occupy splintered into a thousand shards of light. However, an honest assessment reveals that Occupy Wall Street failed to live up to its revolutionary potential: we did not bring an end to the influence of money on democracy, overthrow the corporatocracy of the 1 percent or solve income inequality. If our movement did achieve successes, they were not the ones we’d intended. When victory eluded Occupy, a world of activist certainties fell apart.

      I call Occupy Wall Street a constructive failure because the movement revealed underlying flaws in dominant, and still prevalent, theories of how to achieve social change through collective action. Occupy set out to “get money out of politics,” and we succeeded in catalyzing a global social movement that tested all of our hypotheses. The failure of our efforts reveals a truth that will hasten the next successful revolution: the assumptions underlying contemporary protest are false. Change won’t happen through the old models of activism. Western democracies will not be swayed by public spectacles and mast frenzy. Protests have become an accepted, and therefore ignored, by-product of politics-as-usual. Western governments are not susceptible to international pressure to heed the protests of their citizens. Occupy’s failure was constructive because it demonstrated the limitations of contemporary ideas of Protest. I capitalize p to emphasize that the limitation was not in a particular tactic but ratter in our concept of Protest, or our theory of social change, which determined the overall script. Occupy revealed that activists need to revolutionize their approach to revolution.

      Failure can be liberating. Defeat detaches us from a theory of revolution that is no longer effective, reopening the possibility of true change. “For a revolutionary,” writes Régis Debray, professor of philosophy and associate of Che Guevara, “failure is a springboard. As a course of theory it is richer than victory: it accumulates experience and knowledge.”

      (Pages 26-27)

    1. social evolution

      A Theory of Change

      How did we get here?

      Yesterday (October 26, 2021), I picked up David Graeber’s book, The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity, written with David Wengrow, at Coles in Abbotsford.

      It is interesting to note that David Graeber was interested in the origins, the beginnings.

      Renowned for his biting and incisive writing about bureaucracy, politics and capitalism, Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement and professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE) at the time of his death.

      https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/03/david-graeber-anthropologist-and-author-of-bullshit-jobs-dies-aged-59

    1. Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really there.

      Reimagining our social architecture might begin with rethinking our past and origins as a species.

    1. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Peter Hagen</span> in Peter Hagen (@peterhagen_) / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>10/25/2021 09:47:19</time>)</cite></small>

    1. In the future envisioned here, decentralized networks play the role of governments, municipalities and intentional commons, fostering common goods. It is possible to produce common goods when a big-enough community cooperates to bear the cost of production and its implementation; but this, correspondingly, requires large-scale coordination, and large-scale coordination is generally a very hard problem. In this article we introduce Common Good, a blockchain-based application that solves this problem by enabling the coordination and motivation of different relevant actors for achieving a desired common good, by providing it with a “business model” just as in the profit-seeking sector. Our solution takes inspiration from the Social Impact Bonds (SIB) model.

      A proposal to use decentralized blockchain to make large scale coordination possible.

    1. UCL Centre for Behaviour Change. (2021, October 12). The CBC Conference 2021 programme has just been released and is packed with thought-provoking talks, international keynote speakers, symposia, and plenty of networking opportunities and social exchanges for delegates. Register now! Http://tinyurl.com/5xwa7c27 #cbcconf2021 https://t.co/9iZqPjEEY6 [Tweet]. @UCLBehaveChange. https://twitter.com/UCLBehaveChange/status/1447860878511157252

    1. What are the biggest barriers to action – for countries or communities or individuals – on climate change? And how do we get past those?It’s psychological distance and solution aversion. We don’t think it matters to us. We think it’s a problem distant in space or time or relevance. And we don’t think there’s anything viable or practical we can do at the scale required.

      Deep Humanity, as an open praxis available to any human being to both use and contribute to is a leverage point that, by awakening us to our own sacredness as living and dying human interbeing, can shift our self-perspective from scarcity and poverty mentality, to hsving super powers that emerge from the lived experience of our own sacredness as living and dying human interbeings. The Stop Reset Go linkage between human inner transformation (HIT) and social outer transformation (SOT) are criticsl to recognizing our social transformative potential.

    1. We propose a tri-relationship embedding framework TriFN, which models publisher-news relations and user-news interactions simultaneously for fake news classification. We conduct experiments on two real-world datasets, which demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms other baseline methods for fake news detection.

      It was said in the conclusion that the TriFN can have a good fake news detection performance in the early stage of information dissemination because of the interactions in social media. User credibility was also mentioned since low credibility users tend to spread fake news.

      This means that users play a big part in detecting and reducing fake news in social media. Let's be responsible to only share credible news articles and report the misleading ones.

    1. The Bauhaus began with the metaphor of a church and the Lyonel Feininger depiction of a modern cathedral as a symbol for a new faith in the synthesis of art and technology.

      The fusion of art, technology, and spirituality has been the foundation of my thinking as a designer as I have explored design practice, design education, and design philosophy.

      We mistakenly focused on physical artifacts without fully realizing—and questioning—the values that were being embodied in architecture, built to reinforce our habits and behaviours into social, economic, and political systems. Technology has enabled us to scale, accelerate, and amplify these systems to envelope the globe.

      We have been engaged in social architecture, a form of metaphysical design. It has been a form of colonization that has been built on individualism, specialization, and authoritarianism.

    2. The spiritual vision of the Bauhaus was a faith in people’s ability to transform society for good by breaking down divisions and working together toward a common purpose.

      Originally published on Medium on August 29, 2019.

    1. Lean Canvas

      For the builders collective, I created some tools that are open source and useful for design and social architecture. Other projects are coding challenges to experiment with what is possible on the web.

      This experiment is based on the Lean Canvas, based on the Business Model Canvas from the book Business Model Generation.

      Type in the grey box at the top of the page. Click or tap in the boxes to add the text as a box in each section of the Lean Canvas. Click on the box to delete.

      There is no save functionality, so be sure to take a screenshot. Or roll your own by using the code on Codepen and GitHub.

  4. bafybeiery76ov25qa7hpadaiziuwhebaefhpxzzx6t6rchn7b37krzgroi.ipfs.dweb.link bafybeiery76ov25qa7hpadaiziuwhebaefhpxzzx6t6rchn7b37krzgroi.ipfs.dweb.link
    1. As the emerging field of energy humanities (168)is beginning to show, the traditions, cultures, and beliefs of contemporary, industrial societies aredeeply entangled with fossil fuels in what have been called petrocultures and carbonscapes (169).Future visions are dominated by such constrained social imaginaries (170), and hence rarely offera “radical departure from the past” (171, p. 138).

      Constructing social imaginaries that are alternatives to the petrocutultural, carbonscape ones is critical to shift the mindset.

      Carbon pollution cannot be disentangled from colonialism and social imaginaries must consist of stories that tell alternative futures narratives must address both simultaneously.

    2. For low-carbon practices to grow and displace high-carbon ones, integrated action across dis-parate spaces and coordination between many different actors are necessary (161). For example,mobility scholars (166) highlight the extent of reconfiguration required to disassociate academiafrom high-carbon travel, including altered institutional cultures, funding practices, and student re-cruitment to support virtual ways of working. Although novel low-carbon practices may emerge,policy must ensure these stabilize and become prevalent, as well as impeding the circulation ofhigh-carbon practices.

      A new social imaginary of cosmolocality, where we spend most of our time locally, but use information technology as the prime method for nonlocal communication. In other words, replacing transportation with lower footprint communications.

      In the field of production and provisioning systems, cosmolocal production implies designing and sharing designs globally, and downloading the appropriate ones for local clean production, thereby minimizing global supply chains.

    3. For example, developments in urban infrastructure, everyday routines, and the shifting social sig-nificance of private transport have culminated in the car becoming a dominant mode of mobil-ity (161). Elsewhere, coordinated developments across spheres of production and consumptionhave led to the freezer becoming regarded as a domestic necessity (162), and changing patternsof domestic labor and shifts toward sedentary recreation have contributed to the rise in indoortemperature control (163).

      New stories and narratives, in other world, new social imaginaries of viable low carbon life styles can help bring about a shift. By adopting the viable story, it primes individuals to seek technology elements that are designed to fit that new social imaginary.

      The Swiss 2000 Watt society is an example of such a new social imaginary https://www.2000-watt-society.org/what as is Doughnut Economics https://doughnuteconomics.org/

    4. Yet, these lenses also point to the power of ideas, to how people can thrive beyonddominant norms, and to the possibility of rapid cultural change in societies—all forms of trans-formation reminiscent of the mythological phoenix born from the ashes of its predecessor. It isconceivable that this cluster could begin to redefine the boundaries of analysis that inform the En-abler cluster, which in turn has the potential to erode the legitimacy of the Davos cluster. The veryearly signs of such disruption are evident in some of the following sections and are subsequentlyelaborated in the latter part of the discussion.

      This passage pays homage to Donella Meadows, who identified the shift in mindset or paradigm that supports the system as the top leverage point. If we can shift this mindset in sufficient number of people, it can shift the thinking of the Enabler Cluster identified in the paper. A social tipping point strategy can be adopted to help this to happen quickly. This strategy is being developed by Stop Reset Go and other civil society actors.

    1. Social: learned helplessness (individuality)Economic: trained incapacities (specialization)Political: bureaucratic intransigence (authoritarianism)

      The neoliberal world order is designed to serve a colonial system of capitalist extraction that only benefits the 1%.

      • Social: learned helplessness (individuality)
      • Economic: trained incapacities (specialization)
      • Political: bureaucratic intransigence (authoritarianism)
    2. accountability, reparations, and radical social change

      The mechanisms of our compliance with the dominant system are designed into the system:

      • Social: learned helplessness (individuality)
      • Economic: trained incapacities (specialization)
      • Political: bureaucratic intransigence (authoritarianism)
    1. Academia: All the Lies: What Went Wrong in the University Model and What Will Come in its Place

      “Students are graduating into a brutal job market.”

      The entreprecariat is designed for learned helplessness (social: individualism), trained incapacities (economic: specialization), and bureaucratic intransigence (political: authoritarianism).


      The Design Problem

      Three diagrams will explain the lack of social engagement in design. If (in Figure 1) we equate the triangle with a design problem, we readily see that industry and its designers are concerned only with the tiny top portion, without addressing themselves to real needs.

      Figure 1: The Design Problem

      (Design for the Real World, 2019. Page 57.)

      The other two figures merely change the caption for the figure.

      • Figure 1: The Design Problem
      • Figure 2: A Country
      • Figure 3: The World
    1. Education and job hiring should be integrated.

      Systemic Problems

      The problem is systemic. How do you deal with the problem when the system is off the table when it comes to the design problem?

    1. Regenerative Ventures

      Out of the Trimtab Space Camp course with the Buckminster Fuller Institute in which we were exploring world building with Tony Patrick, Langdon Roberts, Jeremy Lubman, Elsie Iwase, and I gathered to think about how we could become involved in regenerative ventures. This was our initiative, in which we met weekly to think about how we manifest who we are as a more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. The thought was that architecture grows out of values, principles, and intention.

    1. social annotation

      Had I known about Hypothesis at the time of my collaboration with Ilaria Forte, I likely would have suggested this as a tool for documenting the stream of consciousness, collecting stories in the context of the media that people are experiencing on the web.

    1. Pew Study on the American Dream, social mobility between the lowest levels of American society and the middle class is increasingly difficult, if not impossible.
    1. A retrospective of 50 years as a human being on planet Earth.

      The Art of Noticing

      This is a compilation of articles that I had written as a way to process the changes I was observing in the world and, consequently, in myself as a reaction to the events. I have come to think of this process as the art of noticing. This process is in contrast to the expectation that I should be a productive member of society, a target market, and a passive audience for charismatic leaders: celebrities, billionaires, and politicians.

      • Social: fame
      • Economic: wealth
      • Political: power

      An Agent of Change

      To become an agent of change is to recognize that we are not separate, we are not individuals, we are not cogs in a machine. We are complex and diverse. We are designers. We are a creative, collective, self-organizing, learning community.

      We are in a process of becoming—a being journey:

      • Personal resilience
      • Social influence
      • Economic capacity
      • Political agency
      • Ecological harmony

      This is how we shift from an attention economy to an intention economy. Rather than being oriented toward the failures of the past, the uncertainty of the present, or the worries of the future, in a constant state of anxiety, stress, and fear, we are shifting our consciousness to manifest our intention through perception (senses), cognition (mind), emotion (heart), and action (body). We are exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.

      We are the builders collective.

      We are one.

    1. This is the abuse of the power of the state to enforce the abuse of power of a tactical military police force to enforce an unlawful provincial court injunction in breach of Indigenous, Canadian, and international law.

      The Canadian genocide operates on the basis of exclusion, division, and disempowerment:

      • Social: learned helplessness
      • Economic: trained incapacities
      • Political: bureaucratic intransigence

      Watch the Canadian Prime Minister make the argument that institutions such as the Federal Government of the Dominion of Canada and the Catholic Church are set in their ways and inherently resistant to change. Change does not come from institutions, designed to maintain the status quo.

      If the issue of changing the name of a building in Parliament is going to take more conversation and more time, clearly time is on the side of Canada, but not on the side of the Indigenous Peoples. Democracy, capitalism, and constitutional monarchy are weapons of the state.

      The goal of white supremacy is to disempower through the ongoing threat of violence to legitimize the social, economic, and political architecture designed to manufacture the consent of the governed to the rule of law and the Crown.

      A culture of learned helplessness, trained incapacities, and bureaucratic intransigence are the social, economic, and political mechanisms of coercion that have worked so effectively over 153 years to design, build, and maintain a genocidal, apartheid state.

      It is not possible to make incremental changes to a killing machine to mitigate the harms. The Nazi regime had to be dismantled. The Canadian genocide ends with the dismantling of the Canadian regime. Declare the claims of the Crown to the land illegitimate. #LandBack

      The solution is simple. But white supremacy is about power. Letting go is hard. Until the mind of the White Supremacist changes, the public relations spectacles will continue, and the violence of the RCMP and the bureaucratic apartheid state will escalate genocide and ecocide.

      Individualism and the illusion of legislative representation disempower the solidarity of collective action, enabling the public consent and complicity in the Canadian genocide with impunity. Change would require agreement, coordination, and collaboration.

      We have a model for change that we can borrow from corporations that have weaponized collective consciousness, action, and governance. The design process has been proven as a successful model for global domination, monopolizing human time, energy, and resources.

      However, with greater disillusionment in the promises of our institutions, we are experiencing multiple systemic failures, leaving us with deep dissatisfaction in the existing reality with no sense of a desirable, feasible, or viable alternative.

      We are all designers. We can reclaim our power from the authoritarians to which we have abdicated our collective power. We can reclaim our social influence, economic capacity, and political agency. Indigenous History: Learning from the past to create a future that works for all

      We invite people to collaborate with us in the process of changing the world by first changing ourselves through the process of design.

      We are exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.

      We will begin by recreating our own realities by starting with an understanding of our relationships with each other and to all living beings and to the universe of shared experiences in which we find ourselves.

      We will begin with an appreciation of the complexity, diversity, and unity of this Creation that binds us to each other as neighbours and kin.

      We acknowledge that we are living on the unceded territories of those who have lived on these lands from time immemorial. We seek to share the good things of this earth, taking only what is given, living in reciprocity by giving back more than what we have been given.

    1. Victor Papanek’s book includes an introduction written by R. Buckminster Fuller, Carbondale, Illinois. (Sadly, the Thames & Hudson 2019 Third Edition does not include this introduction. Monoskop has preserved this text as a PDF file of images. I have transcribed a portion here.)

    1. Science-Driven Societal Transformation

      Gien Wong notes these three concept papers on Science-Driven Societal Transformation: Worldview, Motivation and Strategy, and Design.

    1. Timothy Caulfield on Twitter: “Will you fall into the conspiracy theory rabbit hole? Https://t.co/8mLQqSBnqb by @databyler @codingyan Good breakdown on some of the social forces (like ideology) that drive conspiracy theories. Despite the fact I study topic, still amazed how many believe this stuff. Https://t.co/L1T0cpy9kB” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved October 8, 2021, from https://twitter.com/CaulfieldTim/status/1445794723101175818

  5. Sep 2021
    1. Stop Reset Go

      How do we engage in bottom-up whole system change? Perhaps we need a model for understanding who we are serving that transcends the bias and limitations of personas as they are used in user experience design (UX).

      What is a more holistic model for understanding human perceptions, motivations, and behaviours?

    1. Are women generally more interested in other social causes besides online surveillance and the negative cultural impacts of social media companies?

      Most of the advanced researchers I seen on these topics are almost all women: Safiya Umoja Noble, Meredith Broussard, Ruha Benjamin, Cathy O'Neil, Shoshana Zuboff, Joan Donovan, danah boyd,Tressie McMillan Cottom, to name but a few.

      The tougher part is that they are all fighting against problems created primarily by privileged, cis-gender, white men.