Group items tagged

Also recommended by David Watkins re the Parable of the Tribes.  David says: In 1954 Sorokin's The Ways and Power of Love: Types, Factors, and Techniques of Moral Transformation was published. The common assumption is that love is weak in the face of power. Sorokin and his staff researched the history of war and peace. What they found was that coercion and force were given far too much credit in the headlines of our histories and the power of love not nearly what it deserved. He devotes an entire chapter to examples of how love prevailed against far superior forces. He said that he could have filled several books with the examples that they found. He covers much of the same ground as Tolstoy, Gandhi and King.

" According to the parable of the tribes, civilized peoples have been compelled to live in societies organized for the maximization of competitive power. People become the servants of their evolving systems, rather than civilized society being the instrument of its members."

Computer-mediated communication systems are believed to have powerful effects on social relationships. Many claim that this new form of social interaction encourages wider participation, greater candor, and an emphasis on merit over status. In short, the belief is that social hierarchies are dissolved and that flatter, more egalitarian social organizations emerge. Networked communications, it is argued, will usher in a renewed era of democratic participation and revitalized community. But as with earlier technologies that promised freedom and power, the central problems of social relationships remain, although in new and possibly more challenging forms.

Recommended by David Watkins re the Parable of the Tribes.  Dave says: Pitirim Sorokin was no stranger to the abuses of power. He was imprisoned in his native Russia by the Czarists. Later he was sentenced to death by the Communists. Unlike many of his colleagues he survived his death sentence and in exile came to the U.S. He founded the Department of Sociology at Harvard and became President of the American Sociological Association. He directed the Harvard Research Centre in Creative Altruism. In 1937, in conflict with the then current view, he predicted WW2. In 1941 Sorokin wrote The Crisis of Our Age. In 1945 the book went to the best seller list. A sociology book on the best seller lists suggests that his ideas must have resonated with the time.

Reed's law or Group-Forming value-add affordance of networks grows much faster  than either Sarnoff or Metcalfe calculations of value.  Nice graphs showing how the three curves compare (scalar of n, square of n, and 2 to the nth power.)

Gene Sharp founded the Albert Einstein Institute. His book From Dictatorship to Democracy has been used as a field manual in numerous liberation movements in Eastern Europe, in the Arab Spring and elsewhere. In his three volume The Politics of Nonviolent Action he examines the nature and control of political power and the methods and dynamics of nonviolent action. He identifies and document 198 specific methods of nonviolent action. Over half of these methods come under one or another heading of noncooperation. 

Another recommendation from David Watkins re the Parable of the Tribes.  He says: Gene Sharp founded the Albert Einstein Institute. His book From Dictatorship to Democracy has been used as a field manual in numerous liberation movements in Eastern Europe, in the Arab Spring and elsewhere. In his three volume The Politics of Nonviolent Action he examines the nature and control of political power and the methods and dynamics of nonviolent action. He identifies and document 198 specific methods of nonviolent action. Over half of these methods come under one or another heading of noncooperation. In this NewStatesman article Sharp is described as the Machiavelli of non-violence.

Some of the biggest changes sweeping the technology world today are new forms of network and computer-enabled cooperation. It was easy enough to see this pattern in open source software development or Wikipedia, a bit more challenging to see how it powered Web 2.0 giants like Google and Amazon, but it gets really interesting when you are able to see how new kinds of man-machine symbiosis and networked cooperation are at the heart of projects like the Google self-driving car, the reinvention of retail by Apple and Square, transportation services from RelayRides to Uber, and even in new models for networked government.

The Collective Action Toolkit (CAT) is a package of resources and activities that enable groups of people anywhere to organize, build trust, and collaboratively create solutions for problems impacting their community. The toolkit provides a dynamic framework that integrates knowledge and action to solve challenges. Designed to harness the benefits of group action and the power of open sharing, the activities draw on each participant's strengths and perspectives as the group works to accomplish a common goal.

Robert Cialdini is an emeritus psychologist at Arizona State University who studies how our behavior is affected by social rules that we're only vaguely aware of but which have incredible power over what we do. What happened to Kunz, he explains, is the direct result of one of the rules that most interest him: the rule of reciprocation. The rule, he says, is drilled into us as children.

Again, from David Watkins, in rebuttal to the Parable of the Tribes

Glattfelder follows the chain of transnational corporate ownership to determine "who controls the world" economically-speaking.  I.e., our economic commons. He defines the rather tight network of control as an emergent property rather than some global conspiracy.